Spiritual Tenacity Strike Force
One of our branding strategies here is to under-promise and over-deliver. We offer half-baked potatoes, not guaranteed shortcuts to peace and prosperity.
Part of this is my visceral reaction to Magic Wand Christianity that massively over-promises and under-delivers.
And as a result of that, millions are leaving the institutional church, burned out on broken promises.
Setting aside the nonsense, there is a troublesome paradox in our genuine walk with God.
Sometimes, we get no movement in an issue because we are off track with our tools. You can't cast out a demon, when the "demon" is a part of your soul, or an AHS.
Having good tools does matter. God is not obligated to bless ignorance, although in His mercy, He does, on occasion.
On the other hand, Scripture is full of stories where a person was on the right track, and tenacity was the key.
Think of Daniel: And he informed me, and talked with me, and said, “O Daniel, I have now come forth to give you skill to understand. At the beginning of your supplications the command went out, and I have come to tell you, for you are greatly beloved . . ." Daniel 9:22ff NKJV
Daniel's heart and head were on target, he just needed to stay on track for a while, until the spiritual realms shifted.
Abraham received an answer to his desire for a son, decades after first registering it in heaven. Hannah prayed long. Simeon and Anna had some pretty extensive preparation times.
So tenacity in staying focused on an issue for a long time when you have inadequate tools and tenacity in staying focused on an issue for a long time because that is what is needed for breakthrough, look very similar, but are worlds apart.
If you are one who has rightly identified your design, and has rightly engaged in the right battle for an extended period of time, then seen measurable, verifiable, sustained change when breakthrough came, I invite you to sign up for this strike force.
When John Dawson wanted to build a chapel on the campus of his YWAM base, it took him seven years to get a building permit, because of the antichrist spirit in the Building and Safety Department.
But . . . today that chapel exists. I have been in it!
Because someone had tenacity in his building strategy.
Being a successful builder requires resources and skill.
Also pigheaded stubbornness, when you know you are on the right path.
If you have that, and would like to share your earned authority with some others who have good intentions but not enough endurance yet, I would love to have you on the Tenacity Strike Force.
Copyright by Arthur Burk
March 2023
Prayer Strategies
Strategy #1
You know those destruction rooms where, for a fee, you can go in and take a baseball bat and murder a computer, as a form of your own inner healing?
A room won’t work for me. I need a 40-acre field and a huge bulldozer to make absolute shambles out of Microwave Christianity. I hate all the false advertising that goes into that, and the crushed hopes from those who bought the fantasy.
Unfortunately, no entrepreneur has brought that fantastic idea to market yet, so those of us who have run the 30-to-70-year marathon will have to roll up our sleeves and go to war in the old fashioned way.
So, where to start?
With sanctifying your treasure.
There are two steps.
First, is a fresh round of confession. While we have run far enough and long enough to see the fruit of the marathon, some of us have done a fair amount of whimpering and whining along the way. So scrub down your attitude about the journey, and be sure you are squeaky clean in your relationship with God.
Then celebrate the fruit. Our Christian culture has a wide strain of false humility, so it seems at times, somewhat inappropriate for people to say, “Because of my 33 years struggling with suicide, I now have higher than average authority over the spirit of premature death.”
So don’t say it in public, if there is no trusted friend who can safely celebrate with you, but between you and the Lord, savor the fruit of your authority. The fruit of my authority has names, faces, dates and times. The ones I wrestled for are alive today and thriving.
Your fruit may be a bit more ambiguous, but I encourage you to put language to it before God, and tell Him emphatically how glad you are you have this particular authority at this time.
I would like you to spend a couple of weeks on this assignment, so as to bring your “weapon” to its highest level of readiness for the King.
Strategy #2
As I began to write this strategy email, the Spirit jumped in and said we need to focus your firepower on getting “certain people” to the event.
Apparently, there are some people who are very important to God, who are extremely ripe for this message, who want to come, and who are being blocked in by the enemy in every way.
So, we are going to focus on getting each one there who God wants there, even though I do not know who these people are.
First, hammer down on the issue of lies. The devil is telling some of them that God does not want them to go – as “proven” by the “fact” that there is no trail of grace – when in reality the demons are fabricating the barriers.
Saturate them with the truth about their battle and give them dignity in the process.
Second, don’t pray the barriers away. VERY IMPORTANT INSTRUCTION. God is deliberately playing the critters. In these struggles, He wants to grow the people through the process of overcoming.
So pour your earned authority that comes from “the long obedience in the same direction” (Eugene Peterson) into keeping the fire going in their inner man, so they can climb or remove one more obstacle, then another and another and another.
Strategy #3
Tenacity in each person varies with the task.
Give me an instruction book, I am usually good for at least nine seconds. A YouTube video on carpentry and I might endure five minutes. A piece of damaged soil? I delightedly spend five years tenaciously seeking to heal it.
The tenacity we have, often causes us to ignore the tenacity we don’t have.
But might need.
