heaven's tree book club

September 22, 2012
Royalty Is Dying to Be Together
I visited the disability ministry for the past two weeks and then e-mailed the leader about my interest and for her thoughts. Saturday came and she never responded. I had this idea that she did not have an interest in me being there. Her supervisor requested a meeting between the three of us to discuss ministry opportunities but she backed out of the first scheduled meeting the day of and the week after she never re-scheduled with us. The interesting thing is that she appears very friendly in person, but has ignored each of my e-mails and her supervisor's attempt to schedule a meeting with the three of us. It seems then more and more as though she does not want me to be a part of her ministry team. I felt a bit discouraged at times tonight, but I know the truth is that it is far better to not be a part of a ministry where I am not wanted than to be there and feel like they don't want me to be there. White churches more and more feel like they are against colored people and me being a colored person with a disability makes me more lower in value than colored people. I so badly want to find a place to serve and belong where I am valued.

"FOR some, the word royalty may inspire images of the kings of old who used their endless wealth and power to fulfill their wanton pleasure through their harems filled with concubines. Concubines cohabited with the king without covenant.Therefore their children didn't carry the king's name, nor did they receive any inheritance.
Our King has no concubines! He is a righteous and holy King who teaches His sons and daughters that passion must only be expressed inside the boundaries of purity and that children are to be the fruit of covenant relationships.
People who are lost in darkness need more than a power encounter with God for true and lasting change to take place in their lives. They need a relationship with the Lord and His people. The power of God delivers us out of the clutches of the devil, destroys the disease of sin and thrusts us into the Kingdom of His beloved Son as a newborn child of God.The born-again experience is only the beginning of life as a new creation, and that life requires nurturing and care from the family of God for it to grow. Obviously the same is true of natural birth, which is why, from the very beginning of time, God intended children to be the fruit of a loving, passionate relationship between a husband and wife."
I cannot imagine being a child where I do not share any of the benefits of sonship and the my mother is one of many wives to my father. I just cannot picture that. Thankfully, it is not so in God's kingdom. Nurture and care is suppose to be present in the family of God. Just the other night I had been thinking of the churches I want to in New York. I visited six young adult groups and twelve churches. I never felt at home in any of them except for the Chinese church but the thing was I did not speak any Mandarin, so I went with the church next to campus where for two years I never felt like I belong. Community is so hard to find. Spiritual nurture and care is hard to find,. I can only dream of community now as I stay home most of the time because of my health condition. Years ago I felt so connected to Acacia, but most of those friends are scattered throughout the world now. Things continue to change, but spiritual community is essential, a group that expresses the love and nurture of God.
"The Bible says, "Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived and bore Cain" (Gen. 4:1 NKJV).The word "knew" here in the Hebrew does not mean sexual intercourse. The Bible assumes that you understand that Cain was not conceived through immaculate conception. Rather, the word "knew" is the Hebrew wovd yada. It means to have a deep, intimate relationship with someone. God is saying that Adam had a deep personal relationship with Eve, and out of that place of intimacy, Cain was conceived.
God fashioned the blood covenant right into nature itself. For years scientists have been bewildered over what purpose the hymen plays in the body of a woman. It seems to have no physical reason for being there. When it is broken it does not heal like every other part of the body. One day I realized that God only wants children to be born out of a covenant relationship between a husband and wife, therefore He provided the blood so that the covenant could be ratified before the children were conceived.
In our society, it has become commonplace for children to be conceived from a one-night stand or a brush with passion. Worse yet, some children are the product of a rape. Rape occurs when one person forces their will upon another. We live in a culture that desires intimacy without responsibility and pleasure without covenant.Weil look more at the fruit of that desire in a moment, but I want to point out that unknowingly, much of the Church has been influenced by this mind-set. Week after week we see people born again at our altars. But where are they? Most of them, not long after they weep in repentance, are thrust into a struggle for survival.
None of this comes close to mirroring God's plan, which is for new believers not just to be applauded as they are going forward to the altar, but also to be received by a family who will personally feed and lead them.The worldly culture has helped create a strange mentality in some of the Church. We think nothing of people being born from a night of ¦passion," only to be left at our altars with a prayer they don't understand and a Bible they can't read."
If there is one problem in the church which I have noticed it is discipleship. Young Christians as well as old Christians are not connected to a mentoring relationship. New believers are given a Bible they don't fully understand. We have a mass of stillborn spiritual births. After a short while they go back into the world. I am no longer impressed about evangelistic crusades where they report 5,000 people made confessions of faith. Because each one of these people needs a church and mentor to take care of these young Christians and the church is not equipt to handle this.
I like it when the Bible explains God's intention for things and to know what things mean. Many do not want to take sides on the issue of gay marriage. My dad has taught Genesis twice now and it seems clear that God intends for Adam and Eve to be in a covenant relationship. Sexual intimacy was never meant to be a one night fling and merely about pleasure without responsibility. In the Bible, the covenant was marked by the shedding of blood. So it is in the sexual act between a man and woman the first time as demonstrated by the description of the purpose of the woman's hymen. God wanted it to be holy and set apart. The children born would be out of that covenant and sacred relationship. Marriage is sacred. Sex is sacred. The spiritual comparison is also clear. The relationship between Christ and the church is sacred.

