God’s Thoughts Vs Our Human thoughts

Isaiah 55:8-9 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord”.

I felt it was important for me to write about God’s thoughts Vs our human thoughts because those who never experienced Him, along with those who believe only in their heads but not in their hearts are in no better position than an unbeliever in their understanding of who God is. While a Christian might have a different explanation of whom God is, this does not change the fact that if you do not know Him personally, then you do not know Him. It simply means that you have learned the lingo because you have immersed yourself in the Christian culture. In fact, until you experience God all that you have is data tucked away. This is the primary reason why Salvation is so misunderstood by His very own and the false prophets are flourishing. We have not armed ourselves for warfare. 

While we have to be cautious not to seek experience because we can be caught up in sensationalism and never really walk with Him. If we look too much for sensation Satan has no problem disguising himself as an angel to keep us in bondage of wanting just that. It is equally important to apply caution in what you call Christianity, if after years and years of claiming to be Christian, the Holy Spirit has never manifested Himself to you, there is a problem there too.

Why? Because the Holy Spirit’s job is to make the life we have in God real to us. It is the Holy Spirit’s job to witness to your soul that you are a child of God. You either believe that or God is a liar. The Holy Spirit works in us is proof that we have been sealed; it is His stamp of ownership that we have become children of God. In John 16:13 we are told:  “But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. ” With that in mind, you have to stop lying to yourself and take ownership for the lack of holy spirit’s activities in your life. You do not want to die and find out you were too proud to accept the fact that all you had was in vain.

 When we read the Bible we are able to understand what we read with our intellect which was given to us by God so we can function in this realm. But when God speaks, the same God who has the intricate mind and unlimited power to create the world, His words are wrapped up in all these things that we can see and cannot see. His word personifies wisdom that we can never possess, intellect that we have not seen or heard of. Each tiny word that He utters also contains justice, love, wrath, and holiness etc. Everything that makes God, who He is wrapped up in everything He says. The understanding we have been given by God could be easily compared to something like someone with gazillions of dollars, then he gives you five bucks while it is nice, but in comparison to what he has you can easily say you do not have much.   

Every word that He utters means all that He is. Because He is who He is, then it makes sense that we do not have the wisdom or the capacity to understand what He says. In a vision I had while spending time with Him, He showed me with sadness that His idea of Salvation for us is as big as the ocean. I remember standing there with this giant God of mine, and I still remember His sadness when He showed me how much we misunderstood His plan because we all ran with our own understanding and our own plan. As I contemplated the vastness of the ocean and the understanding that He gave me right then and there to grasp a tiny bit of His plan for us, strangely, my next step was to open up my left hand, I realized the Salvation I was holding onto was as small as a marble in the palm of my hand, then I dropped it. After I dropped it, I went straight to Him as if I wanted to embrace Him, but He was so big, when I moved toward Him I could not reach pass His feet.

My point is that when we read God’s Word, we should always keep in mind that there is another level of understanding we need from the Spirit which is the understanding that comes from God’s point of view. We cannot hold onto our own understanding that we grasp with our weak and very limited mind, and be content with what we have. Our thoughts and all our sentiments of this life He has in mind for us are different from His thoughts and what He had in mind when He set His plan of Salvation in motion.

This lack of understanding from a Godly perspective has caused the breach we see in the Church all over the world. Yes, Satan is behind it too. But who gave Satan so much power to gain so much terrain?  It is us in our pride and greed.  Can you understand the stupidity of saying Salvation is by Grace, yet we refuse to go to Him so that He can make us understand the full scope of it by His grace?  We reject the very same grace when we hold onto our feeble understanding like a dog holding onto a bone.  In our feeble mind and the pride of possessing some intellect, we reject that same grace we need for our Salvation. So, we sit there, while everyone can see we are just caterpillars, we get upset at anyone telling us we are not butterflies yet.

