Growing Awareness of Judgment

We are staying for the weekend with one of our daughter's on the way to the memorial service for our recently lost daughter Julie tomorrow. This morning I felt compelled to write a couple pieces about judgment which has been a recurring occupation in my thoughts for the past few weeks. I have written several times about this but have not yet posted any of them. I am not sure how to arrange them to make sense but then I wonder if I am supposed to do that or simply lay them out as is. I think that when I do post them that I will likely place them on the Deeper Word blog site as a collection maybe rather than a series.

What I did find interesting was after writing and thinking about the issue of identity in judgment that the sermon we heard this morning was about the very same issue in many ways. Another one of those times when it looks suspiciously coordinated I think.

I am getting increased practice in refraining from engaging in counterfeit judgment so that real judgment can take place naturally. This is a paradigm shift for me that I feel like I am just starting to become more clearly aware of in my life. These truths about judgment are very different from what I am used to but I also believe that it is the kind of life that is far more effective for attracting others to the truth about God.

My Prayer

Father, fill me with life today and make me a life-giving presence everywhere I go today. Influence my thoughts and attitudes and keep me in hope, grace and positive energy. Surround me with Your atmosphere of love and life that will quench every negative temptation and suggestion. Fill me with love to banish all fear from my mind and heart. Fill me with confidence and boldness and assurance as I rest underneath Your protection and trust in Your covenant provisions for me.

Dwell in me by Your Spirit and motivate me with Your suggestions. Fill me with Your peace so real it can be felt by others. Fill my mind and heart with real truth that energizes, guides and reminds me of who You are and who I am designed to be. Permeate me with Your grace, fill my heart with instant forgiveness and keep me very close to You. Keep me from all evil that interferes with my recognition of Your quiet voice within me. Teach my heart to rest in Your strength.

Keep me from defensiveness and self-justification today. Cleanse me from all bitter roots and flush the poison of criticism and fault-finding from my bloodstream thoroughly. Infuse me with faith, hope and love to energize me with desire to see good behind other's unloveliness. I choose to look for You today in whatever ways You choose to reveal Yourself to me.

You are merciful, gracious, life-giving and untainted by my confusion and darkness. You are totally committed to sticking close to me tighter than skin no matter how I feel, act or react. Your love lifts my head when it is pulled down by sorrow, shame or fear. God, I look to You as my Daddy who protects me and provides all of my needs. I choose to cooperate with Your plans for me today whatever that means. I do not claim to be Your most loyal friend, but I want You to grow me into that kind of person. Fill me with loyalty and total, undivided devotion to You.

Thank-you for the many reminders all around me of Your grace, Your provision and Your wisdom. Most of them go unnoticed because I am so used to only dwelling on the dark things in and around me. Please remind me constantly throughout this day of the good things, the life-producing things, the reflections of You that can be detected in each and every person I meet or converse with, the lessons of life and hope and beauty in nature and the touches of love and compassion you have placed in Your creatures. Thank-you for expressing important things about Yourself even in the animals that bless our lives.

Thank-you for the wife You have appointed for me to love, to nourish and to cherish. You have designed our relationship to teach me how to bond and synchronize and enjoy life through compassion, sympathy and shared joys in preparation for the much richer intimacy You have waiting for each of us with You. Forgive me for failing to have Your kind of spirit towards her most of the time. Please transform me into the husband that she needs and that You intended for her.

Thank-you for the children You have brought into our family through various means and for various reasons. Forgive me for failing to live Your love and grace toward them most of the time. Please take them into Your own hands and supply the nurturing, discipline and unmistakable love that I have failed to relay to them. I am being raised as a child not far ahead of where most of them are and I thank-you for Your discipline and training and patience in my own life as well as theirs.

Father, You know we are planning to travel soon to the memorial service for one of the children You entrusted us with for a few years. This is going to be a very sad time for all of us, but more than that it has high potential for igniting and intensifying feelings and triggers that lie unresolved in the hearts of many of the people who will be present there. I especially plead for an abundance of grace, healing and forgiveness to fill all of our souls, minds and hearts. Remove the bitterness that poisons so many of our hearts in this situation and keeps us from loving each other. Much of this poison is fed by many other unrelated issues or people that still remain buried in our hearts and memories that most of us have been unwilling to face. Father, I give You permission to access every heart involved in this time of mourning to reveal the real truth about forgiveness, about Your kind of love and to bring hope and life and joy into the dark places our lives and relationships.

