Copyright Sept. 24, 2007 by David L. Williams. Permission is granted to share this, as long as it is given freely. Nothing may be added to it, nor subtracted from it. If your copy is on paper, request free download via email at: DavWms777@AOL.COMScriptures Referenced in This Article:
Gen. 3:15 π Ex. 34:9 π 2 Sam. 24:1 π 1 Chr. 21:1 π Isa. 7:14-15 π Mt. 16:17 π Mt. 25:1-13 π Lk. 2:52 π Lk. 9:55 π Lk. 10:19 π 2 Cor. 11:3-4 π Rev. 3:17 π Rev. 19:7
Prologue π 1 π 2 π 3 π 4 π 5 π 6 π 7 π 8 π 9 π 10 π 11 π 12 π 13 π 14 π 15 π 16 π 17 π 18 π Conclusion π Epilogue
The series of trials had been long and hard. I had seriously asked God to show anything wicked in me that displeased Him, and had no idea what that would entail. The changes in my life were taking me where I’d never heard of anyone going before, and I often regretted asking that of God. During one of those deliverance trials, I came to that decision making place again. It went like this:
I was slumped at my desk, emotionally drained to the point that even my body ached. I felt I could go no further. Suddenly everything around me began changing, and I was drawn into a vision. It was so real. I found myself on a mountainside that was covered with bitterbrush. Bitterbrush is the three to four foot tall thicket that deer make narrow trails through in the mountains of California. It is too thick for a person to go through, and has long sharp thorns to discourage anyone trying.
I looked downhill behind me and saw a wide trail I had cleared. The soil was roughed up from the battles I’d fought, and in the scuffs were pools of my blood. I turned and looked uphill and saw more bitterbrush ahead of me as far as the eye could see. I was in such pain, I wanted to run downhill.
Then I saw Jesus standing close to me, looking at me with intense concern in His eyes. Then I heard Him plead, more than ask, “Will you go on?” The vision disappeared and I sat at my desk crying. His concern for me overwhelmed me, and the plea was from so deep in His heart that it touched me to my depths. How could I not go on, after that? I told Him I would go on.
Those deliverance trials lasted for 3-1/2 years. I kept waiting for another, but it didn’t come. Little by little I came to know I was to write about those experiences, and tried many times. I did not yet know I had more to learn, but no longer by trials. He had shown me so many things going through those trials and I had not yet put them together with the proper conclusions.
Since then it has been a journey to lay those things out so others could make sense of them. During this time, He showed me the Bible connections so it could be seen this was not from my imagination but had been hidden in the Bible all along, waiting to be seen and acted upon in this era.
Each era in God’s plan has its own revelation for that era. It is drawing near time for Jesus to come for His Bride, so now is the time for her to prepare herself. Note that Rev. 19:7 (top) tells us that the Bride will prepare herself. This verse is missed by many, and needs to be seen as important so we no longer misquote “It is finished” as though we do not have to do our part.
Lord, open the eyes of our understanding. In Jesus’ name, amen.
The question is, “Are we really ready for Jesus to come for His Bride?” To answer that, let’s consider a few more questions; Have we become holy yet? Have we become one yet? Have we dismissed Jesus’ words that He is coming after a Bride without spot or wrinkle, and have we settled instead that we will not be cleansed until after He comes for us?
For that last question, let’s look at some logic. It is said that when we see Jesus as He is, we will become like Him. We need to know that this is not about our being. It is about our body, which will change to be like His. Think of this; If we had already become just like Him in every way, then why would we still need to be judged, with varying rewards depending on our works here on earth? Our being will remain essentially the personality we developed here on earth.
Long ago, I had just finished watching a documentary about the pyramids in Egypt. As I was contemplating the pyramid that had no capstone, I wondered if that was a parable about the Israelites leaving Egypt without their capstone, Jesus. Suddenly, I heard, “Watch this!” A pyramid vision formed before my eyes, made of thousands of shaped rocks. I “knew” that each rock represented a verse in the Bible.
Then I saw a red line go from one rock to another way across the structure, and from that rock to another, and then another. This continued until the whole pyramid was red. I understood that this meant that every verse in the Word must be considered in the light of every other verse in the Bible, and to not merely read in context to get hidden truths. That while truth can come by reading in context, more and deeper truths come from seeing a larger picture.
I saw that reading only in context merely gives rules to follow, while seeing larger pictures reveals the heart of God. The Bible is like layers of an onion, each layer showing what we need to know for where we are spiritually at that particular time. Subsequent readings can peel back more layers to know God more deeply.
It seems to me that most of us stop with the first layer and few find the deeper truths that can help the Bride of Christ to prepare herself for His coming for her. The first layer tells us that we are sinners who need Jesus. We see the Bible heroes and desire to be like them, for we see that God was pleased with them. But we may have come short in staying with that layer, not knowing there are more. Only those who will go deeper will find the Narrow Gate and take the hard path that makes us like Jesus. Jesus said that only a few would find and take this path.
Over and over as Jesus walked the earth, He talked about the evil hidden in men’s hearts, (souls.) He indicated that men could not see their own evil. This book is about our discovering our own personal hidden evil within, and further, being delivered from it, not just following the Law to keep it covered up.
Much of the Bible concerns the Bride and her preparation. And we must take Jesus’ words seriously that it is possible for even the elect to be deceived. It is the intent of this book to show that the Bible tells us just what this deception would be. It was demonstrated all through the Word, and it waits for us to open our spiritual eyes to see it. Know that what you will read in this book will go against much of what you have been taught in church. It is up to you to search out the truth. Let’s begin by showing some of this deception.
We have taught our babes in Christ to look at Bible patriarchs as heroes that we should emulate. Let’s begin by looking at some of them to see if we really want to be like them. But first, know they did the best they could with the revelation each had in his own era. Because they did, they will be placed in high regard in Heaven. But revelation is now available for us to fulfill our era’s destiny, and go further than our patriarchs did. By peeling back some layers, we will show hidden evil in these patriarchs that they were unaware of. And in its place, we will show we have that same leaven. This leaven makes it easy for us to be deceived. We must see this in order to cleanse ourselves and become the prepared Bride. We must also see we can no longer justify ourselves that we are only human. God is perfect, and He ordered us to be like Him.
We all know about how Joseph had dreams as a child about being a future ruler, and how he ended up in a prison in Egypt. We see how he miraculously became Pharaoh’s right hand man, saving not only Egypt from the famine, but also saving the lineage that would form Israel and birth Jesus. But there is something else included about how he accomplished this that is very important.
To save the people, Joseph laid out a plan for the famine that was to come. He caused them to grow extra food and put it in storage under his management. When the famine came, he sold the food back to them. When they ran out of money, he traded the food for their land. When their land was gone, he caused them to sell themselves as slaves to the pharaoh, and thus, slaves to himself.
We have been so enthralled over the miraculous involved in bringing Joseph’s family back together in forgiveness, that we missed seeing how he let evil leaven into the situation. He had no good reason to sell the food back to the very ones who had grown it. He had no good reason to take their land. He had no good reason to make slaves of the people. (Later, the law of sowing and reaping came into effect, and another pharaoh made slaves of the Israelites.) Keep what Joseph did in mind as we explore other like leaven, and in its place, we will show the roots of this evil.
Moses had led the people out of Egypt, going through many trials in the process. Just before they were to enter the Promised Land, God instructed him to speak to the rock to bring forth water for the complaining rebellious Israelites. Not only did he strike the rock instead, but his angry words can tell us something. He said, “Must we bring forth water from this rock?” He was speaking for himself and his brother, Aaron. This anger revealed he felt his personal significance was being challenged, not God’s. He was unaware of this, but God wasn’t. Moses was not allowed to lead the people into the Promised Land.
King David provides us with an even greater example. Even the chosen ancestor of Jesus demonstrated something strange within him that few of us have noticed. This goes beyond the adultery with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband. We look at his good and miss the evil roots hidden within him. But God showed He saw the things in him that David was unaware of. We have to arrange his scattered story in chronological order to see this for ourselves.
We see in the Psalms where David pled for God to show any wickedness within him, and he also asked to see the ways of God. God showed him both, but David was unable to recognize them in the trials God sent to him to expose them. In all fairness, we must know it was not yet time for people to see the revelation about the reasons for trials sent our way. But the record is there for us to see for revelation needed in our day.
It was known that when David personally led the army in battle, quick victory was assured because of God’s hand on him. Yet we see him listening to friends advising him to no longer go to war, lest he be taken from them. He took that advice, and at a time when kings go to war, King David stayed home. There, he is tempted by seeing Bathsheba bathing and sends for her. When it was found she was pregnant, David schemed to make it look like the pregnancy was from her husband, Uriah, not him.
That failing, David sent Uriah, a more righteous man than he, to the front lines of the war and had him murdered. David did not repent until the prophet confronted him. And even then, his repentance was only partial. He said he had sinned against God and God only. He did not see his arrogance in destroying the lives of others as sin against them. Nevertheless, God gave him mercy again and set up another trial situation to expose his iniquity, the wickedness he had asked God to show him.
Next, we look at 2 Samuel 24:1 and 1 Chronicles 21:1 (top) together and see God sending the devil to entice David into counting his warriors. This was to show him his hidden arrogant pride of high position. He was warned by several not to do this, but he paid no attention. So God sent a plague on David’s people. He repented again, but only to what was obvious in the eyes of other people.
So God arranged yet another situation for him. We find David again lounging while his men went off to war. When the battle was near victory, his general sent for him to come and get the glory. He did so, taking credit for a victory he had no part in. Note that God did not use David again except to install his son, Solomon, to be the next king. But also see that Bathsheba had to do the arranging, for David had become rather useless.
Next, we need to look at Solomon, David’s son. He had a dream in which he asked for God to give him wisdom to rule His people. Since it was only a dream, this made his wisdom a gift, rather than learned wisdom. In this, he had wisdom for others but not for himself, as his life story shows.
Solomon knew God had promised to not visit David’s sin on him, and that his reign would be in peace. Yet he prepared for war, buying horses and chariots from Egypt, with whom no Israelite was to do business. Solomon built army outposts to defend against an enemy that should never come in his days. He made his people part time slaves to build an empire he would rule over, exalting himself.
Solomon unwisely married many wives and had many concubines. He had written about how foolish it was to have more than one woman, yet did not follow this wisdom for himself. Many of these women were from foreign countries and had foreign gods. In time, they convinced him to build altars, high places in which they could worship their idols right there in Jerusalem.
In the above stories, we have shown there is often another story about our Bible heroes than we learned about in Sunday school. If we can see that, then perhaps we can go further and find out why these patriarchs could do such evil things, often even while in a close relationship with God. And in its place, perhaps we will see what spots and wrinkles we have, even though we too may be in a close relationship with God. We will get back to the patriarchs later in Chapter Three.
As we go on in this, it is my hope you will come to the revelation of, “They know not what they do,” the words Jesus spoke on the cross. It is one thing to assume the meaning in our mind, and quite another to get a revelation of its real meaning.
To understand what we saw in the patriarchs that we must also search out in ourselves, we need to explore some basics. Here, we will make a mental picture of our foundational knowledge.
A child is born with a relatively empty mind. Let’s see it as a room full of empty information file boxes, each waiting to be filled. As each bit of new information comes, it is filed in the appropriate subject box. Then when a particular subject comes up again, past information would be there to help guide our decision making process.
It would be overwhelming to shuffle through so much information each time a particular subject came up again. But our minds have the wonderful ability to draw an overall conclusion from all the information gathered on a given subject. In a sense, we can write out our conclusion on a label and paste it on the box, so we never have to go into the details ever again. We need only look at the label.
Babies are born with little more than instincts to begin with. When they feel a need, they cry for it to be fulfilled. At this stage, they cannot consider anyone but themselves. So the beginning of their filling those knowledge boxes is about how to get what they want. For lack of a better word, we must call this, “selfishness.” No, it is not intended by them to be selfish as we think of the word, but without wisdom, they know no other way to get their wants met.
Then we found ourselves coming under discipline and had no idea why this was coming about. We only knew that we had to do the will of those big powerful authorities, or we would be punished. So even though our selfishness had not gone away, we had to find ways to not be punished but to still get as much of what we wanted as possible. We learned to act.
Depending on what our family was like, we chose an act that would best suit our purposes to get what we wanted. On one end of the scale, some would choose to be defiant, perhaps even being a bully. On the other end of the scale, some would find it more profitable to act sweet, in hopes this would bring more of what we wanted. There are many other modes of acting between those. But every one of us chose what we assumed would work best for us to get what we wanted. Those were not conscious choices, but were what we felt was the most comfortable for the moment we were in. We did not know back then that we were setting our ways for how to get along in life.
As adults, we have mostly forgotten just how traumatic those childhood learning times were. Back then to us, each moment was our whole life. Without wisdom, we felt that when we were denied our desires, we were not being loved. We felt rejection. This brings us to the meat of the subject. We need to know what else we put in those knowledge boxes.
In our church teachings today, we dismiss the importance of knowing just how our enemy operates. All too often we are told we do not have to worry about the devil, since he was defeated at the cross. But Jesus left him intact for us to contend with, didn’t He? By our ignoring the devil’s ways, we actually help him do his evil works on earth. We even joke about how, “the devil made me do it.” There is nothing funny about this!
We were not told the whole story about evil spirits in the Bible. Note that even the religious leaders of Jesus’ days knew much about them anyway, but not from the Torah. They had learned to put what they saw in daily life with what the Word did say, and came to conclusions that were mostly correct. Likewise, we need to do the same thing, and learn far more than they did. I call this “parable thinking.” Thinking in parables brings revelation.
Parable thinking was shown as Jesus’ tool to make difficult things understandable, but only to those who were spiritual. Parable thinking is putting invisible information alongside visible information, and this brings revelation. The visible speaks of the invisible.
