Becoming More Effective at Memory Healing

Many have gotten into trusting the Lord to remove emotional pains in recent times. Many testimonies have resulted from this practice and have spread around the world. Various healings from diagnosed PTSD, quick healing from the emotional damage caused by molestation at a young age, as well as healing of more mild problems have been widely reported.

This approach of trusting Jesus to take away sins and hurts from the heart is something I’ve used often and found to be very effective in my own life and ministry over the years. Ultimately, this is just the practical application of the gospel. Jesus died to take away our sins and to bear our griefs and sorrows, so he can and will instantly and miraculously lift these things out of our hearts if we trust him to. Still, not everybody’s attempt at this has been successful.

This is a breakthrough in what some have called “memory healing,” where people have used various approaches to bring healing to emotions by revisiting painful memories and inviting the Lord to meet the person there (in different ways) to bring healing. This more simple and much faster approach of letting the Lord immediately remove the pains, in my opinion, is much better than the old-school methods popularized in past decades (digging up the lies believed, etc.).

On the other hand, people have often told me that they’ve found mixed results in praying for the Lord to remove emotional pains. Some people report immediate relief of all the pain they are praying over, while others report only partial relief, and still others report no relief whatsoever. Many people say that they’ve gotten full relief from some issues, partial relief from others, and no relief from the rest. I’ve heard that story over and over. So, does Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross only work sometimes? Does it only do the job halfway? No. Something is missing in these folks’ understanding/application. This is why such mixed results are usually reported.

I’m here to tell you that you can find a much higher success rate at this: 100% removal of all pains prayed over close to 100% of the time if you learn a few “intermediate-level” fixes. There will always be those who are dealing with some unusual problem, and you will need a new revelation to get them healed. I’ve run into a few of those among many cases, but the info I’m going to share has been proven to get the job completely done in by far the majority of instances. I’m going to share the common hangups experienced in this kind of emotional healing, and the fixes I’ve found to resolve them the vast majority of the time.

I did just say that you can get the vast majority of people’s painful memories healed without listening to God’s voice at all. I know some people don’t like that, but why make healing unnecessarily difficult? Why turn the blessing of the Lord’s guidance into a bondage it was never intended to be? Do you think it’s sinful to brush your teeth in the morning without asking the Lord for detailed instructions first? Then why are you upset that he heals people as consistently and easily as you brush your teeth?

Some have trouble with this because they are just skeptical, and it’s hard to be successful at a faith based prayer when you’re full of doubts. It also becomes easy to immediately give up over the slightest roadblock. They may need someone more convinced to walk them through things. On the other hand, I’m talking about strong believers who are usually reporting very mixed results. There must be a need for more wisdom. There must be a more effective application than what people are typically doing.

What I’m sharing here shouldn’t be taken to be all that people need for healing in every area. Right now I’m only talking about resolving emotional pains through memory healing. Of course there are other areas people need healing and freedom in, but I’m sharing this because it is something which folks on the internet, with no special skills or training or high spiritual development, can just pick up right off the page as written and then use to see many people healed from many emotional issues.

In the past, I’ve talked about healing fractured parts here, and I’ve warned not to mix that with re-visiting newly discovered (repressed) memories of those fractured parts. (Yeah, don’t do that, or people will totally relive their traumas emotionally and physically.)

There is some overlap between these two subjects though. When doing standard emotional healing through memory work, you can heal many people’s memories by revisiting them and handing over painful emotions even when those memories and emotions are found in fractured parts. In these cases, you can walk through the entire healing just as if there were no fractured parts, without ever needing to be aware that such a thing exists.

Whether that works or not seems to depend on whether the parts are cooperative with you accessing and healing their memories, and/or whether the spiritual strongholds around the parts allow them to cooperate. (You can use your authority in Christ to nullify that second factor.) This is very different than working with the parts intentionally to discover hidden memories, and then re-visiting those to bring healing, as some counselors do. (Again, don’t do that.)

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about making your memory healing more effective. I’m going to start by assuming that you’re already on board with trusting the Lord to instantly and miraculously remove emotional pains from memories.

 

Roadblock #1, removing fruit rather than the root:

One common mistake is not tracing a pain back to it’s earliest root. If you don’t uproot an emotional pain where it was first “planted,” the issue will not fully resolve. For instance, one may be aware of feeling anger and hopelessness towards their spouse, and if they trust the Lord to remove those emotions, some may leave while a portion remain.

A common reason for a portion of the pain remaining is that the current situation is only an emotional echo, a trigger of an earlier wound. This person may be able to trace their anger and hopelessness back to a previous relationship, and may even be able to see a pattern or theme of the same kind of anger and hopelessness being experienced throughout their life history of relationships.

This person’s anger and hopelessness towards their spouse may only be an “echo” of a painful experience at a very early age, where they developed the same kind of anger and hopelessness towards a parent or other relative, for instance. Now, they are interpreting all current relationships through that lens. This happens below the level of consciousness and happens whether the person chooses it or not until they get the original wound healed.

I don’t just assume that somebody’s current pain goes back to a wound with their parents or to any certain age, but I have learned a reliable way to find out where it does come from. I tell people to relax, to “turn their thinker off,” and just feel their painful emotions, then drift back through those feelings (not through their logic) to the first time they felt exactly that way. I’ve found that people’s emotions will consistently take them to the authentic root of the pain. If they try to figure out where the pain comes from using their logic they will often be wrong.

People typically drift back through their negative emotion, through a series of life events one after another, backward into their younger years, until they finally settle on one memory at a certain time, or possibly on a theme of memories over a span of time. The person will feel that they have finally settled on one or the other. They could go back to earlier adulthood, to teenage years, to early childhood, anything. I’m just looking for where they settle. It could only be the current situation causing the pain. There could be no earlier root, but it didn’t hurt to check, did it?

Those new to this approach tend to have two main problems:

They will over-think rather than spontaneously feeling their emotions, and will often go on and on about all their theories of where they think their problems come from. The weakness with this is that their logical brain usually doesn’t know, but their heart does.

The second common problem is that people will assume the first memory they drift back to is the root when they actually need to continue drifting back farther. This is the logical mind taking over as soon as it sees an earlier situation which would make sense as being the root. Nope, keep going until you can’t go any farther back. I typically look for an original wound before the age of 10, when the psyche was most impressionable and vulnerable and when most pains leading to lifelong emotional struggles were implanted for most people. If the person tells me they settled at an age later age than 10, I’ll have them check if they can go back farther, just to be sure.

You could ask God to show you the root, which can work, but I’ve found that to get very squirrely for some people when dealing with their deep hurts. Many folks have defense mechanisms keeping them away from awareness of their real issues and will decide God is telling them to do something else, or that he is saying they don’t have any issues, or absolutely anything to avoid dealing with reality. I’m not saying everyone does this, but it can be an issue, especially for those who feel they should only tune into visions or guidance rather than their hearts. (What are they afraid of in their hearts?) I’d rather get the “hyper-spiritual” folks authentically in touch with their emotions for the sake of avoiding any spiritualized denial.

The only time I find it best to rely on revelation for this is when the issue is rooted in the womb or early infancy, where the person has no natural memory, or even when the issue goes back to pre-conception (in heaven or on the way to the forming body). Those are situations where you will need to pray over what the Lord shows you, rather than what your natural emotions are able to get in touch with. You may recognize the need for that by discernment, or when all else seems to fail.

 

Roadblock #2, not removing unforgiveness first:

Another reason many painful emotions fail to get removed when handed over to the Lord, is that some form of anger or resentment (revengeful emotions) are associated with them. For instance, if you are trying to get healed from rejection in a memory, but you are holding onto vengeful emotions towards the one who rejected you, the feelings of rejection will often remain in place until you get that anger removed. In the parable of the two debtors, Jesus said that if we don’t forgive others we get placed in prison and handed over to tormentors. This is literally how the spiritual realm works. You get locked into emotional torment when holding onto anger.

The good news is that we don’t need to forgive in our own strength, but we can trust the Lord to remove all the revengeful emotions based on his promise that he is “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” I’ve found it effective to confess (holding onto) the revengeful emotions as sin, to genuinely renounce them (say you don’t want them anymore), and then to believe his promise that he will literally take them away. I’ve found it important to be genuine on those three points, not to just say the words emptily for the sake of appeasing a counselor. After getting rid of the anger, many other emotional issues suddenly disappear on their own or become possible to remove next.

You can remove the anger and other emotions at the same time, but the problem so many have is that deep anger tends to be self-justified at the heart level. The person must genuinely, from the heart, recognize it as sin and want it gone. If the right words are said but the intention of the heart is still to justify and/or to stay angry, I’ve found that it just doesn’t get removed. This is why anger often needs to be focused on, processed in the heart a bit, and prayed over first.

All of this applies to anger against God as well as anger against other people just the same. It applies to anger against self as well, otherwise known as shame, which is the next roadblock.

 

Roadblock #3, not resolving shame first (not practically believing the gospel):

One of the people we need to forgive is ourselves. If we are holding onto shame in a memory, that means we are not believing the gospel in that area. If we don’t believe the gospel, we miss out on its benefits. It’s not too difficult to find freedom from shame, especially if you uncover the early root of it as explained above. First, repent for any wrongdoing on your part. Second, realize that Jesus paid for the sins of the entire world, all the sins of Hitler and all the child molesters and serial killers combined, and so yours are pretty small in comparison to that. Third, choose to receive his forgiveness. Fourth, forgive yourself based on his love and forgiveness. Finally, trust him to remove any shame. (As with anything else, sometimes you may need to command what spirits are holding it in place to go.)

I don’t find that people need to get free from all shame and anger whatsoever to get free from any individual painful emotion (that would be a pretty hopeless cause), but I find that they do often need to first get free from all the shame and anger found in the same memory, in the same emotional root, as the other emotional pains they are trying to get rid of.

 

Roadblock #4, giving up rather than plowing through demonic resistance:

I don’t like to give the enemy a platform by focusing on him unnecessarily, but there are times when he will be active in hindering this kind of healing. You will often need to use a command of authority in Christ to thwart demonic hindrances. You may need to do this before, during, and even at the end of a memory healing prayer session. When a person gets deep healing, the demonic often loses their foothold to that person, so they try to resist it however they can. They may cause the person irresistible distractions, may shut down their emotions, manifest out loud through their body and vocal cords, cause physical pain, put the person to sleep, manipulate fractured parts of the person or their guardian aspect of self (more on that another day) to interfere, etc. You can put a stop to any of this by a simple command of authority, unless you would rather give up when you see these hindrances, because the healing method “didn’t work.”

There aren’t any demons anywhere which any of us don’t have full authority to quickly and easily subdue, unless you believe there are. The only issues are whether you believe in the authority the Lord gave you (authority over all the power of the enemy) and whether there is a foothold in the person’s life allowing the enemy to remain. The Lord’s justice system won’t violate people’s will, so they need to come out of agreement with darkness to be fully freed from darkness. Still, even when people are giving the enemy ground, we can bind him up and restrain him from his activities in their life until we walk those people through removing the footholds. Then we can easily kick the critters out for good.

Usually, the enemy tries to work covertly, so it can help to know some of his schemes. He often silently works to hold a negative or vengeful emotion in place when a person is praying for the Lord to take it, and this can create an appearance that the prayer just isn’t working. This is probably the most common hindrance (of any kind) I run into by far, and you only need to command all spirits holding the anger and pain in place to leave. Easy. Now, what wasn’t working, suddenly works.

Another common tactic is shutting down access to the painful emotions. The person’s memories will suddenly become inaccessible, or they will go emotionally numb. The person won’t be able to focus, will feel a strong sense of anxiety (even terror) or of being overwhelmed at the thought of pursuing healing, will feel a need to blow up at you or to argue theology, etc. People often have no intention or natural control over these inner experiences. Don’t blame the one seeking healing. This tends to only be a spiritual attack. You often only need to command the spirits to be bound and restrained from causing these hindrances, and they will immediately stop. If the enemy is using a part of the person to cause these hindrances, you can command him to be bound and restrained from manipulating any part of the person in that way, and this will also stop such things immediately.

At rare times a fractured part is really deceived and is doing these things of their own free will, without needing to be under demonic control. I’ve found that we can also put a stop to this using our authority in Christ. Be gentle with the part, but use a declaration to put up a barrier in the spiritual realm that the rebellious part’s shenanigans won’t be able to get through.

 

Roadblock #5: when the issues are in uncooperative fractured parts, rather than in the main personality:

Sometimes you will need to switch over to ministering to fractured parts to get someone’s emotions healed. Oftentimes you will recognize this when a person can recall their memories but the emotions in them are numb. They often know they have pain or anger in there because it gets triggered sometimes, but they don’t have access to feel it at their own volition. They can only feel the pain and anger when their parts get triggered by a provocation.

Other times, people are so dissociated that they have no access to certain memories at all. At still other times, a person’s emotions in their fractured parts will not be numb, and you will be able to see partial relief of their painful emotions through re-visiting memories and handing the pains in them over to the Lord, but not full relief (because part of the pain is held by a fractured part who isn’t yet willing to hand it over themselves). In that case, you need to minister to the parts and get them to where they become willing.

For these people, you can know from the start that doing memory healing by itself is going to be inconsistent at best. This is the “hard” stuff, as compared to the “easy stuff” of doing memory work on the main personality. (Learning to heal most fractured parts isn’t one 30th as difficult as learning to read English though, and many children learn to read English.)

 

Unusual Roadblocks:

I’ve seen this approach fail when praying with New Agers who believed in the wrong Jesus (ascended master/new age guru Jesus who teaches all religions are the same, no such thing as sin, etc.).

