Sunday Musings April 28

I spent time with an awesome group of the family of God called The Promise Friday and Saturday. In most ways it was one of the most encouraging experiences in the Body of Christ that I have had. The worship time was not about show or performance and it seemed that there was a freedom to allow the Lord to be in us what He desired in ways that I have rarely known.

Today there was time for "prophetic word" for those who signed up.  It too was a whole different experience as we were given an 15 minute time slot and each had two people that met with an individual. For the first half of the time, those two individuals drew pictures with colored pencils and then shared with me what they had seen and drawn as it related to me.  It was simple and insightful and I would use the word "precious."  It was truly love poured out from Papa's heart through these two precious brothers and sisters.  There was a real sense of community between the three of us.  

At the same time during this conference I experienced something else that began during the first half hour before the doors opened.  Not knowing how big a crowd there was going to be,  I planned my drive to get there a good hour early only to find the outer doors didn't open until a 1/2 hour before and the auditorium 5 minutes before.  So there was a number of us waiting for doors to open. As I leaned against a post drinking my vanilla frappe from the Holy Ground Coffee Shop, I was very much aware of one of the family.  He came over to me at one point and started talking similarly to how I heard he had talked to others around me.  There is a term that I would be tempted to use, but I don't want to be found using of a brother. being aware that we all have done immature and dumb and ignorant things on our journey of walking out Christ in us. I found it was easy for me to be "disgusted" with this fellow. I think of how often I related to people based on "what I knew" rather than inquire of them or express any interest in another's life?

During two days of services and guest speakers, I found myself struggling further with my own sense of disgust.  This same man found it necessary throughout the services to let the speakers know that he continually thought they were speaking "good messages." Over and over he "affirmed" or made declaration that what the visiting speakers and the senior pastor were sharing were "good messages."  Several others in the audience also echoed what I came to hear s their own "sense of approval" of the speakers' messages.

Yet, I know that it has been only the last few years that I have realized that much of my "approval" has been a disguise of a spirit of criticism. Who am I to pass approval or disapproval on another man's message?  If I say, "good job" or "good message", both are judgements which could just as well be negative as well as positive. If I can verbalize that I think you did a "good job" it gives me the authority to tell you you did a lousy job.  I have given myself permission to judge you right out of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.I am just learning how to relate to people out of a sense of community and identity rather than out of a sense of superiority or inferiority which is truly contrary to the gospel which realigns us with who we are in Papa's love.

And I recognized that this man's interruptions and interjections  were clearly from a sense of judgement  And  I found my own heart struggled not to judge him in like manner. Funny how judgement brings judgement!  Yet to do so  was totally out of harmony with all that we had heard spoken about our relationship as family "in Christ Jesus."  My identity as a child of God puts me into my Father's family.  And as His child I see through my Father's eyes.  This man was my brother, also "in Christ". Loved and valued even as I, both of us "the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus".   Both of us are seen in Him, the I am, our sins and shortcomings paid for and buried in the waters of baptism.  My own heart, fought the battle of thinking God thought, the Word and being in Him and recognizing Him in the brother or I could  revel in my own sense of sin and shortcoming.  

Knowing and seeing always gives us a choice. How will I respond?  Will I respond out of my lostness, my depravity, my "sin consciousness"  or will I respond out of who I AM, who Christ is in me, who I am in Him? That would mean to see you and everyone else in my life who they are in Christ and who Christ is in them also!  And He doesn't see as man sees...He sees as Father sees. So that means I am able to see as Father sees me and how He sees others.  Learning to know "Papa" and His love for me is the journey of the rest of eternity and to walk in that awareness. For He is eternal, and He is Love. Therefore to walk in Him is to walk and live in eternal life!

Saturday Musings   April 20, 2013

In the last 24 hours some thoughts have come to mind about some of the language we have been hearing about the suspects in the Boston Marathon and suspects in other murderous deeds.  My spirit reeled when I heard the term "evil men".  It was as if I heard the Lord say, "They committed very evil deeds."  I looked up the definition of "evil".
A dictionary definition of evil is “morally reprehensible, sinful, wicked.” The definition of evil in the Bible falls into two categories: evil against one another (murder, theft, adultery) and evil against God (unbelief, idolatry, blasphemy). From the prohibition against eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:9), to the destruction of Babylon the Great, the embodiment of evil to come (Revelation 18:2), the Bible speaks of evil.
Read more: http://www.gotquestions.org/definition-of-evil.html#ixzz2R2kWZCtf


