Spiritual Slavery to Spiritual Sonship (2 page)

Suddenly, with no warning, the wind rose sharply. Icy sleet blew sideways as the wind quickly reached gale force velocity, and in a matter of minutes the temperature dropped to well below freezing. With every square foot of sail out, we immediately faced a dangerous situation. The sudden onset of gale force winds hitting that amount of canvas threatened to tear the mast off and capsize our vessel. The list meter, which tells how far to port or starboard a boat is leaning, and which pegs out at 45 degrees, was locked on the peg as the wind in our sails keeled us over so far to starboard that water was washing up on the decks.

The captain screamed at us, “Out on deck! We’ve got to take in some canvas or we may lose the mast!”

It was at this point when we experienced the first real moment of panic during the entire trip. Here was a man who knew Antarctic travel and southern ocean sailing, and who had sailed around the world a number of times, and
he
was anxiously screaming at the two guys who didn’t know a thing about the southern ocean or this type of sea. So naturally, we were frightened …
terrified
is a better word!

There was no time to don our arctic gear (masks, suits, and gloves) because every second lost would increase the chance of disaster. But as we ran toward the door, the captain shouted, “Get your harnesses on!” These harnesses had a 10-foot length of rope or lifeline that snapped to another rope that ran from the stern of the vessel to the bow. Wearing a harness ensured that we would remain lashed to the boat in the event we were washed overboard, making it possible for us to be hauled in again (provided, of course, that we didn’t have a heart attack from going over the side in a storm or that hypothermia didn’t claim us first)!

With our harnesses on, we flew out the wheelhouse door and onto the deck. Instantly, the wind-blown sleet felt like hundreds of needles piercing our unprotected skin. The captain took amidships to take in the mainsail and assigned me to the starboard side where one of the other sails was secured. Because we were listing so heavily, the water was about knee-deep at my location, and the only thing that kept me inside on the deck were two steel cables running along the side of the boat.

Except for this one trip, David had never been in open ocean for any major length of time. So, as he told me later, he became panic-stricken as he headed up to the bow where the captain had ordered him to go. If you are ever on the bow when the seas are running high, you will get the ride of your life! Even when there is no wind in the Sea of Fear, you can still experience 10-foot swells because of the motion of the water in that area. And when the wind comes up, it turns immediately into 20- and 30-foot seas. As the bow rises up into the heavens, inertia glues you to the deck. But as the boat crests the wave and falls into the trough, the bow drops from under you, suspending you suddenly 1 or 2 feet above the deck until it comes back up to meet you at the start of the next wave. And the whole time you’re grabbing hold of anything you can so as not to be washed overboard.

Meanwhile, I was on my hands and knees crawling out to the starboard side to take in enough canvas to keep the mast from being ripped off. The wind was howling, the sails were snapping, and the freezing spray and blowing ice were numbing me to the bone. Finally, I finished the job as the captain completed his, and he yelled, “Get back in the wheelhouse!”

As soon as the captain and I crawled back into the luxurious warmth of that wheelhouse, I said, “Man, what an adventure! That was awesome! That’s the kind of thing I came on this trip for!” Then we looked up through the windshield and discovered that David was still on the bow! He had brought his sail line in, but in
doing so had piled all the extra rope on top of the lifeline that attached his harness to the rope leading from bow to stern. Although he seemed to be tangled, he was still able to move, yet David was frozen on the bow. He remained on his knees, gripping the wire railing for all he was worth, and every time the bow dropped, he lifted 1 to 2 feet off the deck, depending on the size of the wave. Icy sleet was blowing sideways, he was without his arctic gear, his hands were frozen and numb, and he seemed paralyzed.

The captain and I were sitting in the warmth of that wheel-house wondering,
What is he doing?
We just couldn’t figure out why David didn’t come in. Finally, we decided, “Maybe he’s just enjoying the ride of his life.” A few minutes later, David finally crawled his way back to the wheelhouse. “Dave, what were you doing out there?” He didn’t say a word. He just went below and into the head (bathroom), and didn’t come out until 15 minutes later.

