About Asking and Receiving...
From Ian's '10 Minutes with John' series

WOULD YOU BELIEVE…?



That primitive and ignorant people once sacrificed
Their babies to stone and wooden gods.
Today we are much less ignorant and ill-informed.
We now sacrifice them to the ‘god’ within.

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Jesus to Martha: "ONE THING is needful...and Mary has chosen it"
(Luke 10:41-42)
 
THE MORNING CHOICE...
 
A thousand ‘causes’ shout at me,
Demanding my attention
Urgency and noise intrude,
Diluting my intention
Confused, I wish for clarity,
Distracted, need direction
 
What’s this—so hard to hear?
A quiet voice is whisp’ring
‘Come near to me, come near--
And let me carry, as I’ve said,
Anxiety and fear’
 
And so I stop. I go to him,
I silence other voices.
Deliberately come close;
Thus close down all the choices
I give to him his asked-for place,
So he can activate his grace--
 
And so he does as he has said,
‘In quietness and in confidence
Shall be your inmost power.’
The crush, the fog, confusion lifts;
Is lifted—by his hand
I realise my incompetence,
I need Him in each hour!
 
And so, I pass into the day,
His promised peace now mine;
Arriving with relinquishment
Of things I need not carry!
I thought I should: it was a lie
To rob me and to harry
And keep me from his true intent
To fashion and refine.

Ian Heard

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From the 10 Minutes with John series, this video is no.11 'MY SHEEP HEAR MY VOICE'

Like Jesus, Christians must be coming from AMONG—not from APART...
 One of the things about Messiah Jesus that impresses me most is that not only was he human—and fully so—but that he stood among his fellow-humans on common ground. He ministered out of shared human experience, albeit without human failure.
 
“Is not this the carpenter’s son?” people said, “where did this man get these things? After all, we know his family and brothers and sisters.”
 
Not a piously aloof graduate of the Rabbinic Schools; he was in the trades! Whose son you were was one of the first questions asked about anyone who began to come to notice. Of David, Saul had asked the same question, “whose son is he?” Pedigree mattered!
 
Jesus’ schooling, apart from synagogue school when young, was life; and he was required to have some 30 years of it prior to launching into his Father’s mission. Life!—in a carpenter or artisan’s workshop, into which came every specimen of Nazareth’s and Galilee’s life of the day. Merchants and traders, farm boys, the well-heeled and the poor, the lame and the sick, fishermen, hucksters, tax-collectors and pretenders, newly-weds along with soldiers and women of doubtful repute. Jesus got to know them all; some were generous and some didn’t pay their bills or always had an excuse. Colourful language? He’d heard it all. He knew of drought and hardship, as he knew also of field and crop and agriculture, otherwise from whence did all the stories and similes come?
 
Full immersion in life was exactly why he connected effectively with all and sundry. He could tell stories of thieves and insistent widows and children’s games and of weddings and funerals and feasts and food and wine. He used experiences from life’s realities to touch every heart experiencing its joys and woes. Tales of vineyard owners and stewards; of disappointments and of women preparing bread or anxious over the housekeeping money they’ve misplaced; of fishers’ nets and farmer’s fields; of rogues, villains and cheats. Situations and people recognised by all. LIFE!
 
His years of immersion in ‘real’ life was utterly necessary so that his message, when it came, was not as one shouted across a chasm by a detached professor with a bunch of theories—like the message of the scholars and Pharisees. No! Where Jesus was ‘coming from’ would resonate instantly with commoners or aristocrat alike, evidencing rich human encounter and a wealth of observation of the ‘ticking’ of the worlds of men, women and children.
 
Having ‘seen it all’ and then some, he understood them and their joys, anxieties, longings and frustrations, and—he understood clearly his Father’s mission and heart for them all.
And so, he presented to them all (and each) an alternative personal government; the government, or kingdom, of God which could change everything—EVERYTHING—in the lives of those who would embrace it. Right there.
 
And...right now too!
 

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          TOWERING CONFUSION…

Babel’s tower was and is a byword for the inevitable confusion that results from humankind insisting on independence, and reaching for god-hood. The motives for the tower were twofold—and in direct contravention to God’s stated intention for people after Noah’s flood.

Firstly their motive was to ‘make a name for ourselves.’ Now, whilst this motive may sound admirable to the purely humanist ear—it does not attract the favour of God. Grace was available as Enoch, Noah and others had found, but it was found in humble obedience, not found in prideful self-elevation.

