Spiritual Slavery to Spiritual Sonship (7 page)

In effect, Jesus was saying, “When you seek to know God’s love and to make it known, you are released from every other obligation in the Word of God.” Romans 13:8-10 tells us that love is the fulfillment of the law. Love is to be the inspiration, the driving force behind everything the Church does, including fulfilling the Great Commission. Jesus left no doubt about the priority of love:

John stressed the same point:

Paul went so far as to say that without love, nothing else we do matters:

It is in this Great Commandment to love God and to love others where we find the Father’s mission. His desire for us is that we
receive His love and give it away, thus fulfilling the Great Commission.

The Great Commandment to love God and love others is a call to intimacy; the Great Commission to go and make disciples is a call to fruitfulness. Intimacy is to precede fruitfulness. The Great Commandment must precede the Great Commission and is an inseparable part of it. When intimacy does not precede fruitfulness, we easily become subject to our own mission and become focused upon religious duty, hyper-religious activity, and aggressive striving that leaves an angry edge in our life and relationships.

How do you recognize a person who truly knows and loves God? By how well he or she can preach? By how many people fall down in the Spirit when they pray? Because they have faith to move mountains? By how they relate to others at church on Sunday? By how much Bible they know? No. You recognize a person who knows God by the life of love, compassion, and tenderness he or she shows behind closed doors with family and peers when no one else is looking. A person who loves God is one who seeks for the love of God to be made mature and complete in his or her daily relationships. I love the way The Message Bible paraphrases it:
“God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us
.” (1 John 4:17-18, TM).

What is the key for the world to come to know God’s love?
Agape
, a love that seeks the low place of humility, service, honor, and value. And that’s where we find God’s mission. The Great Commandment is to be fulfilled before the Great Commission. But those with orphan thinking are easily deceived, as I was for many years, into placing the Great Commission ahead of the Great Commandment. They become more committed to justice, duty, or ministry than to intimacy. Intimacy must precede fruitfulness. When it does not, we usually end up becoming subject to our own
mission, often leaving behind us a trail of fractured relationships where we have misrepresented the love of God to our families, peers, and to the world.

Any time you put the Great Commission (your ministry) before the Great Commandment (your relationship), you step outside being subject to Father’s mission, and death starts working its way into your relationships. I’m not necessarily talking about physical death, but the great “numb-numb-ville” on the bow on the sea of fear (see Chapter One), frozen with no ability to move or to free yourself from the entanglements that come when you’re subject to your own mission. You trade the security of home and sonship for the fear and uncertainty of homelessness and an orphan heart.

Every one of us has to deal at some point with the manifestations of an orphan heart. It doesn’t matter whether you were raised in a dysfunctional home or a stable, well-established home. Even growing up in a good home filled with a father’s unconditional love and acceptance does not necessarily mean that you will not struggle with orphan thinking and be subject to your own mission.

Consider the examples of the prodigal son and his older brother in Luke 15. Although they were surrounded by the deep compassionate love of their father, each of them had an orphan heart that prevented him from enjoying intimacy with his father. The older son was angry and saw his father as someone to obey, while the younger son saw his father as someone who could give him things. Neither son related to his father on an intimate level. It took the younger son leaving home and becoming destitute before he came to his senses, returned to his father, and embraced the sonship that had always been his. As for the older son, Scripture gives no indication that he ever reached that point.

Because we all were born with an orphan heart, we all are subject to our own mission from birth. Think about it—is a 2 year old subject to his father’s mission or to his own mission? What about a 12 year old or an 18 year old? Our orphan heart problem stems all the way back to the Garden of Eden, where our first human parents were deceived by lucifer, the original spiritual orphan.

Lucifer did not start out as an orphan, however. He began in beauty and splendor, surrounded by the glory and love of Father God:

Not only was lucifer continually in the presence of God, he was also the worship leader in Heaven. But that was not enough; he wanted more. And in his greedy attempts to get more, lucifer lost everything. Isaiah vividly describes the disaster:

This powerful prophetic image of lucifer, or satan, also reveals his “job description”: to lay low or weaken the nations. How does he do it? By using the orphan heart to get us into orphan thinking.

