Orphan Spirit

This is the Truth Network The masculine journey starts here now. I have no idea who that might be. I have no idea. Yeah. Alright, so I guess I'm supposed to speak of my thoughts. So yeah, I have mentioned a time or two and I think probably why it had, it was just a, I had an epiphany as I would hear the Wild Art team talking about it. This orphan spirit is, it really goes along with sonship and as you know that's my other favorite topic, but I think they go hand in hand.

And I think, I'm going to pause there for a second. You can't be in both camps, right? I mean you can't be walking in sonship and walking in orphan spirit. Well, kind of you can actually.

You can drift back into it and that's kind of what we're going to talk about. With that being said, you know, for the longest time and I would have, if you would have said, oh you have the orphan spirit. No, I have great parents, you know. They love me, they were there, they were present in my life most of the time. But it's that most of the time, the time that was not is kind of where this came from.

My dad not being there in my adolescence, I've mentioned that many times on the radio show. But, you know, that whole idea of orphan spirit, you were talking about you can't be in both camps, but that's kind of what we're talking about here is the fact that you can be aware of it and you can be healed from it. And you can really see God as your father and he comes in in a mighty way, but you can still, I mentioned it, I feel like I see it in two ways.

One is that maybe you're not allowing him to father you in certain areas that are blind spots or ways that you've been able to kind of handle things on your own. Or you may have some victory or healing in it, but you fall back in, pressure comes and you fall back into a default of not really trusting in God, but trusting in yourself. Well, that comes up quite a bit in our conversations. We all have an opportunity to surrender to him or to try to handle things ourselves. And again, the orphan spirit comes.

It came to me whenever my dad wasn't there and then my stepdad, he came into my life and even though he was present, he didn't handle my heart well. And that's, you know, you just kind of make a vow that says, well, you know, nobody's coming for me. It's all up to me.

I've got to make it happen. And what's really frustrating, I've said many times, is if you haven't been fathered well, it's all up to me, but you don't really have the skills or the sense that you haven't had the example, you haven't learned a lot of things, you haven't been fathered in those things, but yet it's all up to me. So it's kind of, that is where Morgan, and he's doing the sum chip talk, he says, God will raise fatherlessness in you so that you'll step into that.

And if you're not aware of it, again, most people don't talk about it. We just think, well, I'm just the way I am, a byproduct of how I was raised or whatever. Well, we've got all these broken families and all these fathers that may have been in the house but weren't really present and all that stuff, and all that stuff adds up into, and we're talking about it from this perspective of sons, daughters have the same thing.

They can have an orphan spirit. But, you know, you can have your father, mother present in your life, but you can still take on that thing of it's all up to me and I have to own it all. You know, yeah, I'm saved and I love Jesus, but you can still be very dependent on your own abilities, yourself, and it can be very frustrating. Again, I think God raises that into you to begin to say, for you to see, no, you can't really handle it without me.

You know, part of it for me, you can do nothing, Jesus said. I think there's a difference. I think of when you have multiple siblings in a house, right, they're raised by the same parents in theory. Right now the parents change over time and they mature, but yet they're all completely different.

Each of those children are. And so you could be talking about an independence, someone has an independence, which is different potentially than orphan spirit, right? You know, the orphan spirit, as you were saying, is living my life absent of relying on God.

Right, yep. Right, you know, I can be an independent person and still rely on God, but not necessarily have to rely on those other things around me. Right, and so I think there can be some misunderstanding of what we're talking about. Yeah, I don't want to strictly say maybe independent is not the best. You do see that so sometimes in people that are independent, they're solely sufficient in their selves. You know, you see some people that become very dependent on somebody, that's not good either. I think we have to have a sense of who we are by ourselves and not have to depend on codependent, they say.

Not depending on somebody else, and it's good to have that self-confidence, but it can be taken to the extreme where I got life whooped without God involved. And that's really what we're talking about. And, you know, it's not as overt, it doesn't always raise its head that way, but I believe that it's probably more, I mean, it affected my life, and I didn't realize it until I'm 45, 50 years old. So, but that's why, you know, you hear other guys' stories, and a lot of guys have the same background. We've had some guys even at this last boot camp that never knew their fathers. Right. And you have that, or maybe they have mothers, and I think this all ties in, I wanted to make this point too. This is a natural fit to me to follow up from last week's show of the wounding, because this is a byproduct, I think, of the wounding is the orphan spirit that we get.