If there is one thing we need to know as Christians, it is that the evil spirits have still small voices to employ, just as God does. These are thought transmissions from the spirit world to us, and are not usually orders to do something wrong. They are far more subtle and deceptive than that. Their assault on children reaches full speed when we have an established vocabulary, but while we are yet void of wisdom.
Evil spirits send thoughts to us and we “hear” them in the first-person, as if they were our own thoughts and not from another. The evil spirits did not say, “You are bad.” No, they said, “I am bad,” as if it was our own thought. As adult Christians, we can easily dismiss such thoughts. But as children without wisdom, we were absolutely vulnerable to them even into our teens and later. It was the very purpose of those spirits to put wrong information in those knowledge boxes, and to allow the conclusion labels on them to keep us from ever going back into them to correct the lies therein.
Lies were given to us by evil spirits during the traumatic disciplining times of our childhood. This took place mostly as we brooded after being denied something we wanted, and after we found our tantrum did not work. The thoughts they transmitted to us were about our worth. They made us feel as though we were rejectable, not worthy of being loved. The spirits would enforce this and cause self-pity and bitterness to form in us, because it is unfair that we are unlovable. Children seem to have an innate sense about fairness, but they do not draw the dividing line where it should to be.
The brooding brought much self-condemnation. But this could only be taken so long before we needed a solution to make us feel better about ourselves. And the evil spirits were there to give us a way out of those feelings. It took practice and perfecting over a period of time for us to find a way to dull the pain of feeling rejectable.
Early on, we learned to shift blame to deflect feelings of rejection. As a toddler, we may have spilled our milk, then we would say that “it spilled,” distancing ourselves from being at fault. We perfected this to where we never even notice that when things go wrong, we find fault from somewhere else as the cause. It is always someone else, or this or that happened, causing the problem. We ignore that in most cases, a little wisdom would have avoided the problem in the first place, regardless of others or the situation.
But the main way of avoiding feeling rejectable was to justify ourselves. We began seeing that our peers and authorities were not perfect, either. In a child’s mind, this would serve to justify us in our own wrongdoings. “If they can do wrong, then why do they always pick on me?” Guess who put that thought in our minds?
This “comparison” justification will always be there to soothe our feelings in our own minds. But later when we have a great embarrassing fall where others can obviously see our wrong, we are likely to begin speaking it out. We will quickly admit our wrong, (probably not specifically though.) The next phase we choose is to lay out the parts that others involved played. This is meant to get others to take their eyes off our self, and to look at the faults of others, instead. We won’t even be aware this is our motive.
For another example, let’s further consider that toddler spilling the milk. His mother scolds him and kneels to wipe the spill from the floor. She bumps her head on the table and now her anger rises. When the child sees this, he will no longer even consider his responsibility for the spill, but will feel his mother is wrong for blaming him for her bumping her head. He has twisted the subjects in his own mind to justify himself. He conveniently remembered only the part that made him feel less bad about himself. Again, the evil spirits guided those thoughts.
Then of course, there was always the, “I didn’t mean to” excuse. It was proper when a true accident happened, but all too often we were at fault in one way or another and still presented that same excuse. We don’t even notice our thought process as we go on in life. After we do or say something we should not have, our mind automatically goes over the possible ways we can make ourselves feel better about it, and we go on satisfied with the justification we chose. If we do feel slightly convicted by our decision, we let a little time go by and any guilt becomes safely hidden away.
Those kinds of self justification would become a very strong excuse for our wrong ways. We would put a label on a box that would never be entered again to see how poor these excuses really are. That label would carry us throughout our lives and we would never truly see our responsibility for our wrongdoing for what it should be. The mixture of “I didn’t mean to” and time passing becomes an automatic assumption of innocence.
But there is yet another very important thing we put in those boxes in our youth. We were desperate to feel significant and when someone hurt our significance feelings, we vowed to someday show all those people how wrong they were. Vows, even those made by children, have very much power. Not only that, there is vengeance in such vows. The evil spirits worked hard to cause us to make vows, as they knew that they would become a curse within us as we grew older, and that we would never suspect where the curse came from.
Let’s look at this from another angle. The Bible consists of two testaments. “Testament” means, “covenant.” So God presents us with His covenant, and when we are saved, we make a covenant with God in return. That came about by our simply agreeing with God’s covenant. What we don’t realize happened when we agreed with demons’ words to us, is that we made covenants with them. And these covenants remain hidden in place unless we find them and renounce them.
We may have forgotten even making those vows soon after the pressure was off us, but they remain in effect. For example, remember one time when you knew a certain good event was to come in the future. Even though your thoughts were not always on that coming event, there was an underlying sense that something good is coming, right up until it happens. Likewise, our vows give us a subconscious anticipation of someday having others recognize our significance. Don’t take this lightly!
It should not surprise us that the devil wants us to make vows. After all, he vowed to one day ascend to the very throne of God.
So as we grow, we become more proficient at showing the world that we are not rejectable. Alongside this is an inner drive vow to prove we are significant. Added to this is how we learned to manipulate to get our desires met, to the best measure we can without being seen as selfish. This is the personality we present to the world.
But it is a false personality developed with the help of evil spirits, so it is not the personality God designed for us. It is built on the leaven of lies and errors. It is maintained by never going back to those knowledge boxes and bringing truth to them. We assume we are just the way we are supposed to be, and we carry that right into our Christianity, and even into after being filled with the Holy Spirit. Those lies, vows, and errors are our iniquity, hidden deep in our foundational knowledge boxes.
These vows are our “flesh.” They are promises to ourselves that one day, we will have it our way. Later, even after our salvation, we can think we are hearing something from God, but we are really hearing our fleshly desires. It will not be apparent to us that our vows have formed a hidden agenda to rise in the sight of others. And even as we say, “All the glory goes to God,” we won’t realize that is not quite true.
One problem we have with those box contents later in our life is, that our own spirit is fully aware of them and tries to pressure us to re-examine them. Ignoring this pressure can cause many kinds of tensions and sicknesses. Instead of being open to truths, we find ways to keep busy, make mind noise, or use chemical mood changers, or any number of other ways to silence our inner voice. We can even form a constant praise to God to keep from hearing it.
We can also become so busy trying to change the world, or at least to stop the devil from making advances, that we cannot hear God’s voice telling us to fight the right battle, the one for the Kingdom within us.
It is important here to mention other ways vows can affect us later in life. Panic attacks can come from inner fears that we are not completing our vows, or depression can come from unmet inner expectations. We would not know these come from an “inner knowing” that we were not fulfilling our vows. More often than not, these come about the time we realize we are late into our lives. Sometimes we call this, “Mid-life crisis.” But for some, this can happen earlier in life.
We can also erupt in anger, even to rage at times when our vows are threatened. We would not know the real reason for our rage, and would have only to try and discipline our self to stop. But this solution can only last for a while then along comes stress again, and we find our self going around the same mountain once again.
Perhaps we need a mental picture of what our soul is, since we cannot physically see it. Let’s picture it as a hollow ball in our lower chest. Inside it are three smaller balls. One of the small balls is our intellect, another is our emotions, and the third is our will. The former two are used in making decisions. The latter one is for putting those decisions into action. In the mix between those three balls is our own spirit, which was designed to make proper sense of information so we can make proper decisions. It has perfect memory from our past experiences, and it also has intuition of the unknown.
The problem is, when we unknowingly decided as children to listen to the lies of evil spirits, we quenched our own spirit so we could no longer develop it to see wisdom. That left us to make our decisions by our emotions, only sometimes influenced by our intellect. Our emotions had been so overwhelmed by shame, that our main way to get through life is to keep from having hurting emotions again.
So all our decisions are made in our soul. While trying to make an important decision, we may be balancing out the plusses and minuses to know which way to go. Without knowing it, our emotions often tip the scales and are the real cause of our choice, regardless of right or wrong.
So when we get filled with the Holy Spirit, He moves into the mix and tries to awaken our spirit so it can bring wisdom into our decision making process. But we have not known this purpose and have ignored it. We have instead been playing with our Holy Spirit giftings as if that were the sole purpose. Thus we have not been able to win over the enemy, for we have not known his real wiles.
The Holy Spirit is sent to us to bring all truth. But we have concentrated on stopping our sin without seeing the iniquity within us that causes us to sin. So we ignore that by listening to our shepherds tell us all the ways to stop sinning, which is but a thin bandage over the festering wound of our iniquity.
Note that sin and iniquity are two different things, being mentioned in Ex. 34:9 (top) with “and” between them. Often in the Bible, iniquity is mentioned along with a type of sin, showing that we sin because of our iniquity. But most of our teachings talk of them as if they both mean the same thing. The Bride will find the difference.
Now, let’s go back to what we saw in our Bible patriarchs, where they let evil leaven into their works. Let’s see that even they had childhoods like ours. Joseph had been ridiculed and hated by his many brothers. Even his father Jacob could not understand his prophetic dreams and angrily dismissed them as meaningless.
We are shown Moses had a speech impairment of some kind. We know how childhood peers make fun of anything they see as a fault in others. He also had a strange childhood in the Pharaoh’s palace. He knew he was out of place, and he did not like how his fellow Israelites were being treated. When he finally arose against that treatment, his own people rejected him. He had to flee for his life.
David was shown being ridiculed by his siblings. When the prophet came to Jesse’s house to choose the next king of Israel, David’s father did not even consider him worthy to be present at the meeting. He had been sent out to tend sheep.
Solomon was the wisest man alive, but we need to see more about his childhood too, to see why he made some of the worst decisions ever. David preferred his evil son Absalom over Solomon, even though he knew God had chosen Solomon to be the next king.
What do you suppose took place in the minds of those patriarchs as they grew up under these conditions? Isn’t it likely they did the same as we did, making vows to someday show others that they were significant, after all? Now, let’s look at how the vows became a curse in their lives, and perhaps we will see the same for ourselves.
First, did you notice that each of them were absolutely blind to the evil leaven within themselves? How could this be? They were also in a close relationship with God as they went about such. Why were they unable to see what they were doing was wrong? It was because of blind pride.
We tend to think of pride as something we can easily see, since we have all seen boastful people. But this blind pride is different. Remember the vows they forgot they ever made? After they rose to a high position among the people, there came an inner self satisfaction that they had completed their vows. This never came with conscious thinking, since it is an inner soul matter.
This gave them an arrogance, an inner sense of being superior to all who are now below them. They can now justify what evil they do to others as their proper due. And they would not know that there were many knowledge boxes within them that had labels that confirmed that self-justification. Those labels caused them to be blind to their own evil ways. So, they knew not what they were doing. The vows brought a curse on them of hidden insidious pride, the same kind of pride the devil has.
You should not be too sure this same blindness is not in you. You will not be able to see it merely because you have read these words. This can only be revealed by the One who came to bring all truth, the Holy Spirit. I will discuss what I know about how He does this later.
It is discouraging in writing these things about self-justification, shame, and significance, knowing that almost every person reading this will let it go over their own heads. They may be able to see these things in others, but will not be open to see it in themselves. This book is about you, not them!
We have shown some tools the enemy uses to bring us into making vows and in forming our personalities. Those are, self-pity, bitterness, and rejection. But these tools would be useless if they did not already have something within us to work with. This chapter will discuss the devil’s main weapon. We can first see this in early Genesis, in the Garden of Eden.
We see Adam and Eve there, naked and unashamed. As soon as they fell by eating the forbidden fruit, they stood naked and ashamed. We are told they had been corrupted. That means that all God had created in them was still there, but something wrong had been added. It was shame! Now they tried to hide their physical shame with leafs, and tried to hide their spiritual shame with justification for their fall.
Eve said it was the serpent. She knew it was Adam’s job as keeper, (better translated as “watchguard,“) to stop intruders from coming into the Garden, so this shifted some of the blame to him. Adam said it was because of the woman God had brought him, shifting some of the blame to God. In them was the feeling of rejection, that they were no longer acceptable to God, so they tried to paint it over by justifying themselves with half truths. Did you see how quickly they learned to twist things to fend off feelings of shame?
We might say that when shame arises in us, it lessens our feelings of significance. So each time I mention either shame or significance in this writing, know that I am talking about both, from one direction or another. Further, consider that what Adam and Eve lost was their glory. So again, when shame or significance is mentioned, we are also talking about glory. The visible shining glory covering was now gone, thus, the need for lambskins to cover their genitals.
We had been created to be very significant, but now having lost it, we began the battle to regain it. But we have chosen the wrong way as we learned to justify ourselves. There is a proper shame, known as Holy Spirit conviction. This is meant to bring us to ask forgiveness and to repent, bringing back righteousness.
More is needed to understand shame. In our understanding of God, we know He is spirit, but we can also say He “has” a spirit of love. Likewise, the devil is spirit, but he also “has” a spirit. The devil experienced the ultimate rejection from God, and thus, his spirit is named, “shame.” Let’s go into more detail to prove that.
Shame is the opposite of love. We might have thought hate is the opposite, but hate is merely a symptom of shame…. Love loves to be expressed openly. Shame hates to be seen…. Love unites. Shame divides…. The Holy Spirit is the comforter. Shame brings discomfort…. Love makes you feel significant. Shame makes you feel insignificant.
Love is the power of God. Shame is the power of the devil…. God’s love draws us near to Him. Shame, often through self condemnation, tries to drive us away from God…. Did you catch that last sentence? If shame tries to drive us away from God, then that means shame is the spirit of anti-christ, doesn’t it? Don’t reject that thought too quickly. Let’s look at it this way; If shame is the opposite of Love, the Holy Spirit, then shame is the unholy spirit, thus shame is the spirit of anti-christ.
If shame was behind the evil we saw in our patriarchs, then shame was also behind the religious leaders who could not accept Jesus when He was on the earth. Those had satisfied their childhood vows and were now in power. They could not accept the carpenter from Nazareth as the Christ, because He would not recognize their significance. They were against Christ, weren’t they?
