Faith

Curses

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Death and life are in the power of the tongue….
—Proverbs 18:21a ESV

And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.
—James 3:6-9 ESV

At a healing service about ten years ago or so, I was called upon by my church to help with prayer. As a prayer team leader, I was charged with making sure we met the prayer needs of the church while directing the trained volunteers who would pray for others after our meetings. That role was an uplifting ministry that I cherished.

The healing service began and all of us were praying with folks who came up front. After a time, the crowd thinned and I found myself alone. Only then did a small man dressed in a suit entirely in white approach me. He was timid, and with an Eastern European lilt he could only say, "Please pray for me."

When I laid my hands on him, I knew immediately that this man did not covet my prayers for a nice day. Asking God to reveal the man's true need, I couldn't avoid a word that kept coming back to me again and again: Curse. CurseSo I prayed that the blood of Christ would sever the power of all curses on this man's life. The instant I spoke this out loud, he began screaming and fell to the ground.

Being a prayer team leader, I swiftly summoned several others to come over and continue praying with me over this man. We prayed for about ten minutes and I witnessed his countenance utterly change from terror to peace. If ever I needed a video camera to record that kind of profound release in a tormented soul, that moment called for it more than almost any other I've witnessed in my life.

Talking with this man afterwards, he told me that back in his native country his mother had crossed the local sorceress, who responded by placing the entire family under a curse. The man's mother, pregnant at the time, later died in childbirth. The girl that was born was left profoundly retarded as a result of problems in delivery. The man's brother soon afterwards went insane and was institutionalized—until the country's asylums were dismantled in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union. The man's father went blind a few years after his wife died and now rarely spoke.

In my years as a Christian, I've prayed for a lot of people, but there have always been times when people I've prayed for embellish their stories. However, as much as I was beginning to think that this little man standing in front of me now was perhaps adding to his tale, he silenced my doubts by leading me to the back of the church where his blind father, deranged brother, and mentally disabled sister sat as quietly as could be expected, the brother only occasionally muttering something unintelligible.

I was shocked.

I was also called away for another prayer need. Telling the man I wanted to talk with him more, I went back up front, prayed for the new need that had arisen, then immediately walked back to that broken family, discovering they had left quietly in the sanctuary's semi-darkness, only one of them finding release.

Too much "Evil Eye" for you? Not the kind of thing you've ever encountered? Well let me share a more personal story.

I got a call from a friend one night who was truly suffering. He'd come to the decision that he could not be a Christian any longer, and as we talked he confessed that the reason he was abandoning the faith was me.

No Christian ever wants to be the stumbling block for another person's faith, and I was taken aback by the comment, searching through every conversation, every encounter I'd had with this friend for as long as we'd known each other. Nothing I'd said or done to him was coming back to me.

Then my friend confessed that the reason he'd come to this decision was from noting all the rotten things that had happened to me in the years since he'd known me. I won't go into that list here, but my friend recalled every item on that list in excruciating detail, some of which I had never told him, but he must have gotten from other sources. He summed up his comments by saying that he could not reconcile how a Christian like myself, who had given everything up to follow Christ, could possibly go on considering what I'd experienced. If "God" truly existed, what kind of god could he be if he treated his own servants so badly, returning faithfulness with pain? My friend also wondered if I was merely deluded for pressing on in faith with a smile on my face and hope still in my heart. It was for these reasons that he could no longer believe anything in the Christian faith was true. I was the example that proved his deduction.

We continued to talk for hours after. Only later did I learn that our conversation had probably saved his life. But what I didn't know was what was going on in spiritual places because of what he said to me one humid summer evening long ago.

I think it was just today that I came to grips with his pronouncement. In some of my darkest times, what he said to me that night haunted me, and only now do I recognize it for the curse that it was. Only now do I feel like the black power of that comment has been rendered inert in the light of Christ.

How many of us are laboring under a curse someone glibly tossed out a decade or more ago? What words carelessly spoken—or even spoken with intent—have pinned us to the ground or left us flailing?

Many of you reading this are not charismatics; I understand that. But this isn't pew-jumping, bark-like-a-dog charismania, folks. Curses are a dark demonic oppression that gets called into use to destroy, undermine, hamper, and diminish the work of God in our lives. If we do not take curses before Him and let His Strong Right Hand shatter them, they can persist and wreak havoc.

Ask God today to expose curses that have been pronounced over you in your life. Some of you may have had parents that said things to you that have bound you in chains for years. Get those before God. Or you may have said things with a fire on your tongue that has burned people so fiercely that they can't get over it. Pray that out and let God show you who you need to approach in forgiveness. Too many of us speak carelessly and unleash things that can damage many.

Life and Death are in the power of the tongue. Therefore, speak life and not death. Our witness for the Lord depends on it.

