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Hi, my name is Dean and in this podcast, I want to discuss the importance of healing rejection wounds.

There was an interesting study conducted by the University of California in 2003, that reveals the important truth about rejection. It’s real and it hurts.
But more than hurts, it can literally cause wounds, rejection wounds, that can actually weaken you and make you vulnerable.

The study involved scanning the brains of 13 people, nine women and 4 men, while they were playing a computer game.

It involved a simple game where the people would play catch with two other members of the group, while their brains were being scanned.

But there was a catch. While each player thought they were playing with other members of the group, in fact, they weren’t. They were playing catch with two computer simulations.

While things went smoothly for seven rounds, it changed in the eighth, when the researchers programmed the simulations to only play catch with each other ignoring the real human player.

As the simulations ignored the real players for about 40 catches, their brains were being scanned. At the end, the players were asked questions about their response to what happened, and some admitted that they found the rejection quite stressful.

The brain scans revealed two areas of activity. Not unexpectedly, this included the anterior angulate cortex which is referred to as the brain’s emotional alarm system that activates in distressing and unexpected situations.

The researchers also discovered that this area was more active, in those who reported higher levels of stress over the rejection experience.

But another area that showed activity was the right ventricle prefrontal cortex which was a bit more unusual because studies have revealed that this area of the brain used to deal with physical pain.

This meant that the rejection people were feeling associated with this computer game felt like real physical pain.

But the study also revealed that individuals were experiencing different levels of stress over the rejection. Some found it very difficult to handle.

Though I can’t be sure, it makes me wonder if the people experiencing high levels of stress were doing so because maybe they were still suffering from previously unhealed rejection wounds, which made them more sensitive to rejection, even at the lowest level.

This reflects one of the biggest struggles that we will have with rejection, and that is to not take it personally.

Unfortunately, our first inclination is to take rejection personally. But if we do, it causes wounding and will impact us emotionally. In turn, this will affect your self-worth and will impact your self-confidence.

Twice in the gospels, Jesus gave advice on how to deal with rejection and in both passages, the main message that Jesus was providing, is don’t take it personally.

In Luke 6:26, Jesus warned His Disciples, beware when all people speak well of you.

What Jesus was saying is that there are people that you don’t want to like you.
In other words, if we are living by our principles, we should not only expect rejection, but we should want it, because it validates what we stand for.

Then in Matthew 10:22, Jesus warned his disciples that people will hate them, not because of who they are, but because they actually hate Jesus.

In other words, don’t take it personally.

But there is more to it than that. We will all receive criticism for things we are doing and some of us look upon that as a form of rejection.

If you are a creative person, people may not like your work. But it is important that we separate what we do from who we are.

It would be ridiculous for you to say that I am no good because I can’t play quarterback like NFL great Tom Brady or paint like da Vinci.

I am still valued in God’s eyes and that’s what is important.

But if I don’t make this separation, then I will start taking criticism personally resulting in a rejection wound.

I remember a few months ago, someone made a comment and criticized one of my YouTube videos by stating never to trust anyone with a big mic. What has that got to do with anything?

Some criticisms are legit, and some aren’t, but either way, don’t take it personally.

And your reaction to criticism may actually reveal how personally you are taking it. Does it send you into a depression spiral? Do you start thinking you are no good and want to quit? Or maybe you go to the other extreme and get angry or outraged?

If so, these may be indicators you are taking it personally.

However, sometimes it is unavoidable because there are times when the rejection is very personal. It is about you. The person doing the rejection makes sure that the rejection is personal. You are the one being rejected.

But even in these extreme instances of rejection, it is sometimes not about you, but rather reflects problems inside the other individual.

But what happens if you do take rejection personally. Unfortunately, when we take it personally, criticism creates a rejection wound in your heart.

Several years back I worked with an organization that was often involved in politics.

It was late Friday afternoon, around 5:30, and after a busy week, I was tired and just wanted to go home when a man showed up at the office wanting to speak with someone.

He had a briefcase in one hand and a handful of brochures in another, and introduced himself as being from a recently formed political party and wanted to tell our organization what it was all about.

I had actually heard about this political party and was actually interested in finding out more, but it was 5:30, and I just wanted to go home. I was not interested in spending another two hours talking politics on a Friday night, but I was genuinely interested in finding out more about this group, so I asked if I could meet with him next week.

Could we make an appointment next week to talk about this political party.

But that wasn’t good enough, and he insisted that we talk that night.
I simply told him that I was interested and wondered if we could meet next week.

In seconds the man’s mood changed. He became irritable and said, that it was obvious I wasn’t interested, even though I told him that I was.

For the third time, I said I was interested and asked again if we could meet the next week. It was 5:30 on a Friday night, and I just wanted to go home.

In a huff, the man told me that I obviously wasn’t and abruptly turned around, walked out the door, and I never heard from him again.

This man was suffering a rejection wound. He did not hear what I was saying. Everything I said was reinterpreted through his rejection lens. He believed I was rejecting him, even though I wasn’t.

In the end, the man ended up rejecting himself, on my behalf. I didn’t reject him. He rejected himself.

This man had a deep rejection wound and because of it, he couldn’t hear or understand what I was saying.

People with rejection wounds, see rejection even when it doesn’t exist. The pastor walks past you after church without saying hi, and you think he hates you or is avoiding you.

In 1 Corinthians 2:3, the Apostle Paul makes an interesting statement in his first letter to the Corinthians. He spoke of the time that he first showed up at Corinth and how he didn’t come with lofty speeches, but approached them in ‘weakness’ and because of that he came in fear and trembling.
Paul writes quote

3 I also was with you in weakness and fear, and in great trembling, (1 Corinthians 2:3 NASV)

But notice how Paul’s weakness not only caused him to lose confidence in himself but to actually experience great trembling, even insecurity and self-doubt.

The Greek word for weakness is ‘astheneia’ and refers to a weakness both physically, like a chronic sickness. But as we can see in this verse, it also refers to emotional weakness, where we are wracked with self-doubt, insecurity, and fear.

But that Greek word anesthesia shows up in another verse, Matthew 8:17, that was used to explain part of Jesus’ mission on the earth.

It reads:

“He took up our infirmities (astheneia), and bore our diseases.”

The verse tells us that in addition to healing our diseases, the Greek word ‘nomous’, we read that Jesus also wants to take away our infirmities, our astheneia, our emotional weakness our fears, our self-doubt and insecurities and our rejection wounds.

But it’s strange because as we read through the gospels all we see are the dozens and dozens of times that Jesus miraculously healed the blind, the lame or the diseased.

Though these healings are visible throughout the gospels, that verse in Matthew puts the unseen and invisible emotional hurts first. It is almost like it is making them a priority, by putting them before sickness and disease.

It suggests that these unseen rejection wounds, these fears, and anxieties are equally important to Christ and perhaps more common because that is put first before diseases. ‘

But in this verse describing a critical part of Jesus’ ministry, the Lord wants to take hold of our infirmities. The Greek word ‘lambano’ means to take by the hand, to lay hold of and carry away.

Jesus wants to take that rejection wound, He wants to remove it. He wants to carry it away.

But if I am clutching something in my hand, in order for someone to take it away from me, something has to happen.

I have to let go and let Christ take it away.

In the case of infirmities, I have to emotionally let go and unfortunately, there is no easy way of doing this. In order to let go, we must forgive. We must forgive those who rejected us.

Only then can the healing process begin.

READ: Rejection really hurts finds brain study (newscientist.com: October 3, 2003)

Hi, my name is Wayne Johnston, and in this podcast, I want to share what happened a couple of weeks ago at a men’s fellowship meeting.

Normally, it is not my thing to get up early on a Saturday morning and to get together with others, but there is something about this community fellowship where I live, that I really like.

It’s because there are a number of brothers who come from different churches all with the same purpose; what does God want to do in our town and in our own lives, and how can we accommodate that?

So the other week, we had a couple of new brothers from a Baptist church, and all was friendly and great.

And as soon as the leader opened in prayer, I got this vision from God.

It was very brief, but I shared it after he had opened in prayer. And what it was is that I saw from a bird’s eye view two box cars being coupled together.

The couplers on a train boxcar are massive fist-like structures and when they click into one another they hold those boxcars firmly together.

