RED ALERT FORTY DAY INITIATIVE FOR TURTLE ISLAND GATEKEEPERS
June 10-July 20, 2011
DAY THREE June 13, 2011
by James C. Stephens
“I have set watchmen on your walls, O Yerushalayim, all the day and all the night, continually, who are not silent. You who remember YHWH, give yourselves no rest, and give Him no rest till He establishes and till He makes Yerushalayim a praise in the earth”
(Yeshayahu [Isaiah] 62:6-7)Translation Institute for Scripture Research.
“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who,
in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” Dante
“A great Christian statesman, considering the morality of a measure which will affect millions of lives, and which involves economic, geographical and political considerations of the utmost complexity, is in a different position from a boy first learning that one must not cheat or tell lies, or hurt innocent people.”
~C.S. Lewis: Essay on “Dogma and the Universe” in God in the Dock.
WHAT TO PRAY—FOR THE SPIRIT OF INTERCESSION
“That I might be more fitted for doing and suffering.”
~David Brainerd’s Diary April 3, 1742
(excerpt from Journey with David Brainerd by Richard A.Hasler).
“The Spirit does help in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray, but the Spirit Himself pleads our case for us with groanings unutterable. And He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He makes intercession for the set-apart ones according to Elohim. And we know that all matters work together for good to those who love Elohim, to those who are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:26-28).
“And I shall pour on the house of Dawid and on the inhabitants of Yerushalayim a spirit of favour and prayers. And they shall look on Me whom they pierced, and they shall mourn for Him as one mourns for his only son. And they shall be in bitterness over Him as a bitterness over the first-born” (Zekaryah[Zechariah] 12:10).
“The evangelization of the world depends first of all upon a revival of prayer. Deeper than the need for men—ay, deep down at the bottom of our spiritless life, is the need for the forgotten secret of prevailing, world-wide prayer.” Andrew Murray, The Ministry of Intercession.
In the night, I awoke several times and wrestled in prayer over my own shortcomings. Why am I even attempting to put together this prayer initiative. I’m not good enough to do this. The fact is, none of us are good enough. ‘There is none righteous, no, not one! There is no one who is understanding, there is none who is seeking Elohim. They all have turned aside, they have together become worthless. There is none who does good, no, not one. Their throat is an open tomb, with their tongues they have deceived” (Romans 3:10). Even the Apostles could not tarry long in the Garden of Gethsemane when Yeshua was wrestling in prayer in His great agony sweating as it were very drops of blood the night before He was to be crucified. The Apostles fell asleep.
We are on a pilgrimage together and are a body of believers called into a covenantal community with YHWH through the precious sacrifice of Yeshua Ha‘mashiach (Jesus Christ the Anointed One, the Messiah) and guided by the Ruach Hakodesh.
HOW TO PRAY—IN THE SPIRIT
The instructions in Ephesians, Chapter six which speaks about putting on the full armour of Elohim begins with a Torah lesson. “Children, obey your parents in the Master, for this is right. “Respect your father and mother,” which is the first command with promise, in order that it might be well with you, and you might live long on the earth.”
And you, fathers, do not provoke your children, but bring them up in the instruction and admonition of the Master” (Ephesians 6:1-4).
Getting our own house in order. Interesting. So, I return to what the Ruach Hakodesh (the Holy Spirit) was impressing on me throughout the night. It must be something He wants us to work through as His covenantal community. I sensed that this journey began in earnest for me on Shavuot, the Jewish feast commemorating YHWH’s delivering of the Ten Commandments to Moses and the seventy. The Torah is our schoolmaster. Through it we recognize YHWH’s standards and how we have missed the mark, how we’ve sinned. How we need our Messiah, Yeshua.
We ALL have mother and father issues. Even if they are deceased. There is no getting around it. In May, I was re-reading one of my old journals that I kept when I was a Buddhist (1970-1984). I was about to celebrate my sixtieth birthday and was irritated because my Mother who was flying down to attend the party my wife Elizabeth was throwing for me later added that she was going to go to some of her favored relatives and then come to the party later. And before she was to fly home the next day that we should celebrate Mother’s Day by going out to breakfast.
You might think, “What a jerk! Your Mom’s going out of her way to attend your birthday!”
