The Spin Stops Here

Luke 7:22 “So he replied to the messengers, “Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor.”

When John’s disciples came, and asked Jesus if He is the one prophesied of, or should they look for another – it is interesting to see the answer that Jesus gave them.  He tells them to go tell John what they have seen (action/miracles) and heard (apologetics); that the sick are healed, the blind receive sight, the lame walk, etc. In other words, we need to have both. People need to see miracles taking place as well as hearing systematic argumentation and discourse in understanding the foundation of our faith in Jesus Christ (apologetics).

We are to go out and meet the world. We are to be influencers and Jesus showed us some of the principles that will make a difference in the world. Often what it means, is to be just the opposite of what we see in the world.

For example, where there is the spirit of pride, exhibit humility; where there is stubbornness, exhibit flexibility; where there is an unforgiving spirit, exhibit forgiveness.  In other words, we are to exhibit the opposite of the ungodly spirit that is being manifested. We are in a spiritual warfare and we are to use our weapons wisely.

For the last couple of weeks, I have seen in several families a spiritual battle taking place in how what is said is being spun leading to strife within the marriage.

Praying over this I have come to realize that there is a Leviathan-spirit and one of its main tactics is to twist our words and spin the truth. This spirit causes misunderstanding and strife within relationships. It is like a crocodile that gets its kill in its mouth and will spin as fast as it can to bring its kill under its control. We see this spirit being played out in the political and media realm in how truth is being spun.

One of the most successful programs on the Fox News has been Bill O’Reilly’s No Spin Zone. He has now been fired by Fox, because of sexual innuendos. How true those accusations are I do not know, but what is interesting to me is that his “No Spin Zone” is no more. Could this be a spiritual battle taking place?

We live in a world where there is so much deception and the possibility of being deceived is great, because the truth is being spun. Did not Isaiah speak of a day like this?

Isaiah 59:14-15 “Truth has stumbled in the streets, honesty cannot enter. Truth is nowhere to be found, and whoever shuns evil becomes a prey.”

When John the Baptist’s disciples came to Jesus asking if He was the real one, the true one, what did Jesus do? He showed them that He was – by what He was doing.

In all of the spinning taking place in the world today as well as in our families – what are we to do? We show the opposite spirit. We put up ‘no spin zones’ in our area of influence within our families, jobs, professions, etc., and we say to the Leviathan spirit: ‘the spin stops here!’

Luke 10:38-41 “As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, ‘Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!’”

‘Martha, Martha,’ the Lord answered, ‘you are worried and upset about many things, But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her.’”

We need balance in all that we do. We need ‘to be’ like Mary more often sitting at the feet of Jesus and listening to what He is saying, along with the work of each day like Martha. This is why I like the early morning when I get up and sit at the feet of the Lord to hear what He has to say, giving me instructions for the day. When I miss this time it is to my own detriment. We are always wanting ‘to do,’ but God is often wanting us ‘to be.’

In Psalms 37:7 King David gave us some good advice: “Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him; do not fret because of him who prospers in his way, because of the man who brings wicked schemes to pass.”

The Hebrew word for “rest” is daman: to be silent, still, dumb. Calmly resign and leave all things in the hands of God. This is a sure cure for dissatisfaction.  The idea in back of the word ‘wait’ is to set yourself to expect God to answer.

A danger of not waiting on the Lord is that we will run ahead of Him and do the work of the Lord in human energy and not in the Holy Spirit. Not only do we build on wood, hay and stubble, but we can put into effect circumstances that have far reaching consequences. We see with this Abraham’s wife, Sarah, when the promise of God was late in coming, so she thought. What she put into motion is now affecting Israel and all of us today.

In our Western culture, we find it difficult to wait. We live in a world where success takes on the form of doing, what we achieve, being super busy, etc. and when this is not happening there is that feeling of not accomplishing anything. When it comes to sitting at the feet of Jesus, waiting on Him we find hard to do because we cannot measure what is being done. It is not something that we can see. This is where faith comes in because “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”  (Hebrews 11:1)

Yet the idea in back of the word ‘wait’ is to set yourself to expect God to answer.