I don’t deliberately go to a church meeting or anything like that with a word or a vision beforehand. But often what happens is I’ll go to the meeting and I will get it, as we are going to start up.

Because I have a prophetic gift, I try to present it to the Lord and just be open when I am in a circumstance like that, so God can tap me on the shoulder, and give me something to encourage others.

So with this vision, I saw these boxcars being coupled together. I quickly shared that it was like God was joining us together from different churches.

And it may seem obvious to one and all, but an engine by itself is not a train and an engine by itself doesn’t usually run down a track.

Most trains are a mixture of different types of boxcars, flat cars, car carriers, hoppers, and tankers. There may be specialized cars as well.

They all have two things in common. They all have the same exact couplers to join them together, and they all have the same air hoses that connect to each other.

When a boxcar is by itself on a siding, how the brakes work on a train, as I understand them, is that the brakes are on automatically. In fact, even if it is on a bit of a hill, the brakes are on.

And that boxcar may be sitting on a siding full of wonderful gifts for somebody, but it won’t move until it’s hooked up to an engine and those air hoses are hooked up to the box car.

Because it is the compressor from the engine that sends air all the way down to the end of the train, and it’s this air that opens those brakes, allowing the train to move.

Sometimes, when we are not hooked up the way we should be with God’s train, we may not be going too far, too fast.

No breath from the engine, no life, no go.

Sometimes, our Heavenly Father hooks us up with some interesting characters. I may think that I am exceptional and that I am special, and that I should have a place right behind the engine, in front of everyone else, because of my wonderful gifts.

But I may be on a long train, right at the end with live pigs in front of me and a car full of rusted scrap iron behind me. That may be my place for a while.

If that train is going to fulfill its mission or its mandate, it must be hooked up to others and sometimes, God hooks us up with those in front and back, who we may not choose for ourselves, but it is not the boxcar’s decision.

At times trains are made up of boxcars from different denominations, I mean different railways. Sometimes, you will see a train with engines and cars from several different companies, all working together.

And often you hear the thing from the world’s point of view that churches are so divided, and always fighting, and you never do anything.

You know that’s not my experience with this men’s group. We get together with different gifts, with the purpose that the train is going to go down the track and fulfill its mandate.

In Ephesians 4:16, a familiar verse, we read:

16 from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.

The Greek word used here for joined means, “to render close, jointed together or be fitly framed together.”

At the end of the meeting, we were all joking and coming up with the fact that ‘hey, we got a new secret handshake for our men’s group,’ we are all going to come up to each other and join our hands like train couplers.

But you know at the end of the meeting, an older dignified gentleman, who was apparently a retired teacher. He was a Baptist brother, and it was his first time there. At the end of the meeting, this brother looked at me, and he thanked me for the encouraging word.

“All aboard!”

Hi, my name is Dean Smith and in this podcast, I want to discuss how to avoid becoming your mistake.

I was working for an organization several years back and one of my responsibilities was publishing a newspaper.

We had just sent our latest edition to the printer and I remember the moment that someone dropped off samples of the freshly printed edition and the first thing I noticed was a small typo on the very front page.

I don’t know how many times we had proofed those pages, but one mistake had slipped through. The last place you want a typo is on the cover page.

I don’t know how long I stared at the typo before returning to my other responsibilities. That mistake would have to be dealt with later.

As my work day came to an end, I gathered up my things and trudged out to my car for the drive home.

The real war was about to begin.

I opened the car door, sat down and I just stared out the front window into the near-empty parking lot.

When I made these mistakes, I could not just walk away from them. I needed to be punished.

I needed to tell myself how stupid I was for letting that typo slip through. I needed to tell myself I was an idiot.

And it wasn’t enough to just think these thoughts, I actually said them out loud. Sometimes I screamed at myself.

I would say out loud how stupid I was. I would call myself an idiot. I would call myself a loser.

But just before I could start this barrage of self-hatred, something else happened.

The Holy Spirit showed up and began urging me not to do it.

God wanted to break this pattern that had followed me for decades where I hated myself, beating myself up because of the mistakes I made, sometime over the misspelling of a single word.

As I desperately wanted to call myself stupid, the Holy Spirit was inside telling me it was a lie.

I have no idea how long I sat in the car struggling to scream at myself and the Holy Spirit saying don’t do it. I probably sat there for an hour.

What was really strange was how scared I got, when the Holy Spirit was gaining the upper hand as I struggle not to condemn myself.

In some twisted, sick way, these expressions of self-hatred actually comforted me, because I deserved it and not doing it was so foreign to me, it was scary.

But it was all a lie. Because though I had made a mistake I was now trying to become the mistake. I was trying to turn myself into the mistake.

The Holy Spirit won that day, and that hour I sat in the car, became a watershed moment for me.

Now some of you may not have been extreme as me. Maybe you only think these thoughts that I verbally hurled at myself.

Or maybe, you are even more extreme, I remember many years back, I was praying for a teenage boy after a service. Maybe I saw something in him, that reminded me of him, but I felt God revealed to me that this boy was actually hating himself so much, he was actually hitting himself with his fists.

But many of us suffer to varying degrees with this. You see we all make mistakes, but it doesn’t mean you are a mistake. But by doing what I did, I was internalizing my mistakes. I became the mistake.

That day, there was a battle taking place in my mind as the Holy Spirit was trying to change my thinking patterns.

And this is the battle the Apostle Paul was referring to in Romans 12:2 when he wrote:

2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

The Greek word, metamorphoō, translated transformed in this verse, is where we get the Greek word metamorphosis which describes the process when a caterpillar builds a cocoon, dissolves, and then reforms into a completely new creature, a butterfly that is so different it can no longer eat the same thing when it was a caterpillar to survive.

As believers, God wants to transform us into a new creation. In fact, Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:17, that we are a new creation, so in a sense God wants us to become what we already are.

This is how God sees you and the Lord wants you to become what you already are.

But most of us make a mistake and believe that this transformation takes place when we are born again by the Spirit of God, but that is not what this verse says. It reads that we are transformed by the renewing of our mind, literally changing the way we think. The way we think about ourselves and the way we think about God.

This remarkable transformation is actually a two-stage process.

First, we must forget those things that are behind us. That behind can refer to a mistake you made an hour ago, to the one you made ten years ago, but you are still hounded by the memory of it.

Paul writes:

13 Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, 14 I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:13-14 NKJV)

I don’t know if you are like me, but throughout the day I often have thoughts dropping into my mind of things that I did in the past. Some were sins. Some were stupid. Many were mistakes.

The Greek word for forgetting, and I won’t bother trying to say it, means to neglect or disregard. It talks of purposefully forgetting those things we did in the past.

But in this verse, Paul states, that it is not that he had apprehended, which I think means, that he had not perfected this act of forgetting, but he was in the process of doing it.

One of the things that Paul needed to forget is that he actually participated in the stoning of Stephen, the church’s first martyr.

Paul, who at this point is called Saul, didn’t actually throw any stones, but we are told the ones who did, actually left their robes with Paul to take care of, before they executed Stephen (Acts 7:58) and we are told in Acts 8:1, Paul approved of Stephen’s execution.

Paul had chosen to purposefully forget his involvement in Stephen’s execution.

We need to start controlling our thought life. When these memories of past shameful things we did pop into our minds, we can’t dwell on them. We can’t let them beat you down, you must deliberately put them out of your mind.

We need to realize that failure and mistakes are a part of life. Everyone makes mistakes, the key difference is in how we handle them.

Look thoughts can pop into our minds of things we did in the past.

They can bring feelings of shame, guilt, condemnation and regret for things we did or didn’t do.

But for many of these thoughts, there is nothing that can be done to undo them. We can’t go back in time and change the past. Since there is nothing we can do, those memories have only one purpose they are there to beat us up and to condemn us and we must respond by choosing to block those memories.

An important part of this is accepting ourselves as flawed human beings who have and will continue to make mistakes. It’s part of life and we just have to accept it.

But then there is a second stage, that we need to do.

And that is found buried in the middle of one of the worst chapter breaks in the Bible. Just for the record, the Bible’s chapter breaks and verses are not inspired and they were added centuries later.

But in Matthew 4 we read that Jesus had just come off a 40-day fast and was led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan and the first temptation that Satan threw at Jesus was in verse 3 which reads:

“If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.”

Satan was in Christ’s face, challenging Him, saying if you are the Son of God, prove it, show me your power, turn this stone into bread.

