16. Seized into God

And her child was seized into God and into His throne (Revelation 12:5). – John is seeing the normal Christian life and the present experience of all believers in Jesus.

Our problem has been quite simple. – We could not see. And in not seeing God, we inserted into our imaginations “about” God all sorts of not-God things.

I read an account once about how newly discovered cataract surgery was applied to people who had been blind their whole lives, and suddenly they could see. All of them were shocked, for reality had no relationship with what they had imagined for decades. Some worked their way through the confusion into a normal life, but some could not bear to have their carefully crafted imagination overthrown. Some refused to see; some even ended it.

In a land where all are blind, a man with one eye is immediately crucified.

The very moment you asked Jesus into your heart, God seized you into Himself and into His authority. That is, in fact, Paul’s gospel.

We are not looking at or regarding the things that are seen [by outward appearance], but we are looking at and regarding the things that are not being seen [the substance of God]. For the things that are seen are temporary, but the things that are not seen are age-unfolding (2 Corinthians 4:18).

Many who are blind imagine that they see the “heavenly” because they have their heart set on superiority, on a false “ascension.”

 In writing the flow of Gospel Word for Ephesians 4, I discovered a verse I have never seen before, though I have read it many, many times. – The One having descended is the same One who also ascended above all the heavens that He might fill all, that is, that He might make all complete by filling them to capacity with Himself.

Jesus ascended above all heavenly superiority; He ascended into His church, now walking upon the earth. Look in the face of your brother and sister, for you are seeing God, not in a false “worship,” but in walking together inside of Love.

What does it take to SEE God manifest in the flesh? The problem is not whether God is manifest in the flesh or not, the problem is the inability to see.

The Apocalypse is the most powerful spiritual experience on offer. And the riskiest. What will you do when you see God as He really is and when you reckon with the same thing Adam saw, that God does not impress you at all. – He has no form or comeliness; and when we see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him. He is despised and rejected by men, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him (Isaiah 53:2-3).

Contrary to John Calvin’s boastful imagination of what happens when you “see God,” when he saw God, he esteemed Him so little that he burned Him at the stake.

The thing about God, and about being seized into God, however, is that God is light. We could not endure the light if we did not know, all through the fabric of our souls, that God is Love, but not just “Love,” but that God has spoken into – me, His own personal love for me.

To live freely inside of light is full transparency. There is no hiding, no pretending, no presenting to God something one is not. That doesn’t leave anything much, at least in our own estimation. It seems to me that when I offer to God what I really am for the sake of His Church, I am offering the sweepings from the gutter. Yet I do so anyway, for I know that what I am, as I am, is acceptable to God, in fact, it’s the only thing God wants from me.

To know God, true thanksgiving must permeate every particle of our lives and memories.

I want to share with you what God is doing in my life. – I have never done anything more wonderful and exciting than the present writing of the Flow of Gospel Word. And partly by this glorious knowing, a change has come in my seeing, for I see that I am seized into God and into His throne.

And that means something far different than I have ever known. As I said in the last letter, “I am blinking in wonder, hardly knowing what it is I am seeing. I must write in a blundering way, for I cannot yet put things together.” Thus I ask you to bear with me as I blunder through this brightness.

For the first time in my life, I am glorifying God, the thing Adam and all humans since turned away from, and thus can now tell you what glorifying God means.

To glorify God is to KNOW that God IS – in all, and in all my giving of myself to Him.

To glorify God is to acknowledge that I am IN God, that God is IN me, and that everything I am and every moment and circumstance of my life, I offer willingly to the Father for His sake, that God might possess a way into the lives of others.

To glorify God is to acknowledge that God is; therefore I am, not as “my ascendency,” but as my joyous surrender. And my joyous surrender is not a loss of any kind, but a casting of myself into the flow of Giving that is God.

To glorify God is to place my worst moments, my weakest failures, my most troubling emotions, all that I find myself to be in each present moment, utterly into God, with this critical point of view, that, just as Jesus took upon Himself my worst, that inside His refusal to separate Himself from God, He gave the Father a doorway into my heart, so as I give my immediate human dilemma, whatever it might be, to the Father in the same way, God has the path He desires to enter into the hearts of many who also are afflicted.

