RaJean Vawter & Jack Frost
The deep feeling of being a spiritual orphan is one of the greatest hindrances to having our hearts healed and being free to walk in expressed love, intimacy, and healthy horizontal relationships.
We see spiritual orphans all around us all the time and don’t realize it. The Arab/Israeli conflict, for instance, is rooted in the orphan spirit that came on Ishmael when he was abolished from his father’s house. As we go through this study, we’ll see how we can identify this as such. First the natural, then the spiritual. The same war is within the church. The same war is within you and me as we are fighting for a place in the Father’s heart. When I say orphan spirit, it can be a demonic spirit, but it is also a heart attitude. There can be an orphan spirit over an individual person or over a city, a nation and/or a people group.
So what are some characteristics of an orphan spirit? First of all, let’s look at the origin of the orphan spirit because doing so will give us a good idea of what we’re talking about.
Lucifer was the first spiritual orphan. He lived and worked in an atmosphere of pure love and acceptance. But when he decided that he wanted what God had, he was cast out. Have you ever thought about the pain he felt when he went from the place of perfect love to the place of no love, nothing but hurt and emptiness and loneliness and fear? He became an orphan in every sense of the word. Well, misery loves company so he had to get everybody else into that same boat so he caused Adam and Eve to go along with him. In 1 Timothy 2:14 it says that Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression. But in Romans 5:12- 19 we see that Adam willfully sinned. The man actually entered into the sin, but the woman was deceived. How? By orphan thinking.
Then God came along, and said, “Son, where are you hiding?” Adam said, “It’s this woman’s fault.” As soon as he did that, the ability of women to ever trust man went out the window. As soon as we blame another person for our behavior, we have violated trust in the relationship, and all intimacy is cut off, and shame comes in. “You’ll become like God, your Father,” Satan said. In every one of us is a sincere desire: we want to be like the Father. Eve wanted to be like her Father. But Father said “Don’t eat of this tree.” But Eve said, “If I do it my way, I’ll be like the Father, and He will appreciate me more.”
You see how orphan thinking goes? It is a short-cut spirit. We think our way will get us to what we want more quickly. Even then, Eve wanted a place in the Father’s heart. She wanted to please the Father. She wanted to be like the Father. But an orphan will try to convince us to start thinking like them. “OK, you are going to become like your Father, but just do it the way you want to do it, not the way He wants you to do it.” You can easily see independence and sell-will come into play here.
Going on with the story. . . God saw the shame they were carrying, and in Genesis 3: 21 He shed the blood of an animal and He robed them. Right there is a perfect illustration that no matter how far we live outside the Father’s house, no matter how often we listen to the accuser of the brethren, the Father wants to cover us. 1 Peter 4:8 tells us that love covers. He doesn’t want to leave us uncovered. Hebrews 11:16 tells us that God is not ashamed to be called our God. Hebrews 2:11 says Jesus isn’t ashamed to be called our brother. He does not judge us. John 5:22 says the Father does not judge us; the Father judges no one. Does He discipline? Yes, but He will not condemn, He will not accuse. He wants to cover us with a robe of righteousness.
Because Adam blamed his wife, his wife wouldn’t take ownership either; she blamed the one who deceived her. Because neither of them would take ownership, they chose orphan thinking over being restored into the Father’s love. So what did the Father have to do? One of the most horrible verses in the Bible is Genesis 3:24. God drove them out of the garden. Nobody wants to leave the place of perfect love, but when Adam and Eve chose orphan thinking over Father thinking it was Isaiah 59:2 happening. Our sin separates us from God. He doesn’t want us separated from Him. But their choice meant they had to leave the home of perfect love.
When man left Dad’s house which was the place of perfect love, every human being ever born from that day forward was born with that Adamic nature. Every human being is born with an orphan heart. This means that we don’t loose a spirit of son-ship. We never had it. Ask a two-year-old. Go put up those toys. No! Do this. No! Do that. No! From the time they are old enough to fight against us, they are warring against being subject to an earthly father and mother’s mission. From the time Adam and Eve came into agreement with the first spiritual orphan till now, all of mankind are born as orphans, and we can’t cast this out.
But good news! In John 14:18, on the last day of His life. Jesus said, “I will not leave you as orphans, but I will come to you.” That’s the turning point of 4,000 years of history. For 4,000 years, mankind lived life as if they didn’t have a home.
Jesus on that final night said, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” Why did He say that? Because orphans do not have the faith to get to the Father on their own. Orphans have no faith for anyone to meet their need because the only way orphans get anything is to take it. So He said, “I’ll come to you.” And He doesn’t stop there. John 14:21 says, “He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father and I will love him and manifest (or reveal) Myself to him.” He is speaking of the love He has for us. That word manifest in Greek means to exhibit in person, or disclose by words, appear, declare plainly, inform, manifest openly. That sounds like He’ll show us Himself in some way that our five senses can pick up doesn’t it?
