Monthly Archives: September 2020

Miracles

The Young Backpacker.

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The young man got off the plane in Auckland with his back-pack, not knowing which way to turn. He only had five days in New Zealand and all he knew was that he would like to see the Bay of Islands and have a day or so on a farm.

    So he turned to the north, and caught a bus to Kerikeri. Whether he made his travels a matter of prayer or not, I don’t know, and some would call this a mere coincidence, but we prefer to call it a miracle, or perhaps even more so, a matter of the Lord honouring those who honour Him.  After all,  how many young back packers carry a large Bible around with them and take the time out of a tight schedule to go to church in a strange country?

    It was the summer holidays at this time and as we usually did, we were spending the time on our yacht (sail boat)  in the Bay of Islands. We always made a point of attending a small church fellowship in Kerikeri while on holiday and this particular Sunday morning we went there as usual. We saw this tall young man sitting at the back of the church carrying a large Bible with him…by the look of his clothes we guessed he was an American, and when we heard him speak all doubt was removed!

    Our friends invited him as well as ourselves home for lunch, and we had a lively discussion over the meal. When he told us about the two things he wanted to see while in New Zealand, we looked at each other and then told him that we could probably point him in the direction of both of them at no cost if he liked.

    He did like, and so he came back with us to the yacht and stayed a couple of days with us. We were able to take him to all the popular tourist spots, and my, how we did talk. We talked well into the night about Christians things. There were many things he wanted to know that we were able to tell him and we all had a thoroughly enjoyable time. 

     When he left us, we got in touch with our brother on his dairy farm and sent him there for another day or so. So this was a case of the Lord granting him his desire in a way that could not have been engineered in any other way! He came as a stranger and left as a  brother.

     We kept in touch for many years and the spin-off was that we were able to pay a visit to the town in Oregon where he eventually had a tourist business, and he gave us a wonderful and memorable trip on one of the lakes in his area.

Life Lessons, Uncategorized

How Well Do You Know God?

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   Well, how well DO you know God? Or perhaps we could ask it like this…how WELL do you know God? Then again, how well do I know God?   Finally ask, how well do I KNOW God?

   Each of these questions puts the emphasis on different words of the same question thus needing a different explicit answer to each one.

    Firstly, how well DO I know God? Do I know Him at all? Have I had any dealings with Him? We can’t really know a person until we’ve had some experience of interaction with them.     

   For instance, if I were asked “do you know Queen Elizabeth”, I might answer yes, I know who she is, but that is not actually KNOWING her. I have read much about her, and I know that she has been a great horsewoman, and that she has pet corgi dogs. I could reel off a whole host of other things about her that I have read. But none of that means that I really know the inner person that she is.

    This is the same with our knowledge of God…we might know a lot about Him, but unless we have experienced His forgiveness and subsequently His peace, we do not really know Him at all. Until we have been in the depths of despair and turned to Him for comfort and solace, we cannot know Him fully. We need to come to Him with a contrite heart for the wrongs we have done to experience His forgiveness, and then we can say we know Him well. (Psalm 51:17)

  We come to the next question…..how well do I know Him? This gets down to the personal pronoun, I. It indicates that He must know me as well, and in fact we are told that He does indeed know us from the inside to the outside whether we like it or not. I cannot hide anything from Him, and until I can say wholeheartedly, “Search me oh God, and know my heart today, Try me and know my thoughts and see if there be any wicked way in me” (Psalm 139:23-24) ” I do not really want Him to find me out!

   After having pondered on, and answered these questions honestly, then we can evaluate how well we really do know God. It will be dreadful in a coming day when God pronounces on different ones, “Depart from Me, I never knew you!” (Matthew 7:21-23) when many of them will have been engaged in doing what they thought was His work..

   If  God feels far away from you,  guess who moved? Well, you might ask, “How do I get near to God?”

It takes a contrite  heart and a confession of sin to start with but  then it takes time, after that.  Knowing God well will not come automatically, it takes time and effort. We need to ask ourselves how much time we put into this,  and to remember that if we draw near to God, He will draw near to us (James 4:8). When we take the first step towards Him, He will take ten towards us!

Let’s make sure that we do this today!!

Daily Devotionals

Who Created the World?

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Genesis One….             

Verses 1-2….

   Verse says, “God created the heaven and the earth”. Who actually did the creating? Many people think that it was God the Father that did the creating, but there are many verses that show the whole Trinity was involved in the creating business. Let’s look at them….

   Both the writer to the Hebrews and John say that the Son was involved in the creation and in fact, is still seeing to the upholding of the original creation….keeping it going if you like. (John 1:3; Hebrews 1:2-3). We also see that the Father and the Son do nothing without including the Holy Spirit (1 John 5:6-8). It is the Holy Spirit who reveals the Son and God’s truths to mere mortal mankind. All this was ordained and put in order before the world began.

   No wonder Paul goes on to write that man hasn’t even begun to see and hear the wonderful things that God has in store for His people…..in fact, it is beyond our comprehension while we are earth-bound. (1 Corinthians 2:7-11; Ephesians 3:9-11).

Just as a caterpillar has no comprehension of the freedom and beauty of the fluttering butterfly it will become, so man cannot take in or even imagine what lies ahead!! And this is all part of God’s eternal plan….we don’t know yet what we will become, but we DO know that when we see our Lord Jesus we will become like Him! (1 John 3:2)

Morning Musings, Uncategorized

What is in Your Hand?

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    I was given a book to read this week about the old time bushmen that worked the bush in the backblocks of New Zealand in the early days. In this time of high mechanism and technology, it is incredible to read of how those huge trees were felled by hand, cut into manageable sized logs, and then hauled to the nearest timber mill for processing. To read of how bullocks were trained to pull them out of the bush to the nearest creek which had been dammed up until the next heavy rains came, and then to watch them tumble all the way to sea level.

    I found this account quite fascinating as my own father had been involved in the process of towing the log rafts to the timber mill by launch when he was a young man. He only gave up the job when the first timber trucks came in and took over the cartage of the logs to the mills, thus saving many hours of double handling.

   It just goes to show how, no matter what era man has reached, God has given the ability to cope with what is needed for the current job. One time is no more right than another, it is just a matter of using what God has given us, and these old timers did just that. The men of today would be useless if faced with what those men back then coped with, just as the old timers would be bewildered by the modern technology of today.

   It just reminds us that no matter what aids we have, we are still dependent on God as our Heavenly Father to provide the strength to do what is at hand, and it is still our responsibility to use what He has given us at all times.