He will be the sure foundation for your times, a rich store of salvation and wisdom and knowledge. The fear of YHVH is the key to this treasure. Isaiah 33:6
“Do not call conspiracy everything this people calls a conspiracy; do not fear what they fear, and do not dread it. The YHVH, the warrior, is the one you are to regard as holy, he is the one you are to fear, he is the one you are to dread." Isaiah 8:12-13
This is what YHVH says: "Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls. But you said, 'we will not walk in it'." Jeremiah 5:16
Every ancient prophecy is just as relevant now as ever. The Word of YHVH does not change, does not fade, has never been in the dark about anything coming. Understanding these words and how well they fit here and now is only received by submitting the mind to the Word Himself. These ancient writers were just listeners. To hear is to know the Lord. I think we've tried to make up our minds about the meanings of things, feeling helpless to understand without forcing it to stay only applicable to ancient Israel and not ourselves, our daily lives and the worship of idols we submit to.
Having The Word explain Himself changes everything. Getting rid of philosophies and theologies that have prevented deeper growth, and just listening, has opened up the entire Scripture to consistency, to revelation, to increasingly deep faith.
Every word so rich and full of meaning. Every idea and action tested. Every desire and fear put to the flame of the Spirit for rendering. Continuous metallurgy.
This is fullness. Being aware of the Word always offering sustenance and light, and being willing to receive, requires repentance upon repentance. I become deaf when I am unwilling to see and acknowledge my sin and life becomes miserable without the light and the voice of Life.
I heard this afternoon: "fullness and contentment are always a fruit of acknowledging gifts, never a result of having or doing more". I love living in fullness and I want more people to enjoy this inheritance!
Now is where we go deep.
Fear is always a product of idols. If I am attempting to manage or control something (health, time, money, happiness...) I'll know it's void and futile and will fail to capture everything I need. Knowing--intimate fullness through Christ--the Lord is having a life without timidity because I know I already have everything I need.
In January, my family came down with a very intense sickness. I had not heard of the coronavirus at the time. We had intended to have some friends over for dinner and had to uninvite them because our son was in bed all day and struggling to breathe fully and had a vacant, disinterested in life sort of behavior. As I've written in posts last year, the Lord had been training my eyes to see the incompleteness, the lack of power in modern medicine. Through our third child's birth, we came to see already that we have ONE Deliverer alone, and although then I figured it just applied to "natural physiological processes" such as childbirth, afterward He increased my faith to perceive, to confidently stand upon the truth that there really is no other, for any instance regarding the body.
Why? It's a purchased possession. If I honor Him, what is received into the body is done with regard to the faith He's given me, to the wisdom He's revealed to me. I began to seek diligently to test the Word of integral faith--faith that will not exclude parts of myself for my own appetites--and found that throughout the bible, one after another, our disease, unwellness, absence of health, AND it's vitality and energy are ALL under the authority of YHVH. (Job 35:12-15, Jeremiah 5:24-25, Isaiah 45:7...and Revelation insists YHVH is the SAME.)
He led both of us through Job, just before we got sick. We received so much revelation, especially when comparing Job's responses with David's when he was unwell or in trouble. Directly upon these revelations came a sickness like nothing I've ever experienced. The fever, the continuous ache of the entire body to the point that moving from one position to another in the bed required a great deal of pain before the mind was willing to do the work. Complete lack of light and energy in the body, a lack of fullness in the breath. Each of us had varied symptoms, all of us with a fever but otherwise, some had diarrhea, some vomiting, and only I had a very sore throat.
We were being tested. The faith He'd given us declared that "In YHVH alone are deliverance and strength". So we petitioned for revelation about why we were suffering, we received some correction, we were turned to repentance, receiving His mercy...and a week later we were still alive and full of gratitude for His healing. For Life. It did not cross our minds to seek any other help. For one thing, they lack the ability to give life. For another, I can't enter the temples of Aesclepius and render my body to an idol as though the Lord Himself is incapable of healing.
The first week I returned to the gym, I saw something on a TV screen about the coronavirus. I don't have a smartphone anymore, so at some point I borrowed Drew's phone to search what they were calling "coronavirus". I was pretty convinced that was what we had experienced, after reading through the symptoms.
I never imagined that it would become a global, everyday life disrupting sort of drama. But when it DID, I knew that The Word was seeking to captivate our attention. To test where our confidence was sitting. On a foundation or not? If we are seeking our knowledge and help from sources that are not substantial, we are afraid because we KNOW they are at a loss. If we have allowed His authority to be 100% over every part of our beings, nothing really changes--our bodies are still His, our minds are still His, our companionship is ever more Himself, our provision is still coming from Him...but when the whole world is demanding that we submit to *their* fears, that's when an integral faith becomes obvious.