“Okay, I can give that to you. Well, we all have unresolved family baggage.”
You may be asking, “What does this have to do with a “Red Alert?!” Benjamin Franklin said, “Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” This prayer journey is not just any journey. It will take patience with others and in time with yourself. It’s about listening and being obedient to the Holy Spirit’s direction and discerning His voice as well. Before we even put on the complete armour of Elohim, the Apostle Paul begins with our mother and father issues.
Interestingly, when I was doing research in the course of my studies on the interaction of Buddhism and Christianity in history, I read about India’s Buddhist King Asoka who in 250 A.D. established many monuments inscribed with sayings of wisdom throughout the land and one was spoke highly of an ancient rule conducive to long life calling for children to honor their parents.
We’re on this journey together and over these days, we’ll get to know each other. I’ll be open, transparent, and honest as possible. Please post your thoughts on our Facebook page so the covenantal community can interact as well.
Why was I frustrated? What was at the bottom of my irritation I pondered in prayer. It all of the sudden struck me. Pull out your 1971 journal. In my journal, I read an entry on May 22, 1971, when I came home from school and discovered that my mother and brother had disappeared. Basically, my mother had left my dad and was filing for divorce. It left me in a very difficult position. My father was devastated and many years later told me that if I hadn’t been his support during that time he was considering suicide. The entry was forty years old. It was fresh, as if I was still twenty years old. Surprisingly, I discovered also that my mother Alice was twenty years old when I was born. http://intersect.com/stories/24WfvmfKrPp3.
Forgiven, but still yoked to the pain. Although I forgave her many years ago, she hasn’t forgiven my father and continues to harbor ill feelings towards him which she openly conveys to our children. He passed away in 1995. He lived with us happily for years and he genuinely loved his grandchildren who even to this day will not listen to her grievances. It is sad. So, my life was affected by her departure forty years ago when I was a undergraduate in college who unexpectedly had to take on a new role. It takes two to come to terms with issues in life and years to understand their ramifications. Sometimes others are blinded to their complicity. I was a young university student at the time. And then last night, my bride Elizabeth pulled out a letter as she was reviewing archives of our family correspondence. It was from my Mother to my Father. Elizabeth was very upset with my mother’s tone. I mean it was as fresh a wound as if it had been yesterday. I went to bed and it rested in my subconscious. It was not good. It was emasculating. A letter on May 31, 1972 to my father expressing “her concern” that I was looking so thin as I was eating only rice and attacking him for his lack of provision at the age of forty nine years old, “a man your age.” It was as if I had been freshly stabbed in the stomach. I knew his struggles, his broken dream of wanting a happy “Leave it to Beaver” family. We were struggling. He had lost his lease on the Mobil Service Station he managed where he was making a very good living, good enough to fund our skiing trips to Mammoth and Lake Tahoe with my mother who we discovered was going out on him. It had all been premeditated.
The marriage covenant was broken. God hates divorce. I can thoroughly understand why. It is devastating to the family unit. It is selfish to the core. I’ll never forget her lie when I was up skiing and awoke in the condominium one morning as she slipped in the door around 5:00AM. “Hi Mom. Where you been?”
“Oh, out to get some donuts,” she hastily replied.
“Really. What kind did you get?” I asked. There was no reply, because there were no donuts. Children are not blind. “And you, fathers [mothers as well], do not provoke your children, but bring them up in the instruction and admonition of the Master” (Ephesians 6:1-4).
Painful consequences follow. Thank YHWH I have an understanding bride. It’s taken years to rebuild trust in my life and that’s another story, but not for this journey.
Maybe you’re ready to check out here. Maybe you relate. It’s okay. Remember, Yeshua in the Garden of Gethsemane who in His prayer of agony was bleeding drops of blood? The disciples checked out. They couldn’t handle it. They were sleeping and couldn’t pray. What is it that may be blocking your life? If your favorite team or program was on television right now, maybe you’d be good to go. But, this processing, can be draining. On the other hand, maybe this is just what Abba, our Heavenly Father wants. It’s about family! And you’re saying, “Shoot! I thought we were going to pray about Turtle Island! I’m an intercessor! A Gatekeeper! What’s the point?”
