DESTROYING SPIRITUAL STRONGHOLDS

The promise below is amazing promise and very important for the Body of Christ in the world today. Jesus said that by the power of the Holy Spirit we would be able to do even more than He did when He was on Earth. In the revival that began around the late fifties more and more people have learned about and practiced healing prayer and deliverance prayer in Christ Jesus. These are the signs that God's Reign has truly been established on Earth. 

We are living in the "already, but not yet" time -- so that as many people will choose to answer God's invitation in Jesus Christ to be part of the Reign of God and the Children of God -- and so that we can take part in sharing God's love in Jesus Christ in tangible ways with everyone we meet.

It is so wonderful to be led by the Holy Spirit and to know God and Jesus . . . to love and serve the Lord by loving and serving the people who are in our lives.
When we begin by recognizing hat God is the Creator, the only true God and that Jesus is His only begotten Son -- the Messiah, God Incarnate -- Emmanuel: God With Us . . . And we accept God's invitation to receive the salvation offered to each and every human being, we begin a life of wholeness that will never end.

And what joy we have to be able to share that love with everyone in our lives! 

There is so much pain in the world. People have so many needs, and there are so many ways we can help. If we just help out of our human strength we will be worn out. But if we allow the Holy Spirit to work in us and through us, the Lord will do so much more than we can on our own.

May the Lord continue to bless and keep you and yours, Beloved, now and always.

From 365 Daily Promises by Barry Adams --

"I will give you my power to destroy spiritual strongholds." 2 Corinthians 10:3-5 

"For though we walk in the flesh, we don’t wage war according to the flesh; for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but mighty before God to the throwing down of strongholds,  throwing down imaginations and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ;"

Promise #291: I will give you My power to destroy spiritual strongholds.
 
In yesterday's promise from Exodus 14:14, I talked about the importance of us learning to be still and watch the Lord fight on our behalf. In today's promise from 2 Corinthians 10:3-5, we are seeing a different facet to the same diamond. In this passage of Scripture, the Apostle Paul is exhorting us to learn how to partner with the Omniscient, Omnipresent and Omnipotent power that resides in us that will empower us to demolish every spiritual stronghold in our lives.

Paul clearly reminds us that we do not wage warfare like the world does.  We have the power of the living God in us that is mighty to save. Our part in this battle is to bring into captivity every thought that opposes the knowledge of God. But just like I said yesterday, we need to understand that we cannot do this in our own strength, for the battle is the Lord's.

We are called in Romans 12:2 to not be conformed to this world, but rather transformed by the renewing of the mind. Our unredeemed thought life will never be in agreement with the mind of Christ. The only way to deal with an unredeemed thought is to take it captive to the obedience of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit that lives within us.

So the next time that a negative, condemning, self-centered, unredeemed thought comes into your mind, be encouraged to know that God has given you power by His Spirit to take that thought and make it come into submission to the Lordship of Christ.  It is Christ in you that is the hope of glory (Colossians 1:27) and it is His plan that we all be transformed into His image with ever increasing glory, as we behold His face one day at a time.  (2 Corinthians 3:18)
 
Photo by Jeff Epp 

365promises.com 

BETWIXT AND BETWEEN ERAS

Even though it has been nearly four days since I flew home from Illinois to Georgia, I find myself still enthralled with the enchantment of spending time with people so dear to me in places so familiar and beloved to me. The echoes of exquisite memories of childhood triggered by the time spent in our home town are now over-laid and interwoven with new images of the loving looks in the eyes of friends I have known since I was eight years old; since I was twelve years old; since I was thirteen to seventeen years old and beyond. Rituals such as the Homecoming Parade; a tour of our high school; a walk in our lakeside village from bridge to island; to bridge to a second island; to bridge back to the parking lot near the park deliver the framework for reminiscences and accentuate the joy of walking again where my feet, eyes and heart need no prompting.

