Nafrea's Notes

Loving God

2008-08-08T09:47:00.000+10:00

Reading through the Bible I find the pages are full of examples of God’s power, we call them miracles. Everywhere Jesus went he healed people of diseases and disabilities and even brought people back from the dead. And it didn’t stop with Jesus, The Old Testament tells us stories about God parting the Red Sea, speaking to Moses through a burning bush, extending a day for Joshua and sending fire from heaven to consume Elijah’s offering. In the New Testament we see tongues of fire, daemon possessed people set free and much more.

As I read John 14:12 I cannot but stand in awe and wonder as Jesus has the audacity to say that we will do greater things than what he did, especially as I look around the world today and say, where is the power, where is the evidence? Not only do we not seem to be doing greater things than Jesus did, we don’t even see much evidence of the basic stuff. When was the last time you prayed for someone and saw them healed of an Illness? As I look around I see people dying from diseases like cancer and diabetes and I have to wonder, where is the power of the church? Where is the “greater things” that Jesus was referring to? You know, for a group of people who are supposed to be the representatives of God on the earth, we are pretty powerless. There is a spiritual war going on for the lives of the people around us and we are in danger of losing the battle. It feels like I can’t even muster up enough faith to heal the cut on my arm let alone raise someone from the dead.

What did Jesus mean when he said that we would do greater things? Well personally I believe that when God says something he means it, so I think he meant exactly what he said, that we would do greater things. So that brings me to the question, why are we not doing greater things? What is wrong with the church that has caused us to lose our ability to exercise the authority and power of God? It is a big question I know and the answer has many parts but I would like to discuss with you what I believe forms a solid foundation for the answer in this study.

Several weeks ago I was lying on my lounge room floor pondering this exact question. Why are we as children of the most high God so unable to see his authority and power manifest in our society? At this point in my pondering God spoke to me and reminded me of his command in Deuteronomy 6:5 “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength”. It is a simple statement and a very commonly quoted piece of scripture yes, but it got me thinking. Do we in the western world know what it means to truly love God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our strength? Based on what I’ve seen and experienced, I would have to say “no”.

Looking around our society the models of love that I see are so often based on selfishness. We love people and things for what they can do for us and how they make us feel. It is all about us and given the divorce rate in our society, clearly when that thing or person no longer fulfils that desire within us we discard the relationship. Ok, so most of us know that this doesn’t represent real love, but what does God mean when he asks us to love him with all our heart, soul and strength?

The call to love with all our heart, soul and strength is a call to ultimate devotion (Acts 2:42-47). God is calling us to give ourselves away to him entirely, that we should be consumed by him (Luke 9:57-62) and that his word, his love and his life should be our every breath and desire (John 21:15-22). He is asking us to be so consumed by him that we fix our eyes and heart and mind on him so that we are physically unable to look away and our desire to do so is nonexistent(Colossians 3:1-4).

A relationship of this magnitude requires an extraordinary amount of trust and faith and it takes time to develop. We must start by simply taking one step and each step we take that brings us closer to God makes the next step easier. There will be times when it seems that all hope is lost and we cannot move on but God will not let go of us. He has promised that he will never leave nor forsake us and we are not alone on this journey, we are designed to be a community so that we can help one another walk the road into the arms of God.

So how exactly do we start to develop a relationship with God so that we can develop a love for God that is even remotely along the lines of love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your strength? Well fortunately God has given us a hint on how to do this through the relationships we have with one another. We are all created in the image of God and so it seems reasonable that we can develop a relationship with God the same way we develop relationships with one another. So let’s look at how we develop relationships with one another.

Think about your own experience of relationships, if you’re married think about your relationship with your spouse, if you’re not married think about another relationship you have, maybe with your best friend. How did that relationship start? You didn’t just meet the person and all of a sudden know everything about them. Maybe you didn’t even like them to start with but somehow you got to know them and by knowing who they truly were you began to love them. We build relationships with God the same way; we have to start off by finding out who he is. I am not talking about just head knowledge, we learn about God from the Bible, but knowing God comes from our hearts not our heads just like it does with our close earthly relationships. To truly know someone you need to spend time with them, talk with them and listen to what they say. It doesn’t matter if you start out by simply talking about the weather, but the more you talk to them and associate with them the more you begin to learn who they are, their mannerisms, their traits and their beliefs. The more you know them the more you come to love and trust them.

