Tag Archives: feelings

You Feel The Power

You Feel The Power

I was in Luke today and I hit the woman with the flow of blood. Twelve years of that curse, no cure from the physicians, and she comes up behind Jesus in the press of the crowd and touches the fringe of His robe. The bleeding stops on contact. Jesus stops the whole parade and asks who touched Him. Peter, doing what Peter does when he is looking at what his eyes can verify, tells Him the obvious thing. Master, this whole crowd is pressed up against You. Everybody touched You. That is what a crowd is. Jesus does not take the correction. Someone deliberately touched Me, He says, because I felt power leave Me. The Greek is dunamis. The English is power. They are reporting the same event. He is not describing a word of knowledge that the Spirit slipped Him like a note under the door, although a word of knowledge was available to Him, since He was anointed by the Spirit the same way we are anointed by the Spirit after we receive what the Father promised. He said He cast out demons by the Spirit of God, and that this was the kingdom of God arriving on top of people. He operated as a man born under the law, empowered by the Spirit, standing in the same category we stand in. That is why the story is usable and not a stained-glass souvenir. The thing He bothers to say out loud is that He felt it. Power went out of Him, and He knew it by the feeling of it leaving.

Vincent Cheung calls this spiritual physics, and that is the right name. God, by His own sovereign design, created us in such a way that a Spirit-filled man can sometimes feel the power. Think of electricity. You can feel the energy. You can feel the charge. The spiritual side has that too. Both the woman and Jesus felt it on that street. She felt the surge when the curse broke off her body, like spiritual electricity finding a live wire, and He felt the spiritual power of the Spirit leave when her faith drew on what was already in Him. There is such a thing as spiritual force, and the Bible is not embarrassed to say the people involved felt it. For ministry this matters more than the faithless want it to. Feeling the power is normal. It is not proof you have slipped into emotionalism, and it is not proof you are ahead of the brother who felt nothing that morning. Jesus felt it. Luke keeps recording that Paul was filled with the Spirit in ways that were tangible, something moved and something felt, and then a judgment miracle came out of his mouth and a governor got saved. The warning, is that you do not decide whether power is with you by what you feel. Faith is the real issue, and it is only a mental assent and agreement with God. The anointing presence is a real mode of the Spirit, and we seek it on purpose, but if you only move when the goosebumps have already filed their paperwork, you have handed the devil a veto he was never issued. As odd as it sounds, if you rely on the feeling of spiritual power or God’s anointing presence to act, or to feel confident something happened or a prayer was answered, you are being unspiritual and limiting the Spirit of power. We eagerly seek it, but the foundation is faith. Think about this for two seconds. It is by faith you first received the baptism of the Spirit of power. It is by faith you are saved; it is by faith you command a mountain to move. When you use faith to receive the Spirit, you don’t wait on a feeling. If you do get a feeling of spiritual power, it is because you received the Spirit by faith first. You continue to grow in the operation of spiritual power by faith, not by something else. Faith is the foundational issue. Feelings of power are nice, and they can confirm that the circuit opened and connected for a moment. However, feeling does not authorize the mouth. The mouth was already authorized, because you are a royal priesthood in Christ. It is who you are. It is not something you merely do; this authority is you.

Last night a dream woke me. It was vivid, and it was not the kind of dream you shrug off before your eyes are open. A small bear was trying to come through the side door. In the dream I took the .22 I keep by the bed and I was shooting, trying to put it down. I thought that was the end of it. Then a giant bear came through the front door, and I was running for my mom’s bedroom, yelling for her to get the shotgun. I woke up after that. When a dream lands like that I do not pretend I have a perfect method for sorting a bad meal from a real warning. Sometimes it is something you ate. Sometimes it is more than that. I do not need a finished taxonomy before I am allowed to use the authority I already carry. Waiting until you are 100% sure is how your sword gets rusty from underuse.