Father, this requires power and healing and repentance of immense proportions that can only be miraculous. I especially ask that You permeate and flood my own heart with forgiveness, kindness and true compassion. Keep me very close to You as I go through unexpected emotions and unpredictable reactions. Prepare me to be a more efficient channel of Your healing grace to others. Please open my ears, my eyes, my voice and my heart to perceive others only through Your perspective and completely lay aside my prejudices, resentments and misconceptions about others.

Father, while this service and this weekend hold much potential for pain and conflict within our hearts and minds, that means it also holds even more potential for reconciliation, for bonding, for major breakthroughs and for massive progress in the lives of everyone willing to be touched by Your presence. I ask You to show up intensely so that Your presence will be unavoidably noticeable and Your transformational grace will be obvious. Overwhelm our shame with Your assurances of our value to You. Heal our brokenness with assurances of Your comfort and love. Banish all of our fears with the intense light of Your all-powerfulness and Your desires and plans to accomplish our full restoration to joy and wholeness. Father, Daddy, reveal Yourself to all of us in ways that we have never dreamed of or even know how to ask for. Father, show us Your glory for Your reputation's sake. Amen.

What Are You Reflecting?

I have been thinking more about this mirror analogy lately and was discussing it with my sister today when some more thoughts came to me. It is helping me have an internal image for when I find myself in situations that tend to trigger unwanted reactions within me.

I have observed and noted a number of times how our spirit is like a mirror that reflects the spirit of whomever we are focusing on. That is why it is so typical that when someone gets angry at us we most often immediately feel like getting angry ourselves. If someone shames us we often desire to shame them in return. If a group of people start gossiping we feel pressure to join in ourselves. Temptation in general is seen in the natural function of our mind to respond in kind to whatever is coming our direction.

I spent some time trying to draw a crude illustration of this today. It took awhile since I had never used the program before and it did not seem easy to learn intuitively and I couldn't find any instructions for dummies with it. But I finally got it finished and then managed to figure out how to convert it into a picture that I could use elsewhere.

While there may be many times when we may seem to have an opposite reaction to what is coming toward us, like fear in response to anger, I think that if we look deeper into our hearts that we will discover that many of the initial emotions that don't seem to be similar to what is coming toward us are often secondary emotions because of our feeling overwhelmed or vulnerable. But after awhile the real emotions reflecting the ones directed at us begin to emerge and our desires for revenge or for indulgence, depending on the situation, will begin to become apparent and the mirror effect becomes more evident.

Many of the ways we try to deal with this mirror tendency is to suppress our natural reactions so as to try to be a nicer person, a better Christian or whatever standard we have set up for ourselves. Very often we engage in patterns that are really nothing more than fancy ways of being a hypocrite without admitting the label. We try to mask over what we are really feeling inside with trained behaviors and calculated maneuvers to fit the model we want to project for our image. But underneath, the mirror is still functioning and all the painting and decorations that we arrange on the front of our mirrors has little effect on what is going on in our heart and with our spirit.

As I thought more about this analogy I realized that though God designed us as mirrors He did it for a much better purpose that how we normally live. We are designed in such a way so that we are supposed to be reflecting the glory of God just as Jesus did during His whole life on earth. But because we are thinking much more about how other people are treating us and are almost totally oblivious to the truth about what God thinks about us we end up reflecting the things that we were not designed to thrive on but that tend to dismantle us.

What can we do about this problem of reflecting the evil that is so real all around us? Since we cannot do anything about the fact that we are not originators but only mirrors, how can we avoid the consequences of reflecting the wrong things? In addition, if we try to confront others head-on about situations or attitudes the results are usually much less that God's design for our lives. In fact the very word “confront” when looked at carefully in this analogy reveals the problem of this approach. “Con” denotes a negative state of mind and “front” is to face directly. So when we decide to confront someone we are often assaulting them head-on with a negative spirit and will likely create a negative reaction in return because they too are mirrors reflecting what they are perceiving from our spirit.

As I thought about this I realized that when we are faced with a situation that tempts us to reflect someone else's attitudes and spirit we have a choice as to what direction we face our spirit. We may not have much choice in the moment about whose presence we are living with but we can choose who we focus our spirit attention on at anytime. In essence, if we turn our spirit mirrors away from directly facing others who may be the source of our temptations and look to see what God is thinking, something very interesting happens. Not only can we avoid the reactionary tendency to respond in kind to others but as we pay more attention to God others will begin to see in our mirror a reflection of God instead of the spirit they are projecting.

