A prominent part of my time as a community minister was taken up with helping substance abusers and it was not long before I observed the principle of the law of attraction being outworked – like begets like. One day I was at Gary’s house (Refer to my post, You need Jesus Christ.) giving him some biblical encouragement when eighteen year- old Mike called around. It did not immediately appear that Mike had such problems, but given that he and Gary were not related as family and neither were they work colleagues I suspected that it was the similarity of emotional states that brought them together.
As I ministered to Gary, Mike listened quietly and it was not long before he mentioned that he came from a practicing Roman Catholic family, although he himself had ceased his involvement, “some time ago.” Forty minutes later his mother Shelley called in. As I explained my purpose for being there she told me she was pleased that I was among them, sharing that she too had a personal, born-again relationship with Christ and was praying for Mike because, “he’s a violent young man.” I then asked Mike if he’d like to talk about it privately and looking down at the ground, he nodded and said he would. His mother gave permission so we made a time for mid-morning the following day.
At that first meeting, Mike only spoke about issues that I knew to be at a surface level and as a result he was quick to give me reasons and justifications for the violent behaviour that his mother spoke about earlier. After about fifteen minutes of listening to him continue with this I began to ask Mike, “So what?” He was not expecting that type of response from a “minister” and he told me so with anger. It was appropriate at that point to tell Mike that, although his parents, family, friends and priest had probably listened to him reasoning and justifying himself constantly, I was not going to do so, because, “the issues that you’re bringing up here are not the real issues.”
With his mother Shelley praying in another room and myself praying as I listened to Mike, the Holy Spirit did not allow him to get too out of hand at any point as I continued to probe him deeper. I explained to him that neither God, medical practitioners or myself are interested in putting “band-aids on cancers,” but rather, the cancer needs to be diagnosed for the type that it is and then be cut out.
Mike had heard a little about Jesus Christ in his life to date, but he had never heard of Him as the ultimate Surgeon who would willingly carry out the operation if given permission to do so. I said to him that the key to his release was not so much in God’s hand, as it was in his hand.
Mike’s response to that was no different than most substance abusers I’d worked with, he didn’t want to hear it. Nor did he want to hear that there was no solution to his problem other than Jesus, learning that the root cause of this was in his spirit, not in his mind. And given that this was so, I mentioned that any future help sought through humanistic psychiatry or psychology would ultimately fail him also, because, “your problem is in the realm of your spirit and they are not qualified to go there.”
As we continued to talk, Mike very reluctantly shared that his reading and writing was way below standard because of “some sickness” and that he found this very difficult to admit to anybody. He was also embarrassed because of unemployment.
He listened with intent when I explained to him that he could tell Jesus Christ about any and all such difficulties and I encouraged him to do so by saying that in my own case, I go to the Lord telling Him the very worst about myself, “and He is enormously pleased when I do so, because He can do miracles with honesty, but He will do nothing with dishonesty.” He then went on to tell me that when he gets violent he smashes people and things. I told him that a root cause of violence is fear and that, “angry people are insecure people.”
Among other things, he told me he was a heroin user but was trying to get off it, saying his cousin was also a user as were many of his friends. I continued to bring Mike back to the real issues and he began to open up on some of them. I discerned he was suffering badly from rejection, which I saw as the root cause of his troubles and told him so. I spent the next two hours explaining the true purpose of Christ’s death and resurrection, and that it was God’s desire to replace his (Mike’s) rejection with His (God’s) acceptance. Mike then said that he wanted the Lord to come in and take over.
Many times when someone tells me that, what they really mean is that they want Christ to come and take away their problems. Once they perceive themselves to be getting on top of of it all – or indeed, when trouble returns – they push Christ out and begin to take the control back again. It’s a common practice among all types of people and I thought this could be the case for Mike, mainly because he saw himself much more as a victim than he did an offender before God. Nevertheless, I am not the judge and jury of another person’s heart, so we did pray for the Lord to come and He did exactly that.
At the end of our time we sat with his mother Shelley over coffee and she talked to her son about the realities of God and Mike nodded telling us that he had some understanding because he now, “felt very different.” Then Shelley told us that she knew the Holy Spirit was with us all, “because he’s never stayed that long speaking with anyone before.” Given that this was so I encouraged Mike to dwell on the practicalities of what Christ would be willing to do for him and to pray and ask to be delivered from all faulty religious concepts of Him.
I explained to him that the only way he could achieve this was through prayer, and despite how bad his reading was, to start with something from the gospels and believe the truths God would reveal to him regardless of whether he understood them or not.
By exhorting him to do this, I explained to Mike that in God’s time, which is timeless, it was His intention to transform him spiritually, mentally, morally and physically and that He would achieve this using His written word and the Holy Spirit as they fed his “born again spirit.” I told Mike that the Bible is not a natural book, it is a supernatural, spiritual book and as such, he would find much in it that conflicts with his own opinions, reasonings and imaginations and therefore, it would require from him much humility. God has nothing to say to the proud and the arrogant.
As time went on, Mike made some spiritual progress, but he slipped back also. A month later I got a phone call from Shelley informing me he was having great trouble. When I called to the house he was sitting with two of his heroin addicted friends. They too were nice kids but I used the time to tell them all that they only had two choices in life – live for Satan the devil and eventually be killed by him – or – live for Christ abundantly, without measure. They were responsive and asked questions about the practicalities of the Lord which I answered, showing them from the Scriptures.
Another time Mark’s father told me that he (Mike) picked up a chair twice to smash up the lounge room, but both times there had been next to no damage. They saw this as the restraining hand of God upon the situation. Shelley phoned me about a year after that first visit to inform me she found heroin and a needle in Mike’s room but she had no evidence that he was using again. I found no evidence either when speaking with him and gave him the benefit of the doubt when he said it belonged to his cousin. I did meet his young cousin about the same time, but he didn’t want authentic help – the ‘blame game’ was where he was at.
As far as I know Mike progressed slowly. He told me that Jesus was his Lord and he managed to find genuine employment. The history behind Mike was not at all healthy. There was much sickness and violence in the wider family (grandmother, sisters, aunties and uncles) much of it due to occultic/witchcraft involvement, which had all the appearances of being good and godly at the time, but in reality, it came back to bite them in horrendous ways and had been doing so for years.
In some ways, Mike was a victim, but at least he and his mother had the Lord Jesus Christ’s hand upon them. I also ministered to his mother and two aunties, as well as teaching them from the Scriptures off an on for eighteen months. “The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.” John 10:10.