11/28/2017 3 Comments The Contradiction of OffenseAn offense is an accusation.
Whether real or perceived, a complaint is necessary to form an offense. Therefore, offense is a judgment we make against another person’s name. Essentially, as it appears in scripture, offense refers to one of two things: 1. a breach of the law or 2. a stumbling-block that leads to sin. Because we have all breached God’s Law, we are all offenders. We chose to be fathered by a liar instead of our Creator. We committed an offense against God, but did He harbor resentment? Did He talk among the God-head about how untrustworthy we are? With no promise of an exchange, He forgave our offense; laid his life down and paid our debt. Though absolute, forgiveness came with a single caveat: Matthew 6:14&15, “If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins.” Clinging to our right to be offended, we snap, “You don’t know the truth about the situation!” But what is the truth? There is probably no word more abused in the English language. We hear, “My truth…” “Your truth…” “His truth…” etc., but none of these represent “The truth!” For the sake of this article we are using Truth in its purest form: Truth is God’s perspective of a matter. A Lie is Satan’s perspective. There is no other perspective. To be offended, we must choose Satan’s perspective. From our beginnings, we left God’s perspective to follow Satan’s. Offended with the truth, we followed the lie. This is original sin. Though He could have demanded a pound of flesh, God chose mercy. The Way, the Truth, and the Life entered the courtroom and paid our penalty with His own blood. God bankrupted heaven to persuade the Law that we were worthy of another chance. When we fail to identify with our offender, we have lost sight of the truth. “How could they?” And “I can’t believe they said (did) so and so!” are the statements of a liar’s perspective. Even the most egregious crimes are possible when we follow the Liar and all of us potential criminals. The truth is that without His grace we could. We would. And we have… Which brings me to the most common use of the word offense and that is the stumbling-block that comes from a person or situation that catches us off guard. When we stumble over another person’s uncrucified flesh, we fall short of the truth. To harbor resentment is to believe a lie. When I was in my late 30’s, I experienced a traumatic situation that almost crippled me spiritually. Self-pity was a daily battle. Every waking moment was plagued by the pain of my experience and tears flowed freely. One day, I asked Jesus to show me where He was when I endured this suffering. To my surprise, He walked in the door, smiled at me, and went to the one who was the source of my anguish. His arms encircled the tormented soul as they tucked their head into His shoulder and wept. God’s perspective. The most common form of offense is misunderstanding. Emotions are liars. They have been nurtured and trained by the Liar. Yet, we trust them, reacting from our flesh and not our spirit; from the lie and not the truth. Hence, we allow a breach in our Love, which causes us to breach God’s Law. To be offended is to be an offender of the cross. Every violation of Love is a violation of the Truth. “We hate sin, but not the sinner,” my dad used to say. I have discovered that unless I hate the sin that thrives in me, I will hate the sinner that sins against me. To believe that my perspective is greater than God’s is to accept the Liar and reject the Truth. That’s what our first parents did. Sin by omission. The crux of the matter is that offense is on the rise in the American church. Interestingly, Jesus said that this would happen in the last days. Matthew 24:10-12, “And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another. And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many. And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall grow cold.” Offense has always been present. From our first infraction of the Law to this very day, offense has permeated the atmosphere of creation. Cain’s offense ended in murder. In Luke 1:17, Jesus said that “it is impossible but that offenses will come…” So, “How do you respond when offense comes?” The Bible says that if you hate your brother, you have committed murder, I John 3:5. We have a lot of murderers in Christianity. Worse, I am among them. The fact is that offense is thriving in the house of God. It is both hidden and flourishing in leaders and congregants, alike. We are failing our tests. It is impossible to grow in spiritual maturity or lead God’s people without facing the trial of offense and yet, how we respond determines our future. Self-pity is the fiercest, vilest, and most destructive spirit in the demonic realm. Religion, which is man’s attempt to worship God without being submitted to His voice, thrives on the fuel of offense. In other words, we build a fence of protection