Many Christians go through life asking God to spare them from trials and troubles. Most people want their life to be pain free. This is natural, and there is nothing wrong with wanting a smooth, fun filled life. I have found, however, that the greatest joys come after the deepest falls.
What most people miss is the importance of the trials of life. The trials build our resilience. It builds our character to handle greater and greater storms. So, instead of praying for God to keep us from the trials, let us pray that God would give us the strength to withstand them and the wisdom to understand them.
An impure metal is worth less than a pure one. Twenty-four karat gold is worth more than 20-karat gold, and 12-karat gold is worth less than both. To get the impurities out of the metal, whether it’s gold, silver, brass, or copper, you must heat up the metal to its melting point. Once the metal is liquefied, the impurities appear at the surface. You are then able to scoop the slag – the impurities – off of the top. You can then cool the metal, and repeat the process. The more times you do this process, the purer the metal will become.
The same it is in life. We all have impurities as part of us. This is a given. If you are breathing, you have things in you that you need to be purified of – things that you may not even know about, that may even be inherited. Many of the impurities that we have deep within ourselves are some of our most cherished beliefs that were put upon us during early childhood.
As children of God, He puts us through the fire to cleanse us from our impurities. What I’m going to do in this blog is to go over the refinement process, what the Bible says about it, and give an example in my life of what it looked like for me.
Rejoicing in the Fire
In the first part of this message, I brought to mind James 1:2. However, I did not include the rest of the thought. You see, the third and fourth verses are a continuation of the second. Here are verses 2 and 3: “My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into diverse temptations: knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience.”
Why should we rejoice in the fire? Because the fire that you are going through is designed to build your faith and resiliency. Yes, the fire is hot. Yes, the refinement process is painful. However, the reward of going through the fire, instead of avoiding it and holding on to all of your impurities, is far greater than not going through it at all.
In verse 4, after the two verses mentioned above, James says to let patience have her perfect work in us, so that we are whole, complete, perfect, and lack nothing. In other words, the fire builds patience. If we are able to hold on to that patience, and are willing to wait out the refinement process, and engage in it, we will come out the other side as the pure and precious person we were designed to be.
The Process of Refinement
There are three main parts to the refiner’s fire. This is a teaching that is derived from teachings by John Bevere on this subject.
The three main parts to the refinement process that God puts us through are the promise, the process, and the promotion.
The promise comes first. When God wants you to be refined, He will give you a promise of what He has planned for the refinement. It may be a word from Him in a dream or from the Bible. It may be a period of time that you emulate what He has planned for you.
I’ll give you an example of this from my life. That night that I did the meditation set me into the process of being refined from porn. The following 2 months, I was completely porn-free. That was the promise period where God was showing me a little of what He had planned, i.e. freedom from pornography. I did not know this at the time, but as the saying goes, my hindsight on this is now 20-20.
After the promise is given, the refinement really gets going. This is when the major trial starts. This may not happen suddenly. Rather, it may happen slowly as God gradually turns up the heat.
In my life, this part started at the end of October when I started going through emotion clearing sessions with a friend of ours. This introduced me to the fire. Those first few months were very hard. I was still getting acclimated to the heat of the fire, but after a while, once I started addressing what was really the problem, I started handling it a lot better.
The months during winter of 2019-2020 were a few of the darkest few months of my life. As I was pulling up the rotting corpse of pornography and began to go to the root of why I was dealing with it, the forces of darkness put everything in their arsenal to attack me mentally. On the outside, everything seemed to be fine. I had done a few years of personal growth, and I was really good at putting that mask on. But on the inside I was dying. I now know that what was dying was the old me that was bound by sin and Satan. That is why my book is subtitled “Freedom from Sin, Satan, and Pornography.” There were many times when I wanted to get out of the fire. However, I did not see any way out of it except to just move through it.
As I said in the beginning, this is where a lot of Christians in particular get mixed up. Whenever a trial hits their life, they ask God to remove the trial from their life, instead of asking God to give them strength and wisdom to traverse the fire and to handle it more effectively.
I firmly believe that if I had not learned what I did before I had entered the fire, I would not have made it out. I would have either burned in the fire or would have been lifted out. As I phrased it one time, if it would have been someone else who had not developed the mental resiliency to withstand the heat, they probably would have killed themselves.
