Hi all,
Barb and I learned the lesson of these Thoughts many years ago: how to be independent of circumstances. The situation was intense. I was an Associate Pastor under a pastor who planned to retire and promote me to a fully paid Senior Pastor.
But in June of 1986, he and his wife sat in our living room and told us their plans had changed. He had changed his mind about retiring and promoting me to senior pastor. He was staying put. “There is no future for you here.” As it turned out, his brother was asking him to replace me as Associate Pastor, and that’s what he did.
Suddenly, in the Spirit, with my eyes wide open, but also seeing the Lord’s realm, I saw a giant hand slice between us in a slow karate chop. I knew our time there had ended. I knew by the Spirit and told him prophetically: “If you do this, within 1 year of us leaving, you will lose everything.” He did, and he did. He lost his businesses, his church, his home, and his standing in the community, from which he never recovered. With his disobedience, the Lord removed His hand of grace and let him experience the consequences of his actions. But his actions also affected us. For us, what followed in the next 9 months were the toughest days of our lives
It was in this time, as I’ve often shared, that the Lord spoke to heartbroken Barb: “I tried to work through men’s hearts, but they wouldn’t allow me, so now I have to work around them. It will mean a detour for you, but because it was through no fault of your own, you will remain in my perfect will. But it will mean a detour for you.”
His decision put in motion a series of events resulting in the loss of all things for us. We found ourselves jobless, without a car, without income, phone turned off, cut off notices from the power company, and we gave our car back to the dealer because we couldn’t make the payments.
We held sales out of our garage and driveway each weekend just to earn food money, selling off anything we could spare, even things that meant a lot to Barb: family heirlooms. But we had children to feed. Some people in the church who were aware of how we had been treated gave us money. That winter of 1986-87, some church members hired me to shovel snow from their walk and drive to earn some money or gave us an offering when we gave spiritual guidance to them.
This period in our lives was from early June of 1986 to early March of 1987, and it was the hardest, most stressful time of our lives. 9 months that stripped everything from us. Yet we continued attending the church where the pastor had done that to us, while searching the Lord’s heart for a church that might want me as their pastor. On Sunday, March 1, 1987, 9 months after the pastor had changed our lives by his decision, that same pastor knocked on our door telling me he had gotten a call at the church office from a church about a 3 hour drive away that needed a pastor. He drove me to the church office where I accepted that invitation, moving there within 3 weeks. Less than 1 year after we left, the pastor lost everything, just as he had been told through the Spirit.
What we perceived:
As we loaded what we hadn’t sold off into a rented truck to drive the 3 hours to our new church, Barb perceived something in her spirit: “We will never pass this way again.” I recognized that was of the Spirit and paused to check in my spirit, and the same revelation hit me. “We will never pass this way again.” We perceived we had been through the worst time of our lives and would never return to a situation like that. We would never be that poor again. We would never pass that way again.
We had come through the fire, and leaving that church and being out from under that pastor’s hand was a breath of fresh air, though we were moving to a poor little town on the dusty eastern plains of Colorado. But to us, it was a new start, with a confidence we could face anything – we had learned in the midst of poverty to retain a certain independence from circumstances, buoyed by the joy and peace in our spirits during those nearly 9 months.
We could say we were going through a gestation period during those 9 months. We had been initiated into a depth of dependence on the Lord we’d never known before. Everything had been stripped away – house, car, precious possessions – and we carried joy and a very certain knowing in our spirits that we were in the middle of God’s will.
Those contrary elements resided in us: In the natural, it was a horrible time, but in our spirits, we knew we had joy coupled with a knowing we would never go through anything like that again. What a contrast! We had learned how to trust for the miraculous, we had seen Him faithful when men failed us. We had nothing extra, but we had food. When we needed something, and I don’t mean a desire we said we needed, but when we truly needed something, the Father provided it. It was a new dimension for us.
What Paul learned….
When Paul was in prison writing his letter to the Philippians, he recalled in 4: 14-19 how when he was in Thessalonica they sent money more than once to support his ministry – the first of the churches to financially support him. He told them while he was thanking them for supporting him, he wasn’t writing to get more support, for he had learned something.
We know the verse by heart, but we usually use it differently than Paul did. “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” That’s the summary, the end result of what he said in the verse before, in the Greek of Philippians 4: 11-13:
“Not that I speak to destitution. For I have learned in that (circumstance) which I am to be self-sufficient. For I know how to be brought low, I know also how to abound in everything and all things. For I have been initiated into a mystery on how to be full and to hunger, and to abound and to be deficient. For all things I have strength in the one strengthening me.”
The word ‘strength’ means ‘I prevail’ and the root of ‘one strengthening me’ is ‘en-dunamoo’ – dunamoo is where we get the word ‘dynamite’. Paul is stating he has been initiated into a mystery, that he can prevail with dynamite power in any situation through Christ who strengthens him.
The mystery he learned is what Barb and I learned during those 9 horrible months. Next week more about being initiated into the mystery and how to walk it out.
Until then, blessings,
John Fenn
