Seeing through Spiritual Eyes: Expand Your View of Spiritual Reality, Uncover the Mystery of Spiritual Warfare, Envision the Path of Spiritual Well-Being

By Kirk Farnsworth

Bring the otherworldly mystery of spiritual reality down to earth.
Understand how Satan can gain entry into the personal lives of Christians.
Learn how to find peace in church conflict without having to flee, fake it, or fight back.
Put an end to toxic memories from a painful past.
Experience meaningful life in the Spirit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Sep 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781630874599

Kirk Farnsworth

Dr. Kirk Farnsworth is an award-winning author with extensive professional experience as a college professor, mental health counselor, corporate executive, and naval officer. He and Rosie, his wife of over fifty years, reside on agroforestry acreage near Seattle, Washington.

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Seeing through Spiritual Eyes

Expand Your View of Spiritual Reality, Uncover the Mystery of Spiritual Warfare, Envision the Path of Spiritual Well-Being

Kirk E. Farnsworth

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SEEING THROUGH SPIRITUAL EYES

Expand Your View of Spiritual Reality, Uncover the Mystery of Spiritual Warfare, Envision the Path of Spiritual Well-Being

Copyright © 2014 Kirk E. Farnsworth. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Wipf & Stock

An imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

isbn 13: 978-1-62564-831-0

eisbn 13: 978-1-63087-459-9

Manufactured in the U.S.A. 09/22/2014

To Rosie

Ordained minister

and

extraordinary mate and mom

Acknowledgments

I am grateful that Wipf and Stock is the publisher of this book. For one thing, manuscripts are accepted for publication on merit, not on the projected market. For another, the focus is on the full scope of academic disciplines and church ministries. I have found a publishing home for my abiding interests of integrating psychology and theology, finding peace in church conflict, and embracing spiritual well-being.

Throughout the publishing process there was a cultural emphasis on excellence, good stewardship of resources, and a refreshing attitude of partnership in publisher-author relations. The latter was evident in the good working relationship among myself, my attentive-to-detail and reasonable editor, Matthew Wimer, and Kimberly Shoff, my good-natured and dependable typist who enthusiastically mastered the complexities of the many alterations of the original manuscript with computer skills beyond my imagination.

Foreword

The Author of the Bible is writing us into his book,

we aren’t writing him into ours. . . .

Our task is to obey, believingly, trustingly obey. Simply obey.

—Eugene H. Peterson¹

How blessed is everyone who fears the Lord,

who walks in His ways. . . .

You will be happy and it will be well with you.

—Psalm 128:1–2, NASB

I believe in Christianity [Christian spiritual reality] as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it, I see everything else.

—C.S. Lewis²

Do you have eyes but fail to see . . . ?

—Jesus (Mark 8:18a)

1. Peterson, Long Obedience,

206

.

2. Lewis, Is Theology Poetry?

22

.

Introduction

Have you ever wished for a trouble-free life? Do you ever fancy acquiring peace regardless of the cost? Surely peace is what we all crave: peace with God, with neighbors, and within ourselves. We’ll do almost anything to get it—some will even go to war if they have to. When conflict erupts in our families, on our jobs, or in our churches, when relationships get strained and we can’t get back on track right away, our natural tendency is to ask, Can’t we just stop the fighting, get along with one another, and move one? If that were to work, we would probably end up with something that looks like peace but that would not run very deep or last very long.

There are many possible reasons not to settle for what can rightly be referred to as pseudo-peace, that is, the appearance of peace (or absence of war), where we say, ‘Peace, peace,’ but there is no peace.³ What we really should want is peace that is longstanding and unrestricted by a limited, self-serving perception of reality. What is too often left out of any discussion of human conflict in families, the workplace, and churches, and even within ourselves is an attempt to understand the spiritual reality of the situation.

The biblical record gives us every reason to suspect that any serious human conflict that does not involve the possible role of spiritual reality in the discussion of the problem and/or the solution will not likely lead to real, long-lasting peace. We need to reverse the modern tendency to marginalize evil and trivialize Satan. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get a handle on how Satan actually operates in human conflict, and how we personally participate in the process?

In the following chapters, I will attempt to answer the following questions:

1. Can we expose the human factors that Satan uses and connect them with how he uses them?

2. Can we produce objective evidence of a battle within one’s inner self that will provide a deeper understanding of the reality of demonic influence in the life of believers?

3. Can we find a biblical approach that puts an end to troublemakers being personal conduits for demonic influence in church conflict and that resolves the conflict—instead of fleeing, faking it, or fighting back?

4. Can we find a biblical approach to put an end to the prolonged suffering of victims from toxic memories from their painful past?

5. Can we move past finding peace in the midst of and in the memories of traumatic events to the in-between times of ordinary everyday life?

6. Can we develop a strong sense of spiritual well-being and a memory bank of sanctified, meaningful memories?

I believe we can win both the battle and the war. We can connect church conflict and satanic influences and successfully fight our personal demons. We can peacefully manage poisoned relationships and other collateral damage. We can claim victory in Christ by bringing our sinful attitudes and actions, as well as our toxic memories burned into us by the conflict, under the lordship of Christ. And as a pathway for finding lasting peace, developing spiritual well-being, and creating meaningful memories, I have gathered up all these concerns into a list of Key Insights into Spiritual Warfare and Spiritual Welfare in the appendix at the end of this book.

But we can win both the battle and the war and still lose the peace. One of the main contributions of this book is to move beyond the preservation of the physical, psychological, and spiritual wholeness of our being in the context of spiritual conflict. We must focus especially on our spiritual well-being, the holiness of our being, in the context of our progressive sanctification into Christlikeness.

In many ways, this book is a companion to and an extension of my book When the Bride Is Attacked. At the end of that book is a brief essay on the problem of evil. I introduce it with these words:

We must remember that evil is absolutely the most serious problem that could occur in any conflict. Satan will use conflict every chance he gets. This does not mean that every conflict is evil. It does mean that there is no more fertile ground for satanic activity. Conflict brings with it an untold number of openings for Satan to establish footholds in people to distort the conflict for his own diabolical purposes. What more effective way could he possibly use to bring down a strong, healthy church?⁴

I am sounding the trumpet about the marginalizing of evil. Almost without exception, today’s healthy churches do not expect to see spiritual conflict in any material way at any time in their future, and churches in conflict do not seriously consider the possibility of spiritual conflict even when it breaks out in their midst. Just because they don’t anticipate it or recognize it does not mean that Satan is not the single most powerful threat to their very existence.

The postmodern approach to resolving church conflict is to recognize that everyone has a share in the blame and must repent to restore an equal-footing balance, or peace through reconciliation. All sins are assumed to be equal, and evil is marginalized as the bad side of human nature. It’s reduced to a psychological issue, devoid of actual demonic influence. The spiritual issue is confined to how the Holy Spirit can heal, and does not take into account how Satan can hurt. The fact is, both the Spirit and Satan, from the spiritual realm, can materially impact in the earthly realm the course of unhealthy church conflict.

Most approaches to peacemaking (in the generic sense, without reference to a specific method) skirt the issue of the objective spiritual reality of evil. We read statements such as, Remember that often the evil in our desires is not in what we want but in the fact that we want it too much.⁵ Overlooked is the fact that often it is also Satan himself who is the evil in our desires! His footprints are all over our hard-hearted, mean-spirited, self-serving tantrums to get our own way.

This is a fatal flaw in popular thinking. Yes, we must face why we desire so desperately things we cannot have, but we must also face what it is we must have and how we go about getting it. Rather than casting aside the objective presenting issue (what we want) in favor of the real issue (why we want it so badly), we