The Shepherdess Ministry

                                                                                                                                                                   Issue 41

            One of the best benefits available to the Christian is that of a fresh start and of those, as many as you require, indeed every day. The bible says that His mercies are new every morning. And this is true. Confession, repentance and forgiveness aside for just a moment, most of our fresh starts should be based on revelation. If indeed, you have a real relationship with Christ and abide in Him, it should resemble any human relationship you have in that there is back and forth communication and fellowship. Now, a relationship with God is far better than with any person in that it also involves counsel, direction, correction, wisdom, inspiration, warnings, healing, help, comfort, gifts-everything that is good for you and will be good for you for the goodness of God endures. What God calls good endures as good. It should be a good friendship. If this is true and what you have, then you should be able to express on any given occasion what areas of your life He is touching and working on, what He is currently training you in and teaching you. With every fresh revelation, we come up a little higher in Him. The bible says we are being changed from glory to glory. Now if you have a vital relationship with Jesus, if He also speaks to you and you spend time together, you should not fail, not become derailed. Why? Because there is motion. You should be able to sense His hand on your life in an overwhelming way. So that no sins, no errors, no mistakes, no warfare, no condemnation can give you pause or stop you on your way. Maybe you have some glaring problems; nevertheless, you are going somewhere and there is somewhere to go in Christ Jesus. God’s main concern with any of your faults is that they are hampering your way and causing you problems or will. But this is surely not all His conversation with you for you are called and chosen and God is bringing you somewhere and into some service. The motion is God’s overall plan for your life. The bible says that the gifts and callings of God are without repentance. This motion is your constant, even if your spiritual life is rather up and down and harried at times. This motion is your comfort. So whereas you might suffer discouragement, despair, self-pity- this will pull you out of it for this motion doesn’t cease, God does not cease. Perhaps like you are adrift at sea and the waves are constantly moving you somewhere, only this is God and God is precisely taking you. And if you are holding on to paddles, trying to maintain some control, throw them over board. And when you hear a word, go with it, like a fresh start- start fresh.

Regarding revelation then, this week again, I have been meditating on His lordship in our lives, how our lives are not our own. That when He said to take up our cross and follow Him, the cross is the death we died to ourselves and the world. The cross is the day we died to our own desires and the day we began to live for Him. If your life is not your own and it is His, if this is in you like a revelatory truth, then you stop looking back and you humbly submit to the next things He has for you. You look at Him and you look ahead. You leave your opinions about your circumstances, about the way He has taken you and all the hurt and complaints that are in you and you leave them at the cross. And you go on to serve Him. All the stuff that has broken our hearts at various times, the injustices, even the horrors, things we can never understand and the not understanding that causes us to stumble, to just drop in place- where we get stuck... if we could only begin to recognize that these are the places in our emotions where we need to choose to soldier on, where we must choose to not draw back. This is the spiritual life. This is the spiritual battle. This is fighting the good fight of faith. The battle is in our thoughts and emotions.

I had a problem with this when I first began to serve the Lord. I would think all these negative thoughts and just spiral all the way down to hell. It was miserable. One day, in one of those deep holes, God moved me to call my church during the day time  on a weekday and the lady there told me my problem and after she told me what I was doing wrong, I began to be able to recognize what was happening and instead of letting my thoughts and wrong thinking drag me down in misery, I learned to stop it. The simple answer is that I was not taking my thoughts captive.

"For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds,  casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ,  and being ready to punish all disobedience when your obedience is fulfilled."

The bible is our only truth, our hard line. We believe it more than our own lives, more than our own eyes, more than our own experiences and more than our own feelings. So we examine every thought and compare it to the word of God and to what we know of His character and nature and if it does not line up or pass the test, we cast it down. We cast it out. We do not entertain these thoughts. We do not run with them. We refuse. Resist the Devil and He will flee from you. Whether the thought originates from you or is Satan egging you on in your misery, ALL thoughts are subject to God. We make our thoughts subject to Him. This is our obedience. This is Christ's obedience. If you are submitted to Jesus and His Lordship in your life, you will master this. And you will cast your days at His feet. He is worthy.

Post script: This week, I had occasion to personally review this in my own life. I suffered some financial blows this week through no fault of my own and one afternoon when I woke up from a nap, I started thinking like a foolish person. I heard God say, “Be careful,” but I was not very careful because I was grieved. So I spent a miserable afternoon and evening pondering my ill fate. In the morning, I heard singing in my spirit, it was Jeremy Camp’s Word of Life:

“Speak to my weary heart
Strengthen my broken parts
Lead me to Your open arms
Word of truth
Illuminate all these lies
The enemy speaks inside
In freedom I will rise

'Cause You called me out from the grave
So I can live like I've been changed
There is a new song in my soul
And it begins when I breathe in
Your word of life”

It was so perfect that I was turned around immediately and forgot everything I said. Well, I apologized to God first and then forgot all the foolish things I said when I was distressed and God renewed a right spirit in me. I hope that you too can hear well enough to be turned around lest things become imbedded through rehearsal and it become much harder for the truth to penetrate.

