God’s gift was given at one specific moment in time, but the echoes of its imminent appearance changed the course of history; and the repercussions of its manifestation continue to resonate today, changing the story of everyone who comes into contact with it.

God doesn't make mistakes. His plans don't get thrown off. Even when we do everything we can to sabotage and undo God's plan for our lives, He has a plan and a purpose to bring us back into the goodness and wholeness for which He created us.

What is His plan? It's a mystery, and God keeps giving us small clues. It's an adventure without a map, though He fills in a few key locations in advance. It requires trust and faith, as we learn to walk through life in relationship with God Most High.

God is able to prepare his plans by planting seeds even in the midst of great darkness. The birth of Jesus was full of the fulfillment of prophecies through a disparate group of people from all across the earth in different regions and cultures, very few of which actually acknowledged God. 

To know God beyond just rational assent, beyond trying to figure him out with my little bitty mind—but to meet God in the place he drew me too, where he proves to me that he knows me better than I know myself and shows me that he is a personal God who wants to build a relationship with me.

Modern man has come to revere the strictured rails of rational thought far above the mystical by-ways which clouded the minds of their forebears. But there’s no way to approach a supernatural being without getting dragged into spiritual realities which only make sense to the extent that we are, in our material lives, aligned with the righteousness of God which provides the foundation for the world in which we exist.

In other words… It all sounds completely bassackwards to us.

So God says, “Come, let us reason together.”

I’ll state my point. I’ll show you the truth. I’ll reveal your lie. And when I convince you of how wrong you are, and you surrender to my superior intelligence, then maybe you will finally allow me to guide you into the fullness of the beautiful vision I have for you.

Throughout history, mankind has found reasons to disagree and to turn those disagreements into strife. Throughout history, God has been trying to get our attention and turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and children to their fathers; to bring the peace of the only true unity mankind can experience, which is the justice and righteousness of God. This is true freedom; for all other approximations still include the strife that is man's nature.

I might think I know a thing or two about good and evil. I have a pretty good idea of what I should start doing to help God like me better, or at least be less likely to strike me with lightning.

But God isn't interested in my reform programs. He's not here for negotiations, but to accept my complete surrender. Having established that all my righteousness is nothing more than toilet water, he's here to flush it all down and start over the right way: that I would become completely dependent on revelation from his Spirit so that I could act in unity with him, embracing this relationship which is the reason for my existence.

When God set up the regulations for sacrifices, he said that he would choose to take delight and to see that smoke as a pleasing aroma. Later on, through the prophets, he told Israel to stop bringing meaningless sacrifices. His conditional delight had always depended upon their heart, and not simply what they cast upon the altar. It had never been a magic recipe, but had always been an attempt at real and meaningful relationship.

All the righteousness we possess is still contaminated, like toilet water, with the open sewer of sin which spoils the landscape of our heart.

When we confess Jesus, our savior who died on the cross, we confess our complete inability to please God—otherwise, Jesus would never have needed to be the perfect sacrifice for us. And as we place our trust in God and act out that faith, we find ourselves in the beginning of a relationship which is supposed to grow throughout our life. And through that relationship, God will do the impossible: he will cover that sewer, he will purify the water, and he will show us the beauty of true righteousness.

God seems to be disrupting the systems of men in these times. Even in the church, the focus can so easily shift to programs, to good work, to spreading the gospel by any means possible…

Yet we can never escape the fundamental truth that relationship with God is our only foundation, upon which all else must be built.

God will change you when you approach him. He will change you. You might be waiting for him to change the world around you, but he is most concerned with one single relationship, and that is between you and him. When he can work that change in you, the world will change around you because of his work through you.

A blessing comes from adhering to the principles of God and alining with his righteousness. But true freedom only comes from accepting the salvation which is offered to us through Jesus. 

It’s wonderful to live in the blessing of God. But if we are at the same time rejecting him as a good, loving father who wants to teach us his ways so we can walk in unity with Creation, the Creator, and each other… then we are preparing a bleak future for ourselves.

A spiritual covenant leaves a  mark. Abraham bore on his body the marks of circumcision; and we bear in our hearts the marks of circumcision as God's Spirit performs surgery, cutting out death and disease while planting and watering new life. 

This choice will change us. We are formed into what God had first imagined, as he scrubs away the mess that we've made of ourselves in the meantime. And his goal is not simply to make us part of his plans for this kingdom; his goal is to raise us up to our first calling—to enter into creative unity with God, working out his will on the earth as Christ did.

The Bible is not a scientific textbook or a modern historical record. It freely mixes allegory and myth, one-sided history and prophecy. It is a record of man’s encounter with the supernatural, and how the God who created them also wrote his story through them. And instead of a simple instruction book with clear steps, God created riddles which draw us into conversation with the God of all wisdom.

You won’t understand everything God is doing in your life. You won’t understand everything he demands of you. You won’t understand why life doesn’t always make sense…  

In reality, every accusation leveled against God is a confession of ignorance. Because you can’t truly believe in a God so powerful and intelligent and also expect to understand him. Every bargain with God is an insult to his majesty. 

Because the only terms under discussion are complete surrender.

True confession of God’s redemption begins a process borne out in our heart, in surrendering everything and letting God reveal to us what is good and pleasant for me personally, and what is not—even when his revelation to me might well be different than my neighbor, whose DNA and relationship with God are also unique.