So how did Jesus respond?

His answer was actually quite bizarre because the Lord said:

“‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

What words was Jesus referring to?

Well most of us miss it because of the chapter break which leaves the impression that what happened in the previous chapter is unconnected.

Because in the very last verse of Matthew chapter 3, essentially four verses earlier, we have the story of Jesus’ baptism and in the very final verse of chapter 3, we read how the Holy Spirit descended upon Christ and God spoke from heaven saying:

“This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

What Jesus was actually saying to Satan is that His identity as the Son of God was not based on what He did or didn’t accomplish, Christ’s identity was based on whom God said Jesus was.

Because if Jesus’ sonship was based on what He did then Jesus was the son of God when He raised Lazarus from the dead but the Lord wasn’t the son of God when we read that he couldn’t perform many miracles in Nazareth because of their unbelief (Matthew 13:58).

At the very beginning of His ministry, Jesus had determined that His identity was based on whom God said He was, not on what Jesus did or didn’t do.

And this is a critical part of the mind-renewing process. We must not only forget and continue to forget what we have done in the past, we must choose to believe and embrace our new identity in Christ.

We are a child of God because of what Christ did on the cross. We are co-heirs with Christ. We are a new creation.

One way to stop those negative memories from the past that drop into your mind is at the time they happen you need to declare your true identity in Christ.

But reading Bible verses and knowing in your mind that you are a child of God, and believing in your heart that you actually are, are two completely different realities.

Look it is going to be a struggle, much in the same way the butterfly has to fight to break out of its cocoon, this struggle is vital, because the butterfly’s struggle to break free is what pushes fluid into the veins of its wings strengthening and preparing them for flight.

Without that struggle, the butterfly would be unable to fly. So in a similar way, your struggle to forget your past and embrace your identity in Christ is an important part of the process of change.

Thanks for joining me on this podcast, and I will catch you again.

Hi, my name is Alexander, and I am talking about a controversy that is growing among Christians.

Should a Christian be a Vegetarian? Does that make us spiritual and bring us closer to God?

Recently, the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church spoke about eating meat. The quote is, apparently: “Eating meat is part of a self-destructive trend.” He did not say that Christians should be vegetarians, but his comment did not encourage eating meat.

So, what do you believe?

You have probably noticed that we are surrounded by sincere believers, in many things, and some of them are angry.

We have different religions, We also have climate change activists, and we still have activists for and against COVID restrictions and vegetarians, and their polar opposites, carnivores.

When I buy groceries, there is always a section of vegetarian food, in the grocery store. Also, fast food places like to advertise their not-meat that tastes and looks just like meat, but it isn’t.

Vegan Vegetarianism is not just a choice, it’s a sincere belief. The most devout Vegan believers think the whole world should be like them. Some are working to change the whole world, and they expect to succeed.

We will all be vegetarians, someday; they believe.

Vegetarians have been part of human history, for thousands of years.

Vegan beliefs probably started in India, three or four thousand years ago, and that means the first vegetarians were probably Hindu. Vegetarian ideas were religious beliefs.

Jewish people had dietary or “Kosher” restrictions, in their worship of God. Also, the religion of Islam has “Halal” restrictions. Both groups, today, reject vegetarian not-meat which is imitation pork. They don’t eat pork, and they don’t even want imitation, although their religious diets are not vegetarian.

Among Christians, Seventh Day Adventists may be vegetarians. Since the founding of their movement, in 1863, the group has emphasized diet as a religious practice. Some choose to follow the Old Testament restrictions in the book of Leviticus, including no pork or shellfish.

Others follow partial vegetarian diets with animal products like milk and eggs, and some are strict Vegan Vegetarians.

Also, if you go to a restaurant, check the menu for the daily specials. Probably, the special on Friday is fish. That is from a Roman Catholic tradition of not eating meat on Friday. This helped avoid some types of meat, at least on Friday, and that has influenced restaurant menus.

Vegan beliefs circulated among the first Christians, and they are mentioned in the New Testament.

Some of the first Christians were vegetarians. We don’t know much about them, but they are mentioned in the Bible. The Apostle Paul talks about Christians who only ate vegetables and described them as being “weak.”

Some Christians were concerned that the meat sold in the markets had been sacrificed in temples to pagan gods, and such contaminated meat would somehow affect them spiritually. Possibly they just stopped eating all meat, instead of selecting meat by its source.

Whatever caused some Christians to be vegetarians, we have these words:

“One person believes he may eat anything, while the weak person eats only vegetables.” (Romans 14: 2)

This was a picture of life among the first Christians.

In contrast, when the early disciples thought they were seeing the ghost of Jesus, Luke writes that Jesus proved he was alive by eating boiled fish in their presence (Luke 24::41-43).

The false principle is the same everywhere: True believers must control what they eat, or drink, if they want to be correctly spiritual.

So, what is the religious truth about not eating meat?

First, believe. We are wired to believe. An Atheist is a believer.

Secondly, find the truth that will set you free. This is different from ideas that are just interesting and appealing.

We are warned, in the Bible, that some bad things will happen at the end of our time in history. Some people who follow “deceitful spirits and teachings of demons” will teach religious ideas that are dangerous. They will “forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods” (1 Timothy 4:1 and 3).

In other words, they will promote salvation through abstinence. ‘Don’t do this, and you will be saved.’

This is like a magician’s trick. What we believe will be switched to something that looks the same, but is completely different.

We will be taught that we find the truth in don’ts instead of dos. ‘Jesus saves’ changes to ‘abstinence saves.’

This was a big concern among the first Christians. There is a truth much higher than abstinence:

Paul writes:

But food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do. (1 Corinthians 8 v 8) … Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother or sister to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause them to fall (v 13).

The choice to not eat meat was based on a concern for a brother or sister’s spiritual welfare. For someone who ate meat, the sacrifice was not too great, if it kept someone from falling in their relationship with God. The truth higher than dietary rules was love for brothers and sisters.

Hi, my name is Dean Smith, and in this podcast, I want to discuss one of the more thorny issues in the church today and that is giving.

More specifically, do believers need to tithe?

This topic was recently thrown into the limelight through the surprising admission by a popular televangelist, Creflo Dollar, who stated publicly that he was wrong about tithing.

As a prosperity preacher, Creflo basically taught if people gave, God would bless them. Of course, tithing was a foundational part of his prosperity message.

But in that sermon he preached on June 26, 2022, entitled ‘The Great Misunderstanding”, Creflo basically admitted that his teaching on tithing was wrong.

He told his congregation quote:

“… I will say that I have no shame at all at saying to you throw away every book, every tape, and every video, I ever did on the subject of tithing, unless it lines up with this (held up his Bible).”

“So why is this important?,” Creflo continued. “Because religion is sustained by two factors, fear and guilt. And there’s one subject that the church has used, for a long time, to keep people in fear and guilt, it is the subject of tithing, and it has to be corrected. And it’s got to be corrected now.”

Acknowledging that he will probably lose some ‘friends’ over the sermon, code for other fellow televangelists and prosperity preachers, Creflo added that the concept of giving 10% of your income is an Old Testament law and does not apply to the church, which lives under grace.

And he did take some heat for this and bizarrely some who had previously criticized Creflo for his prosperity message are now criticizing him for changing his opinion on tithing.

Creflo summed it up by stating that giving is an act of worship. There is nothing wrong with giving 10%, but here is the key, he said it is not mandatory.

So is Creflo right?

In a nutshell, I believe he is.

But to answer that question, we need to find out what the Mosaic law had to say about tithing. There were actually three tithes mentioned in the Old Testament law.

The first was called the Sacred Tithe and it’s the one we are most familiar with.

Found in Numbers 18:21-24, the Israelis paid 10% of the increase of their flocks and crops to the tribe of Levi.

This is because, when the 12 tribes of Israel claimed their inheritance in the Promised Land, the land was divided among 11 tribes, not twelve, as the Tribe of Levi did not receive any territory.

You see, the Levites had a different role in Jewish society. Living scattered in cities across Israel, they were responsible for teaching the law to the Jews. They also served as workers assisting the priests in the tabernacle and the temple, and as well served as musicians and singers.

