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April 25, 2016 - Praying Medic

01:07:39

048 Faith Living - Rejection and identity

My friend Faith Living is a self-published author. In this message we discuss the subject of her latest book—the idea that emotions such as fear and rejection are not really our emotions, but spirits. Resources Faith Living's Website Rejection and Identity The Kingdom of God as Rose Rock

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	- Hi, I'd like to welcome you to our show.
	I'm your host, Praying Medic.
	We're talking about life as a child of God and all things related to His Kingdom.
	Thanks for joining us.
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	Just look for Praying Medic.
	Now let's jump into this week's show.
	Faith is a friend of mine.
	She's publishing books under the pen name Faith Living.
	Faith Rockrimmon sometimes is your alias on Facebook.
	Yes.
	You, like me, are a self-published author and a blogger and a kingdom encourager.
	I wanted to have you on the podcast today to talk about a number of things, not the least of which is your most recent book on the subject of rejection.
	Which is something that a lot of people, I think, could use some help with.
	So this book that you wrote, it came about in kind of a strange way.
	You had been posting some things on Facebook, and then a couple of smarty-pants friends of yours said, hey, maybe you should write an e-book on this.
	And I was surprised because literally like two weeks later, bam, hey, here's my book is out.
	You put that thing together pretty quickly.
	Yes, I did, and I wonder sometimes if I just didn't make a mess of it, but yet I know the message is in there, and that seemed so urgent to me to get that done.
	And then after I finished it, it was like Father began to open the doors and show me that there's so much more.
	That's not the end.
	So, I have a feeling that down the road there's going to be another book that encompasses A whole lot of negative emotions that we're all experiencing and that we've accepted for a very long time in our lives, that we call them our own.
	And he's showing me that they're not ours.
	They don't belong to us.
	Right.
	And you wrote a little blog post about that the other day.
	Yes.
	Which was actually a response to a blog post I wrote.
	Yes.
	And I'm not mad that you didn't link to my article.
	That's fine.
	I forgot.
	I'm sorry.
	No, that's OK.
	I'm cool.
	Obviously, I knew that it was a response to my article, and I thought it was a very good response.
	And I like the way you picked up on what I was writing about and took it in a different direction and brought some more clarity to that subject.
	For those who don't know, I wrote an article recently on Learning to love your abuser.
	And I have not suffered the kind of abuse that a lot of people have.
	I mean, I'm a guy and so I haven't been sexually abused.
	I haven't been, I have suffered some physical abuse from my brothers when I was younger, but I have escaped a lot of the really bad abuse that some people have gone through.
	Yet, because I work in healthcare, I also I've seen a lot of abuse from my patients.
	So, I felt like the Holy Spirit wanted me to write this article on how we can start walking out through the process of learning to not just forgive, and sometimes even forget the abuse, but how to respond to those people in love.
	And it's a very difficult process, I'll admit.
	It's not an easy thing to do.
	And a friend of mine, Krista Bontrager, who I did a podcast with her a few months ago.
	She was healed of bipolar disorder and she is a theologian.
	She had a very good comment about it.
	She said, you know, this is something I rarely talk about with anyone that I counsel because it takes a really high level of spiritual maturity and a lot of love to get to a place in your life where you can Communicate with an abuser in a way that is going to really be from a place of love.
	Most of the time when people try to communicate with people who are abusing them, it ends up with more abuse and more trauma and it's just not a healthy thing.
	And she said that she only in very rare circumstances will she advocate someone to try to keep in contact with someone who has abused them.
	And I thought that was really insightful and that's been my experience too.
	There aren't a lot of people that I know who are able to deal with those emotions in a mature way.
	Essentially, I think you have to have your heart perfected in love and have been walking in that for a while before you have any chance of not allowing the anger and the shame and the rejection to overcome you.
	And I'd like how you pointed out in your article that these are not our emotions.
	They're spirits.
	And that's, that's been my experience too.
	We think these emotions that we feel are actually our emotions and we own them.
	But I think you're, I think you're right.
	I think in many cases, the emotions are actually spirits, spirits of fear, spirits of murder, There has been in the past a lot of deliverance ministries that I didn't get involved with.
	I didn't get involved because I thought they were seeing demons under every rock and that it took our responsibility away from us.
	But what Father is showing me is that we're not hunting the right demons even in some cases.
	Because we're claiming all emotion as coming from within ourselves.
	And I think we've all experienced those moments where you hear something whispering in your ear, and you think it's your own thought, and later on you find out, wait a minute, that wasn't me.
	That was actually something very evil that was whispering in my ear.
	And I was hearing it as my own thought.
	Well, these emotions he was showing me are the same way.
	When we're in his presence and feeling that love is the moment that we can see who our spirit really is.
	And it's actually very pure.
	He created it to be pure.
	And what he said to me was that hasn't changed.
	That knocked me off my chair and it took me several weeks to even go back and look at what he said.
	Really?
	We're still pure?
	You know, because I think in some ways we're still struggling with that sinner mentality that we're not pure, we're not perfect, even though we're trying to claim it because we know Christ lives within us.
	So when he said, yeah, when he said, your spirit is still pure, And those are coming from outside you.
	It was hard for me to swallow.
	Yeah, that is a difficult thing for some people to wrap their mind around.
	It's difficult for me too.
	I think because if you've been in a church with fire and brimstone preaching, I went to this church for a while where two guys were the pastors.
	They were Baptist preachers and they were kind of typical.
	They preached a lot of You know, you're just a worthless sinner saved by grace.
