Learning God's Precepts

 

“You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. 16 Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.”

 

“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.

 

Salt, one tablespoon in a pot of soup or Stew and it goes from bland to flavorful in no time, or heaped onto a piece of meat in the absence of a fridge or freezer and you extend its lifespan. 

Too much Salt in a pot of soup on the other hand and it goes from flavorful to unpalatable very fast - and because God is a masterful cook, He'll never add too much salt to the pot. So children of God, wherever we find ourselves, even if it looks like there's not enough of us, there is just enough of us there to achieve God's purpose - if we have salt in ourselves.

Salt also serves as a deterrent and is used to limit the movement of certain earth-bound animals. Growing up, my mum used to line the doors with salt to prevent ants from entering the house  after a huge tropical storm. as salt, we are to serve as deterrents and limit the encroaching of the enemy into God's territory.

And this is where the characteristics of Salt and Light begin to directly over lap. You see Light is used to give boundary to darkness, it's what we use to tell darkness - thus far can you go. So, when God sees that there's darkness over the deep in a place what does He do? Like in Genesis, He calls forth the Light and uses it to separate night from day. And God is still doing that today, but now the light is located within us. Because Jesus is the Life that is Light, and He dwells within us 

Light is used as a guide as an exposer. It helps us to see clearly so that we can make the right decisions and helps us to find hidden things. When I think of light as a guide, I picture a lighthouse, with lights that serves as a guide for travelling sailors. 

We are the light of the world, and like the light of the lighthouse, we are a city set upon a hill that cannot be hidden. And if men know not to hide under a bushel a light that has been set up as a guide, will God - who is Wisdom Himself - light us up hide us under a bushel? No. God has put the Light that is Life in us and His plan is that we shine brightly for the world to see. 

This brings me to the second part of these statements 

"Of the earth"

"Of the World"

We are not the Salt of the church, or Light of the church. And of course, Salt And Light should still be Salt And Light where ever it is found, but Salt is not being put to any real use if it is still in the  storage container. 

And though it feels great to be packed in the storage container, we can only truly feel the effect of salt when it being used. 

Same with Light. Usually, No one walks into a well lit room and thinks to themselves, let me turn on the light, no. It's when you walk in a dark or barely lit room that you begin to search for the light switch. 

Finally, I come to the last parts of what Jesus said.

" Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven"

These words are active, and what this means for me is that even though I carry the Light, I have a responsibility to shine it. And I've always wondered how? 

How can provide light to people who do not know that they're in darkness? How do I convince ingredients in a pot of soup that I am what they need to elevate their flavor? And what exactly is this Light? Since it's not as easily seen as physical visible light. 

This led me John's gospel - In him was life; and the life was the light of men. - the Light Is Life! 

So, then what is Life? According to Oxford Dictionary, life is the period between the birth and death of a living thing, especially a human being. Therefore life is everything we are and do while we're not dead in the body. 

So, our sleeping a waking, our eating and speaking, our thoughts and actions. And this is why in the book of Romans we are asked to offer it all as a sacrifice to God.

But so as not to digress from the current topic. We know that the Light is Life and that we are also asked to shine our light in good deeds. We know what the Light is, it's time to define what are Good deeds?

Jesus tells us in Mathew 19:17 that only God is good. This means that anything not of God is not good. So good deeds are God's deeds/works - please note that I didn't say church ministry, I said God's work. And from Genesis chapters one a 2 we can see how diverse God's work can be.

So, if good works are God's work, and Life is all that we do every day, and I have a responsibility to Shine my Light through life. This means that as Light that wants to shine brightly, the responsibility that falls to me is to ensure that my life is in alignment with God's will. That everything that makes up my life is in full alignment with the will of God. 

Obedience and submission to God, driven by love truly is the bedrock of our life/walk with God. And it is also the way to be both Light and Salt. Doing what God wants us to do is not the same thing as doing for God what we think He'll like. Mary has chosen the best option (Luke 10:2) – may we too chose the best option.

Over the course of the pandemic, I added about 26lbs (ice cream and chocolate chip cookies do add up!! - who knew?) Anyways, sometime in March I decided that the pandemic was finally over and so were my excuses - I love going on prayer/worship/praise walks and the extra 26 pounds were making it VERY difficult. It was like my body had reached a threshold where it started refusing to do the things I asked of it! 

I don't know about anyone else but changing my diet was very hard for me to do - very extremely hard. I failed a couple of times before I finally took off. There were days where I felt like I was dying - a lot of days at the beginning actually. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it made no sense. 

Science shows that most people can survive one to two months without food, but here I am, I just had lunch less than 3 hours ago and I feel like I 'm about to die of hunger. Other times, I felt like if I didn't satisfy my cravings my world would fall apart - PS, it didn't. 

