Accountability To Man or God?

Are we accountable to man or God?  I submit that we are to build each other up which includes getting wise counsel, but I don’t think we need to be ”accountable” to one another. We are accountable to God.

The pastor at a church I used to attend made a pretty strong declaration a long time ago saying it is dangerous to put someone in the position of being your ‘accountability partner’ for sin areas, time in the word, verse memory, etc. because the focus can unintentionally be put on being accountable to that person more-so than to God. 

It took a few years of struggling with what my pastor said, but now I agree. I don’t think it is ‘wrong’ to have an accountability partner, however I think it could be dangerous depending on the maturity of the believer.

That said building one another up and discipling one another is a command and a crucial part of fellowship. I am not saying we shouldn’t meet regularly to go over our verses and get into the word and I am not saying we don’t help new believers get grounded in the word. Older women are to help younger women, and as iron sharpens iron so does one man sharpen another, but where does the command to be accountable to one another come in?

I am Looking forward to getting back into posting again soon-haven’t had time in the past three months to post, but will soon. Thinking about direction for this blog.

Taleonic Justice

Pictured above: Jacob, Laban and Laban’s two daughters, Rachel and Leah

Genesis 25-29:

Wow.. What a thread of deception from Abraham to Jacob and despite the deception, God blessed them and His plan for the nation of Israel was not thwarted.

Of course, God’s sovereignty here is amazing as well as his faithfulness let alone how he used all the idiotic things they did and turned them around for good. All of it worked together for His purposes and plans for Israel and of course in the end for the salvation of all who will believe on Jesus.

Without going into the myriad of things I picked up in this passage, there is one thread that I have always been aware of but really just stood out in today’s time in the word.

“Taleonic Justice”. In other words, they all got a taste of their own medicine. So even though God turned the ‘evil’ into good and in his sovereignty it fit into the overall plan, He is still their ‘father’ and disciplined them for it and I think there were many consequences they faced, but one was getting a taste of their own medicine.. 

There is an interesting thread here, for instance, Abraham deceived Abimilech saying his wife Sarah is his sister, then Isaac deceives Abimilech, whom I am thinking was the same King because he reigned for a long time, saying Rebekah is his sister; Then Jacob deceives Isaac when he steals Esau’s blessing, then Jacob is deceived by Laban in almost the exact same way:

Jacob’s deception toward Isaac was done ‘in the dark’ when Isaac couldn’t see what was going on.  He pretended to to be Esau by wearing a hairy garment on his hands and neck and wearing his clothes for the ’scent effect’. Isaac was fooled and gave Jacob the blessing instead of Esau.

Then when Jacob journeyed to go and live with Laban, he saw Rachel who was Laban’s youngest daughter and fell in love. He worked out a deal with Laban where he would work 7 years in order to marry Rachel. He didn’t want the oldest Leah because she wasn’t as attractive. So Jacob works the 7 years and Laban gave him Leah whom he thought was Rachel. He didn’t get to see her until after they consummated their marriage the next morning. When he saw her it was Leah! He was deceived.

Jacob worked another 7 years to get Rachel. It was the same kind of deception as Jacob did to Isaac, in the dark he thought his wife was someone else.

God is a holy God and a just God. He doesn’t go back on His word. He kept the ‘blessing arrangement’ with Isaac and didn’t take away Jacob’s blessing even though Isaac was deceived, but he did make sure that Jacob would receive discipline for it. Sin has consequences. God didn’t take those away, but in His sovereignty He worked the deception out for His good and to accomplish His purposes. 

We will soon learn that Jacob will be deceived by his other sons into thinking Joseph died when in fact his brothers sold him off to be a slave to the Egyptians. The deception continued…

I have seen in my own life how this Taleonic justice principle works.

When I have sinful attitudes toward others such as having a critical or judgmental heart, it always comes back and I actually go through what they went through. It is sinful being critical toward others.  I can think of some great examples, but on in particular sticks out because it is the most recent.. The issue of whether to private, home school or public school.

I remember being critical of those who would sacrifice their children at the altar of liberalism and secularist thinking by sending them to public school. I thought they just weren’t willing to sacrifice their time and resources. Of course, several years later when God closed the doors.. More like SLAMMED the doors on us with homeschooling and private school, we then had no option but to public school. Boy was that humbling and also a huge step of faith for me! I was the one who was adamantly against public school and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why God shut the doors and directed us this way, but without going into it all. I see His hand at work in a mighty way now and know that this was the right decision.