I think we develop relationships with God in the same way, one conversation at a time; we have to allow him to speak to us, to say whatever it is he wants to say. As we allow him to speak we begin to learn who he is, we begin to understand the desires of his heart. As we grow in relationship with him we also learn to trust him and as we begin to trust him more we are able to share more of ourselves with him and allow him to share more of himself with us.

God is a gentleman, he will never force a relationship on you, but if you allow him to, it is his joy to share himself with you. But remember that a relationship that is entirely encompassing requires both parties to be devoted to one another and your desire has to be for the wellbeing of God just as his desire is for your wellbeing. A relationship that is all your heart, soul and strength cannot be about what God can do for you or what you can learn from him it has to be about who he is, it has to be about living for his desire not for your own.

This relationship is what gives us the capacity to exercise God’s power and authority on the earth. Miracles are a side effect of an all encompassing love not something to be attained in their own right. It is through our display of love for God that the world will see his truth and will come to know him. Miracles are just a physical outworking of the love of God that demonstrates his love, power and authority. The true power of God is found in his heart.

Genesis: reality or representation

2008-06-19T13:52:00.000+10:00

When was the last time you turned up at church and heard your minister (or whatever you happen to call him) teaching about the creation story? If you are anything like me it was back in Sunday school and it wasn’t your minister at all it was your Sunday school teacher who simply read you the story and then gave you pictures of Adam and Eve hiding behind a bush to colour in. I suppose then it won’t surprise you when I tell you that the Genesis story is one of the least taught in our churches today. This doesn’t bother most people we all know the story, and after all it’s a pretty straightforward story isn’t it? Or is it?

Did you also happen to know that the majority of Bible believing Christians today actually believe that the story of creation in Genesis is only a representation of the actual event written down so that the people of the day could get an idea of how life started and does not actually factually represent how God created the world?

Many believe that God used the evolutionary process taught in our schools to create mankind over a period of thousands of years, they support this using the passage in Psalm 90:4 that says that one day to God is like a thousand years to us. They also believe that Adam and Eve are simply examples of early man i.e. they were just one couple among many roaming the earth at the time.

You may be wondering at this point why it should matter whether we think the story of creation is a representation of what actually happened or a factual recounting of the actual Events. Does it really matter how long it took God to create the universe or whether or not Adam and Eve were in fact the only two people in the beginning or of there were others that just didn’t get included in the story.

If you are interested in the science of the creation there are several good books available for you to read. You can also find some good websites on the subject (try www.answersingenesis.org). I am not going to make this a science lesson simply because I am not a scientist and I would simply confuse you if I tried to teach you science. I would however like to look into why it is important to know the truth about the creation story.

Genesis means first things, it tells the story of how everything began, and in particular the beginning of God’s plan of redemption for all mankind. It is the very beginning of sin and the foundation for our need as a human race for a saviour. I believe it is important to understand the events of Genesis because if we do not fully understand the events of Genesis then we can never fully understand the sacrifice Jesus made for us on the cross at Calvary.

Let me start by saying that I believe the creation story in Genesis is a factual representation of Events as they took place. I believe that Adam and Eve were the first people God created and he created all mankind through them, making them ancestors to every person who has ever or will ever exist. I also believe that God created the universe in six actual days and then rested on the seventh, not over a period of thousands of years, not even in six thousand years.

Let’s start with Adam and Eve. I want to begin by looking at what would have happened in the story of Adam and Eve if they had just been one couple of many on the earth at the time.

