Dug this out from LONG ago!
May the Holy Spirit overshadow you as you read this text, and may you conceive and bear in this season the full anointing and authority of Christ as he leads you.
I am praying for a revolution, an uprising against self, in me, in all of us. When I was three, I accepted Jesus as my savior, but it was not until 17, that I accepted Him as my Lord. At my first act of submission to His rule, He began to show me His government of "the body" and how its substance is of individuals submitted to Christ in unity with each other.
Each of us fights against, or falls without struggle today, to an army fully motivated and mobilized against our becoming alive and battle ready in Christ. Our enemies' most powerful weapon, our selves. Freedom from self you may well know begins with submission to the transforming love of Christ, but the transformation must continue in us until our identity is replaced as one in His body offering His love to the world. Our Father has placed desires, passions, and instincts within each of us for a purpose; the time has come for us to allow the King possession of them.
We struggle so much with self on a personal level because we have forgotten to confess our weaknesses to each other. In this we have forsaken the gathering together. It is time that we link together and begin a global uprising against self, against the work of the enemy. Can the hand say to the foot, "I don't need you." In the same way, can the body continue to function normally as a whole if the majority grows as the hand withers? We cannot continue our attempts to grow and function as individuals. Christ demands now that we realize our interdependence with each other.
The enemy has led us over centuries, millennia to build an entire culture around self. Our instincts to provide have been steered toward provision for self; our instincts to protect have been geared toward protecting self. We have fallen into loving, nurturing, bettering, forgiving, comforting, and encouraging SELF!! We have fought at any cost for our SELVES to win, to succeed, to grow, to strengthen, and to overcome. Dying to self is not forcing those hard wired passions and instincts into the grave; that is impossible. Our father gifted us with these passions; your passions are His beautiful creation.
Dying to self is becoming aware that many if not all of your passions and instincts have been perverted, directed at your own well being, then choosing under Christ's rule to direct them instead at the well being of the body of Christ and the lost. God has not called for the elimination of our desires, but removal of ourselves from the throne that they bow to.
Our passions have a purpose, one that remains unsatisfied as long as we waste them on our selves. We have failed to see this; as individuals we have tried to stifle an eternal flame of passions that burn within us. These flames must instead be channeled properly, then fueled and fanned so that they grow into a raging fire. We need to be consumed with loving, nurturing, bettering, forgiving, comforting, and encouraging the body of Christ and the captives of the world.
Let us be driven by our desire for each other to win, to succeed, to grow, to strengthen, and to overcome. We can no longer be closed off from one another. We can no longer be separate from each other living quiet lives of discontent and misery. We must confess our faults and weaknesses to our father and to each other. Doing so not only allows us to be admonished, accountable, forgiven, and strengthened for the fight, but also allows our brothers and sisters to live out His love in their passions for healing, for strengthening and nurturing, teaching and admonishing, forgiving and loving.
I know the excitement that you have felt, His fire, the zeal for His house. When we are joined together, strengthening and encouraging one another, seeking to provide for each other, seeking to protect each other, the losses will be so small, the victories great and inevitable.
