Control Archives - The Paraclete's Hammer

K.I.S.S.ing the Apostles: Or The Only Father We Will Ever Need

2 February 20247 February 2024 by theparacleteshammer, posted in Apostle, Fathering, Fivefold Ministry Gifts

Some thoughts, here. Dropping the bomb.

Looking forward to the responses.

I have seen multiple people claim they know what the apostolic is.

I typically either smile and nod, and tell them what they want to hear, or I roll my eyes, cringe for the moment, and smile and move along.

And the reality is that, typically, because of the counterfeit, because of legitimacy, and because of the craving for real power or authority, apart from principles, reality, and cause-and-effect, between 130 and 185 percent of what claims to be the apostolic is not.

So, kissing it here (K.I.S.S), let us be simple.

The frame, before G-d sends the Isaac, the enemy will send the Ishmael. In place of the releasing and liberating apostolic, comes the apostolic overseer and covering…..

And there is a lot of mixture, in the church, of what claims to be the apostolic. However, the truth is most of the “apostlolic” is really et up with the Antichrist spirit.

We read Ephesians 4:11-12, and we hear what the Fivefold Ministry, is for “to equip the saints for the work of the ministry”, and we FAIL ruthlessly to explain what SHOULD happen after that equipping. Paul mentions “equipping the saints for the work of ministry”, and we FAIL to build out that phrase, “the work of ministry”.

In Practice, following the precedent of the Shepherding Movement, and much of the Ruler Season (1901-2004), with its obsession with protocol and hierarchy and order and systems (to say nothing about whether or not those systems were ever truly life-giving), too much of the Fivefold was concerned with controlling other believers, due to woundedness and the lust for power.

What ultimately resulted was we allow illegitimated “covering” types to equip and then ANNEX.

If you want to know few of us trust when you say “the fivefold is the only biblical ecclesiology (form of church government)”, or “only the fivefold is the proper form of leadership”, well, this is one reason why.

Typically, whomever institutes the fivefold in a place installs themselves at the top and calls themselves the apostle over the organization.

And, unfortunately, in practicing that ministry this way, we have rejected the implied exposition that pairs the reality of Ephesians 4:11-12 with the longer ending of Mark 16 and Matthew 28:18-20.

Make disciples, teaching them to observe what I have instructed you, and lo I am with you until the end of the age.

Preach the Gospel to every creature, and send them forth with the signs following.

Here, Yeshua NEVER commanded anyone to control another human.

…NEVER commanded anyone to limit another or shrink another….

…and NEVER commanded anyone to subject what He told them to do to another person who was supposed to act as an intermediary…

On the one hand, the doctrine of covering, natch, will lead to this control. On the other hand, the Great Commission and the accounts of Luke 21 and the work of Acts lead naturally to one thing: freedom. A free people walking directly with their King, and developing into the leaders they were made to be, will increase the real, Isaacite (as opposed to the counterfeit, Ishmaelite) apostolic. It enables rather than disables.

Put differently, IN THE WORDS OF JOHN WIMBER, we equip, and then, as a result of the balance of the biblical text, RELEASE those people, and allow them to do what HE told them to do. Build a platform under them for their success and fulfillment.

Counsel is one thing.

Control is another.

….no, not allowing…..that word choice is terrible.

Allow me to share something.

I want to share part of my testimony here.

Near the end of my first marriage, when we were trying to salvage it, my first wife, who cheated on me, made a disturbing statement.

“I am a strong godly woman, and I AM ALLOWING DAVID TO BECOME THE HEAD OF THIS HOUSEHOLD.”

That statement disrupted not only my spirit, but also the spirit of Jeff, who is my adopted father and was present.

Even allowing someone, permitting someone, releasing someone, loosing someone is inadequate.

We are responsible to REALIZE and ACKNOWLEDGE that G-d designed humanity to be free, and to crave liberty, and whether or not we permit or allow it, they will move toward that direction with whatever tools they have, see, or realize are on hand.

The Book of Numbers in the Torah acknowledges this reality, because in that book, G-d shows us how a loving Father takes a full nation of only slaves, and begets a nation of sons, within one generation.

