Choose Your Path: Complacency or Vengeance

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"Think back now to the Tabernacle we studied a few chapters back.  Do you remember the courts and their purposes?  If you have been hanging around in the Outer Court, comfortable enough in your salvation and baptism, yet oblivious to the victory over sin that God is calling you to, it is time for you to take a step into the Inner Court of obedience.  Are you already in the Inner court, enjoying the Holy Spirit's company and the Word of God, but still living in cyclical sin?  Then it's time for you to put shoe leather on the soles of your spiritual walking shoes!  It's time to take some serious vengeance on your sin!  Are you willing now for your heart to be laid bare before you and the Lord, so that the idols and sin can be removed?  If you are not willing, you will not be able to grow any closer to God than you currently are.  Are you satisfied with that, and satisfied with living your 'small g' god-driven life?

God sent Israel to war!  This will be no less a battle for us, and it will likely last for our entire life.  Will God find you obedient to this call, or will you take the easiest, most flesh-pleasing way out?  The first will lead yo to victory and intimacy with God; the other will eventually defeat you and keep you from drawing near to God.  The choice, ultimately, is yours.  Choose wisely.  Choose to take full vengeance on your sin.  The alternative is only  foolishness, and ultimately it reveals your complacency.  Consider these wise words that speak of this kind of complacency in your Christian walk.

Complacency is a blight that saps energy, dulls attitudes, and cases a drain on the brain.  The first symptom is satisfaction with things as they are.  The second is rejection of thins as the might be.  'Good enough' becomes today's watchword and tomorrow's standard.  Complacency makes people fear the unknown, mistrust the untried, and abhor the new.  Like water, complacent people follow the easiest course--downhill.   They draw false strength from looking back."

What path have you chosen?  Do you need to change your course?

Your spiritual journey is made up of countless choices between your flesh and the Spirit who dwells inside of you. The valley of decision is often a bloody battlefield. But the Spirit CAN win each battle if you are surrendered to Him.

(Quoted from Chapter 7, "Taking Full Vengeance" from Spiritual Healing:  The Surrender That Brings Victory by Cheryl Gnagey)

Your Sins Are NOT Invisible; You Are NOT Bullet-proof!

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Do you have trouble with temptation and falling to sin?  Are you a disobedient child of God and think that it is invisible to God's eyes or irrelevant to Him?  Consider the Israelites who were disobedient and thought God didn't care.

"Have you spared all the women?  Behold, these caused the sons of Israel . . . to trespass against the Lord . . . SO THE PLAGUE WAS AMONG THE CONGREGATION OF THE LORD."  (Numbers 31: 15-16)

"Israel's downfall was not in the keeping of the women and booty.  Their downfall was the moment that they disobeyed the words of God spoken through Moses.  Gods' commands meant very little, if anything, to them once the temptation was before their eyes.  We disobey in the exact same way, by the same process.  Can you relate to these statements?

1. We like what we see, we want it, and we grab it.
2. We like what gratifies our flesh, even when God has clearly said, 'NO!'
3. We want to be in control and not be told by God or anyone else what to do or not to do.
4. We want to please ourselves more than we want to please God.
5. We lack the desire to be in a relationship with God that will require our obedience.

When I was teaching this material in my small group, one quiet, but thoughtful man added one more thing to this list.  This was his comment:

6.  We think that we are bullet-proof and invisible.

I like that answer.  I find it to be completely true!  We tend to think that we can sin, and get away with it, because God surely wouldn't discipline us harshly, would He?  Or we think that He is paying very poor attention to His children, and we might be able to slip one more sin by Him.

Maybe these illustrations don't fit you.  Maybe they do not describe the truth about why you disobey your Lord.  If not, please take some time to identify why you do not obey God's commands, or only partially obey them.  Understanding why we continue to disobey is an important part of the process of learning to obey."

