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Nexus - Cultivating a deeper relationship with God, living a spiritual life

Archive for the ‘Gifting’ Category

Gifting, Spiritual living, Uncategorized

January 17, 2010

So you can see sin? (And you think that is a gift?)

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Satan is the leader in calling out sin, and making a spectacle of it. Whose team are you on?

One of the most encouraging things that I have discovered since Raising Spiritual Children: Cultivating a Revelatory Life was published is that a consistent response is that “this is not just about raising children, but it is for adults, too.” That is truth on several levels. One level is that what we missed out on when we were children can often be put into place when we are older, and we can have full restoration in that area.

In other words, when something we missed as a child is put in place within us, all that we missed along the way or over the years is also established in us as though we had had it all along.

Think of a person who has never experienced unconditional love. Their life will have been lived a certain way, with some clear and distinct voids and difficulties. However, at 30 or 40 or 50, if they experience unconditional love and can receive it, that void they have carried all of their life will be as if it was covered with a balm. Although they may have an intellectual knowledge of how they were growing up, they will not only be different today, but the past will not impinge on them in the same way either.

The unconditional love that they experience will make them whole.

It is a little bit like a computer. If your computer has missing or corrupted files, some or all of your computer programs will not work correctly. Overtime, performance even may deteriorate. Some things might work fine, of course, but there will be those programs or functions that simply do not work the same way they work for other people.

Once you restore that missing or corrupted file though, all the programs will work just like they were intended to.

This is a picture of restoration.

People who have been damaged or injured in life may have sinned (don’t we all), but correcting sin isn’t what they most need. What they most need is to have the important voids in their lives filled, healed, covered — pick your terminology. The outcome is restoration.

Today, there is a cultural mindset that instead of addressing the injury and wounds in a person, many people want to be the authority to hand out punishment and keep the focus on a person’s sin. (Trust me, sin will persevere. It doesn’t matter what penalty you try to extract for it; sin will pop up again doing its damage to someone else.) Some want to assess punishment, as if that is their role. (Some people do have this role of course, but it is a small fraction of the people who try to take it on.)

Confronted with the woman in adultery, remember what Jesus said to the accusers who wanted to stone her: “All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!” [1] After the accusers had scattered, Jesus turned to the woman. “Then Jesus stood up again and said to the woman, “Where are your accusers? Didn’t even one of them condemn you?

No, Lord,” she said. And Jesus said, “Neither do I. Go and sin no more.” [2]

What changed? The woman changed of course. She had been in the presence of the Jesus, and his impartation of love and hope and kindness transformed her, forever.

As a revelatory person, I see more sin than I would like to. I know that Jesus would have seen far more than me. I also see that Jesus worked to bring sinners to Him and to health and to wholeness. I believe that His words and His love imparted to the woman in adultery transformed her, and made her whole. They healed her and gave her hope.

So I try to let the revelation of sin just be a red flag to point out who needs love and hope and impartation.  I want to be able, by the Holy Spirit, to be a person who helps to build His church.

I want to have eyes that see what He sees, and to be the mouthpiece for His message, a carrier of His transforming love.

One of the most gratifying things we experience as parents is when our children grow up and do the things that we think are good and valuable.

As children of the King, I submit that we need to stop trying to please our detractors, stop acting out of fear, and make certain that we are pleasing Him.

It is the sinners around us who need us the most. Do you have what they need?

Jeremiah 29:11:  “‘For I know the plans I have for you,” says the LORD. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.’”

[1] John 8:7

[2] John 8:10-11

Destiny, Gifting, Spiritual living, spiritual attributes

December 3, 2009

Stop, Don’t Think First!

Stop, look, and listen sounds like advice to train children, but it is very important if you want to live a spiritual life. Before you think about something, why not stop, look and listen, to the Spirit of God first?

The Bible is filled with examples of things not being what they first appear to be. We need to learn to Stop (thinking, calculating, concluding), to Look (with our spiritual eyes into the spiritual realm at the same time that we are looking at the natural realm) and Listen (for the Holy Spirit) if we want to know what is really going on.

