PM4 Session 4 Stories
Spiritual authority is for more than warfare. We can also use it to help unpack the treasures of those around us. This is elegant, magnificent Kingdom work.
Suppose you know someone who has huge potential for the Kingdom, but is doing nothing to unpack that. What people in your community would have the highest authority to push against the lies of the enemy that are paralyzing a potential powerhouse?
Click here to download Session 4 Stories as a PDF file.
Story 1: Creativity
The kiddos have all left for university and beyond. You have raced to take over the finest bedroom and turn it into your creative spot. You were born a right brain dominant creative marvel, but life happened and you had to double down on survival, building a marriage, raising kids and all that relentlessly demanding responsibility stuff that just cramps your style.
But NOW! Kids are gone, husband is mellow, income is comfortable, and YOU HAVE DISCRETIONARY TIME.
And you are going to make up for the last 50 years, with an attitude.
You have purchased a new Bible and developed a spreadsheet so detailed it makes your computer groan. A tab for God’s creativity, one for angels, demons, kings, captives, men, women, fathers, mothers, first born, etc. A list made with an attitude.
As you read (in blissful solitude each morning) you plan to ferret out every single expression of creativity in Scripture, then start all over again with a different translation and read it through again.
In the meantime, you are also going to leverage your reputation for amazingly creative meals, as you shamelessly bribe as many people as you can to come over and bless your special room with their authority in creativity in exchange for a gourmet repast.
So who ya gonna invite? Remember, HAVING creativity is not much of an authority point. You gain authority through the hard choices you make. So, who do you know who has invested deeply, against the odds, and against the flow, in unpacking their God-given expression of creativity.
To your immense chagrin, the first name coming to mind, is your harum-scarum second born, with the motion anointing, who developed a variation on The Hospital Flip on his skateboard, after his fifth trip to the ER.
You grudgingly start the process of cleansing all of the words you wrote, spoke (screamed) and thought about your son’s obsession with his (possessed) skateboard, and make plans to fix his favorite meal when he comes home for Christmas and ask him politely to bless your creative space with uncommon endurance to learn the unlearnable.
And you sincerely hope that some of the other creative people in your life don’t cost you as much angst to recruit.
Why couldn’t this be fun?
Story 2: Big-Spirited People
You were having a gigantic pity party, raging at God about all the small-minded people making decisions that crammed other people into little places that reduced their ability to manifest the greatness of God in their lives.
God was not interested in your personal pain and shut you down hard with the statement, “So do something about it.”
You decided to craft “Big Weekends” where you would invite members of the younger generation who you had reason to believe were willing to expand their worldview, and to connect them with big-spirited people who would tell their stories.
You are a wilderness person, so each of these would be some sort of outdoors experience which would enhance the opening of spirits and minds that had been squeezed small by civilization.
AND, since you were still smarting from the slap down from God, you made it your goal to invest so much effort and excellence into these events, that within three years, there would be a waiting list.
You are a seasoned builder, and know how to craft an event and a transformational experience. And you are sure you can develop a new skill set of expanding the soul at first, and eventually becoming exceptional at crafting epically high impact spiritual experiences.
So now that you have your inner vows out of the way, you settle into step one: making lists of your assets.
You decide to pitch the events as simply a wilderness adventure. Your personal objective of expanding their spirit and mind doesn’t have to be announced, initially.
You happen to be really torqued at the culture of discarding and demeaning wounded people. So for the first event, you target the head of a drug rehab program, a skilled coach at a highly effective exoffender program, and a therapist/life coach who works with veterans who have lost a limb.
Each will come prepared to celebrate the big-spirited people who have gone incredibly far in life, despite their battles, because of their drive to overcome.
Now you are going to smother this event with prayer. You want three intercessors for each participant. That means you need 15.
See if your team can come up with a list of 15 different kinds of journeys that would give them people with the spiritual authority to help you yank the sheep-herding Moses’ of this generation, into walking a journey that will lead to intimacy and dominion at an immense level.
Story 3: Fruitfulness
You have an A.T.T.I.T.U.D.E.
Your great, great grandfather started five businesses, three churches and a school. Your parents couldn’t start anything but a fight.
The loss of fruitfulness is frightening, considering how amazing it was, back in the day.
One thing you know: you are going to partner with God in redeeming this family line. The treasure was so huge, and was relatively recent. You are sure God raised you up, because He loves this asset more than you do, and He will be delighted to see it blooming large and elegantly in your family line once again.
Step one is to grab your beloved list of all the men and women in Scripture whose stories you know. You are going to define 100 different kinds of fruitfulness, since you are reasonably sure you won’t be starting any businesses, churches or schools.
