If we could sit down and understand the truth, would we choose to live differently? Would this truth change our lives? Over the past few months, I have been thinking about my life and what this precious time on earth means. I believe God gave me these "What If" questions to challenge me in my thinking and cause me to deepen my walk with Him. Have a read and I encourage you to allow God to challenge you in what you believe. As He does this, I pray He he causes you to live differently as you understand and walk in the truth.
1. What If ..... my relationship with God is what I am on earth for?
It is easy to be caught up in life and forget the true purpose for why we are here for. We have family, get married, have children, have careers, buy houses, but only one thing we do in the light of eternity lasts. The thing we walk into eternity with is our relationship with our God. As that is the case, our relationship with God is what we should be putting our time into as that is eternal. All the other things will pass away.
Jesus came and lived on earth, suffered and died so we could be forgiven for our sin and have an eternal relationship with our Heavenly Father. He gave up His Son so we could experience eternal life with Him!
18 Christ suffered and died for sins once and for all—the innocent for the guilty — to bring you near to God by his body being put to death and by being raised to life by the Spirit. 1 Peter 3:18 (TPT)
16 For this is how much God loved the world—he gave his one and only, unique Son as a gift. So now everyone who believes in him will never perish but experience everlasting life. John 3:16 (TPT)
2. What if ..... my doing things for God is actually is destroying my ability to walk in my destiny?
When we live a life of doing things for God, we lose the essence or reason why we are on earth for. God has created us for a relationship with HIm, not to do things for HIm. God is so incredible, He could fix earth up by Himself and do a better job than us. Instead, He created us in His image and has not only called us HIs children but is raising us to become sons of God, walking with His authority and doing the things He has made us for. The difference is that He has made us so we can do these things WITH Him NOT FOR HIM!
When our life is about doing, we cannot walk in true love. God is calling us to have a deep understanding or knowledge of our identity. This identity comes from what God, our creator, says we are. As we do, we can walk truly in love and freedom. What it means to be a follower of Jesus and how we then relate to others naturally changes as we know our identity then live every day in this deep understanding of who we are. We are unaffected by what others around say or even what we think others want us to do or be. We KNOW who we are and have a deep sense of purpose in our life.
You formed my innermost being, shaping my delicate inside
and my intricate outside,
and wove them all together in my mother’s womb.[d]
I thank you, God, for making me so mysteriously complex!
Everything you do is marvellously breathtaking.
It simply amazes me to think about it!
How thoroughly you know me, Lord!
You even formed every bone in my body
when you created me in the secret place,[e]
carefully, skillfully shaping me[f]from nothing to something.
You saw who you created me to be before I became me![g]
Before I’d ever seen the light of day,
the number of days you planned for me
were already recorded in your book.[h]
Every single moment you are thinking of me!
How precious and wonderful to consider
that you cherish me constantly in your every thought!
O God, your desires toward me are more
than the grains of sand on every shore!
When I awake each morning, you’re still with me. Psalm 139:13-18
God is calling us into deep intimacy with Him. This is what He has made you and me for. Through this intimacy, we get our identity and an ability to receive an inpouring of His love. Everything else flows through this.
3. What if ... I do not do things for God but with God?
There has been a huge change in my walk with God as I just enjoy being with God. Every morning I wake up and say "Daddy, what is the adventure we will be having today?" Then as I spend time in the morning establishing my relationship with God and aligning myself to the truth, I can then look forward to the things God has prepared for me as I walking in relationship with Him all day. There is a book titled Practising the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence. It is worth reading.
Each day is an adventure as I allow myself to be led by God, for Him to arrange conversations and for people to be encouraged, build up and given what God has for them as I walk with God.
4. What if ... when I judge others or myself either good or evil I am accessing fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?
One of the most powerful scenes in the movie "The Shack" is the scene where Mack, the main character encounters Wisdom. He is asked to sit on the judgement seat and judge the people in his life including his father, the man who killed his daughter and finally he was asked to judge his children. He had to choose between his daughter and son, with one of them destined for Heaven and the other Hell. Mack was forced to decide which one would go to Hell. After condemning people all his life, when put in this position he could no longer make a decision but with great emotion chose to allow his children to go free and for him to go in his place to Hell. This encounter caused him to realise God is the one who has the authority to judge and it is not our role. This transformed his life.
We understand about the tree from Genesis 3.
Then the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
God is calling us to give back the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It causes division, power, corruption and relationships to be destroyed. Allow God to judge and learn to love yourself and others without judging. Genesis 3:4-5 (NKJV)
Jesus says something different about judging:
“Refuse to be a critic full of bias toward others, and judgment will not be passed on you. For you’ll be judged by the same standard that you’ve used to judge others. The measurement you use on them will be used on you. Why would you focus on the flaw in someone else’s life and yet fail to notice the glaring flaws of your own? How could you say to your friend, ‘Let me show you where you’re wrong,’ when you’re guilty of even more? You’re being hypercritical and a hypocrite! First, acknowledge your own ‘blind spots’ and deal with them, and then you’ll be capable of dealing with the ‘blind spot’ of your friend.[d] Matthew 7:1-5 (TPT)
5. What if .... it is Satan that wants to destroy my ability to live according to the scrolls God has written about my life?
