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[Editor’s Note: This the fifth and final article in the “Your Jubilee in 2010” Series describing the personal and national “Year of Jubilee” available to us in 2010. The four preceding articles are: (1) “‘Jubileer' or ‘April Fool’?”; (2) “Our National Jubilee’s Forgiveness Factors”; (3) “Your Personal Jubilee’s Forgiveness Factors”; (4) “Getting Psyched Up for Your Personal Year of Jubilee." All together, the articles comprise the five chapters in one entire, free “sneak preview” at the heart of Ken’s forthcoming book, Judo Politics—The Transformation of the Electorate that Upsets Big Brother, due to be released this Spring. To access the entire series, click on “Your Jubilee in 2010” Series under the Categories section to the right.

Husband: “I read your first ‘“Jubileer” or “April Fool”?’ article and just couldn’t get my mind around it. But, for some reason I persisted with articles #2 and #3 on our Personal and National Jubilee’s Forgiveness Factors. Then, I went back to Article #1 and it suddenly all made sense to me!

Wife: “As I read, at first it seemed like you were describing pieces to the puzzle with which I am quite familiar. But, then you started filling in pieces between the pieces, enabling me to see the larger mosaic come together, so that I could take the next step forward instead of just being forever stuck in my recent paralysis!”

Dear Walk Show Family,

Absent an essentially spiritual, then financial, Second American Revolution, in my opinion we are at the beginning of the end of the First American Republic.

Kingdom economist and Walk Show advisor, Jay Ferris, sent me an article this week about the economic dominoes that are already beginning to fall, starting in Greece and on to the rest of Europe. To add insult to injury, Jay included a hint at the much larger collapse that is underway in the U. S: an article and video link in which Fed Chairman Bernanke admitted to Rep. Ron Paul in a Congressional hearing that he printed 1.3 trillion dollars out of thin air in recent months! Such monetizing of our national debt not only guarantees hyper-inflation soon; it almost makes one wonder why Bernanke didn’t just print up a similar amount to pay for all of our health care and save the nation the Congressional health care trauma of this past year, plus bail out California and a bunch of cities on the backstroke. After all, it’s free money, isn’t it?

Mass delusion and corruption are the names of the game now in the First American Republic.

Concerning the falling dominoes, Jay Ferris commented, “I got the impression yesterday that it may have been the beginning or at least a real mile post on the way to our economic end.” Yet, Jay is not a pessimist. So far he has written three books about a new type of “kingdom economy” that offers nothing less than “authentic hope” and “genuine change we can believe in” as all of the godless world systems continue to crumble.

The intrigue in it all is that this higher and better economy is already operational for those who put their trust in the unseen Reality that supersedes and transcends the seen unreality all around us.

Following are some possible guidelines for you as a faith-filled “Jubileer,” described earlier in this series as “the fiercely loyal and proactive minority,” during this your 2010 Jubilee celebration. As Jay Ferris would suggest, the penalty for not acting upon some of these choices could be serious or fatal for you, but the rewards could mean Jubilee/Liberty for you this very year!

My suggestion is that you work your way down through the list, to see if any of the items might fit your situation and spur you to immediate action. If you would benefit from personal recommendations in any of the following scenarios, feel free to contact me, as I have already experienced the privilege of personally working through the following Jubileer checklist with the assistance of the Walk Show team of sponsors who serve in each of the areas listed below:

1)    Asset Protection—I have noticed that many Americans, Christians included, work hard at creating assets, but very few spend the few dollars per month necessary to protect those assets from litigious assaults and identity theft. This is, in my opinion, your first and foremost responsibility as a good steward. As I explain in detail in my Judo Politics chapter entitled, “It Starts with Me,” my own pre-paid legal services have already paid for themselves until I reach well into my nineties, and my identity theft protection has guarded me during three identity theft attempts (two on my business and one personally). Both The Walk Show and Robin and I personally are served by one of the most competent, articulate spokespersons I know of in this dual pre-paid legal and identity-theft-protection industry.

2)    Downsizing—Robin and I have upsized and downsized from time to time in years past, primarily due to the needs of a growing family that has finally left the nest. In this present economy, we are looking to downsize once again, with a desire to streamline, save money, etc. At our age we have a greater appreciation for the reality that, in America, “You don’t tend to own things as much as they own you!” We have concluded—for us, at least—that the less we have to pay for every month, the less we’re on the American treadmill and the more time we’re given for the important things to us in life and our business-ministry.

3)    Real Estate Acquisitions—The combination of historical low rates and low property values could make now the best chance ever to purchase a new home. Probably for a very short time more, first-time home buyers will still be able to move into a mortgage payment that is very close to what they were paying in rent. Last month FHA rates (30yr fixed) were as low as 4.75%, with conventional 30-year fixed rates at 4.75%, as well. Conventional 15-year mortgages went as low as 4.125%. At this point rates can only go up. Time is money. Waiting even a month—such as this past month of April when the federal tax incentives were still in place—can cost thousands immediately and thousands more over the life of a loan.

The Walk Show continues to run its “Loan Watch Program,” which assures our customers of the lowest rates, no hidden fees, and no unnecessary changes in the game plan during the closing period. I have personally watched Walk Show listeners save piles of cash, while also watching others get creamed for ignoring the “Walk Show Loan Watch Program” various protections from unscrupulous practices in the mortgage industry. Whether you need a quality Loan Officer or a Real Estate Agent, The Walk Show’s business-ministry can introduce you to the best of the best.

