10. Becoming Intercession

This letter will be followed by another titled “The Spirit Shared with Us.” The two are always found together, the Spirit with us being Intercession, but I hope to go in depth first into the form shared together, that is, Intercession, and then the Spirit energeoing us inside of that form.

In other words, we are considering Symmorphy, sharing the form of Intercession, and Synergeia, sharing the Spirit of power, inside the impact we are having upon the Church in our world right now today.

My hope is to take you deep into your own person, and there to take you into the greatest surrender to God you have ever known. I can do that only by taking you deep into my own story of self and into the greatest surrender I have known.

Here is our text, Romans 8:26-27. – In the same way, the Spirit also joins as help together with our weakness, that is, personally seizes hold of our need as our help; for we are not aware of the things that are necessary for us to pray, but the Spirit personally brings us in line with Father for the sake of others, with inexpressible groanings. Even more than that, the One [Jesus as Word] who is actively searching hearts to know present needs, is aware of the heart-gut thinking of the Spirit, because, according to all that is God, He joins us together with God – inside complete and absolute connection [the Mercy Seat] – for the sake of those who are devoted [the Church].

The Spirit which God has freely given to you is merged in full union together with all your human weakness to be together the Travail, the Intercession of God, that God might have a way into being known by His Church (paraphrased and reduced).

Starting in April of this year, 2025, the season of Passover, God placed His finger upon things still hidden inside my consciousness, things I had buried deep, of necessity, in order to continue in sanity through great press. I thought that God was about to restore strength in me, but that did not happen. Rather, the penetrating finger continued until now. And now I understand.

Instead of sharing the particulars of this exchange, I want to give the larger picture inside my life, the deepest meaning of that penetrating finger of God, the greatest surrender I have known, and the place of True Strength into which God has brought me.

In sharing of myself, I do not want you to compare yourself to me or me to you. Rather, I want you to follow my example towards God, that you would allow God to do the same with you, inside a very different life, fitted to your own personality, quite different from mine. Yet it is the same Spirit that we share, accomplishing the same Travail of God inside of this present world.

As an Asperger’s man, from an early age, I have known so much internal pain without ever understanding why. Typical of that personality type, I learned to disassociate in order to bear with “feeling too much." I found refuge in vast daydreams of building great kingdoms, or winning great wars, etc.

There were indications in my spirit, even in my childhood, that the angst I felt so greatly, and the confusion I was thrown into so often, meant something that was beyond my own self, but I had no idea what that might mean. That is, inside of my anguish, there was often a call to something I did not know.

My years in the move fellowship taught me, or, shall I say, I taught myself out from what I thought I heard, that the awful “feelings” meant “not-God,” that God was displeased with me. Of course, I had wondrous experiences in the Spirit and in God opening His word to me that contrasted with the usual sense of being under a “weight of fleshiness.” Yet that made me even more certain that feeling bad meant that I had sinned against God. Added to that sense was the hundreds of times I heard God speak, “No,” to me. Many of those “no’s” were of God, but many just added to the confusion.

Then, when I embraced fully the spirit of slavery again to fear, that is, Calvinist theology, in my mind, through the 1990’s, I came to a great depth of hopelessness, It was in that place, as we made the decision to leave Blair Valley and the move fellowship, that I suppressed completely and removed from my thinking any hearing of “no” from God. I determined, rather, that Jesus would always keep me safe. I had to do such a thing if my wife and I were to make independent decisions together.

I was aware, through the months we lived in Fort St. John after leaving the fellowship, of the immense oceans of pain locked away inside of me. Indeed, it was through this time in particular that Rick Annett’s friendship was my support.

The process of healing, then, was very slow, taking from that fall of 1998 to the fall of 2021 when I wrote “The Meaning of a Life” in my autobiography. The process itself was more painful that the years of pain, I think, probably because I was no longer hiding in disassociation all the time.

I want to come at the present moment, now, from a slightly different path, and that is my experience with the political and social arenas of life in this world. My educational career showed me that I have less than no ability in maneuvering through all the stuff thrown at one’s self by all the expectations of other people which usually caught me by surprise and towards which I had no idea how to respond.

By the summer of 2009, around the same time I began the Christ Our Life letter, I no longer had the emotional strength to maintain the expectations of full-time employment. As I’ve gotten older, I am less and less able. When it comes to all the stuff coming at one’s self from other people, I am like Humpty Dumpty who could not be put back together again, or like Jacob, after God touched him in the hollow of his thigh. When I try to relate with “other people,” I have no strength on which to stand.
 
My heart-gut mind knows that the Word coming through me now is out from God, but my intellectual mind cannot resolve the question of why God would give such a thing to a man who cannot present such a word even to his own children.

