Never Talk to Strangers!!?

I am noticing a trend that is becoming increasingly pervasive among Christians – at least in this country – that is imported from culture and is steering us away from the clear teachings of Jesus. This practice is based on fear which in turn is always rooted in unbelief. This trend is to avoid connecting with strangers or speaking with them in a friendly, inviting way. This has the effect of diminishing our influence for good and misrepresenting the truth about how God feels and relates to people.

Think of the classic instruction that we use to teach our children. “Never talk to strangers!” We have taken this to be the standard of truth for our families, but it has had a very chilling effect to isolate our hearts from bonding with others. Because we are taught to only socialize with people that we already know we lose much of our ability to expand our circle of influence and even strongly inhibit our ability to bond and interact with other Christians.

I have been thinking about this particularly since I have been making contacts on the internet with other Christians occasionally. The promptings of my heart is to connect with them on a deeper level and to even meet with them face to face. But immediately I am confronted with the rules of fear that pervades our society and causes us to be frightened of how much we allow others to find out about us. I know the stories about the way people use the internet to entrap and harm others. But all of this flies directly in the face of the way God desires us to bond with each other in the body of Christ. The fears of the world take precedence over the promptings of the Spirit trying to draw us into closer unity.

Compare these social standards based on fear with the teachings of the Bible and the words of Jesus.

Ex. 22:21 You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

Ex. 23:9 You shall not oppress a stranger, since you yourselves know the feelings of a stranger, for you also were strangers in the land of Egypt.

Lev. 19:10 Nor shall you glean your vineyard, nor shall you gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the needy and for the stranger. I am the LORD your God.

Lev. 19:33 When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong.

Lev. 19:34 The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the LORD your God.

Lev. 24:22 There shall be one standard for you; it shall be for the stranger as well as the native, for I am the LORD your God.

Lev. 25:35 Now in case a countryman of yours becomes poor and his means with regard to you falter, then you are to sustain him, like a stranger or a sojourner, that he may live with you.

Deut. 26:12 When you have finished paying all the tithe of your increase in the third year, the year of tithing, then you shall give it to the Levite, to the stranger, to the orphan and to the widow, that they may eat in your towns and be satisfied.

Ps. 146:9 The LORD protects the strangers; He supports the fatherless and the widow, But He thwarts the way of the wicked.

Isa. 14:1 When the LORD will have compassion on Jacob and again choose Israel, and settle them in their own land, then strangers will join them and attach themselves to the house of Jacob.

Jer. 14:8 O Hope of Israel, its Savior in time of distress, why are You like a stranger in the land or like a traveler who has pitched his tent for the night?

Mt. 25:35 'For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in.'

Mt. 25:43-46 "'I was a stranger, and you did not invite Me in; naked, and you did not clothe Me; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit Me.' Then they themselves also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see You hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of You?'

"Then He will answer them, 'Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.' These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life."

Eph. 2:12 Remember that you were at that time separate from Christ, excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.

Eze. 16:49 Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had arrogance, abundant food and careless ease, but she did not help the poor and needy.

Heb. 13:2 Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it.

3John 1:4-6 I have no greater joy than this, to hear of my children walking in the truth. Beloved, you are acting faithfully in whatever you accomplish for the brethren, and especially when they are strangers; and they have testified to your love before the church.

I understand the logic that we use for teaching our children not to talk to strangers. But tell me this; when are they supposed to stop following these rules we set down for children in this respect and suddenly start reaching out to strangers to introduce them to the real truth about God?

What is really happening is that we are raising up generations of people who are conditioned and taught to withdraw from others in fear, and then we wonder why we struggle so much to get people to “witness” for Jesus. We cannot teach people one thing and then expect the opposite results later on in their life. The real underlying problem here I believe is a patent failure to trust in God ourselves and that is what we are really passing on to the next generation. Because we do not live lives of real faith and trust in a covenant relationship with God, we are afraid that strangers will have more power to hurt us and our children than God has to protect us and our children.

