Spiritual Nursing

The process of being made broken bread and poured-out wine means that you have to be the nourishment for other souls until they learn to feed on God. They must drain you to the dregs. Be careful that you get your supply, or before long you will be utterly exhausted. Before other souls learn to draw on the life of the Lord Jesus direct, they have to draw on it through you; you have to be literally ‘sucked’, until they learn to take their nourishment from God.

I know that I have read this many times in the past since I have been reading this devotional book for quite a number of years myself. Yet the powerful message in today's reading seems to elude me and escape my attention much of the time. It is a perspective that I need to remember, especially when I am feeling down and discouraged after being used to minister to others.

It is very consistent though with my own experience and sense of deep need for connecting strongly with God early each morning. I always feel a sense of danger and vulnerable spiritual weakness if I do not have an assurance each day from personal, intimate time with God and sense that His presence will go with me and His Spirit will be in me for the rest of the day. I know that it is vital that I must be fed regularly and sufficiently or I will quickly run out of energy and become vulnerable to the temptations and assaults of the enemy and may dishonor my best Friend and my Savior.

But this concept of becoming the very source of nourishment for other people who are struggling to perceive God properly and connect more with Him, desiring to grow more into becoming real Christians themselves, is one that I don't often consider. I know how much I tend to crave having connections with other humans to mentor me, to show me what life looks like with Jesus living inside, to give me right-brain examples in real-life of what it means to act like myself as a child of God. I know how much this means to me and I realize that the same must be true for others.

That is why, as a maturing Christian, I must be available for God to use as a mentor for others as they seek to grow into fuller dependence on Jesus in their own relationship with Him. They simply don't know what that looks like or feels like yet or what to do to encourage that sort of thinking and feeling in their own experience. They may hear me talking about the increasing joys of connecting with God in His Word or listening to the Spirit speak to me in various ways and they feel puzzled as to the literal and practical means of how to get there from where they currently live. I know that feeling myself – I sense it every time I encounter a Christian more mature than me who has a living connection with God and lives a life of exciting adventures in dependence on Him. I want to pick their brains, to live under their shadow, to watch in flesh and blood what it really looks like in daily interactions with life what it must feel like to live a life of real faith and joy and being led by the Spirit.

According to what Chambers says in this passage, that can have the effect of draining a person after awhile. But contrary to what we might first think, that is not necessarily a bad thing. It is very much like raising children. We don't usually view raising children into maturity something to be avoided. It is a glorious and rewarding calling to be a parent – at least if a person is mature enough and strong enough themselves to be ready for such a thing. But it can also be very draining, so a parent has to be wise enough to know that they must take care of their own health if they are going to have the stamina to be there and provide all the things that their children depend on them for.

I especially like the analogy that Chamber's uses here of drawing on nourishment from someone like a baby depends on its mother's breast for vital nourishment both physically and emotionally when they need it most. Drinking milk from a mother's breast is not only to receive food but has a great deal to do with the psychological and emotional development of the child that leaves a lasting imprint on how all of their relationships will develop for the rest of their life. The deep and intense emotional bonds that need to be formed between a loving mother and her nursing baby have powerful effects on the child's ability to interact in caring and loving ways to other important relationships when they grow older and especially when they start forming close bonds that culminate in marriage later in life. A lack of proper bonding with a good mother in early childhood is a precursor to all sorts of malfunctions in other relationships for many years to come.

Bonding is one of the most important but possibly least appreciated aspects of raising children into healthy maturity. And the same is true for raising people into spiritual maturity. It is important to be aware of the needs of each person who is very much like a little child, incapable of finding sufficient nourishment from feasting on God's Word and receiving spiritual nourishment directly for themselves as they first begin their growth journey into maturity. They need significant mentors and spiritual nurses in their lives to nourish them with concentrated spiritual life just as a mother supplies vital nutrition, immunities and emotional connections to a young child during nursing.

But just as a mother must pay attention to her own diet even more carefully while nursing than at other times and must be sure that her own body is replenished with vital nutrition and exercise, so too must spiritual 'parents' be sure that they don't allow themselves to be depleted too much by those who are depending on them for spiritual food until these children are old enough to learn to eat from the table and even fix their own meals later on. And the physical ages of spiritual 'parents' and 'children' can be surprisingly different than their spiritual maturity age relative to each other. This can be a real source of confusion if one is not aware of this discrepancy.