Following false gods is called evil - Judges 2:11-12 “Then the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the LORD, and served the Baals; and they forsook the LORD God of their fathers, … they followed other gods from among the gods of the people who were all around them, and they bowed down to them; and they provoked the LORD to anger.”

http://www.letusreason.org/Biblexp146.htm


What stirred me to think of this besides the media's comments about the "evil men" ? And why did  my spirit reel? I had more questions when I heard a comment that the dead older brother suspect said to a family member when he went to get his Mercedes, after the bombing, only to find that it was not drivable yet.  That brother said something like he worried that God was unhappy with him and that he hoped that God would forgive him if what he had done didn't please God.    This young man was greatly deceived. He thought he was "pleasing God."  This broke my heart because of all the things that many of us who have declared Jesus Christ as Lord  have done  "seeking to please God" only to find out later that in Jesus Christ,  God was already pleased with us and that we had engaged in "dead works" which are not acceptable in the Lord's eyes.  

My heart went out to the older brother and the younger brother knowing that they were deceived!  Did the older brother and the younger one have a moment of clarity in the last hours in which they realized the immensity of evil that they had participated in? 

What does this mean to me? In all this  I have gained some insight into the evil in my own heart!   I am so thankful for the redemption that was accomplished by Jesus Christ at the cross and that Life which was made available to me by Holy Spirit when Jesus rose from the dead.

Concern about this same  kind of deception came to my mind when I saw the great celebration with the capture of the younger of the suspects and the spontaneous celebrations that took place in Boston and other places.  Why did my heart sink when I saw them holding up the flags and the great sense of patriotism that came forth? I heard no great rise of celebration of the power of Jesus Christ, no great thanks to God Almighty! Maybe it was there and maybe it wasn't there. 


Christians WAKE UP!!   While I know there was tons of prayer in relationship to the deaths and injuries in Boston and in Texas, to whom was the praise and thanksgiving given?  Who orchestrated the coming together of the multiple police forces in the Boston manhunt?  If it is government that gets the credit, does that not just  bring us into greater dependence upon government to meet our needs? 

I love my nation and believe that it is one of the most blessed nations still in the world. It is one of the most "free" nations in the world because of the foundation upon which this nation is built. This nation's leadership appears, it seems,  to be increasingly departing from the foundations of faith in Jesus Christ. And why not? We increasingly see those professing Jesus Christ engaging in behaviors that are contrary to the love of God in Christ Jesus.  We increasingly see Christians murdering with words those people who "serve other gods", those who engage in abortion, same sex marriage, and the leaders of government that don't act the way they are expected to act.  

 If a nation goes the way the body of Christ goes, then is it no wonder we are seeing the kind of things that are getting our attention today?  What seeds of murder, deception, sex sin have I sown into this nation?  This is one of the questions that I believe God is speaking to those who profess to be serving Jesus Christ.  Am I guilty of all those things? Of course and am I choosing to come into that place of faith and trust in Jesus Christ where His behaviours, His mindset, His feelings penetrate my mind, emotions and the choices of behaviours I make? YES and YES.

Today coming home from my Zumba workout, I heard a sermon on a religious station that said we "must not pay attention to our feelings."   Much of the error that we are in today as a nation and as a church comes from the very error that such a teaching holds.  The speaker didn't really have a good grasp on what he was talking about. He was actually talking about behaviours and choices done by the will rather than the emotions.  Much of the problem in the body of Christ and the reason so many of us fall into deception and engage in behaviours so contrary to all that Jesus Christ is, comes from the misunderstanding of the human soul. Our feelings are a part of our soul and to quit paying attention to our emotions is to be fully able to be deceived.  Our emotions are one of the aspects of our soul that God created to give us freedom.  If we are to be free to choose God, it is necessary to be aware of our feelings. It is our feelings arising up out of our emotional network that brings us into awareness into what is going on "in me."  All the awareness of my choices come from being aware of my feelings and understanding my feelings are what bring me to awareness of my choices to act. My emotions give me freedom to exercise my will. My emotions are what activate my ability to CHOOSE what behaviours to engage in. Without being in touch with my emotions I will act on some emotion that I am not even aware of. 