Do not think that I am advocating foolishness in the way we expose our kids to danger or that I am unaware of the dangers all around us. What I am saying is that we are allowing the practices and assumptions of the world that tries to protect itself by using fear and self-defensiveness to supplant the clear teachings that reveal to us the way the kingdom of God is to be experienced in our lives.

Instead of teaching our children principles of isolation based on fear, we should be filling their minds and hearts with stories, teachings and experiences that allow them to develop faith and confidence in the power of God to protect and guide them as they learn to follow the promptings of His Spirit and introduce others to Jesus. Children are actually far more sensitive to picking up the messages in the spirit realm than most adults are. So instead of teaching them to suppress and handicap their spirit sensitivity we should be training them to tune into the right Spirit and learn to discern and test the spirits that they can sense in their hearts more easily than we can.

I rather suspect that if we would shift our focus into training our children and even our adults to be more sensitive to the Holy Spirit and leave off promoting fear as our main motivation for behavior, we may find that our children could become our instructors at times and would begin to help us be more sensitive to hearing the voice of God for our own souls. For I believe that most all of us are still very immature when it comes to hearing the voice of God and following the promptings of His Spirit.

How to Act Like Myself

During the sermon this morning I got to thinking about the purpose of Bible stories and how they are designed to help us today. I came to the conclusion that possible one of the most important reasons we are given so many stories, both of people in and after the Bible was written, is to teach us how to act like ourselves. And the most important time to know how to act like ourselves is when we are afraid.

One of the signs of a more matured brain is the ability to have a coherent identity. That means that a person has come to the place in their growth that they can act the same way no matter whether they are experiencing a strong emotion or if they have no strong emotion. In other words, they will not act any differently based on the emotion they are experiencing. If they happen to be angry they will not act any differently than if they were not angry. If they are sad they can act the same as when they are not. If they are faced with overwhelming fear they will have learned to act as they would if they felt no fear at all.

And this is what I believe is the purpose of why God has given us so many real life examples of how people learned to trust Him and how to act like themselves when they were faced with intense emotions, especially with fear. I can immediately think of a number of stories where people in the Bible were faced with overwhelming odds that threatened their lives and even their nation and chose to turn to God to find out how to act like themselves.

But what does it really mean to act like ourselves?

Acting like myself means first of all realizing that most likely my perceptions about my identity along with what people around me think about me are very likely not the real truth about who I really am deep inside. Every person has been invested by God with a unique and special identity that is reflective in part of God's personality and that has infinite potential to bring glory to God's reputation as they learn to use their identity to reflect that part of God to the watching universe. Learning to act like myself requires that I discover and experiment with my true identity as it is embedded in my heart that I may have never recognized before. It often requires a lot of time and interaction with God to begin to see our true identity, but it is the purpose of the plan of salvation at work in our lives to bring us back into alignment with God so that we can reflect His character and personality collectively.

Most of the time people around us will tend to try to reinforce false assumptions about our identity. They may not realize they are doing that to us and we usually don't realize when we do it to others. But we do it all the time, especially with children. Look at the expectations that we have about children and the way we talk to them much of the time. If a child has a pattern of misbehaving we tend to assume that they will misbehave and they usually come through for us. People tend to be drawn into fulfilling the labels that we paint them with and then we see those results later produced in their behavior and think we are justified in assigning those labels in the first place. The real truth is that many of the problems that are produced in children and each other are due to the expectations that we have about who they are and what they are becoming. It is largely the adults that form the outcomes of the personalities and characters of children.

But how do we find out who we really are and what it looks like to act like ourselves? I believe that this is where it is so important to obey the invitation of God to seek His face. The face is where the most communication takes place both verbally and more importantly non-verbally. It is the face that communicates emotions, feelings and expectations and those communications may sometimes be very different than the words we are using. But God's face is always consistent with His words and God's heart is always toward us. Because we are designed to reflect His face it is extremely important that we learn how to perceive His face more effectively so that we can begin to see and feel more clearly the source of our real identity.

