THE ENCOUNTER

THE ENCOUNTER

                I want to share something of my life today. I have shared this story in times past, but I think it is of utmost importance right now for us to understand the vital difference between religion and true Holy Spirit filled and living Christianity. Religion has all of the earmarks of being the real thing. It can be zealous and driven and all consuming. It can masquerade as the new birth and it can preach and teach and do all of the right stuff. It can create a religious culture in which people can look and act and do all of the right things with the right intentions.

                Religion can be a most powerful thing, eliciting the greatest devotion, the greatest pride of being right while others are wrong. Religion can make you feel like God’s chosen remnant people based upon your doctrine, your strict obedience to the Law. Religion can drive you with an overpowering sense of purpose and zealous ambition for God and yet what I have just described for you here is really the man Saul before he became Paul, the apostle of Jesus Christ.

                At about the age of 40 I had lost faith in everything that had driven my life in my early years. In spite of all of my Christian upbringing, when it came right down to it I was empty on the inside. The shells and facades, the acting that I thought was real collapsed upon me and having lost all hope and sense of direction, I went into the world for a time. I covered my inner pain with alcohol and there was a lot of inner pain to cover. In time I became addicted to the point where alcohol took over my life and began to destroy it and every other good thing in my life.

                In desperation I began to attend a small home group made up of young people who had long ago left the facades of religion to seek the Lord. They were the ones out on the water front and under the bridges comforting the homeless and bringing food to them. They were the ones that I had been too proud to associate with… after all, I was a professional. I was a company man. I had a name to uphold.

                But in my desperation I sought out this humble group whom I heard had been filled with the Holy Spirit and I began to attend their home meeting. To me it was an amazing thing to see. These young people never seemed to tire of worshipping the Lord. They could go for hours just worshipping and adoring the Lord and singing songs of worship and praise to Him. I was drawn to this kind of heart felt worship, because I sensed in it something that I had never had or experienced. And even though I was drawn to it by my deep sense of need, I felt like an outsider looking in. I felt like a stranger to this kind of love.

                After a few months of attending these meetings and loving them and desiring to have what they had I still felt like an outsider… not because they had made me feel like one, in fact they had embraced me with open arms. But they knew something about me that I didn’t even know about myself. They had the real thing and I did not, but they were praying for me.

                Then came the day when losing my foolish sense of religious pride, I came to them and asked them to pray for me. I needed deliverance from my secret addictions and my life was in ruins and I finally asked for prayer. Somehow this deep sense of worship seemed to be connected to the gifts of the Spirit that they had, for I noticed that they often spoke in tongues while praying.

                I suppose the group had been waiting for just such this moment and so they gathered around me and laid hands on me and began to pray for me with great passion and power. But what came next was the shock of my life.

                Suddenly a dark and menacing demon reared up inside of me. He looked something like a shiny black one eyed Octopus that filled up the shell of who I was. He leered at me and threatened me. He said,” I am you. I am your talent, your religion, your abilities, your humor, your personality. I am your everything!”

                He showed me what seemed to be like millions of tentacles attached to ever cell of my body and then he growled at me saying: “If you try to get rid of me I will tear you apart. I will destroy you. I will rob you of everything you hold dear.”

                Well this vision shocked me and frightened me so badly that I quickly backed out of the prayer group, thanked them for their love and concern and I went out into the night, confused and bewildered. How could I have been so involved, so indoctrinated, so  consumed with religion and even passion for the cause all of my life and yet be controlled by a demon?

                As I understand it now, religion is one of Satan’s favorite places to hide. Like they say, “The highway to hell is paved with good intensions.” It is really true. Satan can hide in our good intentions just as he hid in the Pharisees… in Saul… any one that hides their real selves behind a facade of Christian fervor and tradition. We think we have been born again when in fact we have merely conformed to the mold of human expectations. We have learned the act. We have played the part that was expected of us and we don’t even know that we are “of our father the devil or that we are whited sepulchers.”

                So religion is one of Satan’s favorite places to hide and I feel it important to bring this up now, because I think it is this zealous form of religion that is going to drive those that serve the antichrist in the end. Thinking to serve Jesus Christ they will be driven to gain control of the world, to change it, to enforce their brand of religion upon the world. But when the truly Spirit filled, Christ inhabited Christians refuse to comply with this world domineering brand of religion, they will think they are serving God by putting us to death.

                Saul was driven by an antichrist spirit and yet he truly believed that He was on God’s side of the issues. The Pharisees, thought to stamp out this growing cancer called “The Way” before it overtook all of Jerusalem…”Better to kill this one Man than to allow God’s chosen people to be infected by His teaching. After all, they were of Moses. They were of their father Abraham… and this Jesus was blaspheming God by claiming to be His Son. Jesus taught a complete new birth… something totally other than what Nicodemus expected. He had thought to come to Jesus on equal terms… teacher to teacher and yet Jesus didn’t allow this equality for even one second. Everyone, including Nicodemus must be born again in order to see the kingdom of God.