	And the messages we got certainly didn't focus on the fact that we are beloved and cherished sons and daughters of God and that He created us like He created Adam and Eve in the garden.
	They were perfect.
	They were sinless and they were truly made in His image.
	And if He makes something in His image, He doesn't make it flawed.
	Exactly.
	Because he's not flawed.
	I don't think he can make anything flawed.
	Right.
	It gets flawed down here, you know, in the mud.
	But the thing is, the flaw is a perception, I think.
	And I mean, there's a reality to it, but it's mostly perception.
	You know, you talk about this in your blog posts a lot.
	And I really love that.
	How you enter into his presence.
	You look him in the eye.
	And you see an image of yourself that is not the image you see when you're not looking at him.
	Right.
	It's very different when you are face to face with Jesus and he shows you what you look like.
	You look like him, which is an amazing revelation because we don't feel and we don't think and see ourselves like him.
	But that is a reality that we need to start When he first started doing that to me and showing me that reflection, I would shrink down to the floor, almost like I was going into a fetal position.
	It was something I couldn't accept.
	I saw myself so dirty, I guess, that he had to slowly coax me up.
	Come on, come and look again.
	And keep looking and keep looking and keep looking again and again and again until you begin to accept it.
	But then there is even more.
	Not only accept it, but actually put it on and wear it and claim it.
	This is me.
	This really is me.
	Right.
	You have to start seeing that image as your true identity.
	And that's the hard thing.
	It is hard to do that.
	But it's very empowering, I think.
	A lot of the people that I hang out with who are really into healing that come from the Word of Faith movement, they talk a lot about having your mind renewed to the truth.
	They really sort of believe that there's only one hindrance to physical healing, and that is a lack of faith or doubt, which comes from not having your mind focused on understanding the truth.
	And every hindrance to healing in their mind comes from Having false perceptions and ideas in your mind.
	They believe that if you get your mind renewed to a point and understanding and perceiving yourself in the world the way God perceives them, that you will walk in perfect health and perfect wholeness.
	And I think there's some truth to that.
	I mean, I think there are other things that stand in the way of healing, but I think there is so much power in seeing ourselves the way Jesus sees us.
	There is.
	In seeing the gifting and the abilities and the destiny that he's put in us and apprehending that and wrapping our mind around it and just accepting it.
	You know, when my wife had that back injury a couple years ago, we prayed over that thing for five or six months and it didn't get healed until she rejected some lies she'd been believing about herself.
	And once she started to see herself the way God saw her, bam, she was healed.
	She saw the perfection.
	Yeah.
	And it jacked up her faith and she was praising God and it really brought her into a place of greater intimacy.
	He showed me one time that our spirit within us already knows this stuff.
	It's our mind that doesn't.
	Sometimes he even says to me, just stop thinking for a moment and feel.
	Receive it in your spirit because your spirit already knows.
	Right.
	Right.
	That's it.
	I mean, It's our spirit knows.
	Our spirit understands so much more and has so much more knowledge of the truth than our soul does.
	Our soul is kind of in the dark.
	And most of us live out of that place where our soul is weighing and evaluating the things we hear in the world and kind of rejecting, I think, what our spirit knows from God.
	Like, I'll have these dreams.
	At night.
	And I don't even know why I call them dreams because I don't think they are dreams.
	But sometimes I'll be receiving these downloads from the Holy Spirit all night long.
	And I know, I'm aware that my spirit is being taught and instructed.
	But when I wake up in the morning I have no clue, no idea what it was that my spirit was being taught.
	I just know that my spirit was in school all night long, learning stuff, but my soul has no comprehension of what it was.
	And it's kind of weird because there is this duality going on.
	Like, I know that my spirit man is trained and equipped and knows the truth.
	My soul is sitting here going, why am I believing these lies about myself?
	Because we tend to look at things from such a Oh, what would we call it?
	Intellectual standpoint, I think.
	We think our mind is so smart.
	Right, right.
	We want to reason it out.
	And oh boy, do we use those scriptures.
	Let's reason together.
	And I'm not, I'm not against that.
	That's not what I'm saying.
	But if we can shut that off sometimes and just let our spirit speak, And just accept what it's saying.
	It is really, really wise beyond our comprehension sometimes.
	It is.
	Well, you know, the thing is, we certainly in the West have developed a way of thinking about ourselves and about God that is largely based on reason.
	I think that comes from the Greek traditions of philosophy.
	Where we like to argue and debate and you know in Western Christianity it's all about how many Bible verses you can bring up to support your point of view.
	Right.
	That is a method of instruction and discussion that has some value to it but I think the value is limited.
	I agree.
	Because we're all filtering our understanding of the scriptures through The collective experiences we've had over our life and the things we've learned from different teachers.
	And we don't get a pure revelation on that by using the filters that our mind has accepted over our lifetime.
	Our spirit receives pure revelation from the Spirit of God.
	It's unadulterated.
	It is unfiltered.
	It is unbiased.
	It is pure revelation.
	It's one of the things I love about my dreams and the visions that I get.
	My soul is kind of in a backseat and all the filters are in the trunk.
	And the spiritual experience is pure revelation straight from the throne room.
	It doesn't get filtered or distorted until my mind starts to think about it and try to apply it and relate it to other things that happen in my life.
	And then it starts to Then the mix comes in and then my experiences and perceptions and theology start to get involved and it kind of gets watered down a little bit.
	Well, it's the same thing when you're trying to write down in words what Father just said to your spirit.
