​HOW GOOD IS YOUR CREDIT
By Bruce Leane, guest writer
 
Subtitle:  How good is your credit in Heaven?  How do you get a credit in Heaven? Do you work for it or inherit it?   Or do you rely on hope that God is merciful and you’re good enough to obtain credit in Heaven?

​Credit in the Bank of Heaven is there for all Christian believers to claim boldly. The believer’s credit is pre-paid and eternally secured.  The Father God secured the account by the death of his Son Jesus on the cross.  Our Heavenly credit rating is then a free gift from God.
You cannot add to your credit account in Heaven by any effort on your part. Whatever you try to add to the account will not be put into your account because of your imperfect life of living to please self alone.   Trying to add to your heavenly account by good works and hope won’t be classed as worthy to be added to the account.   Only faith in what Christ has done will access the account.
You can’t overspend the account because it’s part of an account set up by God and he has supplied all that is needed to keep the account open.  God has made many entries in the account such as forgiveness of our failures, answered prayer, healing, and the free gift of righteousness. There is nothing we can do that will cause God to cancel these entries. Clearly understand, that as you were before Christ came into your life you didn’t deserve the account.  You cannot be or do anything that will please God and deserve the account, you are here on earth to use the everlasting credit scheme God has set up for you (Romans 4:1-11), and to live by faith in the righteousness God has bestowed on you.

​POVERTY IS AN ATTITUDE
There are many attitudes that cause the Christian life to be one of poverty.  If we insist on working to please God the Christian life will be dry as dust and as joyless as a dried up lake.  This kind of thinking and behaviour does not make entries in the account that God has given us.
 The poverty attitude stems from living in a position of ignorance of what the Bible says we God has given us. To know our spiritual status as the sons and daughters of God we must read the terms and conditions laid out in the book of Hebrews.  Our ignorance has reduced us to a begging mentality and position.  We are forever begging God to give us more when we already have that ‘more’.  The trouble is, the poverty attitude says it never has enough and remains unsatisfied because they miss the heart of God.  He wants to bless you more than you want to be blessed.
 We have been trained to beg, plead, even fast for more so that we miss what we already have. ‘Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.’ (Eph 1: 3). It is like trying to climb a hill your already on top of or sit on a chair that you are already sitting on.  You’ve got everything you’ve ever wanted because God has given it to you.  So enjoy it by taking God at his Word and accepting it by faith.

​THE INHERITANCE
My kids are forever teasing me about their inheritance.  One of them has earmarked a box of old wooden carpenter’s planes in my shed.  I keep on saying, ‘take them,’ but he says, ‘No! They are my inheritance.’  He has his inheritance already but he hasn’t taken it.  It is like many Christians; we have been given everything we need including goodness and divine health, abundantly provided for, but we haven’t taken them.
Anything we own down here will instantly become old junk at our demise and is recycled amongst relatives.  But God has not left us without a roof over our heads, so to speak.  Jesus is recorded as saying,   ‘I go to prepare a place for you… That where I am there you will be also.’ (John 14:1 -4. We can take Jesus’ word as truth and rest assured that our credit rating in Heaven is good and we haven’t had to make one premium.
 Meanwhile down here, God decided that he would make us holy in his eyes, without a single fault – we who stand before him covered with his love.  His unchanging plan has always been to adopt us into his own family by sending Jesus Christ to die for us,’ (Eph 1 4 -5). Accept God’s credit rating here and in heaven and live as God’s children as quoted in Romans 8:17, “Now if we are children, then we are heirs – heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ…”        
 

Guest writer, Bronwyn Battye

What If?
 There’s a true story of two brothers in America which came to my attention. 
One brother had taken good care of his body and health, and was a basketballer.  His only brother had so abused his body with alcohol and drug usage, that he urgently needed a kidney transplant.
 The healthy brother suffered emotional conflict over donating his kidney to save his brother’s life.  He wasn’t sure if the sacrifice was worth it, because of his brother’s lifestyle.  He said, ‘If my brother promised to turn his life around and stop the drug abuse, I’d be willing to save him.’ 
Humanly speaking, his attitude is understandable.  But let’s reflect on how a pure and holy God had every right to turn his back on us, after Adam ditched our original inheritance through willful disobedience!
I am so thankful to God that this new beginning for mankind came about solely because of a conspiracy of unconditional love and mercy by the Godhead – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Luke 1:68  ‘Blessed (praised, extolled and thanked), be the Lord God of Israel because He has come and brought deliverance and redemption to his people.’ V78… ‘Because of and through the heart of tender mercy and loving kindness of our God, a Light from on high will dawn upon us and visit us.’
Thank you God, that when you sent the Redeemer, you knew that although many people would be delivered from muddy rivers of sin, many wouldn’t even want to be rescued from their murky waters!   John 1:12 … ‘But to as many as did receive and welcome Him, He gave the authority (power, privilege, right) to become the children of God, that is to those who believe in (adhere to, trust in, rely on) His name.’
 What if Jesus had said IF to the Father, when the Trinity met together?

