Tag Archives: “My sheep hear my voice.”

We need to have our spiritual ears tuned to our Good Shepherd’s voice, and to recognise the voices that aren’t His and that often drown Him out.

Discipleship and witness, Prophesy and the prophetic

Water what’s fruitful; burn what’s dead.

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“I am the vine and you are the branches. He who abides in me and I him bears much fruit, for without me, you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in me, he has cast out as a Branch and is withered, and they gather them and throw them into the fire. If you abide in me and my words abide in you, you shall ask what you desire and it shall be done for you. By this, my father is glorified, that you very much fruit; so you will be my disciples.” (John 15:5 – 8).

I was in the garden a few weeks ago, burning rubbish in our garden incinerator in an enclosed area that used to be a chicken run. I had a hose pipe to hand in case any sparks jumped from the fire, and was directing it onto the roots of an apple tree on the other side of the enclosed area so that the water was doing something useful. I felt the Lord spoke to me quite clearly as I stepped back, away from the smoke for a moment. He said, “Water what is fruitful, burn what is dead.“ I took the above picture as a reminder to myself.

This is a time of transition. We have heard many times, and we know, that God is doing a new thing. So why do we persist in carrying on with our old ways? I wrote about making disciples in my last post. Jesus says that discipleship is this: abide in Him and let his words abide in us. What does this mean? I think it’s quite simple: Walk with him and do what he says. Forty years ago, before cars were computers on wheels, I rebuilt a car engine (a morris minor, if you remember them) from a DIY manual. You read the information and did what it said. It was tried and tested, and – unless you misread the instructions – it worked. For too long, we’ve been doing it ourselves in the church: repeating strategies that worked in a previous era in the hope that they will work for us today. But it’s time we threw away and burnt our DIY manuals and let Him build His church, because what He is doing today is not the same as it was 40 years ago.

I believe the Lord says:
 “You cry out to me to pour out my spirit and bring my anointing to what you do. But I will not pour my water on that which is cut off from me. I will not water your DIY efforts. Where is there life and growth in your church? Where is there life and growth in your family, in your marriage? Cry out to me for those areas, and I will water them. I will even water one little seedling, I will water a tree that only bears a single fruit. If it is growing, I will water it. Where there is love, I will water it. But I will not water a pile of dead branches, however big and impressive it is, however hard you’ve worked to assemble the pile, and however long it’s been there.

So burn what is dead, abide in me, listen for my word and do what I say. And I will watch over my word to perform it, and I will water what grows when my word springs forth through your obedience.”

Be prepared; hold on., Christian Life

The Great Deception

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(Image generated by AI from its “reading” of my text…)

Every time I ask Google a question read the detailed AI overview of its answer, I think about the Great Deception that Paul writes about in 2 Thessalonians 2 1-12. Is artificial intelligence part of it? Recently I stumbled on a blog on the subject of the great deception and how to be sure not to fall away, and I read it with interest. It was all Bible based and made a lot of sense: basically it was telling us that if we keep our eyes on Jesus and remain grounded in faith and the word of God we won’t be led astray by Satan’s lies. All good stuff, followed by lots of practical applications for family life, similar to material we find across a broad swathe of Christian writings.

I scrolled down the article, and came to other material written by the same guy. But I stopped short when I saw an article that claimed to be “a detailed study of the biblical proof for a flat and motionless earth.“

Is someone who is exhorting Christians to believe the word of God, hold fast to Jesus, and be guided through the complexities of life and the snares of satanic deception by discernment of the truth, suggesting that I believe that the world is flat and that I can find evidence of this in the Bible? I really hope not, yet I believe it’s probably true.

I know the Earth is not flat: I’ve travelled a lot of the way round it, I’ve seen the curved horizon, and I’ve seen photographs from space. I know that none of Magellan’s ships fell off the edge between 1519 and 1522. I’ve got enough experience to tell me that science has got this right.  But it made me think:  what do I do in the areas where the Bible tells me that science is wrong and I don’t have the experience to align with my acceptance of its authority? Did God really create the earth in six days, less than 7000 years ago? Did Methuselah really live to be 969? What about the other end of the Bible: Is there really going to be a rapture? How can the new Jerusalem come down from heaven, for example? And then of course we come to the basics of Christian Faith. Virgin birth? Resurrection? Ascension? Science tells us that none of this is possible, but our faith says it’s true. It’s totally understandable that many people who genuinely ask the question “is there a God?” dismiss faith because it doesn’t make sense. Faith is a “a gift of God, that none may boast,” (Eph 2:9), but it also has to be a gift of God because the human brain simply can’t comprehend it.

