Please do this for me – well, OK, it’s for you, but I’m asking: take a few minutes to dream up your absolute top-drawer vacation of a lifetime, pulling out all the stops, throwing caution to the wind, being as wildly spontaneous as you are able. Not thinking time or money or COVID or any grinding, practical details, just what getaway, all-expenses-paid, were it offered you, you would find yourself incapable of refusing. Now, take another minute or three and think: what would my state of mind be like while experiencing that? How would my soul flourish in that setting?
Most important in the above exercise are the two questions at the end. Here’s why: Many of God’s kids are hobbled with lies from God’s archenemy and develop an earth-bound, ‘this is all there is for me because of ___________’ mentality, forgetting what Scripture says. Namely: “Never doubt God’s mighty power to work in you and accomplish all this. (God) will achieve infinitely more than your greatest request, your most unbelievable dream, and exceed your wildest imagination! He will outdo them all, for his miraculous power constantly energizes you.”1 (if your immediate response is that I must be hallucinating if I think those words apply to you, then that’s one of the lies weighing you down). Or this: “If we own up to our sins, God shows that he is faithful and just by forgiving us of our sins and purifying us from the pollution of all the bad things we have done.”2 (again, if this extravagant cleansing sounds destined for anyone but you, that’s another arrow out of the enemy’s quiver that still has you stuck where he wants you).
The deal is, all the promises of Jesus apply uniformly and without restrictions, to all of us by means of this mind-bending Kingdom thing called grace: “It was not our plan or our effort. It is God’s gift, pure and simple. You didn’t earn it, not one of us did . . . we are the product of His hand, heaven’s poetry etched on lives, created in the Anointed, Jesus, to accomplish the good works God arranged long ago.”3 So, back to your dream vacation questions. How you answered them, describes, if partially, the Shalom Jesus designed for our lives for all eternity, starting back at our initial awakening to his love: “We live in God; we move in God; we exist in God.”4 The enormous open secret is that Jesus has always intended for his Kingdom Ambassadors to richly know, first-hand, and on a day-by-day basis, the super-abundance of his grace. That’s what the world really needs, now! And once we do, they will! PD
1Ephesians 3:20; 21 John 1:9; 3Ephesians 2:9,10; 4Acts 17:28 from the VOICE Translation