Did you notice the word “mission” when I spoke of the Lord’s command not to eat of that certain tree? That was God’s mission for Adam and Eve. It was God’s mission for Satan to have great authority and be a worship leader. But, what happened? Lucifer sought his own mission over God’s mission. Hebrews 12:9 says be subject to the Father of Spirits and live. Another way of saying that is, be subject to the Father’s mission and live. In Greek, the words sub-mission, subjection and subject all mean the same thing. They all have to do with being underneath and dependent.
So what is the Father’s mission? In Matthew 22:37-40, the lawyer asked Jesus, “What’s the first and greatest commandment?” Jesus says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul and with all your mind. And love others as you do yourselves.” There’s the Father’s mission right there. A person who knows God is a person who is at home in love. When I say the word house or home I’m speaking of a place of warmth, protection, comfort, security, identity, a place where we are given a sense of purpose, or destiny, a reason to get out of bed, a place where we receive affirmation, a place where we are encouraged that whenever things are going wrong that day, we know that we have a place that we can run to. We know that there is always a place at home. Whether in our workplace, our church, our home or wherever, we have a sense of, “I’m valued, I’m honored, I belong, I’m accepted, I don’t have to perform to be loved and accepted, I don’t have to meet up with a lot of rigid demands; I am loved the way I am, not the way I should be.” We have a sense of total love and acceptance. The whole mission of all creation is about receiving love and bringing us into unity with the Father. Didn’t Jesus say, “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another. (John 13:34-35). However we feel about ourselves is what we are going to do and require of others and how we treat others. If we are hearing the voice of the Father of creation tell us how much He loves us, we will be subject to His mission, and we will give our life to make the Father’s love known to the next person we meet. When we are subject to the Father’s mission, we understand that the great commandment comes before the great commission.
Obviously, much, much more can be said about this but to cut to the chase, what are the characteristics of the orphan spirit?
- Being more concerned with ministry than in meeting the needs of our family.
- Not feeling as if we belong.
- Not feeling accepted.
- Feeling like we are on the outside looking in.
- Trying to be good enough
- Trying to act right, talk right; do right in order to have a place in a person’s heart.
- Envious of someone who has any sense of love and intimacy. Satan sets himself against anyone who thinks that they have any right to the Father’s heart or the Father’s inheritance.
- An unbiblical view of what God thinks about us. Since nobody loves us, nobody cares about us; Satan tries to steal our idea of what God thinks about us from s. This then leads to. . .
- A closed heart. Someone doesn’t treat us nicely or doesn’t appreciate us so we close our heart to them.
- An independent, self-reliant attitude.
- Control, especially of relationships.
- Superficial relationships.
- Striving.
- Anger.
- Fear.
- Defiance, fighting, wrangling, arguing.
- Bondage.
- Living as if we don’t have a home.
- Looking for love in all the wrong places. Chasing after counterfeit affections and engaging in passions of the flesh.
- Trying to take what a true son has. (Arab & Jew)
- Loving when things go well; lack of trust when things go wrong.
- Inability to receive discipline. Hebrews 12:6-8 – For whom the Lord loves He chastens. And scourges every son whom He receives. If you endure chastening, God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom a father does not chasten? But if you are without chastening, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate and not sons.
- Blaming others.
- Refusal to deal with our heart, our own hurt and rejection.
- Life lived based upon what others think about us – or what we think they think about us.
- Focusing on the faults of those in authority.
- The disappointment, discouragement or grief caused by other’s faults is received as rejection or woundedness.
- Inability to receive love, comfort and admonition from others.
- A life of oppression, getting up every morning battling a sense of heaviness, darkness which results in great difficulty receiving love, acceptance and admonition from God and others.
BASIC TRUST:
If I accidentally step on your toe, I can ask you to forgive me. You say, “Yes,” Then I respond with, “Thank you. Do you still trust me as a woman of integrity?” “Yes.” But next time you have your foot sticking out and I walk by, you’re going to withdraw your foot. You can trust me as a person, but loose basic trust for me to get too close without withdrawal and protecting yourself. Life is a life of pain and rejection. But what do we do with it?
Basic trust in relationships has usually been lost by the time we are five or six years old. So if anybody gets too close, we move behind our walls of protection. Don’t trust, don’t talk, and don’t feel. Basic trust doesn’t mean the ability to believe or trust another person. It’s the capacity to hold our heart open to another person, especially if we believe their motives or intentions are not pure. Basic trust isn’t an issue between us and other people. Basic trust is an issue between us and God. When we truly come into this revelation of the Father’s love, our basic trust is in “What does Father think about me?” When I come into this place of living life as if I have a home, suddenly somebody can be coming at me and I don’t have to take on the same spirit. If I’m subject to the Father’s mission, surrendering to His love, then supernatural grace comes in those circumstances. Whether it is during the situation with someone who is aggressively coming at me or whether it is a situation at home. I can stay in a realm of total rest when I come into this place of son-ship. It is an issue of basic trust.
Taking it a bit further, basic trust is when we risk being vulnerable with an open heart even when it hurts us to stay open and not close our spirit. Basic trust is when we are able to move beyond weaknesses in others and receive God’s healing touch one moment at a time and not run away. When aggressiveness comes at me, I retreat back into the Father’s love. When one person chooses to retreat into the Father’s love, the other one backs down. Even when someone may be misrepresenting the Father’s love to us, when we come into this place of son-ship we can surrender to that.
