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Another great speaker. Dove is really going places this year. He was so humorous. Great to hear such personal testimonies and stories. These are just a handful of the positive comments regarding Dove and June speaker, Duncan Graham, who breezed into Connelly Hall like a breath of fresh air. Duncan, recently returned from ministry in Scotland, India, Singapore and Indonesia, moves in the prophetic ministry of healing and encouragement. He is an ordained Methodist minister and he trains the Elijah House Schools and is now free to travel and encourage churches, minister and mentor.
Duncan’s talk focussed on the resurrection side of the cross – and how to get there. Dare we pray a dangerous prayer ‘Lord shows me what’s in my heart’? How many of us tragically can’t receive compliments? In our heads we do but not in our hearts because it’s hard to get intimate because of the damage and pain that prevent us from receiving closeness.
Duncan gave many illustrations one of which was the case of a 70 year old lady he had met the previous week. All her life this woman believed she had to fight hard for her identity because of the circumstances she experienced in her upbringing and constantly hearing ‘I’m no good.’ A godly woman who worked hard at being a good Christian and a good wife living her life for God – remember working for God is our effort - we need to work with God. She had great difficulty in her marriage and tried hard to please her husband and please God, but all her life deep down because of the judgement she had received this was her truth and she believed it. She also had much trouble receiving compliments and was not able to receive that deep nurturing because she believed the lie. In ministry she allowed the Holy Spirit to take her back to that place in her memory and she invited Jesus into that situation, repented that she had believed the lie, renounced it, and asked the Holy Spirit to speak to her spirit and she heard the very personal words ‘you are a sweetie’. Not religious words, not judgmental words but words she could relate to and she felt warm and loved.
The moment we receive Jesus in our heart he goes into our yesterdays, todays and forevers. But the trouble is we lock the door of yesterday because of the pain and even when we know Jesus as Lord we still shut off yesterdays. Everything this woman now believed is based on the truth which has set her free because of the work of the cross where everything comes alive and old things pass away.
So we have to get to what we believe as our truth, get convicted of it, see it as wrong, judge it as a lie and then when we know that it is a lie in the light of God’s word we can say ‘Lord I am sorry I believed that lie, please forgive me’. – I renounce it in Jesus name. But we have to renounce it as our truth which has set us in bondage so that Christ’s truth can set us free and that’s when you can go from one side of the cross to the other – to resurrection.
The Spirit is the very essence of God in us. It’s the resurrection power in us When we ask Jesus to come into our heart and we discover the living God he sets our spirit alight. The spirit gives life and we carry the Spirit of God and when we get the words of God into the depths of our being we can receive them. We are made in the image of God and God is a spirit – what are you?
We must be born again. If we have never come to that place of asking Jesus into our heart to forgive all our sin and to give us the power to live on the resurrection side of the cross, then we need to come to him and ask him to create in us a new heart and a right spirit – to wipe the slate clean. He’s done it all for us. The challenge is – do you want to be born again? When we pray ‘Create in me a clean heart and renew a right spirit we are actually saying ‘God get hold of my spirit. We are not just talking theology and prayer we are actually saying ‘God get hold of my spirit’.
How do we know who we are in the Spirit? Because God sent his son 2000 years ago to die and rise again. Not so we could constantly come and say ‘I’m sorry Lord for all those sins’ and be weighed down with what is not right with us. When Jesus died for us he rose again and is alive for evermore. Why did he do that? It was to take away the power of sin. Not sin – sin is all around us – we are full of it – but sin has no power over us. Romans says ‘reckon yourselves dead to sin – it and you died with Christ and are now risen with him. So it is all about death and resurrection.
God wants to release our spirit to be what it is made to be in the image of God. He wants us to rise above all those things which have put us down. Some of us live with constant criticism and judgment that keeps our spirit locked in and we believe the words spoken over us by those in authority (parents, teachers, leaders) and we become hurt, wounded people. and that is a difficult place to live. If we do not have in our spirit someone greater is it any wonder we keep coming back asking for more of God and more patience. The implication is we don’t have enough of God and we don’t have enough patience. Everything that Christ died for is for us. It just needs to be matured in us and released through us. So we can declare who we are just like that women who is a sweetie.
