I Am A Man

This Word of God is for those who have lost their way and cannot seem to pull themselves out of the snare of the enemy. It is meant to encourage and deliver. I will say to you only those things that the Master has charged me to say. Nevertheless, if you are not one who is found lacking in any of the issues, then please do not become offended by the dealings of the Word with those who have become willing captives of the enemy. Simply use this message to help in your endeavors to deliver others who are in your territorial sphere of influence. But I pray your heart gives me the liberty to speak to the captives freely as the Lord has charged me to do so.

In an attempt to preserve the image a man has of himself, he is willing to defy his God and all that is called holy. This is not a new mentality. It is the one Adam harbored in his heart from the beginning.

I Timothy 2:14

14 And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.

This simply means Adam knew exactly what he was doing. He made a conscious decision to disobey the law of God. Now this decision came about because of Adam’s lust to be with his wife. But something else was gendered here, the male ego.

Webster’s definition of the word “ego.”

EGO

1. the self; the individual as self-aware. 2. egotism; conceit. 3. Philos. the self, variously conceived as a spiritual substance on which experience is superimposed, the series of acts and mental states introspectively recognized. 4. Psychoanalysis that part of the psyche which experiences the external world, or reality, through the senses, organizes the thought processes rationally, and governs action: it mediates between the impulses of the id, the demands of the environment, and the standards of the superego.

For the purposes of this study and to simplify things a bit, I am going to render the following as what I call a working definition:

THE MALE EGO

• The image a man has of himself. Ego is what a man thinks he is or ought to be.
• It feeds on pride.
• The image is greater than the man, in that it is able to do that which is beyond the power of the individual. It can handle and survive anything that comes its way.
• It causes one to be presumptuous in assuming that it can handle any situation at any given time, including the wrath of God.
• It is the root of arrogance and rebellion against the laws of God.

EXPRESSION OF THE EGO

“I know what your laws say, but I am going to do what I want to do. I will simply suffer the consequences.”

Here we have the ultimate display of the ego. It is presumptuous enough to think that it can withstand whatever consequences God levies on sin. It actually assumes that it can survive those consequences without even knowing what they are.

Wow, what an ego! This mind was from the beginning. It was Adam’s disposition when he disobeyed God and it is also the disposition of many men today. It is so strange to see how the malefactor in the Body of Christ so easily separates God’s Word from God Himself. When a man walks in the flesh, oftentimes his ego will make him numb to the foretold judgment of God.

LOSING THE FEAR OF THE LORD

Hebrews 10:29-30

29 Of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace?

30 For we know him that hath said, Vengeance belongeth unto me, I will recompense, saith the Lord. And again, The Lord shall judge his people.

Ego makes you presumptuous because you continue serving God, without having obeyed the truth. It causes a man to take the posture that he can still serve the Lord without having obeyed Him. The ego seems to assume the continued servitude nullifies the recompense for the sin, even sin that is un-repented of.

The ego destroys the fear of the Lord. We often consider the fear of the Lord as judgment being rendered in cases of disobedience. This judgment is usually considered to be some type of physical chastening. But the fear of the Lord must extend beyond physical chastening. The Lord knows that He has a day set to revenge all unrighteousness. He is going to simply destroy all His enemies. But what is He going to do now? What about the relationship we are to have with Him right now?

Brethren, many of your frustrations in ministry or the lack of ministry is because you have lost the fear of the Lord. It is lost inside of your ego. You have separated God from His Word. Obedience to the Word of God is the prerequisite to servitude. Nevertheless, the ego will cause you to believe that you can maintain your own ways, disposition and iniquity and still continue in your service to the Father. The fear of the Lord must speak clearly to you. You must consider that every act of disobedience is a hindrance to ministry.

THE EGO

The ego provokes us to exercise our own will. For the men of God, this is our greatest enemy. Let us examine this. There have been times when we knew the righteous thing to do, but the ego would not allow us to do it. A prime example of this in scripture is Cain.

God rejected Cain for giving an insufficient offering for sin. This in itself was done in arrogance. It spoke on this wise, “I’ll give God what I want to give Him.” But Cain’s ego is really revealed after his first conversation with God. Cain still could not give God a righteous offering. Instead he remained angry, stubborn and eventually killed his brother. This whole scenario begins with the ego and ended in murder. Our egos cause us to walk in the flesh, which is death. The ego always leads to death.

EGO IN THE MARRIAGE

This is also very evident in marriage. The manly ego will not allow the man to fulfill righteousness in his relationship with his wife. God will allow your marriage to be a miserable experience. In some cases, God will allow your wife to be an unbending individual causing there to be no peace in the home. If God did not chasten some of us in our homes, we would be comfortable walking in the flesh. Brothers, God will not fellowship with us while we walk in the flesh.

