Dream of Lowpoint

So I had this extremely vivid dream this morning.  The kind of dream you think is real life.  Where the colors are bright, you can feel the wind in the air, the leaves cracking under your feet…that kind of vivid.

The dream began late at night.  I had a handgun and walked over to Seth and Anthony’s house.  In front of their house I shot the gun into cornfield.  I had some reason for doing that probably something from earlier in the dream that I don’t remember.  Then I proceeded to lean against their front door and very dramatically and very poorly act like I was dying.  I was kinda laughing at how silly this all was.  One of the kids opened the door and I was telling them that anytime someone dies in a movie they are just acting.  I guess one of the kids like timmy or kissy was scared of watching movies because of people dying.

At this point i know its 7:30 in the morning, I dont expect everyone anyone to be awake but everyone is up and at em.  Seth, Anthony, and I start playing a video game that I bought for them.  It was a modern version of a game that we played when we were younger and had alot of fun with.  Seth asked me what I was up to today.  With a big smile, I said I was going to attend a service at the church in Lowpoint in order to relive childhood memories.

I left out their front door, it was a bright sunny morning with a warm breeze just a gorgeous morning.  As I walked up the block I could see the church parking lot in the distance.  Just a few older style cars I recognized as the elderly people in town.  Infact it was the same cars I remember as a child.  I began to realize only a few people attended this church anymore.

All the sudden I began to feel Gods heart for the people of Lowpoint.  He loved them so much and deeply yearned for them to fill His house, to meet with Him and know Him.  I began to think about how churches are filled with ritualistic services that have lost meaning and relevance.  As a result, people are turned off by it and don’t want to participate in it.  But this is such an unnecessary hindrance, blocking people from encountering the true living God and experiencing his nature filled with peace, love, and joy.  As I was feeling God’s yearning heart, I just began to weep.  I thought I had to do something about it.  Maybe I could talk to the pastor and ask him if I could hold a service on site to reach out to people.  We could have a fun and creative type of service that would give people a chance to come to know God.

I was looking down at the ground through my tears when my friend Tim had a container of water and was splashing some on me, saying some sort of blessing to me.  I knew it was a sign that the Lord was calling me to to do this.

But then slowly as I awoke I realized, the church in lowpoint is no longer open, that its been turned into someones house and that I will never get the chance to relive those childhood memories again.  This made me really sad.

Encouraging Word 12\24\14

I wanted to share something I have felt the Spirit speaking to my heart. I see the Spirit delivering different ones from snares that have been brought into their lives through past failures. These snares latch onto us seeking to be a replacement for the Grace and Wisdom of God. How do they do that? We absorb the pain of our failures into our identity. We can be deceived into thinking hanging onto this pain helps keep us Holy, it will protect us from messing up again because we can still feel that pain. But only the grace of God has the power to truly transform us, clinging to any dimension of pain or shame from past failures do absolutely nothing to transform us and in fact stand at odds against the Spirit’s work in our lives, which is redemptive. Our past failure seek to replace the Wisdom of God when we use our failures to try to make sense of our lives. Maybe we experience a trial and attribute that trial to our failure. Maybe we are tempted to let go of our callings or prophetic words. it just makes sense when we think of our past failures. Infact these failures can replace our prophecies because whether we realize it or not–we predict our future in to be representative of our failures. In some ways our failure shape and give meaning to our lives, but this is contrary to the Wisdom of God. The lens of our failures easily becomes our point of reference which makes receiving anything from the Lord very difficult. There is alot that could be said about this, but I just want to highlight how much these are at odds and the true need to be converted from a failure mindset to the mind of Christ. One of the ways clinging to our failures is justified is through this idea that these are God’s discipline. It is critical to understand discipline rightly. Discipline is an invitation through pain into transformation which works lockstep with God’s redeeming process. It is very much a transaction and a process that we progress through. IT IS NOT A PLACE WE ABIDE! Many times in our discipline, shame is experienced as we are humbled and corrected. As discipline bring a fire into our lives, shame is kind of like the dross\impurity that is brought to the surface that is meant to be discarded as His blood heals us of our wounds and sets us free from all of our shames. The job of a father disciplining his child is to bring forth correction but to minister to that dross that arises in the heart of a child. It could be shame or a bitter attitude but we patiently minister to our children helping them rise above this so the correction we desired can happen in a context where those bitter shameful attitudes have no place to stick around. WE DO NOT discipline our children in hopes that the next time they fail, they will be brought back to a shameful bitter place to relive those emotions. These emotions can do nothing to change us, at best they could affect behavior in a limited way while opening the door to all kinds of darkness into our hearts. I feel charged from the Lord to expose this foul spirits work in our midst. Many of you have been long down the road of the influence of the enemy in your life to use your failures to bring about all sorts of prolonged shame and pain. I want to encourage you to ask the Holy Spirit right now, take a moment, ask Him if what I described is taking place in your life and if so I encourage you to approach the table of the Lord remembering his blood and body that set you free and invite him in to begin the healing process. If you have been in the dungeon for a prolonged time and need prayer I would encourage you to ask a trusted brother or sister to pray through some things with you and receive healing by faith. The redeeming work of Christ is causing your failures to work on your behalf, you are being restored and redeemed to a place of confidence as a child of God open to hear His voice, receive His wisdom, believe in His transforming Grace, and to receive all that has been promised. I love you guys God bless you.

