Motivating the Will

I read an article in a newsletter recently that I found very interesting and enlightening. It had to do with the role of our will which has been a favorite topic of discussion among my people for very many years. However, it has also been at the center of a great deal of misunderstanding about how to properly relate to God, how to live as a “successful” Christian and is also at the center of the practice of legalism. Most people assume that we have to fulfill certain requirements in order to get God to save us and these requirements entail exercising enough will-power to fulfill them correctly. Of course this also sets one up for a great deal of discouragement as well as feeding into the cultivation of a lot of hidden pride.

As I read this article I remembered many of the typical assertions and quotations bantered about during many discussions of this subject. But suddenly the author took an unexpected turn and began to explain something that I myself have been discovering over the past few years in my own experience. When these two subjects were put together I was amazed at the perfect fit that could be seen. And it also got me to thinking about it subconsciously which is often the case after learning about something very compelling.

What came to my mind a couple nights ago (quite inconveniently just after I had gotten into bed) shortly after reading this was the thought that there are two ways to motivate our will to make decisions. As with pretty much everything in this life, there is an authentic way to live and think and believe that we were designed for by God and then there is a compelling counterfeit that is usually much more familiar to us that we often assume is the right way. Of course this would definitely be the case with something so important and central to our life and our well-being as our will.

What came to my mind were these two ways to motivate my will. First and most common, I can be induced to make decisions based on fear. This mode of motivation is a driving kind of force from behind me that intimidates my will to make decisions in a certain direction. Whenever I am using my will from this basis the resulting decisions will also take on a certain flavor in the process, a certain hue that will be incorporated into all of my life and thinking and the atmosphere that surrounds me.

Secondly, there is a less-known alternative for this kind of living but one that I am coming to believe is the truly authentic way that God intends for His children to live. This is where the will operates by the principle of attraction instead of being driven. A will that makes decisions under the influence of attraction involving the affections instead of fear and avoidance will also take on a certain atmosphere that will color and flavor the whole life with its influence.

These two principles can both be very strong motivations but are opposite in their relationship to our will. Being driven and being attracted conjure up mental pictures of something being pushed from behind by force verses something being pulled from in front by something more magnetic in nature rather than brute force from behind. I hope I am explaining this adequately since it is difficult at times to reduce into words things that seem much more clear internally.

What I have observed over the years is that many people believe that we need a mixture of these two motivations in order to have all the incentive possible in order to get ourselves into heaven. This is why the carrot and stick approach has so much credibility. Of course, to most people it appears that fear is the far more powerful motivator and so we tend to dwell on things that frighten ourselves and each other in order to compel right action of the will, or at least what we think it will be right action. I believe that if we can get honest enough to discover what really motivates us inside most of the time that we will discover that most all of us rely largely on fear to get us to make difficult decisions.

I know that I have discovered even recently upon careful reflection that I too often wait until the fear factor rises to a high enough level of discomfort before I am willing to face a tough decision or make a hard choice. This is so common that it is accepted as the way we are supposed to live. But now I am seriously beginning to question that premise. Just because it has always been that way does not necessarily make it right.

Living a life dependent on fear motivation is to live a life comfortable with being enslaved. People who have been slaves all of their life many times have no concept of what freedom might look and feel like and so sometimes they come to believe that they are not really under slavery at all. Because the status quo feels so familiar it is difficult to believe that God has something radically better for us to experience and so we tend to morph the words of God to fit our current assumptions and embrace a religion that is more in our own image than reflective of the true character of our Father in heaven.

But as I begin to get a taste of the better wine offered by Jesus and as my understanding of the real truth about God has begun to change radically over the past few years, I have been forced to challenge all of my assumptions about what I think is real and how to live life in true freedom. And one of the conclusions that I am coming to is that God does not want me to continue living dependent on the driving force of fear as the compulsion for my will. God's ways are not man's ways, and when I begin to experience the superior power and results of exercising my will from a motivation of attraction, the attraction of my affections toward a God whom I am beginning to really perceive with my heart actually loves me with unconditional love, I am starting to see more clearly the danger of continuing to depend on fear to be the fuel for my will.

I will not assert that God never utilizes our fears to initiate our movement toward serving Him and experiencing His passion for us. But what I have learned is that while God may often start our relationship with Him from where we are currently in fear, He never wants us to remain in that enslaved condition as the norm for our new life in Christ. We may start out making choices to accept God's grace, forgiveness and power in our lives from reasons motivated largely by fear. But if we do not learn to soon move past those elementary and selfish motivations we will find that our experience will become stunted and dwarfed and stagnant. For the Christian life will always lead us toward true freedom and that freedom is mainly the freedom from all fear. Perfect love casts out all fear.

I want to not only learn more about this new way of thinking, living and motivation for my will, but much more importantly I want to experience from the heart this new way of making decisions based purely on attraction instead of on fear. I want my affections and thoughts and heart to feel the magnetic power of being drawn to the powerful passion that emanates from God's heart for me that I am now only dimly starting to perceive. I am tired of depending on fear to keep me moving forward. And I am tired of the debilitating effects that fear has to drain my energies and leave me feeling tired and exhausted from trying to fight against evil in my life.

I believe that as I find how to exercise my will using the correct motivations that attract me toward God that I will find myself maybe actually being energized in fighting the good fight of faith. Somehow I sense that the closer I draw to the Source of all energy and life and as my will is attracted to His beauties and amazing attributes that my chains of fear and apprehension and even depression will lose their power over me and I will experience more and more fully the abundant life that Jesus promised for all who would come to Him.

"They will hunger no longer, nor thirst anymore; nor will the sun beat down on them, nor any heat; for the Lamb in the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and will guide them to springs of the water of life; and God will wipe every tear from their eyes." (Revelation 7:16-17)

Thank-you Jesus. I accept this truth from You and crave to drink from this water of life. Fill me with fresh revelations of Your truth, Your beauty and Your magnetic passion. And use me to be an agent of attraction to draw others to You as well.

Living in Front or Back

Something I heard Jim Wilder say a few days ago in his series called Joy Bonds has ignited a lot of questions in my mind as I have pondered it and thought about the enormous implications of it in my own life. To properly understand it one must allow themselves to become familiar with the context in which he said it and how the brain develops and operates. If this is not appreciated properly then to just hear his statement out of context might sound like something bizarre or even like heresy.

Much of what Wilder teaches revolves around the immense importance of developing the right orbital pre-frontal cortex of the brain or what he often refers to as the “joy center” or the “banana”. This part of the brain grows mainly in response to being stimulated from the outside by being around people who genuinely desire to be with that person, who are glad to be with them, who consider them to be the sparkle of their eye. When face to face communication of this feeling is experienced then this part of the brain can grow and increase in size and deep bonding takes place. The amazing thing is that this can happen at any age. Unlike most of the other parts of the brain, this part maintains fetal tissue that always has potential to produce new growth under conducive circumstances. But there are periods of time in a person's life when growth is much more likely to accelerate.

As he explained the difference between this part of the brain and the back of the brain where things operate very differently, the implications began to take on ominous significance. The front of the brain that is developed by joy is where our creativity thrives, where our sense of freedom and true identity and uniqueness is cultivated and where we can bond with other people in joy-bonds that are rooted deeply at the heart level.

Jim says that if you want to stop a person from acting like themselves, then the easiest way to do so is to scare them. When we operate from the back of our brain we are usually reacting in fear. When we live in fear from the back of our brain it operates in ways that are purely problem-solving with no interest in the values cherished in the front of the brain. The back of the brain cares little about our real identity or our morals or even what it might be like us to normally do to act like ourselves. It is only concerned with making the problem go away that is causing our fear or threatening our safety, and it will do so with whatever means will work as quickly as possible. When a person is in extreme fear and through a lack of maturity is thrown to the back of their brain temporarily under intense circumstances, they will often do very strange or unusual things that is very unlike them that may surprise and even shock those around them as well as themselves upon reflection later. This is most likely what happens under the condition called temporary insanity.

The part of the brain that chooses whether we live from the front or the back of our brain is called the amygdala. It is something of a clearing house for incoming information and decides which part of the brain to send the information first. If it decides that what it sees might be dangerous it will attach a warning tag to the information which will immediately alert the brain to activate different parts of the nervous system for action. If the brain has little joy capacity in the pre-frontal cortex and has not practiced how to act like its true self under stress, then the person will easily move to the back of their brain and will become blinded by fear and will remain in a mode of problem solving and doing whatever it takes at any cost to make the problem go away.