Grieving Answers to Prayer

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Then [Job's] wife said to him, "Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die." But he said to her, "You speak as one of the foolish women would speak. Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?" In all this Job did not sin with his lips.
—Job 2:9-10 ESV

I came back from the men's retreat I was on this weekend, but I did not return as I had hoped. Instead, I came back home weeping on the inside.
Grief
This is not the fault of the good men I grew closer to this weekend, but it has everything to do with the knowledge that even in the midst of good company, people truly do grieve alone. And I'd be lying if I claimed I was not grieving.

How long I've been grieving is a more difficult assessment. Or even what I'm grieving. Grief doesn't always announce itself or its intentions, we just know it's there, brooding. However, having the opportunity to get away and think a little may have jarred loose a few answers to both questions of "How long?" and "What?"

I'm grieving answers to prayer.

I'll say right away that you won't find a doctrine on this anywhere in the Scriptures. If you're the kind of person who detests what you might perceive as extrabiblical conjecture, then reading on will only anger you, so better stop right here and skip to another post. For anyone else, all I ask of you is to listen with the Spirit.

Anyone would think another a fool for grieving those answers to prayer that led to sustained blessings, and he'd be right. What's hard is dealing with answers to prayer that resulted in a firm No. Harder still is the answer that led to blessings that were later taken away before they bore fruit.

The accident that renders the promising athlete a quadriplegic. The new husband who loses his bride to an aneurysm only a month after their wedding. The career dream that was reached, only to be snatched away. The ministry that failed. The stillborn child.

We grieve them, don't we? Olympic glory. A love built for the future. The dream we put our sweat into all these years. The heeded call of God put into action. The child of hope. Once they seemed so beautiful in our thoughts and prayers, but what now? There is only grief.

It's popular in many Christian circles to counsel people that it's perfectly fine to get mad at God. But what of Job's response? He called such advice foolish and did not sin with his lips by giving in to such hellish temptation. Grief, though, was permitted, and so he grieved in the sackcloth of his acquired poverty and the ashes of his dreams.

Job's question is a penetrating one: Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil? As for me, I believe Job is right, but I must also believe that grief is allowed when the prayers of the righteous result in something other than their intentions.

I was once told the story of a teen who was one of those extraordinary few who God revealed the purposes of her life. He gave her an enormous burden for the African people, so much so that her whole heart was given to missions at a young age. Upon graduating from high school, she worked hard to raise support and was richly blessed by the many people who loved her and caught her vision. When she was selected to join a team going to the African interior, the joy was palpable. She boarded the plane, set foot in Africa, and promptly died from a fever within days.

As far as anyone knows, she never got to share the message of Christ with anyone there. Thousands had prayed for her, hoped for her, and supported her. But what of all those prayers?

I used to think there was always a lesson in happenings like this, but I'm not certain I do any longer. Some things just are and perhaps all we can do is grieve those answers to prayer that we do not understand. I know people who have driven their faith into the ground looking for a lesson from some horrid injustice that pierced them, but what if there is no lesson other than the way of suffering? What if grief is its own lesson?

Some things make no sense. I know that I reflexively must understand why something is the way it is. None of us says, "Thy will be done!" easily, particularly when that will seemed to lead to ruin. Why did that bright girl with a heart as big as the world start and end her journey the same week? My only response is grief for a prayer answered in a way I cannot comprehend.

We in our household appear to be receiving an extra portion of these questions whose only answer is grief. The way of the cross? I would like to think so. Maybe this is the ultimate meaning and source for that manner of grief, but like a fog it rolls in and obscure everything else before burning off in a shimmering morning that paints diamonds on the grass.

Let us accept good and endure evil. And may our faces be turned to the Son.

The Purposefully Wayward Servant Syndrome

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An anonymous commenter on the post Love Sin / Hate Sin noted that some Christians, especially when dealing with life’s disappointments, use sin as a way of getting back at God. Call it “The Purposefully Wayward Servant Syndrome.” From what I’ve seen, it’s prevalent among all kinds of normally righteous-living Christians.

You and everyone you know at your church has been praying for three months about the transfer you put in at your company, a move that will take you to the branch location closest to where your elderly parents now live in sunny Miami. Not only will you now be in a position to assist your folks as they near the end of their lives, but you’ll be able to work from the beach, plus get a more powerful title and more pay. You pack the family up, move into the fabulous new home that you found in just three days, and spend an entire two weeks in Miami before the news comes down that corporate is closing the Miami branch and moving it to Duluth, just south of the Arctic Circle. And since there’s already a branch in place at Duluth, you’ll lose your title and your new pay increase. And you’ll be answering to the moron who is so well known in your company that every branch office not only knows the guy, but has their own set of regional jokes decrying his ineptitude. Welcome to hell.

