Spiritual Slavery to Spiritual Sonship (4 page)

Later that day, Sarah came home and said, “Dad, I need to talk to you and Mom. I don’t know what’s the matter with me, but I need to talk. And Dad, I don’t need a counselor! I need a father. I don’t need any lectures, Dad. I need a hug.”

As Trisha and I sat down with Sarah in my study, Sarah said, “Dad, I just don’t know. When everything is going right in my life, all I want to do is hug you and be in your presence, but as soon as things aren’t going my way, I just want to cut myself off from every other human being. It’s like I would rather be alone on a deserted island somewhere and never see another human being again. I can’t get hold of God’s love. There seems to be a pattern in me where I can find God only when people are saying all the right things about me. But when they are not, I can’t find Him, and I don’t want to be with you.”

As she was sharing her thoughts and feelings, I was thinking,
That’s me!
When God is answering my prayers and doing everything I want Him to do, how quickly I run to Him! But when I feel like He’s not doing what I want Him to do on my timetable, something in me shuts down and I find myself “on the bow” of the boat in the entanglements of the sea of fear.

I asked Sarah, “When did this begin? What comes to mind first when you think about closing your heart to love?”

She replied, “Dad, do you remember when you resigned as a Salvation Army officer and went back to captaining a fishing boat?”

“Yes.”

“How old was I then?”

“You were five.”

At that time I was captaining a businessman’s sport-fishing yacht. It was like fishing out of a mansion, with a beautiful living room filled with overstuffed chairs and sofas.

“Do you remember the day Mom brought me down to the boat to see you?”

“Oh, yes, I remember.”

Trisha had brought Sarah down to see me, and lowered her over the stern of the boat. When Sarah saw me sitting back in a comfortable chair in the living room of the yacht, my precious 5-year-old daughter came running to me for a hug. She leaped into my lap, knee first … and I suddenly got in touch with the deepest core pain of my life!

My response was an instinctive reaction of self-protection. I had no intention of wounding my daughter in any way, but as I started to fall to the floor in extreme agony, I threw Sarah 8 or 10 feet through the air onto the sofa on the other side of the room. Although I was rolling on the floor almost nauseous from the pain, my young daughter, while having suffered no physical injury, was experiencing a much deeper pain than I was. She had come running to enjoy her father’s embrace only to be thrown away because she had failed to perform or act in the right way. She had risked opening up her heart to me … only to have it slammed shut.

How many times have you come and risked opening your heart for a moment of tenderness, a moment of nurturing, or a moment of warmth, only to receive nothing in return?

As Sarah was screaming and crying, I continued to hug and kiss her and did everything I could to make it up to her. After about ten minutes, she finally calmed down. Did I intentionally hurt my daughter? Of course not. But that was the moment Sarah had stopped opening her heart and receiving me as her father, and she had struggled with that feeling of rejection ever since. That night, as we prayed with Sarah, we didn’t pray over the 17 year old; we
prayed over the 5 year old. Something inside her burst loose in wailing, agonizing groans, and she wept and wept. For about 30 minutes, she lay cradled in my arms as we poured out love and comfort to her. It was a defining moment in Sarah’s life—the beginning of realizing, “If my father, as broken a man as he, could comfort me at 17 years old, how much more does Father God want me to run to Him in every moment of crisis?”

We either live our life as if we have a home and a loving Father’s arms to run to when the world is trying to give us what they think we deserve, or we live our life as if we don’t have a home. We want to live in Dad’s house and enjoy Dad’s provisions, but like Sarah, who locked herself in the bedroom and came out only for what Dad could give her—food, credit cards, keys to the car—we fear an intimate relationship.

So, which will it be? Will you live your life like an orphan who has no home, frozen in numb-numb-ville on the bow in the midst of the sea of fear? Or will you live your life in the warmth of your Father’s loving embrace, a perfect love that drives out all fear? (See 1 John 4:18.)

What would your life be like if you had no fear? The choice is yours:
Fear … or Father’s Embrace?
I hope the remainder of this book helps you to choose
no fear!

