Church People: My People Series

CHURCH PEOPLE: MY PEOPLE

by

Dr. Gale A. Ragan-Reid

(January 3, 2021)

“But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4: 19, King James Version [KJV]).

Greetings in the Holy Name of Jesus Yahshuah,

My sisters and brothers, your perception is your reality. In your quiet place, of serious contemplation of life, you obviously ponder your innermost thoughts and transcend beyond self to consider other people. This is dialogue that you do not fight against because it is all your thoughts and how you would like other people to respond to you. Those thoughts of yours might go from the struggle within you that is the struggle of the world to your inner peace and what should be the peace of the world. However, you are questioning your thoughts and the thoughts of other people but in the context of how you feel; your truth. Let us ponder some of those thoughts:

They did not think they had check until they got checked.

They did not see until they saw check.

They did not get checked until they got checked.

They did not pray until they got preyed on.

They can only see what they see.

Your thoughts are what you think. You think you thought what you heard. You heard what you think you thought. You heard what you think.

You can only do what you do. You did what you did.

The best is yet to come; yet, what comes is yours, but not your best.

When you came out of darkness, did darkness come out of you?

Your perception is your reality. No more acting like this or acting like that because your acting like does not make you who you are and your acting like does make you what you are; God made you all that you are which is without a doubt all that you could ever hope to be. Your pretense is your past tense that reveals your pretense, how very lost you are in your innermost circumstance. This situation here that you hold in your heart and mind betrays your faith because how you feel is how you deal with your judgment upon yourself.

A neighbor of mine said as we passed by his family’s cemetery: I have so many in my family who are so ready to go to the grave. This bird’s eye view looking from a distance at a person or eyeball view when you search out the eyes of a person is possibly a reaction to the many deaths around our world due to the status quo of Coronavirus(COVID-19) deaths. Is the grave your relief for the relief you seek is the freedom of the grave? Is your freedom the grave? Is your salvation the grave?

Jesus came up out of the grave to announce a life beyond the grave, a life worth living. Is it possible for you to find within yourself as you live and breathe each day a life worth living, free in salvation redeemed by the blood of the lamb? “But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4: 19, King James Version [KJV]). “THE Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”[Psalm 23: 1, KJV]. “And Moses said unto him, As soon as I am gone out of the city, I will spread abroad my hands into the LORD; and the thunder shall cease, neither shall there be any more hail; that thou mayest know how that the earth is the LORD’S.”[Exodus 9: 29, KJV]. “The old lion perished for lack of prey, and the stout lion’s whelps are spread abroad.” [Job 4: 11, KJV].

Most importantly, this Psalm of King David when he changed his behavior before Abimelech; who drove him away and he departed shows us “the conviction that the world is in the hands of a loving God.”[Holy Bible, n.d.]. The young lions do lack, and suffer hunger: but they that seek the LORD shall not want any good thing.”[Psalm 34: 10, KJV]. With that said we discover “man’s relation to God in simple trust, the sense of sin, and appeal to a higher power in times of trouble.”[Holy Bible, n.d.].

More importantly, we find Apostle Paul’s discovery of the humility of Jesus in his prison letter to the Philippians; also humility in the faith journey of King David, the oppression of the Chosen as Moses leads God’s people, and Job’s humility while dealing with his own human suffering, his own affliction of the righteous, and the responses of his friends to his judgment as he suffers. Suffering is hard enough on the human heart and mind, alone but when a human suffers without cause, God’s people sit up and stand up to take notice because if it happened to one without cause it could happen to another even all of God’s people. This is how it is with the COVID-19 deaths as 2,000 to 3,000 people die each day in the United States of America (USA)[“WPTV.com, Justin Boggs, December 9, 2020, “More than 3,000 people died from the coronavirus on Wednesday in the United States, which is a figure higher than at any point during the spring surge of the virus.