So why do we go through so many battles with the “old man” within us? We need only to look again at what came into Adam and Eve. It was shame, and this would be handed down through all to be born of their blood after them. Except for Jesus, whose blood came from His Father, God. Shame was already a part of us when we were born, so that gave rejection, self-pity, and bitterness something to attach to.
So shame is the name of our enemy. It resides within us to do all it can to keep us from becoming the cleansed Bride. It stays hidden within so we cannot see how it has corrupted us. Only by bringing truth to those knowledge boxes within us can we prepare ourselves. And that can only be done with the help of the Holy Spirit.
This is accomplished by taking away the tools that the spirit of shame uses to rule us from within. I doubt that shame itself can also be ousted, but we can take away its power. I suspect shame is a part of our DNA, and this is why we need new uncorrupted bodies when we see Jesus as He is. Remember, in Gen. 3:15 (top), we are shown satan has seed. There, we were told that there would be enmity between Eve’s seed and satan’s seed. We could go much further on this theme, but it would take us off track.
In case there is any remaining doubt about the power of shame, remember back to one time in your life when you were horribly embarrassed. Remember the hot red face and the wish you could just disappear? Perhaps you may remember how you also vowed to never let something like that happen again. If you are able, it would be profitable to watch to see just how careful you are in all your dealings with others to not say or do anything that would be embarrassing. To not expose your shame.
Adam and Eve were told that one day they would go forth from the Garden and dominate the world. But unfortunately, satan has turned that into each of us subtly trying to dominate each other, instead. We need to know just how much we are driven by shame, our feelings of insignificance. From early childhood, children shame each other to get their way, or to imply others are lower than they. They learned this only causes shame to be returned to them, so it became necessary to disguise how shame is put on others.
For example, if one was trying to convince another to do something, a different than normal voice inflection might be used that inferred the other was being stingy. If the other reacted to that inflection, it could always be called “your imagination.” We could use as little as a raised eyebrow, or as much as silent treatment pouting to get what we want. Those methods are only some of the polished tools of shame manipulating.
Newly married couples soon see that each does not recognize the other’s significance, and no matter what they may think they are fighting about, somewhere it comes down to their significance being slighted. This leaves essentially two options. They can divorce, or they can learn to not cross the other’s significance boundary. In the latter case, they can come to look like they love each other, but in truth, it is an unspoken compromise, an armed truce. “You don’t shame me and I won’t shame you.”
Unfortunately, one of the ways adult Christians have polished their defense against shame is to misquote Jesus’ “Judge not that ye be not judged” command. Real judging has two components. One is to assess guilt or innocence, and the other is to apply a penalty, whether real or wished upon another. Note that Jesus assessed everybody He came in contact with, but He did not apply a penalty to any. Thus, He did not judge them.
Likewise, every one of us assesses others we know, and make choices whether to be friends or less with them. But when another says something that slights us, we accuse them of judging us. This is to dissuade them from further assessment by putting shame guilt on them for their supposed trespass of “judging” us.
Shame sneaks in, in many different ways in our lives, unnoticed. Sometimes when someone does something for us, we feel obligated to return the favor, whether we want to or not. Can you see that we fear shame feelings in that? After all, we don’t want anyone to think we are ungrateful. There are some who intentionally do favors just for the purpose of making another feel obligated to them.
If we get angry or get our feelings hurt, it means our significance has been challenged, and we react unlovingly. Some who want to hurt another might tell something, true or not, about his enemies to shame them. Shame is often used to manipulate others to do what one wants them to do. Some can even say, “Thank you very much,” sarcastically to put shame on another. A modern way shame is imposed is in Christian emails that end with someone telling us we are ashamed of Jesus if we don’t forward this email message to others. Manipulation. “Christian” witchcraft.
Shame is also often used in advertising. We are given a view that if we had this or that product, it would elevate us above our peers. We might remember some time ago when a new men’s hair product came on the market, they talked about the old product as “greasy kid’s stuff.” In other words, it would be shameful to continue using the old product. It worked.
Let’s consider sports competition as an example of how people try to rise above others, gaining significance and fulfilling their childhood vows. Note that this competition is not only in the competitors, but also is in the watching fans. They identify themselves with their team. This is a way to feel they are better than the opposing fans. If this were not so, there would not be such a letdown when one’s personal team loses. But there are many other ways that competition is hidden in the hearts of people.
Many join an organization that has a goal. The goal may not at first be meaningful to them, but in time they apply themselves to it fervently. They don’t realize that they are finding power in forcing people outside their organization to have to take notice of them, and they like that feeling of significance. Labor unions are an example of usurping power over others to gain selfish goals. As long as they get their share, most union members will ignore that their leaders are in it for personal gain.
So often we see people who rise to stardom in the eyes of the “common people.” Once there, they feel they have all the answers to life and begin telling those below them how they should live. They are incapable of seeing their own faults. How often do we see this in government leaders?
Shame could also be the reason for finding comfort in a certain church and also how we interpret the Bible. For example, a person not comfortable about the Holy Spirit gifts would find it easier to attend a church where such is not emphasized. He would not know the decision was from fear of looking foolish in the eyes of others whom he knows frown on such.
A preacher could push his congregation to grow his church, and not know at least part of this was fulfilling his childhood vows to someday be seen as significant. God may also want to grow that church, but it cannot have His full blessing because there is leaven in the preacher’s motives. He would not even know he was partly seeking first his own kingdom, rather than only first seeking the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.
Shame remains a prominent force in our daily lives. Sometimes, even a preacher might use disguised shame to cause some to come to the altar for salvation. He could also put people in shame if they might be considering going to another church. Or he might use shame to get larger offerings. None of us are necessarily beyond using the devil’s main weapon to accomplish our desires. We are just blind to the fact we do it.
That latter kind of shame use has a Biblical name. It is called, the “Jezebel spirit.” We can see in 1 and 2 Kings that evil Jezebel openly usurped her wimp king husband’s power to gain what she wanted. But we might be surprised how often we usurp God’s authority to gain what we want, ever so subtly.
We can use Bible verses to shame another into doing as we wish for our own gain, and not even know we are using the Jezebel spirit. For example, a husband can quote the verse that a wife should submit to the husband in ways he wants. She may retaliate with the verse that says he should love her as Jesus loves the church. Usually, both are at fault and have wrong motives, neither being like Jesus at all.
People with the Jezebel spirit cannot be confronted because they are completely unaware it is in them, and frankly, they don’t want to know. They are completely satisfied with the label they put on that knowledge box. They mistake God’s grace on them as approval of their actions and cannot be convinced otherwise by man. Many of them will wreak vengeance on any who try to show them the truth. And oddly enough, they will believe they are doing God’s work in this vengeance.
The Ten Commandments and Jesus’ later commandment to us were about operating in love toward God and others. We have been shown that the Law was impossible to follow, and that it was given to show us we could not do so. And that this should set us off on a course to find out why and remedy it.
We are supposedly now free from the Law and living under grace instead, since Jesus fulfilled the Law in our place. And that now, we have the Holy Spirit within to guide us. But this has not brought us together as one, has it? That is because we are still living under the Law, like it or not. Why would Jesus want us free from the Law and yet put another law on us before He departed? It is because He knew we would still be unable to love unconditionally, and this command should also send us searching for the reasons why not.
We may think we love others, because we try hard to do as Jesus’ commanded. But we all know that there are times when we fall short and at the very minimum, fail to love a perceived enemy. We fall into trusting God will forgive us of this, and then we start out and falter again and again. Yes, He does forgive us for our failings out of merciful grace. But He still demands we love unconditionally. So when we are told we have the power to become sons of God, there must be a way we can fulfill the Law and become Love, like Jesus did. That is what this book is about.
In our churches, we think we are being taught grace, and indeed, it is spoken of often. But we are also taught to discipline ourselves to sin no more. Has it crossed your mind yet that disciplining yourself is putting the Law on yourself? Spend some time in church while specifically listening to see if you are being told how to live a Godly life. The words may come softly, but they are still words of Law. It is even putting Law on us when we are told to follow “Biblical principals,” or “spiritual disciplines.”
We need to understand the meaning of the two words, “discipline,” and “disciple”. Because the two words look and sound much the same, we automatically assume they mean the same. They do not! Look it up and find that a disciple is a learner! A disciple is NOT one under discipline! Jesus taught His disciples, but He never taught them self discipline. Think how many times a preacher has unknowingly misled you with this error.
We are shown in the Bible that we are not to fight against flesh and blood, but rather against evil spirits in dark places. But using the Law to fight against sinning is fighting against flesh and blood, and that is not spiritual at all. It cannot win the war. It can only make us look good on the outside, while the inside remains in iniquity.
The Law can fool us into thinking we are perfectly in God’s will. This is because of another law, the one of sowing and reaping. This law is on the earth, just like gravity is a law on the earth. So if we do good, as the Law instructs, we will reap good. We can even have a close relationship with God while under the Law. We can even be filled with the Spirit and operate in the gifts. But this is not the ultimate goal of God.
God wants us to have His kind of love. His kind of love does righteousness without having to obey any Law. Our kind of love is an act, and we perform it because we are commanded to do so. So Jesus was right in saying not a jot or tittle of the Law would be done away with. As we now are, it is the only thing that helps us any at all.
Jesus did not fulfill the Law by obeying it. He fulfilled it by using wisdom, and needed no laws to do right. But even He had to learn wisdom. Read Luke 2:52 and see that in His hidden years, He became Love by gaining wisdom. Also read Isa. 7:14-15 (top) and see that even Jesus had to learn to choose good over evil. Jesus said He only did what He saw the Father doing. This means He had a living relationship with the Father. Likewise, if we are to become the sons of God, then we should also have a living relationship with the Father and do what we see Him doing today.
But this does not mean we should not read and know the Bible. Heaven forbid! But in the reading of the Word, the danger is to obey it as law and miss what the Father is showing us now. If we are in a living relationship with Him, then what He tells us today is just as valid as what we read in the Bible. So knowing the Bible will help us know if what we hear is from Him, and not from our own soul’s hidden agenda.
A real relationship with the Father comes when you get the revelation beyond what the Bible says, that God loves you. It must come to us that even though God loves everyone, it is still as if He loves me personally, as if no one else exists. In this, we will each have our own unique walk with God. Further, we will learn to hear His voice and know it is no other voice. This relationship will even be romantic. We will hate to go to sleep at night, as we want to spend more time with Him. Our first thoughts when we awaken will be, “What are we going to do together today, Father?”
Living in a personal relationship with God is living life more abundant. It is the full knowledge that you and He are walking together on a Path through both good and hard times. It is constant expectancy to see His hand in all we go through. Worldly rewards have nothing to do with this life more abundant. He is enough.
Jesus knew the church would start out as a baby, just as we start our lives as babes in need of much learning before we can take our proper place in life. So, just as we treat our babies with laws, (rules,) the church needed laws as well in its childhood. But there should come a day when laws are no longer needed to keep us on the straight and narrow. So we need to see why we so often wander off that path into sin, in spite of the Law.
First, consider this: THE LAW CREATES FALSE LOVE. LOVE IS NOT CREATED. LOVE IS, BECAUSE I AM.
Now, Jesus’ love was unconditional. That is God’s kind of love. We are told to be like God. We are to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. Jesus told us the Kingdom was within us. So if we are going to seek His Kingdom, we must go within ourselves to see what has not yet been formed into His Kingdom.
(Author’s note: “Midst” and “inside you” are used in different Bible translations about where the Kingdom is. I know that Jesus was talking to the Jews when He told them the Kingdom was in their midst. After all, He was the King and now was in their midst. But I believe this is a dual meaning verse. That our souls are to be made into the Kingdom of God too, for we cannot make any Promised Land into His Kingdom until we have made our souls His Kingdom first.)
Our soul is where those boxes of knowledge are. In those boxes are many ways in which we learned to defend ourselves from others hurting our feelings, and; Ways to justify ourselves; Ways to seek significance; Ways to avoid dealing with others whose ways we do not like; Ways to excuse ourselves from helping those in need; Ways to manipulate others to give us what we want from them, etc; The labels on those boxes of knowledge protect us from seeing the truths about ourselves.
So with those wrong ways hidden deep in our make-up, we can only use the Law to make the best we can of this life. But our trying to be like Jesus is merely an act, a way to appear to others in spite of what is really in us. It is not unconditional love. What we put in those knowledge boxes makes our relationships depend on how others treat us.
We can go on like we are, or choose to seriously ask God to show us anything in us that displeases Him. That is the main key to the Kingdom. It opens the Narrow Gate to the Path that Jesus said few would find. It does not necessarily mean going to hell if we refuse to take that Path. It means we will take the broad path of destruction instead. And this means that when we are judged, we will not hear, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.” Instead, we will see the true motives of all our deeds on earth, and we will watch our works burn in the fire of Jesus’ eyes. Wood, hay, and stubble, fit for destruction.
I hope you see by this that we can have either a relationship with the Bible and follow its laws, or we can have a living relationship with the Father. In the latter, the Holy Spirit will show us what the Father is doing, so we may do it, too. Only then can we be free from the Law.
So, what is it like to go into the inner Kingdom to clean it out? Well, you first need to know what you are asking for. Liken it to Jesus’ Gethsemane choice to go to the cross. He told us to count the cost, so this is the time to do it. When He showed me He was taking me on the Path, I knew it would be painful. But I had no idea how hard it would actually be. No way could I have counted the cost. But after going through the fiery trials, I would not give up having gone through them for anything.
Note that satan asked God to take down the hedge of protection around Job. That hedge was the sacrificed blood of sheep, in lieu of Jesus’ future perfect blood sacrifice. God did take down that hedge. Likewise, when we ask to be cleansed of anything wicked in us, God will take down our hedge of protection, but only to a limit. This gives satan boundaries he must stay within, as he is allowed to attack us. He will not give us more than we can take, although at times it will seem otherwise.