                Well, I left that prayer meeting knowing one thing. I had never been truly born again and something major was going to have to happen in my life if I was to ever be anything but an outsider looking in.

                I began to wrestle with God over this situation. I went to my favorite place in the mountains and I began to fight for my own soul. The problem was that I had tried to turn over a new leaf in my life more times than I could count and they had all lasted, even in the  most determined attempts for about two weeks after which time I couldn’t even stand myself. The only thing I could picture is becoming more legalistic than I already was… and after a few days or weeks I would be so consumed with judgmental attitudes and strictness that I would give up in frustration hating the very thing that I had become.

                So when I finally came to the Lord up there in the mountains, I said to Him, “Lord, this new birth business has to be something totally different than I had ever experienced in the past or this was going to be the shortest new birth in history. Giving my entire life to Jesus was a horribly difficult thing to do because all I could picture in terms of being totally devoted to Christ was to become even stricter and more legalistic than I had ever been and I hated it. Nevertheless I surrendered myself totally to Jesus Christ asking Him to come into my life and to make all things new. I did so hoping against hope that the New Birth was something totally different than turning over a new leaf. So I asked Him to come in.

                And He did. He came into my life like warm oil and a cool breeze all at the same time, but it was more than that. His Person entered me and filled me with an overwhelming peace and an overwhelming sense of His presence such as I had never known.  I knew that Jesus had indeed arrived. Wow! Wow! Wow! This was different than anything I had experienced before. It was real. It wasn’t my sweat and my promises… it was His Person and His presence coming in to empower my life.

                The first thing Jesus said to me was, “Do you want me to get rid of that thing?” I said “Yes” and that huge menacing demon that had threatened to destroy me flew out of me like a scared little black leaf. I saw him fly off into the woods, as if driven by a mighty wind.  I have never seen anything more terrified than that demon. All of his threats to destroy me were as nothing. I didn’t feel a thing… no tearing apart of my insides… no destroying of my life. Suddenly I was set free… my addictions, my foolish pride, my long time depression… it all left with Satan and suddenly I was no longer an outsider looking in. Jesus had taken up residence in my life.

                The people in the prayer group that I had been attending had been Spirit filled people and as such, they spoke in tongues as a part of their prayer and worship. I suspected that this was a vital part of their tireless worship. Their worship seemed to be a very integral part of their beings. It was not put on. It was not programmed and yet I sensed in these people a genuine outflow if life like rivers of living water coming from their innermost beings.

                Not having known my real condition I had initially asked them to pray for me to receive the Holy Spirit and to receive this gift of genuine worship and so I had been shocked when this demon had manifested. I had had no idea.

                So now that this menacing demon was out of the way, I began to pray for this gift of the Holy Spirit out in the woods every day. I even tried to speak in tongues of my own volition and it was indeed embarrassing. I didn’t even want the squirrels and birds to hear me. I said to the Lord, “There is one thing I know Lord, this bla, bla, bla is not the gift of tongues.

                So, after about two weeks of hoping and trying I abandoned the idea. I told the Lord that perhaps it wasn’t intended for me and so I was going to stop trying. I was just going to continue to worship the Lord with thankfulness because one thing I knew. Jesus now lived in me. He had taken up residence in a tangible way in my life. I had experienced His matchless power and I had every reason to be grateful.  

                One day while sitting on my favorite spot on the mountainside, I was just praising the Lord. His presence was so real and so powerful that day. As I sat there the Lord began to teach me the secrets of the universe… how everything is integrated. The entire universe is filled with His presence. There is no time or distance in His realm. Everything is connected and alive in some way so that everything in creation is united in praise to Him. The birds, the trees, the whole earth and sky and everything in them is praising the Lord with joy and yet a sort of anxious longing to be fully restored.

                I had never seen such things, nor understood them like this. It was both technical and spiritual. It was like a door of understanding had been opened to me. I had been given a glimpse of the universe the way God sees it. It is an understanding in which none of our pride and big scientific words have any part. God doesn’t use our words to describe His creation for our words have been based upon pride and false understanding. Love is the heartbeat of the universe. Everything praises the Lord with a combination of joy and sadness. All of creation suffers the limitations of man’s sin and all of creation waits in eager anticipation of the revealing of the sons of God. All of creation longs for the time when everything will once again be released into the freedom of the sons of God.

