Month: January 2022

When the scale doesn’t tip!

| DebBullock51

There have always been seasons in my life when I have started a discipline and I’m pretty good at seeing it through as long as I have made a deep decision to do it. I don’t call it a diet because frankly I don’t like the word. It’s more of a decision to give something up or do something like intermittent fasting etc… I will admit that it is normally because my jeans are tighter than they once were and I want to sort it out, so I brush the dust off the weighing scales or ‘liars’ as John and I like to call them! haha! And here we go – again – I write my starting weight in the journal and usually accompany it with a sad face and with determination I go into a healthier life style.

When weigh day comes around, it’s with hope, that as you tentatively get on board, you will see a smaller number than the last weigh in. When it’s the same reading as last time, it’s rather depressing isn’t it? I’ll admit to moving the scales around the bathroom, even taking it into another bathroom just in case it’s not correct, alas, it’s the same unless you do it on carpet and then you’ve lost half your body weight!

The temptation (after you’ve thrown the scales out the window) is to quit, eat a whole chocolate gateaux and forget the whole thing! STOP! That’s the last thing you should do. Don’t quit. I’m not only talking about health here, I’m talking about anything that takes determination which is just about everything in life! You won’t get anything without determination.

Jesus did promise an abundant life but he didn’t mean we don’t have to do anything in order for it to come to pass. Back to the wise and foolish builder’s analogy, building takes hard work, building a foundation isn’t fun, no one sees it – ever – no one sees the hours of private prayer, the fasting, the travailing, most don’t see the training, swimming, walking, running. When the scales don’t tip in your favour, the easiest thing to do is to quit. Quit praying, fasting, eating good things, training etc…

Some advice before we get to the encouragement bit. I’m doing you a dis-service if we just go straight to the encouragement. Two things to always check. 1. Is there anyone in my life that I need to forgive? 2. Is there any unconfessed sin in my life? I firmly believe these things really matter. They disconnect us from God. Not from our eternal security, but from our clear communication with the head. Someone brought this illustration to our prayer meeting recently, if you put a light switch on, but it isn’t connected to a power source, the light is NEVER going to come on. Same is true with God, if you’ve lost your connection, until you reconnect, I believe you’re wasting your words in prayer.

Encouragement for this week, if you’ve ‘fallen down’ in any area of your life, get back up, keep ‘getting on the scales’ until you see the tipping point, it will come, don’t take no for an answer. Until you’ve clearly heard God say no, keep going. We sold our house in Wales back in December 2021. We’d been praying, declaring it’s sale ‘right price, right time, right person’ for almost 10 years. Now, it is done. There’s a tick by that prayer.

And, if you have eaten a whole chocolate gateaux recently in response to the ‘liars’, don’t worry about it!

Until next time, D xx

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John 10:9¾

| DebBullock51

In the movie Harry Potter (just humour me for this example – don’t throw stones! haha!). When the students need to get the train to get to school, they have to go to a train platform that is in between platforms 9 and 10 and they get to said station (9¾) by running against a wall and if they ‘believe’ that it’ll open, it will and they find themselves on a ‘magic’ station which houses the train to take them off on their adventures. Stay with me!

I believe that Jesus died to give us a John 10:10 life, but many of us settle for John 10:9¾. We may say things like, ‘everything is great, except my health, my finance, my friendships, my marriage and so on. We become content with our lot and so often choose to keep a ¼ of our life and not sign it over for God to complete the fraction.

Of course, life can throw daily storms and hurdles to overcome, but I’m talking more about the long term problems that we’ve carried for years and we’ve just accepted as John 10:10 doesn’t apply!

Just like the characters in the fiction that is Harry Potter had to believe in order to get through the wall, we have to believe in John 10:10 too. If we don’t believe it’s for us, we won’t fight for it. We won’t look that ¼ in the eye and ‘take it down!’ God is a great father and he loves to look after His children just as we love to look after our own.

I was reading just this week about abundant life and the thought came to me that if you want it, you have to obey the rules of it. What do I mean? Well, for example, if you want abundant life in the area of your health, but you don’t look after your body and soul, then you’re disobeying the rules which then negates abundant life in that particular area. You can’t just pray and eat donuts – that won’t work! If you want abundant life in the area of your finances but you’re not a good steward, you’re disobeying the clauses of God’s promises which will negate abundant life in your finances.

