"LET ME BLEED!"

 

"LET ME BLEED!" - AUDIO

I believe Father has given me a message for the church as a whole for the days we are in.  As He always does, He leaves clues on my day to day experiences, very much like breadcrumbs.  Failing to notice them would be heartbreaking as it is not about me, but about Him.

I mentioned in my previous devotional that my daughter and I had an argument through which Father came to show me His purposes in my suffering and His heart for His enemies.  After this conversation with Him I started talking to Him about how hard and malicious my daughter can be and that never in her 16 years have I ever heard her say the words “I love you Mommy”.  Please do not think I am trying to bash my daughter.  Who I am would not have been unless Father used her.  So I am very grateful for all my hardships.  I told Father as I was lying over a footstool praying for her, that her words shred me like lashes on my back.  In that instance Father showed me His Son’s back and said that I was sharing in His suffering. I could only cry. 

The next day, my good friend Simoné, left me a message of a dream she had of my daughter.  This dream was a tremendous blessing to me and also a message to my daughter.  I want to share this dream with you for the purpose of showing you what Father revealed through the dream, which is the purpose of this devotional. 

Dream:

Simoné dreamed that she was with other people in an open auditorium, one who had no walls, but only a roof.  My daughter was standing in front with a mike in her hand with 3-4 pages from which she was reading.  Everybody were crying as my daughter with a broken heart were thanking the Lord God for His love, but mostly pouring her heart out in broken sobs, saying how much she loves me and with a broken heart thanking me for leading her to the Lord.  Simoné cannot remember everything she said, but she said that someone asked her to whom the letter was addressed to, and that she could barely answer the woman, saying that it was for her mother.  After my daughter was finished, she went to the side to her father.  Simoné could see her from the corner of her eye and that she was in an argument with her father.  She said that she knows what my husband looks like, but this was not the same person.  However, in the dream she knew it was her father.  My daughter in great anger started scratching her father over and over until he started to bleed.  He did not react in any way to her malicious outburts towards him.  She walked away about 3 to 4 steps in anger, stopped and turned around running into his arms, asking for forgiveness.  He held her in his arms and Simoné could see that he was letting her know that all is forgiven.  That was the dream.

The purpose of the dream was two-fold.  To let me know that my daughter loves me very much, even if she cannot say it, but also to let me know that every time she does what she does on a regular basis, she does it to Him, because He is the father in the dream.   He bleeds.  I cannot say how much that meant to me.  The other part serves as a warning to my daughter who loves Him very much, that every time she does it to me, she is doing it to Him.  And I know this will break her heart, which I know right now is what He is working in her, a broken heart.

