godliness – Page 4 – Watch. Stand. Pray.

99 – Embedded Human Powers

Deep in each of us, in our very nature, beneath our DNA, beyond our choices, in the common traits of each human soul, God placed an unrivaled flow of power. This flow is like an aquifer; it must be first tapped and then capped. It’s power is infinite, charged by the Power of the Living Creator God Himself.

This power is available to everyone, but God limits our access to it so we can prepare, training our skills and our character first. But, this power cannot be accessed by some gimmick or trickery. There are no shortcuts. The well leading to deeper and deeper levels of power is only drilled through the essence of the teaching from God’s Word.

This does not mean that quoting random Bible verses will help you tap into your embedded power. God’s Word has its own core, “essential” ideas that can only be absorbed, like a sponge, through regular exposure and drenching. These ideas of God’s Word are not any strange mystery that a pontiff must divine and unlock; it simply takes time and familiarity.

God programmed us with this power locked away inside of ourselves, then gave us the instructions on how to access it. Those instructions are encoded in events of history, letters, poetry, even ideas we get today while pondering what Moses’s Sacrificial Law meant for Israel thousands of years ago. While we ponder the contents of God’s Word, a well drills in our hearts, breaking through one impenetrable layer after another, reaching deeper and deeper treasures and sources of strength and power.

This power can give us insight, wisdom in the moment, innovative imagination that prospers, strength for unimaginable prayer and splendid miracles, even supernatural powers to heal and more. We don’t know what all abilities we have except that comic book superheroes don’t do justice to the powers we have buried inside each of us. The important part to learn is temperance and self control first.

God will unlock more and more abilities in your life as you improve your character. He won’t give a lightning rod to a child tyrant. Let God’s Written Guidance embed itself into your heart you will grow unimagined powers.

103 – End Times Evangelism

By the dawn of the twentieth century, the Gospel of Jesus had made its way into every formal nation on Earth, with a smattering of “sub-nations” that have not heard about Jesus. Jesus commanded his disciples to preach the Gospel to every nation and said that the End would be near once every nation had heard; this means that we are in “End Times” by “Biblical” definition from that specific teaching of Jesus. This “Gospel” is the message that the one and only Son of God had died on a Roman Cross to atone for all humanity’s sins, otherwise punishable in the afterlife and thus a curse in this lifetime. “Nations” is Greek for “peoples” or “ethnic groups”; “evangelism” is the Greek verb for “telling Gospel”.

In the New Testament, “missions” focused on introducing the message of Jesus to people for the first time, then maintaining correspondence, distance discipleship, and cooperation. This correspondence comprises much of the New Testament—letters written to the very first Christians, organized collectively by city.

“Missions” today is much different since most of the “introduction” phase has already been completed. This has many ramifications, among them is the need to teach Christians about deeper things of God beyond the basic news that Jesus atoned our sin. Miracles, healing, and prophetic experiences show us more about God’s love; they are part of understanding God’s Word in its fullness. The New Testament teaches us to progress and grow in God this way.

Another ramification is that most people we encounter in our day-to-day lives have already heard about Jesus—they need “clarification” about who Jesus is. One of the best ways is through miracles; miracles are difficult to debate.

But, from the beginning, “evangelism” was never a quest to persuade people, but a quest to find them. Once shown the real Jesus, people only reject him because they want to. Evangelism about Jesus isn’t a sales pitch; it’s a message to which people respond and inasmuch identify themselves as already having their names written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. If spreading the message of Jesus is about “finding” rather than “selling”, it should be easier to do and easier to accept.

107 – Planning Makes Satisfaction

Of all the skills and subjects of school to learn, the most important lesson is the ability to control one’s time and schedule. My friend once blurted in the car, “My family doesn’t plan anything, but it’s not because we don’t know how, but because we don’t want to be committed if something better comes along.” His parents are divorced, so is he. It’s a problem for him and he says so more than I.

