The Shepherd from Heaven

God’s Thoughts to Me

He will feed his flock like a shepherd. He will carry His lambs in His arms, holding them close to His heart. He will gently lead the mother sheep with their young (Isaiah 40:11, NLT).

He Feeds Us

Today is the beginning of the International Fibromyalgia/ME Awareness Week. Although research is only in its infancy, we look forward to progress and perhaps a breakthrough in the near future.

Due to unbelief, many if not most sufferers, received very bad and hostile treatment from the medical profession.

But at least we are finally beginning to be acknowledged as human beings with a real and quite disabling disease.

Isaiah 40:11 reminds us so wonderfully of how well the good Shepherd from heaven takes care of mothers and their children.

He cares for the broken ones, the weak, the sick, the unimportant, the unwanted and the rejected of this world. They only need to come to Him.

When my son, Simon, was in Grade 11, we had to buy text books for Grade 12 when the Grade 12 pupils were selling their old books second-hand at a much lower price than new books.

I recall the week when we had to pay about R600 (around $67) for two text books as well as payment for the initiation camp for the following year’s Grade 12 learners.

It was in the middle of the month and we were stone, cold broke with only a few pennies we had to rub together in any case. Yet, I knew I had a Pappa who promised to take care of all our needs.

The morning the payment was due, we still had not received our Lord’s provision, but I assured my children that the money would be paid before the end of the day.

When they left for school, I had a serious talk with my God, reminding Him that today is D-day and we still were empty-handed (or rather empty pocketed).

He told me to go to the ATM, and of course I stubbornly had to argue a bit, for the previous day when I checked, I was taunted by a big, round zero. Oh, those trust issues!!!!

At the word of our Lord, in the famous Peter style with the fishing nets, reluctantly, off to the ATM I went.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I found that double the amount we needed was paid back to us from the Receiver of Revenue. We were overjoyed and my children’s faith grew with leaps and bounds.

One would think that I was now cured of my stubbornness. Oh no, not this one. As a Fm/CFS sufferer, I had my fair share of unbelief, rejection and neglect from doctors, church people and also family and friends.

To such an extent that I landed up in the proverbial pig pen; not because of my foolishness, but because I had no one to care for me when I couldn’t take care of myself. Nobody believed that I was really ill.

But I was never alone. I could hear my Pappa screaming in my pain and suffering. Faithfully He was working in His normal mysterious ways to perform His wonders in my life.

The shepherds of ancient times would break the legs of the lambs that constantly wandered away.

Then he would set the leg and carry the lamb on his shoulder until the leg was healed. After that the lamb would remain by the shepherd’s side for the rest of its life.

Pappa knew of my stubborn propensities to be a master performer to earn everyone’s love and approval.

With my religious mindset, I just could not believe that I already was loved and accepted by our God.

Because of His amazing love, He did what the shepherds did with their stubborn, wandering lambs. Allowing Fm/ME in my life, He “broke” my legs.

With such tender care and love, He gently set it as well and carried me around His neck until I was healed of my stubbornness and insecurities.

I have learned how good it is when my Beloved Shepherd Himself feeds me with the milk of His love… His grace … His life and compassion.

Fm/CFS has taught me how to always walk with our Lord and never ever to leave His side again.

Even though we suffer greatly at times, I am so grateful for the wonder and joy of walking daily with our God … for the privilege of living in His Loving Embrace.

Love and sweet blessings

Mia

We all have experienced how our Lord has provided in miraculous ways. Please, share His goodness with us!

Linking-up with

Feeding on the Fodder of Law

God’s Thoughts to Me

But-“When God our Savior revealed His kindness and love, He saved us, not because of the righteous things we had done, but because of His mercy”(Titus 3:4-5a,NLT).

Jesus replied,”You are blessed, Simon son of John, because my Father in heaven has revealed this to you. You did not learn this from any human being (Matthew 16:17, NLT).

Kisses from Heaven

There was a time when I would listen to sermons on this costly gem of spiritual truth. The person preaching would sincerely use all his charisma and skills on the art of debate, trying to convince me of this truth.

Yet, I would walk away with a heart yearning and longing for the wonder called God … a heart filled with more spiritual hunger and thirst than before. I thought myself to be quite dull and slow of understanding.

I was like a sheep sitting at the banquet table of our Pappa in heaven, but I was not fed. Actually, my heart was starving of spiritual hunger and I didn’t know why!

And the hungrier I became, the more fervent my religious endeavours would become which, in the end, left me with only spiritual anorexia.

