Sight, Perspective Strike Force
The Blessing Your Heart seminar is largely about healing. There will be a modest amount of teaching, but mostly warfare and healing prayer. As such, I have crafted a set of spiritual tools to support THAT ambiance through intercession.
Passionate Manhood Part 3 is going to be a very different presentation. This is heavy on teaching, showing first WHY everyone, male and female, any age, has to learn to build, in order to reach maturity in Christ.
Then I will be unpacking the fundamental principles of building, so that whether you are a child in school, or a retired person in an elder care facility, you can apply those principles to your situation and keep developing your building skills.
The tools needed for that kind of learning environment are quite different, so the intercessory authority we need, is likewise different.
The rules are the same. You must be able to describe some level of authority in the strike force you want to join. We will close sign-ups at the end of March. A light trickle of directive emails will start in April.
People who can't follow directions on their first email, will be declined.
So the first Scrabble letter we want to hone in the spiritual realm is sight – or more narrowly, perspective.
It was lack of perspective about the sequence of two comings of the Messiah that caused the 12 to be utterly unable to build with the knowledge they had.
So on the road to Emmaus, Jesus delivered a hammer blow to the ignorance, sharing a massive number of Old Testament passages supporting the concept of a suffering Messiah.
Our perspective of God, ourselves, the demonic realm, spiritual principles, our community, time, land, the economy, the government and sundry other things will influence whether we build, and how and why.
What I am looking for here, is a journey that involves God massively upgrading your perspective in an area that you were not looking for.
For me, it was the fact that God loves cities. I had unthinkingly embraced the idea that cities were ugly, dirty and mean and we needed to flee to the suburbs if at all possible.
To see cities through God's grid was a staggeringly huge perspective shift, that I had not been pursuing. God pursued me and put me in front of the idea.
So if you have had a significant perspective shift brought to you by God, which opened the doors for you to see more opportunities in the Kingdom, we would love to have you on this strike force.
Copyright by Arthur Burk
March 2023
Prayer Strategies
Strategy #1
If I had a picture of what the Poverty Spirit demon looked like, I would buy a dart board, put the picture on it, and dissipate some of my frustrations with the Tribe through making good use of the darts.
My inbox overflows with eloquent expressions of why people can’t. And therefore, I MUST (according to them) legitimize their poverty spirit by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
And, to be bluntly ugly, some of the people coming to the seminar are walking in very deliberate, defiant, lazy poverty spirit mindsets, and they come looking for a short cut to excellence, that does not require their doing any heavy lifting.
All that to say, you are going to have to do some heavy lifting in this strike force, in order to get the truth in, through the firewalls.
So, let’s get started.
And the starting point for the next couple of weeks is to sanctify your authority, by savoring the journey.
None of you had a simple journey from the poverty spirit of infancy, where you expected other people to pick you up, to being builders today.
Break your story up into decades, and spend a couple of days on each decade, looking at all of the different tools God used to give you a good sense of perspective – an ability to see the resources He made available for you to build your life and the lives of others in the Kingdom.
As you celebrate God the Master Builder, and the wide variety of resources and strategies He used to grow you to where you are today, it will increase your awe of His creativity, and position you well for the battles that will follow.
Strategy #2
I trust your weeks of pondering how God got you from the poverty spirit mindset of an infant, to the point of being builders now.
One of the most fundamental steps early in that process, is the discovery and the conviction that there are resources within, not just in mom and dad.
Three pictures.
You arrive at a survival training experience with a backpack full of REI’s best gadgets. Your American Express card is just a puddle of plastic. After the orientation and before you get your assignment, the leader dumps out your backpack and keeps most of the contents, giving you back a small number of things.
Why would he or she send you out to battle nature empty-handed? Because they want you to depend on your smarts, not on your tools. They want you to dig deep within and find the hidden resources within you.
The second picture was of Jesus, sending the 12 out and making them leave all their surplus resources at home. It was important to Him that they learn to receive from community as they represented the Kingdom.
The Great Commission is a stunning document. There are sixty words in English. That is the ENTIRE operations manual for taking over the world.
In other words, He wanted them to learn to partner with the Holy Spirit within them, to figure out everything and anything along the way.
Core truth: our ability to hear and receive wisdom and perspective from the Spirit is more important than the availability of wisdom and perspective from human mentors.
That said, God did indeed send humans into the world to take the message to other humans, but BUILDING is heavily dependent on being able to receive from the Spirit.
For this round, let’s target those who are reasonably mature in their walk, but who have been taught that the keys to their spiritual success lie in some spiritual guru somewhere (including those who are addicted to me and need a 12-step program).
Let’s ask God to put them on a crash course between now and August, of becoming comfortable and competent at HEARING the Spirit.
Strategy #3
I tangled with some poison oak recently. Hit Mr. Google. 1% cortisone cream OTC. Hit the pharmacy. Found a green shirt. “Can you show me where the cortisone cream is?” He did.
My usual parting line: “Thanks for saving me an hour and 45 minutes!”
Abundance is a problem. Any enterprise with more than 1,000 products has already significantly limited the ability of their customers to buy what they want to buy. THEY CAN’T FIND IT!
