Billy Coffey
Over the last couple of months I have been following this blog with earnest every day.
I simply love his writing, and his post this morning, just puts things in such great perspective for me.
Equals
1 Peter 3:7
The same goes for you husbands: Be good husbands to your wives. Honor them, delight in them. As women they lack some of your advantages. But in the new life of God’s grace, you’re equals. Treat your wives, then, as equals so your prayers don’t run aground.
Ok, so today I am only going to tell you guys how much I love my wife, and why…
She is beautiful, clever and drives me to be different in everything that I do.
I used to be a very stubborn person, still am, but hopefully less. She has, over the years, taught me that even if I am unhappy about something or somebody, I don’t need to react on it. Sometimes it is better to “Smile and wave” 
She uplifts me in everything I do. If I were to come to her tomorrow and say I am leaving my job to go do something totally ridiculous, I know she will stand with me, all the way. She would even push me to go do it, and THAT is something that I know is why God gave this wonderful woman to me.
If it was not for her, I would be a very sad and uninspired person, but she pushes me to dream great big dreams, and then she will go out and push me to make my dreams become reality.
Just wanted to share this with you guys…
Congratulations
Today, all I can do is congratulate Johan Lombaard and his wife Susan, on the birth of a health baby boy this morning at 7:55.
I pray that the Lord will keep them as a family safe, and bless them up to the point where they will ask why they are getting all these blessings.
Blessing
Got this in my inbox today from a dear friend, Danie Nell. Thank you for this Danie
“Your son is here,” she said to the old man.
She had to repeat the words several times before the patient’s eyes opened.
He was s heavily sedated because of the pain of his heart attack, he dimly saw the young uniformed Marine standing outside the oxygen tent. He reached out his hand. The Marine wrapped his toughened fingers around the old man’s limp ones, squeezing a message of love and encouragement.
The nurse brought a chair so that the Marine could sit beside the bed. All through the night the young Marine sat there in the poorly lighted ward, holding the old man’s hand and offering him words of love and strength. Occasionally, the nurse suggested that the Marine move away and rest awhile.
He refused. Whenever the nurse came into the ward, the Marine was oblivious of her and of the night noises of the hospital – the clanking of the oxygen tank, the laughter of the night staff members exchanging greetings, the cries and moans of the other patients.Now and then she heard him say a few gentle words The dying man said nothing, only held tightly to his son all through the night.
Along towards dawn, the old man died. The Marine released the now lifeless hand he had been holding and went to tell the nurse. While she did what she had to do, he waited.
Finally, she returned. She started to offer words of sympathy, but the Marine interrupted her.
“Who was that man?” he asked.
The nurse was startled, “He was your father,” she answered.
“No, he wasn’t,” the Marine replied. “I never saw him before in my life.”“Then why didn’t you say something when I took you to him?”
“I knew right away there had been a mistake,
but I also knew he needed his son, and his
son just wasn’t here.
When I realized that he was too sick to tell
whether or not I was his son,
knowing how much he needed me, I stayed.”The next time someone needs you… just be there. Stay.
WE ARE NOT HUMAN BEINGS GOING THROUGH A
TEMPORARY SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE.WE ARE SPIRITUAL BEINGS GOING THROUGH A TEMPORARY
HUMAN EXPERIENCE.
(love this line)THIS IS WHAT WE ARE PUT ON THIS EARTH TO DO ANYWAY. RIGHT ?
HAVE A GREAT DAY AND BLESS SOMEONE ELSE IN SOME LITTLE WAY TODAY!
GOD IS SO GOOD
New author
Hi all
Johan Lombaard has joined the Unsafe Challenge team, and will be posting every once in a while on some challenges that he experiences in his life journey.
Welcome Johan, and we are looking forward to you first post…
Thank You
Today, I can only say thank you.
My life is filled with wonderful people, from my wife through to friends and family.
Without putting names in this post, I just want to say thank you for all the prayer, support and friendship that I can share with all of you. Thanks for knowing that I can call you on anything, and if it is within your power, you will make an effort to help out.
I would also just like to say, the same goes for all of you from my side. Please feel free to ask anything, as small as it may seem to you, and if it is within my jurisdiction to do anything about it, I will definitely do everything within my power to try and make it happen.
I love all of you and I get seriously excited thinking about the future we all are going to have together.
Thank you Lord…
The hand of God
This story that I found on Esther Havens‘ blog is simply one of the greatest stories that I have had the privilege to read in the last couple of months.
