The Passover Blood of the Cross

The Church I belong to (Life Changer’s – Century City) has been studying the Exodus story in their series ‘Move Again’, and I’ve come to see how the final plague of the Passover night was a foreshadow of Jesus on the Cross at the time we celebrate as Easter.

The Passover is a beautiful illustration of the gospel. It’s a story of redemption and deliverance from bondage. It’s a story of faith in the grace of God and it’s a story of victory. The tenth plague was God’s wrath on sin, idolatry, pride, false religion, cruelty, and so much more. The Angel of death would sweep through the land of Egypt and lay waste in one of the most heart-wrenching ways of killing every first-born. But, as always, God made a way.

God instructed Moses for the people to put the blood of a sacrificed, innocent lamb upon their doorposts, which would rescue and save them from death. When the angel of death saw the blood covering the doorposts, he passed over them, sparing them from death. However, it was not the blood itself that protected them, but what the blood represented, as a sign of a covenant.

When you think of the action of those people who painted their doorposts with the blood from a basin, using the leaves from a branch of a hyssop tree, they were performing the sign of a cross. The blood from the top crossbeam would have dripped down the center, and painting the blood from the left -side post to the right-side post, would have completed the sign of the cross.

In the Old Testament, blood was used to seal covenants and to create an inseparable bond of relationship, a blood link between two parties. The sacrificing of an animal without blemish and the sprinkling of its blood was also used to consecrate, to purify and to atone for the sins of the people.

The night of the Passover gives us a picture of what Jesus did when He shed His innocent blood to save us from our sin and give us eternal life. It is Jesus’s blood that covers our sins, like it did on those doorposts, so that when God looks at those who believe and have placed their faith in Jesus, He sees His child because of our precious blood covering and passes over us, sparing us from the penalty of our sin and giving us eternal life.

Jesus hung on crossbeams and bled for all of us. His blood covers anyone who surrenders to put their faith in Him. We don’t have to be innocent or perfect, because Jesus was on our behalf. Those rescued from Egypt were imperfect people, and so are we and just like those who God rescued from Egypt, we have to follow Him out of slavery. God didn’t deliver Israel so they could stay put in bondage.

Jesus came to sacrifice His life to rescue and save ours. He was perfect, without sin, and through His sacrifice, He offers deliverance from the power of sin in our lives. Jesus was our Passover Lamb.

When we plead the blood of Jesus over our lives or over our situations, we are not doing a ‘Harry Potter’ like incantation of breaking a curse, but we are acknowledging and standing on the promises of the power of what His blood signifies, and celebrating our inheritance of what His blood has given us.

So as you partake of Communion this Easter, consider this verse:-

1 Corinthians 10: 16-18 “The cup of blessing that we bless—isn’t it a sharing of Christ’s blood? The bread which we break—isn’t it a sharing of Christ’s body? 17 Since there is one bread, we who are many are one body—for we all partake of the one bread. 18 Consider physical Israel. Those who eat the sacrifices—aren’t they partners in the altar?

 Wishing you and your family a blessed, holy and meaningful Easter!

Supernatural Miracle of Time

I know that with God all things are possible, but recently I experienced God doing what would seem the impossible!  Something like the story of multiplying the fish and bread, but in my case it had to do with time.  I had two important deadlines for the next day but felt that there was not enough hours in the day to meet them. Although the deadlines weren’t life-threatening or anything, they were very important to me. My only solution I could see was to burn the midnight oil to get finished in time, which is what I did. Climbing into bed at 3am, I whispered a quick prayer for help, knowing that I would need to waken again at 6am.  I was sure to set the alarm and resigned myself to the fact that I would probably be needing lots of coffee and a red-bull to see me through the day!  Little did I know that God had heard my prayer… You see, when I woke up to the alarm buzzing, I felt completely wide-awake and totally refreshed!  It was as if God had supernaturally given me my full 8 hours of sleep in the mere span of 3 hours! I know it is hard to believe, but it’s true – and if He can do this with time, I know He can do it for energy too!  All He needs is a single cry for help from us, accompanied with righteous motives…

2 Keys to your Spiritual Growth

During the past two months, of what could be called a wilderness season, I discovered that there are two areas of spiritual growth that determines whether you are just a surviving Christian or a thriving Christian. Firstly, it is knowing your identity and who you are in Christ, i.e., who God says you are and what you have inherited as a child of God. And secondly, it is knowing who God is and who He says He is, by having an intimate relationship with Him.

