Time To Break Through The Shame Of Your Past And God Will Give You Double For Your Trouble!

 

“For your shame ye shall have double; and for confusion they shall rejoice in their portion: therefore in their land they shall possess the double: everlasting joy shall be unto them” Isaiah 61:7.

The Lord Is Ready to Set You Free So That You Can Set The Captives Free (A Prophetic Dream)

I had prophetic dream a while back, in the dream I went into what looked like an old rickety house. I was standing in a room and could see over to the other side of it. There were women behind these bars being kept in a sort of prison. They were looking at myself and a friend of mine that is called to set women free of abuse. They were looking at us as if to say, “please help us!” They were almost begging us! The next thing I knew I was upstairs in a room that had three beings in it. One man and two women. The man was in control. I knew these were spirits because they were floating instead of walking. I believe this upstairs room represented the principalities and powers of the air in the second heaven.

These spirits were keeping the women below in their prison. The Lord told me that this was the antichrist spirit, the Jezebel spirit, and the spirit of religion. They began to try and restrain me from getting down to the level that the captive women were on so that we would not be able to set them free. All at once I crawled into a register duct trying to escape these beings grasp! (representing the fiery trials that we go through to get to our harvest) These ducts were very narrow and at times I had to squeeze through them to crawl down. (Sometimes we are put in tight places so that we will humble ourselves and go low to be able to relate to the people that God is sending us to!) At those times, what seems like demotion is actually the process of promotion into your destiny! In the meantime my friend and I led the women out of this captivity! The Lord Wants To Set You Free Now The Lord has been speaking to me very clearly that He wants to deliver His people from the shame of their past even the shame that they are holding onto today. That which these three spirits have been keeping them in bondage to.

He has been telling me that this shame has been keeping people from going to their next level in Him and keeping them from their harvest! He wants to release an even greater weight of glory through them IF they will allow Him to take them through this process. He is saying that, like Elijah after his great victory at Mt. Carmel, there are many who have gone into a cave of fear and depression because of the effect of these three spirits and the shame that has been caused by one or more of them but He can not deliver them until they recognize it for what it is. He wants them to give Him permission to deal with it. He wants you to know that this is not how it is going to be forever but that He is about to give you double for your trouble!

Many years ago, even as a Christian, I thought that I was doing all of the so called “things” that I should be doing as a good Christian. I was praying every morning, reading 10 chapters a day in the word, witnessing to people, leading worship, teaching bible study and all of the other “things” that I could find to do to be a “good Christian”. All of which I had come to trust in like a formula that would get me brownie points with God!

Suddenly, I had a huge battle with the spirit of Jezebel, religion and the antichrist spirit. These spirits of coarse hate the prophets and want to derail your destiny if they are able. After I went through this long bout, I felt so guilty about what I thought was my fault for allowing this to happen in my life that I actually began to build walls up around myself to keep people from knowing that I was a “failure”. Suddenly nothing that I tried to do was working like it did in the past. Little did I know that God was transitioning me out of the religious system so that I could begin to do the real work that He had planned before the foundation of the world! You see, God doesn’t work in our formulas so at times

He will allow things to happen in our life that will shake you out of your formulas (Religious rituals) of the past. Then and only then can we see a new aspect of Him and His kingdom and so that He can take you into your true destiny. In this place of transition is where depression and oppression can set in if you do not know what God is doing at the time and if you do not know that He has a plan for your life even past this place called transition! This in turn causes shame to take hold and before too long you are buried in a mountain of your own demise.

Let God Show You That He Will Speak To You Even In The Little Things

Through this process we begin to see our dependency on God and not on our formulas. Many people begin to believe that God does not love them in their process and that is because they have never had a season of prayer in which God could show them who He is and how much He truly loves them. If you have never done that I urge you to get away into a closet and find out how God’s nature truly is. This season of prayer in my life has kept me through many trials. I learned much about His nature during this time. I call this the wilderness experience. Don’t take your prayer list in. Just go in and say, “God, show me who you are in my life and how much you love me no matter how long it takes!” I promise He will show you! This is not time to quit! It is time to press into Him. Even if you feel nothing. You see, in the cave experience is where Elijah found out that God wasn’t in the wind, the earthquake or the fire but it was the still small voice of God that would bring Him out!! God is getting ready to bring many of you into a knowledge that you can hear his voice at a whole new level even when their isn’t a huge event taking place in your life! He doesn’t just want to rescue you and show up when you are being challenged by the prophets of Baal but in your everyday life! This is what intimacy brings to our lives. It brings a knowing that He is even in the small things and speaks even in the mundane.