	You're trying to put it into words and there's so many words that you could use because the spirit communication covers everything, physical, Emotional.
	It covers so much in such a tiny piece of time that it's hard to put it into words.
	It is hard.
	I struggle sometimes.
	You know, we were having this discussion in our writers group the other day.
	One of the women was asking if it's okay to edit God.
	I saw that.
	Yeah.
	We all receive revelation from God in different ways.
	Some people through their emotions.
	Some people literally hear like a voice speaking to them.
	Some get those thought impressions.
	Some people smell and we all perceive things in the spiritual realm differently.
	So this discussion was about editing what you hear from God and she was essentially feels like God gives her direct Word-for-word dictation and she writes that all down and then she was wondering how the rest of us do it and my experience is very different.
	I get these, I don't want to call them vague, but they are not precise word-for-word dictations as much as some suggestions and thoughts and ideas and concepts.
	Concepts.
	I have a lot of what I call conceptual dreams where the Holy Spirit will speak to me about a concept and he'll give me his perspective on that concept without really a whole lot of words or action or dialogue.
	A lot of times I don't see any people in the dreams.
	I simply, my spirit receives a point of view on a concept You know, I used to write a lot about my dreams and it's getting more difficult now because my dreams are changing and I'm getting a lot more conceptual dreams where he is just simply bringing up an issue and showing me his perspective on it.
	I have to ask him quite often to help write this down because like you say, the concept is so huge and so free.
	It's so fluid in some ways.
	It's hard to pin it down to concrete words.
	Very difficult to put in words.
	And that's one of the things I'm struggling with is when I go to write about those things, gosh, it can take me a very long time to crystallize into English what it is that he's trying to communicate.
	It's so deep.
	It's so vast and so broad.
	You know, his ways truly are so far above our ways.
	And he can give you a little bit of revelation that will have your brain scrambling for weeks to try to figure out how to put that into words.
	Well, you remember my story about hearing God's voice the one time that I heard it audibly.
	He said, go pick up the cup.
	Right.
	Well, even that moment, go pick up the cup, sounds like It was those simple words, but it wasn't.
	In that moment, in that message, I saw my friend's house.
	I saw myself going there.
	I saw picking up a cup, taking it from her.
	So the words that I used could have been a million different combinations, and I had to choose.
	Right.
	There's a multi-dimensionality to whatever he says to me.
	It's hard to pin down a specific application or interpretation on some of the things he says.
	Like, I could take it this way, or I could take it that way, or I could apply it a number of different ways.
	How you express that.
	Was he focusing on me going there to her house?
	Or was he focusing on the interaction where I hand her the cup?
	What is the point of this?
	And quite often with his spirit, it's all of those points.
	Right.
	And you could write books and books about that one message.
	Well, our friend, Northwest Prophetic, a.k.a.
	Al Mack, is fond of pointing out that when Jesus quoted the Old Testament scriptures, He nearly always took them out of context and always changed the application and interpretation of them.
	And, you know, in the church, we tend to really get on people who take things out of context.
	And context is important.
	But as Richard Murray points out, subtext is probably more important.
	The subtext of a discussion or message is the underlying Flow, the overall direction in which the spirit is taking you.
	The immediate context, like if you were in a river and somebody dumped a can of motor oil into the river, immediately afterward, if you dipped your cup into the river, into that slimy, oily thing, you picked up some water with oil in it, you would be looking at the context of The river.
	The immediate context of the river.
	But if you, a day later, came there and picked up a cup of water out of the stream, the oil is gone.
	Right.
	Because the oil is not involved in the subtext.
	It's only in the immediate context.
	The greater subtext of the river is much larger.
	It involves the direction where the River's going.
	It involves all the other elements and things that are in it.
	It involves the fish life and the plant life.
	It involves everything else, the whole ecosystem.
	That's the subtext of the river.
	And the subtext of the Scriptures are the broad concepts that are woven into each passage.
	And so what the Holy Spirit does with me and what Jesus did with the Old Testament Scriptures, He would often magnify the subtext and completely disregard the context.
	When the prophet gave the word and he wrote it down, okay, Jesus takes it out of that setting, out of that context, and completely applies it in a different way.
	Because he's looking at things like subtext, he's looking at the greater revelation, and he's speaking the heart of the Father.
	Which many times was not captured by the prophet who actually wrote those words or said them.
	Right.
	And Jesus flaunts it.
	Right.
	So when you get a bit of revelation from the Holy Spirit, then you have to sit there and think, OK, do I apply this and interpret it in my immediate context of my life and what's happening today?
	Or is this something that applies to a larger part of my life?
	Is it a destiny thing?
	Does it apply to my scroll of destiny?
	Is there something that I need to look at the big picture?
	I mean, that's where life in the Spirit gets really fun, for me anyway.
	I agree, I agree.
	The moment that you receive the message, it's usually speaking to something immediate in your spirit, in your life.
	And it applies to that, of course, but that's not to say that tomorrow he won't apply that same message to another area.
	And it'll be just as relevant.
	But I think that's why we have 37,000 different denominations, isn't it?
	We took that cup out of the river and got the oil in it and said, ooh, this is it.
	This is the one thing that's right.
	And It's very narrow vision, actually.
	It is, yeah.
	And it's good that different people have brought depth of insight and understanding into various aspects of God's plan and His nature.
	But I think the more you focus on narrow perspectives and doctrines, I think you miss out on the bigness of God.
	And like you said, when you get revelation from God, Many times, there is an immediate application, but there is also a much larger application.
