we are all like drug addicts!!!

Paul Mac was speaking today on some very interesting perspectives on sin and the way we function and live so below how we were meant to. We are slaves to our fallen nature, we have access to freedom but we don't embrace this fully because we all have addictions and attachments to things in our lives that take the place of God...idolatry in other words. We live life less fully than we were intended for too...we are sinners and we fall short of the glory God intended for us. The stuff on attachments and how we are all essentially addicts came from a book about a psychiatrist's journey from atheism to faith due to studying drug addicts and his finding that the only ones who got freedom, had had a spiritual experience.

Paul took it further and said that the way God has to deal with us is like how a rehabilitator has to deal with an addict...we are generally deceptive, we try and do disciplines and we can't, we say we love God then we do something that reflects the opposite, we are broken and a mess! 

I have been thinking is this perhaps why we don't see more breakthrough in the supernatural and in our ministries? God can't give us the fullness because in the same way you can't trust an addict, God can't really trust us with the full measure of the anointing until we get rid of the addictions to work, stress, money, TV, food, relationships, dysfuntional ways of thinking....we need to be holy and set apart from these things. The naff thing is also that these things like an addiction also become not as fun to us the more we do them...actually fullness of joy will come in His presence alone and not through these things. That's not to say we can't enjoy these things but if we are looking to them for relief or happiness a lot of the time then we need to reasess...

Ephesians 3 says we will be filled with the fullness of God [that would lead to breakthrough in the supernatural] when we know his love and that we are adopted sons, not slaves. God loves us even though we are needy, messed up addicts and we need to know his love a whole lot more. I think there are a lot of us that need to humbly see ourselves as needy before God, we really cannot attain anything unless he changes us. We need to taste Life and position ourselves to receive a double dose of his love and presence than we have been getting as a step towards more freedom and the fullness of God in us.

grieving and questioning

Bit of a serious/personal one but a couple of people [strange how things come at the same time!] have asked me recently about how i processed faith and the death of my father...i answered some jumbled thoughts I thought I may as well include in my blog...this is obviously not everything I could say on the matter but here goes...

For those who don't know, my father was hit by a car and died in 2002, he wasn't a christian and I had been praying and fasting for him for as long as I could remember.

Reading and thinking and talking were very important...grief cannot be ignored it must be faced and grappled with and God SO wonderfully shares in it and leads you if you let him in [though this for me has come in hindsight]. A few books in particular helped me...

• 'on grief and grieving' [its a secular book - takes you through the steps of what generally happens to people when they grieve - although not christian it was VERY helpful]
  
• 'A grief observed' by CS Lewis - he was single for years, then got married in his forties and his wife died very short after their marrieage of cancer. his account is very real, very raw and honest.
  
• 'When heaven is silent' by someone Dunn. He was a very charismatic believing christian who saw miracles yet his son suffered with mental illness and committed suicide. this book is EXCELLENT on all thiss stuff.

• "God on mute" by Pete Greig...also about his journey of seeing loads stuff happen yet his wife being very very ill.

• the books of Job, Ecclesiastes and Psalms [bread and butter]!!!
  

generally grief is something that is raw for at least five years, its a journey, there are no instant results, there are no formulae or definite ways of dealing with it.  when my dad died my whole world turned upside down...there were some unusual circumstances in that the last time i saw him i was VERY upset for no reason - as if i knew it was the last time i'd see him. Grief is often accompanioed with weird things like that that may be made up or God preparing you.

I suffered with a DEEP mental pain that psychologists call cognitive dissonance pretty much up to last New Years!!! last new years God really healed me/gave me a boost out of a deeper sense of grief and confusion that had been continuous since 2002. The last year has been such a different year than the years previous. God just shifted something in me - I do remembering deciding to receive this as a gift from God. Cognitive dissomnance is where your mind very much believes two things very strongly and yet they completely contradict. It is a very painful thing to live with but life and the christian journey does include living with mystery.. I had to live with and process the fact that my dad had died, not a christian, very young and I had had a hard relationship with him that I wanted to work out but that opportunity was taken away. but yet I totally had believed he would meet Jesus one day and I strongly believe that God answers prayer. I still do for the record.

We never reach full resolution of things like this but the call as Christians is when we face difficulty we MUST press into God closer, push through the confusion barrier rather than follow the tepmtation the enemy offers us which is to blame God and pull away from him [I wasted a lot of time doing this, but God brought me back and he was incredibly faithful and fathered me through the dark times].For me I knew nothing else would work, I knew God enough that he was the only answer even if I didn't get it, i had to trust him, i kept praying and talking to God about it, i kept going to church, i kept reading the psalms and journalling. I held on. Ephesians 6 says to stand on the day of evil and to stand. just stand! 2Corinthians is my fave new testament book and theres loads in it about being "hard pressed on every side but not destroyed, struck down but not abandoned...we carry around in our bodies the death of jesus..." these words along with the Psalsm kept me. Being a Christian is hard -mark 4 -the sower; stuff gets in the way...the enemy sowed a whole load of garbage but i had to pull through anyway. We are following someone who was murdered anda people group who are attacked...we live in a fallen world where the enemy seeks to kill steal and destroy and he does do these things.

A new book called "strengthen yourself in the lord" by bill johnson is amazing and the most practically life transforming book I've read in the last two years...i do wish i had had that during my grief...the base default truth is that God is good and that we must see the things that happen to us through this truth. It talks about how we must choose to worship, give thanks and thus be strengthened in every life situation. It talks about this as a discipline in hard times and we must do it even if we don't feel like it...this is a very releasing truth because I felt it was wrong to say words in worship that I didn't totally mean...actually choosing to turn our mouths to truth and to God will cause faith to be released in us and change in our hearts and minds will result. 

The story of the wise and foolish builders in matthew 7 is one of the most important of Jesus teaching...the rains will come, being a christian is not all hunky dory, but God is good and he will give us the grace if we turn our face toward him just that little bit. We must build our lives now on the rock because grief and crappy stuff happening is inevitable. We are in an exciting time of seeing God move more, healings and hearing his voice; we are seeing more breakthrough...its fantastic. But we will still see and be impacted by shoddy stuff and we must be prepared or we will be offended at God and that is a very sorry place to be...don't go there!!!