The point is that prayer is difficult personal work and as members of the family of God, we are family. When one part of the body hurts, all parts of the body should hurt. Have we become numb? Do you truly believe that the prayer of faith can move mountains? Heal families? Transform a city? Transform a nation? I’ll be straightforward with you, sometimes when people are extremely stubborn and you know that they are headed in a direction that will end up in them harming themselves and others, I pray that YHWH would chasten them unto repentance. He knows how to shepard the sheep. Seriously. Prayer is not just some kind of feel good exercise where we snuggle up to Jesus and present our Santa Claus Christmas list of needs to Him. He is not some type of magical Disneyesque genie who we can beckon whenever we have need. He is the Creator and we’ve got to get our perspective of who He is straight off. Yes, He constantly makes intercession for the saints. But, Confession is in order. An agreement with Him that His judgments are right and we are out of order. That’s a lot of hard work. First of all we must put our own house in order.
WHAT IS PRAYER?
“Prayer is a sincere, sensible, affectionate pouring out of the heart or soul to God, through Christ, in the strength and assistance of the Holy Spirit, for such things as God has promised, or according to His Word, for the good of the church, with submission in faith to the will of God.”
John Bunyan wrote Praying in the Spirit in 1662 in an English jail where he was later to have his ‘immortal dream’ after which he wrote the allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress.
“Without the Spirit, man is so infirm that he cannot, with all other means whatsoever, be enabled to think one right saving thought of God, of Christ, or of his blessed things; and therefore he says of the wicked, ‘God is not in all his thoughts,’ (Psalm 10:4).” “For every ‘imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil.’
So, if our hearts which we struggle against even as the redeemed of God be ‘continually’ wicked and depraved Gen.6:5; 8:21, how can we address God “without the Spirit helping this infirmity?” We cannot.
Bunyan continues, “Many ask and have not, because they ask amiss; and so are never the nearer the enjoying of those things they petition for (James 4:3). It is not to pray at random that will cause God to answer. While prayer is making, God is searching the heart to see from what root and spirit it arises (1John 5:14). ‘And he that searcheth the heart knoweth,’ that is, approves only, the meaning ‘of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.’ For in that which is according to his will only, he hears us, and in nothing else. And it is the Spirit only that can teach us so to ask; it only being able to search out all things, even the deep things of God.”
“Nothing but the Spirit can show a man clearly his misery by nature, and so put a man into a posture of prayer. Talk is but talk, as we accustomed to say, and so it is but mouth worship, if there be not a sense of misery…How far short are the people…who count it enough to teach themselves and children to say the LORD’s prayer, the creed, and other saying; When, as God knows they are senseless of themselves, their misery, or what it is to be brought to God through Christ! Ah, poor soul! Study your misery, and cry to God to show you your confused blindness and ignorance, before you be too ready in calling God your Father, or teaching your children either so to say.”
Bunyan reasons, “poor blind, ignorant, foolish one. It may be your chief prayer is, “Our Father which are in heaven. Do you know the meaning of the very first words of this prayer? Can you indeed, with the rest of the saints, cry, Our Father? Are you truly born again? Have you received the spirit of adoption? Do you see yourself in Christ? Is not the Devil your father? (John 8:44).
When I was in much spiritual confusion as a Buddhist, I recall saying to a business associate who was a strong Christian, “We can fight for world peace. We Buddhists will help do it in Asia and you Christians can work for peace in America. Right brother?” He paused and looked at me directly in the eye and sincerely said, “You are not my brother.” At the time it seemed cruel, but later I recognized as a new Christian, that his honest rebuke, was the most truthful and caring thing he could have said at that moment. The fact is that we must be adopted into the family of YHWH through our confession and belief in the ONE True Sacrifice Yeshua, Jesus Christ of Nazareth. It is quite strange to hear the Dalai Lama refer to everyone he speaks to at conferences as my brothers and sisters. While it may sound like a nice gesture from a grandfather figure, it is the antithesis of how Yeshua honestly addresses others.
Bunyan asks, “Do you indeed say, “Hallowed be thy name’ with your heart? Do you study, by all honest and lawful ways, to advance the name, holiness, and majesty of God? Do your heart and conversation agree with this passage? Do you strive to imitate Christ in all the works of righteousness, which God commands you, and prompts you to do? It is so, if you are one that can truly with God’s permission cry, ‘Our Father’. Or is it not the least of your thoughts all the day? And do you not clearly make it appear that you are a cursed hypocrite, by condemning that with your daily practice, which you pretend in your praying with a dissembling tongue?
