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"Don't let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me."
(John 14:1)
The Jezebel attack is like a cannon shot to the heart. It rips apart vital relationships, undermines vital ministry, and destroys first love. Ruthlessly submerging the family of God in the icy waters of condemnation, shame, doubt, and slander, it’s a complex and multi-frontal spiritual attack on the family of God.
Don’t let this spiritual attack take your heart from fiery first love and the sheer enjoyment of Jesus and his family to the icy cold of a frozen heart, a dead love, and a silenced faith.
Separating “little ones” from key relationships, and destroying the people carrying those key ministries, is a primary goal of this spiritual attack. Spinning divorce, separation, condemnation, false spiritual teaching, and false prophetic words into the fabric of an ekklesia, the Jezebel explodes when everything’s in place to bring the largest effect.
This is all-out war. It’s war on the heart and soul. It’s war on those following Jesus, on those who are part of his ekklesia. By seeking to take down every important “ligament” and spinning off the saints into confusion and condemnation, the Jezebel spirit attacks through the relationships of a community. Random prophets rarely have this kind of impact. It’s those who have established relationships in the ekklesia who deliver this cannon-like blow. Jesus identifies these attackers as those who call themselves prophets. But their teaching and their utterances only mislead.
These blows typically erupt in public, carrying denunciation, corrective condemnation, and definitive and authoritative statements that undermine the ligaments of the body (Ephesians 4:16).
Being crushed in heart by your own family is one of the deepest blows one can face. We know the high value and impact family has on our lives. Spiritual family, the ekklesia of Jesus, is equally (if not more) devastating, when false prophets and false brothers sow division and dishonor and undermine key leaders or ligaments of the body.
When an ekklesia family is in turmoil, everyone connected can feel it. When key ministries and ligaments are under attack, the relationships of the body experience turmoil. When false brothers and false prophets fill the atmosphere with distortion and lies about the important ministries of the ekklesia (Ephesians 4:16), only Holy Spirit wisdom and power can redeem and heal and bring the discernment and wisdom required (James 3:14-18).
Spiritual warfare requires spiritual remedies:
- Total war is very difficult to endure. I’ve found it to be through strong revelation and leaning on the promises in Scripture and on a decent amount of practical spiritual encouragement, that endurance is possible. In such overwhelming situations, the threat of our hearts growing cold is massive.
- The Jezebel sows this kind of all-out disruption and destruction, this all-out war. Distrust enters into and blows up the family, taking down key ligaments of grace and blowing apart long-held relationships.
- Dishonor is difficult to bear, especially when delivered by friends. Being stabbed in the heart by friends can lead to heavy feelings of defeat and condemnation.
- The body of Christ—when abiding in Jesus himself as the head—is equipped for victory and love. Discernment is essential. I’ve found it to be the missing ingredient.
The real targets of the Jezebel are the “ligaments” of the body, those gluing and holding the family of God together in first love.
Ligaments—the Connectors
“From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work” (Ephesians 4:16).
The real targets of the Jezebel are the “ligaments” of the body. These ligaments connect the followers of Jesus to life-giving encouragement and power through the Holy Spirit. Put simply, they are relationships in the body of Christ that connect to fivefold grace. These grace connectors teach the body to obey the teachings of Jesus and to walk in the Spirit. They’re people acting in their metron or measure of grace through faith and in love. Demonstrating the life of love, the zoe of God, they move in the gifts of the Spirit.
All kinds of ministries fit into this picture. Worship, prophecy, prayer, intercession, to name a few, as well as the people of the fivefold gifts—apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers.
When these people express their gifts of grace in faith, they act as ligaments translating movement for different parts of the body. The other parts of the body attach and connect with these ligaments. Through these attachments, the grace of the Spirit is imparted and the glory of Jesus Christ is made known. In the body ligaments are connectors. They connect bones to the other bones of the body. The body and all the connected parts move when the ligaments move. People carrying their grace by faith with the Spirit’s ability become ligaments providing the power of movement for whole segments of the body in Christ.
The Jezebel seeks to take out the ligaments and all the connecting movement; to silence the impact of the body of Christ.
A small-group pastor can be a ligament for a whole group of believers. Providing life-giving grace and love to spur one another on toward love and good deeds. These "ligament" people connect and direct movement between the bones of the body of Christ. Worship leaders are ligaments as well. They inspire, lead, and usher in an atmosphere of the presence of God, attaching the body to the most vital and consistent encouragement in the Spirit. Likewise prophets are essential to the foundation (Ephesians 2:20), providing a wide spectrum of encouragement, strength, and comfort to the body. They glue the faith, hope and love of the family together in divine purpose and inspired utterance and environment.