This whole concept is actually embedded in the very name of one of the people that Paul mentored in his ministry. The very name Titus literally means 'nurse' in the idea of nursing someone with nutrition like a mother would nurse a child. When this is understood, then the way that Paul mentored people like Titus and Timothy can help us better understand the role of spiritual nurse-maids or mothers which may be an almost forgotten but very important role in the body of Christ today.

Evidently there is nothing wrong with the spiritual feeding of others when circumstances warrant it. I have struggled with this issue for many years because of the seeming contradiction between leaning on others for spiritual and emotional input and the insistence by many that we should only depend on God for our spiritual nourishment. Put into this context it makes a lot more sense now. When a person is immature in any area of their life they need others to help them grasp what may be even fundamental to someone who is farther along in their relationship with God. We must learn when to nurse and trust someone to help us know God better and when it is time to begin to access food more directly for ourselves as we grow stronger and come ever closer to the real Source of all life and joy.

Continually go back to the foundation of your affections and recollect where the source of power is. You have no right to say—‘Oh Lord, I am so exhausted.’ He saved and sanctified you in order to exhaust you. Be exhausted for God, but remember that your supply comes from Him. “All my fresh springs shall be in Thee.” (excerpts from My Utmost for His Highest: February 9)

Brokenness and Anticipation

I am starting to see more clearly my own brokenness. God is putting more significant pieces of the picture into place using various books and circumstances.

The Bait of Satan is showing me more clearly that I am full of offenses that are preventing me from being free to love and be loved. Even more importantly it has revealed to me that I am clueless about the reality and immensity of the debt that I owed and that Jesus paid with His life and that is forgiven by God. But because I cannot appreciate the reality of what that debt would have meant in my life and the forgiveness of God in relation to that debt, I have a very hard time reflecting that spirit of forgiveness in my own relationships with others.

How We Love is showing me the roots of this condition, the early causes of why I am this way and why I am so stuck in my cluelessness. I am just starting to perceive and appreciate to a very small extent the damage that was done to my heart in my childhood. But at the same time I must also realize and appreciate how much even more damage similar to mine was in the hearts of those who were doing it to me. Knowing their pain does not negate the reality that what they did to me was wrong, but it does help me to avoid falling into the blame trap, the trap of offense. But it is important to allow myself to be taken back to the causal roots of my malfunctioning or I will likely never be able to find the alternate path that can lead me to wholeness and better relationships with my own children, my wife and with others.

I am suspecting that it is no accident that this is taking place right when my daughter is spending a few days at home before leaving for the other side of the country. Last time she was home I began to become aware just a little of the way I treat her emotionally even yet today. My lack of affection and affirmation to her must be extremely painful for her heart, but yet it is still very hard for me to see myself because of the blindness produced in my own heart by those who failed to do the very same for me in my family.

In the material from Why We Love I am learning that the presence and actions of being comforted is a key indicator of the emotional health or lack of it in the heart relationships within a family. Those who have developed strong coping malfunctions, alternate attachment styles other than secure ones, are those who have not experienced repeated events of real comfort in their childhood years. They did not have a parent or significant adult come to them, initiate the process of touching them, holding them, really listening to them and experiencing relief with them in that event. Since quite clearly all of my siblings and I fit into that category it is now easier to see why we are all so locked up emotionally.

Likewise, it is easy to see why my own children feel so distant from me because they experienced pretty much the same treatment in their growing up years as I did to a great extent. Just apologizing to them now for making mistakes may be a first step but it does not do much to address the much deeper pain that still remains in full force in their own hearts from the lack of love, comfort and affection that is even today still missing in their relationship with me. In my growing-up family the word 'love' was very often referred to as 'a principle'. As such it tended to be detached from affection or comfort and that is the imprint of life that was embedded in my own heart.

Now when I look inside my own heart, I too feel terribly ashamed that I don't have the kind of affections and impulses that should be present in the heart of a loving, caring parent. Just last night as I was reading something, it struck me how odd the word 'caregiver' feels to me when I really think about it. Logically it would stand to reason that a caregiver is one who gives care. Yet in my own experience I can hardly recall any times in my life when I received what felt like care, when someone truly comforted me with a deeply caring heart. As a result my own children have experienced very little affection and comfort from me. This would certainly explain why I am also clueless at the heart level about the true meaning of joy except for the very few experiences that I now share with others that have occurred in my recent adult life.

