9.) Get a Grip!

Chapter.9
 A false notion of God’s love has established in you some level of comfort about your sin. You must snap out of this superficial mind-set and begin to exert your will in obedience. The enemy within wants you to continue in the underlying conspiracy against God; to be comfortable with letting “him” live on within you. As you read this booklet you will find this constant trite reaction against what I am writing; “All right, all right! I know I’m a sinner. Enough, enough already. Let’s just get on with stating the religious formula that makes all this bad stuff go away so I can start feeling good about myself again”. If you do not get serious about gaining discernment of your sin nature it will remain your master  (Gen.4:7).

If something is very slippery you must first get a handle on it before you can manage it. Humiliation is the “handle” of the shovel to dig beneath the lies and deception of your pretense! You can never, never, never, humble yourself too much! You don’t have to worry about over doing it in humbling yourself. Pride is so momentous and so deceptive it totally destroyed the entire world!!!!
Adam sinned he wanted to hide his true state and not deal with all the deep ramifications and consequences. Can you imagine the grief of what Adam must have felt immediately after he fell from God-consciousness into self-consciousness?! Losing the winning lottery ticket for a 50 million dollar jackpot is a trite comparison to the sense of loss that Adam experienced. Instead of walking in his immortal body and caught up in heavenly and eternal glory, he became painfully obsessed with feelings, instincts, moods and physical aches and hurts. Instead of walking about in the bliss of immortal life and eternal fellowship with God, Adam was terribly aware of his deplorable, lost, aimless, lonely and depressed nature. This is what you wake up with every morning. YOUR NATURE IS THE REASON FOR YOUR DEEP-SEATED DEPRESSION (Ps.42:2-6/2Cor.5:2).

Satan says you are depressed because of certain “reason” so that you will never see or deal with your nature as the source. You are depressed not because of a certain job, or a lack of one. Your life is miserable not because of an ill-conceived marriage or because of the loneliness of being single. No matter how bad your marriage or single life might be it is not the source of depression. It is because you are blinded from and lost within your sin nature. You have no idea what is really going on within you. You think you do. But you don’t! When you’re lying alone on your bed at night you can sense the painful, but silent scream of that man within who fell our of the bond of perfection with His Creator God. Your depression is not because “nobody understands”. Your anger is not because you have a lot of work to do or because you have nothing to do. The feelings of misery that make you want to hide in bed, or be angry for no apparent reason, come directly from the nature of sin within you. If you remain ignorant then it remains in power. Every single thing that brings grief to your life comes from within (Matt.15:18). You can never, ever, ever do anything good that will appease this nature. Not before you know Christ, not after you know Christ. It is impossible. Both your capability and very state of being has been forever defiled. A rotten tree cannot produce good fruit (Mt.12:33).

The nature within is like a fire raging to be fed.

 Before Adam sinned the center of his being was filled with the pure worship that declared to God, “YOU are!” After sin, his constant awareness was the inward obsession of “I am”. The philosopher Descartes thought he was saying something profound when he said that man’s inner awareness of himself “I think therefore I am” proves his existence. The fact is this self-pride is the very be-all and end-all of all sin! Your greatest torment in life is your self-awareness. It was never God-intended. You are now driven to satisfy a self-image of goodness. Everything you do in life is an attempt to prove your self is not “useless” (yes, that is “right” grammar). You are driven by your ego to make yourself happy (Rm.3:12).  Everything you do in life is to make the monster named “I am” happy (Prov.27:20/Ecc.1:2). Sin is synonymous with ego or self-life. Jesus says if anyone wishes to follow Him the FIRST thing you must do is “deny yourself”(Mk.8:34). Self-life is the enemy in this conspiracy. It came from the past but now dwells in your present situation. It would be immensely insightful for you, as you read this booklet, to interchange the words self, ego, sin nature, pride, image and even anti-christ. Selfishness is not some bad trait. It is defiant self-obsession. Adam defied God when confronted with his selfish state. He insisted it wasn’t his really his intention. There was something else that made him do it. Your participation with your ego is a very deliberate, calculative, wicked and defiant self-deification (Ez.28:9). God says the birthing of self-centered thinking is like hatching snake eggs (Is.59:5). This thing occurs at the sub-conscious level and sets itself in direct opposition to God’s revelation of faith. It functions in thee most deceptive manner. It is operating right now as you consider all that I am writing and subject it to the judgment of your “great and all-knowing” EGO. It is putting your thinking before God’s thinking (Ps.50:21).