Current Realities
Deception has become a persistent reality here. Pray that I would hold to the truth and that the lies that have been rooted in my spirit would be flushed out and exposed.
Tonight as a team we had a intensive time of reflecting on what we’ve been feeling the past few days. There have been a range of feelings, but a thread of continuity was the lies that some of us have been hearing and believing. Lies like, what we are up against is insurmountable, who are we to be here engaging in what we’re doing, we are from a totally different culture and we can’t relate to the people that we are supposed to be ministering to, the hearts of students are beyond repentance, no one wants to change, we should expect this year to be more about our personal growth than effecting change in anyone else…
All of these are lies that are contrary to the truth of God. We were able to identify these and bring them collectively before God tonight. It is amazing that when we expose lies to light, they quickly shrivel up. When we discuss these things in the community of our team we gain perspective. It is sometimes very hard to bring these things before each other, the sharing of our thoughts and feelings is revealing parts of ourselves that most people don’t see. It’s the part of us that isn’t put together. It’s unanalyzed, unprepared to share before an audience, it’s raw. But when we share with each other in vulnerability and openness, God shows us some pretty interesting things. We gain perspective. We realize that all of us might be thinking the same thing and we find encouragement in the community of emotions. We can rejoice with each other and weep with each other. God uses our insights and things that he has been showing each of us to bring encouragement to us as a whole.
One thing that is becoming more real to me is the nature of Satan that is talked about in John 8:44. Jesus describes him as a liar and the father of lies. We should then expect to hear some of these lies as we do battle against him. I think that in part, our emotions serve as a gauge of spiritual attack. One of our first alerts to oppression is the emotion that we feel. By talking about our emotions collectively, God shows things we might now have picked up on if we had just kept them to ourselves.