The part that really impacted me was when he explained that if we find ourselves always looking for results instead of learning how to act like ourselves, that is a sure sign that we are operating from the back of our brain. He gave the example of people involved in ministry for others who come up to him during seminars with questions about things that seem to stump them in their work with difficult cases. They come to him in hopes that he can solve their problems that they have run into in dealing with people that seem stuck in their emotions. But the very attitude of hoping that Jim can solve their case on the spot indicates that the people in ministry are trying more to solve a problem than to learn how to act like themselves. This is a sure sign that they are likely operating from the wrong part of the brain than what is needed under those circumstances.

When I heard this I realized something very significant. If we approach ministry with an attitude of problem solving instead of using our joy strength and the joy center of our brain, then we will always run into difficulties because the Spirit of God cannot work well with us while we are living from the motivation of fear. We will be sucked into the trap of trying to fix people's problems or focusing on eliminating their pain instead of listening to the heart issues and being willing to be glad to be with them in their problems.

Perfect love casts out all fear and God is love. Jesus stated very explicitly that He promised to be with us always. That is a statement of joy, for the brain's neurological definition of joy is someone who is glad to be with me. So when Jesus states unequivocally that He will always be with us He is addressing the most important and basic craving and need of our brains to thrive and grow and be healed back into our original design and purpose for life.

But if we try to help other people by trying to solve their problems or take on their problems as our own and get into a mode of problem-solving, then we are trying to do something the hard way that God has never asked us to do. For our greatest need is not to make all of our problems or other people's problems go away, but to learn how to act like ourselves under any circumstances by learning to live in joy with each other. This is why a sense of community is so central to the kingdom of heaven. Without others glad to be with us no matter what circumstances or emotions we find ourselves in, we will often lack the strength to endure or the capacity to know how to respond correctly.

Instead of focusing on how to solve every problem as we are usually taught by the world's system of thinking, we much more need to discover our true identity as implanted in us by our Creator and then joyfully live out that identity with our unique style as God designed us to do. In short, we need to learn what it is like us to do, how to act like ourselves all the time. It is God's job to solve problems and our job to live in trust that He can handle His job.

Learning to act like ourselves is at the core of the process of maturing, and maturity can only effectively take place within community where we live in association with others who can help us learn how to act like ourselves by example and encouragement. When we feel the acceptance of others who are glad to be with us even when we malfunction, who are willing to believe in us even at times when we don't believe in ourselves, who are there to love us, to respect us and even to confront us when necessary and hold us accountable, then we can grow and thrive and blossom and mature. For the most important way that we learn is by imitating the example of a more mature mind by watching how they respond under similar circumstances that we experience.

As I thought about the implications of all this I began to realize how much of my time I spend in fear and problem solving instead of learning how to act like myself by tuning in to the Spirit of God to learn my true identity. Over the past few days I have increasingly been asking God to show me who I really am, to reveal to me my true identity as He sees me. I also find myself asking Him to help me see others in their true identity instead of the typical reactions that my brain uses to analyze and evaluate them. This is a whole new experience for me and as yet very unfamiliar. I cannot say that I have had any dramatic breakthroughs yet but this is the direction that I realize I must move if I am to make progress in getting out of living from the back of my brain.

I am also becoming shocked at how many things I approach in a problem solving mode instead of a basis of joy. As I become more aware of this I realize why it is so difficult for me to help other people who are in emotional difficulties. To compound the difficulty I am a male and males are typically wired to be more of a problem solver than just a caring listener. I have been working hard to address that too but am not sure that I've made very much progress. I find it somewhat baffling to know just how to listen to a hurting person without letting my mind rush off into figuring out how to offer suggestions or plunge into the middle of their situation to fix the problems that appear to be causing their pain.

But as I have become more aware of what is really going on inside and what part of my brain I am functioning in, I have had more awareness of my option to choose to switch to a different mode if I am willing. I can turn to God in my mind and ask for more perspective, for more compassion, for more focused attention on what is going on in another person's heart without being so distracted by trying to solve their problems that are frankly beyond my ability to solve anyway. I am realizing that it is not really my job to solve other people's problems – that is God's job. And if I try to take on God's job in other people's lives I will certainly get very bogged down in discouragement and frustration and will end up with a great deal more problems in my own heart that I won't know how to solve very soon.

What I have also realized is that my own fear of entering into more active ministry with others is exposed in what I am learning. Because I am afraid they won't experience dramatic change from my ministry I am secretly afraid people will think less of me and that would be a problem I wouldn't know how to solve. Because I am more focused on getting results than in being willing to be with them and come to God alongside them, I am really living in fear instead of joy and thus am incapacitated for effective ministry.

But as I have chosen to let go of both my problems as well as other's into God's hands I have also begun to sense a feeling of peace and freedom which I suspect is what I am supposed to feel as I move more into the front area of my brain. That is encouraging to me and gives me hope that maybe I too can learn to live more in joy instead of fear and shadows. I want to learn much more how to be genuinely glad to be with people who are hurting as well as those who are rejoicing, while knowing how to act like my unique self. For a true sign of maturity is coming to the place where I can act the same way no matter what emotion I am in or what circumstance threatens me. When I can remember who I am at all times and my connection with God can be alive and real under any circumstance, then my maturity will be to the point where I can become a mentor for others to be attracted to and learn from. I can then show by example how they can connect with God and learn how to act like themselves with their own unique style and personality. And that for me will be a most satisfying and fulfilling source of joy.

Learning to Learn

How do I learn? I mean, really learn, not just with my head, though that is an important aspect of it, but learn in a balanced, effective, thorough way so that it becomes a fully integrated part of my very being, my real, gut-level beliefs, my core identity? What are the attitudes and choices that might help me to learn more easily? What are the things that inhibit or block me from learning?

One problem I have in knowing the answers to these questions is my lack of learning already. For what I already know about this subject, like any other subject, I have already learned, at least to some extent. So I have to take what I have already learned about learning and trust that it is correct or at least useful enough to practice so that I can learn more. But if the skills or methods that I am currently using to learn are faulty or misleading or too restrictive, then the very means by which I am attempting to learn become the inhibitors that keep me from learning. That's a little scary.

Since I can only speak from my own experience and what I already think I know, I may not have the best answers at this time for these questions. But I have been sensing through my previous experience that it is better to ask questions and not insist on immediate answers if one wants to learn more effectively. Sometimes answers do appear rather quickly and are very useful and helpful. But other answers are blocked from coming to me or may be cut short if I have the habit of wanting a full or conclusive answer immediately. Unfortunately this is the model that I have seen in far too many teaching situations, whether in church or in school.

I remember years ago someone explaining to me how a highly effective teacher usually operates in relationship to their students. They told me that a really good teacher does not often give their students answers but instead induces a deep hunger and curiosity in their minds to know things they don't presently understand. Then the teacher provides the resources and opportunities for the students to themselves delve into the information provided or even seek out more resources to satisfy that deep hunger that the teacher has helped induce in their hearts. So according to this example, the greater the curiosity the more likely real learning is going to take place.

But one of the most important ingredients needed for that scenario to happen I believe, is that the relationship between the teacher and the student be a positive one of trust and admiration. The student's emotions must be activated to some extent and they need to have some level of admiration, respect and even awe for their teacher. They need to see their teacher as someone they would aspire to become like and be attracted to their inner qualities as well as their knowledge. There must be some sort of magnetic pull in the life of the teacher before the information he/she wants to instill in them becomes something they hunger for deeply.

If a hunger is always immediately satisfied, then it never has a chance to intensify. (That is also a symptom of addictions) And if a person is never very hungry they will never have that much deeper appreciation of things that really satisfy like those who have experienced deep hunger know about. A person who has endured very intense experiences of deprivation in any area of life and then received what they were craving and have known the immense relief and happiness and fulfillment that satisfaction can bring is a much bigger person inside as a result of that experience. They have greater emotional capacity which is important for growth in maturity. They are also much more qualified to be an effective teacher than those who have simply had their head filled with lots of facts but have never experienced the intensity of need to highlight the importance of those facts in their own experience.

But is it necessary that all answers need to be waited for and must be delayed in order to be more deeply appreciated? I don't know the answer to that question either. But I do know from my experience that it seems to be necessary to have at least a certain level of both skepticism and patience in order to avoid easy, glib and generally misleading answers to very difficult questions. Patience is always a very important virtue to have in most situations, but skepticism is something that must be handled very carefully or it can become more of a liability instead of an asset for us.

