RACISMS RELIGIOUS ROOTS - PART 2 - SET FREE AND DIDN'T EVEN KNOW I WAS BOUND.
SET FREE AND DIDN’T EVEN KNOW I WAS BOUND
If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed. Joh 8:36
One of the most overlooked purposes of Christs' first appearing, that most believers in the body of Christ aren't aware of is that one of the missions of His incarnation was to set His people free from religious bigotry, racism and religious tradition.
One of the earliest examples of racism in modern History (A.D.) actually began with religion. And one of the strongest statements for racial reconciliation was actually spoken by Jesus Christ Himself dealing with religious exploitation in God’s house of prayer in the New Testament in Mark 11:17.
Jesus Christ uttered one the most profound statements about the inclusion of all racial groups in his house of prayer, quoting from Isaiah 56:7, when He said, “My house shall be called of ALL NATIONS the house prayer.” but you made it a den of thieves. The word, “All Nations” is the Greek word “Ethnos,” which is
where we get our English word, “Ethnic or Ethnicity,” meaning
people or racial groups.
I don’t believe Jesus only made this statement because of the corruption of the merchandising of animal sacrifices alone, which was going on in the temple during that time. Jesus was not only upset because of this buying and selling that was taking place in the temple, but I believe he was also just as upset because of where in the temple it was taking place.
They were using the courts of the Gentiles to buy and sell animal sacrifices for the Holy days. The courts of the Gentiles were where the Gentiles (All Nations) were allowed to come and pray. This area was now being used by the Jewish religious leaders for unjust monetary gain for the temple, exploiting the Gentiles, while keeping them from coming to the House of God, probably out of their disdain and racists attitudes for the Gentiles.
A traditional religious spirit that is the root of racism keeps people from coming to God, from coming to God's house and from truly hearing from God, obeying the spirit of God to be and do all that God calls for a people, race or religious denominational group in the earth.
When the spirit of religion was broken over my life I was set free from a bondage that I didn’t know I was captive to. I WAS SET FREE, AND DIDN’T EVEN KNOW I WAS BOUND. That’s the subtlety of a religious spirit. You can be bound and not even realize you’re in bondage.For years I was bound to the religious spirit in denominationalism in our African-American Church expression, thinking that everyone outside of our expression of faith in Christ was going to hell, except us.
Apostolic Oneness had me bound to the belief in a religious works formula of baptism that taught, if you were not baptized a specific way, that our denomination deemed was scripturally tenable, then you had not received salvation through Jesus Christ. I was bound to this error of Christian doctrine because I did not read the word, study or know God for myself.
Just as the beginning of the end of African-American slavery was the secret educating of the slaves by various abolitionists, to be able to read and write and make their own decisions about what truth was in their lives, I was set free from this religious slavery simply by developing a personal prayer life and relationship with God for myself beyond my religious experience and my church hierarchy.
Once I learned how to hear the voice of God for myself, study the word of God for myself, and obey what He told me to do, the spirit of religion, and religious bondage and control was broken over my life. Once you develop a prayer life and learn to fear no one but God, man’s control and what people think about you can no longer have a hold on you.
While you respect people, and submit to God-ordained authority, you learn not to let your self esteem and self worth be found in their minds. You learn to get your worth from the Love of God, living by God’s esteem and God’s worth, not mans.
Prayer and Deliverance from Racism and the Spirit of Control
This is why the restoration of prayer, which produces a true encounter with Jesus, returning back to the church today is so needed. Jesus linked encounter prayer and deliverance from racism and religion when he said; “My house shall be called of all nations, a house of prayer.” With this statement he was revealing what it would take to break the spirit of racism in the church.
Where the prayer of encountering Christ is the culture of the house of God, man-made religion, and racism have no breeding ground. Where encounter prayer is the culture of the house of God the spirit of control and manipulation is not needed.
When a spiritual leader prays and looks totally to God to build and lead
the Church of Christ there’s no need for control and manipulation to keep people in their place. God keeps them in their place, doing what He wants them to do in His Church as long as he wants them there, to accomplish His purposes and plans.
Encounter Prayer and the spirit of religion, (or a controlling spirit) operating in the church are antithetical operations. Wherever a
people pray and encounter Jesus they ultimately make a choice to let go of the controls. Either God’s in control in the earth, through the prayers of man to God, inviting God’s wisdom into His affairs to lead in governing the earth, or mans in control through manipulation and domination of other human beings because of prayerlessness, but never both.
Wherever a people control they ultimately make the choice not to pray, or to pray less. That’s why, I believe, there is very little leader sanctioned prayer meetings going on in the modern churches of the 21st century. You will either lead by God’s control through encountering God in prayer, or by man’s control through prayerlessness.
When we choose the latter, we choose a culture that will inevitably lead to a climate that produces a ruling class, an underclass and racial, and/or clergy superiority and domination over people.
This is so that those in the church or community will listen and do what they’re told to do. When a spiritual leader teaches the church to pray and hear from God for themselves, he’s ultimately teaching them to encounter God, and he becomes increasingly unnecessary in their lives.
The more they learn to hear and know God the more they grow from a dependency on that leader to a dependency upon God. And consequently they become all that
God created them to become.
What Runs Our Churches when we’re Not a House of Prayer.
In fact the most segregated hour of our week in Sunday mornings between 10-1. Because we don’t run our churches by prayer; we run them by a man, and the systems he implements. Why? because in the minds of many leaders, to have a true encountering God prayer culture in our churches would be to lose control of those churches.
Many controlling leaders believe it would cause everybody to start hearing from God for themselves, aside from hearing Him through them, and cause them to begin coming together outside of their manipulation and control, or out outside of their organized flow charts, to do what God tells them to do. People would start developing their own ministries and ministry initiatives that might threaten the supposed vision or direction of the church.
The Pastor might lose allegiance of segments of the people to the churches vision, for their own visions. And ultimately what Pastors’ fear the most; we might lose people to another man or woman’s vision from within the church, to start their own church with “their” so-called members.
Therefore we’ve learned how to run and operate our churches without congregational prophetic prayer meetings where the members encounter God for themselves. We’ve implemented systems that run our churches, both godly & ungodly systems; of performance, systems of faithfulness and reward, systems of competition and corporate posturing, systems of Clergy hierarchy, systems of administration and operation that are governed not by the spirit of God, through prayer, but by the spirit of manipulation, control and performance through man’s wisdom and prayerlessness. This leads to a religious man-made system that leads to relational bondage in our churches.
There is bondage with religious spirits that can even make the word of God preached in the church powerless to change lives. Before the word of God can become Spirit and life to a person, this spirit of religious tradition and culturalism has to be broken. Jesus said concerning the power of religious tradition;
Mar 7:9 And he said unto them, Full well do ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your tradition… making void the word of God by your tradition, which ye have delivered: and many such like things ye do.
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