JOURNEYS WITH GOD Trilogy - A Trilogy of Teachings to help you on your Journeys with God E-Book

Terry Hayward

• Herausgeber: Abela Publishing
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

4 CHRISTIAN SPIRITUAL BOOKS FOR THE PRICE OF 3 @17% OFF. The TRILOGY In this trilogy I share some of my experiences on this “wandering” as I  took my first journey with God, sharing both the nice, and the not so nice, as I share my love of nature and how it helps me, and hopefully helps you, to get closer to God. Listen to Terry talk about his journeys with God at https://www.rhema.co.nz/shows-djs/days/item/10110-journeying-with-god WANDERINGS WITH GOD – Book 1 We are all pilgrims on the narrow road to salvation and “Wanderings with God’ is the first book in the Journeys With God trilogy written in the belief that it will offer my fellow pilgrims hope and direction in their walk with God. I’ve always been fascinated by ‘spirituality’ and write, for example, of my own struggles to obey the Bible’s imperative to pray ‘continuously’. I also address such subjects as becoming aware of the continuous Presence of God with us in our daily lives. I try to address the difficulties of being obedient to the Law of God but also to share the value and benefits of always trying to find God’s will for my life which will hopefully help you find yours. COFFEE WITH GOD – Book 2 Although there is a lot of advice in this book about how to ‘do’ your quiet time with God, it definitely is not a DIY work on meditation or prayer. It was written in the hope that it would be a help in not only developing our prayer life, but also of becoming aware that God is with us all the time, not just during our Prayer Time with God. Paul tells us to Pray at all times and the intention of this book is to help us understand what this means and then apply that to our everyday life. The aim of this book is to help each one of us to understand exactly what it is that God wants of us and then to do it by coming into such a deep relationship with Him. LEARNING WITH GOD – Book 3 The third in a trilogy of the “Journeys with God” books. This book seeks to bring together the apparent angry God of the Old Testament with the God who is Love of the New Testament. Over many chapters covering many different topics it suggests ways for you and me, the ordinary Christians, to live out our Christian calling to be holy as our Father in heaven is Holy, by filling our daily lives with the Presence of Jesus, by trying to make it our aim to act and re-act as He would in all our daily situations. Whilst insisting on total obedience to God, at the same time the book claims that His love is unconditional. Everything is written in the hope that by spending quiet times with God we will eventually become aware of His constant Presence with us and let that knowledge rule in our lives. GOD CALLS – Free eBook Maybe this should have been the first in the series as our individual journeys with God start when we are called by Him. How would you know if or when God called you to serve Him full time? Would you dismiss His call as you would an annoying insect or would you sit up and listen? After all He has your name and number, and He isn’t calling for nothing........ While this little book was written to chronicle my own call, I'm sure it's message is equally as important for you as I have no doubts that God is  calling you and it would be a tragedy if you missed the call. =============== Terry was a practising lawyer for 25 years before answering a call to the ministry in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa. As a Priest he spent time as a Prison Chaplain and a Hospital Chaplain before being appointed to a parish. A one-time law lecturer and tutor of theology, he is now retired and lives in New Zealand. He has written five Christian Growth books and a number of novels.

Leseprobe

Journeys With God Trilogy

Copy right © 2018 Terry Hayward

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner in any media, or transmitted by any means whatsoever, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, or mechanical ( including photocopy, file or video recording, internet web sites, blogs, wikis, or any other information storage and retrieval system) without the prior written permission of the publisher or author.

Published in England

by

Abela Publishing Ltd, London

[2018]

Email

[email protected]

Website

Coming Soon

ISBN 13: 978-X-XXXXXX-XX-X

First Edition, 2018

Wanderings With God

By

Terry Hayward

Wanderings With God

Copy right © 2013 Terry Hayward

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner in any media, or transmitted by any means whatsoever, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, or mechanical ( including photocopy, file or video recording, internet web sites, blogs, wikis, or any other information storage and retrieval system) without the prior written permission of the publisher or author.

Published in England

by

Abela Publishing Ltd, London

[2018]

Email

[email protected]

Acknowledgments

Most of the quotations I’ve used from the Bible in this book are from the First South African edition of the GOOD NEWS BIBLE published in South Africa by the Bible Society of South Africa. Other quotations are from The New International Version of the Bible contained in the programme E-Sword.

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FOREWORD

TABLE OF CONTENTS

WONDER OF CREATION

WONDER OF CHOICE

WONDER OF LAW

WONDER OF FORGIVENESS

WONDER OF THE CROSS

WONDER OF PRAYER

WONDER OF LOVE

WONDER OF EASTER

WONDER OF FOLLOWING HIM

WONDER OF PRESENCE

WONDER OF WONDERS

FINAL WONDER

Foreword

The creation story in the Book of Genesis has always held a great fascination for me and I feel drawn to it on a regular basis, especially the part about God walking with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. To me the picture Genesis chapter one paints of God creating, is too beautiful for words to adequately describe and I can never ‘chew over’, or meditate, on it enough. But it’s that incredible priviledge given to Adam and Eve of being able to just walk slowly with God, enjoying His creation but also just simply enjoying Him, that plays a huge part of my longing. I constantly ache for such experiences with God, and I feel this especially when I have the priviledge of seeing beautiful scenery outside of the concrete, mortar and bricks of our cities.

I feel this ‘wandering’ with God must be the most incredible experience ever, and even now writing about it makes that longing well up inside me. Not just being able to talk to Him, but walking with Him, mostly in silence, and every now and again discussing the beauty around me or even just thanking Him for including me in that beauty. And not just all that beauty out there surrounding me, but also the beauty within, for if I am indeed created in the Image of God and if He, in the persons of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, lives in me, then I too must be uniquely beautiful inside. Although I must admit sometimes I find this difficult to believe and find it much easier to believe that I simply have the inborn potential to have God’s beauty inside of me.

