Thoughts From Teresa

Sometimes the Lord wants me to share the things that have been going on recently in my life. I am guessing that I am not the only one who goes through these things and I hope my experiences will be helpful to others.

Recently the enemy has been throwing a lot of hurtful accusations at me. These are not public accusations, but things that have been coming at me at a one-on-one level. The devil is the accuser of the brethren and he is frequently active in that capacity, in hopes that he can discourage us and maybe even get us to disqualify ourselves based on his accusations. This is not a new tactic. It is documented back in Job chapters 1 and 2, where Satan accused Job of only serving God because God was good to him. I am sure you know the story... I just wanted to point out that is a very old tactic of the enemy and one that he keeps using because it keeps working.

Sometimes the accusations come in our own thoughts and other times they come through the words of others, something someone says to us or says about us to someone else. They are painful no matter what form they come in. The devil wants very much to get us to buy into his accusations and then to send a spirit of condemnation to overwhelm us in them.

It seems that the devil has been trying those tactics on me these past two weeks. Let me share my experiences, and then I will share what the Lord showed me in response to them.

The first of these accusations came from someone who misused addresses from the GodSpeak prophetic lists to subscribe people to her own list. She was warned not to do that but persisted in the behavior and added yet another person to her list against their wishes and without their permission. That person complained to me, so I dropped this lady from the GodSpeak lists and sent her a short explanation of why. She wrote back saying she would not do it again and she wanted to be reinstated to the list.

I prayed and sought the Lord for what He wanted me to do. A week later, I had not heard anything specific from the Lord, so I decided to error on the side of mercy/grace and reinstate her, with the caveat that she must not do that again. But just as I sat down to write an email to her, something came up and interrupted me from doing it. So the email went unsent, and I stayed busy and did not have a chance to send it that day at all. That interruption was actually God preventing me from reinstating her because He wanted to show me what she was like.

The next day I began to receive a series of hostile emails that were from free email account addresses, that accused me of being a false prophet and that complained because I had wrongly removed this person (who they claimed was a true prophet) from the GodSpeak lists. Some of these emails got very nasty. And they all asked to be unsubscribed from our lists but none of them were subscribed to them.

It does not take a genious and it does not take the gift of discernment to figure out what was going on there. Why would a bunch of people who are not even subscribed to any of the GodSpeak lists suddenly demand to be unsubscribed and all use the same wording and phraseology to accuse of me of being a false prophet because I banned this lady from the list? They would not. I knew the emails were all coming from this disgruntled lady who I had removed from the lists for misconduct. I knew the accusations were from someone who was upset with me. But they still hurt my heart.

Anytime that I am accused of anything negative, I always take it to the Lord and ask Him to examine me in that area. I also run it by some people who know me really well to see if it is hitting on a blind spot that perhaps I need to address with the Lord. I did all of these things in regard to the "false prophet" accusation.

The Lord responded by sending someone who did not know me to prophesy to me. The prophesy said that God had established me as His spokesperson, that He found me faithful in that, and that He was pleased with me. And people who know me well were all quick to assure me that this was not a blind spot in my life, that I am not a false prophet by any stretch of the definition.

While this was still going on, an accusation attack began in another area of my life. It had to do with the message that the Lord has given me recently that He wants us to get healthy. I had released a testimony of how God had been helping me do just that in my own life and how the Lord had graced me to loose 25 lbs so far. (Part of my message is that God will grace any of His children who determine to obey Him in getting healthy in a similar way to how He graced me.)

Then someone began accusing me of being a glutton and demanding that I repent for that. They said the fact that I still need to more weight is proof that I am a glutton and in sin. [As it happens, most of my weight gain did not come from over eating (e.g., large quantity of food.) It came from not paying much attention to what I ate because I was so busy. So I ate high-calorie and unhealthy foods and that made me gain weight over time. I was certainly unwise in my eating choices, but I don't think it was what the Bible refers to as gluttony.] Yet here I was obeying God and giving Him lordship of my eating, loosing weight, and giving God the glory -- and I was being accused of being a glutton.

A third false accusation came Sunday morning in the from of a letter I picked up at the GodSpeak PO box on the way to Church. It came anonymous and with no return address. It claimed to be from someone who's full-time job was to investigate various ministries for a group of wealthy donors who like to sow into ministries that "merit it." The letter informed me that my ministry had been under observation for the past year and that I was found wanting. It accused me of pride and ministry misconduct. But it did not give any specifics or any sort of constructive feedback on specific things to work on or fix.