Deception works on the basis of such control. Stir a person to "do what is right" apart from being aware of his own emotional network, and you can manipulate a person to do whatever you want. It is the emotions that ultimately allow a person to have some sense of "right and wrong", that innate sense that God has placed in the human being that tells them to keep on doing some things and to not do something else.   Our emotions are not TRUTH. They bring us to the awareness of some sense of right and wrong, and can bring us to make the choice to "seek God", to ask for help, to renew our minds according to the Word of God.

The dead suspect appeared to realize that close to the end of his life,  that maybe his way of pleasing God didn't please God at all.  Did he have any idea of the emotional response he would have to seeing people with arms and legs blown off from the bomb he set?  Did he have any idea how he would feel after those bombs which he placed were detonated?  Most likely not!   I do not believe these two young men had any contact with their emotions, but were driven by an ideology which demands "obedience" rather than "freedom."  True freedom assumes personal responsibility for the consequences of ones personal actions.  Subscribing to ideology or theology or any other framework of "rationality" assumes one doesn't engage emotionally on a personal level.  Emotions are stirred to the framework of thinking, rather than given a place in the individuals person's life to free him to make choices based on his personal sense of morality. 

Many of us have grown up in dysfunctional family systems where one person is able to gain "devotion" from other family based on raising a sense of "higher authority" than the person's own sense of choice and freedom.  Do it because I said so!  Oops...how many of us have said that?  Do it because it is "right." (according to me and my ultimate knowledge of course!).  Each of these illustration use external control to get performance rather than encouraging individuals to assess their own value system to make their choices. I think of the drunk person at this point, who has no ability to access his feelings or determine what shape he is in because he has numbed out his emotional network. Is he, like the suspects, totally unaware of how he would feel if he drank and drove and killed someone?  Yet, how many of us would call the drunk who gets behind the wheel "evil"? And another question, how many of us have "been so evil" so to speak, to have gotten behind the wheel of a vehicle while under the influence of drugs or alcohol?

And then we wonder why the "current church" in the Western World is declining!   We can't preach Jesus without living the kind of freedom that brings back into the human race the freedom to choose to serve the God that came to earth to serve man by dying for their sins and restoring man into relationship with Him.   Christ Jesus makes me righteous, so I am free to deal with my thoughts, my feelings and my choices, and to "see" how they either come out of a desire to please God or out of the very heart and mind of God Himself. Without being in touch with my emotions (part of my soul) can Jesus  fully abide in me and come to dwell and share His feelings in my emotions?

All religion uses guilt and shame to motivate people into "performing"according to their sense of right and wrong.  Ouch...how many of us parents and church leaders have used guilt and shame to get someone to engage in behaviours that we "approved" or that pleased us?   Yet we will use all sorts of language when it comes to the suspects to call them "evil men."  Yes, like me, they did evil things. Apart from Jesus Christ, you and I or those brothers, are incapable of doing anything to "please God."  To deny that Jesus Christ made me acceptable to the Father, is to leave me open to deception and open to being motivated to evil actions.  Yes, that makes me "evil" except that God doesn't see me that way. He sees me through the blood and broken body of his Son.  

As I hear about the younger suspect being in the hospital, my heart cry is Lord, Show yourself to Him, so that if he lives or if He dies, he has an opportunity to Live in Christ Jesus even if the USA puts him to death for his crimes! Father, that might as well be me in that hospital before You were revealed to me....and maybe many times since!!  Be merciful to us O Lord!

 Meri Ford

The Law and the Fall of Man and addendum

The Law and the Fall of Man


Recently I wrote an article( available on my blog)  talking about our natural man and how we are biologically created with a system that responds to external stimulus and creates more desire in us each time we satisfy that external desire. This external desire works in contrast to the internal desire the scriptures say is put within every human being, a longing and a desire for relationship with God. That seed or measure of faith is put within every man  allows him to  respond and seek a relationship with and in God through Jesus Christ or he can respond to the natural drawings of his human body towards gratification.


Scripture tells us that sin was not attributed to man until the law was given. Does that mean that there weren't consequences for man's choice in the garden to seek the gratification that the enemy offered him in the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Of course not. Adam and woman began their journey as mortal beings once they partook of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For Adam and Eve it took some 800 plus years and many more for Methuselah before their physical bodies died and we know God continued to walk with them and have some measure of fellowship with mankind.


