Friday's Musings Try the Spirits

Fridays Musings   June 20, 2014    Meri Ford

In the last few days  I read an article somewhere on the Internet about the deception that the scriptures talk about in the last days. In that article he talked about how those that are coming as deceivers will NOT speak error or false doctrine until they have the confidence of people that are "following them." Then when they have a following, they will begin to sow false doctrine and heresy.

Recently while I was raking up the grass from a field which I had finally gotten cut with the rider mower, the whole thing about being caught by such deceivers came to my thoughts and with it that scripture that says, 

Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but  test the spirits  to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. 2 By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God;  3 and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God; this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world.   I John 4:1-3

 Tests/try according to the Greek is  Strongs    δόκιμος (G1384)  as listed in Blue Letter BIble....

1. to test, examine, prove, scrutinise (to see whether a thing is genuine or not), as metals

As I pondered these things, I thought of how the article said, you cannot tell at the beginning if these are deceivers or true believers.  And I understand from the premise of his article that at the beginning of a man's preaching, it is difficult to discern if a man is a deceiver.  BUT..Holy Spirit brought this scripture up to my attention. No where does the scripture say "test or try the person or the person's teaching."   But instead it says...try the spirits examine....the spirit by which the man operates.  

Long ago Holy Spirit gave me some understanding of this when I would watch people asking people if they confessed Jesus Christ to come in the flesh. Some people had no idea what in the world that meant and I remember a man who told my dad on time, I don't know about all that stuff, I just know He is Lord and He loves me and has come to live in me.

AH HA...while that man doesn't know the "doctrine" of Christ come in the flesh, the spirit of which he was speaking, was "Christ come in his flesh. The power of God by Holy Spirit had come to live in his being...that is the "test of the spirits" not some standard by which we ask someone if they believe such and such.  This man expressed faith in the fact that Jesus Christ had come to live and dwell in his house of flesh.  

So as I raked 4-5 inches of grass into piles so I could later pitch fork them into the wheel barrow to go to the burn pile, Holy Spirit was showing me that only he who believes that Jesus Christ indwells them by Holy Spirit has the power to be saved from the deceiving wiles of wicked men.  And as the grass blew in my face, I saw that he who welcomes the indwelling of Christ, knows that he needs be taught of no man, but he is taught of Holy Spirit, the teacher.  Such a person can sit under any kind of teaching as he knows that His teacher is the Holy Spirit not the man. The person who is dependent upon the Helper, the Counselor, the Indwelling one who reveals Christ, can not be led astray.

So...Father what does this mean? From that inner awareness I understood that  it meant  that if you have teachers who expect you to follow them and their teaching, no matter how good the teacher or "anointed" person is, no matter what signs and wonders,..be aware that there is a spirit in that person that is antichrist or against Christ that could lead people astray.

Being a counselor, I found it is easy to have people become dependent upon me to learn and to grow. That is not the spirit of  Christ Jesus come in the flesh. Understanding this  makes a big difference in the way I counsel both in the secular realm and with my fellow Christians. The only value any teaching is, is found in  what Holy Spirit illuminates or quickens in another's understanding. When I am teaching in the secular realm, I would refer to the "light bulbs" that would go off in THEIR heads.  With the brethren, it is what thoughts Holy Spirit speaks into their understanding about what I might say or teach.    Unless an individual has assumed responsibility for the indwelling presence of God and the role of Holy Spirit as their teacher from the inside out, so to speak, they are vulnerable to deception.  There are a great number of very persuasive preachers, prophets, apostolic men and women  and counselors out there today.  It is necessary that we drink only of our own well, drink only of that spring of living water that rises up within us and invites us to   be renewed in the spirit of our mind (repentance--metanoia). Holy Spirit always gives us a choice. Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty...freedom to choose. Yes, and freedom to reject Him.   The worldly teacher will ultimately lay condemnation, guilt and shame upon those who don't follow his teaching which the natural man often finds is safer than having the choice or the responsibility  to hear God for himself.  So what was the dilemma of the Israelites when they faced the result of telling Moses they would just hear God from him, instead of hearing and seeing God for themselves?  They went back to camp and got discouraged, and thought Moses was gone forever on the mountain and began to gather their gold and make an object to worship.  So it is with our old nature, it will quickly get discouraged when a teacher or preacher doesn't feed us, or they don't meet our need in some way and we are already on the idolatrous road.