It seems that a certain level of skepticism is necessary to avoid falling into the trap of simplistic answers, of accepting the first thing that comes along claiming to be truth, of avoiding heavy use of the brain without the heart to uncover deeper truth or relying on others to spoon-feed us mentally and emotionally. There is far too much dependence on others these days and far too little real thinking and searching going on that produces real answers to real problems. It is not just mindless people flocking to popular religion that have this symptom. There are millions of “unbelievers” who tend to scoff and sneer at religious people and jeer at their hypocrisy and mindless solutions. But these very same people have their own forms of mindless thinking and reflective reactions and tend to follow their own leaders and depend on others to do their hard thinking for them instead of being open to sensing truth from an outside source in their spirit.

I firmly believe that truth is not something we are capable of knowing by simply trying to uncover it. I realize that this is the foundational presumption of the scientific method that is the most pervasive religion of our world today. And while it is certainly true that we may be able to discover many facts through research and observation, the scientific model carefully excludes some of the most important elements necessary to experiencing true life and a wholeness-based existence in proper relationship with all of our surroundings.

The root issue in this aspect is whether reality can be determined by the sum of our own discoveries and conclusions or whether real truth can only be received from an outside provider of truth that is the only source of it. This is where science-addicts and unbelievers begin to roll their eyes in scorn and turn away from the conversation to return to their favorite toys of self-based religion. For all religion or philosophy that is not a revelation from the only Source of truth and reality is false religion of self-worship and self-dependence. There is no third option in this case. We either trust in ourselves and our own abilities to provide us with knowledge and a true perspective of reality, or we must trust in God and believe that we cannot really know reality and truth without His self-revelation and provisions for us. And even when we claim to be listening to God as our source of truth, our deceitful minds may still be depending on self and the world around us while believing that we are following God. But the god we are following is most often a god that we have created in our image instead of the other way around.

But I still want to explore a little more these questions about how I learn effectively. I want to flush out more clearly into the open some of the things I am learning myself about the process of learning. Maybe it is because the way I have learned is changing so much in the past few years. And since it feels like it is much easier to learn and grow and mature and perceive more clearly than it was for me for the first forty plus years of my life, I would like to know what the difference is and how to amplify what works and minimize what inhibits so I can grow even more.

One thing I am noticing is that I feel more need to lay aside my own opinions, beliefs and pre-conceived ideas and open my mind to the Spirit of God in my own spirit and literally pause at times to see what might come to my mind that was not already there. It is not that what I already think is necessarily wrong. The problem lies in that, if I am unwilling to challenge, reexamine or temporarily lay aside my own opinions there is not enough room for my mind to consider something I am unfamiliar with up to this point.

One thing that is very necessary for me to be able to do this is a safe-feeling environment. If I am feeling coerced by someone to comply with their demands or conform to their opinions, then I simply do not have the desire to feel open and receptive. That is a very important point that I also need to apply to my own treatment of others. I need to be much more sensitive to how I come across when sharing what I believe and not cause others to feel threatened or intimidated into thinking that I am trying to force them to agree with me without their own time of quiet reflection on the things I am presenting to them. I need to respect not only where they are currently but also their personal accountability to God as their primary source of truth. I need to respect their right to take what I am saying with a grain of salt until they have had time to check it out themselves in their own heart on their own schedule and listen to what the Spirit wants to convict them of without my interference.

One of the things I am seeing in my study of Romans 14 is the importance of maintaining proper relationships with the proper partners in those relationships. Paul talks about the problems that arise when a person within the body of Christ tries to take God's place in another person's experience and in essence tries to be their Lord. That is really what judging and condemning is all about. When I judge someone else and view them with contempt as described in this chapter, I am in essence trying to set myself above them and insist that my opinions are better than theirs and they need to conform to mine or they are wrong.

But this passage reminds me bluntly that these people are my brothers and sisters and I am not their Lord. Furthermore, as one of the children myself, I am going to have to give an account of myself and my treatment of my siblings to my Parents in heaven in the day of Judgment and I had better keep that in mind now so it can temper the way I treat those around me. I don't want to have to try to explain to the only real Judge why I was trying to take His place in someone else's life and mess around with things in their heart that only He has the right to work with. That is too much like spiritual adultery, meddling with the intimacy that belongs to God, and God does not take kindly to that kind of treatment of His kids.

So part of the reason why I want to know the real methods of learning that are truly effective is so that I can also help others to learn without meddling in areas of their life that belongs only to God and them. As I better understand how God is working to grow me in grace and maturity and knowledge of Him, then I can better know how to relate to others and what to avoid so as not to cause damage instead of joy.

I have noticed, particularly in my private devotional times of meditation, but also more and more during my waking hours in spontaneous conversation with God, that if I lay out a question that comes up in my mind or heart and leave it with God trusting that He will bring me something in response, that very often if not always, I will encounter something or almost “hear” something in my head or heart that addresses this question in very surprising and satisfying ways. Sometimes it may come as an impression while I wait in expectant silence in His presence. Sometimes it will come in something I am reading or listening to. There have even been times when an answer came unexpectedly on a billboard along the road or in the words of something totally unrelated.

There are also many times when it seems that God takes things of science and nature and daily events and shapes them into profound nuggets of wisdom like parables that have deep subtle meanings very useful for life application in another arena. What I have noticed is that the more consistently I fill my head with things of the kingdom of heaven instead of the entertainment and music and thoughts all around me in the atmosphere of worldliness, that these insights come more frequently and more easily. It really does make simple sense but seems so easy to miss. The outcome of my mental activity is reflective of the ingredients that are available for its use. And my mental activity and choices about input greatly determine the atmosphere that inhibits or encourages my ability to hear the messages of the Spirit offering true wisdom, knowledge and revelations of reality.

To effectively learn in a balanced way, which means learning and growing both with the mind and in the heart, I need to pay attention to how much I am synchronized with the means and ways that God has provided for this purpose. The atmosphere that results from my choices that surrounds my mind and heart will act either as a receptive catalyst in which I can perceive the messages from God or will act as a filter that blocks those messages and impressions so that I do not notice them. This atmosphere is largely determined by my own choices in the little things, not so much in my professed desires for spirituality or holiness.

Father, give me the spirit of a learner today. Mentor me as a disciple and help me to more clearly focus on Your face, Your actions, Your attitudes and Your Spirit. Cleanse me of pride, of arrogance, of resistance, of blocking assumptions and lie-based beliefs that prevent me from hearing You more clearly. Teach me patience, joy and the art of resting in Your love as I receive Your wisdom.

Debt

Forgiveness is related to debt – emotional debt. In fact, the very opposite of forgiveness is debt-collecting. This debt is directly linked to the internal heat produced by the accumulation of this debt. Debt is created when a wrong is committed against my spirit, a violation of my freedom, an incursion into my privacy without permission, the use of force or fear to compel me to satisfy someone else's selfish desires against my will, a trespass against me.

Debts are being created continuously. Just the very existence of corruption all around us induces a certain amount of debt within our spirit. The injustices committed within the context of our political justice system which violates our sensibilities of fairness and right creates an intense sense of outrage that creates more debt inside. Violations of my rights and disrespect for my person or dignity by anyone else can create debt inside of me. Even unintentional mistakes can be misunderstood and become cause for more debt by my suspicious heart.

The original meaning of debt from the Bible conveys the idea of someone chained to me, a person who owes me something that I emotionally drag around on the end of a chain until I feel their obligations to me are satisfied. It denotes something of a slavery mentality where I believe someone should feel like a slave to me because of the debt they incurred against me.

It is very helpful to understand the reality and the nature of internal debt if I am ever to understand how to become free again. This debt is mainly in the spirit realm of my life which intensely affects my emotional being. Depending on my personality and perspective and assumptions, some things may produce much more debt in me than the same thing might in someone else. Likewise, my emotional makeup also will affect how the internal pressure and the resultant heat will react when left inside.

This internal heat and pressure works exactly like the internal heat that creates a volcano. Scientist now understand that the way a volcano will act is greatly dependent on the type of material that composes the makeup of the mountain. Some volcanoes tend to run almost continuously and have destructive lava streams of molten rock flowing down their sides much of the time. Other volcanoes tend to keep it hidden inside, looking good on the outside like a lot of us try to do. But as we have seen a number of times with volcanoes, this kind of dealing with internal pressure can have very explosive and devastating results unexpectedly.

This approach to the problem can sometimes become a little simplistic when compared to volcanoes, however. We may tend to assume from this comparison that it would be better to let our angry emotions vent more often so as to avoid a giant explosion that could hurt far more people. And while that kind of reasoning may sound very plausible, it fails to address the real problem effectively. It only operates along the line of symptom management instead of effectively targeting the root causes of anger or whatever other types of outgrowth may come from this internal pressure.

