The spirit of a person has a porous quality, very much like a sponge. A certain element of this quality can be self-destructive unless it is corrected. If a man reaches out in his spirit and soaks up everything, eventually he becomes a composite of all the emotions, the feelings, and the defeats of people around him. It is good to be sensitive to people’s needs, but it is not good to constantly absorb their attitudes in an indiscriminate manner.
Learning to control what you are open to will be an important factor in your spiritual growth. On the natural level your body can absorb poisonous sprays and many other kinds of harmful chemicals from the food you eat.
In a similar manner, you can pick up negative attitudes, like poisons, and allow them to enter your spirit. Among the factors which influence your growth and development, heredity is not that important. Environment has a great effect, but an even greater influence is the spirit that is in the home and the spirit that is around you.
What you listen to and what you believe mainly determines what you become; it creates you. This is true on a natural plane, from a psychological viewpoint; yet how much more it is true in the realm of spirit.
You may absorb certain things into your spirit very easily; therefore you must be very discriminating about what you discard and what you keep.
The basic process of life consists of intake, assimilation, and elimination. If you take in and retain something that is harmful without eliminating it, death will begin to work within you. When you eat good food, you must be able to assimilate its nutrients and eliminate that which is waste.
Just about the time we think that health foods are the answer to our ills, we hear of some old man who has lived to be one hundred and ten in spite of the fact that he has been dunking doughnuts in hot coffee all of his life. This seems inconsistent.
Throughout history, most people have had very limited diets—sometimes limited to whatever was in season, whatever could be caught in a river or found running loose on some prairie. People did not take vitamins and minerals or eat special health foods, yet many lived long healthful lives.
Ancient skulls have been found of people who lived so long that they actually wore their teeth right down to their gums. Today, teeth usually do not last as long as the rest of the body. This can cause us to wonder if there is not some other quality, a quality of spirit that influences health and well-being.
Jesus said that man does not live by bread alone, but by every Word that proceeds out of the mouth of God (Matthew 4:4). Therefore, when we hear the Word of the Lord, we should hold on to that Word. The Word that God is bringing today has a life-giving quality. No one can afford to be without it. Those who hear that Word cannot allow the birds of prey to come and take His Word away from them. If they do, they will wither and die spiritually.
God is raising up prophets in this hour to speak His living Word. How does a man become a prophet? How does he become that instrument of God? This always seems to be a mystery.
Is a prophet created just by the impartation of a few gifts of the Spirit, such as a word of wisdom, a word of knowledge, or a flow of prophecy? It takes more than that to become a prophet.
A true prophet has learned a secret. He has learned how to draw from God and keep what he receives. He has learned how to receive a Word from God and hide it in his heart. He has learned how to open his heart to God and how to close his heart to evil. He has learned how to keep out bitterness and other defilements of spirit. When someone dumps a load of problems on him, he knows how to take that load to the Lord without allowing it to settle in his spirit.
A man may go far in his dedication, but he will stop short of being effective if he has not overcome a specific need in his spirit: he may still retain a bitter or a critical or a vicious trait.
The Word of God may still not have first priority in his life. Consequently, a mingled flow of ministry will emanate from his life because he has not learned to discriminate by eliminating the negative while retaining the positive.
In II Samuel 23, we read about David’s mighty men of valor, one of whom was Eleazar. During one battle, this wonderful soldier arose and slew Philistines all day long. When he was finally finished, he could not let go of his sword; his hand clung to it (II Samuel 23:9–10).
So, also, we must cleave to the Word of God with all of our hearts. In the midst of spiritual warfare we must cling to the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God. This is the key to victory.
Not only is the Word our source of defeating Satan, but we must determine that we will never lay it aside. After we use the Word to win a battle, we do not relinquish it; we retain the Word. We hold on to it. We think about it. Concerning the Word that was given to Timothy, Paul told him, Meditate upon these things; give thyself wholly to them; that thy profiting may appear to all. I Timothy 4:15.
Like Timothy, we must meditate on the Word of God and reject any transference of satanic thoughts. When people accept thoughts that demonic powers dump on them, their own thinking and emotions change.
One day they may think a certain way, while the next day they think entirely different. They pick up negative thoughts from others. When a lie is spoken to them, they receive it. They become open to deception and soak it up almost unconsciously.
