HOW MY PROPHETIC LIFESTYLE BEGAN
I can tell you exactly the day when my so-called sacred faith took a screaming leap from the lofty pedestal it had been teetering on.
At the time, my husband was an ordained youth pastor who self-medicated with pornography. He was more than a little bitter, at times suicidal, and though he was an excellent provider his tendencies were to “stuff and puff.” On the verge of an emotional breakdown, he stuffed his pain and then it came out in huff-and-puff rages that were emotional terror attacks. I, myself, was more of a “shove and unplug” type—a full-blown hidden stash of junk food in every room, an emotional binge eater who used food like a cutter uses a razor blade. Shoving food into my mouth and then unplugging from reality was my answer to coping with being the obligatory pastor’s wife. I placated every emotion that made me uncomfortable, and those emotions always seeped their way out in the most destructive ways.
Ben and I were quite the pair back then, ten years ago, but it was my sincere belief that my marriage had been built on nothing more than devotion to a doctrine that hurt the most. I decided I was over all of it, any of it, whatever and everything “it” was. My 28-year-old heart, mind, and two-babies-later body was tired. Our seven-year marriage was over, according to me, as well as my belief in a God who seemed to be enjoying my torture. Spoiler alert: I’m still married to Ben and our babies are not so much babies anymore, but life back then was a nightmare.
“I’m done with you,” I screamed into my hands. Withdrawn, attempting to disconnect from the person I felt was an all-consuming vacuum, never satisfied and continually vague, I groaned again, “I’m done with you, God.”
Immediately after screaming at God, a deep mourning from within my soul came flooding to the surface. In the form of hot tears, my hands filled with emotions that I had been suppressing for years. All those moments when life terrorized my heart and I made excuses for it; all those moments handing my power over to a belief in something lifeless; all those moments trying to find intimacy in performance; all those moments—I sat there on the floor weeping and utterly exhausted. I had nothing left in me.
Then, interrupting my attempted divorce decree with God, an audible, otherworldly voice thundered from behind me, telling me to “Seek Holy Spirit.” The presence I felt standing directly behind me was large and overshadowing. I couldn’t turn to look. Frozen in the presence of something pure, I sat paralyzed in holy fear. With the words seek Holy Spirit vibrating within my bones, I was shaken. Unable to move my body, I simply sat in the presence of God. And as I sat there, encountering what I knew was truly God’s presence, a weighted air filled my room. The aroma gave off sweet impressions that something better, something more, was upon me. I dared not lift my head from my hands.
Eventually, I felt a lightness return to the air, beckoning me to stand to my feet. Wobbly, yet strengthened by a holy fear of God, I stood knowing I had just encountered sheer power that could have destroyed me, yet I was still alive and filled with so much hope for my future.
There is something really important about coming undone, letting everything go with no expectations for return. It was as if I had finally crawled out from hiding and stood before God, clothed in my shame, demanding He look at me. What I didn’t understand at the time, but now see clearly as I look back on my life, was that God was not offended by my turmoil and conflict, my sin. He wasn’t the cause of my angst either. In fact, I thought I was demanding He look at me, but He had been watching me all along, calling me out into the open. Calling a shamed humanity out of hiding is a God thing.
Your prophetic nature is simply your union with God revealing itself. When perfect love casts all fear out of your life, in that moment a prophetic lifestyle is born! This is why your soul, as well as every other part of you, is in the process of transforming into the image and likeness of God! Any desire to grow in the prophetic is a desire to know God and experience being known by Him.
When God sent a messenger to my bedroom commanding that I seek Holy Spirit, the weak, whittled idol of god that I had been worshiping paled in comparison to what I had just experienced. Holy fear of God is nothing other than remembering in reverence who your daddy is! It’s the act of repentance, which means to take on God’s perspective of what is true once again. The moment Heaven erupted in my room, bowed in holy fear I knew the god I had been screaming at was not the God I was encountering. Holy Spirit is the one who convicted my heart with the remembrance of God’s goodness, which led me to repentance—remembering that He is with me and He is good—and that was the beginning of awakening to my true identity. This was when all Heaven broke loose over my life and I began walking in what I call a prophetic lifestyle.
