Day 3 "Living Out of the Core"

I am so glad we have the tools to grow as humans that are out here today. I feel like our grandparents generation and before lived in the dark ages when it came to issues of the heart and character. We have progressed so far forward in knowing how to get healed, knowing how to get balanced, knowing how to recover, etc. Also we have taken quantum leaps in character building.

I am constantly growing in heart skills and my core values and I make mistakes all the time, but the cool thing is that I live in an environment with God and friends that bring me back to the core of who I am which is defined by what I believe. I have watched countless numbers of people leave churches, businesses, relationships, etc and not be able to recover because they left unresolved and had nothing in their lives to help resolve them...and frankly just normal relationships aren't going to fix a heart problem. You need a heart specialist. If your friends tell you to go to a urologist when you have a heart attack, you wouldn't take their advice then.

Its funny because we were making jokes as ministers about some of our friends assistants who are reading books like "The Bondage Breaker and "Boundaries" because they don't know how to have a normal relationship with such high powered ministry professionals who don't usually live lives centered around relationships. Almost every high powered person I have ever met from any sphere of society whether ministry, business, politics, etc has learned to be self sufficient, to fix their own problems or hide them, and they don't usually slow down until there is a break down. It doesn't mean they are bad people it just means that they have learned a survival type of accomplishing their goals....not a thriving way that God intended us to walk in.

When you don't have a balance between relationship and purpose  you will kill relationship around you which is the reason why we are on this Earth in the first place. Its funny that so many ministries have a Messiah complex, that they want to save the whole world and feel the weight of responsibility for their gifts and ministries but they usually have very imbalanced families and children. A lot of this is changing right now culturally as groups like Bethel in Redding hold leadership summits and retrain the way we prioritize and impart a new culture.

The reality is I want to be and create a safe place for people to fail. I hate that the church kills her wounded in most circles. We should have counseling, healing, and pastoring to build a process of safe relationships.

Basically there are two types of authority that we need to balance between: 1) Authority given out of respect for position and accomplishment  2) Authority given out of relationship.

This generation is longing for relationship and is weary of the authority that is positional or accomplishment based because of some of the hypocrisy of the lack of the relational balance. Some of the fundamental break downs in Evangelical Christianity are the issues that we are so passionate about but have very little relational authority in our culture to change. These become extremism to people who don't think like we do because we have isolated our lives from them but force our perspective onto them.

I was called several years ago by a pastor on a conference call who was going to go after a Culture Armageddon and fight homosexuality. I had just started my church and told them that I couldn't be part of their fight because I didn't have anything installed in my church to help heal sexual identity problems, so how could I have authority to fight against something that I wasn't using kingdom power to heal first? Then I asked how many of the other pastors had programs to help people with sexual identity problems that were successful who were fighting this battle and none of them did. This made me realize that we need to change quickly and become a source of kingdom power on the earth and install what is missing before we point out the results of those missing pieces. In other words everyone can see when there is a puzzle piece that is a gap in the puzzle but who is forming the piece or looking for the piece that fits and placing it in to complete the picture?

This is also why the prolife movement sucks right now in its impact. I am completely pro life, but very few organizations deal with the 800,000 kids who come into foster care just in America every year not to mention the countless orphans in many countries. How is a poor inner city teen not going to get an abortion when her alternatives only look good on paper? I think when we bring the kingdom of life, we start to steward the lives that are here and now and it creates a culture of life stewardship where abortion just doesn't make sense anymore because of the amount of loving families available to care for those babies. Its easy to see fetus's as not real people when you are not loved well and don't feel like a real person yourself.

So I guess my blog has come down to the fact that we need a love revolution steeped in a culture of honor.

Over the past two years I have been installing Danny Silks message on "Culture of Honor" which kills control and victimization. You can't hold people responsible for your neediness or for your rejection, or for your bad character or for controlling you when you understand his message that I think is revolutionary. It also reprioritizes you life around having safe boundaries and healthy relationship dynamics. I am including it in this blog.

Link to Culture of Honor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFxM9xn3-4Y

So my question of the day is:

What issues are you extremely passionate about that you don't have a balance of position and relationship to be an authority in to our culture yet?