Fear of Man---Do you have it?

But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men. Philippians 2:7 KJV

It’s amazing to me how God will bring something to the surface about you that you didn’t grasp you had. I knew I had rejection issues--but I didn’t grasp that the majority of that issue stemmed from needing to have a reputation. I thought it was normal for us all to develop our reputations. That’s the way the world works. Whoever had the best reputation before others was exalted, was looked up to, was popular, was accepted by all and esteemed by all.

It all started way back in elementary school when we learned there were popular kids and unpopular kids. There were awards for being the best at things. Nearly everything we did was a contest. Getting graded on our work, you were either the smart kid or the dumb kid. You were the best at sports or you were a nerd. We were labeled. And everyone desired to advance themselves to be awarded and held in high esteem starting at a very young age.

As we grew up, it transferred into adult life as well. We were shown through the media that the people who got celebrated were those who made the most money, had the highest position in their workplace or was extremely talented at something being better than everyone else. And so, I was no different.

When I was thirteen, I began training dogs and I had no idea at the time the journey that would take me on. I had a miniature schnauzer at the time, and our little town knew me as the girl with the well trained dog. I got involved in 4-H and when the fair came, I entered myself and my dog in both showmanship and obedience classes. I won everything! First place in my classes and Grand Champion overall. The newspaper came and took our photos, and I instantly became famous.

Wow! MY picture was right there, great big in our local paper. I felt so special. I had found what I was good at, so I continued to work with dogs moving forward. At 16 years old, I was teaching dog obedience classes to grown ups. This again boosted my ego and made me feel important.

As time went on, I would eventually marry at age 25. We bought our own 5-acre farm and my husband said, “I’ve always wanted a Rottweiler.” Well, say no more! Me being an animal lover deluxe, I ran right out and bought him a little female for Christmas. He loved her! But chimed in again and said, “A female is nice, but I had always wanted a male.” Well, say no more--Off I went and bought us a nice strong male puppy and there we were--Rottweiler owners.

I fell in love with the breed, started showing our male in obedience trials and did well. I started meeting new people and got involved showing them in both AKC/UKC and german-style confirmation shows. I also trained and competed in Schutzhund, weight pulling, endurance running, obedience trials and tracking trials. I got deeply enmeshed in the breed and competing. Most of my dogs were imported from all over the world as I had to have the best I could find. I became a well known breeder who received top dollar for my puppies having a waiting list for my litters. Major rottweiler breed magazines hosted articles and many photos of my dogs and me. People knew who I was and that I brought competition.

I ate, drank, dreamt and slept being the best with my breed. I studied bloodlines, I knew what everyone else had in their kennels. I understood phenotypes and temperaments and knew which lines did what and how they produced. I had become a master of my trade.

I had a reputation.

After 22 years of that, my life began going in a new direction. God had called me out and wanted me to let go of it all. It was time to focus my attention on Him.

***

I find it interesting that the fear of rejection for doing what you love in the world feels different than the fear of rejection we feel for sharing our faith in Jesus Christ. Especially if you are walking out your faith by believing Jesus will move in power to cast out a devil, to heal someone or to share that you are hearing from God prophetically. There is definitely a spiritual amplification to create a fear of loss or the possibility of hostility towards you.

I now found myself struggling to build a new reputation.

God is patient...

It’s amazing, being on this end of things now, looking back and seeing just how patient He really is-- how He allows us to muddle through many many experiences in life if need be to help us to finally and clearly understand what’s happening and why we can’t find our peace.

Needing to maintain a reputation creates fear of man. It creates fear of rejection of those in your circle--fear of being demoted, devalued, disagreed with and dejected.

God put the call in my heart in 2006 to believe for greater things. In 2009 I got accelerated into walking it out and began sharing it by openly giving testimonies. It was at this time that God would begin the journey of revelation to my heart that I was trapped in a lie which said I needed to create and maintain a reputation.

