By: General Deborah Green
PRAISE GOD! Today we are privileged to be marching forward in the Lord! Yes indeed, we are privileged, because without the Lord where would we be? What would we do? And so it is a wonderful thing to call upon Him day by day by day! And it is a wonderful thing to know that He is able. You know a lot of times, we are not able, but He is able. And when we cry unto Him, He hears our cries, thank God!
Today we are going to be going into the second part of “The Necks of our Enemies.” God has shown Himself to be the Victorious King again and again and again; and as we rely upon the Lord, we see that His victory is omnipresent, that His glory does remain, and yes indeed, it is a privilege to be His people, it is a privilege to believe in Him, to see His mighty arm revealed.
Now today I’m going to go into some historical data which pertains to how God teaches us that He gives us the necks of our enemies. And you know, a lot of times, as Christians, when God desires us to walk in faith, we are fearful of doing that. We are afraid to believe in God, we are afraid to trust in God, we are afraid to think that “Yes, God can provide. Yes, God is able. Yes, God can furnish a table in the wilderness.” But you know, fear in such a way is the enemy of God. It is the enemy, or the enemies of God, because fear comes in many forms; and when we look to God, He is greater than that fear, or greater than those fears; and when we believe in God, He will give us the strength to overcome those fears, those things that seek to prevent us from going forward in faith and in confidence and in hope in our God.
In this generation, people are so used to looking at the entity called the Church and to the religious establishment, that they think it is a strange thing to trust God. They think it’s a foolish thing to say, “I believe in the Lord, and nobody is backing me up. Nobody is standing behind me. Nobody is saying that they will be my support. Nobody is ‘with me.’ But the Lord is with me.” Now they think that if you make statements like that, that you are ready for the mental ward. Why is it? Because men have stopped looking to God. And when men stop looking to God, when we stop looking to God, we begin to undermine what God is able to do.
In a lot of instances, God desires to heal His people, but His people don’t turn to Him; instead they turn to doctors, they turn to hospitals, they turn (if it’s mental problems) to counselors, and on and on it goes, and they don’t turn to the Living God. And so what happens is they don’t get healed, they don’t receive the goodness of God, and many times, they die prematurely because they resorted to the arm of flesh. Now God does not desire that we resort to the arm of flesh, but God desires that we look to Him, that we look to Him continually, knowing that He is able. Now we don’t learn that all at once, but we learn that by degrees, because we learn that our God is able by what our God takes us through. But you see, if we are unwilling to go through anything with the Lord, we never find out that our God is able, and we will stay in the safe zone, which is also the dead zone, and we’ll say, “Well, by and by, the Lord is going to do something.” Well, by and by, the Lord might want you to do something, and you’re too cowardly to do it, because you are not believing in God!
“A lot of times, as Christians, when God desires us to walk in faith, we are fearful of doing that… [But] when we look to God, He is greater than that fear…and when we believe in God, He will give us the strength to overcome those fears, those things that seek to prevent us from going forward in faith and in confidence and in hope in our God.”
Now the matter of faith is something that we get challenged with and in, by the Lord. Because oftentimes, the Lord will speak things to our spirits, but we don’t obey them. We don’t obey that, because we are afraid that if we step out in faith, we’ll be made a fool, people will laugh at us, they’ll scorn us, they’ll mock us, or you know, maybe God won’t even be there to meet us, and on and on and on it goes. It’s like Peter, when he believed the Lord, he was able to walk the water. When he looked at at the circumstance-BOOM! he sunk. And too often God’s people look at circumstances rather than the Lord. And when you look at those circumstances they will pull you down, they will cause you to lose out with Him. So, praise God we can look to the Lord, we can believe the Lord, we can trust the Lord, because the Lord is able! Now, I’m not saying that out of empty words, I’m saying that because it is true.