But we also see from certain passages, such as Numbers 1:53, that the Levites had a police role, guarding the temple and tabernacle. As part of this, six of the Levite cities were designated as cities of refuge, where people who accidentally killed someone could flee and the Levites would provide protection from retaliation.

In Numbers 18:25-28, the Levites were then instructed to give a tithe of their tithe to the priests who performed the sacrifices in the tabernacle and temple. The priests, who were also of the tribe of Levi, differed in that they were descendants of Israel’s first High Priest Aaron.

The second was the pilgrimage tithe mentioned in Deuteronomy 14:22-27. The Israelis actually set this tithe aside for themselves, providing them savings they would need to attend the three pilgrimage feasts on Israel’s religious calendar, Passover, the Feast of Pentecost, and the feast of tabernacles.

Though there was a religious element to these feasts, it was also break from farming and could be considered a family or vacation time when they journeyed to Jerusalem.

Considering that one of the feasts, the Feast of Tabernacles, involved setting up booths mimicking Israel’s journey in the wilderness, the kids would have loved it.

This is the unique thing about this tithe, it was set aside for the person and the family.

The third involved a tithe for the poor mentioned in (Deuteronomy 14:28-29). It was collected every third year by the community and was set aside for both the poor and the Levites.

As we move into the New Testament and the formation of the early church, we see some major structural changes.

This is largely because the Levites and priesthood were no longer relevant to the early church, because in 1 Corinthians 3:16-17; and Ephesians 2:20-22 we are told that the church and believers are now the temple of God. And the Apostle Peter writes in 1 Peter 2:9, that every believer is now a priest and the priests were the only ones exempt from paying a tithe.

This was all finalized when God allowed the destruction of the Jewish Temple by the Romans in 70 AD.

Essentially the Mosaic tithe is no longer relevant or applicable to believers because the tribe of Levi was no longer needed.

Now there are those who hold that believers should pay tithes and point to a couple of things.

First, there were two instances of tithing prior to the Mosaic law, which may suggest that tithing was a universal principle, that existed before the law.

The first involved a one-time tithe that the Patriarch Abraham paid to a Priest-King Melchizedek shortly after Abraham had successfully defeated several kings who had taken Lot and his family captive.

But, it was not actually a tithe of what Abraham owned, rather it was a tithe of the plunder he collected from the battle with the five kings.

We read:

4 See how great this man was to whom Abraham the patriarch gave a tenth of the spoils! (Hebrews 7:4 ESV)

Because the writer of Hebrews states this Melchizedek priesthood is actually superior to the Levitical one and continues to this day through Jesus, some suggest this tithe is still applicable to the church.

But, even so, it was a one-time thanksgiving payment and one that Abraham voluntarily gave.

The second tithe involved one that Jacob pledged to the House of God in Genesis 28:22. This was the spot where Jacob had a dream of a stairway or ladder to heaven with angels going up and coming down.

Jacob took the stone that he had used as a pillow, declared this small rock to be the House of God and then pledged a tithe to the House of God.

Of course, there was no tabernacle or temple in existence at that point, so who did Jacob actually pledge his tithe too?

It was a problem that the ancient rabbis picked up on as well, and they said that Jacob, who was later called Israel, actually paid this tithe when one of his sons, Levi, would be dedicated to the work in the House of God. They believe this was Jacob’s tithe.

Those who promote tithing for believers also point to a statement that Jesus made that seemed to support tithing.

We read:

23 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. (Matthew 23:23)

Even though Jesus said tithing was less important than justice, mercy and faithfulness, the Lord did imply they should practice it.

But along a similar vein in Matthew 5:23-24, Jesus also encouraged people to reconcile with anyone they may have offended before making their sacrifices at the temple.

In the same fashion are we to take from this statement that believers should continue making animal sacrifices?

Of course, not.

Obviously, Christ’s death on the cross brought a massive change in the Kingdom of God.

The temple and its sacrificial system were no longer needed, and along with it, the tithe needed to keep it running.

But since believers, are no longer under the law, are Christians expected to give?

The answer is Yes.

And in 2 Corinthians 9:6-7, the Apostle Paul lays out several principles about giving.

We read:

6 The point is this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. 7 Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. (2 Corinthians 9:6-7)

From this passage we can pull five principles about giving:

And finally, throughout the New Testament, we find multiple encouragements to support those who are preaching the gospel and as well to support the poor.

But even among these several references, there is no mention of tithes.

I think Creflo is right.

Giving is an act of worship and there is nothing wrong with tithing if you want, but it is not mandatory.

Instead, God prefers we give, because we want to give.

READ: Creflo Dollar: Some of My Teachings About Tithing ‘Were Not Correct’ AND US Pastor Creflo Dollar tells congregation to throw away his books and tapes on tithing, says he got the subject wrong

Hi my name is Dean Smith and in this podcast, I want to talk about the only time that Jesus asked if a person was healed after praying for him

We have no idea how many people Jesus healed during his three-year ministry, hundreds, maybe thousands.

But in all these healings only once did Jesus ask if a person was healed.

It was like the Holy Spirit was planting a massive neon sign beside this healing to tell us it was different and we need to keep an eye on this miracle because there was more going on here than meets the eye.

And it wasn’t until a couple of thousand years later that a strange thing happened that would turn this miraculous healing on its head.

A few months back, someone by th,e name of Jimmy Cricket, obviously a pseudonym, made a comment on one of my YouTube videos.

I have no idea who this person was, but he had an old black and white photo of a young Fidel Castro smoking a cigar for his thumbnail, so that may hint at his political leanings.

But he made this statement, writing:

“The Bible provides no evidence of anything.”

His accusation is that the Bible is not a historical document and can not be used as evidence that an event actually took place or a person actually existed.

Of course, the Bible talks about dozens of secular people such as the infamous Pontius Pilate, the Roman official who ruled over Christ’s trial and ordered the Lord’s crucifixion.

Though we have known about Pontius Pilate for nearly two thousand years, the first archaeological evidence confirming Pilate’s existence did not show up until 1961, when archaeologists discovered a 31” by 29,” what they refer to as the Pilate stone, near the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre in Caesarea, where Pilate dedicated a temple to the Roman Emperor Tiberius.

Or how about Mesha, the King of Moab mentioned in 2 Kings 3:4-27 that was written over 3,000 years ago? His existence was only confirmed in 1869, when archaeologists found a stone monument, called the Mesha or Moabite stele, where King Mesha commemorated his victory over the Israelites.

But in this podcast, I want to focus on a miracle that took place during the ministry of Jesus that provides evidence right within the text itself that the miracle actually took place.

Though, there have been discoveries, like the Ipuwer papyrus. which provides a description of the plagues that God poured on Egypt during Israel’s exodus, but from an Egyptian perspective, normally we have to take Biblical miracles by faith.

But there is one instance where the Biblical text actually provides evidence that the miracle took place.

That miracle is found in the book of Mark.

Mark tells us that Jesus and the disciples had ended up in Bethsaida, now we need to understand that Jesus and the people of this town had a history, and it wasn’t a good one.

In Matthew 11:21, Bethsaida was one of two cities that Jesus condemned stating that despite all the miracles Christ had performed there it never repented, adding that if the pagan cities of Tyre and Sidon had seen similar miracles they would have repented centuries ago.

So, there was tension in the air when Jesus and the disciples arrived for another visit. And we are told that a group simply called “they” brought a blind man to Jesus and asked the Lord to touch him and heal him.

But a couple of strange things happened in relation to this miracle.

First Jesus took the blind man out of the town into the country, we are told. It is uncertain why, but maybe the Lord wasn’t going to waste another miracle on this town.

Then Christ spit on the man’s eyes and then touched him, we read:

23 Taking the blind man by the hand, He brought him out of the village; and after spitting on his eyes and laying His hands on him, He asked him, “Do you see anything?” 24 And he looked up and said, “I see men, for I see them like trees, walking around.” 25 Then again He laid His hands on his eyes; and he looked intently and was restored, and began to see everything clearly. 26 And He sent him to his home, saying, “Do not even enter the village.” (Mark 8:23-26 NASV)

But here in this passage, Jesus asked the man if he was healed. Jesus asked the man what he saw.

As I mentioned earlier, this is the only time Jesus asked anyone if they were healed.

What was so strange about this miracle that Jesus would need to do this?

Did the Lord sense there was something different about this healing?

