Sunday 11 May 2014

So...errr Jesus...howddya do that thing with the fig tree?

All of us would ask Jesus the same as the disciples....How do you get to do that stuff? how do you get faith? He answered in a two or three package story...kind of 1 John 2...1st stage to third stage...but his version was about slaves/servants. NOW this is interesting because NOTHING is said about the Holy Spirit which is what us charismatics would say. Nope....FIRST SCENE. Out working in the elements in the field. Very unspectacular. Lots of raw service. At the end of the day you are tired. Is that taken into consideration? NOPE. You then serve the Master until He (personally) is satisfied. At table. With food. The charismatic realm is in the HOUSE. The three years the disciples undertook with Jesus were both realms. Or perhaps some of their "field" experience was before even meeting Jesus having to find food or fish for the family...or whatever each disciple was used to doing. In Acts 2 people came to the Lord and were filled with the Spirit in one day, similar to many of us since the 70s. So what's the difference? Between Acts 2 and today? The disciples had been through "the WAY". They were now apostles able to show others how it works.
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Luke17:5 One day the apostles said to the Lord, “We need more faith; tell us how to get it.”
6 “If your faith were only the size of a mustard seed,” Jesus answered, “it would be large enough to uproot that mulberry tree over there and send it hurtling into the sea! Your command would bring immediate results! 7-9 When a servant comes in from plowing or taking care of sheep, he doesn’t just sit down and eat, but first prepares his master’s meal and serves him his supper before he eats his own. And he is not even thanked, for he is merely doing what he is supposed to do. 10 Just so, if you merely obey me, you should not consider yourselves worthy of praise. For you have simply done your duty!” Living Bible

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So here's the bombshell. Many of us were filled with the Spirit but we never had people who had been through the WAY long enough to adequately show us how it worked. Many "charismatics" just haven't spent long enough in the "field". Both the field then the house are where we learn Lordship. Christ is Lord. What He says goes. When He is satisfied..... this is not the same as works...because if you look at the disciples it was all in the context of relationship not church organisational structure. You are my friends if you do what I say...(however it seems)...said Jesus
If we don't do "the field" whatever form that takes, we get confused in the glory of the HOUSE. We forget that it is nothing to do with feelings. (Although they are there). Nothing to do with us. We are not the ones eating. We are serving.
There is a heavenly knife that slices away the central concern with ME, with MY life,with How it is for ME....We can't do it. We are not asked to do it. But we are asked to follow Jesus in the WAY. And out in the field, and then dead tired, in the HOUSE is where this knife is secretly and silently applied....and soon, others are aware too that that massive " I " sash that stuck out proudly from our chest and actually was on our very breath in everything we did....has been cut to smithereens. The activation of Jesus faith in us is extremely natural....there is a lot of the second mile snuck in there. Sometimes all our religious stuff has nothing to do with the Way...that is Jesus Himself. We get frustrated because we are getting nowhere....and Jesus gets frustrated because we are not doing the simple things He has communicated to our hearts.

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