So when the law was given in Moses, so also did desire get empowered in a way that it hadn't before. The law which is true and holy, perfect as far as what it was intended to do, stirred up in human beings the awareness of the emptiness and separation that partaking of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil stirred up. We know now from science, that all external pleasure creates dopamine in the brain that then tells the human being that more and more of that “pleasure” is desired. The Law, therefore, which tells man what he has failed to do, only creates in man the desire to work harder and harder to try and be “holy”, “complete” or in our language today, to “feel good.”


Romans tells us that this “law” that works in us is only conquered through the Life of Jesus Christ in us. Relationship with Jesus Christ living and dwelling in Him and Him in me is the power and the Life that saves me from the “law of sin and death” that works in my natural man from the time of conception. Law in all its forms sets up desire in man to work harder to comply with the Law, to do it right, to succeed, to feel good, to get approval. In Christ, we find acceptance and privilege in being children of the Father, joint heirs with Christ. We work from the security and love of the Father that the Law cannot ever give through anything external.


For many Christians, the distinction between going to church and “feeling good” and leaving services and saying things like “how wonderful was the Presence of God” today, such distinction between that “good feeling” and being in God and moving in God and allowing God to be in us and among us who He is apart from our external awareness of pleasure and comfort is unknown. So it shall be with many of us who were in that place that we might find the Lord saying at some point, I don't know you. We were living little differently than the heathen except our pleasure came from “spiritual experience” rather than intimacy with the Lord God Himself in and through and by the Spirit of the Living God.

May we be quickened to respond to the gentle promptings of the Holy Spirit in greater measure to yield to Him, to allow Him to be in us all that only He is, Life, Light, Peace, Joy, Hope, our Justification, our Sanctification, our Righteousness, our Healing, healing and health our everything!

Meri




I wrote the above this  Sunday morning about 8:30am having been stirred of the Spirit to put these thoughts out to the Renewed Hope  community.  Then I left to go to church where my son in law attends in Woodland, a congregation called The Promise. It was indeed a divine appointment that I am so thankful that the Lord stirred me to share in!  The reason I bring it up is because the sermon was an extension of what this post talks about.  I don't know the name of the pastoral staff that preached other than to know he was a brother in Christ for his words spoke what Holy Spirit had been stirring in me only in greater detail.  To briefly summarize, he spoke about our conscience and how we were born with our conscience connected to the law, with our conscience telling us what was right and what was wrong. Motivated then by guilt and shame we often changed behaviors in effort to get approval which of course never came under the law, only the drive or "desire" to work harder to do better.  In Christ, at new birth, our conscience was reconnected to the Source of Value, and tied to our Sonship with the Father which was separated when man sinned in the garden.   Our conscience as one in Christ, tells us that when we do something wrong, that we are still loved, valued and still the son of our Father and it is His life that we are to yield.   He made it clear that most of us have been under the power of guilt and shame, that most altar calls and "invitations" pull from the power of guilt and shame, and the end is that we go forward asking for help to "do better."  Such effort to "do better" are "dead works."  Only when guilt and shame lead us to the awareness of who we are in Christ, are we empowered in Him to live out the works He destined us to walk in before the foundation of the earth! 

I know that I have a lot of scripture searching and review to do to allow the Lord the soil of my heart to bring forth the fruit out of this Word and to keep the soil of my heart fresh for Holy Spirit to come in and convict me so that I can further walk in my identity in Christ Jesus.

The law is holy and perfect but it cannot change my nature. The power of the guilt and shame of the Law/sin was broken when the body of Christ was broken and his blood shed for me.  As often as I eat His body and drink His blood, I am being strengthened in His Worth and in His Value as a child of the Heavenly Father. It is a matter of working out the completed work of Christ in me by faith perceiving who I am in Christ and who Christ is in me, walking out all that is mine as one seated with Him in heavenly places. There guilt and shame only bring me to awareness of the totality of the Father's love for me. I will have feelings of guilt and shame as a result of being human. But with Christ in me and me in Him, those feelings are what the Holy Spirit uses to bring fuller awareness of the power of the love of God in Christ Jesus, not only in me, but in those around me. The new commandment is Love the Lord your God with all your being and your neighbor as yourself.  When the law shows us how short we fall, we are freed from it's influence through the life of Christ in us and freed to be loved and to love others. When we stay in guilt and shame, we stay under the law and live under the law and will not have any assurance of being loved and therefore will automatically treat others  as "under the law", seeing their sins and shortcomings rather than the love that God has for them.