(Quoted from Chapter 7, "Taking Full Vengeance" from Spiritual Healing:  The Surrender That Brings Victory)

Sparing Your 'gods' By Letting Them Off The Hook

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"Have you SPARED all the women?  Behold these have caused the son of Israel . . . to trespass against the Lord . . . "  (Numbers 31: 15)

So we can get a better idea of what was really being said to the Israelites (and so we can understand what God is now saying to us), let's take a closer look at the word 'spared.'  An English dictionary defines it as 'let live,' but looking at the Hebrew root of the word in order to discover its more literal meaning in its context, we can gain greater understanding as to what God meant when He said this to Israel.  To the Hebrew, 'spared' meant this:

1.  To revive

2.  To keep, leave, or make alive

3.  To give life to

4.  To nourish (feed)

5.  To preserve

6.  To repair or restore to life

You might be asking yourself,  "So what?"   I agree that it may not seem like a riveting revelation, but it will take on brand new meaning to you if you will apply these definitions to yourself and your gods! 

In light of the gods that you have dwelling in the safe harbor of your own heart, can you see what you are doing when you spare  them by letting them completely off the hook, letting them live on inside of you instead of taking full vengeance on them?  Choose one of your most prevalent sins or gods in your life and put its name in place of the the word 'god' below. 

1.  Reviving my [god] -- Bringing it back to life again and again after it has been killed by repentance

2.  Keeping, leaving, or making my [god] alive --  Giving life willingly to a new sin

3.  Nourishing my [god] -- Feeding it to keep it alive and refusing to starve it

4.  Preserving  my [god] -- Doing what it takes to keep it alive and active in my life

5.  Repairing and restoring my [god] -- Making adjustments in order to keep it alive and active, like it used to be

Can you see where you are disobeying God's call to take full vengeance on your sins and gods?  Did the light bulb just go on?  By sparing the women, Israel left the door wide open to be influenced again by false gods.  When we let our sins be spared, we open a door to the enemy to gain victory again and again in our lives.  When we walk in our sins, according to the flesh, our level of holiness is directly affected.  In actuality, our gods reveal just how un-Christlike we truly are.  Sometimes we can take some ground back from the enemy who seeks to lure us away from God, but if we don't wipe out the entire stronghold, then we are continuing to allow our sins to co-exist with the Spirit within us.  You must learn how to bring your sins to a complete death.  Then your responsibility will be to pay close attention to those areas where you have gained victory by continuing to keep that sin out of your heart.  That is how you can stand firm in not reviving or restoring your former gods.

(Excerpted from Chapter 7, "Taking Full Vengeance"  from Spiritual Healing:  The Surrender That Brings Victory)

Obedience Is Important To God

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God gave Israel a plan for the destruction of the Midianites:  they were to choose 12,000 armed men to go to war against the Midianites, 1,000 military men from each of the 12 tribes of Israel.   Each tribe stood to loose the same number of men when they went to war.  These men then set out to go to war against the five kings of Midian.  The knew their "marching orders" well.  They were to kill everyone and everything, for that was what God meant by "take full vengeance."  There was no question as to what God required of them, and no other options!

So these 12,000 men of war set out to destroy all of the Midianites.  Even Phinehas the priest went out with them to be God's agent to them, for he carried with him the holy vessels and the trumpets for alarm in his hand.  They wouldn't lose--they couldn't lose!  Just as the Lord had commanded them, they went to war and killed all the men and the kings with the sword.  The captured the women and the children. Then they took all their cattle and all their flocks, and then . . . 

WHAT?  What did they do?  Did these 12,000 soldiers obey God?  Did they comply with God's command?  Had not God said to them, "Take FULL vengeance"? 

Do you understand what they did?  They disobeyed the command of their God.  They killed the men and kings, but they captured the women, kept them alive, and plundered the animals, too!  Why would the do that?  They had been sent to battle  to kill everyone and everything because the Midianites were idol worshipers instead of God worshipers, and they had already had  a great evil influence on the Israelites. 