There are a number of interesting effects of adopting this posture besides the fact that we can avoid reflecting back what is being directed toward us. This angle of viewing others while focusing on God actually allows us to take the things coming at us and reflecting them on to God instead of absorbing them ourselves. In this way we can simply pass along all the anger, the bitterness, the shame and all the other evil that people intend to harm us with and allow Jesus to take it all onto Him as He has arranged for us to do. Then in exchange, because we are linked into relationship with God we can receive the grace, the forgiveness and the love coming from Him and bounce it off our mirror back toward the person we are interacting with.

Even more than all of this, God will also help us to view the other person the way He sees them instead of through our human way of perceiving others. God can see their heart which is hidden behind their mirror and if we will stay tuned to His face He can relay to our spirit what is really going on in their life and heart behind the outward appearances and fill us with His compassion and love in the midst of what otherwise may appear to be a hopeless situation. As we turn our focus onto heaven's perspective we will be more empowered to see as God sees and feel as God feels. We will begin to become real-life reflectors of the image of God which is His ultimate desire for every one of us.

The Counterfeit of Forgiveness

When we refuse to forgive, we are actually attempting to replace the role of the Holy Spirit in someone else's life. We subconsciously believe that our resentment, anger and coldness toward them along with all of our ways of trying to make them feel ashamed and terrible for the offenses that they have done will somehow force them to repent and restore our peace or maybe our relationship. It is our indulgence in the counterfeit spirit of conviction. We want to convict them through condemnation instead of kindness. We believe we might be able to force them into repentance. But the actual result is that we ourselves suffer the consequences of condemnation more than they do. Whatever we carry around in our container to dispense to others will permeate the container itself.

The gall of bitterness is one of the counterfeits of the oil of the Holy Spirit. It is a caustic acid that will eat away from the inside any soul container in which it is held. Jesus took into Himself all of this acid bitterness in the last three days of His life and it finally ate a hole in His heart and killed Him. If we refuse to allow Him to remove it from our hearts we too shall suffer the same agonizing death that He suffered. That is one reason that Jesus demonstrated that death, to reveal to us the true consequences of holding onto sin in our hearts. In the meantime we will suffer all of the pain from the etching and agitation in our own spirit and soul from this caustic poison inside of us. We cannot afford to try to keep this most malignant poison in us. It seems to promise to be a useful weapon against others to get even for their infliction of pain on us but it always ends up hurting us far more than it hurts them.

We may dilute this acid by mingling in the salve of the true Spirit and filling our minds with healing truths. But if we do not allow the convictions and gentle pleas of the Spirit of Jesus to access every chamber of our heart and give it permission to completely neutralize the springs of poison still buried in our memories, eventually the acid will continue to damage our insides and it will ruin our lives both now and for eternity.

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and bitterness and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness, which is the bitterness, anger and pain that causes dissonance and damage to our insides and our relationships. But we must first respond to the gentle promptings and invitations of the Spirit to agree with God's assessment of our real condition (confession) and allow Him permission and access to infuse us with the healing antidote of forgiveness and grace.

When we begin to truly understand the real nature of forgiveness we will be even more amazed at what God does in forgiving us. Forgiveness means taking full responsibility for the pain that someone else has caused us and not holding it against them in our heart any longer. It is true that God forgives us for all of the pain that we have caused His heart and does not hold our sins against us – ever. But even beyond that He does something far more amazing. He not only takes into His own heart full accountability and responsibility for the pain of His own heart, but in Jesus Christ He took into His heart every single effect of sin that ever touched the life of any human who ever exists, whether they want Him to do it or not.

This creates the situation where He can now offer us the opportunity to release this pain from our own hearts as soon as we are willing to release those who have sinned against us from responsibility for our pain. As long as we refuse to forgive we account the other person as the owner of our own pain. Since only the owner of anything has the right to give it away, we cannot be free to give Jesus our pain if we refuse to acknowledge full ownership of it. Only as we take back ownership of the pain that others have caused our hearts and minds can we move to the next step and give Jesus permission to assume ownership of it and release our hearts of that pain with His grace and love. Only then can the caustic acid of bitterness be completely removed from our insides and we can begin the healing journey to complete wholeness and freedom and joy.