As we grow in the knowledge of Christ, and I like the way Paul puts it, about "learning Christ", we begin to be comfortable listening to what Holy Spirit says, learning to rest and wait upon and in Him and trusting the Father's great love for us in Christ Jesus, that He would Himself come in the flesh suffer and die so that He could send Holy Spirit to come and dwell in our flesh.   That is the safety that we have from deception.  Yes, we can get the voice of God mixed up with our own understanding and ways, and can mess our own lives up, but that is different than the deception of antichrist which is abounding as we come into the end of the age.   And godly men and women will risk stepping into our lives and speaking forth the Word of Truth in order to "stir up the Spirit" within us so we can once again hear Him and grow in Him.

I think again of what that article I read  which said something like: You cannot tell the difference in the beginning with the preaching/teaching of the deceiver and the real thing. I keep hearing people talk about the wheat and the tares. It isn't our job to discern the difference. It was the angels who would come and do the reaping at the end of the age because it was impossible to tell the difference until they were ready to harvest.  Besides, one never knows if what looked like darnell/tares might become a new creature in Christ Jesus a week or two or three after we meet them.  None of this is really our business. Our business is being conformed to His image, which means being totally dependent upon the anointed one, Christ in me revealed by Holy Spirit.  Those who are so "dependent" upon Himself, may error, but they won't be  following  those who will ultimately deceive.   

Here is one of the neat things about following after Christ, the anointed one in me by Holy Spirit. Such believers also won't follow any other man, woman, preacher, apostle, prophet, evangelist, husband or wife. They will each be dependent upon the Holy Spirit as the source of their life, and understanding, and as such will relate to ALL men increasingly with the wisdom and knowledge that He who is Love is!  As we listen to Holy Spirit, and see those in our lives through the eyes of Himself, we will be increasingly conformed to the image of Christ until a point will come where this body won't hold that Life any longer and we will be joined with Him.  We will see Christ and Him crucified as we look at those men, women, prophets, preachers, children, etc..and not respond to people after their fleshly desires and thinking or image of themselves.

I trust you will wait upon the Lord and seek what He is saying through or about these things that I write.  

Meri

  Meri Ford 516 Park Rd Winlock, WA 98596 360 520 4503 Blogs
      http://meriford.blogspot.com/
      http://www.renewedhopesite.wordpress.com/ website: http://www.renewedhopesite.com

Stress

It amazes me how little the average person understands about stress and that lack of understanding comes from a basic lack of understanding about who we are as human beings and how  we are made.




Stress isn't about what is happening around us as most of us think. Stress is MY BODY'S response to what is what is "changing" around me. Stress is my physical body's reaction to change. Stress is not bad; it just is our own body's way of dealing with change. Our body puts out  hormones from our adrenal glands sometimes called corticoid hormones which give the body a burst of energy to effectuate a change. When a person gets up out of bed in the morning, it takes energy to change from the prone, laying down position to the sitting up and then the standing position. The body releases energy in the form we often call adrenalin to energize the body to make a move, a change. This is what is called the "stress response."  It causes the blood vessels to constrict and increases the heart beat.




  When I drive down the highway and a car cuts in front of me suddenly, my body releases some of these hormones to allow me to make a "quick response." These responses always call out whatever my predominant "thinking" is in that  kind of situation.  For instance, if you grew up in snow country, you probably learned riding with your parents and then learning to drive, how to drive in snow, how to handle going into a skid.  It is the predominant thinking relating to driving in snow. I live on the West Coast and we don't develop those skills in our youth and our first response to any kind of situation is usually put the brakes on. The stress response pulls from our very basic survival techniques and what we have programmed in our minds as to how to respond.   That is why it is often called a survival mechanism.




The problem with the stress response is two fold. 




One, without adequate understanding of our own physiological and personal make up, we tend to see stress as a matter of "external stimulus" and get into what is appropriately called "victim status."  It upsets me, it makes me, which are both language we learned from our childhood and which we as parents enforced to get compliance with our expectations and standards. Do it or else!   Victim status increases our stress response because it puts us in an ongoing status of "survival" or "threat." So our body is in "high alert" mode ready to act at any moment. One of the problems with this is that the release of lots and lots of adrenalin overpowers the front lobe of our brain where we make rational decisions.  In survival mode, we aren't in need of thinking things through. When a deer runs in front of my car, it isn't the time to think about what kind of deer it is, is it overpopulated, will it decrease the populations too much if I hit it.  It is a time to make a "save my life" decision based on whatever "automatic" response I have programed whether knowingly or unknowingly.




