Having posted my earlier blog and discussed it with my husband and a beautiful sister in Christ and spent more time in prayer, I would like to add to what I said. I feel it is important to get this clear because so many churches today are preaching Jesus only. This is what I term the 'cult of Jesus'.

Why do I pray to God? God tells me it is because Jesus prayed to Him. (Matthew 6:9.) It is such an obvious answer isn't it? I had to laugh at the simplicity of it. So much of what we need to believe about God is really simple. We just make it hard and churches with their doctrine and rituals make it even harder.

In John 14:6 Jesus tells us He is the way, truth and life and that no-one can come to the Father except through Him. Note He says. no one can come to the Father. He does not say no one can come to Him, he says no one can come to the Father. So who should we be praying to?

The Father.

Beware of doctrines that sideline God. Jesus is not alone. He spoke what the Father told Him. In John 5:19 Jesus tells us He can only do what He sees His Father doing. In verse 24 He tells us that we will be condemned if having heard Jesus word we do not believe God who sent Him.

So seek the Father and praise Him and beware the cult of Jesus.

Matthew 16: 13-17
I am taking a break from the blog on John because of something that came up today that really concerned me. I was talking to a man who is seeking God. In his search to find Him, he joined a lively church with lots of hand raising and hallelujahs and a fantastic music team complete with drums and a killer sound system.
This man was confused. He had been told by these people that if he really believed in his heart that Jesus can heal him then he will be. He felt really upset, he just couldn’t believe so he could never be healed. After more questions he revealed a cult of Jesus that this church follows which leaves out God. When I talked about my faith he was puzzled as to why I talk to God. My response was that Jesus intercedes for us, He does not replace God. Jesus is our saviour so that we may be redeemed and enter God’s presence. He does not replace God. Our relationship is still with God, it is just we have Jesus there to intercede for us and we do all this through the power of the Holy Spirit who dwells in us.
This churchianity mob the man had become embroiled with, rather than sending him towards God as he had been wanting, were sending him towards confusion and failure. I felt so angry at the way they were misleading this lost sheep. I told the man that no-one can believe in God unless God gives them the belief. I cited Matthew 16:13-17 to prove my point. Peter only knew that Jesus was the Christ because God told him. This man will only know that Jesus is his Christ because God will tell him. I suggested to him that he needed to ask God to give him belief in Him.
The second faulty doctrine I wanted to dispel was that all can be healed. When Jesus was on earth he only healed some people. At the pool of Bethesda (John 5:1-14) Jesus only healed one man, despite the many waiting there to be healed. Not everyone will be healed this side of death and it is wrong to tell people who do not receive healing that it happened because they did not believe enough.
The third faulty doctrine I set out to dispel was that you can only be saved if you go to church. In this case, it was that he had to go to their church. I told him that many who are saved do not go to church at all and many who go to church are not saved. I told him that our relationship with God through Jesus is a personal relationship In John 10:7-10 Jesus says he is the good shepherd and the gate through which the sheep enter. He did not say that a representative of the sheep enters. The sheep enter the gate individually and respond individually to the shepherd’s voice. We have to relate to Jesus directly. We cannot use a Christian group or a church to do that for us. We must do it ourselves. We can never use others to do the work for us. That is why the children of Christians are not saved because their parents believe. They are only saved when they believe. In the same way, going to church does not save us. Only believing and seeking God through Jesus are we saved.

John 6:1-15
I remember being taught this story in Sunday School. Jesus turns five small loaves and two small fish into enough to feed 5,000 men and a large number of women and children and have twelve baskets full of leftovers. I have heard this story so many times and for so much of my life that it has ceased to excite me. I wonder if that is the danger sometimes, that we become so familiar with many of the stories in the Bible they we become complacent.

We can become complacent in our walk with God too. We are so used to all the stories and the rituals of worship that we forget to experience the wonder of who God is. So many people worshipping in church groups have become used to experiencing God through someone else and never having to exert themselves to have that personal experience. When a person does this for long enough, they come to think that is the way to worship God. But it isn’t. The people in this story were so amazed at the astonishing miracle (and it was an astonishing miracle) they became convinced Jesus was the prophet and wanted to make him king by force. They were filled with the wonder of that miracle. If we aren’t filled by that then we need to spend time before God exploring the wonder of who He is and what Jesus did for us. Are you up to the challenge?

John 6: 1-15
This is a long passage with a lot of lessons in it. So today I am going to focus on the verses 1-4 and 14-15. In my next John blog I will discuss the middle verses.
If you read Deuteronomy 18: 15, 18 you will find two verses from Moses about a future prophet God will raise up from among the people to lead them. If I read it, I can see a reference to Jesus, but for the people then, when they heard that scripture they had a different idea. People had expectations of a prophet who, like Moses, would deliver them from their oppressor (by now Rome) and lead them to a new life. This was the prophet people expected to see when the Messiah came. Of course, Jesus was their deliverer, the prophet and Messiah, but not in the way they thought and God also put words in His mouth as He did with Moses. In John 1:21 John the Baptist was asked if he was ‘the prophet’ by the priests and Levites. People were seeking hard for this prophet and at some level recognised the extraordinary events around John the Baptist and Jesus and their ministries indicated Godly intervention. But they couldn’t see ‘the prophet’ in John the Baptist (because he wasn’t) or in Jesus, even though He was.
In verses 14-15 the people are convinced Jesus must be the prophet and want to make Him King by force. Jesus’ reaction was interesting. I know it wasn’t Jesus’ time so He would not have allowed himself to be made King, but I wonder if his withdrawal was more than that. If you read Matthew 4:8-10 you will read about the temptation of Jesus when Satan promised to make Him king over the entire world. Did Jesus see this as a temptation from Satan and again reject the world’s version of Kingship? In John 18:36 Jesus tells Pilate His Kingdom is not of this world or His servants would have fought to prevent his arrest..
I don’t think we are any different from the people of Jesus’ time. It is part of our human condition to try to model our world and God into our expectations rather than find out who He really is. We build a picture of how we expect God to be or to answer our prayers so that when He does answer our prayers or reveal Himself we do not necessarily recognise Him because we are too busy looking for the wrong thing. Just as with the Jews of Jesus’ time, we need to remain open. God is not some tame deity like the gods of human imagination, He is the living God and He does not operate on command.

This blog is late and short, but I pray there is a message here for you.

Before I start on today’s subject I wanted to say a few words about the link to the John Bevere talk on You Tube. In Ephesians 6:12 Paul states “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” John Bevere’s talk was about intimidation as a spiritual battle. I know some may have misgivings about intimidation being a spiritual battle. But as Ephesians 6:12 tells us, we are in a spiritual battle so anything that ‘nobbles’ us is spiritual. Often satan uses our fears and insecurities to prevent us from achieving what God has in mind for us to achieve. This was particularly pertinent because my healing ministry was nobbled some years ago by intimidation from other Christians. It is really important we remain alert to satan’s tactics to led us away from our place with God.

Please read Matthew 26:31-46. I have been reading a lot lately about people’s perceptions of what happens to us when we die. I have noticed many people consider that we will never be judged or held accountable for our sins. I don’t agree with that. The story of the Sheep and the Goats detailed here is one reason why I disagree with the idea of us not being judged. I believe we will all stand before Jesus and be judged. We will all be faced with our sins. The difference for Christians is that, because we have acknowledged Jesus is our Lord and died on the cross to pay for our sins, then our sins will be paid for and we will be able to enter into Jesus’ presence forever. So expect to be judged but rest in the assurance that the payment for your sins has already been made.