Faith Strike Force
Faith is usually associated with an expectation of God's intervention. And that is a legitimate use of the word.
The reality is that the majority of our faith-based actions have nothing to do with God.
Going through a green light without slowing and looking both ways, expresses faith in the behavior of other drivers.
Allowing a nurse to render you unconscious, so a doctor can operate, involves a lot of faith in people and systems.
Sending your kids to school involves faith in the good intentions and integrity of the staff.
Ironically most of what people think is faith in God is not at all.
If a prophet tells you that God is going to do _________ and you build your life around that being true, that is not faith in God at all. That is faith in the prophet having heard from God.
The same is true for individuals who build their lives around something God told them, and many times it is proven false. They had faith in themselves for their having accurately heard God, not faith in God Himself.
The area of faith that should be most pervasive for Christians is almost never talked about, and that is faith in the effectiveness of Biblical principles, over the long run.
This is my forte.
My first commitment to substantial life change based on principles was from Joshua 1:8 NKJV. “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success."
It was a massive pivot away from studying the Word, which is what I was trained to do, so I could learn to meditate on it.
It has made all the difference in the world, in my life.
A second one was the concept of how to heal brain rot, from Romans 1 and 12.
This massively transformed my brain and hence my life.
A third one was reframing all new problems in my life around God's priorities in Ephesians 3:10, not around my pain.
And a fourth one was understanding that the Church is female and the Kingdom is male, and everyone needs to know how to engage God from both a female and a male perspective.
These and many other principles have produced good fruit in my life – fruit that came over decades, not days. I had to have faith that these principles were valid, and craft my behavior around those verities, anticipating a payoff in the long run, not the short run.
And that is faith. A different kind of faith. Faith in the validity of the principles of God's Word.
And THAT flavor of faith is what we need for the builders who are coming to the Passionate Manhood 3 seminar.
If you have faith in the miraculous power of God and have raised a dozen people from the dead, that is wonderful (except for the poor people who didn't get to vote on the round trip ticket to heaven) but that is not the flavor we need here.
If you have crafted a season of your life to vigorously embrace one or more principles, have walked it out long enough to see major, verifiable fruit, I would be delighted to have you on this strike force.
Copyright by Arthur Burk
March 2023
Prayer Strategies
Strategy #1
The number of people pursuing the power to do miracles is quite high, and there are sundry organizations and teaching packages that purport to get them there.
Much smaller is the number of people who are seeking to demonstrate the viability of a principle from God’s word. Yet, that is a powerful gift to give God.
In my teaching on how to learn to build, most people will focus on the outcome: a stronger marriage, a new ministry, a more vibrant worship team, a skillfully crafted Sabbatical. This is not wrong. All of those are legitimate assets to the Kingdom and we should know how to build them.
BUT, the product will tend to blot out much focus on the process – in this case, faith in the power of a principle.
Said a different way, needing to build bigger and better is a FELT NEED.
Needing to confirm the viability of a principle, in the process of building, is not even a concept, much less a strategy for most.
That said, this strike force is battling against a lot of cultural barriers. We broadly reward people for the product, not the process. If a sports team has a really awful day, but the team they are playing has a more awful day, and the awful team beats the more awful team, that check mark in the Win column is as legitimate as if the winning team was flawless in form.
So the beginning point for this strike force is to explore how God awoke in you the engagement with a principle. Go back to the early stages of your journey, when you may not even have known you were making decisions based on principles and see if you can decode what God was doing, and how, so as to pull you into this remarkably important stream.
Chew on that, seeking to extract prayer points from your own journey until you get the next strategy email.
Strategy #2
Last winter I bought a large bag of Indian mustard seeds to use for phytoremediation in my raised garden beds.
I planted one bed, and nothing came up. Sometime later, I planted two more. Nothing came up.
The logical conclusion is that the whole bag in infertile, I should toss it.
Apply that to people in SLG and principles.
Phytoremediation is a pretty advanced technique used by canny gardeners.
There are lots of visionary people in SLG who are striving for excellence out on the edge.
I believed the sales pitch of the company.
So did they, when they embraced a particular principle.
And when there was no fruit after a “reasonable” trial of the principle, many people in SLG have gotten discouraged and assumed something is wrong with the principle, or with them.
Would you war from your position of authority, for the lies and the pain of the failed experiments with some principles to be addressed by the Holy Spirit?
Once that infection is cleansed, ask the Spirit to begin to highlight all the stories they do know of principles that did work, and to grow their faith to get back in the game with more skill to go with their intensity.
Strategy #3
I am going to hijack this strike force for a couple of weeks. You signed up to pray for the Passionate Manhood seminar, but I am going to redirect your focus for the near term to the Blessing Your Heart event.
Faith grows by being challenged. In just about any sport, when you achieve a benchmark, you promptly raise the challenge and lean into a new, harder process. That is how you grow.
The same is true with faith. No matter what level of faith you are at, you don’t grow your faith by exercising it at that level, repeatedly. You need to face a larger challenge.
That is where I am with the prep for the Columbus, OH event on June 24th.