You may have thought Job’s trials were about patience, the first time you read his story. But if you peel that layer back, there is far more to learn about him. When Job lost everything, it offended him. He thought he was the very righteousness of God, and he was bitter that God had done such a thing to him. Notice that as Jesus went about His ministry, He offended many people. He even offended His many disciples, and all but twelve left Him.
God uses offenses to bring up what He sees in us that He wants us to see. Often, He will turn people against us, so it can show our response. If we get angry or find our feelings hurt, it means there is something wrong in us to allow that. It shows our significance is being challenged, and it opens one or more of our boxes of knowledge to see what is in them that should not be there. It will show that our conclusion label has hidden that from truth. But few look within, preferring instead to look at the offenders.
You may have already tried to see if what I write of is in you. But we cannot yet see it because as children, we imposed the self-blindness labels to prevent this. So God must send the Holy Spirit to arrange our present life circumstances so we can discover for ourselves what He wants us to see. The Holy Spirit is sent to bring all truth, remember? If God showed us our iniquity directly like He does our sin, we would only apply the Law on ourselves to try to stop it, but that would only bury it deeper.
So not all trials sent to us are for what we may have thought in the past. And yes, God sends trials to us. We get a hint of that in Job, where God entices the devil to put Job through a great trial. It may be well here to also show that God sometimes sends evil to us. Look under, “Evil” in an exhaustive concordance and see that God sent evil to His own people more than eighty times. So we need to see that God uses the devil as a tool to show us our own evil.
Those who say God cannot send evil or sickness to us because He has none in Heaven to send have just plain missed it. Did He not send leprosy to Miriam when she tried to show she was equal to Moses? He also sent an evil spirit to King Saul, didn’t He? And those who tell us God will never violate our own will need to reread the story of Jonah. Nor was what happened to Saul/Paul on the Damascus Road, his will.
When Jesus was talking about our entering the Kingdom as children, He was telling us that we must see why we made certain decisions as children, and see them again both through a child’s and an adult’s eyes. He also told us there that we have to enter the Kingdom with violence, and that is true because it takes spiritual warfare to bring Light to the wrong ideas in the boxes. Note He also said that offenses MUST come, so expect offenses. And do not be surprised by whom these offenses come.
It is important here to not look at the evil done to you by your persecutors and concentrate on them. Yes, likely they are wrong in their attack, but you are God’s target, and he is only using them to bring out hidden evil in you. So I repeat, do not be surprised by whom these offenses come! And don’t pray these trials off yourself! Go through them.
Some I have talked to have tried this walk I speak of. But when troubles came, they felt they had no time to spend on the walk when so much else was going on. Sadly, they did not recognize that the deliverance trial had begun that would have shown them something they needed to know. Yes, these trials will be filled with confusion and chaos. This is the process He uses to make us unsure of all the things we had settled on as fact in our knowledge boxes. Only then will we be open to truth when it comes.
Know that the devil will not want you to finish this path. He will stir up people, even friends to come against what you are going through. They will quote all the “pat” answers from the Bible to tell you this is a waste of time. And that you can become happy again merely by praising and worshiping God. They will have no idea what you mean when you tell them God has you on a Path, and that pat answers no longer work for you. It helps so much to have a co-disciple friend who is also on the Path.
It appears we all get an invitation to go through these trials of deliverance at some time in our walk. Unfortunately, the churches do not explain them well enough for many to understand what they mean. Some trials are not about deliverance at all, but are about a more simple change needed in our life. Sometimes, we are sent into a long wilderness experience where nothing goes right and it is so dry and void of the Spirit, one despairs of ever enjoying life again. But the purpose of a wilderness experience is to prepare you for when next God draws near to you. You will do anything He says, to prevent going back into the wilderness.
Deliverance trials are different, as I see it from my experiences. Looking back on how they began, I can see God prepared the way. Through what we originally thought were co-incidents, He put three of us together as best friends. What an unlikely little trio to come together in love! One was a Greek lady I’ll call “Mary” who was long separated from her adulterous husband. The other I’ll call, “Jud,” who was a recovering alcoholic homeless young man I had taken into my home. I am a widower.
There were two other ladies who intermittently joined us, as their lives permitted. People in the church gawked at us, as I was surrounded by these ladies. (This would be used against me in a later trial.) But most of them saw God was doing a thing with us. That did not stop some from gossiping though.
That increased later when Mary lost her home, and I took her in. Some told us it looked bad with Mary and me spending so much time together. I asked them if they then were offering to take her into their home, since she would be on the streets if I hadn’t helped her. They had no answer for that, as they would not take her in. But we knew we were brought together by God, and we kept it absolutely clean between us. We were like brother and sister.
We all so enjoyed each other, we spent most of our waking hours together praying, crying, laughing, and seeking more of God. We attended the church that Mary had been going to for a long time, and loved it. It was a place that was world known at that time for having a move of God going on, and we basked in the presence of God there.
Mary had gone through a class at that church where they taught about “the little child in you.” This class aimed at finding ways to end the ongoing hurt from childhood abuse. What she learned there and told me about was a beginning. She told me about the pain that came as they brought up the abuse memories from where they had been hidden deep within. I watched her go through some of those healings as she dealt with having been sexually abused by her father when she was a little girl. I also saw how after the pain, she had been delivered and until the next trial, she was happy and lively.
Then one day, I began to feel low in my spirit. I could not explain it, for nothing had happened I knew of to cause this. After a few days watching me, Mary suggested I may be going through a healing. At first I dismissed that, for I felt I was right with God and knew of nothing in me that needed healing. She told me to ask God if there is something He sees in me that I needed to know about. I did.
I began to notice the words “self-pity” came up very often in my hearing. I was learning to watch these visible co-incidents, as they would show me the invisible that God wanted me to see. I also remembered many years ago when God would awaken me every morning for weeks at 4 AM and tell me to read the Book of Job. After so many readings, I was bored with it, but kept doing as He told me. One morning as I went to read it, I found I had left my usual Bible elsewhere. So I picked up another Bible that had many footnotes in it.
As I made my way through Job one more time, my eyes came across a particular footnote. It described Job’s complaints as self-pity. I had been too naïve to see that before, and reread Job to make sure if it really showed that. It did. Back then, I failed to see that this was a message to me, though. And that was part of the reason I had to spend seven years in a horrible dry wilderness experience.
That wilderness ended when God spoke to me as my wife was dying. I didn’t know what His words meant until I went into the bedroom and found her dead. He was telling me beforehand that He was taking her to Heaven. His Spirit came all over me, and He helped me through the grieving time. He also led me to the church where I met my friends and found out about inner healings. Now after the wilderness, He had me ready to respond immediately when He showed me something important. So I took it seriously when the many co-incidents about self-pity came about.
Now, people would say hurtful things to me, and my self-pity response surprised me as people offended me. Many long forgotten unpleasant memories from my childhood began to come up. I saw that my feelings were matching how I felt as a child when people hurt my feelings back then. Or when my parents scolded me. I remembered that I often went off by myself and moped. Now, I tried to justify myself by pointing out I don’t mope anymore, so self-pity was no longer an issue.
But God was taking me somewhere, and He would not let up. He knew that self-pity back then had set me on a wrong course for my whole life, including now. This trial went on for over a year. I co-operated all I knew how, but I was so naïve that it took that long for me to see the damage it had done in me.
Believe me, the emotions during that trial ran rampant. I was in pain almost every minute of it, and it was the exact same pain I felt as a child when my feelings were hurt. But praise God, He did not remove His presence as I fought against admitting what I was finding out about myself. When I finally could no longer deny the truth, I repented. Wow, the joy that filled me in that moment! I was so high, I thought there is nothing left in me now that displeased God. Wrong!
After a short period at that oasis, God began showing me why Job had self-pity. So it was on to the next painful trial. But now I knew more about them and how they turn out, so I began intensively watching for the “co-incidents” that would point me in the right direction. I call those, “signposts,” because they show the way He is taking me.
By the way, “praise” means, “acknowledge.” So when we see a signpost “co-incident,” we acknowledge it as from God, and that is praising Him. Since He dwells in our praise, the more we acknowledge these co-incidents, the more He will send.
“Pondering” is another important word to know about. To me, it is different than mere thinking about a subject. When a subject comes before us, we usually think about it for a short time and then let it drift from our memory. But in pondering, we keep details handy on a shelf, so to speak, waiting for more information to come so we can add it to it. Then as this information builds up, we can see a revelation we would have otherwise missed. We need to keep the signposts handy on that shelf to see what they add up to.
Pondering awakens our own spirits to perform what it had lost the ability to do when we had in our childhood chosen to listen to our emotions to make decisions. We will be surprised that we can be in a conversation with another and hear every word they are saying, and meanwhile hear our own spirit processing the information at a deeper level than we had ever known before. We will also be discerning hidden motives in what the person is saying to us.
Now, the word, “bitterness” began to pop up everywhere. It came up in movies I’d see, TV shows I watched, even sermons and more. The more I saw it, the more childhood memories came up, and the emotional pain increased. I began to have stomach aches, and remembered how as a child, I also had them. Now, when looking back, I could see they had come after a particularly hard angry session with my parents.
I now saw that I had considered myself right in those arguments, and that I stood up to my parents with venom as I defended myself. Seeing that put me in touch again with Job, and how he argued in defense of his righteousness. He thought he had done everything right, and had sacrificed many lambs for possible sins of his children. And now these horrible disasters had come upon him. How unfair! Job had been offended by God.
I saw Job was wrong, and so was I. In Job’s case, God saw his self-pity as coming from his bitterness at being “punished” when he was so righteous. He was proud of his righteousness. So had I been. But I was now seeing I had indeed been wrong, and was innocent only in my own eyes because of my self-justifications. I could argue my innocence and come to believe it myself as I argued.
Memories came up about things I heard my mother say about me. She would be talking to someone else, but tell them about what she thought were physical deficiencies in me. I’d heard I was born as quite a large baby, and that gave her hope I would grow up to be tall. I could see she was not pleased I was short. That I was a disappointment.
My size would haunt me through most of my growing years. It would be the main thing I concentrated on as my bitterness grew. This must be why my mother didn’t love me. It wasn’t my fault I was short. Why does that make me bad? Unworthy of love? Insignificant? It was nothing I had control over. That’s not fair! My brooding over this brewed up a pot of bitterness. I hated myself. Then came the tormenting teenage years with the pimples and fears that someone might find out who I really was. And I did not even notice when I had grown to normal height, still seeing myself as short.
I would eventually see that my parents had no idea of the harm words can cause. They too had parents who did not know these things, and it had probably carried on through many generations, possibly back to Adam and Eve.
So at this point I could take the blame off my parents. But I could also see that as the little naïve boy I was, I should not blame myself, either. I felt proper sorrow for the little boy I had been, and this time it was not self-pity. I forgave myself as I saw I had been in a trap and had no idea how else to handle the life I was handed. At last, I could love myself. I was learning where to place the blame, and will show that later.
But just what I had learned as the Holy Spirit taught me was enough that I could repent of my bitterness. Mary, Jud, and I had learned to tell each other what we had found in ourselves. As we confessed these things before each other and God, we were delivered. We had learned we could leave no detail out of the confession that would lessen how badly another might think of us. Facing shame down this way released us, for shame cannot stand exposure to the Light.
I was deeply sorry for how I had treated my parents and others through my life as a result of my hidden bitterness. I felt conviction to send letters of apology to my parents and a few others. None of them understood what I meant, but that was alright. I had done what I could. Again, I was filled with joy at no longer being bitter. And the emotional pain was gone, and the stomach aches as well.
I went through several other deliverances as these were going on, but they were minor ones. The next and last one would be the most painful. This one would be about the very way I had shaped my personality to keep others from seeing my insignificance.
As I was going through the previous deliverances, of course I had a parallel life going on. It was an awesome time that led up to my last deliverance, being both joyful and painful. But God was not going to merely get me delivered. He was going to show me some things about Christianity that would blow my mind. I surely did not either expect or want to know these things.
As I mentioned before, the three of us that God had put together were intent on going as far as possible with God. We knew right away we were put together to take a path that few if any had taken before. This was not our imagination. We each knew it from God. We interceded for our church with fervor. We loved it so much and did not want the move of God there to end. We had seen a few pastoral things there we knew were not of God, and did not want this to cause the Holy Spirit to leave.
One day Mary and I were parked in the church parking lot, talking. She told me the story of her time there before I had become a part of it. I had not known she had been famous before, heading a ministry for the homeless. It had grown to world renown. But one day, a church secretary told her pastor leader a lie about her, and he believed it. She was dismissed from the ministry. It had devastated her. Nevertheless, she continued going to this church without complaint.
Hearing her story was bringing back memories of my previous church. It had been the center of the Charismatic Movement on the West Coast. There, I had sought the filling of the Holy Spirit time after time, but the usual signs of the filling never came for me. As time went on, I began seeing hidden things that were going on behind the scenes in that church. I did not want to see them, as they discouraged me.
Among the many things I saw was the reason the pastor had been taking so many extra offerings. (MANY extra offerings!) Almost every sermon had in it something about tithes and offerings. He was jealous of another charismatic leader who was building a huge university, and began building his own. This became a struggle financially. He could not meet both the needs of the church and the university building project at the same time. I knew one of the secretaries there, and she had told me she was no longer being paid. This is against the labor laws.
Also, I had advertised an item for sale. A man came to buy it, and we talked. Of course, I intended to lead him to the Lord. He was very enthused, and then he asked me where I went to church. I told him, and he scoffed. He had done a contract job for this church and after six months, he still had not been paid. The pastor did not know how far his wrong doings reached. They had turned this man from accepting Jesus as Lord.
As the evil hidden things kept revealing themselves to me, I decided to leave. I did not like it that God was blessing a church with such evil going on behind the scenes. Besides, my feelings were also hurt (self-pity) that I was not worthy to receive the Holy Spirit. This and my not seeing what God was showing me about Job sent me into the wilderness experience that did not end until seven years later, the night my wife died.
