What Good Fathers Do

5/24/2009

We had about fifteen or twenty people work on writing a novel. A novel is like a house—you can’t just start anywhere! It won’t work if the plumbers arrive first and do their work and then later the framers come and eventually the architect shows up. You can’t just start anywhere and have everyone do whatever they want. If you read this novel—it was done very quickly and beautifully—you’d never know it wasn’t written by one man, but there was absolutely no one man in charge.

While that sounds impractical, the novel exists to prove that it actually does work. We have the real thing to prove that something like that can be done without an official person being in charge. That sounds like it would be scary and chaotic but it’s already been done. We know it can work.

We had this same conversation yesterday. The leader we were talking with didn’t say it was impossible when we were describing these same things to him. He said, “That’s very interesting and that’s what I’ve always hoped for. In the early days of our existence we didn’t organize things. But we weren’t growing the way I wanted to grow so we started organizing things and we’ve grown faster as a result.”

He said, “That’s very interesting because for years, that was the hope in my heart. Then I felt we needed to organize things and it’s been working.” But he didn’t say it’s impossible not to, nor did he say that it’s untrue or unbiblical. He didn’t say, “Well, we know the apostles broke up into ones, twos, threes, four and fives,” and “We know the apostles had them broken down into hundreds…” The way he put it was, “This is very intriguing to me because the principles are the same, but the way you are applying them doesn’t involve the same structure we felt we needed to go to.” He wasn’t in any way resistant; he just didn’t understand which is fine.

That’s very much a peace to me. It was okay that he had to have structure like a crutch.

We used that very word with him. We said, “If you’re running a race, you can bring a crutch in case you fall down. Or you can throw the crutch aside and run faster, even though it’s frightening to do that.”

It’s easier to grow faster too, without the crutch. But the crutch gives a certain structure and a skeleton to keep everything together. But in the end it should work that the Spirit is Lord! It should work.

You can think I’m cuckoo, crazy and have a screw loose for saying this, but I believe that’s where you all are going as a Body, because you already understand this idea of being led by the Spirit and following the Life. That’s the same thing that allows Jesus to lead when you are all together too.

It is very good for me to hear. I think it is even better…but it’s harder.

Yes, it’s harder.

It’s very hard to give room to everyone to experiment—and especially if you have many people. But if the Wind is the structure, it must work. How would you describe it—is it more cumbersome?

Maybe not cumbersome, because in English that means it’s burdensome and a weight.

It’s more work or more…I don’t know how to say it.

Well, being a good father is harder than making a bunch of rules, right? Some fathers try to run their households by saying, “Everybody goes to bed at 10:00. Everybody does this. Finish your homework by such and such a time.”

That would be easier. : )

It is easier to make rules. : ) It’s harder to look into the eyes of each child, every day, and see who they are and feel for them and then give them liberties or pull things back. It’s harder to know whether to bring discipline or to bring encouragement. It’s easier to make rules. It’s easier to have systems in place.

It’s not something that can change in one day, but it will begin to change if your hearts are toward that and you have the building blocks of being led by the Spirit. You can feel, “Did not our hearts burn within us?” And you ask, “Was it the Lord, was it the Lord?” Or you see the light bulb pop on for someone or something. When you have the right building blocks, it’s limitless where it can all go. But if you don’t, it’s just an organization.

An organism grows like a child grows. The child outgrows the old clothing, and they outgrow them again and again. He is always growing and the child can always be exactly what he was meant to be. You all have such beautiful building blocks that I think you can expect in the next five and ten years to have even more exciting things happen in what the Lord shows you, because you’re open to that.

I think for me, when you were talking I didn’t understand everything and it felt distant. But it’s just because I’m used to doing it the way we’ve always done it. But it would be wonderful to just let the Spirit lead and get rid of the skeleton and see it stand without the skeleton!

You will actually enjoy it more and be stronger with the way I’m describing. There is something about giving up control that brings more grace and more power and more trust. The man who does that will have fewer burdens. One could become very wearied from all of the responsibilities crutches bring. Moses was weary from many, many responsibilities, and he was a good man, obviously. He was on the Mount of Transfiguration with Jesus. We know how Jesus felt about him since He chose him to be there with Elijah. That was very special.

Our decreasing so that Jesus could increase will actually give increase. It will make a man even more influential and special. Samuel was far more influential and special than Saul could ever hope to be. And Samuel had none of the administration or Jethro things to make it flow better. Samuel had none of that, but he was even more powerful than Saul. Again, David was a good man, but that doesn’t mean that having a kingship was God’s idea. It just means that God worked through that.

It’s very special. When he was chosen, he had a heart after God.

Yeah, I wish I had that kind of heart.

He had that heart both before and after the structure was given. God didn’t give the structure, but He said, “Let them have a king.” He then worked through it to find the man.

Remember it was also prophesied, “If I give you a king the way you want, then a series of bad things will come from it, unfortunately.” Even when men mean well, it’s just like wearing a green mask designating a person as “special.” It changes things just a little bit when you add something unnatural in order to accomplish or protect something. There will be a series of unintended consequences.

So God allowed them to have a king, but He said, “Here’s what will happen. They will start taking your money, and they’ll enslave you and your children.” That can happen to varying degrees in today’s religious world and you could project and describe it in different ways. But always, in the end, gifts will be squashed.

What does squashed mean?

Crushed. And not intentionally, necessarily. We don’t know for an absolute fact that the man who spoke yesterday, for example, was the right man to speak yesterday. We don’t know that for sure. That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have spoken at all, but we don’t know for a fact that there weren’t four other brothers out of those 1,500 who had a more important message for that day, that place, and those people. We’ll never know.

Do you feel like that?

Do I believe that’s what happened yesterday?

Yes, do you mean in that actual case yesterday, that there could have been four men with something more important to say?

Yes, do you believe that?

I don’t know who those four men were.

Yes, of course.

And I don’t know that there even were four men who had something to say. But I know that the possibility has to exist, that when revelation comes to the second, the first one sits down. Which means that instead of three hours, maybe what the Lord wanted him to do was speak for only one hour. But we’ll never know, because the way it was set up, it was anticipated that he would speak for three hours. I knew before we ever got there that he would speak for three hours.

Ohh!!

That’s unfortunate in a way. That doesn’t mean that what he said wasn’t good. But we don’t know for sure that he was the one to speak, because we created a system that disallows anyone else from speaking.

•  What Good Fathers Do