I John 1:6-7

6 If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth:

7 But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.

Our fellowship with one another relies on us walking in the light, which is the Spirit. Even the fellowship we desire to have with our wives depends upon us walking in the Spirit. But our egos separate us when we follow the dictates of it. In doing so we are in the flesh, not in the light of the Spirit. When I made the statement, “God will not fellowship with us in darkness,” I do not mean that God will not deal with us while we walk in darkness because He will, but it will not be fellowship. It will be chastening and if necessary, judgment.

JESUS IS THE WAY

God sent a life, which is a light to show the way to Him. Now, do not expect God to come into our negatives (sin and self-pity). God will never fellowship with us in darkness, neither will He console us while we are in darkness. He will demand that we come back to the light to find Him. “My Son is the way.” He revealed the way to God. He is the vine that we must abide in. It is not the chastening of the Lord that brings self-pity and depression. It is the fact that we wither away from the vine. We are feeling the pressure of God’s gaze at us in the flesh. We feel His fiery indignation because we are walking in the flesh. “All you have to do is agree with My Son. I am watching you,” saith the Lord.

God’s response could be simply, “Hell is hot and eternal.” This is all God has to say. He is God. He will not compromise with our negative disposition. He simply will not fellowship with us in darkness. Jesus is the one who died. “And I will accept nothing outside of My Son. Come to me in Him or not at all.” Regardless of the situations or reasons, He will not accept anything that is not in Christ.

“When will you reverence me as God?You reverence your emotions, your reasons and your justifications. I am God. I am a living God. You can get away with that with Buddha, Krishna and other gods, but I am a living God.”

Chastening comes in every Son’s life to make him better or stronger. Chastening is inevitable, but judgment comes when God is rebuking an ego in a child of God. An ego that produces the mindset, “I know God’s Laws and I know the consequence for sin, but I am still going to do what I want to do.” This mindset causes the judgment of God to come. Ask Adam. He had the same mind in the Garden. Ask Cain. He had the same mind concerning sacrifice. The list goes on and on and in all cases the judgment of God followed this mindset. This mindset was produced by the ego. We should hate having an ego knowing what it produces. But knowing all of this, why do we still walk in these mindsets? Because we believe the conversation our ego has with our minds.

This is a typical conversation of an ego. The ego says, “Except you take every opportunity to stand up for yourself and show who you really are, you will not be happy or complete.” This is what we have to look at. What is an ego? It is the image of how men see themselves, the root of arrogance from Adam. Men worship this image and idolize it. The image says, “I am a man and women are lesser than me.”

So now you have a man who cannot submit to women in the Body of Christ, based on what his image of himself has told him he is. But this is not limited to how he views himself toward women. This also extends to how he views his self toward Christ. The image your ego has built of you will never let you totally submit to Christ. So now we cannot see Christ as the way. See Christ as the way to where? See Him as the way to the Father. Our ego will not allow us to take the way that was given to us. THE ONLY WAY TO THE FATHER IS CHRIST.

St. John 14:6

6 Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.

The ego says, “You do not have to take this way because on this way you will be humiliated and denied some things.” The ego says, “You should not be denied or humiliated.” When you agree with your ego, you continue in the flesh, giving it what it wants and trading your fellowship with God for the pleasure of the flesh.

WALKING IN DARKNESS

When you walk in darkness, the god of this world will blind you to the truth. Then the deceitfulness of the sin will cause you not to hear God. We cannot be at the forefront of our relationship with God. God is not going to come to where we are. We must go to where He is. You may be at a place where you challenge God with an attitude that says, “Until you deal with this, I am not going to move.” But God says we are to move when He speaks.

When the Lord comes, He backs us up against the wall so that we cannot get around Christ. The only way we will accomplish what we are trying to do is in Christ. God is going to make sure of that. He will not allow us to be successful doing for Him in the flesh. The Lord will keep a thorn in the flesh, to guarantee that we never accomplish our purpose without walking in Christ.

Iniquity does not hold us. We hold it. God has a route to destroy the pride in us. The fleshy mind will tell us that we have traveled so far from God when we are operating in pride. But the truth of the matter is that we are only as far away as our obedience and humility.

1 Corinthians 4:5

5 Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts: and then shall every man have praise of God.

When we read this verse we often stop here, but the verse does not stop here. You see, when the Lord comes revealing our mindsets and how we walk in darkness He uses situations and circumstances that back us into corners and reveals to us our true disposition and reveals it to everyone else. This is not just to embarrass or humiliate us, but to cause us to hate the thing that brought us there . . . our ego. Only then can we walk in the Spirit of Christ. We must hate the image of ourselves that was created by the ego.