CROSS-TIES
Here, in the first Room of Mystery, you have come face to face with The Dark Night of the Soul. It is a place where obedience and discipline become the two tracks on which the rest of your life will ride. Each “cross-tie” under those tracks are there to stabilize you. Yet, too many see them as obstacles to their future. What are the “cross-ties” in your life? Cross-ties are things God places in your life that you have little choice over and if they are not there you will not become the man or woman of God He created to be. The train of your life will fall off the track when you hit unstable conditions.

WHAT ARE CROSS-TIES OF THE SOUL?
Cross-ties are the relatives you have, the geographic location where you live, the boss you work for, even the personality of the children you have. Cross-ties are also the flat tire you have, the dog that digs up your flowers, the cranky neighbor, and the stop light that always changes to red right before you get there. All these things and many more are “cross-ties” and they are there to help you become more self-disciplined and obedient. As you grow or mature in these two areas, you will notice a remarkable shift in your emotional makeup and in the way others act when they are near you. Just what do I mean by that?

PET PEEVES
If you are like me, there are things others do that drive you crazy! In some cases it is so bad that you may even try to steer clear of them. It has been a wonderful, self-revealing, surprise to find that as I become more disciplined and obedient to that which God has called me to do, others stop doing the things that irritate me. Further, when what they do stops irritating me, they stop doing the thing that irritates me.

It is almost as if God provokes them to rub me the wrong way just to work on me. Can you imagine that! God is always working on our emotional Stability, and He uses cross-ties to do it.

This room is designed to work on the matters of the soul. The area you just came from, the Outercourt, dealt with matters of the flesh. That is why what you are going through is called, The Dark Night of the Soul. It is depicted in what Jesus said right before they took him to be crucified, “My soul is exceedingly troubled.”

THE CORE ISSUE OF THIS ROOM
In this protected and covered place God deals with your internal make-up and takes you one more step, one room at a time, toward Holiness. That is why the Scripture calls it the Holy Place. The problem is this, here in the Amber swirl of this room, you will feel anything but Holy. You may even have the feeling that if this room is a Holy Place, then if God finds out you are here, He will instantly ask you to leave. Here then is an important lesson, God does not take you into this room because you are Holy, He does it to help you become Holy.

YOUR AGENDAS VERSE GOD’S
The first step to Holiness is drawing close to Him who is Holy, the second step is to choose His agenda over yours. That takes discipline and obedience – those two facets then allow you to make the right choice on any decision that lies before you. When you exit this room you will be able to make wiser choices than you have ever been able to do – and life will get better!

The Dark Night of the Soul has little to do with religion, economics, war, politics, or geo-physical issues. It is not about what goes on around you, it is about that which goes on within you. First we change, then the world will change. It is a WAY of God.

In my next posting I will write about the first “Deep Mystery” of this room. This one will be quite a shocker!

Blessings,
John Paul

THREE PHASES TO TRANSITiON
You might remember in one of my earlier postings (July 2) that there were three phases that you will go through in completing any Transition. You will navigate through those same three phases, desire, discipline and delight as you transition through the Tabernacle. In the Outercourt you are filled with the desire for change and anything is better than where you are. Desire is an adrenaline that sends you charging toward your future – often without looking where you are going.

DISCIPLINE AND OBEDIENCE
Here in the Holy Place, the first of two covered Rooms of Mystery, you are now well within  the Discipline phase. Again it is through discipline you learn obedience. Discipline can be self induced or externally induced but a lifestyle of obedience cannot be achieved without it. Yes, there are moments in this room that may seem unfair - others are getting away with the very things you have to let go of. But then, they are not in this room and you are. Even now, the mystery of the next room, the Room of Delight, where the intimacy of Spirit to spirit communion is experienced is drawing you. Without your conscious awareness this growing oneness is already changing the rhythm of your heart.

One of the greatest disciplines you can achieve is found in the letting go of the vision you’ve told everyone you are going to do. The very vision God gave you, the very vision that when accomplished, will prove you are worth something – you have made it. This type of thinking proves it is your agenda and no longer God’s that you are making every effort to accomplish, even when you believe that in fulfilling it you will have completed what God has called you to do. Yes, the very vision that God gave you that proves you hear from God can actually become your ‘agenda’. To the degree you need to prove something, that is the degree that it has become “your agenda.”

PERSONAL AGENDAS PRODUCE ISHMAELS
It is not that God didn’t give the vision to you, it’s that you think you can accomplish it in your own strength. Such was the feeling of Abraham and the fruit was Ishmael. Personal motives mixed with a vision from God will always produce Ishmael’s as you look for your own provision to accomplish God’s call. Here is where we learn “When God guides He provides.”