When freedom is the direction of a people who have gotten a taste of liberty, lesser structures will not satisfy. To wit, the structure embodied by the phrase “apostolic oversight” is risky when applied to free people, because it lends itself to structures that push people toward ring-kissing, boot-licking, and being subjected to the grand poobah who is more capable of hearing G-d for you than you are for yourself. It creates a spiritual welfare system that forces us to depend on a priestly caste.

That is a caste system we set up. And the priests, the Brahmins who serve their Shiva, sadly end up destroying the flock rather than nurturing it.

That’s what false apostles look like.

Now, describing the true variety.

Apostles primarily, biblically, because they establish new works, look at foundations. They do not sit at the top. They are muddy and grubby, and considering the roots of a thing. They are not bishops or political masters.

They go out and do. They might understand heaven’s blueprint. But they are most obsessed with establishing the kingdom where it is not rightly established, and pointing out obstacles to that establishment.

Believers were made to be powerful and dangerous, and walk hand-in-hand with the King and their Father. Your Father wants to be your first father, ahead of any man or woman.

Second, apostles enable an enviroment where real fathering can take place.

And in the words of Arthur Burk, let me ask this question to a fatherless generation, that includes myself.

What resources does G-d the Father lack with which to father us HIMSELF?

Anything?

Does He lack anything? No.

Now, is it ~~fair~~ just that we do not have access to parents or figures willing to parent us? Perhaps.

However, it is better for us if we are able to receive G-d as father leading us before we engage with another person, because that person can turn into someone we mooch from.

We were not made to mooch from them.

And if G-d in Exodus and Numbers are a blueprint for how He deals with His people.

If His first revelation to pagan humanity was as Father (Israel is my SON, MY FIRSTBORN. LET MY SON GO!, IF YOU DO NOT, I WILL KILL YOUR FIRSTBORN.)….

If He intended to break the slave mentalty by sequentially leading a generation of slaves into the wilderness so then HE HIMSELF could transform them into a generation of sons….

And that was Old Covenant, and we are under the New Covenant…

…then why would we expect Him to do anything less than amping up and intensifying the process of fathering us Himself?

He deals with us as sons, and not as slaves.

He deals with us via connection and intimacy in this season, NOT protocol.

He works at fathering us Himself.

It’s not about obedience. It is about intimacy and connction and family.

And we in the apostolic were made to foster the environment so permeated by love and kindness and justice and mercy and grace and tenderness, that it enables believers to connect more intensely with THE FATHER with HIS SONS. And yes, ladies, if I as a man can be the bride of Christ, then you also can as a woman can be the son of G-d. Congratulations, life is uncomfortable for everyone.

But it makes people uncomfortable to allow He HIMSELF to father, because we look for Him to send someone with skin on.
He never promises that.

He only promises that He, as the ultimate Father will, together with the Son, make His home with us.

The apostolic does run toward fathering, and toward foundations, but all of this is to push for a twofold reality.

Apostles, put in their right place, seek to foster an environment, free of obstruction, where the parts of the engine glide past one another, much like the function of motor oil, so that what comes naturally from them is the fostering of an envionment that enables the connection and flow to be established, and happen more easily, between G-d and man. It’s not about the dude or chick that is anointed. It’s not about them protecting you and me. It is about our obsession that you meet with HIM. It’s about Him meeting with His kids. Personal relationship that is intense and intimate. For the only covering that matters, with no respect to the predatory Shepherding Movement, is the one provided by G-d the Father.

As to the Redemptive Gifts, the Redemptive Gift that makes the best Father is the Gift of Ruler/Judge/Deliverer. The Principle of Freedom that leads slaves out of bondage into freedom. Dominic Torretto is one such example of the Ruler who seeks to father well.

And his dad wanted that for his sons, even though the way he went about it was kind of messed up. You still see the fathering in this vision here when Dom is underwater, before the mother, his bride, Letty, the Prophet rescues him.

And the Prophet says to the Ruler, “none of it is worth a thing if I lose you.”