Communism

V

​Christianity
 
 
 


Communism is materialistic                                       Christianity is spiritual
Communism is godless                                                Christianity is God Centred
Communism is God hating                                         Christianity is God-loving
Communism is God-defying & blasphemous         Christianity is God-honouring
Communism divides people                                       Christianity unites people
Communism pulls down the higher classes           Christianity lifts up the lower classes
Communism spreads hatred and strife                   Christianity spreads love and peace
Communism aims for a classless society                 Christianity says, ‘Thy kingdom come’
Communism sheds blood for revolution                  Christ shed his blood for salvation.

 
TURNING INSULTS INTO BEAUTY
The early settlers saw trees as the enemy, to be chopped down indiscriminately and the land cleared for farming. In the early days trees took up valuable land needed for food and livelihood.
Today we know trees are the lungs of the earth. We need to preserve them to preserve the land and air. 

​What a pity we humans are not like the tree, absorbing the hurts and then encompassing them and covering them with our own beauty of spirit so that the hurts are made beautiful. That’s forgiveness!
We could also look at it as if the tree was the Lord and we were the bolts and chain.  We were hammered into the flesh of Jesus when he was nailed to the cross.  His body accepted our wounds, our hurts, our sicknesses, our independent spirit, and drew us into himself and made us one with himself. Jesus died as us.  We became a person of beauty because he covered us over hiding us within himself. What mega love and forgiveness is that!
 

   
Ostracism conjures up sharp images of behavior toward one another. There are laws against such behavior today, although it doesn't stop people from discriminating and making death threats against people who think differently from us.
The Aboriginal people through the 1950s were non-people. They were outcasts in their own land. Mainstream culture didn't want to know them.
One lady called herself a Maori because they enjoyed a status in the community that the Aborigines didn't have.

​Bruce and I and another couple, Frank and Rita and our children became independent missionaries to the Aborigine people living along the banks of the River Murray in South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales.
We self-supported our work among these people by Frank working his fruit block and Bruce holding down a job as block-hand. Sundays, we devoted ourselves to church meetings and Sunday School. During the week, we would hold Bible studies and prayer meetings. There was a social interaction when we tried to adapt to their lifestyle.
The people who lived along the Riverbank were proud. They refused to go and live on Mission stations and accept handouts. To live on Mission stations was admitting you couldn't look after yourself. They lived by fishing, hunting, and doing seasonal work on the surrounding fruit blocks. They built their huts from materials picked up in the rubbish dumps.
Alcohol, immorality and domestic violence were rife.

When we began moving amongst these people, we became ostracized by many of our friends. Nobody wanted to know us, and the white community thought we were mad, and the indigenous were suspicious of us. In a sense, we became non-people. Today the indigenous are educated are equally housed. They are prominent in the sports arenas, politics, entertainment and the arts.
SIMILARITIES
There are many similarities between God and us. In our natural lifestyle, God is our enemy. We want nothing to do with him in many ways.
It hasn't prevented God from loving us and seeking to draw us into his love and fellowship. Just as ostracism and suspicion didn't stop us from identifying with the indigenous people.
God hasn't given up on us; he provided a way for us to intimately fellowship with him. He sent his Son Jesus as the perfect man to give us a new heart and a new Spirit, so we could be one with God and enjoy an intimate relationship with him.

​Jesus, the perfect man, sacrificed himself to give us a new heart and new spirit, opening the door to a personal relationship with God. We could never indeed be one with the indigenous people because of culture. We can be one with God through Jesus giving us a new spirit.
 When we believe and accept Jesus' sacrifice and give our life over to God, we find our lifestyle changed, we find we are new people, a change has taken place in our heart, and we no longer have the same desires.
God and we are one now; there is no enmity against God. Race, colour, what we have done or haven't done, who we are or are not, doesn't make any difference; we are now one with God. Our relationship with God rests on our belief in and acceptance of Jesus sacrificing himself to take away our enmity against God.
Our enmity with God is over when we accept Jesus. The ostracism will begin between ourselves and our fellow man. Our Godly lifestyle will separate us, and we will exchange one kind of ostracism for another. Being intimate with God far outweighs the separation from our fellow man.
'So believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved.' Act 16: 13.
For further thought, 'Love the Lord God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.' Mark 12: 30.
 
