December 27, 2004

"The Housecleaning Begins at Home"

Whenever we gain territory in any area in our own lives, then we especially have the power to obtain that same grace for someone else.  Unless we have gone through the struggle or have had that experience of some kind ourselves, it seems like we don't have that particular level of grace.  So the housecleaning begins at home so God can restore our household as well.  We need to allow God to heal us.  Once He begins the healing process, we need to choose to reject sin and keep the door closed.  This way sin will not be able to keep opening the door to the enemy over and over again.  Sometimes we actually give the enemy the legal right to enter into our house.  He will come in if the door is left open through sin. 

Any time you are in intercession that might lead into deliverance ministry, you will find that intercession and deliverance ministry go together.  Deliverance ministry will never hold on its own.  Never.  It has to have the healing touch of the Lord so that whatever allowed the enemy to enter the house in the first place will be healed so the door will be shut and remain shut so that the enemy can not return.

Scripture tells us that God has chosen us to be holy and blameless in His sight (Eph 1:4).  Blameless is another word  for sinless.  This is what He wants-for all of us to become sinless.  This is His perfect will.  This is His plan.   More of Jesus, less of me.  John the Baptist said, "He must increase; while I must decrease" (Jn 3:30).  He must because our sanctification is God's perfect will.  In the solitude allow the Holy Spirit to flash His beautiful light to really show you what He wants.  Give Him permission to do whatever needs to be done to bring you into that place where you can enjoy the solitude of love and intimacy with God.

When we are led into the solitude by the Spirit, there are two issues that come up.  One is kind of painful.  Joy and sorrow go together.  As we go into the solitude, especially in the beginning, there can be pain because we're going to get glimpses of ourselves that we never saw before.  We will see bondage, attachments, and sin areas.  That's hard to look at.  We may want to turn tail, as the little Flower said, and run.  At these times, John of the Cross tells us, "Beg for the grace to persevere."  He said that this time of purification is when many souls turn back and no longer walk with God.  So enter into God's light.  Enter into the purification process.  Enter into the fire of God's love and let Him burn away all that needs to go.

As we do that, He is changing us.  We will find that in our own intercession and interaction with people, we will become more compassionate because we've been there.  We're in touch with our own sin and we're very slow, if at all, to judge anyone else.  We say with St. Philip Neri, "But for the grace of God, there go I."  We learn to love the sinner.  We hate the sin, but we learn to love those in sin and we do not judge them.  We learn to pray for them with such compassion and love so that they, too, will come into freedom and  reconciliation with God within.

God sees us as sinners-that's true-but we are loved sinners.  We will fall.  Scripture says, "The just man seven times a day" (see Prv 24:16), so there will be little mud puddles along the way.  But someone once said that the definition of a saint is that they always get up by the count of nine.   So there's hope.

Excerpt from "Wings of Peace," Manila, Philippines, 2001.