Daniel. His submission was physical. He knew his fullness and strength came from YHVH, not the king's table. He knew that his physical posture represented his amount of confidence in YHVH. His appetite was submitted, his attention was submitted. And in this place, he knew that he was fully protected. "we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to deliver us from it, and He will deliver us from your Majesty's hand. And even if He does not, we want you to know that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up." (Daniel 3:17-18)
Physical submission is physical protection. One of the revelations I received while sick was, again, that the APPETITE for pleasure and control will always betray us. The enemy will always keep trying to use the physical desire to consume to bring us death, to start us on a path of submitting to the flesh--which is always slavery. Both Drew and I also received this word, after asking for healing yet holding back from tossing out an [idol] we'd kept in the fridge to enjoy when we got well: "You ask and do not receive because you ask so that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.". So we threw out the chocolate cake.
The physical appetite is so interesting. The Word this morning reminded me: The reason it matters so much is because YHVH is jealous for our appetites. This is what we were designed with in order to find our fullness within Him. But we apply it to SO MANY THINGS that can't actually satisfy the real hunger. So often it ends up with us stuffing our face with a tasty thing--whether something good and complete or something totally disintegrated for the purpose of pleasure or corporate greed and ignorance. This is porneia. Unfaithfulness of the appetite. Porneia means "selling off". Often in our bibles it's translated "sexual immorality"--but I know it to be much broader. Another definition is idolatry. To fixate on anything visible in order to gain pleasure, because of the lack we are feeling, is selling off what belongs to the Lord. Check out 1 Corinthians 6:12-20 with this definition in mind. It makes a lot more sense, acknowledging that the body is no longer my own and what I consume reflects my satiety or lack.
I repeated the Word I'd heard that disease is not a matter of something out there but always of our own consumption. And the authority we submit to determines what we consume. It was completely rejected, despite the fact that the entire Bible speaks to this truth, from Eve on. Taking and receiving are two different things...and once you begin to realize that what Abba is offering can be received without harm and offers fullness, but what is taken for our own desire will always carry a consequence. He wrote it into the design because we are made for Him, to be filled with His Goodness. That's where actual pleasure is--but in our pursuit to get it ourselves we have become so simple minded and deceived.
Going on with our same appetites, in a world that is weakening the physical systems using chemicals that KILL THINGS...we have lost touch with the Head, friends. Dear me. Pursuing our appetites for disintegration is no way to wholeness. Separation has always been the #1 tool of Satan, and now we've got "social distancing", prohibiting us from touching, comforting one another. Dehumanizing. If we were sickly and diseased before, what now that the sanitizers and obsessive separation measures have destroyed the ability of a body to fight? What kills the bad also kills the good. Never before has humanity been weaker for all the knowledge. The ignorance has increased exponentially with the illusion of control. What has caused this weakness? Fear, induced and brought to you by idols.
I'm not scared of the sanitizer. I avoid it if possible, and yet I KNOW (intimately) the One in Whom I have put my confidence, and I am fully convinced that HE IS ABLE TO GUARD AND PROTECT this body which I have entrusted to Him, rendered to Him...even in the day of global distress. (2 Tim 1:12 rephrased). So death cannot touch what Life has owned. That's why I'm not intimidated by what could be "out there". I know the Authority of my body and His power.
Read through the gospels...try to tell me that the Messiah didn't prove again and again that healing was a matter of authority. That His power exerted on our behalf was in any way a product of human thinking and "help". That He's willing to share His glory with idols. That He doesn't care about our physical well-being. "He Himself is our eirene". Peace is wholeness. Completeness. Soundness. Welfare.
To think of ourselves as free agents to get our bodies fixed up by any human with credentials and education, is not faith. To listen to their fear-based knowledge and solutions can never offer life. Any mind giving attention and confidence to the wrong (any but YHVH Himself) authority will be under the influence of fear. We know they are unworthy of it--or we wouldn't have the fear.
The Word has changed my perspective in every way. "When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?"
Words in Revelation keep returning. The cowardly, the unbelieving....... If there was ever a time to test if we fall into these descriptions pronounced by Christ, that time would be now.
Test yourselves. See if you are in the faith. (2 Corinthians 13:5)
Having this confidence in YHVH for our bodies means I'm not intimidated by the virus...and yet Satan has other tools for those of us who refuse to bow to that idol of control. There's provision in this time of "uncertainty". From "How we will get our food?" to "What if our livelihood dries up?" The fear of the Lord is the key to that confidence, too. We will always, always have enough...everything we need in every situation, because we belong to Abba.