I do believe that God is in and through all things, and that he has progressively guided the man that He created through an understanding of the world that He put him in. I think that this is sometimes has been by revelation, and sometimes by exploration. God has given us science. But He has also given us His son, and He has given us the Holy Spirit. He has given us brains, but we also have the mind of Christ. The universe is material and it is spiritual. Spiritual things are spiritually discerned: we can no more understand the mind of Christ with our human reason than we can prove whether or not Christ will return to the Earth in the manner that He ascended, if there really was a worldwide flood and Noah’s Ark, or if we will all be raised up at the last day, and more importantly which eternal existence we will be raised up to – the resurrection of Life or of condemnation. (John 5:29).

Ultimately, truth is neither science nor the printed pages of the Bible, which can be taken at face value to prove almost anything – even, it appears, that the Earth is flat. Truth is a person. Jesus said “I am the way, the truth, and the life.“ We are called to follow His way, walk in His truth, and to share in His life. The truth can’t be separated from the way and the life any more than one can separate the heart from the brain and the nervous system and expect them to carry on functioning. Whatever the great deception ultimately is, its main purpose will be to lead us away from the person who is the way the truth and the life.

I do happen to think that AI will play its part in this, and I think it is part of the fulfilment of Daniel‘s end time prophecy that “there will be a increase in knowledge; (Daniel 12:4) however Paul writes “knowledge puffs up, but Love builds up.“ (1 Cor 8:1)  Knowledge alone, whether we gain it from Google’s AI overviews or from our own intellectual understanding of the Bible, is not the truth. The truth is only in Jesus, the fulfilment and the flesh of the word, and we live in the truth when we walk in Him. And since God seeks worshippers who worship “in spirit and in truth,“ we cannot walk in the truth unless we also walk in the spirit, and none of the fruit of the spirit even marginally hints at the supremacy of the intellect. In fact the Holy Spirit tells us in Proverbs 12:15 that “the way of a fool is right in his own eyes.” One of the most brilliant people the world has ever known, Leonardo Da Vinci, said “The greatest deception that men suffer from is from their own opinions.”

Our understanding of the truth as it is in Jesus will always find its expression in God-given faith and love, and our first rule in gaining this understanding will be to learn from Him and be yoked to His gentleness and humility of heart. (Matthew 11:29) This means that if any of us thinks he is a “better” Christian than anyone who doesn’t share our theology they have missed the point entirely. God’s goodness, revealed to us in Christ, is as far above ours as the heavens are from the earth, so the differences between us are as insignificant as the differing widths of two grass stems in the face of the sun. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians that the Lawless one was already at work in their time, and I believe that a part of the great deception that Satan had been working on since the birth of the church is to convince us that one person’s idea of how to follow Jesus might make them “a better christian” than someone with different ideas.

As for me, I choose to believe the Apostles’ creed over the atheistic writings of Richard Dawkins or the algorithmic manipulations of AI, however convincing their deceptions may be. And whether a brother or sister in Christ chooses to believe that the Earth is 6000 or 6 billion years old, or even that it is flat, there is nothing in the Apostles’ Creed or in what I know of scripture that tells me that I should correct their beliefs. If we build each other up in love we will all come “to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to the perfect man,” (Eph 4:13) whatever views we hold about science or prehistory, or about Great Deception itself; and when we do that we will really know the truth, because we will be seeing Him face to face.

Pursuing Love, Walking in the Spirit

Rooted and grounded in love

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The great grey shrike on Cannock Chase

“That you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height— to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (Eph 3: 17-18)

Love is the ground where the word of God takes root.  It’s the foundation where the house is built. It brings stability and strength. Love characterises the “good and noble heart” of Luke 8:15 that keeps the word of the kingdom and bears fruit with patience. The Greek word translated as “Noble” is Agathos. It’s the same word used in Mark 10:18, when Jesus says only God is good. Similarly, the Strong’s definition of Kalos (“good”) relates to every manner of perfection; flawlessness, in a word. A good and noble heart Is one that is flawless and perfect, not one that is corrupted by sin.

By contrast, Jeremiah 17 :9 tells us “the heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Who can know it?” The Hebrew word “anas,” translated as “desperately wicked,“ has the sense of weakness and frailty associated with an incurable illness. If ever there was a word to describe our sinful nature, this is it. It is definitely not good ground, and never will be. The only “good and noble” heart that Scripture shows us is the heart of God Himself. And the wonderful thing is, that when we are born again of the Father and He has given us a new heart, this is the very “heart of flesh” that we receive. It seems to me that the seed of the word of God can only be sown in the heart of flesh that we receive by the Spirit at the new birth. This is the ground of love with the word takes root and bears fruit.