Even though we are in a new covenant, God has still given us rules of life to follow – above are just two examples of that. Maybe the ¼ is an unanswered prayer that you’ve given up on. Pick it back up – God answers prayer, don’t give up. He will say ‘yes’ ‘no’ or ‘wait’. Some prayers won’t be answered in our life time, but they will be answered. Isaiah was prophesying Jesus who came long after he was gone – around 700 years! I hope you won’t have to wait that long, but if you do, you’ll be in heaven so it’ll be OK!

Be encouraged, go for your dreams, don’t be scared and surrender that ¼ over to God and abundant life!

Until next time, D x

Green fingers

| DebBullock51

I’m no gardener and my knowledge of anything to do with the garden is limited to say the least, but what I do know is, the ground in which one plants, is very important.

One of the stories that Jesus told his listeners was about seeds and ground. If you want to read it in the Bible, you will find it in Matthew (New Testament) chapter 13 verses 1-9. Picture this, Jesus came out of his house and sat beside the sea, beautiful. He didn’t need a pulpit, a whiteboard, a powerpoint, a mic – he simply sat beside the sea to talk to the people.

The story goes, a sower went out to sow seed, some of the seed fell along the path and the birds came and devoured the seed; some fell on rocky ground where it didn’t have much soil, so the seed sprang up very quickly, but because there wasn’t much soil, when the sun rose, it withered the plants because they had no root; other seed fell amongst thorns but the thorns grew and strangled the plants; finally, some seed fell on good soil and produced grain, a 100, 60 and 30 fold.

What was Jesus on about? Thankfully, he gives the explanation a little further on in the chapter – verses 18-23.

The seed is the Word of the Kingdom, i.e. what God is saying to people. The path represents people who don’t understand that word and the birds represent the evil one who steals the word from the hearts of said path! Rocky ground is people who receive the Kingdom words straight away with joy, yet they have no root so when life gets tough, they walk away from the very words that gave them life. The thorns are those who get overwhelmed by the cares of the world and their life is un-fruitful and the good soil are those who hear the word, understand it and bear fruit.

The question for all of us this week then is, how’s your ground? How would you describe yourself today? Pathy, rocky, thorny or goody?Are you confused? Do you have no roots? Are you overwhelmed by the cares of the world? Or is your ground, watered and ready to receive Kingdom words?

If you need a shift of ground and that could be something like listening to different voices or forgiving someone that’s hurt you or letting go of bitterness and anxiety or getting back into community with your church family. A whole host of things could be stopping you from leading a fruitful life, but I’m confident that if we’re prepared to get the gardening gloves on, get the rake and the hoe and go to work on our ground, things will turn around.

In a world where lies are being exposed almost hourly, let’s celebrate, that as followers of Christ, we have access to the one and ONLY truth and it behoves us to make our garden good and ready to receive the Words of the Kingdom and to make sure that those words go deep down and form roots that cannot be shaken.

Happy gardening!

D x

Move closer to move away

| DebBullock51

Let me start with another change! When you start something new, it usually takes some time to get into a rhythm. I decided that Monday wasn’t a great blog day so I’m shifting to Saturday!

I don’t always have a ‘word for the year’ but as I’ve been praying and listening at the start of 2022, I’ve been hearing the word, ‘closer’. I’m reading a really good book at the moment called ‘Ten Words to live by’ Jen Wilkin It’s a book about the ten commandments, which I admit doesn’t sell it well, but let me encourage you to get it. I’m only on commandment one which is, ‘you shall have no other gods before me’ believe me, this is giving me enough to think about. To think about ‘my God and……’ are there things in my life that I depend on or feel I need that knock God of first spot?

Then I began to think, rather than giving up everything I enjoy, giving everything away that I own and going to live in rags in a cave (didn’t really get that far – just for dramatic effect!) I decided that if I just get closer to Jesus, the things that perhaps need to drop off, will do so automatically. If you know me, you will know that I am a huge believer in John 10:10 which says, ‘the devil comes only to kill, steal and destroy, (not God, the devil – in case anyone needs a reminder), but I have come that you may have life and life to the full.’ God is not out to make us have a miserable life. We are His children and He loves to see us thriving – don’t you with your kids?

What we need to watch is that we’re not doing life instead of Him, but rather, as well as. What a winning combination that is. Let me repeat the stat that I mentioned last week. According to a recent poll only around 55% of people have returned to church. That makes me sad. I wonder if they’ve created new habits? I wonder if they think they don’t need church? I wonder if they’ve turned away from God completely? I wonder if they’re scared? There could be so many reasons, but I can’t help thinking that if we all just move closer to Jesus, we would be automatically moving away from the negatives.