Our prayer at the table last night was through tears. Not of fear but of grief for the faithless. In this time, it is a Good Thing our foundation cannot give way. Because others' fear of others really can affect us, but it cannot change in Whom is our confidence.
“Do not call conspiracy everything this people calls a conspiracy; do not fear what they fear, and do not dread it. The YHVH, the warrior, is the one you are to regard as holy, he is the one you are to fear, he is the one you are to dread." Isaiah 8:12-13
This is what YHVH says: "Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls. But you said, 'we will not walk in it'." Jeremiah 5:16
Every ancient prophecy is just as relevant now as ever. The Word of YHVH does not change, does not fade, has never been in the dark about anything coming. Understanding these words and how well they fit here and now is only received by submitting the mind to the Word Himself. These ancient writers were just listeners. To hear is to know the Lord. I think we've tried to make up our minds about the meanings of things, feeling helpless to understand without forcing it to stay only applicable to ancient Israel and not ourselves, our daily lives and the worship of idols we submit to.
Having The Word explain Himself changes everything. Getting rid of philosophies and theologies that have prevented deeper growth, and just listening, has opened up the entire Scripture to consistency, to revelation, to increasingly deep faith.
Every word so rich and full of meaning. Every idea and action tested. Every desire and fear put to the flame of the Spirit for rendering. Continuous metallurgy.
This is fullness. Being aware of the Word always offering sustenance and light, and being willing to receive, requires repentance upon repentance. I become deaf when I am unwilling to see and acknowledge my sin and life becomes miserable without the light and the voice of Life.
I heard this afternoon: "fullness and contentment are always a fruit of acknowledging gifts, never a result of having or doing more". I love living in fullness and I want more people to enjoy this inheritance!
Now is where we go deep.
Fear is always a product of idols. If I am attempting to manage or control something (health, time, money, happiness...) I'll know it's void and futile and will fail to capture everything I need. Knowing--intimate fullness through Christ--the Lord is having a life without timidity because I know I already have everything I need.
In January, my family came down with a very intense sickness. I had not heard of the coronavirus at the time. We had intended to have some friends over for dinner and had to uninvite them because our son was in bed all day and struggling to breathe fully and had a vacant, disinterested in life sort of behavior. As I've written in posts last year, the Lord had been training my eyes to see the incompleteness, the lack of power in modern medicine. Through our third child's birth, we came to see already that we have ONE Deliverer alone, and although then I figured it just applied to "natural physiological processes" such as childbirth, afterward He increased my faith to perceive, to confidently stand upon the truth that there really is no other, for any instance regarding the body.
Why? It's a purchased possession. If I honor Him, what is received into the body is done with regard to the faith He's given me, to the wisdom He's revealed to me. I began to seek diligently to test the Word of integral faith--faith that will not exclude parts of myself for my own appetites--and found that throughout the bible, one after another, our disease, unwellness, absence of health, AND it's vitality and energy are ALL under the authority of YHVH. (Job 35:12-15, Jeremiah 5:24-25, Isaiah 45:7...and Revelation insists YHVH is the SAME.)
He led both of us through Job, just before we got sick. We received so much revelation, especially when comparing Job's responses with David's when he was unwell or in trouble. Directly upon these revelations came a sickness like nothing I've ever experienced. The fever, the continuous ache of the entire body to the point that moving from one position to another in the bed required a great deal of pain before the mind was willing to do the work. Complete lack of light and energy in the body, a lack of fullness in the breath. Each of us had varied symptoms, all of us with a fever but otherwise, some had diarrhea, some vomiting, and only I had a very sore throat.
We were being tested. The faith He'd given us declared that "In YHVH alone are deliverance and strength". So we petitioned for revelation about why we were suffering, we received some correction, we were turned to repentance, receiving His mercy...and a week later we were still alive and full of gratitude for His healing. For Life. It did not cross our minds to seek any other help. For one thing, they lack the ability to give life. For another, I can't enter the temples of Aesclepius and render my body to an idol as though the Lord Himself is incapable of healing.
The first week I returned to the gym, I saw something on a TV screen about the coronavirus. I don't have a smartphone anymore, so at some point I borrowed Drew's phone to search what they were calling "coronavirus". I was pretty convinced that was what we had experienced, after reading through the symptoms.
I never imagined that it would become a global, everyday life disrupting sort of drama. But when it DID, I knew that The Word was seeking to captivate our attention. To test where our confidence was sitting. On a foundation or not? If we are seeking our knowledge and help from sources that are not substantial, we are afraid because we KNOW they are at a loss. If we have allowed His authority to be 100% over every part of our beings, nothing really changes--our bodies are still His, our minds are still His, our companionship is ever more Himself, our provision is still coming from Him...but when the whole world is demanding that we submit to *their* fears, that's when an integral faith becomes obvious.