Why, God? Why?

In keeping with Purposefully Wayward Servant Syndrome, now seems like the perfect opportunity to show God how you feel about all this by doing something really stupid. You fully admit that you’re not in control of issues like this, He is, but you can at least express what little control you have by raising a fist to the sky.

That upraised fist takes on many forms. Anger, obviously, but also frustration, depression, and a whole host on unpleasant emotions. But rarely is it just an emotion—some kind of action accompanies those feelings and that action nine times out of ten is rooted in whatever sin we judge appropriate enough to trot out before God to show Him just how we feel about His sovereignty in situations like this.

Shoplifting? Drunken rampage? Cheating on our spouse? Punching one of our kids? Binging and purging? Buying one of every porn mag on the rack at the local convenience store we would ordinarily avoid because it sells entire racks of porn? What’s the worst thing we can do to show God just how displeased we are at the way He runs the universe?

We know it’s wrong, but for one brief second it satisfies us to think that we still have some modicum of control over our lives. We’re also smart enough to know that God hates when we sin even more than we hate feeling like we moved out in faith and only later fell off the end of the world.

We have a cautionary model in all this:

Jonah went out of the city and sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, till he should see what would become of the city. Now the LORD God appointed a plant and made it come up over Jonah, that it might be a shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die and said, “It is better for me to die than to live.” But God said to Jonah, “Do you do well to be angry for the plant?” And he said, “Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.”
—Jonah 4:5-9 ESV

Jonah under the vineNot a righteous anger. Definitely an upraised fist. And while I don’t want to add to the narrative, I have no problem envisioning Jonah raising a ruckus out there in the desert, probably hurling some sand, and making enough of a spectacle of himself that a few passersby asked, “What’s up with the prophet?” He may have not gone to the depths that some of us do, but he complained enough to let God know that he wasn’t a humble servant who believed “Thy will be done.”

The Book of Jonah ends with a cliffhanger:

And the LORD said, “You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?”
—Jonah 4:10-11 ESV

Unfortunately for those of us who live for closure, Jonah’s response is lost to history. You’d think the correction he’d received earlier in the belly of the fish would have been enough to tame the “I’m not getting my way!” tantrums, but Jonah was a tough nut to crack.

I’d be deceiving you all if I didn’t say that I’m well acquainted with Purposefully Wayward Servant Syndrome. There have been far too many times in recent years where we stepped off the cliff in faith after much agonizing prayer only to be dashed on the rocks of despair below. I’ve done my share of finding ways that I can make myself more miserable and in the process profess my little statement of displeasure to a holy God who’s not impressed by my unrighteous escapades.

Honestly, I think this is where the Church has dropped the ball as God’s agents of hope and reconciliation. Like Job’s advice-giving friends, too often we go to the our church congregations and tell them we’ve been broken on the rocks and the first thing we get is a heaping helping of Romans 8:28, a pat on the back, and an “Everyone’s got problems, don’t they?” talk that only goes to enhance the desire to try out that Purposefully Wayward Servant Syndrome experience—at least once.

Wouldn’t those times be so much better if we knew that at least one person in our church would go a second mile with us?

More years ago than I wish to admit, I sat on the front porch of a sweaty, smells-of-unwashed-boys cabin during summer camp. As a counselor, I hadn’t done much real counseling, but now I had a boy crying his eyes out who wasn’t even in my cabin, who had just been told that his parents were divorcing. Not having come from a household wrecked by divorce, what could I say? All I could tell that weeping boy was one day God might have him sitting where I was sitting now, and unlike me, he’d know exactly what to say to some weeping boy who’d been handed the same awful news.

I don’t know what happened to that boy in the long run, but there on the porch he dried his eyes, looked me square in the face, and said, “I’ll know what to say because I’ve been there.” Then we prayed together.

If you’ve been plagued by Purposefully Wayward Servant Syndrome in your life, perhaps the Lord is asking you to sit down beside the very people who are now going through the same misery you once suffered. Your experience can show them they don’t have to eat the bitter herbs that you greedily gulped down in response to feeling abandoned at your point of greatest need, when the world was caving in and God seemed shut up behind six foot thick celestial doors of brass.

I don’t want to add to Jonah, but I’ve got to believe that we would not have seen so much frustration in the life of that Wayward Servant if others stood with him. Sometimes the mere presence of another is the tempering factor that limits the depths of stupidity that some of us so easily fall into.

Be the Church. Be Christ to the grieving. No platitudes or generic memorized spiels that are easily dispensed to the hurting before you flit off to your next scheduled appointment, but real, bloody, messy care in the midst of someone else’s ruin.

You know how desperately it’s needed because you’ve been there, too.