The Jezebel seeks to cut the connections between ligaments and people, and to sever the connection of first love to the head, Jesus Christ. Take out the ligaments, and the body can no longer move. Take out the ligaments, and the people lose connection to vital mission and grace.
By killing first love and destroying relationships in the body, the Jezebel stops the movement of the body orchestrated by the ligaments and Holy Spirit. The pain of broken and severed relationships becomes the focus of the body. The unsettling and debilitating crisis occupies our full attention and we let go vital and important spiritual action. When that pain is associated with our flesh and with unhealed aspects of our heart, mind, and soul, the momentum of dissolution gains speed and spreads into the wider relationships of the community. Anyone experiencing this turmoil will find it extremely challenging to settle their heart, to gain clear and wise action and to continue moving in the power of the Holy Spirit.
For the Jezebel, the next stage is to destroy the people themselves and the ministries they carry. As each ligament is removed, the parts of the body cease to move, and those members connected to the ligament fall away or begin to lose heart. The temptation is to become “forms without power.” This posture completely misses the redemptive power and grace of the Holy Spirit, the overcoming reality of every life circumstance and situation.
“Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well. This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands. In fact, this is love for God: to keep his commands. And his commands are not burdensome, for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world? Only the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God” (1 John 5:1-5).
Our relationships in Jesus are the target. They’re the connections that hold the body together and gives it any chance of moving in Christ’s power.
Importance of Relationships
Offense breeds division, separation, and divorce. Relationships established in love are the primary glue, the way the ekklesia of Jesus functions and operates. The Spirit blesses people through people—by relationships of love and encouragement. Destroy the fabric of peace and harmonious relationships in a fellowship, and you take out whole groups of people. The utter fear that springs up as we look at our own natural family experiences is reflected in the ekklesia with devastating effect. We see it through earthly, un-spiritual, and demonic eyes instead of through service, love and redemptive power in the Holy Spirit. People begin peeling off, disappearing, and floating out of the ekklesia. They usually aren’t headed to a better place. Rather, they head into the wandering drift of people with no family. This is devastating to the overall mission of the Kingdom of God. And ultimately devastating to the individual.
The ekklesia, or church, is described as a family. It’s intended to overcome the broken and fallen relationships in which the world functions through the gospel and the redemptive grace of Jesus.
Often, the family simply reflects the realities of our culture with high rates of divorced relationships, broken fellowship, and dishonor.
Of course we’re on a journey, and not entirely free from the broken perspectives, relationships, and ways of the life we once lived. What is critical to understand is that the Jezebel relies on agreements with the flesh, with unhealed and dormant offenses, wounds, and revenge. The attack activates fear and rises on the brokenness of unhealed wounds, un-redeemed experiences, memories and distorted perspectives. Each one hidden away and covered in control and a ridged and justified self-righteous protection.
The most wonderful environments of the Holy Spirit—the kind I see the apostles calling for in the New Testament—are those filled with first-love worship and prayer. They’re environments overflowing with the presence of God and true love and encouragement. Families of God who are wholly devoted to Jesus and one another will thrive in love and the presence of God. Where Jesus is clearly the center of love and affection, encouragement and deep worship abound. Where a real and tangible love for one another, for the poor, and for the poor in spirit is the main and plain reality of the ekklesia, the family of God prospers in hope, faith, and love.
Such environments, rich in expressions of the kingdom in signs, wonders, healing, and the prophetic voice are rare, difficult to maintain, and key targets for the Jezebel.
Here’s a quick list of what gets destroyed:
Love—for the saints, for God, for the world. Instead, the self-idol is exalted to fill up our thoughts, actions, and devotions. Obsessive self-focus is a sure sign of the Jezebel.
Hope. As we slip into a hard cold heart and lose love for one another, we also waver in the patient endurance of hope; we begin seeing everything from earthly, un-spiritual, and demonic eyes.
Worship and prayer. The core devotions of first love and abiding with Jesus fade as our desires are ruined by pain, broken relationships, and loss of vision. Prayer shrinks into endless pursuits of personal wisdom and direction. We lose sight of the vast kingdom we’re part of building and of the family we build it with.
Dwelling richly in Scripture. Our hunger for the Word dwindles, and we find ourselves eating crackers instead of enjoying rich Word encounters.
Prophetic ministry. If we don’t kill the prophets, at least we no longer welcome them into our lives. We can go as far as eliminating the basic power of the Spirit in encouragement, strengthening, and comforting the saints. Cold hearts have no words for the utterly broken.
Fellowship. We divorce ourselves as well, heaping up judgment on our pain and condemning our brothers and sisters out of our pain. We pick up the offense and do the exact same by isolating ourselves, divorcing ourselves from the family that brings us hope, faith, and love.