The Echo of a Whisper

The kingdom is hidden. It’s a well kept secret. It’s withheld for OUR benefit. It’s meant to be searched out. It’s meant to be pursued. Childlike faith is serious business.

As live trudges on, the days turn into months turn into years, our hearts progress through dramatic yet subtle transformation. Underneath of the fog of life and its stresses and worries and doldrums, beneath the peaks of great joys and deeply fulfilling moments, The Lord is steadily, faithfully molding our hearts with utmost tenderness. Like a masterful sculptor shaping our hearts, tending to the deepest places where our personalities and emotions are knit together…His work upon the fallen human heart is beyond stunning. The riches of the children of God are beyond what can be comprehended and lies in the secret of His work in our hearts.

“The treasure in the earthen vessel”

How perplexing that he treats a fallen human being in such a delicate way. Almost invisible is the true work of His hands.

On the outside the vessel is subject to the soulish and fleshly experiences of this life. The brokenness, the trials, the frustrations, the loneliness, the vanities, the foolishness, the false glories and joys…these constantly work to glue us to that low place of humility, of a teachable heart.

I think the temptation as we journey though life is to retain the wounds of our failures and absorb them into our identity living in the shadow of our darkest moments. But lets put these dark corners of our heart into the context it belongs:

The Genesis 1 God of eternal glory who spoke creation into existence with awesome power has chosen to set his affections upon YOU. Not a blurry crowd of human beings, but YOU personally.

His statement about the darkest dungeons of your sin, the times where you scorned love in the most repulsive ways, when you offended His glory and gave your glory to idols and walked in wicked ways—The statement He makes over your life is the Cross of Jesus Christ. You see, He pursued you in the darkest place, and offers His own blood to heal your shame.

Folly – Your failures are meant to be wounds you carry so the pain will remind you not to mess up
Wisdom – Your failures are meant to draw you closer to Jesus where you receive healing and trust in His work to transform your heart.

Asceticism (inflicting yourself with pain to achieve holiness ) can never being about the holiness of God.

The revelation is, in your relationship with God through Jesus Christ in fellowship with the Holy Spirit–you are carrying something so glorious it’s far beyond human comprehension. You are in the process of inheriting eternal riches and your pilgrimage in this life is preparing you to be the equally yoked bride of Jesus Christ. You are more precious and valuable than you could possibly imagine.

So while wearing the cloak of childlike faith and humility, I believe the Spirit of God’s work is to bring forth Sons and Daughters. These are the ones who are beholding the Son of God and becoming like him.

In beholding Jesus we understand:

What true beauty is, not how the world sees.
The glory of true meekness
Become established in our identity as children of God

So deep inside of us, inside this earthen vessel— the treasure is YOU and who you are becoming in Christ. You are inheriting breathtaking beauty, stunning character, deeply rooted and established confidence in who you are in Him. He is drawing forth something so powerful in you.

The kingdom is mysterious and hidden, how he hides beauty and glory in common or even despised things. This truth is deep and his work so subtle to human perception yet so glorious. Like the echo of a whisper, can you hear it?

