47. Finishing My Account

By May of 2021, in writing my life story, I had arrived at the early months of 2013, halfway through Chapter 46, “Sealed in the Storm.” At that point in time, I had outlined five additional chapters to complete my account, which account I had intended to bring to a conclusion as of March of 2021.

Then, June 9, 2021 became the worst day of my life since I left the move of God fellowship. The experience of that day shattered everything I thought God was doing through the patterns of my life. I discovered that the vision of my heart, which I had already set forth in the beginning of “Sealed in the Storm,” has been entangled with my own grasping self through all these years.

This devastating experience came through my relationship with particular readers of my letters. Sitting on top of that, then, was the fact that the second half of Chapter 46, through the remaining months of 2013 and starting with what I must write next, was the beginning of similar specific difficulties with readers of my letters.

And so I stalled out in the writing of my account, with only a few chapters to go. And now, as I write these paragraphs, it is mid-September and a whole new and unexpected chapter has begun, a chapter that does not appear to be in line with what I thought was the trajectory of my life. There is no question, of course, that it is entirely in line with God’s direction; the problem lies in the finishing of my account.

I am the kind of person who cannot rest inside of God until He gives me understanding regarding what He is doing through all my difficulties. His answers are always good and true, but they come slowly, and as of now, I hardly know how to continue with finishing my account.

Let me set before you an absolute that has held me in its certainty without wavering since I was a boy. I will use the King James version first, for that is how I knew it for many years.

For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do (Hebrews 4:12-13).

Here is the New King James – the final word “account” is more accurate to the Greek.

For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account.

And then the Jesus Secret version, which is even closer to the actual Greek wording.

For the Word of God is living and energeoing and sharper than any two-edged sword, even penetrating through as far as the dividing of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and is capable of judging the pondering and purposes of the heart. And there is no created thing unseen in His presence, for all are uncovered and laid bare to the eyes of Him to whom is our word of account [our story of self] in return.

There is no making things up on the spur of the moment taking place here. Your real motive is the only thing you will be speaking.

I once thought that giving an account before God, naked and alone, was a future event. Now I know that it is the reality of every moment.

As I was writing the account of my life, the pattern of specific things God spoke sovereignly to me through the years grew in importance in my understanding. In fact, I could start with the first at age 15 – Give thanks in and for all things.

But the first line that came to me inside my introduction to the move of God and Christian community were these words, over and over – “That the thoughts of many hearts might be revealed.” – “That the thoughts of many hearts might be revealed.” And then, the first part of that verse when I finally found it – “Yeah, a sword shall pierce through thine own soul also, that the thoughts of many hearts might be revealed.”

I have lived with that Sword from then until now, exposing every hidden place, every crafty and useless lie, every practice of manipulating others, a sword that requires all honesty and that never stops piercing until it has the only result it will have.

This account of a life lived inside the penetration of that Living Sword has come to you at great cost and through many tears.

I have to accept that most everyone is dishonest. And most everyone manipulates others for their own gain with that dishonesty. I have certainly been and done the same myself.

More than that, the tenets, arguments, and “beliefs” of Nicene Christianity were developed by dishonest people for the sake of hiding their dishonesty. “Go to” heaven is one of the most dishonest “beliefs” that there is, hiding over a rejection of Jesus here and now.

The false human “nature” of selfishness coming from Adam’s actions includes creating false story-lines in order to “look good” in the face of others. And for most of us, this was the only way of living that we learned inside of our church experiences. It was certainly how I learned to live inside the press of move of God Christian community.

Being false towards others in order to put on a “show” of godliness is more woven through the fabric of our thinking than we realize. It is something Christians practice towards one another all the time.

I have to realize that many don’t even know the difference between honesty and dishonesty, between pretending and being real. Many who lie without thought imagine lying to be the only true story.

For some reason, by God’s grace I’m sure, I have not wanted to use the practice of “speaking Christ” to hide myself in dishonesty towards others.

And now I look at the time period of my life from August 1996 to August 2006, ten years, as being the greatest demonstration of God’s grace given to me, and to many. For inside those years I see the mighty Hand of God and the severe penetration of a sharp and eager Sword bringing me to the place of being able to hear the words, “Speak what God says you are” with no dishonesty lurking behind the scenes.

In February of 1998, when I heard the words, “Give My people hope,” when I had no hope at all, I did not know that God had brought me into LIGHT for the first time in my life. You see, I no longer had any hope that I would ever please God or get “hear and obey” right. For the first time in my life, I was honest.