Orphan spirit cannot be cast out, because it is a result of a structure or system of ungodly beliefs that we have been developing over a lifetime. It has become who we think we are. An orphan heart has to be displaced by personal experience in our Father’s love and a revelation of a spirit of son-ship.
When we begin to live life as if we don’t have a home, then everybody around us must fit into the same mold. Did you ever go to your mother or father in need only to come to them at the wrong moment or a moment when they were feeling anxiety, fear, turmoil? And because there was already so much pain in their life when you came they pushed you aside. When did you cease being your mother and father’s son or daughter? I’ll tell you when it was. It was when you touched your mother or father’s hidden core pain and you rejected a spirit of son-ship, daughter-ship. Years later it can still be an area of distrust in your heart toward them which means you are also not surrendering to the Heavenly Father's love, day by day, moment by moment.
The orphan spirit is what causes a child to want all the benefits the parents can give but not submit to their authority or open their hearts to them. It’s what causes a person to take and take from the gifting of another without seeking God as to how to give back. It is knowing that we are to give back but not asking God what or how to do so. Instead, we give what we would want and on our terms. Orphans deceive. Orphans are unreal. Orphans say all the right things, but we can just feel we don’t have their heart.
At some point we need to come to a crisis moment where we either choose to let the Father’s love displace the earthly father’s love and displace that orphan’s heart or we come into a place of deception and we embrace the orphan heart as our way of thinking and living. It is why our children by 12 years old begin to reject our values, our morals, our boundaries. They take on an attitude that says, “Why can’t mom and dad just do it my way sometimes?” How much of that is an impartation because it was also our heart with others? It was our heart since we too ceased receiving our mother and father when we were children, and now we are reaping in our own sons and daughters what we sowed in our youth.
It’s not a matter of salvation. We can even battle oppression every day of our life because we can’t cast out an orphan heart. We can only introduce an orphan to a Father. Do you know any perfect mothers or fathers or pastors? What happened when we were in need of comfort or love and we ran to them only to receive hurt or rejection?
Romans 8:14-15 says, “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, “Abba, Father.” In order to come into this place of son-ship, we have to be led by the Spirit of God which is by a fathering spirit. So what is the opposite of that? Those who are led by the chief orphan spirit, the first spiritual orphan are not sons. Then, when we cut off intimacy in one relationship, it becomes a cold love that defies all relationships, and then all our relationships become conditional. We will only have love and acceptance for those people who are acting right, talking right, doing right, agreeing with us, but those who don’t, we keep out. We are still living in the father’s house. But we’re living as an orphan.
When God moves powerfully in people’s lives, why do so many of them still end up divorced, destroyed and living victory-less lives? They aren’t able to receive discipline, because spiritual orphans can’t receive change. They receive the nature of God as His power, and they relish in the power, but when they get home it doesn’t turn to discipline and change. {A note to divorced people – Many times it is a spouse who will not accept discipline and change even while you are. But, by the same token, many whose spouse will not change often refuse to deal with what needs to be changed in themselves because what they need to change is so small compared to the needed change in the spouse.}
Anything in us that is not subject to the Father’s mission must change. When we’re not willing to change, to look at the three fingers pointing back at ourselves, then true intimacy with the Father is non-existent. Instead, people focus on His acts, on gifts, discipline, duty, and/or in hyper-religious activity, instead of relationship. There is no healthy relationship with God, because we don’t know how to have a healthy relationship. We keep our distance from Father God and try to handle the pain and disappointment ourselves. So then our image of Father God (derived from life experiences compounded by our ungodly belief system) produces within us fear or condemnation and inability to receive His compassionate, forgiving love. How do you daily hear His voice clearly saying to you, “You are the son or daughter whom I love and in whom My favor rests!” so that we are no longer living like a spiritual orphan, but are at home in Father’s love?
Application:
Let your memory get in touch with a defining moment when basic trust was lost and your ability to receive love and healing was hindered. Where was Jesus that day? Meditate on Psalms 22:9-10; 139:13-24; Isaiah 49:15-16; Hebrews 13:5-6; Psalms 27:10; John 14:18-23; Jeremiah 1:5; 31:3; Isaiah 53:4-5; 66:11-13.
Get in touch with the pain and loneliness of the moment when you cut yourself off from receiving a parent’s love.
Look throughout the memory and see if you can see what Jesus was doing when you were closing your heart to love. Can you see Him? What is He saying to you? Be still and listen! Allow Him to speak words of comfort, acceptance, and belonging. If you feel like you are not receiving anything, just think “Jesus loves me, this I know.”
Allow your Father to express His Father heart for you. Hear Him say to you: “You are the son or daughter whom I love and in whom My favor rests! You were created by my love and for love! I am perfection, and I perfectly and unconditionally love and accept you. There is nothing you can do to be loved but to receive it!”
Allow Him to rejoice over you with singing as you are still before him to experience His love and let him restore basic trust (Zephaniah 3:17).
Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.For My yoke is easy and My burden is light. Matthew 11:28-30