Some go back to an emotional root and it is only a body memory, such as chest or gut tension/pain, etc. Or there may be an emotion without a memory. These may be very early, pre-verbal memories. You can hand them over to the cross just like anything else, even though you may not be able to define them or understand them.

I had one person who needed to break a covenant they had made with their body to retain anger against their spouse before the anger could leave.

Removing emotional issues has even involved the removal of disembodied human spirits inside the person before. Forgiving self and handing over shame led to a vision of these human spirits who were provoking it, and they were moved out. I’m not sure it was necessary to know all the details to get rid of them though.

These have been extremely rare situations. At these rare sorts of times, you just need to ask the Lord to show you what needs to be resolved.

 

A Review: Basic Steps for Emotional Healing/Memory Healing:

1) Feel the main emotion behind your issue, explore it and try to identify it in words (just to get a better handle on it).

2) Trace that emotion back to its source, not by trying to figure out its source intellectually, but by just feeling it and drifting back through the feeling to the earliest time of your life it goes back to. Continue drifting back until you settle somewhere. Your memories and emotions may settle on a single event at a specific time, or they may settle on a theme of a larger time frame, such as your whole childhood or a year/s.

3) When your emotions settle on an early memory or a theme of multiple memories, explore what emotions are there, trying to identify them. You may identify them with words such as “fear,” “powerless,” “invalidated,” “angry,” etc., or you may use a sentence or phrase to identify it, but the point is just to authentically explore them rather than dismissing them, and to try to get a grip on what is really there. The emotions in the early memory may feel more precise than the ones in the current situation or may branch out further.

4)Deal with any anger towards God or others first, because this can lock the other pains in place if not dealt with. From the heart: Confess holding onto the anger as sin, say you don’t want it anymore, and trust Jesus to take it from you as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” Command any spirits associated with the anger to go, and trust the Lord to take it all. Wait a few seconds to let him take it. Often, all other negative emotions will leave the memory along with the anger, but sometimes they will still remain.

5) Deal with any shame/guilt. This also holds other problems in place, because it is a matter of not believing the gospel in that area. Repent from any wrongdoing/sin. Receive the Lord’s forgiveness based on the fact that he paid for all the sins of the entire world, and that “God was in Christ, reconciling us to himself, not counting our trespasses against us.” Now, forgive yourself based on his love and forgiveness towards you. Finally, command all shame to go and all demonic associated with it.

6) Trust the Lord to remove any other negative emotions left over, since he “bore our griefs and carried our sorrows.” Command any spirits holding them in place to go, along with the negative emotions as necessary.

7) Check the memory to see if all negative emotions are gone, and deal with any that remain. Invite the Lord to meet you in the memory, to show you what he was doing, to speak to you there, whatever he wants to do.

(You may experience feelings of being overwhelmed or distracted, things hindering you from exploring memories and finding healing. You can often deal with this by commanding that all demonic manipulating any part of you to put up walls or to hinder healing be bound up and prohibited from doing that in the name of Jesus.)

Jenn’s Overhaul – A Story of Healing Fractured Parts, Physical Diseases, and Emotions

This is one of my more impressive testimonies of how physical healing, emotional healing in root memories, and healing of fractured parts can all work together. This is an account from a few years ago of working “Jenn” through healing in all these areas, used with permission.

A friend and I were praying for a young woman’s healing. Jenn had wanted to be healed from one painful condition that her doctors had been stumped by: an inflamed, ulcerated bladder. It seemed she would be left to suffer with it long term.

It was a great day. As we prayed for her using simple, Spirit-led commands of faith, she was not only instantly healed of all symptoms of the ulcerated bladder (long term), but from something like seven or eight other conditions as well.

We were led to address issues with her eyesight, her back, her neck, a shoulder which hadn’t been able to raise one arm above her head, one leg an inch and a half shorter than the other, one foot which couldn’t push downward due to a neurological problem, etc. Each physical issue was being completely resolved before our eyes one after another. The leg grew out to the length of the other, the arm could now be raised overhead, the immobilized foot pushed down, she could read things she couldn’t read before with her eyesight, and so on. It was amazing.

Along the way we were led to address various emotional issues. We resolved them through tracing emotions back to their source in earlier memories, handing over the pain and anger found in them to the Lord for him to remove based on the work of the cross. Standing on the scriptural promises that Jesus is “the Lamb of God who takes away our sins,” and that he “bore our griefs and carried our sorrows,” we were quickly and simply removing one deep emotional problem after another. (Details on how to do that well can be found here.) After getting rid of emotional wounds in this way, we would continue going after more outward issues and seeing more physical healing.

Jenn then shared that she had something called “Chiari malformation,” where she was born with her skull a bit too small, resulting in some of her brain tissue protruding into her spinal canal. I’d never heard of this but figured that if God can grow a leg out he can also grow a skull. In response to prayer, she shared that she could feel the base of her skull growing larger and relieving pressure from her brain.

We were also led to pray for her digestive system, and I had an image of the Lord giving her a bowl of cereal to eat. She replied that a bowl of cereal was one of her favorite things, but that she would have terrible problems in her gut if she dared to eat one. Since her faith was encouraged by all the other miracles she had just received, she said she would eat a bowl of cereal soon. When I heard back from her a week later, she said that she was eating cereal without any problem.

At the end of the day, there had been many breakthroughs internal and external, but there was still one neurological problem we couldn’t resolve. She was unable to flex one of her feet and toes in a certain way, and this didn’t respond much at all to any type of prayer we tried. She would walk around limping everywhere she went due to this stubborn issue.

 

ONTO THE FRACTURED PARTS

I was invited back to pray with her again another day, and I asked the Lord what he wanted to deal with before heading over. I had a sense of part of her being fractured, and a sense of a young girl, around teenage, on the inside of her. When we met up though, my discernment was different. I wasn’t picking up on a teenage girl anymore, but a baby who needed to be warmed up in some way. I began questioning whether I was just off since what I was getting wasn’t consistent.

I asked her to get quiet and see if anything responded as I tried to call a child inside her to the surface. I asked her to pay attention to any thoughts, feelings or images coming to the surface inside of her as I called out to any fractured part within. Her part in this, as described, looked just like listening to the Lord, but was to be focused on listening to a part of herself. She immediately became aware for the first time that there was a teenage girl inside her, and one who had some strong emotions.

I tried to talk to the teenage girl and invite Jesus to reveal himself to her, but Jenn shared with me that the girl was being blocked by a dark presence from communicating with me. There was a demon there who would get in the way and would speak to the mind of the woman being ministered to, swearing at me and threatening me from within her.

Defaulting to previous knowledge and experience, I began sharing with the teenage girl that Jesus would cut the ties between this evil being and herself, freeing her from it if she would only give him permission.

Usually, this is a common situation with fractured parts, that the demonic has tricked them into making agreements of some kind, maybe disguising themselves as another fractured part or even as Jesus himself to trick the parts, and all that is necessary is for the fractured part to renounce any agreements with the demon/s, give Jesus permission to remove them, and he does.

This time, Jenn relayed back to me that this part of her was trying to give Jesus permission, but the demon was still not being removed. This wasn’t typical. I needed to find out what the real issue was.

I asked the teenager to ask Jesus what he was saying she needed to do to get rid of this thing. What she heard from him, reported back to me through the adult woman, was, “Give your heart.”

Apparently, this teenage part had not yet given her heart to the Lord. This can also be a common issue with fractured parts. They may not have given their heart to Jesus. They may not have become born again, even though the main personality of the “host” has. As soon as the teenage part did give her heart to Jesus, the demon was removed, and I was then able to talk with her without interference.

Jenn expressed being especially grateful for this. She was pretty spiritually sensitive, so she had known for a while that there was a “darkness” inside her, and now she was aware that it was finally gone.

I began asking the Lord to reveal what he wanted to do for this teenager to heal her further. Before she would be ready to be integrated into the adult woman, it would be important to make sure she was fully healed. I was asking her to pose this question to Jesus and to report back what he said.

When working with fractured parts, I am always looking for Jesus to bring thorough, complete healing and cleansing to the parts before integrating them. This way the woundedness which caused them to fracture, as well as any other problem issues picked up throughout their life, will not be integrated into the core person, only the healthy aspects which were separated.

Jesus can quickly take away any hurts or issues if the fractured part is only willing to hand them over to him. He simply takes them away, and they have no more presence or effect. I tell people, tongue in cheek, “to think of it like Jesus is magical.” He heals parts faster and easier than any therapy known on earth. We just need to have enough of a grid for that to invite him to. He doesn’t temporarily put the issues out of awareness, but he removes them forever.

Sometimes it can get more complicated when the parts are deceived and unwilling to cooperate with Jesus. There may be a need for him to reveal who he truly is and to address various lies the parts are believing. I try to rely on him revealing truth directly to them, getting their permission to find out what he has to say about a certain subject and then inviting him to speak to them, rather than trying to counsel the parts so much myself.

I’m also not looking for Jesus to heal the parts by uncovering all the lies they believe behind their woundedness and explaining truth in all those areas. That isn’t necessary, would take too long, and could become extremely painful for some people. What I’m looking for is for Jesus to counteract any deceptions or concerns the parts have which are preventing them from being willing to cooperate with him, to then lead them in handing over all their hurts and issues to simply be removed.

If I remember correctly, there were one or two emotional issues which were easily removed for this teenager. I think she was only concerned about the care of another younger part and needed to hand the worry and responsibility of that to the Lord.

Jenn told me that she had just become aware that the teenager inside her was also carrying a baby in her arms. The teenager was a caretaker of this baby. She became aware that this baby was another fractured part of her, coming from a time when she had been left alone in a freezing attic for several days as an infant.

Now it made sense to me that I had perceived a teenager inside Jenn before coming over to pray, and then when I got there I had perceived an infant who needed warming up. I had not shared this with Jenn before she saw it herself. The teen girl was led to hand the baby girl over to Jesus, who warmed her up and brought healing to her as he held her.

Now that both of these parts had been completely freed and healed up, Jesus was saying that they were ready to be integrated into the core woman they originally were fractured off from. I am careful to ask Jesus in these situations and to have the parts ask Jesus if they are really ready to be integrated or if there are any remaining issues to be healed. I don’t want to integrate woundedness into the person being ministered to, as can happen. I want to get the woundedness healed from the parts first so that integration will be a positive step for them.

Parts can be afraid of being integrated. They may think it will mean they will die or something. They are actually going to be brought more to life. Instead of being stuffed away and only coming to the surface when they are triggered or called upon to perform their function, they will be “out” all the time as part of the whole person, living as one.

I am careful to ask the parts themselves if they have any questions, unsettled emotions, or pains, things which we may need to invite Jesus to minister to before integration. If you leave these things unresolved, the parts may play along and pretend to be going into integration, but really may only be going into hiding because they aren’t comfortable with that yet.

With fractured parts, you can be dealing with young and immature, very wounded and fearful parts of a person. It can take time to earn their trust and to walk them through taking all their issues to the Lord as they become comfortable doing so.

As soon as the teenager and the baby were integrated into Jenn, her stubborn neurological issue was immediately healed. She began walking circles around her home excited that she was finally able to walk without a limp, her previously stuck foot now functioning fully like the other. Although a friend and I had seen success with many other of this woman’s healing needs previously, for this particular healing to take place, her fractured parts had needed to be healed and integrated. Her healing, internal and external in these areas, remained stable long term (a year plus) as far as I’m able to tell.

This is an example of a very easy integration. It can get a lot more complicated and difficult depending on where the person is at spiritually, how many and what kind of issues their parts have, etc. You may need to spend a lot of time working through deep trust issues that a person’s parts have towards the Lord and towards people for all the hard things they have lived through before you can even get them to begin interacting with him much or handing their hurts over to him.

 

“LIFE,” AS THEY CALL IT, HAPPENED, AND THEN LIFE HAPPENED

There were further developments. After her integration and healing, she quickly got involved in a relationship with an emotionally abusive man who had little grid for spirituality. I didn’t know about the abusiveness until after the fact. Even not knowing that I would have liked to see her develop and solidify her spiritual walk and her recent personal breakthroughs instead of running off, but it just wasn’t where this guy was taking her.

I realized that it wasn’t my job to try to control her life, but that she needed to walk out her process and do what she wanted to do. She needed to figure things out herself. Seeing her with this guy once or twice, I noticed that her shoulder and neck were again giving her trouble as they had before her original healing and that she didn’t seem too motivated to get that resolved spiritually. This was frustrating to see. Praying, I was led to sit tight until this relationship fell apart. In about six months or so it did, and she got in contact with me again.

Jenn’s shoulder and neck were still giving her trouble, although the other healings she experienced had remained intact. She was planning to go into expensive and temporarily debilitating surgery on her shoulder. (It was frozen in place again.) This was the same shoulder which I had prayed over before and seen her raise above her head.

She had also now been seeing a Christian counselor who had diagnosed her with PTSD from earlier abusive relationships. She described being in constant “hyper-alert” mode, always on the lookout for danger.

Praying with her again, we traced the emotions of her “hyper alert mode,” as well as those related to previous abusive relationships back to their sources in earlier memories. The traumas, fears, and anger in her life at the time, as well as those experienced in memories of her abusive adult relationships, were only emotional echoes of childhood memories. These were memories related to an abusive stepdad along with a few other situations.

It took about 15-20 minutes to listen to her, to walk her through tracing those emotions back to their roots in her original childhood traumas, and to trust the Lord to take the painful emotions away. In that time she found relief from her PTSD symptoms such as the hyper-alert mode and her known negative emotions from abusive relationships. As these emotional issues were healed, her neck and shoulder suddenly relaxed again and stopped hurting her.

