Spiritual Slavery to Spiritual Sonship (16 page)

When I began dealing with the matter of forgiveness toward my parents in 1986, I knew I had many issues to resolve. As prayer counselors began helping me walk through those issues, God began restoring a degree of wholeness to my life. But I still had a long way to go.

The day finally came in 1989 when I realized, with the help of one of my counselors, that I needed to ask my parents to forgive me for everything I had put them through. At first I resisted. After all, with the pain I had experienced at their hands, why should I have to go to them for forgiveness? They ought to come to me! In
my anger over the pain they had caused me, I was blinded to how much pain I had caused them.

From the time I was 12 years old, when I ceased being their son by closing my heart off to them, I treated them like dirt. Because my life was miserable, I wanted their lives to be miserable too. I did everything I could do to get revenge, to hurt them, to wound them, and to betray them.

And through all those years until 1989, I had never considered the pain this caused them. Orphans know only their own pain; they don’t see the pain they inflict on others, or if they do realize it, they don’t care because they feel that pain is justified. I didn’t consider the pain I had brought to Captain Kline’s heart, leaving him in the lurch when the situation no longer served my advantage. All I saw was my own disappointment, and that (at least in my own mind) justified my betrayal and my negative behavior.

One of my dad’s greatest disappointments came the day I told him I was leaving the sea and going to Bible school. You should have seen the look he gave me! “With all the money you’re making at the top of your business, you’re giving it up to go to Bible school!?” He was a man who wanted nothing to do with church or with Christians. He had attended church as a boy, but only until he was seven because he had to. After his father abandoned him, everybody in the church rejected him because he was the only kid in town with no father. Dad had no use for the God I knew and represented, and for eight years after I was saved, he wouldn’t let me talk to him about the Lord.

Despite all this baggage and background, when I resolved to approach my parents about forgiving me, I thought Dad would be easier to deal with than Mom, so I went to him first. I was 38 years
old. At the time, he lived 400 miles away, and we saw each other only a couple times a year. We both liked golf, so one day when we were together on the golf course, I plunged in.

“Dad, I want to ask you to forgive me for the pain I put you through in my teenage years.”

He stopped the golf cart, looked at me, and said, “What? Where did you get this crap from?”

I said, “Dad, at 12 years old, I closed my heart off to you and started treating you with all this resentment and anger. Dad, I want to ask you to forgive me.” He just sat there stupefied. “Forgive me for the pain I put you through and for the times you came and bailed me out of jail, for the times you came to the hospital when I was overdosed on drugs. Dad, you don’t know half the things I was involved in. I was a pornography addict and a drug addict. You don’t know all the times I was taken into custody by the police and all the other things I’ve done wrong, but Jesus Christ has completely forgiven me. I realize how much pain I’ve caused you through the years, and I’m asking you to forgive me, because Jesus forgave me. Dad, please forgive me.”

Dad was speechless. After about ten seconds, my dad said, “No, Son, I won’t forgive you.”

“Why, Dad? I really need you to look me in the eye and tell me you forgive me.”

My dad who couldn’t say the words “I love you,” my dad who couldn’t hold me, my dad who didn’t want anything to do with God or any of this “religious stuff,” my dad who never once apologized for the physical or emotional abuse, my dad who never acknowledged personal fault, my dad now over 70 years old, said, “I won’t forgive you, Son, until you forgive me.”

I was in shock. My dad started crying. He was a hard man who had never shed a tear, but now he was weeping. He continued, “You’re asking me to forgive you when I’m the one who was so
harsh and unmerciful. I’m the one who put you through hell on the tennis courts. You became what you became only because of how much I demeaned you, the way I screamed at you, and the names I called you. Jack, I never knew how to be tender with you; I never knew how to be kind. My dad left me when I was seven years old, and I was raised under harshness and anger and the shame of the community. I need to ask you to forgive me because I was angry that you didn’t play tennis the way I wanted you to, and I took out all my agitations on you. I shamed you, I demeaned you, and I devalued you. Please, Jack, will you forgive me?”