Others in the faith whom I esteemed seemed to have a great reputation in the Lord. I thought in order for me to feel like I had any value as a person in the faith, that I would need to somehow develop a great reputation in the faith as well.

This owned me.

I was owned by the need for people to love me and accept me--for God to love me and accept me. (Keep in mind that all the boundaries presented in this book were present from the beginning. I was learning to overcome them all collectively). I feared being rejected, and this is the fear of man.

Going through this journey with God was extremely emotional for me. I had to work hard to overcome all the fear. Fear kept me unproductive. Was what I was experiencing in this season real and from God? Was it really OK? Meaning, was it all of God (Hearing God prophetically, seeing people healed instantly, manifestations of both the demonic and angelic)? I had no teacher within my church to help me understand. No one in church taught how to hear and discern God’s voice. Which voice was God? Which was my own? Which was from the devil? Oh, how often I cried to God for discernment and to not be led into deception! “Guard my heart and protect me Lord” was my constant cry.

Everything God was leading me to do was producing great fruit. But I was still battling with my past teaching of these things not being for today. Your mind is powerful. I felt like I was in a constant war in how to live my life. Everything inside me wanted to see the power of God moving today to set people free via healing and prophetic encouragement, yet I feared how others would receive this new me. You see, the church I attended did not do any of these things. As a matter of fact, they brushed past the spiritual gifts and claimed that the great power moves that were seen with the apostles died with the apostles. But I had called out to the Lord in my private prayer time for truth about it all. “God,” I said, “Are you the same yesterday, today and forever? And if so, where is your power today?” And so He began to teach me.

Now, this woman (me) who had attended this church, growing up in it, was very different than the leadership once knew. I went from being the normal church attender who sat and listened in the pews each Sunday, to being a Spirit-filled street evangelist who saw radical results. Many being instant results that could be verified. (And they had not taught me this! I learned this from sitting alone for countless hours in the presence of God, being led and taught by His Spirit.) This caused the leadership to have many meetings because of me. They knew me and loved me. So, how were they going to deal with me now? I battled the fear of man--wanting my church family to continue to love and accept me, (I was now treated like the black sheep of the family. They loved me, but would not celebrate me, and one elder in particular flat out hated the new me and confronted me with his anger.) Yet, I had an even greater love of God and what He was willing to do with us and through us as His children. Therefore I could not stop; but advance.

My testimony is truly a testament to the power of God to transform, as the truth in his Word became the living reality of my life.

It is because He was so real now, because His miracles were happening before my eyes, because His Word was becoming so active and real in my life, that it gave me the power to endure the rejection of those I esteemed around me (the leaders of my church, the church congregation, friends and family, strangers on the street). It was all new to all of them as well, so I was constantly trying to convince them that what I was experiencing was real. In this process I was experiencing their rejection, their questions, their concerns about me. AND, all the while I am working towards convincing them of the reality of this new amazing experience of my life, I was full of questions myself. My brain, my thoughts bombarded me daily with-- is this really real? Are these people really getting healed? Are they being honest when they say that they have been? Even with the proof they provided me, it shook me at my core that the God I had learned about in the Bible really was alive and more real than I had capacity to believe before. He was no longer a story I was expected to believe as truth. He was revealing Himself as the living God, active and interactive with His children in Christ today!

It’s amazing to me how the mind works--that you can see people before your eyes getting healed and yet when you go home, your rational mind, your carnal mind, will find every reason why it couldn’t have happened and that it wasn’t real. And yet the people kept coming to me with joyful faces and would tell me how wonderfully God had in fact healed them. Some came with documentation from their Doctors.

I needed to see that documentation as much as anybody in the beginning. I was going through a tremendous paradigm shift at the power I now witnessed that came from belief and faith in the truth of God’s word through us!

I desperately want to explain my journey with you because I think I was the most messed up person on the planet for God to choose for this. I was so messed up emotionally and struggled so violently against what He was trying to teach me; what He was trying to teach me about Himself, about the truth of His word, about His love for me and for you, and that I was safe with Him. I had never felt safe with God. But I share that in yet another part of this book.

