I believe The WORD, and what it says in Revelation 12:11.
This WORD is my own satisfying testimony , that something satan used to traumatize me can forever be what he gets 'spammed with' - as one teacher puts it
- spammed, by my testimony of overcoming that I receive from The LORD, all the ways I am blessed where the enemy meant evil, and all the ways my blessing multiplies into others' blessing.
This also has been the effect of others' testimonies in my life... On innumerable occasions, I have been set free from something or had a question in my heart answered that I didn't really even realize was there, just from receiving the edification in another's testimony. This is living Revelation 12:11.
I also love that Jesus is satan's ultimate 'spammer' for all of eternity.
The enemy will never be able to shut Jesus up.
And, Jesus has the worst possible thing against satan. The thing that satan thought was the end game is now his own end game, at the hands and feet of Jesus.
Jesus in me has defeated death.
The WORD, the JOY of The LORD is my strength includes the joy that comes from knowing just how personal things get when it comes to realizing how absolutely He has placed satan under my feet -- because He loves me.
As is the story of my experience with testimony, I gladly share some of my saga today.
If you are reading, this is for you.
And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death. Revelation 12:11
Saga alert.
I was an eldest sister ... at one time in my life. Eldest sibling translated into sub-parent I discovered later . I'd found years into silent bitterness slowly uncovered that I was blamed for most anything that they could think to blame me for that didn't go right.
I was supposed to be taking care of everyone. I wasn't the comrade but the squad leader.
The disconnect into simmering disdain happened during my first years of college. It was time to take care of what was in front of me, instead of everyone else. And, I'd decided that if I was the only one who would give me permission to do this, so be it.
I didn't realize until years after this decision how much of a war would be ahead, most of the blows swung by lying tounges behind closed doors. I allowed guilt to run my life for a season and believed that if this was the only connection my loved ones would give room for between us that I would take that over nothing. But, I was getting to know someone much better as the mess unfolded.
Jesus.
There came along time wherein I was convinced that I was liked and loved by the best possible person to love me .. With this, the contrast with family dynamic became shockingly obvious. I was facing the fact that my family wanted nothing to do with the me I was becoming in true love.
Growing up in very tumultuous circumstanced with my siblings made things all about survival for all of us. In adulthood, such an upbringing develops into an overall 'me against the world' mindset. As I began maturing in the Love of God, I realized that my closest family members were going to force me to choose between the me I was transforming into and being a person bound to duty and tradition based on world standards. The latter was a person who sought out and allowed detrimental interdependence.
Is was a painfully easy choice, as simple as knowing Who loved me and seeing that the rest simply didn't know how. I was growing and learning things about me in the eyes of Jesus, and it drew me and continues to. As far as family life, it drew me away.
The years following were like when a gang member says they're done with the gang. As a Christian, I know today that the war was majorly in the Spirit - spiritual warfare with strongholds that have a merciless hold in my family like the spirit of pride and anger - and that what I did to draw a healthy line was good, life saving.
The thing is, the people who know you the best can also hurt you the most.
I began to live then what I know today is clear in The WORD. The WORD says to guard your heart.
With our heart we hope, we create, we love.
This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. John 15 :12
God in His Word actually says that we are to guard this treasured space. A parable that Jesus tells in Luke 8 makes the idea clear, the parable painting a picture of where a seed falls to the tending of our hearts like a garden. For me, the parable is the guide for keeping our soil ready.
Our heart is where The Word is planted and blossoms and multiplies. This is the experience of true Love.
If you are reading these words placed with their clean lines in comprehensible language in front of you, know that the experience I am laying out here about my family relationships was nothing near like this. I did not have words to explain what was going on then.
The people I knew and loved the most were hurting me, on purpose. By God's grace, I experienced this shock next to learning what the true love of God was, replacing any need for the idol my family members wanted to set themselves to be in my and each others' lives.
If God was steering me in one direction, family in my life were the ones who felt uneasy about the fact that I didn't need their permission to proceed. If I were sharing here about fellow Christian family members, the saga I experienced may have not unfolded quite like this . But, this was not the case, and I was a completely different person by college graduation.
Not one family member even knew the date on which it occurred.
By that time, God had helped me to evict them from His precious soil space.
So, this is the intro to a spam fest for the enemy.
Let me now begin.
The Truth is, I will always be learning more deeply what i began to learn in that season of my life. I am still learning about true love. This is satan's worst nightmare. Not only does he lose me in this process, but everyone God has set me up to reach in my life.
