Tasting the Powers of the Coming Age: Some Practical Applications Part 3

4/24/1999

Some Practical Applications (Part 3)

April 1999

Question: When you see weaknesses in your life and you want to live in that unseen realm, is it a thing that will come as you have faith in Jesus and grow in your relationship with Him? How do you position yourself, other than begging God to free you from those weaknesses?

Abandonment: Letting Go

There are a couple of primary issues. First of all, unless you forsake your life, you can’t find it. One of the things that holds people back is that there are things they still want. They don’t renounce their right to A, B, C or D. They think they have the right to A, B, C or D. “I expect and demand and have a right to be happy.” “I expect and demand a right to be successful, or my right to provide a good living for my family. I will not be poor. I refuse to be poor.” A very prominent thing on the mind of someone I know who has gone the way of the abyss was always, “I WILL provide for my family... I will be successful in business... I will. I will.” He didn’t abandon that, and it rotted him like a cancer. Then other things began to show up later on, but it was an incredibly excessive thing. You could see a grain of insanity in him come through whenever that area came to the forefront. There was a kind of insanity. He would not let go of his right to be successful. Maybe when he was a little boy his daddy didn’t do very well in business and he was so ashamed that he didn’t have everything all the other little boys in school had. I don’t know what the history was, but I know that it was an obsession for him. Being successful and demanding the right to provide a good living was something he would not let go of based, perhaps, on something he grew up in, and he wouldn’t repent of it.

Here is another example. Let’s say my favorite relative died young when I was five years old. She was my favorite auntie and I just loved to go to her house every summer—and then she died at age 45 of a heart attack because she was obese. So, from that point on, I’m obsessed with health food, or obsessed with exercise because I was hurt and I had a priority system that I refused to repent of. So now, I am grabbing onto this thing, hedging my bet, and making my world the way I want it to be. I pray about other things, I ask God, beg God about other things, but there is something I want that I won’t forsake. I won’t die to it. There is some right that I have, some area of my life that I have to protect myself in. I have to “be god” and know good and evil and control my destiny.

Maybe there is one seemingly small area—“I always wanted to have five children, and I will have five children,” or “I never wanted to have very many children. I will not have very many children because I grew up in a big family and it was a mess. I will not do that.” “I don’t want to be a blue-collar worker. I will be a white-collar worker because my dad embarrassed me. He was a blue-collar worker. I’m going to be a white-collar worker. I will not quit this job because then that will mean...” If you are obsessed with any area of your life, no matter what it is, it will rise up to kill you.

There was a sister who was so afraid to take her baby to watch the brothers play basketball because a ball might hit the baby or something “could” happen. That’s a kind of obsession that will rob a person of their inheritance. That’s why it was so important that she go and take the baby to the basketball game. Guess what happened the first time she took the baby? Her baby got hit with a ball, but she was okay. Everyone lived. The point is: God has this sense of humor in it all, but He is also absolutely totally committed to us that if we hold on to things and demand our right to anything, then all the other areas of our life will lie in ruin. We will be corrupted, decayed, and unfulfilled because He will only give us little glimpses of His blessing. It won’t be the supernatural highway He longs to give, but only little glimpses of His blessing.

There are a lot of people who defy God in this. “I will too find God’s blessing because I will try so hard, and I will do so many good deeds, and I will learn so much, and I will do this and that. I will defy You, God. I won’t forsake this one thing, but I will do so many other things that You will have to receive me. You will have to bless me. You will have to give me a highway into the realm of eternity and reality. You will have to receive me because I won’t forsake it. I have the right to this. I can expect this. I can demand this. I’m too afraid to give this up. I want this too bad, and You ought to understand that I can’t give this up. I won’t let go of that. You need to understand that about me, because after all, you know about my hurts and fears. But meanwhile, I will not forsake this thing, but You have to give me life. You have to free me from bondage and slavery and fear and emotion, etc. But, no, I’m not going to trust You enough to let go.”

