Archive for September, 2008
My daily reading recently included the story of Elisha and his servant. The king of Aram was at war with Israel, but whenever he plotted an attack, God revealed the plans to the prophet Elisha, who in turn told the king of Israel. Understandably, this made the king of Aram quite upset. Eventually he decided that he should deal with Elisha once and for all, so he gathered an army and sent them down to attack Elisha.
When Elisha and his servant woke up, they looked out to see a great army, complete with horses and chariots, encamped around them. And they were just two men!
It reminds me of an old war movie I saw once. The heroes had made a successful attack against an enemy fort, and were trying to make their getaway across the harbour in a tiny boat. Guns were firing at them from the shore, planes were flying overhead trying to bomb them, and somewhere offshore a ship launched a torpedo. All this against a tiny boat with a handful of men!
Life seems like that sometimes, doesn’t it? As we seek to go about our business of serving the Lord, we feel that we are surrounded by a massive force of enemies, and that we are being fired on from every side. We feel so small and helpless in the midst of it.
However, the massive army surrounding Elisha and his servant was less than half the story. Elisha’s servant was overcome with fear, and cried out in distress to his master. Elisha, however, saw beyond the natural. He prayed for God to open the servant’s spiritual eyes also, and when He did the servant saw the mighty army of God encamped around the army of Aram. It was not Elisha’s army, for Elisha to command, but God’s army of which Elisha was himself a part. And because he was part of that army, it would defend him.
Are you part of God’s army? Are you under His command, carrying out His orders and submitted to His will? Then you need never fear, no matter how great a force the enemy brings against you, or how strong the attack may be. Because you are part of God’s army, that army will always be there to defend you.
God’s army will always be greater than anything the enemy can muster, for four reasons:
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God’s army goes forth in God’s power and authority. The best the devil can manage is bluff and illusion.
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God’s army outnumbers the devil’s army two to one. Scripture tells us that when the devil rebelled one third of the angels rebelled with him. That means two-thirds remained faithful to God.
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God’s army is not fighting to achieve victory. Victory has already been won by the Lord Jesus Christ on the Cross. His army fights only to enforce the victory which has already been won.
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The General of the army, the Holy Spirit, lives within each of the human members of the army.
We are not in command, but the one who is in command lives in us! No wonder the Bible tells us that “greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world.”
Got an army camped against you? Fear not, God’s army defending you is bigger. Being attacked from every side? Fear not, the battle has already been won, and you are on the winning side.
Some time ago, as we were praying over Glory to the King Ministries International and the Apostolic Network, the Lord gave us a word that He wanted to release over the Network an anointing of a martyr heart. He gave us the Scripture from Revelation 12:11Revelation 12:11
English: World English Bible - WEB
11 They overcame him because of the Lamb’s blood, and because of the word of their testimony. They didn’t love their life, even to death.
WP-Bible plugin, “They overcame him (satan) by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony, and they loved not their lives unto death.” I saw a great army rising up, an army which is the end time church, an army which will be absolutely unstoppable because they have nothing left to lose.
What is a martyr heart? In our world today there are those of some world religions who call themselves martyrs, but they are not really so. Their heart is not a willingness to lay down their own lives, but a desire to destroy the lives of others – and if, in doing that, they have to lose their own lives, then they are willing.
The martyr heart which the Lord wants to give us – not just GTK Apostolic Network, but the whole end time church – is very different. We must be willing to lay down our lives, not in order to destroy as many others as we can with us, but to bear witness to our Lord and Saviour. We are to be martyrs not to bring death, but to bring life.
To have a martyr heart does not just mean being willing to face physical death. Some will face that ultimate decision, many will not. All of us need to have the same kind of heart that Jesus had. Before Jesus ever faced the Sanhedrin, before He endured the whip and the thorns, before the nails secured Him to the cross, He had entered repeated levels of death.
