| BINDING AND LOOSING - Part 3 Liberty Savage HIS GLORY REIGNS B. Childress Nov 30, 2007 When you first come to Christ, your life is like a pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces. How the puzzle pieces will fit together is not clear. This mystery is further complicated by our lack of understanding that many of your most cherished pieces won't fit in the final picture. Most often we want to hold on to our favorite pieces - you had acquired them; you were familiar with them; they were yours, and you are ready to fight to keep them. But God has been waiting to help you throw out the wrong pieces and put the right pieces into place. When you accepted Christ as your Lord and Master, you gave the Holy Spirit the green light to start your spiritual engine and begin the process. Undeterred by such preconceived notions we may have as new believers born into the kingdom of God, the Holy Spirit begins His work anyway. He will usually put the border together for us first, giving a godly definition to the boundaries and limits of our lives. Then He hands us our first piece to place into the picture. If you were a new Christian, you grabbed it and hit the ground running - we tried to find the spot where it should go and, after much frustration, decided it didn't fit anywhere. So then, we sought after a different piece, the brightest-colored piece in the pile and God said, "No, not that one. Take this one." We often reject things that God wants to give us because they look uninteresting. We grab for the brightest pieces instead, only to find that they won't fit anywhere in our life. That does not mean they will never fit, they just won't fit yet. There is a purpose and an order to the arranging of the pieces of our lives that require certain pieces to be in place first. Many of the biggest and brightest pieces require strong foundational pieces to support them. These foundational pieces include patience, love, submission, restored relationships, jobs, friends, education, the fruit of the Holy Spirit, gain and loss, joy and sorrow, opportunities to act upon, and times of waiting. And mixed all through is the mystery factor - those wrong pieces we will not surrender. So the Holy Spirit continues His work. Just when we begin to think we nearly have our picture completed, God suddenly enlarges our borders. There are new areas to fill and the picture keeps growing. So the Holy Spirit continues His work. Just when we begin to think we nearly have our picture completed, God suddenly enlarges our borders. There are new areas to fill and the picture keeps growing. We often resist all surrendering to God and are bored with foundation pieces. But we must understand that God won't use you extensively if you don't have foundation balance. We must keep an open mind so that we can readily and expectantly grasp the revelation of His truth (His Word - the Bible). Certain things we are taught we accept as single-level truth not realizing that the initial truth from Him can be like an uncut diamond - vastly valuable and filled with potential - but with its full brilliance not yet revealed. Once He has been allowed to cut multiple facets into a diamond and polish it, it becomes far more complex then it was in it's original state. It is these additional facets of truth that turn single-level truths into brilliant understanding. There are too few who want to endure the time spent, energy expended, or stretching that goes with opening up His truths. But He is willing to reveal their full brilliance to you if you have room within your soul (your mind, will, and emotions) to receive it. Many do not want any more than surface understanding. Too often they are like the person who says, "My mind is made up. Don't try to confuse me with facts." It is a tragedy when the truth is frozen in one dimension within a believer. The acceptance of truth in it's simplest form often leaves much to be desired. This is what happens when you accept something as truth in it's simplest form without pursuing further understanding. Diligently reading the Bible and reading the Bible numerous times does not guarantee spiritual wisdom and understanding unless you turn what you read into experience and relationship. Jesus acknowledged that the religious Jews of His time had studied the scriptures and searched them earnestly, believing eternal life lay within the words. Yet they were missing everything they were supposed to learn from them: He was standing right before them, yet they did not accept Him as the Messiah, nor were they willing to receive the overwhelming abundance of true life in Him. You must move past just reading the Word to actually experiencing it. Many life-giving concepts in the Word become unshakable personal truths you will never forget once these concepts become experiential in your life. Faith does indeed come by hearing the Word, but faith grows by experiencing the Word. Faith and experience turn hope into manifested reality. The Body, Soul, and Spirit You have communion with God's Spirit through your spirit. Your body is in touch with the earthly things of the world around you, receiving and responding through the five senses. Your soul consists of your mind, your will, and your emotions - your character and personality. Your body, soul, and spirit make up who you are as a unique individual - a fearfully and wonderfully made tripartie being. Yet at times these three parts, designed to work smoothly together, bump into one another. Your Mind - is like a mainframe computer that is constantly gathering information from the world through the terminals of your senses. The mind receives or rejects input according to what it has been preprogrammed to receive, analyzing what it does accept to arrive at various conclusions. These