Then, the passage of the next several years through the trauma of healing God took me through, I was never able to get “back on my feet” so to speak, into the normality of human lying. There was so much hurt, and healing has been and continues to be so painful, that any “sufficiency in myself” that might be hovering nearby is no longer visible to me.

The SWORD à naked and alone. Honesty. Nothing else.

Notice that it is not the heart itself that the Sword pierces, but the soul, that is, the thoughts and intents of the heart, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Oh the hiding, the endless hiding, the weaving of faces to deceive our brothers and sisters into imagining that we are “holy.” And all of it to control them, to control their thoughts concerning us, all of which is imagination only.

People don’t give a fig whether you are “holy” or not and they see right through your make-believe. Their entire care, rather, is focused on making you think they are holy – which, of course, you see right through and also don’t give a fig about. It’s all fake. It’s all pointless. It’s all so very, very stupid.

Dishonesty is the enemy of Christ. Dishonesty keeps Jerusalem far, far away.

~~~

Let me return now to a topic I raised at the start of this letter, that is, the vision of my heart.

On September 19, 2021, something incredible, something massive, happened to me. As I realized what God had just done inside of me, I looked quickly at the dates and realized that, yes, this was the beginning of Tabernacles.

Again, I must go back to age 15 and the first awakening in me of a desire towards Christ Community. Then, the covenant I made with God when I was 22, in great agony of soul, was that not only would I know God in this age and in this life, but that I would also walk with a people who know God in this age and in this life. The years I spent in move of God community were years of a total commitment, regardless of the cost. Even when I thought I was getting away from God and commitment, at age 28, I was utterly unsuccessful.

When I was 36, God spoke two words to me, words that were so deeply valuable to me. He said, “Blair Valley will be your home.” And He said, “Immigrate to Blair Valley.”

It’s almost impossible to believe, knowing the difficulty of Canadian immigration, that God did exactly that for us, that we immigrated, in poverty – to Blair Valley.

Yet we left Blair Valley and we left Canada, and oh, the haunting ache that I carried for years, that maybe, just maybe, we had left “home” behind forever. I had no answer to that ache until I wrote the account of those years and that leaving.

Then, in September of 2012, when I was still 55 years old, I wrote letters that I titled “My Vision I” and “My Vision II.” In those letters I placed before my readers a declaration of a return to Blair Valley. This event is the first part of Chapter 46, “Sealed in the Storm,” which you have not yet received because I have not yet finished it.

More than that, I have placed into the flow of my life story my commitment to a new form of Christian Community, and my purpose in sending out all these letters – specifically, to make that community happen, somehow.

All of my thought from leaving Blair Valley in the fall of 1998 on, and all my connections with other people, were, for me, about building the relationships that would lead into the full experience of Christ Community as I now envisioned it.  This way of thinking continued unbroken and unchallenged until Jun 9, 2021, when God “popped my bubble,” so to speak, and brought it all to an end. In fact, I spoke two times that day, “I have failed in teaching Christian Community.” I want to show you how that statement was a good thing, the same thing as coming to an end of all hope in myself.

Yet at the same time, I cannot accept the possibility that my holding tightly to my desire and vision of an imminent return to community coming out from my expectation of God and from my writing was wrong. I cannot accept that Symmorphy V: Life, the most important book to me that I have written, was “not of God.”

Abraham’s desire for a son from God was true; he just looked for awhile in the wrong direction. My desire for hope in God was true; I had just been turned towards hope in myself, trying to make it “hope in God.” In the same way, my desire for community is true; it’s just not going to come out from me.

This brings me to the next dilemma that must be resolved in my understanding that is also found in “Sealed in the Storm,” where I remain stalled. The summer of 2013 was when our season of seven years at Lakewood Church came to an end. One of the reasons why I felt that our time there was finished was that I could no longer bear being lifted up into the hope and expectation of God every Sunday, that God would bring forth and place us into a true community, and then, to my mind, see nothing ever come of that great hope.

You see, Joel Osteen taught, Sunday after Sunday, to believe in the favor and expectation of God. I remain convinced that believing in God is believing in His favor. To believe in not-favor is to believe not in God.

Yet by July of this year, 2021, I began to notice a marked change in my life experience. God’s season for us under Joel Osteen’s teaching had come to an end eight years before, but now, for the first time, I had begun to see God’s favor upon my ongoing daily experience becoming normal and constant, in just the same way that Joel had preached.