And it is true that anger is not the only demonstration or symptom of internal, unresolved debts. It may be the most common one, but there are a number of other potential reactions to the buildup of pressure inside our souls from undealt with debts. Many times, much more than most people suspect, our bodies will become diseased in some way as a direct result of internalized debt. This has not only been proven by science but has been pointed out a number of times by people inspired by the Spirit of God.

Addictions are sometimes a symptom of the presence of debt. It is true that addictions are most likely to be associated with failure to advance adult maturity as James Wilder has so aptly pointed out. But this failure to move on in maturity by so many people that results in any number of various addictions will also create a certain amount of debt internally which produces the pressure that one seeks to resolve with the pleasure they derive from their addiction of choice.

What I find interesting is that the judging and condemning and contempt that I am studying about in Romans 14 currently is also likely linked to this issue of unresolved debt. In turn it also can induce debt in the ones whom it is directed against. So in essence, a person who is carrying around a lot of debt will often tend to create debt in the spirit of others by their improper words, actions and attitudes toward them. Is this a subconscious attempt to rid ourselves of our own debt? It might be quite possible, for the concept of revenge or vengeance is an attitude in which we somehow think we can re-balance the books, so to speak, so as to hopefully free ourselves of the sense of debt we feel in our own hearts.

A person who is full of debt in their spirit cannot limit who around them is going to be contaminated by their own spirit of debt-collecting. They may think that they have specific debtors in mind that they want to extract payment from for the feelings built up inside, but their spirit of debt-collection will infuse every relationship that they have whether they want it to or not. And debt-collection is exactly what all of us are wired to do in our flesh when we allow a sense of debt to remain in our hearts from a violation committed against us.

Debt-collection permeates nearly every relationship that we see in this world. And if you want to get a taste of the kind of reaction that debt-collection produces in others, just think about how you feel whenever a debt-collection agency calls you on the phone to harangue you about a real or supposed debt you owe someone. I don't know about you, but I know that the enormous intensity of emotions that instantly rises up in me when this happens is so strong that sometimes I cannot even think clearly. My adrenaline begins to flow and my blood begins to boil and I have to be very careful to quickly disconnect from the situation before I make a complete fool of myself.

I realize that this is primarily due to a lack of maturity on my part, but it also betrays a reservoir of unresolved, internal debt in my spirit that I need to become free from. For it is not just the supposed debts externally that are the problem but the much greater problem is the internal debts within my own spirit that compel me to act irrationally at times. These intense moments are usually connected with a lot of fear as well as anger mixed in with a lot of bitterness and resentment. These are all ingredients of debt that needs to be dealt with if I am ever to enjoy real freedom.

I intend to take more time to think about this issue of debt and forgiveness. For whatever reason it has become a very intense focal point of my attention today and I want to understand it and its implications much better.

Positive Pressure

As I walked out of Wal-Mart yesterday I noticed that I couldn't feel the hot air outside until I had cleared the outer set of doors. Knowing how air systems typically are designed in commercial buildings like that I realized that this was because they keep the inside of the building so full of cool air that it has a little bit more pressure than the hot air outside to keep that warmer air from coming in. It is called positive air pressure and works very well to keep both buildings and even coolers from getting too warm in the summer or even too cold in the winter. It means that when you enter the building you immediately feel the temperature of the inside without much mixing of the air going on around the doorways.

But as I thought about this neat little trick that designers use to keep our bodies more comfortable while we spend our money on someone else's products, it occurred to me that my own soul is very much like that building. Depending on the attitudes and choices and self-perception that make up the atmosphere I have in my soul building will determine very much how I relate to other people around me.

I sense that sometimes I feel like maybe I have something more like negative air pressure inside of me emotionally instead of positive pressure. Negative pressure is usually referred to as vacuum. A vacuum acts very much like a dry sponge that tends to soak up moisture that it comes in contact with instead of oozing out liquid as when it is full. A vacuum condition, or negative air pressure inside of a building will draw in the atmosphere from outside whenever the doors or windows are opened and that incoming atmosphere will influence whatever is already inside the building. If it is very cold outside the incoming air will cool off the room or building below what it already is. And of course the opposite is true; if the weather is very hot and humid outside the building will begin to heat up and feel muggy inside causing much more work for the air conditioning systems.

As I continued to think about this for awhile after leaving the building I realized that this helps explain some of my dysfunctional problems with some of the people in my life at various times. When I feel emotionally empty inside in some way, when I feel an emotional craving or need that is not filled or satisfied, the natural tendency is to begin to look to someone or even some activity as a source to satisfy my desires. This is simply part of being human, how our brains are wired to operate. We are designed to have desires that need to be fulfilled and one of the most important tasks of childhood is to prepare us for moving on in maturity by learning about what truly satisfies.

Failure to learn what appropriately satisfies our needs and desires is one of the most common and basic problems in the world. Because we are so often turning to the wrong sources to find satisfaction we never really find what we are looking for but we often find something we think may do. What we usually find is something more along the lines of pleasure or something that inflates our pride (or even other more physical things like our body). Eating is a very typical outlet for cravings that has its obvious unhealthy affects on our lives. Drugs, sex, alcohol, pornography, intellectual prowess, religion in many forms, entertainment, star and model worship, social power – the list is really endless. And while not everything we turn to for satisfaction may be bad in and of itself, they are many times not the appropriate thing that addresses the need we are trying to satisfy and they thus become something of a false god for us, albeit unconsciously.

There is nothing inherently wrong even with having a sense of vacuum inside of our hearts emotionally any more than it is wrong to get physically hungry. Hunger actually is a blessing at times as it helps us become more acutely aware of flavors that we might not notice otherwise and our appreciation of food can be sharpened. But the real problem lies in when we fail to recognize the correct “food” for the specific hunger or craving that we are experiencing and instead try to address it with something else.

Those of us who grew up with a great deal of missing ingredients in our emotional life (which includes all of us to some degree or other) have some very long-term hungers that have never known much satisfaction to the degree that we sense we need. Anyone who did not receive enough unconditional love as a child or who didn't receive affirmation and repeated confirmation of their intrinsic value in the eyes of those who represented God in their young minds will have a deep reservoir of emptiness that cannot be filled with the platitudes of religious cliché's or artificial accolades from achievements or performance. They will likely find themselves struggling all their lives to discover those missing ingredients that will fill that gnawing hunger inside to feel valued and loved and worthwhile. They may try to deny it or avoid it or suppress it or even exploit it in others, but deep inside every person craves to be valued by someone else who is a significant person in their life.

Scientists have recently discovered through the latest technologies of brain science scans and research that the most important thing that every baby needs and craves above anything else is to be the sparkle in someone's eyes, to be cherished and valued by someone who is significant to them. They have even gone so far as to label this experience of being desired and cherished and loved by someone “joy”.

Joy, according to the neurology cravings in the brain, is when someone is genuinely happy to be with you no matter what the circumstances are or what your emotional condition may be. Joy is the most intense need of the human soul and this need is never outgrown. All through our lives we continue to crave and seek for someone who is willing to be glad to be with us, even in our dysfunctional moments, maybe even especially in those times. Because we know deep inside that if someone is really willing and even wants to be with us in our worst times they will certainly also be glad to be with us in our better times.

But when we grow up in a joy-starved environment our heart will continue to grope for anything that seems to address and reduce the deep pain and emptiness that we feel inside. This is the main driving force behind most addictions. This is what drives the whole porn industry and what causes most of the immorality that goes on in our world. We are all looking for someone to satisfy our deep cravings for someone to be glad to be with us and will even settle for people pretending to wanting to be with us if necessary. Sometimes people are even willing to pay people to pretend to be glad to be with them in various ways, but this only deepens our cravings in the end instead of satisfying them.

What is going on here is that we have a vacuum condition in our heart and we are opening doors or windows to various sources that in turn infect us with all sorts of contaminating influences that only aggravate our brokenness and intensify our sense of longing. This can happen in obvious ways like adultery or abuse or it can often happen in very subtle ways that are very socially acceptable. But the eternal principles continue to operate just as gravity is never suspended and we will always have problems as we remain in a vacuum condition at the heart level.

So if all these things we try to fill our hearts with don't satisfy the vacuum we feel inside, how are we supposed to have it filled? How are we to change over from having a vacuum in our heart that sucks in everything it can get hold of to fill its hunger, to a condition of being full to overflowing so that we can become givers of life instead of takers?

