14: FISH: Freedom & WLVS (Part 8)

[00:07] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On the Trail podcast. You are on the trail with father- daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie, and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God. Alright, we’re in episode 14 in the 8th part of our FISH series. We’re looking at the “F “of FISH, we’ve made it to the beginning of the acrostic.

[00:31] Marcus: Yay!

[00:32] Stephanie: Freedom. We’ll look at this topic over two episodes, but for today we’re talking about dealing with wounds from the past. So hello, my father.

[00:40] Marcus: Hello, my daughter. It’s good to be back doing this together.

[00:45] Stephanie: So I have an icebreaker question for you today. What is your favorite season?

[00:54] Marcus: My favorite season used to be summer. It’s morphed into fall as I get older because I like the cool, the change, and the anticipation of Christmas, and all the things that go with that. But when I was a kid it was definitely summer. Right? Because you’re off school and you’re playing games, but now that doesn’t matter.

[01:16] Stephanie: When I was a kid my favorite was spring, and now it is also definitely fall. So huzzah.

[01:20] Marcus: Huzzah. We are “Autumnal.” I don’t know what that makes us, but here we go.

[01:26] Stephanie: All right, onto the topic at hand. You’ve made the statement, “Freedom is not simply a counseling or recovery issue, it is fundamental to discipleship.” Could you develop that thought?

[01:38] Marcus: Yeah. First of all I look back to when I first came up with the name Deeper Walk for ministry and I was sitting at a coffee shop. (Which seems to show up in a lot of my stories and maybe I have a problem.) But anyway, I was sitting in a coffee shop and I was reflecting on my time as a pastor. I asked the simple question, “How many people could I look back at and point to who had a deeper walk with God, during the time I was a pastor?” Names started popping into my head and as they did I began to ask in prayer to myself and God kind of simultaneously, “What’s the common denominator here, what do they have in common?”

What I realized was that all of them had been in bondage, and experienced some level of freedom that created a breakthrough event that allowed them to move forward, and deeper in their walk with God. And I realized that’s a fundamental discipleship issue, right? We had people who were stuck and they wanted to go deeper in their walk with God but something had them trapped, so they weren’t able to do that. And so I realized that we have got to find a way to get freedom into the heart of the discipleship process, and not just make it something that we outsource constantly.

Around that same time I remember having a meeting at a coffee shop with a pastor of a megachurch in the area. And he was the classic megachurch pastor who had read all the leadership books and all that other stuff. And I remember him saying, “I’m glad there’s pastors like you out there who will deal with the demons and deal with the hard stuff.”

He says, “That’s just not me, I don’t do that.”

And I remember another pastor in the area saying something very similar. Like, if we even hinted that we had a way to help people experience freedom, like we have a “boiling cauldron” in our church, things would erupt and I’m afraid that we would get overwhelmed. Which just points to that this is one of the biggest needs in the church. Right. One of the biggest needs of the church is we have wounded people who are trying to fake it till they make it. They have not found what they’re looking for in the church to help them resolve the issues that have them stuck.

[03:44] Stephanie: Yeah. So today we are looking at the rule of freedom in dealing with wounds from the past. Next episode we’re going to dig more into spiritual warfare basics. But for today, I do want to look at freedom’s role in healing wounds from the past so that you can live with greater freedom. (Redundancy department.)

[04:04] Marcus: Redundancy, yes. Memo from the department of redundancy department.

[04:08] Stephanie: So one of the core models we teach at Deeper Walk is called W.L.V.S. – wounds, lies, vows, and strongholds. And I think that first appeared in your Toward a Deeper Walk book, and then people said, “We need more,” so there is also Understanding the Wounded Heart book. I have literally used this model not only with myself and others when I prayed with them. But also as an editor or as a teacher and working with people, I am like, “Oh, hey, this character has a wound.”

[04:42] Marcus: It’s sadly common, isn’t it?

[04:43] Stephanie: It’s very, very, very foundational. Would you take us through it?

[04:49] Marcus: I look at this as less that I invented it, but more that I discovered it, I’m not the first one. A lot of people have been talking about this in various forms and in various ways. I just happened to “codify” it in a way I could remember and that’s what led to it. I remember John Eldridge talked about the message of “the arrows” and the idea that Satan was not random where he shot his arrows at us. He was aiming at our heart because he wanted to take us out of the battle so we wouldn’t be a threat to him.

