Don't Worry, Be Happy

These are a few additional thoughts to something I shared the other day, you can read it here, “The Tail Shaking the Dog.”

Rich


While all of the positive-thinking techniques seem on the surface to be worthwhile and positively influence human behaviour, the teaching is a major deception. The philosophy that undergirds the technique is not based upon truth. While the principles seem to be in line with Scripture, Jesus is eliminated!
Positive thinking and possibility thinking lead unsuspecting Christians away from looking to Jesus for their identity and life and push them back into focusing their minds upon themselves. While the Bible teaches us to judge the content of our natural life through self-accusation, positive thinking directs us to think highly of ourselves and to hold wonderful thoughts about ourselves. Many positive thinkers consider the consciousness of sin and guilt as negative thoughts which produce negative energy and should, under no circumstances, be confessed. Dr. Paul Vitz of New York University is correct in pointing out that possibility thinking is based upon faith in one’s self and turns God into a mere servant who exists in order to help us achieve our goals.

Identity Theft

I just finished reading a wonderful book I heard of through a brother called Identity Theft, by Kevin Avram and Wes Boldt.
The following is an excerpt from this book.

“Each of us has a unique mixture of gifts, though one of them tends to dominate and influence the way we see and respond to situations and establish priorities. If we walk with the heart identity of Sons/Daughters, our hearts will be open to the prompting of the Holy Spirit, and our giftedness will be a practical extension of what the Father is working in us. We will minister with the grace He gives in the way He indicates we should. The focus will not be the gift, but the Father.

If we do not have the heart identity of Sons/Daughters, our focus will be on our own fulfillment and what we can do with our gift. It is an erroneous disposition that has led more than a few people to falsely conclude that their gift and their identity are synonymous.
Gifts exercised apart from a hearing heart can actually oppose the purposes of God. In fact, much of what we call spiritual warfare is simply God resisting our efforts to use our gifts to build or achieve something that He never called us to do. God resists the proud and self-determined. (1Peter 5:5)”

It never ceases to amaze me of how our calling “to be His” has been funneled by so many into the old wine skin format of religious thinking along with all that that encompasses. Church has been sadly defined by some geographical location usually confined to a building location.

I am seeing with increased clarity within this (for lack of better terminology) grace awakening that the foundational and fundamental corner stone that all and everything else rests upon is that which Jesus said the church He is building would rest upon, the “unconditional love of the Father.”
Because there are NO vacuums, we will either have deeply defined in us our true identity of whose we are Sons/Daughters of the Father, or, we will be defined by something no matter how good, as an alternate identity!

I think these words from Paul address some of this lack of identity within our siblings in Christ. “I mean that the heir, as long as he is a child, is no different from a slave, though he is the owner of everything, but he is under guardians and managers until the date set by his father. In the same way we also, when we were children, were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world.”

Rather than simply being living breathing extensions of our God and Father as His Ambassadors in this fallen world, so many have gravitated toward becoming an expression of another religious organization instead. Look what they’ve done to my work I initiated in them, I can hear the Father saying to His sons!

Rich

"...Till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a fullgrown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ... having abolished in the flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; that he might create in himself of the two one new man, so making peace; and might reconcile them both in one body unto God through the cross, having slain the enmity thereby." (Eph. 4:13; 2:15-16).
"...And have put on the new man, that is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of him that created him: where there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman; but Christ is all, and in all." (Col. 3:10-11).
"...And put on the new man, that after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of truth." (Eph. 4:24).
"For as many of you as were baptized into Christ did put on Christ." (Gal. 3:27).

I want to put this in here as I see it tying in well with my thoughts, it is a quote from A Sparks.

Am I to take upon my own shoulders the whole matter of my usefulness to the Lord, my vocation, my service, my ministry? No, never! How many of the children of God have been beaten, and broken, and buffetted about by the question of ministry and usefulness to the Lord. That is not our affair in the first instance. What is to be done with our lives depends entirely upon our walking with the Lord. We have altogether false ideas of ministry. We have set ministry before our eyes as some kind of order of things, something into which we get, something that we take up, and ministry is nothing of the kind. Ministry is the spontaneous outgoing of Christ in us, and the more there is of Christ to go out through us, the greater will be our ministry. Let us get away from mechanical ideas of service for the Lord. The Holy Spirit, Who has introduced Christ into us, is going to construct everything upon the basis of Christ in us.

