For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and Marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. Hebrews 4:12.
The Lord has a way of bringing a ministry of the word to us that has the effect of cutting deep, severing things down deep in our heart.
We don’t always understand why this is so necessary, yet we need the Lord to cut away everything that hinders us from moving into the next step with God.
The Lord is setting so much before us that we need an “experience of severance”—of being cut off from the old. This is like the circumcision in the Old Testament. Abraham was called out to be a man of God, he and all of his descendants, so God ordered Abraham to circumcise every male. (This included circumcising all of the men servants and his own children, both Ishmael and Isaac.) This was a command of the Lord.
We, too, are in the same position as the Israelites were in the book of Joshua, the fifth chapter, after they had passed over the Jordan. In front of them is all of the land to be possessed; behind them is the wilderness that they have left forever—glad to be out of it. Even that morning they had eaten of the manna that came down from heaven. Then God says, “I want you to circumcise every one of these sons of Israel. Every male is to be circumcised. All these young men that came up in the wilderness, circumcise them.”
And they called the place Gilgal, which means rolling, because the Lord said, Today I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt from you. Joshua 5:9.
We need the same thing: we need to be circumcised so that the reproach of Babylon is rolled off US because we are preparing to go in and conquer. We are getting ready to go in and prevail over all the powers of the enemy and see judgment in the earth. But before we can enter into that high spiritual plane, there must be that which cuts away from us everything that would hinder.
You say, “I don’t know about anything that hinders me.” Sometimes you are unaware of it. Sometimes it is an unconscious conditioning. It is some reaction, some response deep within your own self. You know if it is there. Be glad when you respond wrong to certain situations, because you realize that there is something down deep that needs to be taken care of. You want to respond with a right spirit to all things. If something provokes a wrong reaction, then look and find out what is behind it.
If you don’t know what I mean, ask your husband or wife, “Do I have a wrong response? When something happens to aggravate me is there something I do that I shouldn’t? Would you tell me honestly, do I do anything like that?” They will tell you. They will give you an honest answer right there! Many times I have been counseling with someone and have given them a word: “I see this problem in your heart.”
“No, I don’t have that.”
Then I simply turn to the husband or the wife, as the case may be, and ask “Do they have that?”
“Yes.”
Even when you are unaware of it yourself, everyone else can see it. It is down deep. Everything in the deceptive nature of man says it’s not there. We deceive ourselves.
That is why God must take that Word and go right down to the thought and the intents of the heart and cut it away, dig down deep until there isn’t any question that it has been cut out, because it is the seed of future defeat. It is something that can flare up. It is like a mine with grass growing so green over it, but someday unsuspectingly you may step on that one particular spot and blow your foot off. That can happen.
Satan likes to take the defeats and the things in our flesh and just mine them until there are possible explosions and defeats all along the way for us. So what does the Lord do? He keeps ministering His Living Word to us, like a sharp two-edged sword. It cuts deeply to separate soul and spirit and the joints and marrow; it is a discerner of the thoughts and the intents of the heart. For everything is laid open before Him with whom we have to do (Hebrews 4:13).
Aren’t you glad that God is so thorough, because you could fool yourself. You could walk as a believer year after year and then some day come to find that the defeat was in you all the time. You couldn’t blame anyone else; all it took was just the right circumstance to trigger the response. That is not to be with us.
Time and time again I have seen things occur that normally would have defeated me before. They would have stirred certain reactions in me, but now I don’t react like I used to.
God wants to teach us all of these things. He has to keep dealing with us. It must be a deep work of circumcision because He is going to bring us up to a new level.
Let me explain the wisdom of it. The reason God does this is that things can be latent within your life, so that in normal living they would never show up.
But put a man under stress, then some weakness of heredity or something he has been exposed to like a virus lying dormant within him, will arise. He says, “I don’t understand. All these years I had no trouble, then here it flares up.” God knows that same thing can happen to us in the spirit. It is under the surface. On the spiritual level we are walking along and nothing happens. But the Lord knows that we’re getting into Canaan. We are leaving the wilderness behind.
You can shuffle along through the sand and just worship the Lord and nothing will happen, but over where there are giants and high walled cities, you find tension and pressure. Even if you win a perfect victory, it is tiring to hew giants down all day. There is a stress, there is a fatigue, as Paul says “pressed beyond measure” (2 Corinthians 1:8). That is when anything wrong within you will come up.
There is a scriptural example of this in 1 Kings 18, 19. This is the story of Elijah going on the mountain and defeating the prophets of Baal, hewing them all down, slaughtering them. That was a hard day’s work. Then he outruns Ahab’s chariot to the gates of Jezreel, and when he arrives, the messengers get word to him that Jezebel is going to kill him. So Elijah flees for his life and leaves his servant at one place while he goes on into the wilderness under an old broom tree. There he prays, “Oh, Lord, let me die, I’m no better than my fathers.” God looked down on him and said in disgust, “Elijah, I’ll never fulfill that prayer for you.” He never did. You see, God was almost forced to translate him because of that prayer!
Elijah was tired. A weariness was upon him—something that Elijah had never revealed before. He was the “iron man.” No one had ever seen him discouraged before. But he laid down, “Oh, Lord, let me die.” That wasn’t acting; he really wanted to die. He was discouraged from his heels up. But remember, he had had a busy day, and he was weary.
There is nothing more deadly for a man of God than to do everything he can and then have problems dumped on him outside the leading of the Lord. Like David, coming away exhausted because he had been dancing before the Lord with all his might, he goes upstairs and there Michal says, “What an idiot you made out of yourself today.”
It is the wrong time to hit a man, when he is down. That’s not the time to hit him. The same thing is true for you, because you will hit problems when you’re too weary to handle them.
That is why God keeps using the Word on you all the time, circumcising your heart, preparing you. You may say, “I don’t think I need any deeper digging, I don’t need to repent any deeper.”
Next week you will wish you had been repenting this week! Next week you may really have something to repent of if you don’t repent now when God tells you to, and let Him dig down deep within your heart.
There is an experience of God severing by the Word of God. Don’t wait until you are in trouble before you pray. Get down and seek the Lord now, with all of your heart.
God has a way of constantly moving upon our lives to bring about the crucifixion of the flesh, before there is some unhealthy manifestation of it that we regret.
He works in a way so that each time we come up to a higher spiritual level in the Lord, the tests and the pressures correspondingly increase. Therefore, as God leads you into a word of sanctification before the conquest of Canaan takes place, believe God for it and accept it with all of your heart.