	And a lot of times, I don't really understand the full revelation of a dream until years afterward.
	Yes.
	When I can look and go, wow, I really did not see that at all when I first had this dream.
	And I look back a couple years later and go, wow, okay, I'm starting to see the forest now that I've backed away from the trees a little bit.
	Exactly.
	And it's so much easier to see in hindsight also.
	Yeah.
	So, you wrote this book, Rejection and Identity.
	What is the thesis of the book?
	That if we can accept the fact that that particular emotion doesn't belong to us and see it as a spirit, we can overcome it by seeing ourselves in his eyes.
	Identity is where our strength is.
	We've spent so much time rejecting evil.
	It's the basis of a lot of our religion, our religious behavior.
	Maybe I should say it that way.
	I see evil in someone's behavior and so I reject them from my life.
	And what he's saying through this is that's not how you overcome evil.
	Rejecting evil just moves it to a different place.
	It doesn't overcome it.
	It still exists.
	So how do we overcome it?
	So you're saying that when we reject people who display evil behavior and we reject the individual, all we're really doing is building another fence that's going to keep somebody out of our life.
	And if you do that enough, eventually everyone will be out of your life.
	You will reject everyone because there is what you perceive to be evil in everyone.
	And then you become an island.
	There's that.
	And there's also the more boundaries you have, the less love you can receive, the less love you can give.
	You can't put love in a boundary.
	It doesn't thrive there.
	It only thrives in complete freedom.
	Yeah, I have developed over the years.
	Some, I have a need for setting boundaries, but not boundaries that keep people out of my life as much as boundaries that define what is acceptable behavior.
	Like I've had women, women who have suggested things to me in private messages that they shouldn't be suggesting to a married man.
	You know what I'm saying?
	Right.
	I think it's good to have boundaries for behavior, but at the same time, If I set up too many boundaries where I keep everyone out of my life just because they did something that was, you know, not cool.
	I keep rejecting everyone and rejecting them isn't the solution.
	No.
	It was resisting.
	He showed me the meaning of resisting and it's quite different because it's standing before that evil, standing in front of it.
	In your identity, which is so strong, the evil just simply doesn't penetrate you.
	And it loses its power when it can't affect you.
	If you know your true identity.
	Yes.
	And you stand in your true identity and not the broken person who needs affection or needs acceptance and affirmation.
	Right.
	But the identity that has already received all affirmation and affection from the Father.
	Right.
	Then you can repel the spirit behind the weird behavior, because that's really what it is.
	You know, Paul says we don't wrestle against flesh and blood.
	We're not battling people.
	Our warfare is against demonic powers and spirits that are trying to mess us up.
	And I wrote an article a while back called The Spirit Behind the Words.
	And the thrust of the article was basically that We many times don't understand that the person who is speaking the words or writing the words to us that are harmful or critical or negative or shaming, the person is being used as a pawn.
	Yes.
	They don't understand that there's a spirit that is manipulating them to say those things.
	Exactly.
	And when we take a stand against the person instead of the spirit, we're rejecting one person after another, after another.
	Instead of just taking a stand against the spirit, because that's what Paul said in Ephesians 6, speaking about spiritual warfare, he said, what we really need to do is stand, stand firm, stand against the spirits.
	You don't have to pick up a sword and lop people's heads off.
	Well, I'd like to use the same example that you did.
	Someone coming to you and proposing things that are inappropriate because And that's happened to me.
	It, at one time, bothered me so much that I thought, well, I'm just going to withdraw from social circles because this is happening too often.
	And I don't know how to control these men that suggest these things.
	When Father showed me this rejection issue, And that I was rejecting everyone, closing myself off and becoming very isolated as a result.
	He showed me the resistance and showed me how I can continue to love those men, even as they are saying the things they're saying.
	Because in my identity, I'm so strong.
	Their words are not affecting me.
	I can even walk over to them, put my hand on their arm and say, I love you and that's not you talking to me because I can see the real you and you are a perfect being.
	Let's get rid of that junk that's coming out of your mouth.
	That takes a rather high level of maturity to do that.
	To not want to reject someone.
	Stand in your true identity and to recognize their true identity and to integrate that into a loving discussion where people don't get offended, further offended and further wounded and further rejected.
	Their reaction when you do that is quite profound.
	Their eyes usually get big and they're taken aback.
	They've never heard these things.
	And sometimes they'll even begin to cry because you've touched their true being that needs to be loved and they've been lied to that they receive love by acting this way, by acting out.
	That spirit's lying to them too.
	Right.
	The spirit has been telling us for a long time, there's only two ways this is going to go.
	You're either going to Get away with this and the person you're approaching is going to give in to what you want or they're going to reject you.
	And there's no other option.
	But when we choose to not reject them and not fall into their trap, but instead to speak their true identity over them and to ask them to live from their true identity, which is much greater than what they usually perceive.
	It's disarming.
	It disarms the spirit that's manipulating and controlling them.
	Exactly.
	As soon as you speak their destiny to them and tell them who they really are and who God has created them to be, the spirit has just lost the battle.
	He's just been exposed.
	Right.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	His mask is off.
	And you empower the individual.
	And yes, I mean, that is going to touch them in a deep place in their spirit because they're probably not used to something like that happening.
	No, and even if you don't carry on a conversation with them past that point, or you never see them again, what just happened is going to remain with them.
	It's going to stay there, and they're going to think about it for a long time.
	That is true.
	It's going to change something in their life.
	It will, because that's the nature.
