Most of you who know me, know I am an obsessive texualist; I love the written Scriptural text of both the New Testament and the Tanakh. In their original languages (Hebrew AND Greek).
However, I have also noticed a disturbing reality.
What do I mean by that?
Well, it’s a trend toward incompleteness.
For example…
“The Bible is the Word of G-d.“
“One interpretation…many applications…“
“G-d will not violate His Word.“
“To equip the saints for the work of ministry….”…silence on what happens after that…
“A team of scholars worked on this translation” …silence on identifying the names of the people who constitute this team…
“G-d is moving up here…”…people fall out, BUT there is little change in their lives weeks later to indicate G-d was moving.
“So-and-so is ready to return to ministry….”…same minister also didn’t reconcile with the first wife or husband he or she cheated on to begin with…
And so forth…
Oh yeah, and the only two political parties in America that merit prophetic words are red and blue…
It remains problematic when we refuse to dig into the nuance of a statement and do not ask what is and what is not being implied in that statement…
It is asinine when we are either ignored when we question the statements being made…
called religious or critical when we look for clarification…
or gaslit when we refuse to accept what is said without question…
It is one of the main threads of my calling to not settle for halfway or partial answers when they are given.
Carlene Prince once told me that I have to look for what is missing…she noted that that is something I do.
And she is right. I hate half-assed investigations.
And I know I sound rude when I question what is stated…
But I cannot accept partial answers or perceived partial answers when they are given.
Especially when some of my friends have been seriously damaged by partial answers.
And my second wife is dead because of partial answers.
These partial answers are the Reasons when you say, “obey my covering”, that I respond with a glorious middle finger.
Gang, one of those statements that is maddeningly incomplete is “the Spirit of G-d will not violate the Word of G-d.”
And we are left with Zero discussion about which “Word of G-d” we mean.
And Zero curiosity about the inverted statement.
And Zero desire to ask if there are any other immutable items which the Spirit of G-d will not violate.
So, here has always been my thought to add to the statement “the Spirit of -G-d will not violate the Word of G-d.”
“Neither will the Word of G-d, both living and written (two forms of λόγος), violate the Spirit of G-d.”
And equally important and immutable as testimony to the Word of G-D’s veracity, and equally admissible as testifying of the Word Himself, are His Works.
…that is, what He does (John 5:36) is as important as the words about him.
And Yeshua BEING THE WORD OF G-D, is blasphemously ignored in this statement in Josh’s gospel. (Hebrews 4:11-16).
We refuse to investigate it because we are told to investigate it is heresy.
Gang, it’s not enough, especially given the regularity with which we ignore the Spirit of G-d, for us to merely assert thus-and-so about the words He speaks WITHOUT ALSO AFFIRMING His WORDS that His works are admissible as much as His tesitmony. It’s ironic that He would speak words about the veracity of his works and we would ignore those words about His works.
Tree carcasses and e-carcasses, if not attended to in reading by the Spirit, who alone gives understanding, will not bring life.
Rather, they will kill.
And that suddenly.
For those who have been so traumatized by the Scriptural text, as one who walks in the authority of a scribe, I would implore you to get out into nature and allow the King to meet you there where He is also. Or whereever you find him.
His Words and His Works…
What is missing from your regular routine that is life-giving and points you back home to Dad?
Go and do that.
And know you are so loved, gang.
And, as someone who reads the text and enjoys it, I would encourage you to do things that are life-giving to your relationship with the King without feeling guilty.
Be blessed as you recover your own walk with Him, gang.
For the record, I am about to ruin some bad theology.
Along with the fivefold ministry, or more accurately, the way the fivefold ministry is usually portrayed very badly, I tend to be skeptical of political prophecies and an overquick reading of the Scripture, unless there is a bit of fresh manna being discussed, as with a single point of a new truth.
So, with that out of the way, let’s consider the following.
Paul enters a discussion of the flesh vs. the spirit in Galatians 5, starting with verse 16.
There is an interesting aspect that I want to cover.
Giver we have a spirit and a body made of flesh, what if what Paul is discussing in the fruit of the spirit is not the fruit of the Holy Spirit but the fruit that comes by the work of the reasonably healthy human spirit in partnership with the leadership of the Holy Spirit.
So, Paul talks about walking by the spirit in vv. 16 and 17 and he doesn’t capitalize “spirit”. Ignore the ESV capitalization for the moment.
And Arthur talked about the desirable outcome of us becoming factories and he illustrated factories in Joy Unstoppable, Disc 5, Third Head: Life, Cut 3 “Becoming a Factory” by using the example of a fruit tree.
What if the fruits are factories of creativity from orchard supplies of those qualities listed in Galatians 5:22-23, and the more we cultivate those, the more of a factory we will become?
Only in a functional human spirit can those fruit continue to grow in a sustainable way.