            God said “be careful” in this case not because I did not have cause for complaint, for I did and God did gladly listen to my problems but because when we let negative thoughts run wild within us, we move out of faith and into fear and misery and that is not a good place to go, not where God wants us at all. It was a caution for my good.

Kirsten Caraway

Email: Spiritsheepranch@gmail.com

The Shepherdess Ministry

                                                                                                                                                                   Issue 40

“Now the just shall live by faith;

But if anyone draws back,

My soul has no pleasure in him.

But we are not of those who draw back to perdition, but of those who believe to the saving of the soul.”               Hebrews 10:38-39

            Sometimes when I am about to encounter some kind of discouragement or I am already feeling discouraged, the Lord will sing to me this old song which goes, “I have decided to follow Jesus. No turning back. No turning back.” And while, of course, this song is about our commitment to Christ, when God sings it to me, it concerns my purpose in Christ. He is leading us more places than heaven. He is leading us into a work and a ministry in His name. We all have a place and type of ministry to fulfill. The Lord gives us different burdens and passions, abilities and compassion for a very vast number of people, needs and situations. Sometimes people find their ministry place in their local churches. Some people find it wandering out in the world, aiding those whom God causes to cross their paths. Not all Christians, in every season of their lives, are necessarily meant to perform their ministry in the context of a local church or to attend one regularly. However, there should be seasons when you are receiving ministry and teaching in the context of a church and you must maintain fellowship with the Body of Christ. We need to periodically check in with the people of God. We need to watch for sprigs of rebellion taking root in our hearts. Even if you have been out of church for years, if you have maintained a right spirit within you, it will be as if you never left, except the renewed sense of pleasure you experience joining the saints again, especially in worship.

 There are many ways to draw back from the Lord. One concerns purpose. One concerns His people. Now I want to talk about personally withdrawing from the Lord. God has great compassion and mercy toward us and great understanding of us and where we are and what we understand at any given moment. He knows the struggles in our hearts, where we are tripping up and falling down and I am going to elaborate on this to encourage you. But before I encourage you in the way in which you will be most familiar, there is another encouragement which is harder to grasp though it truly is glorious. God meets us 2 ways. One is with mercy, compassion; the other is with strength. The strength here is when God says, “But if anyone draws back, My soul has no pleasure in Him.” This is the power of God to keep you for it brooks no argument- not from your own soul, from other people or the Devil. You may not draw back from the Lord. You may not do it.

            So whether it be shame, fear, apathy, sin in your life, doubt, disappointment, discouragement, depression, hurt, offense etc… all of which may hamper your relationship with Jesus- to none of this are you permitted to give way. I know, along with every one of you that the most important revelation we can receive of God is that He loves us. But in all the other times, the times in between, “the just shall live by faith.” The faith is that God hangs on your every word to Him, so to speak. The faith is that He longs for you in every hour of every day and that NOTHING ever changes that. Your level of goodness or faithfulness in any way toward Him has absolutely nothing to do with you being received with wide open arms any moment you turn your attention to Him. It will ever be no matter what. Why? Because despite yourself, in you the Father sees the work of the cross, the finished work of the cross. From the moment you received Jesus and believed on Him and the blood He shed, you became like Jesus before the father. Understand your own salvation! You will always be welcomed by God because of the Son. The blood of Jesus doesn’t wear off or wear out. You do not make it ineffectual because you aren’t good enough or remember God enough or try hard enough. And this is faith, that you ever bear this in mind so that every day you may draw nearer to Him and not draw back. Nothing you could ever do would make God desire you to draw back. His word says that “if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” We need to believe this. If we believe this, we will draw near to God in hard times and bad times and with our bad attitudes too. You must live by faith in this at all times. You may not allow anything to separate you from the love of God or hinder your growing relationship with Him. You may not draw back for any reason. If you can remember that it displeases God so much more if you draw back than it does for Him to keep your imperfect company, condemnation will have no power over you. For the only condemnation here is if you do draw back. So fight the good fight of faith and never allow anything to cause you to withdraw from being with God.

            “Return, return, O Shulamite;

  Return, return, that we may look upon you!”

God loves you. You love God.