This is not just theology and spiritual ideas: it works. When we choose to build on the ground of love we experience God‘s blessing. “Give, and it shall be given to you“ does not just refer to money or resources: when we choose to give love to others, God gives back to us, even in the small things. In fact, He often teaches us through the small things so we can apply his teaching to the bigger ones. If you know me, or have read some of my other articles, (eg “Between the Chapel and the Damned”) you will know that I am a bird watcher. A hobbyist bird photographer, to be precise. The picture above is of a distant great grey strike. They are very rare winter visitors to the UK, and there has been one this Winter on Cannock Chase, just a few miles from my house. There are apps that pinpoint the location of these rarities, so people in the birding community know roughly where they are. Yesterday morning I went out to try and find the great grey shrike. I only had a couple of hours, because I needed to meet with Anne by 10.30 so we could be on the same page about what to say at the retirement party that was being given in our honour (we have just retired from our business) at 12.00 o’clock. In other words, I had a relational commitment, a commitment to prioritize love.

I spent about an hour walking around and waiting in the area where the shrike had last been seen, but to no avail. My time was running out, and I was going to check one more likely place, but then I felt quite strongly that the Lord said: “No. It’s time you headed back now.“ On this occasion I did what I was told (on many occasions I don’t!) and started back down the path towards the car park. After a couple of hundred yards I turned the corner, and there was a little group of birders with their  cameras and telescopes all pointing in one direction. Yes: it was the great grey shrike. It was a good distance away, but happily I was able to see it and take some pictures. Five minutes after I arrived it flew off. If I had gone to check that other area before turning back, I would have missed it. God wants to bless us, even in our hobbies.

The word from Jeremiah about the heart of man goes on to say: “I, the Lord, search the heart, I test the mind, even to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings.“ (Jer. 17:10) He blessed me by allowing me to see that bird, of which there are at the time of writing only three records currently in the UK. But, and more importantly, it blessed Him that I listened to what He said and did what I was told, and put my love for other people before my personal interests.

The point is this. I know full well that my natural heart, my heart of stone, would have gone to check that other place before heading home. I would have said to myself, “It will only take five minutes, and that won’t make any difference to the circumstances of the rest of the day.” And indeed it wouldn’t have: when I got home events had actually been delayed by half an hour or so, so I would have had plenty of time. But my new heart, my heart of flesh, was open to hear the word to prioritise Love, and because I was able to respond to it I walked into the blessing that God had planned. “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be given unto you.”  (Matt 6:33)

Even, in this case, a great grey shrike.

Living by Faith, The word of God, Walking in the Spirit

Ears to Hear

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Paul wrote to the Galatians: “Foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you? He who supplies the Spirit and works miracles among you, does He do so by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?”  (Gal 3:1)

When we read this our initial, instinctive, impression of the Galatian church is probably something like “Bad Galatians! Paul is telling you off!” But actually if we look at our own church and compare the active presence of God at work among us, “supplying the Spirit and working miracles,” how do we compare with Galatia, where the text suggests that the miraculous is the norm? And alongside that expectation of seeing the miraculous power of God at work through the “supply” of the Spirit is also the assumption that the believers there are exercising the “hearing of faith” as a norm. Again, is this true of us today?

Paul is addressing a serious issue in the letter to the Galatians, specifically the heresy creeping into the church at Galatia that believers needed to be circumcised and to put themselves under Jewish law to attain salvation, but the context – the “lump” where the enemy is trying to insert his false “leaven” (Gal 5:9)- is that of a church of Spirit-filled believers who had “begun in the Spirit” (Gal 3:3), who hear God and walk by faith, and who experience the presence of God among them in power. The Galatians were a new church, and this level of life in Christ was where Paul feared they would fall away from. Many of us are in churches that have been in existence for decades, or even centuries, and we still haven’t attained to it. Maybe the same leaven is at work today.

Jesus talks about having “ears to hear.” Isaiah says: “Behold, a king will reign in righteousness,… The eyes of those who see will not be dim, And the ears of those who hear will listen.” (Isaiah 32: 1,3) We  can hear the Word with our eardrums and process it with our natural brains, but it doesn’t mean that we are hearing with our spiritual ears, and if we don’t have those “ears to hear,” we won’t be listening. It’s when the King reigns in righteousness in our lives that our hearing ears start to listen. We don’t just listen to Him when we want a miracle; we listen to him all the time and let his word direct our steps. We listen because He is the King.