Writing the Flow of Gospel Word, especially now through Romans, has changed a fundamental aspect of all my thinking and has me now grappling with a level of God-with-me as I have never known.

The cross is final, and it happened 2000 years ago. The Resurrection is the only Life there is, and it happened 2000 years ago. When I asked Jesus into my heart at age seven, that was the Spirit of God already upon me. The thing about baptism, or immersion in water, is that it is without discomfort; in fact, it is quite refreshing. When you come up out of that water, God’s purpose is that you know that you have only ever lived inside of Jesus in all Resurrection.

Then we saw this remarkable fact, that the Ruling Verse of the Bible, that has been my “guiding star” for 38 years, now, is found right in the middle of the Ninth Ruling Verse, our ministry, God through us into our world, or, as Paul said of Jesus in us, in 2 Corinthians 5, God is inside of us reconciling the world to Himself.

When did that begin for us? It could not have been any other than the moment God raised Jesus out from the dead, for we were there inside of Him. Asking Jesus into our hearts was only the first KNOWING of what has always been the only thing True.

A couple of weeks or so ago, I made a sort of agreement with the Lord Jesus. I was wondering over the brokenness of my human strength, something that has been amplified, even increased, through a number of devastating experiences over the last year-and-a-half.

I asked the Lord, “Lord Jesus, could you do for me what all the king’s horses and men could not do for Humpty Dumpty, would You weave back together all the broken places of my soul?”

Then, it was not a word spoken, rather, just the thinking inside my mind, Jesus in me, that I thought, “I will, but you also must do something for Me. I want you to stop all day-dreaming of any kind.”

I asked of the Lord Jesus that He would do this thing for me, weaving my soul back together, by the Flow of Gospel Word, that I might be made whole by a Living Spirit Word. And He asked of me that I would cease all day-dreaming by the Spirit of travail now part of me.

My day-dreaming has been simple, compared to my past. I watch a YouTube video on someone converting a van or truck into their home on wheels, and I immediately like to dream about how I would do such a thing. – Etc. EXCEPT, in not doing that, I have discovered this fact. Not daydreaming means NOT avoiding the angst.

And to refrain from avoiding the anguish by the Spirit of Travail means giving the awfulness to my Father for the sake of others, that God is inside of my trouble reconciling the world to Himself.

And then I realize that nothing else has ever been True. My life, every moment of my life, in its unfiltered, unmasked pain, has been only one thing, God my Father, sharing with me His own pain for creation, as His own path into carrying others through me for their sakes.

In other words, the anguish of being ripped to shreds in every part of my humanity by Lloyd Green, including his mocking of my own dad, that anguish, unfiltered, uncovered by any cloak of darkness, was God travailing with me for Lloyd Green’s sake. The fact that I did NOT know such a thing did not make it untrue.

Our lives have never been about sin or about “getting right” with God. Our lives have been only God with us for others. When we did wrong things, that was not God doing the wrong things with us. But those wrong actions are found inside Jesus’ empty grave. Yet we ourselves were real, even separate from those actions, and with our real self even in that moment, God was inside of us reconciling to Himself even that one whom we were foolishly hurting.

I find that readers of my letters will still sometimes use the King James version of Romans 8:28 in their thinking and speaking. “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God.” They might say, “Well, I know that God is working this circumstance out for my good.”

What is that person really saying? “This circumstance is bad, and that circumstance is bad, but God is going to ‘work these bad things together’ to somehow, come up with something good FOR ME.”

Here is the absolute law of the mind of good and bad – It’s all about ME!

Here is the JSV translation of the same Greek words. “We are fully aware that those who love God are synergeoing with God, making all things good.”

If you are busy calling your present circumstance evil, that is, something you do not like, then how can God counteract your authority to convince you that it is good. And when you are lusting after something “better than God,” that is, something you like, how can God bring True goodness into your knowing?

The King James translation sees by outward appearance and thus refuses God now for the sake of self. The JSV translation sees as God sees, and places us entirely together with God for the sake of others.

God has made this Truth very stark for me.

Last summer, an appliance fire filled our house with plastic smoke, covering EVERYTHING with a layer of toxic soot. We had to move out for a couple of weeks and were entirely dependent on our house insurance paying a cleaning company to clean every surface and item in our home.

As part of that process, all of our air conditioners were deemed useless. The insurance paid us directly for the loss of the air conditioners, fans, heater, and dehumidifier. We had been considering a single larger unit, a mini-split AC and heating system and thought it would be good to use that money towards such a thing. We then signed a note for $5,500 and the AC company installed the new unit. It was wonderful, quiet, efficient, and effective. Our heating and cooling problems were solved.