1.
 Henri Nouwen,
The Return of the Prodigal Son
(New York, NY: Image Books, Doubleday, 1992).

B
efore we can live a life with no fear, we have to deal with the matter of an orphan heart. We all were born with an orphan heart that rejects parental authority and seeks to independently do everything our own way. The only humans who were not born with an orphan heart were Adam and Eve. Instead, they possessed a spirit of sonship from the very beginning but eventually exchanged it for an orphan heart when they chose to go their own way apart from God. As a result of their fall, their orphan heart passed down to every succeeding generation, thus becoming the common heritage of all humanity.

So, our quest is not to
regain
our sonship with the Father; we cannot regain something we never had. Rather, our quest is to enter into the embrace of the unconditional love of Father God and
receive
a heart of sonship that will
displace
our orphan heart. It took me many years to learn this truth. I was radically saved in 1980, radically filled with the Holy Spirit in 1984, and yet for many years afterward continued to live with an orphan heart. Growing up in a home environment of alcohol and emotional abuse with parents who, because of their own orphan hearts, did not know how to express love, I never learned how to be a son,
and because I didn’t know how to be a son, I didn’t know how to be a good father either. Consequently, my family suffered for years.

When you possess an orphan heart, you never truly feel at home anywhere. You are afraid to trust, afraid of rejection, and afraid to open up your heart to receive love. And unless you are able to receive love, you cannot unconditionally express love, even to your own family. You can be born again, go to church every week, tithe, avidly study the Bible, and do all the right Christian “stuff,” and still have an orphan heart. Being saved does not automatically mean feeling secure, loved, and accepted as a son or daughter of God; they are two different things. The new birth in Christ makes you a son or daughter of God, but that does not mean that you will enter automatically into the full personal experience of that love relationship with Him as Father.

This is why over and over and over again people come up to me at conferences I teach and confess, “I just can’t get it. I’ve gone to dozens of conferences; I’ve heard the teachings on the Father’s love; I’ve had countless hours of counseling and prayers for healing and deliverance; and I still cannot get free of fear and insecurity in my relationships.” For a long time I did not know what to say to them because I suffered from the same problem—I still had an orphan heart.

Left unchecked, an orphan heart can grow into a stronghold of oppression—a habit structure of thinking or fortress of thought that is so deeply entrenched that only a profound experiential revelation of Father God’s love can displace it.

My daughter, Sarah, was learning to trust my love until she was 5 years old. The orphan heart that she was born with was in
the process of being displaced. As I said, you can’t cast out an orphan heart. It is a heart that feels as if it has no home. It must be displaced, and the only way to do that is to introduce the orphan to a loving father. Then the orphan must choose to submit his or her heart to that love. Ideally, this should happen for all of us as children through the examples of a loving mother and father. But there are no perfect mothers and fathers. So what then? What happens if you run to a parent for love and comfort and affirmation, as Sarah did to me on that yacht when she was 5, only to feel hurt or rejected? Perceived rejection can be just as damaging to a child (or an adult) as intended rejection. Left unhealed or unresolved, the wound can set into motion in an orphan heart a 12-step progression that eventually manifests as a stronghold of oppression powerful enough to handicap a person for years emotionally and which prevents them from cultivating healthy loving and caring relationships.

1.
We begin to focus on the faults we see in parental authority
. I did not hurt Sarah intentionally; my response to her was an instinctive defensive mechanism. Her 5-year-old heart perceived it as rejection, however, and from that day on, I was no longer the wonderful daddy who could do no wrong in her eyes. She had opened her heart to me in childlike innocence but felt bruised and tossed aside. As a result, Sarah closed her heart to me that day. No matter what I did after that or how Sarah and I related to each other, a part of her heart was shut off to me because of the disappointment inside her, that she had once come to me with open arms and I had rejected her. Sarah’s closed heart was her self-defense mechanism against being hurt again.