What I learned from experiencing God, is that we not only desperately need the Holy Spirit to permeate our lives and fulfill His role, but even when He graced us with an experience, we still do not have the mind to grasp all of what His word encompasses. All that we have written about the Holy Spirit's role from the Scriptures should not be just words to us. God already knew we could not compete with His intellect, He purposed to give us the Holy Spirit to make this life real to us. This life does not get real when we die. But right now! We receive eternal life when we know God through Christ. And we do not know God, just because we have some rituals in our lives.  Every religion has rituals. As Christians our rituals should be the Holy Spirit.

So, how do we get to the point where He can permeate our lives?  I can only answer this by sharing my secret. I have always been humiliated as a child and more so in my adult life, so much so there was nothing left for me to feel puffed up in anything that pertains to me. To make matters worse, I am far from being an educated person. So instead of feeling sorry for myself, I decided to take God at His Word. It was not a big stretch for me to humble myself before Him. As for my childlike spirit, my brain has never been educated enough to know better. Somebody who knows me well said it is so easy for me to humble myself before God; I have no idea how hard it is for other people.

I know the God that I serve enough to know that if we truly want Him in our hearts; He is more than willing to make His Word come alive to us. If you are willing to leave your intellect behind and stop being puffed up when you approach Him, then you are on your way of finding what it means to have a child like faith and spirit. If all of it is still hard for you, then your prayer should be “Lord help me leave behind all my knowledge, my faulty understanding, my confidence in myself and be desperate enough to know your Word that I would approach your throne completely bankrupt.”   We should pray until we receive it. Pray until in your spirit you have become the perfect outcast model. He is the God of the outcasts.

This subject is so vast I could write all day. Because this post is so long, I will omit tomorrow’s post to give you time to read this one on Sunday

May the Spirit of truth accompany you while reading this post.

Please visit my website www.apprehended.ca

Commitment To The Faith

 

In my book "Apprehended & Apprehending" I have a small chapter about commitment. The reason commitment is so important to me and I felt I had to include it in the book is because while I had no idea what it meant to walk in the Spirit, the Holy Spirit was hard at work in the background to help me come up higher. I realize He has never let me be satisfied with my own explanations of the Word of God in the Bible. Pushing people to not be satisfied with data tucked away while living in the flesh, makes knowing someone like me, a little bit annoying if you like your comfort zone. It is harder if you are an immediate member of my family. But, in my defense, I have no idea how to live the Christian life any other way because the Holy Spirit targeted me right at the onset of Salvation.  (Although I suspect He targets all of us) I shared almost throughout every chapter of my book how He called me to come up higher over and over again. Since I talked about it at length, I will refrain from going into more details.

You see, while some professed Christians are busy separating Salvation, discipleship commitment and grace to excuse their behaviors God showed me they are all one in the same according to His standards at work in us. I was surprised to find out that Christ’s call to us in Mathew 16:24 “to take up our cross and follow” actually meant “make the commitment, come up higher, live like you have a Master and surrender to me at any cost.”  Later on, I was more surprised to find out that not only this is Salvation being worked out in me, but the strength to do all these above were in Him,  through His grace alone.  This walk, the Holy Spirit was constantly working in the background to get me to question what I understood only in the flesh, in order to get to the point where I would make the commitment to follow and step into my discipleship role. Indeed, making the commitment to Him to let Him be the Master of your life it is not an easy thing to do. When you make this commitment you know what you have done is in effect what all the other disciples in the Bible did as they left everything behind and follow Christ on the onset of His ministry. The commitment to follow Him, if it is done with the right understanding, attitude, motive and with the Holy Spirit makes you realize that you are aware you found something that deserve your full attention. You feel, there is a Master in town now, and you have to go with Him to hear what He has to say. Like Paul turning his back away from his honourable position with Gamael, like Peter leaving his lucrative fishing business behind, like Matthew the tax collector who left his booth and lucrative business to follow and so forth.  