The Israelites, escaping the oppression of Egypt, followed God as He led them through the desert by way of a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. I love the picture this brings to mind as it gives me something tangible to hang onto in my wanderings with Him. It serves as a reminder that He is always there leading me if I can just keep my focus on Him and my eyes open for Him. I know that we Christians now follow Jesus so that we don’t have to follow a cloud or a fire, but nevertheless I chose this picture for the cover of this book, taken by us, during one of my wife and my visits to one of our favourite places in this world, the Mkhuze Game Reserve, because it is a reminder to me of God’s constant leading.

When I saw this ‘pillar of fire’ in the sky I felt again a deep and compelling desire to renew my following as well as my wanderings with God. As I’m sure you’ve all experienced, we all seem to have days when our walking with Him appears difficult, those days when it almost seems that He is deliberately hiding Himself from us. I love this book-cover picture because it is a reminder to me that our great Creator God never actually leaves us to be alone and is always leaving signs for us of His Presence for us to follow. Over the years I’ve seen many such signs in places such as Mkhuze and this is why that place is so special to me, not because I feel that it is more Holy than any other place on the face of this earth, but because it’s a place where I generally find it very easy to become aware of His Presence with me, even in my dry times.

Wanderings with God are in reality just a culmination, or a record, of some of my ‘quiet times’ spent with God over the years, a number of which I’m sure some of my ex-parishioners will recognise from some of the sermons I have preached. I suppose culmination is really the wrong word to use here because my quiet times will continue until the day I die and I am called home to be with my God, but the use of the word ‘result’ here would somehow sound a bit too clinical. Be that as it may, my quiet times with God would possibly be described by some people as ‘meditation’ and by others as ‘contemplation’. Whatever word works best for you, use that and just simply be with your God and let Him be God in your life. Dedicate those special times to Him (but more about this too later on in the book). The purpose of this little book is not so much to try to define one’s times with God but to share with you some of my own ruminations with Him during my quiet times in the hope that you will find this helpful in your own quiet times as you walk with Him.

I have felt compelled to write this book for some time now because life as a Christian is not always a bed of roses and the walk with God becomes more difficult when we have to traverse rough ground. Sometimes in my walk with God I felt a little bit like Elijah who cried out to God in despair when he thought he was the only one left who loved God, only to receive the assurance that God had kept for Himself several thousand others who had not bowed to false gods and false doctrines (1 Kings 19:10). Re-assuring as that should be, when I look around me at the people who make up the vast majority of the world’s peoples, I still despair and cannot help but feel that God’s true followers are becoming fewer and fewer.

Then I look at the times of Isaiah, writing hundreds of years after Elijah’s days, where he deals with this same problem. I prefer the Good News Bible’s (Today’s English Version) translation in this particular instance, where in chapter 30 (8 -11) Isaiah records my exact complaint:

“God told me to write down in a book what the people are like,

so that there would be a permanent record of how evil they are.

They are always rebelling against God,

Always lying,

Always refusing to listen to the Lord’s teachings.

They tell the prophets to keep quiet.

They say, ‘Don’t talk to us about what’s right.

Tell us what we want to hear.

Let us keep our illusions.

Get out of our way and stop blocking our path.

We don’t want to hear about your Holy God of Israel.’”

While it does help me to know that the people of today are no worse than those of past millennia, I still cry over all those beautiful people I see every day in our streets, and on Sundays in our churches too, who either don’t want to hear about God or don’t want to hear about the ‘tough love’ that we all encounter in our walk with Him. Too many Christians don’t want to be challenged by a Bible that demands sacrifices and only want to hear the ‘nice’ happy parts.

The expression, ‘elastic Christians’, appeals to me because I believe we need to be ‘stretched’ in our faith sometimes. Too many of our churches have become like the Laodecians (Rev. 3: 14) who were ‘neither hot nor cold’, but simply ‘lukewarm’, and all this so as not to upset or challenge parishioners.

In my wanderings with God I have loved most of our moments together, but there have been a number of times when I found what He was saying to me very difficult to stomach. But on all the occasions I have wrestled with God about the difficult bits, He has always overcome me and I have then had to struggle to be obedient to His Love and the demands of that Love. I have over the years slowly come to the realisation that if I truly love Him, then I have to accept ‘all’ and let Him decide what is best. I’d love to be able to tell you that I have experienced success in this, but that would not be true as I still struggle with some of His instructions to me. What is beyond any shadow of doubt, however, is that on those occasions where I have mostly managed to be obedient, the elation that His victory brings has always made the struggle well worthwhile.

I encourage you to know, and invite you to experience, some of my wanderings with God in the hope that as you also wander with Him, and wonder at Him, you too will come to experience His incredible Patience with you and will know His unsurpassable Love for you. I pray that you will see yourself in some of my wanderings and if you do, I give thanks to God that we can share experiences. May His Holy Name be always praised!

This book is not written as some sort of spiritual DIY. At no point do I think you will have an epiphany and suddenly be able to exclaim, “Wow, so that’s how it should be done if it’s all to fit together”. There are some chapters, like those on The Law and on choices, which might be construed as controversial. Even the chapter on Prayer, which is mostly around my personal struggles in those areas, you might find difficult to accept. But they are all chapters reflecting and recording some of my personal journey as I’ve walked with God and struggled with man, and so should be accepted as such. I sincerely hope you will be able to recognise some of your own personal struggles as you read on.