against the sin (offenses) of evil-doers, considering their breach to be greater than our own. Our “fence” determines what we believe and what we don’t believe; who we can associate with and who we must avoid. It predicts validation, establishes reputations and verifies or denies promotions. Tucked safely inside our religious attitudes, we believe the lie that I am good, and you are evil. Religion is the business of exploiting sin. Love releases sinners from guilt. Relying on the Holy Spirit to build a church is time-consuming and humbling. Hearing God’s voice and yielding to His perspective requires the intimacy of faith, patience, and the long-suffering of loving through disagreements. When God’s perspective is silenced, offense fills the void and shapes church policy. To be fair, we are a generation that has not been taught the truth. The spirit of religion has led to spiritual immaturity, which has led to the Lie that offense is not a very big sin. We shrug it off. It’s bad, but not THAT bad… But let’s take a closer look. According to Matthew 6, an “offended Christian” is an oxymoron and a spiritual impossibility. It is a contradiction in terms. One cannot be “like Christ” while nursing an offense. We cannot be “filled with the Spirit” and “full of offense” at the same time. Offense is an accusation; a judgment we make against another. To nurture an offense, we must refuse God’s perspective and embrace Satan’s. Which means, offense requires a spiritual connection with the Accuser of the Brethren. How humbling it is to realize that we are born again and following the wrong voice. Maybe this is the reason we play the word game. “I’m not offended, I’m hurt.” “I’m not offended, I’m just disappointed in you.” A.B. Simpson, in his writings on “The Holy Spirit” and “Power from on High” says, “Someone has said that it is half the battle of life to call things by their true names.” Herein lies the problem: Changing the words silences the voice of conviction and opens the door to delusion, 2 Thessalonians 2:11. Our defense reveals our offense, but our delusion prevents us from hearing our deception. According to Matthew 24, nurturing offense leads to deception and deception is revealed through “cold love.” I learned many years ago that Love is an action and not a feeling; a verb and not a noun. Without that revelation, my offense would have been greater than my ability to forgive the one who sinned against me. Worse, I would have remained forever blinded by my own “rightness.” When we operate by feelings and not by faith, what begins as a lie, grows into a stronghold. And we exchange God’s Love for cold love. It begins with our refusal to deal with the truth that an offense is Love under attack. When we fail to fight for Love, we pretend to love. We avoid our offender at all cost. If forced to see them, we “act” like a “Christian,” but refuse to heal the gap in our communion. We ignore Love’s command to go out of our way to restore what Satan has broken. We will not lay our life down or do whatever it takes to prove that we desire restoration with our brother. This is cold love. God’s Love is doing the hard thing. God’s Love is always the opposite of what we feel. Love is an action that kills our pride and opens our heart to experience the impossible. Love is embracing God’s perspective no matter how hard our emotions fight against it. Love is seeing our accusation against another as an offense to God. To walk in Love is to go to the one we have made a judgment against, humble ourselves, and die to our own conclusions. As I tell my kids, “Beware of jumping to a conclusion. You might miss the other side.” Love cannot slander because it has seen its own evil character. Quoting Simpson again, “Self clothes itself in so many disguises that nothing but the piercing sword of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Scriptures can compel it to take its true place, and own its evil character.” Without humility, we cannot receive God’s perspective. Without humility, we cannot Love. Humility allows us to see a thing as God sees it. Consequently, without humility, we become the author of our own deception. King Nebuchadnezzar’s life testifies that God is not a respecter of persons. Instead of kings, we have apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers and evangelists and we are held to a higher standard than them. Instead of Moses’s Law, we are held accountable to the Law of Love, but like the kings of old, the greater the responsibility, the weightier the accountability. The wider the influence, the heavier the culpability. Without Love our task is impossible. Again, from Simpson, “I would not like to have orphan children and widowed wives cry out against me to God. I would not like to have the little hand of wronged and innocent children pleading to heaven for my punishment… I would rather play with the forked lightning, or take in my hands living