Our true personality is revealed in our family relationships. We can wear masks before the world, but home is where the masks come off. Even as children we notice the faults of our parents. We see how they misrepresent Father’s love to us and recognize the disappointments, broken promises, and inconsistency in
behavior. And these flaws can loom large in our eyes, leading to the next step.

2.
We receive parental faults as disappointment, discouragement, grief, or rejection
. Sarah interpreted my momentary instinctive defense response as my personal rejection of her. How often, whether with our children, our spouse, our work colleagues, or our fellow believers at church, do we throw someone aside as a reaction of our own personal defensive mechanism, leaving that person feeling wounded or rejected? We don’t mean to do it, but it happens. None of us as parents intentionally hurt our children. We do not intentionally misrepresent the love of God. But we can give to others only what has been given to us. How can I ever be a father if I have never felt like a son?

As a child, although I had a father, I always felt more like a slave in his house than a son. There was no nurturing, tenderness, warmth, affection, comfort, or protection. And because I grew up feeling like a servant, that is how I treated my children. I could give to them only what had been given to me. Is it any surprise that they received it as woundedness and rejection? They didn’t feel safe trusting me, which brings us to step number three.

3.
We lose basic trust in parental authority
. Once disappointed, rejected, or otherwise wounded by a parent, we close off a part of our heart to keep it from being hurt again. A wall goes up. A certain degree of basic trust is lost. Trust and basic trust are two different things. If I walk by you and accidentally step on your foot with my size 15 shoes and say, “Oh, I’m so sorry, please forgive me,” you may still trust me as a person. But the next time I walk close by, you will make sure you withdraw your foot so it doesn’t get tramped upon. You trust me as a person, but because of your past experience of pain inflicted by me, you fear that the same hurt may happen again. So you withdraw a part of yourself—the part that was injured before because a measure of your basic trust has been lost.

That’s what happened with Sarah. She still trusted me as her father to love her, take care of her, and provide for her needs. She trusted me on surface relationships, “safe” conversations, and the like, but she no longer trusted me when it came to matters of intimacy and deep personal communication. Because I had hurt her deeply in that area, she did not trust me with her heart or her deep feelings.

When we discuss basic trust, we are not talking about the ability to believe or trust another person, but the capacity to hold your heart open to another person, especially if you believe his or her motives or intentions are questionable. Basic trust is the ability to risk being real and vulnerable, to keep your heart open even when it hurts rather than close off your spirit.

At its center, basic trust is an issue between you and God. Basic trust is when you are able to move beyond the weaknesses in others and receive God’s healing touch, one moment at a time, and not run away; to retreat into His loving embrace and enter the place of sonship, even when someone close to you may be misrepresenting Father’s love to you. It is taking on the Spirit of Christ, a meek and gentle heart, and entering into Father’s rest, while casting all your cares upon Him. Loss of basic trust leads to the fourth step toward oppression.

4.
We move into a fear of receiving love, comfort, and admonition from others
. Once basic trust is lost, it becomes difficult to receive from others because we are afraid to make ourselves vulnerable. So when the inevitable crisis comes, our response is to just suck it up outwardly and take care of everything ourselves because we don’t trust anyone else or believe there will be someone to comfort us. With an orphan heart, you often feel alone, especially in a crowd or during times of crisis.

5.
We develop a closed spirit
. Once we close our hearts to receiving love, we close our hearts to intimacy (in-to-me-see). We retreat into a closed spirit, isolating our heart from outside influence and
from all but the most superficial or unhealthy emotional attachments. Intimacy is lost.

6.
We take on an independent, self-reliant attitude
. A closed and isolated heart manifests itself with an attitude that says, “If anything is going to get done around here, I’ll have to do it myself.” Our insecurities and fears have shut our heart off from any meaningful relationships with others. Independence and self-reliance are often cherished and valued qualities in our culture. While they may seem to be important and useful in the political or business arenas, they are deadly in relationships, family, and community and can result in restlessness and disease because we are not able to cast all our cares upon Him. Instead, we carry them all ourselves, which leads to the next step.