Terry Hayward

Auckland, New Zealand

Wonder of Creation

I AM

Created all

By His Word, ‘Let there be’.

He created me too, His creature

When He spoke His Word and said

‘Be!’

And I was.

And so to be obedient to His Word

I need just to ‘Be!’

What He created me to be.

And so I am.

I am in I AM

And I AM is in me.

I have been fortunate in that over the years I have had the pleasure and priviledge of experiencing many a conducted walk in a Game Reserve, accompanied by a Game Ranger. It has been the happy lot of my wife and me to be the parents to a son working in such a place. And with many good friends working there too, we have been privileged to be able to experience creation, as close to what it must have been for Adam and Eve, as is humanly possible. My wife and I have enjoyed the experience of accompanying the Game Rangers on different occasions when they were darting elephants to collar them for tracking purposes, when they were tracking cheetahs and painted dogs (Cape Wild Dogs) and even tagging vultures, and I will be forever grateful to our Game Ranger friends for these incredible privileges. All these experiences have left an indelible impression in my mind and also in my heart, a truly spiritual impression. What was undoubtedly the most memorable of all was those ‘walks’, or what I have always thought of as my ‘wanderings with God’, was the fact that I could choose to have such times with Him. My hope is that this book will enable you to also enjoy your own ‘wanderings with God,’ wherever your special place may be (more about this later in the book).

Early one morning, as soon as it was ‘legally’ possible, my wife and I left the village at Mantuma Camp in Mkhuze Game Reserve to drive down to Ensumo Pan where we intended to sit and pour ourselves an early morning mug of coffee from our flask. On our drive down to the Pan, we were privileged to be ‘held up’ by a herd of elephants crossing the road ahead of us before they headed off into the thick bush on the side of the road and we had remained with them until they disappeared from sight. With the sounds of breaking trees and the occasional rumbling tummies being the only evidence of their distant presence, we continued our drive down to the Pan.

We had only arrived in Mkhuze Game Reserve the previous evening and intended to spend the first few days of our ‘break’ on a sort of ‘mini retreat’ as we slowed down a-pace and got into the mood of the bush. As I sat silently in our little car gazing out over the vast expanse of the Pan, enjoying the antics of a pod of hippos snorting their laughter contentedly in the waters of the Pan, I slowly relaxed and began to quieten down. Sipping my mug of hot coffee and nibbling on a rusk I realized that we had indeed been fortunate that morning in coming across the elephants and also now as we sat with hippos.

It was great to be back in the Game Reserve, probably our favourite place in all the world. This was a place where we had come to really experience that ‘peace of God that passes all understanding’. As I looked around me I realised that the bush had so much to teach me about our Creator God. Most visitors to Game Reserves only spend a day or two in them and so tend to drive around madly looking for animals, for ‘the big stuff’. This aptly mirrors what our normal lives are all about. We are always looking for the ‘big stuff’ in our lives and our workdays, school life or whatever, and this consequent mad dash causes us to miss out on so much of life, which we simply overlook in our haste. We are so busy doing these ‘big things’ that we forget that everything we do, no matter how menial and unimportant they seem to be, should be done well, because then they are done for God.

Most of us like to do the ‘big things’ and the thought of doing the little things of a ‘Brother Lawrence’, such as washing the cups and saucers in the kitchen, is almost repugnant to us. We so easily forget one of the great lessons of nature, which is that in the greater scheme of things the lowly ant is no less important than the mighty elephant.

Sitting at Ensumo Pan that February morning as my thoughts ran hectically around my still busy head, sipping my first cup of coffee for the day under an enormous Fever Tree next to the water, I slowly began to relax and become aware of my surroundings. Although it was only just after six o’clock in the morning the weather was already sticky hot and threatening us with the real heat yet to come. I was truly grateful to be under that tree and realised I was going to be even more grateful later on for the shade. The humidity in Mkhuze is something to experience!

It was as I sat enjoying my coffee and the peaceful scene in front of me, that I came to the awareness that God had placed that particular tree right there next to the Pan, for just such an occasion as this. Not solely just for my benefit or to teach me a lesson, of course, but for the benefit of His whole creation. That tree was busy doing just what God had created it to be – simply to ‘be’ a tree. And what does a tree do, I wondered, but provide shade and shelter for not just me, but for all of His creation.

The tree was perfect for me and I was very happy to sit in its shade, but what about all the rest of creation appreciating it’s ‘being’ a tree. God created that tree to hold the soil together in times of flooding but also in times of drought when the soil cracked and moved. It was also created to be, for example, a lodging for ants and other little creatures that lived in the tree. The birds that sit in its branches also enjoy the shade but at the same time they feed off the tree as they peck into all the small holes in the bark for grubs and mites. The ants lodge in the tree but they bring their food with them into the tree and, like the birds that do their little poops in the tree as they sit there, they in turn fertilize the tree. All are, in some small way or other, interdependent and come to rely on each other without even realizing it.

And that’s just how our Mighty God works – He’s always busy caring for and about us, without our even realizing it. As the birds and the bees, the ants and other insects, are attracted to and feed off the flowers of the tree, they in turn also pollinate the tree and so life goes on. All this time the tree is there, just busily doing what it does best, simply being a tree!

This made me realise that even the most ordinary things of life, things we take for granted and more often than not don’t even notice, by their very nature have a spiritual essence that we all too often seem to miss in this rat race we live in. Not just the birds and the bees, and the squirrels in the trees, but everything can and should be a message to us of God’s love for His us and for His creation. The humdrum things of the kitchen, the pots and the pans, the broom and the vacuum cleaner, should all be treated with reverence as gifts from God to make our lives easier. We need to give thanks to our gracious, ‘giving’ God and learn to respect them as much as we respect the sacred ‘pots and pans’ of the altar such as the ciborium and chalice. All are worthy of service to God if used reverently and with love; not just love for the ‘things’ themselves, but with love for the creatures we serve as we use those ‘things.’ After all, ‘heaven and earth are full of the glory of God.’

