Supernatural Transformation: Change Your Heart Into God’s Heart (14 page)

• restores innocence to you.
  

• increases your sensitivity to the presence of God.
  

• increases your ability to receive what you need from God—and what He wants to give you.
  

• increases your ability to carry a greater anointing without deviating from it or contaminating it.
  

• maintains a continuous flow of the life of God within you.
  

• makes the spiritual realm more real and tangible to you.
  

• causes your heart to surrender quickly to God.
  

• causes you to no longer resist the process of transformation but rather to submit to it, knowing that it will bring you closer to your heavenly Father.
  

When our heart is soft and tender, there is nothing
we won’t do for God.

Prayer for Circumcision of the Heart

If you have come to the realization that you need God to circumcise your heart and remove everything within it that is evil and hard, so that you can draw close to Him again, then please repeat this prayer out loud:

Heavenly Father, I come into Your presence praising and worshipping Your name. I present myself before You on the merits of Your Son Jesus Christ alone. I recognize that there are areas in my heart that have been hardened, but I repent wholeheartedly and ask You to forgive me. I repent of allowing past hurts and failures to usurp lordship over me; for allowing my heart to be hardened by sin, offenses, emotional wounds, disobedience, rebellion, and wickedness. Lord, forgive me for repeatedly disobeying Your voice and for not giving You Your rightful place in all areas of my life. Right now, I ask You to circumcise my heart, to remove the calluses that prevent me from feeling, perceiving, or discerning the spiritual world and the need I have of You. Please restore my innocence so that I can believe in You with the trust of a child and be sensitive to Your Holy Spirit. Father, fill me with Your power and presence, even now. Transform my heart, in the name of Jesus, amen!

Prayer for Salvation and Transformation

Perhaps you have not yet received Jesus as your Savior and Lord, but your conscience is telling you that there is a real God who wants to transform your life and is fully able to do so. I invite you to become a child of God, just as a young man named Stephen did. Stephen was raised in Rastafarianism, a religious cult. In this group, marijuana is considered to be a “holy herb” that supposedly produces physical, psychological, and therapeutic powers; it is practically a god to the Rastafarian culture. Stephen was only five years old when he began to smoke joints. He smoked marijuana as a “mediator”
to the spirit world and also practiced witchcraft. Stephen grew his fingernails long and wore dreadlocks. He believed in himself and in his own power to do whatever needed to be done.

But Stephen was raised without a father, and his walk through life was a devastating cycle of deception and calamity. He learned survival skills while living on the streets. But on those streets he encountered pornography, which caused him to deviate from his natural sexual orientation. Stephen’s sexual confusion caused him to become aggressive toward homosexuals, hiding the fact that he felt attracted to other men. Furthermore, he was involved in buying and selling drugs as a way to support his lifestyle. He had become addicted to drugs, and he had also developed a physical heart ailment, which made his situation even worse.

Stephen remembers the event that led him to Christ. It was an encounter with the living God that transformed his gangster character into one of a sanctified man of God who is now on the right track. Sometime earlier, when Stephen had been hospitalized for anger issues and was under the supervision of a clinical psychologist, his grandmother had given him a Bible, which he had kept but never read. Then, during a drug transaction, he walked by a table in his room and noticed the Bible. He considered its presence there to be rather strange, as he had not seen the Bible since he’d come home after his hospital stay. He recalled, “I saw the Bible and became afraid. I thought it was a hallucination, a side effect of drug use.”

He left the room for a moment, and when he returned for more merchandise, he suddenly heard a voice that said,
You will not leave this place until you pick up the Bible.
The supernatural power of God prevented him from leaving the room until he physically touched the Bible. “I couldn’t open the door or walk forward,”
he said. Stephen picked up the Bible, sat down, and began to read it. Suddenly, he was able to understand what he was reading, as if it were being spoken to him by a friend. “There was no way for me to have understood the Bible before that day; it had never made sense to me, but God made me understand it.”

On another occasion, the Holy Spirit said to him,
Wash your hands, because today you begin a new season in holiness
. Stephen did this and declared that the healing blood of Jesus cleansed and liberated him from all generational curses. And, when he went back to the doctor for more follow-up tests regarding his heart condition, the results came back negative, showing no traces of the sickness from which he had suffered for years.

That is how Stephen received a new beginning in God. Today, he is on fire for the Lord as an evangelist who produces abundant fruit. Likewise, if your repentance is sincere, the Holy Spirit will circumcise your heart, and you will begin to see changes in your life that you have been unable to experience in your own strength. To repent and receive Jesus as your Lord and Savior, pray the following prayer:

Heavenly Father, I recognize that I am a sinner and that my sin separates me from You. My heart is in need of transformation, which only You can accomplish. I believe that Jesus died on the cross for me and that You raised Him from the dead. I confess with my mouth that Jesus is Lord. I repent of all my sins and break every evil covenant I have made with the world, with my sinful nature, and with the devil. According to the power of Jesus’ sacrifice for me, I break all generational curses operating in my life. Now, I make a new covenant of righteousness with Jesus. I ask Jesus to come into my heart and to change my life, filling me with the Holy Spirit. If I were to die right now, I know I would be in Your presence when I opened my eyes in eternity. In Jesus’ name, amen!

5

O
ver the course of my ministry, I have seen tragic consequences occur in people’s lives when they have allowed offenses to become rooted in their heart. Wherever there is an offended heart, look out! As the Scriptures say, “A brother offended is harder to win than a strong city, and contentions are like the bars of a castle” (Proverbs 18:19).