Just in case you are wondering what I mean in the paragraph above when I said the right attitude, motivation and understanding it is about understanding we have to do it knowing even though it will hurt but it has to be done. We know this mean we will lose complete control over our lives and we are no longer in charge. It means going forward with His plans, not ours. It means we will have to be broken and the self has to be eradicated etc. The end result will mean fellowship, oneness, pride left behind to embrace humility, deeper worship and love for Him and so forth.

Being compelled to go forward is a work of the Holy Spirit in us. It is a work of grace and there is no way left on our own we would understand the need to go forward with Him. I was pleasantly surprised to find out how all of it relates to each other. Through receiving Him I received the light. If I receive the light and I am no longer the “old me”, then I need to learn how to live the new life. While the Church put together discipleship classes and preaching the Word to get us to understand this new life, but it is my duty to hear His call to come up higher. When we go forward to become His disciple, all we are doing is making a commitment to study with the Master. Why do we need to study with the Master? Because not only He needs us to accept our position as His pupil, He also needs our total commitment so that He can make real in us the work He has started, meaning Salvation.

So, God’s call and wooing to come up higher along with Christ giving us a choice to take up our cross and follow Him, plus we have Romans 12:1 where Paul told us to surrender ourselves to Him, are all the same. Meaning same goal, same purpose and all of it is wrapped up in a commitment to this life through His grace. When you live according to His standards, all of it is there in black and white, there is no need to hold a debate. Everything we have in this Christian walk build on each other. The whole thing is like building a foundation for a house where Christ is the builder and He is putting the materials needed together to build this house. While this house starts with Salvation entering our hearts and souls, but we cannot separate it from the builder and the materials needed to erect the house.

This post was meant to be Sunday’s post. But this morning in my quiet time with Him I read Oswald Chambers, I knew this was not a coincidence and that I had to switch the post. So, instead of ending with a prayer, I will end with copying Oswald Chambers devotion for you.

Keep in mind that the second chapter of my book which is about commitment to this life is available for you to download for free. Go to my website

www.apprehended.ca

Here is Oswald Chambers today's devotion

I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me . . . —Galatians 2:20

These words mean the breaking and collapse of my independence brought about by my own hands, and the surrendering of my life to the supremacy of the Lord Jesus. No one can do this for me, I must do it myself. God may bring me up to this point three hundred and sixty-five times a year, but He cannot push me through it. It means breaking the hard outer layer of my individual independence from God, and the liberating of myself and my nature into oneness with Him; not following my own ideas, but choosing absolute loyalty to Jesus. Once I am at that point, there is no possibility of misunderstanding. Very few of us know anything about loyalty to Christ or understand what He meant when He said, “. . . for My sake” (Matthew 5:11). That is what makes a strong saint.

Has that breaking of my independence come? All the rest is religious fraud. The one point to decide is— will I give up? Will I surrender to Jesus Christ, placing no conditions whatsoever as to how the brokenness will come? I must be broken from my own understanding of myself. When I reach that point, immediately the reality of the supernatural identification with Jesus Christ takes place. And the witness of the Spirit of God is unmistakable— “I have been crucified with Christ . . . .”

The passion of Christianity comes from deliberately signing away my own rights and becoming a bondservant of Jesus Christ. Until I do that, I will not begin to be a saint.

One student a year who hears God’s call would be sufficient for God to have called the Bible Training College into existence. This college has no value as an organization, not even academically. Its sole value for existence is for God to help Himself to lives. Will we allow Him to help Himself to us, or are we more concerned with our own ideas of what we are going to be?

Personal Relationship With Him!

Excerpt of My Book Apprehended & Apprehending" From Chapter 2

There is such a misunderstanding among Christians about what a personal relationship with Christ means. Personal relationship with Him is not about going on through our cultural type of Christianity while mimicking Christ. Think about it. There are comedians out there making a living on mimicking well known and famous people, but just the fact that they imitate other people does not make them someone else nor do they become good friends with those they mimic. Our lack of understanding of the Scriptures and lack of walking in the Spirit cause us to think that it is okay to go about doing the external things that the apostles and Christ did when they were on earth. The footprints to imitate them are found inwardly in the person of Jesus-Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit.  We tend to forget that, before we are judged for our work, Christ will look at who we are in Him first. If you do not know Him, there is a strong indication that He does not know you either. Our work has to be an extension of who we are in Christ, and if I do not have enough faith, obedience, and love to go forward in getting intimate with Him, then who’s doing the work? And why? What is the purpose? What is behind that misplaced zeal?