You cannot walk in victory if you still have the mindset of a victim and behaving in defeat. To fully discover your identity in Christ and operate in your inheritance of what you have been given and how God sees you, a great start is to read Ephesians 1, and on a piece of paper, write down all the “I am” statements.  Read these as declarations to yourself every day, until you start believing them in your heart.  Acknowledging that you are loved, chosen, redeemed etc, are the building blocks to your true identity as a Royal Prince or Princess of our King.  Once you have sealed those in your spirit, do this for every passage of Scripture that you read, and you will discover many more powerful “I am” statements for you to declare. Once you start believing them, you will start walking, talking and acting like God intended you to.

You cannot fully trust God if you don’t really know Him. We may know of God, and be familiar with His role in the Bible stories, but until you can fully grasp who God is as a person, and have an intimate relationships with Him, you will always lack a confident trust and belief in Him and His promises. To learn who God is and what He has promised you, you need to be reading His Word to discover this, and be open and quiet to listen to His Holy Spirit speaking to you. A helpful way I was taught, is to get A4 sized paper, and mark down in the left column A to Z, leaving a few lines in-between each letter.  Then, whenever you are reading your Bible, look out for the many characteristics of God that you can find, and write them down in the corresponding first letter of that word.  For example, under H, you will eventually have one of the words as ‘Holy’, and under K, you will need to write ‘Kind’.

My prayer is that you will join me on this adventure of discovering and building ourselves up in these two areas.  I am confident that as we start walking in our true identity and discovering how great is our God as we grow closer in our relationship with Him and start believing it, these keys will help set us free to fly like an Eagle and excel at being a true Christian disciple.

Christmas Love

As we prepare our hearts for Christmas this year, I was reminded about how the colour red is so significant to this festive season. The red and white outfit of Santa or Father Christmas may be what comes to mind, but for me, red is also the colour of love and the blood of Jesus, the son of our Heavenly Father.

The popular verse of John 3:16 is not often referred to at Christmas time, yet when you think about it, it is the real reason for the season – that God loved us so much that He gave us His beloved Son, so that whosoever believes in Him will not perish, but be gifted with eternal life. To put it plainly, Jesus is God’s gift of love to us, and even though many may argue that He was not actually born on the 25th December, it is a day set aside for us to remember His birth and what it means to us.

So as we start to sing Christmas Carols and begin to enjoy in the spirit of the festivities over the coming month, let us ponder this miracle gift that has restored us back to God and let us consider what gift we will give Him in return this year…

Wishing you all a meaningful and joyous Christmas season, full of God's hope and peace, found in the blessings of His ‘presents’ and His presence…

I leave you with this poem I wrote as a reminder of the true reason for the season… 

 

Christmas

Christmas is not just a happy holiday,
Or a time for festive greetings.
It’s a very special occasion indeed,
To enjoy time in family meetings.

Christmas is not about the presents,
Or when Christmas Carols are sung.
It’s a time to spend in Jesus’s presence,
And think what He’s birth has done.

Christmas is not about the feast,
Of flowing spirits and luxury food.
It’s a time to remember His birth,
And remain in a peace-filled mood.

Christmas is not about decorating a tree,
Or sending cards to all we know.
It’s about a birth that sets us free,
And for this, our joy should show.

Christmas is not a time for fuss or stress,
Rushing to find the perfect present.
We should think more of those we can bless,
And remain still in Jesus’s presence.

So set a time on Christmas morning,
To take time and thank God for Jesus.
For when Jesus is the reason for the season,
Love, hope and peace will fill your Christmas.

 https://poetrybysam.blogspot.com/2021/12/christmas.html

 

Feeding our Faith with Prayer

The difference between to pray and a prayer is that pray is a means of addressing God, but prayer is the two-way conversation that we have with Him.  In other words, to pray is a verb, but prayer is a noun, a sacred thing.

As Christians, we are called to pray and there are many reasons to do so, but sadly, we only seem to do it earnestly when in need.  Prayer should be our first response, not our emergency back-up when nothing else seems to work.

We should pray before the event, over the event and through the event, and not just after the event.  Although God knows our needs before we even have to ask them, He desires our interaction of being alone with Him. He wants us to commune with Him, to converse with Him, to vent with Him and to seek His presence earnestly and early.