I hated myself for my detestable life and my inability to live a life worthy of our Heavenly Father.

I was roaming the fields of the law of self-effort, eating only fodder and grass with the beasts like Daniel’s King Nebuchadnezzar.

But our Pappa saw His girl, heard the cries of her heart and paid attention to her silent tears. He knew I needed to see myself through His eyes to enable me to realize that I also was part of the crown of His creation.

When I was able to realize my value and worth to Him, I could finally stop striving to earn His love. He freely gave me the gift of His marvelous grace to dare to love myself.

Our Lord Jesus revealed to me the answer to my dilemma through His words to Simon Peter (Matthew 16:17).

When Paul wrote this letter to Titus, the first Christians had all experienced the love and kindness of our Lord personally, each one for himself and I was desperately trying to ride on the back of their revelation from heaven.

Now, this of course is a useless, futile endeavour if ever there was one. I was rich beyond imagination as far as the good and righteous deeds, according to my mind, were concerned.

Yet, I had no chance of entering the Kingdom of heaven on the back of another. Neither did my religious self-efforts opened its door.

As our Lord told His diciples after His discourse with the rich young man,

“In fact, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25)”.

Obviously He was referring to the rich young man staking his claim to heaven on his impeccable law observance.

He was spiritually rich and self-sufficient. So our Lord made the mountain of self-effort a lot steeper by asking him to go and sell all he owned and challenged him to climb it! And he definitely did not have the feet of a mountain goat!

Just like Paul in his letter to the Corinthians, I had to come to the end of myself to stop relying on myself (2 Corinthians 1:9).

I had to LEARN to rely on my Pappa and to ask HIM to reveal His kindness and love to me personally like He did to the early Christians … I had to ask Him to save me from myself.

He revealed to me a Person … our sweet generous Lord Jesus.

He was not in the least bothered by any man-made doctrines or interested in any theological discourse that only feeds the spirit of division as we have seen all through the 2000 years after our Lord’s sojourn on earth.

In fact, referring again to Paul’s letter to Titus, we see that Paul warned him,

“Do not get involved in foolish discussions about spiritual pedigrees or in quarrels and fights about obedience to Jewish laws. These things are useless and a waste of time (Titus 3:9).

I am convinced that Paul meant all religious law observance, no matter under what denominational umbrella or efforts to earn our Pappa’s generous smile of love and redemption.

I was totally unable to reach to heaven to bring our God down to earth. There was no need to; in fact, it only hindered our Pappa to reveal Himself to me, for law and grace do not mix. Never have and never will!

But I didn’t know it! Yet, my ignorance posed no problems for our Pappa.

Through our Lord Jesus, He stepped down from heaven and personally revealed to my heart the kindness … the love … the wonder … the goodness … the beauty that is God.

He stepped down from heaven and revealed Himself to me personally to embrace me with the glory and warmth of His smile … to envelop me in His Loving Embrace.

Much love xx

Mia

Linking-up with

Rejoice in The Lord

God’s Thoughts to Me

Israel’s watchmen are blind, they all lack knowledge; they are all mute dogs, they cannot bark; they lie around and dream, they love to sleep. They are dogs with mighty appetites; they never have enough (Isaiah 56:10-11a, NIV).

I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that is through faith in Christ (Philippians 3:8, NIV).

Striving in The Flesh

The first lie ever whispered to the human race sounded deliciously good and appetizing: man had the ability to live independently from his Creator … the ability to live according to his skewed perception of good and evil.

This belief, ushered all the children of Adam into a world lost in chaos and darkness, and caused the birth of the nearly 40 000 Christian denominations worldwide, too many trying to earn their way back into Pappa’s favor and Presence.

I was no exception … until … the Truth started to pursue me relentlessly. I was lost and alone, stripped of my abilities to rely on myself to earn anyone’s love, let alone our Pappa God’s.

I had to experience my total inability to love myself, our Pappa God and others before I was able to let go of all my feeble efforts to prove that I had it all together. But, I did not …  not even remotely!

For a long time I suffered from the Paul syndrome described in the Epistile to the Philippians: all the religious works of the flesh.

Paul listed his repertoire of accomplishments and looking through the eyes of the world, it was truly impressive.

He was circumcised when he was eight days old and was a pure-blooded citizen of Israel, a member of the tribe of Benjamin – a real Hebrew.

He was a Pharisee of the highest order who DEMANDED the strictest obedience to the Jewish law, which, by the way, he succeeded to obey without fault, according to himself!

He was the church’s greatest enemy and harshy persecuted her until our Lord Jesus stopped him in his tracks.