This is the beginning of what it costs, which has allowed me to understand many more things.
It cost me first my pride.
This process was very, very shocking, and was only the beginning of much more of the same . The process is very rewarding. It was a tearing down for a building up by the Master Architect.
At the start of this saga, I just wanted my family to love me. I had a picture of what this looked like, who I was in it, and where everything fell into place according to plan.
At the beginning of pride is fear.
Loving God costs Trusting God. No matter who we are and how much we get to know the Master Architect, we aren't God. This yielding is the best condition for receiving Good seed. You may not understand always what He is exactly planting, but you can be in a place where you know the One planting it AND growing in the desire to know Him.
Seeing His fruit is the experience of eternal life, never growing old.
And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name's sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life. Matt 19:29
It is a process that also makes one quite the Gardner.
When you are getting the fruit that satisfies, there's no reason to tolerate the weeds that don't .
This is the picture of guarding your heart. The weeds and the Good fruit cannot dwell in peace together. The thing that would choke out The WORD is anything seeking to set itself up above GOD. Nothing comes before God - family, friends, things, or yourself. Likewise, there is no guilt for evicting anything that would try to set up its residence in such a way.
Being a gardner means identifying with mastery anything trying to take root that does not belong.
Since this is where GOD lives in us, this is the priority. From our heart space, He will flow into everything else. Any other method just doesn't work.
It may be for many people as it was for me.
I had to get to a place of desperation in order to meet God in a real place, choosing to put down substitutes.
The thing is, all I desired was love from the people I loved. There is nothing wrong with this. So, I concluded, it had to arrive at some point. I waited as they treated me like a stranger. Indeed, by the time God had completed that season's work, I guess I was a stranger to them.
I had a dream while away at school that drew out the sorrow I would've easily tucked under class papers and study sessions while miles away from any family member. It was a dream that left one of the strongest impressions on me that any dream or experience had up till then, while at the same time being very sorrowful.
It was like going to a funeral. Instead of burying a body, the season for burying the past seemed to quicken on me. Without the experience of the dream, I would've gone about my life ignoring from miles away what was occurring with the people on the planet who'd known me all my life.
In the dream, I was watching a sunset and knew I was stuck in that place. The time for being able to choose to be somewhere else was somehow past in the dream. I can remember like it was just yesterday how that scene felt. The setting in the dream changed and I was with someone I'd known years prior. The person asked me what was missing from that place , referring to the type of sunset dimension I seemed to be in. I was asked what would make it a place I would be alright with being.
I replied before awaking with a heavy feeling as though I'd just attended a funeral, '...if my family had loved me..'
The dream was shocking to me because it alerted me to the reality of a situation I would've gladly just credited as a necessary burden, a 'part of life', one of those shaky life seasons that clear up and get better, ... or, in desperation, all my fault -- if it just meant I could have my family in the end.
At the time I had the dream, I was not even feeling heavy concerning family. It had been years since I allowed the distance to accomplish the awkward work (ignore the issues) while taking care of my life like a normal person. Suddenly, I was attending a funeral. The shock of the dream was that I was not even saying good bye. In the dream, I was in a place where that had already been done.
About a year from that time, my desperate prayer went up to The LORD. In my transformation, I'd walked away from my family and I wasn't going back. I wasn't going back on Jesus. The dream signified the definition between past and the present. With nothing left as a substitute, I asked of God, empty. And, He began to fill and has been filling every since.
I feel that I know God today that if the same thing were to occur, I would be boldly before Him as a daughter who knows she can have most anything she asks of her father. My prayer would simply be, 'fixt it'. I know today God can do the impossible. I have seen it since I began this walk.
The catch is, I would've never had the space to know and experience God the way I've grown to, knowing Who He is and who I am to Him, if Lazarus had stayed within my grasp. Like Lazarus, Jesus let it pass away. And, I decided to stay with Him in the process instead of the tomb where the passing was taking place.
Something had to pass away in order that Jesus have the space in me that He needed. It may not have made much sense to me at the time. And, without Him, it would yet not make much sense. It is our honor that God asks we hand Him the thing we would place above Him.
This is my testimony. That it costed me. And it is more than worth it.
This is a testimony of my own experience. The lesson I learned, however was how to make a choice that is for every person who walks as a believer in Christ - a choice one has to keep making.
Getting to know The LORD is like when you first fall in love, but better.
