Wednesday, May 25, 2011

5/22/11 The spirit of Abandonment

     During Sunday morning worship, the Lord downloaded into my spirit some good insight and reassurance that I would like to share with you.  He brought this forth in a prophetic word  but the teaching He shared with my heart.  So, I meditated upon it, and searched the scriptures that he shared with me at that time.
     In John 14:18, it says that Jesus will not leave us, comfortless after he physically departs this world through His death and ressurection.  The word, comfortless here is more of an implied feeling atttached to the literal word in the text.  In the Greek, the word is orphaned or fatherless, so it is implied that the individual would be comfortless or bereaved.  Thus, it could be translated as, I will not leave you orphaned or fatherless, but I will send another of like kind as to myself. We know this person to be God Himself, the Holy Spirit.
     Hebrews 1:15 re-emphasizes God's feelings about leaving us alone when Paul shares that " He will never leave us or forsake us"  Paul wants to tell us that the Father doesn't want the ties between us to slacken or for us to feel that we have been deserted by Him.  Simply put, God our Heavenly Father really, really wants to be close to us!
     At the cross, Jesus's sacrifice built a bridge to re-establish our God's ability to get really close to us by overcoming the issue of sin. But, that is not the point of this message.  The word that was shared, was that He was breaking off of us the spirit of abandonment which hinders us from from true intimacy with a gracious, loving Heavenly Father.
     It has been God's intent from the beginning to re-establish the intimacy that he once shared with mankind, namely Adam and Eve.  They walked, talked, shared, enjoyed each other's company.   They had intimacy.  This was the truest,and purest from of parental relationship  between the Creator and mankind until Jesus Christ.  Both God and mankind have longed for that connectivity ever since the fall.  Or as scripture says it, He has put eternity in our hearts.  The longing is born in us, and Jesus is the one who gets us across the gap, back into the arms of a loving Father God.
     A spirit of abandonment falls over the believer when we bite into the lie that our Father is either too busy,uncaring,or unsympathetic enough to act or move on our behalf.  It is just that, a lie.  But, the power of any lie resides in us taking the bait, and then digesting it into our spirit.  It then begins to cause blindness, and deafness to the spiritual realm hindering our faith to trust in a loving God.
     Such actions alone are enough to block our recieving the Father's blessing, not because He intends it to be that way, but because we simply lose our way.  We become estranged.  We wander aimlessly, pawing for a way back, but all the while still tied to the anchor of abandonment.
     The enemy and our minds pester us like annoying flies buzzing in our ears words like: " He doesn't care","He is too busy helping another", You blew it, He doesn't want to hear from you!".  The saddest thing of all is they are simply more lies all designed to keep us in the mire of the orphanage of abandonment.
     We need to ask the Holy Spirit to break the spirit of abandonment and it's cycle of torments off of us by the blood of Jesus Christ.  We need to recognize that God is a father like no other.  And no pure,loving father would do this to his child.  We need to ask forgiveness for believing these lies about His character, and ask Him to restore us back into that beautiful son/daughter relationship.  The one that he had intended for us from eternity past.  Lastly, we need to ask that our spiritual eyes and ears be opened.  In Revelation 3:18, it talks about asking for salve to heal our eyes.  This is not physical healing,but spiritual healing for spiritual sight.  Because we need to be open once again to see that as believers we coexist in two realms of existence.
     We live in the Kingdom of God which attaches us to Heaven, but physically we are still here day to day on earth.  If our eyes, and ears are open and healed once again, we will be able to walk that out in a healthy way on a daily basis,just as Jesus did. You see without that, we have not " crossed the Rubicon" so to speak.
 We are still believers, but we tend to walk more in the realms of religion, faith in theory, and solid moral convictions, than Kingdom lifestyle.  We are called to progress in intimacy with the Father otherwise there will always be areas in Him that we relegate to the great By and By, instead of the here and now.
     I pray that this word of encouragement will help you move into an overcoming affirmation of  the Father's love and move out of  languishing in abandonment.  He has not abandoned you, no matter how you may feel.  Even Job, in his darkest hour had God himself come to reconcile relationship with him.  Jesus did not want us to ever doubt that that Father has ever abandoned us.  He emphasized this by empathetically saying that the Father's promised outpouring would immediately come after His departure.  Be assured God wants to be close to you, so let us cross over that bridge today!