Spirit listener

"After they had prayed, their meeting place was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly."  Acts 4:31 There is one purpose for God's power:  to bear witness to the truth--Jesus Himself. Because there is one purpose for God's power, there is one purpose for seeking God's power. Because there is on purpose for seeking God's power, there is one experience of God's power. Now this one experience, for one purpose, may be manifest in different ways...but it will achieve the very same and only goal:  to point people to the risen Savior, the Lord Jesus. Whether you speak in tongues, heal the sick, cast out demons, teach a Sunday school class, home school your children, write a blog, wait tables--whatever you do to make Jesus known will have God's power.  Whether spectacular or regular, there will be power, if you want to make Jesus known. Do you want to make Jesus known?  By that, I don't mean to argu...

"You will receive power when the Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses...to the ends of the earth."~The Lord Jesus, to His followers, before He ascended into heaven. What does it feel like to experience God's power? Before we can answer that question, we have to make clear what power is, and what it's for. Power is ability to achieve a specific purpose. So, if you are powerful, you feel capable of achieving whatever you set out to achieve.  You feel bold, courageous, confident, and capable to do what you are setting out to do.  This is the key to your experience of God's power:  if you are setting out to do God's will. And what is God's will? According to Jesus, it's to be His witnesses wherever you are on earth. If you haven't experienced God's power, it's because you aren't setting out to do God's will. Plain and simple. But if you are in any way setting out to do anything that is inherently God...

"You shall receive power when the Spirit comes upon you..."   ~The Lord Jesus, to His followers, before He ascended into heaven, and sat at the right hand of God As a follower of Christ, you have a superpower, The Super Power, The Spirit of the Almighty.  Jesus promised you this power, This Person, who would empower you and be your power.  By "power" Jesus meant "supernatural, miraculous, divine power."  I want to share with you what this power is and how you experience it. GOD'S POWER IS THE SPIRIT IN YOU. It is written, "God's eternal power and divine nature, though invisible, have been clearly seen through the things God made, so that we are without excuse."   God's power is eternal, unborn, undying, infinite.  This is the power of God, and this is the power Jesus promised His followers.  What this power is can be seen in the life of Jesus, our role model, who was supernaturally born, and who supernaturally lived.  The same i...

How could God have a real personality and not see what we see when we are sinned against, not thinking of sin as a theological abstraction, but as something that happens in a relationship?  This leads me to the core of what we've been thinking about together. *** One modality used in therapy is CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.   One way to approach therapy in this modality is  Albert Ellis' "A-B-C Theory."   A=Activating Event B=Belief about A C=Consequent emotion and action. Most people only see the connection between A and C, and they think A causes C.  For example, "I am angry (C) because my girlfriend doesn't help out with the dogs (A)"  As a future therapist, I would  help clients focus on or see the "B" belief that they are not putting into the equation, such as "If my girlfriend doesn't help with the dogs in the way that I want her to, she doesn't care about me." So, cognitive behavioral t...

Jesus made a comparison between earthly fathers and the heavenly father, saying, "If you being evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly father give  good things to those who ask?"  Again, as a father, I know what this passage means in a way I didn't before I had children.  When my children were babies, I would go out of my way to warm bath water for them, prepare warm towels, do everything to make bath pleasant for my new-borns, who hate being uncovered. But still, they would scream like they were being tortured.  If you heard them, you would think I was being cruel.  Quite the opposite was happening.  I say all of this to show you that I get glimpses of how God feels by the experiences he puts me in.  As a husband, I get glimpses of what Christ the Bridegroom feels about His Bride.  I get glimpses of God's love, grief, joy...and anger. I'll give you another illustration of something God showed me a...

God has gone out of his way in scripture, in Christ, and in sending His Spirit, to give us first hand glimpses of how he experiences things...including anger. As Christians, we sometimes overcomplicate God's emotions and personality, while ironically telling people we have a "personal relationship with God."  We say over and over again that God is a person with a mind, emotions, and will, but we then make him aloof, or if we allow Him emotions, we somehow act as if his emotions are drastically different from ours.  I'll give you an example. When I was a teenager, I asked my pastor "what does God see when I sin?"  My pastor said, "He sees the blood of Jesus."  Now that sounds all good...I guess...theologically, but it sounded, and still sounds, stupid to me.  That's because my pastor was thinking of "sin" or "sinning" abstractly.  But sin isn't abstract.  It is an act in a relationship.  If my wife walked in on me h...

"What comes to our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us." A.W Tozer I believe what comes to our minds when we think about God's anger, judgment, and reaction to "sin" says a great deal about how we perceive not only God, but the gospel and our salvation.  Because of this, as a future marriage and family therapist , one who was trained to think systemically/contextually/relationally in a way that assumes what is called a "double description," I strive to always think of God as the Supreme Ultimate Person, The Personality, Personality Himself.  In marriage and family therapy, and systems theory, a "double description" is the assumption that everything should be thought of in literally relational terms.  For example, we tend to say someone is a "born leader."  As a systemic thinker, double descriptions suggest that you CANNOT have a "born leader" without "born followers....

S ome people think God's beliefs about sin/sins/evil has changed for some reason, that when God sees a woman commit adultery against her husband, or a man kill his child, this activating event is perceived/believed differently by him than it is by us, and thus God's consequent emotions and actions are vastly different.  Even using biblical sounding language like God "raining down wrath" puts God's anger in a kind of theological category beyond what we experience.  I believe "God's wrath/fury/raining down" is anger like we know anger to be--but of course coming from a being who is perfectly powerful and able to feel and express anger in a way that transcends us.  But I don't think His anger is different from ours in the sense that it is almost opposite of ours, as if our anger and his has no correlation what so ever.  A quote from C.S. Lewis perfectly and climactically captures what I'm saying.  It comes from Lewis' "Perelandra,...

Don't be anxious about anything, but pray about everything, thanking God, asking for good and the removal of evil, and God's incomprehensible supernatural peace will protect your mind and emotions. ~My paraphrase of the Apostle Paul's words to the church at Philippi. Right now, as I write to you, I'm experiencing incomprehensible supernatural peace.  It's incomprehensible because none of the things I was worried about this morning changed.  (It's now 4:34pm.  This morning I was so worried I couldn't sleep.)  It's supernatural because it's from God, a direct answer to prayer.  This is how I know that I'm experiencing incomprehensible supernatural peace. When I worry, I'm sure I do what you do:  I keep thinking about some problem that I have no control over.  That's what was happening this morning.  I'm having a deadline issue for a new job I'm applying for, and an unexpected setback in meeting that deadline.  And I can...