Purifying the Prophetic by R. Loren Sandford

Author:R. Loren Sandford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2005-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

7

The Spirit of Independence and Rebellion

A driving force behind the culture of self that rules the Western world—particularly America—is the spirit of rebellion and independence. It subverts our spirituality, undermines our sense of the Father’s love, defiles the exercise of our gifts and dulls our sense of the flow of God’s power. With its focus on the exaltation of self, it falsely equates submission with being diminished, obedience with loss of freedom and servanthood with insignificance, blinding us to the gift of love that submission truly is.

The opposite Spirit, the remedy for rebellion and independence, is the Holy Spirit—the Spirit of Jesus, with His submissive and humble heart in subjection to His Father. With humble obedience as a settled element of His character, Jesus rose from the waters of the Jordan on the day of His baptism to hear the Father proclaim, “My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased” (Matthew 3:17). In other words, the Father saw His own heart reflected back to Him in His Son. It is as if He cried with pleasure, “That’s My boy!” When God looks into a man, woman or congregation and sees His own heart reflected back to Him in the character of the person or people, He takes pleasure and delight in the same way He took pleasure and delight in Jesus.

A submissive heart makes three things possible: intimacy with the Father, power for miracles and love for people. God will grant us great things in the days to come, not because of the scintillating wonder of our programs or the perfection of our performance, but because He sees in us the imprint of the heart of His Son. That heart does only what it sees the Father doing and speaks only what it hears the Father speaking. It is the pure model of loving obedience.

Every Man Did What Was Right in His Own Eyes

Judges 17:6 describes the spirit in Israel prior to the kings: “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.” Because the people lived under no acknowledged authority, every man thought and did whatever he wanted to think and do, much as our own Western culture teaches us to do. In fact, independence and refusal to submit have become points of pride with us.

Judges 17 and 18 tell the story of Micah, who constructed a very expensive idol. Having done so, he hired a Levite as his private priest, believing that the presence of the priest would legitimize what he had done and bring the Lord’s blessing. I find it revealing that the priest worked for Micah, rather than for God. In the spirit of independence, Micah formulated his own plan, not God’s, and then expected God to back him up: “Now I know that the LORD will prosper me, seeing I have a Levite as priest” (Judges 17:13).

The men of the tribe of Dan saw what Micah had done (see chapter 18). Armed, they came and took away his hired priest and the idol he had made.

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