Let’s assume for this story that the world was sparsely populated with early humans and Adam and Eve were for whatever reason chosen by God to tend the Garden of Eden for him. We know that God told Adam that he was allowed to eat the fruit of any tree within the garden except the one in the centre of the garden aka the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. His warning to Adam was that if he ever ate from the tree he would surely die. We know that Satan tricked Eve into eating the fruit of the tree and then Eve took the fruit to Adam and he ate it also. At this point God gets angry and kicks Adam and Eve and the serpent out of the garden and curses the serpent, Eve and on Adams behalf the ground (Genesis 3:14 – 19). So after Adam and Eve get kicked out of the garden they lose all the perks they had from being the chosen tenders of the garden, like the ability to meet with God in the cool of the evening and are forced to rejoin society and make their living just as everyone else does, they have children, they have grandchildren, and great grandchildren and they live to the ripe old age of 1000 years and then they die.

Ok so what is so bad about this version of the story?

This is where we need to look deeper into the story of creation to understand the significance of the events of the fall. Genesis 1:28 says “…and God said to them, ‘be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth’”. God gave mankind authority over the earth.

What happened when Adam and Eve sinned is that they forfeited that authority. And the worst part is they forfeited it to Satan, who was the one who tricked them into eating the fruit in the first place. Look at Matthew 4:8, Satan takes Jesus to a high place, shows him all the world and tells him that if he bows down and worships him, he would give it all to him, which is exactly what Jesus came for in the first place isn’t it. Basically Satan was saying to Jesus that if he worshiped him he would give him everything he came for and Jesus could avoid having to go through the suffering of the cross. Of course Jesus knew his tricks and didn’t fall for it as Adam and Eve had done. But the point is Satan offered God the world, how could Satan do that if the world was not his to give? The reason Satan was able to make this offer to Jesus was because he did have the authority to give it to him, that authority was given to him at the fall.

We looked earlier at Genesis 1:28 which is the passage in which God gives authority over the earth to Mankind, but look at the verse before it where it establishes exactly who it is that God is talking to at the time. Genesis 1:27- 28 “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them….” In this passage God was addressing mankind, not specifically Adam and Eve, the passage says God made Man in his own image, he did this by making Adam and Eve yes, but the authority was given to mankind not specifically to an individual. If Adam and Eve had been just one of many couples roaming the earth at the time, then once they had sinned the authority that was given to them on behalf of mankind would have passed to someone else not to Satan, Satan is not human he is a fallen angel therefore the only way the authority that was given to mankind would pass to him is if it was forfeited by all mankind, which would have been the case if Adam and Eve were the only ones on the face of the planet at the time.

Now look at the curse. The bible makes it very clear that we are all born into a sinful nature Romans 3:23, 1 John 1:10, Romans 8:3, but God created us in his own image and God is not sinful Genesis 1:31 says “ God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day”. So how did all of mankind go from being very good to being sinful? Through the disobedience of Adam and Eve of course. This however, could not have happened if Adam and Eve had not been the only people on the earth at the time. Romans 5:12 says “...sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men...”

When God told Adam and Eve not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil he gave them a warning he said “for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die”. What did he mean by that? This is also related to how Satan tempted Eve with the fruit, he said “You will not surely die” Genesis 3:4 and in fact they did not physically die otherwise we could not be here today. So what did God mean when he told them they would die if they ate the fruit? I think he meant that their souls would die (be disconnected from God). Look at John 3:3, 6 Jesus is talking to Nicodemus and he says that unless we are born again we cannot see the kingdom of heaven. Now look at his explanation of born again in verse 6 “That which is born of flesh is flesh and that which is born of Spirit is spirit”. Before man became sinful we were made up of two parts one flesh and one spirit, in fact we are still made up of two parts only now we are born into the flesh, in order to be born of the spirit we must be born again into the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.

To understand this we must first understand what sin is. Basically sin disconnects us from God. God is perfect and because of his perfection sin cannot abide in him, therefore in order for us to abide in him we must be sin free. God is spirit, therefore to abide in him our spirit must abide in him. Since we are born into a sinful nature our spirit is unable to abide in God therefore we are unable to abide in God. This is why Jesus died for us, so that by his sacrifice we have the opportunity to be born again into the death and resurrection of Jesus. By his sacrifice he paid the price for the punishment of our sin, a price that we could never pay, so that by being born into his sacrifice we are able to be wiped clean from our sin enabling our spirit to abide in God (this is how our spirit lives). This is what the bible means when it says born of spirit, at this point our spirit is born into God.