When you fall in love, it's a feeling that suddenly everything seems right and is in place - with the world, with you, and best of all you're sharing all of it with another person who is helping along that rightness. Somehow, love seems to have the power to make a rainy day even seem like an opportunity to water those roots, have some fun, splash around a bit and remember that you don't have to be in control of everything because something bigger, better has your back.
With people, when it is true love, you see all of them and this means the good and the bad. Love helps you to see the full picture of a person as a masterpiece you get to be a part of. The journey can be one where you run into things that are not perfect, maybe alarming. With Jesus, alarming is very likely to occur AND .. it's never a disappointment, there are no bad parts to Jesus. Walking with Jesus is a real thing and with a real person ... Who just so happens to be the God of the entire universe. This is how He can reveal Himself that we come to Trust Him.
It doesn't become an easy thing exactly. Instead, it becomes better. If you understand the definition of better to mean deep, uncontrolled, true, kind of wild - then you know what I say when I describe better. I think a lot of Christians may be wondering how we got to be so insignificant in what seems to be unfolding right in front of us. The world definitely has a distorted view of what Christians think love is. God is not boring, God is not far away, God is not scary.
God is Awesome, Holy, to be feared. Experiencing this as mere humans is an experience of love and should burst from us and knock people down, just like when you can tell how in love a husband and wife are, or a new mother. It is OBVIOUS!
This obviousness is where we become a threat that enemy seeks to shut down. But, when you love someone as perfect as Jesus, it can't be shut down.
This is about love.
The lies that Christians allow the enemy to pile up cover the up truth. That this simply is about love.
God Almighty designed us so that our brains operate obsessively toward whatever we would value at the center of our being, no matter what it is. Being the Savior we needed meant giving us the power to choose Him over anything else, over the thing that would otherwise bind and enslave us from where we allowed it to reside instead of Him. Being saved means we get to choose Him and put Him first! Choosing Jesus does not demolish the pleasure of having something to fill up our heart.
The complete opposite is actually true. Choosing Jesus restores the full potential of experiencing why our hearts were created by Him in the first place. It is not a mental experience, but a central experience that no trial or enemy can demolish. Firstly, because He created love. Secondly, because He took the last say in it forever.
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Rom 8:37-39
Rest assure, Jesus does not squander His seeds. He invests in us with a vision of perfect return.
So shall my word be that goes out from My mouth; it shall not return to Me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it. Isa 55:11
When two people get married, they share things and begin to build a history that will not exist anywhere else but in their marriage. While a lot of it could even occur by the default of how intimate the connection is, tending to what is being built has to happen on purpose.
In a love relationship, two people show their love by tending to what is being built.
This may look like something as simple as noticing that your spouse likes a specific soap scent once you're married. On a day you are out buying for the household, you don't then randomly pick a soap. You get that one soap scent that your spouse likes. This is tending. It's intentional.
The fuller picture is that those little things actually build how much value exists in our relationships. We individually notice things about people all the time. However, we respond - or don't respond -based on what we value. Jesus as a loving God gives us an abundance to respond to for tending our gardens with Him. The result is overflowing fruit in any weather.
The fruit is knowing Him, and this is true Love.
It does involve the individual effort of any person walking as a believer in Christ.
The little thing about Jesus .. He asks for all of it - whatever your it is.
I have heard Christian teachings drawing a full line in the sand between the Old and the New Covenant. There is value in seeing where they meet. Jesus is a love story unfolding, and during His perfect life, He came to fulfill the law. God wouldn't have given His only Son to do this if there wasn't value in it.
In my walk so far, I see the law as God laying out of all of His little things - so that the heart would be revealed. This is what would place full perspective on the need for a Savior. 'You need Me ... to love Me. ' God didn't want performance, He always wanted the center focus of His people.
Your new moons and your appointed feasts
my soul hates;
they have become a burden to me;
I am weary of bearing them.
When you spread out your hands,
I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers,
I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. Isa 1:14-15
In the Victory of Calvary, He would be able to dwell in our hearts without hinderance. We could love God through Jesus, Who did it perfectly. Before Calvary, we were just not beings capable of loving God as He deserved.
Being a new creation in Christ is defined by our ability to love - first Him.
This is an eternal journey that transforms us into His image.
There is a lot of Trailblazing to do if God's people are ready to clear and give Him the space.
Let the Truth be sown as a blossoming vine, heavily demolishing the enemy camp. Amen