Faith is being in God’s waiting room and while there – God is teaching us some precious lessons. We find that we are being:

1. Tested by uncertainty. We know that something we have been waiting for, praying for, is coming, but we do not know when. Faith is trusting God in the uncertainty. When we have been praying about something and it does not immediately manifest we will go through a time of uncertainty. This is where real faith comes in. Do we trust God during these times?
2. Tested by fear. Fear is what paralyzes us from doing and being all that God wants.  It was fear that kept me from responding to God’s calling for almost three years. There was a fear that He might call me do something that I did not want to do or felt incapable of doing.  I was afraid that if I surrendered to God that He would call me to preach, the one thing that I hated was public speaking. God had given me a promise in Matthew 28: 20 “I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” 2 Timothy 1:7 “For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline.” It was also through 1 John 4:18 that God spoke to me: “There is no fear (fobos, fobou, fear, dread, terror) in love. But perfect love drives out fear.”
3. Tested by disappointment. We live in a fallen world and there will be disappointments. What we thought would happen did not; people that we depend on can let us down.
4. Tested by delay. God keeping His promises. This is probably the biggest test and that is delay. It ties in with uncertainty, because when something does not happen that we thought would, we begin to doubt if what we were believing and working towards was really of the Lord to begin with.   Satan is very clever coming in at this time to throw doubts and discouragement our way. We may also begin to manipulate and in our strength try to bring the desired result.
5. Tested by blessings. In Genesis 22:1 we see that Abraham after waiting for a number of years is finally blessed with what God had promised that he would have the son of Sarah as promised in her old age: Isaac (whose name means laughter). It was a few years after this that Abraham was tested when God told him to take his son to a certain mountain and there sacrifice him. What thoughts must have gone through Abraham’s mind at the time; what a battle, but he obeyed and Isaac was replaced with a ram. What was happening here was to establish priority. God must be first.

If we will seek FIRST the kingdom of God and HIS righteousness, God will add all good things to us. Nothing good will He withhold from them who walk uprightly.

Psalms 27:14 “Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.”

Luke 6:12 “One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God.”

Jesus was faced with the same problem that we are faced with. How would Jesus get His message out that He came to dies for the sins of the world? It is the responsibility of the Church in world evangelism.

What did Jesus do?

The first thing we see Jesus doing: He prayed. (Luke 4:12 “Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray.” So we see that prayer was Jesus’ main agenda. “At daybreak, Jesus went out to a solitary place. The people were looking for him and when they came to where he was, they tried to keep him from leaving them. But he said, ‘I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because that is why I was sent.’ ”  (Luke 4: 41,43)  What comes out here is that prayer helps us to keep our focus, because if we do not have focus we will have fragmentation. “But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed. And the power of the Lord was with Jesus to heal the sick.” (Luke 5:16,18)

We see the connection between prayer and the power to heal.

Jesus not only prayed alone, but there were times when He prayed with others. “About eight days after Jesus said this, he took Peter, John and James with him and went up onto a mountain to pray.” (Luke 9:28) In Ephesians 6:18 Paul tells us: “pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people.”

It might seem unimportant, but the necessity of waiting on God is essential.  A.W. Tozer said: “When I am praying the most eloquently, I am getting the least accomplished in my prayer life. But when I stop getting eloquent and give God less theology and shut up and just gaze upward and wait for God to speak to my heart He speaks with such power that I have to grab a pencil and a notebook and take notes on what God is saying to my heart.”

Secondly, Jesus chose 12 men. “He appointed twelve that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach.” (Mark 3:14) I shared about power versus influence and mentioned the following: “Power works by division, influence by multiplication. In other words, the more power you share the less you have, but the more influence you share the more you have.”

