Now after him was Shammah the son of Agee a Hararite. And the Philistines were gathered into a troop where there was a plot of ground full of lentils, and the people fled from the Philistines. But he took his stand in the midst of the plot, defended it and struck the Philistines; and the Lord brought about a great victory. (2 Samuel 23:11-12)

 

One of my first pastors often quoted the above scripture.  I loved the way he would come to life when he reflected upon this passage.  I didn’t realize until I was older that the pastor thought of himself as Shammah.

My pastor has spent close to 35 years at his church.  He has seen many changes, People have come and gone.  Some have left angry and hurt.  Others have hurt him as they have gone out the door, but he refused to give up the post because in his heart he knew that this was his lentil patch.

In the kingdom we need to understand the ground that the Lord has given to us.  We have to defend that ground by staying in the place that God tells us to stay.  As long as we do as he tells us to do and stand, then the battle is the Lord’s.

There are times that life can be overwhelming.  There are times that to just stay sane seems to take all the energy that you have.  There are times that you feel you cannot go an inch further, but in that moment you must remain.

The only thing that stops us from standing in the place that God has for us is fear.  Fear will push us out of God’s will.  It will cause you to shrink back from what He has called you to do and can stop you from pursuing opportunities that come your way.

We cannot allow fear to stop us.  We must move forward despite what we feel or see.  We need to face our fears and move forward anyway.

I find it most helpful to pray when fear comes upon me.  I know that if I pray He will hear my prayer.  This I have come to understand through experience.  When He speaks, all fear has a way of leaving me because I know the truth of what He says.  He always speaks peace into my heart and His peace has a way of pushing me forward into His will for my life.

Because I know that God is good, I step forward despite my fears.  I must trust Him to help me overcome in every situation that I find myself.  Even if I am surrounded by fear, I can move forward as long as I keep my gaze upon Christ.

I pray for you today.  I ask the Lord to move you into your lentil patch, the place of your destiny.  I ask the Lord to speak past the fears of your heart and plant His word firmly in your heart.  May all fade from you save His love for your life.  Truly this is all that will remain in the end anyway. 

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.

I believe that there are many in the body of Christ who are wondering when their destiny shall come to pass.  Perhaps there is something that is deep in your heart that the Lord has placed there and you are wondering when you will see this deep thing fulfilled.

I would imagine that there were times when Joseph sitting in Potiphar’s house or working hard within the prison system of Pharaoh wondered when the dream that he had as a young man would come to pass.   David must have thought the same way when he was in the caves running from Saul: “When, O Lord, will I become King as you have shown that I would?”  Esther had to face fearful thoughts when she became Queen and was challenged to stand against the oppressors of her people.

Everything we have done prepares us for everything we will do.  Even when the vision is not fulfilled we are fulfilling God’s destiny for our lives.  We may not be at the high place of our destiny and perhaps there are seasons yet that must be fulfilled, but you are still in the process fulfilling everything that God has ordained for your life even in the prison cell.

I am convinced that there is coming a great time of evil in our generation.  I am certain that many sons and daughters are being raised in this hour for a time that has yet come to pass.  Our greatest contributions to the Kingdom are still ahead.

I believe that you will be a part of the great plan of the Lord for the salvation of many people.

When Winston Churchill was a boy he understood that there was coming a time in his life when he would have to be an anchor for his country during a time of evil.  He was convinced throughout his entire life that he was born for overcoming that evil.   When Nazism reared its head and dared to triumph over the nation of England (and indeed the Western World), Mr. Churchill was not concerned because he understood his destiny and that he was born for such an hour.

There are thoughts that I have been cherishing in my heart since I was a boy.  I know my destiny will be fulfilled.  I do not know how or when, but surely that time will come to pass.

Perhaps you know you were born for more.  Perhaps there are things you know about your destiny that you wouldn’t dare share with anyone else.  The Lord has impregnated these thoughts within your heart.  They will come to pass.  Continue to believe.

The thing about waiting is that there can be many dreary hours, but do not stop believing or give up hope.  I really believe that our generation is about to see its greatest hour.  I feel that you and I as believers in Christ will see a great revival of hope return to our nations.

We may have to face some serious challenges before the earth is revived.  We may see war.  We may see economic collapse, but do not lose hope.  Understand that you were born to succeed in the face of these obstacles.  God has not given you a spirit of fear.  You were born to overcome.  You were born to be more than a conqueror.  Stand firm and be ready.

In this hour be like the wise virgins who were ready for the return of the groom.  Continue to seek the Lord in all parts of your life.  Do not grow weary in doing good.  In all your ways acknowledge the Lord.  Be faithful with the little you’ve been given and God will make you faithful over much more.

Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. (James 1:2-4)

I love it when the Lord speaks to me and says “Darren, everything is going to be alright.”  It is probably the greatest word of encouragement that he can give to me.  He says this to me whenever I need to hear it, which–honestly–is almost every single day.

I am like you.  Many things come into my life stirring worry and concern.  I must continue in the word of God in order to assure myself that I am going to be alright.  I have had financial problems.  I have gone through messy situations on the job and in the church.  I have had health issues.  I have had family and friends attack me and I have watched as some of my family members went through outrageous trials of their own.

So to hear God say that everything is going to be alright means as much to me as it probably would to you.

What I have come to understand is the power of the cross.  I do not apologize for hiding beneath it.  My entire provision is in the place of Jesus’ finished work there.  My health, my income, and my well-being are all tied to what He did for me. 

I am thankful that my God has grafted me into the vine of Christ.  I am thankful that my complete salvation and deliverance is assured. I may stand on the banks of the Red Sea looking at the enemy approaching with mighty power, but I know my God.   The sea before me will open up and I shall cross over to the other side on dry ground.  I shall only look with my eyes and see my enemy’s plans for me destroyed by the mighty hand of God.