Like Elijah after His great victory at Mt. Carmel, we allow the enemy to chase us into the cave of our fear and shame because Jezebel wants to isolate us so that we will not finish our course and so that we will build a wall around ourselves of self defense. Just when you have had a great victory and the mundane sets in is when that devil named, “depression” comes to taunt you and says, “There can not be anything more for you.” It then begins to tell you that all of your past is going to be revealed and you had better give up now while you are ahead! This is the time in our life where we can make bad decisions if we are not aware of the enemies tactics! (Not a good time to make major decisions like marriage, divorce, jobs,etc.) The Great Cover Up The devil is a liar!! So we begin a great cover up! Somehow we think that no one will find out that we failed in an area! Through our great victory, as Elijah’s at Mt. Carmel, we think that we have become like god’s to people and that if they see our scars that they will fail also. So instead of telling people that we failed and God rescued us, we try to hide the fact that we are human. Some people do this all of their life from childhood because of things that happened to them such as rape, incest and other abuse. Not that these things are the person’s fault but the enemy tries to make them believe that it is.

When we are Christians and we fall, it is even worse at times because the religious people will tell us that we must not know God because if we truly did, we would not have fallen like that! (have you looked at almost every hero in the bible lately?) They were men not only of great victories but of huge failures also and God wants people to see this to see that it isn’t in their own strength that they did these feats or even a formula of faith but it is God that did this so that He gets all of the glory!!

1 Corinthians 1:26-29 “For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: That no flesh should glory in his presence.”

I have seen so many young believers in my 30 plus years as a Christian who have fallen away from the call of God on their life because someone shamed them into thinking that they must be flawed individuals. That they should be walking upright at all times and if they fall, they must not be Christians. When all along they do the same thing! Once someone is told by an authority figure that they must be flawed, it is hard to make them understand that there is forgiveness for them because to them this person is God’s representative and this goes into the psyche of a person and becomes a religious stronghold that is very destructive in their life. We as leaders must learn that not everyone becomes born again and is grown up immediately. We have to stop this business of shaming people. Jesus came to deliver them from shame not make them ashamed! The Holy Spirit is well able to convict them as they are able to receive it and no sooner! We must begin to give them grace to grow just like the Lord intends for them to. Besides, some people have way more to overcome than we did and this stuff has become a huge stronghold in their mind! It takes a renewing of the mind in order for them to become free from all that the enemy has done, sometimes for generations back in their life. The enemy started in great grandpa just to be sure that this person that God has called would not fulfill their destiny!

~Let’s Go And Let God Deal With It~

If you never allow the Lord to uncover this shame and deal with it, get rid of it, and let Him show you who you are in Him in spite of what happened, the enemy will always be able to keep you in your “cave” so that you will not be able to go on to the next level and release the greater weight of the glory of God! Elijah went on after God delivered him from the cave to pass down the double to Elisha!

When I went through this as a Christian, I thought that I had to keep it hidden so that no one would know that I had failed God. The thing of it was I was deceived by a Jezebel spirit. I bought her lie! I thought that I was being strong by not letting anyone know that I was hurting! I didn’t want to let anyone down that might be looking up to me and my husband. Instead, I kept on ministering out of this place of hurt and I was angry at people because they did not understand or see my hurt heart!

This reminds me of Elijah telling God that he did thus and such and there were none but him that was doing what was right! I had all of the so called leaders that had told me that I did not need to speak of this (for one thing it would have made them look bad!) I had them say that I was finished as a leader! I heard Satan whisper in my ear that I could never rise above this since it had happened to me as a leader. I even had Satan quote scriptures to me that sounded like if I failed God I would never be able to get back up!

