This is from a woman I know:
When my kids were growing up, if we were on the way to a game or other destination, and had to pass by the porn store in our community, I would take that opportunity to speak a rebuke against it. “In Jesus’ power and through His blood of protection, I ask Him to rebuke the spirits of lust, perversion, sexual idolatry, self-exaltation, and rebellion: the spirits that dominate this evil and filthy place.”
If the kids thought anything about it, they didn’t say much. My husband, on the other hand, known to be startled by my bursting forth in this speech, asked me if I might, from time to time, at least announce my intentions first. Apparently my tone and volume were a little more vigorous and a lot noisier than they seemed to me. He was, like me, diametrically opposed to pornography but was not given to pronouncing rebukes.
Since my children now have grandchildren, it has been many years since we rode past the cesspool, speaking rebukes and/or listening, together. But no act of obedience to the Master ever goes unnoticed and this past month, He gave me a gift from this long-ago habit.
The Bible tells us that if we “train up a child in the way he should go, when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6. And sometimes, that child whom we taught in his or her childhood, teaches us something after we have all become adults.
My daughter called me last week, the week before the presidential election of 2020, in a state of excitement and joy that was vastly different from the anxiety and barely suppressed anger she had been suffering (with MANY of us) throughout the campaigns.
“Mom,” she exclaimed ”I’ve figured out how to have a good response when I see the opposition signs in people’s yards and around town! Do you remember when we were kids and you used to rebuke the evil in the porn shop? Well, I’ve prayed and prayed that I could resist the anger I’ve felt every time I saw one of those signs, and it occurred to me that I could rebuke the evil they represent to me. Accordingly, I started speaking a rebuke every time I saw one of the signs, and was a little surprised that it didn’t make me feel any better than it did. So, I kept on praying about it, and “it occurred to me” that I could also use that reminder to pray that the names on the signs would come to know Jesus and their hearts would be changed. I’ve started doing that, and it has given me peace about this election. Or at least about the signs”
As we live in this world, in it but not of it, we find ourselves in difficult circumstances very frequently. Sometimes those situations drag on for years and it is our duty and privilege to give them to God for Him to either sustain us throughout them, or (as we see it) to correct them. The political environment of our United States is an excellent example of this. The problem of the corona virus has been politicized, exaggerated, and exploited to a degree of wickedness that is mind-numbing. The other issues of pro-life, pro-law and order, and pro-religious freedom for all, round out the picture and it is hard to look around and not feel a little helpless…BUT we serve the one true God of the universe, and He provides us with weapons to protect His people and to defeat the enemy.
One of the most powerful of them is prayer, which can open ours and others’ hearts to the touch of our Master. As my daughter is a woman of prayer, she holds her soul open to the Father and He has access to her mind; in this relationship, she heard His first answer, the answer she could accept at that point, to speak the rebukes and gain a measure of peace that way. Still, with that “heart open to His voice” attitude, she could also feel the undercurrent of His loving desire to give her more. Continuing to listen as part of the dialogue we call prayer, she moved into the “realization” that He wanted her to go deeper, to position herself so she could see through His eyes. This was the vision of God’s love for lost souls that resulted in her completed prayers.
It is with profound humility that I thank our Master for this window-into-the-life of my daughter. May He continue to bless our minuscule efforts with effects that ripple beyond anything we would have dreamed.
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