Thyatira 12
I pray this week will find you blessed and fully filled with the Father’s love and grace.
As I said to you in my previous blog the next few will be some of the hardest I will ever write but honouring Jesus is more important to me than a couple of likes on a Facebook page. I firmly believe that when we get our act together we will see God’s glory in all its manifest wonder.
One of the hardest things to grasp is just how great God’s love is for humanity. His love for the world caused Him to go to the cross to save us. His purpose was to shed His blood for the forgiveness of our sin and thereby destroy the works of the devil. It is this forgiveness which will be our ultimate victory over death. Salvation is enormous. Grace is eternal and there is no power in heaven or on earth that is greater when it comes to victory over sin. Our victory over sin through the redemptive blood of Jesus will bring an end to our greatest enemy called Death.
Remember, the sword of the Lord is the forgiveness of sin through His blood.
But, as great as His forgiveness and grace is in that He forgave us (all humanity) all our sins and no longer holds us accountable for them, because His purpose is to reconcile all things back to Himself through the cross, does not mean He is now tolerant of sin and we can now do anything we like without consequence. That is not grace. That is not love. Everything His grace and love have done for us are to empower us over sin and death and to not be ruled by them anymore.
We are on earth with an assignment, a heavenly assignment, which is to destroy the works of the devil and not to empower them. Our job is to bring heaven to earth. We often pray, “Your kingdom come, and Your will be done, here on earth as it is in heaven,” without any thought of our own responsibility in it. But the kingdom of heaven is within us – the church – and the only way that Jesus will ever be able to establish His kingdom on earth is through the saints. If we don’t co-operate with Him the world will just continue to plunge into an ever-increasing darkness.
Righteousness, peace, and joy are the manifestations of the kingdom of heaven on earth. However, until the kingdom of heaven is established in you and me as individuals in our own hearts, and mind, and actions, the kingdom will not come. I think this is often a place where we miss it in prayer. We bawl and squall with great tears of “repentance” confessing our sins and feeling bad for what we have done, thinking that will move the hand of God and get Him to act and change our circumstances. How has that been working for us?
Our problem is that we have this unsaid notion that God is going to do it all. We are going to be “raptured” out of here before any trouble begins to a party in heaven while God slaps the remaining nations stupid! I don’t think so. Then there are these notions that one nation is more highly favoured than another. This is not so as Jesus shed His blood for all humanity – every nation, tongue, and tribe. To assume that one nation is greater than another is an affront to the cross of Jesus Christ.
When we have thoughts and feelings that “our nation” or “our church” or our family” is better than the next we are operating in the realm of evil and this never bodes well for us. There is only one person who has the knowledge and ability to know who is and who is not His own and that is Jesus. He knows the condition of a person’s heart and does not judge according to external circumstances or behaviour. His philosophy is to let us all grow up together without any distinction between who is who. He treats the true and the false in His church exactly the same. He said that the angels would do the separation between the two when the harvest is ripe, and the harvest is the end of the age. We have not reached the end of the age yet. However, we are certainly facing a harvest time now. The harvest – or the difficulties that the world is now going to face (they have only just started) will separate the true believers from the false.
Harvest time is very important in the kingdom and the Lord is the Lord of the harvest. We are now in a time where the world is reaping all that they have been sowing and so is the church. Hard times are used by the Lord to drive “worldliness and ungodliness” out of His children who are fooling around in it. He has many children that have been playing with the world and time for discipline has arrived. The world and many of its evil systems are now under judgment, just as Jesus warned the saints in Thyatira and the other letters to His church. It is not a time to be afraid, but it is a time to repent – to mentally and physically turn away from the practice of sin and to live a righteous and holy life. Repentance releases forgiveness.
We are, as God’s children absolutely, 100%, once and for all forgiven and we have received the promise of eternal life. Nothing will change that. But remember …
Forgiveness does not mean freedom to sin; it means power to stop sinning.
Let’s get our act together! 🤔
Yvonne
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Amen