That brings up another issue that has plagued me most of my life. These analogies can be very frustrating at times – like this business of seeking God's face. How can I seek the face of God when I physically cannot see Him, much less gaze on His face? If I can't go to heaven or get Him to literally come down and materialize for me to see His face physically, then what does He mean when He tells me to seek His face? (see Romans 10:6-8)

I am still learning a great deal about the answer to this question and I will not presume to have a satisfactory answer as of yet. What I do know is that over the past few years God has been awakening inside of me another part of my faculties that was so underdeveloped that I was incapable of fulfilling this need to seek His face. Jesus declared that God is a spirit and those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth. Because I was so unaware of how to relate to or understand my own spirit I could not know how to seek God's face. For me, religion had always been taught as an external, behavior-oriented set of rules and doctrines so many of these illustrations only frustrated me instead of enhancing my spiritual growth.

But God knew that and has been very gracious in providing all sorts of training and education over the years to help me make sense of His instructions and to awaken my heart to begin functioning again. For much of my life I feel that my heart has been close to dead, or at least so suppressed that it was almost useless. But God has been implementing plans to awaken my heart and rehabilitate it and still has much more work to do in this area. But I am starting to get more of a sense of what it means to seek the face of God over the past few years. The more I get in touch with my own spirit and the more I learn to live in honesty from my heart instead of artificially trying to look good on the outside, the more my spirit faculties become capable of relaying to me communications from the face of God.

If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land. (2 Chronicles 7:14 NRSV)

I ask God on a regular basis to show me His face. I do not have to know how or when He will do it, but if He has asked me to seek His face then it is His responsibility to answer my prayers to show me His face whatever that means. And the more I pray that prayer the more I sense somehow that it is happening more and more.

The more clearly I begin to perceive God's face and the real truth about His character, the closer I come to discovering my own true identity and thus am able to more clearly learn how to act like myself. You see, my true identity is first of all as a child of God, an honored and trusted son even though everyone around me including myself may feel very differently. I have to take God's word for who I really am, and the more I come to believe from my heart the truth about my identity the more I find myself acting and feeling in congruence with my true identity. And that is what it really means to act like myself.

Fear is Satan's greatest weapon against us to keep us from knowing how to act like ourselves. That is why in story after story we see God's people faced with great fear-producing circumstances to frighten them into acting like someone other that their true identity. Our response to fear and fearful circumstances determines the outcome in each situation and whether or not we bring honor to God by acting like our real selves or acting like the false notions about ourselves both from within and from others. The real battle we are engaged in is not against other people but against the lies about our true identity and about God's identity. When we believe lies about God it can only follow that we will also believe lies about ourself. The more clearly we understand and embrace the real truth about God the easier it becomes to act like ourselves under any circumstances and in any emotions. And that is the essence of maturity.

What many people call perfection is really maturity from heaven's viewpoint. In fact, most of the words in the Bible translated perfect really mean mature in the original language. When we begin to view life from the standpoint of the need to mature instead of the legalistic viewpoint of perfectionism, we are making a huge step into learning how to really act like ourselves without being controlled and manipulated by fear.

Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and might free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives. (Hebrews 2:14-15)

Preach It, Brother!

I have started listening to some stories and talks by a very faith-filled missionary that is having significant influence on my thinking. But at the same time I also feel uncomfortable about some of the things he says. Maybe I should say I am uncomfortable with some of the feelings that are aroused inside of me as a result of the way he says some things. For what I am noticing is that my discomfort is very often connected to things I experienced when I was much younger more than what I am hearing today. And it would be very easy to assume based on emotions that what someone says today is with the same intent or spirit as those who tried to use fear and intimidation to motivate me in the past.

