Archive for January, 2010

Communion with God, Prayer, Spiritual living, Uncategorized

January 18, 2010

Quest for Communion

Tags: communion, God, Prayer, spiritual, Spiritual living

Spiritual living is life with God at the center. We are born self-centered. As we grow and mature in spiritual wholeness, we move from self-centered to God centered. A God centered life is lived in communion with Him.

Communion with God is our objective, but moving from an intellectual understanding of the objective into a dynamic, flourishing relationship can cause even the most intent of us to flounder. The answer though may be simple.

Many of us learned to pray by reciting words, most often in the form of requests, to God. We didn’t learn to listen, and our Western minds calculated the substance of our prayer life by the measure of answered prayer. While we know this isn’t really the measure of our prayers, and we also know that often answers to prayer come in forms we have not been looking for, our framework for understanding and evaluating drives us back to this conclusion. Tangible and expected answer to prayer = connection to God. Waiting for answers = a lot of discouragement mixed with questions like:

Does God hear me? Apparently not.

Does God care? Apparently not.

Do I matter? Possibly not.

And so on. (You don’t have to admit any of this.) Things that we have an intellectual understanding are not true, can still feel true.

The truth is that prayer is not substantially about a “grocery” type list that we take to God and hope he will fill. Prayer is really about communion, communing with God.

The problem is that since we cannot always see and touch and feel God in our natural state, it isn’t very easy to “chat”. Have you ever tried to carry on a conversation with someone who didn’t respond to you? It throws you off your rhythm, doesn’t it? God of course does respond to us, but we need to learn to listen. We need to find our rhythm, so to speak, for communion with God.

In truth there are several kinds of rhythms, several kinds of conversations you might say, that we have with God. There is the liturgical rhythm, there is the “grocery” list rhythm for things like a new job, more revenue, health and healing, and then there is the dramatic, “oh God, oh God” (aren’t you paying any attention) rhythm for those surprises and emergencies that cross our paths from time to time.

My experience and my preferred rhythm, is to begin my day with God. Some people like coffee in the morning, some people need to get their newspaper out of the way (maybe just news?). Whatever you do to get your day started, I would like to challenge you to make spending time with God your first daily priority. Let me assure that this is not for God’s benefit, but for yours.

If you will enter into communion at the start of your day, I am very confident that you will find it an amazing and fruitful experience. Your mind will be set on the things of God, you will be in a place of communion and you may find that your entire day goes better, because you embarked upon it with Him, instead of trying to summon Him in a moment of need or desperation later on. You see, if you enter in communion with Him in the morning you will be highly unlikely to then say something like, “Nice spending time with God but I need to get to work.” Or some such thing. Get up in the morning, put your hand in His, and stay there. You don’t have to stay in that chair or room. You go shopping with friends, go to lunch with other people, why not go with God?

Have you ever spent time with someone who was expert in some area, only to realize afterwards that you have more understanding or insight into that area yourself now? The same thing happens when we spend time with God. Our mind is set on spiritual things, and as we go about our day we are much more attuned to the spiritual overlay of our natural world.

Make no mistake. The spiritual realm is senior to the natural realm. Nothing occurs in the natural but what is a result of something in the spiritual realm. By seeing the spiritual and the natural we see better what is happening, what is going to happen, and hopefully we will see it as God wants us to see it.

When I married Greg I didn’t have much of an opinion about football one way or the other. Greg on the other hand played football in high school and then at the Air Force Academy. He liked football, and without any real conscious decision, I began to like football too.

The same thing happens with God. If you hang out with God, you will pick up His interests. You will start to see things that you would have missed before, and things that were not important to you in the past, will take on meaning. You will become more like Him. That is communion, and that is the real reason that we should pray.

(To be continued..)

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Gifting, Spiritual living, Uncategorized

January 17, 2010

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

Tags: change, Destiny, God, Holy Spirit, hope, Jesus, love, prophet, sin, spiritual, spiritual and emotional wholeness, transformation

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