Free your Mind

I love to imagine….

It is beyond dreaming. It is the place were all things are possible, where we are not constrained or limited.

As a kid I was never any good at English. I discovered later that audio does nothing for me. People can explain things 100 different ways, but without a frame of reference I am lost. I need a whiteboard. I need a picture. I love an immersive movie that draws you in and shows you how things work. My favourite movie of all time is the Matrix. It delves into the depths of philosophy, it combines the best of imagination and action and creativity and even maths and science. It is fundamentally about freedom, and freeing your mind.

I love how God reveals himself to me in vivid dreams and snapshots and provides the words to guide and lead my thoughts around His intention. It’s like waking from a vivid dream, where you are shaking and agitated and feel like what you just saw is real, in fact more real than your physical world reality. But this is no nightmare, this is the complete opposite. This is direct insight into the mind of Christ, God’s view of things. Wow! Better still I am not sleeping I am wide awake and even driving down the road. Truly we are meant to be citizens of heaven, foreigners in an alien place called earth.

It is written that, He inhabits the praises of His people, and this is so true. It is so funny and so like God to mess with our human thinking and perspective. I go to the fastest growing church in Australia, with praise and worship music that sells in the millions, in fact their latest album was on the top of the itunes charts here recently. But when I am in church the music creates such an atmosphere, where you can feel the presence of God in the place like no-where else.

When I first turned up at church, the music was so loud that my ears started to hurt. I did not know the words, but God had invited me to come, so I was determined to tune into him. I come from a conservative church background where we used to sing old hymns like Amazing Grace and How Great Thou Art. I would sing them loud and feel a shift in my emotions and passion, but nothing like this. So here I was in a packed room, with the music up loud, but could not sing along. Then a calm came over me and I abandoned myself to it. Then these words “I command a blessing, you need to agree with it and walk in it”. I looked around but could see no-one talking with me. The words were not shouted, but very clear. It was clearly the voice of God as I would come to realise in the next few moments. The music stopped and a Man came onto the stage and spoke these words from the stage. “Today I want to encourage you in your giving from Psalm 133. It is about unity. It is from this place where God commands a blessing and you need to agree with it and walk in it” WHAT THE HECK! God had spoken to me through his word all my life, but never like this! It was so back the front. Hearing the word from Him and then from the Pastor or Minister and then again from the bible. Here is the verse:

Psalms 133 BEHOLD, HOW good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity! It is like the precious ointment poured on the head, that ran down on the beard, even the beard of Aaron [the first high priest], that came down upon the collar and skirts of his garments [consecrating the whole body]. It is like the dew of [lofty] Mount Hermon and the dew that comes on the hills of Zion; for there the Lord has commanded the blessing, even life forevermore [upon the high and the lowly].

It completely blew my mind, how can this be? From that point on, I have become like a sponge that craves fullness, that wants to stay in the living water, so that I might absorb Him more.

Now I stand in Praise and Worship as the music plays, sometimes I sing or hum along, sometimes God moves my lips and speaks his word. It is great that the music is so loud because I can then just tune in to Him and spend time with Him as He inhabits the praises of His people. Now He speaks so much and has so much to say, that I’m standing there taking dictated notes on my phone as everyone else is singing around me.

Last Sunday I was in our new church building and what He had to say was more cryptic and lengthy than usual, so I spent about 30mins writing it down during the workship singing time. Then the sermon was about Immanuel, God is with us, and how God is literally with us and as we draw near to Him, he comes close. Get this from the Pastor “Some of you may get downloads from God and be there in church taking notes on your phone as you hear from Him”. I laughed with my wife, as here I was, at times thinking in my human-ness, what would the people around me think of me on my phone in worship? No one had ever criticised me in the past 5+ years although my wife had, had to explain what was going on to a few people. Here is the funny part. After the service we turned to talk with complete strangers a Husband and Wife from Holland, for them to share how he had just received a download from God and had spent must of the service writing it down!

God so loves to multiply. We tend to add or substract in our experience, but what God has for us is multiplication. Some of you would have heard of the parable of the talents, where three servants are each given a talent. Two of them multiply it, the other maintains it. The two are rewarded the third is punished, with the talent taken and given to the others. I have always struggled with this story, as it sounds like God was being mean and harsh. But then I heard a sermon from John Bevere, where he explained that God is a God of multiplication and when He gives us a gift it must multiply. It is not for maintenance but multiplication. It multiplies as we give the gift. We felt a huge connection with these strangers, who had come from the otherside of the world. They shared some of their download from God as we did, truly God was present in our midst.

But its more than a nice feeling, a place beyond imagination, a place where God reveals His intention. I find when the dream, and the words are more cryptic, it is God’s way of inviting us to come and explore, to look for clues, to be attuned to His presence and to walk with Him.

After my Holiday experience with Him, and our last client meetings for the year, I made a choice to trust him with a particularly challenging client meeting on Friday. Prior to it I was wrestling with how to prepare, to focus on a defense when we had done nothing wrong, to mount an offensive when although they had not followed process they too were suffering. I left for the long drive with a few “bullet points”, but tense with anticipation of what was to come. I was drawn back to the cryptic word, the “download” from Sunday. Some made sense, all about the pole vault and putting my feet on the upside, but much was too hard for my pea brain to comprehend. So here I travelled for some 75kms, with the worship music up, glancing back to the word when stopped in traffic. God spoke of fire and warmth, peace and pieces, getting fired up but not hot under the collar. Images of a warm handshake with a smile, robust conversations amongst those in a commited relationship, and pieces broken, that could not go back in the container they had come from. The word “I have given you pieces, multiplied peaces, multiplied peace. You cannot put the broken pieces back in the one container, for it must expand, no containment”. All I could do is pray that God would align my words and actions with His intent.

It is funny how we Christians use God as a last resort rather than the solid Rock on which we should stand, and the one who wants to guide us and walk with us. It’s taken me 40 years to walk with Him and lean on him – talk about slow learner!

So in the end I went into the meeting and His intent, His presence, His word was spoken and revealed. I left with a solid resolution and 3 x the budget to resolve the issue! How good is God, and how good is the outcome when we align with Him. I had in my human-ness wanted to subtract myself from the relationship or add a machine gun to blow them up. But God multiplied his blessing, and renewed unity came where the enemy had sought division.

Praise be to the God who is able to do far above and beyond all we can imagine, if only we align with him, and act like we trust him.

Ephesians 1:17-19 [For I always pray to] the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, that He may grant you a spirit of wisdom and revelation [of insight into mysteries and secrets] in the [deep and intimate] knowledge of Him, By having the eyes of your heart flooded with light, so that you can know and understand the hope to which He has called you, and how rich is His glorious inheritance in the saints (His set-apart ones), And [so that you can know and understand] what is the immeasurable and unlimited and surpassing greatness of His power in and for us who believe, as demonstrated in the working of His mighty strength,