Absolutely. Hopefully we'll be able to give some insight through some clips. We are kind of short on guys here, but I think we all have a perspective on this, and hopefully we can shed some light on it. Yeah, I'd be hard-pressed to find anyone that would say, oh, I've never felt orphan-like, or like I'm pulled away from my parents. Everybody has those moments in their life where they're just, nah, they don't love me, no, they don't care for me. Somebody, to some extent, where you're pulled away from all that. Okay, I lied and said I am not in the beginning. Yeah, there's a lot to this subject.

I think there is. I think another way to phrase it is, where have I felt abandoned? Where have I felt like I'm on my own and you've said this before, it's all up to me. I think we can all, even if you've had great parents, as you said, there's times that you've felt abandoned in your life, and in those times, what do you turn to? You turn to this feeling of, hey, well, it's all up to me now.

You know, I have to make it work. You have the first clip. Andy, you want to talk a little bit about it? Yeah, so this comes from a great new show on Amazon called House of David. Kind of like The Chosen, only on David's life.

And it's first season, so we're just getting in early into his life. And, you know, we know that David went out into the fields and was a shepherd boy. And we see his father, we know his father just from a little bit from, and there's some creative license that they used on some of this stuff. But you know from his father, whenever they were looking for a king to be anointed, his father's, David wasn't even anywhere to be found.

He was out in the field. So it looks like his father didn't consider him a choice son or whatever. And you see some of that, even though in this, in House of David, you do see a love of a father, you even hear him saying it. You also see wounding that comes from his father in this clip. And basically, just without getting all into it, David, they've had a problem with sheep being killed. And David's father's kind of getting onto him. But you see also David's brother giving him a hard time, the father doesn't really step in. And then also there's a wounding from David, how he was connected to his mother, how his dad wounds his heart.

Let's listen to the clip and we'll talk about it. Forgive us, father. I was distracted by the shepherd. David. Father.

How many did you lose? Four sheep. I'm not a rich man, David. It was the old king. That lion is dead.

It was him. Until we truly kill him, the sheep cannot graze there. We will lose more. David, you know I can graze no other lands. Then let's gather some men and hunt it down.

They wouldn't come. Why? Because of me. It is not because of you. All of Bethlehem treats me like it is, just as my brothers do.

I'm nothing in this house. You are my son, as they are. I will kill the lion. You will not. I will take care of it. What did you do last time? I should have buried that with your mother.

I don't want to hear that instrument in my house ever again. Heed my words, David. Father, this is all I have left of her.

Where are you going? Where I belong. David.

David! Show me your purpose. Show me your will for me. Show me who I am.

Please. So you see this complicated relationship between David and his father. And it's bigger than just a disagreement on how to handle the lion that keeps killing the sheep. But you see David speaking of the nature of his father and mother's relationship and not from the positive standpoint. And you could see that he's carrying something there that his father isn't entering into his life truly as a father. And there's some wounding there and you go look and David wasn't always the best father. And you just wonder how he carried some of that over into his life. But you do see him go at the very end of there calling out to God, who am I? And we know he was a man after God's own heart. And he was really crying out for a father there.

And I think he began at an early age to see that he had a father aside from his own natural father. Yeah, and we'll get into more of that as we come back from the break. We do have a boot camp coming up November 20th through 23rd. It's in Royston, Georgia.

Yes, we're back down in Georgia. What a great place to be. It's an amazing camp. You can go register now, believe it or not.

MasculineJourney.org. We'll talk with you after the break. I said, you know, God, I'm going to ultimately acknowledge what's going on for all these doors to be open for me to come to this camp.

I just want to seek you. So throughout that time since I've been here, you know, just the illumination of God speaking to me through my heart and through my mind and through my soul is just, it's went to a whole other level since I've been here at the boot camp. The covenant of silence after the talks and being able to go out and just submit myself to being able to hear from God and what we've been working on. And it's just been transparent in my life. The level of the sanctification process, the discipleship process and coming here, I feel like this is exactly where I'm supposed to be.

Register today at MasculineJourney.org Welcome back to Masculine Journey. I was just waiting on it to keep going, man. I was listening for the rest of that song.