And from then on, he left all those noble accomplisments behind, calling it dog excrement! He used a much more descriptive word, according to the original Hebrew and he knew he used to be one of those dogs described by Isaiah so many centuries ago.

He was the leader of the pack, barking and biting the poor, ignorant folk, urging human works in opposition to simple faith in our Lord Jesus.

But after his encounter with the living, resurrected Lord, he knew the folly and deceptiveness of religion.

He called the preachers of Jesus plus works, evil workers .. the Party of The Circumcision ,for they were renting the church, tearing her apart.

Just like Paul on the Damascus encounter, our Pappa stopped me in my religious tracks by allowing a debilitating illness into my life.

He planted beautiful seeds of longing in my heart to know our Lord Jesus. It caused an unexplainable yearning that devoured my soul in its intensity … a glorious yearning to know the One whom my heart now desires above all else.

But, just like Paul, I HAD to leave all my noble, impressive religious ways behind. I had to suffer not just physically, which I do every day, but more importantly, I had to suffer spiritually like Paul and our sweet Lord Jesus.

Our Lord was the only man who ever lived who was able to uphold the whole law in His own strength, but He did not.

He chose to trust our Pappa from the one moment to the next to do His works in and through Him, all to Pappa’s honor and glory.

Just like Jacob, I had to cross my Jordan River, where I wrestled with God through the darkest night of my soul to be blessed abundantly with the privilege of living my life in Him.

A life where I daily have to deny myself and my feeble efforts … a life where I carry my cross like our Lord, not trusting in my own strength, but trusting the only Man who ever lived a life of complete dependence on Pappa, our Lord Jesus, to live His life in and through me.

For I know that apart from Him, I can do nothing.

Just like Paul, I needed my own Damascus encounter where I was rescued from the world and its ways … rescued from the lie that I can earn my salvation with a lot of blood, sweat and tears.

And just like Paul, I know I have not arrived there yet, but the one thing I have learned, was to consider the futility of all my religious ways.

Just like Paul, I am leaving it all behind, pressing forward against all odds, for I want to know my gentle, kind, humble Lord Jesus. I want to share in His death to experience the power of His resurrection.

I want to leave everything behind that hinders me to live in Him … to rejoice always in His Loving Embrace.

Much love xx

Mia

Linking-up with the Monday Morning Meditation Community.

Uniting with Jen.

Also with Emily.

And a play- date with Laura.

The Ageless Beauty of Music

God’s Thoughts to Me

If I ride the wings of the morning, if I dwell by the farthest oceans, even there your hand will guide me, and your strength will support me (Psalm 139:9-10, NLT).

Oh, that I had wings like a dove; then I would fly away and rest! I would fly far away to the quiet of the wilderness (Psalm 55:6-7, NLT).

Wings of A Dove

King David was a songwriter/musician/poet par excellence. Even from boyhood as a shepherd, he composed the most beautiful psalms, singing of the majesty, the grandeur, the excellence and, above all, the love and compassion of His Pappa God.

The God who is not only his Pappa, but also yours and mine.

Were he to be alive in the 18th century, he would have been ranked with a Beethoven. Or, in the 17th century, a Handel who wrote “The Messiah”.

In the fraction of time I live and am familiar with, King David, the musician, would have been a favorite of mine along with a Freddy Mercury or a Neil Diamond. In my mind these two guys are incredible musicians!

But King David knew a secret about His Pappa that modern man is totally oblivious to … a secret that seems lost to so many … our total inability to capture the beauty of the Creator of everything, in, well, in about anything.

We have lost this wonder amongst the avenues of rules and programs upon another set of religious rules and programs. We have all but lost the wonder of flying away on the wings of the morning.

King David’s hymnody is filled with hyperbole, trying to capture someting bigger than what his limited mind was capable of, trying to give words to the magnificence of our Heavenly Father. But he knew that words were feeble carriers of such wonder and greatness.

I can almost feel his ardour when he wrote Psalm 139, searching for the biggest of big his mind could fathom to bring glory to his Pappa. “Even if”, shows a bit of his frustration with his human limitations.

Psalm 55:6 describes his longing, actually, his hunger, to fly away on the wings of a dove to there where he could forever just be in the Presence of the Love of his life, for he was surrounded by the storms of hatred and violence of his enemies.

So often I share that same desperate longing to just escape to the quiet of the wilderness where it is just my Pappa and me.

My heart yearns with King David’s to saddle up the wings of the morning and gallop away to the ends of the oceans trying to live in the unimaginable, intimate closeness of this Presence.

