God’s Plumb – Line
In the construction of a building the workers will hang a string with a weight on one end. As the builder holds this weighted string (called a plumb-line) beside a wall it will reveal if the wall is straight or true.
In our lives we are brought back to the plumb-line. God is our plumb-line.The heart and manner of Jesus is our standard. Like any builder we string a line and add a weight to determine the accuracy of our structure and to align our building with what is true.
Within the Kingdom of God our building is the hearts and minds of people (not the church). We must ask ourselves, are we aligned 81 with the King of Kings and do we know the standard of the King? In regards to this standard we must look to the place that the King himself is looking.
Consider:
“The Lord said to Samuel, “Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” Samuel 16:7 NIV
WHAT I AM SEEING
As a prayer minister I am privileged to observe the:
• softening of hearts
• deep realizations of a soul
• healing of harms and trauma
• giving over of idolatrous power
• laying down of false belief systems
• lives change
• compassions increase
• patience takes root
• peace filters deep
• actions take on new holiness
The following material is a product of my experience with my own years of inner healing and transformation, asking for instance,“How did the Lord move me into compassion?” It is also taken from my years of being a practitioner of healing prayer with many others. Week after week I am privileged to witness how the Lord leads people from their own flesh and ego-state into Godliness, observing,“How did the Lord move him into greater humility?”
In the work that I do I witness the common attitudes that keep people bound and with shortened influence, compared to those that move with greater freedom in the Lord.
THE WAY OF TRANSFORMATION
In my coach training 82 I became familiar with these Four Learning Stages:
| 4 – Unconscious Competence | |||
| 3 – Conscious Competence | |||
| 2 – Conscious Incompetence | |||
| 1 – Unconscious Incompetence |
We begin at the bottom. It is a ladder that we ascend. At the start we do not know what we do not know. In #1, Unconscious Incompetence we are blind to what we are missing. There is no awareness of something different than what we already know. Here we mistake our understanding for all there is to know.
Moving forward in our learning brings us face to face with the understanding that there are things we do not yet know. #2, Conscious Incompetence is obviously an excellent state to be in, yet it is exceedingly hard to get to and very uncomfortable while there. Conscious Incompetence requires vulnerability and an admitting that we do not know something.
It was in conscious incompetence, for instance, that Pastor Daniel in Mozambique invited me to teach about women, “I see that you are saying different things about women and I think we need to be taught what you know.” Or when Pastor Michael in Uganda implored, “Teach us to do what you do, impart to us what you know of Spiritual Authority.”
WHAT IS MISSING
My purpose with this month’s study is to bring awareness to what is lacking. We must learn to be comfortable in conscious incompetence, okay to say there are things we do not know about life in Christ, and okay with not being okay. Here humility begins.
Both overseas and in the west we have become settled in a religion of morality where the goal is to keep face and to make pretty, to show ourselves strong and perfect. But this, is a stronghold of the enemy that is keeping Christians from transformation. Bringing Christians to the cross is one of the hardest things to do; by our moral strength and good habits we think we have found the freedom of the cross.
WHY DOES IT MATTER?
KEY: Jesus did not die on a cross, bearing the sins of an entire world, so that we could attend church on Sundays, create groups of people like some fancy country-club, make programs and build buildings, or even become moral people.
The plan is so much bigger than this! The Kingdom of God come to earth is about the effects of sin and death being usurped by the beauty and light of God; it is the truth lived out that when light enters darkness flees. The battle is complete. There is no battle. We are now to bear Him, as light, into our communities; this happens through a trust relationship with Jesus Christ where we entrust to him every part of ourselves and where we invite Jesus to change, heal, and restore us from the inside out.
