Steve Teachings
Heed the Voice of the Lord
I was thinking about my walk with God, and why I fall short of the things that I know He wants me to do. I know that I don't pray as much as I should, and I know that prayer is what keeps the communication lines open between God's will and mine, and without that communication, I feel empty and lazy inside and tend to start assassinating myself spiritually for falling short.
Is that the proper way to handle that situation ?
No, the fact is that we are harder on ourselves than anyone else can be at times, and we have to be careful not to bring ourselves down to the point where we feel inadequate and worthless. Too much self criticism is not only defeating the purpose for our life, but it is also very self destructive.
Why is it that we read in the scriptures:
5 Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not know yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?-unless indeed you are disqualified. II Cor.13:5
There is a difference between destructive criticism and healthy criticism. If you are living in sin, and the end result is going to be detrimental to your spiritual life, then through self examination, you need to see if your life lines up properly with God's word, if not, then you have to make the proper changes to ensure a healthy spiritual life.
So, self examination at that point is a very good thing. We are called to test ourselves for the purpose of gauging our commitment to the things of God and living in His will.
Now there were a group of people who had just left Egypt for a 40 year trek in the wilderness with a guy named Moses. He was a reluctant leader who God called to bring His people out of bondage and slavery. While they were on this journey, God would tell Moses what to say to them and He would deliver the message.
Did they always do what they were supposed to ?
No, just like a lot of people today don't do what they are supposed to do. I have found 7 things that we must do in order to have good health physically, mentally and spiritually. If we do these things, God promises good health for us.
Would you like to have a good healthy body ?
The message that God gave to Moses is:
“If you diligently heed the voice of the LORD your God and do what is right in His sight, give ear to His commandments and keep all His statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you which I have brought on the Egyptians. For I am the LORD who heals you.”
Ex. 15:26
The first thing you have to do to have a healthy life is:
1. You have to listen to God, if you don't believe in God, then you are probably experiencing health issues already.
Why do I say that ?
Because living in a life of sin is hard on your body, it requires a lot of commitment on your part to maintain that life style.
If you are a thief, you have plan your activities to make sure that you don't get caught. If you have an addiction, you have to feed the addiction in whatever way you can, because if you don't, you know there will be repercussions, your body will start to get sick and react to the lack of drugs or alcohol with seizures or withdraws.
Have you ever seen a guy everyone would call a hound dog or a woman they would call loose ?
Some people these days would think that's an acceptable lifestyle, but for that guy or girl who is caught up in sexual addiction, it's not cool at all. Their whole day is spent trying to find sexual partners who will fill in that gap of time when they feel empty and worthless. They have a hole in their hearts that can never be fulfilled by sex because it lacks the true love that they are destroying their lives for.
Living out of the will of God is hard on the body, when the body goes you can bet that the mind is not too far behind.
As I told you before, I was a 139 lb. drug addict who did everything to his body that should never be done. I was strung out on speed because it made the LSD that I dropped more radical than it already was. I would drop so much acid that I would have to stop because I couldn't trip on it anymore until my body cleaned it out for a while.
Even though I wasn't dropping acid I still had to take the speed or go into withdraws, but as soon as I was able drop again, there I was, walking down the street looking like I was an escapee from a mental institution. Man was I cool.
After a few years of this insanity I called my life, with my body slowly deteriorating into a skeleton with skin on it, something started to happen, I would talk and no one could understand what I was saying.
Why ?
I lost my mind.
Do you think that something like that would make someone worry that something wasn't quite right and they needed to make a change ?
As crazy as I had become, even I knew I was in trouble. I needed help, and no one I knew could help me. I should have just been one of those guys that fall through the cracks, who get lost along the way and never make it back.
But I made it back, God had a calling on my life that even I didn't know about until one night in a dark room, where I pleaded with all I had to him to rescue me, and He did. That very moment my mind cleared up and the insanity was gone, and so was the addiction.
Do you know why ?
Because I diligently heeded the voice of the LORD my God and he healed me.
