Meditations on the Holy Spirit

1 Samuel 16:1

¹ Now the Lord said to Samuel, “How long will you mourn for Saul, seeing I have rejected him from reigning over Israel? Fill your horn with oil, and go; I am sending you to Jesse the Bethlehemite. For I have provided myself a king among his sons.”

How long will you mourn for something God has moved on from. The Lord is far more ruthless than we are about moving on from what we have been attached to, and those things we are sentimental about.

When we mourn over things that God has moved on from we are not honoring Him. Jesus identified our condition of resistance to change;

Lk 5:39 And no one, having drunk old wine, immediately desires new; for he says, ‘The old is better.’”

The quicker we can change gears and move on from the past the quicker we will be able to possess our future.

As long as we are pining for what was, we will not be able to celebrate what is, and be paralyzed from entering into what is to be. How long are we going to take to get over something that we have lost? How long to leave the past and move into a new future? Saul was old anointing. How long will we mourn for the old anointing, the old revival, how it used to be? This prevents us from possessing the new oil, the fresh anointing.

The prophet was to fill his horn with fresh oil, new oil, for a new leader, a new day.

God is never taken by surprise. He always has someone he has prepared, waiting in the wings.

Before David was born, God formed the future King in the womb for the destiny of ruling a nation and carrying the presence of God to His generation.

God provides for Himself. Our role is to simply recognize what he has prepared. Even though Saul was rejected he still reigned for many years to come, resisting the new move of God that was emerging.

The interesting thing is that although the Lord agreed to the people’s request for a king, albeit with warnings and reproaches that they had rejected Him, nevertheless here he now continues the new form of kingly government with a choice of his own rather than having enough proof He would now revert the nation back to the way it was, a theocracy. There is a definite warp and woof in the will of God, where our human desires, purposes, plans, failures and successes are woven into the divine and sovereign will.

This transfer of power to the new king, was not because the previous leader had died, as with Moses and Joshua, but because Saul had failed to do the will of God. Disobedience has a higher price than we can imagine. God’s choice of David was because he ‘would do all the will of God’

Acts 13:22 …‘I have found David the son of Jesse, a man after My own heart, who will do all My will.’

See you in church

CREATION SHOUTS!

Rom 1:20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse,

Before creation, the ‘invisible God’ was not clearly understood, but ‘since creation’, even before Jesus, God was not without a vivid, crystal clear witness to His character, in creation, in which He is understood, through all that has been made. From giraffes to bananas, from the smallest of ants with all their industry to the mighty humpback whales finding their ways to mating grounds, with all the engineering marvels of blood circulation in our body and the irrigation of the Earth, our breathing systems, the symbiosis of a thousand eco systems. The list is too long and breathtaking, altogether too marvelous to take it all in. I am speechless at the flight of a small finch. Not tens of billions of dollars could make one, let alone bring the personality of these creatures to life. And then man himself, with all the glory of his intelligence, his dance, songs, art and rhythms, discoveries, inventions and adventures. His own self aware ‘self’, which is no-one else’s, never was and never will be. We are all uniquely ourselves and conscious of that fact. Where did that ‘me’ come from?

We have been created!

Once we were not. Now we are. We did not make ourselves. Neither do personalities evolve. We either are or we are not, and all of us know, we are, we exist, regardless of how many feeble mind gymnastics we want to attempt to explain our being and creation some other way. God is there and He is here. This is the truth we desperately want to suppress, because if He is, then we are accountable, and responsible, and answerable for what we have done with what He has given us. But creation reveals a creator who loves, in the colors, the scents, the nutrition yet not purely utilitarian, but beautiful in taste, scent and feel. The rains, the sun, the oceans, the mountains, the sheer breathtaking pleasure of the beauty of it all is love. The pleasures of companionship and union with others, grace to breathe fresh air and to be able to think, deduct and decide, freely without constraint. We understand that God is

1. Powerful – to create all that is, calls for immense resources of ‘life’

2. Big – Earth’s oceans, mountains and lands with all it’s inhabitants are big enough. Then there’s an unending universe, with uncountable galaxies of solar systems with stars far larger than ours, and some planets with caves large enough to contain our entire solar system;

3. Generous – so many unneeded creations and creatures, so many varieties, colors, flavors, scents, textures, kinds and species;

4. Intelligent – Engineering, like gravity, evaporation, seed, inter-activities of each part, molecules and atoms, such immeasurably clever and un-discoverably brilliant designs;

5. Loving – The rain falls and the sun brings light and heat for life, the endless fruits, vegetables, trees, fish, bird, and sources of food for us with exquisite tastes reveal a caring, loving God desiring to make our lives exciting, interesting and beautiful.

The painfully lame excuse that because God doesn’t show Himself, we are therefore justified to not believe in Him fails outright, in light of all creation surrounding us every day.

See you in church

Phil

Love this. Looking fwd to a sensational

Love this. Looking fwd to a sensational 24 hours with the guys!
https://vimeo.com/100476393