This brings us to the question of how can all mankind suffer from the sins of only two people. Well if Adam and Eve were just two of many people on the earth then it is in fact not possible. God does not punish you for your neighbour’s sin. But if Adam and Eve were the first two and the only people on the planet and through them all man has come into being then it is very possible, God can and does punish people for the sins of their ancestors. Exodus 20:5 “…I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me”, Exodus 34:7 “Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation", and Leviticus 26:40 “But if they will confess their sins and the sins of their fathers”.

Don’t have a stress attack now because you think you have to repent for all the sins committed by your family over the generations before you were born and don’t stress out about the sins you think you may have passed on to your own children, not all sins are generational. Also take note of the end of the passage in Exodus 20:5 “...of those who hate me”.

If you want me to go into generational sin I can do that in a different study, but the point that I am trying to make here is that the only way mankind could go from being very good to being sinful by the acts of two individuals is if those two individuals are the only two individuals on the earth at the time and the punishment from the sin gets passed down through the generations to everyone else.

Having said all that if you want to know the main reason I believe that the record of creation in Genesis is a record of the full reality of the situation, it is because I believe what God says. There is only one thing that God cannot do and that is lie. Exodus 20:11 “For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, ...” Out of the very mouth of God himself, he said it therefore I believe it.

Religion vs Relationship

2008-06-04T12:05:00.000+10:00

In this day and age if you tell someone that you are Christian they will automatically place you in the religious box, i.e. whenever they talk about you, you will be referred to as religious. The two words seem to be synonymous with one another as far as the world’s understanding goes. The world likes labels. It enables people to fit other people into boxes so that they can understand them more easily, and just as an aside, if it helps the understanding of the person in front of me to call me religious then I have no problem with that.

But are the two words in fact synonymous?

For hundreds of years the term Christian has been used to define a group of people who believe in the God of the Bible and follow his statutes. (Followers of Jesus were first called Christians at Antioch – the first missionary sending church outside of Jerusalem) These people most often share a common belief in God the creator of the universe, Jesus Christ his son, and The Holy Spirit the doer of God’s will in the earth and the protector of his people.

Over the years there have become many subgroups for these people separated by theological beliefs but the basis of their faith remains united in God. Because of this common belief in God the values of these groups of people are for the most part similar; we all use the Bible as our guide to tell us what is right and what is wrong, and for “Christian Societies” such as our own our laws and societal rules are all based on this belief in the biblical truth of what is right and wrong. In this definition of Christian we can safely say that the terms Christian and Religious are in fact synonymous due to the fact that the reason we follow God’s laws is because we know them to be truth and we have been brought up with their values at our core. This model of Christianity has been the standard model since 367 AD when Rome was first declared a Christian society.

Most of us know that Rome was the main source from which Christianity spread to the rest of the world. But before there was Christianity in Rome and even Before Rome itself, before Israel and before Abraham I believe God had a different plan.

Genesis 3:8-9 says; “and they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day…the Lord God called to the man and said ‘where are you?’”.

Granted this is the same passage in which Adam and Eve hide from God so that he would not see them naked after they had just eaten the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. However, I don’t think that God was walking through the garden looking for them just because he wanted to yell at them for eating the fruit he told them not to eat. Have a look at the rest of the passage.

Does God really sound like he came all the way from heaven to get angry at them? From the context of the rest of the story, I would say it was a fairly common occurrence for God to be walking through the garden in the evening looking for Adam and Eve.

In Genesis 18 God turns up on Abrahams doorstep to let him know that he is on his way to Sodom and Gomorrah to flatten them and wipe out their inhabitants. But before Abraham will allow the Lord to leave he argues with him about whether or not God should consider destroying a city that might have righteous people in it. He even manages to negotiate with God that if he found 10 righteous people in the cities he would not destroy them. God already knew how many righteous people there were in the cities and he pulled Lot and his family out before destroying them anyway, but have you ever stopped to wonder why God stopped by Abraham’s house beforehand just to let him know that he was about to destroy the cities and then stayed behind to allow Abraham to argue with him about the number of righteous people he was willing to destroy for the sake of the wickedness of the entire city?