Sound familiar… like Job’s comforters? The enemy told me that I could not be healed in my body because what I had was a result of what I had done! This is how Satan keeps it going on and on in your life! This is what shame does to an individual! People listen! Why would Jesus have made a way for us to walk in our destiny and then say to us, “You failed so now you are useless?” No! He would not!! He paid a great price to deliver you from this devil named shame!! It is time to get up!! Get going!! Get this thing done!! Satan only wins if we quit!! Do you hear me? He only wins if we quit!!

I decree that you are going to stop believing this lie right now through the knowledge of the Holy Spirit and His delivering power! What you did or didn’t do to cause you to feel ashamed doesn’t matter. What matters is that God has a plan for your life even when you have failed! Look at Samson and what he went through as a consequence of his sin and still, he fulfilled his destiny!

The Lord is telling me to say to you right now, “It is time to come out of that cave Elijah! It is time to stop grinding at the mill, Samson! It is time to get up off of your knees, David! It is time to arise, Deborah! It is time to come out of the desert, Moses! It is time to leave this shame in the dust and focus on your destiny!”

I don’t care how old you are! God is ready to heal you of this shame and He is saying that many of you are living in a prison of the enemy’s making because you allowed religion, Jezebel and the antichrist spirit to somehow deceive you into building a wall of shame around you! He did this so that you will not go forth but the Lord says,

“Let’s deal with this once and for all and be healed from it and I will give you double for your trouble!! I will give you beauty for ashes!! I will give you favor instead of disgrace!! I have need of you for this season. Arise out of the prostration and frustration in which circumstances have kept you! Come out of obscurity! Shine and flash forth your light!! Let this test that you went through become your testimony! Let this mess become your message!! Let this hard situation become your highest level of ministry!! You have been through it so that you can speak to it!”

God wastes nothing in our lives and will get glory out of all of our messes if we will allow him to heal us and then find out who we are in Him. We are not our messes! We are HIS AMBASSADORS! We are His children whom He loves. We are the King’s kids and He doesn’t throw us away for making a mistake! He wants us to succeed. There are lives awaiting our return!

So How Do I Get Free And Receive The Double?

So how do I get free from this shame and out from under the control of these three spirits and their effect on my life? One day, as I was under so much oppression that I could barely function, I took a walk. Nature always helps clear your mind for God to speak it seems. I did my walk and cut through the cemetery (…always quiet in there…). I sat down under a tree and cried out to God that I wanted to go on in ministry but that I didn’t want folks to know about what I had been through. The Lord spoke to me and said, “Jo Ellen, I will never reveal this to anyone if you do not allow me to and that is what a good friend does.” (covers until you are ready) Don’t you just love Jesus? “But if you will give me permission, I will reveal this so that I can heal it and you can either keep it hid and you will be okay but you can not go to the next level in me! Or I can reveal it and heal it and then you will leave the devil without any power over you. Then you can go forward and receive double for your trouble! It is your decision! I have great plans for you but you will only go as far as you will let me heal the old wounds.”

You see, once it is dealt with then you can get up and go forward using this as a testimony to set others free! You overcome the enemy by the word of your testimony! Then when the enemy says, “Remember what you did?”, then you can say, “Yes Mr. Devil I do but Jesus has set me free!!” Therefore the enemy will come and find nothing in you to bring oppression!!

Don’t you think it is time to allow Jesus to gently heal you of your shame? He wants all of this stuff to be used for His glory if you will drop your pride and allow him to expose it. It is time to get up and dust the old off of you and allow God to shine even brighter through you! It is time to forgive the naysayers, the aggravators and the dictators and go forth!! It is your time for the double portion!

Know That All You Have been Through Is Working For The Good

Romans 8:28-39 “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.

What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us? He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things? Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us.

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

 

– by Jo Ellen Stevens
Arise Shine!

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Jo Ellen Stevens of TCIC Ministries is a Prophetic speaker, author, worshiper and intercessor. She has ministered with her husband for 23 years and was a worship leader at the Assembly of God for many years. She is an ordained minister (Restoration Ministries) and works with Restoration Ministries in their Ministry Rooms doing prophetic worship with her husband. She has taught many bible studies and have led many intercessory prayer groups.