I was picturing Jesus like a fire, and the closer I got to the fire, the more, the rubbish burned away. You see the closer you stand to Jesus, the better your reactions and responses will be, you will bite your tongue just a little longer, you’ll speak kinder, you’ll love better and so on. The opposite is true, if you stay away from a fire long enough, you will grow cold.

How close or how far away are you from the fire? One quick test – do you attend your church’s prayer meeting? It’s always the ‘cinderella’ meeting, but we know that without it, we can’t do very much. If you feel far away, maybe this is a place to start? If your church doesn’t have a prayer meeting (sigh) why not start one? Prayer should be the engine room of every church.

I hope no-one is planning on moving to a cave, but whatever you decide to do in response to this, if anything, at least take a step closer. If you don’t know Jesus at all, take the first step. Contact me, nothing would thrill me more!

Move closer to move away. D x

If you move closer to Jesus, you will move further away from negative stuff

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Build 2022 on THE ROCK

| DebBullock51

One of my favourite parables (stories that Jesus told) is the one about two builders of houses. It’s believed by scholars that the two houses were next to each other and were affected by the same storm. If this is correct, then it makes the illustration even more powerful when you transfer it to the days in which we are living in right now.

It’s fair to say that leading a church through the last 2 years has been very challenging.

March 2020 brought the first lock down – the good one as I heard it once described and totally understood that description. Everyone went with it, no one really knew what was happening. Peoples’ lives changed practically overnight. Everything and everyone went on line. Schools, churches, keep fit classes and so on. We were told to stay at home. Wow. Hard to believe we lived through that – but we did.

Fear was launched at our nation and, indeed the world. The media, scientists, politicians bombarded us with graphs, facts, figures and predictions that were enough to send us all into retreat and ‘stop the world, we want to get off’ mode. Whatever your thoughts on what’s been going on, there is no doubt now that so much of it has been false data, even today I read of a doctor in America who has admitted he himself falsified data. The Why is yet unknown, but I’m sure it will be uncovered either in a movie (haha) or when we get to heaven! Either way, the truth will come out. I have much compassion for those who have lost their lives because of Covid and I include in those, people who have lost jobs, businesses, the mental health issues, the children who weren’t in school and so were missed by social services and were brutally killed, those who have died because of missed cancer diagnosis and the list goes on. There have and will continue to be many lives affected negatively because of Covid 19 and not just the disease.

There’s a lot of work to do and the church has a good chance of helping, but the church can only help from a position of strength. If the church is in retreat how can it advance the gospel? As soon as we were allowed, we were back in our church, gathering together, worshipping and hearing the Word of God together. Nothing can compare with that. Sadly, according to a Twitter poll by Andrew Wilson at the end of August 2021 asking Christians to guess how many of their congregations had returned to church was answered by 902 churches in the UK giving an overall average of about 55%. That’s tragic. Let’s hope it goes up in 2022. I don’t believe the devil was the instigator of the pandemic, but he’s not asleep and can only be rubbing his hands together at such stats! Come on church – we’re supposed to be the light of the world.

For those of us who are Christians, we have incredible access to the mind of Christ. From the start of the Covid crisis, John and I were determined to stand on the word of God as the ultimate truth, the only unchanging truth. I have no desire to leave this earth yet, but I said many times, for me personally, what’s the ‘worst’ that can happen, I die and wake up in paradise. That’s the believer’s reality. This earth is temporal. Don’t know if you ever meditate on heaven, but you should try it some time. If you know Jesus, one day you will live there for eternity. Wow.

So, what about now? What are you building on? Back to the story! There were two men, two houses , two foundations, one storm and two outcomes! The one built his house on sand – what could that look like for us today? Maybe building on unhealthy choices, guilt, un-forgiveness, bitterness, lack of prayer, Bible and church attendance or too much chocolate! 🙂 If you build your life on such things, when the storm comes you are going to struggle to keep your house up!

Build on THE ROCK – Prayer, Bible, Church attendance (this is vital for me – happy to talk further about it if you’d like to know why) good choices, forgiveness etc. When your storms come, your house will stand firm.

In the house building trade, of which I know nothing except to say, foundation building isn’t seen, it takes work, time and much digging down, but when the foundation is set, the houses go up quickly . It’s the same in our lives, build what can’t been seen in order to grow into what can be seen and that should be lights shining brightly in a world that has lost its way.

Love D x