Moving Forward

I’m following the on going series my friend Art is writing and I wanted to post these two portions that spoke to my heart as I continue to move forward in experiencing His overall unconditional love.

Rich

Is Confession of Sins Necessary in the Ongoing Life of the Christian?

As noted in Part 7, the believer’s confession of sins occurring after salvation is not necessary for forgiveness of sins under Paul’s “gift of the grace of God” (Eph 3:7). This is because ALL sin was forgiven at the moment of salvation – past sins, present sin, and future sins; thus, we were accepted in Christ. The requirement for Christians to practice confession of sins for forgiveness is a false doctrine, as if to say a believer “can fall out of grace”; with the result that one minute you’re saved by grace, and then next you’re not. The grace of God’s forgiveness of our sins is freely given and unconditional, covering ALL our sins for all time.

However, there are a few cases that require our confession of sin(s), but not for forgiveness; rather it is that we might come to “the light” of a restored union and fellowship with the Lord, as well as with those around us. These are serious matters of understanding because they affect our daily walk, not to mention the sanity of our mind.

1) There is a place of confession that is not confession to gain forgiveness of sins. It is confession to God concerning sin toward another, such as forgiveness that we may hold against another. Such an acknowledgment before God releases us from the burden of sin.

2) There’s also a place of confession before another believer that is admission guilt before God for past sin. Such an admission releases us from the choking burden of past sin that we may have long cloaked in the darkness of our hidden self-life for many years. We’ve perhaps been locked into a jail of our own making by some sin(s) that we may think of as unforgivable. Sin makes us fear exposure. Sin wants each of us alone. Sin wants to draw me into myself, and away from God and others. The more isolated I am the more control the Sin nature can have over me. Sin seeks the shadows. Sin holds me in the dark, robbing me of complete fellowship with God and others. Others may sense the wall that keeps me from being genuine with them.

Under such darkness, we are easy prey for the accusations of the Devil, whose goal is to literally destroy us. Though the Devil cannot touch God, he tries to destroy God’s image in us.

Jesus said believers are to be lovers of the light. Jn 12:36 While ye have light, believe (pisteuo, trust in, cling to, and rely upon) in the light, that ye may be the children of light… We have these words from the Apostle James to point us to the remedy. James 5:16 Confess (exomologeo, acknowledge, admit) your faults (paratomah, side slips) one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed (iaomai, cured, made whole). The effectual fervent prayer (deesis, petition) of a righteous man availeth much.

Sin toward others brings pain to our own self. Bringing our hidden life into the light of God is not so we may gain forgiveness, but to heal us of sin’s pain. We may be a Christian who is forgiven of ALL sins, and yet be self-condemned due to our supposed unforgivable sin. We may think we were not lovable, not loved of God or by those who we think should love us – all because we don’t accept our self; so we can’t and don’t accept God’s forgiveness.

The problem is our view of our self because we’ve not accepted God’s forgiveness. Since we don’t believe we are forgiven by God, the pain of this is self-inflicted; it’s due to our own forgiveness of ourselves for some sin(s) in our past. The fact is God has long ago forgiven us of ALL our sins, but we have held ourselves as reprehensible.

We are locked into what is a hopeless and helpless condition unless God intervenes. This condition must be brought into the light; therefore God our Father may force the real us to become exposed to our self and/or to others…that we might be healed.

How does the Lord expose us to the light?

The pain rooted in our unacceptance of our self may manifest itself in mental instability and/or physical illness. This may be the end of the road approaching, since our sickness may do for us what we could not do for ourselves, forcing us to be exposed. God does this because He loves us and wants us free of the power of our supposed unforgivable sin(s). The answer is for our self to become exposed, brought under the curative power of the divine radium of God’s light, where it may be confirmed that we are totally forgiven and loved of God, standing blameless before Him in His love.