Maybe this is why we so often don’t often see the miraculous: Maybe we don’t walk in it when we don’t need it. But when we walk in obedience and seek His direction in our lives at every step, we walk in the dimension of the miraculous, so we can expect the miraculous to be part of the landscape. Just as in the natural world we can turn a corner and see a flower by the path or a bird on the branch, so we can expect to see a gift of the Holy Spirit in front of us whenever He has chosen to put it there. As the prophet wrote, “The eyes of those who see will not be dim.”

Paul said he was “exceedingly zealous for the traditions of my fathers.“ (Gal 1:14) As God is preparing the Church for the upheavals of the last days and ultimately the return of the Bridegroom for His bride, we need to be vigilant that we too aren’t in thrall to the traditions of our own “fathers,” slavishly ‘doing church’ the way we always have done or the way it’s done in our particular denomination of network, rather than doing today what He wants today, which may be different from what He wanted yesterday, or last week, or last year. If this is the case we may not be walking in obedience to the King, and it could be that we are being even more foolish than the Galatians.

Prophesy and the prophetic, The word of God, Walking in the Spirit

The desert and the camel

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A couple of months ago the Lord gave me the following word, but I think now is the time to release it:

“I am the God of the universe. I put the stars in the sky. I put every vein on every leaf on every tree. Not a sparrow falls to the ground without my knowing. When those kairos moments, those “god- incidences,” happen in your life where you see my hand at work, arranging and organising your situations, it is because I have knitted the universe together to meet you in that moment and to open up my path for you.

You look ahead and you see an expense of barren desert. A rocky plane, stretching into the distance, with no path turning to the right or to the left. You say “I do not know which way to go. In every direction it looks the same, and the distance seems so great wherever I look.”

But I say I am calling you to walk by faith and not by sight. You cannot see a path because if I were to reveal it, you would be walking by sight and not by Faith. But I will guide you with my eye, even though your eye cannot see where to go. And you will hear a voice behind you, saying: “this is the way, walk in it,“ and you will step forward, one step at a time on my word. Because my word in you is living and active, and as you step on my word I will create that path for your feet and I will build structures that you can’t see through the active power of my word, even the structures of my kingdom. Will you trust me to knit the universe together anew at every step of obedience that you take? Will you trust my word, by which the worlds were made? Will you walk with me? Will you trust the power of my Spirit in your life?”

At around the same time the Lord also showed me a camel. It was, again, in the desert. Someone was trying to lead it with a rope, but it was resisting. I think the Lord was – is – saying that the camel knows that it’s got everything it needs to cross the desert: water stored in its hump; big flat feet to help it to walk across the soft sand without its feet sinking in, but we can be like camels who don’t know what they are carrying in their humps, and are resisting the person who is trying to lead them out across the desert. He says: “You have everything you need. You have my Spirit, and you have my word. I am holding the rope and I know the way you should go. You won’t wander off and get lost, so trust me and come with me across the desert. You may think it’s forbidding and barren, but it is also beautiful, and I will show you things, hidden things, that you have never seen before, because you have never been this way until now. Come, because now is the time.”

Be prepared; hold on., Living by Faith, Prophesy and the prophetic

The Big Reshuffle

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Prophesy from Andrew Baker for 2025

There is coming a big reshuffle, a time, a season, in fact a year, to put things in place for this new season. There will be a very big, noisy rattling, like going over rapids, a time such has not seen been seen before. There will be an upheaval of nations all over the world. There will be a repositioning and a realigning in the practical, financial and even the spiritual area, affecting your position and call, and all aspects, in fact, of ministry. There will be a recalibration, a shifting, so that God’s people, and many others in the secular world, are ready for 2026 onwards.

2025 is the year of holding tight to God as He moves things about. Huge changes are coming; new things and developments appearing; fresh ways of looking at things and new ways to accomplish them.

His people will be required to have a deeper walk of faith, walking right in the centre of corruption at many levels, yet holding the light of the Lord to show the way. God will position His people, and those secular people whom He will use, to bring light, hope, provision and direction during an upheaval that’s coming next in the world and in the church.

Do not panic, be calm. Get the lifeboats ready and practise your drills. This is a different year, 2025, not the same as any other you have experienced. Lay down the thinking that says that things can only be done the way they have always been done. Be free and flexible to operate in new ways, methods and plans. He can see ahead, now He wants you to understand the reality and get ready now! Change is here. You have not been this way before.

God’s ministers will loose, release and relinquish many things and people, even projects. You will collect many new ones but also there will be many challenges but also answers from heaven that you have not seen before, in your lifetime.

It’s a time to step up to the plate and do things you felt unable to do before. Get yourself ready in mind and in faith. Great is your God in the midst of you. He will enable you, bless you, anoint you, fill you and give you all you need in every way. His people will become the head and not the tail. Eventually, His leaders will help people into safety, like an ark, from drowning.

