Ministering At The Altar

We really need to understand the stages that people go through in growing as a disciple. The first stage is when they are actually moving toward discipleship, the stage of unbelief. Unbelief means there is no life, no security, no freedom from guilt. God extends you the invitation, and that is the second stage. At this stage, when you give your heart to the Lord you are forgiven. Then you start to feel forgiven, at least for most of the things you have done. You feel that God has accepted you.

For a lot of people, no one sits down and explains what the stages are and what will be happening to them. Because of that you don't know what to do, you just start doing what comes naturally. This means you start doing your best. You are grateful to God for what He did, but inside you are not satisfied to stay where you are. So, you start reading the Bible. But after a little while you start to see that you still have a problem with sin. Then you learn a verse, I John 1:9. "If you confess your sins He is faithful and just to forgive your sins, and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness." You have learned that verse, so you learn to confess that every time. But you don't want to disappoint God or make Him unhappy, so you try harder to please God because you don't want His wrath to come down on you.

Then you move to the next stage, which is the stage of service. This is where you realize that God has something else for you out there. What happens is that people start saying, "We need someone to do this; we need someone to do that," and you wonder if you are supposed to be doing that. You get hold of the verse, "We are His workmanship, created unto Christ Jesus for good work." So, you are supposed to be working, supposed to be serving. Then one day you attend church and hear this message: "You are saved to serve." You feel conviction. So, you start serving. First you are scared to death. You start doing something, and then you realize that this isn't so bad. You start to develop some talent and ability here, and gaining a little confidence.

A lot of people at this stage can go on for years and years, and never move on past this stage. This is a place where you gain approval. People like approval, they like affirmation from others. You start to feel better about yourself because you are doing something for God. Then finally you get to a place where you are praying this prayer, "Oh, and thank You Lord, for helping me do a good job. Oh, thank You for helping me do this, for helping me do that." Who is the emphasis on here? Then we start moving on to the next stage, which is frustrated inadequacy.

Now you are serving the Lord and you are trying the best that you can. You are trying to overcome temptation the best that you know how. You just don't seem to be strong enough to be able to do that. You make God promises that you can't keep. You do your best, but it doesn't work. You try more, but you get frustrated. You take on two or three more jobs at church. You work harder; you do your best. You want God's best, His approval, His acceptance. All you want is simply God's voice saying, "Bless your little heart. You did so well today." All that you wanted to hear were the words of the approval of God. But there is that gnawing feeling that no matter what you do, it is just not adequate. So, something's wrong here.

Then someone hands you a book about the Holy Spirit. Then you say, "I found the answer, I found the key." Then someone prays for you, lays hands on you, and you are filled with the Holy Spirit. Hey, you get some relief. But the frustration keeps coming back. Finally you think something is wrong. You even look back at your previous walk with the Lord and you say, "I think I was in better shape back then than I am now." You wonder why you feel like you are starting over. At this point you are at a very dangerous point. You feel so inadequate that you feel like quitting, and some people do quit. They feel like no matter how hard they try they can't seem to overcome temptation. They keep being defeated; they think they are just going to quit. But many keep growing, because down deep inside they knew they didn't want to quit.

You keep feeling frustrated, you keep feeling inadequate and you finally get to the place where you say, "God, I just can't." And God says, "Yes!" Because God is trying to bring you to the next place, which is spiritual dependency.

You get to the bottom line and you realize nothing works. That is the way it is supposed to be. God never intended me to do any of this stuff on my own strength; it's always Him. God never wanted me to do this all on my own, why didn't somebody tell me this before? "Well, they tried, but you were not at a place where you could listen or receive. You were doing things in your own power and your own strength, and you were not teachable because you were not at the end of your rope."

So now you have learned to depend upon the Lord and things seem to be going pretty good for a while. Then something starts to rise up within you. You begin to have those crazy feelings of things that you really don't know how to put a label on. They are not really sin, because you have confessed everything you know how to confess. That is not taking care of it. You are depending upon God as much as you know how, and then things begin to rise up within you. You get a little ornery at times; you begin to blame your feelings upon someone else. "God, where is this peace and completeness that you were talking about?" At this place people say, "Well, I need to change churches, or I need to change jobs in the church. Something is just not right. Something just does not seem to fit. It has to be the pastor, it has to be the staff, it has to be the church." So, you change churches. You change, but then these things come up again. This is God trying to bring you up to the next level.