Our personal relationship with God starts with our personal story of salvation according to non-watered down Gospel. We become grounded through acquiring sound biblical doctrines through the body of Christ, yes, but it comes primarily through the Holy Spirit expounding the Word of God to us. Through the right understanding of these doctrines, we find ourselves at His feet in fear and gratitude for His goodness to us and for who He is. Then we move forward in utter abandonment to Him in complete trust. We are told in John 7:17 that the key to knowing God is found in our obedience to Him. Therefore, before we go on with our Bible rituals, it would do us good to resolve to obey His Word by any means. I do not have the slightest doubt that if we do not have sound doctrines from the Holy Spirit Himself, our relationship with God will be off.

I was told by a few people who are serious about their walk with God that they keep my book like a reference book and go back to it over and over again. So, please get the book. I give you my word that you will be glad you did. It is an amazing thing to have intimacy with Him!

Your Spiritual Life Matters To God!

Review of Apprehended & Apprehending - A Christian book

This review on Amazon captured my vision, my goal, the attitude, the motive of my heart and all that the book embodied!

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Revealing "Must Read" Book Concerning The Christian Church October 27, 2012

By Margaret Lukasik

Author M. J. Andre has just written this much needed commentary of the Christian church. It's also a loving contribution of self-help, that if followed, will apprehend the hearts of Christians to live their lives according to the work of Jesus Christ on the cross rather than the man-made doctrines floating about many of our churches.

Sadly, many Christians have been left on their own after salvation, not realizing that they've only taken the first step into God's will for their lives. They have yet to fulfill living the truth of God's Word and obeying the purpose for their lives that has been set for them by God since before the beginning of creation.

This very deep and sensitive information, written from the author's heart and His active knowledge of God's Word embraces the true doctrine of Jesus Christ, dispelling the idea that we can live Christianity by our own actions rather than identifying with Christ in order to achieve full confidence in who we are and what we can accomplish by the power of God.

So many Christians are left to take up their own cross by trying to achieve God's will through "self" instead of "denial of self" through Christ. As M. J. Andre so profoundly wrote in Apprehended and Apprehending, "we have to stop living as if Christ had never been resurrected and ascended to Heaven where He can see everything. Christ never meant for something as important as the foundation of our faith to be mere head knowledge. No wonder those that have assumed a position of growth without Christ have become so sinister when it comes to experiencing God.

I wish I could say that M. J. Andre was incorrect in stating that some Christians have become sinister. But I've seen it, I've been abused by it and I've made sure to stay in a position with Christ where I cannot be touched by it. We must remain close to Christ to avoid the influence of "ego" and "pride" and the damage they can do to the Christian church. However we learn through M. J. Andre's writing that with Christ we can walk with God through the power of humility by yielding to the complete truth of God's Word. This gives us the assurance that we'll be exalted in due time as told in 1 Peter 5:6 without having to go against God's will to move forward.

1 Peter 5:6
Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time.

Pride and ego can only lead us to our own conclusions for what path we'll take in life, but Apprehended and Apprehending gives us the antidote of humility that will take us from our own works to the power of the cross of Jesus Christ to insure that we follow God's will in it's entirety. We've been blessed with forgiveness, so we take it and then begin fresh with God this moment. This is not something we can intellectualize, but take only from a spiritual standpoint.

If you're questioning your salvation or your calling in life, I implore you to get more understanding from this powerful book that will help you approach the things of God not by your head, emotions or your body, but by your heart or spirit as you allow the living Word of God to transform and renew your life through Christ.

Please visit my site www.apprehended.ca and download the first 

chapter of this book for free

Or  go to Amazon to buy the book