Window of Reconciliation - September

Reconciled to What?

Remember the most important theological question of all time?

It is “so what?”

If truth does not have application to our daily life, even though it is profound truth, it is pointless.

Today we have a fresh understanding of what the windows of reconciliation look like “on Monday morning.”

The four seasons of reconciliation in the course of every year are:

We are now in the season where reconciliation with God is the focus. This intrigued me because I knew that historically America has a curse on time in September that causes financial downturns on the stock market. In the last 100 years, more value has been lost in the U.S. stock market in September than any other season of the year.

So it came as no surprise that yesterday Lehman reported the loss of billions of dollars for the last quarter, and today all the major U.S. indices are down as a result. This is partly the result of bad management, but also partly the cumulative curse on time.

It caught me by surprise, however, when in the last 36 hours I began to get distress e-mails from many individuals all over the world. While each trauma had basis in itself, I knew the global spike in pain had to be tied to the curse on time, though I could not immediately figure out the common cause or the root issue.

This morning it suddenly became clear. In each case, the root pain was the silence of God which produced a deep sense of abandonment. God could intervene in any one of those surface pain points, and He was choosing not to. Furthermore, He was obdurately silent on the reason why He was not responding.

The current trauma is running the range of the entire keyboard. Hurricane Ike hitting Texas. Riots and martyrdom in India. People who have gone through massive, sustained deliverance work only to find the problem returning. Cancer or undiagnosed physical emergencies. Marriages that don’t heal or don’t happen. Or children who are unresponsive to all overtures for family healing. And, of course, widespread, bizarre financial problems.

Regardless of the presenting problem, the root issue is the absence/silence of God when His people need Him most.

And THIS becomes the devil’s playing field for causing alienation from God in the September window which God designed for deep reconciliation with Himself.

The enemy has massively defiled this time with our emotions of hopeless despair stemming from a false sense of abandonment. Those who have any propensity toward despair, or who tend toward feeling abandoned by God, could experience these emotions in an overwhelming way during this window.

So what do we do?

1. Deal with the curse on time

If you’re not familiar with the theology of curses on time and how to break them, that teaching is in our Spiritual Warfare album. We cannot re-teach the entire concept in this paper, but the short version is that curses on time come into the family line (or global community) when we put our personal comfort or pleasure ahead of doing our Kingdom assignment. Confess that sin personally, corporately for every group you are a part of, nationally, then globally, regarding the Body of Christ specifically and humanity as a whole.

It is time for the Body of Christ to step up and begin to sanctify this window of time every year until it is restored to its intended tidal wave power. Remember the foundational principle. The times the enemy seeks to defile are the strategic times when God wants to release the greatest blessings. This window was designed to be a season when it is the easiest for us to trust God, yet it has become the hardest. THIS is a travesty and it must stop.

2. Identify the social contracts you have tried to enforce on God and release them

In the album Life, Dominion and Honor, I taught at length on the fact that we try to control the nature and timing of the gifts Father gives us. So often we use our pain to define what we want from God and when we think He should deliver it (usually yesterday!).

On His part, God often resists our demands and just as often offers us something of far greater value which we ignore because He is not giving us what we think we have to have right now.

This is the story of Job. Job’s pain was extreme and his one demand from God was for an explanation of how the system broke down. He didn’t even demand healing – he just HAD to know what was going on. God was, in fact, positioning Job for high spiritual and social authority in the near term, but it was not the gift he was looking for and therefore could not see, appreciate or embrace in the context of extreme pain.

At the end of the day, Job demanded an answer from a silent God because his sense of abandonment had taken him to deep levels of hopeless despair. The emphatic answer he received from God was to mind his own business and let God be God.

As deep as the anguish genuinely is for many of you today, with profound compassion, I firmly invite you to one more time lay down your right to be set free immediately and give over your right to ever know why Father is not answering.

3. Defiantly proclaim the faithfulness of God with your own glory stories

Admittedly, the pain for some of you is so immediate, so intense that it will take all your meager emotional reserves to get through the day. I understand. Around the globe we extend compassion and dignity to those of you who are under withering enemy fire today.

But for the Body of Christ at large, especially those of you who are not experiencing overwhelming devouring or despair, I urge that you war hard during the rest of this window of reconciliation to sanctify it.

This window of time has been defiled by the hopeless thoughts and words of billions of people for centuries. In order to begin to cleanse the deep stain on this time, we must vigorously find and share into it every story of the faithfulness of God we possibly can.

It may not change your emotions at all to share by an act of your will the things you have seen or experienced about the faithfulness of God. The point is not for you to feel better right now. (Job felt worse after his engagement with God.) The point is to attack the root of the issue which is the defilement of time because of the slander against His faithfulness.

We are going to have to frontload the investment of our defiant praise before there is a return on the investment of sanctified time.

4. Ask Father what reconciliation with Him looks like for you today

AFTER you have released God from your social contracts, and AFTER you have invested in the global community by doing your part to sanctify time, ask Him about your situation.

Don’t come with anger or defiance but with pain and humility. Present the reality of your pain and your simple, honest wish for Him to take it away. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be set free from your current traumatic situation.

(Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass . . . )

Then if Father remains absent and silent, simply ask Him how you are supposed to grow in trusting Him, IN THIS SEASON of His silence.

It is not wrong to tell Father that His silence sounds and feels very much like abandonment. It is only wrong to demand that He act on our terms.

Long Term View

Let 2008 be the low point of this curse on time in human history. This year we are scrambling under fire to provide some sort of response to the enemy’s audacity. How dare He turn this window of reconciliation into a time of abandonment and hopeless despair?

By next year, I would hope that we will prepare tens of thousands of celebration events around the world on September 10th so that we can begin this season on the offense, not the defense.

Arthur Burk
Anaheim, CA
September 11, 2008

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