Abandonment is essential in order to see supernatural realms and in order to experience supernatural freedoms in these other areas of your life. Abandonment is an incredibly important part. I’ve seen again and again how a lack of abandonment has kept people earth-bound and limited and shallow. The futility of back and forth, in the storm, out of the storm, unstable living comes oftentimes from this refusal to abandon some thread of life that is almost unspeakably small, and indescribably subtle. But they know in their heart that they are too afraid or unwilling or untrusting, and that they won’t let go of this one thing. Like the rich young ruler, “one thing you lack.” They are hamstrung.

If you want to defeat a cavalry, just cut the hamstring on the horses, because then they can’t do anything. They are still alive, but they can’t do anything anymore. They have no energy, no power, and no thrust left. That’s how a lot of people live their whole lives. They are hamstrung. They are alive and breathing, but there is no thrust, no power. They can’t gallop through the meadow. They can’t jump over the creek. They can’t live the kind of life God intended them to. They’re hamstrung. They are breathing, their brainwaves are still there, but they can’t be all that God wants them to be because “one thing they lack.” They will not forsake their life. They have to hold onto it and protect themselves in one area or another.

Faith: Fixing Your Eyes

There is another issue here that is very dependent upon this heavenly seeing and living: all things are possible to those who believe. You have to believe in the other realm. You have to have your eyes fixed on things that are eternal and not temporary. Your eyes have to be fixed there. Seeing Him who is invisible, Moses forsook the riches of Pharaoh. He saw into the other realm and believed that was reality and therefore could let the other stuff pass by without taking his attention, or controlling his emotions, his feelings or his thoughts. A lot of this, as it says in Romans 6, is reckoning yourself dead to sin but alive to Christ. Why? Because the nature is that the Son of God was manifest to destroy the works of the devil. I feel tempted, but am I really obsessed with it? Do I have to be controlled by this? Or can I have weapons of righteousness in my left hand and my right, supernatural weapons for the tearing down of strongholds? Not that we won’t be opposed by the enemy, but we have to believe with all of our heart that the prince of this world has come, but he has nothing in me. We should be able to drive right past that temptation and say, “That is not me. I don’t need that. That is not who I am. I am not a slave to food. I am not a slave to fear or paranoia. I am not a slave to my children or being afraid for their health or afraid for my health. I am not a slave to those things. Nothing is impossible for those who believe. Nothing is impossible for those who believe.

The people who believe are the people who are so connected with the unseen realm that they don’t do anything apart from God. They are so dependent upon the things the Father says and the things the Father does, that they don’t do or say anything that HE is not doing and saying. As they live watching Him, they bind on earth what has been bound in heaven. Those who believe are watching what is happening in heaven. They are binding on earth what has been bound in heaven. When people live truly believing that heaven reigns and that the unseen world dominates the seen world, then they are able to believe that “all things work together for the good to those who love Him and are called according to His Purposes.” They are able to live without being tossed to and fro by every wind because they believe, and live in, and see, and are dependent upon, and totally confident in, the unseen realm. We are to live by faith and not by sight. To really, honestly, with every fiber of our being believe that we are not limited. Walking on water is not impossible for you any more than it was for Peter. Okay?

The things that we are seeing and experiencing? God can infiltrate the seen world and manipulate what we call “reality” in the human existence because it is truly just a shadow. He can manipulate the seen world for His purposes. He rules everything, the Scriptures say, for the Church. He rules everything for His Church. So part of being able to see the miracles of God and to overcome temptations is to absolutely, totally, be convinced of God’s Sovereignty over these things. In other words...Faith.

Faith is what allows us to overcome the world. This is the victory that overcomes the world, even our faith. Not “even our willpower,” but even our faith. It’s believing that He is and that He rewards those who diligently seek Him. “The work of God is this: to believe on the One He has sent.” This whole thing isn’t about the battle of willpower and fleshly substance and hormones. This is a battle of truth and light. “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life, no man comes to the Father but by Me.” There is but one way to overcome the shadow world: to believe what is really Real. Abandoning ourselves to the Truths of God in the unseen realm—therein lies the power to experience what mortal man cannot. “Reckon yourselves dead to sin.” That is believing that just as He died to sin, and as we submerge ourselves in Him, we too then are dead to sin. The temptations? The prince of this world has nothing in us.

