Thoughts for StS

2/7/07

I arrived at the men's group last night late and they were already well into discussion. After I arrived we called StS to see how things were going for him. During the phone call I was praying for focus and struggling against the strong urges of my flesh or picker to throw out advice without waiting for the Spirit first. I was studying my motives and not particularly happy with what I was finding. So I kept quiet and prayed inwardly and waited to see what God would do. I have found that waiting for God's timing always seems to result in better outcomes.

I observed that Satan is targeting StS very intensely along with his family right at the most critical time in their son's life at the age of twelve. Craig Hill has pointed out that this is very common because Satan intends to steal any blessing that might and should be passed to the children from their father at the age when they need it the most. Our culture has not only completely forgotten the rite of passage to adulthood that many other cultures still observe, but Satan has succeeded in ripping the father completely out of so many families particularly at this very point in time in their children's lives. Thereby, instead of a specific blessing being imparted to the child empowering them for success a curse is cast over their life that they must struggle under for years to come if not remediated.

I also sense that God may be using this situation for StS to create an internal hunger for Himself that is so necessary for us to move into deeper dependence on Him. We go through so much of our lives in easy cooperation with so many of our hidden false gods, sources of support and satisfaction that are so acceptable and approved by our friends and religious people. We have no idea of the extent of our dependence on these gods until tension and conflict rise to an intensity that draws our attention to alert us that all is not right. Even then it is so difficult to admit or recognize our cherished idols after they seemingly have served us so well for so many years. And even then, only the Holy Spirit can safely convict us of these arrangements without driving us into over-defensiveness or hopeless condemnation.

So often it is easy for me to see what I believe are the problems of those around me and desire to point them out so they can see and correct them. You can easily see where this is going. All I have to do is remember how well that works with me when others try it on me. But when the Spirit convicts me of the things that are preventing me from experiencing the deeper, richer intimacy that is God's desire for me to come close to Him and also my growing desire, it gives a completely different perspective on letting go of my idols. I need to see more clearly the contrast between the shallow and temporary satisfaction or pleasure offered by these false sources and the lavish, extravagant riches of favor, grace, freedom and power that my Creator is eagerly waiting to flood into my life.

I would like to strongly recommend to StS the full set of Munchies by Jim Wilder. This is an invaluable source of wisdom that has been a blessing to those of us who are listening to them. They come in MP3 format which makes them even easier to take with and listen to anywhere. He covers a wide range of things that are extremely practical and yet very profound. God has gifted him with wisdom and I am so glad he is sharing it with us. I believe that it would make a great contribution to the capacity of StS to perceive what is really going on in his current struggle for perspective.

I see an intense thrust of the enemy of souls to cast a veil of deception that is not unlike the spells used in heathen countries to control people and distort their view of reality. I believe we are all subjected to various intensities of magical-like powers endeavoring to deceive us and prevent us from living in freedom. But there are times when the spell is greatly intensified, when the enemy specifically targets an individual or family and all sorts of strange events and behaviors are displayed. This is when it is most dangerous to follow human wisdom and counsel. It is when we need a strong infusion of divine insights, revelations and frequent immersions in the conscious presence of God. The intensity of the struggle is directly proportional to the value of the things at stake. We are up against the greatest thief in the history of the universe. He hates our souls and our families because they are so valuable to God. But we have available to us the far-surpassing resources of protection and means of exposure to unveil his schemes if we will learn to live in the true reality of heaven's atmosphere.

I am praying for StS and his family that God will have permission to intercept the attacks, preempt the illusionary thoughts and urges with revelations of what is true reality, and flood light into what is now shadows and confusion. I would encourage you, StS, to practice the praise and worship strategy to disable the powers arrayed against you, to fill your mind with contemplations of what God is really like and call to memory the words that God has spoken to reveal Himself to us. Do not give an inch to any thoughts of failure or alternative plans. Launch yourself into the battle for your soul and align all your resources with God's will. Release all dependence on anything that interferes with total trust in God's love and test God's faithfulness. Remember, God is passionately on your side to infuse life, abundant life into your heart and your family.

Every struggle produces strength unless we don't resist. The muscles we use to resist become stronger. If we resist God by trusting our own plans and wisdom, then those ways of thinking become stronger. If we submit to God and resist the Devil, then those character muscles are strengthened. When we practice focusing on the truth about God we release that very power into our experience. Notice all the incredible stories of victory in the Bible and how many of them were preceded by rehearsals of God's wonders from the past. God is eager to reveal His power again but needs our permission through the agency of our faith in His faithfulness.