Restoration of God come to earth:
• in all glory and honour
• whereby we and all of creation are freed unto life abundance
• where this world is prepared for heaven on earth
The Kingdom of Heaven brought to earth, with restoration on every level that all of creation may be brought back to the original image of God’s design and intention and creation before sin entered the world. This will not happen by moral certitude, good habits, well-planned gatherings, or any other good deeds that we might focus on. The kind of transformation, restoration, and revolution this world requires is only accomplished through the hearts and minds of Christ-followers who give way to deep, profound, difficult, seared by God’s fire, kind of inner work. We must be transformed if we want to see our world transformed. It is the way God has set it up to work.
I hope to normalize the process of maturity:
• to remove religion’s sense of shame over where we currently are
• instilling a freedom to get on with seeing our lives in all honesty
• bringing our in-process selves to the foot of the cross and the presence of The King
The change we need we cannot manufacture on our own:
• We can become aware of our need
• We may see the fractured realities of our hearts
• We might glimpse the darkness in our own souls
But we cannot fix us. Month 10 is therefore not a series of ‘now do this’ lectures. Rather, I am counting on the healing and wholeness of the Lord over each person as we become aware of our great need. It is God that heals us. It is grace that frees us. It is the Holy Spirit that helps us. My job, my role is to simply introduce and facilitate the revelation of our Lord over lives. The Spirit of God does the rest.
• God does the revealing
• God establishes repentance
• God creates the hunger for more
• God leads the heart prayers of a people towards gladness in him • God brings deep heart transformations
The problem is that our sense of self has been built on coping mechanisms, our own best reasoning, the lies we have believed, and the conclusions we have made about self, life, God, and others. And all of these false things must be broken down and rewritten by God himself. He is our master builder and we bring him our whole hearts so that we can be remade in Christ.
The process of becoming disciples of Jesus Christ takes time. Yes, we are entered into the life of the Spirit from the day we turn from our sin and turn to Jesus. As we are baptized in both water and the Spirit we find new life within us.
Only by the power of the Holy Spirit are we changed and transformed into the likeness of Christ. This requires a process of our old person being broken down and then rebuilt in the Lord.
Therefore, as we have already been realizing in this course, we are often brought face to face with our failures, our losses, our mistakes, our arrogance, our wrong thinking and much more. This, of course, is very hard. It is difficult to be vulnerable. It is okay to be broken. Both are absolutely necessary for new life in Christ.
Therefore, this month’s study has been for the purpose of giving a working grid by which to:
• Become okay with failure and brokenness (it is the field being plowed before the planting of the Lord)
• Put down our false selves that have been built on pretence (the image we want others to see)
• Loose off the lies and shame and condemnation of the enemy (the filth of satan is washed off of us)
• Have the assignments of the enemy replaced with the heart of our Lord (the truth of God goes deep)
• Grow in humility, peace, love, and joy (we become glad in God)
• Become safe people, able to handle disappointment and processes of growth (built to lead well)
• Be transformed into the likeness of Christ, gracious to all people, submitted to God, to be his love
You do not need to be perfect. Others do not need to be perfect. It is okay to be broken. It is okay to have wounds from your life. This is normal for every single one of us. It is the enemy that would make this shameful and embarrassing. Refuse shame, refuse embarrassment, refuse condemnation.
As people alongside each other we must spur one another on to good things, to a real process with God, to deep honesty with the Lord, and with true love that understands God’s great and gracious heart to us.
It is the Lord who grows us. It is Jesus who saves us. It is the Holy Spirit who teaches us and reveals to us our own hearts. Grow in him, be blessed today in the name and the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.
“I will praise you, Lord my God, with all my heart; I will glorify your name forever.” Psalm 86:12 NIV
I’ve outlined six ways in which the disciples of Jesus were impacted by their time with Jesus.
Within each of those six I’ve identified four specific heart and life stances that are grown within us.
There are more of course, yet for the purpose of this work my goal is to keep it as simple as possible. I want a snap-shot picture of transformation in Christ, something that can be taken in at a glance, noting, that this will always be a living document, shifting and changing as we grow and realize more in the Lord.
81 To change (something) so that it agrees with or matches something else http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/align
82 from Erickson International College
=> Now we are ready to look at the Overview for this month
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