Second..one of the problems with the stress response is that if we get into situations where there is one change upon another in a rather random pattern, we stay in "high alert" mode and our bodies never go back to "relaxation mode."  Anyone that has started a new job knows the stress of dealing with all new stuff...change after change after change. Then after a week or two we become accustomed to the changes and they begin to be anticipated at which time the body doesn't have to release so much adrenalin.  People can work in high change or what we call high stress enviroment and not have "stress issues" because they have learned to relax and take "change" as if it were normal.  I worked in a field where I dealt with a variety of issues and people throughout the day, changing regularly. However, if I had focused on how things changed everyday I would have been highly stressed out. I learned at least in the later years,however, to stay in a place of "rest", quietness in my inner man and move through what came to be "typical changes" without issue, most of the time!! In the field I was there were big changes, crises, and we knew after they were over, we felt like wrung out dishrags...our bodies had "sped up" to handle the changes and when the crisis was over, there was what we call "adrenalin let down."  And that is a healthy thing...it brings us back to the place where the blood pressure goes back to normal and the heart beat goes back to normal.  If however crises are continual and there is no relaxation period and the body doesn't get time to relax and be restored between changes, we get stress related medical issues.




I was in a high stress situation for 20 years and had no understanding of these things and as a result my doctor told me some years ago that my "stress response" is hair trigger sensitive. It has been overworked until it activates without any real change.  I was having major spikes in blood pressure while doing routine things that made no sense.  For me, once I recognized that and when I changed to a gluten free diet, things  in my body have changed.  It is to note that intolerance for Gluten itself will cause blood pressure spikes.




During a crisis, not only does our body increase the blood pressure to give us more energy (which is sort of stored in the blood) the heart beat is increased as it has to pump the blood that the increased blood pressure causes. In normal situations, if the blood pressure rises, the heart beat lowers to maintain the equilibrium of the system. Not so when under stress............or under the use of any kind of amphetamines or stimulants where both heart beat and blood pressure are elevated as if to prepare for a life threatening emergency.




I retired in 2013 and I love retirement. I didn't have many days sitting around home not doing anything because I had so much I wanted to do that I didn't do while working full time.  Was retirement stressful! Most definitely!  Was it bad? NO....Stress is about change and I changed from going to work 4-5 days a week and being gone about 12 hours a day to being home all day.  Now my days were full, but they were full of different things than I was used to. I started Zumba twice a week, I started painting, I worked in my garden....all things that were "changes."  Plus...my energy consistently went out to the pattern of life that I had established for 12 years. There was an empty hole there where what I used to do no longer existed. One can't fill up that empty hole with all the stuff that I did.  It is a grief and loss issue no matter how busy I stayed.  Grief and loss are about "change"...grief is what I feel when there is a loss or a change where energy went out to something and it no longer goes out there. One can't just change directions of ones energy flow. One has to reckon with the loss or one will find themselves  totally empty on the inside yet busy on the outside.  There was grief and loss issues when I retired though I loved and still love retirement. The people I talked with weren't there to talk with...and NOTHING can replace what isn't there. I had new people in my life but that doesn't deal with the energy going out to what was "yesterday" and which I was accustomed to.

Grief is a feeling based on my past experiences involving "change."  One experiences grief even when what changed is positive. And griefis one of the neatest of "uncomfortable feelings" in that it decreases everytime we feel it. The empty hole of loss fills up as we feel the grief of the loss.



I am sure every husband and wife love their first child...but the birth of that child involved a loss of their independence and a complete change in lifestyle. And as much as you welcomed it, it was still a change/loss and sometimes people don't recognize this. In these changes not only is there grief but the whole body has to accommodate to a different pattern and it takes the stress response to handle that change.  One of Newton's laws says something about a body that is in motion takes a force equal or greater than that motion to create a change.  And in the body, dealing with change involves the stress mechanism....whether the change is positive or negative in our estimation. It takes energy to deal with any change in my life...it is about me, my body effectualing the response to changes.