When my husband and I started out following Jesus, about 35 years ago-yes, 35, 35 years ago we didn’t know anything about following the Lord (at least, I didn’t; he’d been raised in a Christian home, but was a backslider when we got saved). I didn’t know anything about following the Lord because I came from an anti-Christ environment where we were taught that religion was only for the weak people that didn’t have a mind of their own. Thank God, I don’t have a mind of my own now, but I gave it to the Lord! But anyway, so, when we started out to follow God, I had a real naive concept of God. Now I’m giving you some historical data. And my naive concept, which is proven to be true was that if Jesus loved me enough to die for me, then Jesus would talk to me, and Jesus was close by, and He would listen when I wanted to talk to Him, and He would hear what I was praying about because He was Christ. Sol went into Christianity with that belief-that God would talk to me. Well it’s proved to be true. God does talk to me. But most people think, “Well, if God talks to you, you’re crazy!” That’s absurd!
“We can be useful to God if we’ll learn the way of His Spirit, because it’s the Spirit that leads and guides us into all truth. Amen! And when we are willing to follow that Spirit, He doesn’t lead us into a ditch, but He leads us forward into Himself.”
Well, thank God for His mercy, that He didn’t forsake me, but He kept me through all those years. In the early years of our walk with God, we went into Babylon because God had some lessons to teach us. I’m talking about “Churchianity,” religious Babylon. He had some things to teach us there-that we wouldn’t want to be burned again. In other words, He taught us some things that we would learn our lessons well, and we’d realize that our refuge and help is not in man or the systems of man, but our refuge is in God. Because you know, I believe that going into Babylon was a punishment upon our carnality, because in your flesh, you think things like, “Well, I need to go to Bible College so I can be trained,” or, “I need to be with this many Christians or that many Christians,” or, “I need this,” or, “I need that.” And all those things, if you think you need them, God will punish you with them. He’ll give you His sweet chastisements which are a blessing unto your soul, so that you’ll realize that whatever way the Holy Ghost wants to teach you, that’s the way you need to be taught, and you don’t need to go sit in a classroom, bored stiff to where you’re figuring out a fifteen minute sermon once a week in order to be useful to God. We can be useful to God if we’ll learn the way of His Spirit, because it’s the Spirit that leads and guides us into all truth. Amen! And when we are willing to follow that Spirit, He doesn’t lead us into a ditch, but He leads us forward into Himself.
Now, to give you a further update in this chronicle of the history of the Generals’ lives, let us continue. So, we went into Babylon and we spent about five years there (about four and a half or four something to be particular) in a little church that was part of a bigger denomination, and then another year in the mission field, which was a further chastisement from God. You say, “Well, God wouldn’t chastise anybody that’s willing to go to missions.” Oh yes He would! God will chastise whom He loves. And you know, just because you’re willing to go to missions, doesn’t make you an automatic saint. There are a lot of people on the mission field that are really miserable, religious nuts. I know, because I’ve seen them. And I’m not exaggerating that, and I’m not putting down the true people of God who have sacrificed their lives to go forth in the missions. But there are a lot of people who go to the missions because they can’t fit in the church, and they go out there to collect support, because you can live in the Third World at a very elevated level if you get an American salary, if you get a salary based on our economics, and you transfer it to their economics. You can live like a king or a queen.
So we went for a year in the missions, but we didn’t live like a king or a queen. We lived in suffering, we lived in sickness, we lived in heartbreak, and we lived in sorrow because God was chastising us. He was correcting us and teaching us to pay heed to His voice and not the voice of men and women. In other words, if God speaks something to you, and He says, “Thus and such I desire of you,” you better do it! Because even if it looks as though everything is impossible, it is possible with God. But because of fear we can pull back from the counsel of God, and we can receive the counsel of men; and when we do that, we are setting ourselves up to be chastised of God. And we want to cry and boo-hoo and get somebody to feel sorry for us, but we did it to God, and we did it to ourselves because we did not pay heed to the voice of the Lord. But when we learn through our chastisements to pay heed to Him, then we see that He is able.