The bottom line for the Jezebel is that destroying the ligaments and connected relationships brings the possibility of destroying the ekklesia. Of course, this book is about a victorious outcome—not destruction. We were made for overcoming the world (1 John 5:1-5). As much as suffering, opposition, hindrance, and difficulty can surround us, we still have overcoming power and grace through Jesus. The choice is to receive healing and walk in love.
Don’t let this challenging spiritual attack walk your heart into a cold love.
A Silenced and Shaken Faith
A shaken faith is one without a voice, without any volume, without vision. Faith is action. Faith in action is demonstrated in dramatic fashion in the face of a Jezebel attack.
Faith is required to do all the things I am pointing to in this book. Faith is the substance and reality of what is hoped for. Faith drives patient endurance and hope. Faith puts in motion grace in love, and it does this toward anything we face. Faith upholds us and gives us peace in the midst of the storm. By faith we love, serve, and act in the grace Jesus imparted to us (Ephesians 4:7; 1 Corinthians 12:7). A silenced faith looks passive, tumbling into broken fellowship, judgment, and confusion.
A silent faith is not a faith of love. Love hopes all things and believes all things. A faith infused with love will not settle for passivity in the face of Jezebel destruction. It won’t roll over while everything crumbles. It won’t allow the enemy to run free and sow destruction. Faith is courageous. Faith is steadfast. Faith is rooted and established in love and expects outcomes of love and grace when we act for righteousness and truth. Faith is never passive.
The Jezebel attack will silence your faith if you let it. The responses and actions that are stirred up in such an attack create the desire to withdraw, to be passive, and to let someone else do the confronting.
The explosive problem arises when leaders are neutralized and the ligaments disabled. In such times, the body’s real discernment and ability to carry the kingdom become clear. In the low-commitment, high-consumerism church of today, everyone scatters. They run from the unhealed pain and the past failures playing in their mind and heart—when the real victory is in discernment, love, and overcoming faith (I John 5:1-5). Without discernment and wisdom in motion, we are set up for the Jezebel to sow destruction into the veins of the ekklesia. The reality is that the ekklesia builds itself up in love when every part does its work (Ephesians 4:16). Anything short of this grace in motion creates a perfect environment for the Jezebel blow up. For the family of God to advance at all, the average believer begins taking responsibility in prayer, perseverance, forgiveness and love.
Here is a profile of active faith with wisdom and discernment in motion:
- Bonded in his Blood. We fellowship in faith, trusting the Spirit to fit us together for maturity; glorifying Jesus and marching in mission with the gospel
- Revealing the Mystery. We worship in faith, proclaiming week after week the truth of a life of Spirit and truth that’s naturally supernatural.
- Praying without Ceasing. We pray in faith, believing God for the church he calls out and for the transformation of those we disciple.
- Quickened Love in Power. We prophesy in faith, trusting that God can use us to encourage, strengthen and comfort the Bride of Christ and bring her into a spotless vision.
- Overcoming in Communion. We practice the word in faith, trusting God for breakthrough. Walking in his power, life, truth, against all odds and everything hell can throw at us.
- Enduring in HOPE. We walk in the Spirit in faith, patiently enduring in the hope of eternal life and believing that we’re a vital part of what God is doing in the world and in the kingdom of His Son.
When you see all these things evaporating from your life and from the ekklesia or church family you’re part of, take note. Stop the bleeding. Mend the heart. Get the healing and hope moving. Stay in fellowship. Trust in faith, and pour love and hope on the hurting (Isaiah 35:3-10).
Attacks from a Jezebel spirit strip us. They leave us passive, inactive in faith, and often wounded in heart. They silence our proclamation of faith and they silence the first love of our hearts. They silence us by destroying our confidence. Quieting the fiery Spirit in the churches redemptive story, and our ongoing telling of that story in overcoming testimony through the Lamb of God. The Gospel also goes quiet in the heaps of our unhealed pains. This pain is one of the very things Christ set us free from! Freedom of heart requires a whole and healed heart; a heart in which pain is healed and filled with peace.
'For Zion's sake I will not keep silent, for Jerusalem's sake I will not remain quiet, till her vindication shines out like the dawn, her salvation like a blazing torch." (Isaiah 62:1)
Don’t let your heart grow cold, your love fade, or your faith be silenced. Instead, stand (Ephesians 6:10-19). Overcome in faith (1 John 5:1-5). And go deeper with Jesus (Psalm 144).
Go ahead. Run with HIM.
Thanks for reading.
The dialogue is awesome. Thank you. Testimonies? Share em with me. Re-Shares lov em. Thank you! With much love in Jesus
Jeff Reynolds ---
Brother Jeff