Or did the Holy Spirit lead Jesus to do this as a way of underlining this miracle, telling us that there was something unique going on here and we needed to pay special attention?

When the man answered that he saw men walking as trees, Jesus laid His hands on his eyes, and the man’s eyesight was completely restored, and the Bible says he could see clearly.

People have a lot of opinions about what happened here.

Some in the faith movement suggest that Jesus need more faith to complete this healing.

Others argued that its evidence that healing can come in stages. It can be progressive.

Others have wondered if it has a connection to Mark 4:12 where Jesus says people were seeing but not perceiving or understanding what they were seeing.

And Mark hints at this when he uses two different Greek words to describe the man’s ability to see.

When we read this passage we find the word “see” used several times.

The first two times, Mark uses the Greek word ‘blepo’ that refers to the physical act of seeing, which was used when Jesus asked what the man saw and the man answered he saw men walking as trees.

But Mark uses a different Greek word to describe the man as seeing clearly after he had been touched a second and his sight was completely restored.

It is the compound word ’emblepo’ and means to focus on and according to Strong’s Greek Dictionary means “metaphorically to look at with the mind. To consider.”

It seems to add a mental aspect to the seeing.

But there was much more going on in this passage than just that and I suspect it is this latter thing that is the real reason why the Holy Spirit emphasized this miracle.

But to find the answer to that, we need to hit the fast forward button and make sure you stop when you reach the year 1991, where we will take a look at an eye procedure done on a man named Shirl Jennings, aged 50 at time.

Shirl, who died in 2003, had been blind since he was ten years old after being diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa. It is a condition that attacks the retina affecting how it responds to light and can result in permanent blindness.

Dr. Oliver Sacks, now deceased, was a professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Centre in New York, when he wrote an article in 1993 entitled, TO SEE AND NOT SEE, for The New Yorker.

In the article, he told of the strange thing that happened to Shirl when he received his sight after basically a lifetime of blindness, becoming only one of a few people to have experienced this, including the man at Bethsaida.

In 1991, Shirl’s girlfriend was seeing an eye doctor, Dr. Trevor Woodhams, because of her diabetes. After telling him about Shirl, Woodhams encouraged her to have Shirl come to see him because though Shirl had been diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, Woodhams wasn’t convinced that was the problem because Shirl could still see light.

In fact, Shirl had very thick cataracts on his eyes and after Woodhams removed them incredibly Shirl was able to see.

But there was a problem.

Sacks quotes a passage from the journal written by Shirl’s girlfriend that stated for several weeks Shirl struggled to see properly.
She wrote that Shirl:

“… often felt more disabled than he had felt when he was blind… Steps posed a special hazard because all he could see was a confusion, a flat surface of parallel and crisscrossing lines; he could not see them (although he knew them) as solid objects going up or coming down in three-dimensional place.”

She added that the cat was a real challenge. Though Shirl recognized the various parts of the cat such as its paws, tail and ears, he was not able to visualize these separate parts as a complete unit.

Sacks described what was happening, writing:

“His retina and optic nerve were active, transmitting impulses, but his brain could make no sense of them.”

But then Shirl’s girlfriend made a statement in her journal that is oddly similar to our blind man in Mark. She said that it took several weeks before Shirl could see the branches, leaves and trunk as being part of a single tree.

And this was exactly the same problem that the blind man was having when he saw men walking as trees. The images of the men and trees were all merged together and they were not making sense to him. They looked like one unit.

Though it took several weeks for Shirl to finally sort this out, when Jesus prayed for the blind man in Mark a second time, he was able to see clearly.

In fact, this was not a two-stage healing, like Shirl, the blind man would have eventually learned to see properly to distinguish the different images.

And here is the incredible thing about this story. That statement, ‘I see men walking as trees’ is proof of a miracle taking place because only a man who had been healed of a lifetime of blindness would have had that problem.

We didn’t know about this until modern medicine was able to restore sight to a blind man about 2,000 years later.

I think we have a pattern developing here. Pontius Pilate was mentioned in the Bible in the first century AD, confirmed in 1961. Then King Mesha, an Old Testament king, whose confirmation is found in an old Moabite Stele discovered nearly three thousand years later, and now a man who saw men walking as trees, his miracle is confirmed in 1991.

The Bible is the word of God and we can trust it.

Sources:

Hi, my name is Dean Smith and in this podcast, I want to talk about our secret thoughts. The things we secretly think about ourselves.

Many of us have secrets. Things we think, but have never told anyone.

We secretly wonder if God really loves us, or if God loves others more than you. We wonder if we could ever be good enough to be used by God? Does God really have a purpose for your life? Are we good enough to serve God?

Sure, on the outside, things look great, but on the inside, these secret thoughts swirl around in our minds.

What is behind this?

We may have a clue from an article published in 1994 in the Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion that reported on the odd connection between how children perceived God and how they perceived their parents.

The study asked 153 children to rank how they perceived God on a number of characteristics, such as kindness, love, patience, and warmth, and then asked them to judge their parents on those same characteristics.

The researchers found that despite differences in race, religion or financial status, the children visualized God in the same way they visualized their parents.

And this connection should not surprise us. Because God created parents to have that important role in a child’s life.

In Genesis 1:26, we are told that God created humans in the image and likeness of God.

Likeness implies that we are similar to God. We think, have emotions, and a will, and these similarities allow us to have a relationship with God.

But the Hebrew word for image, ‘tselem’, has a completely different spin on it. The word means representation. We are to represent what God is like.

In fact, this Hebrew word is used throughout the Old Testament to describe idols.

It is used in the ten commandments, telling the Hebrews that they were not to make any idols or graven images (as the King James Bible quaintly described them), in Exodus 20:4.

But this unique word also leaves the impression that humans were to function as the idols representing God, not something made of wood or stone.

This leads to the bigger question. What purpose would it serve to have humans, you and me, be the idols that represent God?

I mean I could say to you really look Divine today, and of course, would reply Ditto to you, Dean.

And having gone through that routine, what else does it accomplish?

Well, I believe it was done for the children, who as they interacted with their parents, would gain an understanding of who God was and what God was like.

This would serve as a natural bridge for them to develop their own personal relationship with God, their Heavenly Father, as they matured and became adults.

But then sin entered the world and this idol that was intended to represent God was horribly scarred and cracked, and because of that children developed wrong and often flawed perceptions of what God was like.

Unfortunately, these flawed perceptions typically follow us into adulthood.

In 1999, Catholic psychologist, Paul Vitz caused quite a stir among atheists when he wrote a book entitled, Faith of the Fathers: The Psychology of Atheism, where he examined the family life of many renowned atheists, like Madelyn Murray O’Hair, Voltaire and Nietzsche.

And he noticed that they all had one caustic similarity, they came from homes where their fathers were either very abusive or absent. As they got older, their response to this flawed perception of God, was not to believe in God at all.

Though we haven’t gone to the extreme of these atheists, many of us to some extent have a distorted image of God, largely because of our parents.

Our parents weren’t perfect and neither are we, so it applies to our children as well.

Because of this, we may struggle by believing that God prefers others over you like your parents preferred your brother or sister over you.

We may think that no matter what we do, it is never good enough for God.

We may think that we will never amount to anything in the Kingdom of God because that was hammered into us by our mom or dad.

We may find it difficult to trust God because you couldn’t trust your dad. I know one man, who had a horrible time trusting God, and it could be traced back to his narcissistic earthly father, who time and time again, would give his son permission to borrow the family car and then at the last moment change his mind. When this man was in his 70s and 80s, he was still talking about the behavior of his earthly father.

At other times, we are scared to do anything because if you make a mistake, God will punish you. Because, no matter what we did, it was never good enough.

We struggle to believe that God loves us unconditionally because our parent’s love was always conditional.

Our obedience to God is driven by guilt, as your parents guilted you into obedience.

This list is endless.

So how do we break free from these false perceptions of God?

In Matthew 18:21, Peter asked Jesus how many times he had to forgive his brother, seven times. Now, Peter thought he was being overly generous, because the Jewish rabbis taught, based on a misinterpretation of prophecies in Amos, that a person only needed to forgive three times, and then on the fourth, you could let them have it.

In other words, Peter was thinking he was twice as good as the best rabbi, but then Jesus replied seventy-times-seven.

Essentially, Jesus was saying we need to forgive indefinitely. I mean who could keep track of forgiving someone 490 times and if you did manage to do that you really have to wonder if the person had forgiven the 489 times previous.