Apparently, her earlier healing in these areas had only been in the physical, but there were still emotional roots causing tension, leading to the symptoms returning later when she was put under similar stress. When we finally dealt with these emotional issues, she was able to maintain healing long term. This situation is common.

When such a thing occurs, we can at first be tempted to think that the original healing wasn’t real, that it was some kind of mental trick or a false sign or something. We only need to keep pressing in and get the source of the problem resolved rather than only the symptoms. The recurrence didn’t mean that God hadn’t resolved her symptoms in the first place or that he was teasing her with a temporary blessing. It only meant that she needed some deeper work to get things resolved permanently.

Although the tension and pain were now gone, I still had to pray over her shoulder for her to be able to raise it overhead. It appeared that it had physically locked up (again) after six months of tension. It still needed a miraculous work beyond the emotional healing. She found healing that day again and was able to raise her arm overhead without pain. She would not need the surgery she had been planning for.

Although this story is an example of very rapid healing in all these areas, and not everyone moves through things anywhere near this quickly, it is also an example of process. Nobody gets all their issues resolved in one prayer session or just a few. If we are being realistic, there is a need for all of us to continually make more progress.

Too often, I’ve run into a mentality among Spirit-filled crowds that we are supposed to get “totally healed” or “totally free,” and that this is supposed to happen immediately, or maybe after going through somebody’s little program. That is religious fantasy, not reality. I think it’s more of a sales pitch. People are more likely to buy something if it promises spiritual perfection in a single day. Such a thing doesn’t require a minister to really get down into the nitty-gritty with anyone, only to do their hocus pocus, take people’s money, and move onto the next customer. People are left with a delusion that causes them to resist dealing with their real issues.

I don’t think I’ve ever known anybody who has gotten “totally free and healed,” but everyone can receive more freedom and healing if they are willing to. I know I am still receiving more. There can be a need for persistence and a need for resolving roots in the healing process. All of these things, fractured parts, emotional wounds, physical conditions and more, can be interrelated.

People will also make decisions with their lives to go in a different direction and may end up needing to get some of the same issues resolved once again in the future. Thank God that he is patient with us even when we do this, or we’d all be doomed. We need to reflect this patience with people and be willing to minister to them without condemnation as they become ready again to receive.

Basics of Healing Parts/Fragments

This is an enhanced version of something I wrote out for a FB friend, who knew that she was experiencing fractured parts/fragments in her life but didn’t how to heal them. The little write up included in the middle of this seemed to help her safely make progress in her own healing when she applied it, and it would likely be useful for more people in the same way.

In her instance, she seemed to already be comfortable with perceiving things in the spiritual realm, and seemed to even be quick to pick up communicating with parts of herself. These things tend to be more of a matter of having a willingness to walk in childlike faith, rather than being a matter of needing to have some unusual gifting.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about at all, here is a variety of teachings from Praying Medic on the subject of parts (fragments and alters), from his website:

https://prayingmedic.com/?s=fragments+alters

 

INTRO

There are areas of woundedness which don’t seem to respond to typical methods of inner healing, such as when we are attempting to heal emotions found in painful memories, but we just can’t seem to really get ahold of the emotions themselves or get them to fully release. Many times (not always), this can be due to fractured parts being involved.

Many times a pain or issue is within a fractured part of a person and not in their main personality, and so the person’s main personality simply doesn’t have the ability to hand that issue over to the Lord, to make the decision to receive his healing of that issue, etc., but the fractured part itself must make those decisions. I’ve found that ministering healing directly to these parts can resolve many pains and problems which couldn’t seem to be budged any other way.

I don’t want to make it sound like healing fractured parts always and only boils down to a simple written formula, like there are just a few steps in a certain order and that’s all anyone ever needs. Still, for many people, healing fractured parts can be much easier than it sounds. When we rely on the Lord to bring miraculous healing, things can be accomplished much faster and much more painlessly than any other way.

Some people have long and complex healing processes, yet I’ve seen a decent number of people get a large number (maybe all) of their parts healed and integrated in one or two prayer sessions. It depends on the individual and exactly what they are dealing with.

For those who are already working with their parts and have a healing process which is taking years to complete, there is absolutely no shame in that, but they may be dealing with something more complex than what I can give all the answers to in a little blog post. Sometimes though, people just don’t know what they can do to speed things up to make these things easier on themselves, because.. who talks about this sort of thing?

What this is ultimately about is experiencing the “sozo” (Greek for: healing, rescue, “salvation” in the NT) which Jesus died for us to receive. This is about opening up the deeper areas of ourselves to allow him to work in those places and to bring wholeness and freedom where there has been pain and bondage.

I don’t get involved in labeling people with psych disorders such as DID, DDNOS, or the like, and I prefer to just talk about “parts” rather than trying to judge whether they should be called fragments or alters or whatever the latest psychological term is. Since I’m not a doctor, I don’t get involved in all the medical labels (which are subject to debate among the doctors anyway), but I just pray with people and invite the Lord to bring healing. Somebody else can put labels on you if you want.

I should include a warning: If someone reports missing time in their daily life, a history or signs of satanic ritual abuse, or being tremendously overwhelmed or traumatized by attempts at emotional healing, you probably want to back off and get help from someone experienced with those things. The info I’m sharing here is for more common, less complex cases. Healing parts usually isn’t that difficult, but there are certain people for whom it can be a more rough process.

A programmed SRA survivor for instance, may be programmed to kill themselves as soon as someone begins healing their parts or as soon as one of their parts shares certain information. That programming may take over and one of their parts may do the deed whether the rest of them wants that to happen or not.

Even a few non-SRA people, with complex and severe woundedness among their parts, may get hurt more severely if someone digs into their stuff too quickly or too recklessly. Most people aren’t going to experience anything like that with any kind of healing work though. Again, for the vast majority of people receiving ministry, these things will never be an issue, but there are some out there for whom they can be.

This post is for information sake only. Minister only to those you are truly prepared to help. You may need to find in person training, do more research, and even partner with someone else for awhile before taking on really tough situations. Still, with most people, Jesus just heals the parts quickly and painlessly (or close to painlessly), without complication.

The basic idea behind what I do is to get the parts in personal communication with the Lord, and to allow him to do the heavy lifting of counseling and healing them directly. He can bring exactly the truths needed to answer their questions, to resolve their concerns, and he can instantly take away all sorts of bondages and emotional issues which could otherwise take years for the person and their parts to work through in their own strength.

There are several ways that you can get in contact with fractured parts to communicate with them, to invite the Lord to begin communicating with them and bringing healing:

-Some people call them “up” or to the surface of a person’s consciousness, to actually “switch” or take control of the body. (People find success with this approach, but I prefer to use other methods when I can.) From here, you can have a conversation with a fractured part just as with the normal personality of the one you are ministering to as it speaks through their mouth. Depending on how seriously fractured a person is, they may experience a subtle or drastic shift take place with this, or even a headache as the switching takes place.

-Rather than getting people to “switch,” I typically like to talk to people’s parts out loud (they can usually hear you as you talk to the person out loud) and ask them to just put thoughts and pictures in the person’s mind, feelings in their emotions, and such. This is just as if the person were listening to the Lord, but instead, they are listening to a part of themselves. This seems to be easier on the person receiving ministry many times, and for one thing, also allows them to communicate with and walk their own parts through healing when nobody is around to help.

-Another way is to just perceive the parts in the Spirit, to see them in vision form for instance, and to go to them “in the Spirit,” bringing the Lord there with you. This way, you can communicate with them in the spiritual realm, without needing to physically say anything, and you can introduce them to Jesus, releasing him to minister to them however he wants to. As you watch the Lord begin to minister, just trust him to accomplish the one thing he is doing, and then wait for him to show you the next thing, watch him do that, and so on. You may recognize the part receiving all sorts of different kinds of help (it is often different every time) until they seem to disappear, becoming integrated into the rest of the person. (They don’t actually disappear, but they become one with the core person. They become more fully alive and “out” all the time in the person’s life.)

 

A FIRST STEP

In any of those three approaches, it can be very helpful to start by binding up and restraining the demonic from hindering ministry in any way, and specifically to bind up and restrain them from manipulating or controlling any parts of the person, causing them to cause hindrances or blocks to ministry.

Oftentimes the enemy will manipulate and use parts whose job it is to protect other parts of the person, using these “protectors” to protect the person from getting healed. (Yes, different parts tend to have different jobs, protectors, helpers, ones carrying pains, ones to function in the outside world, etc.) He will drive these protector parts to cause mental distractions, outbursts of anger, feelings of numbness or of being overwhelmed, theological arguments, etc., and will shut down access to areas of woundedness you are trying to minister to. This is often forced by the demonic rather than being the real intention of the parts themselves.

If this happens during a session, just take authority over it, command the enemy to be restrained and moved back from doing these things, and it should immediately stop. The protector parts will appreciate being released from the demonic manipulation and control. This may get these “protecting” or “guardian” parts on your side if they weren’t before. Most importantly, this should get you past many defense mechanisms which you wouldn’t be able to get past normally, so that you can bring healing where you couldn’t even get access before.

Now that the demonic control of those parts is released, you can often get the parts’ permission to have those demons totally removed. Be sure to lead those parts into relationship with the Lord to take the place of that junk if you do. (Just lead them in receiving Jesus into their hearts and in meeting him personally.) Don’t leave the parts with an empty void that they don’t know how to fill on their own (without Jesus), or they may invite the enemy back in to fill that painful void once again. When introducing the protector parts to Jesus, it helps to explain to them that Jesus isn’t taking away their job, but is going to empower them to do it more effectively if they let him in.

 

ABC’s

What I’ll share below are some steps for when you are having the parts communicate to or through the person, as you communicate with them verbally (the first or second approach I shared above). These are what I find to be the most common steps useful for walking parts through healing:

-Discern the parts and listen to them: Get an image of what they look like maybe, what condition they are in, what they are carrying and what is around them. Ask them to share anything on their heart, their emotions, any statements they wish to share, etc.

-Bring Jesus or another member of the Trinity to the part/s (by faith) and help them get into relationship with him. He may need to reveal himself to them a little at a time, explain something to them, heal them from something small, or give them gifts or food etc. to help them become able to trust him. Just ask him to minister to them however he wants, and work with the parts to help them receive.

-There are sometimes false Jesuses who may need to be exposed and removed before the parts can come into relationship with the real Jesus. This is often the case w/ religious backgrounds or heritages. Have the parts make sure to look into Jesus’ eyes to check if there is love in his eyes. If there isn’t, that means it isn’t Jesus but a religious spirit. You don’t want a demon posing as Jesus ministering to the parts. It may hurt them. You can use your authority in Christ to expose the tricksters and get the parts permission to remove them. You can persuade the parts that Jesus isn’t like that, isn’t mean, is all love, all good, etc., and that the bad Jesus they’ve known isn’t really Jesus. As soon as the part gives you permission, you can cast out the false Jesus and invite the true one in.

-Make sure that all the parts receive Jesus as their Lord and savior. Just have them pray a simple prayer of surrender to his lordship and inviting him into their hearts, receiving the work of the cross. It makes a big difference in them getting free. Even among Christians, many fractured parts have not received the Lord as their savior yet, have not begun a relationship with him. If they aren’t ready for this, he can just reveal himself a little at a time, maybe from a distance, and minister to them at whatever level they are comfortable with until they become ready for more.

-Once the part is in a relationship with Jesus, get the part’s permission to let the Lord take away any anger, unforgiveness, trauma, negative emotions, demonic, anything negative, and he can take it away instantly and miraculously. If there is any hangup to this he can work with them to resolve it and get it done. Often there is a bad guy strapped to their back and they need to give permission to remove it. Often the parts’ clothes need to be changed from colored to white, representing purity in the spiritual realm. They may need to be taken out of a bad place such as a dark cave or a dungeon filled with demons, etc., and moved to a better, safer place to receive ministry.

-After they are healed up, they may go somewhere with Jesus to take a break for awhile before receiving more ministry another day, or they may help with finding and communicating to or for other parts or groups of parts so that the Lord can continue healing all of them in the same way. Or, they may be ready for integration into the whole person. Have them ask the Lord if they are ready to be integrated and to follow him into the light to be integrated if he says yes.

This is all done from a place of just listening and discerning the part/s, just as if you were listening to the Lord, rather than a place of exploring memories and re-living emotional pain. That means it’s a totally different approach than secular trauma processing, and is about the Lord miraculously taking pains away as the parts merely give him permission, rather than you having to feel the pains all over again and figure it all out.

These are just basics, but well tested. I would think that it would be enough to resolve many issues among fractured parts if a person’s case isn’t very complex.

I really consider having someone to help you with this valuable, especially if you get stuck, but I also find that it’s important to learn to do this sort of thing just with the Lord if we are ready for that. He wants to take us so much farther than we can go in just a few sessions on somebody else’s schedule.

Another warning: If you work with more severely fractured parts who discover repressed memories, do not try to have the person go into those memories to re-explore them or to feel out the emotions in them, as they can go into what is called an “abreaction.” This is where they will totally re-live the experience of their abuse physically and emotionally just as if it were happening again. Traditional counseling often relies on that to heal dissociation, since it gets the repressed emotions up to a conscious level, breaking down the dissociative barriers in the mind, but obviously it can be a horrible experience. Instead of emotionally exploring the newly surfaced memory and abreacting, just have the Lord identify the pains and issues in the memory, and have the part hand all that over to him. He will take the pain and anger, etc. away instantly without them having to re-live it.

