LOVE KNOTS

I was paging through a book the other day and this sentence caught my attention “God is closer to sinners than saints”.  The thought crossed my mind that it was a good thing as I doubt very much whether I will ever achieve the status of sainthood in this life time!

It carried on to say:

“God, up there, in heaven,

Is holding onto each person with a string.

Every time you sin, you cut the string;

But God fixes the string again, with a love knot.

Since this knot makes the string shorter,

You are also a bit closer to God.

Thus each sin cuts it,

And each cut means a knot,

And each knot draws you closer to God”.¹

Imagine yourself standing on the outstretched palm of God’s right hand here on earth, around your waist is tied a rope which is attached to God’s left hand in Heaven.  Every time you sin it is like you have taken a scissor and cut that rope but instead of plunging to your death you are supported by the hand underneath you. 

 

As you confess your sin to God “He is faithful and just and will forgive your sins and purify you from all unrighteousness”².  God then reaches down with His left hand, to which our rope was attached, picks up our dangling piece of rope and ties the two pieces together with a love knot. He actually says in His word that He leads us “with ties of love”³. As His left hand goes back up to Heaven, the string tightens and He lifts His right hand a little higher so our feet are still firmly supported on His hand and we are drawn closer to Him.

Ephesians 5 states “Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love.”⁴

If we follow this command we will find that as time goes by we will sin less and less and therefore God won’t have to make as many love knots in the rope which is a very good thing because the shorter that rope gets the closer we get to heaven and the nearer we are to meeting God face to face which will mean we are dead!  God says to us “I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction.  For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you”⁵

¹Praying Body and Soul, Methods and Practices of Anthony de Mello

²1 John 1:9, Paraphrased, Holy Bible, NIV

³Hosea 11:4, Holy Bible, NIV

⁴Ephesians 5:1, Holy Bible, NIV

⁵Deuteronomy 30:15 & 16, Holy Bible, NIV

 

 

A WORK IN PROGRESS!

 

Every person on this earth started their lives as a blessing!

In the Bible we read that “children are a gift from the Lord – they are a blessing”¹
Therefore we are all blessings.
We are children of an Almighty God and we need to start believing that and acting accordingly.
God says in His word that “where there is no vision, the people perish.”²
We need to ask God to share His vision for our lives with us and to find out what His original plan was for our lives before the world got in the way and some of us fell so far short of what God had planned for us.

Before any of us are born God has already spoken a prophetic word over our lives.  He says in Jeremiah 29:11 “I know the plans I have for you.  Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future”.

We serve a God who has so much compassion for us He sent His Son to die on the Cross in our place.  Jesus suffered horrific humiliation, He was mocked and those He loved and cared for turned their backs on Him when He needed them most.

God knows exactly how sinful we are, how petty and nasty we can be and yet He still chose to send His son to die on that Cross.  It is through the death and resurrection of Jesus that we can enter into a relationship with God.  He says “If we confess our sins He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness”.³

My husband married a broken and damaged woman.  I had no sense of self worth,  I struggled with feelings of total inadequacy and had built so many barriers around myself for fear of being hurt I am utterly amazed that he even took the time to get to know me never mind marry me!

We have been married for 21 years now and a few years ago I asked him what he had seen in me that made him want to marry me.  His answer shocked me.  He said he had seen a wholeness in me.  I was a broken person and yet God gave him this image, this vision of wholeness and through the years because of his love and the fact that he has always treated me as a whole person I have been able to grow into wholeness.  I am still a work in progress!

From the time we are born God sees us as whole people.  If we have accepted Jesus Christ into our lives, if we are committed to living for Him God looks at us through the image of Jesus Christ.  “God created man in His own image, in the image of God”⁴

We need to ask God what His vision is for our lives and then through His love we need to start living that vision.

 

¹Psalm 127, Holy Bible, NIV
²Proverbs 29:18, Holy Bible, KJV
³1 John 1:9, Holy Bible, NIV
⁴Genesis 1:27, Holy Bible, NIV

THOSE PESKY FLIES!

Today I came across a letter that Oswald Chambers wrote to a friend of his in the year 1909.

I had to laugh at the way he describes the attacks we come under and the phrase he uses for the things that irritate us.

The letter is in reply to one sent to him by a friend.  The friend had written to Oswald to tell him of the struggles he was going through at the time.  This was Oswald’s response:

“Praise God for your report that the Devil is paying attention to you – so long as he keeps firing at us you may depend he thinks that we are worth watching.  The ‘plague of flies’ was not peculiar to Egypt – you will find them in the shape of busy little people that try to get over the window of your soul and irritate your outlook.”¹

Isn’t that a wonderful way of looking at those taxi drivers who cut in front of us in the traffic or shop assistants who are rude and unfriendly?
A ‘plague of flies’ that disturb our souls and irritate us!  It reminds me of a song my children sang when they were younger.  “Shoo fly, don’t bother me.  I belong to somebody”.²
Every time we start to feel irritated or angry we could just wave our hand in front of our faces and sing “shoo fly, don’t bother me.  I belong to somebody”!
If we have accepted the Lord as our savior God says that we belong to Him.³
A synonym for belong is ‘to have a home, to have a rightful place” and the origin of the word belong comes from ‘to reach’.  God reaches out to us and Jesus says “If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching.  My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”⁴
It is God and the person who lives in a house that makes it a home and I love the way CS Lewis describes the way God changes our house because He wants to make it a fit place for Him to call home!

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”

When we feel that Satan is paying too much attention to us we need to remember the verse that says “Submit yourselves, then, to God.  Resist the devil, and he will flee from you”.⁶   In other words we can shoo him away as well!

 

 

 ¹Oswald Chambers Abandoned to God, David McCasland

²http://specialneedsinmusic.com/folk_song_pages/shoo_fly_new_09_1216.html

³Romans 1:6, Holy Bible, NIV

⁴John 14:23, Holy Bible, NIV

⁵Mere Christianity, CS Lewis

⁶James 4:7, Holy Bible, NIV