conclusions are strongly influenced by what your senses perceive as truth. Unfortunately, your senses can be completely deceived. Your Emotions - flavor your mind's conclusions. Emotions are like powerful God-given spices to enhance your life. These emotional spices add greater, adequate, or lesser amounts to your perceptions. Filled with sensory perceptions and emotional flavoring, your mind's conclusions are then downloaded to your will for some form of action - fight, flight, fidget, or file for later. Sometimes your will authorizes a reactions quite the opposite of what your born-again spirit would advise. Your perceptions of a particular situation and the amount of "spice" your emotions add to these perceptions can lead to inappropriate reactions. To respond wisely to your circumstances, your mind, will, and emotions must be submitted to the will of God and the mind of Christ to override erroneous input from your senses and emotions. If you are not, you can make very wrong choices. The best choice you ever made was to accept Jesus Christ as your Savior. Every other choice you make from the point on, even wrong ones, will ultimately be worked together for good when you love God and are called according to His purposes (Romans 8:26). Wrong choices may slow down your progress because of their consequences, but if you repent and allow the Holy Spirit to teach you by them, so that you can get back on track. Your present, your future, and your relationship with the Lord and others will only be diminished by an inability on your part to willingly receive God's grace and mercy for restoration and wholeness. Your Enemy You will be intensely battled whenever you try to pursue God's plan for your future, for Satan is waging a very personal assault right now to prevent you from doing just that. Satan knows your name, your phone number, your address, your fears, and your strongholds and he customizes his attacks accordingly. You must learn to use the Keys of the Kingdom to pray and dissolve your fears and shatter your strongholds that have given Satan the power he has to wreak havoc in your life. Satan is no dummy. He knows full well that your fears and strongholds are his only edge over your life and he's been using them to access and attack your whole being your entire life. You have believed you were protecting yourself by the strongholds your soul has built, but you have actually been cooperating with Satan's plans against you. Stronghold - the Greek word for stronghold is "ochuroma" which basically means to fortify by holding safely - what one uses to fortify and defend a personal belief, idea, or opinion against outside opposition. We "build" strongholds to fortify, protect, and defend what we have chosen to believe about ourselves, about others, and about God - even when we are dead wrong. If you have believed and bought into a lie, your soul will fight to protect that wrong belief. The lie might be that you are unloved, unwanted, unnecessary, unsuccessful, unworthy, or any of those ugly un-words. If you have decided the lie must be true, your soul will erect a stronghold to defend your right to believe it. Repeated attempts by those around you to convince you that it is a lie will be viewed by your soul as attacks, causing it to reinforce it's protective stronghold. Satan knows this and loves it. Deception is his most important weapon; Ezekiel 28 tells us that he was created perfect and with great wisdom. He can be a powerful enemy if he is still able to deceive you today, but as a believer, you are protected by the Blood of Jesus Christ and your standing in Him. However, if you have built strongholds around unresolved issues in your life, Satan will be on them like a magnet on steel. He will turn his vast knowledge (accumulated over your lifetime) of your unmet needs, unresolved issues, unhealed hurts, bad memories, pain, anger, bitterness, unforgiveness, and hidden sin into an arsenal against you. He will trick you and tempt you by circumstances and situations that reinforce your hurt and fear of having these areas exposed. Satan cannot read your mind, but he has kept exquisite records of your life. He and his demonic pals know exactly how to use their storehouse of information to bring about predictable responses in you. KNOW that Satan is not the root of your problem. He only uses what already exists in your soul - toxic, self-protected unmet needs, unresolved issues, and unhealed hurts. The Root Problems First, our root problems lie in the vulnerability of our damaged souls and their strongholds erected to keep additional pain out, but they also keep existing pain inside our souls. These strongholds, which are erected by a wounded soul to protect lies birthed from our perception of traumatic experiences we have been through, also keeps God's truth out. Secondly, the old nature or unsurrendered soul is another of the believer's root problems. Binding and loosing make it possible to surrender that old nature while making room to receive God's full healing and restoration. God's truth can always stand testing and remain unchanged. Deception, misunderstanding, and human theories never stand up to serious testing by His truth. You do not have to throw out God's truth that you have in order to embrace more truth: "new truth" may only be additional facts of the very truth you are already believing - there should be no conflict, only a deeper understanding. We Are New Creatures In our early years as Christians, we may be puzzled as to why the Word of God is not manifesting itself in power in our lives with signs and wonders following. We may experience feelings of failure and discouragement and eventually give up on victory and slip back into old patterns. Clogged Filters Our minds have been used to