Lifetime Guarantee (4 page)

At the other extreme, if Charlie ever tastes love, he may latch onto it like white on rice. I’ve seen more than one Yukky Flesh mother who smothers her kids, often producing lots of them “because I love kids.” She then strives to keep them dependent on her so she can extract her love supply out of them, while simultaneously alienating them with her counterproductive methods. Thus she winds up rejected again and “proves” that she really is yukky.

If you try to be kind to such a person at Sunday school, she shows up on your front porch after lunch “just to visit with such a nice person.” She leaves at 10:30 p.m., but not before learning how many days you have free this week so she can come over and “enjoy good Christian fellowship.” Now she’s sucking her love supply out of you. It will begin to drive you up the wall. Then Satan will work the false guilt number on
you
as you begin to resent her taking up so much of your time.

I’ve also seen some folks with the rejection patterning who are all peaches and cream one day and who will give you the cold shoulder for no reason the next. They are the vacillators; they jump from one of these polarities to the other without predictability. Once you see what’s happening to these dear people, it will become easier for you to discern the cause of these symptoms.

Let’s return to Charlie’s childhood and use the rattlesnake illustration again to add the finishing touch to his emotions. If little Charlie
believes
in his mind that he is worthless to his parents, how will he
feel?
Worthless. When he matures, his feeler will be stuck, feeling worthless at, say, level 9. If he believes he’s inadequate, how will his emotions get programmed? He will feel inadequate (say, at level 7). If he believes he’s ugly, he will feel ugly. If he believes he’s a loser, he will feel he’s a loser. If he believes he’s responsible for all the misery in his house (which is his
world
), how will he feel? He’ll feel guilty.

Is Charlie guilty? No! He’s not guilty of anything. His parents are doing him a great disservice. They are being used by Satan to strap unmerited guilt on their son. That’s
false
guilt.

Here’s a crucial point, so underline it: False guilt
feels
exactly like valid guilt (a conviction from the Holy Spirit). You can’t tell the difference by how they
feel.
Your feeler will return the same verdict for both. Guilty! The jury is fixed as far as the feeler is concerned.

Because this is true, you have to look to the Word of God for discernment to determine whether any guilt is valid or false. The Word is the path to truth, not your emotions. Emotions are fine things, but emotions will lie to you at times; the Word of God never will. You’ve got to know whether you are guilty or not from the Bible. False guilt comes from the Evil One, working through the flesh (old patterns in the brain). Valid guilt comes from the Holy Spirit working through your spirit (see Figure 1.1).

You can confess false guilt through the night until sunrise and it’ll never get better. In fact, it’ll get worse! You will greet the dawn after your night of confession
feeling
guiltier because you still feel guilty.

You must never confess false guilt to God as if it were valid. You must agree with God’s Word that you are not guilty and deny that the guilt is valid. You don’t deny that you
feel
guilty, but you deny that you
are
guilty. You confess, “Praise God! I am not guilty! Even though it is true that I have committed sins against the Lord, I have repented and confessed these to You, Sir, and I am forgiven! Praise God I am forgiven! I am not guilty! You said so, Lord! Hallelujah!” (Stage whisper: “Lord, I sure do
feel
guilty, though.”)

(Stage whisper in reply: “Yes, your feeler’s stuck, but you keep hanging in there on what
I
said about whether you’re guilty or not. I’ll begin to unstick it for you as you ‘set your mind on things above.’ I’ll give you more points to play with on your Richter scale. You’re going to grow to where you can tolerate this false guilt number and slough it off with truth.”)

Obviously, adult Charlie has a problem. He set out as an infant to get all his needs supplied by himself, doing it his way. But the deck was stacked against him as far as getting love was concerned. There was no way he was going to make it. So, while on this self trip, he gets rejected, is trained to believe he’s a loser, and thus learns to reject himself. His feeler gets programmed for non-love, and he develops skills in how to live with rejection.

This becomes his “turf.” It’s where he functions best. He’ll gravitate to rejection or generate it, because it’s on this turf that he’s best able to function. However, since God created him to
need
love, he’s miserable! He can’t tolerate love or believe it’s real if he does get it. His Lord-of-the-Ring approach isn’t working for him. He’s a very unhappy person.

Consider now the average person (who may be reading this book). We’ll call him Joe. He got a pretty fair share of love as a child. Oh, sure, he may have been rejected off and on by certain people during the course of his life, but all in all, he has experienced a pretty good measure of acceptance. Unbeknownst to him, however, the love he has received has not been received without his having paid for it.

People don’t usually love you with no strings attached; you must earn their love. A child must perform up to certain standards in order to be “loved.” Since he desperately needed love on a moment-by-moment basis, he was willing to pay whatever performance price was demanded in order to receive it. All things considered, he was pretty fair at playing Lord of the Ring. These techniques are very precious to him. He relies heavily on them to generate and maintain love from others and for self.

Consider next a home where the dad is a moderately successful businessman, works fairly hard, has built his business by increasing its size, is rather perfectionistic in several areas, and has, on many occasions, philosophized on the merits of such a lifestyle to his son Sam. Dad’s system of reward (praise) and punishment has been predicated upon these standards that characterize his life.