I could easily launch off into some great-sounding platitudes right now that I would be as disgusted with as most other people. I am asking these questions very honestly and am looking for realistic answers myself. I am describing to some extent my own condition that I often find myself in and am daily addressing in my pursuit of God and His presence. I want to be a person who really exemplifies the reality of the words of Jesus, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life. (John 4:14)

I want to know what it feels like to be so satisfied and full of life that when I am jostled that life will just spill out of me all over others. I want to be a sponge so full of life and joy that when I am squeezed that I will be life-giving instead of complaining or becoming bitter. I realize that too often in my relations with those around me I am grasping for a sense of intimacy, of belonging and desiring affirmation to fill the emptiness that I too often hide inside. Instead of denying my emptiness I want to have it so full of the life of God that I can be the one genuinely glad to be with others who are hungry and hurting and desperate for joy themselves.

Just Say It

Yesterday on the way home from work I was thinking about my relationship with God and my weaknesses in how I perceive my own identity. I thought about the discrepancy between what I have been learning and writing about and the contrasting beliefs that still lurk in many of the darker recesses of my heart. This unsettles my stability and disrupts my assurance and affects the way I relate to others and even greatly inhibits my ability to rest and trust in God at times.

I know that learning new truths about God are very important but are not enough to really transform my life in the ways that need to happen to make me a truthful and effective witness for Him. I also realize that I am generally incapable of directly changing the opinions of my heart (or anyone else's for that matter) by assaulting it with lots of information no matter how true or wonderful it may be. The heart learns primarily by imitation, by picking up on the nuances of body language, voice tone and absorbing the atmosphere of the spirit that surrounds the one it is learning from. Words for the most part seem to not get very deep into the heart part of the makeup and are not able to put down deep roots in that part of my brain. That is why a person can be very surprised at their actions or reactions when caught off guard under intense circumstances and temptations. They may suddenly find themselves doing and saying things that are later very embarrassing or humiliating and that reflect more their fallen nature of sin than reflecting the new heart Jesus has given them.

As I was reflecting on some of these things and the frustration that I experience at not being able to change my own heart's opinions about God or my feelings about myself to agree with the way He sees me, I found myself asking the question, “How can I do this? What can I do to really take hold at a deep level the real truth about my identity that God has given me and what He says about me?”

At the same time I remembered that whenever I get into times of sharing with others on a personal level the exciting truths about God that I have been learning, I often come away almost in awe myself at how much my own heart has been listening and absorbing during the conversation. I many times feel almost something like a buzz, an excitement of spirit, a warm kind of emotion that feels energizing and life-producing – I suppose it is something like the word thrive. This word has intrigued me for a number of years as something that my heart very much desires. I want to feel that sensation of thriving, of being filled with life and hope and energy and joy. I want to feel it much more often – all the time if possible. I believe that is what our hearts are all designed to crave and to enjoy because our hearts were designed to thrive in the presence of the Life-giver for eternity.

Of course it takes so much longer to describe these thoughts than the time it took for them to transpire originally. I drove along the highway contemplating this idea of my need to really embrace God's identity, His opinion about me much deeper into my psyche. I pondered His reminder of my experiences with what I suppose many people call witnessing (I still have baggage associated with that word from the past that I am getting free from slowly) and the effect that it has on myself. Then suddenly I passed a big billboard beside the road and read the words printed across the shirt pictured there.

When I read the words (and I never could figure out what the reason was for the message on the billboard), I realized they were so appropriate and direct as an answer to my unspoken question. In fact, it was so immediate that I was startled at first and then overwhelmed with gratitude and appreciation for God's willingness to communicate with me so quickly and directly through any means available. The words on the billboard simply said, “Say it out loud”.

I couldn't avoid the truth of how those words applied to the things I was thinking about. It was clear to me that God was reminding me that my heart needs to hear me express what I am learning through my own ears so that in the expression of it to others I come to believe it much more deeply myself. I have heard about this principle before but I have had some skepticism about its effectiveness because of problems I have had experimenting with it. But I have also seen it work very effectively at times and I felt more and more strongly as I drove on down the road that this message was indeed from God in direct response to my question and desire to deepen His feelings about me into the heart-part of my being.

One of the reasons I have reservations about just speaking things out loud is that my own voice still reminds me too much of the negative feelings I got for many years every time I heard my own Dad's voice. It ignited many triggers and reminded me of many hidden messages buried in the tones of voice and the phrasing of words that usually tended to make me afraid of God and of authority. Long into my adult life those triggers were still very active and potent and it was not until just a few years before his death that I was able to start effectively getting free of many of those triggers.

Tragically I reflected the same pattern of child-raising to a great extent in my own family and today my voice has a similar effect on my own children. This distresses me greatly but as I have explained to them, I only have one voice and I am stuck with it for now. Until God makes significant progress in my healing in this area of my life, I don't seem to be able to change the affect that my voice and inflections have on certain people who are triggered by it. The problem is, in the times when I try to express certain things out loud even for my own benefit I am sometimes triggered myself in much the same way. It is almost like having an emotional auto-immune disease.

But I also notice that there are other times, times when my spirit is in tune to listen to God's spirit and I am humble enough to hear and synchronize with His quiet internal suggestions while I am sharing with someone my passion for the God I am learning about; there are those times when my heart seems to begin to ignite and burn with a sensation and passion that intrigues me and actually feels more life-giving than intimidating. It feels like I am finally finding that place as a channel of the Spirit to be used to bring hope and truth and life to someone else who is willing to listen and consider what I am so excited about in my personal pursuit of God.

I feel during those times a sense of almost fear and excitement mingled together. I have fear because I know all too well how easy it is for me to allow this passion to overwhelm the other person and turn them off the to very things I want to share with them, or I might begin making the conversation about me instead of about the God I am becoming so passionate about. But I also feel excitement not only because I see new life and hope and understanding and interest being generated in another heart that is hungry to thrive but that in the process my own heart is experiencing something very similar once again.

I suppose that something my left brain is deducing from these observations is that it seems more life-producing to share with others what God is relating to me than to just try to verbalize these things for the sake of saying them out loud. However, there are also exceptions even to that that I have noticed.

I have discovered in the past few years that writing has become an outlet for things that I cannot express any other way very effectively. There have been times when I have written very passionately what was stirring in my own heart and what I was hearing from God. But when I got done writing I still felt that it was not having the effect inside of me that I needed to experience or that could be seen in the words. There was a discrepancy between two different parts of me that needed to get together in agreement and I felt impressed to go back and literally read what I had just written out loud and try to do it while engaging my emotions and feelings and heart more than with my head.

Those times felt somewhat awkward for me, for when I speak out loud it has a little of the same effect on me that having someone else in the room has to stifle and suppress very effectively my ability to externalize my deep emotions and feelings. For whatever reasons, I have been extremely intimidated to share some of the deeper emotions that make me feel extremely vulnerable and so far I have generally just played it safe. I have gotten better about sharing deeper things with others to a certain degree, but there are still many levels that I simply do not have the courage to share with anyone and even believe to some extent that it is not even appropriate to do so whether that belief is right or wrong.

But that system of inhibition even affects my ability to verbally say those same things that I feel to God even when I am alone. That does seem a bit strange. And the scary part is that I am finding it easier and easier to write these kinds of things but at the same time I still cannot speak them out loud. It is at this point of tension that sometimes God asks me to go back and read out loud what I have just written to allow it to take on another whole dimension of reality for me that I cannot experience by just leaving it in writing only.

When I have done this I have experienced new and strange feelings that definitely were along the lines of what I likely need to experience much more but is still outside my “comfort zone”. But it is very likely quite necessary if I am to effectively grow in maturity and stability and intimacy with God and even with others. It is likely indicative of yet another false god that is trying to stand in my way of connecting intimately with God's heart, a fear that resists expulsion and replacement.

As I drove on down the road toward home I took the suggestion from the billboard seriously and began to speak out loud what I thought maybe I needed to hear about God's opinions and feelings about me. At first it sounded downright cheesy and artificial and I felt like scoffing at myself. But it was likely not really me scoffing but the false gods still hanging around inside my flesh that keep insisting that they are me and reflect my identity. So I persisted and continued to grope for what to say out loud that would affirm what my left brain had on file about how God feels about me.

It did not take very long before the verbalized messages began to have their intended effects. Even though it was very brief and simplistic, the words about how God feels about me as His son began to stir my emotions unexpectedly. As I said, “I am a child of God and God takes good care of His kids. In fact, God is very jealous about taking care of them and looking out for them”, I was amazed at the power that hearing words like these had on my own heart. I began to tear up and began to feel the truth of those words in ways that I very seldom feel.