Just being born, for Jesus, was a form of death. For all eternity He had enjoyed the love and fellowship of the Father and the Holy Spirit. He had rejoiced in infinite power, infinite knowledge and infinite holiness. He had filled all of existence, unlimited in space or time. From the beginning of creation He had been acclaimed, honored and worshiped by the host of heaven and the creatures of the earth. Yet to rescue the one species on earth that did not serve Him faithfully – man – He laid all that aside, died to all His power and prerogatives, and became a helpless infant. He did not love His life as God so much that He was unwilling to lay it down. That’s a martyr heart.
Do we have position, power, privilege? Do we reason that it has been given to us by God, and therefore we should not have to let it go? Do we cling to it, offended that anyone would even suggest that we may need to step down? God wants to give us a heart which will willingly lay aside all that is ours, in order that we may rescue those who are perishing without Christ.
In coming to earth, Jesus left the perfect world with which He was so familiar, to come into a world which was totally alien to Him. A world made filthy by sin. A world made ugly by man’s hate and greed. A world thrown into chaos by man’s disobedience. Have you ever pondered how uncomfortable this world must have been for the sinless Son of God? How difficult it must have been for Him to live with the attitudes and behaviors of even the best of His friends and acquaintances, never mind those who blatantly opposed Him? He had to die to His own comfort, in a sense even to His own standards of acceptability – not that those standards were ever lowered.
Do we hold on to our comfort, clinging to what is familiar? Do we feel it would be beneath our dignity to walk among those who do not conform to our standards? Do we have trouble tolerating the shortcomings of others? God wants to give us a heart which is willing to die to those things we hold most dear, in order to reach those very people.
Scripture tells us that Jesus “became obedient.” Not that He had ever been disobedient, but because He had never before known what it was to have to obey. There was no disharmony between Him and the Father, so His life in eternity had not been a matter of obedience. With the Father and the Spirit, He had framed the laws by which the universe operated. From the beginning of creation, He had been the one who was obeyed. Now, He was placed in a position of subjection, not only to the Father, but to His earthly mother and stepfather, and to the governing authorities of both Israel and Rome. He had to learn to choose to follow the will of another, even when that will was contrary to His own, even when He knew that what was being asked of Him was mistaken, or foolish, or unnecessary. That obedience reached its ultimate conclusion at Gethsemane when, with every fibre of His human nature screaming that it should not be so, He nonetheless bowed before the Father’s will and accepted the cup of human sin and guilt. That was a death far more potent than the physical death which He was about to face.
Do we cling fiercely to our own will? Do we want to “do it our way”? God wants to give us a heart which will be totally submitted to Him, willing to accept His will, plans and purposes for our lives even when everything in us wants something different.
In short, God wants a people who are dead: dead to their own power and privilege, dead to their own comfort, dead to their own will. When we come to that point, the question of whether we are willing to face physical death becomes a non-issue.
There is a story of a young man in the 19th Century who was going as a missionary to one of the wild countries of Africa. Some of his friends were horrified, and tried hard to dissuade him. “You could be killed!” they told him. His reply was simple: “I am already dead. I died when I came to Christ. Whether He chooses to allow this body to continue on earth or not, is His prerogative.” That’s a martyr’s heart.
Have you ever noticed how, even though our friendships may be filled with fun and laughter, we grow closest to those with whom we have walked through difficulties? Suffering, whether our own or that of someone close to us, has the ability to strip away all the trivialities and focus on the things that really matter.
We can be sure that Christianity was never meant to be a “long-faced religion.” Joy is one of the fruit of the Spirit, and when we consider the incredible gift of salvation that is ours in Christ, we have more reason than any people on the face of the earth to rejoice.
However, there is a difference between joy and frivolity. Sadly many in the Church today seem to have embraced a version of Christianity that is all froth and bubble, with little or no substance beneath the foam. Much of the modern understanding of God confuses Him with Santa Claus – a benign grandfatherly figure whose function in life is to provide us with whatever we want. It is a concept far removed from the God of the Bible.