And the message of the arrows was the idea that there’s a wound that came with a lie.

Ed Smith and his idea of Theophostic prayer, was talking about these wounds where the devil has planted lies that felt true. He was one of the first people I heard that really emphasized the idea of lies feeling true, and putting them on a scale of one to ten, of how true does that actually feel to you? So we start with the idea that there are wounds in their lives. That’s the “W” and the”L” of WLVS.

And then the next thing that came out of there were vows. And the idea of a vow is an “I will” statement, of how I am going to take control of my life. And you run into this all the time. “I will not let anybody make me feel this way again.” “I will not let myself be put in this position again.” And what we find is that there are a lot of us living in this very reactionary mode in life. I remember doing premarital counseling as a pastor and sat down with this couple, and their only game plan for marriage was, ”We’re not going to do what our parents did.” That was literally it. So it wasn’t the best game plan for life. And I don’t remember exactly what I said, but they never came back I do know that.

So I look at wounds, lies, vow, and I see wounds is like the world, the world wounds us. Lies is the devil, the father of lies, the devil lies to us. And then vows is the flesh, it’s me trying to take control of my life, “I will do this.” The end result is strongholds and that I am now stuck. That’s where we started with the idea of freedom. I need to get free from something that has me in bondage so that I can move forward the way that I want to go. So that’s W.L.V.S. We sometimes we call it “wolves” or we call it the demonic radio network, WLVS broadcasting all deception all the time. Right? That sort of thing.

[07:22] Stephanie: Yes, I was going to bring us there to say that people might notice that WLVS isn’t your normal acrostic, but never fear, there are two sides. You could remember it like wolves or you can remember it like radio.

[07:35] Marcus: Yes, absolutely. So you know being from the east side of the Mississippi river, WLVS was a logical thing. I haven’t come up with a “K” word for wounds for the people in the west, but maybe somebody will come up with that.

[07:47] Stephanie: All right, so in chapter four of A Deeper Walk, you lay out four strategies for emotional healing. Building joy, forgiving, taking thoughts captive, and listening prayer. That’s a whole lot to cover here but do you want to speak to the role of freedom in each of these strategies?

[08:04] Marcus: So let me speak to the role of freedom in the four strategies. The first one is talking about building joy. One of the things that I noticed was people would come and we would take them through the steps to freedom, and some would just turn a corner, and never look back. It was like, wow, life change. Or people would come in and we would pray with them about a wound in their past and Jesus would meet them in that wound. They would experience healing and it was like something unlocked and they went forward, and then came back. But I realized there were a whole lot of other people who seemed to be just as bad off the next time I saw them, as they were even after they had this dramatic experience. Sometimes in as little as two or three days they were right back to where they were. In fact, I’ve seen it happen in a few hours, that something triggered them and they were right back where they were.

And so the question is, “Why is this sometimes completely life changing and other times  it does not bear much fruit?” And it was really Dr. Wilder and the life model that gave an answer to this, and that was the idea of capacity. So what we learned was that if people came with a relatively high level of emotional capacity to begin with, and then helping them get freedom through either an inner healing experience, or a spiritual warfare experience, it unlocked something and they were able to go forward. But if people came with really low joy, isolated, and a low emotional capacity, they would have an experience that would normally create breakthrough. They were now free but still an infant emotionally. They were free but still with no capacity for joy. And so that was a capacity that had to be built up over time and required something more than counseling.

And part of what I began to realize was that my model said, “I should be able to provide everything you need in this counseling appointment as a pastor.”

And that’s not true, right ?There’s no way I can do everything that everybody needs one on one. So that was really helpful. That’s where that idea of build joy came from. Tool number one is we got to help people build joy. And sometimes people have to build joy before you can actually do the other work with them. And sometimes doing the other work is what frees them to begin building the joy, it can work in both directions.

The second one is forgiveness and taking thoughts captive. So let’s start with taking thoughts captive. That one for me was kind of a metaphor for spiritual warfare, for people that I didn’t want to freak out with the term, spiritual warfare. The idea of taking thoughts captive is getting at the idea that there is a lie that has been planted here in this wounded place in my heart. I think it was Alaine Pakkala who talks about pockets of pain inside. We have pockets of pain in our heart where the devil has stuck in this lie, or more than one lie, but it takes root now, and that pocket of pain grows into something else. So at some point we have to do something about those lies.