For 38 years, I had never heard what I wanted and needed to hear my dad say. He had never apologized or in any way acknowledged the pain he had inflicted in my life. And now, for the first time, I heard an apology from him: “Would you forgive me?”

I thought,
Wow!
And I said, “Of course, I forgive you, Dad!”

As long as I was subject to my own mission—self-protection, blame-shifting, nursing my pain—nothing ever happened between Dad and me; nothing ever changed. But when I came to him and asked for his forgiveness, I became subject to Father God’s mission—the ministry of reconciliation. And when I became subject to Father God’s mission, I also became subject to my own earthly father. Every earthly father, no matter how much they’ve hurt their kids, longs for it to be made right. But many of them have no idea how to apologize. They don’t know where to start.

My father never humbled himself to me until I first got underneath and was subject to his mission. Then he looked me in the eye and said, “Jack, I love you.” It was the first time I heard him say that since I was 19 and in the hospital for a drug overdose, when he had come and embraced me and told me he loved me.

Now, on that golf course 19 years later, my father reached out, put his arms around me, and with tears in his eyes said, “Son, I love you. Thank you for forgiving me.” And we cried together as
we both asked forgiveness specifically and in detail for things we had done to each other. There was a lot of weeping, but oh, the joy! I experienced a homecoming and a dad with an open heart to me!

A year went by, and then one Sunday the phone rang. It was Dad. “Jack,” he said, “I want you to know I went to church yesterday.”

“What? You went to church?” I couldn’t believe it. Dad had hardly been to church since his youth.

“It was a men’s breakfast,” he continued. “One of my old partying buddies came over to the house Friday night and said, ‘I’m taking you to church tomorrow.’ I told him, ‘I’m not going to church tomorrow.’ He said, “Hey, I gave you free golf lessons, I trained you, I taught you everything you know. You owe me and I’m collecting the debt. Tomorrow, you’re going to church with me.’ I said, ‘But there’s no church on Saturday.’ He said, ‘It’s a men’s breakfast, and I’m the speaker.’ ‘You’re speaking at church?’ I asked. ‘You were one of the biggest party animals in town!’ He said, ‘That was my other life.’

“So I went with him. At the end of the breakfast, he shared his testimony of recently accepting Christ at his wife’s deathbed. Then the pastor prayed for those who didn’t know Jesus to accept Jesus. Jack, I want you to know that yesterday I accepted Jesus as my Savior, but it wasn’t because of anything my friend said at the breakfast. It was because a year ago you came and forgave me, and I realized that day that there must be a God. And when I looked at your life, I knew that only God could do in you what happened that day. That same day I started reading my mother’s old Bible and have read it every day since. Ever since that day, I’ve just been waiting for the right moment to accept Him. It was your forgiving me that transformed my life.”

Even after he was saved, my dad was never really keen on church because of all the personal pain he associated with it, but
for the next ten years he was really keen on the love of God. He’d read his mother’s Bible every day. Every phone call we had, he would tell me he loved me and that I was his hero. Dad is with the Lord now, but before he died, the two of us were completely reconciled. Everything was resolved. There was total closure. What peace that brings to my heart. It’s truly amazing what can happen when you become subject to Father’s mission.

Having experienced such unexpected and complete success in being reconciled with Dad, I felt more optimistic about talking to Mom. So not long after that day on the golf course, I went to her and said, “Mom, I want to ask you to forgive me for all the pain that I put you through in my teenage years.”

“It’s about time you came to me,” she snapped. “Do you know how much you hurt me?” She really lit into me.

Her angry, bitter response blew me away. No, I
didn’t
know how much I had hurt her. At that time, I had not yet received the revelation of Father’s love or entered into the spirit of sonship. I was still walking as an orphan, and orphans need everybody to say all the right things, or they put walls of protection up to keep people out. When Mom attacked me like that, I simply cut off the conversation. For the next ten years, I was very careful always to honor my mother in accordance with Paul’s instructions in Ephesians:
“Honor your father and mother (which is the first commandment with a promise), so that it may be well with you, and that you may live long on the earth”
(Eph. 6:2-3 NAS). I was always polite and cordial. I honored her, but at the same time kept her at arm’s length emotionally. My interaction with her was on a superficial level as I continued to protect myself from her criticalness and hurting me again.