God’s statement at Babel (in a sense by hyperbole) was, “learn this: confusion and disappointment can only ever be the outcome of seeking to make a name for yourself and of seeking your security within humanity”.
 
Their second motive, touched on above, was the desire to find security within humanity and within control and centralisation. They said, “LEST we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth”. The tower, it was thought, would be a cohesive monument to themselves and their cleverness with their new-found technology of bricks (instead of stone) and oil-tar mortar.
 
This too, was in direct contravention of God’s plan and instruction to them to “be fruitful and multiply and FILL the whole earth”.
Only in obedience to The Maker’s plan can true security ever be realised—as counter-intuitive as his plan may sound. Abraham had to discover the same truth when God said, “leave your country, your family and your father’s house for a land I will show you…and I WILL MAKE YOU…”
 
Today’s abounding confusion and dysphoria is the direct outcome of humankind’s building of another Babel. Of listening to Lucifer and succumbing to the same wrong motives—of elevating mankind to god-hood as destiny-masters, and, placing trust in collective humanity, knowledge and technology instead of in God.
 
The ‘tower’ and ‘towers’ will fall—are falling. Confusion will abound more and more—in both individuals and in peoples.
It will abound until the bankruptcy and vulnerability of such towers is revealed as they crumble, and repentance comes and people run to the One who alone is our TOWER!
 
‘Blessed be the LORD, my rock…my lovingkindness and fortress…
my HIGH TOWER and deliverer’ (Psalm 144).

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THE WATCHER DISCUSSES LIGHT AND DARKNESS…
 
HUMAN: “Jesus said ‘I am the light of the world’ did he not? But today we have so much knowledge and understanding—and what I would describe as enlightenment, so can that still be true?”

WATCHER: “More true than ever.”

HUMAN: “Oh…explain please.”

WATCHER: “Well, have you considered the context in which he said those words? There was a display of darkness occurring at that very moment as he was speaking his light to people, early one morning near the temple.”

HUMAN: “And what was the occurrence you speak of?”

WATCHER: “Pharisees and scribes brought in a woman caught in adultery. They were ready to stone her but what they failed to see was that the motives of their dark hearts was as bad as, or perhaps worse than, her sin.”

HUMAN: “And their motive was?”

WATCHER: “Twofold, no threefold …to test Jesus and to find a means to accuse him. And—they tried to use the woman as a pawn for a game of ‘gotcha’ with Jesus. So there are at least three counts of darkness in their hearts against them.”

HUMAN: “These were men who were pretending they were the light of the world?”

WATCHER: “Aha…you’re getting it! And then he wrote their darkness on the ground and exposed it to them—and to the others—so that they stole wordlessly away.”

HUMAN: “It’s like true Light revealed pretend light as actual darkness. Yes, of course…darkness is just absence of light isn’t it? They had no light within!”

WATCHER: “Wonderful! Exactly so—and is why he then said to the gathered people, ‘I am the Light of the world. He who follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the Light of life!”

HUMAN: “And today?”

WATCHER: “Human hearts are the same—and, the more they shut out the true Light, the more desperately they try to manufacture their own light from the darkness within. Soon dark motives reveal themselves in virtue-signalling, hypocrisy, desire for attention and publicity, along with denigration of—or cancelling of others—most especially those who seek to walk by the true Light of the world.
It’s also the reason Jesus said in another place, “If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!”

HUMAN: “Sigh…”

(John Chapter 8)

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Genghis Khan or Joan of Arc?
Simple questions...
If a man believes he is Genghis Khan or a woman thinks she is Joan of Arc...or for that matter, if a woman believes she is Genghis Khan etc., they are usually referred for treatment and therapy before more damage is done.

Everyone would agree that it would do no good for doctors or helpers to provide the man who believes he’s Genghis Khan with a horse and a sword and an army of followers.

On the other hand if a man with all the necessary anatomical components believes he is a woman today, why is it considered wrong or damaging to help them come to terms with that delusion/deception. And secondly, to make it worse, why do others deliberately join them in their delusion to aid and abet it!

Are two or three or a hundred deceived people somehow better than one?
All of us are deceived or deluded about one thing or another, but REAL transformation from any deception begins within and works out from there—and it’s on offer from the only One who has power to transform us in this way. And—to whom we are really meant to come and transition into, and not some warped counterfeit.

It is Jesus Christ. He said and says, wonderful words (and backs them up with wonderful actions), like “COME TO ME all who are labouring and under oppression, and I will give you ease.”

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