What did Jesus do? We read that Jesus spent the night in prayer and the next morning He called His followers and out of them He chose 12 whom He called His Apostles.

We read in John 20:22: “And with that he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’”

One could say that He gave them His influence and they went forth and spread that influence.

Thirdly, He taught them. What did He teach? He taught them the true meaning of discipleship. “Looking at his disciples, he said: ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.  Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when men hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man.’”

This sounds like the beatitudes in Matthew 5, but I do not think it is so because of the following verses. If He is talking about the poor in spirit then why would he mention about being rich and if he is talking about hunger in righteousness then why would he mention about being well fed, etc. “But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for that is how their fathers treated the false prophets.” (Luke 6:20-26) Jesus is teaching His disciples that God is first in all things. He is the Lord; He is the King and not self. This is a hard lesson to learn, but one that we must learn if we are going to be successful in God’s work.

Fourthly, Jesus showed His disciples how to influence the world – to live by His kingdom principles. But if Jesus is not the King in our life it will be impossible to do; to love your enemies; to bless those who curse you; to lend expecting nothing in return; not to judge. So often we have a tendency to judge the motives of others and find ourselves acting in the way that we have judged others.

We will face many storms in life and whether we will stand or crumble before the storms of life will depend on our foundation. Are we built on the sand or on the solid rock of the teaching of Christ?

Luke 5:13 “Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. ‘I am willing,’ he said. ‘Be clean!’ And immediately the leprosy left him.”

It is interesting to see when Jesus healed the man He did not pray, but just spoke the Word and this leper was made clean. Jesus said that when the Holy Spirit comes upon us we would do the works that He did.

Doing the work of the Lord like Jesus we need to keep in mind what Jesus told His disciples when He spoke with the woman at the well.  He said: “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work.”  John 4:34 (NKJV)

Jesus had a particular work outlined for Him by the Father. He was to go to the cross and give His life for our ransom. This was His work outlined for Him by the Father and His last words on the cross were: “It is finished.” In the process of fulfilling the work that He had been called to do there were many other things that He did: He healed, He preached, He comforted many, He debated and He lived a life that was beyond reproach.

What is our work? This was a question that the crowd asked Jesus and He responded by saying: ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.’  Secondly, we read what Paul had to say about the work in Philippians 2:12: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” We even see with Jesus that as a man “he learned obedience from what he suffered.” (Hebrews 5:8) And so we are to do the same.

However, we know that “we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Ephesians 2:10)  What is the work that God has in advance prepared for us to do? This is something that is of utmost importance and that is making sure that we are doing the work the Lord prepared for us. Jesus said “I have come to do your will” and this should be what we pray as well. When we pray that prayer with all honesty He will show us step by step the direction we are to go so that at the end of our life we too might say: “It is finished!” and we would hear the Lord say “Well done, good and faithful servant!” Matthew 25:21

The key to know and do His work will be outlined for us in prayer. We read in our text “He Himself often withdrew into the wilderness and prayed.” (vs.16) It is no coincidence that we read in verse 17 that “the power of the Lord was present to heal them.”

The enemy tries to get us distracted and again this is where prayer comes in to keep our focus on the work that the Lord has for us. Jesus was preaching in Galilee and a great work was being done. Early in the morning Jesus goes to a place of prayer and later everyone is looking for Him. What is His response? ‘He said to them, “Let us go on to the next towns that I may preach there also, for that is why I came out.”  This is focus and this is what we need in order to do what He has ordained for us.

In doing what the Lord has outlined for us to do there will be many questions, doubts, uncertainties that will arise and wisdom will be needed. James tells us that “if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.” James 1:5-6

Without a habit of prayer – we are lost. Just like Jesus went to a place of prayer or in the wilderness where He could be alone with His Heavenly Father, so it is with us. Find that place of prayer and visit it daily – otherwise you will find that your work is in the flesh. And in the last days when it is being tested it may be found to be hay, wood and stubble that will be burned up. Let us build on a solid foundation – a foundation of prayer.