Stress is an important factor in our lives. Stress creates enough anxiety over change and in change that we adjust our behavior. The stress we feel of an uncoming test, or social event, prepares us, gives us energy to study for the test, or get things ready for the social event. Without the stress response, we'd  be stuck in the same position we started the day in all day long.  Learning that we as the human being with this human body are literally "in charge" of our stress responses, releases us from a lot of the guilt and shame from facing stress related issues, of denying stress and blaming people places and things.  

I am pushing 70. I still am aware of certain things from my past that activate my "survival" mechanism almost immediately. I am learning to understand these things and as I change my thinking about them, I have some measure of power over the stress response by coming to a place of acceptance and relaxation in my body.  Anxiety is a part of what we call "stress ailments"....and I used to find at at 5pm each day I would find myself stressed out, in a measure of anxiety and there was no present circumstances that was activating it. Instead it was a long established survival mechanism of gearing up for change around 5pm not knowing if the man of the house was coming home when he got off work at 5, if he was going to call and say that he was working late, or if I wouldn't hear from him and it would be later before he'd come in staggering drunk with who knows what consequences then to face. Years later when I recognized that anxiety would come up about 5pm I learned to address my thinking, speak forth the reality which I was living in in the now, which then solicited different emotions and my body then could relax. It took some time for this process to wipe out that anxiety pattern altogether but it began. The same thing activated when someone didn't show up when I expected them too. Suddenly I found myself irrationally anxious...and the stress response went into high gear. Again, I began to "see" that it was tied to my past experiences, change my thinking about the now that it wasn't the same, altered my emotions, and my body began to respond differently....again a process.



We are in a victim based society today therefore stress is very high and stress related illnesses are maxed out as is seen in the amount of antianxiety medications that are prescribed. Also, the end result of stress is burn out and depression. More and more people on the job are facing "burnout." One speaker on this subject told how he had so been filled with adrenalin, functioning at a high paced lifestyle that one day his body literally stopped...in  the middle of the 520 Bridge in Seattle and he couldn't move or drive his car and had to be extricated from his vehicle by emergency workers. His whole body had been drained by the demand that had been put on it, mainly by the stress mechanism, continually exhausting the energy supply of the body until it was drained.  Several years later, he was still having to take things to supplement his body to help repair the complete drain and exhausted supplies. He learned he  has to order his day very simply to be able to maintain his physical body in that state of relaxation as much as possible.



We are not going to escape Stress........it isn't about our circumstances as such. It is about our response to the changes in our circumstances and our attitude about them. The more we see our stress as about what is happening to us, the greater activation of the stress response we have....because I am a victim and that puts me into a survival mode.   My husband and I joke about being the victim because so much of our language and that of our society's is victim language which puts us into survival mode and increases our stress levels.  So for his birthday a year ago I got him a black T shirt that said I AM THE VICTIM!    For us it is a joke, something we can laugh about, and remind ourselves that we have a choice today and we don't have to operate out of victim mentality and have our stress levels activated unnecessarily. Life itself without our contributions brings us enough change.