For three days. Then along came the outskirts of a hurricane that ricocheted a small object first against the house that then bounced off of the outdoor unit of the  mini-split. We did not notice at first, but the tiniest of holes in the tubing then leaked out all the gas. The entire unit had to be replaced for another $2700. This accident would have fallen under house insurance, not warranty. Yet our insurance company had just spent around $40,000 on our needs. More than that, the deductible was $1700, which we would have had to pay from money we did not have.

At that point, we made the decision that we could not go further into debt. The events of that summer had already put great pressure against our attempt to start a nursery business, an attempt that was hitting up against my inability to deal emotionally even with the demands of customers.

There the two AC units sit, on the backside of the house and in our laundry room, beautiful and useless. I walk by it several times a day, with sorrow, for over a year now. We will be making payments for several years for nothing.

Now, I have shared this with specifics. I think you can agree with me that it does not look good, that it falls into the category of a significant and devastating problem. Yet I have given thanks, as I teach.

I must admit that this exercise of not daydreaming about “better things” took me through a bit of a “cold turkey” withdrawal, one might say. Yet this is happening at the same time that I am writing “Made Justly Innocent,” and “Inside of Christ,” and “The Spirit of Life,” and “The Gospel Core: Set Forth and Symmorphosed,” all of which you should read/listen to on my website.

Writing “The Gospel Core: Set Forth” shocked me. I guess I had never taken fully seriously the intense meaning to God of our travail together with Him, that we ARE Intercession, that in all, God dwells inside of all that we are, reconciling the world to Himself.

Even more than that, what I wrote in “The Gospel Core: Set Forth” must change how I saw and presented everything in the first lessons, listed above, on Gospel Word in Romans.

My intention now is to describe exactly what we are as the Intercession of God, yet also, how we “become” such a thing. Let me bring in one final thought on this background layout before I do that.

There sits our beautiful mini-split AC in utter ruination. That experience, that ruination, that loss, is intrinsically and utterly GOOD. It does not “become” good; it is GOOD.

To say that, to see that, is a revolution, an even greater turn around than I have yet known. You see, the revolution is not that it is GOOD, for it has always been good, but rather how it is that I see what has been the only thing True.

To see as God sees is to be seized into God. And to be seized into God is to be seized into His throne, that is, the normal Christian life, what God desires with all His Heart for every believer. Yet that throne is the Mercy Seat, for we are the Intercession that is God.

The entire purpose of “the great struggle against sin in the flesh” is to turn us towards self, that we might make God’s word all about “me.” What we cannot know in this hostile position is that our backs are turned against something and Someone so awesome beyond what we could imagine, turned against the only thing and the only One True.

What does it mean that we have become Intercession?

We understand that God and His Word are living and energeoing, always from God to us and from us to God in an unending flow. Even as we are carrying all of our brethren inside our hearts into God, so God is always flowing through us into His Church. And just as God is always flowing through us into His Church, so we are carrying all of our brethren inside our hearts into God.

It's Synergeoing with God. It’s being the tip point of the Pillar of Fire touching down upon Mercy.  This thing and that thing “working together” has no meaning. You and God synergeoing together has ALL meaning.

God laboring in travail over His creation is your entire life. Your entire life is God laboring with you over His creation, that His knowledge might be birthed into the knowledge of all.

Here is HOW it works. – The Spirit also joins as help together with our weakness (Romans 8:26).

The Devoted Spirit out from God, now one with our own human spirit – joins as help together with – our human weakness, flesh of His flesh, one flesh with Him.

The Greek word is sunantilambanomai. It means to take two things that appear to be very different, even opposite of each other, and to join them together as one. The help is mutual, for what the Spirit has, our human weakness does not have, and what our human weakness has, the Spirit does not have.

The Spirit has Life, but no form in heaven or earth. Our human weakness has form in heaven and earth, but no Life. The Spirit is the power of God, but possesses no authority. Our human weakness is the authority of God, but possesses no power.

In short, God can enter His creation ONLY through us, yet not just “through” us, but utterly sharing together with us Life Energeia, Devoted Purpose, and Outward Form.

Romans 8:26 continues. The Spirit personally brings us in line with Father for the sake of others, with inexpressible groanings. This is how I translated the Greek words in the JSV. Most translations will say, The Spirit makes intercession with inexpressible groanings.

The Greek word for “makes intercession” is huperentugchanó. Most then define this word, not out from the Flow of Gospel Word, but rather, by external and separated theology. Let me give the simplest true meaning of the Greek word inside the Gospel.

The Spirit places us inside of the One who is always connecting us together with God for the sake of others, with inexpressible groanings.

In another letter I want to discover the meaning of all the New Testament verses containing the word entugchanó, “inside of the One who always connects us with God.” Here, I want to continue with the form of our joint Intercession with God for others.