In his days the ends of the seas must have seemed like the ultimate leap into the unknown for they were still unaware then that the world is round.

Oh, the beauty of his love, for trusting his Pappa’s hand to guide him in the darkest of dark should he ever be so overwhelmed by the splendour of his King that he would try to hide.

I think he must have experienced such a deep revelation of his feebleness as a human apart from his God to entertain thoughts of hiding from our Pappa.

Our smallness against all that  He is … all the power and splendour contained in “THE GREAT I AM”, takes my breath away and at times makes me want to hide too, but I have found His right Hand lifting me up in my brokenness, enveloping me in His love.

Even though King David admitted that,”Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, to great for me to understand! (Psalm 139:6), the conclusion he comes to in this ode of admiration, is the overwhelming love of our Pappa!

He is our God who knows of all our sorrows and heartache … a Pappa that does not belittle our feeble efforts to bring Him glory … a Pappa who does not laugh at  our volatile emotions of love and admiration … a Pappa who does not consider our pain and suffering as something insignificant.

He is a Pappa who collects all your tears like precious pearls and stores them in a jar marked with your name.

King David found the joy of knowing how to revel and delight in his King’s Presence … the secret of experiencing Him … the secret of Living in His Loving Embrace.

Much love xx

Mia

I have the honor of linking-up with

The Shadow of The King

God’s Thoughts to Me

Those who live in the shelter of the most High, will find rest in the shadow of the Almighty. This I declare about the Lord: “He is my refuge, my place of safety. He is my God and I trust Him” (Psalm 91:1-2, NLT).

For these rules are only shadows of the reality to come. and Christ Himself is that reality. (Colossians 2:17, NLT).

They serve in a system of worship that is only a copy, a shadow of the real one in heaven (Hebrews 8:5, NLT).

A Sabbath Rest

The apostle Paul had a hard time with the first believers in the epistile to the Hebrews. He needed the patience and endurance of a Job when he wrote the letter to the forever nursing baby believers.

They seemed to be unable and slow to understand the better things in our Lord Jesus and wanted to revert back to their old religious system under the law of Moses. Their minds were still veiled, unable to comprehend that it was all only the shadow of the King!

I have been searching in vain for a long time for the wings of our Pappa. I craved the shelter of His love … the rest of the Shadow of His Presence. I couldn’t understand why I never seemed to be able to find that safe place of refuge, for I was trying my utmost best … yet … not a single step of progress was made. Until … I suffered a severe case of total  burn-out.

Did I learn my lesson the first time? No ways! The futile, useless cycle started again when I recovered enough to try again! I was like King Nebuchadnezzar who roamed the fields for 7 years. And just like him, after my time had passed, I looked up to heaven, when my sanity returned (Daniel 4:33).

According to Wikki Answers a shadow is formed when an opaque object blocks the travel of light. Light travels in straight lines and any barrier along its path averts the rays striking the barrier. This forms a region of darkness, shaped like the surface of the object obstructing the light.

The verses from the epistle to the Hebrews became alive to me and I knew that I was still dwelling in the shadow of the Law of religious traditions, ways and efforts. And to me … oh well … it looked like the real deal!

What an incredible burden I carried, breaking me down one step at a time. Mix that with my well-meant heroic efforts to impress my Pappa, I was cooking a poisonous brew, just like Snow White’s stepmother. It guarantees to kill with just one bite! And just like that disastrous apple, it all looked so beautiful and delicious … so … just right!

Crying out to Pappa, light dawned from heaven, expelling the darkness clouding my mind and understanding. I have sold my heart to a shadow of our Lord Jesus that was only a shadow, a faint preview of the good things to come.

All these traditions, self-effort and THINGS were a barrier blocking the Rays of the Sonshine Pappa lavished upon me. But all I could see was the shadows, resembling the good things we were made to experience when we live our life abiding in the reality from heaven, our Lord Jesus.

Our Pappa promised us that the old system of law observance will cripple us, as it did the Hebrews in Moses’ time. Not Moses nor Joshua were able to lead them into the spiritual place of rest.

But our Pappa prepared another oasis of rest … a place under His wings … a place in the Shadow of His Presence to shelter us against the scorching desert heat of this world (Hebrews 4).

Dear Ones, let us cease from all our useless labours … let us not harden our hearts when we hear the gentle voice of Pappa urging us along into that special place of rest … into His Loving Embrace.

Come, let us leave the shadows of futulity behind and enter into the Life of our Lord Jesus … the true Sabbath Rest.

Much love xx

Mia.

Linking-up with.