James 3:11,12 Does a spring send forth fresh water and bitter from the same opening? Can a fig tree, my brethren, bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Thus no spring yields both salt water and fresh. NKJV
What To Do With This Old House
Britain still currently holds the abysmal record of producing the worst serial killer ever to the stalk the earth. The Doctor of Death, Harold Shipman was convicted for the murder of hundreds of his patients. No one really knows that actual number.
Before the horror of Harold, it was the ferocity of the serial killer Fred West, that haunted people’s dreams. Fred West and his wife Rose confessed to killing thirty people, many of whom were found to be an integral part of the structure of 25 Cromwell Street. This house has since been demolished and every brick has been crushed and every piece if timber has been burnt.
It is not 25 Cromwell Street that bothers me, but rather 27 Cromwell Street, the building next door, which was and still is at the time of my writing, a Seventh Day Adventist Church, still offering 'Sunday School and Divine worship on the Sabbath'. These services both are and were then, held right next next door to this house of death, I mean just feet from these grotesque happenings! Twice on the Sabbath and no doubt mid week as well, they would lift their faces to God Most High in prayer, for themselves, for their missionaries, for their communities and for their neighbours, even the people who lived next door to them. Imagine that.
As God looked down from heaven, He saw in the same screen shot, both the hands of these worshippers lifted high in praise and supplication and no doubt the pleading hands of women being brutally murdered, mistreated, begging for their life, before being hacked to death and hidden just feet away from the all the prayers and praise. God saw the living and the loving wanting to be anointed for service and sacrifice whilst next door, He saw the blood in the basement and the bodies in the walled-up chimney, their screams settled silent in concrete. One community of life and light pleading for mercy and another community of darkness and death, screaming for justice and both just feet from one another. All this happened down a simple street in England, down our street, down my street, down your street. Now tell me, how haunting is that!
In the same screen shot, God looks at every happening on our planet. In the same screen shot, God takes in every happening on our planet that has happened, is happening and will happen, in both space and time, all at the same time. Imagine that! Such knowledge is too much for me.
So we Christians all, draw near to God. Our lips full of praise and our hearts like the sinking Titanic. Some chambers playing ‘Nearer my God to thee,’ other chambers full of laughing and hope, others, behind the water-tight doors, already full of death and drowned bodies. Still other chambers sealed with murders, unforgiveness, vengeance, bitterness, greed, foul and pestilent thoughts and all this in the same body, just feet from one another, drawing near to God at the same time. Imagine that.
The growth of the new man, the expansion of the new heart, does not reclaim old death, but rather demolishes it, crushing every brick, burning every timber, letting the wind of God’s freshness blow the ashes across His own great deeps where they are dissolved forever in the blood of The Lamb. No, the growth of the new man, the expansion of the new heart does not reclaim old death, but builds something new and grows something better than there ever was before. God the Holy Spirit says, “Come on in! Let me show you around a little. Come and discover all the newness that is mine, all the newness that is thine and let me teach you, how to live in its freshness, how to live in its fullness, how to decorate it according to your eternal future and not according to your ‘piddly’ little past".
Let me encourage you tonight, to stop revisiting the old house of death, stop visiting with the Father whilst you are still inhabiting the old house of death! Rather friend, move houses, move into the new and living, ever growing, ever renewing, ever fresh and flowering new man of the heart. Let it be so!
Listen: - But now you yourselves are to put off all these: anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy language out of your mouth. Do not lie to one another, since you have put off the old man with his deeds, and have put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him, Colossians 3:8-11 NKJV
Pray: Lord, do not allow me to decorate the new with the language of the old. Lord, do not allow me to put my old furniture on the rooms of the new. Lord, do not allow me to invite old smelly guests into my new home. Lord, do not allow, do not allow, do not allow. In Jesus name I pray, Amen.
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