	Essentially, you're speaking prophetically to the person.
	Yeah.
	The power of prophecy is that we are revealing and declaring something about the person that they may not know about themselves.
	Or maybe they've forgotten it.
	They know it, but they've forgotten it.
	Their spirit certainly knows it.
	Their soul, their mind has probably forgotten it.
	When we speak prophetically to someone's identity and their destiny, we're taking a bit of their scroll from heaven and we're showing it to them and saying, look, this is who you are.
	That Spirit's talking to you to convince you that you need to act this way to receive love.
	That Spirit is lying to you.
	You don't need to act that way.
	And you show them their destiny.
	And you show them their identity.
	It's very empowering.
	It changes them.
	It will help them understand how loved they already are by God.
	Yes.
	Amen.
	And it's so freeing for us.
	That means that I don't have any boundaries.
	I can go to any social situation and accept People, no matter how they're behaving.
	Could I go into a large crowd that's acting out?
	I probably wouldn't, no.
	This is much more effective, I think, one-on-one.
	Right.
	But if you are called to go and reach people who are in lifestyles that are not exactly churchy, Yes, this is a powerful tool to give you the ability to do that.
	I remember reading about the different ministries that go to the Burning Man Festival.
	Okay.
	And they go there and they hang out for a week or so, a week or two, and the Burning Man Festival is a big, huge pagan worship festival.
	They build a big effigy of a Burning Man and there's a lot of partying, a lot of drugs, a lot of sex, a lot of, you know, debauchery going on.
	Okay.
	But the people who go there and do ministry, I suspect that they, this is the type of thing that they use.
	They're not really affected by their surroundings and they're not, they don't come under the influence of the spirits that are there because they know their identity and they're walking in it.
	Exactly.
	And they know who they are, and their job is to find those who are looking for their true identity.
	Because that's what a lot of people are doing when they go to the Burning Man Festival.
	They go there because they're looking for a sense of belonging, a sense of who they really are.
	And when they run into some believer who knows their identity and can speak to them and tell them who they are in Christ, How the Father sees them.
	It kind of wrecks them.
	But it's hard to do that.
	You know, if you're going to go there preaching fire and brimstone, you're not going to make an impact on anyone.
	But the people who do that successfully, I think, they understand their identity and they know when a door is opened to speak to somebody, not critically, not harshly, but out of love and You can reveal their identity, reveal something about them that they don't know.
	How much God loves them, how much the Father adores them, and how they were created as a perfect spirit, child of the Father.
	That really gives them something to meditate on and think about.
	And that's one of those situations.
	I don't think that love is something that we can decide in our mind, I'm going to go out And I'm going to behave in love.
	I decide.
	And that's part of the identity, is being able to step into Him, seeing ourselves like He sees us.
	Then we are love.
	We don't decide to be love.
	We just are.
	We actually live and breathe and exist in love.
	And when we accept that identity, And see it.
	It is so powerful.
	Sometimes things will come out of my mouth that I don't know where they came from, because my spirit knows already who I am.
	And the more I give it the freedom to just live out loud, so to speak.
	When you were talking about the Burning Man, I remembered, I don't know what ministry it is, but they go to Renaissance fairs It's powerful.
	up a booth and put out a sign, we'll pray for you.
	And they may be sitting right next door to someone who's doing tarot cards or reading a crystal ball.
	But they get a big response and people will walk in and they simply sit down with them, hold their hands, pray with them.
	And if you see something about this person, share it with them, share their true identity with them.
	It's powerful.
	It is powerful. - Yeah, there's a lot of ministries that do that, John Paul Jackson, his ministry has been big on going to New Age fairs and festivals and giving people what they call destiny words and dream interpretation and doing healing and they have really done some great work and they've been a model for a lot of people.
	I have some friends up in Washington State who have learned from that model and they go to a lot of the festivals in Olympia.
	There's a lot of pagan festivals there during the summer.
	And they go and they set up tents right next to the tarot card readers and the psychics.
	And they're an exceptionally gifted prophetic group.
	So they read people's mail and they give them destiny words and they get them healed and they interpret their dreams and they tell them.
	And the funny thing is the last time I was there, it was a few years ago, there was lines of people at their tent and The other people, the other readers there were getting a little irritated because all the business was being taken from them.
	It was pretty good.
	I remember one gal that we were praying with, she was manifesting demons.
	She was rolling around on the ground and we were taking her through deliverance and stuff.
	Okay.
	But it is pretty cool when you reach a place in your life where you can go into places of relative darkness and you can be the light.
	I remember this story John Paul Jackson said.
	He was at this New Age Festival.
	See, when you go to these festivals, your popularity determines the place where they put your tent, basically.
	And all the years that John Paul and his teams were there, they kept becoming more and more popular.
	And at one year they went, they gave them like Top billing because there were so many people loved going to their booth.
	So they're there, they're hanging out and giving people dream interpretations and prophesying over them.
	And the organizer of the event comes to John Paul and says, I have to ask you a very difficult question.
	And John Paul said, okay, what's the question?
	And he said, are you a spiritual vampire?
	And he said, some of the vendors here are saying, basically accusing you of stealing their power.
	They have said that when they're next to you or near you and you come into their area, that they lose their power, that they can't contact their mediums, that they're having a hard time reading people.
	It's like you're sucking their power away.
	And John Paul looks at the guy and goes, I'm not a spiritual vampire.
	He said, but when a greater light appears in an area, all the other lights around it seem dim by comparison.