In the new covenant, Holy Spirit has been poured out on all of us (see Acts 2:17). Our union with God through Jesus has made knowing God, the ways of His Kingdom, and His heart toward the world as easy as remembering who God is! This is why we are all prophetic beings inside the new covenant!
Jesus said that He has restored within us a right spirit that cries Abba (Daddy God)! (See Romans 8:15.) We are children who know the perfect love of the Father! A love so perfect that it casts out all fear! A love so perfect that we, in turn, are commanded to love in the same way because in that love we share in likeness!
It’s important that I walk us through this because the prophetic gift is not from God if it’s not found within the context of the new covenant. The prophetic gift flows from the intimate relationship we have with God. The prophetic, in the new covenant, is purposed to honor the new command Jesus gave us—the law of love and forgiveness (see John 13:34). This one command sums up God’s whole heart behind all spiritual gifts. If the prophetic gift in your life isn’t empowering you to love or forgive the way God does, then I question not only the spirit you’re operating in but I wonder what covenant you are abiding in.
The old covenant and the new covenant are not equal. The new covenant is even described in the Bible as a better covenant (see Heb. 8:6-7), and indeed it is! The old covenant revealed glimpses of God’s nature but was focused on what man could do for God. The fruit of that covenant was nothing but broken people breaking promises over and over again. But through the old covenant God had a purpose! Galatians 3 explains that purpose was designed so God’s people had a “guardian” that led them to Christ (see Gal. 3:23-26). Remember, God had rescued a people who had been enslaved for generations. Can you imagine what had been developed in them? His orphan-hearted, idol-worshiping people had a long way to go before they knew how to even operate within the context of a family. Meant as a tutor, the old covenant taught rules of how to function in a relationship, but it wasn’t until Jesus came that we were able to see God’s full heart for what being in a relationship with Him would look like.
Second Corinthians 3:14 says that the relationship God had with man within the context of the old covenant veiled Him:
But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read. It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away.
The Israelites, who had firsthand encounters with God’s power and provision repeatedly and generationally, were veiled to the full picture of God that would only be found in Jesus.
Though God’s nature was veiled as His orphaned children’s hearts were being refined and readied for freedom in a relationship with Him, His intentions for His children were never hidden. After being delivered from slavery, in Exodus we read God speaking to His children’s potential—a prophetic statement that echoed throughout the New Testament:
Now then, if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, then you shall be My own possession among all the peoples, for all the earth is Mine; and you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation (Exodus 19:5-6 NASB).
It has always been God’s intention for us to be His and Him to be ours. We were always going to be an open-hearted people whose motives were pure and our remembrance of who God is would be accredited to us as righteousness. But that was never going to happen outside of Jesus, because God’s hopes had never rested in man’s ability; His hopes for humanity rested in Himself, His Son Jesus, and Holy Spirit! It’s the work inside of this new and better covenant that brings about redemption through the revelation of who God is as our Father and who we are to Him as a child! With God it’s always been and always will be about relationship.
Many times when we read the book of Genesis, specifically the part where Adam and Eve sin and hide from God, we forget that God, in that moment, related to mankind not just as a Creator interacting with His creation but as a Father would engage with His child. Adam was not just a toy that had gone defective and now God had lost interest. Long before Adam and Eve, before land kissed the sea, before the heavens shimmered and the earth rotated, God (the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) imagined a family that would inherit a joy that surpassed all understanding. He dreamt of a people who would reveal His glory by walking in His likeness. Humanity was conceived in God’s heart first, and it was in the imaginations of His heart that He decided He would take on the responsibility for this creation; He would be a Father. Fatherhood begins long before a baby is born. Fatherhood begins at the decision to take on the responsibility for one other than yourself.
Even on the other side of the Garden of Eden we find God fathering Adam and Eve’s children—Cain and Abel.
Then the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it” (Genesis 4:6-7).
That conversation would have been a little different for today’s parent. It would’ve sounded more like, “Fix your face! You can do better, I didn’t raise a fool!” Obviously, God in all His wisdom says it so much better, but it’s the same gist, right?