God wrestled with Jacob (Genesis 32:22-32), spoke with Moses on Mount Sinai (Exodus 34:29), called out to Samuel (1 Samuel 3:4-10), and then stepped into flesh and blood, in the person of Jesus Christ, to walk amongst us teaching us and even dying for us.

If God’s plan was just simply for us to follow his rules he would have just handed us the rule book and left it at that. He knows that we are not very good at following rules but we effectively would have ended up where we are now (let’s not dwell on the fact that without the death of Jesus we would have no opportunity for forgiveness or salvation, that is too not in the scope of this discussion).

If God’s plan wasn’t to simply place us on the Earth with a list of do’s and don’ts and sit back and watch us experiment with each one of them to find out what happens when we ignore them, then what was his plan and why do we live as though that is his plan now?

I believe that God created us for relationship. Looking back at the way he has interacted with his children throughout history I see a God who desires a relationship with his children. He is not content with having a group of people just do what he tells them to (or not) simply because they know he is big enough to smite them all with one flick of his wrist. He is not content with just knowing each one of us no matter how loyal we are to him and how much we try to do what he wants, though that does give him much joy, his true happiness is sparked by those children who desire to know him, to have relationship with him in a way that enables him to share his heart with them.

The word Christian originally meant “like Christ” or simply “Christ ones” and we all know that the ultimate goal of the Christian is to resemble the character of Christ to the world. But how do we become like Christ? Can we really achieve a likeness of Christ simply by observing his will? And how do we know his will if we do not know his heart?

Please don’t misunderstand me. The bible does give us a lot of information about who Jesus was and what God’s will is for us. I am certainly not saying that people aren’t Christians unless they have an intimate, one on one relationship with God. The Bible clearly states that anyone who believes with their heart, is baptized and confesses with their mouth is a Christian. (Romans 10:9).

I am simply saying that salvation is only step one and God’s heart desire is for much more. (Philippians 2)

His desire is for a relationship that is personal, that enables you to truly know him, a relationship that allows you to influence him, a relationship that enables you to converse with him and interact with him as though he was your best friend. In John 15:15 Jesus says “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you”. Salvation by faith is an obligation for all those who wish to live for eternity in the presence of God but relationship with God is an opportunity for those who truly seek to know God.

Don’t think, however, that God will just hand you this kind of relationship on a silver platter without any work on your part just because he wants you to know him. Knowing God in a personal way is a privilege not for the faint of heart. There are many situations in the Bible where God has given so much of himself to people who don’t deserve it, just because he loves them and the Cross is just one example. It is also true that we can never deserve anything from God, especially a personal relationship. (Ephesians 2:8 – 10) But just as we need to be discerning when we choose our own friends, God is also discerning about who he shares his heart with.

The point is that God will not share his heart with someone who does not truly care about who he is. Yes, He offers this opportunity to all his children, but we have to choose to enter into the relationship and the way we do that is by desiring to know him. We have to first truly care about who he is and desire to know his heart not for our own benefit but out of a true and honest desire to know him.

I wish I could share with you what it’s like to have a relationship with God. But unfortunately I can’t. That kind of revelation can only come from experience.

I can however tell you that having a relationship with God has been the most amazing experience of my life. I have seen things that my imagination could not possibly fathom (and that is saying something), and I have experienced things that I could have sworn were impossible. I have experienced his joy and also his grief in ways that have brought me to my knees and had me crying my heart out. I have had the privilege of engaging God in conversation and I have been honoured to receive information and insight not available anywhere else on the planet. But the most amazing experience is just to know him, to sit quietly with him talking about nothing in particular and feeling his heart as though it was beating in my own chest. It seems such a simple thing but that is the ultimate joy of my life and I believe the joy of the Lord’s also.

How I wish that you could feel what I feel and experience what I have experienced, because I know that anyone who has had the opportunity to truly connect to God’s heart will never desire to leave his presence ever again. But I can’t give you that revelation. It is something you must experience for yourself. To experience this relationship you need to allow yourself to fall in love with God and surrender your life into his hands so that you are able to take his hand and walk with him in obedience and love.

