More Faith

The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith!" And the Lord said, "If you had faith like a mustard seed, you would say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and be planted in the sea'; and it would obey you. "Which of you, having a slave plowing or tending sheep, will say to him when he has come in from the field, 'Come immediately and sit down to eat'? "But will he not say to him, 'Prepare something for me to eat, and properly clothe yourself and serve me while I eat and drink; and afterward you may eat and drink'? "He does not thank the slave because he did the things which were commanded, does he? "So you too, when you do all the things which are commanded you, say, 'We are unworthy slaves; we have done only that which we ought to have done.'" (Luke 17:5-10 NAS95)

OBEY means to listen and submit to authority.

FAITH may be the vital combination of surrender to love and obedience.

When we are fully surrendered to God, full of His love and living in total surrender to His authority, then we may find that all creation will begin to submit to the authority of God in us.

Ordination

We have so adopted the Babylonian model into religion that we have turned ordination on its head. God originally designed ordination – laying on of hands – to be an event of recognition of God's empowering and an embracing by God's family of a person and their choice by God. The family of God was committing to support and defend this person as an elder maturity function for their community or in support of some other work God had singled them out to do.

Now, although we create the external words and pretension that we are supposedly doing this, in actuality we use ordination as an exclusion tool to block people from fulfilling their calling of God. Unless a person pays their “dues” through prescribed educational achievements and meet certain arbitrary criteria of tradition they are not deemed worth of authority from man-made institutions based on the kingship/legal/economic model of government.

Jesus, when speaking of binding and loosing, said that His family would bind or loose what was already bound or loosed in heaven, not the other way around, contrary to some mistranslations of that passage. In the family model the family follows the lead of the head and the head looks out for the needs and best interests of all the family.

(reference Ye Shall Receive Power for June 11)

Disciples' Left-brain Block

The disciples minds were deeply entrenched from childhood in the left-brain teachings and doctrines from the scribes and pharisees. Living with Jesus was an intense right-brain experience that progressively raised conflicts and questions about their left-brain explanations of reality. The big problem from the time they first met Jesus all the way through the crucifixion was that they were still using their left-brain doctrines embedded in the minds as their source of authority instead of ravishing themselves in an abandoned relationship with the passionate God right in from of them.

I have a stiff shell, an exterior facade that seems to have a life of its own, maybe like a vine that covers a tree and appears to be its foliage. It has almost complete control of my voice tone and face and gestures. It is rooted in years of use and evolvement in acting as a defense against pain and rejection by others. It effectively blocks over 90% of the new life awakening inside my soul from being seen on the outside. In doing so it causes confusion on the inside as to who I really am.

It powerfully inhibits truthful expressions of praise and heartfelt gratitude. It uses fear and intimidation to stop me from singing, dancing and rejoicing in God my Savior with full abandon like my heart inside wants to do. It suffocates the new life and growth that the Spirit is doing inside of me. I am like a hothouse box with plants pressed against the glass desperately struggling to push into the open freedom of fresh cool air and refreshing showers while withering from the intensifying heat in the restricted interior.

Even simple stories of answers to prayer wither in significance when attempting to come into the open. The facade ridicules them and discounts their significance and hides the fact that it only wants to protect its own reputation of consistency. It is full of hidden pride, aloofness, viewing myself as better than collectively those around me. It is carefully defensive and hides the anger that often flares up inside, careful to maintain a pious exterior and allowing enough of the new growth inside to be seen by others as to impress them with my growing spirituality. I definitely feel like a perfect specimen of Romans 7 – who will deliver me from this external body of death? Only Jesus can. But how do I get there from here? God – you know.

Focus of Attention

We need to take a check of our spirit before entering into discussion about ideas that are new to us. Do we sense an urgency, a feeling of duty to defend the “faith of our fathers”? If so, then chances are very good that we are really justifying some of the prejudice of our fathers in the name of “historical purity”. The faith of Jesus does not need defending by us any more than a small child needs to justify it's natural love for a caring, nurturing mother. Faith is a natural response to an ever-increasing awareness of the beauty and truth about God, not an organized, learned set of rote beliefs, doctrines and arguments.

A desire to defend doctrine and tradition from any ideas unfamiliar betrays a deep underlying reservoir of fear as the basis of our life. Realizing this should give us pause to take warning that we are not living in the truth of God's love, for perfect love casts out fear. The two are mutually exclusive. And although God will use our fears in the initial stages of our journey to turn us to Him and away from sin, that does not mean He intends for us to live in ever-deepening fear as we draw closer to Him. He only uses our penchant for fear to turn our attention toward Him and away from evil with its mesmerizing spell of fear over us. But once we are focused on Him He wants to transform our fear-based bonds into love-bonds which are far more permanent and stable.

So true faith is simply a description of the response in love of a created being to the true revelation of a God completely worthy of trust and compellingly beautiful in every sense of the word. Faith is not something I must work up by will-power and effort – even with help from God. Faith is a natural response, a spontaneous outgrowth and ingrowth when I begin to really see the true face of God.

I must remain constantly on guard that I do not allow myself to unconsciously shift my focus of attention, and thereby my worship, from God Himself to any other aspect or target such as my beliefs about God or my service for Him. This is one of the most subtle and common problems we get trapped into without ever realizing we are doing it. And that may be because we primarily have lived from our heads and not from our hearts most of our lives. Living from our heart and being aware of our spirit and its condition is foreign to most of us and very frightening to many of us to the point where we label it as error or heresy dimply because it doesn't fit into our current concept of religion. But when Jesus spoke with Nicodemus, a man who had a doctorate in religion and was widely viewed as a dependable expert on religion, He plainly stated that “religion” wouldn't even get a person to first base in the reality of heavenly things. In fact, He stated that until a person was completely and radically altered in his way of perceiving what is reality, he was or even capable or equipped to perceive the things of God.

Most of us till are in the shoes of Nicodemus but simply don't want to believe that. We live in our own framework of reality based on a strange mixture of fear and supposed love handed down to us by our culture and family. We tinker with our religion and may even go through years of formal training to align our religion more carefully to our chosen culture and church and then believe we have a handle on truth. But God will not leave us completely in peace about this arrangement. Our hearts, though buried or repressed for many years, yearns for a breath of reality, a vital connection to the Source of real life.

It is at the peril of our souls that we continue to ignore and suppress these God-implanted yearnings of our hearts. True spirituality is not an improved, modified religion. It is death and life in a way we are too often unwilling to face or admit. It results in a passionate, obsessive and exclusive focus on the person of God and nothing else. Not on the Bible, our beliefs about God, our church, our doctrines, our sources of information about God, our prophets.... Although these may assist us, they must never intercept our full attention to God Himself.