[Continuing on in this chronicle:] We left Babylon, the second time God commanded us. The first time God commanded us, we did not leave Babylon; we merely left the local church and went to the bigger church, and from there we went to the mission field, and our entire year that we did those things, we were in disobedience to the first command of the Lord. Now, there are all kinds of excuses that your carnal mind will raise up. “Well, I sought the counsel of the elders.” Well, the elders didn’t tell you to get out, God did! That was the response I got from God! “Well, I sought the counsel of your elders, I wanted to do something for your Kingdom, I was willing to sacrifice to go to the mission, blah, blah, blah, blah.” But you see, God will chastise us when we don’t do what He says. Now, there’s nothing wrong with seeking the counsel of your elders-IF those elders agree with God. But if they disagree with God, and they’re only seeking to keep you where they want you, then you don’t need their counsel. It’s a beautiful thing when your elders are moving with God, because then you can seek the counsel of the elders and the elders will guide you in the way that God has ordained. But you can be sure that most elders in “Churchianity” are not going to guide you in the way of the Lord. They are going to guide you in the way of the denomination.
Well anyway, after we heard from the Lord the second time-after an entire year of complete misery and great affliction and great physical suffering and sickness and poverty-yes, after we sought the Lord the second time, the Lord said, “I told you to leave, and you didn’t leave.” Now everybody thinks that the Lord is always full of lovingkindness, tender mercies, and He never mistreats you or He never makes you suffer anything. Those people don’t know the Lord. If you’ve disobeyed God, you’ve come into the category of disobedient children, and I don’t care what kind of justifications you have, you’re still disobedient and God will punish you. And I say that because I received that from God. I received the chastisement of the Lord because the Lord spoke to me directly-l prayed all night when it was time to leave that church; the Lord told me, “Get out of your positions in the church, and stay out of it.” And then we were convinced by our elders that no, we should come to the big church, come under the auspices of the denomination and go to the mission field and be useful for God.
So after that chastisement in our lives, we left Babylon: I mean we heard from God to leave Babylon the second time, and this time we obeyed. We left there, which was Jeffersonville, Indiana (and we had been stationed in Mexico). We left that, and we went to a place in Montana where that we tried to put our lives back together by seeking the Lord. And at that time, we didn’t have the assurance that what we had done was completely right because we were still young and somewhat feeble in our faith in God. So we kept praying and seeking God, praying and seeking God to gain the assurance of the Lord. Well, it was during this time that the Lord gave to my husband and myself, our true ministry calling. Now the reason that I’m bringing all this up under the title of “The Necks of Our Enemies,” I’ll make clear to you as time goes by. But the Lord gave to us our true ministry calling through prayer and through vision, and He said that our calling was to feed the hungry and to take His light to the blind. Okay, it was not to be the directors of an orphanage as we had been in Mexico, and it was not to be a pastor and a pastor’s wife as we had been told was our calling; but the Lord said that our calling was to feed and to give light. So, not knowing exactly what that meant, we proceeded to seek the Lord further, and then the Lord spoke to us, and He said, “I want you to go to Venezuela.” Well, recalling my sixth-grade geography, I figured out that Venezuela was in South America. Beyond that I had no understanding at all of where Venezuela was. We didn’t know how to get passports, we didn’t know how to go there, we didn’t know how to do anything, but this time we set out to believe the Lord. No longer were we clinging to our denominational covering, but we were seeing that we needed to either follow God or die, because we’d been through enough with that one year to realize that we couldn’t go back and we couldn’t crawl back and say, “We don’t know what we are doing.” We needed to step out in faith and believe God and let Him teach us and guide us and instruct us in the way.
“If we are unwilling to go through anything with the Lord, we never find out that our God is able, and we will stay in the safe zone, which is also the dead zone.”
You know it’s a beautiful thing to look to God and let God teach you, to let God teach you what it is that He desires. Now turn with me to Psalms 18. We were in this Psalm the last time, and it says in verse one, “I will love thee, O LORD, my strength. The LORD is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower. I will call upon the LORD, who is worthy to be praised: so shall I be saved from mine enemies” (vv. 1-3). Now we see that the psalmist is starting out there with a very bold declaration. And did you know that when you are learning Scripture that you can recite that Scripture and you can do it in a very bold way? The psalmist declared, “I will never fear, though a host shall encamp against me, I will trust in the Lord.” And then it says in the next line, “The sorrows of death compassed me, and the floods of ungodly men made me afraid” (v. 4). Now what does that mean? That means that as soon as you purpose yourself to believe in God and to trust in God, that there will come the floods. And so it was with us in our early lives of learning faith in the Lord that as soon as we purposed ourselves that we would believe in the Lord, that we would do what He commanded us to do, did we ever get assailed!
