Doers II

 It is within your ability to do what the Word of God instructs you to do. God will not ask the impossible of you. He does not require us to lay aside all filthiness and overflow of wickedness, knowing we could never manage to do so, wanting to see us try and fail. He is not a cruel God. He is a good Father. If God requires something of me, then I know it is within my ability to carry out His command. It may not be pleasant, easy, or otherwise painless, especially to the flesh, but it is doable as long as you desire to obey.

It’s not supposed to be painless anyway. If you think it is, revisit Abraham and Isaac and their journey to Moriah. That’s the lie, though, isn’t it? You must strive for and pursue everything else in life except for eternity. Eternity will be thrust, nay, forced upon you, and God will be so filled with gratitude that you accepted His offer to save you that He will bow and scrape to stay in your good graces for the rest of your life!

Either I’m switching to decaf or putting together a book titled All the Lies the Church Believes! I haven’t decided yet. I will let you know when I do.

Once more, we are confronted with our heart's true desire versus what we declare with our lips. People sing lies every Sunday because their actions are contrary to what they sing all the other days of the week. They go and sit in a pew and hear the word being preached, but once they leave, they take no action to follow through and do as instructed.

More often than not, the emphasis is not placed on being a doer of the word because it’s likely to cause friction. Even when the shepherd shepherds and emphasis is placed on our faith being more than just warming a pew for an hour every other Sunday, the sheep seem to have selective hearing and only receive the thing about blessings being pressed down and shaken together.

James 1:22-25, “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does.”

Being a hearer only and not a doer of the word is not an alternative or a secondary option. It’s self-deception. Oprah is not being open-minded when she insists there are multiple paths to the same destination; she is a deceived individual who is attempting to deceive others into embracing her deception.

But what if you don’t yet know the whole Word? Be a doer of the Word you know, and with each new revelation of the Word in your life, be a doer of that as well. Everybody wants to bind and loose and dispatch angels to foreign lands, but nobody wants to lay aside all filthiness and overflow of wickedness. That’s too banal. It doesn’t get anyone excited.

We dance around singing about having the enemy under our feet when we haven’t removed him from our hearts, then wonder why there is no power and no authority in today’s church. Nobody wants to hear about what it takes to walk in authority or have the devil know your name. All they want to hear is how they’re queens and kings and priests, oh my, while refusing to be doers of the word because that’s not how they roll.

Being a doer of the word implies no longer being a doer of everything else that stands in opposition to the word, and as long as we can find someone who will tell us we can have the best of both worlds, what’s the point of denying ourselves?

Tell me how to be victorious! Well, you have to put on your armor and learn how to fight first. Forget that; just tell me how to win. By learning how to fight. There must be another way, an easier way, a less taxing way. There isn’t! So either you learn how to fight, stand, and strive to the utmost in standing, having done all and leaving everything on the field of battle, or you will never know the taste of victory in your life.

It’s war! If you think about it in anything less than those terms, you will not take it seriously enough. You’re not going to put up much of a fight when the devil’s trying to kill you and you’re trying to flirt with him.

If you are a hearer of the word and not a doer thereof and believe you have attained, you are deceiving yourself. It may sound harsh, but it’s better that you know now while you can do something about it than when you stand before the throne of judgment. There will be those fully assured in themselves that they will be welcomed into the kingdom with open arms, only to be told to depart from before His presence because He never knew them. We don’t like to talk about that too much, and when we do, it’s always meant for someone else. I’m sure those told to depart also thought it was about someone else.

We approach God with the mindset of daily being refined, not as ones who have achieved perfection and have nothing left to whittle away or remove. We are not perfect but are perfected daily by being doers of the word and not hearers only.

The situation becomes problematic when we look in the mirror and see something that isn’t there. Bodybuilders call it muscle dysmorphia when they see themselves as small and puny, no matter how big they get. Christians have yet to coin a name for it, but inverse spiritual dysmorphia is likely a good jumping-off point wherein we look in the mirror and see ourselves mightier than we are, thereby concluding that we have no further need of refinement or being a doer of the word.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.