But the seventy-times-seven principle may mean something else.

Because I think there are times you may have to forgive an incident more than once. I am not talking about forgiving 490 different incidents, but forgiving a single incidence 490 times.

Let me explain.

I was in my late twenties, and I can still vividly remember the day I was walking down 11th avenue in our city, and I had a flashback of an incident that happened to me years earlier as I was growing up.

There were thousands of things that happened to me as a kid, that I couldn’t remember even if you paid me, but there were four I couldn’t forget.

And for no explainable reason, I would periodically get these same four memories flashing through my mind.

They were always the same and were as clear and as alive to me, as the day they happened years earlier.

I had been getting these flashbacks for years, but this time I asked God why I was getting them. I felt the Holy Spirit say that I was still getting them because there was still an emotion attached to them, such as anger, betrayal, or shame, that was keeping these memories alive.

And the Holy Spirit told me that I needed to forgive what happened to me and those who were involved, my parents.

And I began to do this. I forgave each of those incidents and I thought it was done.

Then late one night, I got another lesson on forgiveness as I pulled into the driveway of our home. I can still remember the headlights lighting up our house and something triggered one of those flashbacks.

It surprised me because I had previously forgiven the incident. I wondered what was going on, but then I felt that the Holy Spirit was urging me to forgive again.

That is when I learned that the seventy-times-seven principle can also refer to layers of forgiveness.

Forgiveness is like an onion. We forgive and one layer is pulled off. But there are more layers left. And over time, the Holy Spirit will lead you to forgive again, and maybe again, and then one day the onion has disappeared.

Jesus described that final step as forgiving from the heart in Matthew 18:35. Of course, this principle applies to all areas of forgiveness, not just the areas involving our parents.

I remember being plagued by those memories. I remember the name of the street where I asked God about those flashbacks.

But today I can’t remember what they were about, except one, and that is because as I forgave and forgave again, this broke the emotional attachment that kept these memories alive.

For the first time, these flashbacks finally had a chance to grow old.

But as I was working on this podcast, oddly one of those memories came back to me and I wondered if there was more I needed to forgive.

It involved a football game in high school. I was on the team, and I had finally talked my dad into coming to the game. We were playing a very tough team, and I ended up lined up against a strong player and I was getting beaten all the time.

In fact, the coach was pulling me from the game, but then he would send me back in. I knew my dad was watching and It must have been hugely embarrassing for him, as I am sure the other parents were talking.

But by the second half, I was finally able to make the necessary adjustments and I was doing quite a bit better and other players were being pulled because of their play.

And I remember looking up to see if my dad was still there and I saw he was gone.

That was my flashback that had been rehearsed again and again in my mind, looking up and seeing he was gone.

Though I had forgiven my dad, I wondered why I was still having this memory. Sometimes, it is not always clear what we need to forgive, and I felt God saying that I needed to forgive my dad for specifically giving up on me.

You see God never gives up on us, but sometimes we believe He has.

Look, I don’t want to dump on our parents, because they went through the same stuff with their mom and dad, who went through it with theirs and we have done the same to our kids.

And I am not suggesting every time you have a flashback, that it means you may need to forgive. I am just suggesting that it may not always be the pizza.

I believe the journey to wholeness, and a proper relationship with God must invariably go through our parents.

I read an interesting article a while back on CBN entitled Holy Spirit Outpouring by Vernell Windsor where she talked about a church service she attended in North Carolina with a friend.

During the service, she became so drunk in the Spirit, that she could no longer stand and was crawling around on her hands and knees.

But not only that she also experienced periods of weeping, where in her words she “got all snotty nosed.” And then she went through periods of intense laughter as the Holy Spirit fell upon her.

And this article brought back fond memories of the day people at the church my wife and I attended, returned from visiting the Toronto Blessing, a powerful outpouring of the Holy Spirit that took place at Airport Christian Fellowship in Toronto, Canada in 1994.

And they brought with them, a deposit of the Holy Spirit, that literally flowed out of them into our church. As they began praying for people, dozens were slain in the spirit. Others were experiencing contagious bouts of laughter and weeping.

When the Holy Spirit fell upon my wife, she was no longer able to stand and collapsed on the floor and began experiencing an intense travailing type of prayer, no words, just intense groaning.

And, it was not limited to church services.

I remember the time my wife was in our kitchen getting a cup of coffee. We were talking about something that was happening in our church and suddenly the Holy Spirit came upon her.

I grabbed her cup before she collapsed to the floor, and she went into an intense time of groaning intercession presumably about what we had been talking about. During these times she had no idea what she was praying for,

But it wasn’t just happening at the Toronto Blessing, it was also happening in the early church.

The Apostle Paul wrote:

26 Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. (Romans 8:26 ESV)

Paul just casually mentioned how the Holy Spirit prays through people with groanings that were too deep for words. And then he provides absolutely no explanation on what he is talking about and just presumes that the Romans would know.

And it wasn’t until I saw this happening to my wife did I fully understand what Paul was describing in this verse.

This was normal Christianity for first-century church.

Paul also mentioned in his letter to the Galatians that he was experiencing similar birth pang prayers for the Galatians.

“My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you” (Galatians 4:19).

And in our church, this outpouring of the Holy Spirit was happening to believers and nonbelievers alike. A couple had brought a nonchristian friend to the service and before it started they had introduced her to one of the leaders ministering that night.

He just started to pray for her and the woman collapsed to the floor. A few minutes later, she was finally able to stand up and the first words she uttered were “what happened to me.”

For years, I have oddly misunderstood a statement that Jesus made in the Temple on the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles.

Jesus stood up and said:

38 The one who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ‘From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.’” 39 But this He said in reference to the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive; for the Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified. (John 7:38-39 NASV)

For some strange reason, I always presumed Christ was saying that if we believed in Him that rivers of living water would flow out of the Lord.

That is not what Christ actually stated, the Lord said that the rivers of living water would flow out of you. The rivers of living water would flow out of me. The rivers of living water, the Holy Spirit, would flow out of us into others.

And we saw this happening at our church when people who were going through intense times of laughter touched others, this spirit of laughter flowed out of them and whole rows of people ended up laughing.

It was so real, that I even experienced something similar to what Jesus did when a woman with an issue of blood touched his robe and was instantly healed. Jesus knew this had happened because the Lord had felt the power leave Him.

46 But Jesus said, “Someone did touch Me, for I was aware that power had left Me.” (Luke 8:46 NASV)

But mine was different I never actually felt the power leaving me, it was actually the exact opposite. I had laid hand on a man who hadn’t experienced an increase in the Spirit. He was a bit hesitant, even resistant to what was going on.

As I was praying for him, I felt a surge of power coming into me. It was strange, I had no idea what was going on. But suddenly I felt the Holy Spirit say to me the word ‘backwash’.

Backwash occurs when water is flowing in one direction, hits a shore or a wall, turns around, and flows backward in the direction it had originally come from.

As I prayed for this man, the Holy Spirit had flowed into him, hit a wall, and was now flowing back into me.

There was something inside this man blocking the flow of the Holy Spirit. I didn’t know what it was made of, unbelief, fear, unforgiveness, resentment, but it was enough to block the Holy Spirit from flowing into him.

In fact, I had similar blockages in my life and it took several weeks before I personally experienced the flow of the Holy Spirit during this outpouring.

And this is why one of the major themes that the Holy Spirit focussed on during the Toronto Blessing was inner healing, focussing on the past issues in your life. The key is that we needed to forgive those who have hurt or offended us, particularly our parents.

God wanted to break down those blockages that were hindering the flow of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

As those walls disappeared in my life, I experienced the Holy Spirit, and this included heaves or crunching in my stomach, similar to birth pangs.

Sometimes, it was so intense it actually got sore.

But there is one strange thing I have to mention. One of my family’s favorite movies at the time was the Sound of Music, which we watched several times.

Every time we did, I would get the heaves.

I had no idea who the Holy Spirit was praying for. Maybe it was the Von Trop family who are still around. Maybe it was the actors, I know Eleanor Parker, who played Baroness Elsa von Schraeder, was a Messianic Jews. Maybe it was for Austria or Austrian believers.

Who knows it was all a mystery, too deep for words.

But it was strange.

