When Spiritual Maturity Comes

This is from John Garfield of RELEASING KINGS. 

Here's a portion of what he says.  It's worth reading.

Our dreams are very much a part of our personal identity and self-worth. When we contend for our land in the Kingdom, we also sign up for the warfare that comes in the form of resistance from other people or circumstances, and it feels very much like rejection.

“We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God,” Acts 14:22 NIV

When our heart’s desires are unrealized, it’s often because there is a Kingdom ingredient in what God writes in our hearts, and it naturally draws opposition. It can be from religion, church, work, family or friends. As Christians, we can even blame God for the feeling that what is most precious in our hearts is dismissed by others or even by Him. It is wounding and heart breaking.

Symptoms – The feeling of rejection is same hopeless resignation whether we are saved or not.

Justification – the first symptom is that we retreat into theories to explain to ourselves why our dreams have passed us by. We can become entrenched in a negative view of life and close our hearts for protection. We become opinionated, deaf to the hearts of others, unbending, unreasonable, stubborn, self-righteous and self-centered. Our pessimism easily identifies the bad in people on the opposing team. We subscribe to the fear of conspiracy theories more easily, and a false prophetic anointing is prone to express the will of the enemy instead of the will of God.

Contentious issues in politics, religion or theology are defended with irrational and unloving zeal (as opposed to Godly zeal). They are really just rallying points for a militant fellowship around shared issues of rejection… among people who are out of touch with their personal Kingdom purpose.

Projection – Our dream is still with us, but instead of working on it, we impose our concept of how things should be on others, especially those from whom we feel rejection. The church is a favorite target, but the same projections can target work institutions, the government – any entity that represents the source of our rejection. We project / preach the theory of our imaginary utopia instead of living the example and demonstrating the fruit that naturally flows from a healthy heart. We become enforcers of our own law. The problem is there is no ministry of “sheriff” in the Kingdom.

Countertrends – Our heart is continually longing to prove itself right, and everyone else wrong, so we naturally gravitate to counter-culture movements. We’re trying to correct the imperfections in the institutions that wounded us – out of our own dysfunction. In day trading, it is a diagnosable tendency to trade against the trend and take huge losses. It’s the same way in life… the more we try to counter the rejection we feel in our hearts, the more rejection and defeat we experience.