God not only thought of you and planned you before the foundation of the Earth, but He has also written His plans for you on Scrolls He has written about you. When we learn to live in a deep relationship with our Heavenly Father, our heart is to live out what God has planned for our lives. We understand that His plans are best because he created us and the plans are good.
In Ephesians we learn that we have been created by God to fulfil the destiny He has made us for. We are made for a purpose.
10 We have become his poetry, a re-created people that will fulfil the destiny he has given each of us, for we are joined to Jesus, the Anointed One. Even before we were born, God planned in advance our destiny and the good works we would do to fulfil it! Ephesians 2:10 (TPT)
One of my favourite chapters in the Bible is Psalm 139. In here we read:-
Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed.
And in Your book, they all were written,
The days fashioned for me,
When as yet there were none of them. Psalm 139:16
In Psalm 40 we read:
So I said, “Here I am! I’m coming to you as a sacrifice,[a]
for in the prophetic scrolls of your book,
you have written about me. Psalm 40:7
God has created you for a purpose and Satan is doing all he can to cause you not to fulfil the destiny God has made you for. Satan is destroying families, marriages, churches, Christian friendships through these curses that Satan has had a legal right to place on people.
To read more about this topic, Robert Henderson has written some books about the Courts of Heaven. This is a picture of one of the latest He has written which is very powerful. It talks about going into the Courts of Heaven and dealing with our past sin including sins of our families of origin.
6. What if .... I can sit in my Daddy's (Heavenly Father's) lap and just allow Him to love me as my Heavenly Daddy and know he loves me despite my sin?
Just recently I wrote Psalm 3: God is my Daddy. God revealed to me the incredible joy it is when we can call our Heavenly Father Daddy, Papa, Aba or whatever He allows us to call Him. This intimacy is a place where He releases a deep understanding of our identity and in this deep intimacy, we can hear what He says about us. This is such a comfort to be able to go to this place of intimacy and be in a place of rest, peace and knowledge that He is a good father. I am safe in His arms. Because He is good, the world is a safe place for me.
7. What if .... I cannot truly love others until I am fully immersed in the love of my Heavenly Father?
When looking at the Emotionally Healthy Relationships course by Peter Scazzero, I realized that all the things I do in life mean nothing if I do not have love. (Read 1 Corinthians 13). God is calling me into deep intimacy with Him and is releasing His love in my life in a way I have never experienced. In my brokenness, I can enjoy intimacy with my Father, even in my brokenness. He loves me because He made me to have an eternal relationship with Him. As I am released into this love, God has given me a completely new understanding of His love for others.
Then you will be empowered to discover what every holy one experiences—the great magnitude of the astonishing love of Christ in all its dimensions. How deeply intimate and far-reaching is his love! How enduring and inclusive it is! Endless love beyond measurement that transcends our understanding—this extravagant love pours into you until you are filled to overflowing with the fullness of God! Ephesians 3:18-19
8. What if.... discipleship leads me not to do things for God, but to know God through knowing myself.
Through this process I can be fully transformed into the person He had created me to be! I have been living in Stage 3 of my faith for a long time. The last five years have been an incredible time of pain, sadness and loss. This has caused me to move from this stage and get to Stage 4 where God has been taking me on a journey inward. I have been on a journey where He has been with me and examining my inner life. God has been raising things from my family of origin and things that have caused me to react, respond or be triggered in unhealthy ways. He has restored me back to how He "designed" me to be and to walk as the "Tim" he had thought of before the foundations of the Earth. The Emotionally Healthy Spirituality Course has been instrumental in taking me on this journey so I can not "Do things for God" but be "Transformed into Love" (Stage 6).
9. What if ... I now know God's love, but I have grown up without the skills for relating to people in love?
When going through the course "Emotionally Healthy Relationships" I found that I did not have good skills in relating to others in love. I am finding that this course is equipping me not only to love others well but to love myself as I relate to others. As I do this I understand my feelings, needs and perceptions are important. As I love people I also desire to hear the heart of the people God has placed in my life.
The Emotionally Healthy Relationships course teaches skills in hearing where people are up to, getting more information from people instead of guessing what they are thinking and learning how to fight fairly.
10. What if .... I have been under the most incredible attack from Satan over the last 5 years and God is now releasing me into the new destiny He has for me
Wendy Alec has been such an encouragement to me. She has written a book called "Wounded Warriors, Visons from Heaven, Out of the Wilderness". She has been through the most traumatic 5 years, but in her time with God has been shown that Satan had been given permission to sift His key people, but this time of sifting is now over. God is releasing healing, wholeness, restitution. restoration and HOPE to these people. This is now a new season. God is releasing us into the destiny He has made us for. It is time for things to change and for God to heal and have His people to rise up and walk in the destiny He has made us for and no longer be wounded, exhausted and unable to keep going. God is releasing His destiny in our lives in a fresh way. Our old wineskins have been removed and He has replaced it with a new wineskin. He is going to pour into us something that would have burst the old wineskin. Be ready... your destiny is being released in this new season. This will be the most exciting season of your life. It is just around the corner!
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