It is my opinion that the devil knows a fair amount about each of our journeys and each of our birthrights. He knows where we will need uncommon tenacity for critical issues.
AND he moves proactively to damage our willingness to invest in that area with tenacity. We develop a well (wrongly) reasoned package of ideas about why it is OK for us to give it a try, then walk away if we don’t easily succeed.
This is a MASSIVE issue in SLG – selective tenacity. People have a lot where it is not strategic and lack it profoundly where it is essential for possessing their birthright.
Would you war against the mesmerizing spirit for a while, asking GOD to show each individual coming to the seminar where they need to aggressively up their game, in a specific area of their lives?
Strategy #4
We have entered the second phase of the search engine development.
We are now manually entering suggestions for the tags that were previously created from our content.
There are 34,662 major tags, plus 53,848 moderate and minor references for a total of 89,510 tags.
Seems overwhelming for a team of six people to do.
We can reasonably do 100 a day as a team. If we factor in 45 productive weeks a year, that gives us 22,500 tags upgraded.
We started two weeks ago, and are already at 1,240. We are running slightly ahead of the goal. Good stuff.
In January, we had 158 searches a day. February, 170. March, 172. April, 156. May, when we started upgrading, 334. And for the first ten days of June, 589 searches a day.
Measurable, verifiable and trending upwards.
More to the point, in each session in January, there were an average of 2.4 searches per session.
In April, 2.2 searches per session.
Basically flatlined.
Last two weeks? 8.9 searches per session.
This dawg will HUNT.
Our goal is to add a zero to the searches by the end of the year. Instead of 589 searches a day, we would like to see 5,890 a day.
Can we get there? Probably.
No bells and whistles. Just tenacity. Each member of the team doing a handful of tags each work day. And people who find it productive, using word of mouth to tell their friends.
I do tenacity.
To quote Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of a verse, “A long obedience in the same direction.”
And the builders in the Tribe can also get “there” if they will learn to value the accumulation of small right things, done well, rather than waiting for the supernatural breakthrough.
Microwave Christianity and fundamental human laziness are two massive forces predisposing people against tenacity.
But God . . .
He is capable of hacking THAT firewall along with all the rest.
Since you have seen the benefit of walking in tenacity in your own lives, would you pray during the next month that God would hack every firewall in the people coming and in those who will be listening, so that they will have a deep receptiveness to the idea of accumulating assets over a year, by using one of the tools we will present?
I don’t have a magic wand. The seminar is not about a quick deliverance prayer that will unleash all the resources needed. It is about HOW to mine the resources that are there, but will need some sweat equity.
And they will need a head and heart fix, before we come together.
Pray it in, please.
Strategy #5
What is the longest you ever VOLUNTARILY invested in one growth project? (Twelve years of mandatory schooling does not count.) This can be a natural skill set (your college degree) or a hobby or a spiritual discipline.
What was the treasure that this effort gave you?
Now flip the script. Where has God trapped you in a long-term situation, so your tenacity was involuntary, probably not appreciated, but necessary.
Now, what was the treasure that THIS journey gave you?
Humanly speaking, my seminar will be mostly a waste of time, because tenacity is not one of the top 500 virtues celebrated in this day and age of Microwave Christianity. But we don’t walk by “humanly speaking.”
We serve the God who uses an extensive range of tools from persuasion to coercion, to grow us in the areas that require tenacity.
I will appeal to those coming to select three specific areas from the masses of ideas I present, and to commit to building them out, over a year’s time. Most will be willing to commit.
And the devil will be right there with a truck load of bribes and distractions, seeking to do damage control.
So . . . if you intercessors would preemptively do some damage to his damage control strategies, it would be fantastic.
Start with worship. Find one or more areas in your life where it was the grace of God or the hand of God that enabled you or forced you to be tenacious in some growth project.
Celebrate the fruit, then ask Him to invade each person’s life with the right resources to make people tenacious, with or without their willing participation.
Strategy #6
We will close the day with an extensive exploration of the treasures of soul and spirit from our journey. I will share from mine, and then wander through the audience asking people for their stories. The point is to illustrate that everyone has those resources they just need to recognize them.
One of the themes I will be trying hard to develop is that the best resources are the ones that took decades to develop. Individuals who were sent to one gym after another, and thought it was because of their own thick heads, can begin to see how intent God was at making them spiritually wealthy. Therefore, THE LONG OBEDIENCE IN THE SAME DIRECTION was worth it all.
I am fiercely intentional about legitimizing tenacity as a vital virtue.
Obviously, I don’t know the intimate details of people’s journey. I will be wandering down the aisles, picking out the people who God highlights for me. At the same time, the devil will be trying to suggest names that would be less than productive.
So your prayer focus will be for me to have my ears on, to partner with God in drawing out the stories that will most legitimize tenacity.
This will run approximately from 3:15 to 5:00 p.m. Scrub down the time so that there is no residual defilement on it from previous events there, then load up that slot with keen hearing for me, and the ability to be nimble in interpreting people’s stories.
Copyright by Arthur Burk