This is the season, enter it with joy and faith. There will be new adventures, and 100% commitment and submission will be required of God’s children and servants. Now the miracles, rescues, upbuilding of new, of good things, and the falling of old things. This is your day coming now. 2025 is your Esther season, Esther chapter 4 verse 14. This is your time, your moment, your season, your era. Don’t miss this! Rise up and be the ones who would take hold of the season with great courage. Be like Jesus, who for the joy set before Him in eternity, endured the cross as well as brought changes to the world. It is not a time to think of self, but to expand the kingdom of God. Be God’s people of this final season! Be those who will give, release, loose, relinquish, and yet pick up, run with and enjoy it, gathering, on the way forwards, an abundance of all that is needed and many new believers, too. It’s time to disciple the new and the younger; teaching with your experience, showing them how to walk in faith and in power. It’s time to see the last revival and the resources to do the job.

This is a time of fire and faith, not fear. It is a time for victory, not running from the enemy, for believing, rising up and seeing the kingdom increase in depth, height, wisdom, numbers, and, in particular, commitment to Jesus.

There will be an upheaval of nations, world finances, climate issues, lawlessness, power struggles and all that goes with this. You have authority and peace in Me. Take up your positions, allow the preparations to take place step by step, during the coming year, as you hear and obey. These changes and directions are not just to carry you through future issues coming on the earth and in the church, but are to give you the foreknowledge, the ability and the enabling to help so many more. The Lord is saying that we must now take time aside and meditate on these things.

The word of God

In Him we live and move and have our being

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Psalm 119: 116 says “uphold me according to your word, that I may live, And do not let me be ashamed of my hope.“ God’s word is not just ink printed on a page. It’s not just a collection of true stories, a set of ideas and principals to live by, descriptions of past events and prophecies of future ones, although it is all of those.

Hebrews 4: 12 says God’s word is “living and powerful and sharper than any two edged sword … and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart,”  and in Hebrews 1:3 we read that Jesus is “upholding all things by the word of His power.” These are profound statements, but they are also very familiar to most Christians who have any knowledge of the Bible: how can we take hold of them and position ourselves so that we don’t lose their depth in their very familiarity, but experience the reality of our lives being upheld by the word that upholds the Universe?

God said in Isaiah 55:8 that His thoughts are not our thoughts, and his ways are not our ways; that they are as far from us as the heavens are from the Earth.  Indeed, if we could comprehend those thoughts with our little human brains then He wouldn’t be much of a God, and the mystery of faith that underpins our relationship with Him would be non-existent. So in as much as I can stretch my thinking in the direction of His truth, I see it like this:

Just like the force of gravity in the natural world, God’s word is an ever present force in the spiritual realm. Speaking of the Temple, Hebrews 9:5 tells us that things on earth are but a shadow of the reality in Heaven (Hebrews 8:5). In the same way, I think that the power and the immanence of the word of God must be more tangible, its light more visible and its truth more discernible in heavenly places than they are on earth. Only in Christ, in the incarnation that we celebrate at Christmas, did the fullness of God’s word enter earthly dimensions; and since Pentecost the power of His word has arced in and through the body of Christ like an electric current as the Holy Spirit has taken what is Christ’s (John 16:5) and brought heaven to earth to build His kingdom. The Incarnation is more than Christmas; it is now: the Spirit of God is always wanting to make His word incarnate in our lives as we, His body, grow “to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” (Eph 4:13)

Kairos moments
To illustrate this, here are a couple of examples of how His word has supernaturally reached from heaven to earth in my experience. These are “kairos moments,” moments when, according to Webster’s dictionary, “conditions are right for the accomplishment of a crucial action; the opportune and decisive moment.”

I know a young Christian man who is a military pilot. When he was first deployed onto an aircraft carrier, I wanted an encouragement for him from the Bible that God would always be with him. I didn’t look the following verses up because I knew them and thought they were appropriate; they were the next section in my reading on the morning when I prayed for him:

“If I take the wings of the morning,
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there your hand shall guide me,
And your right hand shall hold me.” (Psalm 139 9-10)

Is there another verse in all the Bible that would have been more fitting for him then? I don’t think so. I cannot begin to fathom how God so arranged the universe for my reading of that scripture and my prayer for his deployment to coincide, but coincide they did: His living, active word reached across from heaven to enter a young man’s situation, answering his prayers and mine in one kairos moment.

