Manipulation

P 2560 We are in a war and we must learn to fight.

/ DVH

2 Samuel 2: 1-7, 8-9. 12-17 plus 3:1. “So “David went up there with his two wives, Ahinoam of Jezreel and Abigail, the widow of Nabal of Carmel.David also took the men who were with him, each with his family, and they settled in Hebron and its towns Then the men of Judah came to Hebron, and there they anointed David king over the tribe of Judah. … … …

Abner son of Ner, together with the men of Ish-Bosheth son of Saul, left Mahanaim and went to Gibeon. Joab son of Zeruiah and David’s men went out and met them at the pool of Gibeon. One group sat down on one side of the pool and one group on the other side.Then Abner said to Joab, “Let’s have some of the young men get up and fight hand to hand in front of us. “All right, let them do it,” Joab said… …

So they stood up and were counted off—twelve men for Benjamin and Ish-Bosheth son of Saul, and twelve for David. Then each man grabbed his opponent by the head and thrust his dagger into his opponent’s side, and they fell down together…The battle that day was very fierce, and Abner and the Israelites were defeated by David’s men. … …

3:1 The war between the house of Saul and the house of David lasted a long time. David grew stronger and stronger, while the house of Saul grew weaker and weaker.”

Saul and David had a ‘history’ which consisted of King Saul trying at every opportunity to kill David. At one stage this king even took David’s wife, Michal, Saul’s own daughter! … and gave her to someone else to marry! satan does not fight fair either! I personally see these battles between Saul and David as a parallel to the battle we fight every single day, between the flesh and the spirit. David only ever did this jealous King good, because His ultimate loyalty was to the Ways of God and Saul was the anointed king..That’s also the way the Spirit of God works for us – He only does us good. No matter how things look – He wants to bless us.

In this life, thanks to everything Jesus did for us — just like David, we’ve already won. Our Hero, our mighty Warrior Jesus Christ, fought for us and won. And one day He will fight the last battle and dispose of that enemy forever. But even though we know that Jesus has already won on mankind’s behalf, yet we are still destined to have to fight for what is ours while we are here, because our enemy refuses to let go of this battle. Just like Saul – he will cheat and fight ’til the end.

However we can daily defeat our enemy by the way we choose to live!  We are the peace bringers and peace-keepers. We are called to rout out the enemy’s damage in people’s lives and usher in God’s kingdom – by the way we treat others. Our weapons aren’t ordinary – they operate in the Holy Spirit’s power. They are the Word of God plus our humility, yieldedness to the Lord, and Love is our greatest weapon of all! Even when our enemy tries to take us out – the key to winning is being prepared to die for Jesus’ sake. However, if or when we do not choose to enter the battlefield, we will still be battered and bashed by this life’s sorrows and suffering, and our flesh will lose every battle by default!

Sometimes the enemy’s strongholds are inside us – which means we must choose to fight our natural inclinations to be snarky and nasty and grab at things by force or manipulation. We do this by asking the Holy Spirit to help us. The devil will also twist our perceptions and our emotions to trick us into fighting over the things that don’t matter eternally. That means we will waste our energy and get weary in the battle. Our flesh will always be at war with the Spirit, because the Spirit has a much higher aim … to glorify God … Dying daily is the only way to learn to fight and WIN.

It is interesting to note that David had been selected as King, by God Himself – but not everyone in the kingdom accepted God’s edict. A whole lot of people still followed Saul! Which is why popularity is never our aim! This story shows me that there are many people who are not discerning. Spiritual discernment is one of the treasures I talked about yesterday, it keeps us from falling into sin’s snares. However, at the same time, any difficulties in our day-to-day lives need to be used as opportunities to be transformed in our POV, attitudes and actions with the Lord’s guidance and help. We should never ever forget that we are in a war, and let the stuff that rushes at us, take us by surprise, and change our aims. Our aim is not comfort – it is Christ proclaimed – we are to bring His kingdom here, now.