functioning as filters for everything we have ever heard and experienced. A mind filled with unresolved memories and unmet needs from the past is a mind clogged with pain - a mind that will cloud and pollute the truth it receives today. The filters of our mental and emotional "receivers" can also become clogged or jammed and this jamming (like telephone lines) scrambles the receiving units so that vital information being transmitted perfectly become dirty noise or static. Unmet needs and unresolved memories from yesterday become the source of strongholds protected distorted ideas, bad attitudes, and wrong patterns of thinking. It can take a lifetime to overcome these deeply ingrained patterns of thinking if you do not have the Keys of the Kingdom prayer principals to tear down strongholds around them. But God's love, mercy, and unfailing faithfulness will help us press through. God's timing is a mystery to us, for His ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts (Isaiah 55:8,9). On through the revelation of the Holy Spirit are we ever able to understand what god is doing in us, in others, in the spirit world, and in His perfect timing for such works. Are The Doors of Access Open? The Word of God says, "Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you." James 4:7 Suppose you take a stand against the devil, front and center, clothed in your spiritual armor and resist the devil and they flee. They will only circle around to see if you really have it all together and they find your back covered with signs that say: STRONGHOLD BUILT TO PROTECT BITTERNESS: ACCESS HERE STRONGHOLD BUILT TO PROTECT UNFORGIVENESS: ACCESS HERE STRONGHOLD BUILT TO PROTECT ANGER: ACCESS HERE STRONGHOLD BUILT TO PROTECT PRIDE: ACCESS HERE The enemy is going to check you out from all angles to see if you are as strong as you think. If you aren't God's mercy may save you from a mortal "wound" because He desires to protect you, but you will probably take a major hit from the enemy. God is longsuffering with many of our stubborn streaks, always working to help you come into the fullness of truth in your relationship with him. But God will not pardon or condone the sin of the strongholds in your life, regardless of what cruel and terrible things that have been done to you. God will not allow you to hang on to unforgiveness and bitterness. You will never enter into the fullness of your inheritance dragging strongholds behind you. Right Standing with God If you are not in right standing with Him because of protecting wrong things in your soul, even though you are washing in the blood of Jesus and the recipient of His mercy, you can cause God to oppose your prayers. It is the prayers of the one who is in right standing that God hears - it is the righteous man or woman whose communications lines are up and whose strongholds are down who consistently reaches the ear of the Father. Many believers simply do not believe God would oppose them because of self protective strongholds in their lives. His mercy has spared many in such disbelief and disobedience, but His mercy will not always be extended towards their determination to believe a lie. Existing strongholds are always reinforced when a believer chooses to ignore God's plea to tear them down, "For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ; And having in a readiness to revenge all disobedience, when your obedience is fulfilled." 2 Corinthians 10:3-6 Strongholds can exist even in those who deeply love the Lord. Some realize they are there, but they've given up on ever destroying them - deception. There are those who only know something is wrong, but they believe it is guilt over having failed - discouragement. Then there are those who refuse to admit anything is wrong, denying the reality of their pain and despair - denial. Strongholds can be torn down by any believer! The word "loose," in Matthew 16:19 means to destroy and demolish. There is a great power in praying to loose the strongholds in your soul. Reconciliation and Restoration Promised But God is merciful. The Word of God says God has committed unto us the ministry and the word of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:18-19). The Greek word for "reconciliation" in these verses is katallage, meaning exchange or restoration to favor with God. Part of this occurs as we are transformed by the renewing (renovation) of our minds (Romans 12:2). To renew means to restore, rebuild, reestablish, and renovate. The grubby, stinky, stained, old things in your mind, will, and emotions have to be shoveled out, torn up, stripped away, broken apart, and removed to make room for your divine renewal to begin: loosing is the key to getting rid of old things in your soul. Let's turn to the Word for types. From the Old Testament: The woman in Second Kings 4, the widow of the prophet, was about to lose her two sons into slavery to satisfy her creditors. She had nothing left to her name but a little oil. She cried out to the prophet Elisha for help. Elisha told her to ask all her neighbors for empty jar and then lock herself inside with the jars and her sons, and begin to pour the bit of oil into those jar. Elisha promised it would not stop flowing until all the jars were filled. She would be able to sell the oil, pay off all her debts, and live on what was left over. What if that woman had not bothered to clean out any old contents from the jars? The miracle required completely empty jars, jars capable of receiving as much as they could. Your miracle of receiving from God may be diminished, perhaps completely blocked, because your jars are full of old rubble. From the New Testament: The first miracle Jesus ever performed was turning the water into the wine at the wedding in Cana in John 2:7. Jesus told the servants