***

The Depression

I kept questioning God, “Why am I so depressed all the time? Why can’t I get free from this never-ending cycle of depression?” I had been living my life literally on what would look like a roller coaster, where I would be on a great high and enjoying life, to where I would find myself in extreme depression with suicidal thoughts. This just didn’t make sense. Why should a Christian who has the love of Jesus Christ and is seeing God move through great signs and wonders and miracles have the ability to fall into depression the way I was doing so consistently? I was declaring freedom over everyone around me and yet I was not living in the freedom myself. None of my friends seem to be able to help me. They would pray for me, console me, edify me, encourage me and tell me how much God loves me, and yet the cycle continued. Then there came a day while I was reading my Bible that I came across a passage where it spoke of Jesus being a man of no reputation.

REPUTATION.

The word just jumped off the page.

I got stuck on the passage where Jesus spoke of not accepting the judgments of men. He only accepted God’s word over Himself. And then there was Paul who also declared such things. That he did not receive the judgments of men because men’s hearts were imperfect and that he didn’t even judge his own heart because only God knows the true motives of the heart. And something clicked.

As I meditated on this further, I began to see that God was healing my heart of the boundary of having a reputation and that my grief and pride came from the need to have a reputation. God was showing me that it was time to let go of man’s interpretations of me. They all see me through their own heart lenses and therefore cannot judge me correctly. No, I cannot even judge myself correctly. Only God can truly judge my heart knowing what my true motives are. I learned that I was in deception. And through this revelation, God showed me that deception keeps you from seeing a truth. Because you cannot tell that you are in deception or believing a lie while you are trapped in the lie, you yourself cannot truly judge your own heart.

I had been living my life for other people‘s opinions of me.

When you live your life allowing other people to dictate your happiness, by whether they accept you or reject you, they own you.

You will live every day of your life looking for that acceptance from them. You will modify your behavior in order to gain that acceptance and to feel valuable in their eyes. I had been doing this my whole life. I had been modifying my behavior depending on the person I was standing in front of in hope of gaining acceptance and feeling valuable in their eyes.

This caused great conflict in me because I felt the draw from God to walk out my life in a way that would cause others to reject me. It took me 10 years of fighting against this type of rejection, constantly going into states of depression, to finally get so tired of it that I saw the need to accept something new. The new thing that I needed to accept, was the truth that God loves me and that I am safe in that love--that it was OK for imperfect people to reject me as long as I understood I was accepted by God. At this point, I had finally grown to the point of knowing that this was true of God. That if the entire world rejected me and turned their backs on me, that God would be enough.

I worked very hard to grow into having a pure heart before God where I feel no condemnation. And my relationship with God is such that, if I get off course in any way at all, He tells me, we work through it, and we continue on. But even when He chastises me, He is so-o-o-o-o kind and patient. I never feel He is angry with me; just leading me. This was so so huge for me. Because I hadn’t believed that God loved me my whole life. I felt dirty, tarnished by sin and my lack of ability to abstain from it.

I discovered why it was so hard to abstain from sinning. You will sin when you don’t understand just how deeply loved you are by God. When you don’t feel complete in Him or satisfied or content. When you don’t feel perfect love from Him, you expect punishment from Him. You will find yourself unable to behave in any other way than to do things that deserve punishment. But when you finally grasp the intensity of God’s love for you--that He is for you and not against you, that He wants the best for you, that He is always seeking for your good, you yourself will fall in love with the One who first loved you. It will break your heart, causing you great sorrow to do anything that would break His heart or cause separation from this perfect love.

I thought my whole life that I was pursuing God, trying to get Him to see me and accept me. It wasn’t until my friend, Joel Sweeney, told me to stop pursuing God that this changed. Joel said, “I want you to run from God. I want you to stop praying, stop worshipping, stop reading your bible. Just live your life as if He doesn’t exist for a few weeks and let God pursue you.” I didn’t realize just how badly I was trapped in a works mentality to gain God’s love, approval and acceptance until I was asked to do this seemingly simple thing.