How desperately the devil wants to deceive and to destroy. In this day, our progress will be very difficult unless we develop an ability of eliminating everything negative by not being open to it, not listening to it, not absorbing it. If we do not learn this, we will need God’s deliverance again and again. Because of the deception that can reach out and destroy, we could be shattered in our oneness and unity with the brethren.
You must learn how to receive from a brother the good that he ministers, but you must also develop a capacity to resist that which is negative. It is easy to become a partaker of deception. Just by sitting and talking with a brother, your own heart can be overwhelmed with the deception he is under. Yet you can see all of his good traits and you can bless him. Then, because you are open to him in his goodness, you may find yourself becoming sympathetic with him in his criticism and rebellion.
His stubbornness may be subtle and devious, but it is rebellion nonetheless. His stubbornness or persistence to walk in his own way is like the sin of witchcraft (I Samuel 15:23). It opens the door for everything that the enemy would heap upon him and upon another person. When a man’s will is stubbornly set in rebellion, it actually makes him as harmful as someone who is practicing witchcraft. His will is strong enough that he can disseminate the bitterness and defilement that is in his life.
We must learn to build our immunities, until we do not care what the enemy does because it does not even affect us.
We need to have the heart of a dove and the hide of a rhinoceros. We must be wise as serpents and harmless as doves (Matthew 10:16). A strange combination of two factors is required.
When we are completely immune with what we have appropriated from God, the enemy will neither move us nor disturb us. We must have the armor of God upon us so that we can resist in the evil day as we war against the principalities and powers (Ephesians 6:13).
At the same time, we must have the heart of Christ in our compassion for our brothers and sisters, an openness to help them and a readiness to lay down our lives for them.
The militant Christ is coming forth so that He might destroy the works of Satan. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil. I John 3:8b. We need the same dedication.
There can be no pity in our hearts for the works of Babylon. This world’s systems must be brought under subjection to Christ. We must hate the demonic viciousness in the hearts of men who are turning this world toward Satan. While there is wrath in our hearts against Babylonian systems, there must be a deep love for the Body of Christ. These emotions must coexist within us.
On one hand, we must be capable of the deepest love, the greatest unity, the greatest blessing, the greatest worship that has ever been. In contrast, we must be capable of the most intense, violent intercession and spiritual warfare imaginable.
We are not yet as intense in our rejection of satanic assault as we should be; nor are we open enough in our flow in God.
We must achieve a complete openness to God, along with a complete immunity against Satan. This is what we need. This we must have. The Lord must help us to reject what we must reject.
A life that is crooked is like a river that is crooked; it flows in the line of least resistance. A river only flows in a straight line when it follows a man-made channel, where the valleys have been filled and the mountains brought down. We must do this spiritually.
Too often we find ourselves following the course of least resistance. This is true of the food we eat. Some of the foods that we buy, just because they are convenient, often contain harmful ingredients. When we do not eat the foods we should, we are sinning against our physical bodies, the temple of the Holy Spirit (I Corinthians 6:19).
Usually we have control over what we put in our mouths; we have been making that decision since we were weaned. Even young children try to determine what is going to be put in their mouths and what is not. We should also try to control what we put into our minds through the things we read and listen to.
Somewhere in your life, you must decide what you are going to be and what you are not going to be, what you are going to absorb and what you are not going to absorb, what you will take in and what you will reject, what you are going to say and what you are not going to say. If you are undisciplined in everything else, you will find a mingled flow of the divine and the satanic coming forth from you.
This is illustrated in the life of Peter. On one occasion the Lord commended him, “Blessed are you, Simon Barjona; flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.” A little while later, Peter spoke impulsively, and the Lord told him, “Get thee behind Me, Satan! You savor not the things of God” (Matthew 16:17, 23).
If you partake of the bitter and the sweet and retain them both, you will be a fountain giving forth bitter and sweet.
What you absorb is what will come out of your life. You will be what you determine to be, when you decide what you are going to absorb and what you are going to reject. It is your indecision concerning this that enables Satan to come and snatch God’s Word away from you. The Word of the Lord will become rooted in your life to the extent that you reject the lies of the enemy.