to take jars and fill them to the brim with water, which He then turned into wine for the wedding supper. He filled the jars with a miracle. What if those jars had been filled with refuse, with old waste? "Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord; And he shall send Jesus Christ, which before was preached unto you: Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began" Acts 3:19-21 We can be refreshed and revived and recover from the effects of previous experiences as we make room in our souls to receive renewal and restoration. God has promised restoration all through His Word: "And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpillar, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you. And ye shall eat in plenty, and be satisfied, and praise the name of the LORD you God, that hath dealt wondrously with you: and my people shall never be ashamed." Joel 2:25,26 "And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God." Romans 12:2 God has always wanted to restore men and women to himself. He sent His Son to die on the cross to bring about a blood-bought way for man to come fully into that restoration. Jesus is now being retained in heaven until this has been fully accomplished. We partake of this restoration by making room to receive it. Receiving Restoration and Renewal Everything in the Word of God exhorts us to expect restoration and renewal. But so many Christians aren't receiving and experiencing that restoration and power in these last day. They are too busy trying to defend themselves against the enemy. Who has time to be used in miracles and signs and wonders? Who has time to lead captives free or heal the sick? With the exhaustion from life's grinding pressures, struggling to pay the bills, keeping a roof over their heads, and fighting to prevent their families from falling apart - indeed, who has time for such things? So, who has time to walk in the Spirit and do what Jesus did, let alone even greater things? The believer who has learned to conquer his or her old nature: the unsurrendered soul. Any believer can resist the enemy and cause him to flee. All believers can walk in the power of the Holy Spirit, receive from God, and bring about deliverance through the cleanness of their own hands. You can tear those strongholds down, those strongholds that are protecting the lies and doubts and fears that allow Satan to torment you. Hell is only able to sustain its program against you when it is not resisted: it is very difficult to resist the enemy if you are like a house that is divided - a house that opposes itself. We can receive mercy and healing from the Lord. The key word here is "receive." It can be very difficult to receive anything if you are already full of something else. You simply cannot heal yourself of a strong will to survive or by working in a program. You are healed by surrendering everything in your life - past, present and future - to the will of God and then receiving healing from Him. The only way to be free is to strip your unsurrendered soul's old nature of everything it derives power from, tear down the strongholds you have erected to deal with the toxic waste of your past memories and fears, and then allow God to spiritually realign your life. Understanding Strongholds Strongholds are what you rely upon to defend and protect your right to believe something or to protect something you greatly fear being exposed. Listed below are just a few examples: * Being painfully deceived by people that you trusted. The stronghold: justifying the belief that you must protect yourself against every being deceived again. Defending this wrong belief will even cause you to resist intimacy with God. * Serious doubts about whether or not the word of God works for you. The stronghold: protecting you right to resist being too gullible about the promises in the Word. * Being rejected. The stronghold: The false belief that you really are independent and self-sufficient, needing no one. * Having been told that you have a lot of unmet needs. The stronghold: the false belief that you are very secure in who you are, projecting a facade of strength intended to keep other from knowing how fragile and needy you really are. * The inability to forgive someone for what they have done to you. The stronghold: being able to rationalize defending your hard feelings, bitterness, and anger towards those person(s). * Betrayal. The stronghold: protecting your right to prevent anyone from getting too close to you. * A dysfunctional childhood. The stronghold: protecting your right to prevent anyone from getting too close to you, even God. * Always feeling deprived and unappreciated. The stronghold: Justifying and protecting your right to indulge yourself inappropriately to compensate for your unmet needs and pain. * Growing up with a great deal of fear. The stronghold: apprehension and anxiety over unresolved issues in your life which becomes your life. What you believe about yourself can be more powerful in shaping your future than the truth. You need His help to sort through your many beliefs to make room for His truth. Then you need to sort through the bits and pieces of truth you have and let God help you focus them into powerful right beliefs. The binding and loosing that accomplishes this is ours by the grace of God and the power of the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ. We can begin to cooperate with God's restoration by stripping old things out of our souls, choosing to make room to receive His renewal. Use the Keys of the Kingdom to cause things here on earth to come into alignment with the will of God in heaven. Source: Shattering Your Strongholds, by Liberty Savard, Copyright 1992, Bridge-Logos. |
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