There is something special and powerful when we make the choice and sacrifice to start our day early, alone and in a quiet place, to get into the presence of God in prayer. There is much rest, replenishment and wisdom to be found in this secret place, which sets up our attitude for the day correctly, to face whatever lays ahead.  

When we study Jesus’s example of prayer, we can clearly see the awesome benefits and miraculous results of time spent with His Father.  Unlike ourselves, it should not be a rushed quick request chat, but a lengthy, sometimes overnight time of seeking and listening.

Our prayers are a time of memorial and for remembrance – to remember the person and His faithfulness and to remind God of His promises towards us. It’s like a court case where we get to go before the Righteous Judge with our advocate Jesus and our counselor the Holy Spirit, and plead our case for His ruling, to make our requests and supplications known.

Many of us when faced with adversary, either isolate or talk to anyone who will listen, when instead our prayer time should be when we turn to God for His advice and opinion on the situation, and then wait to hear it, either for Him to speak to our hearts, or through His Word.  When we spend time in prayer, I like to imagine God lays His hands on us to bless us with the touch of His anointing, for there is nothing more powerful than having felt His touch after spending time in His presence.

When we develop a posture of prayer, either with our hands together, eyes closed, or on our knees or with our hands up in praise, it is like a tap that opens up to pour out the filling of the Holy Spirit into our lives, our minds and our hearts.

When we prayer regularly, constantly, consistently and persistently, it fuels our faith and grows our belief, so that every doubt, worry, fear or temptation is destroyed.  It is the power that gives us our Spiritual strength to face our stormy situations with a nevertheless, overcoming faith.

If you are facing a situation with no answers or a scary future, I challenge you today to get serious about prayer and see how God can transform the situation; if not the problem itself, then definitely ourselves to deal with it.  Our breakthrough will come when we stop asking God to remove the problem and start asking Him to help us to get through it.

Just like our muscles need exercise, and how we say Grace before we eat to bless the food to our bodies, we need to exercise our faith with prayer so that God can bless our day.

In conclusion, I leave you with this simple acrostic for prayer –

P = Praise God for who He is and for His faithfulness
R = Repent of your attitude, sin or lack of faith and unbelief, and ask for His forgiveness
A = Ask God for His help, for answers, for whatever you are needing
Y = Yield and submit to whatever is God’s will for your life and for your situation
E = Empty your mind of all your worries, concerns, doubts or what makes you confused
R = Rest in God’s presence and be replenished and restored

 

 

 

Taking Control of your Thoughts

As my South African nation was thrown into turmoil last week with looting and anarchy, gripping fear into the hearts of its people, I was reminded how important it is to control our thoughts.

What we choose to see and hear and focus on creates what we will think and it’s these thoughts that manifest into our emotions, which result in what actions we take.

There are so many verses in the Bible that teach us about taking control of our mind. Colossians 3:2 instructs us to fix our minds on heavenly things, 2 Corinthians 10:4-5 tells us to tear down and take captive our wrong thoughts, and 2 Timothy 1:7 says we have a sound mind and we must not fear.

Without being disciplined or using self-control to choose what we think about, the devil will use our thoughts to try distract us from what really matters and if he can’t do that, he will discourage us with fears, worries and stress, to kill our faith, our joy and our peace.

The word ‘control’ comes from the Latin word ‘contra’, which means to check, verify or oppose.  Think of your mind as a security road-block, that needs to be thoroughly checked before anything can enter it – is your thought kind, is it pure and is it Godly and holy? Any thought that does not pertain to heavenly importance, or for no good reason, should be rejected entry and cancelled out with the promises of God.

We can never hope to be transformed into the image of Jesus until we learn how to renew our minds with right-thinking.  Our thoughts are like birds that fly into our head, and we need to make sure that the bad ones do not make a nest, but are shooed off before they can ever land.

Steven Furtick teaches 3 helpful questions in his sermon “Taking control of your mind”, to stop us asking the wrong questions, based on Paul’s response to being thrown in jail.  See Philippians 1:12-26. 

1. What does it matter? See verse 18.  This question reflects your priorities and decides what your distractions you will allow.
2.  What does it mean? See verse 22a. Asking this, helps us to see our circumstances from God’s perspective and discover His purpose for it.
3. What will we choose? See verse 22b. God gives us the freedom to choose our thoughts. 

Using Steven’s computer analogy ‘R U N CTRL’?, we need to be doing a CTRL+ALT+DEL, so we can remove any bad, negative or evil thoughts and reboot our minds back into alignment with God.

