You don't 'arrive' as a Christian, there's always more

No matter how many years you've been a Christian, no matter how spiritually mature you get, you never 'arrive'. You're never done. You never achieve the 'highest rank' and then stay there.

This is not because there's more 'work' to do. It's not because you are so imperfect and must keep working on yourself.

You are imperfect of course, but that's not actually what God focuses on.

Because being a Christian is not a job description.

It's a relationship.

In a friendship or marriage, you never get to a good place in the relationship and then say "Ok, that's it. We've done it. I can stop making any effort now."

If you stopped talking and laughing and spending time together, that good marriage or friendship would quickly dissolve.

God wants a relationship with you, first and foremost. Maybe after that you'll do things, He'll change you, work on your heart, make you a 'better' person and all that.

But it all flows naturally out of a relationship with God. You can't 'arrive' in a relationship. It is ongoing. Especially with God - there is always more to know, more to discover, more to understand, more love, grace and peace to be found...

If God focuses on the relationship, why do we continue to focus on the work?

For yourself vs By yourself

We can't copy someone else's journey.

While God is the same, an absolute Truth, and what he has done for us, he has done for ALL of us...we can't simply copy the way someone else does it and expect it to work for us.

God works individually in each of us. And there are many things you will need to work out for yourself. Something that is right for one person, may not be for you. You have different talents and gifts. You also have different weaknesses and problems.

If you see other Christian's drinking wine without problem, and yet you know that alcohol causes problems for you - saying, 'well they do it so it must be ok' is only going to get you into trouble.

And simply following a rule someone else has set without actually understanding why, or without a change in attitude or in your heart, does little good in the long run.

If I say to a child "Don't touch the oven", with no explanation, that may work for a little while. But if the child never believes for themselves that it is actually hot and touching will be a bad thing, one day they are going to want to touch it for themselves to find out.

You are not a passive passenger in your faith.

"work out your salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12)

Don't take this as permission to ignore good advice from others or have a pick and choose faith - like I was tempted to think of it when I was younger and (more) rebellious. But it does mean there are things to be sought after, things to be worked out and learned and understood. And you need to do this for yourself. No one else can hand you a close relationship with God, or give you a recipe to follow from their lives. Your faith takes active participation on your part.

But for yourself is not the same as by yourself. By yourself means isolation, carrying the burden alone, and often a dangerous lack of perspective and accountability.

God of course needs to be involved, or what are we doing?

But God gave us other people for a reason. Taking another person's story as an exact to do list won't work, but neither will ignoring other's story because it is different to your own.

Learning from advice, leadership, friendship, example, teaching - these things all add to and guide your own journey with God.

Don't fall into the trap of "No one understands me. I'm not going to listen to them because they just don't get it." or "They couldn't handle that, but I'm stronger than that." We are all different and you will never find anyone who exactly 'gets' everything about you - but what you are looking for in finding people you can trust to have influence in your life is godliness. The commonality of a desire to pursue God is a powerful connector, no matter the other differences.

When we set ourselves apart from, away from or above others the only yardstick by which we measure things becomes our own. Everything seems right if you wrote the rule book.

Don't wait for someone else to work out your faith for you. Be active and pursue God. And remember that in pursuit of God, a relational God, other people will be and must be a part of it.

Dotting the t's and crossing the i's

Dot your T's and cross your I's.

Sounds pretty silly doesn't it. Read it again if you missed it. It's easy to do if your read it or someone says it fast. It sounds like it's supposed to, until you realise that it's backwards.

It sounds like the saying that means get everything perfect and do it just the right way. But it actually makes no sense. If you did that - put dots on t's and crosses on i's - you would be achieving the opposite of getting things perfect.

Religion can be like that. We think a set of rules and doing everything just the right way will make it all work. But it's actually backwards. Religion can actually sometimes cause us to achieve the opposite of what we are meant to.

But the enemy likes to say it to us fast. Make us skip over it quickly, so we think we are seeing and hearing all the right things, so it must be right. He makes us miss the fact that it is all in the wrong order. All the right parts in the wrong places makes a big difference sometimes.

Rules cannot take the place of relationship. Doing all the 'right' things doesn't take the place of a right heart. Ritual doesn't take the place of devotion and love.

The devil likes to make us believe his version of things where we are still sinners in chains, who have to get the paperwork right to get free. And then he reminds us constantly that we don't know how to get it right.