My previous devotional was particularly hard for me to write.  In fact, seldom are any of my devotionals easy to write, because Father works these things out in me first, so that I can write from a place of authenticity to the degree that I have allowed Him to work it in me.  So I write from the gut by the grace of the Spirit through me.  But even though the devotional was a heavy topic, I struggled to write it because of something brooding in my spirit.  I did not know what that is until the evening late when I listened to a lady giving a prophetic message to the church for not praying and crying out to the Most High.  A seed was sown in my heart in that moment and I started to cry.  Because I asked myself why I was not crying out as I ought to?  Why am I subscribing to something, but not living in the reality of it?  And then it dawned on me.  I am overwhelmed.   I needed to acknowledge it to myself.  Not to you, but first to myself and to Him.  Everybody has a certain way to deal with high level stress.  We call it the fight or flight response and so much through the years have been said about it.  The way we often deal with high level stress is to internalize it up to the point where we are not even aware of it.  It is not that we do not pray about it or talk it out with Father, but we are now so full to overflow with information that it is difficult to keep up. I have discussed this topic previously.  It is called Cognitive Dissonance.  The ability to ascribe to something, but not being sufficiently moved by it.  I think if I had to paint a picture for our visual friends out there, I feel like a duck swimming on a sea of information and the waves are just getting bigger.  Yes, a sea and not a dam.  We are living in the age of information and what dawned on me is that the truth is out there.  Nobody can say, “I did not know.”  The enemy has to divulge their schemes on the various media platforms in order to have legal ground in the courts of heaven and not just to program us into passivity. But I think what came to me is the understanding that even we as Christians, who now see things for what they are, not only the physical, but the spiritual and that which is about to happen, still somehow are not sufficiently moved.  I realized that we are not remotely aware of how deep our self-preservation goes as well.  Sometimes we subconsciously do not want to deal with it. And on the other side we are unaware just how programmed we are to the point of not being moved, even though we know the truth. It is not important what we know, but what we do with it. We are astonished, disgusted, sad and angry, but not moved to amongst all the reality to be like the woman with the issue of blood, to press through the throngs to touch His hem.  If only we can touch the Master’s hem.  And is He not seeking those who will do what it takes.  Not once, not occasionally, but with the persistence of those desperate beyond words, holding onto the horns of the altar.  Weeping in desperation for mercy.  Rather, what I find in myself and others is a lets “be still and know that He is God” syndrome.  Not that we should not be that, but are we not subscribing to a soon world revival?  No revival has ever come without prayer in anguish and consequent repentance.  Those two elements are the backbone of revival.  Yet, we look at this world and like I said to my daughter the other day after she asked me what is new in the world, “Oh nothing, just going to hell in a handbasket”.  Really?  How is it that I could jokingly say this?  Paul said, “Knowing the terror of God I pursued men!”  We have been well rehearsed in the understanding of what is to come eschatologically, but somehow it plays off in our minds like a scene from “The Game of Thrones” in our heads, because we have been fed these realities from the portholes of hell.  Somehow, the information through the magic black screens has subconsciously limited this to what we see on a square black mirror, which we can switch off with the press of a button.  As quick as we switch it off, it is removed from our reality. Afterall, we need to go on with life. However, when virtual reality becomes spiritual reality, there will be no “reset button” as the “powers that be” would like to call it. The only One who has that button comes at the end of the age, who alone will make all things new.  I guess my gripe with myself is the fact that I know of cognitive dissonance, but have failed to see just how much it has left us numb.  We know what to say when we see or hear these things.  We say I am saddened by this, or this makes me furious, but does it really?  Do you not wake up the next morning and move on to the next subject?  Do you not simply go on with life, because in essence it is something that happens somewhere else and not in your own house?  I do.  And that is what is bothering the living daylights out of me.  The fact that I go on as if these things are removed from me.  The fact that innocent children are slaughtered, enslaved, ritualistically killed and used as prostitutes disgusts me, but somehow I sleep at night.  The fact that countless people are dying of hunger and wars all over the world, as this world is raped by the enemy and their puppets in charge, is something I know and store in my subconscious files like the windows of a Microsoft program. Even though we are not all robots as they would love to make us, we have become programmed not to call out to God until He answers.  We give shotgun prayers and have not been schooled in the school of travail. Instead we subconsciously think, “What can I do?  Please Lord, help those children”.  It is not that we do not pray, it is that we do not bleed.  We are disassociated from the reality of it even though we know about it.  We do not feel the pain.  We feel our own pain and some of us have more than others to go around with, considering pain. I have previously given a word about the midwives that are to be released in the Spirit. I am asking those midwives, not limited to only woman, how do you think this plays off in the Spirit? It can only be by the prayer of travail. By a crying out for souls! 

As much as this devotional at this stage sounds as if it is about me, it really is not.  It is about Him.  This dream of my friend made me realize that He is still bleeding, but why am I not?  He is the head of the Body and He said that when they reject us, we need to understand that they are in fact rejecting Him.  He said that whatever we do to the least of them, speaking about the little children, they do it unto Him.  He also said the following:

Matthew 25: 34 - 46

³⁴ Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:

³⁵ For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:

³⁶ Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

³⁷ Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?

³⁸ When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?

³⁹ Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?

⁴⁰ And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

⁴¹ Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:

⁴² For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:

⁴³ I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.

⁴⁴ Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?

⁴⁵ Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.

⁴⁶ And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.

Luke 10: 16

¹⁶ He that heareth you heareth me; and he that despiseth you despiseth me; and he that despiseth me despiseth him that sent me.

Of course when we read this our minds tend to go to the fact that we do give to the poor and hungry and visit those in jails.  But this is not what I am getting at.  The issue is that He is saying that He is vitally connected to His creation.   That He who knows all things and are above these things, still condescends to identify with pain.  He identifies with the pain of the poor, the sick, the prisoner and the hungry.  Not in the way that we do, but in a real felt way, so much so that He says that when we do these things unto them, we are in fact doing it unto Him.  When my daughter comes lashing out on me and it feels as if I am being torn, He is saying by virtue of my union with Him, she is doing it unto Him.  He bleeds. 

As mentioned before I am reading the autobiography of Amy Carmichael.  She once was burdened under the weight of the enormity of trying to save temple prostitutes from the streets of India. Standing in her hut she looked outside to the trees surrounding them and right there the Father transformed the trees in her garden in a vision of olive trees.  There she saw our Master sitting under the trees weeping.  Tears flowed like rivers down His face and in that instance she knew that He was crying for these children.  The message was clear in that holy moment that it was not that she needed to ask Him to help her bear the burden of these children, but rather that He was asking her to bear His burden with Him.  The burden was not hers, it was His.  She asked, “Who could have done anything but go into the garden and kneel down beside Him under the olive tree?”  She wrote this following poem in which she is the “he” that comes to the Master praying in the garden.