So, part one of the answer to your question is abandonment. Part two is absolute total faith and confidence in God and living in that confidence that says, “I know it seems this way, but that can’t be right. That can’t be so. I refuse to accept that.” You must believe truth rather than believe the lie. We have these supernatural weapons to tear down strongholds. What strongholds are we tearing down? Those things that exalt themselves against the Truth. The things that exalt themselves against Jesus and against His authority. That’s what the supernatural weapons are for—the tearing down of strongholds. The strongholds are built by lies. They are built by things that aren’t true. They are built by what seem to be natural laws, habits, past histories and weaknesses we have, but in Reality we don’t have those weaknesses. We don’t have those limitations. We don’t have that frailty. Those things are lies based on the shadow world. The reality is in Christ, Christ in you.

What is “Christ in you”? What is that? That’s the hope of Glory! That’s not the hope of weakness and failure. Christ in you is the exploration of a world that is without fear, that is without sin, that is without weakness, and that is without failure. It is without selfishness, without pride and loneliness and all that other junk. We are not afraid anymore of giving everything to God. We believe that every spiritual blessing, everything that ever could be and ever will be, is in fact in Christ Jesus. And we are in Him, if we’ve abandoned ourselves. Those are the two things: abandonment and faith. The prince of this world has nothing in us with those two things lying there at the altar in front of us.

Can we fail in spite of those? Yes, but only when we lose sight of those things. Will we fail? Probably. Why? Because we probably will take our eyes off of those things for any number of reasons. Do we have to fail? Absolutely not. Have I? Have you? Absolutely. Do we “have to” anymore? It’s not possible that we “have to.” Expecting to fail defies everything in the Scriptures. You can go back and look at testimony after testimony in the written record of the Scriptures and see the men like Moses and Elijah and David and Paul. Go right down the list and you will see those two things in their lives—abandonment and seeing the unseen world and putting all of their confidence there. Those two things are what sustained them. Those two things are what catapulted and propelled them, not the fact that they never failed or never had temptations. Those two things are beyond question. You can’t look at those men and say they never sinned, never made any mistakes, and at every point in time were pillars of strength and perfect execution. You can’t say that. But you can say the substance and essence of their lives were those two things—Abandonment to God and Absolute Confidence in Faith.

You see the substance that was in David’s heart when he said, “Give me a sling shot. That’s all I need. You will die, big guy.” That wasn’t something he mustered up reading a few bible verses, and then stammering out there to see if he could maybe pull it off. There wasn’t any doubt in his mind. Because he was abandoned, and because he saw into the unseen realm and trusted, he went right into it. That’s what created David. That’s what formed Moses. That’s what gave substance to Abraham. An abandonment and total trust in the unseen and not the seen. What was seen wasn’t important to them. What was unseen was what they were about. That was God’s measuring rod of those men, and that will be God’s measuring rod for us, too. The things men judge by—even as Samuel was selecting David—are not how God makes these decisions. God makes His decisions by abandonment and faith.

Question: If you want to know what you have not yet abandoned to God, He will show you if you truly want to know, won’t He? If there are things left in your life and you are honest with God that you want Him to tell you, there is no way that you will be deceived, right?

Yes, but you definitely won’t like what He shows you or else it wouldn’t be an issue. You will not like what He shows you, and you probably won’t like how He brings it about either. But anytime you want to know, anytime you want to be tested to the limit so that you can explore the depths of the riches, He will take you there. In the meantime, you don’t have to sweat it. The abandonment isn’t that you have already faced everything you could ever face. Abandonment is that you are willing to face anything that would ever come up...whenever, if ever. So, you don’t have to sweat the now, just because the new thing, whatever it is, hasn’t come up yet. I don’t know what the next thing is that God is going to test me in, but I have to lay it all at His feet in trust and abandonment. Whatever that may be, I must face it when the day comes. I’m not waiting for some big new test and some big new event. Things will come as they come, but I need to be postured as abandoned. In the meantime, everything that I do know about I have to lay at His feet. I’m not sweating it...because in the meantime, I’m His child. It’s not a game; it’s a relationship. I’m forever His, and He loves me.

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