Putting on the Full Armor, Pt. 1 by A.P.

For months, we have earnestly seeking God to be healed.

Systematically, step by step, God has been leading us to this place, drawing us close to Himself.

Again and again, God has answered our cry to heal my husband, Jerome.

That started the night that Jerome called me on the way home and God healed him, as referenced in the article: “The God Who Answers”.

That was the beginning of faith. That was the beginning of confidence that we will find the answer.

Literally, that night, we saw God answer so fast, my kids and I all looked at each other: “Wow, that was crazy cool”.

Yet it wasn’t completed. Something more needed to be found.

A few nights later, God stirred our whole family to pray, and gave us a new heart, as referenced in the article, “Heart Surgery”.

Then, many times in between.

For instance, the night when God filled me with the Spirit.

Or the time God revealed that Jerome, whose father passed away when he was a boy, was NOT fatherless. Or another night, I began to see the spirit of offense in my life, and God delivered me of that.

Then, lately, through a dream, a friend and brother in Christ had about our family. There was a rock in the path we had been going around, yet God was speaking in that dream: “It’s time for that rock to go”.

One night, we sat fellowshipping with other believers about that “rock”, that peculiar blockage in our own life that holds us back from receiving the miracle God wants to give each of us…

What is the miracle you need?

Yet that night, fellowshipping with the other believers, I felt tense, unable to be free in my own spirit. I was tired. Going home after meeting with the other believers would be a long, hard drive.

I didn’t feel like praying or seeking God right then.

My son asked if I was okay; I was honest.

A friend, a sister in Christ, came and asked me that same thing; I was honest. She gave me a hug.

Finally, I began to realize that if I were to allow that feeling to persist and leave there with it, I would be directly hindering the miracle that God wants to give my husband, the healing still needed in his body and spirit.

In my spirit, I heard a still, small Voice: “Humble yourself in the sight of the Lord… Confess your faults one to another that you may be healed…”

So, I spoke up, revealing the ugly thoughts and feelings inside, exposing my need to be set free so God can move in my family.

My friends, the other believers, shared very comforting, encouraging words and prayed over me. My feelings didn't change right away, but there was a sense of relief in having been obedient.

We did indeed have a long, hard drive home.

Heavy snow and terrible roads. Then there were animals to feed and fires to start. We finally fell into bed around 7am.

Then began one of the hardest attacks of the enemy against my mind I have ever been through.

Maybe I am just more aware of his tactics now.

Maybe it's because I have been experiencing actual freedom in my own heart.

The battle raged.

I didn't sleep. I prayed and sang constantly. I watched my husband not feel well for days.

I'd break through the fog for a moment and be right back under.

I wrote out testimonies of victory and wondered if it was even real. I sang constantly, prayed in the spirit, chanted Bible verses.

People called me to encourage me to continue to stand on the word and what God said...

I wept because I felt like such a failure. I gave my feelings of failure to God, yet still felt no relief.

Then one night, around 2am, my husband woke up super afflicted in his body.

We cried out, rebuked the enemy and every tormenting afflicting demon. We woke up the kids so we could all stand together, for I know the power in unity.

(“One will chase a thousand…two will [chase] ten thousand…” Deut 32:30)

Yet still my husband grew worse. I called a close friend and mentor to get more help.

He asked about the symptoms Jerome was experiencing. I told him, and he said Jerome was having a panic attack.

But Jerome said: “I don’t feel afraid.”

The answer came back: "No, it isn't fear. It's stress or something like anxiety."

He began to pray–we began to pray. I began to sing and pray in tongues looking for the revelation by the spirit.

After a long time it was crystal clear...

We are Done with Anxiety!!

I called to each person in the room, "Are we in agreement? Are we kicking this out tonight?"

Everyone began to shout and agree together that we as a family repent of and will no longer give place to anxiety.

We are Done! Jerome shouted, "That's it!!"

Then he shared a revelation of having received that spirit of anxiety.

He had gotten stuck there when his dad died.

Jerome renounced that bond, that family pattern, renouncing anxiety in Jesus name!

We shouted and praised and rejoiced as peace began to wash over us. I could see the symptoms relaxing off of Jerome's body.