To glorify God is to call one’s humanity and circumstance as God through me for others.

Adam was not deceived; he knew all things; he chose control over others and closed the door to God. Jesus also “knew all things” coming out from Gethsemane (John 18:4), much more than Adam did. And Jesus walked away from all the clamor of need, that He might give the agony of His human soul to the Father for the sake of all.

We follow Jesus, and in so doing bring an end to all falseness.

I have shared with you that last April God took me back to the summer of 1998 when I willfully disassociated myself from those things I imagined were “God,” but had brought me only to such confusion and hopelessness. As I looked at myself in that time, from my present point of view, I realized that what I did was mostly good. Nonetheless, I thought at the time that God would now “fix” some of the broken places of my soul.

Things did not go as I had hoped. And so I simply waited upon God. In October, then, when God showed me a place inside of Himself wherein I was enabled to give to Him me as I am, I began to see things differently. And seeing things differently happened only because of the agreement Jesus made with me, that as I gave to Him my propensity to daydream, choosing rather to just rest in my human difficulties of the moment as the “deep groanings,” the intercession of the Spirit for the sake of God’s Church, so Jesus would rebuild my broken soul with the wondrous Flow of Gospel Word. (Actually, it’s the other way around. Jesus gives me Himself first, and then He enables me to give myself to Him as I am.)

From October until now, something has been happening in me that I did not expect. Week after week, small circumstances of the present moment have evoked one painful emotion after another, many of them terribly painful feelings that I have felt at one time or another, or rather, cycling from one to another my whole life.

My life has been filled with internal pain of many kinds, each of them strange, each of them without reason, each of them unbearable, yet I knew little else. Inside all that pain, I cared for others and gave of myself freely. Inside the pain, I sought God to know Him. Yet the various pains were always way too much, and so I could only disassociate myself from them in my psyche in whatever way I could.

Asperger’s had its own set of painful reactions and emotions. Then, my personality type, INTJ on the Briggs-Meyer scale, had its own set of painful reactions and misunderstandings. On top of that, possessing a gifted intelligence both literary and practical created its own set of painful responses and deep loneliness. Each one of these three things could by themselves account for all the confusion of my life; all three together were a hurricane.

Yet there are more sources of difficulty that I could add to these. I won’t, because my goal is understanding for you, not “maudlin tears” for me. And drawing from all of these, then, is my acute memory of most every experience of my life, as if it happened just yesterday.

Now I am not sharing any of this for you to feel sorry for me. I know that each person has their own unique sets of difficulties in life and differing ways to cope. At the same time, laying all this out is helpful to my present understanding. Yet feeling deeply sorry for myself was one of the many emotions I once knew.

My point is this, over and over since October, God has allowed me to go from feeling again one kind of difficult emotion to another, emotions that have no reason or solution, inside the context of no longer hiding from anything.

And so what I have done each time is to give that awfulness to God my Father, me as I am, with zero need to fix or hide from myself, to give myself as that awfulness, without any need for it to change. But inside of each, saying, “Father, I belong to You. You are moving through the agony of my human soul reconciling the world to Yourself.”

At the same time, God has shown me a new way to offer all that I am to Him, that He might offer me as His son for the sake of others (Hebrews 12:7).

Inside of the anointing of the Spirit, I went in remembrance into each setting through the course of my life, first my family as a child, then Lacomb Elementary School, then Lebanon Union High School, and so on until now.

I spoke, “God, You sent me into that setting and among those individuals, that You might offer me as Your son for their sake. Father, You sent me into my family as a little boy, that You might offer me as Your son for their sake. Father, You sent me to the Ridge at Bowens Mill, that You might offer me as Your son for the sake of those with whom I interacted while there.” – And so on all the way through.

Then I realized that this was just half the equation, and that, by itself, it could lend itself to someone imagining “I’m God’s man sent here for you,” a way of thinking I abhor. For that reason, I added a second set of words. “Father, you sent every member of my family into my life  as a child that You might offer them as Your sons for my sake. Father, You sent the classmates and teachers of my school years into my life as Your offering to me, for my sake. Father, You sent every person in the Blueberry Community into my life as Your offering for my sake.”