We were going to a little local church, a church that claimed it was non-denominational, but it was actually in a non-denominational denomination. But anyway, we were going there, and as soon as we heard the good news from God and we were charged up to believe God, to obey God, to do what God said, to follow God’s command, we went to the pastor. (Now listen, we didn’t have any backing and we didn’t have any money and we didn’t have any fancy things that we could even sell to get money, we just had the Word of God which was “Go!”) So we went to the pastor of this little church, because we were still trying to submit, and we said to him, “The Lord has called us to take this journey, and the Lord has spoken to us that we are to go to Venezuela.” Well this man was an ungodly man, and to our face he said, “Oh, that’s great,’ and as soon as he had another meeting with his congregation, which we couldn’t go to at that time because we were working, he completely railed on us and told the congregation that we were insane and that we thought the Lord had told us to go to Venezuela and that the church was to pray for us that we come to our senses. Well, not all of his disciples were trustworthy because many of them came to us and told us what he said. So the floods of ungodly men started. And then from there, it was one flood after another flood after another flood, and we were treading through mud to get to the goal of God.
You know, when you set out to do the will of God, believe me, it’s not going to be a lovely path through a sunny meadow. Sometimes you’re literally trudging through mud to get to what God has called you to do.
And then when you get there, you might slip in the mud (it literally happened to me one time!), fall face first in the mud, have mud all over your clothes, and still know that you are in the will of God. No, we’ve been painted a picture in Christianity that everything that God ordains is full of bliss and we’re just skipping along picking tulips in the sunshine and that everything is oh, so wonderful. Many times the will of God does entail hardship, it does entail being pushed to the uttermost, it does entail suffering, it does entail loneliness, it does entail a lot of things, you know, heartbreak, that we think will never befall us. Yes, it will befall us in the will of God; but believe me, it’s much better than being in the chastisement will of God.
Better to be in the will of God through obedience than to be in the permissive will of God where you will receive chastisement day by day, because God is permitting you to learn your lesson.
So anyway, we were faced with the first flood of ungodly men, and we began to wonder, “Did God really tell us to go?” Well, the Lord reaffirmed that yes, He told us to go and we better go! So we set out to do all these things we’d never done before; and we secured our passports, and we prayed for God to make a way for us to have finances to go, and we had all these fantasies about how we would go and how we would live forever and how God would do this great work. Well, those were our thoughts, not God’s thoughts. And you know that’s another thing that causes many young Christians to lose confidence in the Lord. Once God speaks something to them, then they begin to make the building, then they begin to add brick on top of brick on top of brick on top of brick, and they haven’t even put any mortar in the brick, or if they have, they’ve used untempered mortar. And along comes the first wind of adversity and the whole building comes down, and then they want to accuse the Lord. Amen!
God said to us to “Go”-and that’s all He said. So we set out to obey the Lord. We went out to California, and when we got to California, we thought, “What are we going to do now? Now that we’re over in California, what are we going to do?” So we prayed again and prayed again and then my brother came to us and said, “Would your husband like a job?” Well of course, you know, if you’re following God and you’re not at an 8:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m. job every day, all the family is saying that you are lazy, that you don’t want to work, that you don’t want to support yourself, that you’re living in some kind of madness because you say you’re seeking God, and on and on it goes. And immediately families see you as a burden to them because you are supposedly not earning your own way. Well at that time we were earning our own way because we had saved up money and we were using our money; but we knew we couldn’t use all of our money if we were going to get to our destination. So, my brother came and offered my husband a job, and we both prayed about it and we felt like, yes, the Lord wants him to take that job. So my husband worked for several weeks in, I guess you call it, a bean plant, where they brought in beans from the harvest and they bagged up the beans to be ready for shipping. This was in the farmland area of California. So he worked there for several weeks, hoisting around bags (in those days they put things in 100 lb. bags, because that’s before everybody wore their little back braces and before everybody was so weak because of the weight of their bellies). But anyway, in those days he hoisted around 100 lb. bags of beans all day long. Sometimes he worked ten hours, sometimes twelve hours, sometimes sixteen hours. But even in that hardship we kept thanking God because we were getting money to take our trip.