 

​The nest was empty.
  It was time to make some changes.  I wanted to be myself; I wanted to be free from the stigma of being the wife of Bruce.
I enrolled in a Creative Writers Class at the TAFE College. To become a writer and change the world appealed to me. The class of ’78 was a group of ten people all with an agenda but not necessarily about becoming a writer.  

​‘Your first exercise will be stream of conscience.  Write for ten minutes every thought that enters your mind,’ the tutor said.
I looked at him; then at my blank page; then into my mind – another blank. Finally a thought wandered along. I grabbed it and wrote it down. How I hated this lesson.  I simply could not bring myself to write down all the silly, inane thoughts that came into my mind.  ‘Times up,’ the tutor called.
We read out our pieces, the tutor fixed his eye of learning on me, I knew I had failed.  ‘Gwen, you are incredibly disciplined.’  What’s wrong with that, I thought angrily, bowing under his condemnation.
Not about to quit I turned up to class again.  ‘We will write another piece of stream of conscience again,’ the tutor announced. I groaned, there rose within me such a rebellion that I thought, whoa, what gives here?  As the next couple of weeks passed, I was forced to do some heart searching.

I discovered somewhere in my 45 years I’d lost myself, I was a sham, a fake and I didn’t know how or why it had happened. I knew though, that if I wanted to be a writer I needed to break down the barriers and open up myself to life.  I had built walls of self defence to save being hurt.  I need to feel hurt, love, and joy no matter what.  People would get hurt because I spoke from the hip, yet I had to be myself without shame.  The changes were insurmountable. I would fail and did so many times.
The class of ’78 broke up at the end of the year but the course of my life was set.  I would be a writer. I went on to study the art and craft of writing, gaining diplomas along the way.  Already I was being changed, slowly, slowly.
I have failed to write the great Australian novel with two novels half finished. Instead there are many stories published in anthologies along with two biographies and several books written by other people and edited by me.  You see, they are the stories of other people not my own stories.  I’m still in hiding.  The failure to feel and open myself up still lingers like a faint odour. A failed writer in many respects but deadly determined to enrich this world by what I have written even if it is another’s story.

​George Chen was the very first Chinese Christian our founder Paul Hattaway ever met in his life. He was speechless after hearing the testimony of this man who spent 18 years in prison for Jesus. He had endured horrific conditions, and had not only survived the ordeal, but had emerged with an unconquerable faith!
For most of his years in a prison labor camp, George Chen was not called to preach from a pulpit, but rather he found himself standing deep in a prison cesspool each day, shoveling the human waste from 60,000 prisoners.
That cesspool was God’s place of blessing for George, and the Lord used it to give him a rich faith that could not be gained any other way. At first, he abhorred the work, but he soon realized the disgusting stench meant that no guards or other prisoners went near the pit, allowing George to pray and worship God in privacy. He frequently sang aloud his favorite hymn, “In the Garden,” and that most disgusting of places was transformed into a special spot where the Holy Spirit came down and George Chen communed daily with Jesus Christ.
It is our privilege to share the testimony of our dearly departed brother George Chen with you. It may be the first time it has ever been written down for the Body of Christ to read and appreciate.
God bless you as we serve together in the harvest,
The team at Asia Harvest
www.asiaharvest.org
 

Jack and Jean is  a real  life story. It can be read in the book titled The Mavericks Roundup.
Mavericks Round is the life story of Bruce Leane, Pastor.
​The book is available through Amazon/Kindle or KML Publishing.com