But they are meant to be storehouses of resources so we can bring forth the new things connected to the work of partnership between our human spirits and Holy Spirit, for the our working of Competence (Belongingness, Worth, and Competence are the qualities the Trinity ministers to our souls).
When you remove something that has metastisized at an alarming rate, what instrument do you use? Answer: a scalpel. Or a sword. That depends on the context.
Likewise, when you are in Denial about a result and the truth, and the stronghold is allowed to gather strength, that stronghold rooted in denying or hiding from reality creates an oppression. This oppression, left unchecked, will result in the Fourth Head of Leviathan, which we will discuss in the post on that head.
In order to survive and then thrive, you MUST tear down that stronghold, or fall under its weight. In order to tear down that stronghold effectively, you must deal with the root of Denial.
Denial. We heard it when Bob Jones said Bill Clinton had a mantle of humility. We heard about it when people suggested on one side that the morality of the President has little to do with whether or not he or she can govern. “We are not electing a pastor but a President.” We got to the point with Clinton when he said “he didn’t mean it as adultery”. We suspend judgment when it is our people, but heap it when it is the other party or group.
And meanwhile, Joe Biden is grasping for legitimacy because we allowed the President’s office to get that raucously defiled. This creation of the Office of the President-Elect, complete with Presidential Blue backdrop is a Denial-laced grab for legitimacy, because he has not been sworn in.
And many of us appear not to give a damn nor bother to pray for the toll this passed-around nonsense is taking on the marriages and families of those in positions of influence and public service.
So, Donald Trump can be the wrecking ball all you want until the cows come home.
Bill Clinton can be humble all Bob Jones claims.
Bush 43 can be the one who wants to “restore dignity to the Oval Office” while he commits us to an open-ended battle campaign with zero end in sight.
Clinton can give us surpluses until we are blue in the face…
Both Republicans and Democrats can spend us into oblivion with impugnity…
And we can pass around lists that say Republican are for limited government…
Even though Trump and Bush 43 asked for stimulus packages totaling in the billions of dollars….
However, it will not mean a thing as long as we are single-sided in our attacks and corrections and rebukes.
We still have not come out of our Denial yet, church. Neither have our government officials. And I am not convinced they want to.
The problem, indeed, is that SHIELD is a nothing more than a front for HYDRA. Those of you who have never seen the MCU movie “Captain America: Winter Solider” may not know what I mean by this. So, here are the pertinent movie clips.
And we are conserving and liberating nothing, except for the cancer that is present. Our responsibility is not to let one party or group play us off one another. In ANY arena, political or otherwise.
Spiritually speaking, this Denial and “my-partial-perspective-is-the-whole-picture” mindset is what allows things to grow without our knowledge or consent: In government, in the private sector, in the church and in the academy (looking at you, Liberty University sex scandal).
The Mesmerizing Spirit and this partial-as-whole perspective create a defilement of our times, our seasons, and our capacity to accurately discern the rhythm of times, seasons, and our moving forward in a horizontal manner with the constellation of our relationships in the surround.
When you are vested in the success of a political party come hell or high water, regardless of the actual truth, you have crossed the line into Denial.
When you are vested in the protection of a church’s reputation regardless of who was harmed by the abuse (Mars Hill, Hillsong, the Southern Baptist Convention’s mishandling of Beth Moore who called them out on their sex abuse culture), then your attitude is part of the problem.
When Denial strikes, prophets go hazy with their sight, planes fall from the sky because of imprecise engineering, and whole movements in the church go batty because they lose their focus. I am looking at the German Lutheran church for starters, where Martin Luther, the Exhorter, wanted a number of reforms, but moved to embrace anti-semitism and wasted the latter portion of his life combatting and slandering the Jewish people.
This problem of Denial and non-reality can affect anybody regardless of their gift, but it is particuarly and disproportionately damaging to the Exhorter.
Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, FDR, Ben Franklin, Walt Disney, the Assemblies of G-d, the Apostle Paul, Moses, Solomon, the state of California, Hollywood. All have had seasons where they were massively wide of the mark while being effective in other areas, and for some of them, that distraction and non-reality cost them their birthright.
And yes, when you are a President that says “I alone can do this,” then there might be an issue embodied in that mindset.
Or you are a king who, for the sake of political peace, you marry many foreign women…..
Or you are a daughter of a pagan king and are sold as a commodity to cement your father’s political relations (Jezebel), and you swear you are never going to let another person control your destiny or aspirations….
Or if you are a skilled animator who pressures everyone around you to the point where you think that because you are Walt Disney, no one of your staff will unionize….
This diorama of reality is not about one specific set of pot shots against one person. It is about helping to illustrate the worst of what happens when we embrace non-reality.
Defining Reality
Reality is the latest manifestation of the Fourth Principle. before that, it was referred to as the Principle of Sowing and Reaping, and, before that, the Principle of Pain and Suffering.
