wounds – Fire and Light

This is why I speak to them in parables:
“Though seeing, they do not see;
    though hearing, they do not hear or understand.
In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah:
“‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding;
    you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.
For this people’s heart has become calloused;
    they hardly hear with their ears,
    and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
    hear with their ears,
    understand with their hearts
and turn, and I would heal them.’ ^{[Isaiah 6:9-10]}
Matthew 13:13-15

Doubt and unbelief are never an intellectual issue. Some of the most intelligent people on the planet, even some of the most well-respected scientists, have been followers of Jesus (for modern examples see John Polkinghorne and Francis Collins). Jesus makes clear, right after he tells the Parable of the Sower, that lack of understanding and lack of belief happen in the heart.

Notice the progression mentioned in Jesus’s quote from Isaiah. First, the heart becomes calloused. While the heart is not yet completely hardened, it is on its way. Usually this happens not because of an intellectual question about God but because of a wound of the heart. Someone hurts us or God doesn’t meet an expectation we had. A person stops trusting God because they had the wrong definition of trust in the first place.

Too often our hearts become calloused because we think trust is built by “someone doing what I expect they will do.” Meaning, to build trust we want a person to be predictable. We want the person to do what we would have done in particular situations. In other words, the more you are like me, the more you respond the way I would have responded, the more I trust you. This faulty understanding of trust means that any time another person does something I can’t anticipate, mistrust starts to grow.

You can see how destructive this understanding of trust would be to our relationship with God. When we expect Him to be just like us, and then He isn’t, we begin to lose trust in Him. When He doesn’t respond in a predictable way, a way that we wanted Him to, we begin to live in mistrust. God is completely perfect and good. He is worthy of absolute trust. But we’ve already started with the wrong understanding of trust.

Healthy trust is built on someone consistently telling us the truth not on someone being and acting predictably like us. God is wholly other than us. He will act in ways that surprise us and maybe even confuse us. But this is no reason not to trust God. Jesus is the Truth. He cannot be other than truthful with us. He is worthy of our trust.

Our wound of the heart, our mistrust, then leads to the next progression. We stop hearing. This is a more passive reality. Hearing God (and people for that matter) depends on listening and trust. When we have a wound in our heart, we stop trusting and we stop listening. Hearing God’s voice gets more and more difficult. Weeds of doubt and confusion start forming in our hearts. We are not actively plugging our ears, but hearing gets difficult until we repent of our distrust and get healing for the wound in our heart.

Eventually, after struggling to hear from God for a while, we shift into rebellion. That’s the next step in this progression of doubt and unbelief. While our struggle to hear was not intentional, the next step is intentional. We close our eyes. Closing our eyes is something we actively do. It’s not just that we struggle to see, it’s that we are now actively closing our eyes to the truth of God. We resist. We reject. We live in cynicism and skepticism. We choose unbelief. We close our eyes and proclaim that the room is dark.

This whole progression started with the heart, not the head. This is why Jesus spoke in parables. Parables aren’t meant to confuse the mind; they are meant to expose the condition of the heart. Those who have soft hearts, open hearts, are willing to trust the Lord. They will receive the seed of Kingdom truth planted in them. They will either understand the parable or it will lead to a curiosity that invites them into exploration. Lack of understanding for a person with a softened heart is an invitation into deeper intimacy as curiosity leads them to seek the Lord even more.

Calloused hearts, hardened hearts, will not understand the parables. Instead, they will likely be offended by them. It will not provoke curiosity but suspicion, mocking, and accusation. Lack of understanding for a person with a hard heart becomes mounting evidence that they were right to doubt. Lack of understanding exacerbates mistrust in the Lord. Cynicism abounds.

Jesus spoke in parables because they expose what is underneath our intellectual prowess and our religious actions. They expose the condition of our heart.

Jephthah the Gileadite was a mighty warrior. His father was Gilead; his mother was a prostitute. Gilead’s wife also bore him sons, and when they were grown up, they drove Jephthah away. “You are not going to get any inheritance in our family,” they said, “because you are the son of another woman.” So Jephthah fled from his brothers and settled in the land of Tob, where a gang of scoundrels gathered around him and followed him.
Judges 11:1-3

It doesn’t take a psychologist to see how Jephthah being born to a prostitute and feeling rejected by his family led him to connect to “a gang of scoundrels.” This same story is playing out in our culture over and over again.

I’ve prayed for a number of people in the last couple years in extended prayer sessions that last two to three hours. During these prayer sessions we focus on inner healing and deliverance. Inner healing is when wounds of the heart are uncovered, forgiveness is given, judgments are forsaken, and the love of the Father and peace of Christ are invited in to bring healing. Deliverance is when demons, who often entered a person through the wounds of the heart or generational sin, are cast out.

It is a regular occurrence to find a spirit of rejection as the primary, and often the most insidious, demon a person is dealing with. A spirit of rejection often attacks a person in early childhood and sometimes in utero. This spirit then becomes a kind of “door opener” propping the doors of a person’s life open for other bigger and stronger demons to enter.

It’s not hard to see the strategy of the enemy here. If someone has a spirit of rejection, they feel a pervasive and constant sense of rejection from everyone in their life. Even small slights become major wounds. Over time a long line of rejections–relationships, work situations, church, and family–start to mount. The lens through which a person sees the world is colored by rejection. This is the set up.

Now when other sins start to show up in a person’s life (anger, hate, lust, pride, homosexuality, greed, fear, lying, gossiping) it is nearly impossible to address it with that person without them feeling rejected. They will live in a constant state of feeling that any confrontation of their sin is a rejection of them. They will demand full acceptance, not only of their person, but of their sin. In other words, they will so strongly identify with their sin, they will demand that you accept it as a part of them.

Loved ones are now trapped. How do you let this person know that they are fully and completely loved and yet that their sin is hurting them? A spirit of rejection is often at the root of this dilemma.

A spirit of rejection enters a person’s life at such a young age, they are often unaware of what life feels like without its talons dug into their heart and mind. Babies can often sense what is happening in their mother in utero. If a child was an unwanted pregnancy, a spirit of rejection can attach itself to that child before they are even born. It was given access by the rejection of the mother. I’ve prayed for a number of people where this was the situation.

The antidote to a spirit of rejection is to renounce it, break its bondage, and cast it out in Jesus’ name. It’s important to no longer believe the lies that rejection whispers.

Additionally, experiencing the acceptance and love of the Father is essential. God is able to perfectly love and accept who we really are and who we are created to be without embracing our sin. Without experiencing the acceptance of the Father, a spirit of rejection will often worm its way back into a person’s life. We must go to God and hear from Him about who we really are and how He sees us. A single word from Him is more powerful than years in a counselor’s office or a decade of sermons.

Jephthah was a mighty warrior. That is his true identity. That is who he was before rejection had a chance to speak a different identity over his life. We need the Father to remind us of who He created us to be. We need to daily hear His words of acceptance and love.

Has a spirit of rejection gotten a hold of your life?