Then, when we say both together, we get the full picture. “Father, You sent me into my present family, Maureen and our children and granchildren, that You might offer me as Your son for their sakes, AND You sent each one of them into my life, that You might offer them as Your sons for my sake.”

When I no longer need to be “fixed” in any way; when I no longer need difficulties to be resolved; when I no longer need solutions for myself – BECAUSE being God’s connection for others is worth so very much more, then I just rest in God. And understand, practicing such a way of thinking without immediate engagement with the Father through the Spirit is not something we want to do, for it would be as much iniquity as any other kind of self-folly.

I read a story in Reader’s Digest many years ago about two boys who lived in the New Jersey barrens, one Native American, the other European American. The native boy had learned  how to escape quicksand, so the two boys wanted to see if they could do such a thing together. They went into the swamps of southern New Jersey and leaped full on into a mire of quicksand.

Sure enough, it worked, and, after a few hours of rest, they climbed out and went home.

What did they do? They did nothing. You see, the human body is lighter than water and even more so than quicksand. Those who die in quicksand are those who struggle to save themselves. The two boys simply allowed their bodies to rest, having ensured that they would float on their backs faceup. And as their bodies rested in complete peace, so their parts very slowly came up to the surface. Then, once they were still upon the surface, they very slowly began a light backstroke that sent them bit by bit across the surface to the edge, where they got up and walked home.

I was always impressed by this story, but applying it to my own emotional pain has never been possible – until now.

Let me paraphrase Romans 8:13 to what I am convinced Paul meant by his choice of words and why we are justified in defining them only by the absolute Atonement of Jesus.

“For if you struggle against your human dilemma, trying so very hard to get God to fix you, you will sink and you will die. But if you rest fully inside of the Spirit, knowing that the agony of your human form is the deep groaning of the Spirit for the sake of others, giving yourself to the Father with all your heart, with no need to fix or hide from or save yourself, then you will find yourself inside of God – seized into God – and as you move together with the Spirit in such a giving of yourself for the Father’s sake, so you will arise out from death – and go home.”

Of truth, this is the same meaning as Jesus’ words in John 12:25-26. – “The one who loves more his soul, his own story of self, loses it, and the one who loves less his soul, his story of self inside this world, will keep and protect it into age-unfolding life. If anyone serves Me, let him accompany Me; and where I am, there also My servant will be. If anyone serves Me, the Father will value and honor him.”

We follow Jesus.

I want to share a note sent to me by a reader (with her permission).

Thanks Daniel. Just heard the lesson on being the great travail of God. I've listened to it a few times now, and it's hitting the innermost parts of my heart. I now see that my life has always been for God doing what he desires and it's not about me. Quite a sober awakening. We also left many fellowships behind and sometimes it was such a relief especially the last one. I had been praying for months  that we would leave there. They actually read a sermon from Jonathan Edwards? About the people hanging on a pitch fork above the fire. It was so horrible. My whole life is now coming before me and so many answers why things happened that particular way. So much sadness, never feeling good enough, always needing to change myself and failing all the time. But now I know I'm loved by Father and Jesus lives as me and we walk every step together. – We appreciate your prayers. Much blessing to you all, and I'm praying the anointing will flow freely. 

To be “seized into God” includes the wondrous knowing that every moment and circumstance of our lives have been only God with us for others, just as Jesus KNEW inside his human agony upon the cross.

 There are many things that we find inside of God, all of them good and wondrous, all of them life-changing, and all of them belonging entirely to us.

Both the Spirit given to me and the present Flow of Gospel Word shows me that the God into whom I have been seized is POWER. Now, this topic of power is different from what I hope to explore in the upcoming letter “And into His Throne.”

The authority of the Throne is already given to me because I am a human filled with Jesus; it is part of the fabric of my person. But the power is only out from God. I am inside of it, yes, but it’s not me at all.

And when we think of power, we must think of two opposing concepts, “God is” VERSUS “God ought.” “God is” and “God ought” are always at war against one another in the cataclysms of our souls. Most Christians, including us for most of our lives, have sought desperately for “God ought,” even while calling “God is” as being of the devil.