Christians are cool!

I think it’s interesting that over the years I have heard this same Christian sermon preached in many different churches. I’ve heard this same vision cast before ministry groups in so many different places. The vision that I have heard shared is this idea that our ministry or our community will be so interesting or so loving that unbelievers will come in and be fascinated by us and thus want to be saved. Now I do understand the impact of a group of people being open and accepting of others and how that could be an influence on people. I also understand that the idea that a group of people having “fun” May also be appealing. but I also understand what it was like to be an unbeliever in church, or at least someone who ” thought” that they were a believer, and there is very very little to someone who is completely dead spiritually to be found in these sentimental ideas about a ministry. The thing that is exciting and powerful and alluring about Christianity is only God himself! It is the power of the Holy Spirit moving upon the human heart revealing Jesus that is the most powerful incredible experience that you could ever imagine. And it doesn’t matter really the people that are ministering under that anointing/in that environment, because it’s really God himself that is drawn men to him. That said, I am deeply indebted to people who reached out to me after I was saved and allowed me to be a part of their spiritual community. That is definitely necessary and is powerful. But the idea that our meetings or our ministries are in and of themselves able to answer the dire need in the spiritually dead is a silly fantasy that puts much pressure and promotes performance among the spiritual community. This is completely unnecessary. All that a spiritual community need, is to focus their lives completely on Jesus Christ, to love and serve him with all of their hearts. That is all that is required. Truth be told we are an awkward weird bunch and our traditions offer little in and of themselves. Our relationships are powerful but only to the degree that we love each other with the love of Christ. When the spiritual community reached out to me to involve me in what they did, it wasn’t this community or the people themselves that anchored me but it was that I was being anchored in Christ that was powerful in my conversion experience. Otherwise if I was converted to a program or a community, that would have left me dependent on something other than Christ. I mean not to completely diminish the role that the body plays in the harvest, but I do mean to squash are misguided fantasies that cause us to believe we will be so cool and interesting and loving that this will convert people. There is so much about the spiritual life that is so uncomfortable and so awkward to the unconverted that if we try to make ourselves attractive to them we do it at the expense of an authentic expression of our faith often times. Just some thoughts I had today 🙂

Flee the evil d…

Flee the evil desires of youth and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart.

2 Timothy 2:22

The Incredible Hope in Humility

I am finding humility to be a truly mysterious thing.  On the front end, we are often blind to it’s way.  Half the time I don’t even know what the “next step down” looks like.  I heard someone describe it like learning how to play guitar.  To position yourself to cultivate this skill, you have to “take a step down” into a place of difficulty as you play the instrument poorly, develop the callouses and straining your hand to be held in unnatural positions of the chords and you have to persevere through this for quite some time.

–BUT–  I already have a good idea of what learning guitar is like.  I have plucked around myself and seen others cultivate this skill.  It’s all of the little areas of my life that I find this to be particularly challenging.  There are flaws in my life that I didn’t even notice for many years, let alone know how to actually deal with them.  I have like a million and one different blind spots where I can’t see what the reality of my life is, how my decisions are affecting my life and people around me, the nuances about how I give and receive love in all its expressions, the stewardship of my time, finances, the words I speak….  All of these are opportunities to embrace humility, to cultivate a deeper expression of the nature of God.

It seems pride, trusting in ourselves or influences that don’t come from the Lord contributes to the blindness.  I often don’t see the low road because my heart isn’t even in a place to consider taking that path.  Like learning guitar, how willing am I to submit myself to an uncomfortable path revealing my weakness that could take years to reap the benefits from.  I would look for a short-cut or try to find my own way to that destination.  But my self-made shortcuts only serve to reinforce what humility is trying to break down.  If embracing humility in a certain area of my life would take years to pay off, taking my own road would just make the journey EVEN longer.

Things I wrestle with when it comes to Humility:

– I don’t want to face the truth.  It confronts me.  Makes me decide (thus revealing my heart).  Holds me accountable.

– I am impatient.  If I don’t immediately get breakthrough I don’t want to persevere.  When I give up on something that’s tough it’s hard to start over.  Return to battle that thing that has defeated you or discouraged you over and over again.

– I like to do things my way.  I prefer my own version of the truth.