In fact, there is even a difference between joy and happiness. Happiness depends on the things that happen to us. It is ephemeral, here one moment and gone the next. Joy, on the contrary, has substance. It is firmly tied to our relationship with the Lord, and does not desert us just because things don’t happen to be going the way we would like them to go.
It is this substance that makes joy big enough to accommodate the reality of suffering. We can know that no matter what things we may have to walk through, our joy will remain in tact because it is not centered on those things but on the Lord.
More than that, our relationship with the Lord can make it a joy to actually embrace suffering for His sake.
Paul wrote, “I want to know Christ, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His suffering…” (Phil 3:10Phil 3:10
English: World English Bible - WEB
10 that I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, becoming conformed to his death;
WP-Bible plugin) Most of us today would agree wholeheartedly with the first two sentiments. We want to know Christ – Christ the Saviour, Christ the Healer, Christ the Deliverer, Christ the Comforter. We want to experience the power of His resurrection in our lives – the power of victory over satan, death and destruction, the power of a new beginning.
Yet Paul pressed toward something deeper. He wanted that kind of relationship which comes only from having stood with another through pain and anguish. That relationship may come as a result of us standing with another in his suffering, of another standing with us in our pain, or of us standing together through the fire.
Likewise that deeper level of fellowship with the Lord can come in several ways. It can come by a revelation of the Holy Spirit, making Jesus’ sufferings powerfully real to us. I remember a day 15 years ago on a beach in Brighton, England, when the Spirit caused me to walk through the whole of Christ’s human experience, from the time He laid aside His divine power and prerogatives to take on human flesh, to the time when He ascended again to be enthroned at the Father’s right hand. At every point the emphasis came: “He did this for me! He did this for me!”
It may come through intercession, as the Lord allows you to feel a tiny part of His suffering on behalf of man, and at the same time to feel the suffering of man in need of God, and as it were to bring the two together in your own body.
It may come as you personally suffer for your faith, choosing to stand for Christ rather that back down and save yourself from persecution. I recently read of a brother in one of the countries where Christians suffer persecution. A convert from another religion, he had been beaten severely over an extended period of time. Seeking out the missionaries through whom he had found Christ, he told them joyfully that, whereas he had previously thought that he was a disciple of Christ, now he knew he was because His Saviour had allowed him the great privilege of suffering for Him!
What sort of relationship do you want with the Lord? Are you content with a “fair-weather friendship”? Or would you prefer something deeper, something with substance, something which can never be shaken? If your answer is the latter, then join Paul in his plea to share in “the fellowship of His sufferings.”
We have been doing some cleaning up around the hall where we meet for church. An old Scout hall, it has been sadly neglected for a long time, and what were once garden beds are very much overgrown weed patches. Unfortunately, predominant among the weeds is blackberry.
Blackberry is a particularly aggressive weed. Most garden plants – and even most weeds – are content to sit where they are, going through their life cycle in one spot, and relying on their seeds to spread their presence further afield. Not blackberry. It grows rapidly, and can put down a new set of roots just about anywhere where a stalk touches the ground. It can take over whole gardens in no time at all. There are stories of people finding complete buildings buried under massive blackberry patches.
When I was a kid, I thought blackberries were wonderful. We would dress up in our oldest, thickest clothes and our sturdiest shoes, and set off with buckets for the blackberry patches in the local bushland. I knew of a couple of particularly fruitful ones, and it was very rarely that we came back with anything less than a bucket of berries – often, we had several buckets.
Sure, we had scratches galore, and the odd embedded thorn, but the feast of those luscious berries was, to our young minds, more than worth the price.
Strange how our perspectives change. I still love the taste of blackberries, but as I attacked those thorn bushes this morning, I saw them as nothing but very annoying weeds. I saw them also as something of a metaphor for the work of sin in the world.