You will be able to hold on to the Word when you determinedly reject everything contrary to the Word. You cannot have your mind conformed to this world and still know the perfect will of God.
This instruction of Paul is much needed today: … present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind… Romans 12:1–2. When you are rejecting the world and are not at all conformed to this age or to its thinking, then you will prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God. Then you will know it.
You will be able to walk in the perfect will of God as you absorb His living Word. You will find yourself accepting and believing truths and thinking a certain way as His Word teaches you. You will be liberated from the carnal mind. Your mind will be fortified with responses that belong to the mind of Christ.
You will come out of one mind and into the other. Consciously lend yourself to the discipline of waiting upon the Lord. Reject the old life and determine to walk the way God wants you to walk.
The eighth chapter of Luke records the parable of the sower. What happens after God gives a Word? When the seed falls by the roadside, the birds come and grab it. The devil comes to take the Word. Verse 15 tells us about the good ground: And the seed in the good ground, these are the ones who have heard the word in an honest and good heart, and hold it fast, and bear fruit with perseverance. They take hold of that Word and will not let it go; they hold it fast.
If you are not dedicated to the Word, if you do not hold on to it tenaciously, the devil will take it away from you. He will bring doubt and confusion and distractions, as the cares of life spring up.
If he cannot defeat you with wicked thoughts, he may bring you success until you are so busy that you do not have time for God anymore.
If you can be distracted, he will find a way to distract you. He will bring a thousand things in the way. He can easily defeat one person by throwing before him the lust of the flesh. Another man would never bite on that hook. Satan defeats this man by giving him success, by making him a fine, upstanding citizen with a flourishing business. He may be making a lot of money, but he is so busy that he is not going to church. The thorns, the cares of life, have choked out the Word.
The man who succeeds in his walk with God is the one who appropriates the Word and holds it fast with a good and honest heart.
The Word is more important to him than anything else in the world. He will not let it go. Then he begins to bear fruit. His fruitfulness comes forth to the same degree as his intensity in holding that Word in his heart.
He cannot produce the works of God by his own capacity, for that is not possible. At best, he is but a channel as he lets the Word have free course within him.
Believe the Word and hold on to it. Live in the Word and repent for all the days when the Word did not have priority in your life. Curse the needless distractions. Evaluate your priorities. Find every way possible to throw off any poisons that have built up, any attitudes or ideas that have been dumped on you from any source. Become immune to them. Determine to have the hide of a rhinoceros.
The people of God will not move the world by compromising or by sympathizing with its ideas. They will move the world when they speak a Word from God. Nothing will move the world except those who come forth with faith to speak the creative Word of God in its power. The Word of God created the world in the first place, and the Word of God in the believer’s mouth can move the world today.
A famous writer once said that the human race will never eliminate its problems as long as ninety-five percent of its energies are devoted to the lust of the flesh. Lust causes wars. James 4:1 tells us: From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts…? Too many believers are intrigued and even obsessed with the natural instincts of sex and marriage.
You can rise above that plane if you focus on the Lord and worship Him. All the natural instincts and drives must be completely submissive to the Lord Jesus Christ. Whatever He says, that is what you must do. If He forbids something, that is exactly what you must not do.
Learn to be totally, absolutely submissive. Follow the Word of the Lord. Do not allow anything within your flesh to rise up and upset the Lord from the throne in your life. The Lord is not to be to you like a lollipop, a consolation to help you until the dream of your life suddenly walks into the picture and your lonely days are ended. If you are looking for someone else to be that great to you, you are not worshiping Christ as the Lord over your life.
Determine what you are going to receive, what you are going to believe, what you are going to walk in, and what is going to be first in your life. You can look at all the things that are wrong and not be moved by them if you have a correct sense of values—you determine that the Lord is going to be first.
Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. Then you can become an effective channel for God—a true prophet. A prophet is a man who first and always has the right priorities. He will stand against kings and rebuke them, speaking what God has told him to speak for the sake of righteousness, as Nathan did to David (II Samuel 12:1–15). Even if he knows that his actions could result in his death, he will still do the will of God because he has the right priorities.
The true prophet loves God first. He seeks the Kingdom first. He is ready to throw aside everything else.