God is love. The Kingdom of Heaven is all about perfect love, joy, and peace with no fear, insecurity, or anxiety. Lucifer dwelt there in the beginning and reveled continually in God’s perfect love. At some point, however, something in lucifer desired to be subject no longer to God’s mission but to be dedicated to his own mission. Anytime we become subject to our own mission, separation goes to work. Lucifer subsequently lost the privilege of dwelling in the Father’s house of unconditional love and acceptance. He was separated from his Creator and from his home. As Isaiah says,
“Your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden His face from you, so that He will not hear”
(Isa. 59:2).

Lucifer became the ultimate spiritual orphan. Separated from his original home, he became resentful toward anyone who enjoyed intimacy with Father God, particularly those human beings God had created in His own image. Because he no longer walked in Father’s mission of love, lucifer began to compete for a place of recognition, position, and power.

Jealousy drove lucifer to deceive Adam and Eve. The tool he used to cripple mankind and weaken the nations was orphan thinking. His strategy was to convince man to think the way he did—homeless and cut off from God’s love—and thereby weaken man to the point where he would give in to temptation and allow shame and fear to replace intimacy.

Satan’s thoughts were,
I will do it my way. I will pursue the things that make me feel good and give me a sense of value and significance!
And because Adam and Eve bought into his orphan thinking, they, as well as we, have received his orphan heart as part of the “package deal.”

Having failed in his bid to rule Heaven, lucifer lost his right to have a home in Heaven. He then immediately set his sights on Adam and Eve, who lived in innocence, joy, and in open, loving fellowship with the Father. That’s the way it often is with spiritual orphans—they do everything possible to make sure that everyone around them is just as unhappy as they are.

In the meantime, Adam and Eve were at home in the Garden of Eden, every fiber of their beings warmed by the unconditional expressed love of Father God. They fellowshipped with their Father face-to-face, continually tasting and drinking deeply of His affectionate love. They walked openly and innocently before Him and with each other with no fear, shame, or embarrassment. No clouds of doubt or uncertainty dimmed the light of their peace and joy.

Meanwhile, satan looked on this scene with bitterness and hatred, envious of the love and intimacy with God they enjoyed and which had once been his as well. People with an orphan heart are envious of anyone who enjoys true love and intimacy. Lucifer was determined to destroy it.

The quickest way to shut down intimacy and trust is by sowing seeds of doubt into the relationship. Appearing in the form of a serpent, lucifer approached Eve and led her to question God’s character and integrity.

Adam and Eve desired to be like their Father, forgetting perhaps that, because they were made in God’s image, they were already like Him. But satan insinuated that God was holding out on them. He tried to steal from them their understanding of how God thought of them. That’s where orphan thinking begins—you start doubting Father’s love, kindness, and generosity towards you. From there, it is only a short step to doubting the love of others around you, including family.

Doubt about God’s love for them led Adam and Eve to doubt His mission. In their desire to become “like God,” they chose to abandon Father’s mission and pursue their own mission. In other words, they tried to become like God through orphan thinking—which never works. It is impossible to be free as long as your thoughts and attitudes are in agreement with the father of lies.

Eve was deceived, while Adam sinned deliberately. Paul makes this distinction when he writes:
“And it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression”
(1 Tim. 2:14 NAS); and
“… sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned … death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam.”
(Rom. 5:12,14). So Adam, then, actually entered into sin willingly, while Eve was deceived by orphan thinking.

The Father’s command was, “Don’t eat the fruit from the tree in the middle of the garden.” Adam and Eve’s desire was, “If we do this our way, we’ll more quickly mature and become like God, and He’ll appreciate and value us more.”

Do you see how orphan thinking confuses the issue? It may sound perfectly logical and reasonable on the surface, but it never leads where we think it will. Instead of leading us closer to God, orphan thinking leads us away from Him—and prevents us from drawing close. I call orphan thinking the “shortcut spirit” because we think that
our
way will take us where we want to go more quickly than being subject to Father’s mission. Adam and Eve wanted to please God; they wanted a place in His heart, and thought that through their human effort they could get there more quickly. However, seeking to do it their way led them far away from Him instead.

There was now no turning back for Adam and Eve. Having disobeyed God, they no longer had the sense of sweet fellowship and kinship they had before. They were now thinking and acting like orphans without a home, which is why they hid when they heard the sound of God walking in the Garden. Look how quickly relationships deteriorate under an orphan spirit. No sooner had God confronted Adam about his sin than Adam turned on his wife: