Who’s in Control?

I should probably begin this with a disclaimer, a warning: this is not politically correct, not religiously correct, and may be offensive to a lot of folks. It’s offensive to me. You probably don’t want to read this.

What? You’re still here? Well, you’ve been warned. Proceed at your own risk.

A few months ago, I posted something on the topic of “Trust, Don’t Lean,” a lesson for this season from Proverbs 3. I can’t get away from that topic.

I believe that this is a season for us to trust Father God instead of leaning on our own understanding. I also believe that this is a much subtler issue than I have realized before.

I hear so many of my brothers & sisters praying the way that was so very common for me, until I realized the rebellion that it represented in me.

My favorite way to pray for guidance from God was along the lines of “God, show me what to do, and I’ll do it!” It sounds good, right?

But what was really in my heart had a slightly different interpretation. The way I walked this out was more along the lines of “If you’ll show me what you want, then I’ll make a decision about whether I want to do that.”

The difference is subtle, and it’s huge. It’s every bit as big as the difference between Him leading me and me leading Him, because that’s what it is.

If I insist on knowing his instructions before I obey, or if I want to understand before following, then I’ve changed the authority in my life. If I have reserved the final approval for myself, my own authority, then I am the “lord” of my life, and God has become my counselor.

In less subtle language, it would sound like this: “Look, you give me all the advice you want to; I’ll decide whether I’m ‘feeling led’ to obey it or not.”

That sounds harsh stated bluntly like that, but this is the way many Western believers follow God: “You advise me, but I’m making the decisions!”

A few years back, there was a popular bumper sticker: “God is my co-pilot.” Then another one came out to rebut it, and it captures something of what I’m trying to say: “If God is your co-pilot, change seats!”

If I am asking God to tell me what to do, then I choose to obey what he’s saying, of necessity, this means that I am the king of my own life, and God is reduced to my advisor or assistant.

In the same way, if I need to understand what is happening before I walk forward into it, then I am choosing to be master of my life. If this happens when I’m facing a room full of unfamiliar people, there is great wisdom in this approach. But if I’m waiting to understand what God is up to, then I’m back to making him my Heavenly Concierge again.

I wouldn’t bring this up, except that I see it in so many Western Christians: “When I understand what God is doing, then I’ll trust him with my life.” I see many believers sitting on their hands, “waiting on God” to understand what he’s doing in their lives before moving forward in obedience.

“Is this the season, Lord, where you fulfill all my grandest dreams?” If they feel an answer in the affirmative, they risk hoping in those dreams; otherwise, they don’t go anywhere.

I would argue that if God says, “Step forward!” then it’s time to step out. It’s not time to ask what will be the results of my stepping forward? “Will my sister ‘get saved’ if I step forward, and you know that it would be really good if she did!”

There’s room for this argument: “But how can I obey if I don’t know what I’m going to obey?”

It seems to me that asking the question reveals the disease: the folks who have God in the Number Two seat tend to be the ones who ask that question.

How do we obey without understanding what it is that we need to obey? I keep having to ask, why do I need to understand before obeying? Here are some of the questions that this leads me to:

• What benefit does understanding provide to my ability to obey? I find that my understanding is limited by my capacity to understand, which is – as hard as this is to believe – noticeably less than God’s capacity to understand. He can see the relationship between my obedience and my sister’s salvation whether I can or not.
• When I ask for understanding, have I already chosen to obey and even begun to obey, or is my decision to obey going to come after I understand, if I understand?
• What do I do if God has a different plan for my life than I do? What if “success” in God’s mind is the thing that we call “failure”? Jonah will work as an example here. He wanted to live the comfortable and well-regarded life of a prophet in Israel. God had other plans: “Go to Nineveh!” Later, Jonah reveals his agenda. “You’re doing exactly what I didn’t want; that’s why I went the other way! Go ahead: kill me now!” (Paraphrased from Jonah 4:1-3.)

Here in the western church, we’re big on the concept of God as “Daddy” and our “best friend.” Those concepts are true, but we overlook the less comfortable concept of God as “King of Everything” (the technical term is “sovereign”) who has the inherent right to do any thing he darned well feels like with our lives. We are fortunate indeed that his plans for us are always (as in “100% of the time”) in our best interests, but his commands are no less commanding simply because they’re good for us.

I was whining about martyrs to God one evening long ago. He let me go on for a while, and then when I stopped my pity-party long enough to draw a breath, he interrupted: “Do I not have the right to spend the lives of my servants as I see fit?”

I realized that I had done what I’m writing about here: I had judged his plans by my tiny little brain, and because I couldn’t see the connection between “the blood of the martyrs” and any tangible benefits, I was judging his plans for ruling the world, for leading the Church as inferior to “the way I would do it.”

God the Father is indeed my Daddy and Jesus really is my Best Friend. But more than that, God really is omniscient: he really does know what will come of my obedience. He really is sovereign: he has the right to tell me “Go here” or “Do this” and he may give me an explanation or not as he sees fit. In fact, as my friend, he is very likely to explain things to me.

But for me to demand an explanation before I obey is not obedience. It’s rebellion of the highest order.

“Why Lord” is illegal until after we have declared “Yes Lord!” in both word and deed.

All Things

Let me tell you some stories.

First story: I was talking with a friend recently, and he told me an interesting story.

This friend is a musician. He lives & works in the California desert, but he had no air-conditioning in his office. Someone gave him one that didn’t work. He described to me how he was encouraged (someone had thought about his needs) and frustrated (so close, but it still doesn’t work!).

That’s when the story got interesting. He was thinking about the AC unit and since he’s pretty handy with fixing things, he was trying to get it to work, but without success. As he was grumbling about his lack of success, he heard the Holy Spirit whispering to him. “Try this” he said, and showed him a picture of some accessories for his monitors: these are components for a sound system. Oh, and he just happened to have that part in his pocket.

He applied it as the Holy Spirit suggested and it worked: impossibly and perfectly, and it has been running for several years now.

Together we chuckled: it appears that God is an expert in HVAC repair. That’s somewhat outside of the box that we had had Him in.

Second story: Another friend was out hunting one recent winter with a buddy. In addition to his hunting rifle, he carried a pistol, but this time he had brought a favorite: one that had been a gift from an important friend who had carried it as an officer in a recent war. During the creeping-through-the-undergrowth part of the hunt, the pistol fell unnoticed into the snow and was lost.

His hunting buddy, a good friend of mine, tells this story: frustrated by the loss of our friend’s pistol, he went back to the same hunting grounds, where he prayed. His prayer was well beyond anything he’d prayed before, but “What’s life without a little stretching?” he said.

“God, you know where that pistol is. Would you please show me?” Before he had a chance to entertain second thoughts about his unusual prayer, he felt a nudge: go this way. He spent a couple of hours wandering through the forest this way and that, following the little nudges that he felt, far from any trail or road. It was unusual enough that he had to work hard to quash both the doubts and the excitement that he felt rising.

Then the nudges went away. Stopped altogether.

“Father, would you please show me where the pistol is?” Nothing. Silence. He prayed several more times. Still nothing.

Frustrated and confused, he turned to head back to his truck, but his toe bumped something. He looked down, and there was the pistol. It was a little rusty from spending the winter under the snow, but only a very little as our friend had always kept it well oiled. As you might imagine, he was pretty happy about finding the gun, but even more excited about his adventure with God.

Third story: Corrie TenBoom tells the story of her father’s watch repair business:

There weren’t many repair problems he hadn’t encountered. But occasionally one would come along that baffled even him. And then I would hear him say: “Lord, you turn the wheels of the galaxies. You know what makes the planets spin and You know what makes this watch run….”

The answers to these prayers seemed often to come in the middle of the night: many mornings I would climb onto my stool to find the watch we had left in a hundred despairing pieces fitted together and ticking merrily.

The Hiding Place, p70

The other day, I stumbled across a verse that I’ve read a hundred times:

But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you. John 14:26

In this verse, one of many places that He instructs us on the Holy Spirit, Jesus teaches that He’ll do two things: one is that he’ll remind us of what Jesus has said to us.

But the first thing Jesus says here is that the Holy Spirit will teach us all things. All things.

I’ve been thinking about that recently. The Holy Spirit teaches me all things. That sounds too good to be true.

I looked up “all things.” You’d never guess it, but it actually means “all things.” Strong’s concordance describes it as “all, any, every, the whole”; Vine describes it as “every; every kind or variety”; Kittel says it’s “an inclusion of all parts”; Thayer says, “any and every, of every kind”; Balz says it’s “all things/the All (in the broadest sense).” It sounds pretty conclusive to me.

We tend to think of the Holy Spirit teaching us about spiritual things, or at least about things that the Bible commands us to do: raise our children, love our neighbor, help the poor.

But apparently “all things” includes fixing air conditioners, finding lost firearms and repairing broken watches. That would probably extend to astrophysics, gardening, auto mechanics. I could tell you stories about how much He knows about fixing sound systems!

I propose that we let the Holy Spirit teach us, particularly that we let Him teach us about subjects that we don’t discuss in church. We’ll be far wiser people!

Prophesying Judgment?

I have heard a number of prophetic words recently that have carried a tone of judgment in them. That concerns me.

This is one example. I did eventually publish it on Northwest Prophetic, but not until I’d run the word past a number of prophets with whom I have a relationship to add their discernment to my own, and they are correct, this word adds a large dose of hope at the end, after the disasters are declared. But it really made me think.

Words of judgment bother me. I was discussing that with a new friend recently, and it made me think about why it bothers me.

If I were to sit in the judgment of 1Corinthians 14:29 over this word, I would say that this is definitely from God, this is definitely from the heart of the Father, and in that sense, it is both prophetic and accurate. But I think I would suggest that this legitimate and no doubt powerful prophetic experience might have been intended as a call to that prophet to intercession for the cities she spoke about, not as a declaration or calling-forth of judgment on them.

One of the principles that God is reinforcing in this season is the power of the prophetic declaration. It’s the means by which God performed the work of creation: “And God said …. And it was so.” Job 22:28 captures it clearly: “You will also declare a thing, and it will be established for you.”

I can tell you of a prophet I know (Kris Vallotton, Bethel Church, Redding CA, and he shares this publicly), who was visiting with a couple who wanted desperately to have kids, but were medically unable; the doctors had given up hope. God whispered to Kris, “Tell them that this time next year, she’ll be holding her son in her arms.” Kris argued with God, “I can’t say that!”, and God answered, “If you don’t say it, I won’t do it.”

I can also tell you of times that I have made declarations and seen circumstances change, sometimes literally overnight; unfortunately, not all of my declarations were as well informed as they were well intentioned, and so not all of the miraculous power released through them ended up bringing praise to God. There were expensive lessons there.

One reason I hesitate so much to declare prophetic judgment is because I have learned that accurately declaring a sinful state that does in fact exist only releases power to strengthen the sinful state. I can find chapter & verse to support the concept, but I have enough experience that has taught me as well.

One of the most powerful parts of a prophetic call is the call to be with God: without intimacy, we can’t speak intimate words. He pointed out to me one time that there are a whole lot of things that my wife speaks to me in our intimate moments together that I would never think of sharing publicly, the vast majority of them in fact. So it is when He and I are intimate: many, perhaps most, of the things that pass between us in those moments are not intended for public conversation. Not everything that God reveals in private is to be declared publicly.

Occasionally, He has revealed someone’s sin to me so that I can pray for those caught in the sin. Other times, He has shown me failure so that I learn His ways better (“This is what grieves me, Son”). And other times, he reveals failure to me as a warning to me personally: I must guard myself if I don’t want to go the way that some of the “huge” ministries you spoke of will go. He has never revealed someone's sin to me so that I can tell people about that sin.

I'm convinced that the vast majority of the time that God shows us something of judgment, something of sin, something about someone's problems, He is not giving it to us to declare, to prophesy, to talk about it. He's telling us of the things that break His heart so that they'll break our heart, so that we'll pray.

He reveals His heart in Ezekiel: "I looked for a man among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it..." His goal is that he "would not have to destroy it." His goal is mercy, because mercy always triumphs over judgment!

So please allow me to encourage the prophetically gifted among us: don’t prophesy the problem. Pray until you can prophesy the solution.