In a nutshell the disobedience of God's people was a result of this:

1. The Israelite men had a thing for the Midianite women, who introduced them to their gods.  The men then would marry these women who were outside of the Jewish faith, thus destroying the purity and holy calling of the Jewish race.
2. The did not want to destroy what their flesh definitely wanted to hang on to and enjoy--the women.
3. The wanted to be in control and make their own decisions  instead of allowing God to be in charge.  Flesh doesn't normally like to be told what to do by God or anyone else.
4. Maybe they thought God would somehow be pleased with them for keeping the women and children alive.  He might just approve of their "compassion."

Can't you just see them merrily returning to camp with those they took captive and all the spoils, hoping to be rewarded for the fine work the had accomplished and for the wealth they were bringing into the family?  They were surely proud of their increase, and they probably couldn't wait to choose from the booty that would be their reward for a job well done.

No matter what the reason for their disobedience, the truth is that they still disobeyed God and He and Moses would surely have something to say about that!  Moses was angry!  Surely his words to them cut them to the quick!  There was no applause, no congratulations, no heroes' welcome home from battle.  This is what Moses said to them:

Have you spared all the women?  Behold these caused the sons of Israel . . .  to trespass against the Lord . . .  so the plague was among the congregation of the Lord.  (Numbers 31: 15-16)

God is the same, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. What was important to Him in the Old Testament and New Testament is important to Him in the Church Age right now. Obedience has always been VERY IMPORTANT to God!

(More tomorrow on how this applies to the believer.  Today's quote is excerpted from Chapter 7 of Spiritual Healing:  The Surrender That Brings Victory  written by Cheryl Gnagey)

The Walk of the Flesh Vs. The Walk of the Spirit

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Many nations will come and say, 'Come and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord and to the house of the God of Jacob, that He may teach us about His ways and that we may walk in His paths' . . . Though all the peoples walk each in the name of his god, as for us, we will walk in the name of the Lord our God forever and ever .  (Micah 4: 2, 5)

These verses prompted me to record these thoughts in my journal:

"All Christians have a 'walk.'  We all show up on Sundays at the mountain we call church to be taught about God's ways, and desired result is that the teaching will have an impact on the 'walk' we are currently experiencing (Micah 4:2).  We are being taught for one purpose--that we may walk in His paths!  Yet the true testimony of so many believers today is that we have been taught and Taught and TAUGHT!   We could teach seminary classes on what we have learned and already know.  But the rest  of our testimony is often that, though we know a lot, we continue to walk in the name of our 'gods' rather than in  the name of the One and Only True God.  We know what we know , but we 'walk' in our flesh (Micah 4:5).  So, we basically are worshiping our gods, idols, and sin alongside of the God whom we claim a Lord!  Whose name are we really walking in then?  We are just like the people in Micah 4:5.  Our actions don't line up with our words.  We go to the Lord's house to be taught how to walk in His ways, and then we walk in the ways of our flesh the very moment we leave God's house and His teaching."

We tend to let every continuous sin off the hook, knowing it is sin and that it is displeasing to God.  We choose to keep them alive.  We don not crucify them.  We just keep letting them off the hook by setting them aside to presumably deal with later.  We constantly refuse to see our need to rid of them.  We think that God either winks at them or just turns His holy eyes away from them.  We simply do not care at all that we have been called to a walk of holiness.  These are the telltale signs that we are "sparing" our gods, our idols, and our sin instead of taking full vengeance on them.  This is true spiritual complacency.  This is reclining in the spiritual easy chair!

Today's blog, in part, is a quote from a past journal entry after reading Micah 4: 1-5. God spoke bold words into my heart, words that brought conviction, and humbled me and my walk. Does it speak to you, too?

Repairing the Breach in Your Wall

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Every Christian's heart has places of disrepair.  Whenever there is a breach in our heart and sin is allowed to reside there, the enemy has control.  It is time to repair the walls of our heart and to clean out the dirty chambers of our hearts.  It is time for God to have full control of our hearts!