I got off the phone with Joel and I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed, because I didn’t believe that God would pursue me. I thought if I didn’t do all the religious acts that had been drummed into me my whole life, as to what a good Christian was supposed to do to please God, that He would drop me like a hot coal. It was all I knew. It was all I did, every day. I had lived a life of begging God to love me. Everyday I begged Him to forgive every little thing I saw in myself that I felt fell short of perfection. I was a hot mess! I needed to have a reputation with God! But Joel had an INCREDIBLE relationship with Jesus unlike any I had ever witnessed, so I trusted him and did what he asked.

I found it very difficult to try to ignore God and just do what came each day. But God--He must have smiled so big at my obedience to this challenge because He started doing things to show me how He was in fact pursuing ME! He wanted to show me how much He loved me. He just needed me to get out of the way, to stop living in fear, and believe that He loved me more than I love myself.

This began a new season in my life where I began to see the power of pursuit of God in my life on a consistent and continual basis. God was in overdrive revealing Himself as all sufficient. That He heard me and knew the cries of my heart. He began showing His love for me by fulfilling my needs that no one knew about. Needs that I kept in my heart alone--but He knew. This was indisputable love from Him that I could not deny.

As He continued to do this over the next two years, answering my prayers in ways that boggled my mind, I developed a love and security in Him that helped me to see that the ONLY reputation that I needed or wanted to have, was my clear conscience before God. I have a clear conscience because I live in abiding never ceasing prayer with Him. We talk all day every day. I wake up thinking about Him and I go to bed thinking about Him. He wakes me in the middle of the night and my first thoughts are of Him.

You can’t fully love someone until you feel fully loved yourself. You can’t fully love someone until you no longer need them to return that love back to you to fulfill a need in you.

Because I feel fully loved and accepted by God, I was able to learn to fully love myself, and because I now love myself (accept myself as I am, faults and all, resting in God’s love), I’m free to love others without putting an expectation of a return of that love. Jesus loved all, and sacrificed Himself as an eternal act of love all the while those He loved were crucifying Him.

It’s amazing, I am never depressed anymore. I discovered that the depression came because I needed the approval of others. When you give up the need to have a reputation, you take away the power of others to dictate your value. The judgements of others no longer have power. Their words may sting in the moment, but they will not cling to you.

All human judgements are imperfect.

People can only see a very small portion of who you are. No one has seen everything in your life to understand why you do what you do or what led up to it. They are judging, many times, through their own brokenness and faulty perceptions of truth. Only God’s judgements are pure. Only God sees all and knows all (even better than we can see ourselves). Only God sees you from perfection in pure love.

There is an extraordinary peace and joy in life when you set yourself free, not only from the fear of the judgements of others, but from your OWN self judgements. God was teaching me to rely ONLY on His judgements of me; and I feel safe with Him.

Now this does not mean that I never listen to criticism from people. I am actually very open to people sharing if they see something wrong in me. But the difference is, I listen for the heart of God in them. If they are speaking from any other place, I just give it to God and ask Him to let me know if He sees anything He wants to touch in me. Other times, I can instantly recognize the person is speaking from the heart of God, and I will go before the Lord for further instruction in my prayer time.

Not only do I walk in an amazing freedom from judgement or rejection, I am also very hard to offend. It still happens occasionally, but it lasts only a brief moment and it’s gone.

Why? Because God has helped me to understand that if a person’s behavior does not reflect the fruit of the Spirit, which are; love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, they are broken and need God’s love in that area of their life. This goes for me too! It is the standard by which I judge my own thoughts, words and actions.