Bind the Sacrifice

The reading in My Utmost for His Highest today talks about a very uncomfortable issue that God has been pressing me about. I have realized at times when He convicts me about things I say to others that are self-promoting or undermining that my resistance to repentance usually involves self-pity. I often whine and drag my feet with God while analyzing myself and maybe even trying self-therapy. I believe it is important to get past the surface circumstances to unmask the deeper issues. But the self-pity is a liability that inhibits growth in ways I do not yet full realize.

“'I am ready to be offered.' It is a transaction of will, not of sentiment. Tell God you are ready to be offered; then let the consequences be what they may, there is no strand of complaint now, no matter what God chooses. God puts you through the crisis in private, no one person can help another. Externally the life may be the same; the difference is in will. Go through the crisis in will, then when it comes externally there will be no thought of the cost. If you do not transact in will with God along this line, you will end in awakening sympathy for yourself.”

I saw the familiar pattern at this point. The Spirit prompted me to go ahead right now and tell God that “I am ready to be offered”. I detected a great amount of resistance, a desire to change the words – to soften them. But that is evasive and betrays something trying to hide inside, most likely another strong false god in there. So I go ahead and say the words. Yes there is fear and a certain amount of pain. But I also instantly realize that it is a choice, an important step toward the intimacy with God that I long to experience.

Then I read the next line and it tightened even more. “'Bind the sacrifice with cords, even unto the horns of the altar.' The altar means fire – burning and purification and insulation for one purpose only, the destruction of every affinity that God has not started and of every attachment that is not an attachment in God.”

Not only must I offer myself as a sacrifice, my self-protection, self-justification, self-defense, but I must fasten it there with some kind of security measures to keep it from escaping the flames. This is serious and threatening. But then dying to self is not a picnic at the park. The flesh inside of me that has tried to protect me all these years becomes angry that I am “betraying” it to be destroyed. It threatens to create hell for me if I really go through with this. The truth is, that is what hell is all about. If my flesh, my self-dependence does not die now in the fire of God's presence it will die later in God's presence at take my soul with it.

“You do not destroy it. God does; you bind the sacrifice to the horns of the altar; and see that you do not give way to self-pity when the fire begins. After this way of fire, there is nothing that oppresses of depresses. When the crisis arises, you realize that things cannot touch you as they used to do.”

Yes, I see it more clearly. Self-pity is often the symptom of my resistance, whether it is complaining to God during conviction or trying to subtly elicit sympathy from others to soften my struggles. But as I read the last line the Spirit was insistent. “Tell God you are ready to be offered, and God will prove Himself to be all you ever dreamed He would be.”

Thank-you God for that reminder of what this is all about. I must remember that the whole object of this sacrifice is to remove all the things inside of me that prevent me from experiencing your presence more fully. Your passion is to prove Yourself to be more than I could ever imagine, to ravish me in your love, to satisfy and fill the deepest emptiness of my soul.

Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. (Hebrews 12:1-3 NAS95)

Winter is Cold Finally

It has gotten very cold here lately and promises to get even colder over the next few days. This is what happens when the door doesn't get shup properly. Of course maybe its good that it froze open or it may have frozen shut and we could not get in or out at all. As you can see our house (actually my daughter's) is in need of more insulation so we don't lose so much heat out the roof to form all these stalagtites. They are forming a bigger and bigger curtain over our kitchen window. Last week my daughter's car transmission went out on her. With the Lord's blessing a 90 year old customer and friend of mine told me of a relative trying to sell a car for a very reasonable price. We were able to pick it up from them last week but are still in process of getting all the paperwork finished. Here is some interesting natural snow art that I stopped to capture after dropping my daughter off at work one day. I have spent most of the day typing up multiple writings from an old ledger that I had written between May and October of this year. I will soon be adding them to my site back-dated. If you have been perusing my writings recently you will find the new ones inserted by date as I enter them over the next while.

Vacuum Cleaner Prayers

I was thinking about the way we pray today as I was praying for a couple people close to me that I believed were likely in a situation that would create potential for very intense temptation. The thought came to me that too often our prayers devolve into simply praying our fears. How often I hear prayers that primarily beg God to get rid of the negative things we don't want in our life and don't do much more. How many times have I found myself praying that way. “Oh God, please deliver me from this temptation. Please take away this bad feeling. Please fix my financial problem. Please protect me from evil and bad things happening to me....”

