Is this seat saved?

    

We used to joke around sometimes when someone asked if the seat next to us was saved. We would say,

“I’m not sure,” shake the chair, and ask, “Are you saved?” 

The humor was based in a time when people might well have asked you, or any stranger, if you had truly received salvation.

Last Sunday I had an empty seat next to me in a thankfully very full church, where late arrivals were searching for a spot. (I wish all our Bible-believing churches were that full for 4 services.) The one empty seat made me think of our old joke. It also prompted me to think who should have been in it. Who was God calling to take his or her place there? 

The pastor spoke of Lazarus and the fact that Jesus was not the one to actually roll away the stone or even unwrap his grave-cloths. He asked the others to do it. “Unbind him and set him free!” (Luke 11). The pastor’s message had to do with our role in ‘unbinding’ others and the power we have to do so, even though Jesus is the One Who brings the actual resurrection.

He spoke of people ‘being dead to one another.’ Of the binding cloths of unforgiveness and judgment. Of the lonely ones, the hurt ones, to whom we could be reaching out and drawing into our life circle. He spoke especially about the ones who have severely wounded us or continually taken wrong paths until we have finally given up on them. The ones of whom people say, “He’ll never change!” [Never speak a prophetic word that opposes God’s will!] Even those whose prickly personalities cause us to avoid contact with them whenever possible. The ones who often need ‘unbinding’ much more than those vulnerable-seeming, humble ones who are much easier to love.

Whom have we written off?

Whom have we ignored and left in the cold, while cozy in our own warm circles?

Whom do we intensely (or even moderately) dislike and avoid reaching out to, whose presence in our friendship groups could sabotage our comfort levels and pleasant interactions? (Martha: “but Lord, there’ll be an odor!” Luke 11:44)

Whose reserved seat may be empty because we ourselves have fallen short of doing the hard thing? 

Or perhaps we’re the stone-removing forgiver or renouncer of condemning prophecies. (Speak ‘crop failure’ to those spoken words!) Yet God then plans to call someone else to draw that person to his saved seat?  All we need to do is be obedient to our part. 

It seems unfair that we should be considered responsible, especially when we have been the recipient of someone’s unkind, disrespectful, neglectful, or even abusive treatment. It may be a jolt to our self-righteousness that we are even seen by our Lord as having the ‘job’ or the capability of helping to bring that change about. We’re ‘only human,’ right? 

We absolutely need to set boundaries in cases of potentially harmful relationships. However, that is not what I’m referring to above. It’s the large stones blocking the tomb, the boulders of refusal to forgive, the walls of a back turned against another, and even the pebbles of rejection due to our discomfort with those annoying personalities, that make it challenging to reach out to another, whether stranger, acquaintance, or even family member.. 

So many reasons for a seat sacrificially saved by our Savior to remain empty. Sometimes it’s self-loathing masquerading as arrogance. Sometimes it’s straight-forward intellectual arrogance. Sometimes it’s a spirit of rejection that whispers to a mind, “You’re unwanted, unsuccessful, unworthy, unknowledgeable, unloved, unforgiveable.” 

If you find yourself, like me, putting your hands over your ears and saying to the Lord, “I can’t hear You!”…you’re in good company. Hence, so many empty ‘saved’ seats. Let’s determine that the next time there is an empty seat next to us at church, we take our hands off our ears and ask Him for whom it’s reserved….and what He might want us to do to help fill it. We might be one of several on a team or in a series, whom our Father is asking. Yet if no one else answers His call to roll away the stone, let it not be we who refuse.

Accumulated Grief

   

   One of the prophets and apostles I listen to regularly is Tim Sheets. You may be more familiar with his brother, Dutch (“Give Him 15”), whom I also respect greatly. A humble man with profound insights from Scripture and Holy Spirit, Tim has been enduring much that most of us, until recently, were ignorant. He has been battling both cancer and rashes of painful welts from a reaction to medication. All the while we have seen him faithfully preaching, pursuing God’s heart and listening to His messages to share with us. Learning what he has silently been enduring affected me greatly, especially when I considered the way even small irritations and annoyances can cause me to grumble, if only in my mind. 

   For several years, I have been reading and decreeing from several of his books, as well as listening to his sermons at Oasis Church. His knowledge of God’s Logos (Scripture) and his sharing of God’s Rhema Word have kept alive my hope for our chaotic and corrupted times. Neither he nor I believe we are in the end times. So much of God’s Word, including promises to His Son, have yet to be fulfilled. I do believe, however, we need to fight like never before, in partnership with Him, to defeat the enemy’s plans to hasten those End Times. There is a widespread harvest and time of great blessing coming before then.

   We have been fighting, in prayer, decreeS, and actions, for years now. We have been believing and speaking forth both God’s written will and His Rhema promises. These have concernd what He has been doing, is doing, and will do, to rescue us and bring about a massive Revival. This word’s very denotation, He says, is totally insufficient for the magnitude of what He is bringing about. In essence, we can’t even fathom it. This will include worldwide healings, signs, and miracles so great that even the previous individual revivals around the world were merely a presage.. 

   You may not believe it now, as you look about you at the mess we are in, However, I encourage you to listen to GOD’S streaming, instead of that of secular media. Truly believe and declare “His Kingdom come, His will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.” If that were not possible, why would Jesus have told us to pray it? Was He just messing with us when He said it, as well as declaring “you will do greater works than these…”?

   Proverbs 13:12 says “HOPE DEFERRED makes the heart sick”. It can also encourage us to give up and resign ourselves to ‘whatever’. One prophet describes this as sitting immobile on our Rapture rug, waiting to be taken out of the craziness.. Multiple experiences of GRIEF can also cause us to give up. . The combination of these two (hope deferred and multiple griefs) can be geometrically devastating. Often we aren’t even aware of why we feel so ‘down; why we lack our previous energy and enthusiasm. All the more so if we’ve always been an upbeat, hopeful person. [If we’ve always tended toward “Eeyoreness,” it may not cause us to ponder as much. 😅 🫏]

   This morning, on a repeated journey through a book of prayers, commentary, and decrees by Tim, I read the following. It hit a deep chord within me, and tears came unexpectedly to my eyes. 

“I woke up in the middle of the night with God speaking to me about accumulated grief. I had never thought about the concept of grief accumulating, but the more I thought about it the more I realized it does happen. The older you get, the more grief in life seems to accumulate. This happens, that happens, and you think you’ve laid it down but really it’s still sticking to the soul and you need someone bigger than you to come along and take it away. Thankfully, the promise of our great Lord Jesus is that He came to take away grief that accumulates—the divorce, the loss of a loved one, the bankruptcy, the broken relationship. These things can accumulate in our lives, but Jesus comes to unwrap our soul and set us free, healing our emotions, feelings, and minds.”  —Tim Sheets*

    I thought about ‘hope deferred’ as an additional type of grief and realized how ADONAI is able to heal that also, especially when we ask Him for a a large dose of faithfulness and trust. Everything is healed by looking up into HIS tender countenance. So let’s ask Him to show us the ‘accumulated grief’ that may be weighing us down. Griefs we hadn’t even thought of as such. Griefs we didn’t even think about offering up to Him for healing. He is able. He wants us free to live ‘life abundant.’ According to His Word, that is why He came! 

“The thief comes only in order to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have and enjoy life, and have it in abundance (to the full, till it [a]overflows). “ —John 10:10

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Prayers and Decrees That Activate Angel Armies, Tim Sheets