"I will never forget the night that Kathy and I received the Lord. I was 18 and Kathy was 15 years old at the time.
I had an encounter three years earlier that sent me on a journey to find God. My mother had become very sick with psoriasis and her body was covered with a rash. To make matters worse, for nearly a year we had a prowler looking through our windows at night and terrorizing us. One night I even took a shot at him after I awoke to find him coming through my bedroom window.
The police were at our house several times a week. My mother was sleeping on the couch with a shotgun. I would wake up in the middle of the night and hear my mom crying as she struggled to keep herself together.This was all extremely unsettling for a 15-year-old boy who was the oldest of three children. We were not raised in a religious home and therefore I didn't really know if there was a God. One summer night, at about three o'clock in the morning,the pressure got to be too much for me. I sat up against my headboard. It was pitch dark and I could hear my mother weeping quietly in the front room.
I cried out in desperation, "If there is a God, if you heal my mother, I will find out who you are and I will serve you the rest of my life!"
An audible voice answered, "My name is Jesus Christ and you have what you requested!"
The next morning my mother woke up completely healed. Her psoriasis was gone! Within a few days the police caught the prowler and life began to change.
A week or so passed and I was lying on my bed around midnight contemplating these amazing events when the voice spoke to me again.
He said, "My name is Jesus Christ. You said if I healed your mother you would serve me and I am waiting!"
I began searching for God everywhere. I would go to different churches and stand in the back during the service and wait to see if God was there. I would often leave in disappointment saying to myself,"The God who spoke to me isn't here."
Finally, three years later, Kathy and \ were invited to a friend's fellowship. It was a home group packed with young people. They were all excited about Jesus. We came in and sat down on the floor with about a hundred other kids.The worship started and everyone began to sing passionately with their hands raised. As the music died down, the leader gave an invitation for anyone who wanted to receive Christ. Kathy and I raised our hands and prayed a prayer asking the Lord to forgive our sins and come into our lives.
We didn't realize it then, but what happened next would forever change our lives. After the meeting ended the leader came over and introduced himself. He explained what it meant to be saved, how we were newborn babies in the kingdom and we needed to be fathered. He then introduced us to three young men and asked which one of those men we wanted to "father" us. I didn't realize that "fathering" wasn't normal in church at that time because I hadn't been in church much. We picked a man named Art Kipperman who was about three years our senior. He and his wife, Cathy, became our spiritual parents. It was awesome having someone to mentor us and speak into our lives. We had a relationship with them from that point on.
A few y7ears later we moved up to the Trinity Alps in northern California. We lived there a year without the benefit of having a spiritual father and mother living alongside us. I was starving to be nurtured and felt lost. I began to cry out for God to send me a father."
I can identify with the author in this passage. I am right now going through a bit of a crisis. Every day I pray to know the God over life and can heal us and help us in our difficulties. Tonight, more than ever I feel like God has forgotten and abandoned me and has turn me on mute. In addition, I need a spiritual mentor and feel lost and struggling in my faith but there is no mentor for me. I wish I had someone older in the faith who would pray with me and give me some sound Biblical counselling in regards to life. All of us, whether new born or old, need spiritual mentors. This is an essential part of the normal Christian life. We see it here in this passage a church that values discipleship for new believers. This is how it should be. Sadly, there is no such thing in our church maybe because the church is comprised of mostly women in their 80s and a few in their 60s. This is an unusual church missing many generations and so not a healthy picture of how the church sould be.
"God's desire is for the bride and the bridegroom to be so passionately in love with one another that children are the natural outcome.The very presence of our children reminds us of the covenant love that we share.When conceived in love rather than lust, the natural outgrowth of children and their parents is an unbreakable, unchangeable and everlasting bond. Their children's hearts become tablets on which husbands and wives write their love letters to one another. The outcome of this kind of relationship is that the children are secvire, well-adjusted and have a healthy self-worth because their parents value them.
When the Church of Jesus becomes a family instead of a harem, people won't just come to church, they will become the church. It will no longer be a place they go to but a tribe they live in, a people they have responsibility for and a family that nurtures one another in good times and in bad, in sickness and health, until death do us part. They won't change churches just because the worship isn't as good as Joe's Super Church down the street.They will be committed to a family where they hear the voice of their Shepherd in the people who are leading them.
Covenant also means that people belong to a fellowship to be a contributor rather than a consumer. Covenant breaks the back of the pressure that leaders fee! to perform because their flock hasn't come to be entertained but they have come to be led."