May we all come to the knowledge of Christ and the greatness of His love  which has more power than  all the principalities and power on earth and in the heavens

Meri Ford


I think the pastor's name is Dan  Schiopu who is part of the Power Culture School of Ministry at The Promise in Woodland.

The Spirit of Abortion from The Rhema Code by Scott Schang

I was reading in Scott Schang's book The Rhema Code last night and want to quote from it from  pages 94-96 and 108


...the Holy Spirit began to speak to me in my office: "There is a spirit of abortion on the church!"  "What does that mean?"  " Whatever is happening in society is a direct reflection of what is happening in the church."

He goes on to write, "

When the Church devalues the completeness of spiritual conception, the world will devalue the completeness of natural conception."

p.96  When the Church maintains and teaches an incomplete view of the work of grace and promotes a performance-based approach towards a someday in the future condition of approval by God, it becomes that seedbed for a pro-abortion spirit.  It devalues the life of a fetus, declaring the fetus is incomplete until there is some further action or activity.  I know this is strong language but here is what God said about this issue; until we get our understanding in line with His  and stop arguing with Him and discrediting what He has done in us at the cross, we will have no significant breakthrough against the evils of abortion in society.

Social reform will be inspired by the theological reform of the "complete" work of grace in the heart of man.

Is it possible that we are contributing to the moral decline of society and the increase of social ills by our poor understanding of the complete work of grace at the cross?

Until we stop placing a load of guilt on the body of Christ to measure up and become something that they already are by His grace, we will continue to contribute to the calamity of the world's devaluing of life and we will keep the awesome wonder of what god has done hidden in the spiritual womb until some ambiguous day in the future.

When we devalue the power of conception so does the world. When we have to see an external demonstration of manifestation to prove value -so does the world.

When God says 'be holy' He is referring to a "condition" that only He can create and we are called to live from that reality. What a gift and what an honor it is to live from  that reality....to "be holy" on the inside and to live from that great revelation on the outside....no longer striving to become something that we could never become by our own effort if we had a hundred life times.(italics mine)

.....and much more...

on page 108....to live in faith is to live from an unseen reality yet perceiving the unseen as superior to that which the natural eye sees.

It is imperative that we make the unseen realm more influential than that which we can see.

The call into His Kingdom is a call to a superior realm that offers life-altering potential to all who "see" or live by faith...

________________________________

Rhema Code by Scott Schang  expanded version
ISBN  978-0-9832336-2-6
Published by

The Promise
PO Box1510
Woodland WA98574
www.the promise.com


can be ordered at
www.rhemacode.com

Stale Bread revised 4/9/2013

Stale Bread

Revised April 9, 2013Recently I was in a service where the  people  took communion. When I ate of the “cracker” I found it tasted extremely stale. The thought Stale Bread came to my mind,  and I was reminded of a congregation who arrived for services one morning and found the sanctuary smelled divinely of “fresh baked bread” yet no physical bread was found. 

Another thing involving bread also was brought to my remembrance:  I was praying once  with some intercessors in an upstairs room during a worship service and we were crying out to God for “fresh bread.” When the guest preacher got up in the pulpit he told  the congregation that he had prepared a sermon for that service,but now that he was in the pulpit the Lord stirred something “fresh” up in him that he was going to share.

So I began to wonder about “stale bread.” The sermon in that
communion" service had been a powerful exhortation on the Sons of Issachar. And not wanting to be particularly critical I asked the Lord,, "What was stale? "

 And it was seemingly pointed out to me that He, the Lord,  hadn’t been able to say anything He wanted to say in the service. 

Yes, some of what the preacher said was  about what He wanted them to say, but what He would have said Himself was different. The forms and methods of the service didn’t allow for “fresh bread,” only day old bread: the way it was always done, the way it was expected. 

One of the things I remembered about that communion  service was that during a time of worship the song leader admitted that he felt a need to go on with the worship and at the same time  to go on with the expected order of worship. While that congregation/denomination doesn't have a “written order” like some churches, their unspoken and unwritten  “order” is perhaps as set and rigid as any listed in a bulletin!!


Manna was to be collected daily except on the Sabbath and then enough for the Sabbath could be collected on the 6^th day. Anything left over was to be destroyed or it would turn to worms. 
 