	He goes, that's exactly what I thought was going on.
	Okay, I get it.
	Okay, I'll go explain to them what's going on.
	That was an excellent response.
	We carry in us the greatest light ever created.
	We carry in us the light of the universe.
	We have the ability to reveal to people Things that no one else is going to tell them, their identity and their destiny, and who they are as beloved children of the Father.
	And I don't understand why people are so afraid to go into those settings and to help people see the truth, why they have been rejected.
	One of the things John Paul said is, in all the years they did their New Age Fairs, 80% of the people that they did ministry to were ex-Christians.
	Yes.
	And he said it's because a lot of people get into the church and they are hammered over the head with the Bible.
	They're preached fire and brimstone from the time they get into the time they leave.
	They never see any display of power.
	Right.
	Or they never see any light.
	And they go in search of power and light and they find it in the New Age.
	And they leave.
	And it's a bit sad that Christianity has been relegated to what it has become.
	We're not revealing the love of the Father.
	You know, God describes Himself as love.
	That's what He and who He is.
	He is love.
	Exactly.
	And if we are His children, if there's anything we should be displaying to people, it's love.
	We don't maintain our holiness by pushing evil away from us.
	That's not how we got to be holy to begin with.
	It was through His love.
	That overwhelming love that made us holy.
	And then we take over and we think, well, let's start pushing evil away.
	Let's start rejecting a bunch of stuff and we'll maintain our holiness that way.
	And that's not how it works.
	Love breaks down barriers.
	It sets you free so that there's nothing out there that we need to fear.
	Nothing.
	That love is The most powerful, the way you just said it, most powerful force in the universe.
	You said there's nothing we need to fear.
	What is fear?
	Exactly.
	It's a spirit.
	Exactly.
	In fact, I have several friends who have asked the Holy Spirit, what is the root cause of asthma?
	And they have all universally said they were told that asthma is a spirit of fear.
	That actually a number of other Okay, thank you.
	are actually not a disease per se, but a spirit that is bringing some kind of manifestation of a physical illness, whether, you know, fear and anxiety and hatred.
	But I believe they're all spirits and I believe they all bring different afflictions with them if you allow yourself to come under their influence.
	Wow.
	Okay.
	Thank you.
	You are reading my mail today.
	Yeah, because, you know, people who have fibromyalgia and who have even things like, I was talking about this yesterday, shingles.
	People don't understand that.
	I mean, some people do, but they don't put two and two together.
	Shingles outbreaks are caused by fear, stress and anxiety.
	Right.
	If you live in a life that's relatively stress and anxiety free, you're not going to have shingles outbreaks.
	My son has shingles.
	And the only time he ever gets a shingles outbreak is when he gets really, really stressed out.
	And bam, the shingles show up.
	There are spiritual roots and there are emotional roots to a lot of illnesses.
	And you know, I've been, since the Sid Roth Show, I've been receiving tons and tons and tons of prayer requests for people.
	And I can't help but see all these patterns.
	Like almost everybody who tells me that they've got fibromyalgia and chronic pain and migraines, Also reports they've got high stress, high anxiety, lots of it.
	Sounds like their family hates them and they suffer rejection.
	I mean, you just see all these patterns in people and it's hard not to look at them and go, you know, there's some spiritual dynamics going on behind all these illnesses people have.
	Yes.
	Wow.
	You just, you just nailed me to the wall right there.
	I've been struggling with reoccurring asthma over the last month that I had thought was gone from my life and it suddenly has been coming back and I've been thinking, okay, what door have I opened?
	What have I done?
	How did this get here?
	I just think, thank you, Father!
	That was the one that you really Brought up just now.
	And I appreciate that because I see it now.
	He's been exposed.
	He's been exposed.
	So now it's time to kick him out.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	You know, the thing is, when someone has symptoms of some illness or disease that comes and goes, and it seems to be related to lifestyle things, whether it's eating or drinking, or being around certain people or being in environments or having emotional reactions like fear and anxiety and stress.
	If you journal what is going on and you write down when you have these episodes of whether it's asthma or chronic pain and then journal in your life at the same time what's going on with relational dynamics, how people are treating you, how you're being accepted, what kind of things are happening, you will find a high correlation with a lot of those things.
	And for most people, if you can, if you can, and I don't want to say modify your behavior, but if you can do things to reduce the stress and anxiety and fear, get your mind in a place where you're walking in your identity and the fear and the anxiety and the rejection and the shame are not having a chance to work their way into your life, those symptoms are going to leave.
	They won't come back.
	I really do believe they're spirits.
	They are.
	And those spirits will come back and they'll see if there's an open door and they'll see how renewed your mind is.
	And if you're believing a bunch of junk, they're going to come in and start handing you all these symptoms that you thought you were healed of a year ago or six months ago.
	Right.
	I received a question from a fellow this week who had been walking in really outstanding health for about six years.
	No health problems at all.
	Okay.
	And then all of a sudden, Out of nowhere, he started having this very severe condition that he's very concerned about.
	And he said, the only thing I can say is, I got so proud about my perfect health.
	And I was telling everyone about how great my health was.
	He said, I almost feel as if my pride and arrogance is the thing that brought this affliction on me.
	And I was like, well, there's a very good possibility that's the truth.
	Because a lot of these illnesses, they are simply spirits.
	All right, so I'm gonna rabbit trail here.
	A person that you and I both know just got involved in a full-on deliverance session.
	She had no experience with deliverance up until then.
	I'm bringing this up because the demon revealed a bunch of very, very interesting things during this discussion.