Parenting doesn’t always go that smoothly, does it? I mean, even with God directly influencing Adam and Eve and Cain, they still seemed to get it wrong. But I don’t believe God as a Father got it wrong! Even to Cain, who was cast out of God’s presence after killing his brother (our sins may be forgiven, but our choices have consequences), God revealed His fatherly nature once again by marking him so that no enemies would attempt to kill him now that he would be going at life apart from God’s direct influence (see Gen. 4:14-15).
I believe this is where we as believers make a very vital mistake. We forget that even in our sin, God is a Father to us first. Though we grieve His heart, He will not turn His back on His children. From the beginning, God walked with His children. They knew Him as their Father, not only their Creator. He has proven that over and over, but for us today our ultimate proof of God relating to humanity from a Father’s heart is found in the new covenant and looks like Jesus!
Jesus said if we have seen Him, we have seen the Father (see John 14:8-9). He is the complete picture of God, and it’s not only through the lens of Jesus that we understand the Scriptures; we should be looking to Jesus for prophetic discernment, because the prophetic is God’s perspective and voice. As Bill Johnson so famously says, “Jesus is the only perfect theology.” To look upon Jesus is to know God fully! This also brings up another important point—when reading the Bible it’s important to know which covenant with God people were operating in to understand the relationship between God and man in context. It’s also important to make a distinction between the old and new covenant because how you understand and know God will become the filter that all prophetic experiences pass through. If you have any desire for the prophetic, then you seek to know God and experience being known by Him!
There are so many teachers, but not many fathers.
I feel like today we construct organizations and call them ministries before we’ve even served those in our immediate lives very well. We set up a social media page, file for nonprofit status, and go out field-of-dreaming it—build it and they come. It’s true—build a shelter and the homeless will arrive with little effort. But I think when we skip the step of learning how to be fathered by God through Holy Spirit and don’t turn and practice fathering/mothering within our daily relationships, the only thing that will really be built or offered to anyone is hierarchy—a pyramid scheme.
The reason Jesus came to reveal the Father was because the only way into the Kingdom was through a relationship within the context of family!
Being matured through the context of family first is necessary because having authority with no responsibility leads to tyranny. And having responsibility with no authority leads to slavery. Jesus dealt with these at the cross, but many reject it. Not all of us want or know how to be in a family. For those that reject it, we interact with the world around us as an orphan, as a victim.
In a family, the father and mother are consistently giving authority so the child can mature in responsibility. This equips a self-aware, powerful individual who knows how to manage himself as well as create an empowering atmosphere so others can do the same.
All I’m saying is, maybe we have this “ministry” thing backwards. Building organizations and calling them communities that have as much relational responsibility as a fast food cashier tends to create a lot of bitterness in a person who is timidly hoping to be a part of a powerful and loving community. Ultimately, as individuals it’s our responsibility to grow in a relationship with Holy Spirit so that we can experience firsthand the family of God and then in turn be the family to those in our immediate lives.
LIVING FROM A FORGOTTEN IDENTITY
My husband and I, as I described in the beginning of this chapter, were the perfect example of living from a forgotten identity. Reared up by religion, shame became our tutor. But it was ineffective. All that shame developed in us was a no-good identity and a perceived disconnection from the only source that could tell us otherwise—God. Even more unfortunate, we had devoted our life to a doctrine that said God didn’t speak to humanity presently because we were sinners. The effect of sin is shame, and shame always leads to hiding and a lifestyle cultivated by a forgotten identity. This is why God tells us that the wages of sin is death. When we stay hidden from the only source of complete acceptance, we never experience the perfect love that casts out fear and we stay hidden from the very one we were created in the image of—our Father God! This is death. There are many today who profess to be believers but their lives look more like a scene out of The Walking Dead.
Ben and I tried multiple times to find our own way out of hiding, but that only led to consistently falling short. We had compromised our own internal integrity so many times that we didn’t even trust our own abilities to honor ourselves, let alone honor the vows we had made to one another. We were fully living from a forgotten identity, and it was destroying not only our marriage but us as individuals as well. We were losing ourselves to an unseen, unacknowledged battle with the very spirits that were coming against the knowledge of God and who we were to God.