One thing this man says is that he does not want to make people comfortable. As I continued to think about that this morning I remembered that the Bible seldom has positive things to say about being comfortable. This is partly understandable because, as this missionary says, when we are comfortable we are not likely to grow. It is usually only when we get out of our comfort zone that we are challenged to change the way we think and to take decided steps to move in a different direction.

But as I stop to think about this word “comfortable”, I also think that some of the problem may be with language itself. For to believe that God does not believe in comfort would be to imply that He would refuse to comfort us when we are hurting, and I will not fall into buying that lie. So there seems to be a wide variety of meanings attached to this word “comfort” or “comfortable” and I believe we must be careful not to be too dogmatic about God's intentions as relating to these words.

What I have seen at times is that religious agitators who like to promote their radical brand of religion often seize upon this issue of being comfortable and use it abusively in ways that I don't believe God ever intended and that misrepresent Him. They confuse peace with comfort and thus promote an atmosphere in the soul where a person feels guilty if they are not in a constant state of fear and agitation thus robbing them of peace. But this is completely incongruent with the inner peace that God has promised to all who live in close connection with Him. Again, this is another classic case of a counterfeit supplanting what is supposed to be an important part of our experience.

Something else came to my attention while I was listening to these talks. Every once in awhile there was a noticeable outburst in the audience by someone who would enthusiastically say “preach it” whenever the speaker said something particularly discomforting. I have observed this kind of spirit and behavior a number of times in my life and almost every time I encountered it I had the same feeling of uneasiness. As I now try to analyze just what this produces inside of me I would describe it as a mixture of guilt and intimidation. I sense that these kind of people want opportunities to impose forcefully on others what they believe is sharp truth that they perceive as coming from the speaker. I have to admit that there have been times when I myself have felt that same spirit inside of me, and now I wonder about its legitimacy and my own motives.

What suddenly came to my mind as I thought about this today was the experience of Paul and Silas as described in Acts 16 when they were followed by a slave girl who was saying apparently only positive things about their message. She was strongly affirming that they were preaching the gospel, and yet they eventually were not comfortable with her public affirmations and support. After a number of days of this experience Paul finally turned around and ordered the spirit within this girl to leave and she was delivered. But the results of that miracle were anything but pleasant for Paul and Silas over the next few hours.

I have often wondered about this situation each time I read this story in Acts. Now it makes a lot more sense to me. When I put this together with the spirit that I sense in people who typically urge a speaker on, supposing that stern, fear-oriented messages are what people need the most while appearing to be strongly promoting the spread of “truth”, I am beginning to sense that the spirit in both situations may be very similar. Just because a person is enthusiastic about some presentation of truth because it is sharp and convicting does not necessarily mean that they are in tune with the real Spirit of God. And it is also true that just because a person indulges in this spirit while someone else is speaking that it does not necessarily follow that the speaker shares that same spirit.

I often wondered about this story with Paul and Silas. Why did they wait for a number of days before doing anything about this situation with the slave girl? And why did they feel the need to do anything at all since she was not saying anything bad about them?

I believe that they probably struggled with these questions themselves which is why it took so long to decide what to do about it. I can imagine that they may have had long and intense discussions at night about how to relate to this unusual situation and did a lot of praying and soul-searching to figure out what the right thing was to do. It was an extremely clever ploy by the enemy of souls to come up with this unique circumstance and it was not really clear as to how they should relate to it.

I believe that the other situation that I have described with enthusiastic extremists eager to broker fear into other people's hearts may be even more difficult for a speaker to know how to deal with. For it is not nearly so clear to others that this person may have a spirit out of tune with God's Spirit because they are so enthusiastic about religion already. For a speaker to confront them like Paul did with the slave girl would likely be highly offensive to the person unless they first came to realize that the spirit they possessed was not from God as they had believed so strongly for so long.

