Take My Hand Inspirations: 2017

Tuesday, 26 December 2017

18: THE TRINITY FRUIT of PEACE

Take My Hand Inspirations

Fruit of the Spirit Series

THE TRINITY FRUIT of PEACE

Pursue peace with all people, and holiness, without which no one will see the Lord (Hebrews 12:14). Why? Because: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God (Matthew 5:9). And: You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on You; and nothing causes them to stumble (Isaiah 26:3; Psalm 119:165).

Once again, consider your Christian life like a plant; and Jesus Christ as the Sower. From our conversation (Blog #15), when I introduced this Fruit of the Spirit Series, we trustingly embraced the knowledge that when we give our hearts to Christ, He opens our hearts and plants His seeds of whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy—meditate on these things . . . and the God of peace will be with you. (Philippians 4:8-9).

As you allow these seeds to germinate with the watering of God’s Word in your mind’s thoughts (and emotions/feelings stored in your heart), YOUR SOUL (therefore, your life) becomes rooted in Christ: That Christ may dwell in your hearts [soul] through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, . . . may be filled with all the fullness of God (Read Ephesians 3:17-19).

We are born through the portal of the Fruit of Love. We experience power from the Fruit of Joy when we embrace who we are in Christ and celebrate the talents, strengths and beauty He has breathed in all of us without discrimination or partiality. Generous is the Lord in His giving. So in Love and bubbling over with Joy, why is it so hard to get and maintain PEACE within our own souls as well as sustain it in the outside world whirling around us?

As we are watered, we grow and mature and develop our multi-coloured, sweet-smelling flowers in preparation for pollination, fertilization and fruit production. As a teacher of so many subjects, the one I find most exciting is science. When we understand (even a little) how God created everything and how it all works, is it most astonishing. I feel part of God’s plan as I teach some of the mysteries of His work! How a flower fascinatingly becomes a fruit is so much like the processes necessary for the Christian to produce the Spirit’s Fruit of Peace.

Meditating on the Fruit of Peace and actually applying its principles to produce this trinity fruit were a challenge for me. And I am not a theorist wherein I share the “how” and never do it. I must first do it (apply the Word of God about peace), see how it works, learn from my failures when I do not achieve it, then meditate on it some more and try again. That is why it took me this long to write this blog.

Peace does not develop overnight, instantaneously as we will it to come. Developing the fruit of peace, to me, is a three-step process—that’s why I call it the Trinity Fruit; and it’s also the third fruit produced in line with the Holy Spirit. Just as a flower goes through many processes before transforming into fruit, so must the life of a watered-by-the-Holy-Spirit Christian go through ups and downs before “the Peace of God which surpasses all understanding” (Philippians 4:7) can shoot out of his or her life.

Step 1: We must clean up our “house” before we endeavor to bring peace into it. That cleaning involves putting the “GOOD” or the “BAD” sticker on our thoughts, as I’ve spoken on throughout this series. What are you thinking about? Is it about the wrong spoken against you, or how you are going to give to those less fortunate than you? Ask yourself whether what you’re thinking about is “GOOD” (in line with Philippians 4:8-9) or is “BAD” (totally off the markers of Philippians 4:8-9) then pour those marked “bad” into the toilet and flush it.

Step 2: Now get your mind in order by scrubbing and rinsing and re-washing it in Philippians 4:8-9. Read, watch and talk about everything relating to God’s Word in books, audio and visual cassettes, films, podcasts, etc.; go to lunch with fun-loving, faith-filled Christians; take a short vacation to enjoy nature; or gather family and friends and host a fabulous Birthday party for Jesus! Get in the kitchen and cook or bake till you drop while singing and dancing to worship and praise songs to the Lord. Or simply smile as you go on visitation to the sick and shut-in; volunteer in your community church’s soup kitchen—do something kind or give something nice to a stranger. Encourage the down-trodden with the goodness in you.

DO GOOD TO OTHERS AS THE LORD LEADS YOU.

Step 3: Work on how you relate to yourself and to others. Peace involves human relationships. Peace also involves the inner relationship you have with yourself. If you are a contentious, argumentative person who is so easily provoked, you take yourself wherever you go and will continually experience rivalry, jealousies, fights and quarrels with everyone around you. What is in you surely comes out in any situation or environment you find yourself in.

Don’t get me wrong, there are “haters” always ready to falsely accuse you about something absurd. Look at the flower. Are only birds, beetles and butterflies allowed to pollinate it? Birds, beetles and butterflies are the “beautiful” ones—the ones who love you for who you are with all your strengths and weaknesses. They are the ones who stick to you in hard times. Your soul feels “beautiful” when you are around them.