​ 
There comes to mind one story I must share, Jean and Jack, not their real names, were a couple who asked me to come and visit them when I lived in Whyalla.
We were sitting over the usual cup of coffee around their kitchen table amidst the cigarettes, matches and cigarette fog.  Cutting my way through the smoke haze, when counselling, has always been a bit tough due to years of asthma.
‘Bruce, we can’t find the victory in Christ that you talk about and practise. We keep stumbling.  Why? Please help us.’ There were tears of frustration in their eyes.
‘You need to realise that Christ has you cover3d: you are trying to fight the fight that he fought and finished for you.’ I explained.
‘Sounds easy, mate, like you tell it – but not so easy in real life. Tell us more,’ Jack was dubious.
I silently pleaded for divine wisdom as I drained the last drops of my coffee and plunked the cup down on the table.
‘Jack, toss me your matches, please,’ I asked.
‘What you want a smoke now,’ Jack laughed, he wondered if I might be leading a double life.
‘No, I don’t,’ I was very blunt. ‘I want to demonstrate something to you.’
I took the matches and placed them under the coffee cup, saying, ‘the matches represent me: the coffee cup represents Christ covering me. The cigarette packet here represent God the Father looking on.  He says to Christ, ‘How is Bruce getting on?’
‘He’s absolutely fine,’ says Christ, ‘I’ve got him covered.’
The Father smiles at Jesus and me because he can only see the perfection of Christ between him and me. I am no longer accredited with being below par.
Christ is our absolute covering for our substandard lives.
The timeless words from the Bible declare, ‘we have an advocate with the Father (who is) Jesus Christ the righteous.’
 Christ’s giving of himself in death covers us so when the father looks at us he sees Christ the good one, not us the substandard one.
Those things we wish we hadn’t done, or shouldn’t have said, a past that has abused us, broken relationships that hurt us, are all covered by Christ and they are swept away  as far as the east is from the west and God doesn’t see them let alone remember them.
‘Jack and Jean, you have the right to say I am in Christ and he in me and we no longer live under condemnation,’ I said to the couple.
‘But what about when we fail to live as we should?’ Jean spoke up, she was very aware of how easy it was to sip-up.
‘It doesn’t mean to say we won’t slip-up but those slip-ups are under the covering of Christ.’ I explained, adding, it is so profound it seems too easy. But it is so liberating.’
Jack and Jean were lit by an inner light as this truth burst across their minds.
I remembered the words of a song, ‘I am covered over with the righteousness Jesus gives to me.’
My words to the couple were, ‘Stop trying to improve yourself which is religion. Accept the covering of goodness given to you by Jesus and by believing you are good, that’s Christianity.’
 

​Alone Versus Alone
 
Isolation – the enemy of Covid lockdowns and quarantine. No-one is exempt from being its prey.
Bruce, my husband is 92 and in residential care. He has been in lockdown for nine days with a few more yet to go.
 I have not been able to visit him in that time and future visits are not in sight. We have kept in contact through messenger several times a day. His mental health has been challenged greatly. Due to a strong faith in God who has promised ‘that from his glorious, unlimited resources he will empower you (us) with inner strength through His Spirit. ’Ephesians 3: 16.

​I recently read these challenging words written by a Chinese missionary:
Friends, let me share a secret how a child of God can overcome hardship and persecution.  This lesson has been learned from many brothers and sisters in China, Vietnam, Laos and other countries over the years.
The first step God calls us to take:  is to  endure. The Apostle Paul told Timothy, ‘You therefore must endure hardship as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. 2 Timothy 2: 3.

OVERCOME OR AN OVERCOMER
​There are additional steps for God’s children to gain victory in suffering. If the Lord gives His grace and power, we can overcome whatever wicked men may do to us, even if our bodies should die in the process. The final step, which requires supernatural strength from the Holy Spirit, is when we learn to embrace suffering and persecution, rather than just putting up with it.
With the mighty supernatural power of the Holy Spirit isolation can be overcome. Its effects on our mental health nullified. God is more than equal to Covid, isolation and quarantine.
The apostle Paul also wrote, ‘despite all this (Covid), overwhelming victory is ours through Christ who loved us enough to die for us. For I am convinced that nothing can separate us from his love. Death can’t and life can’t. The angels won’t, and all the powers of hell itself cannot keep God’s love away. Our fears for today, our worries about tomorrow, or where we are – high above the sky. Or in the deepest ocean – nothing will ever be able to separate us from the love of God demonstrated by our Lord Jesus Christ when he died for us.’ Romans 8: 37 -39. LB

PRISON OR PLAY
​Lockdowns may imprison us, isolation be a fearsome enemy but we children of God have unlimited resources. We need to open ourselves to God and embrace the truth that ‘If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God.’ 1 John 4.
Cast our fear and loneliness on him. He will take care of us. Isolation will become a place of intimacy with God, a place of growth, a place of enlightenment, a shrine of worship.   

Today this vaccine will be distributed in several countries including Germany, which counted thousands of deaths due to the pandemic.
Ironically, this vaccine which will save the lives of millions of people around the world including many Germans was led by a little Jew from Thessaloniki, the son of Holocaust survivors, most of his people were exterminated by Nazi Germany.
And that is why Israel became the first country to receive the vaccine. In memory of his grandparents and his parents who gave birth to Israel-Abraham Bourla known today as Albert Bourla: CEO of Pfizer!