Focusing primarily on my fears can actually have the unintended effect of making those fears my gods and empowering them instead of overcoming and eliminating them. One of the enemy's greatest weapons against us is fear, so when we allow our imagination to obsess with those fears, even in our prayers to God, the fears become bigger to us than God is and the fears and objects of those fears are literally turned into gods that gain control over our lives. We then live in reference to those fears and make our decisions and goals in relationship to them instead of orienting our life using God as the solid source of reliable reference. It is very much like allowing a compass needle to be distracted by a nearby magnetic object that cause it to produce false readings instead of referencing the true mother-lode magnetic North.

It is true that confession is an important aspect of prayer. But it is also important to understand what confession really is and what it isn't. The literal meaning for the word confession is simply “to agree with”. When we are convicted of something wrong in our soul and life we simple agree with God's Spirit and His assessment of that fact about us. That is confession. But when we attempt to preempt the Holy Spirit or replace its role in our life by trying to dredge up more and more evil that may be lurking within us instead of moving on to growth and forgiveness and following the leading of the Spirit, we fall into a trap of negative prayer that leaves us nearly powerless and makes a mockery of the power of God to effect change in our lives and those we are praying for.

An examination of some of the powerful prayers recorded in the Bible shows that they often, if not always, started with confession. But confession also involves not only agreeing with God about sin but agreeing with God about God. Really, effective prayer and confession is simply a reality check. When you want to go on a trip using a map, you first have to know where you are on the map before you can figure out how to get to someplace else. Confession is perceiving and acknowledging where I am so I can then make definite plans and progress toward where God wants me to go.

I believe that many of our prayers are like vacuum cleaners. We spend a great deal of energy and focus on trying to get evil and discomfort out of our lives but we do not ask God for the good things that we need and that He desires for us. “"Now when the unclean spirit goes out of a man, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and does not find it. Then it says, 'I will return to my house from which I came'; and when it comes, it finds it unoccupied, swept (vacuumed), and put in order. Then it goes and takes along with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first. That is the way it will also be with this evil generation.” (Matthew 12:43-45 NAS95)

Notice that it is not wrong to clean and sweep your soul-house. It is very important to participate in the process of cleansing, healing and restoration to wholeness. But an empty house can also become an open invitation for druggies, pimps and others such characters if it is not filled up with good things and good people.

As I was praying for my friends yesterday and thinking about this, I began to reorient my prayers to ask God not so much for protection and deliverance from temptation for them, but more for good thoughts implanted in their minds, for blessings to fall on them and for them to inexplicably fell urges toward goodness and love and purity. I asked that God glorify His name and reputation in their experience and that growth and good lessons will emerge from whatever takes place in their experience. As I chose to pray in this (unfamiliar) way I found my own feelings toward them and my fears melting away in the atmosphere of praise and the positive presence of God. I realized that even if they were overcome by temptation that God has the amazing ability to bring more good out of bad situations than we can imagine if He is just given permission by His people on earth.

I have a great deal to learn about this, but I am glad that I am starting to be more aware. There are many very powerful things we can do that are easily within our reach but are often kept just outside of our awareness because of our past conditioning. Maturing and growing involves bringing these things into our lives and practicing them by choice until they become more integrated into our thinking and living.

Filter Shield

I am aware that around each of us there exists an atmosphere. I am not referring to the physical aroma that emanates from our bodies, though that may be somewhat of a factor, or maybe more of a symptom. I am speaking of the spirit, that elusive part of us that may be more real than the physical realm that we usually assume is reality. The word “spiritual” really means anything in reference to this spirit realm.

When we start throwing these words around the idea of “spirits”, as in ghosts or angels, also comes into the question. They definitely are a factor that strongly plays into this issue at times, but what I am focusing on here is the immediate sense or flavor or “spirit aroma” that is created and surrounds our own unique individual spirit and the effect that it has on both ourselves and others. This is an area that is often completely outside the awareness of many people. Because they are not aware of their own spirit or may even be hostile to even believing that it exists, they lose the ability and cognizance of what is going on in this realm, how they are being powerfully influenced by others and how much of an effect they are really having on their surroundings.