We think secretly that if we forgive those who have wounded our hearts deeply that this will leave us defenseless and vulnerable to be hurt again. In a way that is true and we certainly can be hurt again. But this supposed defense is yet another counterfeit that is a false promise of safety for our hearts. The only real protection we can have against destructive pain in the heart is not a hardened wall around our hearts to keep us from feeling pain again but to be filled with so much grace and forgiveness that any pain that does occur will be swallowed up and neutralized in the healing presence of the grace of God filling our minds and hearts with instant forgiveness. We will learn that as we immediately take ownership of any pain we experience from others instead of holding it against them and making them accountable as the owners, then we can just as immediately turn ownership of that pain over to Jesus and in exchange receive His peace, His love, His healing grace that will transform us on the inside in totally unexpected ways. We will begin to really experience the life that Jesus offers, the abundant life.

The world's belief about survival and living life successfully is to protect ourselves against being hurt using whatever means necessary. Most of our lives revolve around the avoidance of pain which is rooted in fear. But God's method's are very different and must be exercised by faith in His ways and wisdom, not because they make sense to us, because He knows what is best for us. What feels sensible to us is what the flesh believes and it will always direct us toward the world's wisdom and logic and solutions that are deeply embedded in our logic and our natural reasoning. God's ways often appear irrational and unreasonable but are the ways that will bring true healing, wholeness and will restore us to our original design that presently makes very little sense to our ways of thinking.

When someone has violated us or someone we care for deeply, our natural instinct is to shut them off from our hearts, treat them with disdain, coldness and hostility. We may even wish them ill and hope that they will suffer intensely for the sins that they have perpetrated against us or our loved ones. This makes us feel a little more powerful, a little more in control. And control is something we somehow believe will make us safe again. Control is a way of building or maintaining the hardened wall around our heart to keep others from hurting us very much.

But control is another counterfeit that will let us down when the crunch times come. God never controls us in the way we imagine control most of the time and the way that we want to have it. Control is the enemy of freedom and perfect freedom is the environment in which we were designed to thrive. God will never destroy freedom with control and force for the sake of appearances, but we are ready to do that most of the time. God will allow natural consequences to affect our lives but He will not indulge in the enemies deceptive tactics of control for the sake of conformity. That is one of the core principles of the external-based world of Satan's government. God's empire is built securely on internal transformation and motivation based on the constant influence of grace, humility and perfect love – never control.

I am facing these issues in a very real way right now and want to learn these principles at the deepest levels of my own heart, not just in explanations and understanding the theory. I do find it helpful to work through the growing awareness of God's ways, but unless my heart also receives and experiences what I am perceiving I will lose the most important part of the lesson and will be eventually be exposed as a hypocrite. I already have plenty of that to deal with and want God to transform my heart and life to be more in line with the true reflection of His beauty and attractiveness.

As I look inside I see desires and fears and pain that are indications that the healing oil of forgiveness has not yet neutralized some of the acid of bitterness against those who have hurt me deeply or damaged the lives of those I love. I can easily justify my resentments but that path will never get me to true freedom and wholeness. It will only circle me around back into more misery and will keep me trapped in the vicious cycle of illogic, depression, increasing isolation and bitterness. If I choose to cling to my pain and believe the false logic of my flesh in my attempts to protect myself, I will remain circling around in the wilderness much like the Children of Israel did in the desert after Mount Sinai. I know this wilderness all too well and I want to be filled with the faith of Joshua to take bold action to follow the lead of God in a new and uncharted direction.

This bold new direction will involve facing impossible odds and terrifying obstacles that threaten to destroy me. They are designed to keep me securely in my old box thinking, but to stay in my “safe” box with all my bitterness and fears is to suffer even more caustic damage from the acid of bitterness. I want to get out of the box, to be filled with holy boldness to cross swollen Jordan Rivers, to face giants and high walls and overwhelming armies set against me and enter into the land of milk and honey where I can grow and thrive and enjoy new adventures.

But entering that land of abundant life requires that I embrace the presence of the One who knows how to get me there safely. It means giving Him my fears and allowing my heart to have its defensive walls collapse before His holy armies of love that sing and celebrate instead of threaten. I must allow Him to plunder my own heart and take possession of everything I consider valuable so that He can rebuild me into His holy temple and set up His throne of love within me. My flesh and all its logic and protection mechanisms are really the enemies in the promised land that must be conquered so that God's Spirit can make me safe to be His homeland. Then He can launch His campaigns from this home base to take down every stronghold that still resists His love and forgiveness. I will then be able to see those who have hurt me and those I fear through new eyes and realize that they are also victims of the enemy and not the enemy themselves.

