Inheritance

Who would throw £4millions away? James Howell did-inadvertently. He recently threw away his computer which disappeared irretrievably into a land fill before he realised the hard disc contained his 7,500 bitcoins. Bitcoins are a computer generated digital currency that has soared in value from $15 last January to over $1,000 this week. 

Bitcoins have long been favoured by libertarians, gold bugs and drug dealers. They escape government controls and can be used, almost anonymously, anywhere they are accepted.

 While feeling sorry for James, I “praise... God [who]...in his great mercy... has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead... into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you”. 

Have you made that inheritance yours yet? I have-the best thing I ever did!

Ron White

Can Google Solve Death?

“Can Google solve death?” ran a headline in the current issue of Time. It added that “the search giant is launching a venture to extend the human life span. That would be crazy-if it weren't Google”. With a world view that believes “everything is solvable if you reduce it to data and then throw enough processing power at it. The project “might one day defeat death itself”. Don`t you think that we should tell the geeks of Silicon Valley that the problem has already been solved. Two thousand years ago the man, Jesus, was publicly executed; certified dead (they speared him through his ribs just to make sure); buried and on the third day after being killed he rose bodily from the dead to be seen alive in public by many people over several weeks. Death has indeed been solved: it has been “swallowed up in victory”. 

Ron White

Forgiveness

Forgiving him “frees us. It keeps us from going to prison with Conor” said Andy and Kate Grosmaire about Conor McBride who admitted murdering their daughter Ann. 

Could I have forgiven like that? I don`t know. 

But I do know that I need forgiveness and that Jesus told a parable about a man who had been forgiven a huge debt, refused to forgive his debtor a trifling sum. The man who did not forgive was told `“I cancelled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?”  In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he paid back all he owed` (Matt 18:32-34).   

Jesus died on the cross to pay my penalty for me so that I might be forgiven. In view of what Jesus has done for me, surely the only proper response is for me to forgive others?

 If I find that difficult, I can count on His grace to help me.

Ron

How do you lead?

What is leadership?
What is good leadership?
How is my leadership?

LEADERS MUST UNDERSTAND WHAT LEADERSHIP IS.
Colossians 3:12  
‘Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.

 Nicky Gumble says  “Leadership is taking people where they want to go. Good Leadership takes people to a place where they do not know where they should be but taking them there.”

Leadership is the act of influencing/serving others out of Christ's interest in their lives so they accomplish God's purposes in for and through them.

Never judge someone without knowing the whole story, you may think you understand but you may not.

As a teenager I was rebellious, I came from a line of rebellious men whose hearts were not towards God but very much distant from Him. I had a negative style of leadership, I could lead people but towards the negative rather than a positive goal.

My heart was not right. I had influemce over my peers but I led people towards war not peace.

The KJV Bible mentions the heart 833 times. What is going on within us is far more important that what is going on externally.  You might present very well to those around you but who are you kidding?

In Matthew 23 Jesus is speaking to the religious whose hearts have been overtaken with the power of their position. Rather than correcting their hearts before God they present well to the world but it a sham.

v23 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practised the latter, without neglecting the former. 24 You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel. 25 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. 26 Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.”

Colossians 3:12 ‘Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.’

Influence comes from serving by Instructing, Encouraging, Evaluating, Confronting, Training, Releasing,
Influence does not come by
Overbearing, Criticising,   Manipulating,   Threatening, Competing, Controlling.

Jesus said “If you love me you will obey my Commandments”—a radical commitment to Christ in every Christians life that propels them to act in love with truth no matter what it costs that leader

 Matthew 20:26–27  “Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 27 and whoever wants to be first must be your slave—“
John 13:16 -16 “Very truly I tell you, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him”. ; Phil. 2:5-11  “In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:  Who, being in very nature[a] God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;  rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature[b] of a servant, being made in human likeness.  And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!
 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father”

Love has to be your primary motivation to lead, everything else must be secondary, your God given gifts abilities will amount to nothing if your heart is not right.
As leaders our focus is first on God and His purposes for our lives and for those following us.
God’s purpose in using you is to equip and mature those you are leading them into Christ-likeness, and the leaders prime instrument in guiding the followers to become more and more like Christ in their own relationship with God. If you are not living right yourself how can you lead others into anything other than your own hang ups and sins, if there are unresolved issues within us, we will pass them on to others around us.
God’s purpose through the followers is to participate with Him in accomplishing the Great Commission in accordance with their gifts and opportunities.
The leader focuses on both the functional and the foundational in the followers’ lives.
It refers to the followers’ competencies.
The foundational refers to the followers’ character, the core essence of their being on which all they do rests.

The foundational determines how well the leader and the followers function.

Influence comes from serving by Instructing, Encouraging, Evaluating, Confronting, Training, Releasing.Influence does not come by Overbearing, Criticising, Manipulating, Threatening, Competing, Controlling

Blessings. Ray

How do you steer: by the stars or the wake?

How do you steer: by the stars or the wake? A ship`s captain does not lean over the stern of his ship and set his course by looking at the wake; he stands on the bridge and sets his route by the stars; to do anything else would court disaster. God has a plan and purpose for our lives, which are not discerned by looking to our past, however bad or good. Our job is to look up and to trust and obey him. Does anyone love us more than our heavenly father? Is anyone wiser, or more knowledgeable, or more powerful than the creator of the heavens and the earth? It is, therefore, plain daft to rely on our understanding and to do anything other than to trust and obey him.
Ron.