"There are so many Kellys in the world who are either born outside of covenant, or experience their parents breaking covenant through divorce. There are many other children who have moms and dads that parent as a hobby or as a side job because they are out chasing "success." When loving relationships are absent in the lives of children, another message is written on their hearts, which is not love, but rather rejection and abandonment. These things get carved into their tender little hearts through reckless words and lonely nights.
The same condition is prominent in the Kingdom. Much like my little brother who was not fathered, we in the Church have given birth to children and then left them fatherless and trying to survive on their own. Jesus never intended for us to make Christians but rather to make disciples.The word disciple means "learner."The very nature of a disciple is that they need someone to teach them.
What happens to the new believers who are not parented? Most of them go back into the world from which they came. Later when someone tries to win them back to Christ, it is nearly impossible.They think, "I've already tried that and it didn't work."The truth of the matter is that what they experienced has little to do with the gospel. The gospel means "good news." A large part of the "good" that's in the "news" is that we were all supposed to be born into a family that cared for us, not just be influenced by fanatical people who cared mostly about winning souls rather than adopting sons and daughters."
 
"This transition from concubine to covenant must take place so the Church once again can be "The Family of God.'The mark of true royalty7 is the ability to lay down our lives in covenant with others for the sake of the Kingdom. As the Church truly becomes a family7 and gives birth to sons and daughters, expressing the covenant we have with the Bridegroom, the foundations of our cities will be rocked.This will cause a dramatic contrast between the world's lust and God's love! At last the world will receive what it is longing for.. .the supernatural, unconditional love of the Father who loves us as sons and daughters. It's about time that we give them the real thing!"
Prayer:
Father, there is a major difference between the world's lust and Your covenant love. One seeks a one night stand without responsibility and is self seeking the other is sacrificial and in it for the long term. Yet, we have so many children today who have never experienced Your love or the good news. This chapter is so powerful and so true. I feel lost right now not having a spiritual mentor and in this season of my life I feel abandoned and forgotten. Tonight as Donna never got back to me it feels like she does not want me to be a part of the disability ministry. I long to find a ministry to serve but I have not found a place that welcomes me. Father, please help me to find the right spiritual community to belong, to serve, and to give.