One of the greatest struggles I have had, not so much with God but about Him, came to a head one day on a walk in the Reserve. My wife and I had driven up to Mkhuze Game Reserve after our Christmas services to spend a week or so with our son, and early on New Years day, before leaving to return home, I had gone out alone for a walk around the open spaces near the staff village.

Because it was the beginning of a new year I had just that morning read from one of my favourite Bible passages, the creation story from Genesis chapter one. I started musing over this Reading as I walked, and I tried to imagine ‘nothing’ and then watch as God created ‘everything’ out of ‘nothing’. My Oh my, but did this make my head spin! The Bible starts with those salutary words, “In the beginning God…” I couldn’t get passed that point, after all, “in the beginning” there was just ‘nothing’ but how do you imagine ‘nothing’?

Try to imagine nothing, and no matter how hard you try, you always come up with ‘something’ even if it is just fresh air. But the problem is that even fresh air is not merely ‘nothing’. Just let the air out of your car tyre and a scientist will assure you that that air definitely has substance, as you will agree when you smell it and feel it. Non-believing scientists tell us that it’s possible that ‘everything’ started ‘by accident’. Just look around you; does all the beauty out there look like an accident to you? In any case, those same clever scientists admit that an accident cannot just happen out of ‘nothing’, as there has to be ‘something’ to start it off, or to set off a chain reaction.

I decided that before my head actually exploded (no, this was not the ‘big bang’ theory), I would move on from that part of my morning’s Reading about God actually starting the creation process, a few verses deeper into the actual creation narrative itself. What an amazing experience that was to be for me. It was as though I were actually there at the time He spoke His word and I watched in awe as the world came into being. In my mind I visualised the earth appearing out of ‘nothing,’ and then watched the sky as it divided and the waters appeared, only to in turn also be divided. And then I saw the animals appear!

It was at that very moment that I spotted a little Duiker (a small antelope) crouching down behind some bushes. I recognised in this amazing creature of God, chewing gently and contentedly as it looked cautiously back at me with its big brown eyes, the story of creation. It was at that moment in the Presence of God, that I felt that for one brief moment I was actually looking into the Face of God.

I then, enthralled by the pure bliss that I walked in, felt a deep anger start to well up deep inside me as I thought of all those poachers, particularly the white-collared poachers sitting safe and secure in their ivory towers, making their fortunes out of the death of such as these beautiful creatures; such as this little Duiker. Making their money, not for their own or their children’s survival, but purely out of greed, to feed their bank balances, not their children’s tummies!

Those greedy criminals desecrating nature purely for their own profit and self aggrandisement make me sick to the stomach. Here I was in this beautiful Game Reserve where I had been so privileged to be able to be a part of God’s creation! A place where at times I felt that I had been granted that privilege of being able, in some sort of way, to look on the Face of God. Yet in that hallowed place I was ripped out of my comfort zone as I remembered all those horrid people thinking only about their own false god, their bank balances!

Some of us have the opportunity in this lifetime to feel the Holy at moments like mine, walking with God in His wilderness, and yet these greedy criminals are doing their best to deprive us of this particular opportunity to look at God at work, and all because of their insatiable greed for mammon!

Not too long ago a friend of mine, a Game Ranger from Zululand, asked me a very awkward question. He is a believer but he wanted to know why, if God is indeed Love as the Sunday school teachers taught at his church when he was a young boy, could they teach the children that only humans go to heaven and not animals. I’d never really thought about this before, because it was something that I’d never believed myself. Although I was vaguely aware that other people had also complained about this teaching, it had never got me thinking deeply about it.

I couldn’t help but wonder at the mixed messages we sometimes send, not only to our own children, but also to others new in the faith or who are struggling with their faith. On the one hand the Sunday school teacher teaches that the animals don’t go to heaven when they die, but when the family pet dies and the child’s grief demands answers, we tell the child the pet has ‘gone to be with Jesus’. My wife and I were preparing the Ranger and his fiancé for marriage and the preparation was almost derailed by that question, but that was good because it made all of us think and search the Scriptures for answers.

After looking at various passages from the Books of the Prophets, such as Isaiah (11: 6) where God foretells of the future Kingdom where the child will play next to the wolf and the lion without any problems, and the Gospel reading (Matthew 10: 29) where Jesus assures us that not even a sparrow will fall to the ground without God being aware of it, we all came to the conclusion that the animals were actually OK as to life after death. (See too Psalm 50 wherein God claims all the animals belong to Him). If God is concerned about a sparrow falling to the ground, surely He’s concerned about it’s death? Mark 16: 15 even tells us that we are to even go and preach the Good News to ‘all creatures.’ None of us were able to find any reference in the Bible to animals being dammed to some sort of eternal oblivion, or for that matter having their own separate sort of heaven.

Just as there is nothing Biblical about the different human races having separate heavens, so I believe it was out of just this sort of false reasoning that the creators of apartheid had come to their beliefs about ‘separateness’. Paul also, in various passages in the New Testament, such as chapter eight of the Book of Romans, tells us that ‘all creation’ (which must obviously include the animal kingdom) groans in anticipation as we wait for the coming Kingdom. While it is true that only we humans are actually made in the image of God, the animals were certainly placed on earth by God, not just for our entertainment and edification, but because He loves them too. There is nothing He has made that He does not love and so we decided that when animals die they won’t just disappear into nothingness. After all, if they were just simply going to cease to exist, why would He talk about them in the way that those Scripture readings do? What about trees and flowers and all other ‘living’ entities? The answer, if we’re really honest with ourselves, is that the Bible doesn’t say and therefore we just simply don’t know. The Bible tells us very little about heaven and simply leaves us with a sense of longing for it to come.

