RENEW

Are you living in the power of the Holy Spirit?

Have you received power to worship God with more freedom, to pray more effectively? Have you received power to witness? Have you received power in your life to heal the sick, to deliver someone from a demon, power to overcome addictive behaviours in your own life or to pray for others to be set free?

If someone asked you to describe your experience of the Holy Spirit, what would you say? Would you speak of a life-giving, empowering river of refreshing waters, forever flowing, and overflowing on yourself and onto others? Or would you speak of a heart that is desolate and dry with barely enough energy to put one foot in front of the other?

No matter what may come always leave all the results in God’s sovereign hand. Remember, the same Bible that contains the Gospels also contains Job

Sometimes God’s answer to the prayer of faith is not healing, but grace to persevere.

The Kingdom of God is not absent of the Holy Spirit. We need to embrace and engage with the person of the Holy Spirit. We are promised the ongoing presence and gift of the Holy Spirit who mediates God to us here on earth.

How do you make a marriage work? How do you make this one flesh relationship, this marriage covenant last?

Jesus started a process of developing and equipping so that we can be of service to him. Where is presence is, his power is. We have been given authority to share the message of the Kingdom of Jesus with the world. But before we go, we need to be discipled and equipped to minister in the power and anointing of the Holy Spirit.

According to God’s original design for marriage, the general truth is that a spouse is bound to their marriage partner for life. Only death should end the marriage covenant. But as we all know, in this world of broken people—including broken Jesus-followers—God’s design for marriage isn’t always accomplished. God cares about marriage but not simply for marriage’s sake. God cares about marriage because God cares about people.

We are challenged to choose to follow the path of the cross by setting aside our own natural inclination to place our self on the throne of our lives and rather, in the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit, and by means of the new life of Christ, to empty ourselves of 'Self' and become a servant of all.

Good and satisfying sexual relations require building a relationship with a marriage partner. Loving sex is the expression of mutual love between two people. And it becomes more loving and more satisfying the more the love grows and deepens between the two people.

Pornography, on the other hand, is all about short term, uncommitted, shallow sex. It’s about depicting sexual fantasies in the imagination that have little or nothing to do with the actual love life of real-life happy couples.

We can’t confuse pornography with love, or with making love.

Jesus identifies our imagination as part of reality. He says that what we do in our inner imaginative world is as important as what we do with our bodies in the outer world. What we do with our bodies in this objective world is an expression of what’s going on in our inner world, in our imagination.