Finding my younger self in memory, and then losing my contemporary self from time to time, giving my mind and heart over to the consciousness that allows me to be eight again walking to the beach with my brother and sister on a summer afternoon; to be eleven again riding on our 4-H float in our town's Bicentenniel Parade with our beloved Lady Bird, the springer spaniel kind enough to humor me into believing I had trained her to perform obedience tasks; to be fifteen again getting ready for the Dame's Dance in the spring of our Junior year in high school; to be eighteen again, coming home from Freshman year at the University of Illinois . . . all those musings and time-machine-like-hopping yield precedence to the necessity of regaining a grip on the present; to work with stalwart precious friends on tasks that are necessary to prepare for each reunion event.

For some time now I have been feeling that I am on the threshold of a distinct new era in my life, one that I can't quite conceive of as yet. That concept of walking by faith, not by sight has transitioned from the abstract into a very real moment by moment manifestation. Slipping in and out of dissociation, time has been capricious and contradictory. What seems at times to be linear and unremarkable turns out to be elusively cyclical; no . . . disjointed and un-connected . . . fantastically surprising.

Passing by our old house, I see the building as it is now, but overlaid on the way it looked the first time we saw it; after the siding had been put on it; after the garage was built in front of it and to the west; as it looked the first time I saw it again after eight years as a young adult; and then back to the way it looks today, but remembering that early fall morphs into late fall with trees and bushes now naked of leaves; the almost constant motion of the water of the lake with its play of light . . . sun sparkling on gentle waves in evening transforming into delicately surface with thin shiny unreliable clean mirror-like ice; giving way as the winter draws onto thick ice;snow-covered ice; ice surfaces shoveled into hockey rinks; into figure skating rinks; into follow-the leader pathways.

Then the remembrances of the times of late winter, yearning for the solid motionless coldness to disappear so that the water would become alive again; reflecting the sky; devouring the ice floes as they came to be -- sun, rain, whipped up small waves, gentle evening stillness reflecting the roses; the oranges; the fuschias; the scarlets of the skies from sunset through dusk and into darkness.

Then the joys of spring in fits and starts; blossoms and flowering bulbs in a push-me/pull you tug of war with snow storms and ices storms until the heat of the sun and the torrents of rain or gentle showers conspire to renovate and rehabilitate the earth; the lawns; the streets; the paths that had all been inundated by the inches and feet of the white stuff -- recognizing the reality of the shapes of row boats, sail boats, paddle boats, canoes rising gradually out of their shrouds and recovering their true colors; warming up; drying out . . . waiting for children to bring oars, put on life vests, turn them over, launch them and be propelled out onto the living lakes.

Then, oh! The summer beginning gradually fully dressed; emerging from the delicate greens of mid-spring followed by the forceful conquering dark oak leaves; elm leaves; sycamore leaves; lilac bush leaves; willow sprays; shoots of tiger lilies; blooms in their time, looking back and remembering the first purple and white crocuses poking their heads out of the tired old remnants of smooth shiny white blankets of snow -- a steady white layer decorated with a kind of variable crumbling crystal covering . . . then daffodils while cherry tree blossoms make their appearance . . . then hyacinths . . . then tulips -- and do you remember the azaleas, the snowball bushes, the pear tree blossoms? The lilac hedges twenty to twenty-five feet high . . . then gladioli and irises and the rich, thick dark green carpets of northern tier lawns.

But also the parks, the woods, the forest preserves; the joy of picnics and hikes, bike riding and horseback riding . . . all with parents and family, or with friends, or even alone sometimes. . . remembering the thrills of launching down steep hills on bikes -- races, and hide and seek games, or just riding together by twos, by threes, by fives, by sevens, even. . . calling out challenges; trying to speak when the sounds of words have been left far behind; caught or not caught -- repeated or not repeated.

So even though I flew home to Georgia, sections of my heart, my mind, my soul, my spirit, my psyche, my intellect, my memory, my hope and my dreams are still held captive miles away, years away, eons away, furlongs away.

It's a good thing this kind of super-conscious and/or semi-conscious time travel in my mind still allows me to realize that I am home in the here and now.

But it still may take a few days to let go of the way it is possible to haunt the glorified past. I'll let you know.

Thanks, beloved, for "listening" . . .