I really hate it. I couldn't let it go for another 20 seconds because it's just getting good. Yeah, that's the best part, man. It was kicking in. Well, it wasn't the best part. It was the part, the most well-known part. You can't go alone.

White snake, here I go again. And, you know, that's kind of where I got to thinking about this. Everybody knows I talk about the Orban spirit, but I said, I was thinking, you know, I don't think we've ever done a show on it. And then that song hit me and I was like, you know, that's the kind of attitude that we're talking about there. You know, it's here I go again, I'm all alone, you know, and that's where you feel like you're all alone. And there were times when people would come in your life, a girlfriend or whatever, break up, then you're back to being on your own again. And I don't know, I just think it's just a mindset that we have, and that song, I guess, speaks to that. Yeah, it does. And I feel I do the easiest way.

Yeah. This topic is conceptually easy and conceptually hard, both at the same time, you know, because we have this feeling of what Orphan means. I'll probably go ahead and do my clip, if that's all right, but I need to take a little while to set it up.

If you don't know, well, let me think how I want to set this up. If you don't know some of my story, and I've talked about it on the air, when I was young, 7, 8, somewhere in there, I was molested by a family member, a nephew that was older than me, 5, 6 years older than me. So I guess I would have had to have been about 10 at the time, you know, when this happened.

And through a series of events I'll talk about after the clip, I couldn't – well, I'll just talk about it now. There had been some history with my mom and dad. I grew up in a household with my mother and my father.

They were there the whole time. You know, my parents lived together the whole time that my dad was alive. He passed when I was 21. And so, you know, they were always together, but that doesn't mean that I was without wounding in my house. And part of my wounding, if you know some of my story, is my older sister who would say some very mean things to me. She was 28 years older than me, so it wasn't like just a couple years older than me. And she would say some very mean things, and my parents would never – they heard it.

They were there. They witnessed it and never stepped in on my behalf. And so when you're a juvenile and you think like a juvenile and you reason like a juvenile, when these things happened to me from my nephew, I felt like I couldn't go to my parents because they didn't even stand up to me when my sister said things, you know, stand up for me.

When my sister said things, you know, what are they going to do when I accuse her son of having done something to me? You know, and again, as an adult you may say, well, that doesn't make sense. But as a kid, you think like a kid, right?

And so fast forward to – and I promise you I'll get to the clip. Fast forward to my first boot camp in 2002, and I'd been stuck on the book Wild at Heart. I'd read it, but I'd been stuck on the chapter on the wound for the longest time because I couldn't figure out, believe it or not, what my deepest wound at that time was I had to work on. And I think along the way God would bring up this whole subject of what happened between me and my nephew. And as I'd done for so many years, I would shove it right back down and say, no, I'm not going to let that be my wound, you know, almost an arrogance kind of thing. And so I go into the wound session with John. You know, he's doing the talk on the wound. And I go out for quiet time, and I'm just – I know I got to go out, and I got to talk to God about this.

And so I go out on the side of the mountain in Colorado, and I say, okay, Jesus, you know, what's my wound? You know, and he didn't start laughing, but I could almost hear him laughing. You know, he's like – I've been trying to tell you. You know, he's like, Sam, you know what your wound is.

And he starts bringing it up, and I start getting angry, right? And so we work through that. We work through that, and he helps me have some breakthrough.

Now, fast forward to my next boot camp a year later, a couple years later, 2004 – yeah, that's two years later – back in Colorado, and I'm out working on wound again. And part of what John's teaching us on is reconciliation, reconciliation in inviting Jesus back into those old parts and helping reconcile us to the younger part of ourself that's been broken. In Isaiah, when Jesus quotes, you know, why he's come in Isaiah 61, and it says, I've come to heal the brokenhearted, that word brokenhearted means shattered, like throwing a glass up in the air, and shards are everywhere. And so what John talks about before we go out for this session is invite Jesus in and say, Jesus, can you bring some of these shards back into my broken heart and make them whole again? And so we go out, and I'm excited, and when we go out on the mountain, I think we're going to talk about something. But we go out, and it's time to enter into it. And Jesus starts telling me, the adult Sam, we're going to deal with this wound issue again.

And we need to invite young Sam into the story. And I know this may sound crazy to you out there, but I want you to think about something. Time does not exist for Jesus. God is before time, during time, after time. There is no time in God, right? And so there is nothing impossible with Jesus.