So my typically skeptical left brain is forced once again to admit that its opinions or fears about some things are simply off track and I need to obey the promptings of the Spirit more readily. I want to live a more balanced life of utilizing both my left and right brain in better synchronization with each other and with God's Spirit. And for me that generally means much more exercise in certain activities designed to engage the heart to synchronize with the truths that the left brain is embracing. I want the truth of God and His presence of love and joy to pervade both sides of my cranium and electrify all of my body so that I can glorify His name more and be restored to my original design and function.

When I opened my Bible this morning to 1 Peter 2 I immediately saw a confirmation of this from God waiting there for me. It explains not only some of the aspects of my true identity but the reason behind why I have received that identity. In verse 9 it tells me that I am chosen, part of a royal priesthood, part of a holy nation of people and that I am designed to be God's own possession. Then the very next words give the underlying reason God has given me this identity. It is so that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.

While that may certainly include writing out those things about God's excellencies, it must also at times include proclaiming them verbally so that they become even more real to me. This also helps explain why evidently Jesus prayed out loud even when He was praying alone. If He had not been praying aloud His disciples would not have been able to hear what He was saying and thus had intense desire awakened in their own hearts to learn how to really pray with passion like Jesus did. I believe that Jesus realized that at least sometimes one has to pray out loud in passionate intimacy with the Father to stay fully connected with Him from both sides of the brain.

I do not take this as an arbitrary rule that I must now obey; that I must feel guilty if I don't always pray out loud. I do not feel God convicting me that only those who pray out loud will be listened to and will receive answers. That is very inconsistent with the truth about God's character that has so much warmed my heart over the past few years. However, I do feel Him reminding me that I am too much the other direction and that I will need to be more willing to engage my physical voice at certain times if I want to have more efficient growth in my soul. And I will have to leave it up to Him to heal me of the triggers that my own voice still sets off both in both myself and in others.

I sense that as the sweetness of Jesus more fully pervades my heart that the “edge” that comes through in my voice will gradually fade away. It is not something I can force on myself but is something that is going to have to happen in God's way and His timing. It is part of the transformation that He is in charge of and that I trust His faithfulness to accomplish.

For you once were NOT A PEOPLE, but now you are THE PEOPLE OF GOD; you had NOT RECEIVED MERCY, but now you have RECEIVED MERCY. (1 Peter 2:10)

The Passion Reactor

In harmony with the ever-increasing knowledge of a principle of parallels, the fact that every truth seems to have its counterfeit and every counterfeit definitely has its counterpart in truth, I am beginning to see more clearly that the core of the battle going on in the universe is a struggle to the death between passion and passion, but two different versions of passion.

This word passion has been so hijacked by the enemy that some are even afraid to attribute it to God. They have come to believe that there is no such thing as good passion. But that is not true and believing that can actually blind our minds from perceiving the true nature of the Great Controversy. For I believe that the titanic struggle going on all around and inside of us is the clash between the passion originating in God's heart that is completely selfless and constitutes pure love, and the passion first seen in the heart of Lucifer that now infects all of the world – the passion of selfishness.

I have become much more aware over the past few years of the reality of the enormous, unfathomable reservoir of passion burning in the great heart of our Creator. It is usually referred to by other names such as love or wrath. But it can equally be described as intense passion by God for an intimate and synchronized relationship with everything that has been created by His Spirit.

However, one of the created beings who was at one time the very closest of all intelligent beings to that unapproachable nuclear core of energy and powerful passion and who understood it better than any other created being in the whole universe, figured out ways to misrepresent and distort our perceptions of that passion and to hijack this foundational power source that God had implanted in the beings created in His own image.

I believe that God designed humans to be motivated and empowered by passion similar to the way He lives and functions. It is very much like a nuclear reactor that is motivated by the immense power of controlled atomic fusion. And just as nuclear power can be unleashed in controlled ways to accomplish much good or in uncontrolled ways to wreak unspeakable destruction, so too the nuclear core of passion that has been embedded in all of our hearts to be used to impart life and help us thrive can either be a source of good or unbridled evil.

When sin came into this world by the choice of Adam and Eve to turn over the control room of their nuclear reactors to God's archenemy, we lost the ability to recapture the deadly radiation that spilled out into our lives and began to quickly contaminate not only ourselves but everything and everyone around us. The security of our power plant had been breached by an enemy and when he gained control he quickly smashed the locks, began tearing down the defenses and supplanted the control programs with his own altered version. As a result our passion power plants have been malfunctioning ever since, spreading death and pain and broken relationships in place of peace and love and joy.

Just as nuclear power often carries a bad reputation because of its association with nuclear war and the disasters from mismanaged power plants, so too, passion has gained a dubious reputation as a reliable source of energy and power for our lives. It is clear that passion has very great power – that is an unavoidable fact of life. But to think that it was designed to be a legitimate means of motivation is for some Christians a disturbing thought.

What I am starting to see is that, far from desiring us to abandon all use of passion, God desires to replace our passion with His pure and holy passion. He is offering each of us the opportunity to have our security systems repaired, our reactor buildings reinforced and rebuilt and our nuclear cores refitted with fresh fuel that will burn much hotter than we have ever imagined possible. But with this new potent power in our hearts, if we allow God to fulfill the passionate desire of His heart for us we will realize that we can again function in the image of our Creator and begin to thrive and give out energy in life-giving ways that will bless those around us instead of leaking radiation and hot steam causing damage and pain and destruction.

God is not wanting to shut down our power plants because of the damage and the false operators that have taken us over. But He does need our daily permission to continue His work of expelling the false gods, of exposing the security breaches and giving us opportunity to allow Him to repair them. This is done through the means of allowing us to get triggered by someone or some circumstance that ignites a false belief deep inside that needs to be exposed and replaced. If we try to live in denial of our core faults and false beliefs in the heart that resonate during these times of exposure, we will only have them continue to be triggered in opportunity after opportunity until it is too late to have them repaired.

God will respect our choices as to whether to allow Him access to the central controls of our heart to do His reprogramming and improve our security systems or whether we will insist that we can handle some of it ourselves. But if we do not allow Him full access to every detail of our heart and our belief systems, it will be exposed sooner or later that the unrepaired, hidden faults will prove to be our undoing and will culminate in catastrophic meltdown when least expected.

God's laws and principles must be written into the code of our programs and God's principles of living, both in physical and mental arenas must be incorporated into all of our life or else our defenses will have gaps that will be exploited by the enemy of our souls. This enemy is very aware of all the aspects of our security apparatus and knows the weak areas of our passion reactor far better than we can ever know on this earth. He is determined to sabotage our passion with every means and deception possible and our only safety is to turn all authority and control over to the only One who has the wisdom and skill and power to counteract the schemes of the enemy.

One of the greatest weapons of our enemy is deception, and the very nature of deception is usually not knowing you are deceived. Pride often deflects God's attempts to alert us to our weaknesses. God has provided a way for us to become undeceived by giving us His Word in the Bible and His Spirit to properly apply that Word. But if instead, we fill our minds with the entertainment of the enemy, the news propaganda that is calculated to brainwash everyone into false assumptions about reality or any of the other many distractions provided abundantly all around us, we will not be able to enjoy the salvation purchased for us at the cost of the very life of God's Son. Many believe that they have a secure salvation and are satisfied with a partial repair job. But if our passion plant is not fully retrofitted in every respect and detail, then the time of revealing and testing will expose our vulnerabilities and we will be compromised, to put it mildly.

God, I have lived for many years either expressing passion in lethal ways or in trying to suppress it altogether. I am beginning to see that, far from living without passion, You want me to have a life with far more passion than I ever dared to think possible. I also know that my security systems and defenses are still badly damaged and my reactor has far to many cracks causing radiation leaks that hurt those around me.

I ask You, Father, to take over my control room, place your angels around the perimeter of my heart and life and home to secure the premises and continue Your work of repair, reprogramming and refueling my heart with the passion that originates in Your own heart of pure, selfless, serving love.

Install Your receiver the the power plant of my heart to synchronize my passion with Yours. Help me to avoid all false broadcasts designed to distort Your signals to my heart. Continue to accomplish Your wonderful experiment of grace in my life. Surround the core of my passion with the water of Your Spirit so that the output of my passion becomes life-giving instead of spreading pain and fear.