More recently– in October 2024 – I was due to fly to Dallas from the UK for a business conference. I had invested time and money into the event, and I was expecting it to be profitable for our business. But a situation came about in the UK that suggested I should be here and not in Dallas. When I prayed about it, I felt the Lord strongly confirming that this was with was the case, so I didn’t go.

On the night when I should have been flying, I couldn’t sleep: did I hear from the Lord? Should I be on that plane? I really needed to know that I had heard from God and had made the right decision. It would have been too late to change my mind, but I needed to know for my own well-being.

In the morning, again, not by any prior knowledge of the scripture or seeking comfort by looking through an index of relevant verses, I read the following words:

“I will bless the lord who has given me counsel, My heart also instructs me in the night seasons.“ (Psalm 16:7)

I had wanted to know that I had heard from the Holy Spirit, but He wanted me to know as well. He had given me counsel and had instructed my heart in the night season.

Just as the word of Christ upholds universe by his mighty power, so He wants to bring His word into our lives by His Spirit, to uphold us “that we may live.“ Our God loves to communicate with us. His sheep hear his voice. Moreover, Acts 17:28 tells us “In him we live and move and have our being.” But any signal needs a receiver, so to step into these Kairos moments we need our spirits to be in tune with His. We can look at the River of Life, or we can step into it.  If you have not ever experienced the reality of moving in the dimension of the word of His power, take a step forward in your Christian life and make 2025 the year that you get your feet wet. And if, like me, you feel you may have sometimes dipped your toes into this wonderful heavenly stream, let’s at least try and get in up to our knees by the time we next celebrate the Word made flesh and dwelling among us.

Have a blessed new year!

Christian Life, Knowing God, Living by Faith, Walking in the Spirit

Between the Chapel and the Damned

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The Parable of the pectoral sandpiper

The Chappel Hide
The pectoral sandpiper (shown above) – or “Pec” as it is known in the birding community – is a wader that is scarce in the UK. (Waders are long legged, long billed birds that feed mostly around water margins.)   One had turned up in our local bird reserve, so  I decided one night I would go there before work if I got up early enough. Pecs are usually “passage migrants” – they stop by somewhere for a few days before moving on to their breeding or wintering grounds somewhere hundreds of miles away- so when there is one around, most birders make an effort to go and see it if they know where it is. According to the bird club blog, this one seemed to favour one particular part of the reserve, conveniently just in front of one of the hides. All the hides have names – this one is called the Chappel Hide.  I woke at 5 am and said: “No that’s too early. Lord, if I’m going birding, please wake me at 6 o’clock.” ( Nothing like spiritualising one’s hobby) But God seemed clearly happy with my hobby on this occasion, because I woke at 6 am exactly, practically to the second. What I didn’t realise at the time was that what He got me up for was rather more important than the bird…

I set off after coffee and a quiet time and got to the reserve at about 7.30. There are two very experienced and dedicated birders, Steve and Mark, who are often on the dam wall at one end of the reservoir at that time of day, scanning the whole reserve with their telescopes. The Hide is towards the other end. I felt quite strongly that when I got there, I had to go straight to the hide, and that I would see the pec if I did. However when I got to the end of the path and reached the edge of the water where the path forked I saw my two friends on the dam wall, and instead of turning left to go to the hide, I turned right to go and talk to them. I thought that they would probably know where it was, so it was worth checking with them first. But when I got there, Steve said, “it’s at the Chappel Hide!“ I knew what he was talking about of course. I stayed and chatted for a couple of minutes then set off for the Chappel Hide. However, when I got there, the pec was nowhere to be seen. I waited half an hour for it to show again but to no avail. Then the door to the hide opened and Steve walked in. “Have you seen it? he said.
“No.”
“It was just there,” he said, pointing to a very open spot just in front of the hide, where it would have made a perfect photograph. He scanned the whole area expertly with his binoculars and said, “No it must be skulking in the undergrowth again. But when you came up onto the dam it was there in front of the hide. I could see it with my telescope!”

Confluence of circumstance
When I had decided to go and talk to Steve and Mark where the path branched, it was about equidistant between the dam and the hide. If I had turned left, as I felt the Holy Spirit, who got me up at 6 o’clock practically to the second to go there, had told me, I would’ve seen my bird. But instead, I had decided to go and listen to man, as if their advice would be better than the Lord’s. Chappel? Chapel? Is that a coincidence? And what about the Dam wall? I was between the chapel and the damned, and I chose the damned. And when you start thinking about how God organized that confluence of circumstance the mind slowly explodes…

Driving home I was kicking myself for my stupidity. But the Lord made it clear that He knew what I was going to do, and that it was an important lesson for me that He wanted me to learn. It might only have been about a bird that I didn’t photograph or even see on that particular occasion, but the principal was one that had to be applied in much more important situations. It can be drawn from a number of scriptures, such as