 

FURTHER RESOURCES

There are some good books out there on understanding dissociation and ministry to the more severely dissociated if you want to learn more. These are mostly from professional therapists who come from a strong psychology background, and who have limited understanding of the supernatural.

Most of these people rely on revisiting and reliving the memories which caused the parts to fracture in the first place, then doing secular methods of trauma processing. These are things that I find unnecessary and unnecessarily painful, but the general understanding these therapists have of what kinds of issues people deal with, and the great practical and relational wisdom they share should not be underestimated.

The Lord can be called upon to bring miraculous healing, and at the same time we can grow in practical understanding of what people are wrestling with on the human level. I think that if we are going to work with the more severely hurting folks, we are going to need all the help we can get, even from people who only understand the natural side of things.

These are books about ministering to the most severe cases out there, SRA and DID, so they get pretty intense and a decent amount of the info is not necessary for what this post is about. I don’t know of any books written about healing common fractured parts, so the real intense stuff is all I can offer when it comes to further reading. (Wait a minute… I’m co-authoring three books right now, which will go way more in depth into all kinds of healing than this little blog ever could, so maybe that will help pretty soon: )

SRA is beyond the scope of what I’ve even tended to work with much at all so far. I do know Diane Moyer, who has worked with SRA survivors since the 90’s, and I run my questions about such things through her.

This first book, written in everyday language, Help for the Fractured Soul, is from a very experienced Texas based Christian counselor who combines a lot of practical wisdom and clinical understanding with some spiritual work. She does traditional memory work, having people revisit/relive their parts’ horrible memories, like most counselors do, but invites the Lord to come in and speak and heal in the midst of them. Everything else she shares in the book is tremendously insightful and helpful (invaluable?), not to be underestimated just because I believe there’s a better way to do the healing itself.

https://www.amazon.com/Help-Fractured-Soul-Experiencing-Deliverance/dp/0800795326

The second, written in psych jargon and aimed at those working with most severe folks, Restoring the Shattered Self: A Christian Counselor’s Guide to Complex Trauma, gets into even more detail and advanced understanding of working with parts. My favorite aspect is the early discussion on relational safety, an absolutely necessary thing to walk in while ministering to parts on any level.

The author shares a lot about relating to people in such vulnerable situations safely and ethically, shares tons of very practical wisdom, and puts the healing sessions (she uses memory work and secular trauma processing rather than the Lord, again) as a second step after a long phase of building safety and stabilization with the person first. After the memory work, (if the client chooses to go there, she makes it clear that they may not), she explains how she then helps the person develop a whole and balanced life once integrated. Lots of brilliant insights if you have the patience to wade through the professional psych jargon and totally secular perspective. (The title says “Christian,” but I think that means “using secular methods while having a traditional Christian worldview.”)

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CMSE71G/ref=oh_aui_d_detailpage_o05_?ie=UTF8&psc=1

The third, Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control, is extremely informative about what people with SRA and mind control are dealing with, how they get programmed, challenges to healing them, and so much more. Again, basically a totally secular perspective, completely secular methods, but much information one probably needs to work with the most severe people out there. This book goes way beyond the previous two when it comes to understanding specific issues in SRA programming. Not for the feint of heart.

The fourth, The Shining Man with Hurt Hands, is a layperson’s journey in learning to work with the Lord and his angels to heal people’s parts from many levels of severity. This one is spiritually based (Woohoo!) and takes a very different approach than what I’ve shared above, but is very informative.

Click to access ShiningMan.pdf

Finally, (but definitely not least) here is a great blog sharing an SRA/DID survivor’s healing journey and spiritual healing work with others:

https://catenfriends.wordpress.com/home/

Oh wait, then there are resources such as Restoration in Christ Ministries (a pioneer in working with SRA/DID, employing deliverance and some sort of ministry to parts which I haven’t learned from yet.), or HeartSync (great insight on deeper healing, much of which applies to parts), where you can purchase training materials in the form of audio seminars. I’m hoping they get their training materials uploaded to their site soon. For now you have to go to a seminar to attend in person or just to buy their training DVDs.)

A Fear-Less Guide to Encountering Deceptive Spirits, The False Jesus, etc.

See that guy? He’s not really Jesus. I can explain: Many have been taught to be way too worried about deceiving spirits. At the same time, I’ve run into plenty of those buggers, and can’t dismiss the issue.

The fear of deception is exactly what keeps us vulnerable to deception, because it keeps us from developing experience with the True. If we don’t push the edges of our comfort zones and grow in experientially encountering the Lord, we will always lack the knowledge of the true necessary to spot a deceiver.

The main issue is trusting his heart, that if we ask for bread he won’t give us a serpent. From there, once we’ve eaten a lot of bread, we can learn to spot a serpent, because a serpent isn’t very much like bread.

Did you know that there really are “false Jesuses” out there though? Even Paul wrote about “another Jesus,” and he’d never been south of the border. Recently, I prayed with three people for deep healing within the span of a week, each of whom needed to be delivered from false Jesuses. These people lived in vastly different parts of the world (West Coast U.S., East Coast U.S., and South Asia), had completely different ethnic backgrounds and life histories.

I’m sure that three in a week is a low number for some of those who are praying on this level with people full time (I’ve run into this so often). Dealing with these counterfeit spirits wasn’t any big deal, and I’ve never found them too difficult to recognize or to remove.

I’ve often run into “evil Jesus” while working with people’s fractured parts, especially if they come from a religious background or a religious heritage (i.e. most people on some level). The main problem I’ve seen these cause is that they prevent the person’s parts from coming into relationship with the true Jesus.

How I often walk people’s fractured parts through healing is to get them into relationship with Jesus, and then to have him do the heavy lifting of counseling and healing them directly. I’ve found that to be the most effective, quickest, and easiest way to bring healing in that area. This can be difficult though if they think they already know Jesus, but know a false one instead, or if they have been abused by something they think is Jesus, and now want nothing to do with him.

I’ve run into this when I’ve asked people’s fractured parts if they can see Jesus nearby, or to ask him about such and such, or to ask him to heal them from this or that, and they have turned to their familiar spirit who has been dressed up like Jesus, but who (for one thing) is unable to heal them.

Dealing with all this becomes necessary because people are very often fragmented, and sometimes dissociated at higher levels (like DID, etc.), and these fragments/parts have their own needs for ministry. I basically learned about this through getting healed from it myself, having plenty of dramatic experiences along the way.

I found out I needed such things by searching for answers for others who were dealing with worse, being led to the beginning of some answers, then realizing in the process that I needed the same kind of healing those people did. Then, it seemed that most people could benefit from this, just on various levels.

I wasn’t shy to experiment with Holy Spirit, or to learn from others who had lots of previous experience. A decade and a half later, I still have the privilege of praying with and seeing quite a few people being healed in this area. It’s just one more of the multiple facets of deeper healing and transformation paid for us through the work of the cross. I’m also watching as many more people are starting to learn about such things and applying them nowadays. That’s a long story made very short, but let’s move along with the subject, shall we?

 

All About Jesus’ Evil Twins as Seen in Fragment Land

Like I said, this area of working with people’s fractured parts is where I’ve run into many Jesus impostors. I’m not convinced that this is the only place they exist. I have a hunch that there would be lots of them hanging around your local house of religion, inspiring sermons and prayers and such, but I’ve only seen them exposed while working with fractured parts.

These “false Jesuses” have never been hard to recognize for anyone who knows to check for such things, and who has a basic familiarity with the ways of the true Jesus. One test I’ve never found to fail, is to have the fractured parts look into the eyes of the thing presenting itself as Jesus, and to check whether there is love in those eyes. The true Jesus always has love in his eyes, while a counterfeit will have cold eyes, or hateful eyes, or something of that nature (usually cold).

You can also often tell by the way “Jesus” treats a person and their parts. If he’s mean, condemning, sexually, physically, or verbally abusive, etc., then it’s not the real Jesus. Easy. Also, the bad Jesus won’t be able to heal the parts’ pains and issues, but the real Jesus can and will take those things away like magic as he is given permission to by the parts who were holding them.

The false Jesus tends to not be able to dress in all white (representing purity in the spiritual realm), but will have other colors. In one case, a false Jesus seemed to be dressed in all black with a white stripe down the center, like a skunk, and he even smelled like a skunk. Other times, it’s been more subtle.

The parts only need to be shown that the fake Jesus is fake, and to give permission for him to be removed. They only need to look into his eyes and check for love. Then, you can remove him with a command. Now, you can introduce the kiddos to the real Jesus, and let him start healing them.

So, making this relevant to more than just healing fractured parts, let’s look at how the “evil Jesus” has been known to operate. Maybe we can draw general principles from that of how the enemy counterfeits spiritual things in our lives.

I’ve seen the fake Jesus be like a voice of self-criticism on steroids, always drawing attention to something to accuse or condemn about the person. John 3:17 tells us that the the real Jesus didn’t come to condemn the world, but to save it. That means that even “the world,” the system of people who are actively involved in sin and not even asking for a savior, are not being condemned by the true Jesus. Instead, he is saving them.

The false Jesus will beat you up for your sins, and anything else he can possibly get you to feel bad about just the same, all in the name of “conviction.” Self condemnation and self criticism leads us to become critical and condemning of others too, so it shows up outwardly.

The fake Jesus is cold and rigid, more about “obedience” than relationship. He seems to just kind of keep things “decently and in order,” as in everybody staying within the lines, staying wounded and dead inside, not daring to do much for the sake of avoiding being wrong, not making any real progress. The biggest thing he seems to do is to keep people’s hurting parts from coming into relationship with the true Jesus, because they think they already have that.

Talking about being lifeless, I recall one person who had a false Jesus who was only a framed picture of Jesus, like the picture at the top of this blog post. Instead of relating to this person’s fractured parts personally, this picture of Jesus merely stood for the teachings and rules passed down from authority figures early in life. This person’s fractured part needed to see that their “Jesus” wasn’t real, and that the true Jesus wanted to be in actual relationship with them.

Some people’s parts refuse to meet with Jesus, because they think they have met him already, whether in the form of a spirit or in the form of the example of religious institutions and people. I’ve found different folks’ parts refusing to receive help from Jesus because they think he hates everybody and is going to send them to hell, or because they think he endorses various forms of abuse which are common in religion, such as shaming and condemning people, oppression of women, etc.

I’ve had a few people whose parts have raised the objection of hell, that if there is a forever hell which God is going to send people to, he must be a bad guy and someone to stay clear of. As long as they held a belief in this “hell,” they weren’t going to dare let Jesus talk to them or begin healing them. I’ve had to explain to them how that is a false doctrine based only on mis-translations, and I’ve even had to invite the real Jesus to explain the truth to them directly. I’ve then listened in as he has explained how there is no such thing as a “hell” of eternal torment for anybody, how he would never create such a thing.

For those who are freaking out now, I know of no better current theology source on the subject than Richard Murray, who has a great, scholarly pdf, “The Question of Hell,” which is usually free online but down at the moment. For now, here is a FB note of his using some of its content:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/annalize-mouton/apocatastasis-a-heresy-a-hope-or-a-doctrine-by-richard-murray/10153347472833370

This issue of making God out to be a sadistic monster worse than Hitler, Freddy Kruger, and Hannibal Lecter combined, to throw billions of his own children into everlasting, fiery torture for no redemptive purpose, is only one problem which arises when we take the modern English translations at face value without doing any deeper research, or when we take the popular theology teachings out there as being “what the Bible says.”

There are multiple passages where people caught up in religious institutions (following a false Jesus) translated scripture into English in such a way as to make it conform to their own doctrines of a cold, abusive God. Subjugating women, taking away their personal authority to teach, lead, or minister, is another example of a false teaching based only on mis-translations.

As one example, here is an article from “The Junia Project,” refuting the common, poor translation of 1 Timothy 2:12, so often used to forbid women from “teaching or exercising authority over men:”

found here

So, the false Jesus tends to be cold, overcritical, blaming/judgmental, and supportive of abuse in the name of righteousness. Also, he is subject to the authority of those praying in the name of the true Jesus. You can bind him up, shut him up, expose his true nature as a demon, dress him up in a silly costume (or get creative in all kinds of ways), and when the parts give permission you can cast him out completely.

How About Some Even Weirder Stuff?

I got involved with some ministries and ministry approaches where they used different methods to discern deceiving spirits. Today I tend to give the demonic minimal attention, only addressing it at strategic times while I focus on healing the person, and I believe that is a way more effective approach than focusing on deliverance, but here are some things I got involved with at times in the past.

In one ministry model, if we suspected a spirit to be a deceiver, we would ask it two questions, “Is Jesus Lord?” and “Did Christ come in the flesh?” to decide whether the spirit was trustworthy or not based on its answers. These questions are based on two Bible passages saying that a demon won’t lead you to say “Jesus is Lord,” and won’t confess that “Christ came in the flesh.”

Later, I learned from a more far out there ministry, which I still don’t totally understand. I do recognize a lot of reality behind it because of the awesome results I saw and experienced with them. They had been described to me beforehand in a prophecy (from someone who didn’t know them) predicting that people fitting a certain description would give me some training I needed to help someone in a certain rough situation, and then this ministry, fitting the description perfectly, quickly showed up in my area offering training in what they did, which totally applied to who I was trying to help.

They would require spirits to confess things as true, “in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth who came in the flesh,” and if the spirit so much as failed to CLEARLY enunciate one letter of that phrase, it was considered to be lying. Oh, and there were a few other conditions too… if it was one of a few different types of spirits, it needed to be stripped of its title and rank and spiritual uniform with certain insignias and such first, (or something along those lines) or else it could still lie “in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth who came in the flesh.” Even though I didn’t feel comfortable unconditionally swallowing everything (such as what I just mentioned), I found some of their material very useful.