"God desires for you to 'go up to the breaches' and build an unbroken wall around the home of God, your heart!  By giving Him access to your heart to close the breach and destroy your idols, He is able to repair and restore your heart with a strong wall that will protect you in the future from falling head-long into sin and the worship of other idols.  Whitewashing or trying to plaster over your damaged heart will never mend it.  Only God can do that through you, the surrendered you.  (See Ezekiel 13: 5, 10-14).  It is time to begin to consider the members of your body as dead to all forms of sin, for that is idolatry.  (See Colossians 3:5).

Be very encouraged.   God is not through with you yet, if you are willing to walk on!"

Take time to read these questions, but then be sure to examine your true answers to them.  This kind of introspection can lead to heart change, if you will hand God the real truth in humility.

1. What are the gods and sin of your heart that are hidden in its creases?  Let God reveal them to you.
2. Contemplate the ways in which you have trusted in them instead of God.  How have you used them to 'get you through the rough places of your life instead of relying on God and praying through your need?
3. How have you rationalized that these have been helpful to you?
4. Christ-likeness will be the result of the process of sanctification, removing the gods and sin, bit by bit, from your heart where He resides in the form of the Holy Spirit.  Prayer over these issues. and surrendering them to God,  is the power for the victory over them.  How important is it to you to pray every day over your sin- and god-filled heart? 
5. Prayer is the beginning of surrender, and surrender leads to the spiritual healing of your broken heart.  What are you willing to do to see that goal realized?

(Excerpt for Chapter 6 of Spiritual Healing:  The Surrender That Brings Victory)

Safeguarding Your Heart

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"First Peter 2:9 teaches us that we are part of God's royal priesthood.  It is the priest's job to 'keep charge' of the Tabernacle, according to  Numbers 1: 47-54.  The Hebrew rendering of the phrase 'keep charge' is this:  preserve, keep safe, safeguard, take custody of, and serve as if on sentry patrol.  Are you keeping charge of your heart?  Will you?  Will you offer up your broken heart to God and allow Him to heal you?  God already knows everything that is hidden in your heart, so nothing is going to surprise or shock Him.  Psalm 44: 20-21 says this:

If we had forgotten the name of our God, or extended our hands to a strange god, would not God find this out?  For He knows the secrets of the heart.

And be reminded from Psalm 78:8 that there is a generation who is 'stubborn and rebellious...a generation that did not prepare its heart  [put it right],  and whose spirit was not faithful to God.'  Do you belong to the generation that desires to put their hearts right with God, or will you remain in your stubborn rebellion?  The latter will make you like Pharaoh; the former will make you like Christ."

(Excerpt from Chapter 6, "The 'gods' of Your Heart," found in Spiritual Healing:  The Surrender That Brings Victory)

Pharaoh's Poor Example

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When God is trying to root out and destroy the gods of your heart, do you ever find yourself saying to Him, "Let's make a deal, God"? That is a response that you must be careful not to have. Learn from Pharaoh. It didn't work out so well for him. It won't for you either!

"We must be careful of our response to God's revelation of the gods found in our hearts.  Pharaoh was shown the sin of his idol worship with each of the ten plagues sent by God. [Each plague was specifically chosen by God to prove to Pharaoh that his gods were powerless to overcome the plagues God sent because they did not truly exist.]  Pharaoh responded with a hardened heart toward the God who sent the plagues.  With each plague, Pharaoh's heart was hardened all the more.  But when you look at the biblical account of this story, you can see some other responses as well.  Be careful as you work through your own heart and it idols.  Keep referring back to this list of Pharaoh's deadly mistakes, making sure that you are not responding to the Holy Spirit as Pharaoh did.