Another awareness came to me this morning that is a clue in this whole puzzle. For me the actions and emotions involved in being comforted were very many times linked strongly with shame. To be physically touched by someone or to touch them was associated with shame and immorality by those in authority. And additionally, to have someone sympathize and console you when you were emotionally hurting became a sign of weakness, another source of shame in a world where men were supposed to suppress their emotions and become hard and strong and 'manly'. Since shame is one of those emotions I never have learned to recover from very well, it now makes more sense why the association of shame with these other legitimate needs blocks me from being able to receive them or give them very well.

I am just now even becoming aware of all of these factors and conditions in my life. As I said, it is no accident that I am looking at all of these things at the same time. God is faithful to orchestrate things in my life and His timing is always on time. I know that He is behind all of these insights and there are so many more things that I need to learn just like these. But He is choosing right now to use these things and I need to pay attention and cooperate with whatever He is seeking to do in my own healing and the reconciliation of my family.

My brother called me yesterday feeling compelled and under conviction to ask forgiveness for something he said to me over thirty years ago that I have no memory of at this point. For me now, the incident had no significance but at the same time I felt encouraged that he was even listening to a conviction in his own heart and affirmed him for taking action on it. I wondered if he might be acting more out of fear that something might be held against him by God that could endanger his salvation as he approaches his later years rather than a desire to really experience healing and better relationships. I do not want to judge him though for I myself spent years in that mode of thinking and it seems clear, at least in all my encounters with him, that he is still stuck in that perception of how God feels about him.

But at the same time I have to remember that God must work with us where we are and it took a very long time for God to gently move me past those deep fears of Him and my legalistic motivations for apologies. It has taken years for me to realize that it is my heart that is the real problem and that what He really wants an intimate relationship with me more than dutiful conformance to a list of rules. The more I perceive a more mature view of God and the real truth about Him the more I realize that these needed apologies are not so much to clear my legal record in heaven so God won't use them against me in the judgment, but they are internal obstacles that prevent my own heart from functioning the way it needs to operate in order to have healthy bonding with God and with those around me.

As my brother was speaking with me I easily recalled far more serious offenses that he had committed against me that still have a great deal of pain in them that he could have been addressing. But I also know that he is not yet capable of going to those memories because he still has far too much defensiveness and fear and pain in his own heart to do so. But just the fact that he is doing anything at all is reason for encouragement because it shows me that he is responding in at least small ways to the nudging of the Spirit of God in his heart. The more he responds the farther the Spirit will lead him into deeper convictions and more healing and maturity. I need to pray for him, to see him through the eyes of heaven myself, to affirm him to the extent that is currently possible and to forgive him in my own heart long before he is even ready to acknowledge the wounds that he has inflicted in my heart.

The most significant block that I myself am currently facing, the greatest obstacle that prevents me, just like my brother, from even being able to feel the need to repent and confess and forgive others is my own unawareness of the pain that I have caused the heart of God myself. Just as my brother is still unable to face his responsibility for the deep wounds that he caused my heart at a very young age and that he inflicted on his sisters and mother, I too am just as guilty of ignorance of what God has forgiven me in my relationship with Him.

And just as it would have only triggered my brother into defensiveness and fear and denial or superficial apologies if I had tried to confront him about those other far more significant occurrences in our past, I suppose if God tried to confront me with the full reality of what I have done to Him I might also react in terror, denial and revert back to my dark pictures of God that plagued me for most of my childhood. It is God's mercy and compassion that restrains Him from fully answering my requests to show me all the truth about my debt to Him. But at the same time I have to admit that I am so clueless that I can't even see why that is true. I am pleading with Him to open my eyes and heart and mind to at least have a much greater appreciation of my own debt so that I can have more heart motivation to forgive others as a reflection of His forgiveness for me. I don't think it is wrong to ask for that revelation, even when I know it will likely be very painful when it comes.

So I am giving God permission to reveal as much as He knows I can handle, to show me the real truth about myself, my offenses against Him and others in the light of heaven. Of course at the same time I also need to have the healing revelations of how solid His forgiveness is for me at the same time or the revelation of my own guilt will crush all hope out of me. But at this point I don't seem to be able to see either one of those things and I am pleading with Him to take me there because I know that is the only path into greater healing and higher maturity.