Thinking Right: Changing Our “Stinkin’ Thinkin’”

 

Today’s encouragement lies in Philippians 4:8-9:

⁸Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. ⁹Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.

What more can I say other than in today’s time I had in scripture I have been reminded about how easy it is to get lost in a bad thought life. Even though I have been walking with Christ for a long time and have understood and applied his word in my life, there are seasons in life where I can easily be swept up with the ‘concerns of the day’.

It is easy to allow what is going on in our life and in the world to provoke anxious or depressing thoughts. Instead God wants us to replace those thoughts with His word. Even if we have had a lifetime of memory verses and meditating in God’s word, we are still challenged day by day and the challenges get tougher the older we get.

Whatever we have learned, received or heard from Him, we are to PUT INTO PRACTICE. We are to replace these thoughts with truth which is God’s word.

To “think upon such things’ and ‘put into practice’ what we have learned is a command, not an option.

Respect Authority..

“We aren’t against Obama, we are against what he stands for“~ Rush Limbaugh.. I have to say I agree with this. This statement by Limbaugh is really a great example of the kind of ‘respect’ we need to have for whomever our president is.  However, I am going to address this a little deeper via a great sermon our pastor gave in Romans 13 yesterday. 

This post may be a hard pill for you all to swallow as it was for me listening to my pastor teach about this yesterday morning because it goes deeper into what ‘respect for authority’ means in Romans 13. It was freeing to understand how God set up government and how we should respond to whomever is leading our country. Sometimes that gets foggy when we are in the thick of it all.

We need to have balance. By balance I mean,  as my pastor explained, to yield to our leaders a certain respect, Romans 13: 5-7. Paul doesn’t say if they ‘earn it’ then respect them. He tells us to respect their position, not necessarily their ideology, However, it is easy to cross that line and disrespect their position while disagreeing with their actions.

I am not saying you should put your head in the sand, or when you hear of government violating scripture you jump up and down for joy, what I am saying is that we watch our tongues for the sake of others so that we don’t discredit the gospel. Ouch!!

Our pastor also mentioned that he wasn’t saying we don’t have the constitutional right to protest lawfully and the right of decent in a lawful manner. I am merely talking about respecting the office of the presidency whether it is evil or good BECAUSE God set it up and He tells us to.

My encouragement in this regard is for us to remember that there are countless examples in scripture where God uses evil for good. There are so many I can’t name them all. We have Job where God allowed Satan to do everything short of taking Job’s life, and God used it for good. We have the story of Joseph who had to endure the evil acts of his brothers, yet God used that evil for good, Genesis 50: 19-21:

19 But Joseph said to them, “Don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God? 20 You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. 21 So then, don’t be afraid. I will provide for you and your children.” And he reassured them and spoke kindly to them.

We can even see it in our day with the war on terror and how there is now a huge movement going on in the middle east where many Muslims are coming to know Christ. God has used the evil act of 9/11 for good and I suffice to say He used George W. Bush to accomplish His plans of freeing a people who were once oppressed in Iraq and Afghanistan who can now hear and respond to the gospel of Christ without fear.

I am convicted that we need to really be careful to be responsible citizens and vote for those who stand for what is right, but we can’t get out of balance and forget that it isn’t about right and left but about our purpose here and that is to go and preach the good news of the gospel both with our words and our lives.

My Testimony

How can I have a blog where I write about what God is showing me and not tell you about how he changed my life?

I have a 2 minute, 5 minute and recently I completed an hour testimony, so I will try to spare you the ‘wordiness’ and get down to the nitty gritty of it:

Put it this way, I was a low-life- worm of a sinner. I still am a low-life, worm of a sinner but because of Jesus’ death buriel and resurrection my sins have been forgiven and I am reconciled to God- meaning our ‘relationship has been restored’. I am justified before God because of what HE has done.

All I had to do was believe and hand over the reigns of my life to Him, i.e. trust Him. Now I am justified before God- “Just as if I had never sinned”.

Why am I still a worm? It is true that if there is anything good in me it is Jesus. The difference between now and then is that I now have conflict between the flesh and the spirit. I didn’t have that before. Before I just did what my feelings-flesh told me to do. I had no clear direction or righteous path to follow. Now I do.