Like blackberry, sin bears fruit that, to the immature, seems wonderfully attractive. Yes, we may recognize that the very thing we find so attractive is hurting and scarring us, but the price seems little compared to the pleasure.
But, like blackberry, sin is an aggressive weed in our lives. It is not content to sit in one spot and “bloom where it is planted.” No, it spreads out, ever claiming more ground in our lives, and turning what had been fruitful areas into unproductive prickle patches.
Blackberry is particularly difficult to eradicate. This morning the best I could do was to cut it back, chasing the prickly stems back to the ground and chopping them off. It is only a stop-gap measure, and very soon the blackberry will begin to grow back. Pulling them out by the roots is just about impossible. Apart from their very tenacious hold on the soil, even one small bit of root left in the ground will soon send forth shoots to begin a whole new blackberry patch.
No, the only way to deal with blackberry is to poison it.
Sin is much the same. We chop it back in one area of our lives, and next thing we know it has popped up somewhere else. Before we can even turn around again, the sin that we cut back is again beginning to sprout. Likewise, pulling sin out by the roots is an almost impossible task. We just don’t have the strength to do it, and even if we have some measure of success, in no time we find that old root is again beginning to send forth shoots.
Sin, like blackberry, needs to be poisoned.
What is poison to sin? The blood of Jesus, for a start. It prevents sin from setting its fruits of destruction. Then there is the Word of God. When we commit ourselves, as Jesus did, to live according to the Word no matter what, we put a covering over our lives that makes it impossible for sin to spread and put down new roots. There is the powerful poison of repentance. It goes right to the root of sin and makes it shrivel in the ground. Prayer and the life of the Spirit work together to remove sin and replace it with the character of God.
It’s hard work clearing blackberry, but far better than seeing a whole garden disappear under a prickle patch. It’s even harder work clearing the sin from our lives, but infinitely more satisfying.
Stress – it’s the buzz word of our modern society. It seems everyone suffers from it, from the busy executive working 70 hour weeks to the housewife coping with the demands of children and husband to the student overpressured by homework and exams. Many of our modern diseases are, if not caused, then certainly exacerbated by stress.
Yet stress is not really new. In 2 Cor. 1:82 Cor. 1:8
English: World English Bible - WEB
8 For we don’t desire to have you uninformed, brothers, The word for “brothers” here and where context allows may also be correctly translated “brothers and sisters” or “siblings.” concerning our affliction which happened to us in Asia, that we were weighed down exceedingly, beyond our power, so much that we despaired even of life.
WP-Bible plugin, the apostle Paul writes “We were under great stress, far beyond our ability to cope. We despaired even of life.” Paul’s stressors, of course, were very different from ours – his were shipwrecks, beatings, persecutions, imprisonments (somehow I think I prefer mine!) However, Paul rose above them, and in doing so he gave us a way to rise above our own.
Firstly, Paul acknowledged that he couldn’t cope. There are things which we simply can’t handle on our own. To acknowledge this is not a sign of weakness. In order to tap into God’s power, the first thing we have to do is to need it. (If we think we can stand on our own, God will let us try till we find we can’t.) In fact, Paul said that the pressure came to stop him from relying on himself and cause him to rely on God (v.9).
Secondly, Paul declared that in spite of all appearances, God’s promises stand. (v20). What God has said He is, He is. What God has said He will do, He will do. No matter if the world is falling apart around us, no matter if God seems to have retreated to the outermost corner of the universe, no matter if every man on earth and every demon in hell is against us, God has said He will never leave us nor forsake us, so He will not.
Sometimes we simply have to cling to that truth in blind faith.
Thirdly, Paul acknowledged that the battle is already won. In Chapter 2 vs 14 he gives a picture of a Roman triumphal procession. Now, this did not happen as the army was going out to wage war. It happened as they returned home, victory won and the spoils in their possession. Jesus is not going to win the battle with Satan at some time in the future – He has already won it at Calvary. We are already victors in Him – we simply have to enforce that victory in our circumstances.