For the next several days David didn’t say a word to any of us about his experience on the bow. Whenever we brought the subject up, he just said, “I can’t talk about it.” Finally, when we were at the airport for six hours, waiting for our flight home, David began to open up.

“David,” I said, “tell me what happened to you.”

He said, “I had my ‘Shackleton moment.’ I had the moment that I came with you on this crazy trip to Antarctica for.”

Sir Ernest Shackleton was the leader of an expedition to Antarctica in 1915-17 who, along with his entire crew of 27 men, survived for two years on the southern continent after their ship, the
Endurance
, had its hull crushed by pack ice.

David was now 58 years old. He had grown up under an extremely harsh home situation; and until his mid-30s, he had been an alcoholic. Along the way he had wounded the lives of his wife and daughters, and his own life had come apart at the seams.

Then David had a deep encounter with Jesus Christ and with the Holy Spirit. After he became a Christian, he began following after the “Father’s heart” message that I teach through Shiloh Place Ministries. That’s how I came to know him. He attended many of our events, and because he loved the sea, we easily became good friends.

In the meantime, David developed a passionate desire to see his family healed and restored but became very frustrated with himself. “I just can’t get it,” he once confessed to me. “I receive all these teachings, but the love of God just won’t move from my head to my heart. My family still has so much more healing to go through. And I know I’ve got to have a breakthrough in my fear of intimacy in order to help facilitate healing with them. It’s like I’m in ‘numb-numb-ville.’ I know all the principles of the Bible. I know the principles of God’s love, but it has never become truly
real
to me.”

That day in the airport, David said, “When I was on the bow, I couldn’t get my lifeline untangled. I knew I was stuck. My only possibility of getting free was to unsnap the lifeline from the safety rope and make my way back into the warmth of that cabin without it. But the fear of being washed overboard hindered me from letting go. And I sat there thinking,
This isn’t too bad of a way to die.”
(Hypothermia gives you a cocaine-like buzz just before you go under.)

“I was just getting to the buzz part,” David said, “which I hadn’t had in about ten years, and was even beginning to enjoy it. That’s when I heard a voice inside me say, ‘Live!’ Then I heard it again: ‘Live!’ And then a third time: ‘Live!’ And I said, ‘Father, is that You?’ And He said, ‘It’s time to let go of the pain of your past
and begin to live for the restoration of your family. Just let go.’ I thought,
I can’t end it here without the hearts of my family being restored
. That’s when I unsnapped my lifeline.”

David confronted his fears and chose life. He risked letting go in order to bring healing and restoration to those whom he had inflicted the most pain upon in the years before he found the Lord.

As David told me later, when he unsnapped his lifeline, he sat and waited until he bottomed out in the trough between two waves. Just as the bow started to rise back up, when inertia held him to the deck, he jumped back toward the stern, seeking to crawl out of his entanglement. Fortunately, his lifeline pulled free of the snaky pile of rope that was on top of it. He began crawling his way along the deck, which was not canted over as far to starboard as earlier because we now had less sail out. Safely clear of the entangling rope, David reattached his lifeline farther back. Finally, he crawled into the wheelhouse, soaked and shivering, and disappeared into the head below. I assumed he was going to change his pants. I was wrong.

“Jack,” he later told me, “when I went into the head, I curled up in a ball like a little boy. For 15 minutes I was curled up in a fetal position. It finally happened! Everything you’ve been preaching on and I have been listening to for eight years finally happened! I was a little bitty boy in the arms of a great big Daddy! As I was lying there weeping in the arms of Father God, the ‘numb-numb-ville’ of my emotions began to fade away, and I knew I was going home a different man!”

Recently I talked to Dave and asked him, “Dave, do you still have it?”

“I don’t
feel
any different,” he answered, “but people
tell
me I’m different. Everybody asks me, ‘What has happened to you?’ Even my wife and children are saying, ‘You’re not the same person you
were.’ I don’t feel any different, but they say that life is flowing out of me now.”

After years of being afraid to trust, afraid to open up even to the ones he loved, and afraid of being rejected, David experienced the defining moment of his life on the bow of a storm-tossed sailboat in the middle of the night. David confronted his fears in the Sea of Fear … and chose
life
.