The wisdom of this world is foolishness to God (1 Cor 3:19)
Blessed is the man who has not walked in the counsel of the ungodly (Psalm 1:1)
There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit (Rom 8:1)
We ought to obey God rather than men. (Acts 5:29)
There is a way that seems right to a man, But its end is the way of death. (Prov 14:12)

There is one more, too, because this isn’t quite the whole story. Isaiah 30:21 says “Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.” The path that I took was path B (below). But there was another path, path A, which is the one that I had intended to take and which I had seen myself taking as I drove to the reserve. If you are going along with my “leading of the Spirit” assumption, this is the one that I felt God was showing me. Path A was the way I should have been walking in. When I decided to take B instead – “just to see if Steve and Mark are on the dam” – I had actually already decided to go and talk to them if they were there. When I took that path I was already  in “the way that leads to death.” But what do we all pray? “Lead us not into temptation…” If I had gone the way I had been shown at the beginning, when I “heard the voce behind me,” I would not have been led into temptation…

The Valley of Decision
Is this all ridiculously over-cooked? Well, maybe; but it worked for me. Because when I got to work the same day (I am CEO of an educational supplies business when I am not writing or birding) there was a very important financial decision to be made. All “human” thinking pointed strongly in one direction, but we (myself, my wife Anne, and two other Christians in senior management) chose to seek God instead of doing what circumstances seemed to dictate. Anne had already felt that the Lord had told her not to “go down to Egypt,” which represented the obvious choice in the particular circumstance where we found ourselves, but if it hadn’t been for the pectoral sandpiper I would have been inclined to override her. Then as we prayed, we received a very clear course of action that no-one had seen before, which has turned out to be the wise choice, for a number of reasons. God is faithful, and His sheep hear His voice. But we have to be prepared to go to the chapel…

There will be more decisions for us all to make: as darkness covers the Earth and world systems tremble and collapse we will need increasingly to follow the paths that God shows us, and not the ways “that seem right to a man.” We need to be yoked to Jesus, because in that day there will be “multitudes in the valley of decision;” and if we can listen to that voice behind us – and obey it –   we will be following the right paths ourselves, and many will follow us to the chapel instead of going to the damned.

(The photo is the only other pectoral sandpiper I have seen. I took the picture in 2021, at Titchwell Marsh, in Norfolk UK.)

Knowing God, Pursuing Love, Walking in the Spirit

Yes and No: Life and death in the power of the tongue.

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Jesus said: “By your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” (Matt 12:27), and Proverbs 18:21 reminds us that “Life and death are in power of the tongue.” Every  time we open our mouths we release life or we release death.  Paul wrote the following to the Corinthians:

“The things I plan, do I plan according to the flesh, that with me there should be yes, yes, and no, no? As God is faithful, our word to you was not yes and no. For the son of God, Jesus Christ – who was preached among you by me Sylvanus and Timothy- was not yes and no, but in him was yes . For all the promises of God in him are yes, and in him amen, to the glory of God through us.“ (2 Cor 1: 17-20)

In Christ there is only Yes
“In Him was yes.” There are no negatives in Jesus. He only spoke words of Life. There are negatives in the flesh – “yes, yes, and no, no” – but in Christ there is only “Yes.” In the realm of the Spirit, where all the promises of God are ours and where we are called to live, there is only Yes and Amen, and for every yes and amen God receives the glory. Whatever context Paul was referring to here when he talks about his plans, the statement he makes is absolute and so I think we can rightly apply it to our own lives. In Christ there is only Yes. Does this mean that we say yes to every request or agree with every suggestion made by others? Of course not. But it does mean at the least that we remain affirming of the people whose requests or suggestions we refuse; at the most it means that what looks like a “no” to our flesh is actually a massive “yes” in the Spirit; and always it presents an opportunity to release something of the promises of God into the circumstances where we find ourselves.

So how do I move from the flesh, with its yes yes and no no, to the spirit of Jesus Christ and the life affirming faithfulness of God that is always Yes?

The answer begins with a question. When we read the account of the woman with the issue of blood in Luke (Luke 8: 43-48) we see Jesus on a mission, pressed by the thronging crowds, to raise to life the dead daughter of one of the local rulers of the synagogue. Here indeed was one of the “lost sheep of the house of Israel“ coming to worship him in faith. Surely nothing could be more important than to demonstrate the sovereignty of the Son of Man to one of the religious hierarchy? But a woman in need touched his cloak, He put aside his urgent agenda, and He stopped to asked the question “Who touched me?”