I have noticed a trend the last few years in the worship services of our modern churches. Most of the songs during worship are about how much God loves us and I think we misstep here. I think we are misstepping here and it should be amended. For God does love us, each and every one of us very greatly but He always does and He always has. However the truth is that nothing in your life will truly change until you love Him too. Your love for God is the catalyst for the power of God to flow in your life. How do we spend all this time singing about how much God loves us but decline to answer His cry for love? It may be because we don’t truly understand that God has a heart, even though we are made in His image. He had the first heart. God is love. Love longs to be loved. Love longs for an answer. We spend a lot of time trying to receive that love which we sing about so repetitiously, not really understanding that the life and the power between you is only in a love that goes both ways, that freely flows back and forth between you. 

Many persons get saved in church. The Holy Spirit is always moving and working. He constantly reveals that Jesus is real and alive and that the work on the cross is the truth and the only means by which we are saved. And I know in that instant that these individuals feel loved by God for they encounter Him (He is love) but unfortunately so many stop there. So we have a lot of saved people out there, loved by God but the relationship is completely one sided.

At some point, our tune has to change. It is your love for God that will cause you to seek Him. It is your loyalty to Him that will cause you to be a witness for Him. It is your compassion for Him that will cause you to serve Him. It is a desire to please Him that will cause you to want to live holy and blameless before Him. It is your love for Him that will cause you to love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those that curse you. Your love will become sacrificial because you want to be like Him and a son or daughter of your father in heaven. Your love will cause you to purify your hearts and cleanse your hands. Your love for God is what causes you to want to change, it sets you on a path of sanctification, of becoming like Him. It means that the fruit of the Spirit will shine forth in your life as He said, “You will know them by their fruits.” By their love. But what love?

It is: God loves you. You love God. Not God loves us. We love others.  For that will never happen. Only if you love Jesus can you begin to love your enemies. Only if you love Jesus will you ever walk this walk or finish this course or go anywhere at all in Christ. Only if you love Christ will you wait and will you sacrifice immediate rewards for eternal rewards. Unless we are motivated by something real and powerful on the inside we will never be like Jesus and walk in His footsteps. Only if you love Jesus will you put in the hard work that it sometimes is to change. The only thing that will carry us through the hard times is love for Him. Just as Christ loved the Father and us and that motivated Him to endure the ordeal of the cross.

God loving us doesn’t magically change our lives. Look at how many people are saved and not much has changed. The amount of backslidden Christians out there would make your head spin. Look at all the unsaved, who do not know Him whom He loves just as much as you. We can keep singing about how much God loves us but until you love Him too, nothing is really going to change. And that is what we have lost in our churches: You love God. The equation just doesn’t work without your heart in it. There is only so far that gratitude or fear or a rigid understanding of the obligations in scripture will take you; it won’t take you to the cross. God loves you. You love God. So you love your brethren.  By some stage, you should be able to sort through all the imperfect junk that everyone has going on to be able to hear the sound of God in them anyway and through it all. That sound evokes love in you for them. It is Christ in them, whom you love. It is the sound of your Love. Look for the One you love and when you find Him, be content.

To know God is to love Him. It would be far more profitable for us to sing “ I want to know You. I want to love You. I want to see You. I want to hear You.” Make it about God, not about getting your fix and your endless need to be reaffirmed. For if you make it about God and begin to answer His heart too, He will answer you by revealing Himself to you in great and liberal ways and then you won’t need endless confirmations of His love because you will already know and for God’s sake, move on! Grow up as you are supposed to do. But can you? When we have made the church about the unbelievers? All about evangelism? Church is for believers. When we start to cater to the unbelievers and neglect the sheep, when we endlessly reiterate the first things and how much God loves us, we can’t grow up and our churches have no power. Because the power is in relationship with God. I will prove it. Besides, that is the only way I will take it. You can take it by faith, so I have read and so I have heard but it will be quite a hiccup for you if He says, “I never knew you.”

If indeed God loves us, don’t you think we will be called upon to prove it? How can we hope to prove it unless we also love Him? I like the songs on the radio and I also like some of the old hymns but I will set them aside to go back to choruses because God answers choruses because they give Him something to answer, a work to do, room to speak. I don’t know how delighted God is to hear song after song about how much He loves us. It is not exactly worship or praise, is it? And in truth, no matter what God does and says, it comes with love. Any word He speaks, even correction, any bit of anointing that falls, any experience of His presence or power at any time we feel loved by Him. It just comes with it. If God starts stirring something in my spirit, a word, I feel loved. Anytime God reaches out to me, I feel loved. Anytime the Spirit of God bears witness in my spirit when I am writing a sermon, I feel loved because it is innate to it, inherent in it, it cannot be separated out. Experiences of conviction and repentance even, of great sorrow over sin, even in these, we feel loved. If you don’t feel loved, try loving.

God loves you. You love God. This will fulfill all, for you will fulfill all if you love Him. If you don’t, you will fulfill nothing. You will never be able to do the second commandment unless you manage the first.