After I trusted Christ God took the blinders off my eyes and I was able to understand scripture for the first time. Before, I would crack open a bible my sister in law gave me and I couldn’t understand a word of it. It was a huge mystery, but God made me, the blind girl, see. He restored my relationship to Him and now I can walk and talk daily with God. I know God now.

Jesus promised he would send the counselor, ‘the Holy Spirit’ to counsel us. I have the Holy Spirit living inside me and He gives me insight into God’s word, convicts me of sin and gives me the strength to follow through in obeying what God tells me to do in scripture. I didn’t have that before.

There IS a clear difference in my life from August of 1988, the month before I trusted Him, and September 17th, 1988-the day I believed and handed my life over to Him.

The “Why’s” in Life

 

This year I have committed to reading through the whole bible chronologically and this morning I read Job 29-34.

Has your faith ever been tested? Have you had a trial that seemed unending and had other trials heaped upon you at the same time?

Isaac, my second son, was born with autism and it was easy to accept it as God wiring him that way and that it was meant to be. It was easy because my husband and I were meeting with an older, much wiser couple who were mentoring us at the time who told us that God made Isaac that way and he has a plan for His life and it includes having autism. It really helped us start off on the right foot with our thinking because that was the truth and it would be so easy to tell ourselves lies. So, by the mercy and the grace of God we didn’t fall apart.

God reminded me of  Psalm 103:19: “The Lord has established his throne in the heavens and his sovereignty rules over all”. God also gave my husband and I the strength to go through 3 very long years of helping him with therapy knowing that God didn’t want us to live in the future. God taught me that He wanted Isaac to reach his potential and only God knows what that would look like. Isaac was in His hands, not mine.

I never usually asked God ’why’ when trials came UNTIL our business went under. It doesn’t make sense that I never asked ‘why’ regarding Isaac, but I did when our business went under. After all, I was the queen of being a good steward with our finances.

 Yet our trials have been nothing compared to Job’s  and I feel like the lowest of lows for even mentioning them. I am not sure if I had to go through what Job did that I would come out on the other side as strong as Job did, but by the grace of God I might, who knows.

I am still chewing on the cud in these passages in Job. There is so much there. My first impression here is that while we know Job was blameless and upright and never denied God or turned away from God the whole time, he was trying to figure out what he had done wrong.

Job feared God, and his whole life was about doing the right thing and pleasing God and then wham this hit him out of the blue.

Again there are several different angles I could take here, but the one that struck me the most was that while Job revered God, he was struggling to figure out ‘why’ this was happening to him because he didn’t do anything to deserve it. He had no clue what went on behind the scenes when Satan went before God. He had no clue this was a test that was unprovoked by anything he did.

He soon will learn that God works in ways we don’t understand. God makes sure Job understands that while He is holy you can’t put Him in a box. He will allow trials in people’s lives for His purposes and it may not be because they have done anything wrong, but to bring Him glory. God really challenges Job’s thinking when you get to chapter 38. Wow!

The book of Job is a powerful reminder of the fact that God indeed sits on the throne and is in charge of it all. He wants us to daily walk by faith trusting Him instead of asking ‘why’. You can walk by faith if you have been reconciled to Him. 

Jesus who is God and the son of God, died on the cross as a payment for our sins so that we wouldn’t have to pay that penalty and therefore could be reconciled to Him.

God is holy and can’t stand in the presence of sin so if you died today in your sins you wouldn’t be able to stand in the presence of God. So, HE came and paid the penalty FOR US. What a loving God He is!  You just need to believe and accept his forgiveness for your sins and just trust Him and follow Him. 

Hand over the reigns of your life to Him! He is God and wants you to have a relationship with Him where you can walk by faith daily with Him.  He will set you free. He will straighten your paths and give you a clear direction in your life.

Things That Can Happen in The Bathroom

And now, for something completely different. Watch the video above!

What’s More Important?

Have you been involved in a ‘ministry’ of some kind and find that God usually takes you on twists and turns and you walk away with a totally different perspective about the purpose of your ministry than you started with?