————

But what I am learning, is that when humility is embraced, its like a bright light that opens up so many possibilities.  It attracts the presence of God and is truly a kiss of Gods grace.  Humility is His nature, and Oh the joy to be like Him.

more on this soon!

Vanity of Vanities

Everything under the sun is vanity! and oh How I have felt this recently!  I am weary and greived by the vanity of this world deep within my soul.  I am longing for the true substance of the being of Christ.  Painful longing for substance!  Longing for the true answer to my heart cry.  Vanities of this life only provide temporary distractions that just deepen the ache.  I feel thrust into this dark place by the very Spirit of God…this place where I wander and I search for Him in places that aren’t comfortable.  In places where I do not expect to find Him.  The places in my soul where I feel alone, lost, fearful, confused.  I am learning about my nature to be deceived by my own desires.  I spent most of my life giving so much weight to what I felt my heart telling me.  I thought the key to really being yourself was following your heart, which after being saved didn’t seem to be wrong…but it is so wrong.  My heart has been lying to me my whole life.  Day by day it told me what it needed, what it desired, and in the pursuit and occaisonal attainment of these brought perpetual dissappointment.  Going around the mountain again and again.  I tried to do course correction in my own heart.  See I just did it wrong last time and now I am so much wiser.  I will follow my heart with WISDOM this time!  I know how to navigate this!  and this fruit the serpent offered me, the wisdom of my own heart, led to fall after fall.  Yet I return to this tree seeking my own knowledge.  My own way.  I am coming to see my ENTIRE life, my pursuits for success, spiritual maturity, deep meaningful relationships, money, it has all been tangled into a web of deep deception.  My deepest longings in all these areas of my life have been glued to such vanity.  I look to so many things thinking in them I will be satisfied.  It was only in embracing my true blindness that I began to really see the tragic state that I am truely in.  No more fig leaces… No more nonsense… No more lies… Nowhere to hide anymore.  The truth is a light so bright it blinds you.  At the end of the day everything I desire and hope for is in this man Jesus and His perscription for me is a Cross.  It’s a perpetually deeper humility.  It’s just so clear right now, there is no other way.  The deception is far too powerful, to follow your heart is a dark twisted road.  It’s no longer excusing myself out of allowing His word to penetrate so deep that I actually do not see living it as an option.  He didn’t let me go.  I feel like a child sitting on my bed in my room after being disciplined again and again coming to the realization my behavior and my attitude has to change.  My Father has been nothing but good to me and I owe Him everything.  It kills that entitlement deep within where I felt God owed me the American Dream.  Where I am at truely is a very dark, painful, and lonely place.  I have run from it so many times before but I am learning not to try to escape any longer.  I know He is here but I can’t see Him very clearly.  What He is uprooting in my life is so deeply attached to my identity, I don’t know who I am on the other side of this.  Not finding my identity fully in Jesus has gone from a place of comfort to a place of suffering.  It’s all coming to an end.

Lessons in the Wilderness

– Pride = blindspots. When you are proud you can’t see what is real.

– thing that are cheap and fast are nearly always meaningless

– my strength can accomplish 0% of the will of God

– my failures have no bearing on my identity

– I can’t earn anything from God ever

– love never fails but is always very costly

– sincerity is incredibly valuable and purchased with blood sweat and tears

– when i begin to feel wise that is evidence i am beginning to become deceived

more later

Judgmental Disposition quenches the Prophetic Spirit

I was seeking the Lord as to why we as the people of God have such a hard time truely turning from our ways and throwing ourselves wholeheartedly into the heart of God for our lives.

I know people who have followed the prophetic movement for many more years than I. Some of them know some of the major leaders in the prophetic movement before they were ever famous and had large ministries. The romance of the office of the prophet doesn’t affect them. They know they are just messed up errant people just like anyone else. This is good to a degree.

But think of Jesus and John the Baptist? In Matthew 11 Jesus makes the statement “Blessed is he who is not offended because of Me”…He then goes on to give an indictment against that generation as one that was unresponsive, one that called John the baptist demonized, and called Jesus a drunken sinful fool.

The issues with making judgments about Jesus and John the Baptist has less to do with finding fault with them and more about NOT UNDERSTANDING them. We are naturally disrupted by that which we do not understand, we are provoked in our flesh to make judgments about that which we do not understand.