1. Pharaoh begged relief from the consequences of trusting in other gods.   God might not remove the natural consequences of our sin and idol worship.  We should beg Him to change us, change our hearts, not the consequences of our sin.
2. Pharaoh made promises that he never intended to keep.  Once the pressure was off, he seemed to forget the promises he had made.  Don't make promises to God that you do no intend to keep.  God is a covenant-keeping God, and He takes vows and promises very seriously. 
3. Pharaoh refused to listen to reason.  When his people pleaded with him not to continue making the God of the Israelites mad, he refused to the advice.  How are you responding to the sins and idol God is revealing to you?  Refusing His counsel to you means that you will likely keep worshiping your idols.
4. Pharaoh tried to bargain his way out to a plague by offering Moses something other than what God told Moses he would receive.  Trying to bargain with God by only partially putting away an idol, or telling God that you will take care of it sometime soon (so you don't have to lay it down today), will lead you deeper into that idolatry and further away from God.
5. Pharaoh had a moment of revelation about God and about his own sinfulness, but he never had a change of heart.  Be careful not to walk away from reading this, having a new revelation or new insight into the god that rule your life, and then forget what the most important result is to be:  Getting your idols out o your heart and into God's hands.  The goal is HEART CHANGE!

God is patient with us, like He was with Pharaoh, but He won't allow us to continue in our sin and the worship of other gods." 

(Excerpt from Chapter 6, The 'gods' of Your Heart, in Spiritual Healing:  The Surrender That Brings Victory)

Unite My Heart

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Teach me Your way, O Lord;  I will walk in Your truth; unite my heart to fear Your name."  (Psalm 86:11)

"Isn't that awesome?  God knows that our hearts, even after salvation, are broken and divided.  The apostle Paul obviously knew it as well, for that is the very thing he is trying to convey in Romans 7: 15-21.  He can't seem to understand why, when he wants to do the right things, he continually does the wrong things.  He needed the Lord, just as we do, to unite the pieces of our hearts.  God alone is capable of healing them.  When we finally see our broken hearts being restored by the Spirit of God, we will be able to become all that He intends for us to be--like Him.  This is sanctification.  This is the highway to holiness."

Are you ready to submit your heart to the only one who can transform it? Today, why not stop all of your "trying" to get it done, and surrender your heart, that is divided between flesh and Spirit, to God. Follow in the footsteps of Paul, who learned to say, "I die daily." This is victory!

 

(Spiritual Healing:  The Surrender That Brings Victory--Chapter 6)

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The middle section of Spiritual Healing: The Surrender That Brings Victory is based on a diagram of a broken and divided heart that God had me draw. When filled in with my own personal sin issues, it revealed to me in a very painful way, the truth of my heart.

"After God had me draw [a] very ugly heart, He said to me, 'You have stuff hidden in the creases of your heart.  What has been clearly noticeable as sin, you have let Me work on.  But what remains are these.  They are your sinful attitudes, and they are deeply rooted in your heart.  Each of them is a god of your own making.  You have trusted them in a thousand different moments when you weren't trusting in Me.  Each one must be recognized, confessed, surrendered to Me, and crucified.'

God spoke so plainly to me about what was in my heart, and I knew He definitely wanted me to respond in the way He had described to me.  But the choice would be up to me.  Would I confess it, vowing to turn away from it by my true repentance?  Would I really surrender each sinful part to Him?  Pharaoh hardened his heart ten times.  Would I choose to have a Pharaoh-like attitude that resulted in an unchanged and hardened heart, or would I choose to be Christ-like, surrendering my heart to the will of God so that He could transform it?"

If you would like to read what happened next, the rest of my testimony can be found in Chapter 6 of Spiritual Healing:  The Surrender That Brings Victory which can be purchased at www.cherylgnagey.com.

Cleaning the Crevices of Your Heart

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When was the last time you prayed that kind of a prayer?  Do you pray it consistently, knowing that the Holy Spirit longs to have full rule and authority in your life?  Do you know that God requires your surrender of the "old" you in order for Him to create the "new" you?  He wants to give you a clean heart, but you must give up your right to your dirty one!