I was in a group called ‘One Voice’ and in that case I think I walked away with the perspective that God didn’t mean for us to just be a ‘music ministry’ ministering to people, but our ministry was much deeper than that. He built a community amongst us. A strong bond between us as sisters where we served one another and other women along with a ‘group effort’ to offer up songs of praise to Him.  He worked  in ways we couldn’t see that may have been a lot more closer to His heart than our ‘out front’ stated purpose of ministering in song. 

What is really important to God? It is our hearts motivation in whatever we do.

I must admit that I am a VERY focused person. I tend to stick with something until it is done and it can’t be just half baked.  I am so focused and driven that a lot of times I forget the needs of those around me regardless of whether I am working on something at home or at church or anywhere else where I am trying to ‘get something accomplished’.  What can I say, my heart is deceitful above all things, and it is exceedingly corrupt.  It could be my children’s needs at the time when I am trying to ‘accomplish the goal of getting some major house cleaning caught up’, or I miss the need of someone at my church while I am working on a singing opportunity.  I mean, come on putting reaching goals above people is not what God intended for us, but we do it.

Sometimes, when you are involved in a ‘ministry’ effort at church with others it is real easy to get too focused on the details which isn’t wrong because really God does desire excellence in everything we do. That includes doing ‘everything’ as heartily unto the Lord, but we all struggle with the fact that God does work in ways where sometimes there is no time to ‘plan’ and we just need to ‘go’ and serve.

Most importantly, He wants us to consider other’s needs above ours, so there are times the ‘focused person’ needs to focus on others rather than her task. After all, I firmly believe that when God puts people around us they aren’t there by accident but by divine appointment.

God loves to take us out of our comfort zone, and sometimes those times are the most awesome as we learn to walk by faith.

Let me give you an example of a “small thing” that happened in my life recently as God drove home Romans 12: 3-8.

As far as I know I am not telling you this with a heart of pride, but hopefully humility as God has been exposing to me once again that His singing ministry in my life is much more than just a ’music’ ministry:

When I was leading a worship song for the ladies at the luncheon a few weeks ago, I hadn’t had the opportunity to go over the song with the pianist, Joni, and was looking for her before the luncheon Started. Joni, among other women I have met at my new church, is a woman I would love to model myself after. Her warm, gentle and loving spirit is contageous and she really has reflected Jesus to me in my life since I have started going there.

I was hurridly looking for Joni when she came up to me and said she was sorry that she wasn’t available but she was helping a lady in a wheelchair and asked for me to help her help this woman go to the bathroom who was paralyzed. My first thought was, ”I hope this doesn’t take long because we can’t do this song without going through it’, but then as I was walking over and met this lady, I was convicted and my thoughts began to change.

 

The Holy Spirit started ministering to my heart and I was confident that THIS is what God wanted Joni and I to do and that it was MORE IMPORTANT than working on that song, AND God will take care of  the song anyway. It was a time of walking in faith and trusting God. 

 

I handled the easy part of helping to pull her pants down while lifting her legs up as we got her off of the wheel chair. Joni had the hard part of lifting her from the back and getting her set on the toilet straight, holding her and then wiping her when she was done. Watching Joni serve this woman was probably the most beautiful snap shot I ever saw of God’s intention when he told us to serve one another and put each other’s interests above our own.   He showed me for a brief moment His picture of love and His desire for us women working together in the body of Christ to love and serve one another. It seemed God was saying, “See Rebecca, THIS is what is important to me,”.  

 

I was speechless at the example Joni set for me of  Jesus washing the disciples’ feet.

 

It was an opportunity I was privileged that God made me a part of and one that humbled me as I became aware of just how shallow I can be. I  got a glimpse as to what this woman in her wheelchair and others like her face every day and how I whine about the petty things in my life such as not having enough time to get a song ready. Sheesh!

 

God taught me a lot that day as we helped that wonderful sister in Christ. 

 

Of course, I will leave you with this thought:  Do I have this same perspective when God calls me to serve my own family when no one is watching? Do I sacrificially serve my husband with the right attitude when ‘no one sees’? Ouch!!

 

I HATE my flesh. It is  so easy to ’serve’ in public, but in the mundane of life is where I really need to walk by faith, obey and just rely on the Holy Spirit to give me the strength to carry through in obedience to God in His timing to serve others.

 

Hi Friends!

Welcome to my blog! It took a while to get this thing up.

See you tomorrow with my first post!