DEATH IS MORE THAN AN EVENT or effect of disease inside your body. Death is the cause of dis-ease inside and outside your body. If you want this dis-ease out of your body, you need to understand how Death operates in your life.
Let’s place death at the outermost end of the spectrum of energy and life on the opposite end.
This spectrum represents reality.
Now place yourself somewhere on this spectrum. After all, you are energy and cannot exist without it. How are you feeling today? If you feel alive, place yourself somewhere closer to life than death.
If you feel angry, afraid, bitter, hurt, disappointed, out of control, resentful, jealous, sad, depressed, or hopeless, you can place yourself somewhere closer to death than life. This is the place where you feel dis-ease.
When you feel dis-ease, is it safe to say reality does not match your expectations?
If God is—and you are not—the source of all energy and has authority over Death,Revelation 1:18 what do you suppose you are going to do to stop this dis-ease you do not control?
Have you willed yourself to be more positive only to find that acting positive is a temporary fix and requires you to leave reality?
Have your strategies to deny, minimize, or bury your feelings rid you of them?
Have you learned that time will not heal you either?
Have your strategies to ignore or defy Death caused you to run toward love?
Have you tried to love people, places, things, and circumstances to overcome your negative feelings?
Have you tried to love God with all your heart and found it to be impossible?
Have you been unsuccessful in finding relief from the pain you suffer by pleading to God?
Have you followed the advice of the religious people, who told you that you would be rid of negative feelings when you cleaned up your life; when you tithed; when you served in the religious institutions?
The reality is that you will never do anything to rid yourself, once and for always, of negative energy.
As long as you are physically alive, you will exist somewhere on the spectrum between life and death. Even when you seem to be winning, you will fight against the fear of losing what you have gained.
You cannot escape the effects of Death. The best you can do is to acknowledge Death as a genuine force of negative energy.
If God has the power and authority over all energy, but you believe otherwise, you will give your best effort to try to manage energy in and around yourself. Therefore, in reality, you think that you have power and authority over the energy in and around you. In order to manage the energy within your control, your focus will be on yourself and what you will do.
You’re a smart person, and you’ve had enough experiences in life to know what makes you happy and what makes you sad. You know what brings you contentment and what brings you turmoil.
You have learned from prior mistakes and now have rules for yourself to follow that will help you feel good, and if you are religious, you have accepted additional rules to follow, too. You do your very best to reach a full measure of love, respect, significance, and security.
And sometimes you win.
What I am describing is the belief and strategy that all human beings have used to get to peace and harmony. I have yet to meet a person who has not tried to manage the outcome of his or her own happiness.
This is true even with people who tried to manage their happiness by making other people responsible for their peace and harmony.
The paradox is that your strategy to reach a full measure of love by following your rules, or your religion’s rules, will always take you away from love.
Death will always be present to steal your peace and harmony, even when you acknowledge God. This is not because your rules or your religion’s rules are wrong or bad. Rules are neutral, the same as the emotions you are after, but your rules and your religion’s rules are cause in the matter of the negative energy you experience in trying to follow them. I’ll give you an example to make my point.
Let’s say you have a rule that requires you to go to your place of worship every week. Or, let’s say you have a rule that requires you to visit your mother every week.
You determine these are good rules because they have delivered to you some measure of love.
Let’s say you know you don’t have to go, but you want to go. You are in control of your time and behavior and the feelings you are after. Let’s say you get very busy after a year of this routine, and you would rather not make the usual visits every week.
Let’s say what you want to do is to sleep in or sit in your underwear and drink beer the whole day you are supposed to follow your rule.
Regardless of what you end up doing, you will experience negative energy. The object of your love may not generate any negative energy toward you, but your rules will be the cause of the genuine turmoil you will feel.
If you do not make your visits, Death will accuse you of not being loyal, sincere, perfect, kind, caring, responsible, or whatever it is that will stir up the negative emotions within.
Death will do more than be cause in the matter of your guilty feelings, but Death will whisper to you that if you really loved God or your mother, you would not stay home.
Death will accuse you of being a hypocrite. If you do make your visits, your mind and your heart is divided. Now you feel the tug of war between positive and negative energy.
If you decide to make your visits, you are no longer in control of your rules. At this point, you forfeit the power and authority you have over your rules, and they control you.
You cannot do your life without rules. Like it or not, you do follow rules. Even if you say you don’t follow rules, you are following the rule that says you do not follow rules.
Your rules are always meant for your good, but if you follow them, you will always end up at the same place. You don’t own your rules.
Your rules own you.
If you want the dis-ease out of your body, you need to understand that Death uses rules to control and condemn you.2 Corinthians 3:3-6
The problem with rules is the same as the problem with diets. We all know diets can give us the result we want if we can only follow them perfectly. We command ourselves to follow them, and we get certain results, but after a while, we get tired of being a slave to the diet.
Instead, we want freedom more than we want the positive results from the diet.
I have come to believe that Death roams up and down the spectrum between life and death and finds us wherever we are, on the sunny mountaintop or the dark valley. In either place, we will feel the effects of negative energy.
In either place, we will feel the loss of some measure of love, respect, significance, and security.
We can rinse and repeat our strategies to alleviate the pain we experience, or we can face the reality that we cannot do anything to avoid Death. When we recognize that we cannot escape the reality of Death, we can admit that we are powerless to control the effects of Death.