I am excited about Your plans for me and trust You to do whatever it is You have designed and created for me to do. Live in me every moment and link me closely with Your great heart of passion. Thank-you for hearing this prayer and thank-you for Your amazing goodness and passionate love for me.

Jesus as a Mirror

Jesus became a human because it was necessary in order for Him to be incarnated into a mirror like we are. All of God's intelligent creatures are only capable of reflecting life and light, not originating it. So for the Son of God who is the originator of light and life to demonstrate how His created beings are to live in proper relationship to their true Source, He had to take on the essence of the nature of humans in order to have the credibility with us that is needed to change our minds about God.

After sin entered this world we had no way of knowing how to live in proper relationship to our only Source of life except the rules and guidelines given over the years. But rules cannot transform us, partly because they only address half the brain – the half that is far less effective over the roots of our natural behavior. We need much more than simply descriptions of what righteousness is supposed to look like, we need a real live example of what all of this business God talks about actually looks like. For the most important and powerful part of our brain, our right hemisphere, can only learn primarily by imitation, not by instruction.

So Jesus had to become a mirror like we are in order to give us an example of how to live successfully as a mirror in proper alignment with the real Source of life and light. But He went beyond that and also demonstrated the consequences of what happens when a mirror with dirt on it encounters the fiery presence of God's passion. All of the suffering and agony that finally killed the human life of the Son of Man was due to His taking onto Himself all of the guilt and condemnation, the pain and sins of every person who has ever existed. It was like piling all the mud and filth of the whole world onto the surface of His mirror and then allowing it to be exposed to a lethal dose of the laser light of God's purity and holiness.

But there was one very significant difference between Jesus' human nature and the rest of us. The sin that Jesus took upon Himself was all on the surface of His mirror creating the distortion and dissonance that killed Him as He encountered God's presence. But the sin and filth that is in our lives is within the glass and is deeply embedded in the reflective part of our psyche. Jesus did not have our propensities to evil like we experience them, but He did understand the results encountered from having those tendencies vicariously.

But in taking on our condemnation and experiencing those natural consequences so that we would understand the danger of sin more clearly, He also earned the right and authority to replace our faulty systems and reflectors with new systems designed to once again reflect the glory of God properly. He is able and eager to also engage us in a lifelong process of thoroughly cleaning and polishing our mirrors so that we will more and more perfectly reflect His face and disposition if we will allow Him permission.

Our mirrors have imperfections both on the surface and in the substrates. We have deep roots of bitterness and lies buried in our reflective layers that distort the light and creates ugliness. We also have habits, addictions and false notions that smear the surface of our mirrors that likewise distort and confuse the reflections that we emanate. We also have problems with focusing on the things of darkness and turning away from light that might expose our weakness and imperfections.

But God is in the repair and cleaning business for all who give Him permission to do so. He even works behind the scenes with those who do not yet know Him properly or who are filled with many lies about Him that keep them afraid and at a great distance from Him. There are many I believe, who cannot tolerate engaging with the God that they have heard about through the misrepresentation of those who raised them or who claim to represent Him currently in their lives. But that is not the real God who passionately loves them, it is a fictional deity that has been created by the enemy who stops at nothing to slander and distort His true image in our hearts.

So when a person claims that they want nothing to do with God or Jesus or reject the Holy Spirit as they have perceived Him through the distortions of others, He knows that they are not really talking about Him but about the caricature of Him imposed on them by their surroundings and by religious impostors. So He works quietly in the background and in their conscience sometimes for many years to untangle their many lies about Him until the day when they are ready to let down their defenses and give Him more open permission to actively engage in their restoration and repair. This is the experience I believe happened to Saul of Tarsus.

If I want to know how to live in freedom, joy and peace as a good mirror like I was created to live, then the best way to do this is to immerse myself in an emotional and deeply spiritual journey into a heart-oriented study of the example in the life of Jesus Christ. Jesus demonstrated throughout His whole life what it looks like to live as a mirror with a constant focus on the face of God while interacting with sinful humanity like we may do. He laid aside His inherent natural tendencies to always living perfectly and choose every moment to live only as a mirror in order that we might have an example to follow. It was not so much the consequent perfection of His outward actions that was our example as many have supposed, but it was the orientation of His spirit/heart mirror that was the most important aspect of His example that we need to emulate.

The very greatest temptation of Jesus while living on earth as a mirror was to allow His own natural tendencies to support or supplement Him in His life interacting with others. And His natural divine tendencies are to always do what is kind and perfect and loving and graceful. But we make a huge mistake when we believe or teach that Jesus' life was good because He was God in human form. That is precisely where His greatest temptation actually lay. He never once accessed His divinity in order to supplement His needs as a human mirror, and He did that precisely because He needed to show us how to live in total dependence on an outside source for our identity and power.

But in doing this He placed Himself in a situation far more severe than any human will ever face. For to have infinite power and natural desire to be good constantly right at your fingertips so to speak, and never access it for your advantage is the greatest temptation one could ever face. Satan knew that and did everything he could think of to amplify and exploit that vulnerability in Jesus' life.

On the other hand, we humans who have nothing but natural tendencies toward selfishness, the very opposite of Jesus' divine natural tendencies, somehow feel that we can use our own strength and abilities at times to produce what we think is a good life or to make good decisions. We have all manner of variations on this with many versions claiming we just need a little more assistance from God to accomplish it. But the message of the Bible and the example of Jesus shows us that we must come to a point of total abstinence from all dependence on our own natural tendencies whether they appear to be good or otherwise. We must follow the example of Jesus in learning to live in constant and intimate vital communion with the only Source of life and light if we are to live in righteousness as mirrors. We must live a life led by the Spirit of God if we are to be true children of God.

Jesus made it very clear that only God is righteous. Since that is a fact, then for us to be righteous while existing only as mirrors, we have to align ourselves properly with the Source of righteousness so that we can reflect that righteousness and light effectively. And when that same light exposes the filth and distortions on our own mirrors, instead of turning away from the light we need to accept His provisions for cleaning our mirrors and healing us from all the embedded flaws and cracks and brokenness so that we will reflect His light and face more accurately.

This is not an optional idea for us, it is a matter of life and death, of survival itself. For there is coming a day when the laser light of God's glory is going to be unveiled and will permeate every place of the whole universe. All who have allowed God to bring healing and wholeness to their hearts and minds and have been realigned with His perfect character and law will become an integral part of the new creation He is planning. All who are prepared will become reflectors of that powerfully dangerous but glorious light that will fill the whole world and even the universe with the dazzling light and color and love and our Creator.

But those who resent or reject His offer of repair and realignment will, upon exposure to that same laser light, find that the intensity of passionate love is far too much for their little damaged hearts to handle and all the dirt and filth and imperfections they clung to in their mirrors will become painful liabilities that resist the light. When intense, overwhelming light meets distortions and flaws in the glass or mirror, those imperfections create resistance which becomes fatal to the very existence of the mirror itself.

So we all have an individual choice to make right now. We can ask God and continue to ask Him to clean us and grow us in maturity and reveal to us what needs to be removed from our hearts and minds, or we can resist His offers of sanctification and end up self-destructing in the day when we should be glowing with the passion from the heart of God.

I want to cooperate with this process while I have been given time in this day of grace. Jesus has postponed the natural consequences of my sin by taking them on Himself at Calvary. But that does not exempt me from ignoring His provision and ending up suffering the consequences myself in that final day of revealing (judgment). I want my spirit to be perfectly aligned with the sweet spirit of Jesus and my life to become the fragrance of love that fills the courts of heaven and earth. I give my permission for God to continue His work of grace in me so that I can participate and enjoy and walk in the fire when everyone is exposed to what is currently veiled deep in the heart of God.

A Troubling Truth about Forgiveness

Forgiveness is something that has changed color quite dramatically for me in the past few years, especially after I learned what it really meant and involved. Letting go of many of the false preconceptions generally believed about this concept and embracing the real truth about forgiveness also involves facing a troubling aspect that was never seen before.

I usually find it helpful for context to explain some of the old ideas commonly held about forgiveness that I now realize are not accurate. I suspect that stopping nearly anyone on the street and asking them what they think forgiveness means would produce some of the following ideas.

Forgiveness is forgetting about what someone has done to hurt us.

Forgiveness is letting someone off the hook who deserves to be punished. (But if the heart is consulted about this option it will usually be discovered that a great deal of resentment is harbored as a result.)

Forgiveness is pretending that we were not hurt by someone when in reality we still feel the pain, we are just trying very hard to suppress it in the name of Christianity, or whatever other ideal we may hold.