In this book, I use the terms
offense
and
offended
in relation to the negative attitude a person adopts after being affronted by someone or something, so that he sins in attitude, word, or deed—and usually
keeps on
sinning
as he develops bitterness and resentment toward the offending individual or situation. An offense goes beyond taking momentary exception to a casual comment someone makes or to the rudeness of a stranger (unless it continues to fester within you). We may be temporarily bothered by someone’s remark or behavior and then immediately let it go or release it through prayer, with no lingering negative feelings. In contrast, an offense is something that remains in our heart.

As I wrote earlier, I have seen offenses divide churches, ministries, marriages, families, businesses, and organizations. I have seen people lose their spiritual and natural inheritances alike—inheritances such as miracles, healings, deliverances, and financial blessings—so that they never attain to their full purpose in God. I would suggest that the chief reason people decide to leave a church is that they were offended by someone or by some policy. If no one were ever offended, our churches and ministries would grow large and remain so; certainly, we would be more effective in expanding God’s kingdom, and our testimony to the world would have a much greater impact. Jesus said,
“By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another”
(John 13:35).

The problem of offenses is nothing new. For example, in the Bible, we find accounts of people like King Saul, who held on to an offense, causing him grave consequences, including being removed from the presence of God, forfeiting his anointing and kingship, and even losing his life. (See 1 Samuel 9–31.) The greatest tragedy of holding on to an offense—and its most frightening aspect—is that it can result in eternal separation from God if a person continues down a path of anger and revenge, allowing his bitterness either to keep him from receiving Christ in the first place or to reject his Lord.

In this chapter, we will explore what an offense is, the characteristics of an offended heart, the root of offenses, and how to deal with offenses effectively. I pray that you will be able to identify the state of your heart with respect to this subject and be set free from any destructive offenses that you may be harboring.

What Is an Offense?

Several different Greek words in the New Testament are translated as
“offense”
in the
New King James Version
. One of these Greek words is
skandalon
, from which we get the word “scandal.” This term means “a stick for bait (of a trap),” or “a snare (figuratively, cause of displeasure or sin).” It indicates “occasion to fall (of stumbling),” “stumbling block,” or “thing that offends.” In fact, when translating
skandalon
, certain Bible versions sometimes use the word
“stumbling block”
rather than
“offense,”
such as in Matthew 16:23 (niv, nasb).

An offense is a trap, and traps are hardly ever set by accident. When a trap is set for a person, it means that someone wants to impede that individual’s progress, steal from him, or even kill him. Satan, the enemy of our soul, is behind various traps that come into our life to hinder us and to take away what God has given us; the enemy desires to rob us of our purpose, destiny, spiritual and natural inheritance, family unity, and spiritual harmony with our brothers and sisters in Christ. Contriving to thwart the advancement of God’s kingdom, Satan tries to prevent the will of our heavenly Father from being established on the earth. He desires not only to deceive us but also to cause us to perish spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and physically. For this reason, Satan seeks to cause us to be offended not only by other people but also by God Himself.

In the Scriptures, we see several examples of people who were offended by God, including John the Baptist. He was imprisoned by King Herod toward the end of his ministry, during which he had served God faithfully. While John waited for some response from his cousin Jesus, he became offended when his expectation—perhaps of a supernatural rescue—was not fulfilled. His faith was in crisis, and his maturity was on trial—so much so that he began to doubt Jesus’ identity as the Messiah.

John sent two of his own disciples to Jesus to ask Him, “Are You the Coming One, or do we look for another?” (Matthew 11:3). Christ instructed these disciples to report to John the signs that had followed Him and the miracles that had taken place by His hand, which John would recognize as being the works of the Messiah. (See Matthew 11:4–5.)

Then, Christ declared, “Blessed is he who is not offended because of Me” (Matthew 11:6). The word translated “offended” in this verse is skandalizo, which is the verb form of the noun skandalon we noted above. Skandalizo means “to entrap, i.e. trip up (fig. stumble or entice to sin, apostasy or displeasure).” Therefore, I believe Jesus was saying, in effect, “Tell John not to be offended with Me, because the offense might cause him to stumble in his faith or even to fall away from Me and miss out on My purpose for coming to the earth.”

Many people today are offended by God because He has not yet answered their prayers; because He has not yet healed them; because they are suffering from some other adversity, and He has not yet delivered them; or for other reasons. They have come to view God as an obstacle rather than as their ultimate Source of life and power in the midst of their situation. If Jesus Himself did not avoid offending various people among whom He lived and ministered (such as John the Baptist, many Pharisees and scribes, Judas Iscariot, and others), no one else on this earth will be able to avoid it, either. At times, when we offend someone, it is because we have made an error or have been insensitive; however, at other times, when we offend someone, it is because he expects us to do something that we cannot or should not do.

An offense is a trap of the enemy to rob us of purpose, destiny,
and harmonious relationships.

Unintended Offenses

Once, when I taught at my church on the subject of offenses, I asked people whom I had offended to come to me so that we could talk through the offense and resolve it. To my surprise, I discovered that many people were offended with me! In most cases, I didn’t even know that the people were offended, much less why. What shocked me most were the reasons people gave for the offenses, most of which seemed rather inconsequential. For example, someone told me, “I am offended because you walked right past me and didn’t say hello.” I don’t remember the circumstance, but I may have been focused on a particular task or concern at the time. Someone else said, “I am offended with you because the message you preached a month ago was spoken against me.” I had no idea that he had a problem related to what I had preached.