On a personal note, and perhaps to comfort you a little, I have had a few Ishmaels in my life, and the resulting pain can be almost debilitating. In fact, it nears paralyzation, which is just one step away from petrification. One sign of the onset of petrification is spiritual immobility – or the inability to have consistent, focused prayer. Here in this room, you will learn to pray again as discipline tends to generate desperation. In a sense discipline is God protecting you from spiritual immobility or to a lesser degree spiritual atrophication, which is the degeneration of spiritual strength and a loss of the very desire to pray.

DO YOU HAVE AGENDA’S?
Do you have an agenda? Hummmm, well let’s see. Agendas can be hidden to you or known to you. Yet, it makes no difference; they must be eradicated before you walk into the next room – the Room of Delight. Some of the signs of a personal agenda are; an argumentative nature, defensiveness, jealousy, exaggeration, identity in your gift, aggressiveness, and a feeling that you are barely surviving. There are other signs, but these will do for a start.

So, it seems many of you have an agenda, if you do not, you are a rare bird indeed and as such you will proceed speedily through this room and the dealings of the furniture herein. However, if you eventually find your progress to be somewhat slower than you imagined, you might want to take another look at the matter of accomplishing God’s desire in your own strength – these are personal agendas.

At this stage in your spiritual development, it is often difficult to distinguish your agendas from God’s. Soul and Spirit seem so intertwined. However, the ability to distinguish between Soul and Spirit are obtained as you implement the elements found within this room.

HOW LONG WILL THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL LAST?
How long will the Dark Night of the Soul last? It will last as long as it takes you to get rid of your agenda and your self-sufficient strength. Be of good cheer you will make it if you do not quit.

Blessings
John Paul

The Dark Night of the Soul is the progression from exterior to interior spiritual impact and that spells change. It is for this precise reason God has ‘wooed’ you here. You have now transitioned from the Outercourt into the covering of the first room of the Sanctuary, the Holy Place. The exterior life is much easier to control than the interior as it is always easier to sacrifice food (fasting) for a day or a week, than to discipline the thoughts, feelings, and will of the soul for the rest of your life.

LETTING GO OF AGENDAS

That is why this room is so important – it is the beginning of the formation of new spiritual habits, conditioned responses, and higher thought processes. It is here you will learn to let go of your agendas that have been constructed from errant perceptions. Those perceptions form your thoughts, those thoughts form your choices, and the choices you have made are the reason for the pain you have deep in the recesses of your heart. Pain that no one but you know about and you may have ignored the pain for so long that you no longer notice it is there – until it is gone. So, in effect, this room is a room for pain removal and you will struggle to keep from running out the screen behind you.

THE PAIN WE PROTECT

Some of you see this pain as a friend – it gets you the attention you need from others, and the thought of losing that attention can be frightening. To you, losing the attention of others means being alone and that seems unbearable. Still this is another lesson you must learn – to the degree you feel alone is the degree you depend on others for your satisfaction, value, and self worth. Here, in this lonely place, God removes your dependency on others to woo you to depend on Him. That is why He only brings one person at a time into this room – here you have to depend on His love to make it. When other loves and distractions are gone you will be able to feel how much He deeply loves you. You can only learn this to the degree you trust Him to heal you where it hurts. He does this by going deep into those inner recesses that you have allowed no one to see let alone touch.

Entering into this room is the only way to learn to hear, think, and have passion for the matters that are on God’s heart – His plans, His desires, His purposes. There are no shortcuts.

EXPECT DISORIENTATION

If you have some disorientation as you enter this room do not be alarmed, it has a certain spiritual swirl that may catch you off guard. You will often feel you have lost your balance in life and are groping to find God. This groping is precisely the inherent meaning of learning to live and move and have our being in Him (Acts 17:27-28). In the darkened, disorienting swirl of this first room you will struggle to know ‘right’ from ‘wrong’ because your values and life principle are being renovated. Soon you will discover that what you used to get away with when you were first saved is no longer permissible in the Holy Rooms of Mystery. The resulting disorientation is the only way for you lose your old patterns of behavior, your old ways of thinking, and your own agenda. If you do not lose these “old ways” you will go right back to doing what you did before you came into the Holy atmosphere of this room. Time in the Dark Night of the Soul is the only antidote to the multifaceted, conditioned behavior of the sin you may have grown accustomed to.

LEARNING WHY YOU WERE MADE LIKE YOU ARE

It is here in The Dark Night of the Soul that you will learn to follow the call of God on your life and leave behind what you thought you were called, designed, and purposed to do. The gifts, the abilities, the personality, even the way you smile affect others and God’s wonderful design of you will start becoming clearer. You learn that all the abilities that God has given you are for a reason - you’re just not using them correctly. As you proceed to the furniture in this room, you will actually learn to appreciate the Dark Night of the Soul and all it is doing in your life. Shortly, you will see that you have now entered into God, later you will learn how to let God dwell in you.

More on the Dark Night of the Soul in my next Post.

Blessings,
John Paul