We need this because we’ve assembled ourselves incorrectly. We’ve been warped by allowing sin into our lives. So God has to break us apart (fall on the rock) in order to put us back together correctly.

When God gives authority, he also gives responsibility. That responsibility is heavy in that it requires us to treat others in a way that we can honestly stand before God and give an account for. But the burden is also light, in that God's grace increases for every mistake along the way, because his desire is to bring us deeper into redemption and restoration every step of the way, so that we can turn around and extend this same grace to others.

Science said that we are locked into our DNA and can’t change. Science now says that our body can reinterpret its unchanging DNA in the emerging study of epigenetics. Science says a lot of things, to the extent that we have a difficult time comprehending all that is being discovered, much less assimilating it all into a rational paradigm. 

God has been speaking since the beginning. Much of what he says, we have not yet come to understand. And one of the things he speaks is exactly who each one of us is, beyond the misguided attempts at establishing our own identity. We have the power to change—most of all, because he wants to reveal the truth of our identity to us, by removing the heavy burden which has been smothering us this whole time.

It is very common today to see lives portrayed as helpless victims of the choices others have made. And yet, there is one choice we can make that places us at the center around which all life revolves, and releases our destiny into the hands of the One who can decide our future... and that choice is unconditional surrender to the God whose divine plan for us is also our best possible life on this earth.

God is after the heart. And where the heart is, there's always an emotional response.

Logic meets its limits as it approaches the human person, whose emotional and spiritual aspects refuse to be negated by the rules of simple logic. In fact, humanity and God don't make any sense at all until we bring Jesus into the equation as the 2 in E = mc²

God has the timing, the distance, and the direction to bring his plan about—even when we sometimes end up working against him more than with him.

Nothingness is our ultimate truth apart from God. It is all meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

It is only when we come into agreement with the Word spoken since Creation, reverberating throughout all time, that we find the divine creation alive in us—the Temple which God envisioned as the vessel in which His Spirit could abide on this earth and the chosen method of enacting His will, through those whom He has made ambassadors/slaves/sons/brides/fishers of men. 

The mystery of God’s works, especially in mystical experiences like laughter or speaking in tongues as an overwhelmed response to the revelation of his presence, serves not to confirm and appoint us to a special service, but to remind us of the “foolish” things of God which confound the wise.

The greatest thing I could ever be is a fool for Christ. The fakest thing I could ever be is a Christian conformed to my own ideas about what holiness looks like. So…do we have the courage to be real with God, even if it might make us look foolish sometimes?

We don’t have to understand it, we don’t have to bind it with cords of theology to dominate it, control it and direct it along our delicate sensible paths… It is wild and undignified, but also glorious and good. It is sometimes intelligible, others indecipherable. It flows where it will like a mighty flood, even though there are those who would try to erect dams and every kind of barrier to the move of the Spirit.

We love to make up a bunch of rules locking off the Kingdom of God—making it part of our personal culture and heritage and denying access to anyone from outside our group. And yet we cannot even comprehend this God that we serve, much less condense the totality of our experience of him into a list of rules and behaviors.

We must extend the Kingdom of God in the same grace of adoption which we encountered when we once stood outside looking in. Freely you have received; now freely give.

Culture is a gift from God. Sometimes we have a hard time differentiating our own culture from our religious observances, and as a result we end up judging others based on cultural differences, while missing the same Spirit that God has put in us. But God delights in redeeming what he has made, demonstrating the fulfillment of the truths within a culture while doing away with the lies.

Jesus is interceding for us, the Holy Spirit is working in our hearts... But have we learned how to speak God's language? When he calls an audible, do we respond, or are we stuck in the rut of the play we designed on the practice field?

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not understood it. 

The darkness cannot comprehend it. The darkness cannot overcome it. The darkness is undone by the unstoppable, unconquerable, inescapable light of God.

If the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!

We have a gracious and patient God, but there comes a time when our next choice might be final: to embrace the light, or to disappear into the great darkness.

Often we are searching, without knowing what we seek. Yet it is God, the answer, who is seeking us in order to free us from the sickness of our sin and work in us that transforming miracle of a new creation.

I looked up the link, I guess it takes all kinds brother😉

Once I got past poop aspect😝 it was good. May the Lord bless this ministry. 

(Encouragement...Rom 10:1.)

(admonition ...James 3)

Keeping  it real🤗 

Many strong points that bring God glory!

Jesus came to the Pharisees, Sadducees, wouldn't-sees and couldn't-sees, and he told them all that they needed to ask God for spiritual sight.

The choices we make are evidence of our spiritual eyesight. We all recognize the importance of spiritual sight when we smack our head against the wall, or when we finally recognize that we’re stuck in a hole. And that's the good thing about the Outhouse: there's nothing to see, no distractions to get in the way.

"I listened to the first episode. It was epic! I absolutely love Gods heart for you, and you for His. All three of you guys had so much richness to share about God's relationship with us and our likeness to Him! I loved it! You all three made God come alive and relatable! Thank you for sharing with me!"

As we respect God and his call for us to be holy, to be set apart, we also respect his Word declared over us, calling us what we are not—and the power of his creative word makes us something new. And as we learn more about God, we begin to intuitively understand his heart, and to act out of that love and not our own selfish desires.

It's not enough to simply repeat His words; they must be brought out with the same love that was in His heart when they were spoken.