That is the level of inner pain that I was struggling with. The reason I never told anyone, especially my parents, is (1) I didn’t know how to put what I was feeling into words and (2) I now realize that this is something that I was to walk this part of the path by myself. I was to traverse the tunnel to discover my own inner strength, to see how much I have been truly given in Christ Jesus.
That being said, I also believe that if I had not learned those things, that I would not have entered the fire to begin with. That is the thing about it. God will not allow you to endure what He knows you can’t handle. If you are facing a challenge that seems much bigger than you can possibly handle, just remember this – God WILL NOT test you more than you are able to pass, nor will he test you against what His Word says. If you are being tempted by pornography or sex, it is not a test from God but a temptation from Satan. God can use it as a test later on, but He did not originate it.
Do you know when the hottest part of the refiner’s fire is? The very end. Do you know when the hardest part of the trials God gives you will be? At the very end. As you go through the fire, the temperature will continue to rise and get hotter and hotter. You will be more and more challenged the farther into the fire you go. This is necessary because God cannot scoop off the slag of your life if you are not melted before Him. You won’t melt if the temperature is cool.
The final part of the refinement process is the promotion. This is the reward. This is the part that everybody wants but is not always willing to go through the fire to get. This is where God says, “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have finished the trial well. You have handled it the way you should have. Here’s the reward for what you have overcome.”
As I said before, not everyone who enters the refiner’s fire will receive a reward. Navigating the fire is done through a close relationship with God and communion with Holy Spirit. The more instruction you are willing to receive from God and walk out into your life, the purer you will be at the end of the process.
Again, when most people hit the fire, they do not realize that what they are going through is meant to purify them. Instead, they gripe, whine, and complain about the heat. They want everything to be perfect. They don’t want trials and pain. They will do everything they can to avoid it. When they react that way, God says, “Okay, you’re not ready to release this. You want to hold on to it and not deal with it. Okay, I’ll just let you hold it until you are ready.” The sad part is that many people never get to the point of being able to handle the fire. I believe that the reason for most of them never get there is because they have simply never understood that trials are a blessing in disguise. Like Henry Ford said, “Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”
There is a fascinating way that this was manifested in my life. When I look back on my life, I can see – and towards the end of the process, I could feel – how the darkness of pornography rose through my chakra points.
Through meditation and Body Code sessions, I have found that there are more than the traditional 7 chakras. I have found that there are 12: the traditional 7, one positioned below the root chakra called the earth star, and four positioned above the crown chakra. The only one of those outside of the traditional 7 that I have explored in meditations is the Earth Star. It is positioned at about the same position as the lowest point on the Kabbalah Tree, at the soles of the feet. As far as I have explored, this chakra deals with ancestral energy and emotion.
Pornography, or more accurately lust, was planted in me at birth through ancestral iniquity. It was then lying dormant until it was activated in 5th grade. From that time it grew under the surface, until it broke through at age 14. After, that it quickly spread to my root, sacral, and solar plexus chakras – the first, second, and third – in a cycle of fear, guilt, and shame.
When I started seeing Sylvia for the sessions – and uprooting the tree that had grown over the preceding 6 years, releasing those demonic powers, and forgiving myself for what I did – that is when the great darkness came over me. This was the beginning of the refinement process.
When I started to expose those dark emotions, and facing my inner darkness, the darkness moved to my heart chakra, manifesting itself as tremendous grief for what happened. It was when I had the great breakthrough that I will talk about later that it moved from my heart to throat chakra.
It stayed here for about 7-8 months, largely undetected. In January of 2020, my dad and I started meeting at the Toastmasters club in Sioux Falls, SD. A year later, in January 2021, I gave a speech where, for the first time, I went public about my pornography struggle. Until then, the only people who knew about it were my parents and Sylvia. When I gave the speech, I felt a clamp of sorts around my neck. This was the darkness trying to prevent me from being real and vulnerable about my past.
There were four separate times that I shared about porn during this period: (1) the aforementioned speech, (2) to a group I was a part of that was going through John Bevere’s course “Multiplied”, (3) one of the team members of Carry the Love (a group of young men and women who are going around the country preaching the gospel; they came to our area at the beginning of March 2021, and this is when I am talking about), and (4) on the last night that Carry the Love was in our area in March 2021, when the whole group of guys that were there got prayed over for porn freedom.