During that time, I ran into one guy who seemed to have a bunch of demons named “Jesus,” or “the Lord Jesus,” or “Jesus of Nazareth,” and supposedly you couldn’t cast any of those critters out in their own names. You supposedly had to use a more full, more specific name of Jesus to effectively cast them out, because they supposedly weren’t allowed to take on the full name, title, birthplace, with anti-gnostic qualifier added at the end, but they were said to be able to take on anything short of that.

Then, I learned some things from another ministry that had a lot of awesome insights which I’ve seen some great fruit from applying to healing, but who taught a totally different set of rules. They didn’t do anything to check for deceiving spirits (that I recall), but would demand that you start out by praying a specially worded petition, asking the Lord to please restrain all cosmic powers AND demons from your prayer time, and you had to say to them “the Lord rebuke you,” rather than commanding them directly. If you didn’t follow these rules, you were said to likely get deceived by the highest and mightiest spirits of the universe (cosmic powers) which are inhabiting everyone, which believers supposedly don’t have authority over.

More recently, I’ve run across a very informative book online about ministering to DID and SRA people, claiming lots of success. The author claims that you need to test for deceiving spirits by requiring them to confess that “Jesus Christ IS COME in the flesh” (present tense as the King James translates it) because they can be tricksters and still confess that Jesus “came in the flesh,” since that is the wrong tense.

So who is right? All of this is looking ultra suspicious to me, even though each of these ministries had much worth learning from. There are those who would say to throw all these people’s experiences away, because it’s all garbage if they’re off on these points, that we need to start from scratch to be Spirit led. One problem with that is that most of these people are seeing lots of folks healed and delivered on a level which the vast majority of so called Spirit led people aren’t anywhere close to.

There are those who would say that these people’s approaches work for them merely because they have a special anointing for their approaches, and so you can’t learn from what they do. The problem with that belief is that I’ve seen lots of people learn from such ministries, use their approaches, and then reproduce much of the same results. Obviously, most of it isn’t based on any special anointing.

If you’re going to throw out all the contributions of people who get something wrong, you’re going to have to throw out all of your own contributions also. It seems to me that we all go around acting like idiots about half the time, but somehow God still gets things through to us anyway.

In the end, I have to believe that what matters on this issue of taking authority over a deceiving spirit is what you believe, not what you say. I wonder if, “We ask that the Lord rebuke you,” or the most exact proper enunciation of, “In the name of Yeshua Ha Mashiach who is come in the flesh, one substance with the Father, begotten not made, crucified under Pontius Pilate, raised on the third day after the stone was rolled away by the angel Melachim,” or whatever the perfect verbiage happens to be, really carries no more weight in the spiritual realm than, “Abracadabra” or “In the name of Ralph,” just depending upon what a person believes when they say it.

Is the name of Jesus a magic word, or is it a spiritual state you are in as a result of your faith? Look at the seven sons of Sceva and how they had no authority over demons even though they were using the right name, while at the same time handkerchiefs could be silently taken from Paul, laid on the demonized, and they would be delivered. The issue wasn’t a technicality over what words were used.

So, after all the weird rules people come up with, which seem to work at least some of the time for them and those using their stuff for some reason… my take is that it ultimately all comes back to just trusting God and not being worried about any of this stuff.

 

Back to the Slightly Less “Weird.”

What about when prophecies apparently don’t come to pass? What about “revelations” that turn out to be factually untrue? I think we all experience that at times. In my experience, the ones who say they don’t ever are the ones who get the most ridiculously deceived, because they lack the humility to correct their course.

I remember when I was praying over the middle east back when ISIS had just taken over Iraq and Syria. I seemed to be getting some revelation from the Lord about how he wanted to stop ISIS. I was being led to declare into the situation that their big financial supporters, particularly some kind of banker or bankers, would become disillusioned and drop out of their cause, and that this was supposed to lead to infighting among the leadership of ISIS, causing them to break apart, disintegrate almost completely, and to never be a threat to the world again.

I prayed this, and also posted it on facebook as a prayer strategy for others to join in with me on. One or two others shared it on their walls which had a lot of publicity. Some very spiritually sensitive people commented on my post that they felt God all over it, felt fire go through them as they prayed it, and so on, and these weren’t people who tended to be making such things up. Another very spiritually sensitive person chimed in that the Lord had been showing her exactly the same strategy in prayer all week, and she had been declaring a shaking of the “financial pillars” which would lead to ISIS crumbling, as I recall.

It’s been at least three years or so since then, and ISIS still exists, still appears to be well funded, and has not disintegrated into non-threateningness. Does that mean this was a deception? Were we all listening to the wrong Jesus spirits? Or, did we just miss something? Was there one strategic thing which needed to be prayed but was left out, causing the whole strategy to fail? Was there a lack of perseverance, when a little bit more warfare would have accomplished the goal?

Did these things actually bear fruit, since I have heard vague snippets in the news over the years about infighting among ISIS leadership and financial troubles, but is it possible that these shakings only amounted to one play in the whole game? Maybe our prayers accomplished what they were meant to accomplish, then the enemy moved in countermeasure to keep ISIS supported by another means, and we didn’t take the cue to get the Lord’s strategy in response to that?

On the other hand, what if what we had WAS the whole picture, but it is just taking five or ten years to fully play out? There are so many possibilities, only one of which is that we all got deceived. Technically, that is still a possibility, but I doubt it.

Around the same timeframe, I had some friends praying with me over the middle east and Europe by google hangout regularly, and we prayed some things about Israel and Palestine which seemed to show up in the news the very next day, and prayed some things for the middle east in general which were confirmed in other ways by an outside source. Apparently, some of what we were prophesying over those countries did come to pass, but what was spoken over ISIS seems to have yet to happen, or simply hasn’t happened, and maybe won’t.

Words of knowledge for healing is another area where I’ve missed it who knows how many times. Still, if I hadn’t stepped out and gotten it wrong a bunch of times, I wouldn’t have had the privilege of also getting it right a bunch of times and seeing those people healed. A funny one was when I went to a store with a friend and cold approached an aisle worker, asking him if he had difficulty urinating and if the pee tended to come out in a very specific way (which I don’t remember the details of). He answered a simple, “no.”

However, the friend I was with told me that he did have that exact problem in exactly the urinatory (I now copywrite that word) details I had mentioned to the store worker. I prayed with him, though I didn’t bother to ask him how it went with his symptoms later. This has happened more than once or twice, where I’ve gotten the right word of knowledge but for the wrong person, and lo and behold, the world didn’t end, and somebody still got healed at the end of it.

Today, I really don’t know absolutely if I and those who had confirming revelations about ending ISIS were right or wrong or what. I’m flat wrong sometimes. Pretty much everybody I’ve ever known has been flat wrong in the name of the Lord sometimes, even the ones with the most clear spiritual perceptions and most powerful ministries. The truth is that this is OK. We’re in a process of growth and we don’t have it all together. We don’t do everything right or perceive everything right, and God understands that very well. I’m sure he factors in our foolishness when he’s moving through us. I find that he is still who he is even when his kids are acting goofy, or horrible, or just making mistakes. I’ve found that he is faithful to bring us back on track when we get off track, and to still make the best of it.

So, not worrying about deception isn’t the same as thinking we never get deceived, but it is focusing on the one who is leading us into truth, recognizing that he can and will lead us out of our deceptions and turn even those instances for good.

Should Christians be “Under Authority?”

We’ve been joined to the Lord, have become one spirit with him, and have now basically become the fourth person of the Trinity. Jesus said in John 17 that we would be one with him and with his Father as he and the Father are one. I didn’t make that up. It’s straight outta the Bible. This applies to all those who believe the gospel.

So… who’s spiritual authoritah should we submit to? If we are joint heirs with Christ, if all things belong to us, if we carry his literal authority on earth, what authority do we not have?

If you’ve ever spent time around the Charismatic world, you’ve surely heard the demand that, to be really right with God, to be really walking in his purposes, you need to “submit to authority.” You may have heard things like, “You need a spiritual covering,” or, “To have authority, you must be under authority!” I agree with those statements, but that’s because I understand their meaning way differently than those people do.

Some talk about five fold ministers as God’s designated authoritah which everybody needs to submit to. Okay… but what does that mean? We’ve gotten the Lord’s model of authority completely mixed up with the world’s model. The Lord’s model looks like Jesus… who humbled himself, taking on a form with “no beauty that we should desire him,” identifying with us at our lowest level, taking our guilt and shame upon himself, becoming the one who was wrong so we could be right when we were actually wrong, serving, washing feet, laying down his life for us.

The world’s model of authority looks more like a bossy corporate executive, like say… the Donald on The Apprentice screaming “You’re FIRED!” Our typical model of authority stands head and shoulders above us (or at least maintains that image), and if any of us start growing, it pushes us back down to keep us in order. Our standard idea of authoritah is something “over us,” holding us down, keeping us in check from stepping outside the lines it has determined for us.

It’s the loudest, rudest guy in the room, whose might makes right and who probably got where he is by stepping on someone. The traditional church’s model is based on a belief that people are untrustworthy by nature and need their freedoms restricted, that they need someone to control them so they won’t get out of line. Cartman (of South Park fame) shows us what this may look like:

Jesus turned that whole model on it’s head. Rather than dominating people with an organization’s visions and agendas, he laid down his own agenda and his own ministry for the people, to help them follow the dreams and desires of their hearts. He gave us the ultimate endorsement of belief in what is in our own hearts, freeing us from the laws and restrictions meant to control our behavior. (You have been released from the Law through the death of Christ -Romans 7:6.)

The ultimate spiritual authoritah thought it was better for us to just be ourselves from our hearts rather than to have an outside structure telling us what to do. Rather than demanding conformity to a cookie cutter image, he freed us to blossom into our uniqueness.

Jesus contrasted his model of authority with the world’s in Matthew 20:25-26, “The rulers of the heathen lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them, but it shall not be so among you. Instead, whoever would become great among you must become your servant.”

What many seem to miss is that Jesus said plainly here that we are not to exercise authoritah over one another. Jesus did not say that we are to have a “servant’s heart” while we exercise authoritah over one another. He said that we are not to do it at all.

Authority in Christ is exercised over the kingdom of darkness, not exercised over people. It serves people. It is exercised under people for the sake of supporting them rather than being exercised over them to control them.

In Matthew 23:6-10, Jesus once again warns against hierarchical, authoritarian relationships in spiritual communities, speaking of the pharisees, “They love the place of honor at banquets and the chief seats in the synagogues, and respectful greetings in the market places, and being called Rabbi by men. But do not be called Rabbi; for One is your Teacher, and you are all brothers. Do not call anyone on earth your father; for One is your Father, He who is in heaven. Do not be called leaders; for One is your Leader, that is, Christ.”

We’ve tried gathering around fathers before. It was called “the papacy,” and it didn’t work. (Pope means “father.”) Instead, we are meant to gather around the Father.

 

What Real Authority Does:

Real spiritual authority doesn’t boss you around, but comes underneath you and sacrificially serves you.

Real spiritual authority doesn’t demand that you think or believe in a certain predetermined theology, but helps you walk out your own process of discovering truth.

Real spiritual authority doesn’t try to convince you that they know best what God is really saying to you, but tries to convince you to depend on hearing the Lord for yourself.

Real spiritual authority doesn’t boast in how spiritual they are to try and convince you that you need them to teach you, but tries to convince you of how spiritual you are and that “you have an anointing from the Holy One and… have no need that anyone teach you.” -1 John 2:20-27.

Real spiritual authority doesn’t try to impose a parent-child relationship upon you, trying to impose a hierarchical system of command and obey where you need their permission before stepping out, but encourages you to walk in your own authority and to step out in your own authority.

Real spiritual authority doesn’t forbid people from ministering who aren’t under their umbrella, but like Jesus in Mark 9:48, in the case of the man found casting out demons outside their group, says, “Do not forbid him.”

Real spiritual authority doesn’t try to be the center of God’s purposes in a town or region, but tries to help everyone else be the center of God’s purposes in a town or region.

Real spiritual authority liberates you from outside controls rather than putting you in bondage again.

So, yes, we do need to submit to spiritual authority… but this means something opposite from what the Charismatics meant when they said it.

 

Some talk about an apostolic model of authoritah. Was Paul a good example of apostolic authority? When his authority was questioned by “super apostles” among the Corinthians, he pointed to his weaknesses as the best evidence of his apostleship. He didn’t claim to be an apostle based upon his popularity, his wealth, or his public speaking skills. Instead, he pointed to his often earthly poverty, his poor reputation as “the off-scouring of all things,” his suffering, and his reliance upon the power of Holy Spirit despite his poor presentation skills.

I’ve heard people teach about apostles today, and what I’ve typically heard has made it sound like apostolic authoritah needs to look like Bill Johnson, Che Ahn, or Randy Clark (or… the Donald?). I’m sure most of those guys are probably apostles and/or pastors, but I tend to think their highly visible corporate position and widespread prestige is the exception rather than the norm.

Is kingdom authority really based on how big your church network is, how big your name is, and how many book deals you get? If so, Paul himself would have been disqualified at times. He began as one whom the Christians kept their distance from, then became more recognized, then went back into obscurity later in his ministry, writing that all had forsaken him except just a few, and that even the very churches he started had left him. Jesus himself ended his life with no organization or network and with very few supporters.

