Lockdown Reflections… 📝
Food from my Host’s Kitchen Table 🍽️🍯🥛🍴
Take a Break with Jesus in the Lockdown 🍞☕
Day 238, 270 Days Bible Reading, Monday, 9.3.21.

A Spiritual Lockdown can be a time for our spiritual eyes to be sharper than our physical eyes through fasting and prayer so that our scales can fall off… Acts 9:9-18.

🙇‍♀ All conversion in Christ is the work of the Holy Spirit in the regeneration of a sinful person. It involves receiving God’s Spirit, and being declared righteous by faith in Jesus. This is possible if we truly become humble and repent like Paul, who started a new life in Christ. When we do that, we will be accepted however bad our sins may be. Not all conversion is like the Dramatic ‘Damascus Road experience,’ but all conversion has the same result.

🙇‍♀ Paul’s conversion is a model for all who have sinned and fallen short of His glory, Romans 3:10. Paul himself tells us what we are meant to learn from his conversion, in 1 Timothy 1:15: “The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.”

Like Paul, we need a Saviour because we are all sinners before we come to Jesus, no matter how good or bad we were. It is possible to reject Jesus, but no one is beyond His salvation or saving. In the process of his regeneration of his spirit, he had to die to his earlier ways and lifestyle to experience the resurrection power that was to flow through him.

🙇‍♀ For three days without food and drinks, Paul was in a spiritual lockdown, Acts 9:9. Paul went through ‘dying to self and rising up, crucified in Christ Jesus,’ allowing Jesus Christ to live through him, Galatians 2:20. Later on, he will go on to write about the sanctification process a believer has to go through. This helps to have his/her mind renewed, and to know that the old life is gone and a new life has come and that s/he is a new creation, 2 Corinthians 5:17, Ephesians 4:22-24, Colossians 3:10 & Romans 12:2.

🙇‍♀ Child of God, Remember this, true conversion will result in carrying the marks and stripes of Christ to become Brand Ambassadors for Christ, 2 Corinthians 5:20, Galatians 6:17. Ananias’ obedience to God to serve someone converted from a background like Paul’s, to do things that are difficult, hard, and even risky, resulted in helping Saul to be Paul, who went on to give us the Epistles in the New Testament. When we are truly converted, we would become risk-takers for the Kingdom of God.

🙇‍♀ Once we had to give a hardcore criminal who became a disciple for Jesus, accommodation for the night in our family home, after he preached at a Convention. Some of the family members were uncomfortable thinking about his past. Who would have given Paul an accommodation, except for the strong believers in Christ whom Paul writes about during his missionary journeys? Paul was not hurting and killing just people but Christ’s Body, Acts 9:4. He had to truly shut out his five senses to train his mind to tune in with God’s ways and not his ways.

🙇‍♀ We need to have our spiritual scales coming off in this lockdown, and die to self, so that we can go out with the resurrection power experienced by Paul as the Body of Christ, Philippians 3:10-11… Amen.🙏

anniekoshy@God’s Thirstydeer🦌 Breaking the Chain with You…