“Love Personified” by Michael Clark and Susanne Schuberth

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freedom, God's love, Jesus Christ, living water, spiritual power, The Holy Spirit, worship in spirit and truth

Woman at the Well (Picture taken from http://catholicalcoholic.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/woman-at-the-well-5001.jpg)

Susanne (aka me 😉 ) wrote,“I was just pondering on the fact why we as human beings are not always the same. I mean, there are people with whom we dare to be more open than with others. People of whom we know that they love us and that they will forgive us whatever we might say or do. But there are other people we do not know that intimately and therefore we are a still bit cautious of how to deal with them.” (https://enteringthepromisedland.wordpress.com/2014/12/08/be-who-you-are-since-there-is-no-other-you/)

There is something that the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well felt about Jesus that made her dare to be totally open with Him. When we hear the story about her preached, many like to say that Jesus confronted her with her sins. Susanne and I hold that this was not the case, but rather she was confronted with how much Jesus loved and respected her in spite of knowing what her past history was. She was shocked that He was even talking with her and asked her for a drink, knowing that Jews did not have anything to do with Samaritans, much less a Jewish man with a Samaritan woman! She was the dog of dogs in the mind of an orthodox Jewish Rabbi.

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Who Needs Love? by Michael Clark and Susanne Schuberth

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God's love, knowing, knowledge, love, preaching, psychology, rebuke, sinner, speaking, Teresa of Ávila

GOD IS LOVE
(Source: http://www.anaheller.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/58860011.jpg)

It is not the loveable person that needs to be loved. It is the unlovable person, the clamoring child, the rebellious adult, the nasty friend, the raging parent, in a nutshell, it is the SINNER that needs to be healed. If we react to misbehavior by speaking mere words only, they might be able to bring across what we mean, but without love they will never touch the heart of someone who has gone wild. Well, “words” alone are based on knowledge… what we think we know or what we feel. But if our words are not tempered with grace, they can wound and kill. For it is written,

A hot-tempered man stirs up strife, but he who is slow to anger quiets contention. (Proverbs 15:18 RSVA)

Know this, my beloved brethren. Let every man be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger, for the anger of man does not work the righteousness of God. (James 1:19-20 RSVA)

Summer Storm Sadness

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caring, comfort, experience, feeling, God's love, joy, love, sadness

And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.” (Mt 7:26-17 ESV)   (Photo by Susanne Schuberth)

For about 20 hours we have had stormy weather here in Germany, a weather I normally do like. I always loved to be at the seaside, for instance, where I tried to walk or even bike against the stormy wind. Not so today. This spring and summer I planted more than 70 pots on our two balconies and so today I have been watching my beautiful plants partly being destroyed without me being able to do more than trying to fix them with cords, gathering broken branchlets, blossoms and (still) green tomatoes. As I came home from my weekly “big shopping” this afternoon, I saw that the mess had got worse and worse. Whatever I would try to improve the situation for the plants in the following hours, I saw it made no real sense. Eventually, I found myself wearily sitting on my bed where I tried to pray. Very sad, not really mad at God because of the storm, but disappointed…..and feeling completely helpless. Although I tried to reason and comfort myself with saying, “These are only plants…,” I could not get rid of the sadness. Prayer did not help, either.

The Pursuit of Happiness

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being born again, experience, fear of the Lord, following Jesus, God's love, happiness, obedience, refuge, spiritual blessings, the new self, the old self, troubles

Seeing the Son in the Sun 🙂
(Photo by Susanne Schuberth)

I never met anyone who wanted to be sad, sick, and sorrowful. We as human beings might be able to adjust ourselves to a certain kind of pain at times, but no one longs to be unhappy continuously. No, we all want to enjoy our life! Well, but that is exactly our problem since God created us to be happy eternally in His presence, yet we have fallen short of obeying Him and thus have had to face several consequences of sin, one of which is temporal unhappiness. We know that it was Jesus’ atonement and God’s grace that opened the way back into His presence through our Lord, who has become our personal way to an abundant spiritual life. But knowing about it and living to see it are two very different animals. 😉

What is the Kingdom of God about?

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being born again, entering the Kingdom of God, experience, God's love, seeing God, the new self, the promised land

Take your time and think about it…
( St. Paul’s Church in Fürth – Photo by Paul Schuberth )

Here are just a few thoughts of mine.

We only need His power of love and the rest will fall into its place. It is so simple the kingdom of God: First He makes us see it and later He lets us enter. Eventually, when we have entered the Kingdom of God, He teaches all of us so that we can stop teaching each other.

The Crisis from Death to Life

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A.W. Tozer, darkness, death, dying to self, experience, following Jesus, John of the Cross, light, pain, spiritual power, T.A. Sparks, the dark night of the soul, the dark night of the spirit, the new self, the old self, the valley of the shadow of death

Jesus: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”
(Photo by Susanne Schuberth)

This life on earth provides joys and pains for everyone, whether we believe in God or not. However, if God has chosen to adopt us as His beloved children, we will experience an additional kind of suffering this world will never know. These pains that spring from taking up our cross daily in order to die to self are by no means an end in itself. As painful as such periods are, there is a goal ahead to which God will surely bring us.
As I was sitting at the hairdresser this morning, I would read several entries on “Dying to Self” on the internet. It dawned on me that only those who experienced such a process were really inclined to write more detailed about it. Or to put if more humorously as A.W. Tozer did,

“Among the plastic saints of our times, Jesus has to do all the dying, and all we want to hear is another sermon about his dying.”