wires with their fiery current than speak a reckless word against any servant of Christ or idly repeat the slanderous darts which thousands of Christians are hurling on others, to the hurt of their own souls and bodies.” Hence, the reason “offense must come.” Only the man or woman who has faced the fire of offense and refused to point the finger of accusation, only that person can fulfill the Law of Love and direct God’s people without crushing the least of these. Only an unoffendable leader can lead us into revival. Fear and pride are the guardians of an offended heart and grace the only remedy, but God gives grace to the humble, James 4:6. We pray for revival; for an awakening in our nation, and it will come. When pride is exchanged for humility. When fear is replaced with faith. When we renounce the Lies we have accepted as truth and embrace God’s perspective. When the fence of offense falls, revival will come. To be revived is to be awakened to the unrighteous judgments that thrive in our soul; to consider offense sin, again. When the name, Christian, comes to mean examining our own heart and pulling down every stronghold, every lie, every deception and every delusion offense has created, we will see an awakening in the body of Christ. Revival will begin where offense ends.
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9/21/2017 0 Comments The Power of Two | Part 2Genesis 1:1&2, “In the beginning God (Elohim) created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.”
In part 1, I shared one of my early morning contemplations. This time, I was meditating on themystery of God and how the Name, Elohim, gives us our first glimpse of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We see the flawless unity of Three as Elohim works and moves in perfect harmony to create the heavens and the earth. I thought about how amazing it is that God made us like Him. We resemble Him in so many ways and one of those is found in the many three’s He placed in us. For instance: We are a body, that houses a soul and a spirit. Three in one. Our soul is made up of a mind, a will, and emotions. Another three in one. Our mind says, “I think” and how that reminds me of the Father, who knew us long before we were born. He who was the Thought, the idea and imagination behind creation. Our will says, “I want” and how like the Son, who left everything to be with us. Who said, “My will is to do the will of My Father.” Our emotions say, “I feel” and how like the Spirit that is. The One who came to live in us. The One who hovers and broods and grieves, who comforts and counsels and convicts. We are so like our Daddy. At least, we would be like Him, if we had not chosen to be fathered by another. We wanted to know evil; to explore the possibility that God was not the only good. We abandoned our Father; the One who gave birth to us. We left the One who Loved us, to be brought up by one who despised us. We were abused. Lied to. And the knowledge our mind consumed was the trauma of evil. We were deceived, manipulated and controlled. To survive, we learned his ways. Ways of dishonesty and trickery. Dread was our daily companion, inscribing the good of evil in our thoughts; tattooing our soul with the ink of sin. We sank deeper into the aftermath of the darkness we knew and slipped farther away from the Father we feared. This is the state and condition of a soul without Christ. We have all been there and yet, why do believers continue to live in this embattled state of mind when we were made in the image of our true Father? Our mind, our will, and our emotions were meant to be one. To know the peace of God. To enjoy the power of perfect harmony. To imagine. To speak. And to establish. One of the most important questions we will ever answer is this, “Is it well with my soul?” Too many Christians are still speaking and moving out of the lies, the traumas and the false knowledge of the old man. They are captive to the cravings of the Self-life, Galatians 5:13-21. Galatians 5:17, “For your Self-life craves the things that offend the Holy Spirit and hinder Him from living free within you…” [PT] Clothes can change our appearance and we can even learn the nuances of religious-speak, but an undead, uncrucified Self will always serve sin. To find our true selves, let’s come back to the garden. Back to our birth, where our purpose and design was imagined. Had we not first been a beloved Thought, these bodies would not house an eternal being. Job 32:8, “But it is the spirit in a person, the breath of the Almighty, that gives them understanding.” [NIV] Our spirit is the breath of God. With anticipation, He leaned over the clay. He laid forehead to forehead, hand to hand and foot to foot. Placing His mouth over man’s mouth, Elohim exhaled… and His never-ending, immortalbreath permeated the soul of man and we became a living being. Eternal. A soul unable to die. Which is why science