Sometimes I think that the Body of Christ is like a bunch of small children at a Bazaar. They run from this shiny new thing, to another tasty thing …without any thought at all. They chase after easy answers that will give them what they think they want. Immediate gratification. We are in a war, we MUST learn to fight. Even our own flesh only wants what it can see. However, the Spirit wants what only God can see, so we can see it too! Now that’s a good place to praise God! 🙌 

P 2495 Let God disarm you …

/ DVH

“Now, please listen, for I need to address an issue. I’m making this personal appeal to you by the gentleness and self-forgetfulness of Christ… … Now I plead with you that when I come, don’t force me to take a hard line with you (which I’m willing to do) by daring to confront those who mistakenly believe that we are living by the standards of the world, not by the Spirit’s wisdom and power. For although we live in the natural realm, we don’t wage a military campaign employing human weapons, using manipulation to achieve our aims. Instead,our spiritual weapons are energised with divine power to effectively dismantle the defences behind which people hide…” 2 Corinthians 10:1-6 (with omissions.)TPT.

Paul talks about this greater wisdom in the verses from 2 Corinthians above. This wisdom relies upon God’s power not man’s clever plans, or great counselling … or even avoidance. Instead it exposes lies, and disarms the sorts of excuses that men and women often make in order to stay the same and feel good about themselves. Paul is quite severe in this edict, as he first establishes the essence of this lie – there is no power of God in it … therefore … it won’t accomplish anything lasting!

He is explaining that the Lord’s spiritual wisdom goes beyond the stuff we understand with our minds, into the very heart of what is actually going on. It leads to complete exposure of the desire that human beings have to justify themselves, and hide our true selves, for one reason or another. That hiding gig started in the garden of Eden, the first thing Adam and Eve did after they sinned was HIDE. Hiding is not good because that action denies the power of the cross. “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. IF we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness…”1John 1:8&9. Confessing sin means we own it!

Meanwhile, we don’t have to tell every single person every single thing about ourselves! But we do need to be ready to have the Lord uncover the things we have hidden …  sometimes … even from ourselves. I have found hatred in the weirdest circumstances in my life. If you asked me I would have said: “I don’t hate anyone, its a waste of time.” Actually what I was really saying was: “I hide my hatred under another name.”

But the Lord had my number, and He showed me what I called hurt was actually hatred, and I avoided looking at it because I did not want to know. It was like my own private warning system that flashed a sign that said: ‘this person is dangerous,’ when I looked at certain people, and that was my excuse for not loving them. These are the lengths we go to to justify ourselves! When all we need to do is confess our sin. 

Unfortunately, in reality, I think I sadly felt quite OK about having that attitude – the people I was scared of, and concerned about were very mean! Hiding was a way to avoid their meanness – but it also cleverly disguised my real feelings! None of these thoughts were allowed to prevail in my conscious mind, because I had become really adept at concealing this stuff from myself.  I would have noticed things like that in a heartbeat. So instead, I gave it another name. HURT. But as I chased after loving like He loves, things kept floating up into my conscious mind. Like gritting my teeth when that person spoke to me – a big clue right there!! 

That’s when I realised that I actually went out of my way to reward those who were good to me, and secretly avoided those who weren’t. I pretty quickly figured out that loving like the Lord loves, means my opinion, or experiences no longer matter. He does not love us based on our behaviour. He took that aspect of our lives out of the equation, when He died on the cross. Indeed, our bad experiences and attitudes actually need to be confronted because they create greater potential for His Grace to be released! 

He wants us to treat everybody the same way – we are to love them enough to die for them. And if we truly want to changed to be like Him – then that’s the standard! Here’s a red hot tip, taken from my own experience: you and I can’t do that all by ourselves – we need supernatural help. This is the place, mentioned in the bible, that is designed by God, for His power to be made manifest through us. His strength is made perfect in weak people.  And along the way we will gain, bonus buy …  self-control.

If we choose to hide our weakness – the result is we will miss out on that perfect strength. Father God is not interested in the appearance of good.  He wants His goodness to be immediately evident even when someone else takes a nasty big fat bite out of us. Boy is that’s going to cost us! It cost Jesus to save us, and we are following Him now on the road to total transformation. Praise God! Right now we have His power available to us, so we can overcome anything that paralyses us, by leaning on Him and following His ways – instead of pretending we are A-OK.  

We simply must let/allow the Lord to disarm us. This new life in Christ comes with honest transparency, not deceit, shame or guilt. Embracing transparency will, over time, help us to know that we are truly loved by Him – especially when His love reaches into the hidden corners of our hearts.  👋🏻

P 2470 “The weapons of our warfare are not carnal …

/ DVH

…but mighty to the pulling down of strongholds.” The best way to get rid of a stronghold, is to first of all … identify it! There are some things that we can quite cheerfully call habits, or traits, or mindsets, that are against God’s greater purpose. The tragedy of that kind of scenario is that then we are often quite reluctant to part with the very thing that is holding us back from going deeper into the Lord’s plan for our lives. 