“God ought to heal me,” versus, “God is inside my human brokenness reconciling the world to Himself.” And of course, when we thought “heal” we didn’t mean what God means by wholeness, we meant “fixed.” – “You have it wrong, God; You need to fix Your mistake.”

In other words, we did not glorify God as God, but were unthankful.

God did not “heal” Jesus’ scars and will never do so. What happens inside of Power, as we know God-is, reconciling the world to Himself through our human brokenness, there comes a “putting together,” a wholeness, that is so different from what we had imagined when we lusted after “superpower,” that is, the power to force, the power to “fix” (which always brings sinking further into the mire).

I now have another upcoming letter in mind that could be titled “The Apostolic River.” The vision of the Church, as I see it now ever more completely, can happen for real ONLY out from the overwhelming flow of Apostolic power entering the lives of multitudes as Fire, a power that instantly opens the things of God to them in experience, things they had never known before, and hurls them into a way of living they would never have arrived at otherwise.

And the last time I sought to see if God would move just a little bit in such a way through me, God sent me home with overwhelming rebuke, and pointed me to the significant limitation of giving myself no further than the Zoom meetings.

Yet the Gospel Word flowing through me now can find its fulfillment ONLY as the Church, and it can do so only by Apostolic Power, of which I possess NONE.

Just yesterday, a couple of minor circumstances worked together to bring back to me full bore the deep self-pity that marked my soul during my early twenties. I neither sunk into it nor hid from it. Instead, I offered it as myself to the Father, “This is me for You.” There is a real loss of self in such an approach, for there is no expectation of betterment, even though it cannot work the woe it once did because I rest utterly upon God.

I do not see outwardly God doing anything. I do not see inwardly any fixing of my soul. I just rest myself as I am quietly upon God – but always in the mind of, in the deep expectation of, “God through me for the sake of others.” With that thought having its place and meaning ONLY inside the deep groanings of the Spirit God has given to me.

If there is to be power, it must be by my hand touching nothing. My gain is not for self, but for you.

Three times in the history of creation God set before Himself a doorway through which to enter into the knowledge of all. The first time, the door was slammed in His face. The second time, the Door was opened wide, but then slammed again in His face. The third time is His final opportunity to enter into being seen and known.

We can know the meaning of that open Door for God only by knowing the meaning of Adam’s refusal and the meaning of Jesus’ saying, “Oh God, You have answered Me.”

Jesus gave Himself to the Father in every way that Adam refused. Yet Christianity has sided with Adam, not Jesus, having driven Jesus far away over there somewhere.

We follow Jesus.

What did all the power flowing through Jesus in His ministry accomplish? As far as transforming the world is concerned, absolutely nothing. Even His disciples ran away and hid themselves in terror.

What Jesus accomplished happened in an entirely different way than human manipulation of power. It happened entirely inside of Jesus’ psyche inside the deepest of human agony. And what happened there was Love, Love for the Father, and thus, Love for us.

And we also.

Love for the Father – without power – is the only Doorway God can use.
 
Yet there is something else that I am finding here inside of God. I am finding that I see. I see as God sees; I see through eyes of Fire.

I see the Church. And my love for the Father becomes His Love for the Church.

This is one of the reasons God has limited me into an almost solitude in immediate outward relationships. It’s the same reason why Jesus walked away from all the needs of all the people around. It’s what He told Philip to tell the Greeks who were sure that seeing Jesus could fix their problems. – The Church will happen only if I am planted into the earth.

God wants my focus, including my limited ability to write short prayers, to be focused on the ENTIRE Church in heaven-earth, all who belong to Jesus in this hour of His revelation.

I don’t know what God will do through me going forward. He keeps me always next to despair, that nothing is happening, though never in despair.

But I do know this. NOTHING can compare to the Value to me of this present life I know, finding myself as I am, in all my human mess, here inside of God, and not just here inside of God, but inside of God for His purpose, that the Father might win this final opportunity to be known.

This is why I will not stop. As Paul also said, this is why I persevere.