The tragedy God showed Duncan was that he had that resurrection power in him but he was still living on the dead side of the cross. He was believing stuff that Christ took the power away from 2000 years ago. So when he heard authority figures saying ‘you are not good enough, you can do better’ – he was driven to perform better this side of the cross. But when he got to the resurrection side of the cross it was a different story. We should not go around saying ‘the devils giving me a hard time today’ - what are you doing on the dead side of the cross? Go over to the other side and say ‘I’m not going to give you any power. I am risen (in the spirit) with Christ.’ Can we be God’s ambassador of life in a dead situation? We have been transformed from death to life. The moment judgment comes to the door and we start speaking stuff that’s not truth – we have got to go right through the cross and say ‘I repent Lord for believing those lies and now Lord I want to choose and speak your truth’. We can say ‘I am not a liar and I don’t speak lies’ but unfortunately we do and this has become our truth. We say ‘look at me, I’ll never get much further’ or ‘I’m not good enough’ and we get locked into ‘me’ and believe the judgements put upon us. The hardest thing is to take accountability for our sins as God reveals them.
A few years ago Duncan asked the Lord ‘Show me what’s in my heart’ and four weeks down the track his wife of 40 years told him he was stubborn. He stubbornly denied that! It took Duncan a while to realise the source (and root) of his stubbornness was because of his ancestral Scottish heritage. (Sometimes we often confess the sin without disempowering the source!) Duncan wasn’t blaming his ancestors; he was in line with them. The Grahams were a stubborn lot and God took Duncan all the way back to Scotland to the source of the problem, and in St Mary’s Chapel in Edinburgh Castle he bowed his knees and said ‘I am a sinner and I repent publicly of the sins of my fathers and forefathers and the stubbornness of all the Grahams and I ask you to create in me a clean heart and take away the power of that stubbornness. Later going down the Royal Mall it started to rain and so he ran into St Giles Cathedral and there in the Cathedral was a tour guide and as he came to a bier (concrete tomb) he said ‘now this is the Earl of Montrose the first Graham and he was a nasty man, stubborn, he was so hated by the Scots that they hung drew and quartered him and sent his body parts all around Scotland. That was Duncan’s inheritance. The guide said how the Earl of Montrose had argued and tormented his enemy the Lord of Argyle and then he then crossed over to another part of the Cathedral to the bier of the Lord of Argyle. After everyone had gone Duncan went up to his ancestors bier and said ‘I am one of you lot and I just want you to know that this day I have publicly stood before the cross of Jesus and taken accountability for your sins and for the sins of all the Grahams and I declare we are now free in Jesus name. Then he went to the other side of the Cathedral and said ‘Hello, I am a Graham (this was very real to him as he was in the realm of the spirit) and asked for forgiveness and to set the Grahams free so they could be reconciled. When Duncan got home he was a different person because something had come out of his spirit.
Duncan urged us to give God permission to tell us what is in our hearts. He may tell us something we may not like it – it may be an experience, a thought or a memory we have to take accountability for – not blame. We just need to repent and say we are sorry because it’s not the event that God is interested in, it’s the root cause. Our character is built on dealing with our heart. We can turn our behaviour on and off soulishly but when our heart changes we get a heart transplant – we have the heart of Jesus – we have the mind of Christ. When we are set free our mind begins to think the mind of Christ, our heart begins to feel the feelings of Christ and our words begin to speak the judgements of the life of Christ. Our soul thinks God’s thoughts, feels God’s feelings and chooses God’s choices - because God is Spirit and we are working through the Spirit. The simple truth is we can believe so much in our souls because our thinking is based on wounded spirits and wounded circumstances. Duncan’s message for us was which side of the cross are we really on? We must not let our circumstances rob us of our position in Christ. We must not live out of our circumstances – we must live out of our position in Christ. Easy to say – hard to do – but that’s what maturity in Christ is all about.
Duncan told many other personal stories of his childhood but there just isn’t space to tell them all here.