He subordinates every personal idea or goal to Christ. His lack is not the issue. His ignorance is not the issue. His limitations are not the issue. His education is not the issue. His looks are not the issue. His personality is not the issue. His priority is God: to seek Him first, to love Him first, to absorb His Word, to hold fast to that Word. When this is determined, then he is a prophet indeed.
This must be your attitude, even though everything else might be taken away from you. It cannot make any difference to you whether or not God stays your hand before you put a knife in your Isaac. What if the knife hits its mark? That is not your problem.
You must have faith in the One who told you to do it and believe, like Abraham, that God can raise your Isaac from the dead. God spoke many promises over Isaac. If He chose to kill him, that was His problem. Abraham’s only concern was to do what God told him to do. The Word says that God stayed Abraham’s hand. When God tells you to do something, He will have to be the One who fights with you to stop you from doing it. He will test you to see if you are going to love Him first.
Make no mistake about it, God is not concerned about fulfilling your ideas of happiness. He is concerned about fulfilling His perfect will in your life. He is not at all concerned about being the God who measures up to your standards of happiness and success in life.
Look at the prophets in the Bible. On a public-opinion poll, most of their names would not have appeared on a popularity list. No one liked them. People did not want them around. They banished the prophets, killed them, stoned them to death. Like those early prophets, you must be ready to say, “It doesn’t matter. All that counts to me is doing the will of God.
God and I have an arrangement: He is the Lord, and I am His subject. He is the Lord, and I will serve Him. Everything in my life is exposed to His Lordship. I retain no rights to anything within myself. Not passively, but aggressively, I channel everything to love Him and to do His will with all my heart, with all my soul, with all my mind, with all my strength.”
Make it happen to you. Dump the poisons. When a person eats a meal, he absorbs the nutrients and eliminates the waste. He flushes it away as soon as possible and he may even deodorize the air afterward so that the memory of it does not linger. You must do the same with the defilements of spirit. The Word is like a laxative which can purge your spirit of all that is poisonous. Get rid of it! The responsibility is laid on you to throw off the poisonous elements from your life.
You must have a new way of thinking. Your life with God has to expand until it fills the universe. Your mind has to reach into Christ until you are no longer conformed to the world. Your mind must be renewed, so that you know what is the good, the acceptable, and the absolutely perfect will of the Lord (Romans 12:2).
Learn to reject the vile. Until you do, Satan, through others, will drain your strength and rob you of your life. He will take away everything that you have and will heap on you everything that he can. Until you learn to put up a wall to his devices, you will be porous like a sponge, soaking up what you should not and having the good squeezed out of you. Reject everything that Satan throws at you. Dump it off. Throw it back.
You cannot become a pure oracle of God as long as there are defilements poisoning the stream of your spirit.
God told Jeremiah, If thou take forth the precious from the vile, thou shalt be as my mouth…
You yourself have to separate the precious from the vile and get rid of spiritual constipation.
You not only have to take in the Word, but you have to eliminate the vile.
When you separate the precious from the vile, then your mouth will be as His mouth, speaking the Word of the Lord as an oracle of God.
God also told Jeremiah, And I will make thee unto this people a fortified brazen wall; and they shall fight against thee, but they shall not prevail against thee; for I am with thee to save thee and to deliver thee, saith Jehovah. And I will deliver thee out of the hand of the wicked, and I will redeem thee out of the hand of the terrible. Jeremiah 15:19b–21. This Scripture shows that you can be immune and fortified against anything the enemy would dump upon you.
You can determine what you tune in to and what you dial out, what you are open to and what you reject. It is far superior to following legalistic rules of what you should do and what you should not do. However, even under the most liberal interpretation of the grace of God, there comes a time when you must observe simple spiritual principles that operate.
The issue at stake is not whether you will go to heaven or to hell, but whether or not you are going to be an oracle of God, an instrument in the hand of the Almighty to do His will.
Believe to move in God completely, with nothing holding you back. You cannot do this and still compromise; out of your mouth must not come forth both bitter and sweet. Therefore, you must shake off bitterness and dump criticism. Otherwise, when you listen to someone talk and know it is not true, your carnal heart will still feed on it. Learn to stand against unrighteousness. Be understanding toward others, but refuse to absorb any oppression. You are in the world, but you are not to be a part of it.