	The demon took over this guy and was talking through him and refused to let him talk.
	And the demon said, I'm a beast of pride and you are a beast of pride.
	He was talking to the guy whose body he was inhabiting.
	He called this guy a beast of pride and the demon said, I am also a beast like you.
	I'm a beast of pride.
	Unfortunately, this friend of mine, he is a very proud and very arrogant person.
	He's of a personality type where he's very intellectual and he's very opinionated and very outspoken and just full of pride.
	And it's interesting because his nature is to be full of pride.
	And so he attracted a demon that specializes in pride.
	And he has what is basically an incurable disease.
	And I suspect that the disease is connected to the spirit of pride.
	The funny thing was, as this deliverance session is going on, the demon gets kicked out and This guy has been a completely different person since this happened.
	I mean, 180 degrees.
	He is the most humble, meek, childlike person you can imagine.
	He is completely different.
	It's scary.
	I was talking to him on the phone after it happened.
	I was like, Oh, I don't know what you did with, you know, his name.
	You put him back on the phone because it's not him.
	I suspect that this guy is actually going to see this incurable disease gone, because I think it was related to that demon of pride.
	And I think if he allows the Holy Spirit to show him his true identity, and he's able to walk in that, pride will not be able to come back into his life.
	It's a spirit.
	Yes.
	The spirit said, I'm a beast of pride and so are you.
	That's why I'm here.
	You know, we hang out together because you are a proud and arrogant person.
	As long as you're like that, I can own you as much as I want.
	Yeah, it's really interesting.
	There's a good question right there.
	Did this man have pride in himself naturally?
	Or did that spirit begin affecting him so early in his life that he became very developed in that thing of pride?
	He is an intelligent person by nature.
	That's how God made him.
	Intelligence, unfortunately, often leads to pride.
	I don't think he was made a proud and arrogant person.
	He was made an intelligent person.
	And he started to believe too much of his own press clippings.
	And that opened the door for pride.
	The funny thing is, and this is not funny, it's ironic, he has suffered, he admitted this during the deliverance process, that he has been afraid to reveal things about himself and to be who he really is, because he was afraid of being rejected by people.
	He was afraid of telling me some things because he was afraid I would reject him.
	And that's the lie that the enemy is telling a lot of us.
	If you tell people, if you let people see who you really are, they're going to hate you.
	They're going to reject you.
	So you have to live a false life.
	You have to pretend to be holier than you are, pretend to be more religious than you are.
	You have to pretend to be smarter than you are.
	You can't You just can't be who you really are because people won't accept you and love you for who you are.
	That's the big lie.
	That is very interesting because when I started writing The Kingdom of God at Rose Rock, I began facing a lot of episodes of overwhelming panic.
	I noticed.
	I was noticing your updates on Facebook and I was like, oh, you're really getting your head kicked in.
	Stupid spirits.
	And I had never faced them before.
	These were, well, I don't think I had.
	I don't recall that I had.
	But boy, they were coming out of the woodwork.
	And especially when I finished writing it, the moment that I finished the last sentence, I went in for a couple of hours, just absolute fear.
	And I had to go to my husband and ask him to help me.
	Help me pray.
	Help me.
	Help me.
	It was almost debilitating.
	It was so strong.
	And that was when I had to, I began just saying who I was, even though I couldn't see.
	I was looking through a dark fog and I couldn't see who I was.
	But I just started saying it.
	I am.
	I am.
	I am Jesus.
	I am.
	He is in me.
	And I had to keep talking and keep talking and eventually it released me.
	Yep.
	It was quite a battle.
	I can imagine.
	Yeah, those battles are very real and they can be very terrifying.
	But, you know, it's just part of the spiritual warfare that we all have to go through, I guess.
	And you, you know, fortunately, you did the right thing.
	You went back to your identity.
	I know who I am in Jesus, and I know who he is in me, and I'm going to get through this thing.
	You know, my friend, when she was doing this deliverance, she didn't know anything.
	She's like, I've never done this before.
	All she knew to do was to keep commanding that demon to leave in Jesus' name.
	That's all she could remember.
	She was in a panic.
	She was terrified.
	This demon is calling her horrible, nasty, vile, evil things, and she's getting kind of freaked out about it.
	And in that panicky state of mind, it's hard to think, OK, I've read some books.
	What should I do with this?
	Yes.
	All she knew to do was just keep commanding this thing to leave in the name of Jesus.
	And it did.
	It comes in like a fog and it tries to drown out your thoughts and your memory.
	That's one of the things that fear and panic does is it really disables your ability to process and to think.
	And to connect with God and to work through the process just kind of paralyzes you, really.
	But if you go back to your identity, like my friend, she went back to her identity.
	She's like, I know that I have authority in Jesus to get rid of demons.
	That's my identity.
	Yes.
	And she just started speaking from that.
	And you did the same thing.
	Yes, I had to.
	I knew I had to because what it was trying to get me to do was quit.
	And I knew I couldn't.
	I would have to just go curl up in a hole and die.
	Right.
	Well, you know, here's the thing.
	If you look at the ministry of Jesus, okay, to me, this is the foundational thing.
	If you don't understand anything else in the New Testament, other than Jesus died, you know, to redeem you, you have to understand this.
	When Jesus started his public ministry, He went down into the Jordan.
	He got baptized by John.
	The father said, this is my son in whom I am well pleased.
	He went into the wilderness for 40 days.
	And the rest of the time, the enemy tried to question, get him to question who he was.