Now dad would probably insist that his acceptance of his young son is
not
based on whether Sam can emulate his dad’s performance. But the youngster gets a different message. You see, he is living in a hostile world, peopled by peers who demand that he dance to their tune if they are to “pay him off” with acceptance for services rendered. He begins to take for granted the notion that acceptance is available on this planet, but that it comes with a price tag on it. That price tag is performance. And he’s able to pay for it. He has enough talent, intelligence, looks, and whatever else is needed to earn love from people.

What has
he
learned? How has
he
been trained on this planet? Why, he’s a winner! He plays Lord of the Ring very well. Oh, sure, he’s lost a few in his day, but nothing that has been so devastating that he couldn’t cope and ultimately land on his feet. And through it all, he has learned to accept (love) himself. He takes for granted that he can beat Joe. And he can’t identify with Charlie at all. He may even feel compassion for Charlie and wonder why he can’t get his act together.

Do you see that
all
these men have cut Christ out of their lives as
the
source? They’re as lost as a ball in high weeds! It’s just that one’s god-playing trip is unproductive, whereas the others’ god-playing is “working.”

Now, let’s have them each accept Jesus Christ as Savior. After salvation, they will each begin to demonstrate different versions of the same problem—walking after the flesh. I’ll explain briefly now how this works and discuss it more at length in later chapters.

Charlie hears all about how much God loves him, but he can’t seem to “feel” the way he “feels” other Christians “feel.” It would appear on the surface that Joe and Sam are relatively free from this problem, but not so. They
feel
good. They feel loved, and since the techniques they’ve used all their lives to generate acceptance from others as well as self are still productive, they continue to employ them. Only this time they apply them to the church environment. They simply tack a few appropriate Scriptures onto their existing good feelings about themselves and “feel” they’re now walking in the Spirit.

“My strength is made perfect in weakness,” the Lord told the apostle Paul (2 Corinthians 12:9
KJV
). I love Ken Taylor’s paraphrase in the Living Bible: “My power shows up best in weak people.” Since Charlie is weak and knows without a doubt that he’s weak, he’s a super candidate for God’s strength to “show up best in.” But how about Joe and Sam? They thank God daily that they’re strong! They mean well, but they’re flying on flesh power and heading for a flameout.

Here’s the point to remember:
Now that these three men are saved, the Evil One will try to control each of them by working through their old patterning.
He’ll try to use Charlie’s flesh to
block
him from appropriating love and self-esteem through Christ’s finished work for him. This was happening to the young woman who wrote the suicide note that began this chapter. The Evil One was seeking to destroy her through her Yukky Flesh. On the other hand, he’ll try to deceive both the Plain Vanilla Flesh person and Mr. Wonderful into settling for a cheap imitation of the valid article, trusting in the same old fleshly techniques they have always used to generate acceptance from others and from self. They seek to satisfy their God-given need for love with the conditional (merited) love of people instead of the unconditional love of their Creator. In addition, they have built their own self-esteem on this same foundation. Now reread this paragraph, please. It’s that important.

Perhaps you have been able to identify with one of these types of flesh. If yours is the rejection pattern, you must see that by striving to adjust to the world’s demands so you can gain others’ acceptance and accept yourself, you are still caught in the flesh trap. If, on the other hand, you identify more with the people who managed to “make it” through techniques found in the “self-help” section of your local library, you are no different from the man who identifies with Charlie. You just
feel
better. Your flesh is paying off with the world’s (and, alas, the church’s) acceptance, where his is not. Both positions are sin positions, failing to trust God to supply all your needs in Christ Jesus.

There is no such thing as Spirit-filled flesh, although you see a lot of teachers who are trying to market and package this product. How are you attempting to get your love needs met?
How does your method for getting acceptance differ from that of the lost man or woman?
You programmed these patterns into yourself during your childhood as you sought to get all your needs supplied, primarily your need for love. This constitutes your unique version of the flesh. Do you still depend on it? The precious Holy Spirit wants to reveal to you what Christ has made available to you to liberate you from “walking after the flesh” to get your acceptance needs met in Him. Ask the Lord to reveal this truth to you from His Word as you study this book. We are totally accepted in Christ! It’s not necessarily a feeling; it’s a
fact.
It is to be primarily
believed,
not felt.

Answers in “Answers to Questions for Further Study”.

One night some years ago, I was invited to dinner in the home of a member of the church in which I was speaking. The couple’s son, his wife, and their one-year-old flew in from out of state shortly after I arrived. It’s always neat to see people warmly greeting each other, but this visit took a sudden nosedive. It seems the baby’s diaper bag was missing, and mama began to let daddy know in no uncertain terms whose fault it was. The poor guy was calmly trying to reassure her that this was the termination of the flight, that it was probably still on the plane, that he’d call his friend who worked at the airport, and that they could pick it up the next day.

She lit into him like a tiger, however, and
ordered
him back into the car, telling him not to come back without that bag. That’s when he, feeling emasculated in front of his own folks and a stranger, retaliated. But brother, he made no headway. She was acting out the role of headship in that relationship, and she made no effort to conceal it.