Some in the spiritual healing ministries have drawn pictures to illustrate the condition many of us find ourselves in with locked hearts. They sketch a drawing of a person with something like a force shield around their body that has been put in place to keep others from getting to their heart. This is usually erected very early in life as a barrier in our attempt to keep our hearts from being further damaged after repeated abuse and pain. It is a natural part of our human experience to act this way, but it is also very damaging and obstructive to the process of healing and growing in maturity.

This “force shield” around us is really an atmosphere that acts as a very selective filter that blocks out or allows in only selected ideas, emotions and communications according to the evolution of the damage done to our hearts previously. It is constructed in our mind through the various experiences and traumas that we have been through, many of which we are no longer aware of. The healing process involves undoing the locks and bars that have been constructed over the years so that we can once again begin connecting meaningfully with others at the heart level and begin to understand and experience life as God intended for us.

I have been thinking about this filtering shield the past few days and some of the ways it operates as I observe it in action both in myself and in those around me. I have noticed that this filter is built mostly on assumptions about life, about others, about God, about what is good and bad, about what if desirable and what is threatening. Most of the time many of these assumptions are at best partially wrong if not totally, but we believe them very strongly in our heart even when our head knows otherwise.

These filters seem to have the effect of allowing us to only see and hear what is important to us and also what are serious problems of our own. Though we almost never think of it this way, this is why we most often focus on the problems and issues in those around us that are the biggest problems of our own but that we have the least ability to see in ourselves. This seems to be a very pronounced attribute of this filtering phenomena. I think this may be because these “mutual” problems are where our mind dwells, either consciously if we are working on them, or unconsciously if we are in denial of them.

This filtering atmosphere around us often causes us to focus on the negative problems we perceive in those around us, those we work for, people in the store, people in church or in our families. We talk about them to our friends and complain about their faults while our friends silently are wondering when we might wake up and realize that what we are so accurately describing is really ourselves more than the people we are complaining about. But often our friends or family are too intimidated of our reactions to express what they are seeing us do so they just quietly let us vent until we have exhausted our energy or time. Or, worse yet, they may join into the pity party and began telling their own stories of the faults they see in their co-workers or others, being careful to not include us in their list of complaints at least for the time they are with us.

It is really amazing to me how very accurate the complaints a person has about those around them often fit the very character of that person themselves. It is also very frightening because I realize the same truth must apply to my complaints about others and I begin being much more attentive to the things I feel compelled to say about others and asking God to show me why this is such an intense feeling inside of me. The more intense my frustration is with someone else's problem, the more likely it is that this issue must be a part of my own nature and needs to be discovered and healed.

I also begin to think about how this same principle applies on the opposite side of the equation. When I choose to break out of the rut of focusing on the negative in others I can begin to create a new atmosphere that will invite people to see in me what I am seeing in them which in turn becomes motivation for that positive thing to be strengthened in me. For instance, how many times have we heard an unexpected, genuine expression of deep appreciation and suddenly felt to urge to be more appreciative ourselves? When we hear someone receiving affirmation, especially when they don't seem to have obviously earned it, we become aware of the incredible power inherent in affirmation to transform a life and we want to both experience it and give it. We feel the warm glow of life surging through our body and spirit and for a short time we resolve to be more positive and more loving. But habits die hard and we too often find ourselves back in the rut of negative thinking, criticizing and fault-finding with our filter locked solidly in place.

This filter not only is composed of assumptions but is knit together with expectations. We have compiled a list of things we expect to hear from people about us and we simply cannot hear or believe anything that is not on our list. It is simply beyond the realm of possibility. If we believe we are ugly we will discount and disbelieve every word anyone says to us to the contrary. If we believe we are stupid we will only allow messages into our hearts that agree with that foregone conclusion. If we believe that our real identity is found in the faults and sinful desires of the “flesh” that lives inside of us, we will gravitate toward those who point those things out in a spirit of condemnation to reaffirm the condemnation we already feel even though we may strongly resent them. What we believe about ourselves and our true identity is the filter we use to screen out all messages that disagree with the assumptions and expectations locked into that particular filter. And will tend to use the same filter to view others and judge their character. “To the pure all things are pure, but to the corrupt and unbelieving nothing is pure; their very minds and consciences are corrupted.” (Titus 1:15 RSV)

Our words combined with our spirit take on creative-like powers. In judging others we craft the very filter that will be used to judge us because it is the only thing that will be allowed in. “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.” (Matthew 7:1-2 NRSV) We reap what we sow.