I also learnt from Craig Groeschel from Life Church, in his sermons about the mind, that our thoughts are framed by our past filters, which are determined through our life experiences and in many cases can be warped.

This is why the same event or circumstance can happen to many people, but they all respond differently.  We need to make sure that our filters are from a clear, untainted Godly perspective, without any worldly corruption, or warped by the devil’s lies that we have believed from our childhood or past trauma’s, as this makes our vision blurry and makes us react or respond wrongly in our thoughts. These wires that are crossed in our brain are what are known as strongholds.

The way we destroy these strongholds is to find the Spiritual scriptural truth from God’s Word, that will break them. You then you need to write it out, meditate on it and confess it until you believe it; until your renewed mind and filters have been transformed.

God wants us to live a life like a beautiful transformed butterfly, flying high and seeing life from a heavenly perspective, not like a dull, restricted caterpillar, ready to curl up and think its life has ended.

Only when we have learnt how to renew our minds with right-thinking, and have broken down our strongholds, will we ever win the war in the battlefield of our minds.

We can choose whether we will focus and obsess about the problems of the world, or whether we will change our attention and share the solution instead. What we share on Social Media can either add fuel to the flames of fear and panic, or it can restore hope and bring comfort.  The choice is YOURS…

The Importance of Fathers

Whilst the world recently celebrated their dad’s on Father’s Day, many children and adults had no father to spoil. Sadly, the cause of this is not always due to their death, like myself, but for many, it is either the choice of the father not wanting to be present or involved, or the choice of the mothers to exclude the father from their child’s life.

The World’s culture seems to place little value on the role of fathers. Evidence of this is found in the pop culture and media to government policy. Yet, studies have shown that fathers play a vital role in the emotional and overall development of children, not just for sons, but for daughters as well.

Children look to their fathers to lay down the rules and enforce them, thus providing a feeling of security, both physical and emotional. Children want to make their fathers proud, and an involved father promotes inner growth and strength. Studies have shown that when fathers are affectionate and supportive, it improves their child’s cognitive and social development, and instills an overall sense of well-being and self-confidence.

The fact that men and women are different, results in a significant different parenting style. Dads, for instance, love their children more dangerously by playing rougher, more likely to encourage risk-taking and encouraging competition. They provide kids with a broader diversity of social experiences and introduce them to a wider variety of methods of dealing with life. They tend to instill rules, justice, fairness and duty in the way that they discipline, thus teaching objectivity and consequences of right and wrong. They prepare them for the challenges of life and demonstrate by example respect towards woman.

A father shows his daughter what a good relationship with a man is like. If a father is loving and gentle, or strong and valiant, his daughter will look for those same qualities in a man.

Sons see their fathers as heroes, modeling themselves after their character and seeking their approval from a very young age. When a father is absent, young boys look to other male figures to set the rules for how to behave and survive in the world, which is why many turn to gangs. As for daughters without a father or father figure, they often end up seeking a man’s approval in all the wrong places.

A mother’s influence promotes sympathy, care and help, by the way they model these traits, thus demonstrating to children the value of healthy relationships. Neither style of parenting is adequate in and of itself. Taken together, they balance each other out and equip the next generation with a healthy, well-rounded approach to life.

In an analysis of over 100 studies on parent-child relationships, it was found that having a loving and nurturing father was just as important for a child’s happiness, well-being, and social and academic success, as having a loving and nurturing mother.

Research from the University of Pennsylvania indicates that children who feel a closeness and warmth with their father are twice as likely to enter college, 75% less likely to have a child in their teen years, 80% less likely to go to jail and half as likely to suffer from depression. Studies demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt, that fathers play an important and irreplaceable role in healthy child development.

What this means for single mothers raising their children alone, is the importance of including the father in their lives as much as possible, but only where this will have a healthy impact. Where there is no father to speak of, either by choice or death, then they need to find a good male role model for their children, either in an uncle, a family member or through their Church.

From a religious standpoint, an adult who has never had a father figure present in their lives, will battle to have a healthy relationship with their Heavenly Father. The good news is that for a child with no Father or orphaned, God offers full adoption into His family.

It is said that anyone can father a child, but it takes a special kind of a man to be a daddy. If you have never had a dad in your life, or perhaps don’t know who your father is, then come to your Abba Father, whose love and grace can heal all your broken pieces and help change you into the son or daughter you were created to be.