Much like most of you reading this, the doctrine I was raised on taught me that I was depraved and God physically could not be in presence of sin; therefore, He was distanced from me. These doctrinal accusations about God’s character made having a relationship with Him and knowing Him near impossible. And they are just that—accusations about God that come straight from the accuser himself, accusations that have been formed into doctrines of men.
Accusations against God’s motives are how the enemy creates perceived separation. It’s the tactic that was used on Adam and Eve, so of course it’s the same old, tired tactic that is being used on us still today.
Check it out—Adam and Eve did not have a sin nature when they chose to disobey God in the Garden. There was nothing of or in them that was lacking or depraved. When they ate from tree of knowledge of good and evil, the only thing they gained was the knowledge of evil. They already had the knowledge of good.
I define evil as everything that comes against the knowledge of God, while sin is the result of agreeing with the accusations against God and how God has defined you—good! What humanity gained that day in the Garden of Eden was a mindset that was now open to the accusations that came against the knowledge of God and His goodness. This ultimately gave us a lens to view life apart from God, giving us the choice to live a life from a forgotten identity. If evil is the antithesis of good, and God called you good, then it is no wonder that one of the biggest assaults on God’s creation would be against our likeness in God.
Called out of hiding, in Eve’s response to God we find humanity’s very first acknowledgement of a choice that was made from a forgotten identity. I love the way Young’s Literal Translation translates her response:
And Jehovah God saith to the woman, “What [is] this thou hast done?” and the woman saith, “The serpent hath caused me to forget—and I do eat” (Genesis 3:13 YLT).
What was it the serpent caused her to forget?
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:1-5).
Satan deceived Eve by telling her to focus on an apparent lack. He delivered his second blow by causing her to question God’s motives and His intentions for her life, resulting in her forgetting what was true—she had all authority and dominion in the land God gave her; she lacked nothing and was made in the likeness and image of God.
Daily, the enemy is attempting to convince us to focus on perceived lack so that we should forget the promises we have in Jesus! Satan tempts us with fear of disappointment, which leads to our hopes being deferred. We then become heartsick and desperate, resulting in choices made from a place of forgotten identity.
Now Adam and Eve were experiencing shame for the first time. Sin will always, immediately, lead to shame because sin is an act that violates connection in our relationships. Shame is your soul’s way of recognizing that love has been violated! The soul’s signal that shame is present in your life—hiding yourself, withdrawing from community, shrinking back in conversations, a complete lack of self-control. All of us, because of sin, have experienced the effects of shame. Sadly, some identify so much with their sin and shame that they are unable to recognize the voice of God calling them out into the open. And believe me, He is calling, not because you’re lost but because you’re in fact found—you’ve just forgotten!
Psalm 34:5 says “Those who look to him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame.” When we remember God and who He is, we are wooed out of hiding and His grace removes our shame so that once again we can radiate His likeness to the world.
When I tell the story of how my journey to a prophetic lifestyle began, no one is much shocked that it started with Holy Spirit. After all, it is Holy Spirit who imparts all gifts. But I think what does shock people is that when I became awakened to my prophetic nature, it had nothing to do with a cool new supernatural function; rather, it had everything to do with me abiding in the remembrance that God perfectly loves me.
Being called out of hiding and being met with mercy instead of judgement, I felt the shame melt off of me and the fear disarmed. I stood in the presence of God and soaked in His satisfaction with me. Religion had taught me to identify more with Adam hiding in the bushes than I did with Jesus, the last Adam, who had been resurrected and seated in Heaven (see 1 Cor. 15:45). God had been waiting for me to throw the version of someone else’s god away for a very long time—a process I am in daily. When the words “Seek Holy Spirit” illuminated all the dark corners of my heart, I experienced my first real breath as a born-again believer, even though I had been technically saved 20-something years prior. The hope I experienced was supernatural, and it still vibrates through my body when I recall that moment! Holy Spirit had always been with me, but now I was going to learn how to walk hand in hand in union with Him.