This is the third post in a series that I have written on fear and repentance.  In this post I want to show you how to repent of fear so that it no longer has a root in your life.  You will remember the Woolly Mammoth dream from my first post.

As I prayed about this dream, I came to understand what it meant through the help of the Holy Spirit.  He showed me that the dream was linked to a situation that I went through when I was a teenager when I got in trouble with the law.

I came to understand that my present fear of authority was linked to a situation when I was a teenager.   In that situation I invented a story to stay out of trouble.  Therefore, one of the first steps to emotional freedom was for me to repent for being a part of the robbery and for lying to the police and covering up my own fault.

The second step was to repent of a bitter root judgment that all people in authority want to incarcerate me for something that I do which was wrong.  This was the lie that I keep feeding myself—the pizza in the dream.  I discovered that I fed myself this lie so many times that there was a deep wound in my heart that only God could heal.  I couldn’t even stop feeding myself the lie. The fear was so deep that it was a major motivator of my current behaviour.

So in order for the lie to be uprooted from my life, I had to repent for holding onto it.  This is how I prayed, “Father, forgive me for the bitter root judgment that I hold in my heart that all those in law enforcement agencies or those who work in government agencies are trying to find reason to get me in trouble and send me to jail.  Forgive me for coming into agreement with this lie.”

Once such a fear is rooted out, we can ask God to send the Holy Spirit into our hearts and replace the hole where this fear used to be with His peace.

After I prayed the above prayer, I asked God to show me the truth about that night and I saw the police officer with whom I spent that evening in the car long ago.  I saw Jesus using him to speak into my life.  That police officer was actually a good man.  I believe he knew that I was involved in the robbery but chose to be merciful to me.  He actually treated me like I was his equal and encouraged me to live a better life.

Now I understand that for my entire life since then, I have been like Jean Valjean from Les Misérables who was on the run from the law because he stole one loaf of bread when he was young.  Monsieur Valjean’s fear carried him into his old age and death; if it wasn’t for Christ, my own fear would have gripped my heart until I died from the weight of it also.

Now I see Jesus where I once saw fear.  These kinds of prayers are key to our destiny in Christ.  I pray that God will help you as He helps everyone who turns to Him confessing and repenting of their sins.  He always grants such humility His Glorious peace.

In the last post I described to you a dream that I had of a Woolly Mammoth which I understood to be a fear that I held in my heart regarding those in authority.

When God shines His light on such a fear, I have come to see this as an opportunity to be free from it.  I have learned to simply turn to God and say, “Forgive me, Lord, for coming into agreement with this fear.  Please show me when it entered my heart.”

When I did this for the dream described above, I saw an incident from my teen years. I don’t share this with others often, but I was actually a very troubled youth.  I was part of a quasi-gang in Newfoundland that caused a lot of trouble in our neighbourhood.  We got drunk, vandalized property and stole from our neighbours in richer neighbourhoods.  Many of my friends got into trouble with the law, and I myself was arrested twice by the time I was 15 years old.

When I was 14 or 15, I spent an evening in the back seat of a police car trying to convince the police that I was not involved in a robbery.  The truth was I was actually a lookout for my friends who were doing the robbery.  The police tried for two hours to get me to admit to the crime, but I did not.  I invented a story that I kept feeding them over and over.  They arrested me but nothing ever came of the charges, but the fear of the experience remained.

Six months after this incident, I left this gang and became a Christian.  I have tried to observe the tenets of the law from that day forward but there has always been this fear that I would be arrested again, as I was that night for being involved in some crime with the Law.

The truth is I keep feeding this fear with thoughts.  I would overanalyze my every action trying to find reason why someone would find fault with my life and throw me in jail.  These thoughts are the Woolly Mammoth that came charging into my dream and which I found myself trying to appease with junk food.

The junk food represented wrong thoughts that I would feed my mind.

The only way out of this mess is to repent of the fear, so I will model how this works for you in my next post.

In the meantime, would you also ask the Lord to show you when fear (or other emotion) may have entered your heart. He will answer your prayer, just as He did mine, and get you going on the road to freedom.

There are times that God peels back a layer of our hearts to show us the deep roots of bitterness that hold us in patterns of behavior that have bound us and our ancestors for generations.  The fear of man is a demonic cord that will hold you and strangle you if you will allow it.  In order to come to fullness we must allow God to open up the wounds that fester in our hearts so that gangrene and maggots do not set in to destroy.

Fear is a blight that will eat us in the end.  In dreams my fears are often depicted as giant creatures or raging robots.  These phantoms metamorphose before my eyes as giants that if allowed to touch me might destroy me if they come too close.

As fallen humans we end up feeding these ancient fears sacrifices in the hope that their wrath will pass from us and move to some other unsuspecting ghoul in the wind.

Our emotions, when bound by fear, are hard to decipher.  We have so many fears and compounded fears that it is difficult to pinpoint which one is which.  We need the help of God to untangle this ball of string for us.

The only sure way to be healed of fear is through prayer.

Last night I went to sleep asking God a question about ministry.  I didn’t realize that the question that I was asking was from a motivation of fear.  I ask God questions before I go to sleep knowing that He will answer them for me in a dream.

The answer to my question didn’t really seem to be the answer at all.  Instead of addressing what I had asked, the Lord went to the root of the motivation of why I asked it in the first place.  He understood that there was fear in the question and wanted me to understand it.

In this dream the Lord showed me that I feared being abused by authority.  This was depicted as a Woolly Mammoth with two government officials sitting on top.  The men by themselves were nothing to fear.  They were just men with white shirts and ties on, but when they rode into the room on this fierce creature I was terrified.  I thought I was going to be crushed to death.  The Mammoth rose on its two hind legs and came crashing down just near where I was lying.  To appease this creature I fed it ‘pizza’ and then it became tame by my side.