It is very easy to use the temporal things of this world to explain the stuff in our lives that has not changed, or the things we do not want to change. That’s called having a stronghold. Those things start in the mind and work their way into our everyday attitudes and actions. We dare not normalise these thingsby explaining them away, or by calling them our own personal individual attitudes … the things that make me, me! Judas did that and look at where that got him!

Sadly, strongholds mean that selfish, heartbreaking, soul destroying stuff is allowed to roam free through our lives, because we justify these things and wreak havoc on other people. Our own thought life, and internal reactions are also affected. A temper is a temper, that’s still a temper … even if your great grandfather had one too! It is not a family trait to be proud of or laughed off! Or what about having to be in control all the time? Control uses manipulation to maintain it. It avoids the personal discomfort of making different choices. At the same time as we are toddling along resisting transformation, other people are judged and crushed by our sinful decisions to remain the same.  

Because of the stronghold, we think to ourselves, there is nothing wrong with me … it’s YOU! You are, and you have the problem. If you didn’t bother me and resist my way, we’d be fine. We can hide behind our severe, sometimes judgmental thoughts, because we can’t face the truth – WE have sinned. Thinking like that is a big fat clue that we are resisting the Holy Spirit’s work in our heart and lives. If we have to exert our will to make it happen – that is the wrong spirit. Over a lifetime, we’ve learnt to dismiss and excuse destructive things, as momentary aberrations, and we’ve distanced ourselves from the very real consequences in other people’s lives.

However, our whole purpose is to be changed to be like HIM … not carry with us the details of death that have strangled and destroyed us, plus other people along the way. None of that is LOVE — and LOVE MUST ALWAYS BE OUR AIM. That Love is described in 1 Corinthians 13 and Colossians 3:13-15. Now, here is the same verse as the one above, but this time it is from the Passion Translation. I really like it, it inspired me today. 

“For although we live in the natural realm, we don’t wage a military campaign employing human weapons, using manipulation to achieve our aims. Instead, our spiritual weapons are energised with divine power to effectively dismantle the defences behind which people hide.We CAN demolish every deceptive fantasy that opposes God and break through every arrogant attitude that is raised up in defiance of the true knowledge of God. We capture, like prisoners of war, every thought and insist that it bow in obedience to the Anointed One. Since we are armed with such dynamic weaponry, we stand ready to punish any trace of rebellion, as soon as (we) choose complete obedience.” 2 Corinthians 10:3-6 TPT.

We cannot and we dare not, avoid obedience. Obedience is essential. Otherwise we will spend our lives protecting me, myself and I, and forget about poor old Fred who is half dead in the corner! If Jesus Christ chose to obey and He never sinned in thought, attitude or deed, don’t you think we need to follow His example? Telling ourselves we are OK and we don’t need to change anything, is putting another nail into the coffin, they will eventually carry us off in! Metamorphosis is part of our mandate from Almighty God. 

At the same time, if we are this careless, we are denying the power of Christ to make our old life, new. There is not one of us alive that does not need heavenly correction or change. I can’t talk for everywhere in the world, but where I live obeying the gospel means nodding your head and hoping someone else will do it for you! That’s not transformation – that’s avoidance. We avoid the opportunities God sends us to make different choices. Dying to self hurts. It is meant to, but it provides the impetus to drive us further into His ways.

We pull down personal strongholds by our choices. That means we continually choose to seek out the Holy Spirit’s correction and believe that He is bigger than our ability to resist Him.” …our spiritual weapons are energised with divine power to effectively dismantle the defences behind which people hide.” And the best place to accomplish that, is to read the book and do what it says! Read Peter, Paul, Jude, James, Philemon etc … and take what they said seriously. Don’t read it and think “I don’t do that” ask the Lord …”Where do I do that? Please show me Lord.” Then we make it our personal aim to check out our behaviour and motivation toward others as we go along.

We live this new life that we have been given, alert, asking the Holy Spirit to highlight to us where we are living out of order with His words. And we value knowing Him over our own comfort. Lastly, let’s get ready to change … because you and I are going to get VERY busy. We are about to demolish some strongholds. Bye 👋🏻