And as I think about the times when I myself feel motivated to be enthusiastic about some strong message I hear I wonder how much of my enthusiasm is really God-inspired or how much is from my flesh being influenced by a spirit from a more diabolical source.

What I do sense is that I do not want to judge another person who is clearly being led by God in their life. I must remember that they are growing still, that they are God's responsibility and that there may be blind spots or weaknesses that God is still working on in their life that may trigger past unresolved issues in me. I have no responsibility for taking care of their growth but I do have full responsibility to cooperate with God in resolving my own triggers and in guarding the condition of my own spirit. I am accountable 100% to God for myself and I must answer to Him first before anyone else.

Father, I want to learn Your gentleness. You have also given me the shield of Your salvation, and Your right hand upholds me; and Your gentleness makes me great. (Psalms 18:35)

The Nature of Sin

I have thought a lot about what is the real essence of sin. I have heard all sorts of arguments about what sin is (and some of them probably demonstrated a bit of it in the process) and have been confused by various pronouncements about it. But underneath it all I have searched for a clearer understanding of what it is about sin that is so repulsive to God and at the same time seems to make it so attractive to us.

As I was sitting in church thinking about various things my mind came back to this issue again. Here is another stab at what I believe is at the very heart of sin.

Sin is the very resistance that a created mind has internally that resists the love and attraction of the One who created it. And because resistance prevents the fulfillment and bonding that is inherent in a reciprocal love relationship, God hates sin with a perfect hatred. For God did not create any of His intelligent beings to live apart from His love but created all of us to thrive in the atmosphere of love. So when we entertain lies about God that cause us to pull back from Him in fear or resentment, God becomes deeply hurt and also intensely passionate about doing everything possible to eliminate whatever it is that interferes or distorts our relationship with Him. Some people call this God's wrath.

Sin is the attitudes, the beliefs and the lies about God that causes our hearts to resist the real truth about His unconditional love for us. That is becoming very clear to me. But then another truth presented itself to my mind in this context. I remembered the following verse and the implications that it has on this issue of sin separating our hearts from God.

The sins of some men are quite evident, going before them to judgment; for others, their sins follow after. (1 Timothy 5:24)

I have commented on this verse at various times and have come to understand it in a different light than most might view it. After learning so much about our great need for emotional healing and the tremendous freedom and joy that it brings into a person's life, I have come to believe that this text is talking about the crucial need that each one of us has to allow all of our pain, our triggers, our emotional land mines to be uncovered, exposed, unlocked and resolved as soon as possible. For it is the condition of our spirit which is linked to our emotional make-up and history that is the most important part of our being and that will make us fit or unfit to thrive in heaven's atmosphere of perfect love.

If we have allowed all of our sins, fears and lies to become evident instead of trying to repress them, deny them or run from acknowledging their presence in our hearts, then we can experience the freedom that real judgment can bring us if we are willing to be judged by God's Spirit here and now instead of procrastinating until it is too late. As the light of the real truth about God increases in our heart it will expose the dark lies about Him and about ourselves that we have lived under for all of our lives. If we allow this healthy kind of judgment to occur in our lives, the healing kind of judgment where we choose to allow the Spirit to expose all the evil and bitterness and pain from our past and dissolve it in the truth of His love for us, then when the final day of judgment comes we will find ourselves already free of all the resistance that would prove fatal when the full current of God's passion is revealed.

The more we learn about the true God, the less we are inclined to resist Him and be afraid of Him. All of our fears about God are based on lies that we still believe deep in our hearts about Him. As long as any of these lies and pains are cherished in the heart and we refuse to let them go, we are in danger of suffering the natural results that occur whenever power and resistance to power meet in the same circuit. This process of releasing our lies about God and ourselves is the process of sanctification.

More on Motivation

I have written recently about the two very different ways of motivating the will. Now those thoughts are starting to circle around and apply themselves to my own heart in various ways that I find convicting and helpful.

