In His Likeness w/ AntTBri

When you need Him more than you need to be right or to prove your point you will respond differently to life and love.  Righteousness is the standard of life and love for the believer. A many of us aim to do the mere minimum when it is in our power to exceed it…do the work of life and love and people will get the point…s/he is living and loving for God. Better yet God will get the glory from our life and love. Obedience to the Word, way, and work of God is the believers plight, purpose and present.  We gift God with our life and love. Our life for His Life. Our love for HIS Love. God’s truth is that we must die daily to the unregenerated self and be quicked alive unto His.

Believers we are called to live and love selfless lives.  Sacrifice is our mandate, mission and manner of living and loving.  How efficient are we in doing so?  Are we effectively appropriating this word to life and love?  Are we dying to our way, wants and work so we can live and love according to the standard of God’s Word, work and way? Are you like me needing help in dying to your own narcissistic ways and works…struggling with what you want life and love to be? ARE you weighing the qualification of authentic love? “If you love me…love me with your WHOLE heart, mind, body and soul”. Is life and love requring you to sellout,  be sold out, selfless and sacrificial? If so, your response proves if you are spiritually alive or living in the natural?  It’s worthwhile to come to terms that God requires our all.  He wants all of us…to occupy us completely. If we are not meeting the standard it is my hope that we avail our hearts to the work of the Holy Spirit that we allow His perfect work in us.

My grandmother use to say “I can show you better than I can tell you”. As we live and love we have to ask ourselves the hard questions. Am I loving God, myself and others according to the standard of the Word?  Am I loving and living the way God desires, designed and designates for life and love? Am I loving God the way He wants to be loved? Are we showing Him, more than we can tell Him?  If so we’re dying daily to what we feel we need, want and desire opposite His leading and direction.  We are loosing our defense mechanisms and desire to control and manipulate life and love to push our own agenda.  We are loosing our right to live and love according to our natural senses.  Our spirit is being quickened alive beyond the symbolic expression of baptism. We are becoming more like Christ. If for no-one else,  are we beginning to prove my grandmother’s statement to Jesus Christ? “Here’s my life in exchange for your life”.  “Here’s my love in exchange for yours”. This exchange makes the difference, is the determinant and DEFENSE for the righteous while living and loving. God for us, in us, and working through us makes living and loving dead to the old way of life and love consistently possible. It’s not what we produce on occasion,  or more times than not…it’s the integrity of our hearts toward God as it is weighed and tried in the balance of life and love.   Maybe our best choice of action is to really sell out and whole heart surrender to the plan, purpose and promise of God for life and love on a daily, minutely, secondly basis.  Maybe then we won’t be a talking, walking, and lying contradiction to our said faith.

When pleasing God is our only objective of living and loving our responses will be antithetical to normal human behavior.  We will crucify the flesh by submitting to the Holy Spirit.The Holy Spirit will strengthen, support and sustain us when life and love tries to discount, discourage and destroy our witness through our humanity. We will do the work of sacrifice and total surrender.  Forgoing our right to opinion, obstinance and oblivion to fleshy actualities.  People are watching and LISTENING to what we say and do.  Many of us are our own worst enemies…we are ensnared by our own words and actions…cancelling ourselves…and making a mockery of grace and mercy.  It’s not what goes in a man/woman that deviles them it’s what comes out of them that is their detriment. Too many of us are speaking death, planting seeds of discord, doubt, disdain and using devious devices to push our own agendas as we live and love.  Too many of us are presenting ourselves one way in public but are living a different reality in private. We are double-minded and unstable in all our ways…we do just enough to keep up the facade of righeteousness.  We’re fooling and hanging ourselves at the same time and we fail to realize it because we choose to believe the lie we tell ourselves and others…”I love the Lord”.  The truth is He knows our hearts toward Him, how we put our wants and desires, the way we think life and love should be and go before Him.  Life and love our way has desynthesized us to the desire, designatation and development of the workings of the Holy Spirit in, through and around us.  Self gratifying practices need to be put on the altar of life and love…the need to be right…the need to be in control has to be relinquished if we are ever going to reciprocate the love of God authentically.  My dear sister and brother can you you hear the screams and scampering of humanity saying “I’m dying here…no more giving life to what currently makes me me. It is the hallowing of God’s name…the admission that He is Lord…absolutely and completely right about life and love and that we are wrong, incomplete and undone without Him. It’s the surrender of  our last ditch efforts to stay alive outside of God.  It is exposure…the truth revealed or unveiled.

Life and love is full of chameleons…people blending in and becoming what the environment calls for instead of living and loving according to the standard of Holiness.  We fail to image our creator because we’re mimicking the counterfeit and esteeming his way and works above the ONE deserving to be exalted. We are giving the enemy the greater advantage because we’re calling wrong right and right wrong to satisfy our attempts of justification. We want God but not so much, we live and love for God but not really.  When it comes to selflessness and sacrifice we surmise God knows my heart…that’s too hard…that’s more than I’m able to do or can bare. We pass off productivity  for progression because it looks and sounds good..keeping the old man alive…denying him/her nothing.  We barter compliance and forfeit commununing…we believe that our minimal sacrifice is good enough.  Is life and love in it’s current manifestation really worth not dying? Who are we kidding? Are we like the fig tree, displaying green leaves when there is no evidence of fruit on us?  Are we dead men and women living and loving?  Is the work of the Holy Spirit killing off or causing everything antithetical God to die off our life and love?

People of old use to sing, ” it’s me, it’s me, it’s me o Lord standing in the need of prayer”…”Lord I want to be a christian in my heart” these songs reminded humanity that we need God, the work of the Holy Spirit to navigate and negotiate life and love successfully.   They maintained a dependency on the Word of God and were not self sufficient, all knowing or wise in and of their own strength.  They realized them with out God meant eternal death and not the temporary inconvenience of denying and dying to natural desires to obtain the excellency of His manifested glory upon life and love. What is preventing us from obtaining Him.  Olivia Pope told Fitz last season during “Scandal””if you want me…earn me”.  Well, we will never merit the love of Jesus Christ but we can lay down our intellectual, emotional and natural selves to reciprocate His love by living and loving  spiritually.  It’s time to call a spade a spade. Too see what it is we don’t want to see and believe about ourselves and change/make a different choice while there is still time.  God will not chide with us forever.  Don’t we want to do and be better for God (forget those persons we want to impress, not hurt, or we feel indebted too..ourselves included)?  We’re either with God living and loving in His righteousness (righteously) or against God (wickedness) and the determinant is in what we consistently do and say juxtapose to the picture we’re painting for ourselves and others… God knows our personal truth. Why we’re in the state that we’re in? Where we really are and if we’re meeting His standard for life and love.  Many of our  hearts are so far from Him. We have got to do and be better and TRY (put forth some effort) to stop breaking God’s heart. We have to die.  It’s time to make our election sure…who is it that we’re living and loving for ? Is it God, ourselves, or man? The way in which we consistently live and love defines, displays and demonstrates the truth of our assertion. May we want to please God more than we want to appease our flesh. The righteousness of God makes us righteous we simply have to accept, agree and adapt to the standard. It’s possible all we have to do is die to our way and be quickened alive to Gods way, Word and way. It’s life and loves choice and consequence. We will reap the reward of our choice…choosing to die to my way, work, and wants that I  may obtain Him…living and loving for Christ is not comfortable, convenient, or cute it’s selfless, sacrificial and sacred. May heaven hear and honor the cry of our humanity as we ask for help in dying and we inspire a willingness to die to who we are and who we’ve been so we can authentically live and love in His likeness together. May the truth of our assertion be “I’m dying here”~AntTBri