By reality, I mean embracing WHAT IS as the L-rd sees it. He sees more fully than we do. So, right off the bat, we are talking about recognizing that we see only part of the picture, or, as one Exhorter put it:
…we know in part, and we prophesy in part
Paul to the believers in Corinth.
Gang, reality means embracing the L-rd’s agenda and applying our part for what it is, into the whole, and refusing to see our portion as the whole situation. Broadly speaking, we regularly see less than the L-rd, for some reason….
So, our responsibility is to ever look to the L-rd for direction and input as we progress into our journey.
We seek His agenda and what of His agenda He has placed within us.
Some Implications of Reality
Our responsibility in hunting for His agenda (Reality) is to refuse the popular phrases or excuses of the Charismatic Movement such as:
” I do not have the time to. research this/seek for that/therefore give me the finished product, because I came expecting….”
“I do not have time to process these raw materials. G-d will send me somoeone who will provide the finished product.”
“I do not have time to do this work or that assignment or that thing over there or this thing over here.”
It is one thing for us to ask for help when we really need it, but to engage in every situation by waltzing in with a bang and a flourish and expecting others to give to you finished products from their resources with zero understanding of the cost to them, or the sequence of Giving and Receiving is something entirely different.
There is an entitlement mindset pervasive in the body of Christ that loves to claim divine intervention for Every. Single. Situation where our poor planning or lack of resources is a factor.
Uttering Praise the L-rd and G-d Came Through when He actually came through is not a problem.
However, when we poorly plan and poorly execute and someone comes in and bails us out and we refuse to thank them for fixing our problem in our blindness, and we refuse to make course corrections or adjustments so we do not have the same problem in the future, then we have a larger root problem, and are not far from walking in non-reality.
We simply have to walk this cause-and-effect thing we call Reality more cleanly. If we are chronically late, for example, then we need to figure out why we are late and fix the problem.
We must intentionally sow good seed in order to reap a good crop.
Now, I am not beating up people who have a wound or some trauma or some junk where G-d is working in a long-term process with them to bring them to a better place. Each of us has some issues and stuff and none of us has arrived at the place of sheer perfection. If you are actively attempting to work at bettering your situation, that is one thing.
But it is entirely a different thing when sloth is part of the equation, and you are allowing life happen to you. The spirit of passivity does not belong to the highly effective son or daugher in the Kingdom; they happen to situations.
You must, in walking in Reality, know the difference between pawning your situations off on others, asking for help if you are stuck, and working at the areas you know something about and have means to fix.
It is critically important for each of us to have a goal in mind and, pending our relentless consultation with the L-rd about those plans, move toward the goal that should result in us possessing our birthright.
And in engaging Reality, we must all learn how to….
Embrace the Right Level and Kind of Pain
Indiscriminate pain avoidance is not the domain of those who wish for Reality. Rather, our responsibility is embracing the right kind and level of pain.
Your Pain….Productive Or Not…You Decide…
You have a score of choices with respect to what you do with your pain. And there are two types of pain….productive or unproductive.
Grossly put, unproductive pain is pain that comes into your life situation from which you fail to derive any lesson of any sort. You do not connect with the L-rd in this pain, and as a result, the adversity brings little to know growth.
Productive pain, on the other hand, is pain from which the L-rd is able to instruct you.
Most pain starts out as unproductive. It is the lesson that makes the difference in whether or not the pain moves from the Unproductive category to the Productive category.
For example, years ago, my father abandoned me and my parents divorced. For a long time I could only feel the sting and the heartache of my father’s absence, and this was compounded by the fact that he died a few years back.
What helped transform this pain from unproductive to productive was me helping others who had lost fathers to abandonment or alcohol or death, and blessing them. Taking care of my sons and my daughter.
Sometimes, walking in the blessings that come from walking in reality means embracing others who need when you are in a place of lack and stepping into places to bless and encourage in areas where you have received little to no human encouragement.
We have a perfect Father, and we lack no father, even if our eathly fathers abandoned us. Given we have a perfect and loving Father, what do we lack in terms of tools, affection, and depth of capacity to love and father others?
Nothing.
Reality dictates that we lack nothing with which to father. Not wisdom or resources. Not heart or spirit. Not emotions. Not understanding, knowledge, or wisdom. And certainly not a sense of justice or the capacity for a heart oozing with compassion. Because our G-d could related to our frailties, we also can relate to the weakness of others, and the lack in others.
Because He received from Our Father, we also can receive and then give to others who lack.
Provided we are wiling to move beyond slavery and into the embrace of our Father and give that embrace to others.
We love, because he first loved us. We have freely received SO MUCH, and so we are able to give even in areas where we have lacked.
This is reality that comes from the Father of Lights who has given us his son. How much will He not also give us all things.
Translation: G-d gave us everything He had in the embodiment of His Son. What’s a little bit of stuff? Especially when we are sent to be life-giving to others.