It takes great training not to rely on our natural sight. In 2 Kings 6 we have a story of Elisha’s servant, who is terrified at the enemy that he is seeing (with his natural eyes) all around him. But then, Elisha prayed for him (2 Kings 6:17):

“Then Elisha prayed, “O LORD, open his eyes and let him see!” The LORD opened the young man’s eyes, and when he looked up, he saw that the hillside around Elisha was filled with horses and chariots of fire.”

When the servant looked with his spiritual eyes, the situation he saw was vastly different than what he had seen with his natural eyes.

The spiritual realm is reality. God in His realm existed before He made the earth. The earth is subject to God’s design, and the spiritual realm is still the pre-eminent realm. If we live without the spirit we are forced to operate under the limitations and corruption of the world. However, what occurs in the natural realm is still subject to the spiritual realm.

While living in the natural realm, we always want to be responding by the spirit. This way, we will make the right choices, the right responses, and the right decisions.

Years ago, Greg and I were in downtown Jerusalem very late in the afternoon. When we returned to our car, it had a boot on the wheel. Apparently, we had committed a violation of some sort, even though we had parked among several other cars that morning. Ours was the only one that had been detained.

Greg took a paper off the windshield, and we read it inside the car. One side was printed in Hebrew, the other in Arabic, neither of which was very helpful for us!

It was getting dark, stores and shops were closed, and the streets were empty. We really had no idea what to do next, because we couldn’t leave. If we moved the car with the tire lock on it, the tire would be destroyed.

Suddenly, a stranger walked up to the car and tapped on Greg’s window. Pointing at Greg, he said, “You need help. Come with me.” Then he pointed at me and said, “Stay here.”

Israel seemed like a very foreign land to us, especially in that moment. Twenty years ago in Jerusalem, there was no English on the buildings or streets outside of the tourist areas, and it was very easy for travelers to become disoriented.

Greg got out of the car and followed the man for a couple of blocks. They came to the middle of a large courtyard. Standing next to him, the man told Greg to go through an archway, up the stairs, through a certain door, and how much money to give the police inside. Greg followed the man’s hand as he pointed out the directions, but as he turned to thank him, the man was gone. Not gone as in walking away gone, but gone as in nowhere to be seen.

Looking all around him, Greg realized the man couldn’t have run fast enough to get out of sight, and yet, he was not visible, either.

Having no other good options, Greg went through the archway, up the stairs, through the doorway the man had told him about, and paid the person at the counter. The man took the money and told him that was all he needed.

Greg returned and climbed into the driver’s seat. He started the car.

“What are you doing?” I asked, since the boot was still on the tire.

He told me what had happened and marveled at how quickly the men had come to remove the tire lock. He had come back immediately, and it was already gone.

That is when I had to tell him. No one had been on the street since he had left with the man. We got out of the car. We stood in the middle of what had been a very busy street hours early but was now deserted, and we stared at our rental car as if there was something very mysterious about it. Of course, it wasn’t so much mysterious as “unnatural.”

Then we got back into the car and drove away. Who was that man who had helped us? What happened to the tire lock on the car?

We are not advocating go off with strangers and following their instructions, leaving your wife alone on a deserted street in a foreign country . . . unless you are going with the Spirit of God in you.

We need to learn, and to teach our children, to be led by the Spirit. That doesn’t mean we don’t think or put aside common sense. It means that our thinking must include the direction and input of the Spirit of God within us. God, of course, can and will intervene in our lives as He chooses. Most of time, though, day in and day out, we have many opportunities to nurture our spiritual self, to cultivate the communion that will allow us not only to stop, look and listen, but to see and hear by the Spirit far beyond what we might imagine.

We stopped, we looked, we listened, and when it was over, we knew. God had sent an angel to help us.

Could we have done it without the angel’s help? Sure. We could have muddled around and possibly had the car towed; we could have found a cab, a policeman, etc. We might have spent hours and a lot more money doing something that turned out to be pretty simple, because we were able to respond to God’s provision for us. Our spirits, in communion with God, led us to respond to God’s provision. Remember how Jesus said, I only do what I see the Father doing (John 5:19). Jesus could walk and talk and remain in communion with His Father, and so can we (with our heavenly Father). That is the essence of spiritual living.