This was very disconcerting to me, for it spoke of a big problem inside of me through all these years, something that had prevented that normal state of human life that is living and walking inside of God and inside of His expectation and favor.

And that “something” was this. I had turned my expectation of God in one direction only, to take us as a family, while our children were still young, back into a true Christ Community, one that came out from the vision of my heart. Because that did not happen, then my hope in the favor of God took a back seat, one might say.

From June until now, I see the favor of God towards Maureen and me in outward demonstration all the time. Yet this normal Christian life, as was taught by Pastor Joel, has not really been my experience until this present season, a season that began in June when that eager Sword first pierced my own grasp upon “my” vision.

And that brings us to September 19 when, in the Zoom meeting, I said something along the lines of, “I had been grasping for community out of my own selfishness.” That afternoon I found myself in great joy, a joy that remains hard for me to place, for it is the joy that comes from the penetration of that Sword that is the Word having pierced all the way through into the cessation of all our pretending and into the pure rest of God. It was then that I realized that it was the beginning of Tabernacles.

And so, although I place the Lord Jesus Christ upon every moment of my life, I must still accept that it was my selfish grasping towards ‘community’ that blocked out the favor of God in my present life through the years of our children growing up and leaving home.

Let’s look again at our verse. – For the Word of God is living and energeoing and sharper than any two-edged sword, even penetrating through as far as the dividing of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and is capable of judging the pondering and purposes of the heart. And there is no created thing unseen in His presence, for all are uncovered and laid bare to the eyes of Him to whom is our word of account [our story of self] in return.

And so, the sword having pierced all the way through the tangled web of my own heart, from the summer of 1998 to the summer of 2021, with God’s purpose and my own selfish purposes all tangled together through those years, I cannot complete the chapter “Sealed in the Storm,” apart from beginning to untangle all those tied up knots in this word of account I am returning to God.

To put that in simpler words, I cannot finish “Sealed in the Storm” apart from humbling myself, uncovered and laid bare.

Can one’s “desire” for something promised by God be the very thing that prevents that promise from coming? Well, that is exactly what happened with Abraham.

With Abraham, it was twenty five years between the promise and its fulfillment, with the penetration of that Sword having become complete the year prior, that is, after twenty-four years. For me, it was twenty three years until I now no longer try to see God’s promise fulfilled out from my own earnest expectation. And as with Abraham, God can now do whatever He intends without my grasping involvement.

Before God whom he believed, this One who is continuously giving life to the dead and calling into existence things not existing. Alongside of hope, Abraham believed upon hope for the purpose of becoming father of many peoples, according to what God spoke, “So will your seed be.” And not having become weak in faith, he perceived his own body already having become dead, being about a hundred years old, and the deadness of Sarah’s womb. He did not judge that deadness through unbelief, however, but he was filled with power in faith, into the promise of God, giving God glory. Abraham was convinced to full measure and completion that what God had promised, He is also able to do (Romans 4:17-21).

And so I must go back to June 9, 2021 and accept something that has been very hard for me to accept, and that is that I bear the lion’s share of the blame for the difficulty of that day.

Let me explain. This grasping for the fulfillment of community in our lives, that I had wrongly called “faith” and “the expectation of God,” has been a pressure inside of all my writing from The Jesus Secret until now. And this grasping pressure, subtle and hidden, has been there upon all my readers as a result.

And so people of integrity such as yourself would be drawn to all the word that I teach on the one hand, and yet be aware that there was something “not right” pressing against them from me, something they could not put into words.

This grasping pressure towards ‘community’ coming from me placed a reader of these letters into an untenable position, something he did not understand. The fault was entirely mine. The difficulty that came was only out from the brother not knowing how to respond to something from me that wasn’t pure and true, but that he did not understand.

And so I ask all of my readers to forgive me for putting my hand upon the promises of God in subtle but selfish ways. I was wrong.

In Abraham’s story, he did not let go of Ishmael until three years after Isaac was born. And then The Reese Chronological Bible places Abraham offering Isaac to God thirty years later. In my present understanding these two things are two sides of the same.

Both experiences are “no sufficiency in ourselves,” and both are “God all in all.”

Yet there is a whole other similar reason as to why I am stalled out in completing “Sealed in the Storm.” That problem is my inability to engage in long-distance relationships and my limited ability to engage in face-to-face relationships.