Some say the apostolic is about networking among the who’s who… and that’s probably the emphasis for you if you are an administrator. If you’re more of a service motivation, then it’s more about moving in the miraculous and in authority over the demonic without grasping for attention, since the service motivation is the one which emphasizes those things the most. If you’re a teaching motivation, it’s more about producing life changing teachings. A prophetic/perceiver motivation will likely make it more about having cutting edge revelation, and a mercy motivation will likely see it as stewarding the atmosphere of heaven and making people feel loved. An exhorter motivation will likely see it as being about reaching and influencing large numbers of people, and so on. We tend to see these things through our own narrow perspectives.

A fivefold pastor, for instance, is not a pastor because they are a professional “pastor” of a church, but because they are gifted in such a way as to shepherd and nurture people, to equip them into maturity by doing so, and are walking in that gifting. “Submitting to their authority” is merely a matter of recognizing what God is doing in them and receiving it. It’s just allowing them to love you.

If real spiritual authority looks like Jesus, then real authority looks like someone born in a barn, who grew up in the ghetto and spoke ebonics, who was violently opposed and cast out by the religious systems of his day. He carried not only a stigma of heresy over his ministry, but a stigma of sexual perversion.

A bastard birth was taken very seriously in those days, and the Pharisees brought this up to Jesus repeatedly, such as with the woman caught in adultery. It says they came to tempt him when they asked him, “Moses says such should be stoned… but what do you say?” Later, after he told them their father was the Devil, they retorted back, “We know who our father is, we were not born of fornication.” He would have been considered unfit to enter into the presence of God for multiple generations to come due to the defilement of what were believed to be his birth circumstances.

If real spiritual authority looks like the people Jesus sent, then it looks like the unknowns and unlikelies, the prostitutes, the anarchists, the foul mouthed blue collar workers who had failed morally under stress in the past (aka Peter), and the tax collectors/liberal ACLU lawyers.

For some reason he seemed to pass over the upstanding rich young rulers and the prestigious, whitewashed scribes and pharisees for the sake of sending out the scandalous ones. He favored the poor above the rich, and in Luke 16:15 he said, “That which is highly esteemed among men is detestable in the sight of God.”

In Jesus’ day, submitting to true spiritual authority meant that you would be blacklisted by the widely recognized leaders and banned from the synagogues.

 

What about the Bible verses so often used to club people into submission? Let’s look at a couple:

Let’s start with the ol’ standard, Hebrews 13:17, “Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they keep watch over your souls as those who will give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with grief, for this would be unprofitable for you.” Case closed right? Obey your leaders who watch over your souls. Command and obey relationships in church are endorsed by scripture… until you look at the original language a bit.

The root of the word translated “obey” there (“peitho,” Strongs# G3982) is much more often translated as, “be persuadable.” “Be persuadable,” is different than, “obey,” although “obey” fits much better with the theologies of the institutions behind most translations (Church of England, etc.).

Another verse I’ve heard used to club people who don’t “respect authoritah” right in the groin is Jude 7-8, “Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh, are exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire. Yet in the same way these men, also by dreaming, defile the flesh, and reject authority, and revile angelic majesties.” (NASB).

I’ve heard this one used to say that people who “reject authority” (supposedly meaning hierarchical church systems) are totally out of control morally, sexually perverse, under wrath like Sodom and Gomorrah, etc.

This even goes on in the next verse to appear to be associated with spiritual warfare, that these people take authority over the Devil inappropriately when they should only ever say, “the Lord rebuke you.” This is really what I’ve heard people teach.

The word translated there as “angelic majesties” however, is “doxas,” meaning “glories” (Strongs# G1391). Nowhere else is this word translated “angelic majesties” as if it spoke of some sort of high spiritual being, but speaks of the nature of God, or of the act of worshiping or exalting God. This verse is talking about those who revile the nature of God, who revile “glory.” In no way is this saying that it is rebellious to know your authority in Christ and to exercise it over any and all levels of the demonic.

It seems though, that there is a common perspective taught in the church world, one which would like us to believe that we should respect the Devil’s authoritah over us, that we should submit to demonic authoritah, that we generally need to submit to religious control, oppression, and judgment, that to do otherwise is to be rebellious, and next to being grossly immoral.

In Matthew 28:18, Jesus said, “All authority in heaven and in earth has been given unto me.” That doesn’t leave any authority for the Devil, any of his principalities or powers, or any of his religious systems. In Luke 10:19, he says, “Behold, I give you authority over all the power of the enemy.” That doesn’t just mean some. The real authoritah in heaven and earth belongs to those who believe. Jesus has given it to us. It doesn’t belong to something which would like to oppress us and hold us down.

And, just for fun, here’s some more Cartman:

Stars Falling, Powers of the Heavens Shaken, Why the Message Changes with The Times

I had a dream where I wrote this and published it here, so I’m choosing to make my dream come true.

I’m writing the main ideas (though I can’t remember exact words) I wrote in the dream. I’m sharing all the points I recall at least. Some of them were new to me at the time. I’m also including a bit of extra explanation which wasn’t in the dream.

“The stars will fall from the sky, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”

This phrase shows up in Jesus’ prophecies about the destruction of the Jewish temple in Matthew 24 and Luke 19. These prophecies would be fulfilled during the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, just like he said they would, within that very generation. (Don’t worry, this will be a positive message)

Revelation 6, at the breaking of the sixth seal, also has a similar prediction. The Sun is turned to sackcloth, the moon to blood, the stars of the sky fall to the earth and the sky itself is split like a scroll. I’m pretty sure this was talking about the fall of Jerusalem as well, just as Jesus spoke of most of these same things happening during that generation in his prophecies.

Obviously, this was not a literal physical event. The stars couldn’t fall from the sky and then… life continue on earth. The moon didn’t literally turn into blood or the sky split in two. These are poetic sayings which are speaking of events taking place in the spiritual realm.

I understand there is a modern Evangelical tradition of interpreting these things as being about the end of the world (yet to come), but that’s wrong.

Jesus said that during those days, there would be great tribulation which had not yet been seen in the land, nor ever would be again. He spoke of men’s hearts failing them for fear. He said that they would see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with great power and glory, which had always been a picture of large scale severe judgment leading to large scale redemption in OT scripture (the coming of the Lord, the day of the Lord).

Revelation 6 speaks about people crying out to the mountains and the hills to “hide us from the wrath of the Almighty and of the Lamb!” Jesus spoke of “great wrath” upon the people. He said that these things would be followed by redemption drawing near, and by a great ingathering of the elect from all over the earth.

History records the fall of Jerusalem as one of the most brutal true stories known to man. The Jews of the time were crucified in huge numbers, the people starved and went insane because of fear, they practiced cannibalism to survive, and in the end human blood filled their temple and their streets like a small lake. At least that’s what I remember from Josephus’ account. It was something like the masses going crazy in Gotham City, in that near final scene from “Batman Begins.”

Josephus recorded a sign in the sky, where a cloud formation took the shape of a sword pointed at Jerusalem, during the week or few weeks before this happened.

I don’t believe that this was a matter of Jesus being pissed at the Jews for crucifying him, taking back his words, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do,” and going ballistic on them with his “great power and glory,” and “the wrath of the Almighty and the Lamb,” like the first middle eastern suicide bomber. At the same time, I’m pretty sure it was the result of his “coming in the clouds with great power and glory.”

His wrath was upon the “powers of the heavens,” the beings spoken of as “the stars of the sky,” which were holding the chains of captive humanity at a celestial level. Judgment upon those higher powers produced their falling down to the earth and causing havoc among those already under their influence.

Revelation 12 speaks of Michael and his angels waging war in the heavens against the Dragon and his angels, and the Dragon being cast out of his place in heaven. He is said to bring a third of the “stars of heaven” with him down to the earth, and to have had great wrath to release upon the people because he knew his time was short. This similar picture may have been speaking of the upcoming fall of the Roman Empire.

The best I can understand such a thing is that it would be something like WW2 causing tremendous chaos, tremendous death and destruction in Europe, but resulting in the people being freed from the rule of Hitler. The fallout of celestial war would be terrible, but a new level of redemption would be released to mankind.

One thing I’ve been slowly coming to understand more about is that the star systems are important, and play a role in determining times and seasons. The creation account in Genesis speaks of stars and heavenly bodies being created, not only to signify times and seasons, but to rule over them. The Lord speaks to Job about his creation, speaking of various high level spiritual beings, “when the morning stars sang together, and the sons of God shouted for joy.”

The book of Revelation is full of reference to the stars, to spiritual war taking place among the stars, and even reference to various constellations. This subject goes a lot deeper, but I’m just sharing about the fact that these “stars falling from heaven” were high level spiritual beings, and in these examples were not good ones.

The “ages” of the happenings and purposes on earth seem to be determined heavily by happenings in that realm. Really, it is we, the sons and daughters of God,  who are meant to govern creation, not to be governed by it. What I’m sharing about is the practical process of power being transferred over to us from what has held it in the past, what has held us as slaves to corruption.

When “the Son of man came in great power and glory,” shaking the powers of the heavens in 70 AD, there was a transfer of power to the sons of God, an age came to an end with the end of the Jewish temple system, and a new level of redemption was released upon mankind.

This was not the only such event in history, but there have been many others. Some have been lesser in scale, and some possibly greater in scale. All in all, I believe that the Lord’s view of history comes from a much different perspective than our own, and revolves much more around who is in power in the high places of the spiritual realm than it does around who is president of the United States.

SIDE TRAIL: A FEW EXAMPLES (NOT FROM MY RECENT DREAM)

A small example of this was 2013, when I’ve observed that many people had a rough time spiritually and naturally. I believe the powers of the heavens were being shaken heavily then. Many people’s faith was shaken. Much that we thought was faith but really was our own religious posturing and covering was taken away. There was a time of warfare in the spiritual realm. At least I was aware of more intense pressure in that realm.

I remember a dream early in 2013 where the stars were falling from the sky to the earth, and some of them turned into a huge bus which was headed straight for me. The Lord shared in that dream that I needed to get rid of generational issues or I would be smashed by this bus.

I had a difficult time with that at first, because I didn’t think I had any more generational issues to deal with. I didn’t know how I possibly could after going through everything I knew to pray and to remove such things, having seen good fruit from that. I didn’t know of anyone who did much of anything more than I’d already done to clean up generational junk.

I was led into a newer understanding, that iniquity is the most significant problem passed down generationally, not sins, curses, or demons. Those are more side issues. Learning to not only do Spirit led prayers of repentance for previous generations’ sins, but to trust the Lord to supernaturally remove the resulting iniquity (the twisted nature which results from sin and gets passed down generational lines) was something I found much more powerful for myself and others than previous approaches to generational cleanup.

Along the way to that revelation though, life was more rough that year. I dealt with some difficult circumstances as well as spiritual attacks, I struggled to walk as high and mighty and spiritual as I thought I had been, and was forced by necessity to rely on grace a bit more than upon my own ability to perform.

I recall several ministries at that time which were also getting revelation about that year being a year of heavy warfare, where high level strongholds were being broken and where there would be fallout upon those connected in any way to what was under those strongholds.

One of these ministries even related this to “Pluto being ascendant,” (or some terminology like that) which sounds very New Agey, but was actually probably an expression of the real thing the New Age imitates. I only bring that up because of our subject of the star systems and spiritual happenings within them being a governing force upon earth, whether governed by the Sons and Daughters or by the higher level principalities and powers on the other side.

2001 was another such year. Just about everyone I knew had a rough time in 2001. I was reeling for the next decade or so from what I went through, having so much of what I thought was my walk with God violently ripped out from under me. I’m glad to say that the fallout of 2013 found me in a much less vulnerable place than 2001 had.

BACK TO THE MAIN TRAIL: WHY THE MESSAGE HAS CHANGED

When the powers of the heavens were shaken in 70 AD, strongholds were broken, humanity moved into another “age,” and the big difference pointed out in my recent dream was that lust no longer became the issue it had been for mankind. This is why you see such vicious tirades against lust and against the overt sins of the flesh in the epistles of the New Testament, but today you don’t see the Spirit focusing on that very much. We see a message focused on the Father heart of God, identity in Christ, and more upbeat things of that nature mostly being inspired by the Spirit today.

It isn’t that lust and the sins of the flesh aren’t an issue at all, but that they aren’t the issue they once were. Today, we have access to some things on the internet they didn’t then, but I’m pretty sure they still had worse. I’ve heard one historian say that the popular theater in those days was not only dedicated to Pagan gods, but that the actors tended to perform naked and regularly did sex acts onstage. The Jews lived under the law, with no power over sin but that of their own making.

The Pagans worshiped their gods and goddesses in the standard religions of the world’s most powerful empires by sleeping with temple prostitutes. In the Roman army, it was customary for older soldiers to keep young boys around to sodomize. It wasn’t that these people were “gay,” it was just that such a thing was normal and expected.

I wasn’t around back then, all my experience comes from modern day, where I’ve been seeing most people pretty much going crazy with lust all my life, but the message of this dream at least still makes sense to me. The point is that there was a breakthrough, and that it isn’t as big of an issue as it was, that the heart and message of the Spirit is no longer focused on it in the way it was when the NT was written.

Today, in this age, my sense is that the message of the Spirit to us revolves around the gift of the Father. Not a gift from the Father, but the Father himself as the gift. He has given himself to us freely, with open arms, saying “Welcome home son/daughter!” There aren’t conditions of behaving better first to qualify for this gift.

He is removing our shame, not trying to stuff our noses in our carnality. He is inviting us into relationship with no strings attached, revealing his love more clearly, taking away the veils of superstition and self-imposed religious rigor. He is taking our attention away from our bad behaviors rather than back to them in this present age. Apparently, this is more the battle of our times.