Apostles fade into the background while Dad Himself meets with His kids and the minutes just slip away as the intimacy slips away, and people begin to hear G-d more clearly for themselves. They know the Father heart, and yearn for others to have that, not to control those hearts, but to release and send out those hearts as they themselves have been.

So, whatever else has been written about the apostle, if it

Would that all the people were prophets…..capable of hearing G-d for themselves.

Moses cried out for the complete and dangerous liberation of people to pursue G-d for themselves to a place of full freedom and flow of revelation and vision and understanding (what constitutes the prophetic) in freedom.

Yet, here we are under the New Covenant, looking for apostles to be covering and our daddy’s and control us and lead us into further bondage because we may have rejected the fruit of the spirit of self-control.

Maybe we need fewer of these “apostles” and more connection with Father Himself. As people who walk in the principles, we are more than capable (Romans 8:37) of engaging personally with Him in His love and seeing that connection bring a multiplication in all arenas of our lives, causing a flourishing. Sons build and fight. Part of His fathering of us, and part of the DNA of a son, is that we learn how to build; we accrue, manage, and transform raw materials into products that are useful for the agenda of the kingdom; and we learn how to fight and who to fight. When we subject that organically life-giving connection to the caprice of another person’s discernment, as too many lived examples have shown, we retard or destroy the fullness of life, shrinking our supply, and making our spiritual life unsustainable.

This is now how we were designed, in order for the Kingdom to flourish and us to flourish, we must be free.

And G-d is the one who will hold us accountable, per about 5 referneces.

Why does the wicked renounce God

and say in his heart, “You will not call to account”?

Psalm 10:13

I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak,

Matt 12:36

So then ^zeach of us will give an account of himself to God.

Rom 14:32

And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are ^cnaked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.

Heb 4:13

but they will give account to him who is ready ^lto judge the living and the dead.

1 Pet 4:5

We are responsible to be free, with the King at our side as our bridegroom., and G-d as our Father before all others.

40 years ago, when I needed a Father, it was Yeshua who introduced me to the reality of true fathering by offering that chance to be fathered by him, and in the ensuing decades of coverings doing a really bad job of fathering, many to the point of abuse, He never once left my side as He walked with love surrounding me. And Just over a year ago, the L-rd used a woman of G-d to connect me to the Father Himself. And she is one of the most important people in my life. And this last year, I have had the honor to see survivors grow in that connection. And THAT is my favorite thing in the world.

One problem, however, is that His offer to father goes unreceived, because so many want a person on this earth in this fallen world to take on that responsibility. And that is not what He has designed sons for. He designed us so he could be with us.

And that connection point, process, and moment is what we in the real apostolic live for. Period. On stronger-than-the-gates-of-hell foundations, we seek for others to connect with Father Himself.

And the ministry of the real apostolic gets ignored in favor of this Ishmaelite, lesser-than, weak substitute. We can and we must do better.

Just some thoughts.

How G-d Wounds And Then Heals a Teacher

8 June 202311 June 2023 by theparacleteshammer, posted in Principles, Teacher

Mistakes…..

We all make them….

Including Prophets…..

Giggle…..

That was a razz on my Prophet friends, given the tribe, when they make decisions and judgments about items, tend to have a pretty good track record of being right. Not because they are arrogant, but because they are able to extrapolate from principles and see when things are not well-put-together or well-thought-out that the rest of us miss.

Further, they have a heart for justice, and they are centrally impacted by issues of right and wrong.

And given my last post in this series finished up how G-d Wounds and then Heals a Mercy and then dealt with the same issue concerning a Prophet, I was going to start with Servant, and the King said, “no, Teacher.”

Heading In the Right Direction versus Heading In the Best Direction

Sigh….

This is my absolute favorite gift to deal with, without exception, because there is so much potential and so much that gets undersold and mislabelled with the Teacher, so much so that many do not understand themselves. They are known for keeping their heads about them and heading in the right direction, generally speaking. However, so many of them are not known for being dialed in to the best direction of many right directions, which requires some fine-tuning and callibration, that can only be accomplished with the gentle whispers of the Executing Spirit, the Holy Spirit. (Whereas sin and defilement are the violation of principles, holiness actually means “weaving principles together”, and few can tinker and dial things in as well as the Spirit-governed Teacher who leads with their human spirit.