Changing the subject slightly now; to me personally, the best teacher in our quest to raise our level of awareness of the Presence of God, is nature. Go for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a long walk, and it doesn’t have to be a walk out in the countryside, or my personal preference, a walk in the bush for that matter. A walk in the ‘concrete’ jungle can be just as good as a walk in a real jungle in which to learn this need for awareness because our Creator God is at work everywhere, not just out in the bush. As you walk, stop and have a look at a tree, but not with all that thinking about what’s going on in the tree like I described earlier on. Just simply look at the tree and be aware of it.

If you’re in the middle of a city where there are no trees, look at a little flower, or maybe even a weed, battling to grow in a crack in the concrete pavement. It’s all a part of creation, after all. Don’t try to analyse the flower, don’t try to marvel at its strength of survival in such a harsh environment, just be aware of it. You might like to pick up a small stone or pebble and feel its texture in your hand. Feel its texture, whether smooth or rough. Look at its colours and be aware. Don’t try to analyse, just be aware. If you find you are analysing, don’t become angry with yourself or despondent that you have gone off at a tangent once again. Just slowly stop your ‘thinking’ about it and simply return to ‘being’ aware.

Then try to become aware of other ‘stuff’ around you, at the same time remaining aware of the flower or pebble. Let your awareness lead you, not your feelings. Just look at what’s around you and push aside your ‘feelings’ for what you see. Don’t be alarmed if you become distracted, because this simple type of awareness is new to most of us and has to be learnt. It’s not in our nature to be ‘aware’.

What is probably the most startling thing to learn in this new experience is that you are not trying to achieve something. The pressures we constantly live with, of achieving and doing well, cause fear and tensions in our lives. Here we don’t have to achieve anything, we just have to relax, to ‘chill’ as the youngsters would say, and try to enjoy that freedom. You don’t have to achieve, so stop and listen to the birds, don’t try to identify them, listen to the ‘babbling brook’ and don’t concern yourself with how clear, or murky the water is. Just ‘be’ aware!

The biggest problem you should have to face on this walk in creation is getting bored. But boredom is just another distraction and should be dealt with like any other distraction. Don’t try to fight it, just acknowledge it and slowly and gently lead yourself back to the task of simply being aware. You don’t have to change anything, whether in your attitude or in the nature around you. Just let it ‘be’, just look.

We live lives that are so fast moving, a real rat race, that we tend to feel guilty about just ‘chilling’. But take the time to learn how to relax. Don’t let your conscience accuse you if you choose to take ‘time out’ to spend wandering with your God. I assure you, get into this mode and a whole world of wonder awaits you.

Becoming ‘aware’ in the broadest sense of that word is absolutely vital in our becoming ‘aware’ of God’s Presence with us. We know in our heads that He is with us, always and to the very end of time (Matthew 28: 20), but we are very rarely, if ever, aware of His Presence with us at all times. No matter how hard we try, especially in this crazy fast-moving world we live in, very few of us are ever aware of His Presence for very long. I will deal with this problem in more detail in a later chapter but for now know that the exercise above is so easy and pleasant to do and it is one of the best ways to learn to be aware of that Presence with you at all times.

Wonder of Choice

Today there are millions of criminals in our prisons

But where will they be tomorrow?

Today they are incarcerated in a world we can control

But tomorrow, when released, they will try to take control

of our world.

Today we need to guide their lives into a new direction

Or tomorrow they may try to direct us and harm our lives.

Today we need to teach them legal work skills that will

enable them to live in our world

Or tomorrow they will try to corrupt our world with

their illegal skills.

Today we must try to rehabilitate them and win their hearts

Or tomorrow they will try to debilitate us and break our hearts.

Today! Tomorrow may be too late!

God loves you and me so much that He has given us the second greatest of all gifts, the gift of choices. The greatest gift of all is, of course, Jesus! God has decided, in His wisdom, not to make us into computer driven robots that will do exactly what we have been programmed for, but has instead given us a set of morals to live by, in the form of His Word and His Law. He has shown us that sin is the greatest danger of all and mostly it is our own sin that threatens our tomorrows. With these thoughts as our guide, we are allowed, by His great love, to make our own decisions, to choose.

One of the Desert Fathers, Antony the Great, offered this sage advice in answer to a fellow monk’s query about salvation: “Do these three things and you will be saved: Whoever you are, always keep God before your eyes. Whatever you do, always do so by reference to the Scriptures. And wherever you are, do not easily leave there.”

We make choices every day without even being aware that we are faced by them and those choices are made, mostly instinctively, without making conscious decisions about them. These choices are usually made as a result of our conditioning, the results of our upbringing and surroundings, and as such are sort of ‘inbred’ if I may use that expression. Choices, such as what I will wear today, are made with a lot of thought and are influenced by outside influences that often make us want to conform, usually to peer pressure. These choices such as what I wear today define ‘what others tell us we are’. Other choices made by our upbringing (the way we and our family were taught to do things) on the other hand define ‘who we have been set up to be’.

Both these types of choices are very often forced on us by our need to conform and meet the expectations of our peers, or our loved ones. That’s why Paul in chapter twelve of his letter to the Romans warns us of the dangers of ‘conforming’ to the ways and wiles of this world and instead he encourages us to be transformed in our minds by the Spirit of God (verses 1 & 2).