The next thing we have to do:
2. We have to receive instruction.
"Blessed is the man whom God corrects; so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty. [
God allows us to do things that can be very destructive to our lives.
Why do you think He does that ?
Because just like a good father, He allows us to make mistakes, He allows us to be wounded, He allows us to be in bondage to things that are destructive and He allows us to suffer injury.
Is it because God gets off on making His creation miserable ?
No, because some of us would never receive from Him what we need to receive unless we suffer some kind of loss, we would never receive the healing that He wants to bring to our lives. God wants to rescue us, He wants to deliver us, He wants to calm the storms in our lives and take us out of harms way if we let Him, but we have to let Him.There are some here that will never let Him,
Why ?
Because if we did, it takes away the power we think we have in our lives. We are too proud to let Him heal us.
So that brings us to the third thing we must do to have a healthy life.
3. We have to humble ourselves.
Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD and shun evil.8 This will bring health to your body and nourishment to your bones. Prov.3:7-8
The scripture says: to fear the Lord and shun evil, and right there is where we have a problem.
Does anyone know what it means to shun something ?
It means to turn our back on it. We want to think that we are fearless, we want to think that we can stand on our own, we want to think that we don't need anyone or anything, especially someone we can't see named God who is a crutch for weak minded people. We are the god of our lives and the god of our destiny. Unfortunately, that is called original sin. We inherit that thinking from Adam and Eve, and as original as we all think we are, it's all been said and done before, and until we have an enlightenment, we will always think the world evolves around us.
So unless we loose that pride, humble our hearts and turn from our sinful ways, we will have no healing in our lives. We have to accept wisdom that we know will help us to become what we were intended to be from the very beginning, when we were formed in our mother's womb.
4. We have to act on the knowledge that we receive.
Every prudent man acts out of knowledge, but a fool exposes his folly. 17 A wicked messenger falls into trouble, but a trustworthy envoy brings healing.18 He who ignores discipline comes to poverty and shame, but whoever heeds correction is honored. Prov.13:16-18
For such a short set of verses, these one's really pack a punch.
Do you know what it means to be prudent ?
Webster's defines it as this: a
: marked by wisdom or judiciousness <prudent advice> b:
shrewd in the management of practical affairs A prudent man or woman is someone who knows how to handle their affairs, they take advise that is beneficial to them, and act on that advise, they never just do things and see what happens later. A prudent man or woman is shrewd, they act in a very clever manner and they are very discerning.
A prudent person is never, ever caught off guard because they take the knowledge that they have gained and become wiser for it.
Jesus said this to His disciples: “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.
We have to act on the knowledge that God imparts to us and turn away from the folly and troubles that we so easily get ourselves entangled in. God loves us so much that He will let us make mistakes as I said before, but if we continue in those mistakes and never change, then poverty and shame will in most cases be the end result and you will not gain the respect of anyone.
You honor yourself and God, when you receive and act on knowledge that He imparts to you for the betterment of your life. Those around you will honor you for your commitment to doing what is good and proper for the sake of your community.
The fifth thing we must do is:
5. We have to return to God.
"Come, let us return to the LORD. He has torn us to pieces but he will heal us; he has injured us but he will bind up our wounds. Hosea 6:1
Jesus Christ came to this world to do one thing, heal our relationship with the Father. God is a God of restoration. God sees us as we are, exposed and naked before Him with nothing to offer other than ourselves. Most people wouldn't want what we have to offer. You look around and all you see is hurt and wounded people, outcasts, the dregs of society.
Why is it that those were the only people He enjoyed being around ?
He knew that they were the most transparent, they had nothing to hide, what you see is what you get and there were no illusions about who they thought they were. They were the ones that no one wanted to hang out with like lepers, cripples, demon possessed lunatics, harlots, tax collectors and dumb uneducated fishermen.
Why ?
They needed Him to accept them, because no one else would. But in them He found the heart of champions, in them He built His church and in them the world changed forever, because they returned to the true living God and not the status quo. They weren't like the religious leaders of that time, egomaniacs who were self-righteous and unapproachable.