Today, stop, look and listen, at your life. Do you have peace or stress? Do you have unity in your relationships or strife? Do you have provision or want? (Not want as in a new 40″ flat panel HDTV, but want as in not having enough money to buy food for your children.)

I would submit that if your answers are the second, and not the first, you are looking with natural eyes, not spiritual.

Spiritual eyes will bring you into communion with God, and that is a place of peace no matter what is going on around you. Relationships, of course, require more than one party, but Jude 1:19 says: “These people are the ones who are creating divisions among you. They follow their natural instincts because they do not have God’s Spirit in them.”

Lastly, want is the icon of the worldly cultures we live in — contentment is not the outcome of lack of want. Contentment is the confidence, by our spirit in communion with God’s Spirit, that what we have today is exactly what we need, because God knows.

If we don’t stay in communion with God, it is hard to stay in the place of knowing that God knows, and if we are not confident that God knows, we will be thinking with our natural minds, before we stop, look and listen with our spirit.

 

Character versus Gifting, Gifting

March 24, 2009

What Is A Prophetic Response To Sin?

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Let me begin by saying that I believe that there needs to be both governmental responses and individual responses when leadership falls, and they are different.  The governmental responses are within the scope of a few people per event.  We all have a role to make an appropriate individual response.

What is our role?  It is not, most of the time,  the identification and broadcast of sin in others.

Let me say that some of the easiest things for prophetic people to see are sins (in others, of course).  Here is a news flash.  When people are in sin, they know it (most of the time).  Much of the time when people are vulnerable, struggling to overcome their weaknesses, ripe for a fall, they know it.  Rarely do they need someone to tell them their condition.  What they do need is for someone to tell them how to get through their present state, to overcome and move forward into God’s plans and purposes for them.  They need to know that God is with them, and for them, and loves them.

If you think you are prophetic because you can see hidden sin I am here to tell you to grow up.  Seeing sin doesn’t make you a prophet.  It may mean that you are prophetically gifted, but it doesn’t make you a prophet. 

 As for letting people know about someone else’s sin, what is the model?  What is the motivation?  The sinner knows they are in sin, you know they are in sin, and of course, God knows. Does anyone else have a need to know about the sin?  If others need to know, are you the one who is called to act?

Biblically the prophets went to people to confront the sins of the people, of the nation.  They went to the leaders to confront the leader’s sin.

A good example is Nathan, who went to David after he sinned against Uriah and Bathsheba.  We don’t know when Nathan knew what was going on, or potentially what was going to go on.  We only know that when he went to David it doesn’t appear that he went to the people first.  There were no meetings in the streets calling David a murderer or adulterer that we know of.  There were great consequences for David’s sin, yet God always called David a man after His own heart.

David for his part suffered an enormous price for his sin yet he did survive.  For my part, I hope I am never a person who is found to attack or sin against someone that God calls a “man after His own heart.”

I don’t believe our contemporary prophets/apostles went to Lakeland because they were blinded to sin or weakness or because they needed to have some platform to promote any agenda.  They went to Lakeland to lend support (prayer, unity, leadership) because they did know there was vulnerability and because that is their apostolic role. Their role is very distinct from our individual role.

Like our present day prophets/apostles/national leaders, Nathan the prophet went directly to the King. 

There is nothing in the scriptures that leads us to conclude that Nathan “went public”, stirring up the people against David, like we often see today in these situations.

The role of prophetic people is not uncovering other leader’s weaknesses, vulnerabilities and sin in some cases, for the purpose of inspiring many thousands of people to join them in isolating, disdaining and discrediting a brother in Christ. 

 

This is not a mandate for hiding sin.  I believe in leaders making governmental responses to leaders, and for the rest of us to make godly individual responses.

 

I am not nearly so concerned about the events surrounding “Lakeland”.  I am concerned with how we, the members of the Body of Christ, individually respond.  I believe that how we respond to events like this one measure the condition of the church.