Though I personally never experienced the drunkenness that overcame Vernell, I witnessed it during one meeting, after the Holy Spirit fell upon one of the elders of our church, who, similar to Vernell, ended up crawling on the floor on his hands and knees, and completely incapable of standing. His speech was slurred. Even his eyes were bloodshot. Anyone looking at him would say he was completely drunk.

But he wasn’t. He was drunk in the Holy Spirit.

And while the naysayers may criticize and mock this, the early church faced similar accusations.

After the Holy Spirit fell on the 120 believers gathered in the Upper Room on the Day of Pentecost, they poured out onto the streets of Jerusalem speaking in tongues.

The streets were filled with Jews from around the Roman empire, who had gathered for the feast, and they were now hearing the gospel proclaiming Jesus as the Messiah in their own languages.

But there was more going on than just that.

Because some in the crowd mockingly accused the disciples of being drunk, which we read in Acts 2:13:

But others mocking said, “They are filled with new wine.” (Acts 2:13 ESV)

Would you accuse a person of being drunk simply because they were able to speak in your language?

Of course, not, so there must have been other things happening for that accusation to surface. What are some of the signs of drunkenness, stumbling around, and in more severe cases crawling around on the floor because you can’t stand. Slurred speech. These are the obvious signs.

This drunkenness was so widespread, that Peter was finally forced to address it saying:

“For these people are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day.” (Acts 2:15 ESV)

It was 9 am, Peter said, and too early for people to be drunk.

What a weak explanation, but understandable as this was undoubtedly the first time the Apostle saw people being drunk in the Spirit and he had no idea what was going on.

But by the time the Apostle Paul showed up, it was now better understood and Paul makes an unusual statement when talking about being filled with the Holy Spirit.

He writes:

18 And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, unquote (Ephesians 5:18 ESV)

Why would Paul compare drunkenness with being filled with the Holy Spirit? There had to be a connection.

Obviously, it was because being drunk in the Spirit was a normal part of church life, as the Holy Spirit moved on congregations similarly to what happened on the Day of Pentecost.

This same manifestation of drunkenness showed up at the Azusa Street revival that took place in 1906 in Los Angeles, where there was a powerful outpouring of the Holy Spirit, that paved the way for the Pentecostal and charismatic movements we have today.

After the revival started, the Azusa Street Mission began publishing a newspaper called The Apostolic Faith, which contained testimonies, and teachings from the revival.

In its January 1907 edition, Myrtle Shideler shared how she was so overcome by the Holy Spirit, that she was drunk:

“By the time the chorus ended, the power of God was so heavy upon me. I could scarcely open my mouth, and every fibre of my being was trembling. Yet my feet felt glued to the floor and my knees stiff, so I could not sit down. I only got out a few broken sentences that I remember. (I never fainted in my life and was never unconscious, but God certainly took me out of myself.) . . . . I was under the power the remainder of the meeting, and for three days was as one drunken. . . . and I am sure if my old friends in California could see me, they would think I was indeed insane.“

We are living in difficult and chaotic times today, and we need the Holy Spirit, more than ever.

We need to have the Holy Spirit flowing through and into us as He did in the past.

Hi, my name is Dean and in this podcast, I want to discuss what it means to pray boldly.

In Hebrews 4:16, we are encouraged to come boldly into the throne room of grace when we pray, that we may obtain help in our time of need.

16 Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (Hebrews 4:16 NKJV)

But what exactly does this mean? How are we to pray boldly?

Well, this verse provides two vital keys to praying boldly.

First, it speaks of knowing our position in Christ.

Several years back, I read the story of how an Inuit hunter in Canada’s north had come across an abandoned wolf pup and decided to bring it back to his village.

It immediately became the town’s favorite pet, but the village dogs knew it was the odd man out and began bullying it. But that pup continued to grow, and before long it was towering above the other dogs in the village in both size and strength.

But the writer remembered the day that he saw a small house dog chasing the wolf down the street. I could have destroyed that yappy house dog in a matter of seconds, but the wolf was blinded to its own power. It was blinded to its strength.

It was blinded to what it actually was.

The writer ironically noted that a few days later, one of the villagers took the wolf out into the Tundra and shot it.

It is a sad story, but what is even sadder is that many Christians have similar identity issues.

The Bible tells us that we are children of God, coheirs of Christ (Romans 8:17).

Because of our favored position, we can confidently enter God’s throne room.

But it is not enough to just be that, we must believe and know this in our hearts.

Unfortunately, sometimes we think we are not deserving. Sometimes, we think we are not good enough. Sometimes, we think we are not spiritual enough.

But that is an absolute lie because you are all of that in Christ.

And more importantly, we need to start acting on this inner belief that we have full access to the throne room of God.

You see, what we believe often determines how we act.

As a child of God, we have rights, and we need to take advantage of them because there is more to that Greek word “parrhesia” translated boldly in Hebrews 4:16 than we realize.

It literally refers to free speech. It means to speak boldly and to speak the truth. It refers to the idea of speaking at one’s own personal risk.

We have all probably watched movies when a lower-ranked person in the police force asks his commanding officer if he has permission to speak freely, and we all know what is about to come.

Well, that is exactly what “parrhesia” means.

The word described the type of speech allowed in Ancient Greece’s political assemblies, where people were free to say whatever they wanted.

The idea of free speech also extended to the playwrights, such as comedic Aristophanes, who were allowed to ridicule the rich and famous as well as those in power in their plays.

But for the rest of Greek society, there were limits on how far they could go.

And when it comes to prayer, God has already given us the right to speak freely, and not only that the writer of Hebrews says that God wants us to speak freely.

Respected Greek Scholar, Rick Renner, describes “parrhesia” this way:

First, we know that whenever we approach the Lord in prayer, we need never fear that we are too frank, too bold, too forthright, too honest, too outspoken, or even too blunt when we bare our hearts to Him or request His help. We should never be irreverent, but neither do we need to be ashamed to speak exactly what is on our hearts. When you go to the Lord, He wants to hear exactly what you have to say!

Here is the big problem, when it comes to prayer we often don’t pray freely.

We may be thinking about how unfair a situation is, but we never say that to God. What I mean is that many of us have opinions and thoughts in our minds about a situation, but we never actually express them to God.

God knows all our thoughts, but He doesn’t actually hear them until we start praying what we are thinking.

In other words, thinking is not praying.

God wants us to be honest when we pray. God wants us to say exactly what is on our mind.

Take the prayer of King Hezekiah.

Hezekiah had come down with a boil, and God sent the prophet Isaiah to tell the king he was going to die and to make plans for a transfer of government.

But look at what Hezekiah prayed.

3 “Remember, Lord, how I have walked before you faithfully and with wholehearted devotion and have done what is good in your eyes.” And Hezekiah wept bitterly. (2 Kings 20:2-3)

It doesn’t take much to read between the line here.

Hezekiah was one of only a handful of Judah’s Godly kings, and Hezekiah reminded God of how he had walked faithfully with God.

And though he didn’t actually say it, he clearly was implying it,

Hezekiah was saying, “and, this is how you treat me.”

Hezekiah was saying this is totally unfair.

Through his prayer, Hezekiah was being honest about how he was feeling. And incredibly we are told that God actually changed his mind, yes, God changed His mind and sent Isaiah back to heal this King.

Or how about the time, that God became so fed up with the Hebrews after they built the Golden calf, that the Lord was ready to wipe them out and start all over with Moses’ descendants.

How did Moses respond:

13 Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel, to whom you swore by your own self: ‘I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and I will give your descendants all this land I promised them, and it will be their inheritance forever.’” (Exodus 32:13 ESV)

In his prayer, Moses actually reminded God of His promise that he had made to Abraham, Isaac, and Israel that He would make a great nation out of them.

Moses was saying, remember the promises You have already made.

And look at how God responded to this. In the very next verse, we read:

And God turned to the arch angel Gabriel who standing nearby and said “Did we make such promises?” And Gabriel, who was sheepishly looking to the ground, muttered, “Yeah, we may have said something along those lines.”

Of course, this is not what happened.

In the very next verse, we read that God changed his mind and did not judge Israel.

So, why did Moses have to remind God of His promises? Had God forgotten them?

Of course not. The issue is this: Do you respect God’s word enough to claim the promises He has made?

It is not enough to just think them, we must actually verbally claim these promises in our prayer.