Then in 1995, I received the revelation of Father’s love and began learning to walk in that truth. Opportunities for ministry began opening up, and I moved also into teaching and leading conferences on Father’s love.

In the summer of 1999, I was visiting Mom again, as I had every year. She and Dad divorced when I was a teenager and now lived five miles apart. Every Christmas and every summer I would drive the 400 miles home to see them, usually staying at Mom’s house. One morning I got up early as I usually did, and hearing that I was up, Mom came out for the little verbal swordplay we engaged in every morning. She would try to get inside me, and I would try to keep her out: thrust, parry, thrust, parry. I loved her, I honored her, I blessed her, I sought to think good thoughts about her. I had even led her to the Lord in 1991. But I could not trust opening my heart up to her. So every time she tried to find an opening through my shell, I deflected her and kept things on a “safe” superficial level.

About this time, my dad walked in and rescued me, immediately saying all these wonderful things about how proud he was of me. For many years, this man had always pointed out everything I had done wrong, and now … I could do no wrong whatsoever in his eyes. For my part, as soon as Dad walked in the room, I lit up and came alive.

He had invited me to play golf with him, and as we got ready to leave, I glanced at Mom out of the corner of my eye. Although I noticed she was crying and wiping away tears, I still had an orphan heart to a degree, and it didn’t register to me emotionally that I was the reason she was crying. I just wanted to escape. So Dad and I left.

A little later, after my wife got up, Mom asked her, “Why is it that Jack has such a wonderful relationship with his father, but when I try to have a conversation with him, it’s like pulling teeth?”

Trisha, in her impeccable wisdom, said, “That’s between you and your son. I’m not getting in the middle of it.” Later, however, when we were driving home, Trisha told me about it. I just blew it off. I was honoring my mom to the best of my ability; what more did she want? I knew the Father’s love but had not yet made the complete transition from orphan to son.

A few months later, in November, I spoke at a large international conference on the Father’s love. It was the largest gathering I had been invited to, with over 3,000 people and some “top-tier” speakers attending. The size of the conference combined with anointed world leaders of such high caliber caused me to become so overwhelmed with insecurity that I was afraid I would not be able to minister effectively. By His grace, God blessed mightily anyway.

This circumstance raised my awareness, and I realized that even though I had been walking in a revelation of Father’s love for four years, my understanding was still only skin deep. I was still more concerned with what people thought than with what God thought, and the key to deeper breakthrough and freedom continued to elude me.

About two weeks later, during our “family reunion” (the yearly gathering of our team, intercessors, and supporters), the speaker, James Jordan, addressed the subject of the spirit of sonship and asked us the question, “When did you cease being your father and mother’s son?” He went on to add, “When you rejected your mother and father, you rejected a spirit of sonship, and God will deal with you only as a son.”

As soon as he said that, I knew I had found a missing key. I realized that I needed to go to my mother and ask her one more time to forgive me. To make sure I didn’t chicken out, I told my wife my
intentions. Mom would be visiting in a few weeks for Christmas, and I would talk to her then. I needed to practice the ministry of restitution with Mom because I was beginning to realize how much my attitudes had hurt her. I loved her, I had forgiven her to the greatest degree I knew how, and I practiced honoring her to the best of my ability. But something was still missing because my love was guarded around her.

I planned to talk to Mom the first night she was there, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Or the next night, or the next. Finally, on the fifth and last night of her visit, I was getting ready to go to bed when Trisha confronted me. “Are you going to talk to your mother or not?”

Taking a deep breath I went to her and said, “Mom, I need to talk to you a minute.” Here I was, a man of supposed faith and power, secure in Father’s love, trembling in my mother’s presence. I was scared to death.