Some of us here have walked with God before, we have experienced some of the things that were written about in the bible, but for one reason or another, we walked away and things have gone down hill since then. In our hearts we know that we are not living the way that we know we should, we know that because of our pride, or hurt feelings, we have separated ourselves from the very God that we know loves us. We need to return to God and be healed and brake down the walls that we have erected to keep Him out of our lives.
6. We have to remove the calluses that cover our hearts.
In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah:" 'You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving. 15 For this people's heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.
16But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear. Matt. 13:14-16
When we live our lives apart from God, or when we have walked away from God, something unique happens, we become hardhearted and desensitized to His calling for our lives. We start holding a grudge as if He turned his back on us when in reality we walked away from Him.
Those who have accepted secular thinking as fact harden their hearts even more because of the misinformation that they have adapted to their lives through the years. Some people who have never read the bible, even once, will spout out verses in such a way that they sound as if they know what they are saying to those who are just as misinformed as they are.
A study showed that from the age of 8-12 years old, children are 50 % more likely to accept Christ as their Savior during these age years and live their lives as a Christian than their older counterparts.
From 12-14 it drops to 25 % and from the time they enter high school to the time that they graduate it drops to 5 %. The real shocker is that after they graduate from high school, the chance of them accepting Christ into their lives drops to 0 %.
The only way that anyone will accept Christ into their lives, after graduating from high school, is that some major event has to take place in their lives that causes them to be as venerable as they were when they were 8-12 years old.
Until that major event takes place, our hearts become hard, callused and unbending to spiritual matters in our lives. So we all have to remove the obstacles that we have so carefully built up in our lives, through the years, in order to become accessible to the calling of God's Holy Spirit in our life and be healed.
7. We have to have faith and trust in God and become one with Him.
The scriptures ask us in Amos 3:3
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Can two walk together, unless they are agreed ?
If we are divided in our commitment to God and separated because of our sins, it is safe to say that there will be problems that are going to effect every aspect of our lives, since we are created to have a union with our creator. As I have said before, it is programmed into our DNA and every the cell in our bodies have been coded with the need to know how we were created and who God is, that's why there are so many religions in the world today.
It is like Mission Impossible, where the agent receives the information about his next assignment and the object that contains the information self-destructs at a certain time right after the agent hears the message.When we are exposed to Christ and the reason for His coming, we have to make a decision as to whether we want to believe what is said or not. And since we are programmed to have to have this information in our DNA, to reject God in our lives only agitates the situation even more.We all want to believe in a higher power than ourselves, but that goes against everything that we have been taught in our schools, universities and our places of social engagement. People have been made to feel, that if they believe in God, they are weak and uneducated.
That is where faith and trust come in. We have to believe what God says over what mankind says. We have to give up the crutches that we have depended on for so many years, and take a leap of faith into new and uncharted territory in our lives. That is not easy to do since we have all grown accustom to depending on our selves. God says trust in me and I will heal you.
Have we have all heard promises before in our lives that have not came to pass that cause us all to become hard and suspicious when someone tries to get us to let our walls down ?
Trust is a very hard thing, it doesn't come very easy, but Jesus says, that no matter what has happen to us before in our lives, he will come through and heal us. We have to have faith, we have to have trust.
The scriptures say:
And the prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. 16 Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. James 5:15-16
We have to be open and exposed before God and our fellow brothers and sisters, not trying to hide behind the image we have created for ourselves, breaking down the walls that we hide behind and letting our poser self go. We have to give in, and put God first in our lives, wash ourselves clean, and purify our hearts to do what we know is the right thing to do for our selves to be healed.
7Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.
We have to quit trying to scam people, most of all we have to stop trying to scam ourselves and resist the things that we know are the reason for the hardships that we are enduring. We have to be honest and sincere about our lives in order for God to do a miracle that will bring the healing we so desperately need.
We need to have faith and trust God in order to have the healing we need.
Would you like to invite God into your life so you can be healed and made whole ?