Daniel. His submission was physical. He knew his fullness and strength came from YHVH, not the king's table. He knew that his physical posture represented his amount of confidence in YHVH. His appetite was submitted, his attention was submitted. And in this place, he knew that he was fully protected. "we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to deliver us from it, and He will deliver us from your Majesty's hand. And even if He does not, we want you to know that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up." (Daniel 3:17-18)
Physical submission is physical protection. One of the revelations I received while sick was, again, that the APPETITE for pleasure and control will always betray us. The enemy will always keep trying to use the physical desire to consume to bring us death, to start us on a path of submitting to the flesh--which is always slavery. Both Drew and I also received this word, after asking for healing yet holding back from tossing out an [idol] we'd kept in the fridge to enjoy when we got well: "You ask and do not receive because you ask so that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.". So we threw out the chocolate cake.
The physical appetite is so interesting. The Word this morning reminded me: The reason it matters so much is because YHVH is jealous for our appetites. This is what we were designed with in order to find our fullness within Him. But we apply it to SO MANY THINGS that can't actually satisfy the real hunger. So often it ends up with us stuffing our face with a tasty thing--whether something good and complete or something totally disintegrated for the purpose of pleasure or corporate greed and ignorance. This is porneia. Unfaithfulness of the appetite. Porneia means "selling off". Often in our bibles it's translated "sexual immorality"--but I know it to be much broader. Another definition is idolatry. To fixate on anything visible in order to gain pleasure, because of the lack we are feeling, is selling off what belongs to the Lord. Check out 1 Corinthians 6:12-20 with this definition in mind. It makes a lot more sense, acknowledging that the body is no longer my own and what I consume reflects my satiety or lack.
I repeated the Word I'd heard that disease is not a matter of something out there but always of our own consumption. And the authority we submit to determines what we consume. It was completely rejected, despite the fact that the entire Bible speaks to this truth, from Eve on. Taking and receiving are two different things...and once you begin to realize that what Abba is offering can be received without harm and offers fullness, but what is taken for our own desire will always carry a consequence. He wrote it into the design because we are made for Him, to be filled with His Goodness. That's where actual pleasure is--but in our pursuit to get it ourselves we have become so simple minded and deceived.
Going on with our same appetites, in a world that is weakening the physical systems using chemicals that KILL THINGS...we have lost touch with the Head, friends. Dear me. Pursuing our appetites for disintegration is no way to wholeness. Separation has always been the #1 tool of Satan, and now we've got "social distancing", prohibiting us from touching, comforting one another. Dehumanizing. If we were sickly and diseased before, what now that the sanitizers and obsessive separation measures have destroyed the ability of a body to fight? What kills the bad also kills the good. Never before has humanity been weaker for all the knowledge. The ignorance has increased exponentially with the illusion of control. What has caused this weakness? Fear, induced and brought to you by idols.
I'm not scared of the sanitizer. I avoid it if possible, and yet I KNOW (intimately) the One in Whom I have put my confidence, and I am fully convinced that HE IS ABLE TO GUARD AND PROTECT this body which I have entrusted to Him, rendered to Him...even in the day of global distress. (2 Tim 1:12 rephrased). So death cannot touch what Life has owned. That's why I'm not intimidated by what could be "out there". I know the Authority of my body and His power.
Read through the gospels...try to tell me that the Messiah didn't prove again and again that healing was a matter of authority. That His power exerted on our behalf was in any way a product of human thinking and "help". That He's willing to share His glory with idols. That He doesn't care about our physical well-being. "He Himself is our eirene". Peace is wholeness. Completeness. Soundness. Welfare.
See now that I, I am He, And there is no god besides Me; It is I who put to death and give life. I have wounded and it is I who heal, And there is no one who can deliver from My hand.
Deuteronomy 32:39
The Word has changed my perspective in every way. "When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?"
Words in Revelation keep returning. The cowardly, the unbelieving....... If there was ever a time to test if we fall into these descriptions pronounced by Christ, that time would be now.
Test yourselves. See if you are in the faith. (2 Corinthians 13:5)
Having this confidence in YHVH for our bodies means I'm not intimidated by the virus...and yet Satan has other tools for those of us who refuse to bow to that idol of control. There's provision in this time of "uncertainty". From "How we will get our food?" to "What if our livelihood dries up?" The fear of the Lord is the key to that confidence, too. We will always, always have enough...everything we need in every situation, because we belong to Abba.
Our prayer at the table last night was through tears. Not of fear but of grief for the faithless. In this time, it is a Good Thing our foundation cannot give way. Because others' fear of others really can affect us, but it cannot change in Whom is our confidence.
Comments
Post a Comment