Two months into that journey, you have only identified 42 kinds of fruitfulness in Scripture, but then it occurs to you that the world is your playing field. You branch out from Scripture and begin studying history and the culture to see what you can add. A quick search on Google showed a gold mine, and you double down on growing your list of 100.
Meanwhile, you are on the hunt for local people with highly fruitful lives, in less than obvious ways.
Your first score is a first grade teacher in the ghetto who is amazing at teaching kids to read, early on. It qualified as fruitfulness, because she unlocks the whole rest of their academic lives.
Next was a lead nurse on the surgical floor of the local hospital. She took nurses who were new to the OR and taught them how to synchronize non-verbally with the whole team. In the local medical environment, nurses who had trained under her were highly prized and the employment agencies poached as many as they could.
Next was a 96-year-old friend, of a friend, in elder care. Turns out she is an intercessor and was living one of the most fruitful lives in the entire county. AND she understood the power of blessing.
You marched right down to that elder care facility, arm wrestled the management, and made arrangements to bring that lady (and her oxygen bottle) to your home, once a week, for a meticulously crafted evening of food, fellowship and eventually a blessing of your family line and your current growth processes.
Your assignment as a study group is to come up with ten more real or imaginary people who could bless your journey with recovering the gift that was once there.
Story 4: The Trinity
You have purchased a used house and are planning to be there for a long time. You are going to be very intentional about imprinting the house with a specific spiritual dynamic. You are going nuclear here: a three-year investment for the first spiritual asset, then add more after that.
Discuss your family’s spiritual trajectory and tell us which member of the Trinity you want to incarnate and embed in the land to help your family’s growth, and why.
Then put language to at least five, and preferably ten, different facets of that member of the Trinity. Break it down into details.
For example, if you say Father because He is about community, you could point to Father’s heart for reconciliation, in light of your kids going through the teen years, and undoubtably causing a robust number of offenses along the way!
Having identified the facets of Father’s nature that you want baked into your home and the land, begin to list real or imaginary people who might have authority to bless your home and land.
A Mercy or Servant who has never taken up an offense, has only a modest level of authority. Some, but not a huge amount.
Someone who was savaged by a parent, and then returned when they were 60 years old to care for that parent during their end-of-life season, AND didn’t just do it out of duty, but learned to love that parent – now THERE is some wild authority.
You don’t have to have real people whom you know. Use your creativity to tell the story of the kind of life that would result in the authority you need.
Story 5: Light
Life is absolutely intolerable for you and your family. Every single night, there are tormenting, defiling dreams. The problem has been escalating with demons touching some of the family at night, and others hearing screeching sounds that are savagely traumatizing.
You are a no-nonsense problem solver. Clearly this is demonic. You have heard of deliverance but don’t know much. You work the network of your acquaintances and start down the road of comprehensive deliverance for your whole family. Two years later, you have renounced enough things to set Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar and Hugh Hefner free of all their issues, and your life is still unchanged.
Someone suggested it might be a land issue and you found that rather sketchy but did a bit of reading. Out of desperation, you hired Megan to come out and see if there was “anything” on your land.
She drove in, stayed with you, had a horrible night, and woke up with fire in her eyes. Breakfast was short and she dove in. A 15’ wide leyline was running through the house at an angle. An earthgate in YOUR bedroom. AND lo and behold, your wife has amazing discernment (once Megan prayed for her and released it) and she personally discerned and corroborated what Megan was seeing.
You have emotional whiplash. You finally have hope, but you are angry that in all the deliverance you went through, no one asked when it all started. Everyone in the family remembers the horror of the night you moved in. OBVIOUSLY this is a land issue, not a mysterious generational issue.
After the anger, you feel betrayed by God for letting you get tricked into this mess that has damaged your family so badly. And when you finish working through all five steps in the grieving process, you emerge with your fury intact, but a very clear target: the critters are going to pay, pay, pay, pay and pay.
You and Megan print off maps of the area at different scales and she points out the crematorium, the corner where there was a horrific car accident and a murder, the worst drug neighborhood, and sundry other not-so-good entities on the leyline, downstream from your house.
You feel mildly vindicated when Megan says the darkness flowing on the leyline is so dense, she can’t tease out the individual components of evil there. Well, you are a rookie at this land cleansing stuff, but you understand coming in the opposite spirit. If the devil’s junk is darkness, then you need to infuse the line with the Light of God with sufficient intensity and volume that hell howls in frustration at all the damage you are doing downstream. Payback.
Your team here at the workshop is going to come up with profiles of “people of light” who you could invite over to your home. What kind of journey would someone have to be on, to have so much Light of God in them, that it is portable and they would have authority to bless your home and the land with enough intensity for the Light of God to flow miles downstream, playing havoc with the structures of darkness that have been built there over centuries?
Copyright by Arthur Burk
February 2024