Scripture still carries the authority of being the written word of God, it is still applicable to today, but just like how the law of Moses doesn’t apply to us in the same way it did to the people in the age it was written, apparently the emphasis on overcoming the lust of the flesh found in the NT epistles isn’t meant to be such an emphasis to our generation, after that celestial stronghold was diminished in 70 AD.

 

How My Back Was Finally Healed (Gospel of Remission)

A year and some months ago I injured my back. I’d previously taken a sedentary yet very time and energy consuming job. Six days a week, 12-14hrs a day of sitting is a great way to de-condition your lower back and improve the likelihood of injuring it.

Then I tried to go straight into doing the same kinds of intense exercises I’d done before, such as 300lb tire flips followed by power clean and presses (an Olympic style lift) at the same weight I’d used when I’d been doing that regularly a couple years earlier, before the sedentary job.

Bad idea. I quickly tore muscles in both sides of my lower back.

When I was younger, if I’d gotten out of shape, I could just get right back into doing what I’d done before, go hard, and pretty soon I’d be right where I’d left off. No problem. It seems things don’t quite work that way in my 30’s.

I partially recovered and did some traveling. Not having learned my lesson previously, I decided that even though my back was still a mess, it would be a better idea to walk a good number of miles while carrying heavy luggage in each hand, rather than taking a bus to the airport. That injury was worse than the first.

I couldn’t get out of bed for the next several days without excruciating pain, and dealt with a lot of limitation after the fact. Quite a few people prayed for me, many of which commonly see healing, but I noticed little to no benefit at all.

I did recover to a large degree over time through careful exercise and stretching.

I’d been interested in Chiropractic and had read some older journals called “Validating Chiropractic,” which referred to a lot of clinical studies to back their assertions.

The basic point I got out of them was that the only earthly treatment for common back injuries which had been proven (at that time at least) to do any good was… exercise, and if you combine exercise with chiropractic, the exercise becomes even more effective because you are training yourself to function in proper alignment.

Large studies were done examining the effectiveness of back surgery for herniated discs and such things, and standard surgeries were found to show no significant evidence of benefit to patients long term.

(It may sound shocking, but knowing a few people with seniority in the medical industry, I understood this phenomenon of invasive, expensive, and harmful treatments being commonly sold which have no proof of effectiveness to be fairly common, so learning this about back surgeries wasn’t any surprise.)

However, people would improve if they rested for a few days to a week after their injury, then went straight into some light exercise involving their back and core, then slowly progressed into more strenuous exercise. Their herniated discs or other injuries didn’t necessarily change, but the musculature of their back developed and did the job of supporting their posture, taking the stress off of their injury.

In many cases, simply through regular exercise, people could get back to feeling and functioning just as if they hadn’t been injured, even though x-rays would continue to show a herniated disk. If they didn’t exercise, no treatment would tend to do any good.

So this sort of worked for me. It worked fully for the left side of my back but only partially for the right side. Here’s what I did:

I didn’t go to any doctors, but I started out with walking and stretching. I would walk maybe a block and then stretch out when my back started seizing up.

Pretty soon I could walk a few blocks before needing to stretch out. I got to where I could walk longer distances, stretch, then continue walking, rinse, repeat, etc. Walking is a good start, so are planks.

The lower back (Quadratus Lumborum) is an endurance muscle meant for maintaining posture while other muscles do the harder work. So, something light and long distance such as walking or planking, is helpful if you want to start.

Then, when I was ready for something more intense, I began using a kettlebell to strengthen my lower back. What I was doing looked something like this, a more advanced kettlebell movement, but also included a push pull motion at the top of the swing:

I’d gotten the idea for that by experimenting based on this guy’s videos, modifying things and finding what worked best for me.

If people want somewhere to start in improving their injured backs or preventing such, I’ll include a suggested, more simple, short, two exercise regimen as an appendix at the end of this post for back and core training . We’ll get on to the spiritual stuff here soon.

After maybe six months I was feeling great: no pain and only a little tightness on the one side. I thought that maybe if I really pushed it with more intense lifts before stretching, I could finally get that right side to fully loosen up.

So I loaded up the barbell for deadlifts, and found that I could now lift significantly more than I’d ever been able to before. I felt like I could have even pushed it farther if I had wanted to.

Thank you alternating staggered stance one armed kettlebell swings with a pull-push at the top.

I was feeling pretty confident. Next time I loaded up the weight for heavy Olympic style lifts, did many of those and the back didn’t feel challenged too much. I followed with some low weight deadlifts, and soon felt the right side of my back tear apart.

Immobilized again for days, then having to sit against an icepack all day at my job for months, I learned a lesson: going quickly into all those heavy lifts isn’t the best idea for a recovering back injury. (That won’t be my suggestion in the appendix.)

Fast forward six months. My back felt a lot better again, no ice packs needed to sit down, but it was still even tighter on the right side than it had been before that third injury. I still could only walk so far before needing to stretch out. Sitting was still very uncomfortable and would tighten things up quickly.

So, why had the left side recovered but not the right? Why did it not seem to respond to healing prayer either?

In the few weeks before I finally found healing, I’d seen several people healed on the streets through a simple command of faith. One was a homeless guy who I had walked up to, tuned into the Lord about by faith, and heard the thought, “broken back.”

Since he was standing in front of me I figured that “broken back” was a previous event, not a current one. When he confirmed that he’d had back injuries, I prayed a simple prayer from a distance, commanding healing. He was able to immediately notice relief from his remaining back symptoms and was very impressed.

So why wasn’t this working for my own back?

I heard a testimony from Diane Moyer about how she used to remit certain sins from people depending on which side of their body their injury was on. The right side tended to relate to hatred of men or of God, while the left side tended to relate to hatred of women or of mankind in general.

She shared about a woman who came to her with a messed up and painful left foot due to a botched surgery. It had happened just after this woman had been on a mission trip with a group of other women who couldn’t get along, stirring up the issues she already had towards females.

Diane had her remit (send away to the cross) the sin of hatred towards women from her body. Her left foot, which had stubbornly refused any kind of healing up to that point, suddenly recovered completely in a day or two.

I decided to give this a shot. I tuned in and prayed a Spirit-led prayer of “remitting,” or sending away to the cross, various subtle issues I’ve had with men. These were things which hadn’t been “major” enough for me to really notice before. This only took a few seconds. Then, I prayed a quick prayer for healing for the right side of my back.

I immediately noticed that all the tightness was gone. The right side was now just the same as the left, no issues. Where the prayer of faith for healing had done nothing before, no matter who said it, it was now immediately successful.

Then, I got on a plane and flew across the country, sitting for a good six hours straight. My back felt perfect. I got off the plane and then carried my (light) luggage as I walked beside the road for miles into town. My back still felt perfect. I didn’t even need to squat down and stretch out as I would have had to before after very much walking.

As I sat for extended times while in Florida, I did notice my right hip tightening up, but not my back. I guess the hip had picked up some issues from the back being tight for so long, and I’m still kinda working on getting that healing finished.

Coming back from my trip though, I’ve noticed that the hip is looser. Either way, the back itself is good, which is a big change.

So, what is this remission of sins thing and how does it relate to physical healing? I mean, why would you need to remit sins or deal with any sort of inner issue before you can get healed? Doesn’t the Bible just show examples of the command of faith, “Be healed in the name of Jesus,” and that’s all people need?

Firstly, no, it doesn’t.Secondly, it isn’t meant to give examples of everything.

To start with the first point, Luke 5 gives an example where Jesus remitted the sins of a paralyzed man when he was lowered through a roof to him for healing, and then he healed the man physically after his sins were remitted/removed.

A look into the original languages reveals that the gospel was about remitting, or sending away our sins from us, not about changing God’s attitude about them so that he could “forgive” us.

The issue here is of poor translation (besides missing God’s heart to begin with). Jesus has been made out to say, “Your sins are forgiven,” when the word translated “forgiven” there (root word in the Greek is “aphiemi”) is often used elsewhere in scripture to speak of sending something or someone away, the removing of something, or delivering someone from bondage.

The pharisees were offended because they understood Jesus to be removing the man’s sins, not just declaring an encouraging message that God had forgiven him. The passage says that they thought, “Who can aphiemi/remove sins but God alone?”

Another example is James chapter 5, where believers are exhorted to confess their sins one to another, and then to pray for one another that they may be healed. The passage goes on to say that “and the prayer of faith will heal (sozo) the sick, and if he has committed sins, they will be removed from (aphiemi) him.”

Obviously, this passage cannot be saying that confessing our sins to one another and praying for one another is a condition which needs to be met before God forgives us, as it is usually translated. Nobody would ever make it if we needed to confess every sin and have them all prayed over by another believer just to get forgiveness.

I can’t even remember all the sins I’ve ever committed, let alone find someone willing to listen to me tell all of them for a year straight.

Scripture actually declares elsewhere that “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.” So the fact is, God has never been counting the world’s trespasses against them, period.

He has always forgiven us regardless of anything we did or ever will do. This is simply who he revealed himself to be when he went to the cross for us. This was before we repented, or confessed, or believed anything. This was even while we were in the act of murdering him.

Before we were born, God was revealed in Christ, not counting our trespasses against us, even before we did them. He wasn’t caught by surprise by anything, and he never will be.

The issue has never been one of forgiveness, but has always been that we needed to be released from the bondage of our sins. This is what Jesus died for, and this is what we are exhorted to pray for one another to accomplish regarding specific faults brought to attention. This is clearly brought up in context of seeking physical healing in James 5.

John 20:23 tells us, “If you remit/send away (aphiemi) the sins of any, their sins have been remitted/sent away (aphiemi), if you seize/take hold of (krateo) the sins of any, they have been seized/taken hold of (krateo).”

Obviously, we don’t have the power to determine whether God will forgive someone or not based upon whether we choose to forgive them.

Instead, what we have the power to do is to seize/take hold of people’s sins from their being, and to remit or send away the power and effect of those sins from them (such as hatred towards men, or women, or God, or mankind, etc.).

We don’t have the power to violate someone’s will if they don’t want their stuff removed, but if they want it gone, we can remit it/send it away. I’ve found more effective and less effective ways to do this.

This is what Jesus practiced and commissioned his disciples to do, and this is what James exhorts us to do as well in the context of believers being sick.

My second point is that the Bible was never intended to contain examples or teachings about everything.

The accounts of Jesus’ healing and deliverance ministry were only general representations. They don’t reveal everything he did, even though there are still a few examples of him remitting sins.

John 21:25 tells us “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written in detail, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books that would be written.”

Jesus commissioned the disciples to teach others to do all that he himself had done and taught, and he told them that there were many other things beyond what he had taught them, which they weren’t yet ready for, but which the Holy Spirit would teach in the future.

Holy Spirit would be the one sent to lead us into ALL truth, not just an abbreviated written record of a few healing stories in the gospel accounts.

I have some friends who’ve spent time with some of the big name teachers in healing, the folks who record their healing miracles on video and put them on YouTube and all that. One of these guys took a group out on the streets and pulled someone out of a wheelchair in front of them. The formerly wheelchair bound person was proclaiming themselves healed and able to walk after a quick prayer.

That’s great, but my friends ran into the man later in their community; he was back in his wheelchair again as if nothing had happened. They started building relationship with him and encouraging him in his walk with God, walking him through healing of some inner issues as well.

Even though they see physical healing regularly, they weren’t led to pursue it with this man, but to focus on other areas. They felt that working on the physical just wasn’t what God was focusing on. He was focusing on the man’s heart. A mere physical healing wasn’t going to stick until some heart issues were resolved.

The best healers I know of today seem to see maybe a 70-80 percent success rate in physical healing through the command of faith, but this is only if you define success as a person having some perception of some degree of symptom relief for the moment.

I’ve walked out enough (and seen enough) to know however, that this is often not the end of the story. A good percentage of these people only receive partial relief and continue living with their issue, just to a lesser degree, or even find all their symptoms returning within minutes, days, or weeks.

Truthfully, that probably cuts the success ratio down by half or even more than half, if we are going to consider the “purpose of God” kind of success to be complete, long term resolution of the issue prayed about.

We can come up with our own explanations for this:

We can say that the pray-er or the pray-ee didn’t have enough faith, even though the same amount of faith has often just produced full healing for someone else who had the same issue.

We can say that God is only willing to heal some but not others, or that he must be sending some diseases to teach people lessons, but this contradicts the example of Jesus and makes the Father out to be a child abuser.

We can say that there wasn’t enough power or anointing available at the time, or that Jesus just wasn’t there or else everything would have been instantly, perfectly fixed. However, this line of reasoning contradicts Jesus’ words when he said, “Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” God isn’t holding back his anointing unless you believe he is.

I find that a much better route is to look at what the Lord is doing today in our experience. He is leading us into healing the whole person, not just focusing on the surface issue, and oftentimes this results in a greater amount of physical healing than if we were only ministering to the body.

More importantly than the fact that it leads to greater physical healing, is that it brings inner transformation.

Jesus said that believers would do greater works than him. Usually we’ve thought of that as maybe walking on air when he walked on water, or multiplying gold bars and sirloin steaks instead of just loaves and fishes. What if it also means doing more complete healing than he did?

Jesus spoke of the generation of people he had healed and delivered in large numbers, saying that when an unclean spirit departs it searches through dry places seeking rest, and finding none, returns to the person it came out of with seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and the last state of the man is worse than at first. He literally said, “so shall it be with this generation.” His prediction came true about many of those he had healed and delivered.

The same multitudes who Jesus had healed and delivered on a surface level were in large part the same multitudes who soon turned on him and participated in the murderous work of the principalities and powers of darkness, shouting as one, “Crucify him!”