There is nothing wrong with citing Bible verses in prayer, reminding God of His promises. When you are praying for your children, remind God of His word that if we train up a child in the way, he is to go, that when he is old he won’t depart from it.

We need to be very respectful when we pray, but we need to pray honestly. Express how you really feel.

We are to speak boldly.

This means that we should hold nothing back.

Voice your complaints. Be frank with God. Many of the prophets such as Moses and Jeremiah complained to God, which is very different from complaining about God, which Israel did in their journey to the Promised Land.

Tell the Lord exactly how you are really feeling, respectfully, of course.

If you are having doubts, tell God.

Speak your mind.

If you have questions, ask them.

If you think God is being unfair, be truthful.

Tell the Lord exactly how you feel about a situation.

In closing, there is one thing that I have noticed that was very different between how the old patriarchs prayed and how we pray today.

They had conversations with God expressing their fears and doubts. Abraham even negotiated with God on Sodom and Gomorrah.

A while back I was riding on my bike, and I began to remember some things that were going on in my life, I realized I was thinking these thoughts, but I had never expressed the situation to God.

So I looked at what I was thinking, and I decided I needed to tell God, not just think, about all that was going on in my life. So I began to tell God, line by line, everything that was going on.

I even complained about some things that I thought were unfair.

In that sense, I was having a conversation with God.

And I think this is what God desires from us. He desires that we have conversations with Him.

Now, at the same time as we are having these conversations, we need to be open to hearing from God. Hearing what the Holy Spirit may say in return.

But if you have gone through difficulties and challenges, rather than thinking about them, start telling God exactly what is going on in your life.

God wants us to start having conversations with Him. Remember, God knows every thought in our mind, but only hears what we pray.

As believers, we need to take our prayer life to the next level. We need to start praying like we are a Child of God.

A few days ago, I was talking to a friend of mine and ended up sharing what I would be discussing in this podcast.

He had a very unusual response to what I am going to be talking about and said it was either very powerful or really bad.

So, I have no idea what you are getting.

But it was three o’clock in the afternoon, the hottest part of the day in Jerusalem, and Peter and John were climbing up the steps to enter the temple for prayer when a very strange thing happened.

They encountered a man lame from birth begging for alms.

Now that in itself wasn’t particularly strange, as the sick and the disabled were often forced to beg to survive, it is what happened next that was.

We read in Acts 3:6:

6 Then Peter said, “Silver or gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.”

And the man was instantly healed. And even that wasn’t all that strange because, for the previous three years, Jesus had been healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead.

It is how he was healed that is strange.

Because it was very similar to a strange healing that took place in Germany, 1,500 years later.

During the 1500s Martin Luther, a Roman Catholic priest, started the protestant church after the Roman Catholic church rejected his call for reform.

Luther claimed that the Bible was the final authority and that man was saved by faith in Christ not by purchasing indulgences for some old cathedral in Rome.

But a strange thing happened in 1540 when one of Luther’s important protestant coworkers, Friedrich Myconius, was in bed dying from tuberculosis.

Myconius had sent a letter of his impending death to Luther.

Luther responded with what basically consisted of a prayer proclaiming his friend’s healing. After reading the prayer, Myconius was instantly healed and would actually outlive Luther.

But it was a strange prayer.

Martin Luther wrote:

“I command thee in the name of God to live because I still have need of thee in the work of reforming the church… The Lord will never let me hear that thou art dead, but will permit thee to survive me. For this I am praying, this is my will, may my will be done, because I seek only to glorify the name of God.”

Now, there was nothing wrong with the first line, as Luther commanded Myconius to live in the Name of God.

But where we run into problems is at the end of this prayer, when Martin Luther prayed that it was his will, Martin Luther’s will, that Myconius be healed.

How sacrilegious.

How arrogant.

And except for the one small fact that the Holy Spirit healed Myconius on the spot, it almost sounds heretical.

Now, as strange as that sounds, this is similar to what Peter said.

When Peter looked at that lame man, he said ‘hey man I don’t have silver and gold but what I do have I am going to give it to you,’ and the Holy Spirit instantly healed the lame man.

Notice how Peter said ‘what I have,’ because it is similar to what Luther said when he wrote, this is ‘my will’.

And though we look at Peter and Martin Luther’s statements as almost pretentious, I think it reflects a misunderstanding that people have of their position in Christ.

In Luke 9, we read that Jesus gave His disciples authority and power:

And he called the twelve together and gave them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases, 2 and he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal. (Luke 9:1-2)

But we need to read this verse carefully. It says that Jesus gave them authority and power.

If I give you my Bible, it is now your Bible, and this means you can give it to whomever you want.

So, when Jesus gave his disciples power and authority, it was now their authority, and they were shocked by what happened when they prayed.

It is similar to police officers today.

The government has given them authority to arrest people.

They don’t have to call the mayor and ask, “Do I have permission to arrest this guy” when they see someone breaking the law?

They have the personal authority to do it.

Police officers understand their authority and what is equally curious is that police actually go through training on how to enforce this authority, including training in voice inflection in order to command attention.

As believers, we have been deputized with authority in the Kingdom of God.

But we need more than authority, we also need the power, and that comes through being filled with the Holy Spirit.

Jesus made a strange statement when a woman with an issue of blood pushed through the crowd and touched the hem of Christ’s garment and was instantly healed.

We need to understand what was going on here. At this point, people were looking at Jesus as a celebrity. A huge grown had gathered around Christ. They were pushing and jostling him, maybe even looking for autographs.

At one point, Jesus said someone had touched him.

The disciples were shocked. “What do you mean, someone touched you,” they said. “Everyone has been touching you in this crowd.”

But Jesus replied:

Then Jesus said: “Someone did touch Me, for I was aware that power had left Me.” (Luke 8:46 NASV)

Jesus said the healing power flowed out of Him. This woman’s faith literally pulled this healing virtue out of Christ.

At this moment, Jesus was fully human. He had set aside His deity and was demonstrating how we will function in the Kingdom of God when we are similarly filled with the Holy Spirit.

Many of us have this strange idea that healing falls down from heaven. This woman’s healing did not come down from heaven, it came from the Holy Spirit residing inside of Christ.

And the same thing occurs when we pray for healing.

When we are filled with the Holy Spirit, the healing power of God is now inside us. When we pray and people are healed, the healing actually flows out of us, which is why Peter said, “what I do have I give to you — in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth walk.”

Peter understood that he had authority and the power of the Holy Spirit was resident in him.

But many of us are still functioning at the level of Jewish exorcists that Luke described in Acts 19, who were trying to hijack an outside authority in their attempts to exorcise demons and ended up getting beaten up:

13 Then some of the itinerant Jewish exorcists undertook to invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits, saying, “I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims.” (Acts 19:13)

They were saying the right thing, proclaiming deliverance in Jesus’ Name, but it didn’t work.

Similarly, we can pray eloquently in Jesus’ name, but often we don’t fully understand the authority and power that Christ has given us.

If we don’t understand and believe our position in Christ, that we have been deputized in the Kingdom of God, these can be empty, hollow words.

I think Hebrews 4:16 describes the situation best when it states that we are to come boldly into the throne room of God for help in our time of need.

In other words, we need to act like we belong there.

When we pray, we should almost sound pretentious. We should almost sound arrogant.

We should pray like someone who belongs in the throne room of God.

In closing, I would like to mention we have two responsibilities here.

First, we need to understand our position in Christ and most importantly, we need to believe that we have received authority. We need to believe that it is our personal authority. We need to believe that we have been deputized in the Kingdom of God.

Secondly, we need to be filled with the Holy Spirit. This is where our power is.

But most of us think they have nothing anymore to do, as this all falls on the Holy Spirit.

No! The Holy Spirit wants to empower you, and we play an important role in this.

In 1 Thessalonians 5:19, the Apostle Paul exhorts us to not quench the spirit and in Ephesians 4:30, he tells us to not grieve the Holy Spirit.

Despite being filled with the Holy Spirit, we can quench the Spirit of God inside us.

The word quench means literally to put out the fire.

In other words, you can literally hinder or impede the Holy Spirit’s ability to heal other people through you.

We have an important role to play in all this.

You have been deputized. You have been empowered, and you need to own this and minister with Peter’s attitude, ‘what I do have I give to you.’