I may stand before a giant that curses the very core of my belief in God, but I shall be empowered to throw a stone right between my enemies’ eyes and watch as he comes crashing down before me.

A thousand false prophets may declare for the entire world to hear that the Christian God has no power, but I know that my God is real and that His power and His word will stand.  It doesn’t concern me that I might have to stand alone because I know that in the hour of my testing my God shall stand with me strengthening me like He strengthened Daniel in the Lion’s Den, like He strengthened the three young men in the fiery furnace.  He won’t leave me in that place of suffering but will come into the fire with me.

 

But in order to come to understand that God will be with you in the fire, you actually have to go through the fire.  James said to consider it pure joy when you go through trials of many kinds because you know that the testing of your faith will produce perseverance.  He said that when we persevere under trial our faith shall become mature and complete in Christ.

God’s encouragement is what strengthens me to face the trials that I face.  When He says everything is going to be alright, this thought enters the core of my being and the truth of it is simply known.

I pray for you today.  May God strengthen you in the face of all the trials you face on the road to your destiny.  I pray that you will overcome the world even as Jesus overcame and rose from the dead to sit by his Father forevermore.

As I sit at the end of 2013 looking straight ahead into 2014, my heart wanders to the scripture in Matthew 25 regarding the ten virgins waiting for the bridegroom.  It is said that five were wise and five were foolish.  The five wise kept their lamps trimmed and had enough oil to wait until the bridegroom appeared, but the five foolish ones, well, that is a different story.

 

As we enter into another year, I am certain of two things: God is still on the throne and Jesus will touch my generation.

 

I have been living in revival for a long time.  I came back to the Lord 10 years ago in 2004.  For the last decade I have been living and breathing revival.  I have seen God do incredible things, and yet, I am still waiting for the greater outpouring that has been promised.

 

I first heard about a great coming revival when I was still in my teen years.  I am now 41 years old.  I went to Bible school starting at 18.  One of the highlights of those years was hearing David Yonggi Cho from South Korea’s largest church speak.  He told us that God had a plan for Canada and I believed him.

 

A year or two later I was a youth pastor in Halifax when a young man stood up and prophesied the coming of a great revival that would sweep all across Canada in such a way that the enemy would not have room to move in anybody’s life because most would be saved.

 

Twelve years ago I was at a church in Ottawa when Cindy Jacobs got up to prophesy about Canada and the end time revival.  I was still not really serving the Lord when I heard her prophesy.  I don’t even know how I got to that church to hear her.  When she spoke I heard the sound of a trumpet blowing and I looked up into the roof of the church and saw the heavens open.  The sound I heard was coming through that opening.  It was one of the craziest things I had ever seen.  I could not doubt that God had a plan for Canada when I saw that.

 

And yet, I look at Canada and the USA today and they are darker than they have been in any time in my life so far.

 

About 5 years ago I had a dream.  I was outdoors in a small village at night.  I looked up at the clouds and they were very dark.  I started to run and call out to God.  I knew that He was just above the clouds in the dream because I could see flashes of light coming through the darkness.  I knew He was very close.

 

I started to cry out in intercession.  I said, “You said, God!  You said you would move, so move, God.”  I kept crying this out over and over and my heart was heavy with the prayer–it still is.

 

And today I would say to you “continue believing and praying for God to move.”  Yes, we have been waiting a long time, but the revival will come and those who have been faithful and remained in intercession will see a great moving of the Presence of God that will go forth into the entire earth. 

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while[a] Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to their own town to register.

So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them. (Luke 2:1-7)

 

The sight of the infant Christ in the manger is the most vulnerable picture I can imagine.  Here is the Saviour of the world as a mere child who can do nothing to protect himself from the brutality of the world around him. Yet he was safe and grew to fulfill the will of God for his life.

 

Surely all heaven and hell understood the birth of this Messiah King: Heaven rejoiced and hell was thrown asunder.  Surely the devil amassed the forces of hell to launch an assault against this small child and tried to end his life through Herod before he even had a chance to grow up, but God protected him.

 

And that is the nature of God to protect the infancy of His great exploits from those who war against Him.  God will defeat our every enemy in Christ.  When we stay under the blood and look to God alone as our defense and shield, He has a way of carrying us through every storm.

 

When I think of the vulnerability of the Christ child and how God took someone who was born in obscurity in the lowliest of conditions and brought that one to the place of greatest honour, I am amazed at my God.

 

You see, it is not about our ability to achieve, but rather it is about His ability to exalt.  God is able to take the person who is completely sold out and dedicated to Him from the prison to the King’s court (Joseph), from tending sheep to the Kingship of the land (David), from the grape press to the place of the general of an army (Gideon) and from lying in the manger to reigning as King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

 

In 2 Timothy 1:12 Paul says, “For this reason I also suffer these things; nevertheless I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep what I have committed to Him until that Day.”

 

That work of infancy in your heart where the fires began to burn on that brand new day and when heaven began to ring like bells over your life was not something that you initiated and it is not something you will have to consummate.  This work of grace is consummated in our hearts through the work of Christ Jesus on the cross.

 

I am convinced that I am safe in God’s arms and no matter what comes in this life I will be with Him where He is.  No matter what the devil tries to do to defeat that work in my life, I will overcome.

 

Jesus was born in a manger to remind us that it does not matter where we come from.  What matters is that if God be for us, who can be against us?  Jesus accomplished the will of the Father and those who are in Christ will accomplish His will also.

 

I pray that through this season you will take some time to remind yourself of what God has done for you, and if you should not yet know Him, then I pray that the greatest revelation of His goodness will rise through this Christmas season. Changed forever by His love, may you then rise to your destiny.