One important long-distance relationship comes to an end by the end of “Sealed in the Storm,” and a second by the end of the following chapter, “Time to Turn Around.”

You see, I have known many wise and godly anointed elders in the church over many years, and I have taken their example into my knowing in great measure. I have watched those anointed by God to shepherd His Church defuse difficult situations with grace, require commitment in such a way that brings repentance, lead the congregation into direct engagement with God, bring forth deliverance in many, and keep the direction of community focused into God.

And I have to accept the fact that God did not design me with any part of such gifting. God did design me with a great gift and He has anointed that gift in me to overflowing measure, but that gift does not include any of those essential parts of being a shepherd to God’s people. Yet I know from long experience that without such wise and anointed shepherding no attempts at gathering together could ever become a successful community of Christ.

I do not know how to resolve the difficulties of this summer. I think about it most everyday and often it prevents against my ability to write. Yet all my thought-up “solutions” become only hollow and pointless to me. And so for me to write about similar long-distance difficulties going awry is not an easy thing.

I want to return, now, to the subject of this book – God coming through.

– The voice of one crying in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill brought low; the crooked places shall be made straight and the rough places smooth; the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken” (Isaiah 40:3-5).

Only one thing prepares that way and makes it straight and true, and that is the living and energeoing, sharp and EAGER Sword piercing through all the dishonesty we have woven into the account of ourselves that we give to God every day.

In May of this year, I would have told you that this Sword had done much completed work inside of me, and I would have been telling you the truth. Yet I had no idea of the piercing of my own soul also, that the Living Sword yet needed to accomplish.

God cannot come through dishonesty, either in me or in you.

And the only way I can continue completing this account of my life is by that very honesty, an honesty that is not found in us except by the living Faith of the Son of God.

Honesty of heart is a miracle of God Himself, arising inside of us.

It is God alone who will accomplish His desire and fulfill His promise in our lives.

I had no idea how deeply that knowing must penetrate before God is free to be what He is inside of me. Yet this is how God has always been towards me. God never lets me get away with anything, nor has He ever allowed my selfish grasping to win.

I must conclude this letter, however, with the original reason I had for placing this chapter, “Finishing My Account,” here. That reason was to place before you my giving of this account of my life back to God as a firstfruits of Christ, what that means for you.

The idea that we will “give an account someday” is part of the fakery of Christians refusing a Jesus who is entirely here and now. Every moment of our lives has always been open and bare, not only before God but also inside all the heavenly realms.

Hiding happens in one place only; it happens only in the absurd fantasies of the human soul.

Someone said to me recently, “It will be much easier to give an account when I am in heaven.” I disagree completely. In fact, I am convinced that it will be impossible to depart from fake and imaginative hiding after you are dead, not until the firstfruits of Christ here on this earth have opened the way.

I have shared that God has kept me all my life by His grace from doing wicked things that would have taken me away from the knowledge of God, things that would be impossible to share openly in this account. Yet many who love the Lord, including some of my present readers, have done things which God has not kept them from.

Let me explain what firstfruits really is. There is no way that I would have shared with you this giving an account of my life back to God if I had not been kept from doing wicked things through the years. And I say “kept,” because it wasn’t my fault that I could not do what I surely wanted to do.

Yet opening myself up in writing my life story such that all can see my account given back to God has been excruciating. In doing so, I have humbled myself before you.

I can do such a thing ONLY because I KNOW the mighty Hand of God hedging my way, penning me in, keeping me at every turn.

Yet because I have done this, I have given you hope, as God told me to do 23 years ago.

I have given you HOPE that you also can be led by God out from all hiding and pretending and into the turned around HIGHWAY made straight for God coming through.

I sent to you the last chapter of my life story in the early morning hours of June 6, 2021, now right at four months ago. It took that eager Sword four months to work its way through all my tangled webs, all the pondering and purposes of my heart.

I can now consider the possibility of completing “Sealed in the Storm.”

Here is the meaning of firstfruits. What God has done for me, He is well able to do for you and far more so, in all outpoured abundance.

And the covenant I make with God is that my “Yes Lord” in the midst of all my tears, will be a  wide open door for you, a smooth path, a swift passage through, so that you might enter into all the knowledge of God through you much more easily than I.

God is a Keeper of Covenant.