Awakening

“You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love.”- Galatians 5:13

Why are we free?
What makes us different to those that are not yet free that they would so desire our freedom?
Our use of God’s freedom manifests itself ironically in becoming a slave to the love that set us free
True freedom is slavery
True freedom is self-giving to others
Jesus exampled this great pattern of exchange
Not using his freedom for his own gain but for the gain of others
Now we have the chance to imitate Him
Why are you free?

+jk

Where do i begin? Awakening 09....passion.alive.broken.blind.alive.FREEDOM.breathe...ok.exhale...alive.selfish.bitter.hearing.listening.crying.deeper.embarresed.intimacy.hard heart.shattered.soft heart.....still alive...wanting to run, wished i could hide...scared.MY GOD IS BIGGER...He will never leave me..born to cause change..VISION..determination..TRANSFORMED..still alive..smiling....AWAKE AWAKENED AWAKENING!!!! i felt....i fought....i lost the battle to keep my hearts walls up from being broken for this world.....God won my heart once again, he opened my eyes, my heart, my being to his perfect love and to the love WE MUST SHOW TO THIS WORLD...i didn't walk into every Awakening conference thinking id walk out the way i did, London,New York...especially Sydney all shattered the core of my walls that i brilliantly built up to stop me from seeing the pain and disfunction this world owns so well...but now i have a set of brand NEW eyes.....and before them the path God chose for me to walk.....NOW I SEE!!!
Lv Brooke Dillon

^{Matthew 22:34}Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. ³⁵One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question:

 ³⁶"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" ³⁷Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.'^{[b] 38}This is the first and greatest commandment. ³⁹And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'^{[c] 40}All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

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I sometimes wonder why I always complicate things.  My world and my emotions seem to be in a vicious cycle of confusion to clarity back to confusion.  I would like to say that as I write this first blog that I have figured everything out and that my life makes sense however this is not the case.  I am in a perpetual tension of faith and doubt, life and death, flesh and spirit, joy and sorrow, laughter and crying and a whole lot of other opposites.

This is the reality of my life, not sure if you can relate...

I tend to hang my future, my thoughts, my emotions and choices on things that cannot handle the weight of them and ultimately let me down everytime.

We all would like a more simple life, one filled with peace...I mean real peace not just the notion of it.

Jesus silenced the self righteous.

Then he silenced my fears.

Joshua....just do two simple things, love me and love people.  All the rest of that other stuff hangs on this.

Easy.

Revolutionary.

Life altering.

Now take a deep breath and live it.

No ifs ands or buts.

It is that simple.

As I was about to speak in Singapore this weekend I felt a voice in my heart say clear as day...

"Trust me Joshua"

It was the most simple and clear thing I have heard in a long time.

This is God.

Simple, clear, love, truth, joy, peace...

So let us not hang our thoughts, lives, decisions on anything else.

Ask yourself does this choice love God and love people?

Does this thought love God and love others as I love myself?

IT ALL HANGS ON THIS....LOVE

+jk

 
I was walking along an esplanade a few days ago. Along the path, I noticed a piece of jewelry had lodged itself into a gap formed between the large tiles. It was hidden from view unless you were standing right above it. Just across from me, on the same stretch, there was a lady in a sort of panic. She was looking for something. Being the kindhearted mathematician I am, I put two and two together and suggested to the lady I may have found what she was looking for. As she was presented with the lost item, she erupted into great elation. For the sake of the story, I’m going to say she started to cry.
Isn’t it remarkable when you go looking for something and find it?
Later, I pondered this whole experience. We’d both found the same thing, but it meant the world to her, whereas for me it was just a piece of shinny-coolness.  If the lady wasn’t there, searching so fervently, I’d have been able to keep the ring, but unbeknownst to me, I had failed to recognize what it is that I found. In six months time, I'd have lost the ring in my sock draw and possibly not even realised I didn't have it anymore.
 My interpretation of the object is that it just happened to be there and so did I. Her interpretation is that she needed to find and reclaim something which was precious to her, she went looking and there is was, now it will be with her forever.
Ask anyone, Awakening was incredible; this would be the general consensus of any participant. But watch what happens over time- you’ll be able to separate those who happened to be there and stumbled across something shinney from those who went looking and found. The exhilaration will dissipate, leaving only the core element of what was truly discovered.
Some will build their lives slowly and steadily simply by being faithful and turning up, and that’s just grand. While others are radically changed because they came hoping and hungry; their existence will never be the same because they realized that they were going to find God and become aware of his truth, his love, his will and his plan. That’s extraordinary.
The exemplary truths of God I learned over Awakening have unquestionably altered the progression of my live forever. The joy I found, the burden I picked up and God-given breaking of my heart have redirected my path.
The value of  experience, teaching and presence is established by way of intention.
Think of Awakening 2010 as the esplanade. Choose to be the lady fervently searching for her prize and feel the joy of the Lord as you find what it is you’ve been looking for, waiting for and expecting. God will be there, no doubt.
Just be ready.
jf. x
 "Seek the LORD your God, and you will find Him if you seek Him with all your heart and with all your soul.” Deuteronomy 4:29
 "In their distress they turned to the LORD God, and they sought Him, and He let them find Him"  2 Chronicles 15:4
 “You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart.”  Jeremiah 29:13