I have long experience with God sending me into a ministry session “unprepared” and meeting me there with glorious revelation and immensely superior articulation. I have built my faith a step at a time over decades.
And now, it is being challenged.
Ann’s death was unexpected – to me. God fully knew my life would be disrupted when He directed me to book the event. With Ann’s six weeks of trauma before the hospitalization, hospice and interment, I have lost a mass of study time I expected to have in order to be well prepared for the event.
And even now, although things have settled out environmentally, processing the loss has dealt a big blow to my mental bandwidth. Some days I can’t work on my notes at all, and when I do, it is only for short periods and has none of the snap, crackle and pop I am used to in my thinking/note writing processes.
On a biological level, what is happening with my brain is totally predictable considering a loss this size, and with this timeline. I am not in the least concerned for the long run. This will pass. Eventually.
On a functional level, the harder I push, the longer it will take to recover, so wisdom dictates that I let nature do its thing and I sleep when I feel like it, sometimes several times a day, work in the woodshop when I feel like it, since that is a great solace, and I work on my notes when I can do so, with some modicum of effectiveness. And don’t when I can’t.
On the soul level, I look at the immensity of my investment in this project. It is one of my most loved babies. And in the natural, I could show up at the event with a blitzed head and no notes and absolutely bomb my firstfruits presentation of the heart project.
On the spirit level, I am crystal clear that this whole thing is rigged by God, Father filtered, designed to advance the Kingdom. The most logical thing in the world, based on my long experience of Father’s faithfulness is that He planned all this to take my soul offline, so that the Spirit could speak through me that Saturday and share amazing things with the Tribe that I don’t know and could not deliver even if I had another ten years to work on my notes.
I know that.
Most of the time.
And I am not concerned.
Most of the time.
At present, I am committed to letting my body and soul heal at their own pace, which means not pressing into the notes in a way that is unproductive. In other words, I am putting myself completely at risk of massive failure on the 24th because I believe God has planned this whole thing to produce maximum impact in the Kingdom.
My request to you is simple.
And the Lord said, “Simon, Simon! Indeed, Satan has asked for you, that he may sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, that your faith should not fail; . . .” Luke 22:31 NKJV
That simple.
That my faith should not fail.
Thanks.
Strategy #4
This prayer focus will be for a month. In two weeks, I will be involved with the Blessing Your Heart seminar and will not have the emotional bandwidth to update you in my desired cadence of every two weeks.
In terms of the last prayer focus, God has answered your prayers immensely. On two separate days, He downloaded the skeleton for the entire seminar. It has been easy filling in the details.
As of four days ago, my head is much more clear and I am more confident in my walk.
As we turn your face back toward the Passionate Manhood event, would you focus on the kids? At present, we have a dozen kids signed up to come. That is exciting to me.
Kids also have limited exposure to building through acquired assets. The ordinary home is quite the center for welfare as children receive the message that their needs are going to be met because they have them!
Would you pray that God would prepare their spirit and their soul to embrace the concept of doing hard work in order to access the assets they need?
Strategy #5
We are a few weeks out from Passionate Manhood 3.
I will be doing a lot of vision casting there, focusing on the raw materials that we have available, that can be unpacked and used for the Kingdom building project.
Some of those resources are in our spirit, soul, body, birthrights and offices.
There are those who have had their essence profoundly reviled on many occasions, by many people in power. For those, it is far easier to have immense faith in God, but not in themselves.
BUT, God rarely allows a person to move into a place of profound impact while they are still unreconciled to themselves. Think of all the effort Jesus went to with Peter. He was the first man to see Jesus in a personal reconciliation meeting, then there was the intense drama in John 21 where Peter did not believe in himself.
Would you bring the best of your personal faith-walk to bear on warring for the Spirit of God to prepare those who bring the wound of low self-worth to the seminar? Ask Him to do immense miracles in this group, reconciling people to their own design.
Strategy #6
Remember those iconic comics of an angel and a demon each hollering in the ear of one person, with opposite messages, seeking to get them to buy into their view?
That is our dynamic in Shelby on the 12th.
I am going to passionately pitch a new way of thinking about assets.
The critters will be howling relentlessly, “Works for Arthur but you won’t be able to do that. Let me remind you of ______________. Don’t even try. Not worth the pain of the inevitable failure. This is just a niche tool for the special few, and we already established long ago that you are not one of the elite.”
And the Holy Spirit will be pulling up stories from their own journey, showing how they have already thought and worked like that, “accidentally doing things right” and getting results, so it is not that long a step for them to do more of it, intentionally, with better insight than before.
The dueling narratives will determine the Kingdom value of the event. If the critters win, people will disengage and “audit” the content, hoping possibly to pick up a crumb small enough to be useful for them.
If people can come into agreement with the Holy Spirit, the spiritual energy in the room will increase exponentially throughout the day, and will shatter many strongholds.
Look at your own life and pull up some files of two narratives going on loudly, simultaneously. Draw from those experiences the wisdom you need to fight in your own way against the critters.
THIS is a battle that will have implications in eternity.
Fight big.
Copyright by Arthur Burk