attempts to quantify the measurement of the separation that takes place between body and soul when death arrives. Deep inside, we know, that we will live forever. We have a spirit, which comes from the breath of God and yet, it is so much more than that! As His Spirit hovered over the deep, so our spirit has the power to move, to hover, and to brood over whatever we feed it. Our spirit is the most powerful thing about us, but our soul feeds our spirit. Which is how the tale turns because our soul was fed by an outsider. An imposter. A Liar. And still, our spirit hovers over the thoughts we feed it. When our mind is filled with unclean, unholy and unrighteous thoughts, the energy of our spirit broods over those thoughts until they manifest into action. They become our reality. A saved soul and a saved spirit make one a whole new man. A saved spirit and an unsaved soul make a double-minded person; a tormented man. God gave us an eternal spirit so that we could belong. Like sons and daughters belong to parents, we had a place where everything made sense. We had a home where we could sit by the fire and let Daddy solve our problems, but we gave our birthright to another. He took what we gave and so much more. We lost our identity. We lost home. We lost the understanding of why we were created and how we function. All these things, our fallen master knows. He knows who we are and how we were designed. He knows that our spirit energizes whatever we come into agreement with. Our spirit; this breath of God in us. He knows that our spirit has the power to inspire, encourage, embolden, rouse, strengthen, allow, etc. And he knows that our spirit can discourage, dishearten, oppose, hinder, restrain and suppress. Most importantly, he knows that our soul defines the state of our spirit because our spirit produces what our soul craves. Whether we like it or not, we are spiritual beings living in a physical realm. Our spirit broods over the thoughts that dominate our mind and the moods that sway our emotions. Our tongue is merely an extension of whatever our spirit is dwelling on. Matthew 12:34, “…For whatever is in your heart determines what you say.” [NLT] Words become energy because our spirit broods over our thoughts. Our Father is the Creator of all things and creation happened thus: Jesus was the Word that spoke the Father’s Thoughts. The Spirit was the energy that hovered over His Word. Chaos was disrupted and the world became. Shape. Form. Substance. With our words we authorize, we consent, we establish, permit, enable, or forbid. With our words, we build walls or tear them down. Our words become the matter and substance that we live. They are the fences behind which we hide, or the gates through which we move. Our thoughts influence our feelings and our words reflect our thoughts. What are you brooding over? How many believers live with a tormented mind when God created us to rule over our soul? We are powerful beings. Powerful in the natural. We can affect the world that we can see with the naked eye, but we are even more powerful in the world we can’t see. In the same way that we can direct and impact material achievement, we can command and influence spiritual forces. Every time two come together and open our mouth in agreement, we direct armies. Unseen hosts go in and out on the earth with assignments according to our words. In the early stages of my waking, these thoughts were skipping through the uncluttered waves of my mind. I love those moments. Rare. Unchaotic. All is at rest, but just as I started to roll over and go back to sleep, I heard the Lord say, “Creation is the power of two becoming one.” My covers flew back; my feet swung to the floor. In yet another way, we are like our Daddy! We are creators. 8/28/2017 1 Comment The Power of TwoPart 1 Mark 3:24-27, “If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. And if Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand; his end has come. In fact, no one can enter a strong man’s house without first tying him up. Then he can plunder the strong man’s house.” [NIV] In John 13:35 Jesus said, “Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.” Yet, the church has never been more divided, more restrictive, or more offendable. In John 17, Jesus, Himself, prayed for our unity. As we watch the chaos in the nations around us and marvel at our own political environment, we can only wonder that there appears to be more unity in Satan’s household than in God’s. What do they know that we don’t? My favorite thing in the morning is the dreamy moments between sleep and wakefulness. It is the perfect opportunity to hear His voice. Each evening, as I close my eyes and drift into a sea of unconscious oblivion, I allow His loveliness to peak my final contemplations. At first light and with flawless care His whispers are always there, resting, like sparkling gems crowning the surface of the waves in my brain. It