What does any of this have to do with living by faith and not by feelings? 

You see, feelings are very intense, and very loud, and very real. But they lie.

These feeling of "near death" and "world falling apart", I felt when I changed my eating habits were real - anyone that says otherwise has never had the misfortune of basically crying themselves to sleep from hunger even after eating. But no matter how real they were, they were not the truth - I was not dying, neither was my world falling apart.

And this applies not just to "bad" feelings but also to "good" feelings. When I think about the times I "failed" and simply reached for the chocolate, (minus the guilt) I felt good after, like I had given myself a "treat". But is sugar really a treat? Sugar is generally bad for the body, but it definitely doesn't feel like it - in fact the opposite is the case, you feel really really good after consuming sugar in copious amounts!

That "good" feeling is also a lie.

Feelings ≠ Truth 

So, I asked myself, if my body goes to these lengths to lie to me about food, what else is it lying to me about? Food is great, but it's not that big of a deal. Why would my body deploy all these ammunitions to get me to keep eating? I don't know, but thankfully I knew the truth. The truth that I wasn't actually going to die, the truth that I was doing the right thing, the truth that I was nourishing my body with the right food.

And that truth set me free from the tyranny of my feelings. 

You see, because I knew the truth, because I believed in the truth AKA had faith in the truth. I was able to live above my feelings.

Did I want to be delivered from this feeling, YES! And I prayed for it over and over again. My God can do all things, and since He created the body, He can definitely adjust mine. But I learnt that God's grace is sufficient for me. Everyday I draw strength from Him to say no to my feelings, and with time my feelings have largely adjusted to the new reality that there's a new sheriff in town. It was no longer the boss of me, and would not be the major factor in my decisions.

We live by faith and not by feelings first by knowing and believing the truth, and then by understanding that our feelings lie, a lot. Think about all the times people thought you slighted them and were hurt, but you didn't actually do anything! Or the times you were hurt because you thought someone slighted you, but then it turns out that they actually didn't.  

Also, we must believe that the truth applies to us specifically, not just to others. Because if we believe that our situation somehow exempts us from reaping the befits of the truth, we won't be able to keep going when the enemy comes at us, and he will come. 

I know that I desperately wanted to believe that my case was different (PCOS), and that it required something more than the Word God gave me - which was that and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations - could handle. But then I realized that I had made it into something bigger than the Word of God. Guys, it's so easy for a diagnosis to go from being a help to being a clutch, it's such a slippery slope. 

We live by faith by believing the Truth - Jesus Christ. But how can we believe What we don't know? The only way to know the Truth is by reading the Bible. I pray for you, that you pick up a bible today, and that when you do, you hear the hearing of faith.

For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. Or as the NKJV puts Colossians 3:3 – For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. 

Hi and welcome to the Marriage Episode! My name is still Josephine, and this is still Learning God’s Precepts or LGP for short and today we’ll be talking about marriage.

Seeing as I’m currently single, I do not feel quite qualified to speak about this topic, but then I do not feel qualified to talk about every other thing I talk about on this podcast. The only thing I know is that which God has taught me, and I decided that if I could share every other thing I’ve been taught, why would I hold back on this? God’s Word in my mouth qualifies me, and so I’ll speak.

Now that we have out of the way, let’s back track to when I got my marriage lesson. You see, I’d never really gotten the fuss about marriage. It made no sense to me, and just seemed like a lot of stress with the occasional peck that did not make up for the stress.

Then Jesus saved me, I got into church, and there’s this umbrella graphic that they share in church when they speak about marriage that annoyed me even more. I’ll look for a picture and attach it to the blog, but in this picture, there’s four umbrellas in graduating sizes with our Lord Jesus being the biggest umbrella, the husband being the next in size, the wife the next, and the finally we had the kids. This was the communication and reporting hierarchy (we human beings love power so much), where they say God speaks to the man, and the man to the wife and the wife to the kids. 

All I kept thinking was who in their right minds would meet Jesus and then decide to put a human being, a man between them?? Why would I give up Jesus, for a human being?

Do you know that Eve was only relegated to mother of all children after the fall? When sin had entered the world and Adam no longer had the life of God in him? Before the fall she was bone of Adam's bone (i.e., one with him, so whatever Adam was, they were together or as Peter puts it, she was his partner.) Motherhood is great, but women being called only to motherhood is a result of the fall of man. 