                I don’t know how long I was caught up in this reverie. Everything here was so beautiful… so full of praise to God. It is as though all of nature is alive with the presence of God. I had become completely unaware of myself and my surroundings and I begged God to allow me to bring some of this knowledge and understanding back into the world… so as my thoughts and worship began to fade and I became aware of my surroundings again, the first thing I noticed was that I was speaking in tongues. It was flowing out of my mouth and out of my heart profusely and effortlessly. Whoa!! The promises are true! God’s Word is still alive. We can be animated by the presence of God. The gifts of the Holy Spirit have not passed away!

                This gift of the Holy Spirit has never left me even though I have had a rough road to travel on my journey out of what was and into what my life has become today. Receiving the Holy Spirit is not graduation day. It is in fact the beginning of our training. We must now learn to live according to heaven’s eternal ways rather than our temporal ways. It is an ongoing process learning how to walk by the Spirit and not by the flesh. And even though I had this wonderful vision, this being caught away into timelessness for a little while, the Holy Spirit most often is with us in the trenches, where the battles of life are fought.

                It is not euphoric feelings that we seek, but the living realities of a selfless life … of learning to live by the Spirit rather than by our flesh. .. of learning obedience from the things that we suffer…Of course we want the devil kicked out of us… but in reality our own flesh is the more stubborn and persistent enemy of our souls. Kicking the devil out can happen in an instant, but learning to live by the Spirit and not by the flesh can take a lifetime. Once the devil is kicked out, then the real battles can begin. Good intentions try to sneak in and replace the work of the Holy Spirit. Flesh is always seeking supremacy over the Spirit. It wants credit. It wants to rule. It wants to feed itself on the things of this world. It wars against the fruit of the Spirit. Our lives seem like a battlefield and our only hope of winning is to draw from that Source that entered us when we were born again. We need to live by THAT power… THAT wisdom… THAT forgiveness… THAT Word…THAT blood, THAT presence.

                Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit and yet He will only take the territory that we allow Him to take. He will not take what we refuse to give Him. We are in training to reign with Christ and our fitness for that lofty position is directly linked to how fully His Holy Spirit has access to our lives.

                We have as much to unlearn as we have to learn. Religion seeks to replace this vital life Source with doctrines and practices and traditions and programs, all of which give us a sense of serving God without really being born again and Spirit filled and Spirit empowered. No matter how much we try to please God we still feel like outsiders looking in. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God, so how can we expect our flesh to prepare us for that kingdom?

                Our manmade rituals of worship… our supposed conservative ways… being shaped and formed by man’s expectation rather than God’s… we become actors acting out a life that is void of His real presence and power. We have the form but deny the power.

                In these last days we need the real thing. Nothing less than this will get us through what lies ahead. And even among those who, at one time or another, have received the Holy Spirit and even His gifts, are in danger as well. If we have grown lax in our ways… if we have failed to call upon the Holy Spirit to continue training and teaching and empowering us, we can become just as weak and uninformed as those who have never been born again.

                If we stop searching the Scriptures… if we stop praying like we should… if we grow lax in our pursuit of the Spirit over the flesh, we too can end up unprepared. Like I said, receiving the Holy Spirit and even His gifts are not graduation day, but the beginning of school. There are many so called “Spirit Filled People” who stopped growing shortly after they received the Holy Spirit. They thought they had arrived. But in fact they have allowed things like unforgiveness or self, or any number of things to block further growth in their lives. Many have ignored Bible Prophecy by which God prepares us to operate in His agenda. They begin to neglect Bible study and prayer. They lose their hunger for the things of God. They begin to fall into a routine of human activity.

                Yes, we are sealed by the Holy Spirit, but it isn’t a one- time thing. It is a continual sealing as we allow Him full access to our lives. Anything in our lives that has not come under His Lordship must be shaken out. We belong to Him. We are His property and we cannot pick and choose what we will allow Him access to. It is all or nothing.  We must humble ourselves before God. Many will say to Him on that day, “Lord, lord, didn’t we heal the sick and cast out demons in your name?” And He will say; “I never knew you.” You see, they had the gifts, but they never allowed the Lord to invade their lives.  They had the gifts, but not the fruit of the Spirit. They never really learned to live by the Spirit. They never developed that intimate connection with Jesus Christ. They never really entered that Most Holy Place called the “Secret Place of the Most High. There are many casual Christians today that claim Psalm 91 for protection, when in fact it is only offered to those that dwell in the Secret Place of the Most High.

                                I invite you to ask Jesus into your life for a fresh new start… and this time, give Him everything. When I did that I discovered that Jesus has a kind of power over Satan that I had never dreamed of. Satan is absolutely no match for Jesus… not even close… and yet Jesus will only take charge of the things in our lives that we give to Him.  Selah