Striving to get everything perfect actually gets in the way of what God has for us - because we never can get it perfect. We'll never attain that goal. Trying to will only distract us from really knowing God.

Because God is the only one who can make things perfect. God is the only one who can put things in the perfect order, the right parts in the right places. He has already done that for us.

Grace means that God's got everything covered. If and when we mess things up, it doesn't matter because God has already done it all. He's already crossed those t's. And he has won. He has triumphed over sin and death.

Because of Jesus, when God looks at us he doesn't see a messed up person who can't manage to live up to His rules. He doesn't see a failure in need of punishment. He sees a child, a pure, white, cherished creation. And he loves you.

Don't you just want to lay down everything you've been carrying and searching for to get it right, lay down the lies and the misdirection you've been struggling with, and just bask in that love?




Peace and joy. (Romans 5:1-11)

Jessie.


But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Being A Woman...doesn't mean taking away a man's role.

(Now reuploaded since the audio got switched off.)

Right after recording this video, I got a reminder of how much I really do need to hear this message myself. That night, after recording the video in the afternoon, I found myself getting angry at my husband for what I felt was a lack of appreciation, and for a whole lot of other things until I ended up attacking him on all fronts.... before finally realising that I was doing exactly what I had been talking about in my video.

If I was feeling any distance from my husband, it was because I had pushed him that far away so many times and made it clear I wanted him at arms length because he was cramping my style. I'd made him feel like he wasn't really wanted in my life.

This made it even clearer to me how important it is for me to explore this topic - even if I'm the only one who ever watches my videos. I felt like I was under attack, and the moment I realised I was thinking lies I felt peace again.

When we're on to something, when God wants to do things in us, that's when the enemy is most likely to come in and try and set us off track. And the thing is, he often doesn't have to work very hard at it.

I imagine him coming in, mentioning to us "Remember that thing you were upset about the other day..." then sitting back, putting his feet up and laughing while he watches us self destruct.

He wants us to keep believing the lie that we are always hard done by. That submitting is being weak. That lifting the men in our lives up means we're pushing ourselves down. That to be happy, women have to be independent of men, who are only out to crush us.

We believe these things in varying degrees is so many areas of our lives, but they can be so subtle, or so ingrained that we don't notice them until God points them out for us.

I think this is such an important issue in our society. We have so many family issues but we're starting not to notice it anymore because we see it everywhere. Marriage break-up is becoming so commonplace that we are in danger of thinking of it as the norm. But what is becoming the norm is that women have distorted ideas of their self worth, distorted ideas of how to treat and be treated by men. Men have distorted ideas of what being a man means, of how to treat women, of how they expect they are going to be treated by women. We need to break the cycle.

In Christians' lives, the relationship between a man and a woman is meant to be a reflection of the relationship between the church and God, the bride of Christ.

Ephesians 5:21-33 - the passage in here used to be a standard at weddings, but something has happened in our attitudes that now it receives criticism if you choose it. We chose it at our wedding and had people question why we would choose that verse, as if it was out-dated and old fashioned. But when you look at it closely, it sums up exactly what our relationships are supposed to be between husband and wives and how closely it reflects our relationship with Jesus, so much so that it almost is hard to discern wether Paul is talking about husband/wife or Christ/church at some points. It's pretty clear, and so fundamental I feel like it should be a requirement at Christian weddings.

"Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. 

Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. 

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— for we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband."

There are a lot of reasons why women shy away from even looking at their roles and what might need to change - one is fear. Fear of being let down and or not appreciated by men. Sometimes it's just plain stubborness. But when you look at it this way, 'Submit to eachother out of reverence for Christ' - we're not doing for the other person, we're doing it for God. 

Other Videos

How can we receive what God's giving us if our hands are already full?

God wants to give us good things. His gifts of grace, forgiveness, blessings and love are freely overflowing. All we need to do is ask, and we will receive. He's not a mean God, he doesn't even make us work for it. That's the amazing thing about Grace.

Sometimes it doesn't seem like we're getting anything though. We may be asking, but we think God isn't delivering, because we don't feel the love, our lives are still going downhill, or no prayers seem to be getting answered.

Sometimes we need to be patient and wait on God and his timing.

But sometimes, God is waiting for us. Waiting for us to realise he's answered, he is giving, but we aren't taking it. Sometimes our hands are so full of other things, things not from God that we have no room to receive what he is giving.

Almost a soon as we realise what it is we're holding on to that's taking up space, as soon as we let go of it and give it up, God's blessings can pour in.