…Darkly distinct, he saw a vision pass

Of One who took the cup alone, alone

Then broke from him a moan,

A cry to God for pain, for any pain.

Save this last desolation; and he crept

In penitence to his Lord’s feet again.

...Never an angel told, but this I know,

That he to whom that night Gethsemane

Opened its secrets, cannot help but go

Softly thereafter, as one lately shriven,

Passionately loving, as one much forgiven.

And never, never can his heart forget

That Head with hair all wet

With the red dews of Love’s extremity,

Those eyes from which fountains of love did flow,

There in the Garden of Gethsemane.

When Father started to reveal how yoked His Son is to the burden of the lost, broken, poor and imprisoned, just by a very simple dream, I could not but cry out…”Why am I not bleeding!”  Where is my burden?  Give me a burden! Where is the pain of your suffering in my life?  Not the suffering of circumstances, of which I have plenty, but the suffering of Gethsemane?  He took me to Psalm 78 that speaks of the Rock that was smitten in the wilderness.  Water poured out of this rock in the same way as when watered poured out from His side on the cross.  His Body was pierced and water and blood flowed as a spring of life from His side.  Are we not hidden in the cleft of the Rock?  Why is it that when we are smitten with truth, that out of us rivers of tears do not flow?  Why is it that when we hear and see, we do not bleed? 

The evening that I realized that I am overwhelmed, I told Father that it feels as if I am coming apart at the seams.  The next morning the song of Cory Asbury, Unravelling, was the first thing on my YouTube feed. I will play it on the audio, but for those reading the devo only, you will be able to find it on YouTube.  So I just want to play this song that you may see how pertinent it is to what we are discussing here.

I'm coming apart of the seams
And everyone's pulling at me
And I am unraveling

The smile isn't quite what it seems
But it does well to hide what's beneath
All the pressure is staggering

In the unraveling, father unravel me
When I can't feel a thing
Have mercy and let me bleed
I know it's dumb
But I have been numb
For way too long

So goodbye now, yellow brick road
Thanks a lot, what I need is back home
So homeward traveling

And in the unraveling, father unravel me
And when I can't feel a thing
Have mercy and let me bleed
I know it's dumb
But I have been numb

For way too long

I don't want to be alone anymore
I don't want to survive anymore
And I want to feel, unravel me

 

I am tired of exposing darkness for the sake of exposing it only.  I am confronted with the question of how many of what I have exposed, did I spend hours in praying for?  How much of what I have read or listened to has caused me to cry out to Him and drawn me to the Garden where He prays.  Have I been touched with His burden or have I grown numb?  So much talk and so little prayer.  Why am I not bleeding Lord?  Have I lost my faith to the fact that the prayer of the righteous availeth much?  We pride ourselves secretly in the knowing that Father uses us to expose the enemy, but have we been broken by this knowledge?  Maybe this devotional is only for me?  Maybe I’m just overwhelmed by life, but I cannot help to think that I am not alone.  And if anything, my cry is that this is a call to the Church for anguish as one of the most well-known sermons of David Wilkerson is called.  Not just prayer, but anguish.  To birth through travail the will of God!  My cry is, "Lord, stir us, break us, move us, anything, but please do not leave your Bride, your Body, numb.  Please give me my part in Your burden to bear.  Please let me bleed!" 

We read in the accounts of the synoptic Gospels of Yeshua travailing in the Garden.  Three times He went out to his disciples finding them asleep.  Every time He rebuked them for not watching and praying saying that the flesh is weak, but the spirit is strong.  They were to watch and pray.  We have become experts in watching, but not so much in praying.  This "watch and pray" is essential in the time we are at as we see the day approaching.  This praying is more than just a casual praying.  It means to beg and to bind yourself, to knit or tie.  This makes me think of a child that wants something and just will not let you go until they get what they want. Much like the woman with the issue of blood. Have our fountain dried up in the spirit? Would we not also like her do whatever it takes if we were bleeding, to just be able to touch His hem? It was in the garden He was saying this to His disciples.  Bind yourselves to me in prayer.  Are we bound to Him in prayer?  We say we want our loved ones saved, we say we want our marriages to be healed, we are enraged by the corruption, the church in deception and the reality of the spiritual dimension. We spend countless hours exposing these things, but the reality is that the knowledge of these things are not changing anything.  It is said that knowledge is power.  I submit to you that the prayer of the righteous is power!  The prayer of a people crying out to God in agony is power!  People repenting in conviction, identifying with the sins of the nation, is power! Why are we not bleeding?  Why are we not in pain with His pain? Why do we not anguish with Him in the garden as His Body?  Why is He still alone in the Garden and we, still asleep?  Why are we not crying out to Him to move us, to do anything but leave us numb!  Why are we not baptized in anguish?  This is the result of a people of God who has been baptized in truth, but living outside of the reality of it.  This is the result of compromise and being entertained with the flood of information as if it is the end in itself.  Why are we not broken over His church, but only angry?  Why are we livid with the gay agenda, but our hearts not torn over the eternal damnation that awaits them?  Why are we not even asking ourselves this?  Why has the spear not pierced our side so that it penetrates our heart?  Why is there not water and blood flowing from our side! Why are we not bleeding? 