Forgiveness is trying to ignore the pain that an offense has caused us because someone insisted that we had to forgive. This is not really successful but we sometimes think it is if we can repress our pain so effectively that we don't notice it anymore.

There are many more subtle definitions of forgiveness that I suspect could be uncovered if people were interviewed about this, but what I have realized is that none of these things is real forgiveness the way it must take place for effective and long-term healing to occur. (Not noticing our pain after lengthy repression is not healing.) And if the heart could be interviewed about any of these commonly held beliefs about forgiveness I think it would be quite dissatisfied with most all of them. But since it is the intellectual part of our brain that commonly steps in to answer these questions based on what it thinks is the “correct” answer, the heart is seldom heard on this issue. It is usually suppressed both internally and by society around us in an effort to comply with the demands that we mistakenly believe forgiveness requires of us.

A few years ago I watched a video by a Christian pastor/counselor who illustrated true forgiveness in a story he told about a couple he was working with who had very intense problems in their marriage. As is often the case, the story was far more effective at conveying the real meaning of the word much more than simply an intellectual explanation of what it means. But I have also found it helpful for the kind of thinking I like to do to condense the principles uncovered in the story to words that explicitly lay out what it means. Maybe that is because my right brain relates better to the story with its emotions and drama, and my left brain relates better to logical explanations that correlate to the reasons the story is so effective. With both sides of my brain tracking in the same direction, maybe I then feel more balanced and congruent.

Even as I am writing this, part of my brain resists the need to tell the story as I remember it because it would take so much time and effort to write it out in length. But another part of my brain says that if I don't I am a hypocrite after all that I have just stated about the importance of stories conveying the meaning far more effectively. So to avoid contributing to undermining my integrity with hypocrisy I better take the time and effort to go ahead and relate the story before I go on.

As I remember it, this couple was on their last attempt to possibly patch their marriage back together even though the wife was quite certain there was no hope. The husband had had an affair while away from home on business and the marriage had been in turmoil, separation and pain ever since. (I am sure I am leaving out many important details, but it has been awhile since I heard the story myself.)

The wife related that her family had been Irish Catholics for many generations and no one in their family had forgiven anyone for generations. Evidently it was just not something they ever did in their family. As they sat there in the pastor's office locked in their pain and memories and emotions, the solution to reconciliation seemed impossible.

The pastor turned to the wife and asked, “How much money could your husband give you to take away the pain he has caused you?”

The wife was shocked and almost angered by this question. She looked at him in unbelief and exclaimed, “There is not enough money in the whole world that would effectively take away the pain that I feel inside from what he has done to me!”

The two people sat facing each other in front of the desk but they could not look at each other's eyes. The husband was numb in his emotions and just sat staring at the floor. He could not feel repentance like what might be expected of him even though he regretted what he had done. He really did not know what to do or where to turn at this point. The wife sat across from him pondering the dilemma they were in and the implications raised by the question that the pastor had asked.

As she began to see more clearly what the real situation was and her husband's complete inability to remove the pain that she felt inside, it began to become clear to her what her real option was. She made a decision and looked up as she said, “There is nothing that he can ever do to eliminate or remove all the pain and suffering that he has caused me. So I choose to accept full responsibility for all this pain that I feel and I do not hold it against him any longer. I accept the pain as my own.”

In that moment her husband looked up at her with a look of shock and amazement and instantly burst into tears and lunged into her arms. The two embraced for a long time crying onto each other's shoulders and allowing their hearts to once again engage with each other in what was the real experience of forgiveness.

As I listened to this intensely emotional story for the first time, and in fact each time I hear it, I was struck with the amazing truth of what forgiveness really means. But the implications of this truth resonate far beyond this story. When I take the principles revealed in this story and apply them to not only my own relationships with others but to God Himself, I am amazed at all the implications and insights that suddenly burst into the open about the whole plan of salvation and what is really going on with the Great War between Christ and Satan. I begin to get a much clearer view of how God goes about winning this war and the relationship that He has toward everyone who has offended or spurned His love for them.

But as I thought about it over the past few years since hearing this story, another aspect of this suddenly struck me as very troubling. I believe if we view forgiveness in this new light that we will be forced to rethink very seriously the flippant or mindless ways in which we often relate to forgiveness or the ways in which we try to force our children to ask for forgiveness.

Think about it seriously with me here. Forgiveness means that the only way I can become free of the pain of an offense is to take full ownership of my pain and release everyone else. I also have to let go of all desire on my part for vengeance or retribution, even at the heart level. When I come to realize that the offending party is completely incapable of bringing healing to my damaged heart by anything they can do, say or experience, then I can choose to stop holding them hostage by my bitterness toward them and release them to be responsible to God in their own relationship to Him. I will accept that the pain I feel is resident within my own heart and no longer try to link it to the one who incurred it to begin with. And after I release believing that they can fix me, either directly or through their being punished, I can then be ready to find healing and release in my own soul and spirit.

If I am not willing to take this act of intentional forgiveness and release in its true form, then I will continue to harbor either an open or a secret desire that somehow, sometime that person will experience pain that will force them to know what they have done to me. We mistakenly believe that we will somehow feel “healing” satisfaction in seeing others suffer who have hurt us and thus we will somehow become freed of our own pain. But this is an illusion, a lie that is so deeply rooted in the human psyche that we mostly assume it must be true. But it is really part of the deception of sin that has infected our thinking since the fall of the human race into sin.

This belief in the need for revenge or punishment, to make others feel the same or worse pain than we feel, lies at the root of much of our reasoning and even under girds much of our mistaken theology about how God is going to resolve the problem of sin. It is pervasive in many of our suppositions about justice and is the foundation of most of our legal apparatus and system of punishments. But nevertheless, it is still a false presumption and keeps us locked in a cycle of pain and dysfunction that takes us lower and lower as we get farther away from the ways of God.

Because of these assumptions about crime and punishment that pervade most of our thinking, our notions of forgiveness parallel that false line of reasoning. If an offense must have a punishment as we normally assume it does, then forgiveness must mean escaping deserved punishment and thereby getting away with an offense while leaving someone else holding the bag of pain and consequences. But all of this is reasoning based on the kingdom of darkness and upon which all the kingdoms of the world are founded.

Understanding real forgiveness, like so many other aspects of true reality, requires a complete and radical rethinking of all of the aspects of reality and truth. But that is more than I have time or space for right now but is something that I am continually seeking to understand better. At this point I would like to explain the other side of forgiveness that should change the way we think about it from a different perspective.

It is one thing to accept the true meaning of forgiveness – accepting full responsibility for the pain someone has caused me and releasing them from being our hostage. This allows me to then turn my pain over to God and in turn receive His forgiveness, peace and joy in my heart in place of the former pain. (see Matt. 6:12) But what about when I ask for someone else's forgiveness? In light of a clearer understanding of the real meaning of forgiveness, what am I really asking them to do for me? I know that for myself this new understanding has given me pause before glibly asking someone to forgive me. It is one thing to forgive someone else, as difficult as that may be. But what does it really mean for me to ask for someone else to forgive me?

It appears to me that what I am really asking the other person (or God) to do when I ask for forgiveness is for them to take full responsibility for all of the pain I have caused them and no longer hold me responsible for it. That sounds rather wrong in the way we typically view fairness and justice, but in the light of what I have learned I cannot avoid facing this fact. If this is what forgiveness really means – and I believe it is, for it is far more effective in resolving our relationship problems that the false notions about forgiveness ever accomplish – it makes me think much more seriously about what I am really asking a person to do when I ask for forgiveness. I hesistate to use these words so lightly as I often have in the past.

What complicates the problem is that while I may better understand what I am really asking someone to do for me when I ask them to forgive me, I also realize that quite likely they are hearing my request with the false ideas about forgiveness still firmly embedded in their own assumptions and so they will not understand what I am really asking for if I simply use the word forgiveness. But if I explicitly spell out what I am really asking them to do it becomes even more painful for both of us, because what I am asking for is generally considered highly unfair and unjust. It almost seems to be an affront to ask for someone's forgiveness in the light of a true understanding of the word; but on the other hand forgiveness is the only path to real reconciliation and healing for both parties.

It is a truth that forgiveness does not have to be asked for to be extended. Forgiveness can be refused but still be valid for the person forgiving. A request for forgiveness can be rebuffed and rejected as well, but the need to seek forgiveness is still no less important on the part of an offender. All of these aspects of forgiveness require further exploration and I want to do that. But for this time I simply wanted to expose some of the real issues involved in forgiveness and the implications involved in asking others to forgive us.

(part 2)