A lot of times we blame things on the devil, and in reality, it is God. That level of frustrated inadequacy was God's idea? God thought that one up. And we blame the devil, and it is God. Moving to the next level is God's idea. All those frustrations, and the feeling that something isn't right, they are from God. He does this because He's bringing you into the place of emotional surgery. This is one of the most difficult stages because you are doing the best you know how, and it just doesn't seem to fit. You may change churches, but the same problem keeps coming up again and again. Then finally it occurs to you that maybe this isn't from the outside. Maybe this is on the inside, and you learn something. God is doing something. "For whom he foreknew He predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son." God is about you becoming like His Son, Jesus.

To resist this stage is only to prolong it. To resist this stage is to resist the Lord. You are going through stuff that you can't quite identify as sin, and then you realize you are doing this because you are replaying this tape over and over. Your thought patterns and your motivations are playing over and over. So you get to the place where God begins to open you up and you go through some emotional surgery, and God takes you there and puts you on the operating table. He opens you up and runs down deep inside of you. He brings the healing and restoration to a level in your heart. He puts you on the recovery table after He sews you up and you think, "Oh, God, thank You so much for this healing. Thank You that You've freed me." And you are feeling freed; you are feeling relieved and pretty good.

But pretty soon God picks you up, lays you back on the operating table, and He makes the incision in the very same place that He did before. You're thinking, "Wait! What's the deal? God, I thought we took care of that." God says, "Well, I took you to as deep of a level as I could, as much as you would allow Me and as much as you could receive." So He opens you up in the same place, in the same spot, in the same tender areas, through the scar tissue, goes down deeper and begins to go deeper into your heart. He begins to touch you. He comes out, sews you up and He puts you on the recovery table. And you think God has finally taken care of this area.

Then He lays you back on the table again, in that very same spot, and then he goes a little bit deeper. And now you're really confused. "God, what is going on?"

And then you learn this: God's not after fruit; He's after roots. Some of those roots are very deep, and He has to go down very deep. He's not going to go just so far and tell you to live with that little bit. God is very thorough. He goes after roots of hostility, anger, bitterness, rejection, poor self-image - everything. He's going down deep. And you see that the Bible talks about pruning. God cuts away stuff that you don't need. God prunes.

We can't shut our heart to spiritual surgery, but some people try to. They go to that first level and then God puts them on the table again. That's when they bail and they run from God. It's a large price. That's why the church is filled with so many wounded people. They've drawn the line. "I can't do this anymore. This is as far as I'm going. I have to quit; I have to stop here." So they develop this attitude and don't realize that they have to go higher by going lower. It's easy to confess sin, but it's a little different when He begins to pull out His pruning knife and starts going down deep. Some people can't handle it; they quit.

A lot of people try to deafen this voice, but it's a noisy, grinding work of the Spirit. People try to serve the Lord to cover it up. People are running from the Lord. Some people try to run from this by just getting more jobs at church. Some people become troublemakers. Those are people who have shut down the process. People who hurt, are wounded, and have resigned themselves just to sitting in churches, in the pews, listening to sermons and not growing one bit. It's a lot easier to give money than it is to let God go down deep. It's a lot easier to come to church regularly than to let God do spiritual surgery. Some people get convicted and so they just leave and go to another place. It doesn't work. You can't run from God. You can ask Jonah about that lesson.

What happens is that you will be in church and something happens and something rises up. Then those defense mechanisms rise up and you start pushing them back down. But when it rises back up, that's the Holy Spirit saying, "Come on, let it out. Let it come." We need to cooperate with the Lord when that happens. We can't cut off or stop the process. Sometimes in the cycle, items four, five, and six just get recycled over and over. Regardless of what level you go to, sometimes you find yourself going through that cycle again.

Completeness in Him

Here God breaks our rebellion. He brings us to a place of rest. It's a stage of brokenness. It's a stage of being complete in Him. It's a stage where God has stripped us completely and we become like the river that flows.

So when you look at that, you have to ask yourself what level you are in. What stage are you in? Just think through the stages and think where you are. Just reflect on that for a moment. What stage are you in? You reflect because you realize God knows what is ahead, what the next stage is. Some of you haven't gotten to the place of frustrated inadequacy. Some of you say you have been in that place for years. I understand what God is bringing you through.