So all this time we kept believing that somehow God was going to do this miracle, and maybe some benefactor would come and knock on our door. We were staying in some cheap little motel, and we thought maybe he’d come knock on the door and say, “You’re the ones I have been looking for. Here’s a check for a million dollars.” You know, don’t we all live in fantasy at times? But God didn’t do it that way. He did it the real way. So my husband kept working, and I kept scrimping the pennies, and they’d squeal every time I tried to go to the grocery store or anything. But I kept pinching them, so finally we got some cash accumulated.
By this time it was getting a little “hot and heavy,” because in the meantime we had gone to live with our mother, because she said, “You won’t have to pay me any rent” since she wanted to be around her grandchildren. She said, “Come over here and stay until you’re ready to go, and you won’t have to pay me any rent.” Well, this was another trap of the floods of ungodly women. Because once we got under her domain, every day we were questioned about what we planned on doing, and why we were going to take those children to some foreign country, and how did we ever imagine that we would survive to do such a foolish and stupid thing? So if we thought the floods of the pastor were bad, the flood of mama-“Mommylon”-was even worse. And mama got really brutal in her accusations and her assumptions as to what we were going to do.
Then we felt in the Spirit that “Mommylon,” I mean, mother, was cooking it up to take us to the authorities to get our children taken away because we were so stupid that we were going to trust God to take our kids with us to the mission field. So when we got that “red alert,” we quickly packed our bags, waited until “Mommylon” was at work, and took off. And that was the prompting that we needed to be pushed into the will of God.
Now, I’ll tell you one thing: you think you love your family, but your family could end up being a goad to drive you into God, because they don’t love the Lord to follow the Lord, and they don’t love you if you follow the Lord. They’ll say they love you, but they’ll work in opposition to the will of God. But that was good for us because it served as a goad to push us into the will of God. And so we took off and headed down the state of California. And there we were, just telling ourselves that we were going to obey God. We were still waiting for that millions-of-dollars check, we were still waiting for that great benefactor, but we went forth anyway, trusting that somehow God was going to lead us to the great benefactor, to that mercy that was going to come our way.
By this way of leaving in our truck, we actually abandoned our first vision that came from our hearts, and not from the Lord. And our first vision had been that maybe God was going to provide us this money through this benefactor, and we were going to get on this airplane and have these nice suitcases and take off, you know, and just arrive in the capital of Venezuela, all ready to go to work for God! Well, it didn’t work that way. We took off in our old beat-up panel truck-with two kids and with our suitcases that were dilapidated. We never got our beautiful white suitcases we imagined we were going to get for this plane trip. We ended up with some grubbies that we had left over from our missions trip to Mexico, and there we went.
Okay, we were living out of the truck by this time, because no longer were we staying at mother’s and we’d left the motel behind. So we got in the vehicle, we took off, and along the way we thought, “Oh, we’ll meet somebody.” Well, all we met along the way was opposition, because whenever we would stop to go to a church to get fellowship (we did not want to forsake the coming together of the saints), all we would get was opposed. They’d ask, “Who sent you?” The floods of ungodly men continued. “Who sent you?” We’d say, “The Lord.” “The who?” they’d reply. “The Lord.” “The who?” “Well, the Lord Jesus sent us. “Oh…” they’d say, and immediately their faces would be cold: there would be distance between us and the other saints of God, and we would be treated like we were some kind of crud-balls that crawled in out of the gutters of Miami. And they would say, “Well why don’t you just sit over there, and why don’t you just keep it to yourself what God has called you to do.” Why?
Because they didn’t want us to “contaminate” anybody with the thought that people could trust God. Now that’s true! I’m telling you the truth. You will find the greatest opposition will come to you if you are truly sent by God; the greatest opposition will be from other Christians. And we were only being prepared by our God for what faced us as we pressed forward into the vision, into the spoken Word of God that He had ordained for us. We were only being prepared for the great opposition that would swarm us from the flood of ungodly men as we kept on our way. But you know what? Through it all, God had His plans and His purpose, because He desired to give us the necks of our enemies. And what is our enemy? Fear, unbelief, doubt, and failure to trust God. Amen!