It Begins by Believing God

2008

Well, this process of learning to walk in the Spirit—the undergirding principle of the whole thing—is the faith of Abraham. Calling things that are not as though they are. Without wavering, fully persuaded, though our body is as good as dead. Though we can’t do it. Finally—admit it—you can’t do it. That’s a good thing, not a bad thing. Because only at that point can you make a decision: (I can) be apathetic, I can be angry, or I can believe God and, in so doing, learn to walk in the Spirit rather than in the flesh.

So, my failures actually are profitable if we then turn, are led by the schoolmaster towards Christ, towards the anointing—that’s what Christ means. If we move towards the Anointed One and share in His anointing, we learn how to put to death the misdeeds of the body by the Spirit. And the undergirding of that, the beginning of that journey, is to believe, hope against hope, that His Word is more important to me than my observations. His Word is more important to me than my history. His Word is more important to me than what 10 billion people say. I don’t care if nobody else believes God. I don’t care! What did God say? He gets the only vote that counts. God said I could put to death the misdeeds of the body by the Spirit. Okay, I’m not putting to death the misdeeds of the body very well. Apathetic about it? No. Angry about it? No. Learn how to walk in the Spirit. That’s the whole reason He’s allowed these giants in the land. It’s to teach us how to do warfare. The purpose of these stumbling stones in our face is to teach us how to turn to Him more effectively.

That’s the whole purpose. It’s not this big guessing game of doing good deeds and avoiding bad deeds, and that’s what gives us our identity. The whole purpose is that He would unravel our humanity to the uttermost, and leave us nothing but Him to look at, and lo, and behold, we learn to walk in the Spirit because we died, and if we’ve died, then we can be raised to walk as He walked in the power of His resurrection.

Well, dying, especially on a cross, is not a very pretty thing, and it’s not painless. Does that mean it’s bad? Just because it’s painful? Or is it actually a gateway into a supernatural life? Pain isn’t even our enemy. We’re not trying to avoid pain. We’re not even trying to avoid failure.

Oh, you’re saying we should fail? No—what I’m saying is you will fail. I’m not advocating it, I’m just prophesying it. It’s gonna happen, and the purpose of it is good. It’s one more of those 10,000 things that don’t work, that your flesh will always scramble for an identity of how good you are, how effective you are, and how much you’ve accomplished, how much you know, how much you’re liked... You know, all that garbage is nothing but that. In the unseen realm, none of that means anything—it takes a long time sometimes for God to convince us of how little all that junk really means.

Because our native eyes, the nature of our biological eyes and our ears and our senses—we’re being saturated with all these things that we’re trying to weigh and incorporate into our existence of “how I look” and “how I feel.” “Who likes me?” and “who doesn’t like me?” and “how they looked at me. Waaaah!” You know, well, come on! God’s looking down and saying, “No! no. Do not be like mere animals that everything has to be weighed and measured this way. Your successes and your failures are all weighed and measured that way. I’m going to take you to a cross where you can fail utterly, and you choose not to be apathetic, you choose not to be angry and frustrated and mean, but instead you choose to find one more thing out of 10,000 that’s not walking in the Spirit, and you rejoice, and you learn that by faith what God said is true.” And therefore, it doesn’t matter what my experience has been. It doesn’t matter what everyone else’s experience has been. It doesn’t matter how much I failed, it doesn’t matter whether people like me, or how much they know about my failures, and therefore ruin my reputation. All of that stuff is just nonsense. It doesn’t matter.

What matters is: Will every single individual make their own personal choice to believe God and to walk by faith and not by sight, experience, or failures, or victories? Just look to God and learn how to believe Him. Period.

And in so doing, you’ve laid the foundation of communion with the Head by learning how to walk in the Spirit, by learning how to walk by faith in what God said, instead of trusting your own emotions, your own experiences, your own failings, your own brain—these little stupid neurons firing around, defining who you are.

Do you have to let that happen? Do you have to let this define who you are? Inside of this little tiny space right here—you have to let that decide who you’re gonna be? I don’t think so. I think you were created for more than that.

The thing is, and this is the excerpt (that we listened to)—the summary of all that thing I suppose would be just this: You gotta learn how to let that stuff go and walk by faith. You gotta learn how to let it go, because in learning how to let it go, to stop weighing, judging, evaluating, comparing, being angry, being apathetic, striving, fighting, fussing, zhzhzhzh…

Learn how to open your hands and trust. And extend your arms for the Prince of Peace and let everything ride right there. Nowhere else. Right there. Come what may. Right there. End of story. That’s the Alpha and the Omega. Beginning and the end. Right there.

And those who’ll do that learn how to commune with the Head and how to keep in step with the Spirit. How to be led by the Spirit. How to be connected to the Vine. All those word pictures in the Scriptures that define how Jesus lived. And because He emptied Himself and made Himself nothing, took on the form of a servant, became like us in every way—what He was really demonstrating as the pioneer of our faith, as the second Adam, is how to live in the second Adam life instead of the first Adam life. So this grand experiment of all your failures and your ups and downs and emotions and your bing-bing-bing-bing-bing-bing pinball inside of your brain—about feelings and emotions and failures and victories and everyone’s perceptions. All that stuff is first Adam life. And Jesus came to demonstrate that second Adam life is possible for you, too.

And it begins by believing that what God said is more important than our experiences, our feelings, our observations, our histories. But to open our hands to the Prince of Peace and settle it as the only thing that matters. That’s the foundation that everything else rests on. You never get off of that. Try moving a building, a 50-story building, off the foundation and move it somewhere else. There’s nothing left. You gotta stay on that foundation every minute of every day for the rest of your existence. And 10 billion years more. It is to trust the Spiritual realm more than you trust the natural realm. Trust the Prince of Peace more than you trust yourself.