The skirmishes we fight today are much like the small enclaves of Japanese soldiers who, for years after the end of World War II, were being found on isolated islands. They had no idea that the war was over and they had lost. In holding their positions they could, and sometimes did, inflict casualties, but they could never win the war. The devil is in exactly the same position with Christians today.
Finally, Paul tells us to keep an eternal perspective. It always amazes me that in Chapter 4 vs 17 he can describe his troubles as “light and momentary”, but he is looking beyond this world. In all the ups and downs of life, one thought has kept me going more than any other: “this too will pass”. If there are bad times, there will eventually be light at the end of the tunnel – even if we have to dodge a few oncoming trains along the way. If there are good times, they too will pass – so we shouldn’t get too comfortable.
Most importantly of all, in a thousand years time very little of what we are experiencing today will matter at all. What will matter is the relationship with Jesus Christ that sustains us through it.
Recently a team of scientists decided to test the power of prayer in relation to healing the sick. They took a group of sick people and divided it in two. One half of the group would receive prayer, the other would not, and neither group would know whether they were the receivers or the non-receivers. They then asked people around the world to pray for the first group. At the end of the experiment, the group which had received prayer had not made any better recovery than the group that had not, so the scientists in all their wisdom concluded that prayer for the sick simply does not work.
What could have caused this outcome? Very simply, the terms of reference given to those who were asked to pray. They were told to pray to whatever god or supreme being or spiritual force they worshiped. Thus many prayed to false gods, some prayed to dead people, and some “prayed” to no god at all, simply “directing good wishes” toward those for whom they were praying. No wonder it didn’t work!
In a very real sense, the scientists’ conclusion was right: Prayer doesn’t work! There is nothing in the act of prayer itself which has any ability to release power into any situation, other than the psychological comfort of “having prayed”.
The power is not in the prayer, but in the One to whom the prayer is addressed.
We see this graphically illustrated in the Old Testament in the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18). All day these false prophets danced around, shouting and even cutting themselves in an effort to get Baal’s attention. If prayer worked, the outcome of this story would have been very different than it is! The point of the story is, you can’t get the attention of someone who does not exist. If the object of your prayer is not real, then you can pray till you turn blue, but you will never get an answer! Likewise, if the object of your prayer has no power, then no amount of prayer will invest it with power. Prayer, in and of itself, does not work.
How different when Elijah prayed! He did not need to scream and shout and jump around. He simply presented his cause to the Living God, and God’s power – not the power of Elijah’s prayer – did the rest.
Prayer is like a pipeline. When the pipeline is connected to a water supply, you can turn on the tap and expect to get water. If the pipeline is connected to nothing, then no matter how fully you turn on the tap, nothing will flow.
The flip side of that, of course, is that even when the pipeline is connected to the right Source, we still need to turn on the tap. The water will not flow until we do.
There is only one God. He is the God of the Bible, the God who manifested Himself in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the only source of life, of wholeness, of power, of supply, and of every other good thing. If you are praying to any other god, your prayers will not work. Your pipeline is connected to emptiness.
If, however, you have a relationship with the Living God through the Lord Jesus Christ, then your prayers to Him have the ability to release His power into whatever situation you are bringing before Him.
Very simply, prayer in itself doesn’t work. Our God does.
Often people ask me, “How do I get into spiritual warfare?” The truth is, if you are a Christian you are in spiritual warfare whether you like it or not. The only choice you have is whether you stand in that battle as a victorious warrior for Christ, or whether you fall helpless and defeated before the enemy.
Before you were saved, you were in the devil’s army, even though you might not have been aware fo it. When you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you defected from the army of satan and joined the army of God. You became an enemy of the devil, and he will attack you in every way he can.
The good news is, Jesus has already won the war at Calvary. The bad news is, the devil does not accept defeat easily!
Though this blog we will explore some of the ways to stand in the victory that is already ours in Christ.