Now I was seeing evil going on behind the scenes in this present church, too. I had already been told by many I had prophetic giftings. Now I was able to see that back at my previous church, the things I was seeing were what God shows prophets. And that I’d had signs of the infilling without recognizing them.
An example of the kind of things I was now seeing was, a married church leader began flirting with a married church secretary. The secretary started divorce proceedings, thinking the church leader would do the same and marry her. But it turned out he was only flirting with her to make his own wife jealous, and had no intentions of marrying her. This was kept hushed. There were many other examples.
So after Mary told me her story and went into the church, I sat there crying for some time. I felt God was telling me to be the prophet and write letters to the pastors of the church, telling them what I’d been seeing. I was really reluctant to do this. God had previously dealt heavily with me over my critical personality, and I was glad to no longer be a fault-finder.
For a time after my wife died, God had a sign for me to know if what I was hearing was from Him, or not. He did amazing things for me to see with eagles that live in my area. These signs would mean nothing to anyone but me, and would take too much space here to explain. As I sat there considering writing the church leaders, I saw an eagle in the distance. It swooped down and passed close to my car windshield, and it looked like it was being forced to fly toward me against its will. I got the message. So I wrote my first letter to them. It was ignored.
Meanwhile, I noticed a beautiful lady in the church, and more than once caught her looking at me. I was not interested, because she was much too young for me. The church bulletin told us there was a new class starting soon for people who wanted to join the deliverance ministry team. I thought I would go, just to learn. And if God showed me to, I would join the team. At the first teaching meeting, He showed me to join it by giving me an accurate vision of something that had happened in the childhood of one of the other applicants. The person confirmed the vision by turning pale, jumping up, and running from the classroom.
At my first actual ministry meeting, I got to the gathering room early, and “co-incidentally” the beautiful lady was there already. I had not known she was on the ministry team. From here on, I’ll call her, “Lira.” Short for, “Lady In Red, A.” We talked and enjoyed each other until time to start our ministry. But she was still too young for me.
After the next week’s ministry ended, we gathered as usual in the meeting room to discuss what we had experienced. But this time it turned out to be Lira’s birthday, and someone had brought her a cake. She cut a slice and brought it all the way across the wide room and stood in front of me smiling for a long time, before handing it to me. You could have knocked me over with a feather.
A few months after I had begun attending that church, I was enjoying life so much that I thought to myself, “I don’t want to marry again.” As soon as I thought that, I heard, “Oh, but you will marry again!” I told Him, “Okay, but You choose her for me.”
Now, Lira and I were running into each other “co-incidentally” way more than could be normal even for two people in the same church. We even showed up at the same places at the same time, many miles from our homes and the church. I asked God why this was happening? He said, “This is the woman I have chosen for your wife.”
Then a memory from when I was about thirty years old came to my mind. I had been watching my kids playing and laughing with joy, and wondered to myself, “Why can’t my wife be like that instead of her constant angry jealousy?” Immediately, a loud voice within me said, “There is a little girl out in the world somewhere. She is the same age as your children. One day she will be your wife.”
Back then, I did not even know God would speak to people. I didn’t even know IF this was God. But it had come with such power, it shook me. It took months for it to finally be forgotten. After all, I was not going to divorce my wife, and it never crossed my mind she would die early. Lira is the same age as my oldest daughter.
So I gave in, and returned Lira’s flirts. Shortly after, I was standing near the church bookstore and Lira came walking across the campus to enter the store. As she came, I saw a vision word over her in large black letters. It said, “PAIN.” I asked God what the pain was, and immediately felt sharp pain in my back muscles. Then I saw another word vision over her. It was, “REJECTED.”
As we filed into the next ministry meeting, Lira was just ahead of me and I heard her ask the lady next to her to rub her hurting back. The lady said she didn’t know how, but began trying. I reached over and began massaging her back. Lira told her it was perfect. The lady told Lira that it was Dave, not her. Lira smiled and asked me to continue. I’m telling these things to establish that Lira was very interested in me. Things would soon happen that might put that in question in your mind.
Later, our little group felt led to have special intercession meetings for our church because of what we increasingly saw going on behind the scenes there. One of the other ladies who had sometimes joined us had a fiancé, an ordained man who would lead us. The only night we could all meet happened to be the night my ministry met. I would have to miss seeing Lira there, and did not like that. But I asked the ministry leader for leave of absence until God was through with our intercession.
So we began intercession, and it was awesome. God showed us He was paying attention by having the church’s Sunday sermon include whole sentences we had spoken in prayer at the previous meeting. We looked at each other with open mouthed amazement.
One night in the intercession, something humorous happened. God told the leader to turn to a certain verse, but to not read it yet. I was face down on the floor, waiting to see if God had anything to tell me. Suddenly, the bottom of my right foot felt like it was on fire. I jumped up and hopped around in pain. The leader asked what was wrong, and I told him my foot felt like it was on fire.
He laughed, and said he now knew why God told him to wait to read the verse. It was Luke 10:19 (top), where Jesus told His Disciples He had given them authority to tread on serpents and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing shall hurt you. My right foot had been anointed to do this. We all laughed. God has a sense of humor.
Again meanwhile, I had asked God what I should do about Lira, and He told me to woo her. So when the first opportunity came, I asked her to consider going out with me. She beamed her smile at me over that, and we agreed to talk about it at the next church service. There, after the service, I approached her to talk and she stomped out of the church in anger. I wondered what had changed.
A few weeks later, our deliverance ministry team was to minister to any who wanted it at a large conference meeting with people coming from all over the world. I asked the team leader, whom I will call, “Lex,” if I could be there, and he gave a vague non-answer. I pressed him and he finally told me I couldn’t. I asked him why not.
Lex told me that I was not over grieving for my wife, (I was,) and that I should not yet let myself be close to women, as takes place in ministry. He said Lira called him after I asked her out, wanting his opinion. He told her he saw me rubbing her back that night, and was not comfortable with it. He warned her that I was flirting with her for the wrong reasons, that I was on the rebound from my wife’s death, and I would end up hurting her. He also told her our age difference to further discourage her. He accused me of stalking Lira. He would not listen to my explanation that I had nothing to do with our running into each other all the time, that it was God causing it.
Lex further explained that he had used his engineering knowledge to put out a fleece to God. He had made sure I never again ministered to women, and if he was right, I would soon quit the ministry. He smugly brought up that I had left. I reminded him I had only taken a leave of absence, having been called to intercession by God. I asked him why he did not use Holy Spirit knowledge instead of engineering knowledge to make this determination. His pride of being a smart engineer wouldn’t allow that to sink in.
It turns out Lira looked up to him as a spiritual father, and she took his advice. I saw it as something different. I knew he liked his position with her, and he did not want me to take his place. I discerned a controlling spirit in him. This surprised me. I had never considered such a high church leader could have that spirit.
But Lira had become valuable to me. I didn’t know how much I loved her until I had to fight for her. I went to talk to Lex many times to try and convince him I had no wrong thoughts about Lira. Then he warned me to never approach her, or talk to her, unless she approached AND talked to me first. He was my authority in the church and I had to obey. I heard the Still Small Voice say, “Do as they say, but not as they do.” So God made it official. I spent many hundreds of nearly sleepless nights tossing and turning, trying to find a way around that command.
But the last time I tried talking to Lex, I brought up that he had been wrong in telling Lira such things without talking to me about it first to check my intentions. I had found out he had gone around to other leaders, supposedly to investigate me. I knew his real intent was to get his version in first, in case the story became openly known in the church. He also threatened me he might go to the police to report me for stalking Lira. This had become slander.
It became a loud argument, but he finally just looked at the floor with nothing more he could say. He knew he had done wrong, but was unable to admit it. I was dumbfounded that he would cost Lira and me a relationship just because he could not admit wrong.
I would come to see that Lira had doubts about what Lex had told her. She tried many things to get us close together “accidentally,” even now knowing our age difference. But she did not know she also had to be the first to talk to me, and all I could do was watch. This went on for several years as she would make efforts then withdraw, angry and hurt that I had not spoken to her.
In an early talk with Lex, I tried to tell him that Lira was making attempts to bring us into contact, that she still had an interest in me. He scoffed at that and maintained his position. I felt conviction for having told him this as it violated her privacy, and never brought that up to him again. She did not know she was playing two acts, one to him, and one to me. The spirit of rejection was guiding her.
Another thing she tried was phoning me to ask about the weekly singles meeting in my home. She pretended she did not know who I was, but I found out from the person who gave her my phone number she knew exactly who she was calling. Naïve me, I did not recognize who she was until after we hung up. She showed anger the next time we saw each other, for I had not taken advantage of her attempt to break the ice.
(Author’s note: I know this story is getting long, but I’m trying to show just how much evil can happen even in a church that is having a great move of God going on in it. And know that the before mentioned deliverances were going on while all this was happening, and these present experiences would bring about my last deliverance.)
As mentioned above, our little group was having a church sponsored weekly single’s meeting in my home. It was awesome, and many people drove long distances for the fellowship. We had physical and emotional healings happen there. We even had food multiplied once when not nearly enough was brought for the potluck dinner. There was as much left over as we started with. Many took the message about the homegroup back to the church leadership, and they became aware it was a move of God.
One night there, a lady I’ll call “Jez” made a belittling comment to Mary. I spoke up softly in Mary’s defense, and the lady apologized. But this would not be the last of her. Now, Jud, the young man I had taken in to disciple becomes important in this story. Jez would get revenge on me by secretly pursuing Jud, and turning him against me. In time, people began asking me if I knew what my friend was saying about me. I confronted him, and had to send him out of my home.
Together, Jez and Jud made a list of “evil” things about me, and turned it over to a high assistant pastor. She was his secretary at the church. The list included that Lex had been right about me, that I indeed had bad intentions with Lira, and was stalking her. So I went to that pastor and asked for a meeting with all parties present. He agreed, and set it up with two assistant pastors to lead it. Mary suspected something bad would come from the meeting, but I was only glad that I would finally get to show Lira the truth.
The pastors decided the meeting should be two meetings, instead. One was for me to confront Lex, and the other to confront Jez. At the first meeting, they acknowledged I had called for the meeting, but gave the floor to Lex first, instead. He spent almost all our appointed time telling his side. I noted two lies he told that I could disprove when my turn came. At last, Lira would hear the truth!
When it was time for me to speak, the pastors did not let me finish a sentence before interrupting me with accusations. They were not going to let me defend myself. Then I heard Jesus say, “Dave, close your mouth like I did at my trial.” So I did, knowing that He could yet make good come from this evil. The pastors found me guilty as charged. I was charged with being obsessed with being around women, and with bad intentions. I was dismissed from the three ministries I had been in. I knew the rulings really had nothing to do with Lira and me, but were vengeance for my having the nerve to send those letters to the pastors.
I was told I had to go to meetings with one of the pastors, so he could help me change my ways. The alternative of course, was for me to leave the church. I knew they hoped for this. I had seen examples of their getting rid of people who did not conform.
The second meeting followed soon after, but with only one of the pastors present. Jez did not show up, but Jud repented and admitted the list was lies Jez and he had made up. He also told how he had been with me when most of the co-incidental meetings with Lira happened. He knew I had no part in them, and that I was not stalking her. He told us how Jez lured him into drinking alcohol again, and used sex to persuade him to agree to the lies against me. He had betrayed me for a price.
One would expect that the second meeting results would have been conveyed to those present in the first meeting, to expose the lies of Lex. But they were not. I was amazed at how the leaders protected each other without considering the consequences to others.
One of the subjects of my letters to the pastors was about when one of the leaders hurt someone, they did not care that the person left the church. After all, they had so many new people coming in daily it didn’t matter to them. I reminded them of the shepherd who left the 99 sheep and went after the lost one, so he would not be devoured by wolves.
After that, one of the pastors made a point in his next sermon to come over on the stage near me and glare at me as he explained this parable was about going out and bringing in new converts. But the context there shows it is about being careful to not hurt God’s little children, and that the lost sheep had been part of the flock in the first place.
But I stayed. And I sent more letters to the pastors. I did not include what had happened to me in the letters. I had been seeing signs that the church was being led away from why God had brought the revival in the first place. The revival reached a peak when this church began to see revelation about the works of evil spirits, and had been teaching about it, though not from the pulpit. It was discussed in the back-room teachings and at well attended spiritual warfare conferences. It had become obvious that even Christians can harbor evil spirits. And the church had become active in helping people get rid of these spirits. This was the purpose of the deliverance ministry I had been in.
I saw signs the church was backing off of this controversial subject due to the pressure from outsiders who heard of the teachings. This was one of the subjects of my letters, as I felt God wanted this truth out to refute the man’s tradition that an evil spirit could not remain in a born again Christian. Much more later on this subject.
I had been going to the meetings with the assistant pastor, as assigned. He said he could see no problem in me that he could work on. Nevertheless, he handed me a pamphlet to read as we parted. It was about, “Defiance.” I had learned to pay attention to anybody’s advice, even if it came from an enemy. It might be a needed message from God. I read that booklet and went into great emotional pain again. But this time I knew the name of the spirit I was to battle from the beginning. It was, “Defiance.”
Long forgotten memories from my childhood came up. I remembered one time I was at a contest, watching an event. A friend came over and asked me to come help him argue against a call a judge had made. I told him I had not even seen that event. He told me that didn’t matter, because I could argue anything and win. Ouch!
I remembered when as a child, I was desperate to be loved. I would try to sit close to my mother on the couch, hoping she would respond in kind. But she merely moved further away. As these memories continued, I knew I had made the decision that if nobody was going to love me, then I would love nobody! That would show them! I did not know I was making a vow that would follow me through my life.
God does miraculous things to bring up memories. He had my car break down as I came homeward from a long trip. It “just happened” to falter as I entered the small town I had been born in, yet hundreds of miles from my present home. I put the car in for repair and walked to a restaurant. I looked at the worn sidewalks my parents must have carried me over, so many years before.