And Jesus can take you back into parts of your story. And so we're sitting there on the mountain, and I have my eyes closed, and I hear Jesus say, Sam, call out to little Sam, and tell him it's okay to come out. And I'm like, okay, I guess. It sounds a little weird, but I'm like, okay, Sam, it's okay. And I hear this little voice say, I can't do it, he'll be mean to me again. And I started to say something, and Jesus said, no, you need to be quiet now, older Sam. And he starts saying something to younger Sam, I don't know what it was, talking to him, trying to get him to come out, to come out of the shadows, and to come back to be a part of my whole heart.

And it gets to the point where he allows me to talk again, and I don't have to. I get to apologize to my younger self for how I have treated my own heart, because for the longest time, I hated that person that I was, because as a juvenile, and you think juvenile ways, instead of blaming my nephew for everything that happened in my life about that, about that instance, I blame myself for having let it happen. And so I had an anger for little Sam. Is that making sense to everybody? Darrell Bock Well, yeah, you're explaining the kid right now, and I'm sure that makes even more sense of how that impacted your life, because that's exactly the conversation that they had.

Oh, it does. And so I had to say, look, I'm so very sorry, and let myself grieve for little Sam and get some healing. And now we get to the clip. And so on this clip, you have a story of a man named Antoine Fisher. It's from the movie Antoine Fisher, and it has, I can't remember his name again. What's his name?

Darrell Bock Denzel Washington. Denzel Washington plays the therapist, and what happens to Antoine when he is coming up through the foster system, he is abused in every way, sexually, emotionally, physically, verbally, everything. And when he gets out of the foster system, he has no place to turn but to the Army.

So it may have been the Navy, the military, the armed services. And so he joins it and gets into lots of trouble, and he's sent to this therapist who starts working on some things, and he starts getting to some breakthrough. And at this point, we come into the – Antoine's come to Thanksgiving at the therapist's house, and they're standing by the fire, and he thanks him for having him come for Thanksgiving.

He never really had one at his previous homes that he's been in. And he gives him something, which is a poem, and I want you to listen to this poem. You okay? Yes, I'm okay. I just never had a real Thanksgiving at the Tate's before. You didn't have a real one over here either, I guess.

No, no. You have a real nice family. Thank you. I got this for you for having me over today. I got a gift for me. Is it mine? No. It's a poem.

You can't see it without my glasses. Why don't you read it for me? I'd rather you read it.

Please. Who will cry for the little boy, lost and all alone? Who will cry for the little boy, abandoned without his own? Who will cry for the little boy, he'd cry himself to sleep? Who will cry for the little boy, who he never had but keeps? Who will cry for the little boy, who walked the burning sand? Who will cry for the little boy, the boy inside the man? Who will cry for the little boy, who knew well hurt and pain? Who will cry for the little boy, who died and died again? Who will cry for the little boy, a good boy he tried to be? who will cry for the little boy who cries inside of me, who will cry for the little boy, Antoine. I will.

I always do. And the part that I wanted to share with that is that sometimes it's hard to get fully past the orphan spirit in some areas until you let God work on some woundedness, right? There were certain things that I tried to get past just by sheer will, through prayer, through lots of things, but until I was willing to let God take me into some very uncomfortable places, some very hurtful places, some very places I didn't want to go into, I was never going to be able to cry for the little boy that cried inside of me. And until I could get to that place, I was never going to be able to be free and be anything but an orphan, not that God wasn't pursuing me, not that God wasn't loving me and wanting to be there and be there for me.

I just wasn't letting him do it or didn't know how to let him do it. And once that occurred, then that part of me could have healing, that part of me could have restoration, and those shards of my heart could come back together and be whole. And maybe that's what God will call you into in this season as you deal with the orphan spirit is he may bring it up to you, but he may take you back into the wounds that we talked about last week, and may have you actually forgive yourself on some things that you never owned to begin with. And so I would encourage you this week just to lean into God on this topic and say, God, where am I still acting like an orphan?

And maybe it's obvious to you. Maybe it's not, but let God walk you through that. Let him love on you, but take time if he tells you, and love on yourself. Love on your little version of yourself that made some mistakes or was hurt or got hurt along the way. It'll be worth it because the freedom on the other side is so valuable that God promises. We'll talk to you next week. This is the Truth Network.