Now you might just say that this is a pizza dream, but is it really?  The problem with feeding our fears is that the fear continues to come back to be fed.  We need God to rout the fear from our lives so that His peace remains in our hearts.

I understood that my fear of authority was paralyzing me and if it is allowed to continue, there was a chance I would be crushed by the weight of it.  However, this is where the grace of God comes in.  The work of the cross is sufficient for this fear and as I repent for my fear of authority, God removes that fear and replaces it with His weighty and glorious peace.

I will show you how to deal with this fear in two additional posts over the next two days, so keep your eyes open for them.

I was watching a show last night.  There were two Lakota medicine men speaking with each other.  The younger of the two says to the other: “He wanted a sign from the Great Spirit to show a direction that he should take.” The older man replies, “To ask for a sign shows that a person has weak faith.”

Well most of us in the world today are weak in faith.  To believe in God in the face of all the barbarism that has been perpetrated against Him truly takes faith.  Modern day philosophers and the scientific community have tried in earnest to suggest that the biblical notion of reality is a lie, and, it is exactly this lie that grips the foundation of our educational systems in North America.

I was a child of this system.  I was taught to believe in the things that I could see and nothing more.  If you could not see it, then it was not real.  My philosophy professors taught me that all cognitive thoughts were the products of an observable behavior pattern or the human languages that I spoke.  They tried to reduce every human thought or emotion to an empirical study.  They suggested there was nothing outside of the physical realm and that even non-physical or metaphysical occurrences would be nothing more than an explainable pattern if truly assessed and diagnosed.

To define oneself in relation to God was weakness since there was either no God or no understanding of God.  They argued that even if He were real, He would be so beyond human reality that He would only be a cosmic force and we the soup that resulted when He passed through our region on His inter-galactic or inter-dimensional journey.  They would argue that there was no intent or meaning in our creation, but that we were simply the residue of a celestial lightning bolt.

The very reason that we need a sign from God is because of the delusions that have been forced upon us by the philosophy and science within our culture.  For me signs are the language of God to an unbelieving scientific mind.

Any god can produce a sign and many have turned to these lesser vessels by their demonstrations within the earth.  Just ask the Pharoah of Egypt if he was not convinced by the strength of his gods. Just ask Jezebel if she didn’t think that Baal had more power than Yahweh.  Sure they believed in their power or they would not have served them.  

We need the one true God to meet our intellectual and religious counterparts on the Mount Carmels of our time.  As they call upon whatever magic they understand, we need to be set apart to Father God through Jesus Christ His son.  We need to call on Him like never before and ask Him for a demonstration of His power and His glory.

I believe there is coming an anointing of power upon the vessels of His glory.  I believe that those that truly know this great God Jehovah will be endued with power from on high.  They will be a part of the glorious army that is rising with love and hope in the earth, truly glorious, truly righteous and truly holy.   They will command the enemy of the faith.

I feel that the anointing which was on Sampson is coming to war against the powers of Intellectualism.  Miracle workers will rise with healing in their wings.  They will rise with supernatural demonstrations that will awe not only the church, but the media, the intellectuals and those in strategic places of power.

I pray that you too will be a part of this new army of God.  I declare that you will walk with a new hope and new power from God into your destiny.  And you too will speak God’s “Sign” Language!

“Fight the good fight of faith.” (1 Timothy 6:12)

As we live in North America today we are seeing one of the greatest assaults on the Christian faith in generations.  Many of us who are Christian have had to re-examine our thoughts in light of Scripture to determine what it means to be a Christian.

Not one of us wants to be a bigot, but there are things in Scripture which are considered sin and no matter how a society tries to change the way we think to support certain lifestyles, a Christian must not base their ideas on the popular idea of truth.  We must be grounded in the word of God, which is the only truth.

Even in the Church there are those who are trying to water down what the Bible says in order not to alienate those that are proposing these ideas to the masses.  Some believe that hell is too hard of an idea for people to swallow and they say that there is no hell in order not to offend those who are offended by it.

No matter what the Media, Supreme Court or Parliament says, we must continue to adhere to the principles of faith laid out in the Scriptures.  We cannot bow to the idol of human rights simply because the proponents believe it is a nobler system of thought and are threatening to take legal action against us if we do not accept what they say quid pro quo.

A Christian must abide by the word of God.  We must stand for what it says even when what it says is not what the people around us want to hear.  It is easy to be a Christian when society is Christian.  It is a different story when society is opposed and hates the very core of what we are and that core, my friend, is Christ.

There are coming more difficult times in our culture.  There is a dark cloud rising on the horizon.  I am convinced that we are going to see levels of persecution against Christians that we have not seen in North America in a long time.

Those of us who are of the faith must stand and fight the good fight.  We must exhibit the peace of Christ in the face of the coming onslaught.  We cannot afford to compromise in order to save ourselves or our families.  Our own comfort is secondary to the truth of the gospel.

We must shine with peace and not rise up in anger.  We must allow our quiet countenances to radiate into the hearts of the onslaught before us.  If we open our mouths, it must be with the peace of Christ and with love, and not with the same anger that is directed at us.  The only way we will overcome is by acting in the opposite spirit of what is being directed at us and this by the grace of God and power of Christ in us.

If they curse us, we bless them.  If they ignore us, we love them.  If they abuse us, we forgive them.  We must shine like never before.  Remember that they are just lost souls looking for their Father.  If we do not radiate that love in truth, then they may never come to know him.  It is as simple as that.