On the drive home today, a good hour, I had worship on and I was praying in tongues. I was glad to be doing it. I was not running on emotion. I was tired from a long day at work. I was numb. I was not feeling the presence of God in any way I could point at and call a surge, which is the relevant part of the testimony, because of what happened the moment I decided to take authority. I decided, just in case it was more than a dream, to take authority over the thing I had seen. Isaiah 54 was already sitting there, the way it always is. If anyone attacks, it is not from Me; whoever attacks you shall fall because of you. Every weapon formed against you shall not succeed, and you shall declare guilty every tongue that rises against you for judgment. That is the inheritance. That is the legal right. Not God. You. The older rendering that has lived in my mouth says you will condemn, and the doctrine is the same either way. Jesus did not say God will speak to the mountain while you watch from the boat and call the silence humility. He said you will say to the mountain, be lifted up and thrown into the sea, and it will obey you. If you sit there waiting for God to condemn the weapon He already assigned to your mouth, and the weapon formed against you smacks you in the face, that is on you. He told you whose job it was.

So I opened my mouth. No bear. No jaws of a bear formed against me, against this house, against my mom. The moment the first words left, every hair on my body stood up. The whole car charged. I am talking about that skin-tight goosebump surge, except it was not a mood and it was not the worship track doing emotional work on a tired man. I felt power released, and I felt resistance on the other side of it, the way you feel a fence wire you did not know was hot the second your hand closes. I had been numb five seconds earlier. I kept the confession going. I condemned that situation in the name of Jesus Christ and said it will not succeed. Then I prayed in tongues some more, and I had the sense from the Spirit that what I had said was good and that I was not done. So I spoke again. Not only will the jaws not enter this house. They will not touch this house. They will not come near this house. I will see the defeat of my enemy from afar. The power came over me a second time, on me and around me, hair up again, resistance again, and I had to press through it. The .22 in the dream had been cute. The Name was the shotgun. After the second pass I felt a release, the particular kind where you know the words that needed to be said have been said, and then peace. I was still the same tired man in the same car driving home. The difference was that the weapon forming against me had been answered by a mouth that carried more power.

That is the usefulness of the feeling, once you have refused to make the feeling your priest. I was not sure the dream was spiritual. I was numb, not sensitive, not worked up, not “led” by an anointing presence of the Spirit. I only decided to act on faith, just in case, and open my mouth. Then the words left and the power reported in. Suddenly the question answered itself. There was something to it, and it was a good thing I did not wait to first see the jaws before I realized I needed to do something. Jesus felt the power leave because the woman had already touched with faith. Faith released the power. Spiritual physics does not ask your emotional permission. It waits on faith to be released. Spiritual power moved by faith, while the crowd was still arguing about who had done it.

Jesus told them to pray that their flight would not happen in winter or on a Sabbath. People hear that and turn it into a horror trailer, as if God were the weatherman of doom. He told them the hard thing so they could pray and have the hard thing altered. Information was ammunition. The same pattern sits on the spies. God named the fortified cities and the sons of Anak, and some of those names carry fear in them, and the faithless heard a scare. Joshua and Caleb heard a menu. When God warns you about something, it is not to make you afraid; it is to make the thing He warned you about afraid, as the inhabitants of Jericho were afraid of the Israelites. They are our bread. Their protection is gone. Do not fear them. God was not introducing Israel to a new species of anxiety. He was plating their food and handing them the sword. When you have no faith, a fortified city becomes a reason to die in the wilderness. When you have faith, the same report is lunch, and the spoils come home with you.

A dream like the one I had is the same kitchen. It is not there to scare you, and it is not there so you can clutch the pillow and call the clutching discernment. God is setting a plate down. Here is some food. Take the sword of the Spirit, condemn the weapon, kill the thing, and be blessed on the other side of it. You do not only divert the hidden danger. You overcome it, you watch the defeat from the porch, and you eat the spoils of the war, because a conquered enemy nourishes the man who refused to let it land. Numb is not an empty battery. Numb is a charged car sitting there with the radio on. Worship and tongues had the alternator spinning. The faith confession was the key. You do not wait to feel the engine before you turn it. The key is what makes the engine announce itself.

Open your mouth. The power is already designed to move when faith touches the promise, and sometimes, like it did for Jesus and like it did in that car, you will feel it leave and you will feel it land. Condemn the weapon. Take the bread.