In addition, I sense that my relationship with my children and even my wife has remained stuck and too shallow for many years because of my lack of appreciation in this area. Because of my resistance to forgive those who have deeply wounded me based on my own lack of appreciation for my relationship with God, I am still incapable of having any real breakthroughs in the most important relationships with others in my own home. But at this point I don't know of anything I can do to break that logjam except to ask God to intervene in my own heart. I sense that I am at the pivot point, that if my own healing were to have a major breakthrough then the hearts of many around me might find much freer access and incentive to flow down the river of healing along with me.

So here I am, still caught in the logjam that has developed over many generations of malfunction, child abuse and emotional neglect. While it is true that blame will do nothing to release this massive logjam of offense, ignoring the reality that the logs are still jammed will not promote progress either. I sense that as all of us get honest about what is real and cooperate with the means and power provided in God's Spirit to clear these jams in our hearts that we may be about to see things we never dreamed possible in our wildest imaginations.

I write all of this while fully realizing that my words have far more significance than possibly I can even now yet appreciate. I am trying to listen to what the Spirit is saying to my heart as I write and to simply convey what seems to make sense to me given what I know and what I have learned. Only God can take all of this and move it down into the regions of the heart where it really begins to operate the way it is described in these shallow words. But my cooperation or resistance to that movement can have a significant affect on how much this can happen and possibly how soon.

When the jam begins to unravel and the logs begin to roll and pitch and crash together before they all straighten out and flow together down the river in better harmony, it may feel terrifying and appear chaotic and even very threatening. The temptation will be strong to say that what is happening is all wrong, the the spirit involved is not from God and that we should all return to the days of stability. But though logjams may appear to be very stable they are not at all to be desired or protected. For the whole purpose of them floating on the river to start with is to move them all farther along the river toward the destination they were intended to be sent to originally.

Father, I don' know what else to say. I am still asking You to do whatever is it You want to do and remove all resistance from my heart so You can accomplish the healing in me that needs to take place. If my log begins to break free there are many others that You will have more freedom to work with as a result. So I give You unlimited permission again to do whatever it takes to bring glory to Your reputation as the ultimate log-roller, the great heart-transplanter, the wonderful liberator of those who still sit in prisons of darkness.

I want to be free. I want to grow up. I want to learn to dance and sing and celebrate You without fear of what others think or feel about me. I only want to know that You love me, to appreciate the real truth about how much You have forgiven me and to rest in Your comfort and experience real joy in Your presence. Have Your way fully in my life today for Your reputation's sake.

Clueless Awakening

After watching the video, The Bait of Satan by John Bevere three times now, it suddenly dawned on me what one of my biggest blind spots is in my heart. I have even specialized in teaching about the subject of forgiveness for several years but it has never come this clear to my own mind that I am clueless about the significance and size of the debt that I owed and that God has forgiven me.

I am keenly aware that many people would claim that this is because of my unusual views about God and His laws and all the related issues around how God relates to sinners. I realize that most religious people have used familiar dark pictures of God as the means to induce terror in the hearts of millions in order to supposedly bring them to repentance in a reaction to what God is supposedly waiting to inflict on them. I cannot and will not subscribe to these terrible lies about God as a way of scaring me into thinking what constitutes my debt. God has been too clear and emphatic in sweeping away hundreds of these lies about His character and His ways for me to go back into that miasma of darkness about Him devoid of any real love. Those ideas about God are the main cause for many atheists in the world and actually lie at the root of the presence of this satanically inspired theory of evolution that keeps so many people in darkness about the truth of God.

But having firmly renounced these lies which are the foundation of most people's assumptions about what constitutes our debt to God, I am now seeking to understand the real truth about what my debt really does look like and what it really involves in the light of the truth He has already so graciously shown me. Just because the true nature of my debt is not presently clear to me does not validate the gross lies that others purport about God as a counterfeit for the real truth about our debt as sinners.

I am starting to pray earnestly for God to reveal to me the truth as He sees it about what really is involved in my debt to Him and to have some appreciation of the enormity of that debt. I now realize that this lack of appreciation on my part is the key reason that I struggle so much with my own inability to get truly excited about the grace of God in my life. I now see much more clearly that I am far too much like the ungrateful debtor in Matthew 18. That explains why I struggle to have the proper perspective and motivation when it comes to forgiving others, even when their debt is not insignificant relative to my own life circumstances.