Good things come along from time to time. You can only catch them if you are ready. But, the best things in life can only be planned because they require preparation. Your children will live the type of life you do. If your family lives a free-spirited life, they will always be happy, but they will never be satisfied. They will hunger for something better, but they will always be chasing the next wave—always chasing the wind, yet never learning to soar—because the very best things in life can only be planned.

Parallel to planning is spontaneity. About half of God’s gifts come along without warning and if you reject everything that you don’t plan for, you will miss God’s best. Planning is not about locking down the future in your scheduling calendar, but about preparation. Preparation includes the unforeseen.

The secret to living effectively with planned spontaneity is think like a homing missile or a game of golf. First, know your general direction and stay on the fairway. If it’s a par 5, the second step is to get to the green. Third is the hole. But, you’ll never be able to “birdie” a hole unless you get years of regular practice. That means saying no to last minute movies and getting out of bed—or boogying after work—to the driving range.

Even the best golf courses offer rain checks, but no strong, healthy, toned body happens without exercise and diet being the priority. If the practice doesn’t get done, neither do the results; it doesn’t matter the excuse. “Flex days” smartly prepare spontaneity—the exception, not the rule. You must rule your time, otherwise others will rule you because they ruled their own time first.

110 – Everything Gets Shaken

At one point or another, sometime in life sooner or later, no matter what we create that we depend on the most—it all gets shaken.

For “churchgoers” it is the Sunday morning “Churchianity” culture that gets shaken. For the Buddhist it is Buddhism. For the Atheist it is godlessness. For the Hedonist it is the claim that indulgence gratifies. For the one who writes his own morals, his morals fail him and his life implodes. For the free spirit, he gets crushed by bureaucracy or starved by the famine. For the one who prepares, his storehouses get robbed. There will inevitably be times in life that whatever things we depend on get shaken; and whatever lasts through the shaking is of God.

Jesus told a parable of two houses, one built on sand and the other built on rock. Not “if”—when the storm came, the house built on sand crashed into a terrible wreck; the house built on rock stood sound. Jesus explained that to follow his teaching was to build a house that lasts. Remember, Jesus was a carpenter.

In his parable, the house built on rock was not exempt from the storm; it went through it. The storm was not an attack or hardship visiting itself upon the wisely-built house. The storm was from God. The only attack and hardship came from the wisely-built house upon the foolishly-built house because surviving the storm proved the last word. It was through the storm that the house wisely built on rock showed it’s “revenge by massive amounts of success” upon the house so foolishly built on sand.

It’s thinkable that the house on sand was large and on beachfront property at the same price of the smaller, less-scenic house cut into rock. But, Jesus makes no comment on the structural style of the houses, only the ground on which they were built. The key to surviving the inevitable storms of testing is not some unfathomable, expensive, elitist mystery—it is a simple choice.

Don’t let success lower your guard. The storms and shaking will come. You must be prepared, not by skills or “outsmarting”, but by being strong from simple choices of priority.

Matthew 7:24-27, Luke 6:46-49

111 – Prepare in Prayer, Don’t Wait

You can’t wait until turbulent times arrive before you develop a prayer life in God. Everything that grows grows slowly, even you, even your heart that grows by prayer and Bible.

Study God’s Word, especially the Gospels and Revelation and, quite frankly, the entire thing, especially. Know what it says. Study it. Read it. Study it.

Bad times are always waiting. Many bad people distort truth about God. They use entertainment and religious teaching—of any religion, Christianity or otherwise—to give people a view of God that’s at least partially false, so when people see God in action they don’t recognize God for Who He is. They even get their ideas about God from pop fiction, even when it runs contrary to God’s Word—and they don’t think twice about it because they study pop fiction more than they study God’s Word.

The devil is behind this, along with his band of moonlight followers—and you’d be surprised to learn who they are. It’s almost like “moonshine religion”, they even go to church knowing they worship the devil at night. Many more of them are Christians who refuse to acknowledge the lack of love and justice in their actions, constantly arguing and looking for a witch to hunt.

