Treasure Hunt

This journey I'm on is more like a Treasure Hunt instead of a Path to me. When I think of a path I see others ahead and behind me. That type of thinking has lead to feeling inadequate and prideful at times. But in a Treasure Hunt the Lord helps me to find treasure to learn and discover new things. Then when I share it with others it is like "Hey look at what the Lord showed me!" without the thinking that "Well I guess you just haven't arrived yet, but maybe someday you'll get there".  So below are some of these treasures:

Treasures:

1) That I'm a Disciple of Christ. In the last place that I attended each person had a discipler and you were their disciple. They were "over" you and the book they gave to everyone was called "Under Cover". But I discovered that we are to help people be Disciples of Christ and not of ourselves. People were known as Disciples of Christ before they were known as The Way and called Christians.

2) Jesus is my Pastor (Shepherd). He said in Isaiah 34 that he would be my Shepherd. Then in Matthew He said He is the Good Shepherd. Trusting and depending on Jesus is much better than putting my trust in a man.  Jesus asks Peter to feed His sheep.  They didn't become Peter's sheep and it didn't make Peter a pastor like how we think of pastors today.

3) The Gospel (Good News) is about the Kingdom of God. Of course what Jesus did has allowed us into His Kingdom. For some reason I never heard many sermons about the Kingdom of God. Once we are Christians we are Citizens of this Kingdom. This Kingdom doesn't operate by the same rules as our earthly kingdoms. For example God's Kingdom isn't run with money. It operates by Love.

4) We are the Church. Church isn't a building or an organization but a people. Now the hard part is knowing what it means to Be the Church instead of going to church.

5) I just thought the book of Hebrews was about Faith. It is true that chapter 11 talks about faith but the first 10 chapters are so rich in talking about Christ as our High Priest. It is so neat to see things with new eyes.

6) When I was reading through Acts, Acts 13:2 really hit me. (Act 13:2) While they were ministering to the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, "Set apart for Me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them."

I was thinking: Ministering to the Lord, now that is something I haven't heard of before. How can we minister to the Lord? So often I would go to the Lord with mine and others needs and what I was shown was that I also needed to take the time to just focus on Him. It sounds like in this verse that they first ministered to the Lord and then through that He gave them direction so that they could minister to others. I think too often I would go out and try to do something for God without any direction hoping that the Lord was in it. I guess it would be like being an employee and building a barn and coming back to your boss and saying "Look at what I built". The boss would say "I never told you to build me a barn". It would have been much wiser to spend time with the boss and getting an idea of what he needed and Him giving me direction. Kind of like asking the Lord to bless my work instead of being a blessing in doing God's work.

7) I was telling some people I fellowship with about how the last place I attended in 2003 turned up the temperature so fast I was able to see what was going on and jumped out before being boiled. (Thank you Lord!).  This also included Him telling me.  "I am THE LORD not a lord.  Don't make a man your LORD".

What I said it was like the frog in the kettle story where if you slowly bring up the temperature then the frog won't realize what is happening and will be cooked before long.

What hit me as I was telling that story was that if I'm the frog in that story what was I doing in a pot to begin with?

Well no more pots for me.