I saw a vision of a war helmet: it said Salvation on it. I took this helmet and placed it on my head, buckling it on tight!!!

With my mind protected by Knowing He saves, knowing He Is, we are protected from the attack of the enemy!!

I placed this helmet on each of my children and my husband.

We all said goodnight and went to bed. Jerome and I played music as we relaxed into our bed.

I felt such an extreme relaxing of my muscles that I could not even move!

I just lay there fully flat upon my bed, a feeling I do not even know how to put into words.

In the night I dreamed of a catastrophic event. Huge items falling from the sky, water rising, people in a panic. I gathered my children and the things we needed to take with us and

I thought, "This is why we have been learning to keep our mind fixed on Jesus," and I had perfect peace.

I woke still with that feeling of peaceful relaxing. You see, I too was delivered from anxiety.

We birthed that night.

The whole experience from the expression of lack the other day to peace last night was indeed so similar to the final days of pregnancy and the birth experience that all I can say is, we were brought by God to the place of deliverance.

Systematically God has been bringing us to this place, one thing at a time, one deliverance after another. Setting free, healing and delivering! Hallelujah! Glory to the God who Saves! 💕

The Ultimate Answer by Anita

 Years ago I was going through a time of soul searching.

I was in great need. Distressed in my mind, trying so hard. I was trying to figure out the answers to so many questions–doubts, fears, unbelief, so many questions that were plaguing me.

Around me, I could see others who were experiencing such a freedom and joy. 

Singing and even dancing to the Lord in His presence. I wanted to enter into that freedom as well, but could not. I was so hindered and tormented with fear and doubt in my mind. So many questions and everything else.

I was raised in a very religious home, but was not free or full of the joy of the Lord.

Being very religious, I had a form of godliness with no life or power. I was trying to figure out God and this LIFE I was witnessing in others around me. I desperately wanted to be a partaker, not just a spectator.

I just didn’t know how. I was bound up.

So I was fasting and seeking God for three days.

On the 3rd day, God sent a friend, a sister in Christ, to my house.

She knew nothing that I was going through. She simply said: “God told me to come. What’s going on?”

She had been used of God very powerfully in my life and had ministered to me many times before.

So I shared everything with her. My struggle to find God. And what about this and that. And how I was praying for the Holy Spirit.

God had been setting me free of bondages already, but I needed more--so much more!!

Silently my sister heard me out and heard my heart.

She said, “I don’t know the answers to all that but you know you want God right? And the Holy Spirit?”

I said “Yes!!!”

So we cried out to God together for GOD and His Spirit!

Not for the answers to questions of the mind.

God showed Up!! He set me free then and there!

I could sing and rejoice in the Lord!

The questions I thought were so important didn’t matter.

They faded away. Like the old song that says, “the things of earth grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace.”

All you need is God!! God spoke to me so clearly:

“Wait on Me for the answer. I Am the Answer.”

The Ticket to the Peace Train

It’s possible to led by God in your day-to-day activities.

I’ll never forget when my own family members started to come to this realization. Mom lost a bunch of presents for my youngest brother. She looked everywhere she could think of, until finally she prayed.

“God, show me where to look. Show me what to do.”

God directed her to look in her bedroom closet.

The presents were sitting right there!

God moves spectacularly and quietly. Genesis 5:24 says: “and Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him”.

It’s possible to walk with God like Enoch did!

Throughout the Bible, people prayed for God to direct their day, and God showed up.

1 Samuel 2:1, to quote one of many examples, tells of King David inquiring for direction of the Lord:

“Shall I go up into any of the cities in Judah?” And the Lord said to him: “Go up.”

It wasn’t just a general word of direction.

David kept asking for specifics:

“Where shall I go up?”

God said: “to Hebron”.

This is one of many times God’s people have asked God for direction. Another example comes to mind, in Acts 16:10, when the apostles were seeking God about going to Macedonia, “concluding that the Lord had called us to preach the gospel to them”.

A friend of mine, a brother in Christ, was sharing about this earlier.

“How do you know the will of God?” he was sharing. “Because, when God moves, there’s always a lot of peace in it.”

I’ve seen that a lot in my own life.