When you can see that someone is broken, your response should be to bless them. So, if someone goes off on you in anger (and you had only acted in true love) you can see they need more of God’s healing in their own lives so that they are able to walk in love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. They need more of God’s Spirit active in their life. They need Jesus! It’s hard to get offended when you see them through that lense. This is another reason why God said, “bless those that curse you, pray for those who despitefully use you.” Luke 6:28

Did you know you can’t hate someone you are blessing? It’s not possible. Try this test. Smile right now and try to hate someone. You can not smile a genuine heartfelt smile and hate at the same time.

Now, pray blessings (really good blessings) over someone you are holding anger in your heart towards. You will feel your heart soften as you are praying. Pray like this; Father I want to thank you for this opportunity to come to you for my friend _________. I’m asking that you heal every brokenness within them. Help them to know you, to experience your love and to experience your peace. I bless their family, their job, their property and belongings. I bless their health and wellbeing. I pray that you heal us both and set us free from all the works of the enemy. Release us from anger, bitterness, selfishness and unforgiveness. Help us to walk undivided as one body in Christ Jesus. Thank you for answering my prayer as it is in your will and the desire of your heart. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

God is healing YOU by having you do this. It may be hard to say, ‘my friend’. But if you do, it will change your heart.

***

The next thing that is important to share here is that not only will other people’s criticism of who you are, what you do or what you believe, have less impact on your heart, but the same is to be said of praise and adoration.

Just as a person cannot judge me perfectly to say I am not up to their standards in (fill in the blank), I understand that when people tell me I’m a good person, or I’m amazing, or they share things that make me feel adored, I know they don’t know me perfectly, because if they did, they may not say such grand things.

Just because I did a good thing or said something that blessed someone or prayed and saw someone healed doesn’t make me good. Even the Lord Jesus said, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.” Mark 10:18. If you see good in me, you know it originated with God, and He is the one deserving of the glory. Knowing this, really helps to keep one humble.

Part of my issue that caused me so much depression was the need to be seen as good. The freedom came when I stopped living for others acceptance and approval and just loved them free grata. This was the most frightening thing I had ever been asked to do in my life--trust God to love me so much that I was willing to let go of the outcome of my life. Meaning, let go of who got to be in my life and who could not be a part of my life. I let go of the direction my life would take and gave it to God. I learned to trust that God knew what I needed better than I knew what I needed. I needed to learn that I could live without things or people I felt I could not live without. Not realizing that they were idols. Anything or anyone you feel you cannot live without, owns you, and you will serve it in order to keep it. Only God gets to have that position. So, in this process of learning to live without a reputation--removing the power of people to dictate whether or not I had a good day or a bad day emotionally--I also learned to live my life with my hands held open. God got to choose what He put into my hands/life or what He wanted to take out of my hands/life. I was very fear-filled going into this level of trust in the beginning. Everyday--I would say out loud: “I trust you. I trust you, God. I trust you.”

Time would pass and as I left my life in God’s hands in this way, He has proven to me that I can in fact trust Him with the whole of my life and all that I am. It sets me free from endless concerns or worries. I now live my life moment to moment as He leads, and it is good.

***

The next step in my freedom from the power of others over my emotions was, that God spent a lot of time teaching me the concept of loving without condition.

People can tell when you want something from them. When you want something from somebody, it can cause them to feel that you are draining them or taking something from them they may not want to give. Therefore, they resist what you are offering, even if it is a good thing (because the motive at its root is self-centered--you want a return on your investment). BUT, when you begin to do things for others without the expectation of getting anything in return, they will want you around because you give life to them. You are a giver, not a taker. And, because you are there solely to love and bless them, they feel the freedom to love and bless you back.

How often do you say I love you to someone because deep down you long to hear them say, I love you too. This is selfish. It isn’t freely given. It is offered with an expectation of a return. If it is not returned, you then feel offended in your heart. You feel unloved. You feel like you just put yourselves out there only to get hurt. So next time, you withhold love. You say to yourself, they didn’t return love to me so I am not going to show it back to them. This is not love. It is manipulation at best and emotional control at worst.