God wants to be Lord over those priorities that are elevated above Him.  He wants our sins that we have refused to bring to Him in repentance.  He wants those wrong attitudes that we continue to call our 'personality' or 'humanness.'  He wants our surrender, the same kind of surrender that He required of the rich young man [to give up what he least wanted to give up], the surrender that ultimately was required of Jesus.  He wants to overcome in us and bring victory to us in everything we do, think, and say that is not scripturally correct or aligned with His holiness.

I love how Oswald Chambers puts it:

 The only way we can be of use to God is to let Him take us through the crooks and crannies of our own characters.  I am astounded at how ignorant we are about ourselves!  We do not know envy when we see it, or laziness, or pride.  Jesus reveals to us all that this body has been harboring before His grace began to work.  How many of us have learned to look in with courage?

(From Spiritual Healing:  The Surrender That Brings Victory--Chapter 6)

When Is Enough, ENOUGH?

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It is not enough to merely fear the Lord if we are going to continue to serve those idols in our life that take precedence over our reverence of and service to God.  That will lead to a spiritual legacy that is undesirable to think about.  It is important for us to question ourselves as to just how long we will allow ourselves to walk in sin and idol worship.  We must consider, at some point in our journey toward the very face of God, our need to put our flesh to death, even as Christ suffered in His flesh.  It is the only way that we will be able to walk in the Spirit.  The Lord told us this more eloquently through Peter in I Peter 4:1-3.  Absorb its truth, especially the last sentence.  This is a verse that has helped me tremendously as I have striven to remove idols and sin from my own heart.

Therefore, since Christ has suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same purpose, because he who has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for the lusts of men, but for the will of God.  For the time already past is sufficient for you to have carried out the desire of the Gentiles, having pursued a course of sensuality, lusts, drunkenness, carousing, drinking parties and abominable idolatry.

God's point to us is simple and clear:  Enough time has already passed in our lives that we have lived with a divided and spiritually unhealthy heart.  We have spent plenty of time already pursuing those things that divide our heart because they are more important to us than He is!  So we must ask ourselves this question:  When is enough, ENOUGH?  

What is the sin that you commit the most? How long have you been practicing this particular sin? How much longer do you plan to practice it? Is today the day you will say, "ENOUGH!" ?

A Believer's Incomplete Heart

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Think of the story of the rich young man in Matthew 19:16-26.  The young man came to Jesus wanting to know what other good things he might do to obtain eternal life.  Jesus' answer for him was to simply "keep the commandments."  The young man avowed that he had kept these commandments.  What Jesus said in reply is as important for us as it was for the young man.  Jesus said:

"If you wish to be complete, go and sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me." 

You see, Jesus could see right into the young man's heart.  He knew that there was something that he was hanging onto, trusting in them more than he trusted in Him.  For this man, it was his money.  What is it for you?

Our completion (perfection, growth in the Lord, maturity) is dependent upon discovering what those things are, [those things] that we rely on "in a pinch."  These are the very things that are preventing us from walking in the Spirit.  Once He helps us to identify them, God will ask us to do the same thing that He required of the the rich young man.  He will ask us to give them up!  And the only way to do that is to "Come, follow [Him]."  The rich young man had a choice to make, and he didn't choose wisely. . . Will you lay down your gods, and follow after the one and only God?  Will you be honest with yourself and say what Isaiah said of himself and the Israelites?  He said this in Isaiah 26: 13: 

"O Lord our God, other masters besides You have ruled us." 

Or will you continue in a lifestyle that leads to the predictable legacy for your children and grandchildren as seen in 2 Kings 17:41 that says:

"So while these nations feared the Lord, they also served their idols; their children likewise and their grandchildren, as their fathers did, so they do to this day."

Will you let God put all the pieces of your heart, that reveal what rules you, into their proper place, by your surrender of them to Him?  If your misaligned pieces of your heart are anything like mine, they do not serve you well in the end.  We have a saying in our home that we should ask ourselves about those idols we tend to default to:  "How's that working out for you?"

(Excerpt from Spiritual Healing:  The Surrender That Brings Victory--Chapter 6)