Wicked fools are everywhere. You can’t hunt them all down, though. God keeps them there to make sure that no one loves God without an objective choice. The solution is not to expose wickedness to the world; God will do that Himself at random times, whenever it suits Him, which always ends up bringing amazing justice.

Don’t deny evil or its followers; don’t fear evil either. The only thing you can do to strengthen yourself against evil is the best thing you can do: Grow strong by growing daily.

If you grow to withstand wicked people, you will also grow to withstand the bumps and turbulence of life. It’s all the same. The only way to be strong against shaking and testing is to grow. So, grow, remain standing after the shaking, and be celebrated by Heaven, where it matters most.

Know the world, just know God more. And remember, God must be known in advance.

115 – Charm, Wit & Tact

Never fall for the motto of the Georgian rhetoric psychopath, “It’s not what you say; it’s how you say it.” It’s why you say it.

Tact and charm begin with genuine live in your heart. Without that, all other advice on charm and tactfulness will only make one come across as a deceitful snake. However, once you have love…

Some things are obvious, evident. Those are things you should never say because, well, they “go without saying”. If you state the obvious, people will think something is wrong with you, either that you are hiding something or don’t know about life or are just trying to flatter.

Other things must be said. Especially in English, we communicate with the assumption that we all expect new ideas. If one person knows what another person mans to say, there is no point in conversation because there would be no progress, whether in exchange of ideas, technology, business growth, or anything else worth discussing. When you do indeed need to communicate an idea, provide enough detail that people know what you mean. For example, don’t overuse pronouns to a point where the listener doesn’t know where the pronouns point to. My mother would often say, in many occasion, “I know that you know what you are talking about, but I haven’t a clue. Start over, but don’t begin with the word ‘they’.”

There is a time to presume what is evidently self-evident and a time to state the idea that no one considered; know the difference. This is a knowledge you will never stop learning.

You can say almost anything if you have a twinkle in your eye and a sheepishly childish grin in your face. When wrong or in those times you accidentally step on toes, be humble. When you cause an injury, own it. When you don’t, be the Good Samaritan who helps someone else’s victim.

When you must confront someone, twinkle, grin, and be the large, gentle giant in charge. If people love your results, and you break neither skin, bones, nor feelings, it won’t matter which silly protocols you may have to break. You don’t even need to smile if you have enough love.

1 Corinthians 13

118 – Message via Cosmos

God will approach us with individual, routine guidance. Sometimes it’s a warning, other times it’s an encouragement. He might speak to us through a feeling or “sense” of an idea.

God also likes to talk to us through people. He will send a friend, coworker, classmate, cousin—and He especially likes to deliver messages through people that happen to irritate us most, right at the time they deliver the message. Those people probably don’t know that God’s using them to deliver important truth for our lives. To them, they are just getting something off their chests or bubbling over with some frustration we stirred in them by our recent action. But, for us, their words may be remarkably relevant to the situation in our lives, especially in light of recent events.

God can, and does, use anyone for this—some passer-by on the street, a drunk guy at a bar who doesn’t know you and everybody thinks is a fool, but his words address a riddle in your heart that you went to bed with the night before. He’ll send a teacher, supervisor, student, subordinate, spouse, ex, parent, child, older or younger sibling, or whomever we least want to listen to. He even uses billboards or other events in life. God spoke to Balaam through his own donkey and He spoke to Jonah through a crew of sailors.

Don’t look for it; it will find you, especially when you don’t expect it. It will never stop happening, no matter how old you get, no matter how much you grow in knowing God.

When God sends messages to us through such means, He makes a few presumptions. The messenger neither needs nor earns any “credibility” kudos for delivering the message, and may or may not even know that a message is being delivered at all. You’re expected to get the message and are responsible for understanding it. And, God may not tell you how to obey His message, only the results He expects. He’s already told us how.

God has revealed many things in His Word already, also through life. Every prophecy or message from the cosmos presumes we have read God’s Word and paid attention.