We are to be in the world but not to be of the world and we are warned repeatedly by the New Testament writers not to follow the ways of the world. An example of what I’m saying is given by the Apostle of Love, John, in his first letter chapter 4 (vs. 5 & 6), where he warns us about paying attention, and giving any credence, to false prophets, as follows,

“Those false prophets speak about matters of the world, and the world listens to them because they belong to the world. But we belong to God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever does not belong to God does not listen to us. This then is how we can tell the difference between the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error.”

The most difficult choices we have to make are those in which we battle to decide which is the Christian way or which is not, especially when both seem to be good choices. When faced with such choices, as Christians we very often think we have to make them on the basis of choosing one or the other (one will be right so the other will automatically have to be wrong), what we see as the Mary or Martha choice (Luke 10: 40).

This is not entirely correct though, because although Jesus commended Mary for making the better choice by wanting to sit at His feet and hang on to His every word, He never put Martha down for working hard. All He said was that Martha worried too much and that Mary had made the better choice and that she, Martha, should get her priorities right. The Bible makes it very plain that we need to get out there and work, and in fact Paul in his second letter to the Thessalonians (3: 10) tells them that the Biblical policy is very simply, ‘no work no eat’.

I think that what Jesus was saying in that Mary and Martha incident is that we have the choice to make our decision become the objective of our lives, which should be to do all for the ‘glory of God’ (see 1 Cor. 10:31), whatever we are doing. I wonder how many of us would dare to claim that all we do or say, we do with the sole objective of bringing glory to God. Prayer and service are two sides of the same coin: one is having compassion and selfless love; the other is doing compassion with selfless love. We can’t have one without the other as James is at pains to point out in his letter (James 2: 18).

Unfortunately, when it comes to morality and the Law and Word of God, too many of us are still influenced by the peer pressure group or our own selfish desires, and what we have to understand is that God’s Word and Law is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow – it changeth not! We cannot subject God’s Word or Law to popular opinion such as the ‘Bill of Rights’ or to whether or not it is ‘politically correct’. Just see below what God says about this sort of thinking when He says through his Prophet Jeremiah (8: 7-12):

“…But, my people, you do not know the laws by which I rule you…Look, the laws have been changed by dishonest scribes…They have rejected my words…My people, were you ashamed because you did these disgusting things? No, you were not ashamed at all;”

The people of Israel in Samuel’s time cried out for a king to rule over them (1Sa. 8: 5 – 9) in place of God as they also attempted to align themselves with the need to be politically correct, to be the same as those round about them. Samuel was flabbergasted at the thought of the people taking someone other than God to rule them, but God intervened and allowed the people to exercise their gift of choice. And so they made their choice, a choice that proved to be a disastrous choice for Israel, and replaced their King with a human king.

God’s Word and God’s Law are not negotiable and therefore we can’t call a public referendum to decide whether or not they meet with the approval of popular opinion, whether they are ‘politically correct’ and in accord with some sort of ‘Bill of Rights’. And if we decide they don’t meet these criteria, then we can’t simply make the changes we feel will make them ‘correct’. If we try to do this God might just permit it to happen, as He did with the Israelites in Samuel’s time, and then we will also have to live with the consequences of our decisions.

Let me try to give you another example of what I mean. Jesus was a radical in His thinking, and treated women so differently from the norm of His time, that it was quite pointed and has been mentioned by people of all walks of life throughout the ages. Women were His equals in everything and He never patronized them but dealt with them just as He dealt with the men he came into contact with. Because of this He never gave women special privileges. They had to live by the same rules.

Now I also believe that women are my equals in anything they put their minds to, whether intellectually or otherwise. One of the things I believe is that just like a man, a woman has complete rights over her own body. So what about when it comes to that heated debate over abortion? Because she has full rights over her body and because she has the right to make her own choices, does that mean she has the right to an abortion and thereby kill her foetus? The answer is a resounding NO!

Am I now going against my stated belief in women’s rights? Again no, not at all, I don’t believe I am, because a woman still has full rights over her body and she still has full rights to make her choices, it’s just that I believe she exercised those rights when she agreed to have sex! At that point when another human being was conceived, she gave up some of her rights in favour of that other person. Now her unborn child also has rights, such as the right to life, and those rights must take precedence over her original rights as she has already had her chance to exercise her rights.

As I said above, we make umpteen choices every day of our lives, most of them without even thinking about them. Sometimes we do manage to make the right choice, in fact most of the time we do so, but we still need to slow down and learn to think. It is when we just re-act and make our decisions without thinking them through that we can get into trouble.

Some people, like my son, are natural pacifists and his re-action will probably be different to mine in a situation that demands instant decisions. For example, if someone swore at my wife and took a swing at her, my son would probably pull her out of the assailant’s way and leave the scene. My natural re-action would be to retaliate. I am all too aware of this flaw in my make-up as a Christian and is something that I have to work hard at each day. When I say each day, I really mean that because little things such as another driver swerving his car in front of me can set me off.

The important thing is to be aware of one’s shortcomings and to take the necessary precautions to avoid getting into those predicaments. I need to look at them through the eyes of the Scriptures and ask the Holy Spirit for help against my instincts. For example, don’t go to places where you know people drink excessively because you know that when people get inebriated, they tend to become over-exuberant or even aggressive, so avoid such situations. And the other thing you need to do is to train yourself to slow down and think ‘before you leap’, even taking the time for a little prayer to ask for the strength to resist.