In the next installment, Part 8B, I will offer my personal testimony of God’s forced exposure of His light upon my needy soul.

Indecent Exposure

What are we to understand in this exposure that seems to only be intensifying?
Is God perverse? Is He capricious?

Herein lies the key to God's dealings with us. We must draw back from our tendency to see evil and the devil's purposes advancing against us. The Devil is God's devil; he can only accomplish God's purposes [Gen 50:24]. Seeing God in our circumstances requires an ability to see through our circumstances. We must become fixed in the conviction that all things work together for good for those who love God" [Roms 8:28] and see that the apparently negative "all-things" are the tools of the divine trade useful for conforming us into His image and likeness" [Roms 8:29]

I love how our Father is so good at bringing whomsoever to Himself, although the process and the ongoing being processed will never be at first, something we initially warm up to, until the miracle of His total unconditional love begins to address the lies that seem to bind us!

The following is a glorious living picture shared by my brother Paul, and in it I see an untold, unknown, army of sons and daughters likewise being released into the surpassing greatness of the Father's love.

Rich

--------------------------------------------

Up until then, I had known at an intellectual level that I was one spirit with Him. I knew that Christ "was my life" but that summer I discovered the life of Christ. I had only understood salvation as my giving my life to Him - I had not realized that salvation was Him giving His life to me. Ironically, I had been developing a reputation for being an accomplished teacher of the Christian identity but, in truth, I was like Apollos who, though full of fervour and passion for God, a sound teacher who could explain freedom from the law and the divine exchange needed the way of God explained to me more accurately. In recent days, He has been gracious enough to send my Aquilla & Pricilla to me in the written form of Norman Grubb & Dan Stone and in the physical form of Dee Dee Winter & Linda Bunting.

That summer as never before the Lord began to apply His cross to me and as He did He began to reveal His life in me [Gal 1:16]. I began to see that I had been set apart from before I was born [for union] but, like Paul, in the absence of enlightenment I was deceived and sought to cultivate a righteousness of my own, a righteousness that I too now considered rubbish [Phil 3]. To my dismay I realized that what others thought was the model Christian life was actually a backslidden compromised existence. Having begun in the Spirit I was now trying to live the Christian life by self-effort.

I had reduced the Christian life to something I did rather than a Person who I now was. My successful church career had validated the deception. From the ashes of Brazil, the Lord was about to bring forth the real self, the unexpected -self the new creation. I was suffering from a condition that I have since diagnosed as false self-syndrome.

Recognition of your inability is the key to experiencing His ability. Man, saved or lost, must become conscious of his total inadequacy. Each one must have his Job moment and recognize his parlous condition.

Perhaps it would be appropriate for us to ask ourselves at this juncture whether we have any of the symptoms of this condition. A few simple diagnostic questions ought to be sufficient:

Do you have a tendency toward self-reliance?
Are you self-consciousness? Are you sin-consciousness?
Are you law-consciousness?
Are you right and wrong consciousness?
Are you good and bad consciousness?
Is your self worth based on what other people think of you?
Is there a cure?

Most of us, without fear of being branded hypochondriacs can recognize some or even all of the above. The question then is, can anything be done about it? Is there a cure? To that we answer emphatically "Yes there is." However, candidly one must also admit that God's prescription can taste rather unpleasant.

We must first see that the root problem is sin and we must see that the root of sin is independence. Much of the trouble with our modern day discipleship is that it is pre-occupied with sin and sinning, whereas discipleship is concerned with the invasion of life, not the intrusion of sin.

Moreover, if, as we suggest, the core problem is the independent self then the remedy is to know the Christ-dependent-self. The remedy gives rise to the core strategy, which is to convince us of our total need of Him. This He does by exposing us to the futility of self. It is imperative then that we fail and fail spectacularly in our attempts to live the Christian life. Failure and disillusionment create in us "a godly grief that leads to repentance that leads to salvation, without regret." [2 Cor 7:10] Once persuaded of our total inadequacy we are ready to be introduced to The Person who is our adequacy and "infinite supply."