So taking thoughts captive is meant to encompass all of that. What is the spiritual warfare work we need to do to uproot the lies, and to evict whatever spirits have been assigned to keep that lie alive in my life? Sometimes that’s a deliverance type of process and sometimes that is simply recognize what’s going on, taking authority over it and commanding it to leave.

Let’s start with offensive praying and commanding this thing to go saying, “ God I ask you to beat up whatever spirit is bringing this thought my way.” Taking thoughts captive is largely the warfare part of this and then forgiveness. When you’re dealing with wounds you are going to deal with forgiveness at some level. And so because I started with steps to freedom in Christ, it starts with step one, deal with the occult.

Step two, deal with deception. Step three, let’s deal with bitterness and forgiveness. Well what I found was by step three people were telling me about wound stories in their life. I was wounded this way and I was wounded that way. So the steps are designed to forgive that person and walk them through forgiveness. And I saw dramatic things happen in people’s lives just by choosing to forgive. But it also became the logical launching point for dealing with the wounds, lies, vows and strongholds. Let’s invite Jesus in to do some healing at that wounded point in their life.

So the process kind of grew out of while we’re here and talking about these wounds, let’s not just forgive these people, but let’s also see about bringing healing there. So that was where that came from. Again we take sort of a warfare approach to forgiveness, and that we want to remove the legal right that demons have to be harassing us. And so there is a legal transaction taking place in the way that we talk about forgiveness. And that is, “I want to cancel the permission that I have given to the enemy by renouncing my bitterness and choosing to forgive. And on the bases of that I’m now filing paperwork in the court right here. I’m going up to the court of heaven, I’m filing my paperwork, and you no longer have any claim here. Now that I’ve dealt with that you got to get out of here in Jesus name.” So that’s sort of the warfare approach to forgiveness that we take.

And then the last one was listening prayer. The steps to freedom itself was a listening prayer exercise. Because you would say, “Let’s stop and ask Jesus. Would you bring to my mind any way in which I have given ground to the enemy through the occult?”  That sort of thing. And then you would ask people, “Tell me the first thing that comes to your mind, let’s write this all down and let’s process it.”  Then we get to, “Well, let’s go back to that wound memory that you brought up and let’s ask Jesus a similar question.”

“Would you bring to my mind any wound that you want to heal today?”

“Would you bring to my mind what began to feel true because of that wound?” And we would make lists. So it was a very similar process to walking through the steps to freedom.

I often had a notepad right there and I would just write them down, and it was not uncommon to have four or five lies come up from a single wound. And when I’d write them down I’d ask, ”On a scale of one to ten, how true does that feel?” It was effective and we would invite Jesus to do something about that. Seeing people completely change what they believed because of that experience was really phenomenal. Those are the four tools, build joy, take thoughts captive, forgive, and  listening, prayer. And honestly I’m not sure it always matters what order those are in. Those are just tools in the box that we might want to use.

[14:34] Stephanie: Yeah. Okay. I don’t know if we have brought up steps to freedom specifically before, do you want to explain what that is?

[14:43] Marcus:  My father was the international director of Neil Anderson’s Freedom in Christ Ministries. They were partners in ministry and co-authors. The Steps to Freedom was a tool designed by Neil to help the seminary students he was teaching at Talbot to get rid of some of their baggage before they went into ministry. He was watching all these guys get thoroughly educated and thoroughly equipped with ministry skills leaving seminary, and are still in bondage to pornography. They are still in bondage to rage, anger, and still in bondage to their depression.

And he’s like, we got to help these guys experience some freedom before we send them out into ministry. And so that was actually the origin of that tool. It’s got seven steps to it, we start with the occult,  then deception, then wounds and forgiveness. Then there’s pride, rebellion, habitual sin, and ancestral sin. So those are the seven things that it deals with. And we’ll talk about it probably more in the next session. But that was the tool that I used when I was in my twenties when I would meet with people. I would just walk them through that particular tool. So you know about the 50th time I’ve taken somebody through there, I began to combine that with the listening prayer tools. I found that this was a great kind of a one two punch, the steps to freedom and what we call REAL prayer, which we’ll talk about in a minute I’m sure.