I am going to create that problem at the Passionate Manhood Part 3 seminar. My building model says you need three things: assets, skill and a playing field. This seminar will be about the assets available.
I will be exploring a wide variety of different ways that God provisions us for what He called us to do. It will be a bit less than the one million products in a Home Depot, but still enough to cause more writer’s cramp than good strategy.
And the number one cause of not seeing the resource you need is the poverty spirit.
I am continually amazed at the fear factor that the poverty spirit brings. When I am speaking with someone who has a poverty spirit, their desperation to write down or record every single asset I mention, blocks them from actually recognizing the two assets that exactly fit their project. Pray that in the weeks leading up to the event, instead of having a floating cloud of needing “a lot” of resources to be able to progress in their Kingdom project, ask the Spirit to distill a few clear items that they can come to the event listening for.
In Scrabble, there is a world of difference between wanting “better” letters and wanting the U so you can play that Q in that awesome spot.
A simplified wish list will get them more progress in their project than a desperate intent to get every single thing I mention.
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.
This prayer focus will be the reverse of last week’s. Instead of looking at the abundance the listeners have, the problem is the abundance I have.
Here is the backstory.
I have 12 years of work on heart research. I struggled for a couple of months to distill what to share in the first seminar. I had too much data.
Then God came, and in the context of my journey through bereavement gave me one single word which formed the core of the message. A day later, someone called from overseas and asked a question which led me, indirectly, to two other words.
I now have a tight focus for this event, and it is VERY different from what I anticipated, but very good.
The same issue of abundance of material exists for Passionate Manhood Part 3.
The focus is how God provides resources to build. I could go through the stories in Scripture and preach for 20 years on all the principles related to the different ways God provides resources for different enterprises. It is an area where I have depth, and breadth, and texture, and color, and intensity, and . . .
But I don’t have 20 years’ worth of Sunday mornings to communicate that information at the seminar in Shelby, so I will need to pare it down.
For the next two weeks, I am focused on the heart seminar in Columbus. Then there will be a week of recovery and getting the album out.
The week of July 3rd, I will be in the office, with my head clear, my ears open, eager to hear God’s revelation for what the basic outline of the seminar should be.
Would you pray for that time?
I am usually in the office around 6:00 a.m. Bless the time, the land, the office and my whole being with being able to capture the heart and mind of God for that event.
Strategy #5
For our next round of prayer for the Passionate Manhood 3 event, I would like you to focus on FOMO – fear of missing out.
Think of my model for building using the grid of Scrabble. I maintain you need three things for building: assets, skill and a playing field. The better your letters, the more points you can score. The better your skill, the more points you can score with those letters. And the better the layout of the board, in any given game, the easier it is to score with the words you can play.
In PM3, we will be looking at just the first part of that equation: assets. And this is a topic of intense passion for me. I will take people on a tour of a wide variety of resources that they most likely had never seen before. It will be empowering, and energizing and distracting.
The distraction is a problem. In the eagerness to not miss anything, people will reach for too many resources and not adequately develop the ideas they take home.
I will robustly appeal to them, at the beginning, to look for three areas of inert resources that they can unpack and leverage. If they will work a year on three, it will be so much more powerful than working for three weeks on each of two dozen.
But, when someone has been cruelly treated by genuine or perceived lack of resources, the default craving will be to grab one of everything that comes by.
Pray that they will hear the Holy Spirit and be focused on the specific resources He tags for them.
Strategy #6
The heart of the message involves seeing and using non-cash assets. I will begin with illustrations from Jesus’ life. We look at the power He had and tend to feel it is beyond our reach, but the reality is there is much He used, that we can use.
When the crowds intruded in Capernaum, He got in a boat and preached from there, using the surface of the lake as an acoustical resource to bounce His voice to a larger crowd.
When He took the apostles to Syria for the Great Confession, He was leveraging the redemptive gift of the land.
When He went to Jerusalem and healed on the Sabbath, He was setting up a fight with the Keepers of the Ancient Way, to reinforce His legitimacy being in a different category than where they got theirs.
When He wanted to raise Lazarus from the dead, He used the simple tool of time, allowing enough time to go by for Lazarus to die.
We are so enmeshed with the Sunday School version of the stories that focus on the power of God flowing through Jesus, that it is hard to see the wide array of other resources He used.
And even when people can begin to look at familiar stories in Scripture and see additional resources, it is a hard skill to apply to their own lives.
Would you hammer HARD on the poverty spirit that says, “I don’t have those resources in my life” and “I can’t learn to see things like that in Scripture.”
The second step would be for there to be a growing excitement throughout the day about the things they DO begin to see, in their own lives, that they had not noticed before having this grid. I will illustrate many things from my life and the lives of others. Every time someone in the room sees something similar in their lives, it will ignite hope and faith.
The introduction of the concept of resources that are available but hidden in plain sight, will begin sometime around 9:30. Please cry out for the Holy Spirit to intensely hack the firewalls in the 9:30 to 11:00 window replacing them with eyes to see and joy over seeing.