The author, Nina Lilley, writes about the way in which faith and fear, in the context of the coronavirus debacle has expanded, have substance, and those comments are worth a whole lot:
Just as faith has substance, fear is the stuff our worst nightmares are made of. Just ask Job. In Job 3:25 he reports, “What I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me”. In my estimation, the current reporting in the news is an opportunity to put our faith to the test. Do we believe His Word or are we going to proceed allowing vain imaginations of “what ifs” plague our consciousness?
Bang-on-the-dot!
Gang, faith has substance and fear has substance and that substance can become a plague on the positive and on the negative, if we loose (Bible Terminology for “permit) either to spread.
Yes, I know the idea of a positive plague sounds counterintuitive, but we ought to let faith spread like a contagious, breeding, reproducing, living, organism with the capacity to augment our DNA for the better.
And, yes, it is an analogy, and the analogy can break down. But let’s take and cultivate the value that is in the analogy.
Concerning Spiritual Napalm…
Some time ago, my wife and I were discussing the correction that we had received from a particular friend. What confused us was that we had trusted this friend, and believed them to be accurate in hearing the things of G-d, and speaking truth. And, in fact, the initial piece this friend had spoken had some truth to it.
The problem with the truth is this….
The piece of truth that can be dead-on accurate, can be followed up by a whole load of implications that also stick based on the truthfulness of the original piece of info and it uses the initial truth claim as a detonator, and acts like spiritual napalm.
If our perceptions are off through woundedness or trauma or unhealed whaatever, we can jump to things G-d never actually said.
“Did G-d really say, ‘don’t eat!’ ?”
“We may eat these other trees, but this one over hear, we cannot eat OR TOUCH.”
That OR TOUCH problem is the opening for the explosion and for the clowns to ship us truth + napalm, if we tolerate them.
What we have present, in at least part of our discussion on coronavirus, is similar. We have a true issue or set of issues, and then we have wrapped around that truth or truths, a whole crapload of stuff that is not true or a distortion of the truth….
And it sticks
And burns…..
And sticks…
And burns….
Fear is like that if we let it grow. A plague or a napalm bomb, or Agent Orange.
And, gang, we have enough problems with Monsanto, without the devil-empowered batallions of Screaming Nazguls carpet bomb us after the initial truth claim has hit us and after we receive both it, and what we believe are the implications of it.
And this is an aspect of what has happened in the context of the corona panic, we have several true things happening at once, but we also have a lot of this sticky stuff affixing to believers.
So, if G-d has not given us a spirit of fear, and all of the major networks have spiritual junk that traffic through their broadcast media, if we do not filter out or limit our intake of the news, what are we allowing that we probably should not.
For those of you that are not aware and are conservative, FOX has a litany of the spirit of lewdness that floods its entire network.
And the other networks have stuff as well, but because I have decades of familiarity with the various FOX entities, I can most readily speak to that issue.
The question is, what of this are we going to accept and use, and how are we going to remove the things that we should not have.
In this case, how are we going to clean up the spirit of fear that has been released like a plague upon us?
The answer is both simple and complex.
Simple because we need to release faith.
Complex because we need to release and walk in faith in as many areas as we can manage. When we experience the spirit of faith calling us to do something in response to the fear that people would seek to place on us, we can drive the clowns back more effectively.
Also, we simply must not do this alone. Rather we need to embrace a deep level of relationship with the L-rd that enables us to PARTNER with Him and His agenda, and with the others that He sends us, and walk in His truth, and only His truth, in this community into which He has placed us.
So, the question we each should answer is, “what is the serpent leveraging in your life in order to add to–and hammer you with–the truth.
With those additions, the enemy adds plagues and destruction to us.
So, consider what you are adding to your own life, follower of Messiah.
φρόνιμοι ὡς οἱ ὄφεις καὶ ἀκέραιοι ὡς αἱ περιστεραί
Translated, be wise as serpents AND harmless/innocent/blameless as doves.