There will be many situations when you simply don’t have the time to step back and view things dispassionately, so start now to train yourself to think first. Start today to spend time studying the Scriptures so that they become part of who you are and direct your thoughts. I personally find the best place to start this training is with my tongue. It might be because of my training as a lawyer, but I definitely have a problem with sometimes allowing my mouth to go off independently of my brain and then regretting the words later. The most important part of this new training is to make sure that we saturate ourselves in the Holy Scriptures so that our re-actions have at least a chance of being God inspired. Make a plan to spend time with God every day and talk to Him about choices and problems.

Possibly the greatest obstacle today to our making the right choices is this liberal concept, in fact I believe it is part of the new age beliefs that have crept into Christianity, that if it feels good and makes me happy, then its go ahead and do it. Psychologists have latched onto this thought process and encourage it too. Due to this type of teaching, which is also coming out of many of our churches today, we are loosing that ancient moral shaper known in the Bible as ‘the fear of the Lord’.

In fact this whole belief in the fear of the Lord has been eroded by our own natural inclination to do what makes us feel good coupled with a totally incorrect interpretation of John’s assurance to us in his first letter (4: 18). While it’s true that perfect love does in fact drive out fear, if we have perfect love in us we will obey all the Lord’s commands, not just the ones we like and when we like.

Fear of the Lord is a two part concept that we need to acknowledge in our walk with Him, because both are still, today, Biblical. Firstly there is the type of fear that was instilled in Adam and Eve when they attempted to ‘hide’ from God after they had disobeyed Him in the garden. They knew that they had disobeyed His command not to eat the fruit of a certain tree and therefore they feared His wrath. Your psychologist will no doubt tell you that if you enjoyed that piece of fruit then that makes it allright, but deep inside, like with Adam and Eve, things just don’t ‘feel’ right. Deep down inside us, our training in reading of the Bible nudges us and creates in us that uneasy feeling that we shouldn’t really be doing this, and that disobedience is actually not allright.

There are, of course, many such examples of this type of fear of God that we need to foster and develop but the other specific type of ‘fear’ is the fear of God that is the result of our coming to the appreciation and realisation of our need to reverence Him and hold Him in awe. This is the second part of coming to understand the correct meaning of the term the “Fear of the Lord” and will also develop with training ourselves in the Scriptures.

Our word ‘awful’ comes from this word ‘awe’ and it actually means to be in complete wonderment, full of wonderment, so much so that we end up reverencing Him. The problem with so many of us adopting this attitude of fear of the Lord is because it sounds so politically incorrect and our tendency is to be too flippant in our attitude towards God.

But this need to instil in us a ‘fear’ of the Lord is not just some old-fashioned, Old Testament theology because as I said we have misinterpreted John’s telling us that ‘perfect love drives out fear’. This ‘fear’ is still demanded of us in the New Testament! Early in the New Testament, in the Book of Acts we are told;

“So the church…walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit was multiplied.”

Already there we can see the advantages of fear of the Lord as the Holy Spirit intervenes. For one, whereas the church today is decreasing in numbers, that early church that walked in the fear of the Lord actually multiplied! And when we do walk in the fear of the Lord, we will have the additional advantage of feeling the comfort of the Holy Spirit with us.

Paul is so right in Romans (3: 18) when he looks at ungodly people and says that there is no ‘fear of God’ in them. When those sort of people make their choices, fear of God plays no part in whether or not they will obey God’s commands and His word; all they ask themselves is, “will I enjoy it?” The author of the letter to the Hebrews (4: 16) assures us that because of what Jesus has done for us we can approach the throne of God ‘boldly’, but we need to still remember that later on he warns us that, “our God is a consuming fire” (12: 29).

There are many more examples in the New Testament exhorting us to walk in the fear of God but I’m sure that these few examples will underline what I’m trying to say. Jesus is indeed our friend and our brother but He is still God and so we nevertheless need to have an ‘anxious fear’ of Him and we still need to reverence Him and be in awe of Him. Just look at the might and majesty of God displayed in Revelation chapter 4, as an example of how much awe the New Testament holds Him in, and you will have to admit that He is not simply ‘our buddy’ to be treated like the boy next door.

Moses, in Exodus 33 from verse 19, had begged to see the Face of God but had been denied this request because no one can look on the His Face and not die. So Moses was granted the next best thing, the extraordinary privilege of being able to watch God go by and see His back. After this indescribable encounter with God, Moses went back to his people only to find that his face was shining so brightly that the people couldn’t look at him and he had to wear a veil over his face. (I believe that for one brief moment that morning in the Mkhuze Game Reserve on my walk as I looked at that little Duiker, I knew just how Moses must have felt when he saw God’s back.) Now if Moses’ face shone so unbearably brightly just from looking on God’s back, this is probably the reason God refused to let him look into His face. It would have been just too much for Moses to have survived and yet we Christians are assured that we will receive that privilege one day, the chance to see God “as He is”. (see too the Word in Rev. 22: 4).

But why did the people have such a problem simply looking at Moses’ face? Paul gives us the answer in his second letter to the Corinthians (3: 13-18). They couldn’t look at Moses because they were too scared of God, their minds being closed to the light that would have shone out of the Scriptures. It would be easier, they felt, for Moses to listen to God on their behalf and then relay to them what God said. They felt more comfortable if God’s word remained hidden behind a veil where it wouldn’t burn too brightly in their lives.

We too have that choice to make and unfortunately so many of us have made a choice to keep Christ hidden from our eyes behind the veil of non-belief, or maybe simply a veil so that we won’t be challenged by His word. We have the choice to read and study the Scriptures and see Jesus on every page of the Bible, but some choose rather to let their clergy lead them (and unfortunately sometimes mislead them) instead of being like the Bereans in Acts 17: 11 who listened to Paul with great eagerness and then every day studied the Scriptures to see if what Paul had said was true.