As I passed the small town center park, I looked up at the tall trees there, fascinated. Now I knew why I always felt déjà vu when I looked up at tall trees. I realized my parents had often placed me on the ground there as a baby, and all I could see was those trees. But I also realized from this that I was never held, if it could be avoided. When I got home, I discreetly asked my parents about that park, and it had all been just as I suspected.
I also remembered once when I was in my grammar school classroom, writing on the blackboard. There were visiting dignitaries that day. Then I heard my teacher say, “David! Our very best speller! You misspelled Des Moines!” I realized that had been the only time of my childhood that I had been affirmed, even if it came with criticism.
In between the many memories that came up, I saw a vision. I was a child, standing with my fists doubled up and my legs spread as if preparing to fight. I was glaring at someone not in the picture. But I knew it was my mother. Then I heard my dad’s voice say, “Banty rooster!” I had forgotten he used to call me that when I stood up to my parents. Bantam roosters will defy anything threatening them.
I came to realize that all my relationships through my life had been affected by my defiant attitude. I had made this a defense to protect my inner feelings of falling short of others’ expectancy of me. I saw that I had refined my ways of defiance so that it could hardly be seen, yet it would still make my point. It had become my very way of getting through life feeling better about myself and getting my way. And I knew I had been absolutely blind to this evil in me.
Worse yet, I realized that the letters I had sent to the church were accompanied by a subtle spirit of defiance from me, even if they were also true. No wonder they could not be accepted. I was devastated to see this. I knew what I had to do to rid myself of this spirit. It must be exposed so it loses its hold. But this time, I knew it could not just be confessed to friends I trusted with such information.
I went to the two pastors who had crucified me and in tears, confessed the defiance spirit I had found in me. I knew I could not claim I was still right in the letters, as ANY justification would void the deliverance. Yes, I was delivered by doing this. But it hurt that the pastors would only find themselves reassured they had been right all along in persecuting me. They would remain blind to their own evil doings.
As I mentioned earlier, my first deliverance took over a year. In each one after, I learned more how to co-operate with the Holy Spirit. The last and main deliverance took only about two weeks from the time I found the name of the spirit until it was sent away.
You might ask if I forgave my persecutors. One day I was driving home, and suddenly saw a vision of the leader who had wronged me. I felt a deep sadness for him, and began wailing, crying out for God to forgive him. I had to pull over for safety, as the wailing was so strong and from so deep within me. Then one by one, the faces of my other enemies came before me, and I wailed for them too. I begged for God to not hold this against them, for they knew not what they were doing. How could I not forgive them, after finding I had hidden evil within myself all those years without knowing it.
I had paid little attention to Jesus’ words that we would experience what He had experienced on earth. Now I saw that; I had come for my own, and had been rejected by her because of religious leaders; I had been betrayed by my disciple for a price; I had been put on trial on lies; I was found guilty of those lies; My ministry was cut off; I had been spiritually crucified. Sadly, even after I forgave Jud, he went out and hung himself.
Before we go any further in this, I want to make one thing absolutely clear. We are shown in the Bible that God chooses our authorities, not man. And He tells us to honor them, whether we agree with them or not. My writing about them is with great trepidation, and I want to be sure this is about exposing evil in ALL men, and is not in any way meant to cause revolt against our leaders. Rather, it is my hope here to cause us to do another of God’s commands, to pray for them. And to realize the evil I speak of here is in all of us, not just our leaders.
The reason I have such trepidation in writing these things comes from an experience I once had. I had recently left my “traditional” church and joined a Charismatic one. I found it much more exciting, and wondered why I had wasted so much time in my previous church.
One day, a few of us from my new church were discussing this, and putting down our old pastors and churches. Just as I finished putting down my former pastor, I felt an almost violent movement in my belly area, and a VERY loud stern voice said, “THOSE ARE MY PEOPLE!” I was quite shaken by this, and I immediately spoke out my repentance. I’ve never forgotten that reprimand.
Please, please remember the purpose of this writing, and do not turn against people that you consider not up to your standards of belief in the faith. Instead, open your spiritual eyes to see the overall truths, but meanwhile knowing, “they know not what they do.” And let the Holy Spirit also teach you what you know not, that you do.
In this present time this becomes most important. We are entering a time where many preachers and prophets are demonstrating their own hidden motives, often of greed and seeking fame. They try to gain a following of disciples to legitimize their status. Many are even now seeing this and are trying to warn them of their error.
Presently, it is almost impossible to convince those caught up in error because they see God is not angry at them, and lets the movements go on and on. Besides this, they have a wall up that prevents prophets from even confronting them with truth. Already, many who have run into this wall have shown anger, rather than love for these brethren.
That leaves us only to obey Jesus, and pray for them that the Holy Spirit will convict them.
For a period of time many people, even strangers, would begin telling me what evil had happened to them in their churches. They did this with no prodding from me, and it was very discouraging. God wanted me to not rely only on second-hand stories, so He gave me my own experience, as shown in the previous story. But another experience was particularly interesting, and is worth telling about.
Mary and I filled as much time as we could by going anywhere Jesus was being preached, and we often went to a particular mid-week service at another church. It was thrilling to watch the physical healings there. And it was awesome to hear the pastor give out accurate words of knowledge for people. We admired the pastor greatly.
But one day, Mary’s car was stolen. When it was found, it had some minor damage and all her personal items were gone. A few weeks later, she received a phone call from the police. A school had searched the backpack of a high school student, and found Mary’s credit card in it. He was being held in jail. He confessed that he and two other students had stolen her car and he had taken the credit card. He would not reveal the others who had been with him.
Mary was allowed to talk to the boy, and we were surprised to find he was the son of the above mentioned pastor. She wrote the pastor, asking him to pay for the damage done to her car. No answer. Nor did further tries get him to reply. So she contacted the church board and got permission to attend the next board meeting.
At the meeting, Mary told her story. The pastor said he would not pay anything, because the other boys would not have to pay anything. I reminded him that it was his own son who withheld the names of the other boys. He merely repeated what he had said before, ignoring my point.
I asked him if he considered what the Bible told us about how to treat widows and orphans, and that perhaps his decision would not be in line with Jesus’ words. He sneered, and asked me if I really wanted to get into a verse by verse argument with him. His board members showed shock and disgust at his retort. So the meeting ended with Mary and me shaking our heads in wonder at what we had seen and heard.
Out of curiosity, I sneaked into that church again months later. Sure enough, the healings and words of knowledge continued to flow as before. At one point, I thought he recognized me, so I left quickly so I would not be thrown out. I would now put nothing past this pastor.
To further prove the point of today’s pastors now having fulfilled their vows and that they are now blind to their arrogance, let’s consider probably one of the most famous TV pastors ever. He took his robe into the cabin of an airplane for a trip. He did not want it to get wrinkled, so he wanted to hang it in the cabin. The steward properly refused this because it is against Federal Aviation Administration laws. But he made a fuss and went over the steward’s head to the pilot and gained permission.
This event went to national news headlines. After he returned home, he stated he had not broken a commandment in his actions. Didn’t he? Aren’t we to obey the laws of the land? Was it loving to humiliate the steward? Was he a good witness to the steward, and will this man ever even consider becoming a Christian after that? What did the many news watching unbelievers think of this action?
Another following event happened with this pastor, making our local news. He wanted to expand his huge church campus and needed some adjoining land to build a museum of sorts, to honor past greats of the faith. The owner did not want to sell the land to the pastor for that. He said if it was for something useful like an orphanage, he would sell. That message from God seems to have gone over the pastor’s head.
Maybe it is time to take another look at our churches and leaders. We enter a church and get saved, and assume the churches must be following God’s will. After all, there are so many already there that are following the pastor and his teachings, so it must be right. Oh? Maybe we need to look in the Book of Acts and see if we are building improper “towers” on the foundations the Apostles laid out.
Why do I call our churches, “Towers?” Anytime we see God mentioning Babylon in the Bible, it is showing man’s evil. Babylon had become a major settlement after the Flood, and its leader was a man named, “Nimrod.” He did not want the people wandering off from under his influence, so he caused them to build a tall tower, later known as “The Tower of Babel.” Babylon means, “Gate of god.” But it is not the God we know of.
It was supposedly another way to heaven. Perhaps they thought in their rebellion against God, that the tower height would save them in case of another flood. In any case, it gave the people something to stay gathered around, rather than leaving. God showed His feelings about this by confusing their language, so people had to leave and group with others speaking the same language. Is this tower concept beginning to sound familiar?
Do today’s pastors gather people around them, ask them for their tithes, and cause them to build a “tower” to show off their significance? The significance they once vowed to achieve? Like the patriarchs, they would not know this leaven was a part of their desire to serve God. Wolves in sheep’s clothing do not necessarily know they are wolves.
But we must make no mistake about this. These pastors are doing all they know to do to serve God. Indeed, they actually hear from Him what to preach about. But the depth of their teachings can only go to where their knowledge boxes allow them to go. God will not tear down those conclusion labels, (strongholds,) they have chosen to block out truth. They must find them and tear those strongholds down themselves. Until then, we can only hear baby milk talk coming from their mouths. Until they peel back another Bible layer to see they are teaching men’s traditions more than God’s will, they will remain blind, leading the blind.
Do our pastors struggle to show us from every vantage point to follow the law of tithing? And this, while telling us we are free from the Law? Look in the Book of Acts. No longer were tithes pushed on the believers. Rather, they gave when and where they saw needs. Of course, this properly included compensation for the traveling teachers of the Gospel. You may be tempted here to mention that Jesus told some religious leaders they were right to tithe. But don’t forget, Jesus lived His life in the Old Testament Law times.
And remember, the OT tithes were supposed to be used in certain ways by the leaders. One was to support the ministers so they could serve God full time. But they were also supposed to help the orphans and widows, who had no man in the house to pay their way. (Just for the record, the word translated “widows” included divorced women.) And some of the tithe was to help the stranger passing through the Land.
For the most part, today’s churches forget the orphans and widows, spending much money instead to tempt the strangers to come join them. When they do find an orphan or widow in need, they tell them to give what they can so God can give them an increase. They are not ashamed to take the widow’s mite to help build their tower. And more than that, many of them live off the fat like Solomon did, making themselves mansions to live in.
They twist Paul’s words to make it seem we are all supposed to prosper financially. They conveniently forget Paul spent much time in prisons, hardly prospering financially. And at least once because he didn’t want to take people’s money, he made tents for a living. We are also told that Jesus was rich, so we should be, too. They conveniently forget that He had to send Peter to catch a fish and take a coin from its mouth to pay their taxes.
One must ask himself just what God prefers when He spoke of His people prospering. Would He have meant to prosper financially, or spiritually? He also said His people perish for lack of knowledge. Was this perishing for lack of knowledge of how to get rich, or was it lack of spiritual knowledge? When Jesus came on the scene, His thrust was trying to get people to think spiritually. And this, even in the many things He said about money.
I wonder if these get-rich-now preachers ever consider the third world Christians, where millions are dying for their faith. How would their prosperity-now message go over in those countries? If they were preaching only the pure Gospel, the same message would be appropriate anywhere in the world. Their new gospel is tainted.
These words are not against anyone being rich. God does make some rich. This is about how we get rich, and what do we do with our riches. Are they God-given, or man-taken from others for wrong motives? After all, when preachers teach on tithes and offerings, they are the nearest and most obvious ones to give them to. Nor is this about not giving. It is about our motives in giving. Do we give to get, as is promoted by many telethons? Or do we give where God shows us a need, with no expectations of earthly reward?
So when one of us questions one of these preachers, we are warned to not touch God’s anointed. They forget the Bible is full of prophets “touching” God’s anointed when they needed correction. “Christ” means, Anointed One. So we who are called, “Christians” are also anointed ones. When Jesus warned us not to run around because of rumors that “Christ” is here or there, perhaps He was warning us of those who constantly talk about their anointing, and that those may be the ones He said would be coming saying, “I am the Christ.” They certainly are in the business of creating a following.
Many of today’s ministries have become big businesses, operating as such. They spend much of the money sent to them to promote this business to keep money pouring in. Most offer trinkets or special deals to persuade people to send more. And they put people’s names on a mailing list so they can barrage them with more pleas for money. Even prophets God has sent to warn them have instead chosen to join them. I think if Jesus came on the scene, He would turn over all their money-making sales tables.
We have seen all too many ministries that started out well, spending given money with great care. But in time, like Balaam before them, they have searched out ways to get around what they before knew was right. They now seek earthly treasures rather than laying up treasures in Heaven waiting for them.
This includes those who have received special personal gifts from others, aside from gifts to their ministries. This, they spend upon themselves, rather than helping the poor who are always with us. They justify their mansions and luxurious living as their just dues, twisting Scriptures to fit the real desires of their hearts. The old adage fits here: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And just like our patriarchs before them, they know not what they do.
Some of our TV teachers’ names have become more famous than the Jesus they preach, no matter how many times they tell us that all the glory goes to God. They can sound holy even as they tickle peoples’ ears.
The early church simply met in homes of believers and needed no tower, and the Gospel spread like wildfire.
So what is the point I’m trying to make? To see it, let’s look at one of Jesus’ parables in Mt. 25:1-13 . (top)
In this, the ten virgins were waiting for the groom to come so they could go to the wedding they had been invited to. When he arrived in the dark, five of them did not have enough oil for their lamps to light the path. Sometimes, something not said in a parable can tell us more than the parable itself. If you or I had a lamp, we would share the light and walk together side by side. But note that in this parable, there was no allowance for them to walk in another’s light. That should tell us something.
When the Israelites were heading for the Promised Land, they refused to hear directly from God, for fear of Him. They insisted on walking in Moses’ light instead, and floundered. Even after they made it into the Land, they insisted on hearing from God through others. And we know the many ways that failed as their religious leaders stifled them with law after law they must live under.