You must also just have a look at the pictures she takes on her website. It is some of the most inspiring pictures that captures the soul of the person and the moment.
May we all be touched by this…
Serving
So, this morning, on my way to church with my baby girl, I am starting look forward to the amazing worship and another great service, just to come down to earth, BIG TIME!!
Arriving at the baby care, there is no one to look after the kids, and guess who needs to look after the 3 little girls…
Yep, that would be me. At first I was very disappointed, as I was really looking forward to do some worship in the audience, and not being on stage for a change.
On my way home, from church, I realised, that through me serving, I was able to give the other 2 girls’ parents the opportunity to connect with God this morning, and not have to run after their girls the whole time.
Thank you Lord, for keeping me humble and giving me a serving heart, and please, keep it coming…
Relationship?
I am busy reading Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell, and this theme has jumped out at me on a number of occasions during his book, and now, being bored with all the ladies in my life sleeping, I read this amazing piece of writing by Louis Brittz, and this is exactly the way I am starting to feel about this issue…
In our generation words have become so liquid. It’s as if we don’t care whether the words we use communicate what we are trying to say. We’d say something remotely close to what we mean and end it off with “.…oh, you know what I mean” and the listener ends up saying “Oh I can see where you’re going with that.”. This isn’t clear, good or understandable communication. And, as we also love saying: “What’s the big deal anyway?”
The big deal is that the Gospel of Jesus and all the related Good News is a long string of words. Very important words. Words that carry life in them and give birth to spiritual sight. When the Jesus of the Gospels transforms us into his witnesses, it’s mainly words that we use to describe his role in our lives. What we say and how we say it becomes the oyster that harbors the pearl of the Gospel. It determines whether the ultimate truth comes across with a ring of truth to it. Do you agree?
Then I need to make a seemingly radical statement at the risk of being kicked out of the church:
It’s O.K. if you don’t have a relationship with Jesus.
Now, please don’t burn me at the stake. I know I’m probably the only evangelical Christian you’ve heard these words from – ever! – but be broadminded and allow me to explain.
To have a relationship with Christ has become the most important element of Christianity in our culture. It’s the rule of thumb-test, and the preceding question to almost all evangelistic appeals has for many years been: “Do you have a relationship with Jesus? Do you know Jesus, or only know about Him? Do you have religion, or do you have a relationship?”
These are great sound bytes and they spice up our sermons, driving our point home with force. But what is our point if we speak in vague, abstract terminology that Jesus himself never used? Why do we call people to something that is totally undefined, thus constantly being redefined and actually indefinable? Is this the best we can do as communicators of the Gospel? How is it that “a relationship with Jesus” has become the most common descriptor of the essence of Christianity, but nobody knows just what the heck it means to have one. Oh, every one thinks they know, and the thought of not having one or not understanding it is a most embarrassing one.
But in reality defining our relationship with Christ is impossible, and calling it a relationship is confusing to all who aren’t believers of the Gospel. They don’t know what we are trying to say, because we don’t know ourselves. The sooner we realize this and start using words responsibly, the sooner we’ll communicate the Truth as clearly as Jesus and Paul did. Isn’t that our ambition?
Do we care that Jesus never said that we could and should have a relationship with him? That it doesn’t appear in the Bible at all? And yet, how many times haven’t we felt miserable because of our failing, struggling, non-developing relationship with Him? How often have you felt a failure because you didn’t know how to keep this relationship going and growing – didn’t understand what was expected of you in it? How is it that the fantasy of every Christian is something that isn’t the reality of even one?
Relationship is the wrong word for this thing we have with God and it matters that it’s the wrong word! Here’s why:
We all have a concept of what a relationship is because we have parents, friends, teachers, brothers and sisters, husbands, wives, children and role models. We are in these and other relationships and – we have no choice – these institutions form our concept of what the word relationship means. Thinking that we can redefine our concept of the content of it is like thinking we can change our idea of what water, wine or bread is. We can’t (not without being brainwashed) and I’m really grateful that Jesus doesn’t require it of us. He does require us to redefine other abstract words, such as life, truth and love. Being a Christian means that we redefine and relearn the meaning of these words – but we know we must because Jesus preached about these words and connected himself to their definition. The word “relationship” doesn’t feature, and I’m not surprised. Jesus didn’t come to complicate things.