If I refuse to forgive those who have hurt me deeply I am also labeling them in my mind as the enemy and am setting them up as having the character and motives of Satan. But it is a deadly risk to accuse others of having the character of Satan, for accusation itself is the essence of Satan's character and name. By refusing to forgive I not only determine in my heart that my enemy is much like Satan but I fall prey to becoming more like Satan myself through my own indulgence in accusing.

God never, ever accuses. God never, ever forces. It often appears that He does because of the many things He allows or even utilizes already in place in order to draw people away from the false to look to Him for life. But God does not initiate these false motivations, He only captures them in His secret, amazing ability to bring good out of any evil situation whenever He is allowed. God can take all things and all situations and work them out for good in the lives of those who respond to His invitation to abide under the shadow of the Almighty. He is trustworthy and all who choose to trust Him will not be disappointed in the end.

God, please continue to pour Your healing spirit of forgiveness into my heart and neutralize the poison of bitterness that intensifies my pains and my false illusions of safety. Show me Your face more clearly today. Be with all of us in our sorrow and grieving and fill us with the peace of heaven that transcends all logic or explanation. You have promised to always be close to us and never, ever leave us alone. But open our senses and our hearts to know and feel Your presence more clearly. We need Your comfort, Your perspective, Your compassion, Your forgiving love in our hearts.

Father, there are a lot of dynamics for potential conflict, bitterness and resentment in our current situation. Please pour out barrels of the oil of grace into our lives and overwhelm us with fresh revelations of Your awesomeness, Your beauty, Your compassion, Your perfect ways. Open our hearts to forgive each other and those we struggle to see without fear or anger. Give us new hearts, new minds and a completely new spirit to see others as You see them and be filled with Your compassion for them. Take this opportunity to advance Your desire and plans for reconciliation and bonding in all of our lives so that Your glory can be more clearly exposed before our eyes and the world will be more amazed at what You can accomplish.

A Sad Time of Tribute

We received very sad news this morning that is very painful for us. Our most recently adopted daughter who we have lost contact with for the past few months has died in a diabetic coma. She died last Wednesday after spending two weeks in a coma. This was after going into six comas over the previous month and being involved in a high speed car accident just days before her last coma.

We loved Julie very deeply even though she had abruptly left us and cut off all communications with us after being encouraged to believe false insinuations about us. We have considered her a precious daughter and an intimate part of our close family through all the good times and the bad. We are going to miss her very much.

Julie was a very unique and special girl. She had a spirit of kindness and gentleness like I have never seen in anyone before. She was so sensitive in her spirit that even many animals, even wild animals at times, seemed to respond very quickly to her and would come to trust her in amazing ways. She also had a natural and strong attraction with children who felt very comfortable in her loving presence.

She was very gifted with artistic skills and longed to expand her abilities. She dreamed of going into a career in high-fashion clothing design. She was definitely not a conformist stuck with boxed in thinking in many ways but she also struggled to know how to deal with a lot of internal pain and confusion in her life. Because of very painful past experiences, beliefs and relationships she often did not know how to express her feelings consistently or perceive circumstances or other people's actions accurately. We realized that her perceptions of reality were often confused by misunderstandings or misinterpretations and were very easily influenced by her intense desire to please whoever was in her immediate presence.

Julie spent much of her attention in concern for others who might be in pain or going through difficult times even though her own life was often as bad or worse than theirs. She had a very high level of sympathy and compassion that was surprising at times. She had a sweetness and softness that would immediately invite the trust and friendship of anyone open to her influence and was almost always welcome everywhere she went.

Julie had very deep struggles that she never resolved in her attitudes and beliefs about Jesus. Her heart had received so many negative messages and lies about Jesus throughout her life that she had come to view Him with deep suspicion at best. Based on this misinformation she understandably wanted nothing to do with Him though her attitudes about God were very different. She felt that she could hear God in her heart and often learned things from Him that she would apply to her life.

She realized a few years ago that it was important for her to let go of the bitterness and resentment from many of her past experiences and relationships or it would destroy her heart. She relayed to us that at times when she was in a coma she would feel immense peace and would sometimes feel impressed with truths like embracing a spirit of forgiveness and releasing all negative thinking so that she could enjoy true freedom. She said that there were times that she felt so good while in a coma that she sometimes did not really want to return to consciousness.

She is gone now and is at peace. The repercussions of this untimely death will affect everyone who loved her for some time to come, but the deep love that we feel for her has never changed. The beauty of Julie's life will glow in our hearts and memories for the rest of our life.