What would
your
life be like if you had no fear?

What if you had no fear of man? No fear of what others think about you because you are secure in the love of your heavenly Father and in His kind thoughts toward you? No fear of opening your heart to truly experience the depth of God’s love so that you could live and give away that love to the next person you meet? What would your life be like if you had no fear?

What would your marriage be like? What would your family life be like? Your other relationships? What if you were not afraid to trust, to become vulnerable, to reach out and touch others, and to let them touch you? Fear paralyzes us. Like David, frozen on the bow of that sailboat, mere yards from the safety of the wheelhouse, fear can stop us from making choices that will bring us warmth, security, and abundant life full of love, peace, and tenderness.

What would your church be like if you had no fear? What if everyone in your local body of believers was set free of the fear of trusting, the fear of rejection or abandonment, and the fear of opening their hearts to love and intimacy? Fear disables us. We can know all about the things of God and yet our fear of trusting and of intimacy can hold us back from receiving the benefits of what Jesus died for—to bring restoration and healing in our families and
our relationships. So many of us Christians do all the right Christian “stuff,” yet fear continues to hold us back from casting ourselves fully into our loving Father’s embrace.

Do you rise up every morning feeling like a son or daughter secure and confident in your Father’s love, and living to give that love to others? Or do you get up every day feeling like a slave, struggling constantly with fears of failure or rejection, unable to trust, and wondering what you have to do to appease the Master today? Moving from slavery to sonship or daughtership is a matter of reaching the place where you get up in the morning feeling so loved and accepted in your Father’s heart that your whole purpose for existence becomes looking for ways to give that love away to the next person you meet.

What would your life be like if you had no fear?

We either live our life as if we have a home, or we live our life is if we don’t have a home.
¹
We either live our life feeling safe, secure and at rest in Father’s heart, experiencing His love and giving it away, or we live our life with apprehension and uncertainty, struggling constantly with the fear of trusting, the fear of rejection, and the fear of opening up our heart to love—the three fears common to all people.

So many of us have hooked our lifeline (sense of security) into “counterfeit affections,” that sooner or later will entangle us in unrealized hopes and unfulfilled dreams. Instead of drawing our energy and our source of life and peace from the love of God, we try to find them in these counterfeit affections of performance, the passions of the flesh, power and control issues, possessions, position, people, or places. Somehow we think that unless we have these sources of comfort in our lives, we simply can’t go on.

Let’s be honest—we all have counterfeit sources of comfort, don’t we? Every one of us has people or possessions we turn to or attitudes or behaviors we fall back on when life does not go the
way we want it to. Counterfeit affections exert a strong pull, even when we realize they are counterfeit. Sometimes it is easier to hold onto the familiar, and make it our lifeline even if it does not satisfy, than to risk letting go in order to grab hold of something else that will. When you’re out on the bow being tossed by every 20-foot wave and with sleet whipping against your face, it’s easy just to grab hold of whatever you can find and say, “I’ll just ride it out right here.” But unless you let go—unless you relinquish your grip on your false sense of security and comfort—you may never attain the true warmth and security of the wheelhouse—Father’s embrace.

For those 21 days that we were in Antarctica and traversing Drake passage, that cramped cabin was home. Whenever we were there, we were warm, safe, and sheltered from the wind and the waves. The problem with us today is that so many Christians have never made their way beyond the sea of fear into a place of safety and security. Isn’t the brokenness of so many of our marriages, families, and other relationships evidence enough?

Living life as if we have a home means living to experience God’s love on a continuing and ongoing basis and making that love known to others. As Christians, we are sons and daughters of God, yet so many of us live as if we don’t have a home. We live, think, and act like fatherless orphans because we have never truly embraced Father God’s love on a personal level. The storms, setbacks, and disappointments of life have made us afraid to trust, afraid to let go, afraid to risk becoming vulnerable by believing God when He says, “I love
you.”
Because we do not love ourselves, we feel unlovable and find it difficult if not impossible to believe that anyone else could love us, including God. The thought of Him loving us personally seems too good to be true … and much more than we deserve.