Know your Bible so that you can develop your very own close and special relationship with Jesus. After all, how do you have a relationship with someone you hardly know? Read and study your Bible each and every day as you follow your precious Jesus as He walks through every page of Scripture!

Wonder of Law

We come to Jesus, not because we are worthy,

But because He has made us worthy.

We come to the Lord’s Table, not simply to be fed,

But because He told us to hunger and thirst after righteousness.

We only search after His righteousness

Because He loved us first and He calls us to be righteous.

Come, Holy Spirit, fill us and guide us.

The age old saying ‘The law is an ass’ certainly doesn’t apply to God’s Law as set out in the Bible, although I’m sure there are many out there, hopefully all non-believers, who wouldn’t agree with me. Even in the secular world, in most countries law is much needed to ensure society does not slowly but surely slide into total chaos, hence the saying ‘law and order’.

For example, here in New Zealand we drive our vehicles on the left hand side of the road. Just imagine if I decided to ignore that law and drive on the right hand side of the road, I’m sure an accident would be the result. If I went even further and decided that every person born in a month beginning with the letter ‘J’ should drive on the right side of the road and all others should drive on the left, chaos would be the inevitable result.

So we see that the general idea of law as a means of avoiding chaos is a good one. But what about in an unjust society, say South Africa during the old apartheid era? Those laws separating people on the grounds of race were patently wrong, yet why did so many South Africans (many of them born again Christians) get it so wrong and cause so much grief and pain to God and so many people of colour? Simply because they let their emotions (and prejudices) override the Law of God.

The rulers of that country took the Law of God, re-interpreted it to mean what they wanted it to mean (much like the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland), or just simply ignored His Law, and all just to fit in with their own political, or social, beliefs in what was deemed by them to be ‘politically correct’ or ‘socially acceptable’.

The morning after the opening ceremony for the 2011 Rugby World Cup in New Zealand, a television reporter walked the streets of Auckland randomly interviewing people and seeking their views on the previous night’s festivities. One pretty young girl, I would guess her to be about 20 or so, was interviewed and asked her opinion of the events. Her reply was along the lines of, “What a mess up they made of the transport system and crowd control, but Jesus Christ, what a party we had!”

That this should then be aired on national TV was bad enough, but that nobody said a thing about her outburst of blasphemy was an indictment of our society. “She has the right to her own opinion”, people will rightly argue; “the Bill of Rights guarantees this,” and they will undoubtedly add, “actually there was nothing politically incorrect in what she said”.

The name Jesus Christ, one of the names of my God, has been reduced to a swear word, into the same category as the “F-word” (which is also bandied about willy-nilly on TV). At best the Name has merely become, or been reduced to, an exclamation mark! (See the prophecy of this in Psalm 102:8 where the Psalmist tells us that people “use my name as a curse”). God is Holy and we need to remember that. I have noticed that even a large number of people who claim to be Christians, blaspheme on a regular basis by taking the Lord’s Name in vain as we forever hear them exclaiming, “Oh my God”, or such like.

In the Old Testament you have probably noticed that the word ‘Lord’ is often written with a capital ‘L’ followed by lower case ‘ord’, whereas sometimes the Name is written all in capitals. This is no typographical error or a mere forgetfulness in translation.

Its because the word Lord, when used with the lower case letters, is actually the translation of the word Adonai which is the title of God meaning “sovereign One’, much in the way we refer to the President, say of the United States of America. On the other hand, when we see the Name written all in capitals, LORD, this is God’s actual name as He told it to Moses at the burning bush. It is the word JAHWEH which is so Holy that the Jews wouldn’t even mention it out loud and in fact only wrote it with the four consonants jhwh. A Name so Holy as to create fear and awe in the people of God, and yet now the world, and even many people claiming to be practising Christians, bandy it about with gay abandon! “Oh my Lord” or “My God” have become mere expressions and people don’t even think when they use these expressions willy-nilly.

But what about my rights? What about my right to freedom of religion? Are my rights not also guaranteed by a Bill of Rights? The problem with that word ‘freedom’ is that it merely opens up another can of worms. Everybody is free to do or say whatever he or she likes. But they are not free to step on my rights, and so in our endeavours to become politically correct, to make sure that all people are allowed their freedoms, we are giving away our Christianity. I’m not just talking about the commercialisation of Christmas and Easter, but I’m talking about standing up for the Word of God. We would never allow people to use the name “Allah” in this way because we would be too afraid of being branded racists and offending Islam, but we Christians have to suffer this indignity quietly, without complaining and at the risk of being ridiculed if we do complain.

So, it’s little wonder that Christianity is now debating issues such as same sex ‘marriages’ and whether or not gay people should be ordained as Priests in the Church of Jesus Christ! In this debate as it rages on, we Christians who believe in the sanctity of the Law of God are branded ‘bigots’ and ultra-conservatists. I’ve not yet heard anyone, though, with the courage of their convictions to make these accusations against Islam. You see, this would not be ‘politically’ correct!

The Song of Solomon (2: 15) tells us that it’s these “little foxes” that ruin the vineyards and so when we permit the thin edge of the wedge (e.g. political correctness) to decide the direction of our church, we invite God’s wrath. Instead of allowing the Bill of Rights to influence our religion, we should be ensuring that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is influencing the Bill of Rights!

We read in the Book of Genesis, chapter 3 from verse 1:

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made.

He said to the woman, ‘Did God really say, “You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’

The woman said to the serpent,

‘We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden,

but God did say,

`You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the

middle of the garden,

and you must not touch it, or you will die.’

‘You will not surely die,’ the serpent said to the woman.

‘For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’