Meri Ford

Call it not conspiracy

Call it not conspiracy

Date: Jun 11, 2014 7:50 AM

This morning as I was reading the scriptures and seeking the Lord, I came across this scripture and it stirred in me, once again and I share here with you what I was seeing and hearing.    Isaiah 8:11-20    (Jerusalem Bible)  For this is how Yahweh spoke to me when his hand seized hold of me and he taught me not to follow the path of the people, saying Do not call conspiracy all that this people call conspiracy; Do not dread what they dread, have no fear of that. Yahweh Sabaoth is the one you will proclaim holy., him will you dread, him you will fear. He will be a sanctuary, A stumbling stone a rock to trip up the two Houses of Judah a snare and a trap for the inhabitants of Jerusalem over which many of them will stumble, fall and be broken, been ensnared and made captive. Bind up the the testimony, seal the instruction in the heart of my disciples. My trust is in Yahweh who hides his face from the House of Jacob. I will put my hope in him. Look, I and the children whom Yahweh has given me shall become signs and portents in Israel on behalf of Yahweh Sabaoth who dwells on Mount Zion. And should people say to you, Go and consult ghosts and wizards that whisper and mutter------------------ a people should certainly consult its gods and the dead on behalf of the living! As regards instruction and testimony, without  doubt  this is how they will talk and hence there will be no dawn for them.... .........for is not everything dark as night for a country in distress? It goes on in  Chapter 9 to say... The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light... ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ And as I read this, I so remembered Deb Moore's word given to this list or its predecessor during one of the times of internal turmoil of this nation as things in the White House and things happening in this nation were in turmoil. She shared this Word: Don't call conspiracy what this people call conspiracy. Does this mean there aren't devious and wicked plans being perpetrated in and against this nation? Of course not. that is not what this scripture refers to.  It is that OUR focus is to be upon Him who is in CHARGE...The God that is...Yahweh Sabaoth....The Lord of the Angel Armies as a popular song translates it, The God that is, that is Lord of War; the The God that is the Lord of War himself.  Him we are to "dread." Him we are to stand before in reverent awe knowing it is by His hand presidents rise up and presidents fall, that is is by His hand that al Qaeda is able to be successful in bombing our troops or that our troops prevail. It is by His hand and His word  whether Afghanistan is over taken even as Iraq is being over taken as the American "saviours" are being pulled out.   It is Yahweh Sabaoth who controls Wall Street's up and down and allows crooked men to rise up and manipulate the global economies. This morning as I read,  I noticed that Yahweh Sabaoth declared that the King of Assyria was His River....the force he used to flood into Judah, flooding everything and passing on (Is. 8:8). In other places, as in Joel, He talks of HIS ARMY.....how often in years past I heard people talking about wanting to be in Joel's army. I don't.....that army that the Lord called his own....was a tool of devastation upon the earth. And in good Hebrew style, scriptures in the Old Testament remind us that HE IS LORD OF ALL.  No army, no wickedness arises that operate outside His control. He sent the evil spirit to Saul.   HE IS LORD OF ALL. Weeks ago I began eliminating most Facebook posts from my Timeline that address the negative conditions of this nation.  No one needs to be told "how bad things are."  I am not ignorant of the sin and wickedness that are afoot in this nation  or be reminded of the nasty plans of the men in power or of their lasciviousness.  And making folks aware of these things does not "illuminate their understanding."   Wake up Church!!  Light awakens people.  It is the Light that  shines in the darkness that allows people to "see."   When we accept the reality that "we are light in the Lord", then we will have a message so very different from the world.  We don't have to tell the world how sick or how dark it is. THEY KNOW.  The Holy Spirit convicts the world of sin, of righteousness and of judgement and He is poured out on all flesh for yet awhile. It is as we walk as children of the Kingdom of Light that they will 'see" a way out of their darkness.   Those who have been known as the "church' have often sought to show people how sinful and how dark things are.  People don't "see" in the dark. In the dark, we grope for whatever we can touch to hold onto for some semblance of stability. It isn't until Light shines in the darkness that there is Hope, and HE, the Light is our Hope. In this day where darkness is increasing, sin and destruction abound, where statistics tell us that there is one school shooting on an average of every week in this nation unlike any other nation in the world, where car wrecks are the number one killer of our teenagers, and where medical care is increasingly unavailable to the average person due to high costs and high deductibles, may we walk IN HIM, who is the Light of the World.  Yes, He came to his own and his own received Him not because their deeds were evil and they desired to remain in their evil deeds.  And as He is so are we in the world. And as they rejected Him when He came to his own, to those by His Word he created and whom he would desire to hold in his bosom,some will reject the Light as we walk in Him in this world also.  May we forever be mindful not of the darkness, but of Him in who we dwell, in Him who is Light to our souls, and who makes us the Light of the world even as He is that Light in us.   Fear not what you see about you.  Fear not the earthquake that will come, or the increasing mudslides that have been prophesied by His Mouth,  fear not the rise of power and authority that takes over the mind of a people,  but fear the Lord God, Yahweh Sabaoth,  for He is the one that wages war, He is the one that WON THE WAR that we are invited to participate in, knowing that the battle is the Lords,  that He broke the power of the enemy who is now allowed to "work out his sentence" here on earth until the appointed time.   Our appointed time is NOW, in Christ Jesus, Lord of All Creation, Lord of the Angel Armies, Lord of Hosts!,  YAHWEH Sabaoth,..Jehovah, the GOD THAT IS.... Meri Meri Ford 516 Park Rd Winlock, WA 98596 360 520 4503 Blogs http://meriford.blogspot.com/ http://www.renewedhopesite.wordpress.com/ http://www.renewedhopesite.com