Here is my challenge to you.  Have you voiced your opinion about these current events?  Have you “warned” others about going to Lakeland, about Todd Bentley’s weaknesses or sins? His tattoos or appearance?  His marital struggles or other things that don’t look like you would like a man of God to look?  Have you asked or asserted that what happened in Lakeland couldn’t be God?  (In spite of the signs, wonders, miracles, etc..)

Can you imagine what it is like to wake up every day with thousands of carnal prayers and defaming words being spoken over you?  Twenty-four hour per day warfare, not from the wiccans, not from the New Age, but from the Church.  Maybe the question we should ask is not how did the leaders and work in Lakeland fall, but how did they endure so long in the face of what was coming against them?

What if more leaders had rallied people to intercede and support all the team at Lakeland, without division? Instead of focusing on the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of men, what if we would have focused on the awesomeness of God, what He was doing, and upheld our brothers and sisters in Christ - many of whom we know now suffer?  What role was played by those in the Church who heard these inciting reports?  ( I know that many, many people did rally in prayer and intercession, speaking life to what was happening in Lakeland. I also know that many went the opposing path.)

Proverbs 18:21 tells us: “Words kill, words give life; they’re either poison or fruit–you choose.[1]“

We sap the strength and the peace of our fellow laborers, and then we act like their fall has nothing to do with us.  Perhaps the sin we need to ferret out is our own.

This lesson applies to us in many places of course.  In our homes, our church, where we work, the schools our children attend. Our words can kill or give life. Fruit or poison, all day we will make choices.

Choose life.

Patricia Mapes

Patricia Mapes

Executive Director, Nexus Connection.org

[1] Message translation

Character versus Gifting, Gifting

March 18, 2009

Character Over Gifting

As a caveat let me say that I never went to Lakeland, FL and I have never attended a Todd Bentley meeting.  By his own admission Todd has issues in his life that demonstrate his weaknesses and shortcomings, and I have no opinion on any of that nor do I think it is my place to speak to it. Nevertheless,  when I read Rick Joyner’s first message on the topic of Todd Bentley’s restoration( http://www.morningstarministries.org/Articles/1000045589/MorningStar_Ministries/Media/Special_Bulletins/2009/Special_Bulletin_17.aspx )I sent it to my family and friends as an example of “Prophetic People Acting Prophetically. 

I was caught a little off guard by some of the responses that followed the release of that announcement. 

One of the big criticisms of Rick was that Todd’s now ex-wife was not part of the process or the announcement.  Personally, I believe that the reason Rick didn’t address her and their children more in his initial message was probably because they are not public figures and it isn’t appropriate, nor is there anything that will benefit them,  by bringing them into the public forum.  That is not my issue either though.

“Character is more important than gifting”, which was used against Rick in some responses, is my issue.  I have taught directly or indirectly to thousands of students over the year on this expression.  God has spoken to be about it many years ago and I am so sad to see how it used today, not just in this situation but in so many conflicts and judgements within the church. 

I believe that character over gifting is a message for a person to take into their heart and measure where they are putting their own value.  Instead it has become a club, a self-righteous mantra, used to beat people down .  I don’t believe that God ever intended for us to go about judging whether other people’s character was more substantive than their gifting.  I for one can hardly manage my own heart, let alone others.

Thank God for all of the good God did for people who went to Lakeland looking to encounter Him.  I for one am grateful that I serve a God who has mercy on sinners, being one myself.  Who am I to say that someone else’s sin trumps mine?  This is a slippery slope that leads, among other things, to the brotherhood against the Prodigal Son.

I agree that the process of resolving conflicts in Matt 18:15 is a great model and would resolve, oh maybe, 100% of the issues in the church today.  For those who don’t find themselves a party to this conflict directly it might be good to revisit Matt 18:23: the story  of a man forgiven a great debt who goes free only to imprison someone who owed him much lesser debt.

Or even Matt 7:1 “Do not judge others, and you will not be judged.

Personally, I would like to see us all become the church, instead of just talking about it.  (As in  being prophetic, instead of talking about it….)

Grace to you all.

Patty

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