Sometimes, I would even stress out about hearing God’s voice correctly in the moment!

“God, are you leading me to go over there? Or go over here? God?! Augh! Which is it?!?!”

God replied: “My Spirit, my kingdom is in peace and joy.”

Then that still, small Voice spoke something to my heart that changed my life:

“You’ll never find My Spirit outside of My Spirit.”

In other words: “You’ll never find God’s Spirit of peace and joy by leaving peace and joy to find Him.”

Isaiah 55:12: “You shall be led forth with joy and go out with peace…”

That peace is a key element.

I’ll never forget an evangelist telling me: “no matter where I go, I always keep my joy. I never let anything steal my joy.”

After a crazy conversation, I stepped outside to clear my head in the cool air. It was 2am, and my brain was spinning. No matter how much I walked, my head wouldn’t shut up.

“Can you believe what they were saying about…”

“And then, can you believe…:”

I won’t even tell everything my brain was going on about. Thing is, it wasn’t important.

Why wasn’t it important?

There was no peace, nor joy in it. God’s spirit was absent from my whole head trip.

It didn’t matter because it was just noise.

And in the moment, at 2am in the morning, in the dark, I could hear it.

What do you do when everything is screaming and yet God isn’t in it?

Don’t you wish you could just turn it off?

You can!!

Rebuke the noise. Rebuke yourself! Bow before the Lord. As John 20:19 said, receive Jesus’ peace.

At 2am, I put on worship music and started singing to the Lord over the roar in my head. In the middle of it, listening to Michael W. Smith’s “Sovereign Over Us”, I heard a still, small Voice:

Do you want joy?

And this is what my head had to say in that moment: “What in the world does this have to do with the situation that badly needs–”

Shut up. Again: nothing important.

As Jesus says in Luke 10: “...you are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her.”

What’s that good part, again?

Just sitting at Jesus’ feet, basking in His presence, and listening to Him.

Yes, it’s nice to figure things out. And often needed. But what’s needed more?

Our hearts staying in peace and joy, basking in the presence of God.

Again, in that moment, 2am, I received that gift God was offering me, that joy. I went to bed, and that peace and joy enveloped me. God gave rest to His beloved, as Psalm 127:2 says.

We are His beloved!!!

Nothing can take away that peace! Nothing!

But the enemy comes to convince us to give it away.

I start thinking about finances, about a difficult situation where I work, or this or that, and suddenly, the enemy shows up.

Ding!

“Hello! This is the time where you get frustrated / depressed / overwhelmed about things!”

Suddenly, I feel swamped. Suddenly, I feel stressed. Suddenly, I feel confused and uncertain.

A few years ago, I was working when I started thinking about my love life. Or my lack of a love life. I’m not really sure what the correct term there is.

But I heard it, just like I heard my head talking at 2am.

“Heyyy... You in the mood for a complete garbage dump of utter hopelessness?”

Again, I heard the choice presented in that moment.

And I saw I had a chance to respond yes or no.

So I did.

“No. Life. Peace. Joy. That’s what I’m in the mood for. Now and forever.”

This is the peace that passes all understanding.

I’ve heard of people in devastating situations.

When all hell roared, when the devil came to rob everything from them, in face of tragedy, what happened next was remarkable.

God called an African prince on the brink of death in the middle of a Liberian jungle.

In that moment, that Light and that Voice changed his life, much like Saul of Tarsus’ experience on the road to Damascus.

Set free of his bonds, he escaped to a missionary settlement where this Liberian prince learned about the One who had called him.

Hungry for more, Samuel “Kaboo” Morris determined to go to America to learn more about God.

God led him to a ship where he traveled as a cabin boy.

On this ship, the diversity of his shipmates led to an powder-keg situation.

One man drew a cutlass, determined to spill blood.

But Kaboo stepped in.

“Peace,” he spoke. “Peace.”

And the peace of God, which passed all understanding, defused the whole thing,

The Spirit of God fell on the ship.

Over and over again, this happens.

At the casket of a beloved, the inexplicable joy of the Lord fell and changed everything.

In the lion’s den, in the midst of an inferno, you, too, can know the meaning of the “fullness of joy”, as Psalm 16:11.

The life of God is a very rich life.