In this parable the first debtor had a debt that amounted to 150,000 years of full wages for a man which is mind-staggering and almost incomprehensible and obviously impossible to pay back, especially for a servant. Yet that servant seemed clueless and totally insensitive to appreciate what the king had done in forgiving him of such an obscenely large debt. That was because he evidently didn't really believe he owed it or for some other blinding reasons. As a result he felt no motivation to do anything similar to another servant who owed him a vastly smaller though still significant amount of debt – one third of a year's wages. Because of his lack of real appreciation of what had happened for him, he could not feel motivated to act in a similar manner in response to how he had been treated.

Symptoms betray causes. If I see the symptoms of ingratitude in my own heart, an inability to let go of offenses that come into my own life, then according to the teachings of Jesus I do not yet grasp the real relationship that God seeks to have with me in forgiving a debt I am not even aware that I owed. Like this servant, I might be arraigned before the King as a serious delinquent because of a huge debt that is impossible for me to pay; I may even hear words coming from the King that He has forgiven that unfathomably large debt for me, but if I don't somehow feel ownership of the debt at some point in my life it will all seem like a charade to me. It will just be a lot of words and claims and counterclaims but will never really change my heart in any significant way.

I am just beginning to grasp that reality now, at least the reality that I am still in the dark about true reality. I now have to confess before God that I really don't know or appreciate the true nature of my debt and I don't even have the capacity yet to do so. I suspect that maybe I have lived in the presence of grace and forgiveness for so long that I never really felt the truth about what sin really has done to me and how it has affected my whole existence. God knows all of this and has been very kind to reveal many truths to me that have been very obscure for all of my life. I realize that He is moving me to the next step now, to produce within me yet another awakening that will allow me to move deeper into an appreciative relationship with Him. I cannot force myself into appreciation because the heart does not respond well to force. I have to simply cooperate with the conviction of His Spirit and appropriate all the things that He has been teaching me the last few years to allow all of His truth to come together in ways I do not yet perceive currently.

So if you are impressed to pray for me at some time, please do not pray that I will become terrified of an angry God that threatens to torture me in hell for not appreciating that Jesus appeased an angry Father on my behalf on the cross. In that case, know that I am praying for you that you will come to know the real truth about God as it is in Jesus. It is not terror that God uses to draw us to His heart but it is the kindness of God that leads us to repentance (Romans 2:4). Jesus and God are not in opposite corners in this issue, they are in perfect unison seeking to draw us to them by exposing and removing the many lies about God from our hearts.

What I am seeking is to know the real truth about my debt in the new context of the real truth about God that He has been carefully instructing me in over the past few years. I strongly suspect that this revelation to me is going to be staggering, mind-boggling and totally transformative for my whole life and all of my relationships and my testimony for God. He did not bring this to my attention accidentally and I trust that He is ready and eager to answer my prayers to show me my true condition and my relationship to Him. I just am not there yet.

So, here I am God – clueless about the real nature and size of my own debt that I owe. I have been learning many very important things about forgiveness over the past few years as You have been tutoring me along this line, but obviously I have not grasped some of the most important aspects of my debt in my own heart yet. I know that You have led me to this point in my growth and have the answer waiting for the precise time that it will help me the most. This is all about Your reputation, not mine; so I come to You right now and implore You to speak to my own heart. Please show me both the reality and the substance of what is really involved in my debt to You and the true nature of how the cross of Jesus fits into that picture and all that You have been revealing to me over the past few years.

You have brought me to this point to ask for this very revelation for my heart. You are faithful, gracious, merciful, just and kind. You have warmed my heart many times with fresh revelations of Your kindness and love but You know how blind and dull I still am to the real truth about my condition as viewed from heaven's perspective. I want to see things as You see them, not through the eyes of an ungrateful debtor who goes around holding offenses against others and landing up in prison myself because of my ingratitude. I plead for a new heart, for new eyes, for new perspective, for a much fuller revelation of just what and how much I have been forgiven so that my forgiveness for others may be spontaneous and immediate.

I don't know what else to say about this, God. You are drawing me into this and You know just what I need far more than I can know. Answer the prayers of Jesus for me and flood me with the real truth about both the true nature and size of my debt and the true nature and greatness of Your love for me. Do all of this for Your name's sake, for Your reputation, for Your glory.