Likewise, today we listen to a man who takes the place of the Holy Spirit dealing with us personally, One to one. I hope by now you see that our pastors have grafted themselves between us and the Vine, and they have deceived both themselves and us in doing so. No, they do not know what they are doing. They have merely followed the traditions of their predecessors who built towers on the foundations the Apostles laid for us.
We are building a new Babylon.
We need to come to some conclusions, so the following chapters will be trying to nail down what I have written before. In the foregoing, we can see that the devil’s main purpose is to keep us from gaining wisdom. He knows wisdom defeats him, so he begins early in our life to cause us to make decisions by emotions, rather than wisdom. God tells us to be like Him, but without wisdom, we cannot.
Personal learned wisdom, righteousness, and love are so closely related, that we could say they mean the same thing. If we have any one of those, we will have all three. Of course, we are talking about God’s kind of love, not emotional romance love. God’s kind of love will do righteousness, no matter the cost.
When we are delivered from the evil spirits that found their way in while we were children, wisdom takes their place in us. We come to know who we really are, and no longer need an act to present to the world to make us look significant.
Real learned wisdom that comes after being delivered gives us simple choices to make without the influence of laws, emotions, or evil spirits. It will not take self discipline to fulfill this wisdom. Yes, we can still make unprofitable choices, but somewhere down the line there will be a price to pay for doing so.
Do we think omniscient God did not know before He created us that we would eat the fruit of the wrong tree? When we did, it started us on the Path to wisdom. The devil played into His hand by tempting Eve to take the fruit of the tree of knowledge, good and evil. God in His three parts said, “Now they are like us, knowing good and evil.” But He was speaking of things not yet as though they were already finished, as He often did when prophesying the future.
Wisdom could have been put in Adam and Eve from the beginning, but that would have made them like robots, programmed to love God and others. He wants a Bride for Jesus that will give her love out of her self, no matter the price. This kind of wisdom can only come about by the Bride experiencing both good and evil, so She can then make righteous choices. Solomon was an example of one who got the gift of wisdom freely, and he never became righteous.
Jesus warned us about the blind leading the blind into a pit. He also told us we cannot rise above our teacher. It seems logical then, our teacher should be Jesus, in a personal walk with Him on the Narrow Path. He said He was the Way, didn’t He? There, we would learn how much of what we had been taught was from men’s traditions. We would see we have made ourselves accountable to men, rather than Jesus. When we stand before Him at judgment, we will know that we cannot point our finger at the pastor God sent us. That didn’t work for Adam, and it won’t work for us.
You might doubt God would let His churches go on believing traditions more than God. But we need only look at how He allowed Israel to go on and on thinking they were the apple of His eye as He let the sin be complete before He judged them. Likewise as we today learn newly revealed truths, some of us may find ourselves rejecting them because of our traditions. It may be that we will find ourselves in the position of the Scribes and Pharisees, not recognizing the work of the Holy Spirit. Jesus warned them they were close to blaspheming the Holy Spirit.
For way too long the church has failed to face the facts of demons’ purpose on earth. Churches keep people squeamish of even considering the reality of the devil’s use of demons in us. Instead, they unknowingly teach us to follow the Law, because they see that it does at least a little to fight doing wrong.
The tradition that Christians cannot harbor demons has been a long believed lie. At no place in the Bible does it say that demons and the Holy Spirit cannot inhabit the same body. In fact, the Bible has evidence they can both be in a saved person. For example, when Peter was trying to persuade Jesus to not go to His death, Jesus said to Peter, “Get thee behind me, satan.”
We might consider how many times Jesus spoke of wickedness and evil being in ALL men’s hearts, and that He said that while His disciples were present. Did it go over their heads that this could include them, too?
We have further evidence in Luke 9:55 (top). Here, Jesus and His disciples were refused entrance to a town. Some of the disciples wanted to call fire down on them. Jesus told them they did not know what manner of spirit they were of. (Note; this verse is not in all translations.)
Another place to look is 2 Cor. 11:3-4 (top). There, Paul is writing to people he knew were saved. He is warning them about receiving another spirit, brought to them by a false prophet. This spirit, in addition to the One they had received from Jesus.
Another place to note is after Jesus came out of His temptation, He said the devil found nothing in Him. Would that not note that anyone who did fall to temptation would have something in them? Something that would tempt them to sin? What else could that be than an evil spirit?
I know that few of you who read the following will be convinced, but I must tell what I witnessed, anyway. I was surprised when these things became obvious, too. At the first session for our deliverance training class, the teacher told us a story of what happened at a recent conference he attended. He told about a man he had led to the Lord. The man wanted to be baptized right away. Arrangements were made to do so the next day.
When the man came up out of the water, he was manifesting of demons. What? I went to the teacher later and asked him how a person could be saved, if only for a day, and still have demons. He merely told me it happens, not wanting to get into details then. I continued the classes and learned much more.
The deliverance ministry was meant to help Christians who had long ongoing problems in their lives. The teams were divided into groups of three people. One would do most of the talking while the other two silently prayed in tongues and listened for words from God about the person being ministered to. Often in this Holy Spirit atmosphere, the victim would begin to manifest of demons. If you had witnessed this, you would have no doubts of its reality, nor would you doubt they were also saved.
Now, know this was nothing like the demoniac with a legion of demons, nor like the movies depicting exorcising demons. And know also that no one is “possessed” by demons. That is too strong a word. After all, the demoniac was still able to make his way to Jesus, wasn’t he? So instead of possession, let’s use the word used now in most new translations, “demonized.” Most exorcisms are quite calm, with none of the theatrics we might have seen on TV.
Most demons do their work in us while we are children, and they remain silent and hidden after that for the most part. They usually only rise up in us to “help” us defend against our significance being challenged.
First, let’s tell about an elderly widow who had before been on the same deliverance ministry team. She came for help because she had an inordinate fear at night alone. As we questioned her about the fear, she slid off the chair and slithered on the floor, hissing like a snake. We cast that demon out of her. She said she was very surprised, having cast demons out of many before and now finding she had one, too.
Another example was when a pastor’s wife from a Spirit-filled church came for help about the weird supernatural things going on around her in her home. As we questioned her to find out more, she told us she often has terrible headaches, and she had one now. I asked her if the headaches ever move from place to place in her head? She said they did. I told her to tell us if it moved while we were in session. Moving pain is a manifestation. We never went after demons unless they manifested first.
Not much later, she said the pain had moved. I commanded the demon to manifest. It did, and her face contorted and her voice changed dramatically. (Note that face and voice changes are not always evident when a demon speaks through its host.) We questioned the demon, knowing it had no choice but to answer the truth in the presence of the Holy Spirit. It told us its name was, “Deceit.”
We asked how it got in her, and it told us he had convinced her to cheat on a test in grammar school, allowing him in. And it told her he would always be there to make her look smart. She agreed to this, and had made a life of others looking up to her for how smart she was. We brought the lady back and questioned her on this, and she admitted it had happened just this way. For hours we tried to cast this demon out of her, to no avail. She was not willing to lose the significance that appearing smart gave her.
This instance came as God was showing me the many ways demons get permission to enter children. A child merely agreeing with a demon’s lies gives it permission to enter. Just as our agreeing with Jesus’ truth saves us and lets Him enter us. I seldom cast demons out of people anymore, because if they don’t know how they got in the first time, the demons can soon come back in.
A lot of what God was showing me was how parental authority had much to do with permission for demons to enter a child. We just do not understand that this authority means much in the spiritual world. A parent’s attitude and words to the child can give them permission to enter. This was partially described in an earlier part of this book, where we showed how evil spirits guide the thinking of vulnerable children.
This is magnified when an authority may take sexual liberties with a child. Several kinds of demons can come in because of this, and certainly it permits a spirit of sexual lust to enter. I have dealt with many victims of this type abuse. Some definitely want this demon out, while others develop a relationship with the demon of lust, even to some allowing incubus, sexual intercourse with an invisible demon. The victim may not like all the other things that come along with this, but they are unwilling to give up the pleasure part and remain in bondage by choice.
I could write many of these experiences, but the few here will have to do. Earlier in this book, I told about my deliverance trials. What did you think that meant? I was being delivered of demons! In each case, I was taken back by the Holy Spirit to see how I fell for the demons’ lies as a child. As I saw how I was duped, I repented, but more than this, I rebuked the demon and commanded it to leave. It did, and a great change came over me as a result, each time. One of the times, I even felt two demons burst through my lower chest in a hurry to leave.
We need to tell more about the demons’ purpose. First, a strong one gets into a child, then he works at getting many underlings in as well. They like to rule over other demons. Each of the demons has a unique specialty. Scan the list below and see if you have any tendencies their names describe. These could be traits that you have to either hide or discipline yourself to overcome. Some, you will not even know are in you, as your knowledge box label will prevent you from seeing it.
In no particular order: Deceit, envy, lies, scorn, strife, panic, impulsiveness, greed, pride, jealousy, procrastination, control, anger, hate, self-pity, bitterness, bully, vengeance, fear, covetousness, prejudice, theft, manipulation, shy, rejection, obsession, depression, tardy, suicide, macho, argumentative, homosexual, murder, defiance, lust, laziness, gluttony, oppression, filth, selfish, addictive, infirmity, self-mutilation, negative, darkness, over-achiever, arrogance, and etc; Yes, there are more.
Demons have no mercy in trying to find a body to occupy. Some people are born with brain problems, which give easy access to demons. Sometimes brain injury or an imbalance in brain chemicals opens the way. Autism, Downs Syndrome, Tourette’s Syndrome, bipolar, and at least one form of Alzheimer’s can sometimes allow in the most vile of demons, among other problems. Then there are several mental disorders which are accompanied by a myriad of internal voices of demons. Need we mention that dabbling in the occult is a direct invitation for demons to enter a person? But the most common way in is as earlier explained about our childhood.
You would be surprised how many preachers have seen people they knew as faithful believers who momentarily openly manifested of demons. But most preachers don’t know how to handle it, nor do they want to face the ridicule they would get from their peers, should they talk to them about it. Besides, they see that they are no better than the victims, and this might hint that the pastor himself had demons. Who of them would be willing to face the shame of that? So they remain silent and end up helping the devil keep his work secret.
Our church once had a pastors’ conference, and a multitude of pastors from nearly every denomination from all over the world attended. During one meeting, so many of them began manifesting of demons, the scheduled program had to be set aside so those could be ministered to. I have seen two of the assistant pastors from our church manifest of demons.
When the recent “Laughing Movement” and “Toronto Movements” swept through many churches, I looked on with amazement. We were seeing actual moves of the Holy Spirit and manifestations of evil spirits going on side by side. What troubled me is that the leaders could not discern the difference, and blessed the whole thing as from God.
Church missionaries often come home from third world countries after having seen demons openly manifesting in people, even after they were saved. But they are prevented from telling about that part when they make their report to the congregations. Pastors fear talking about the enemy, because that may frighten some of their sheep.
I believe that each time a church gets close to seeing the truths about demons in Christians, that a principality or power fallen angel is especially assigned to that church. Their job would be to foment problems, stirring up demons in people and causing them to rise up against such thinking. Thus, Christians are kept blind to the truths.
So there is nothing more I can say to convince you about demons in Christians. You will either believe it and take steps from there, or you will ignore it to your shame at judgment. Your choice.
I don’t remember much of how I first became conscious of the power of our childhood vows. Of course, I saw the vows I had made when the Holy Spirit brought up my childhood memories. I have also dealt with people who, it became apparent, made vows in their youth.
I’ve seen absolute jealousy and the need to control what a mate was doing at all times. And this was from long ago seeing parents going through a troubled marriage in which one parent was involved in adultery. This so affected the child, that vows were made to never let something like that happen to her. This gave her a distrust of men, and a jealousy that demanded full time accountability. The frustration of not being able to control the situation at all times brought on panic attacks. Love given by such a demand cannot succeed, as love must be given willingly or it fails.
I also saw among young ones whom I had taken into my home, that they were making vows of how things would be when they grew up. Especially, that they would never be like their parents are. Then later, they find themselves doing exactly what their parents did and condemn themselves for this.
God took me through many “co-incidents” to show me about shame, just as He had in showing me about deliverance. I suppose it began one night during worship at a meeting. I saw a vision of myself as a little child, sitting alone and lonely. Then one side of the vision lit up brightly and in ran The Father, holding His robe up off the floor as He ran to me.
He pounced on me and we tumbled and rolled on the floor. Then He sat on my belly, holding me down but being careful to not put His full weight on me. He was tickling my ribs and we laughed hilariously. He finally rolled off me and lay laughing beside me, trying to catch His breath from our play. Then I heard the words, “This is how your father should have treated you as a child.’’
After that, I began having experiences as I went about my daily routines. I’ll tell a few of many here. I went to the dentist to have some work done. I asked for extra pain-killer, because they have little effect on me. Even after the extra amount, I jumped when he hit nerves as he drilled. He had no patience with me, and began ridiculing me for being, “such a baby.”
I left his office angry that I had been shamed, and went to a restaurant for lunch. They were not busy and seated me immediately. But no waiter came to serve me. I waited and waited as I watched the waiters chatting with each other. I finally got up and went to a café across the street. The exact same thing happened there. As I said before, I watch for co-incidents, and I saw God’s hand in showing me being ignored. I began to ponder these things as He showed me my shame of being ignored as a child.
I remembered my dad sitting in his chair hiding behind his newspaper. He did not like this routine to be disturbed. I remembered that he seldom even scolded me, and discipline was left to my mom. He had seen how angry he could become with my older siblings, so by the time I came along he had chosen to be aloof from us for our safety. Later, he became an alcoholic and this kept him even further from us.
These memories and more came along, including times with my classmates. I happened across an old school picture, and was amazed to see the bewildered child I had been, standing there among my classmates. I saw I had struggled to just get through each day with as little trouble as I could manage. In time, I became the class clown, finding I got at least some attention, good or bad. I was also pondering the experiences I remembered when going through the deliverances, filling in details about why I felt so much rejection and shame as a child.