Romans 1:1-6 – BELONGING to CHRIST
The Gospel is introduced right up front. Quickly reveals and explains the overarching theme of this letter and the reason for this letter.
Paul - a servant of Christ Jesus – Belonging to Christ was something that Paul truly understood…before his salvation and his meeting of Jesus he was a devout Jew who believed he had a special revelation that the new Christians were deceived by following Jesus – so his belonging was defined by being well known in his religious circles. But once he meets Jesus, the people he would of belonged to disowned him and were now his enemies from their perspective. So where he once had a life defined by what he did and his status and belonging was dependant on being accepted by how many Christians he put in prison. Paul would of felt like an orphan, a child without a family, totally vulnerable and with no answers within himself.
His salvation experience was so full on he was even physically blinded by the light of Jesus. It’s like God wanted Paul to understand how much he now belonged to Jesus and no one else that he blinded him so he could see no one or nothing he used to belong to. All he could see was Jesus, nothing else, Jesus became his everything.
Paul gets radically saved by the sovereign will of God and his whole world is rocked, he loses all his old friends, his world is turned around 180 degrees and now he only belongs to Jesus. Even the existing Christians were not very accepting initially, understandably. So Paul has no option but to belong to Jesus. This is not a burden but Paul discovers that this is the greatest place to be in, to just belong to Jesus…a massive weight of pressure is lifted off of his shoulders.
If you remember when you first met Jesus and said you will radically follow Jesus you would most likely remember certain people in your world disowning you. Although this is painful it is also allowed by God so that we would learn to belong to Jesus and Jesus alone. Where before we belonged to the things and the people that surrounded us in our world we now belong to someone that is beyond this world, our heart awakens to our true belonging in our Father and creator through His son Jesus. Do not be afraid that when you meet Jesus that people that you used to hangout with disown you. Its not that you don’t love them or that they can’t also belong to Jesus it just means that you are no longer defined by people that love this world, but you are defined by someone greater. You may even go through a beautiful experience of being blind. Not physically necessarily but things that used to matter to you don’t anymore. It is not unusual to give away things, or give up things or quit things, because they just don’t satisfy anymore. This doesn’t mean all those things are necessarily evil, it rather means that the love of those things or belonging to those things are evil.
Therefore these first verses are not just good theology they are coming out of a heart that has experienced the feeling and reality of not belonging and then discovering true belonging to Christ. It reveals that Christ chose us before time began, we have been elected and now belong to Jesus. This changes everything. We live different if we understand that we belong to Jesus and not this world, we belong to someone who has paid the greatest price, he paid the price of Death for my sins, not his own sin, but my sin through shedding his blood. The penalty for sin is death so we must understand that through the death of Jesus we have been set free from the penalty of death and now belong to Jesus and has given us eternal life. Martin Luther calls this the ‘Great Exchange’.
What Paul is saying right up front is all we need is Jesus.
Romans 15:13 – May the God of Hope fill you with all Joy and Peace in believing…
It is believing that we belong to Jesus that we are filled with Joy and Peace.
We don’t need to try and belong to anything else but Jesus. We don’t need to prove our self in anyway. We can’t earn this belonging, we can’t prove to God that we deserve it by our good works, this belonging only comes through Jesus Christ.
This is freedom, this is peace, this is the great joy that we belong and we do not have to strive to prove ourselves any more, we can now live differently, we can serve with everything we have, we become humble through this revelation, we suffer and endure differently, the spirit of God gains access to our life through us belonging to Jesus.
This happens because Jesus lived the perfect Holy Life and gave his life up freely so now there is no separation between us and the spirit of God. This means we can now live out this belonging to Jesus through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit fulfilling the will of our Heavenly Father.
We now belong to the Family of God. This is not a family that will disown us, it is an eternal family motivated by true love, the head of this Family will never leave us nor forsake us. He will not divorce us, he will not disown us, he will not doubt us, he believes in us and eternally loves us. It is the greatest family that has ever existed.
Eph 1:4For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love 5he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— 6to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.

So Paul reveals to us that this is the good news, the Gospel, that although we deserved to be separated from God for all eternity because of our sin we now eternally belong to Jesus through His Death on the cross. This is not sad news but the most freeing and joyous news. We can now enjoy this life that God has given us and freely give this love that we have freely been given.







BECAUSE WE BELONG:
• We can love our enemies
• We can love our Christian brothers and sisters as we are now part of the beautiful family of God.
• We can serve others and not ourselves
• We can bring justice to others because we understand we don’t anything else beyond belonging to Jesus
• We are righteous not through our own works but through Jesus
• We are therefore free from guilt forever
• We can live radically
• We are truly generous as we have been given everything we need through belonging to Jesus
• We are not takers in life but givers
• We can forgive others as we have been forgiven
• We can resist temptation because we have access through belonging to the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead
• We are victorious because Christ is victorious over sin and death itself
• We are fearless
• We are bold and courageous - because greater is he that is in me then he that is in the world
• We are secure
• We can live for His Glory, we can respond to this belonging and the amazing sacrifice of Jesus to give us access into the family of God by living for His Glory and giving all of our lives.
Food for thought and Discussion – Questions to Wrestle with this week and live out…

1) What does it mean to belong to Christ?
2) What security do we have in belonging?
3) How should we respond to this belonging?
4) How does our life speak that we belong to Jesus?