	Right.
	Tried to question his identity.
	Tried to basically get him to forget who he was and what he was there for.
	And that is, in my experience and from what I've got from a lot of people, That is the one place the enemy will always attack you is your identity.
	It's the easiest number one place.
	I'm going to try to get you to forget who you are.
	That's exactly what Father was showing me happened to Adam and Eve.
	Right.
	It was their identity.
	Exactly.
	Satan knew exactly how much the Father loved those two.
	Yes.
	Oh.
	Because he, at one time, he knew The love of the Father.
	He knew how powerful it was.
	He knew what his identity used to be.
	He knew all that stuff and he knew if I can get these two to doubt that the Father loves them, I've got them.
	I can own them.
	It's the number one trick that he tries to do is to get us to question who we are.
	I feel that he was showing me that ever since the garden Humanity, he's been trying to help us to grow up, to find that identity again.
	And when we do reach that point, we will have created the garden again.
	Oh, absolutely.
	Yeah, the garden is a powerful place.
	I have a lot of friends who spend a lot of time in the garden, what they call the garden of God or the garden of their heart.
	And they hang out with the Father there.
	Yeah.
	It's probably worth doing as an exercise to meet with the Father in the garden and to let Him speak to you about how much He loves you, what He thinks about you, what He likes about you, what things He wants to do with you.
	That is a very, very empowering exercise to do if you're willing and able to do that, because you spend so much time hanging around people who want to tell you who you aren't.
	And what you can't do and who you're never going to be.
	And you need to spend some time hanging out with the creator of the universe who knows your potential and who knows what he wants to do with you and who can dismantle some of those lies.
	Exactly, exactly.
	It sounds a lot like what I do in just standing in front of him in my, wherever I'm at, whatever situation is going on.
	I can close my eyes for just a moment and see him right there in front of me.
	And he is surrounded by that garden.
	And the peace that enters me, I bring back with me into the situation.
	I can open my eyes and it changes.
	From that second on, it begins to change the atmosphere around me.
	It will change it at work.
	I was thinking about you the other day and what you were describing because I have a family member that's a police officer and we have talked about that very thing.
	The anger, the abuse that he's seen and how difficult it is to not believe that it is actually those people that are acting out.
	It's difficult to see and separate it, that it's a spirit and it's not that person.
	And that inside those people is a perfect spirit.
	The one that we have in us.
	It's like ours, although we're all unique.
	So I was thinking about you the other day and just praying for you.
	I appreciate that.
	I do appreciate that.
	I take all the prayer I can get.
	I've been getting a lot of prayer.
	My first, I think my first two Periscope videos, I was asking people to pray for me and I do appreciate people praying for me.
	It's awesome.
	Yeah, it is.
	Hey Faith, I'm going to let you go.
	Okay.
	I got some things I have to do today.
	Sure.
	I just wanted to talk to you a little bit about the books that you've written and people know they're out there.
	I'll put links to the books in the podcast notes.
	The Kingdom of God at Rose Rock and Rejection and Identity.
	Yes, thank you.
	Two books, both available on Amazon and Kindle.
	And your website is?
	FaithLivingNow.com.
	FaithLivingNow.com.
	And your tagline is Spiritual Diamonds.
	Right.
	And she has some great messages there.
	If you are looking for some good revelation about The thing that I love is you write about your interactions with Jesus and the Father in a very tangible, very flesh and blood way where other people could read your stories and go, wow, I need to connect with him the way she does.
	You just describe it in such a really strong and powerful way.
	And I would recommend if you haven't checked out Her website, I'll leave a link to it in the podcast notes.
	Thank you.
	Go there and read through her articles.
	Some of the stuff she writes will challenge you, just like some of the stuff I write.
	You know, I had this dream a couple of years ago and you were in the dream.
	Wow.
	And it was kind of funny because a group of us had been given kind of an assignment and it was to come up with a way of understanding our identity.
	And I looked at the model that you came up with of how to do it.
	And you had created a model that was really effective.
	And I decided to copy your model instead of creating my own.
	And I think that I think that really speaks to one of the things I really admire about your writing is you do have a really unique way of helping people understand their identity.
	I try to be simple.
	Yes.
	I understand simple.
	And Father has told me often, I'm not hard to understand.
	It's you that make me difficult.
	Yes.
	Well, theologians make understanding God difficult.
	But you do write in a very easy to read way.
	I think your writing is a lot like mine.
	I try to keep things on the bottom shelf where everyone can access it and everyone can read it and understand it.
	It doesn't have to be complicated.
	And you write about some very deep subjects, but you write about them in a way anyone can understand.
	Thank you.
	I appreciate that.
	Thank you.
	It's been so good to talk to you.
	I've enjoyed this.
	It's been good talking to you.
	I've been wanting to have you on the podcast for a while, and I think this message is going to bless a lot of people.
	I pray that it does.
	Faith, thank you so much for being on the show.
	I look forward to having you back on sometime.
	Thank you.
	I will.
	All right.
	Thanks.
	Bless your day.
	All right, you too.
	Bye.
	Bye.
	Well, folks, that is our show for today.
	I hope you enjoyed it.
	Thanks for dropping by.
	If you're new to the podcast and you haven't been to my website, you might drop by and check out the articles I have there.
	If you have any questions or comments about this show, you can contact me at admin at prayingmedic.com.
	That's A-D-M-I-N at prayingmedic.com.
	You can also contact me on Facebook and Twitter.
	I'd like to thank you again for dropping by.

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