The Teacher, universally almost as slow as the Mercy, is also very deliberate and demonstrates a preference for telling the whole story, and also has a predilection for getting the details and the account of a thing or event right.

However, unlike the Mercy, they tend toward a predilection for the old and the well-researched, as my post on that RG shows, and they often get stuck in their thoughts, whereas the Mercy tends to gets stuck in their emotions. Both gifts can appear a bit absent-minded or head-in-the-clouds, and so they each need to have a couple of close friends that see them as they truly are, and be able to reach them where they are. The Mercy tends to find this in a Prophet or another Mercy, and the Teacher tends to find this in an Exhorter, which are typical pairings for those respective gifts.

A problem with the Teacher, as with the Mercy is the issue of being in control of a situation, versus being out of control. The King will routinely give both gifts situations and circumstances that are not neat and where they do not have control, to see how they respond to those.

See Exhibit A of the Exhorter/Teacher combo: Tony Stark and James Rhodes. And the line that hits me here, is “you got your best friend back”. Rhodey was not in control during this sequence in Iron Man 2 because his suit had been hacked by the fiilm’s antagonist, and the Prophet had to fix that problem.

Again, with the lack of control. This time in Captain America: Civil War. This time, hitting much closer to home.

And then having to be faced with the reality of his circumstances.

The fight needed to be fought, and the Teacher is central to the fight. Central with their humor. Central with their anchoring presence. Central with their safety. Central with their slowness. Central with their strength to endure.

And this whole thing with paralysis sucks…..But it is his consistency that helped Tony stay grounded.

And one other Teacher….who was saved by his divided personality….

Beyond that, there is, as with all the gifts, a certain stronghold that must be dealt with, in proper order, if the Teacher is to submit to the process by which they are wounded or broken, so they can grow into the fulness of what they were designed to be.

One of the major issues with the Teacher, and an issue G-d makes with them is the question of them being in control of a situation apart from His divine empowerment.

Teachers have to get to the point where, in order to walk in fuller authority, they give up their right to know in order to control.

Rather they know intimately, in order to wash feet and be a safe place, and to break the stronghold of witchcraft and rebellion by offensively engaging with those entities directly in the spirit. Further, they must wrestle, hand-to-hand, in close quarters, and submit (think the wrestling definition of “submit an opponent”) the predator spirit that seeks to hold hostage those they love.

They have to find the way that, through the spirit, enables them to marry what they know, to the Fire of the One Who Is All Truth, and allow the Holy Sprit, who is the Spirit that Executes, not merely Sets Apart, to lead them into all truth. It is not the biblical text that leads us into all truth. It is the Spirit of Truth that leads us into all truth. Our own mind, with all its absorbed and accumulated biblical knowledge, trivia, and understanding of the truth, is not what leads us into truth. Rather, it is the Spirit of Truth alone that can rightly divide the written biblical text, and apart from Him, with Torah in hand, we will risk killing the life-giving thing G-d gave to move us into the next realm of divine understanding.

My question to the Teachers in the crowd is this:

Do you want to continue being the one that kills with your cerebrum alone, or do you want the spirit G-d has placed in you to rule over the work of your mind, marry that to the felt work of your heart, and then your reins, and together with the thoughts, allow your emotions to emerge as your heart is strangely warmed by the Holy One of Israel?”

Apart from Him, you are incapable of exegeting at all.

I do not care how much Torah you know. If you do not know Torah Himself, the Word Himself, all your supposed truth is nothing more than the Vale of Ben Hinnom.

We go into all truth and get into all truth, ONLY by the Spirit of G-d.

And trust me, it is going to look really weird, the end product, and it is going to unsettle you and those around you, but as you grow into it, you will see the King’s faithfulness, and the Exhorter Himself walking alongside you will stay with you as you undergo this healing and transformation.

It is going to take time and a process, but it can happen, and Teacher, you are worth knowing, and being more fully known, even as you so fully know so much.