 Desire vs Faith

We can define “desire” as one of two main ways, as “feelings / emotions,” or as “a want or wishful hope.”

Both of these definitions have the same non-relevance in regards desire being non-intellectual and having no necessary connection to faith, or no necessary connection to receiving the promise.

Faith is simply a mental assent to God’s truth. Having a desire or wishful hope to be saved, and mentally assenting to the gospel propositions as truth, is not the same thing.

The bible does speak of a “sound mind” and that we are to renew our minds. This is in two ways. The first and foundational meaning is to know the propositions of Scripture and assent to them, and deductively apply them to yourself and to decisions of good and evil about reality. You remove false propositions and replace them with true propositions from Scripture, and you remove invalid reasoning with deductive reasoning. The second part is what we call the psychological state of the mind. A renewed/mature mind will experience a more stable state of joy, and without even trying will keep gravitating towards wanting or desiring to please God rather than the self or man. However, as John says in 1st John 3, our hearts or that is, our irrational emotions and thoughts can condemn us, even when it is not true. Thus, you never base what is true or false by your emotions or by your up and down desires. You base what is true on “faith.” You do not base truth by sight for sensations is no truth or produces truth. Or simply put because we live by faith alone, and since sight is not faith, we do not live by sight. By the same reasoning, we do not live by feelings and desires, because these not faith. To go from sight to a proposition is invalid; however, it is just as invalid to go from desire/feelings to a proposition. In both case one is making a category error and denying the law of identity.

A wishful hope for healing is not faith. A wishful hope is not a mental assent to the fact that in Christ’s atonement “you” are already healed (Isaiah 53); that is faith. To desire to be healed, is on one hand something Jesus presupposes that people want; however, because desire to be healed is a command then even if you do not “feel” the desire to be healed, you can be obedient, if by nothing else, by pragmatically seeking to be healed by faith, in how the bible says to grow faith.

The desire would and often should be there, but it is not faith, and it is not needed to obey God’s commands. We should desire and seek for a sound mind, both in the intellectual, spiritual aspect, and also for a constant state of joy and desire for God. However, we do not start off with a mature mind when we are born again. We renew our minds by the means God has given us. If we do not start off with a perfect state of mind when born again, and having such a mind is required for us to ask and obtain our requests from God, then it would never happen. Think about the examples of faith in the Bible? Samson, when his eyes were stabbed out and bound in chains of slavery, was his mind in perfect joy? All he did was believe God would be faithful to His promise to use Samson. His faith was so great he is mentioned in Hebrews 11 with David, Moses and Abraham as a man who the world was not worthy to have utter Samsons’ name on their filthy lips.  It is true that having a joyful and peaceful state of mind for good things is able to help, so that even prophets asked for music to be played, and David would retreat and quietly meditate on God’s goodness; however, with or without the perfect desire, only one thing is needed, a mental assent that God will do what He said, without doubting it. When this is done you can ask for 100 mountains to throw themselves into planet Saturn and it will happen.

Also, like assenting to the fact that bananas are your favorite fruit, it is either mental assent that you do, or if they are not and you still affirm, “bananas are my favorite fruit,” you mentally assented to a lie or a delusion. A mental assent does not merely mean you affirm something like (2 plus 2 equals 4), if the context demands it. It is one thing to assent that figs exist, and a different thing to assent that figs are “my” favorite snack. This is either true or false; if false and you say it in your mind anyway, then all you have done is indulged in a mental delusion.

When we realize our faith is not where it should be we are told to renew our minds. We take off the old falsehoods and replace them with the truth. We “confess” them, even when we know we have doubts, not because we are delusional, but because the promise of God is that we can renew our minds and that the Spirit will help to strengthen us. We confess God’s promises, knowing God will be faithful to sanctify our minds so that soon, we can assent to them without doubts. Because the “foundation” is not us, but GOD, we have the confidence to read God’s promises, and confess them knowing God will renew and strengthen us, so that soon the doubts will be gone and an indomitable faith remains.