Oh, that the Most High would break our hearts and we become as dust before Him who are not even worthy to take another breath.  Oh, that our hearts would break as Nehemiah over the broken walls of Jerusalem.  The walls and gates of this world is broken down and the enemy has plundered and raped the world.  Why are we not mourning?  Why is it that we will read a devotional like this, agree with it, but not be sufficiently moved to never be the same?  Should we then not cry out to Him and say, “Lord, even if I am the last person on this earth, Lord, break me to bear this burden with You.  Let me bleed with you.  Give of Your pain, of Your anguish for my family, for my friends, for the lost and broken, anything but this numbness!” Let me watch and pray with you in this dark hour. 

It is high time that the true Church wake up from her slumber.  It is high time that we realize that we have enough information about life to cause us to never get up from our knees!  Where is our cry for souls?  When will we cry like Praying Hyde, “Give me souls or I’ll die!”  I have said before that it takes tribulation for the Church to be the Church as He intended her to be.  Why do we have to feel it on our skin before we are willing to fast and weep before Him?

Maybe it can be said that I am guilt tripping you.  No, if anything, this is an indictment against a prayerless Church who no longer believes that the Most High will do anything, because the end is nigh.  That thinks that people are too far gone and that there is no use in praying for them.  Why have we forsaken the burden of the Lord?  Jeremiah was told that when the people ask him what the Lord is saying that he was to tell the people that the Lord has no burden.  Why did He say this?  Because the people were only interested in the tickling of the ear and were not truly interested in His burden.  Even today, the truth has become the tickling of the ear and we are no longer concerned with the burden of the Lord.

I usually look for the pictures to go with my devotionals after I have written them.  This dove is called The bleeding heart dove".  I have never heard or seen such a dove, but find it no coincidence that Father led me to this photo.  It truly speaks volumes.  The Ruach of God, the Dove of God desires to baptize the Church with a bleeding heart before He sends the fire of Revival. We take it for granted that it will happen as if we have no part in it, but just to wait. If you and I have no desire for souls, why should we have a part in it? He desires that the same bleeding heart of the Spirit of the Most High would beat in us. 

May He stir us within our depths and cause us to seek Him afresh to break our hearts.  I end with a word Yeshua gave me at the beginning of the year.  I pray you hear what He says to His Body.

BROKEN HEART

So many seek Me for My hands, but not My heart.  They seek the outpouring of My Spirit.  They seek gifts, dreams and visions and they seek miracles. 

But what do I seek?

I seek the mirror of My heart in you.

If you look carefully, you will see it is broken.  Broken for the lost.  They did not break it on the cross, it was broken before the foundation of this earth.  But the cross was the full expression of My broken heart.  The cross, the path I chose because of My broken heart.

Where are those who mourn My broken heart?  Those who have come and desired not My hands, but My heart? 

I will not deny those who seek My hands for I am the giver of all good gifts.  But, the secrets of My heart are for the broken and contrite.  For they are ever aware that for them I died.  They enter into My suffering.  They enter into which I hold dear…the broken heart for the lost.

Father, we are now at the precipice of a new beginning.  The world may be prepared for the rise of the anti-Christ, but in truth the world is crying out for the manifestation of the sons and daughters of the Most High.  May we as Your Body be known by the scars on our feet, hands, brow, back and side.  May water and blood flow from our wounds that have been inflicted by the hand of the Most High on us in our inner-chamber.  May we travail in prayer in the garden of Gethsemane with You.  Break the numbness over our minds and hearts Father.  Remove the opaque veil that causes us to see reality, but not be moved as You intended.  Break our hearts and let us bleed.  We pray this in the Name of Yeshua HaMaschiach.  Amen.