Provoking your season
Today is the last day of the summer holidays and ‘la rentrée’ begins tomorrow, in principle. Back to school, back to work for most people, back to jackets and soon winter coats; the careless ease of summer, open sandals and casual wear is over; it’s a new season. A season imposed by agenda other than our own, by the school calendar, by the weather and we must follow suit.
Every season in the natural is an opportunity and a reminder to take stock of where we are with God, is it cool weather or warm weather, is it casual open sandal season, careless ease, lazying on the beach or are we girded up in proper clothing to withstand the rigours of life in a fallen world. It is a reminder that things change even in the spirit, we might find that we are more lax in the things of God than when we first believed, that we are less caring than when we first fell in love, that…
Spiritual seasons need not follow the agenda of circumstances or the flesh, they can be provoked by an act of our will in submission to the Holy Spirit. How do you provoke your season?
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Irréprochable Dieu ( ?)
Ce matin je me suis retrouvée à dire à Dieu en prière, ‘Seigneur, je n’ai aucune raison de me plaindre, tu es irréprochable’. Pour certains, parler ainsi c’est de la présomption, pour d’autres ces paroles sont sources de guérison. Soyons vrais, il nous arrive souvent, trop souvent d’ailleurs, consciemment ou inconsciemment de reprocher quelque chose à Dieu, de trouver qu’Il n’a pas assez bien fait. Read more
A palace for the Lord God
There was a man called David who enjoyed the favour of God. God took him from nothing to the throne, made royalty out of a nobody. David loved God despite his imperfections. One day he looked around and said I cannot possibly be living in a beautiful home when the ark of my God is under a tent, and he decided he would build a place for God. But God stopped him and said no, you will not do it, your son will. David, rather than be offended, did the next best thing, he made ample provision for the work, gave generously from his own pocket for ‘the palace will not be for man but for the LORD God.’ (1 Chronicles 29). And when it was built it was glorious indeed.
We are all as David, God took us from nothing and made us children of the kingdom, literally turned us into the temple of the Holy Spirit. Then He requires us to meet together to worship Him, and for that a place is needed. Question, what attitude do we have towards our place of worship? Do we have the heart of David, that our place of worship should not compare unfavourably with our own places of abode, the heart to build a place of worship worthy of our God, to give sacrificially and generously to ensure that the place where Read more
My generosity spurned
This Sunday my church saved me a lot of money while giving me the opportunity to be generous. As I prepared to preach the final message (on prayer) in our long series on Armed and Dangerous, I had the same feeling that I did when I was preparing an earlier one in the series on the word of God. I thought of all that I would not be saying, all that I had previously taught but which could not be fitted into the one hour of that particular message. My heart went out to all the new people who had joined us in the past three months, mostly new believers who did not know the things I had taught before on the importance of God’s word and on prayer.
I decided I would make them a bold offer. Read more
Startling.
I stepped into the early morning bible class on Sunday as they were concluding the class and i just had time to glimpse the final part of my video teaching on Jesus as i spoke of the preincarnate, the incarnate and postincarnate Christ. Because we know His divinity we may despite all our trumpeting of His miracles underestimate the greatness of the power He deployed here on earth. Too much familiarity with the text may dull our sense of wonder at the awesomeness of what His physical presence on earth must have been.
Something of that was mercifully brought home forcefully to me again as I read in the gospel of Mark chapter 6 as Jesus went about His business and people everywhere in the villages, the cities, the marketplaces came and laid the sick out before him so that they could simply touch the tassel, the edge of his robe and be healed. Someone must have been talking about the woman with the issue of blood who got her healing that way, and she was not the only one. The passage says that all who did, that is, all who touched the edge of His robe were healed. Startling.
nurtured by leaders or tamed by experience
Experience, someone said, is the teacher of those who do not listen to their mentors. One of the most difficult parts of pastoring is watching people walk into a ditch even as they turn a deaf ear to your injunctions. Indeed leadership in any form will inevitably bring you into such situations. One of the follies of ignorance is the certainty of knowing when the contrary is obvious. It is also one of the dangers of pride and the unwillingness to be taught. It is better to humble oneself and receive guidance and correction than to obstinately pursue a path in our own wisdom that either leaves us worse than we began or stumbling along on crutches when we could be soaring like eagles.
That is what happens when we buy the lie that we are independent and should do our own thing and no one has the right to call us to order. In the corporate world we understand the value of mentoring, in our churches not. Pastors cajole rather than correct, they simper rather than speak out. The result is Read more
AUTHOR
pastor bola olivia ogedengbe,
The Theophilus Company,
ABBA HOUSE, Paris,
see profile-