Perhaps you feel that having a relationship with Christ doesn’t require you to redefine the word. That would mean you draw from a lifetime of experiences in relationships with different people to know what exactly it is you have going with God. And it becomes confusing: Should your reference be parent, friend, teacher, brother or bride? Jesus is all these things, but which should be the main focus of this relationship? What’s more, Jesus is truth, life, living bread, morning star, advocate, path maker, forgiver of sins and judge there of. HOW are you to have a relationship with Him in this capacity…especially since this description doesn’t come close to defining Him?
The problem with having a relationship with someone is that you need to have a picture of that person in mind. Doing that with Jesus is very hard, but at times gloriously possible. In incredible revelations the Lord allows us glimpses of himself and these glimpses are so wonderful that we want to attach ourselves to them. But they are not a fraction of his being, and we only restrict and imprison God if these pictures of him become the focus of a relationship with Him. If some one is far too enormous, radiant and holy for my mind to comprehend, how can I have a clear enough image of that person so as to have a relationship with him?
The next problem with having a relationship with Jesus is that a healthy relationship depends on communication. Now, good and well to say that God gave us his Word, reveals himself to us in many other ways and that we in turn speak to him in prayer. But this communication falls far short of what the word “relationship” would call to mind. There can be these huge lapses in time between our prayers and God’s answers to them. And even bigger lapses from revelation to revelation on a personal level – those times when we honestly say that God ‘spoke’ to us. Mostly He leaves us to live life with the specifics and parameters given in his Word, which was given for all mankind – hardly a personal note passed between those entwined in relationship.
Please don’t think I’m saying communication between us and God is unimportant or meaningless. I’m just calling you to honesty about not reading things into this communication that God never intended to put there. We can be so in love with our way of thinking about holy things that the truth later doesn’t seem to matter…
Then there’s the problem that we don’t know or understand God at all. Again such a radical statement that I feel unsaved (another one of those words…) for writing it, but it’s so true. We’re always saying and singing about how we know Jesus, but we know pitifully little of him. We have a couple of accounts of his 33 years on earth, but He is the Living Word who has been present since the conception of this earth and reigns now on the right hand of the Father. Who is your connection to: The Jesus who walked the earth for 33 years, or the risen, spiritual Christ at the Fathers right hand?? And what do we know of the Christ who sits on the throne? What qualifies us to say that we know him? That He allows us glimpses of his time on earth, enough to understand the way He made for us and how to carry his message to the world, hardly gives us the right to arrogantly proclaim that we know Jesus. No wonder people who understand how unfathomable Christ must be, laugh us off. We can be so arrogantly unintelligent sometimes. Or has the word “know” also become bereft of meaning?
As for understanding God, all I can say is – we would be so lucky. He is the Creator of a world of which He is the Savior and also the Judge. He is our Brother but also our Bridegroom, our Father but also our Friend. Who can explain the character of God? Who can safely say that he or she has a grasp on how God’s mind works? No one. Not Freud, Nietzsche, Luther, Einstein, Billy Graham or me. We come to God accepting that we can never know or understand him even partially, because to do so would mean to be gods ourselves – holy and infinite in wisdom. We have no hope to be, and God will for ever remain a great puzzle to us. A wonderful Mystery of whose love we can be sure, on whose character we can depend and whose great dream for this world we can buy into. But his heart, mind and psyche are not ours to know or understand in this world. Because He is – well, God. If you disagree, maybe you should ask the Lord where He is from and what his favorite color is. If He tells you then I’m writing rubbish.
Also, in a relationship that works, surely there is some form of equality. Such as between brothers or partners in marriage. Because of this equality each partner has a measure of control. You can see how this isn’t the case with us and Jesus. Yes, we are his bride and his brothers and I’m fully “grace-awakened” to our standing before God. But we are also his disciples, his instruments, his hands and feet, his servants. We are in a covenant with him because He made it with us and signed the contract with his own godly blood. We brought nothing to the table and we still bring nothing. We are receivers, who gratefully take the pardon offered. But even as we come boldly to the throne of grace as the Lord invites us to, we know that He who is on that throne is the Savior and we are the saved, is the Giver and we are the takers, is the Life and we are the dead that He came for. If I dare look Jesus in the eye, it’s only because I haven’t taken a hard look at my own heart for a while. There’s no morsel of equality here…
…but there are secrets here, and secrets are the death sting of a relationship, aren’t they? You can argue that we’re not supposed to have secrets from God. Also that we can’t really have any, because He knows our hearts as if they were his own. But that isn’t the point. The point is that God holds out on us and there’s no way we can make him tell. He has many secrets and it’s his right, because He is God and we are not. A relationship gives you the right to demand openness from the other party involved so that the foundation of the bond can remain firm. But God feels no obligation to share his past operations or future plans with us because the bond between us lies in a connection wrought by a covenant sealed in the blood of his Son. We share our deepest thoughts, fears, sins and desires with him not because of a relationship that behooves honesty, but because we have no choice. He has given us his nature and we empty our hearts to him because the very nature of God in our hearts compels us to. It’s not a soothing thought perhaps, but the deep connection we feel to God in these times of soul bearing has little to do with us. It’s the Spirit in us drawing us to the Father. We are just so privileged to be the vehicles and the spectators of this wonderful amalgamation of God the Spirit with God the Father through God the Son. What joy to be right in the centre of this event!