After these four instances, I felt the darkness shift from my neck to my head, specifically between my Third Eye and Crown chakras. To give a proper account of why this darkness was there, below is an entry from one of my many notebooks, this one being one of my most private and treasured ones. This entry was written on March 7, 2021, and details why the darkness was hanging out where it was at the time and what I did to release it. This is the “great breakthrough” that I alluded to just a few paragraphs ago:
“I know why that feeling of darkness that was pornography was stuck at my 7th chakra, my crown. It relates to John Bevere’s message on ‘Killing Kryptonite,’ and is what the Holy Spirit just told me and I wrote above: I had not totally let it go and turned away from it.
“This past week, I heard this message about 5 times from different places: (1) John Bevere’s course “Porn Free,” (2) one of John’s “Killing Kryptonite” [messages] that I listened to about a week ago, (3) Carry the Love last Sunday when one of the girls that spoke used a similar analogy to (sic.) John, (4) the last “Multiplied” group [when] John mentioned it in one of the videos we went over, and (5) tonight we listened to John’s sermon “Killing Kryptonite” for church. Tonight, I finally felt convicted that I had not truly repented and abhorred porn the way God does.
“I thought that I had turned from it. I figured that it was some other thing that I needed repentance for. But the thing that really convicted me that this is what I needed true repentance from is what Holy Spirit said to me at the end of the third paragraph that I wrote: I had never looked at porn, lust, and masturbation the way God does, as sin and abhorrent in His eyes. I had never truly internalized that it grieves His heart every time I turn to it, just as it would grieve my wife if I did.
“On 1-28-2021, I said that I would never masturbate again because God demanded it. That is not the proper way to look at any sin. That is the fear of the law, not the fear of the Lord. If you aren’t sinning “because God said so,” you are not operating in the right spirit, because if you want to do it yet don’t under that mindset, you are operating under the fear of punishment and not fearing being away from God’s heart. That is why repentance is SO CRITICAL to Christianity.
“Repentance is NOT being guilty and shameful crawling through the dust before God asking for forgiveness. It is fully committing to love what He loves, hate what He hates, and walk in His intimacy, not because you fear His wrath, but because you don’t want to cause Him pain or sorrow.”
It is interesting to note how much of God’s will is hindered by Christians not having the correct view of repentance. Much of the bondage Christians are under is a result of simply not repenting, or turning away, from sins.
Once the darkness had lifted from my crown chakra, it moved to the higher chakras, which the four are collectively called the “soul star.” I have not yet explored these chakras in detail, so I cannot reveal anything as of yet as to the nature of them, and I am still walking out their journey. However, over the past several months, I have been feeling more and more freedom from sin, Satan, and pornography. I do know that the next steps for me at this moment involve work with renunciation of ties to the Kabbalah Tree as well as inner healing of my soul fragments and parts, which are themselves entirely different discussions.
Conclusion: Stand Fast in the Spirit
The Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 8:18, “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.”
God has not called us to suffer through life. He has given us the ability to heal what needs to be healed then help others that may be going through what we did. We are not to sit idly by as the world continues to suffer. In verse 19 after the one above states, “For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the manifestation of the sons of God.”
We as Children of the Most High God need to stand up and take back what has been stolen from us by Satan and his forces. We are not to cower in fear of them, for there are more with us than there are with them. At the end of Romans 8, Paul wrote, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sward? …In all of these things we are more than conquerors through Him who 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 created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Do not be afraid of the hard times. Do not fear what the enemy may bring against you. Do not fear your mistakes. I am living proof that your mistakes don’t have to define who you are. You are bigger than your fear. You are far greater than your failures.
Again, Paul writes in Romans 8, “As many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if Children, then heirs – heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if we indeed suffer with Him, that we may be also be glorified together.”
Lastly, Paul writes to Timothy in his second letter, “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”
Let this be your portion, that the God of Peace may sanctify you. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May He make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord Jehovah El-Shaddai lift up His countenance upon you and give you everlasting peace. May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God with the communion with the Holy Ghost be with you all. Amien.
Super Success 