A while ago, I was in a relationship that wasn't good for me. It wasn't going anywhere for a whole lot of reasons but I was afraid to let go of it because I feared being alone again. So I was clinging to it desperately, while asking God to help me with it. I thought he wasn't answering since nothing improved in the relationship.

God was answering, I just wasn't receiving. Until one day, I finally gave in to God's prompting and let go of the relationship. Not only did I feel almost instant peace, but it was just about the very next day that I met the man who is now my husband!

My hands were full of my own ideas for a relationship. As soon as I gave that up to God, he gave me the gift I needed. (My husband's name - Matthew - actually means 'Gift from God')

More recently I have been considering job changes. I have been a teacher for three years but have not been feeling satisfied with it. It's a scary thing to change careers, especially when the new career options are not nearly so secure or certain or comfortable.

But I felt God's promptings in my heart, and I finally made the decision to resign from my permanent, secure job even though I had no idea what next year would hold. I just felt like God wanted me to be available if something came up, and I knew I wouldn't have the flexibility to do that if I was in a permanent job.

Not long after I made this decision, but enough time for me to begin to worry and doubt, God provided. God gave, and I was free to receive because I had trusted him and let go. Now I am going to be the Christian Pastoral Support Worker (formerly known as Chaplain) at the High School I was previously teaching at. It's an exciting new role and something I can clearly see God in.

Over the last two days I attended training workshops for this job, and there I saw clearly many examples of people letting things go, freeing up their hands to receive God's gifts and plan.

One man's story stood out to me. He gave up his house and job in a much more prosperous position to move across the state to a tiny town and apply for the CPSW position at a school with only 7 children. Worlds away from what he was doing and much, much less secure and certain, he had the faith give up a life lived for himself for a life lived for God. I am excited to hear about the blessings I am sure are coming his way in whatever God has in store for him.

You may not need to give up everything in your life as you know it, it may just be small. It could be leaving one job, to be open to something more fulfilling. It could be letting go of a relationship to grow or find a new one. It could be letting go of bitterness or unforgiveness to receive healing for your heart.

But whatever you hear God asking you to let go of, you can be sure whatever he is waiting to give you is far more important and wonderful. We often hold onto things through fear. Fear of being alone, fear of not having enough money, fear of not being in control, fear or what others will think. It may not feel safe and secure or even comfortable sometimes, but you can be assured that God is Good! He does not send you out to do his plans then leave you there all alone to fend for yourself.

God is good.

Psalm 103: 5 He fills my life with good things.

John 1:16 From his abundance we have received one gracious blessing after another.

When People Drive You Crazy

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Mark 12:30-31

The two greatest commandments are Love God. And Love your neighbour as yourself.

That doesn't just mean the people you like, or the ones that are nice to you.

The people in our lives aren't always going to lift us up, encourage us or even like us. But that doesn't mean they weren't put there for a reason. It could be a family member, someone you work with, even friends aren't always what we want them to be.

But before you get angry or frustrated again, before you try to cut them out of your life thinking how much easier it would be if they weren't in it - think about what purpose they might be serving.

I always love the thought, 'be careful what you ask God for' - if you ask him to make you more patient, he probably won't go, 'zap' you're more patient - he'll probably let you go through a challenging situation that teaches you to be patient through experience!

We are like uncut diamonds, still caked in dirt and rough. The people we come across, especially those who grate against us, can often do us the most benefit. Sometimes that person who we can't stand is there to teach us tolerance, or patience, or compassion. And we are in their lives to show God's love.

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
John 13: 34-35

Before you come across this person again, pray for them - but not "God, please make this person stop being so annoying!" - Bless them. Find something about them to thank God for. Or at least ask God to show you what you can learn from the situation.

There's a quote I read that said 'Have you ever asked God to change someone else, only to have him say "Well, you're here now. Why don't we start with you." There are a lot of things in life that we put on other people, when really it lays within ourselves. We don't have control over how anyone else acts or behaves. We only have control over ourselves. When you forgive someone, it's not really for them. It's so that you aren't eaten up and destroyed by harbouring those negative feelings. When you bless others, God blesses us in return.

"But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."

Matthew 5: 44-48

But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.

Luke 6:27-28

It's one of the hardest things in life, to love the people who you don't even like! But God loved us first, even when we were unworthy.

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Romans 5:8

And it's not all off our own backs - the love we have for others comes from God. Ask him every day to help you see other's through his eyes! It's a daily challenge, I know!! But he'll help you.