Anyways, one day, I’m reading my Bible and I’m awed by the perfection of God’s plans. I’m blown away by how intricately entwined everything thing is. By how complete and purposeful everything God has ever done is. And I say exactly this to God, but then I also say that though everything was perfect and good, marriage stood out as a sore thumb to me. I remember saying that I knew that because He (God) is good, everything H e does is good, but I had examined marriage and I couldn’t seem to see that same completeness and perfection as I saw in everything else. I did not get an immediate response.

About two weeks later God calls me into a 3-day retreat. I had been praying specifically about something else, and I thought that that was what He was calling me to receive. Alas it was not, it was to address what I had said a couple of weeks earlier. I’m going to try and summarize what I was taught over the course of 3+ days in about fifteen minutes.

Now I’m going to ask that if you’ve not listened to the very first episode please stop here and go listen – it’s called our identity in Christ. I’m going to be assuming that you’ve listened to it as that is the foundation upon which this is built.

So, Let’s begin

Genesis 1: 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. 

From the above, we can see very clearly that both male and female humans, were made in the image of God. Today, I’m not going to try to define what that image is, I just want to establish it as a fact.

Then 1st Corinthians 11:7b says – forasmuch as he (the man) is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. But then I began to wonder why men got to be the glory of God, but we women were the glory of the man? I was not a happy camper

So, let’s go back to Genesis, shall we?

Genesis 2:22-24 and the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, this is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore, shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. 

You see when God wanted to create Eve, He took her out of the man, He basically turned Adam from single to double. (This is why I really need you to listen to that first episode). In order to create Eve God removed something from Adam. What exactly was removed from him? What does this mean for Adam? And for eve? And for marriage as an institution.  To explain this, I’m going to be examining 3 or maybe 4 stories in the Bible.

Let’s start with Abraham. In Genesis chapter 15, God made a covenant with Abraham and promised him that his servant would not be his heir but that he would birth his own heir. This was where God told him to look now towards heaven and count the stars, that if he is able to number them, so shall his descendants be.

The Bible tells us that Abraham believed, he actually believed God. But then he went home and slept with Hagar, Sarah’s maidservant. I don’t know about you, if God speaks to one half of a couple that they’re going to birth a child, the assumption is that you know He’s speaking to both you and your partner. But when you don’t see you and your partner as one, you take the vision that God gives you for you guys’ life and destiny and personalize for yourself only – making it all about you, with your spouse as an extra in the movie where you’re the star act. I want to let you know that the result will always be Ismael. And don’t forget that Ismael was a miracle, a miracle child! But God said he was not His will.

Abraham was called to be the father of nations, through Isaac. He had many other children, but through none of them would his destiny – the reason God called him in the first place – be fulfilled. Sarah had only one child in her womb – Isaac – and he was the child of promise. But had she birthed him by anyone other than Abraham  he would not have been the child of promise.

This brings me to the next point I want to quickly make – if you think God called your wife to be a mother, then he called you to be a father. And vice versa. I’m not saying God called you to be the same thing – since Adam was divided into Adam and Eve, I very much doubt that it’ll be the same – but you are two halves of one vision. And those 2 halves merged at the point where you got married. For God to make Eve, he took something vital out of Adam, this means that whatever you have in your hand; though very important, is the incomplete half of something of which a vital part is in the hand of your spouse - be you male or female.

Let’s take a quick detour to Isaac himself when he married Rebecca. In Genesis chapter 24, when Abraham’s servant found Rebecca – just as he was about to leave, Rebecca’s brother blessed her with the following blessing in verse 60 - “Our sister, may you become the mother of thousands of ten thousands; and may your descendants possess the gates of those who hate them.” Does this sound familiar? This is basically the exact same promise that God made with Abraham in Genesis 22:17 that was to be fulfilled through Isaac. This means that immediately Rebecca said I will (or in our case, I do), the same covenant came upon her too. These 2 incidents happened years apart, in 2 entirely different places.

My next example is Moses.  Moses knew that God had called him to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt, and he was right. But he grew up in pharaoh’s palace, and he only knew the way of the palace, but the way of the palace is not God’s way. And when he tried to apply the things he knew and learnt from his time in the palace, it backfired and next thing you know he was on the run.

Thankfully, because God is the God of providence, he ran into Jethro’s daughters who were shepherds – one of whom he married. You see God had called Moses to shepherd the people Israel out of Egypt, everything else (the miracles and signs) God would do through him, but he needed to learn to be a shepherd, and to think like one. Remember that Joseph had told us that Egyptians found shepherds to be an abomination, and Moses had been raised by Egyptians. This means that for Moses to effectively lead shepherds, he couldn’t still hold the mind set that found them abominable. Moses needed to learn new skills and to have his mind renewed.

So, Moses had the vision, but his wife had the methodology.  