But flowers are also pollinated by stinging bees, acidic-biting ants and ugly moths, even bats and houseflies. They represent the haters—those who don’t value anything about you. They wait for you to fall or fail, and rejoice when you do it, though ever smiling and pretending to be your cheerleaders all the while hoping and wishing for your demise. Yet, we need the “haters” to produce the product of perfect peace because they force us to run to God to find a way out of their terrifying entanglements. Life is not only a bed of roses. To get to peace, we surely will learn life-long lessons from stings and bites and pinches and punctures and odious odors.

But how you handle the outside world definitely relates to how you handle your inside world. This is a conversation I usually have with myself (my soul): O.K. I love myself. Others don’t love themselves. They strike out against my “sunny” disposition to bring me down into their darkness. Oh, Lord, I need your grace to overcome wanting to be accepted and thus drown in that depression. I definitely need Your help to bring about a change in how I want to be in this situation and bring others up into Your light with me. Show me how right now, Lord.

Then the Lord opens the way and I run through it emerging on the other side with great and perfect peace. You must develop the Fruit of Peace through the gift of discernment (read 1 Corinthians 12:8-11)—seeing how a situation is going and listening to God as He tells you how to move through it to achieve peace. So ask the Lord right now for this gift of discernment. That is your way to developing His Fruit of Peace.

And when you find yourself in a situation desiring peace, He will tell you how to get it without compromising your Joy. He won’t make the other person feel good, and leave you feeling awful at the end of it all. Listen for His voice. At times, the Lord has told me to do one or a combination of these to move into peace and stay there.

· * Say, “I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”

· * Keep silent. Don’t talk.

· * Excuse yourself and walk away; at times, just calmly walk away.

· * Flee! Run! Don’t look back.

· * Tell the truth. Stop lying or trying to cover yourself with half-truths.

· * Speak with frankness and clarity on an issue as the Holy Spirit gives you the boldness to do so.

· * If you can “see” (discern) what’s good in you, then force yourself to “see” the good in others and tell them about it.

· * Switch off the phone for a few hours and rest your mind.

· * Leave that platform—it’s doing nothing good for your soul’s inspiration.

· * Give the troublemakers, the peace-snatchers, over to the Lord in prayer. You cannot change the stubborn; they must be put on the Potter’s wheel for a while.

When we shut God out, perfect peace can never be achieved because we would resort to our humanness to solve problems with shouting, disrespect, cursing and dissention—the works of the flesh. The Fruit of Peace can only germinate by the watering of the Holy Spirit in an atmosphere of prayer. Memorize and recite Psalm 23 throughout the day--everyday!

My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid (John 14:27).

Glory to God in the highest,

And on earth PEACE,

Goodwill toward men!

(Luke 2:14)

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Take My Hand Inspirations

Wednesday, 1 November 2017

17:THE SECOND FRUIT: The Fruit of JOY

Take My Hand Inspirations

Fruit of the Spirit Series

And the remnant who have escaped of the house of Judah shall again take root downward, and bear fruit upward (2 Kings 19:30 and Isaiah 37:31).

Remember from our last discussion (Blog #16), that you, being rooted and grounded in love . . . may be filled with all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:17-19).

As you allow yourself to be watered daily in God’s nourishing Word, you will grow strong in spirit, filled with wisdom; and the grace of God [is] upon you (Luke 2:40) to mature and bear His FRUIT OF JOY because now He lives in you.

So let’s enjoy ourselves in this soul conversation. What is joy? The world defines joy as great happiness; and happiness is defined as a feeling, showing or causing pleasure or satisfaction. The source of this joy appears to come from outside stimuli—a situation or event that occurs around you and eventually enters your heart to make you smile.

Don’t get me wrong. Holding your high school or vocational school diploma or your first university degree certificate; or that first kiss on your wedding day; or watching your child forcing his or her first wobbly steps; or slowly swallowing a chocolate, vanilla and strawberry banana split with walnuts, rainbow sprinkles, chocolate syrup and cheery cherries on top on a hot summer day can bring joy unspeakable to the body and to the soul!

But this kind of joy is stored in your short and then long term memory box, and must take effort to be consciously recalled, or remembered if not forgotten by other extraordinary events or outside circumstances (good or bad). What makes us smile or laugh by what we see, hear, taste, touch or smell is temporary. It won’t last long; and most often has to be replaced immediately, or else we fall into that deep pit of despair or depression, a terrible, lonely sadness.