To bring this full circle, we may have had a history of seeing the weakness of true prophetic leaders in the body of Christ, but if we let judgments take root in our hearts, it will dull our hearts from the word of the Lord coming to them.

A generation with a critical spirit will be HARDENED by the prophetic word of the Lord. They see the gulf between where they are and where the prophet is calling them, and because they don’t understand the heart of the Lord, they are pressed to make judgments in their hearts towards the prophets, thus allowing them to be unresponsive. It’s a way of exalting ourselves above the knowledge of God.

bunny trail – one of the main ministries of Paul was commending himself unto the conscience of men as to not hinder them from receiving the message because of this propensity latent in the human heart to cut people down in our minds when confronted with the burden of the prophetic word of the Lord.

While my heart is to contend for Jeremiah 23:22, one who stands in the counsel of the Lord and hears his word that people may turn…I am feeling the weight of this reality, that if the hearts of men are drawn to cut themselves off from the word by seeing weaknesses in my life, I would only serve to harden their hearts.

It really puts discipleship in context to proclaiming the word of God. But at the end of the day I cannot be held responsible to the conditions of the hearts of men ultimately, they called the spotless lamb a drunken sinner and the “greatest man born of a woman” a demonized maniac.

So here we find a tension. The people of God need a word to emerge that would turn their hearts. They need a vessel that would commend itself to their conscience, but they also need that root of pride to be unresponsive to the word of the Lord to be uprooted.

Lord grant to your people wisdom in Jesus name…

The Pain of Longing

“Longing is the compass on the journey”  – Dana Candler

God creates longings.

God awakens longings.

God sustains longings.

God ANSWERS LONGINGS! 

Psalm 42:7 AMP   “[Roaring] deep calls to [Roaring] deep at the thunder of Your waterspouts; all Your breakers and Your rolling waves have gone over me.”

                God delays the answer of the longing in order to cultivate the heart to receive the desire he placed in it.  The deep ache comes with deep power.  The two most influential influences on the human heart are pain and beauty.  The beautiful God imparts transcendent longings upon the human heart. This wonderful and awful pain shapes the heart and increases the capacity for fulfillment. 

–  In the Garden, Adam named all the creatures, cultivating the ache which God answered with Eve

–  God promised the Seed, the one who would crush the serpents head, in the garden of Eden.  Jesus Christ was born, the minister of the new covenant, thousands of years later.  To this day we are 2000 years into longing for Him to return. 

…and there comes the revelation.  God is love, and love is patient.  You are never more alive when you are aching with longing.  To be patient is to suffer long, which in it’s truest sense is the very definition of longing.  We experience this truth daily in the form of hunger, you long for food and it’s answered when you eat a meal.  What you will discover though, is that if you skip a few meals, all the sudden food tastes alot better!!!  Go for a jog in the sweltering heat, and come home and chug an ice cold glass of water!  Wow, what an experience, but the ache of the hunger and thirst is what made the possiblity of pleasure. 

We as a generation have been deceived that instant gratification is the answer to our longings, and it is only producing dullness, boredom,  and emptyness within our beings.  The slightest discomfort sends us running to media, relationships, food, entertainment, anything to answer the cry of our hearts.  Even in the church, we see epidemic of spiritual dullness and we are FULL of all the secondary forms of satisfaction.  But Jesus addressed this in John 4, lets take a look at it.

The chapter starts out with the disciples going off to town to get food (seeking the answer to their hunger) and Jesus was tired and sat down by Jacob’s well.  A Samaritan woman is at the well and Jesus asks her for a drink (brings up the subject of thirst).  She asks why a Jew would ask a  Samaritian for a drink.  Jesus answers and says ‘If you had only known and recognized God’s gift (answer to her longing), and who it was your talking to, you would have asked me for a drink and I would have given you Living Water.’ Jesus also explains to her that if she drinks from this well she will thirst again, but if she drinks Living Water, she will NEVER be thirsty again, but the water will become a spring of water flowing continually unto eternal life.  He goes on to give her a word of knoweldge (awakening fascination, and kindly leading her to repentance), tells her the Father is seeking worshippers in spirit and truth, and tells her He is the messiah.  She leaves her water jar and runs off to town.  Then the disciples show up and try to get Jesus to eat.  He tells them his food (nourishment) is to the will (pleasure) of the Father. 