The Ancient One : But you are leaving out the most important part. In order to return the stones, you have to survive.

Bruce Banner : We will, I will. I promise.

The Ancient One : I can’t risk this reality on a promise. It is the duty of the Sorcerer Supreme to protect the time stone.

Bruce Banner : Then, why the hell did Strange give it away?

The Ancient One : What did you say?

Bruce Banner : Strange, he gave it away. He gave it to Thanos.

The Ancient One : Willingly?

Bruce Banner : Yes.

The Ancient One : Why?

Bruce Banner : I have no idea. Maybe he made a mistake.

The Ancient One : Or, I did. Strange was meant to be the best of us.

Bruce Banner : So he must have done it for a reason?

The Ancient One : I fear you might be right.

Bruce Banner : [the Ancient One hands over the Time stone to Hulk] . Thank you.

The Ancient One : I am counting on you, Bruce. We all are.

Going beyond the science and the knowledge acquired, the Teacher has GOT TO STEP INTO THE PLACE WHERE THEY PUT THEIR HEART, FAITH, AND WILL ON THE LINE, AND RISK DANGER WITH HEART AND SKIN IN THE GAME, in order to step up to the next level of who they are, which can invite circumstances that can hurt them in the process, trusting the L-rd to make them and their very, VERY tender hearts whole again. Teacher have to risk emotional exposure in order to be made more whole, bring wholeness to others around them, and to grow reality to a place where the L-rd needs it to be, embracing a potentially painful responsibility, the one thing they are supposed to do, in order to make the potential reality kinetic.

Be at peace, Teachers, for your is the most precarious of the seven gifts, I deem.

You are truly the motorcycles among the gifts. Huge payoffs and incredibly fun when the gift is done right, but also the risk of great destruction when mishandled.

Responding to Murray Rothbard: Free Will Vs. Control

17 March 2022 by theparacleteshammer, posted in Five Levels of Holienss, Principles, Time

Jotting some thoughts down here…

Tom Woods, arch-libertarian and Teacher, is refreshing me on sabbatical:

He writes:

Murray Rothbard described the free market as simply “the social array of voluntary exchanges of goods and services.’ In titling one of his books Power and Market (originally intended to be the closing section of Man, Economy and State) Rothbard was positioning “power” and “market” as antinomies. The market consists of voluntary transactions between willing parties; the state, or “power,” introduces compulsion into human relations, bringing about coerced outcomes that people would not voluntarily have chosen.

Noting Rothbard’s idea, I looked back at the idea of market as akin to free will, a gift we are unilaterally and without condition given, even if we mess things up.

I look at coercion by the government as akin to the overworn concept of control.

And the conscious or unconscious desire for control leads inevitable to structures and polity that lead to destruction of what would otherwise be a genuinely, disproportionately life-giving exchange (means of exchange for goods, or good for good).

In the case of our King, He exchanges our debt for His life and adoration.

I wonder if we are missing, in our desire to crown popes, presidents, and apostles (all usual forms of control) the legitimate and requisite aspect of the divine nature of which we were each made to partake, of releasing.

Father designated seasons of release, whether sabbaths, seasons, holidays, years, or other χρόνος or καιρός moments (and yes, Greek is good and both of those concepts are good) for us, as He designed both unique and non-unique timestreams in accordance with our divers designs, for us to unpack time-relative treasures for us.

And we need to hunt for those.

Another dynamic I have considered deeply is the concept of the “starways”.

Though I cannot find another reference to the concept of the “starways” outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and specifically, Guardians of the Galaxy (leave it to the Ruler Thanos to make us aware of such a reality), I know that they exist and are time-connected.

Someone, or several someones, will have to begin the process of unpacking the lightyears worth of pathways traced by the stars in the κόσμος. So that we can begin to embrace how we were MADE to be released, and not merely to control or limit or make small all sorts of things.

What is our place in being released and in giving release to others?

And what is our place in being aware of the connections between His light, His lights, the path that light and those lights travel, and the journeys which we were meant to take.

Just some thoughts here.