“Would you have the kingdom of God come indeed, and also his will to be done in earth as it is in heaven? Nay, even though, according to the form, you say, Thy kingdom come, yet would it not make you run mad, to hear the trumpet sound, to see the dead arise, and yourself just now to go and appear before God, to give an account of all the deeds you have done in the body? Nay, are not the very thoughts of it together displeasing to you? And if God’s will should be done on earth as it is in heaven, must it not be your ruin? There is never a rebel in heaven against God, and if he should so deal on earth, must it not whirl you down to hell?”
These are serious words from a wise and persecuted patriarch of the faith. Wisdom is greater than weapons of war. As I weigh these issues in my own family, I wrestle deeply recognizing that our family issues are intimately tied to one another. We care for our parents. At times, we speak words of truth at the gates of hell.
My mother who told me that she was flying down for two days to celebrate my birthday told me that she was going to visit some relatives on Saturday before the party and then on Sunday we could celebrate Mother’s Day. Control. Then she became ill and was not able to fly. Within two weeks, she called and was going in for heart surgery to install a pacemaker. Over the years, many people have asked for my counsel about their serious operations and have also asked about their funeral plans. When I first asked my Mother about her preparations, she told me everything was in place, but then upon asking about alternative scenarios, other sensitive issues arose. Arrangements were not something I was made aware of, but would be expected of an elder son in the ministry. Words were exchanged as forty years of undealt with emotion were addressed. I would not be abandoned again. She was not going to tell me about her serious operation, except that my daughter who is living in her area and going to school said “You must tell your son.” She told me that it felt just like it must have when she left you with no knowledge of leaving you forty years ago. Nothing in her modis operandi has changed. Just words of justification.
Why is this important? Old wounds open the door to further assaults. The Red Alert will look at historical National wounds that may have been topically addressed, but not healed that are festering below the surface on Turtle Island.
“Our Lord gave His disciples on His resurrection day the Holy Spirit to enable them to wait for the full outpouring on the day of Pentecost. It is only in the power of the Spirit already in us, acknowledged and yielded to, that we can pray for His fuller manifestation. Say to the Father, it is the Spirit of His Son in you urging you to plead His promise.” Andrew Murray
SPECIAL PETITIONS
Pray for the healing of broken family relationships. Pray for YHWH’s healing of our childhood wounds and their consequences. Pray for our Mothers and Fathers and their salvation. Forgive them for their transgressions against us and express our gratefulness to YHWH for His tender mercies and for ministering to our needs as no one on earth can possibly understand.
John Bunyan’s prayer:
The Lord awaken you, and teach you, poor souls, in all humility, to heed that you be not rash and unadvised with your heart, and much more with your mouth! When you appear before God, as the wise man says, ‘Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be hasty to utter anything (Ecclesiastes 5:2); especially to call God Father, without some blessed experience when you come before God.”
Open our eyes to the offenses still harbored within our covenantal community and help us to delve deeply into the causes through the Spirit who helps us in our infirmities and allows us to take the plank out of our eye, so that we can take the splinter out of our neighbors.
Help us get our own house in order before we endeavor to address the root iniquities and defilements occurring on Turtle Island.
Hebrew culture used qahal for a very important concept: gathering to accept the covenant. Qahal is a word that carries the idea of calling by appointment to a particular purpose of God. This is an event, not a place! It is focused on God’s purpose, not our participation. However, when it comes to “congregation,” the word is almost always ‘edah. 123 times this word is found in the Torah. It is related to the verb “to appoint.” It is all about the unity of those appointed, not about the individuals gathered. It is not bound to a special place or time. It is always about a special people appointed as one unified whole before God.
The covenant community does not exist as the local assembly. Just as God’s covenant does not apply to the individual, so it does not apply to the collection of individuals who meet at some building and call themselves a church. The covenant community is the whole family of God. There is one God. There is one covenant. There is only one covenant community. Perhaps it’s time for us to start thinking and acting according the Deuteronomy 6:4, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is your God. The Lord is One.”
Skip Moen
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