Pastor Bell's Words To Live By

To develop suggests that we are going to dig deep then polish off any rough edges that we find when we unearth our treasures.  The objective for developing our roles is to get a biblical understanding from the study of the lives of particular biblical characters, so that we are empowered to fulfil our roles in our families, our communities and our fellowship. To meet these objectives we firstly need to reflect back on the role of the original human as defined in the biblical narrative of the book of Genesis. From the creation narrative we notice that after the infrastructure of the earth was created, that is everything was set in its place, human being or humanity was created and given a specific mandate, viz “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over everything.”   We must recognise here that the creation narrative states that God created ‘male and female’ v.27 and he Blessed them in v.28 and gave them the mandate to be fruitful and to multiply. We can draw from this narrative that God was and is not a misogynist [a hater of women]. The concept of men dominating women was not in God’s original mandate but came after the deception and the introduction of sin in Gen 3:8ff, as the very good creation, humanity heard the voice of the Lord, but ignored it and listened to the deception of the fallen angel, Lucifer, instead vv.1-7. This instituted the notion of curses on humanity, which leads to toil and hard labour to achieve the things we want. Our objective should be to get our minds aligned with our spirit so that from today we to start to listen and tune into the voice of the Lord [Adonai] God [Yahweh] again. So to become a leader in all the spheres of my existence I need to Live by Faith and activate the Blessing in my life so as to become a Friend of God. We will start the leadership process by reading from Joshua 1.