She was the shepherd that taught him how to be a shepherd; how to pick out the right shepherd stick, good places to rest and feed the sheep, amongst many others, and it was after he had fully embraced this role that God appeared to him in the burning bush and sent him.

Finally, I’ll end with Mary, the mother of Jesus and Joseph her husband.

Mary may be called the mother of God, but Jesus is referred to in the Bible as the son of Joseph, who is a descendant of David.  Now, according to prophesy, the Messiah must be a descendant of David and since Jews are patrilineal, Jesus’s father had to be a descendant of David. So here we have Mary, chosen to be the one to carry the Messiah, but had she been engaged to anyone but Joseph, who was a descendant of David, and who had also been chosen to be the father of Jesus, there’s no way we’d know who she is today.

Also, there’s Joseph – good Jewish man, a descendant of David – but he was probably one of thousands just like him in his day. Why do we know who he is today? He married Mary. Had he married anyone else but her we would not know who he is today. He was called to be the father of our Lord, and Mary to be the mother of our Lord.

This brings me to the comment I made at the beginning of this episode about 1st Corinthians 11:7b which says – forasmuch as he (the man) is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man.

We’ve already established from Genesis that both men and women are made in the image and likeness of God, but this verse introduces something new – glory. It states that men are the glory of God but women the glory of men. Why do we women get to be the glory of men and not of God? What does it really mean for women to be the glory of man?

So, lets go back to Genesis. (This would be easier to understand if you have listened to the episode on our identity in Christ). When God created humanity, He created them in one body, He saw that it was good and asked him to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. But male human bodies – though declared good by God – cannot on their own be fruitful or multiply so they are not equipped to fulfill the mission God gave him, thus, God said that it is not good for man to be alone, or in other words, for man to be singular.

So, what did God do? He removed something from the man, and then built what He removed into a woman who had a body when joined with the man, together, they could carry out and fulfil the mission given to them by God. As marriage is a mystery that points us to Christ Jesus, it’ll be great to go back and look at that relationship to help throw more light on what it means for women to be the glory of men.  

 In John 12:24, Jesus in reply to Phillip and Andrew said – “Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”

That word alone comes up here again. And in the same way that the Father said in Genesis that it was not good for man to be alone, Jesus also insinuates that it was not good for Him to be alone/singular. He wanted to multiply Himself. And He has done that by dying on the cross, crucifying our old self, and giving us new life – His own life. In the same way that eve came from Adam, when we are born again, we become body parts of Jesus’s bride removed from His side.  We become the branches growing out of Him, the Vine.  We – the church – are the bride of Christ. The Eve to Christ’s Adam.

So, how is Christ Jesus glorified on earth? By His bride. In His church. In John Chapter 17:22 Jesus said - I have given them the glory that You gave me, that they may be one as we are one. Christ is glorified in His church. people do not see Jesus, they see us His body, but when they see us, they glorify Jesus. It is in us and through us that Jesus’s handiwork is being exhibited as we are built up in and by Christ. So, just as it is in us and through us that Christ is glorified on earth, so also it is in and through the wife that the husband is glorified. Outside of that, there is no glory, what you get is Ismael.

What God removed from Adam and built up in Eve is what makes for his glory. So, it becomes their glory (i.e., The man and the woman). So, how does God want this to play out in simple terms?

Husband, all of your life must be focused on building up your wife. And as for the wife, you must recognize that all you are is his. Christ’s focus right now is on building His church, our response as the church is to let Him build us up. In a marriage, God relates to the man as the leader, and to the woman as the helper - no one replaces the other before God.

Finally, I’ve seen a lot of people insinuate, whether by words or by practice, that one is more important than the other, or that one is greater than the other – that need to be greater than or more important than another is the manifestation of the flesh and has no place in God’s marriage. Nothing can be done from the place of strife or vainglory, not even marriage – God resists the proud, and calling pride by another name like ego will not change what it is. There’s no place for self, or self-importance in the things of God.

We (male & female) are made in God’s image, and while men reflect God’s image as Leader, women reflect God’s image as Helper. You are both a reflection of God, and you are both ONE. Just as the triune God – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are one and co-equal.  You both must ask the Holy Spirit to show you where both your callings merge to become one.

God made marriage good, in fact God said that it is not good that man should be alone. God wants to help you, that’s why He gave you your spouse. He wants to close up the gap in your journeys – both of you.

What about us single people? Does this mean that God doesn’t want to help us too? No, far from it. The Bible tells us that God covered up the flesh at the place where the rib was removed. This means that for men, God will cover up what is lacking in you. And for women, He (God) will continue to build you up i.e., make up for what you didn’t know you needed.