Remember though, knowing God personally does not give us the right to ignore his commands. Instead it is through knowing him that we begin to understand why he has given us these laws and we begin to share his values not because we know them to be right but because our heart changes to reflect his. It is through this deep and intimate relationship with God that we are transformed into his likeness, we begin to share his values, we begin to love the things he loves and hate the things he hates and we start to follow his laws not because we know them to be right but because we cannot bear to see his heart hurt when we do things that upset him. Knowing him also causes us to desire to know him more and to draw closer to him, all the time becoming more an image of him. A transformation of this magnitude cannot go unnoticed by the world, as we become more like him the world will begin to see his likeness in us and desire to know him for themselves. This is how the world will know that God is king.

At this point the words religious and Christian separate, at this point we cease to become followers of a set of rules or in fact anything of our own understanding and become followers of Christ. This I believe is the heart of God for all his children and the very reason he created us.

Handing over dreams

2007-06-04T09:08:00.000+10:00

Sometimes in life God asks us to hand over or give up certain things that we hold dear to us. Maybe it is a family member that you have been praying for for years and now you feel God calling you to release them into his hands, maybe it’s a lifestyle that you have become accustomed to, a lifestyle that is comfortable or a lifestyle that you understand, or maybe it’s a dream, something you have been striving for, desperately seeking, maybe it is even something you feel God himself has called you to.

If that is where you are now then I would like to encourage you by sharing this story of my own, a dream that I had, that God asked me to lay down. If you had asked me two years ago what my plan for the future was I would have given you a very simple and very definite answer, I was going to be an actor. I believed it was what God had called me to do, the very thing he placed me on this earth for. Everyone who had seen me act said that I had talent and it was everything my heart wanted to do. So I did everything that a normal actor would do, I got myself an agent, I put together a showreel, I got headshots done and put together a CV. I sent it to all the local casting agents, and I even got some work, not much but hey we all have to start somewhere. I was so certain that this was what God had called me to and I even knew why. So of course you can imagine my surprise when I felt God calling me to give up my agent. I didn’t understand, I thought this could not possibly be God, I must have been imagining it, but his voice grew stronger and stronger until finally I realized that it was God calling and so I gave up my agent, of course my thinking at the time was more along the lines of ok God so if you want me to be an actor then without my agent you will have to do the work and get me the roles, fully expecting him to just drop a role in my lap. I was still expecting to be involved in local amateur productions, but as time went on I began to realize that I was not getting any roles and everything that I signed up for got postponed for an extended period of time or just plain cancelled. I couldn’t even find any church productions to be involved in. I turned to God and said basically what on earth is going on here? Through my journey I heard God saying to me that I needed to lay down acting all together, I was still holding on to strands, trying to make it happen in my own strength. So without any understanding of what the future might now hold for me I had to gradually let go of the strands I was still holding onto one by one until I found myself holding up empty hands to God saying what now?

As I began to walk the journey considering what life might look like without acting I began to hear God reminding me of an older and deeper seeded dream. A dream that I had dismissed years ago because I thought it was childish, unrealistic and humanly impossible. Bu God reminded me is that just because something is humanly impossible does not mean that it is Godly impossible. After all he is God.

I do not want to go into too much detail about my dream at this point, simply because I do not yet understand enough about it myself, and that is not the point of the story. My point for the moment is simply this – sometimes in life God calls us to lay down things that are very near to us, even things that we thought were of him, and we may not understand it, we may not have any idea of what lies beyond it. Please be encouraged to just step out in faith and do what God is calling you to do. You may need to ask him to help you do it, that’s ok he never asked you to walk this road alone. Don’t be afraid, God will not let you fall, be encouraged and know that he has something in store for you that is greater than anything you can dream or imagine. Your heart may not be ready to hear what he has planned for you until you let go of whatever it is you are holding onto.

Just for those who are interested to know God is now allowing me to be involved in some drama productions. I am directing a church play that will be performed at a school in my area this month.