BINDING AND LOOSING - Part 2 Liberty Savage HIS GLORY REIGNS B. Childress Nov 23, 2007 "Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." Matthew 18:18 There is so much strife in the body of Christ, it seems difficult to believe we will ever rise in unity into the full stature of Christ. Without this unity, we are like arms and legs all pursuing their own agendas, twitching and jerking as we try to walk out our collective earthly destinies. When any human body has a personal power outage or has cut off links to the power circuits coming from the head, its members become spastic or paralyzed. As members of His Church, the destiny of the world is linked to our ability to share the power circuits coming from our head, Jesus Christ. This mullti- sharing requires right agreement with the will of God. Until we are capable of being in unity in our own individual bodies, souls, and spirits, we are unable to understand this corporate multi-sharing of His power and revelation. Simply seeking agreement with each other is not the most direct route to unity - the most direct path is seeking to bring all of our individuals wills into agreement with God's will. There has to be one will in charge. There must be a clear Master note for the body of Christ to start on so everyone can achieve harmonious unity with divine purposes: that Master note is God's will. His will alone is the will to be pursued. Period. Each of us must see beyond the fussiness of the self absorbed souls we all have. We must look beyond each others' failings and encourage and support everyone to succeed. We must look beyond our own failures and seek God's support to succeed. We must see ourselves and each other as God sees us and press on together towards our united potential - God's plans and purposes for our lives, which is bigger than our tiny personal agendas and soulish desires. Those of us who should be fathers and mothers in the faith must grow up and start parenting those who are less mature. These fathers and mothers should not be running around with dirty pants and runny noses. Instead of spiritual parents, we have too many adult juvenile delinquents in the body of Christ today - Christians who are seriously delinquent in their spiritual growth and making excuses for it. Mature Christian role models are fine for immature Christians to pattern their understanding after while they are learning how to walk as children of God, pray effectively, and fellowship with other believers. But as we mature, our goal must be to look to Jesus Christ as our role model. Making this transition can become a real power struggle if you do not pull the plug on your soul's internal power source. The keys of the kingdom, binding and loosing, used upon your own unsurrendered soul, will cut the power cords of your human nature with its limited finite thinking. Relationship and Receiving The power of the keys to the Kingdom should be in getting our own souls free from the half truths and wrong patterns of thinking we've learned from our families, the church world, and the conventional wisdom of the world around us. We have been using the devil as an escape mechanism by our own souls to avoid accountability for perpetuating our pain and bondage. We have allowed our souls to make Christianity complicated and self-centered, believing our Christian victory to be hindered at every turn by evil spirits and believing ourselves to be weak or strong according to our personal failures or successes. Christianity is not about legalistic rules and regulations, nor is it about sloppy agape and grace to keep making wrong choices. Christianity is about relationship and receiving. The unsurrendered soul simply does not want to give up any of its control over unresolved, unrevenged traumatic memories to allow room to be created to receive a new King upon the throne of our lives. Let's take a look at Paul's epistle to the Galatian Christians, "But that no man is justified by the law [the rules and regulations of the Old Testament Law] in the sight of God, it is evident; for, 'The just shall live by faith.' And the law is not of faith: but, THE MAN THAT DOETH THEM SHALL LIVE IN THEM." Galatians 3: 11-12. Rule keeping does not naturally evolve into living by faith, but only perpetuates itself in more and more rule keeping, a fact observed in Scripture. The purpose of the Law was to keep sinful mankind aware of their propensity to make wrong choices until the Promise would come. Until mankind was finally ready to respond to God in faith alone (a most abstract principle to the hard headed soul), man was given the Law to help him understand what he needed to do to avoid going to hell. Ultimately, only a divine mediator between mankind and God, Jesus Christ, could save man from the consequences of the wrong choices made by his unsurrendered soul. Keep It Simple The binding and loosing keys of the Kingdom appear too simple to many. The unsurrendered soul of the born again Christian fights this simplicity, for the principles of the keys of the kingdom allow no room for self-preening (which the soul loves) for adhering to any religious regulations that would "make" you holy. Nor do the keys of the Kingdom, binding and loosing, principles of surrendering everything to God allow for awards to be handed out for the acts of self- will successes.