is these moments that determine the rest of my day. I hold on to them as long as I can before the sun burns its way into my consciousness and I am forced to awaken. This was one of those mornings. I was thinking on the most beautiful expression of unity in scripture; contemplating the perfect union in perfect Love as it is expressed through the name, Elohim, when He dropped this nugget into my heart: Creation is the power of two becoming one. “In the beginning, Elohim…” Genesis 1:1. According to Strong’s Concordance, the original, Hebrew word is אֱלֹהִים meaning God, Divine Being, Plural in number; Plural intensive… Therefore, the opening act of scripture is absolute unity. Father. Son. Spirit. Three, the number of wholeness, moving, speaking and acting as One. Perfect Love finding expression through our Creator. Genesis 1:1&2, “In the beginning [Elohim] created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of [Elohim] was hovering over the surface of the waters.” Years ago, my brother was speaking at our home group, when he shared this scripture in a slightly different light: “The Father was the Thought. Jesus was the Word. And the Holy Spirit was the Action.” The Father was the Mind where the Idea of Creation began. Jesus was the Sound of the Father’s Thought; the Expression of His Contemplations. The Holy Spirit was the Verb, the energy and force that flowed into the Thought… And it was so. This is how my mind imagines it: As the Holy Spirit hovered over the face of the deep, He vibrated, brooded, and stirred the waters with the energy that came from the perfect union of Elohim. Jesus spoke the Word of revelation into this energy as it agitated, troubled and inspired the face of the deep. Suddenly, the atmosphere was pregnant with the authentic, unadulterated images of Elohim’s dreams. The Holy Spirit wrapped His energy around the visions and imaginings of God that were spoken into the void by the Word and Life burst forth. By the power of agreement, we live. Not just believers. All of us. Everyone, from Adam to the newborn babe who has just emerged from his mother’s womb, all were made in His image. We are like our Daddy. We think. We speak. We move. Of course, it is so much better to know Him. Only then can we explore the limitless possibilities of what it means to be His children; offspring of Elohim. “Jesus replied, ‘The Kingdom of God can’t be detected by visible signs. You won’t be able to say, ‘Here it is!’ or ‘It’s over there!’ For the Kingdom of God is already among you,” Luke 17:20-21. (NLT) We are King’s kids, representatives of the King’s Kingdom, but what does our disunity reveal about us? Saved and lost, alike, we were made to express a kingdom. We were created to represent our Father’s Kingdom, but sin took advantage of that power. For that reason, wherever we go a kingdom is present because we are there representing the kingdom of the one we serve. And where two or three agree together, the kingdom we agree with manifests. Satan’s kingdom of darkness is manifesting all around us, so what does that say about unity in his realm? How is it that the Kingdom of God is not manifesting all over the earth? Has the enemy deceived us? Have we come into communion with a lie that would keep us from the desire to spread the Kingdom of God over the world? A lost person is powerful because they, too, were made in God’s image. Through acts of agreement, they also give birth. We see the fruit of their collaboration in television, movies, business, politics, education, governments, etc. They are unashamedly furthering their kingdom. On the other hand, believers live in an entirely different realm. Whether we realize it or not, we will never be un-powerful again. Our thoughts, our words, and our actions will either bring heaven to earth, or advance the division of darkness. We are native residents of Elohim’s kingdom and our job is to subdue the earth. Everything we think, everything we say and everything we do has the power of Elohim behind it. No wonder Satan works so hard to keep his strongholds in our mind, our will, and our emotions. He often has more access to what we think, do and say than our true Father. If the church persists in functioning by the rules of darkness, we will continue to witness the fruit of that kingdom. Anger, division, offense, abuse of authority, finger-pointing, accusation, titled, untitled, servants, masters, intimidation, manipulation, etc. These are the manifestations of a foreign country and one we don’t belong in. If we knew who we were, we would step into the vast unformed universe of faith, as Elohim did. We would speak the world we want to see into existence through the unifying power of perfect Love. We would stop speaking division. Sorrow. Pain. Judgment. So long as we use our thoughts and the words that proceed from them to protect Self, we may be God’s sons and daughters, but we are echoing another kingdom. |