I used to be that person. I would become vulnerable and tell people that I loved them and when I didn’t get the response I hoped for, I was shattered and felt the pain of it for a very long time. This at times had the power to cause bitterness, resentment, unforgiveness and a host of other ugly things.

However, when God taught me about the freedom of unconditional love, I found extreem freedom and peace. I was only able to do this though, after I knew my security in God’s love for me. When I understood His unconditional love for me, I was able to live that out towards others. Every heart desires this kind of love. To be cherished, valued, to feel protected, safe and pursued as someone of great worth, to have someone who sees every part of you, the good and the bad and still wants you and to love you deeply. Every heart deep inside, desires Jesus.

Interesting fact

I discovered that people can take nearly everything away from me in this life, but the one thing NO ONE has control over, is who I choose to love. You can hate me and do all kinds of evil against me, but I can still choose to love you and there is nothing you can do about it. Love or hate is a choice. The initial feeling or emotion you experience might not be in your control, but what you choose to do after that moment is a choice.

God gave me homework to do until this truth settled deep within my heart. He had me love people who hated me, with no expectation of them ever loving me back. He had me do that by praying incredible, powerful prayers over them and their lives. He said to pray prayers over them that you wish someone who loved you would pray over you. He showed me his word that said,

“...bless those who curse you, and pray for those who despitefully use you. Luke 6:28

But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Matt 5:44

I began to do just that and it healed my heart. Those who hated me no longer had power to hurt my heart. I had made a decision that no matter what they did, my response would be to bless them and love them. And it was genuine.

This then grew into stage two. God then had me release any thought or idea that I should even expect a thank you from a good deed done. As a matter of fact, He wanted me to search for ways to bless people without them ever finding out it was me. My giving was to be before God alone. My thanks--from Him. My reward--knowing that in that moment I got to look like Him.

By learning to give love freely in the many ways God would teach me, with no expectation of that love being returned, I found that I was FREE! Your feelings can’t get hurt if you give a gift to simply give a gift. Your feelings can’t get hurt if you pour out all you have to bless another for free, with no expectations of a return on the investment. It is absolutely lilberating! I no longer judged their love for me by whether they gave a gift back or said thank you. I chose to do it all from my heart. Free love. I no longer sat around judging others trying to figure out why they treated me the way they did. I no longer had the fear of man. Fear of man lost its power over my life. I chose to live a life of no reputation.

***

If you are like me, in the beginning, I would tell God, “But what about me, I have needs too ya know?” This is where trust had to take root. God has a principle in His word that says that what a man sows he shall reap. In the beginning, you will feel like you are suffering loss. You plant seeds in your garden day and night. You watch them go into the ground and disappear. Then nothing happens for a long time. Or so it seems. But slowly, in time, things begin to grow and grow. Until one day, a harvest much larger than what you planted is poured into your lap.

It’s a law--give and you shall receive. Check out Luke 6:38.

To recap: To become free from the boundary of the fear of man, give up your desire to have a reputation. Just be you with a heart that feels no condemnation before God. If you are off track, He will put a check in your spirit. Live clean before Him and be led by His Spirit. Your only reputation should be a clean heart before God. Will you be remembered for your great love? We are commanded to love one another. Love does not sin. It can’t.

Second, learn to love all you meet without expectations from them. Love because you want to love them. Give because you want to bless them. Bless them to truly let them feel blessed. Then let it go. If they love you back, then it feels like such a blessing to you, because you didn’t demand it. It is received as a gift.

Set yourself free from the pain and torment of unfulfilled expectations from others. From this place, you are free to just enjoy being you with the freedom to love everyone you meet without reservation.

Lastly, know and trust that your sacrifice will be rewarded. You can not plant seeds of love all over your life garden and not receive a harvest much greater than what you have planted. It is a law.

***

Father, Thank you for sending Jesus to be our example of a life lived without the desire for a reputation before man, and for showing us what it looks like to love without conditions.

Help us to follow You in this, and discover the great freedom and joy that is found there. In Jesus’ name, Amen

#powerofprayer #keepingthefaith #religion