Your Soul's Salvation The keys to the Kingdom, binding and loosing, will simplify your destiny directives by clearing everything out of your mind's record-keeping system that will not enhance your end-times messenger assignment from God: The neutralized facts of your past will be archived in a remote location in your brain where they belong. You have a unique destiny assignment for these times that surpasses anything you have ever thought you might do for God. However, the launching of it is just temporarily held up waiting for you to voluntarily strip yourself of the soulish baggage that is hindering you from fulfilling it When you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Master, the only part of you that gets "saved" or put in spiritual order with God is your spirit. The Blood of Jesus Christ created the bridge for you to be drawn into full spiritual commission with your heavenly Father. This is the beginning of your understanding that your soul needs healing, cleansing, and renewal - a work that you are going to have to agree with, cooperate with, and help press through. Your spirit has been linked to the Spirit of the Creator of the universe and beyond, but your soul still needs to undergo a surrendering of its will, a renewing of its mind, and a healing for its emotions. PLEASE NOTE: God will not fight you for the right to renew your soul from a lifetime of 'stinkin' old baggage, but He will work with you to empower you to voluntarily receive His renewal. You have to clean out the storage lockers of your soul yourself to make room to receive healing from Him. Paul wrote in Philippians 2:12, "Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling." This is the salvation of your soul. Christ has done His part, now you must assume your part in the salvation process - it only requires that you surrender everything you now know about your life. Working out our own salvation requires us above all things to secure the welfare of our souls. We are required to work out our salvation, Katerguzesthe. This word signifies working thoroughly at a thing, and taking true pains...with fear and trembling, lest you miscarry and come short (from Mathew Henry's Commentary). Nowhere does the Apostle Paul or any great saint who truly understood the crucified life - the surrendered soul - ever give allowance for blaming moral shortcomings, miscarriages of will, or any other human failing upon the devil. Nor do they offer reasons for blaming your parents or any of your ancestors. The condition of our souls today is the consequence of all of the wrong choices we have made throughout our lives in addition to our soul's refusal of all personal accountability for having made them. Things have been done to you, said to you, and taken from you - this cannot be denied. But the condition of your soul today is not a product of those things. Your soul's condition today is the result of its refusal to let go its reactions to those things of your past. Your soul actually keeps all of the effects of need, pain, and confusion alive by keeping your worst memories on artificial life support. The devil only takes advantage of the doors of access opened by your soul in its attempts to rationalize, justify, and deny its part in the whole mess. Paul basically told the Philiippian Christians that even though their spirits had received salvation, they were accountable for the salvation of their own souls. He was telling them, as he did others who received his epistles, to 1) surrender their own will, 2) to search the Word and spend time in prayer to renew their minds, and 3) to reject fear and open up the deepest closets of their soul for the healing for their emotions. God's Divine Plan for Your Divine Destiny Too many think God will imprint His great divine plans for their destinies over the wrong ideas, beliefs, and attitudes and whisk them to victory without any change on their part: He won't. Neither will He scrub out the deception and denial from the inside of your soul if it is resisting a complete abandonment of its throne. Remember, your soul is that unique inner part of you that is yours to hold onto or yours to give over to His plans and purposes for your life. You must make the choice to give all to Him, holding nothing back. Only then will He see that the cleansing blood of Christ gets into every nook and cranny of fear, pain, and deception within you. Your unsurrendered soul's desire to control and run things must be shattered, smashed, and collapsed - completely. Your soul is meant to fulfill an enormous role in your destiny as an end times messenger, the role of a servant vehicle to manifest God's purposes through your life. It has been created and designed (when it is surrendered) to be the interpreter or translator to the world of what your spirit received from the Spirit of God. What keeps your soul from surrendering to such a divine destiny? The old nature, the sin nature, the old man, the carnal man, the carnal mind - all one and the same. The old nature must be eradicated from your soul which can be accomplished by loosing its self-anointed and self appointed agendas of what it is determined to do or not do (at any cost). There are times when people surrender everything to God, but once he begins to chastise them because of wrong attitudes and personal agendas, their souls take on a full scale rebellion against all that God is trying to do in them. Just one seed of rebellion and resistance left in your soul will cause the entire bramble patch to grow back. As His children, most of us have but a faint resemblance to His true nature - with only an extremely pale likeness of some of His attributes. Unfortunately, however, we have all acquired extremely close likenesses of undesirable attributes from sources other than God - particularly the unsurrendered soulish attitudes and teachings of many of the authority figures of our lives. But understand this, no matter what kind of an alternative plan your soul's agenda contains, it can never meet your deepest needs, heal your oldest hurts, or answer your most troubling questions and unresolved issues. Your soul's own answers and plans for fulfilling the emptiness of itself will only make you feel more unsettled and empty when the lights go off and the music stops. And your ongoing need, pain, and confusion will make you vulnerable to manipulation by those who know exactly how to use those areas of vulnerability to advance their personal agendas. Surrender............Bind yourself to the Will of God and Loose yourself from your plans and purposes. To be continued.................................................................................. Source: Shattering Your Strongholds, by Liberty Savard, Copyright 1992, Bridge-Logos. |
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