We know what follows. Power had gone out of him. The Holy Spirit was responding to the woman’s need as she came to him in  faith.

The dynamic of the miraculous
This was the moment of choice. The disciples saw only the agenda of the flesh, which was to say no in response to the pressing crowds; but the Spirit had a different agenda, which was to respond with a life affirming Yes to the sick woman’s need. Jesus ignored the pressing of the flesh and the negativity of His disciples to stop and see where the Holy Spirit was flowing.

We see the same contrast at work when Jesus fed the multitudes. Faced with His compassion for the 4,000, the disciples only saw the impossibility of feeding them:  “Where could we get enough bread in the wilderness to fill such a great multitude?” (Matt 15:33), whereas Jesus saw the limitless resources of Heaven and “commanded the crowds to sit down.” The flesh said No, the Spirit said Yes. The blind, the deaf, the lame, the demon-possessed – yes, yes, yes, yes.

This dynamic of the miraculous is available to us in the details of our everyday lives, where we can choose to release life or death into every situation that we face. We may not be ministering healing on every street corner and in every conversation, but if we pay attention to the exhortation of James to be “quick to hear, slow to speak,” (James 1:19) we never know when those opportunities might arise, our eyes can be open to avenues that only the Holy Spirit can reveal, and even our objections and refusals can be clothed in Grace.

To walk after the Spirit and not after the flesh we need to silence the “No!” that rises up when the negative voices are clamouring in our ears and circumstances are pushing us along their road, and we must be open to the touch of need and  ready to stop to ask the question that will connect us to where Jesus is saying yes.

(See also “Pursuing Love” for more around the story of the woman with the issue of blood).

Be prepared; hold on., Prophesy and the prophetic

The waters are rising

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Every year there is a wildlife spectacle on the Dee estuary (in NW England), when the high Spring tide floods the saltmarsh and sometimes comes right up to the sea wall. Hundreds of small animals are driven inshore; the roosting and feeding birds fly up and wheel around – and the gulls and birds of prey gather for the feast, Birdwatchers came from all around to watch the spectacle. I was there on the day of the highest tide of the year – over ten metres – standing on the rocks of all that remains of an old ruined quay, and as the waters ran in across the marsh and past where I was standing I sensed the Lord speaking through it:

“The waters are rising. The waters are rising and covering the low ground. Those who dwell in the marshes will rise up and panic, running from the racing tide or wheeling around and crying: “Where is my resting place? Where is my supply?” But I say I’m flooding the marshes. Even now you are seeing My waters rise, and have seen the floods begin, but I say that a time will come and is coming shortly when the flood will speed up. There will be times of suddenly, when the waters break through in different places one after the other, and men will run between them with their sandbags to try to plug the breeches, but the waters will continue to rise and the streams run together until they change the landscape completely. This will happen quickly. Nothing will stand before My Waters. So I say to you now, come onto higher ground, find your resting place on My rock. Come now, while you can. I will feed you and keep you safe, I will give you all that you need as you watch in amazement what I the Lord am doing. And when the floods recede you’ll see a different landscape, and you will walk with Me in the places where I will take you.”

Hebrews 6: 16-18 says that we “have fled for refuge to lay hold of the Hope set before us. This Hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stead fast, and which enters the presence behind the veil.”

The only safe place where we can flee for refuge is in the Presence of God. While the world flees from the waters, we must flee to the One who holds them in His hand. He will “show us the path of life, and in His presence is fullness of Joy.” Psalm 16:11. The call to “come up higher” has been echoing round the Church increasingly in the last few years, whether this has been in prophetic words given at large and small assemblies, released in prophetic forums or written in books. It tends to be an exhortation that some run to, thirsty for more of the Holy Spirit, and which others leave for those that do the running. The “higher ground” is seen as that place of more intense spiritual experience; of deeper love and more profound worship in the presence of God, where we may well walk in greater spiritual authority and more effective ministry but which is not so relevant to our day to day lives. And indeed Jesus does want us there because He loves us and wants to surround us with His love. But this is only part of the story: He is calling us to higher ground because it is the place of safety, the place where we will receive His directions and practical provision, as well as the anointing for ministry to those who are struggling in the flood and are reaching out to be pulled onto the rock themselves. It is an urgent call as well as an exhortation, and those who ignore it risk being among those caught in the flood. Jer 12:5 (which I’ve referred to elsewhere on these pages) becomes increasingly relevant with each passing day:

“If in the land of peace, in which you trusted, they wearied you, then how will you do in the floodplain of the Jordan?”

So what’s stopping you? The waters ae rising. Come up higher!