In doing so, we can face the reality that we need something outside ourselves and outside the spectrum between life and death to avoid succumbing to Death’s stronghold over us.
Knowing that you are in bondage is a frightening reality, but it is far better to know reality than to waste time denying the truth.
If you trace your steps backward, you will see that you were in bondage a very long time, much longer than you ever realized.
You can do the work, but don’t stop at the place where you married the wrong person, chose the wrong career, or got hooked on your favorite vice. Those events were nothing more than the effect of your best thinking at the time, and all were your best attempt to control your peace and harmony.
You were already in bondage at that point, but you did not know that you were, and if you did know, you thought you knew the way out.
It does not matter that you spend a lot of time tracking your steps backward if you can accept the reality that you and I, and everyone on this planet is, and will always be subject to the effects of Death.
We became ensnared in the moment we lost our innocence and suffered the first blow to our hearts.
It was at that moment in early childhood when we first experienced fear that we awakened to the reality that negative energy existed. This was the moment we were trapped.
As early as two years old, the loss of some measure of love, respect, significance, or security caused you to enter the fight for your life.
Your focus before this experience had been on yourself, and it remained that way as you developed strategies to avoid future pain. You wanted freedom from pain and suffering without realizing that you, nor anyone alive, could ever escape pain and suffering.
Your strategies were based on a faulty belief that you could do something to win a fight you did not know you were in.
If your beliefs are wrong, your strategies will always be counterfeit.
Counterfeit strategies will always be the effect of your best thinking, and because you did not, and will not ever have enough information about reality, you will create your own reality.
Until you know better, you will believe you can read other people’s minds or know their motives.
Until you know better, you will believe you know what is right, wrong, good, or bad.
Until you know better, you will believe you have the power to control your desired outcomes.
Until you know better, the reality you create will become your truth, and your truth will destroy you.
If you can accept the reality that you are in bondage and you can see that you can do nothing to escape, you can stop trying to break free. And surrender.
If you were in an actual prison on death row, this might be a more natural reality to accept. When you stop trying to break free, you can then spend your time and energy evaluating reality. You won’t like the reality of being in bondage, but if you are honest with yourself, you will see that you have never liked reality.
The reality of life is that total freedom is an illusion.
By definition, total freedom would mean that you must control the thoughts, behavior, attitude, and desire of every person on the planet. The reality is that you cannot even control your thoughts, behavior, attitude, and desires enough to sustain peace and harmony.
If you can accept that total freedom does not exist in reality, then you must accept the reality that you have always answered to some authority higher than yourself.
Your caregivers had authority over you until you awakened to the reality that you were an entity outside them. At that moment, power over your life transferred to Death, who took control over you with one God-given emotion.
That emotion was fear.
Fear is the primary emotion that causes all other negative energy to manifest. It triggers anger, hate, shame, humiliation, bitterness, loneliness, jealousy, envy, spite, indifference, depression, insecurity, resentment, violence, and the like.
In other words, you cannot feel any other negative energy or emotion unless you have first felt afraid whether you know you are worried or not.
Consciously or subconsciously, you feel afraid of losing something valuable to you before you feel or act out other negative feelings.
Regardless of what you lose or are afraid of losing, you will find the first loss will be love, which causes you to feel the loss of some measure of respect, significance, and security.
Fear is also an emotion that causes us to struggle against God.
Fear causes us to feel indifferent, doubtful, resentful, and angry towards God. Fear causes us to believe God is impotent, uncaring, aloof, and disappointed in us. Fear causes us to think God is punishing us when life is terrible.
Fear is the emotion that causes us to try to escape reality, but after years of practice, we learn that reality waits for our return.
And so does God.
When reality becomes too much to bear, and we recognize that we can do nothing to save ourselves from the pain of loss; when we have nothing to live for and death would be welcomed; this is the moment of truth.
Reality is truth.
The reality is that God did not give us the power to control love or fear. The only power he gave us, in reality, is the power to accept or deny the truth.
If he says he loves you and you don’t believe it, you have the power to deny it, but remember this: If God really loves you, he will let Death destroy you before he makes you believe him. To do otherwise, would not be a demonstration of love.
Love gives you a choice in the matter of your own life.
So what does it matter that you believe God loves you?
It matters because when you believe God loves you, your struggle with God ceases to exist.
When Death shows up, as he will, and you become afraid, you can rest in the belief that God is using Death to guide you toward life, the life he planned for you. This life is exceedingly abundantly above whatever you could, or would have planned for yourself.
The God of the Bible says, “I put before you life and death, therefore, choose life.”Deuteronomy 30:19
Reality doesn’t get better than when we know the truth.
Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.—Philippians 4:6-7 (NLT)
When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.—Jesus (John 16:13NLT)
Luke 22:31-32, Ephesians 6:11-16, Zechariah 3:1, 1 Peter 5:8-9, 2 Corinthians 11:3,James 4:7, 1 Corinthians 11:12, John 8:44, Matthew 16:23, John 10:10
As always, it is my intent and hope that my words may encourage you wherever you are in your journey.
Please share your thoughts in the comments below or go to the group tab above to share your own experience. It only takes a minute of your time, and your words may help others.
If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.–Jesus(Mark 4:23)