Am I saying that there’s no relationship between us and God? That’s not my intention. We should realize that God chose to stand in several relationships with us. As mentioned before, He is Father, Friend, Counselor, Savior, Creator of life and the one who takes it away…and so, so much more. I can think of at least thirty different relationships that God chose to be in with me and then I’m not scraping the surface. They are all between God and me, and the individual content of each connection He has established between us differ so much that in a lifetime I couldn’t get my mind around the core of the nature of these relationships. Suffice to say that God has various relationships with me to which I respond. This response (the core of which is giving my life to him) is called Christianity, because Jesus Christ sealed the covenant. He made the way for it. He was quite clear that He came so that we could come to the Father through him. The relationships the Father wanted to establish with us was on the mind of Jesus. No relationship with Jesus himself was ever at stake.
So here we are. Connected to God and acutely aware of that connection. This connection is sealed in a covenant given and upheld by God through Jesus. Our awareness and celebration of it is through the Spirit in us. Is it a sin to call it a relationship with Jesus? Surely not! I don’t think the Lord minds us calling it that. I’m sure He listens beyond the words we use and hears our hearts in any case.
But it’s still incorrect. It strips the incredible connection that God forged between us of its mystery. The fact that we’ve pasted a vague, descriptive word onto something wonderfully shaded between God and ourselves has caused thousands of unthinking people not to delve into the depths of it, not to try to discover its many colors. We called it a relationship, and because that’s what we believed it is, we had to define it. Welcome to confusion. Instead we should have realized long ago that it’s a bond so mysterious in its nature, with so many different shapes and nuances that it’s a goldmine of infinite depth. We are to be the delvers, the miners of this treasure and we should know that we’ll never quite hold it in our hands. That in this world we’ll only see it glimmer in a bouquet of radiant colors and every time we look into it and find only mystery, we’ll know one thing for sure: It is there! And that is what God wants us to know.
I have often heard Christians say that they were saved on this and this date, that they now know Jesus and have a wonderful relationship with him. I am so glad for the salvation of these people, but my heart mourns their needless spiritual poverty. When did we become such an unthinking generation? Or has our arrogance just blinded us completely?
Do you still wonder why I have such a problem with us using the phrase? Haven’t I admitted that I don’t think God himself has much of a problem with it…?
It’s just that it’s such a glowing example of how we turn sound bytes into theology without thinking them through. It’s the virus of our generation and it infects the kind of Gospel we are handing down to our children. We are teaching people that we can use any words we choose to describe and define the new covenant God has birthed us into. And when they think about it and realize that they don’t understand a word of what we were saying – then they realize that our words don’t mean anything. They stop listening because we’ve stopped thinking.
Christianity is a realization of a mysterious connection between God and us, wrought by a covenant that came into fulfillment through the cross and empty grave of Christ. Think about every one of those words and start digging into their meaning. It should take you at least a lifetime.
Do NOT explain it away. It came much too expensive for us to give it such callous treatment.
Grace
Today we had a silent retreat with 2 other couples from our house church. The 3 men has received a word from God that we should start with camps, and today was basically the kick-off of those camps. We had this silent retreat in order to hear from God what he wants us to do, and how He wants us to do it.
The results was awesome, as we all confirmed what the other heard, and it was just such an awesome day of spending time with God and our brothers and sisters.
In any case, during this silent time, I got these following words, and I simply have to share it with you guys…
Grace
Jesus stands for Grace.
We should stand for Grace.
This can only be done through the salvation of Jesus Christ
We have been freed from the chains of hell and the bondage of the law through Grace.
The Son of God, dying on the cross for the sins of man…
HOW?
Love…
The answer to the question of love, is Grace. Not any grace, but the grace that Jesus came to give us on the cross.