Blessings,

-More people trust Google than God!

 

-More people trust Google than God!  So found one recent survey. “I saw that. I was very grumpy about it. Google always gives me the wrong answer. They`re out to make money out of us” said Archbishop Justin Welby when this finding was put to him in an interview. But surely the finding is unsurprising. People have always tried to make a god in their own image. At one time people made idols. More recently it was a “Pik `n` Mix” god, now it`s cut and paste: only technology has changed not the human heart. When God made his masterpiece-us before we turned against him and went our own way- he made us in his image. God`s intention was that we should be like him. A likeness that includes being morally aware, able to communicate and free to choose. But we chose to ruin it. However God did not leave us to stew in our own juice, instead he sent his only son Jesus who is “the exact representation of his being” and ”the image of the invisible God”. Jesus said he was the way, the truth and the life; a claim God validated when he raised Jesus bodily from the dead. Jesus died on the cross to pay the penalty for our wrong doing. If we admit to God that we are in the wrong, thank Jesus for dying for us and become his disciples, then he puts his Spirit within us and begins to remake us in his image and we discover how trustworthy God is. 

Blessings,

Ron.

are we hiding in the wine press?

God wants us to experience encounters with Him, through these encounters God comforts, challenges, heals and forgives us. 

He changes us. 

We cannot manipulate these encounters but we can make ourselves available, to be attentive to His voice and to follow His guidance.

We need to set aside time to meet with Him daily, to commune with Him and seek His plan for our lives.

We read about many encounters with God throughout the Bible, many men and women who have had their lives changed through these confrontations with their heavenly Father.

The Israelites were being oppressed by the Midianites, they cried out to God and He demonstrated His mercy by raising up a man named Gideon. 

The Israelites had disobeyed God and this was the reason they had fallen into a dangerous place. Gideon was hiding in a wine press threshing his wheat when he encountered God. This encounter left him a different person, he had gone from hiding from his enemies to being called a 'Mighty man of valour'. 
He had been transformed.
Are we hiding in the wine press or do we want to experience an encounter with God? 

We need to be attentive to His voice and follow His commands

Lindsey Toms

-The `undo` button on my laptop! Ron White

The `undo` button on my laptop!   

This is my favourite button. It is the most used and necessary of my laptop`s features. Edith Piaf used to belt out a stirring song 

“Non, Je ne regrette rien”(“No, I regret nothing”). 

I don`t know if she lived by it, but the morphine and alcohol addiction of her later years and an early death when only 48 years old suggests all was not what it might have been. When I look back I can think of many occasions when I wish life had an undo button. But it has not. What has been said and done cannot now be unsaid or undone. But God has provided something better, at huge cost to himself, because he loved us he has provided a way that can put us right with him. The Bible says if we admit the wrongs we have done, God is faithful and just and will forgive us and purify us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9). This is real because Christ died on the cross to take the penalty for all the wrong things we have done.  More than that if we trust in Christ then God will make us a new creation! Wow! Not an “undo” but a “make new” feature: that is grace.

Do you worship the Work? by Oswald Chambers

'We are Gods fellow workers...' 1 Corinthians 3:9

Beware of any work for God that causes or allows you to avoid concentrating on Him. A great number of Christian workers worship their work. The only concern of Christian workers should be their concentration on God. This will mean that all the other boundaries of life, whether they are mental, moral or spiritual limits, are completely free with the freedom God gives His child;  a worshipping child not a wayward one. A worker who lacks this serious controlling emphasis of concentration on God is apt to become overly burdened by his work. He is a slave to his own limits, having no freedom of his body, mind or spirit. Consequently, he becomes burned out and defeated. There is no freedom and no delight in life at all. His nerves, mind and heart are so overwhelmed that God's blessing cannot rest on him.

But the opposite case is equally true - once our concentration is on God, all the limits of our life are free and under the control and mastery of God alone. There is no longer any responsibility on you for the work. The only responsibility you have is to stay in living constant touch with God, and to see that you allow nothing to hinder your cooperation with Him.The freedom that comes after sanctification is the freedom of a child, and the things that used to hold your life down are gone. But be careful to remember that you have been freed for only one thing - to be absolutely devoted to your co-Worker.

We have no right to decide where we should be placed, or to have preconceived ideas as to what God is preparing us to do. God engineers everything; and wherever He places us, our one supreme goal should be to pour out our lives in wholehearted devotion to Him in that particular work.

'Whatever your hands find to do, do it with all your might....' Ecclesiastes 9:10

The Cross of Christ

Colossians 2:11-15   

 In him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands. Your whole self-ruled by the flesh was put off when you were circumcised by Christ. Having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through your faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead. When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins. Having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.

Because of the work of the cross our legal standing before God is complete at the moment we are born again.It can have nothing added to it, no matter how obedient or committed to Jesus we become after we are converted. This is because it is given to us purely on the basis of God’s undeserved grace and mercy. It is not something we can earn or deserve. It is received by faith. It involves the total cancellation of our previous legal standing of guilt and condemnation before God the Supreme Ruler and Judge John Stott wrote  'The Christian community is a community of the cross, for it has been brought into being by the cross, and the focus of its worship is the Lamb once slain, now glorified. The Christian life is an unending festival. And the festival we keep, now that our Passover Lamb has been sacrificed for us, is a joyful celebration of his sacrifice, together with a spiritual feasting upon it.'