Another memory came up. I was too young as a child in my crib for this memory to have come naturally. As my teeth came in, I chewed the paint off my crib rails and the nearby window sill. I somehow remembered my parents’ concern over my eating leaded paint. Now I knew why I had what they now call, “Attention Deficit Disorder.” No wonder I felt shame that I could not learn as easily as my classmates.
I went to a church conference and the speaker talked about shame, how we feel inferior to the “beautiful people” who seem to have everything going for them. Mary went through my old music recordings and found a song she began playing. I had never noticed before that it had appropriately mentioned, ”shame” three times in three different ways in the song, written by a wise composer.
I once had a seven year old fatherless neighbor I had led to the Lord. She later went out into the world and did the devil’s pleasure. She made contact with me again when she was about twenty, and we renewed our friendship. Shortly thereafter, she lost everything, and she was pregnant. I took her in. She became bedridden with the pregnancy, and we both saw that I was being used by God to be the father she never had. I took care of her every need in her helplessness, and gave her the fatherly love she had never been given.
When the baby was born, I became its “grandpa.” She could not have received more love anywhere else. I got to see firsthand as she grew that in spite of this love, she used every way to try to manipulate us into getting her wrong desires met. The lady also adopted her two nieces, one eleven, and the other eight. Their activities took us into the company of many other children, and I got to observe them as well. God was using this and bringing up my own childhood memories to show me how shame was prevalent right from birth. That no matter how much children are loved, they will still feel rejection and seek ways to justify themselves.
Mary and I had always been able to talk openly about any subject before, and I tried to tell her what God was showing me about shame. It took a while before I noticed she was resisting this subject. We had been like brother and sister, but now, this was driving a wedge between us. In time, it split us apart. I could also see that she sensed I discerned her hidden motives, and that I was seeing through her manipulation. I had to go through this without my best friend.
This went on for a long time as God showed me more about shame and its power. Then one day, He told me to write down the order of the evil powers. I wrote, “demons, fallen angels, devil.” He let me know something was missing. I pondered this for quite some time, and gave up, frustrated. But He pressured me to finish it. (I won’t go into why I believe that demons and fallen angels are different, as that would take another whole book.)
It may have taken a few months of frustration before I saw in a revelation moment what he wanted me to see. That “shame” was the spirit of the devil. That “shame” was the name of the unholy spirit. And that the order of the evil powers was; “demons, fallen angels, shame, devil.” He made it obvious He was pleased that I had seen this by pouring out a blessing on me that I could hardly stand.
This opened my mind to see that this makes shame the spirit of anti-christ. That this spirit within us keeps us from becoming truly like Christ. And that leaves us to only try to act like Him by following the Law.
Way back when I was just beginning to learn about God in church, I was confused. I heard it often preached we no longer followed the Law, but live under grace. I wondered why they then still preached the Law? Surely, they were right and I was wrong, because all the people seemed to easily believe what they were being told.
One day back then as I left church, I thought to myself, “Someone should write a little answer book that explains this and other contradictions I seem to see.” As I thought that, I could see that book in my mind’s eye. You are reading it.
So what do I see coming in our near future, before Jesus comes for His Bride? I believe there are many besides me that see the evil leaven in churches. And that we have been set aside until now to come out speaking as if with one voice about it. New truth directly from the Bible will bring new revelation for our era.
Teachers of today are quick to point out that teachers are appointed by God, but too many of them dismiss the rest of the five-fold ministries. I have watched as some prophets tried to bring warnings from God into churches. They are put down, and only the prophets who tell how greatly we are pleasing God are allowed to speak. They call this, “Edifying the church.”
Preachers need to reread how God dealt with this in the OT. He sent a deceiving spirit to cause false prophets to speak lies to them, since that was their preference anyway. Has He changed? Have some of our “popular” prophets already been deceived? Have their now achieved hidden vows made them speak what makes them feel an inner satisfaction? Have they mistaken this for God’s approval?
A denomination should not smugly look at other denominations that these days are being found in sexual sin coverup and feel that, “at least, we are not that bad.” That may justify you in other people’s eyes, but does it justify you in God’s eyes? Does He consider your wrongs as only little wrongs? Comparisons are not justifications. Iniquity is iniquity.
Nor should any denomination scorn another that openly follows a man as if he were Christ, Himself. Rather, it would profit a denomination to see if they do the same thing, only in a much more subtle way.
I have had several experiences and visions both during my trials and since, regarding the end of days. One night at a home fellowship meeting, I was asked to open the meeting with prayer. I began, but soon the Holy Spirit came upon me. Everyone sensed it, and all fell to the floor. As the prayer progressed, it became a warning to not make our leaders our guides, but rather, Jesus Himself. Soon, the heads of the leaders popped up, showing disapproval.
The teaching after was changed from the planned one, and it was about dismissing what the people had heard in my prayer. The next two weeks were also about that. After the last one, I went to the teacher and thanked him for the gentle mercy he had used. It was hot that night, and at the break, I went outside to cool down. Suddenly, the Presence came strongly. I had to sit down, or I would have fallen down. Then I heard, “You handled that well. I am going to bless you.”
He did bless me, but it did not feel like a blessing at that time. That was when my church turned against me in full force. But from that persecution, I was to learn much of what I now write about. Life was so abundant during those trying times. And they were abundant without seeking riches, but rather, seeking His righteousness.
One day shortly after those teachings, I was in the middle of intercession, and asked God to bless that homegroup. I was loudly interrupted with, “STOP THAT! I WILL NOT HEAR THAT PRAYER! THEY KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING!” Now, I did not understand that at all. I had only known the part that, “They know not what they are doing.” Now I had to figure this out. It took a long time for me to understand.
The leaders of that group knew I heard from God, having witnessed many accurate visions and words of knowledge from God through me. When someone asked a Bible question they couldn’t answer, they often turned to me for the answer. They had even twice enthusiastically anointed me to be a teacher, saying the Holy Spirit was telling them to do so both times. But I saw they were afraid to let me teach at those meetings. They knew I did not conform to their traditions.
I finally saw that when Jesus confronted the religious leaders, that there was something in them cautioning them against coming against Him, but they let their leaven overrule it. He was not conforming to their picture of what the Messiah should be like. And these leaders of the homegroup let the same leaven overrule their acceptance of me. In both cases, they did not see God immediately correcting them, so after a little time went by, they felt assured they had done right. What they did not know they were doing was that they had allowed their self-justification mechanism to take over.
So in a way, they both knew what they were doing, and didn’t know what they were doing. I saw more evidence of this after I was crucified. None of those leaders could look me in the eyes for some time, until they saw that I was not vengeful. I suppose this caused them to think I had seen my wrongs and had repented. But it was only that I had forgiven them.
More about that homegroup; It seems there was a recurring prayer theme there of asking for the water of the Holy Spirit to cover us. In a vision, I saw a huge earthen dam, larger by far than any dam on earth. (Note the dam was earthly.) The water behind it was about to overflow it. I knew the dam was the church of today, blocking the water. Then I saw the dam burst, and torrents of water crashed down the canyon below, violently tearing great chunks out of the canyon walls as it roared downhill. Far more water of the Spirit than anyone can imagine, bursting forth in spite of the church’s earthen dam.
Another vision I had began with my seeing a large yellow object I did not recognize until it rumbled to life. It was a huge ditch digger, and it began going forth, digging a ditch. People were milling around the ditch, waiting their turn to fall in. Then I recognized the driver as the teacher I spoke of above.
Another vision was; I saw a long wall to my left, reaching out into the distance ahead of me. On the close side, it was dry and parched, and I knew it was the church world of today. (The end times church will think it is rich and has no needs, yet it is poor, wretched, blind, etc; Rev. 3:17; top .) And I saw green shrubbery growing from the other side of the wall, reaching over it. Suddenly, a row of long blue trumpets thrust through the shrubs aimed at the church world. I knew that when they blew, it would shake up the churches of today.
I wondered why the trumpets were blue, and asked God to show me. One of the trumpets moved up close for me to examine. It was not like the spun brass horns we know of. It was made of many small rectangles of steel, each fit together absolutely perfectly with the rectangles around them. I saw that each piece had been in the fiery furnace, and had been hammered into shape while red hot. Such heating turns steel blue. I believe the many pieces of those trumpets represent people God has set aside in the fiery furnace to see the truths about today’s churches. And that one day, they will be called forth to blow the trumpets in unison.
One more recent vision I saw was of a doorway on a street. I was suddenly through the door and into what looked like a museum. All was quiet, and everything was absolutely clean. Not a speck of dust anywhere. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a movement. Had the lance of the horse-mounted knight moved? Then I thought I saw another movement. Had the sword of that knight in shining armor moved?
Then I turned back and saw that the mane and tail of the horse were slightly moving. I wondered where the breeze was coming from, and looked at the windows at the back of the room. One of them was slightly opened, allowing a slight breeze. Then I heard, “These are the first stirrings of the war you have been expecting!”
Indeed, for a long time I have felt that calamity would hit the churches, causing a great falling away. But I have sensed that the ones staying in the churches were the ones falling away. And the ones leaving them were the actual Church, having come to its senses.
I have noticed many faithful believers already leaving the churches. They have not given up on God, but have given up on the churches. Some of them have begun forming homegroups with others like themselves. The danger in this is, if they have not been delivered, they will take Babylon right in with them.
I do not believe God is calling all of us out of the churches yet. This is a transition time, and only later will we see which leaders will follow God, and which will continue building themselves towers. Many have been prophesying a soon coming revival. I believe it will come both in the Church, and in the churches. The churches won’t notice the Holy Spirit has departed, and that another spirit has taken His place. I believe this revival will serve God’s purpose. It will separate the sheep from the goats by our own choice.
I must mention here, the present “revivals” we see taking place here and there. I believe these have a demonic purpose. As I said before, God is holding some aside for a future date when they will be sent forth with truth, in the spirit of Elijah. I think these meetings are meant to cause two things. One is to tempt Christians to either seek another jesus. The other is to make sure that when the real Elijahs come forth, that the ones who did not fall for the fake revivals will be too wary to accept the real.
I hope I have presented this in a way that you do not think God is angry about the leaven in the churches…yet! In this transition time, this revelation will come before all believers, and only then will we be held responsible for how we react. It will no longer be that, “We know not what we do.”
Grace, as we know it, will come to an end.
People pray and wait for answers to their prayers. That seems to be proper when one is a babe in Christ, but perhaps it is not God’s preferred method when He wants to grow us up. We talk of following Jesus, but maybe we don’t know just what that means. So we attend churches and visit Him on Sundays. We may even go to a weekday meeting. And we may spend time in prayer daily. But is this, which is generally approved in churches, really following Jesus?
Jesus told us to seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness. The word, “seek” means to “pursue.” This would mean that in every moment, there should be a God-consciousness of seeking what His purpose is in that moment. That is walking with Jesus, not just visiting with Him now and then at appointed times.
When Jesus said to Peter that, “this is the rock on which I will build my church,” He was not talking about Peter being that rock. He was talking about what had just happened with Peter. It had just been revealed by the Father to Peter that Jesus was indeed the Christ, the Son of the Living God. Peter had been blind to that until that moment. ( Mt. 16:17; top ) “Revelation of Jesus” is the Rock.
We may have also had that revelation, but why do we stop there? Isn’t there yet much to learn from God by revelation? If Jesus told us He was building His church on the rock of revelation, then it is up to us to seek more of it. And this, not by merely going to church to hear another talk about God. That is walking with a man, more than with Jesus. We tell people we have a personal relationship with Jesus, but do we really?
In this book, I wrote about watching for “co-incidents” that come from God, and acknowledging them as such. And to keep these things uppermost in our minds as we watch for more. This is living with an expectancy. These will be small parts of a whole revelation. When all God sends on that subject come together, it will amount to a large revelation that we need to grow in Him.
It is apparent that God will seldom if ever tell us our iniquity, as He does our sins. So it is up to those who would be the Bride to search out hidden things. She will know this has a great price, but will be willing to sacrifice for the closer walk She desires with her Bridegroom. This is pursuing first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.
The purpose of this book is to point out that each of us has hidden iniquity, and that the purpose of the trials that come upon us is to help us discover our iniquity for ourselves by revelation. If you have not seen this purpose, then perhaps it may benefit you to reread the book with this goal in mind.
I’ve been writing on these things for years now. As the books have been shared with others, I’ve seen several reactions. Most start out finding it very interesting, but they soon decide to finish the book later, which never comes. Something in them warns them they are about to learn something they do not want to know. Some reject it outright, as they prefer the present status of the churches.
Some read it and fully agree with it, but they do not recognize how to take the Hard Path, even though it is explained in this book. It takes seriously asking God to show any hidden evil in us, and then watching the co-incidents that God will show as signposts along the Way. And to not be dissuaded by what comes upon you as you travel with Him.
My intention at this point was to call this work finished, but I recently witnessed a wonderful event. In an online Christian Chatroom, many women had become distant friends. They decided to meet personally, and gathered at the home of one of these women for a few days of fellowship. God took over, and it went beyond fellowship.
All of us have been hurt, and keep secrets of things we feel ashamed of. When this group met, they opened up their hearts to each other, testifying of many things from their pasts that had been secret before. The result was not shame, as the devil promotes. Instead, the result was pure love and acceptance between the participants.
In the Garden, Adam and Eve had been naked and unashamed. While “Naked” often means nude, some Bible scholars write in commentaries that one use of that word in Genesis means, “no barrier or wedge to drive Adam and Eve apart.” In other words, there was no shame to be kept secret from one another. Their hearts were open and naked to be seen by any.
This is what I expect the Bride to become like. Yes, She will have experienced many shameful things in her life. But She will become naked before others, and unashamed. And shame will lose its power to keep us from becoming one.
I’d love to hear comments and/or questions from you! Email me!
God bless you.