A couple points to consider in this passage:

– Like the disciples, our natural response to longing is to seek a quick answer apart from Jesus.  (not saying the disciples getting food was wrong necessarily)  

– We do not recognize Jesus as the answer to our longings.

– Jesus invites us to ask Him for a drink, that we will never thirst again.  We likely have prayed this and felt nothing.  We likely stand before him as this woman did not even realizing who in the world Jesus is!?  As we mentioned before, it’s the delay in time, the patience and long suffering of love that we experience when we come before Him and ask Him for more.  The pain when we read His word and pray and sing to Him but feel nothing.  You are coming smack dab into contact with your own cold, dull, unmoved heart.  STAY THE COURSE.  Do not give up, do not give into instant gratification, keep pressing in till it hurts.  Till you can’t stand it anymore!  When you can’t take it anymore, start fasting!  Become more hungry.  Allow your heart to begin to truly tear, and allow yourself to be brought to tears because of the lack of His presence in your life.  When you keep pressing in, you are making a place for Him!  You are cultivating a capacity to receive and experience transcendent love like you have never known.  Don’t wait for the power of God to give and serve and love and seek Him out, if you do you lost the point! 

–  If you look closely, the conversation has little to do with water and more to do with the thirst of the spirit.  Jacob’s well is representative of the Jewish history and faith.  There was a momentary answer to the cry of the heart in the Jewish religion, one God provided through His promises, but one that was incomplete.  Judaism was never intended to be an end in itself, but actually something meant to create a longing God fully intended on satisfying in Messiah.  It was designed by God to cultivate longing, but provided no sustaining answer, the peoples relation to God was distant and required maintenance through the sacrificial system.  Imagine how powerful it is that the promised Messiah, the wondrous one who would shed His own blood for this woman, was standing right in front of this woman!?  She is actually thirsting for Him, His love.  The truth is you don’t have to imagine it, by the Holy Spirit, God has never been nearer!  He is yearning to be a fire inside of you, to be the great ache inside of you because He desires to answer that pain with deeper revelations of the love of Jesus upon your heart!

–  I believe “never thirst again” does not speak to us never drinking water again.  I also don’t think it means that our spiritual desires are just always answered.  I believe what Jesus is speaking of is the Holy Spirit, the very capacity within us to experience nearness to God without the guilt or shame of our sin because of the blood of Jesus.  We will never be dominated by our flesh nature’s drive to seek instant gratification to answer our true longing apart from God. 

–  The Father is SEEKING  worshipers!  Is that not amazing?!  Does that provoke wonder in your heart?  Jesus was seeking to bring her into relationship with a God that is pursuing her, and desiring her worship!  This is a critical revelation your soul is yearning for whether you are aware of it as you read this or not!

–  Jesus opens up to the disciples a whole new realm of true hunger and the true answer.  Jesus found sustainance and nourishment by seeking to answer the FATHERS longings!  To fulfill the Father’s pleasure?!  When is the last time you got home from a rough day of work and recognized that you would find more satisfaction and nourishment in seeking to bring pleasure to the Father then by eating dinner?  This isn’t romantic language!  Jesus actually said this, not to set Himself in a league of His own, but to INVITE US INTO IT!      

I am writing this because I am coming off a profound week of encountering the Love of God, experiencing profound breakthrough in the Spirit and in my heart, and seeing worship arise in my heart.  The truth is…I am experiencing a profound ache in my soul, and emptyness in my heart.  I am longing to fill it with ANYTHING.  I want to surf facebook, try to connect with someone, play a video game, make music, anything to distract myself.  Anything to rot my brain!  I am longing and all the Word and worship is doing is awakening my heart to it’s barrenness and it’s painful.  Typing this out maybe gave me some instant gratification, but it served as a reminder.
                                                                                      The pain is good.
                                                                The ache is there for a reason.
                                                                                                                                  God is faithful always.
                                                                                                   He will answer the longings of my heart. 

                   …..in due time.           

with love,
Rob

Blogged with the Flock Browser