That is why a lot of folks always need people around them, either to talk to or to talk about in the absence of those same people they need. This transient emotion of happiness is based on what you get from outside of the inner you.

DO NOT ALLOW PEOPLE TO CONTROL YOUR JOY. DO NOT DEPEND ON PEOPLE TO SUPPLY YOU WITH JOY.

In Christ, the FRUIT OF JOY does not come from outside. Its source is from deep within . . . you. And it comes from God’s taproot—being rooted and grounded in love.

The FRUIT OF JOY of the Holy Spirit of God is one of the seeds planted in your heart, which over time, germinates into its maturity so that when the winds of worry, doubt, frustration or bitterness blow, you can temper it with the JOY OF THE LORD. Study Nehemiah and allow his testimony to sink into the depth of your meditation (chapters 1-6). After all the mocking and barrage of intentional indignities that Nehemiah and his team of devout builders endured during the re-building of Jerusalem’s wall by archenemies Sanballot, Tobias and their band of cruel cohorts, at the end of the day, the wall was completed (in record time), and Priest Ezra exhorted them: Do not sorrow, for the joy of the Lord is your strength (Nehemiah 8:10c).

Nehemiah was minding his own business, busy doing the ordained work of the Lord with a peace-filled heart, loving his God and his people; and here come the haters. This is the way it is, dear Christian. Not everybody’s going to love you or admire what you’re doing for the Lord. Even fellow Christians, based on their fruit’s level of maturity, can attack you with their eyes, words, and covetous callousness though they greet you with pithy praise and artificial appreciation.

YOU MUST STAND STRONG IN THE JOY OF LORD FOR THIS JOY IS YOUR STRENGTH. And this joy must mature from within your soul, watered by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit which guides you, covers you, uplifts you, and shows to all creation the beauty of His fruit, bearing its work in you revealed outwardly as a testimony, a witness, of how far you’ve come on your Christian journey. And this FRUIT OF JOY can never come from outside of your soul; neither does it take conscious effort to be remembered because it stays moving in you pumping in your blood circulating all through your body always, ever-present, never-ending as long as the Holy Spirit lives in you.

It magnifies from the inner, deepest part of you. It thrives from a contrite heart, a heart that does not possess any hardness or haughtiness, but is open to being re-molded and re-formed by the Potter on His wheel. It may take years for this fruit to push its way through all the multiple layers of your years of agonizing pain, but if you allow it to, the fruit of joy will burst out as a great explosion from a place you never knew it was.

And the pangs of rejection, regret, resignation, and pure anger, bitterness, and depression will never sting you as it did prior to the maturity of the FRUIT OF JOY. You will feel “different” when people talk about you, accuse you, or just get on your nerves while you hold nothing in your soul against anyone.

That “different” is called JOY—a still calmness that elicits a great peace, a humbling acknowledgement that it is God who grew this in you, because you no longer fret over the works of evil-doings. Instead, you seek with all your might to forgive the transgressions thrown at you; and when you find you can’t forgive, you turn the whole matter over to the Lord and wait patiently for Him to work it out; as you continue loving Him and yourself and that same person trying to steal your joy.

Then when the Lord vindicates you, by showing to those attacking you how wrong they were about who you are and the work you do, that’s when you “eat” the purity of that fruit’s sweetness. Jesus endured all the attacks and accusations all the way to the cross and even hanging between two conniving criminals on the cross. Yet, minutes before He took His last earthly breaths, one of those contentious criminals finally realized who Jesus was and humbly pleaded for salvation.

Vindication is to prove that what someone said or did was right or true, after other people thought it was wrong. And the FRUIT OF JOY is fulfilled in the Lord’s vindication of you. You can’t vindicate yourself, though we constantly try to prove how right we are to others all the time. But when God—the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit—opens His mouth and moves His hand in your matters . . . He will turn your enemies’ reproach on their own heads. In other words, back to sender!

May all those who falsified your character, and who tried to damage your dignity and renounce your reputation while you were on the potter’s wheel, being re-born and re-shaped into the image of Christ Jesus, be put to shame as the Lord vindicates and validates, you--in Jesus’ Name.

Keep on, dear Christian, bearing your FRUIT OF UNSPEAKABLE JOY. After overcoming the layers of trauma, trial and troubles, ENJOY! (And don’t you dare feel “bad” about it!).

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Take My Hand Inspirations