One of the interesting things about the “communion service” the Sunday morning involving Stale bread was that when the ladies who do the filling of the communion trays found that they had no juice and crackers for elements. So they sent someone out and they brought back “stale crackers”---leaven ones at that! Not that it ultimately makes any difference. 


 Our hearts must be prepared to receive Fresh Bread or else what we will dish up will be “stale bread”, day old bread, and often it has worms in it!! Did the crackers have worms in them? No. But one might say that  the order of service had a tons of worms in it. One lady said that something so powerful entered in through the service that it “took her breath away” and she initially shrunk back so shocked. Others reported that they were before the Lord in worship when instead of Him being acknowledged, the order of service went on to another function while people were still standing waiting upon the Lord. God had fresh bread for the congregation that morning, but so often it is more important to “have something” that we call “anything anyone can supply” rather than wait upon the Lord, putting aside our own abilities and understandings, and commune with Him in Spirit and in Truth.


Jesus is my bread and He’s new every morning and like others, we didn’t go away without feeding/communing at His feet. But there was something He had to give ALL those that day that they didn’t get because they were offered up “stale bread”.

But then, are the shepherds supposed to "feed the sheep" with what is dished up during the pulpit, during the sermon time, or will the Shepherd of the Sheep Himself feed His sheep who wait upon Him personally, intimately?  Is the "pastor" there to get people to feed from him or is he to direct the people to feed on Jesus, to eat His body and drink His blood?  How do we "break bread" so that people feed on Jesus instead of feeding at our feet and get "fresh bread" from heaven!

 

Meri Ford
renewedhope@peoplepc.com
516 Park Rd.
Winlock, WA 98596
360 520 4503

Standing Your Post April 6 , 2013

Saturday April 6 Musings
 
As I sat down to write this a song came on my music station that was  called  I Know Where I Belong!!

How appropriate as I address some concerns and issues this Saturday.  How often have some of you questioned why you were given some of the assignments the Lord sent you on?

I was visiting with a dear friend this last week and we talked about "standing our post" and she mentioned how she saw that I had been sent to various congregations and was there to "stand my post."  I was in one congregation three years and it was a congregation that has been around 100 years and that was  raised up in one of the early revivals in our county back in the early 1900s.  It was also a church my dad pastored for a few years as an "interim" while I was in 7-8th grades.  I knew after being in that congregation for awhile I was there to "stand my post."  Otherwise, just to be there!!  I knew that I carried the Presence of the Lord with me or in me when I went there and He had some purpose for being there.  I saw the power of the Holy Spirit move among that people. I saw that group pruned down to a "faithful few" and I saw a pastor who was upset with the pruning and didn't realize the group he had left was the crew that God had chosen to carry out His work.  


Sadly, that work was not done and still is in limbo. And while those of the "force" that held that church in its power have left that congregation, the "force" is still there, binding up the Holy Spirit.  I don't understand the Lord's ways but I did see that as the Holy Spirit moved upon the congregation and the pastor, the pastor had a choice and that pastor chose to whine and complain about the small numbers rather than to welcome the Holy Spirit and yield to what He wanted to do.  A day came when I knew I was to leave....no big deal. Just quietly done. I had played the piano for them for 3 years.

Then the next congregation was one not so removed from the one I had left. The founding father of the last church was involved in building the congregation that was housed in the building on the site of the next church I learned.   Plus, the new one was a congregation I had been in back in 1971 and which we were told to leave.  In 71 when we left God told us that we'd been on that mountain too long!!  And off we went to wait upon the Lord for where he would have us...newbies in the Holy Spirit. We were placed in 1971 in a non charismatic congregation for the next 10 years. Shortly after we left that congregation built on a historic foundation, it split and how thankful I was not to be a part of that. Being a minister's daughter, splits were something I never wanted to have to deal with again!!

So back I was to that congregation full of old people. At 64 I was one of the "young ones" with a pastor in his 70's.  I was there on a one year assignment with very specific instructions. At the end of the first year that assignment was completed.  God had done what He told me He wanted to do and which he had asked me to cooperate with.  Service after service I was there to "release His Spirit" into the services as I knew I carried His presence into the services. And Second, I was to call forth leadership into that congregation. 12 people with strong spiritual backgrounds came into the congregation. A strange and motley crew I have to admit, but God had sent them or maybe brought them. However, leadership didn't recognize them because they were "in the congregation" "in the pew." The power of the Holy Spirit moving across that congregation was so present but since it didn't come from the platform it wasn't acknowledged as having great importance, or enough importance to be yielded to or to
 cause leadership "wait upon HIm."  At the end of the year I knew that my assignment was done. I was pretty much hidden and yet I had become accepted within the congregation.