And it said "Of course, we will not be giving you any money because of these things" and implied that if they had chosen me, it would have solved all of my future financial problems for the rest of my life. I think they wanted me to be upset over not getting some large sum of money. They must not realize that God finances His ministries and that we are to be dependent on Him for support, not on some large contributor.

I did not care about their money, which I assumed probably never existed in the first place. But it really bothered me that they accused me of ministry misconduct and pride, because integrity and a pure heart before God are both extremely important to me.

Again, it did not really take the gift of spiritual discernment to figure out that this letter is a hoax, that someone was trying to accuse me and make me feel bad. I don't believe that a group of investors would hire an employee to secretly observe ministries for a year before making a donation to them. And even if such a practice did exist, it would be completely absurd to write anonymously to tell a ministry that they "fell short" but not give any details of how they fell short or of things that need to be changed/improved. That type of letter is not helpful in any way, so it obviously came from a motivation to hurt.

And the letter did accomplish it's intended goal to some degree, I felt very hurt that someone would accuse me of ministry misconduct. I knew that there wasn't any. I was not aware of any pride issues either, but then things like pride can be a blind spot; a person could fall into pride and not even realize they were there. Why would someone go through the effort of writing a hurtful letter and the expense of buying a stamp to mail it? It did not make sense to me. I could not see any validity to the vague accusations in that letter, but I began to feel bad about myself anyhow.

All this was happening just as the worship portion of our Sunday service was starting. As much as I love worship, I found myself feeling small and thinking that perhaps I was not worthy to come into His presence and worship Him. I responded to this feeling with what I have been trained to do. I went before the Lord and invited Him to search my heart and point out the things He wanted to change, the things that displeased Him. I went to God and began to prayerfully examine my heart with the Lord.

We were doing corporate worship in the Sunday service as I prayed and the Lord's presence was very thick in the room. This is a time/place where it is easy to hear the Lord's voice very clearly. So I asked Him if He felt that pride was an issue in my life that I needed to repent of or to deal with. I invited Him to shine His light into my darkness and to speak to me in this area. I asked Him what He wanted my response to Him to be.

Then God reminded me that Satan is known as the "accuser of the brethren' (Rev 12:10). Part of Satan's tactics are to falsely accuse us, to try to make us feel small and to dissuade us from following God and doing His will.

"So God," I replied, "what do you want me to do? How do you want me to respond to this?" I still wanted to be yielded before Him no matter what He might say to me. Then God said to me, "Your defense is in the blood of the Lamb and in the word of God." Then He told me to apply the first part of Romans chapter 8 to my situation. So I picked up my bible and read it. Romans 8:1-9 says,

1 There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. 2For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death. 3For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh, 4that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. 5For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. 6For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. 7Because the carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be. 8So then, those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

9But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you.

Let me summarize what God showed me and spoke to me about how to handle accusation. First you come to God, come into His light and invite Him to expose and dispel any darkness that is there. In other words, you bring the accusation to God and invite Him to look at it with you. You ask Him to examine your heart. If there is any truth to that accusation, then you invite Him to transform your heart and you allow His indwelling Holy Spirit to change you and fix your shortcomings. And if there is no truth to the accusation, then God's light will simply dispel the darkness of that accusation and dust you off from the slime of it. So either way... whether the accusation is true or false, you bring it to the Lord and invite Him to look at it with you.

The second thing you do is that you receive the grace Jesus has purchased for you on Calvary. Romans 8:1 tells us that there is not any condemnation for us because we are in Jesus and walk according to His spirit. So we do not accept any false-guilt or condemnation that the devil might try to load on us. Instead we receive the cleansing and washing of Jesus. If we need to be transformed in this area, then we receive that transformation from the indwelling Holy Spirit and we allow Him to change our nature. We receive the truth that because of Jesus we stand holy and pure before God. Then we seek God's will for us and do our very best to obey His will and to behave the way He wants us to behave.

God does convict us, but He does not accuse us and He does not condemn us. He is our source and our strength and we turn to Him when ever we are accused. We come into His light and allow Him to shine on us and to make us radiant with His glory. We renew our desire to yield to Him, to obey Him and to honor Him. Then we reject the condemnation of the enemy, then we follow God and obey Him with all of our hearts.