I think about the typical way that I naturally try to get some people to view God differently, say for instance, people in my church that often view Him from a very external religious perspective. When I contemplate this and try to be as honest as possible about the intensity that rises up inside of me sometimes whenever I feel like confronting false opinions about what God is like, I realize that my spirit is conveying the very kind of negative motivation that I do not want to use myself.

As I was observing previously, the will can either be attracted and drawn toward something or someone positively like a magnet draws other metal or magnets to itself, or the will can be pushed and intimidated by fear, force and intimidation like a physical object can be moved in a certain direction by brute force. What I am now seeing is that my natural instinctive way of trying to motivate others is usually by the last means and not by the first. Of course I am not very successful in making much of a significant positive difference in their lives doing it this way and many people complain that I am not very friendly.

I certainly do not like this state of affairs that I find in my natural ways of doing things. The problem, of course, is that we tend to do whatever has been modeled to us and it is difficult for me to remember making very many decisions based on positive attractions rather than avoidance of punishment or bad consequences. But I am so grateful that God does not treat me the way others have treated me and that He continues to try to attract me to Himself instead of driving me harshly.

Somewhere I read that Jesus is like a good shepherd that never drives his sheep. A skilled and caring shepherd always leads his sheep and invites them to follow him instead of forcing them ahead of him. This speaks volumes about the character of the shepherd.

I confess that there are more and more times that I am finding myself with options now that I never experienced before. What I mean is that I am sometimes sensing more clearly alternative motivations that I never felt before my perception of God was challenged and transformed through better knowledge of His personality and character. It is becoming so much clearer to me the past few years that what we feel about God at our gut level absolutely determines how we are going to respond to His words and actions in our lives. And this revolves directly around this issue of how we perceive the ways that He tries to motivate us.

What gets me excited each time I realize it is that more and more I find myself sensing the option to make a positive choice, do the “right” thing, or refrain from something harmful because it will enhance and deepen my joy and intimacy with God. I am not talking about a left-brain theory that is imposed on me from a religious perspective but I am talking about an option that my heart senses at times that involves a sense of real attraction as an alternative to fear motivation.

It would be very easy to analyze this and quote a lot of scripture verses to support it and thus turn it into another left-brain doctrine, and that would certainly support the truth of what I am sensing. But it would also possibly rob my heart of the opportunity to more deeply explore what is really going on in this area of my life that I really want to experience much more. I sense that my heart needs far more training in positive attraction motivation than I presently have, and it does not respond very easily to just left-brain lectures about why it should do that. What I really need is to experience it first-hand and to see it in action both in my own life and in others.

Often when I attempt to think of how to go about relating to others from this new way of thinking rather than my normal, ingrained way of fear-motivation I find myself coming up with a blank. I honestly cannot visualize what that might look like most of the time because it is so unfamiliar to me. But I also know that this is the direction I want to move in my own life and in the way that I treat other people.

But I sense that this can only happen in my own life to the extent that my picture of God is transformed and I chuck the lies about Him that have poisoned my thinking and assumptions for all of my life. My mind operates on the principle of being transformed into whatever it dwells on just as everyone else's mind does. I want to be transformed into a person who can relay the attractions of heaven to other's rather than dwelling on terrible consequences while trying to force others to change their opinions. Instead, I want to become much more a channel of attraction for God and much less an agent of fear.

Yes, I am aware that there are times when fear is the only option left for God to get people's attention. Those, who like me have been raised with minds trained to only respond to fear to motivate them often have to initially be jolted out of their deep ruts by warnings of the consequences of the choices they are making. I realize that God often has to use this method to get our attention, but I also am learning that this is not the goal of our loving Father for our relationship with Him. I believe that He wants to move as quickly as possible to a relationship based totally on attraction and to discontinue having to warn us of dangers. And this is largely due to the terrible distortions about Him that are created when we think that He is like the effects that we feel in our heart while experiencing the internal results of fear.