I sought the Lord and wise counsel and  I determined the Lord gave me freedom to stay in that congregation for another year, to enjoy the fellowship and safety of the people.  A year to the date of when my first assignment ended, I saw something happen in a service and the Lord spoke to me and said it was no longer safe to be in the congregation.  I waited upon the Lord that week to see what He was saying and I got no clear direction other than it wasn't safe any longer.  Sunday morning I checked on line to see who the guest prophet was that was to be filling in the pulpit and found out he was someone I had heard before. And as I looked at the website where he was featured, my eyes caught a link that said something like When Life says it is time to make a change. And I clicked on the link and the first sentences of a pastor who I never heard of were about being on that mountain too long!!  Same scripture given to me in 1971 when we were told to leave the same congregation!!  I knew as i went to church that day I was saying my goodbyes to those special ones whom I knew would understand.  And I was gone! Quietly and no one inquired where I was or why I left. Now that is hidden or "welcome loss?"


In the following months I went to various churches in the area and attended a Baptist church for about 3 months but knew that my pot wasn't to settle there.  Then in the spring of 2012 I attended a little church in the community where I live. I have been there a year.  I have just "been there." I carry whatever God is with me and in me to service on Sunday morning and a rare other service.  This last week visiting with my dear friend we were talking about what I was doing there. Again, there was talk about "standing my post."  There is something in this congregation that God values and is working out.  I admit I don't really know all what He is doing but I know what I am to do and be....at rest!!  To go to church the same way I do anything else...at rest in Him and letting Him be what He wants to be in me and in the service.

 I haven't gone to church to "get something from God" for many years. Not since one day the Lord told me to take my lunch to church and give it away!! My food is to do His Will. He is my food, the bread of life. So I have learned since the late 80 's  to go to services "in Him" "more or less"!   It has been a process of laying down my own desire and plans and resting in Him and allowing HIm to be in and through me what He wants...and in the congregation!! That is my acceptable worship!


The sad thing is I see the Holy Spirit wooing the congregation and its leadership.  And the agenda doesn't let them see what He is doing or how to respond.  Recently the pastor referred to the moving of the Spirit as "getting all stirred up" and he was stirred up but he "put it down" rather than yield to it and wait upon the Lord to see what He wanted to do! He just saw it as his flesh being "stirred up" but it was Holy Spirit!!  But then how many of us responded to the presence of God with our flesh/carnal nature rather than yielding to Him in worship and praise and quietness? 

Standing my post.  I remember years ago there was a man in a congregation that I had been a part of.  He was an older man and when that church fell to pieces long after I attended, I ran across the guy and I knew that he was "holding the pew."  He was a piller that was holding the Lord's standard up over that congregation. He was "holding his place" against whatever the enemy was trying to do in that congregation.  And that congregation weathered puny days and new leadership came in and it began to grow. And guess what...the old guy died!!  His "place holding job" was done!!

I don't know what other names this kind of assignment might be called. Are these 'watchers", "gate keepers"?  I remember in one congregation I was given one of two jobs at different times. Sit in the very back and keep people from falling away (figuratively) and then at times i sat up front and in some way God used that place to direct what was going on in the Spirit. How and why? I have no idea!! I just manned my post so to speak.

The interesting thing, is that manning my post put me in the places that have changed me and caused me to draw near to God. The trials of the assignments are too many to mention for in many I wasn't very "hidden." And even when i sought to be "hidden" it seemed that I was "seen" by forces that didn't appreciate even my hiddenness! And little did I understand the power of my words when I even spoke casually!  The assignments or calling are the ways the Lord has chosen to change me and invite me into more fellowship with Him! He who gave the call and the call are One!

As I close these musings, I think of that scripture that says a person in the military doesn't get involved in civilian affairs.  To those of you who are "manning your post" and are set in a place, remember, stay out of civilian affairs!! 

Sincerely,

Meri Ford

Meri Ford
516 Park Rd
Winlock, WA 98596
360 520 4503
blog http://meriford.blogspot.com/