What if one of the greater works is leading people into deeper healing, not just temporary relief of an issue on the surface, such as a demon or a disease? What if literally removing the sins and driving woundedness from the hearts of the masses was one of the things he had in mind for us but which he didn’t have time to thoroughly accomplish in his own mission?

He was just getting the ball rolling in the right direction, showing a taste of what was possible, but not showing everything. It would be our job to search out the wisdom of God and move into progressive revelation over the ages.

Today, as Holy Spirit is leading his people into many deeper areas of healing for the whole person, some of the areas which have been proven effective for own my life and in the lives of others I’ve observed or participated in praying with are:

-Sending sins such as hatred or anger away to the cross, leading to spiritual freedom, emotional healing, and physical healing,

-Sending emotional pains away to the cross based upon “he bore our griefs and carried our sorrows,” leading to the same kinds of freedom and healing,

-Healing fractured parts of people from many different issues and integrating them, leading to, again, the same kinds of freedom and healing,

-Repenting for generational sins and trusting the Lord to remove generational iniquity based upon “he was bruised/crushed for our iniquities.” Again, this leads to the same kinds of freedom and healing,

-Speaking healing to the human spirit, which I’ve seen do a more deep internal work rather than so much related to the physical body,

-and more.

I can find scriptural examples and references for these things I’ve listed, but they are scarce and don’t encompass nearly everything I or others have been led to do in these areas. The point is that we have a living and growing relationship with God, not just a closed book.

Many times, when walking someone through remitting/sending away a sin or issue, I will have them go back to a root memory that it came from. This is to help them really get in touch with the area of their heart which holds the issue, so they can authentically bring it to the Lord rather than just staying stuck in their head and disconnected from it.

However, in the example of healing my back, I didn’t go back to any memory, I just prayed a quick prayer of declaration for issues to be removed.

Diane has shared with me how she will often lead someone in seeing their issue in the spirit and handing it over to the Lord in whatever form he shows it to them in, and then she will have them watch to see what he does with it. I’ve tried this and found it to be effective also.

Another friend has people visualize the sea of glass before the throne, and trade their issue in there for something better from the Lord.

My point is that there isn’t only one right way, but there is a basic truth and various ways to apply it which we know so far, some of which will be better than others in different situations.

I’ve found that going back to memories is good if you want to really be sure to do the most thorough job for people who aren’t totally in touch with their hearts, but that it isn’t the best way or even necessary at all when dealing with issues among people’s fractured parts, such as fragments or alters for instance.

So, another hot button subject: Am I saying that we need to do “works” to receive what Jesus died to give us? No… and yes.

I’m not saying that we need to earn our healing, it was earned for us already, but like Paul wrote, we do need to “work out our own sozo (healing/salvation/deliverance).”

Isn’t it horrible that all our issues don’t just go away in two seconds when we pray the sinners prayer? Isn’t God so mean to put us in charge of taking territory and co-laboring with him in the purposes of redemption?

You might think it would be enough for us that we have someone who miraculously takes our issues away as we bring them to him one by one, or even several at a time, or a bunch of them at a time even when we may not fully comprehend what he’s doing in a moment of encounter. I guess that isn’t enough for us though, we demand that he do it all in a two second prayer at once or it just isn’t fair.

The Isrealites were given the land in a promise, but they still had to co labor with the Lord to take it step by step, city by city, as he led them to do so practically. They are the prophetic type, the foreshadow of ourselves in Christ.

I guess it just isn’t good enough for us though. It’s such a burden to have to kill giants and take land with Divine empowerment, it’s such a horrible chore that no spoiled child should ever be subjected to. We should throw a tantrum and complain about it, and refuse to participate like they did in the wilderness, that’s probably the right answer to our plight.

After all, if it was really God, everything would happen instantly, or it would be a two second prayer on a prayer line at the most. I guess this must all be from a religious spirit since I’m saying we are supposed to participate in something to find more full healing and freedom.

: D

 

Appendix: Suggested Simple Back and Core Training Regimen: (two exercises which can be done in five minutes a day, for those looking to improve their back’s function, feel, and resistance to injury, )

Once you’re used to being mildly active through something like walking, a good back strengthening exercise would be the basic kettlebell swing. It strengthens the muscles of the “posterior chain,” all the way from hamstrings and glutes, to lumbar and traps. It’s more simple to do than the one I was using which helped me a lot, but basically works the same areas.

You can usually get a kettlebell cheap off Craigslist, but you probably want to go down to your local sporting goods store or gym first to experiment with different weights to see which one is best for you before you buy.

Here is an instructional if you want:

You’ve got to work the abs also somehow, if only for balance. Having a super strong back and no abs is said to lead to injury or at least pain and discomfort.

I like high knees for abs. They feel a lot more functional than laying on my back doing crunches or other such tedious things, plus they work most of the lower body as well as cardio. You can look that one up if you want, it isn’t very technical.

I’m just saying, we all get older, we all have the opportunity to get out of shape, become injured and injury prone, but we can also do a lot to prevent it or to recover from it.

We may not all be trying to train like athletes, doing risky Olympic style lifts to build explosive power such as deadlifts and power cleans, but there are easier and safer things to do just for health benefits.

FORMULAS & PROCEDURES, OR LED BY THE SPIRIT?

Should we expect God to operate according to formulas, or should we expect him to do things completely different every time?

Many have been taught to have a relationship with a set of rules and principles, rather than a living and interactive God.

A popular saying in more Charismatic circles is, “God doesn’t use formulas, just be led by the Spirit.”

Yet… everything we know from hundreds of years of scientific observation tells us that all of creation is designed according to formulas. Apparently, God does use formulas, at least… often.

So, if God (at least often) uses formulas, how does that jive with being led by the Spirit?

Proverbs 3:5-6 tells us, “trust in the Lord with all your heart, do not lean on your own understanding, in all your ways acknowledge him and he will direct your paths.”

On the other hand, Proverbs 4:7 says, “The beginning of wisdom is: get wisdom; and with all your getting, get understanding.” Proverbs 9:7 says, “Forsake your folly and live, and proceed in the way of understanding.”

Huh?

So, “get wisdom… get understanding… proceed in the way of understanding,” but, “do not lean on your own understanding… and he will direct your paths.” Sound contradictory? Nope. These truths are meant to complement one another.

We can turn these two “sides” into a false dichotomy by overly narrow thinking… much like we can do with the two “sides” mentioned in the very title of this blog post.

 

I’m giving away gold right here:

One thing helpful for me lately in being led by the Spirit, is to realize that I already have the mind of Christ, that the revelation is already in me. (it’s already in you too)

Instead of asking God to show me something with a posture of request, I’m kind of assuming (standing on his word) that he has already shown me and so all I have to do is access it within my own mind of Christ, within my own mind and heart. So, with that posture of faith, I just check for what is there and… there it is, consistently.

Hey, I guess God wasn’t lying when he said that thing, huh. I’m still working on and getting better at this, I haven’t arrived, but I’m saying this helps me lately.

 

Revelation and Process:

The trouble I find with “just be led by the Spirit,” if we think that means to throw away all understanding and acquired wisdom, is this: it often takes a long time for revelation to become proven and to be put into the larger picture before it will be very effective.

We start out with some kind of experience, some kind of revelation, but it is only a small part of the whole picture of whatever subject our revelation is on. We will get the rest as we walk things out over time.

We don’t start out even knowing where our new revelation fits within the bigger picture.

Some of the other insights we need for our original revy to become complete may seem to contradict it. We may need to learn many apparently contradicting lessons before our new revelation becomes highly or widely useful.

Another issue: everybody misses it, and the people who think they don’t ever… miss it the worst.

Please don’t hear some sort of discouragement from listening to God in this, but hear an encouragement towards humility. I want you to listen to God much. I want you to believe that he wants to talk to you more than you could possibly want to hear him, because he does, and he’s willing. Often he only needs us to believe that. My point is that we’re all wrong sometimes.

We are all in a process of sorting out by experience how much of our revelation really is revelation. We are all in a process of sorting out where our leadings of the Spirit fit into the bigger picture of understanding and wisdom which he is leading us to acquire over time.

Does this mean that we can expect God to move according to formulas? I would say yes. Not necessarily our formulas, but his. We need to learn his ways, not just string some ideas together and expect him to fit within what we made up. Our understanding of who he is and how he moves is ever expanding and changing.

Do you feel that he can be depended upon, that he is faithful to his promises, or do you believe he is going to change his mind from day to day?

2Corinthians 1:20 says, “For all the promises of God in Him are yes, and in Him amen.” We can know that God will (in a general sense) do the same thing twice, three times, and a million times in a row, because he has made that kind of commitment to us. He has given us his own life and how will he then withhold anything from us?

He has shed his own blood to make a covenant of union with us and to fulfill every promise in Christ to us. He has offered us the inheritance of a Son, he has freely offered us everything in his kingdom, everything that is good.

His promises are not yes some days but no on other days when he doesn’t feel like it anymore. His answer is always yes. He is consistent.

He can always be counted on to have a living relationship with us, to show us new things if we trust him to… AND he can be counted on to fulfill the promises he has made in his written word, along with the promises he has made to us in the past.

 

How all this relates to healing, especially inner healing:

For many years, a section of the evangelical crowd has loved a prayer/healing ministry called “Theophostic,” which is almost completely formulaic. The Charismatic crowd has often loved a prayer/healing ministry called “Sozo,” which makes a lot more room for the Lord to lead the healing.

Years ago, I learned and used both. I benefited personally from both. I found strengths and weaknesses in both. I don’t use either one today, but I bring them up because they are great examples of opposite extremes in popular camps out there.

I was introduced to Theophostic first, when the head pastor of a very Spirit-led church I was loosely associated with at the time shared his story of having a significant issue in his life resolved as a result of receiving Theophostic prayer. I was pretty impressed by this guy’s maturity and wisdom. He led a worldwide network of ministries and really had a lot going for him. I went over to a nearby evangelical seminary and went through their class on Theophostic.

I was introduced to Sozo when I was hanging around the church where the founders taught it. I learned from them and joined their team for a bit, but that only lasted so long. I didn’t feel like either of these approaches were really something I could stay bound to.

That was a time when I was personally burned out and disillusioned with all things churchy, but I also felt like I was led by the Lord to spend some time around and learn things from certain church groups, so maybe you can understand my habit of only loose affiliation in these stories.

Both approaches I mentioned have become widespread and have resulted in thousands of great testimonies, if not more than that. Sozo has produced offspring such as “Liebusters,” and some other lesser known ones, and these ministries are all over the world. I know that Theophostic has been used as a staple of many professional Christian counselors for decades, and they seem to find it consistently effective enough to keep using it.

Rarely did I see these two camps meet. Rarely did I see someone learn both, which is so weird to me. Are we really THAT stubbornly divided?

“The Immanuel Approach” seems to be more of a blend between aspects of the two with some new things, but that group is just getting started.

I believe in having tools, yes, but I don’t necessarily believe in making those tools into something which claims to be THE complete system. This is one reason why I don’t ever intend to put a name on what I do in this area, or turn it into some kind of rote, trademarked system.

Sozo’s strength, in my opinion, was the spontaneity, looking to the Lord for guidance to lead the session, and teaching people by experience that they really do hear God. It’s weakness, in my opinion, was that the healing tools themselves weren’t nearly the most effective on the market.

Theophostic’s strength, in my opinion, was that the tools were stronger and resulted in a more complete healing, but the weakness of course, was a lack of openness to the Lord’s leading in how to use them. It was, “do this, then do this, if this happens do that, then do this, if this happens do this then start over and to this other thing, then after you get to this certain point… finally invite the Lord to speak into the person’s woundedness.” It was almost totally pre-scripted, with a pre-scripted response to every common situation. However, it apparently worked for a lot of people. It worked far better than Sozo did on me.

When I went through Sozo sessions, I was led into dynamic encounters with the Lord where he took me many different directions and showed me many different things. That was cool. It also wasn’t all that new to me, I was used to him showing me things. There was a little bit of healing which took place along the way.

I got way deeper healing through Theophostic methods than I did through Sozo, simply because it incorporated a lot more wisdom and understanding into the tools it was using.

That isn’t everybody’s story though. Some people got better results with Sozo.

Some people needed something else because neither approach was going to meet their needs. Sometimes I’ve seen him do things which were totally original. Usually it isn’t so hard though. These two approaches have become widespread because they both seem to work for most people to at least some degree.

 

Beware The Fearmongers

In the Theophostic training materials, at least back in 2004, they had a section titled: “Beware the Prophetic Jesus,” with an image of a creepy looking cartoon figure in a hooded cloak holding a staff, and staring off the page at you with creepy, beady little eyes.

The Theophostic people were sure to warn you in this section to not get into listening to Jesus any farther than only to the specific truth statement he spoke to you at the end of a ministry session. They said they knew many who had gone off the rails this way, and it was very dangerous.

Besides this, there were comments throughout their materials disparaging physical healing in the Charismatic world, implying that it is mostly a counterfeit from the devil.

How fear based can you get? This popular Christian ministry was literally telling people to “Beware of… Jesus.”

That is one extreme camp, which few of my readers are probably even close to.

Yet, these people had proven wisdom which allowed the Lord to work through them to change many lives. They even improved the life of a pastor of pastors who a decent number of other established yet wild and crazy ministers referred to as “an apostolic teacher,” who I would say was leading a church much more advanced in Spirit-led ministry and in the prophetic than the majority of Spirit-filled places today.

So what’s my point? Let’s be led by the Spirit, but let’s also be willing to learn things. These are not mutually exclusive. Lets not get all caught up in the narrowness and fear-mongering on either side.