[16:13] Stephanie: Yeah. I did want to go back to listening prayer and you will frequently say, “There’s only one wonderful counselor, and he’s not me.” And as you were talking about asking Jesus about what memory He wants to deal with now, what wound He wants to deal with now, it is important to know that you not in control of that process. Jesus knows what the person is ready for. So sometimes it’s not the biggest, darkest thing that they need go to first, but sometimes it is.

[16:50] Marcus: No, absolutely. I had a tendency to want to fix people quickly. Right. Don’t we all? Somebody would make an appointment and like most pastors what I found was that it was people from other churches who would come to make an appointment. As I started going through this process, what I began to realize was I could either take all the pressure onto myself, like, “Okay, this person is looking to me to help them and I need to do something.” Or I can take that pressure and hand it to Jesus as quickly as possible.

So we would basically walk them through the model and then walk them through a prayer process in which they are talking to Jesus, and getting what they need from Jesus. They are the ones evicting the spirits. They are the ones doing this and we are  just kind of walking through the model. And I had many people when they were done thank me not only for what it did to help them, but for modeling what it looked like so they could do it on their own later. But, yeah, that was where that came from.

[17:49] Stephanie: Yeah. So we are actually coming toward the end of our time. Do you want to go through what REAL prayer is?

[17:57] Marcus: Yeah, REAL prayer again, is a process. I wanted to be able to remember it without always having to have handouts in front of me, and so I use the acrostic REAL. And it’s not that other kinds of prayer aren’t “real”, it just was a way to remember it.

I would tell people to ask Jesus what you need to remember right now. Just ask him for one memory. What’s the one memory he wants you to remember right now? That was the “R”.  Then “E”, let’s explore that memory. And we again ask Jesus, “What do I need to remember about this memory?”

Because I don’t want to pull up all the painful stuff they don’t need to remember. So it’s Jesus, “What do you want me to remember as I explore this with you?” And I would specifically ask, “What are the nonverbals that you remember about this?” “And what were the verbals, what were the things that began to feel true?” So I would write down things from both on the pad of paper and we would ask, ”On a scale of one to ten, how big is that?”

And it was not uncommon to have people say, “That was a twelve or that’s a 20, or that’s just way past a ten, that’s absolutely bedrock to the way I live.” Once there is a sign that something really powerful and profound happened, then we would go to “A”, ask. Let’s ask Jesus, “What would you like to do now to heal this memory that you brought to my mind?” And once you ask you, “L”,  listen. So you would have them close their eyes and revisit the memory. And I basically asked for three things. I said, “Does anything change about what you feel?” “Does anything change about what you hear, do you have any new thoughts?” And thirdly, “Do you see anything change about what you see?”

And then we would push into those things. And then that’s also where I would combine some spiritual warfare with this, to do some testing and make sure we were actually dealing with the Holy Spirit, and not a counterfeit spirit. This process became kind of core to what I did with most people, to the point where I began reversing and dealing with REAL prayer first, instead of adding it to the steps to freedom. I began starting with REAL prayer and then dealing with something spiritual warfare oriented if we needed to. That’s REAL prayer. It’s remember, explore, ask, and listen.

[20:09] Stephanie: Awesome. Next episode we’re going to be talking about the permission and authority aspects of spiritual warfare. For this episode, any concluding thoughts?

[20:19] Marcus: I remember my dad saying on many occasions that he doesn’t understand people who oppose this. Who are like, anti-spiritual warfare among Christans or anti-emotional healing through listening prayer. His question was, “How do you help these people, and what do you do when you are in front of them?” And honestly the answer was that a lot of what they do is ineffective. What we’re trying to do here is give people hope by giving them some tools that have helped a lot of people. Not in the idea that it’s always quick and painless, but that there is hope and there is a path. And that’s the goal here. Part of discipleship is getting people on a path to a deeper walk with God. And that path has to include growing in freedom. So that’s where we kind of launch here.

[21:12] Stephanie: Yeah, and there’s so many tools and not everybody needs the same tool, so we’re trying to get all the different tools of freedom in front of people. So very good. Thank you.

And thank you all for joining us on the trail today. If you want to keep going deeper with us on your walk with God, please subscribe to the Deeper Walk podcast and share with your friends. You can find more at our website, deeperwalk.com.

Thanks again. We’ll see you back next week.