A Real Wow Problem with a Real Wow Answer

[HKHaugan]

What we have described as cul de sacs are really strongholds with a fancy French name. Just as a cul de sac is a dead end the same is true of strongholds. They are heart freezers, the real ‘dead ends.’ They keep us from breathing the freshness the Holy Spirit brings to our spiritual life in every next moment. When you build an idea to live by that is not from God it causes increased pressure on the heart due to the erosion of our ability to breathe spiritually.

To give a picture of what I mean take the human lung. There is a disease that deteriorates the lungs called emphysema. It is the result of the tars and nicotine slowly eroding and hardening the lung. Having seen a picture of an emphysema’ed lung it looks like and was described there as what happens when you fry liver. It turns from that deep reddish brown color to a dry greying piece of hardened leather. When you see someone dragging a cylinder of oxygen behind them it just might be they have emphysema. It is a non-reversible continuing condition until a person dies, at least so I am told. When the lungs go the heart is not far behind.

Strongholds, the cul de sacs in our mind, heart and spirit, perform the same execution. When you get to the point that your mind is no longer open to taking in challenging ideas and letting the Scripture speak to them there’s a good chance you’re dealing with an intellectual stronghold. The same is true of our heart if we can’t face challenges to our feelings and attitudes. Accordingly, when our spirit senses something that it knows is dark and foreboding or wonderful and exhilarating and our responses seem frozen. There is no question, a block needs removing. In each we are in a cul de sac, a stronghold that needs to be taken captive. One in which we can let the Lord Jesus stand with us, show us how to turn around, remove its narrow confines and take His lead on the way out to the highway He initially planned for us. This is the course of inner healing and the freedom it brings.

Let’s break open some of these mind, heart and spirit cul de sacs. We’ll begin with their origin and then take each in more detail as we go.

When God made Adam and Eve through the work of His Son and the power Of His Spirit, they were in a perfect relationship with Him and with each other (Ge.1:26, 2:7). The Holy Spirit was their life, their guide, their unity and their strength. But they decided to walk down a path in spite of God’s direct command not to. “Don’t eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen.1:17). At its end was not just one but a number of self-multiplying cul de sacs (Gen.3). Several things happened that developed the first strongholds. There was a path at the entrance of which stood the devil. First, Eve listened to his question “Did God really say…?” Then she was tempted in her mind as she stopped to consider it.

Observe what the devil was doing. He was getting her to doubt God’s Word and to think apart from Him. That’s the first mental cul de sac, the tearing of our mind from God's mind.

The heart cul de sac came right on the heels of the mental one, “…you’ll be like God knowing good and evil.” The tug on the heart was too much. The potential of controlling her life on her own was too strong. The fruit was “good for food, pleasing to the eye and desirable for gaining wisdom.”

Then the spirit cul de sac opened. It was motivated by what her mind and heart considered apart from God so she took some of the fruit and ate it. Immediately she got her husband who was with her to do the same.

Now both of them had lost contact with God, they reached a dead end together, no more life-giving Spirit.

Suddenly they realized they were naked. The operative word is ‘realized.’ Realization is an unexpected internal heart response. What they really found in their ‘realization’ was that they were spiritually naked. The Spirit that unified them was gone and the consequence was shattering. In essence they had walked down a path with a cul de sac from which there was no return. They tried their best to cover up. They “sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves” which all of us have been doing ever since. With every self-made cover-up come more complicated variations of the same as each individual puts their own spin on the process.

But their realization was far from over. They found themselves hiding among trees in Eden. What was that all about? Then the voice of God comes to them and asks a simple question, “Where are you?” That question was for their benefit. He already knew. So now realization comes in buckets. Four things are realized, “I heard you in the garden (God was now outside, distant, from them),” “I was afraid (fear replaced the Spirit),” “…because I was naked (internal spiritual nakedness which they could physically cover up)” and “they hid” which we try and do from God and one another (Gen.3:8-10).

But now came the most agonizing realization. Their fear, the need to cover it up, the impulse to hide, were all bundled into one horror that has plagued the heart, mind and spirit of man ever since, aloneness. They were experiencing spiritual separation from God and one another. Now there was individual and personal distance from every other living and material reality. Their unity with one another, with God and with their physical environment was gone. Even their own body worked against them. To protect and provide for them God sent them out of Eden lest they live in this awful inner realization forever. Sin was real, biting, constant, alienating and inescapable.

Aloneness has been the inherited frightening realization every human being since Adam and Eve experiences. This was built into the warning God had given Adam, the consequence of disobedience, death by aloneness. “If you eat of the fruit you will surely die and in the very next breath He says, “It’s not good for the man to be alone (Gen.2:18).” When you die spiritually you are one third dead. Only biological and emotional life remains. They are only as good and lasting as the Spirit who gave them spiritual life to begin with but He was gone.

They end up dying because what took the Spirit’s place was sin, the self-inflicted disease of fear-driven self-centeredness. As Paul so insightfully shared, “The wages of sin is death (Rom.6:23).”

Sin is the fountainhead of aloneness, the devil’s playground of temptation. Here he wanders in our secular wilderness seeking whom he can lure into his frustration and evil to exaggerate and harden our alone condition. From him come all the cul de sacs that lay along the road of our intellect, our heart and our spirit to isolate and alienate us until his grip takes its hold and we are dragged into the final hell of eternal aloneness where he is.

In complete contrast there is the other half, the shining half, of Paul’s insight, “…but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom.6:23).” This is the joyous proclamation of the reason Jesus came in the flesh, in a human body, mind, heart and Holy Spirit,--- to meet us in the ultimate cul de sac of our sin and aloneness where our mind, heart and spirit are scared, scarred, scoured and scored. There His Holy Spirit brings another realization, another spiritual alert. If by faith we receive Him as our personal Savior and Lord He is the One who turns us around in the middle of the cul de sac with His forgiveness and takes us out. In fact what the devil did to isolate us into evil Jesus turned around so we could be free in Him and live confidently in the world as a witness to Him. In Jesus we are not only restored in our relationship with God but the path to others is opened back up. There’s more good news next. This just the beginning.