When I look straight at my present agony, this feeling of great angst inside of me right now, whatever it might be responding to, in outward circumstances or in sharp memories that hit me regularly, and I call it GOOD, all I am doing is seeing what is already True. That’s what it means to be seized into God, it means to see God as Good in all, especially in my awfulness, which we will get to in a moment.

My seeing it GOOD does not make it good in itself, for it already is, it simply brings me into union with God my Father such that I am seeing out from His eyes. Yet being seized into God is only the first part, being seized into His throne is the second.

I flipped into day-dreams in order to dull the ache inside. To not day-dream is to look squarely at the ache and not avoid it. In looking at the ache, I know that it is GOOD, for I see that it is utterly God with me.

Nonetheless, I am able to do so much more. You see, I have the AUTHORITY, inside of God, to turn my ache, to turn even the awful ruination of our mini-split AC, for instance, into MIGHTY blessing and life flowing into YOU!

I have the authority to call my present moment of agony as God-with-me for your sake, that the Spirit of God might burst into your soul with the same knowledge of God.

You see, Romans 8:31-39 is NOT about God loving me; rather, it’s all about the authority I have to Love out from God, to share with God that Love that sets you free into all JOY!

I have the authority to join together with God to Love you. And nothing can prevent me and God in so doing.

I am not a “loving” man; I am a man filled with a God who Loves.

Let’s look now at a Truth I have just discovered that Paul has been weaving from Romans 4 to Romans 12, a Truth I have never known before, a Truth that has to adjust even what I have written in the Flow of Gospel Word thus far. That truth is God’s only purpose for our dying bodies. This is something I must develop further in upcoming writing, but which I want to set before you now.

Your body now dying because of former sins has never been about anything other than God’s own Form inside of creation that is His Path into becoming seen and known. To present your dying body to God as a living offering (Romans 12:1) means that your dying body is God’s Path, His Highway, His birthing, His travail, His entrance into a world that needs to know God-Love. This is the meaning of everything Paul says about our bodies from Romans 4 on.

Your body has never been devoted to sin, not since the resurrection of Jesus; your body, even in its dying condition, and all the agony of soul that goes with such a body, has always been devoted to God.

Finally, I want to end on a little secret inside of God, how He operates, and what our authority really means.

You see, I can’t stand the thought of a wasted life, nor of any moment of life that has not been without great purpose inside of God. To stand before God and to say, “Well I don’t know what this part of my life was about, it was all so useless,” that is inconceivable. I don’t want to know such a thing or to be near those who call themselves in that way.

God’s reply is, “As you call your life, so it is for you.” – As you judge, so you will be judged. – By your words, you will be inside of Jesus, and by your words you will consign yourself to hades, to a life of shadow, seeing everything as worthless.

“Yet the day WILL come when you WILL give thanks, for My Son will win your heart.”

As I call this present awfulness GOOD and filled with God for the sake of others, so my entire life, in every moment, in every interaction with others, in everything I was – BECOMES. And in becoming so, my entire life as the INTERCESSION of God becomes a Door flung wide-open for the sake of His Church.

In the same way, the one who sees the present awfulness as evil and pleads with God to make it “better,” so that one’s entire life becomes, an entirely wasted life.

To hear someone say to me, “Daniel, I am here inside of God because you gave your agony to Jesus for my sake,” is to know TREASURE beyond all value.

Here’s the thing. If I had to give my present agony to Jesus, without using it as a springboard to enjoy a great daydream, for myself, for my own connection with God, I would not even try, for I would most certainly fail quickly.

But I can do it for you. I can do it for the sake of the Church. And so in the midst of my choice, I give myself to the Father for the sake of God’s people, all across the earth. I say, “This is for our Church, my Father, that she would be free, that she would know You, that Christians everywhere would love one another with pure hearts fervently, that Christians everywhere would enter into Christ Community as the Revelation of Jesus Christ.” And I am at  peace.

You’re dying body is dying. Okay. And it is entirely and only FOR God, because this is His Way through which, alone, you and He together sets creation free.

This is the hour, now is the time of the great Travail. Let’s give every awful part of our bodies and our souls to the Father as His Travail for the sake of His Church, for God is coming through.

~~~

I realize that many questions have arisen out from what I share in this letter, specifically, how is this Biblical? We must understand that everything conveyed to us by every Gospel Verse means, inside of the Tree of Life, something very, very different from what it once meant to us inside the mind of good and evil.

Yet if this is indeed the Father’s hour, the time of His Great Travail, that He might enter into creation as Himself made known, then we really want to know, from Bible verses, what that really means for us now, for every moment of our lives.

I can see three letters going forward, “The Spirit Shared with Us,” “Our Dying Bodies Shared with God,” and “The Meaning of the Great Travail.” In these letters, I hope to bring in the Bible verses that speak of something inside of God that we have never before known.