4)    Loss Mitigation—There’s a slow way and a fast way to work your way out of debt. Since many are caught between a rock and a hard place, they might consider a fast one—loss mitigation.

You may need to negotiate down your loans or credit-cards. With the proper professional help, it is not unusual to be able to cut them by half or more. As there are many pitfalls when working with creditors, I’ve found that rarely are people equipped to handle the terrain without professional assistance. Long experience has taught me this fact of life: “A trained, equipped, and experienced professional rarely costs me anything and usually saves me mucho money, as they normally create more value in their service than they charge in fees.”

If you find the best loss-mitigation counselor (as distinct from many incompetent advertisers of loss-mitigation services), you are not likely to spend a dime more than you would if you tried to do the job yourself, and you’ll probably spend less—yet without all the stress! In The Walk Show’s search for “the best of the best” in this field, we now have experienced, trustworthy loss-mitigation professionals to recommend to you.

If you are having temporary difficulty making your mortgage payments, you might start out by considering a forbearance agreement with your bank or other lender. A forbearance agreement is typically an agreement to postpone, reduce, or suspend payment due on a loan for a limited and specific time period. Competent counsel here might help here, as well, for each bank has its own quagmire to plod through. The Walk Show’s competent counsel warns us about the end-game on the forbearance limited time period—increased payments:

Forbearance is for homeowners trying to get caught up. This process requires not only that you pay your current payment but [eventually] an additional amount to “catch” up the arrears. Often it is not a viable situation for homeowners . . . How can you pay more than your payment if you got behind on you payment to begin with? Be careful, this is not always viable….and a definite no no if you are short selling.

One of our Walk Show preferred loan officers describes a second line of defense if you are having difficulty making your mortgage payments:

The one thing I would mention to your audience members who are “upside-down” is to look into a loan modification before doing a short sale (unless they really want be out of the house). Many lenders are reducing the interest or the principal to make the payment be about 35% of the borrower’s income. This is a better alternative to saturating the market with short sales. It usually is a win-win between the borrower and bank. A friend of mine recently had her loan modified and her payment dropped by $900! . . . I can get into more detail for you on the procedure and differences from bank to bank.

One beauty of first investigating a forbearance agreement; then, if turned down, a loan modification; then, if disqualified, a short sale, is that each application and processing period buys you more time! Yes, even if you are turned down by any of the three options, with each procedure you have normally bought weeks’ or months’ more time in your home without foreclosure and often without making payments. Time can be everything when seeking to restore your cash flow! Ignorance of these matters, as well as the lack of professional advice, can unnecessarily stress you out as well as “do you in.”

5)    Short Sale Your House the Right Way—If you’re upside down with the loan-to-value ratio of your house, where your house is worth less than the mortgage(s), you may need a short-sale. I noticed the other day that in one of our Western Washington counties, close to 80% of all residential sales are now “short sales”—where the house is bought for less than its mortgage, and the bank absorbs the loss so as to avoid even greater losses through foreclosure. Because many if not most candidates for short sales are under financial stress, your indecision, ignorance or bad decisions in this arena could needlessly shorten your ability to stay in your house while you are working to improve your cash flow.

A properly shepherded short sale can often buy you up to a year or more in the house before you have to move out—yes, even a year without mortgage payments if you’re in a distressed situation. Again, in times like these, cash flow is everything, and even the lenders themselves will suggest that it is best for you to remain in the house throughout the short sale process. Yet, I still watch as the naïve or ill-informed get clobbered when trying to navigate through these shark-infested waters alone. With the right professional help, the short sale process can be much more stable and manageable, giving you less stress and more time to get repositioned.

I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that one of the primary reasons short sales are taking so long—to the benefit of cash-strapped sellers—is that the current national Administration has so hamstrung the industry with its confusing, capricious and arbitrary regulations, along with the ever-present threat of new ones, that the banks themselves are largely in paralysis. One banker told me, “We’re not sure how to interpret the regulations that are already hitting us, and we never know what new ones are going to come down the pike. For example, if we liquidate too soon, we might miss out on a government bailout. So, we remain in paralysis!”

Every government “cure” I can think of nowadays is much, much, worse than the original “disease” it would purport to treat, so if you’d like to learn something about what it might mean to be “wise as a serpent and gentle as a dove” (Matthew 10:16), you might consider the many, many, many ways in which you can employ the force and momentum of the corrupt and deluded’s own weight against them. Buying time in financial transactions is but one expression of what is called Judo Politics!

Not everybody who offers to help you in your short-sale process can really serve your highest interests. For example, most short-sale negotiators will not have investors ready to make an immediate offer on your home. The short sale/loss mitigation service you employ should definitely have such built-in investors, so that the short sale proposal is submitted with a bona fide purchase offer. This results in your short-sale file immediately being thrown in a much more secure category with the lender, which normally puts 90-120-day foreclosures on hold until the short-sale negotiations are completed. If your mortgage is with some of the larger, bureaucratic banks, it can average as much as the afore-mentioned year or more before you will be needing to move out.

If at all possible, do not enter into short sale negotiations without a built-in investor.

I know of one case where, out of ignorance, fear, and the bad choices they often engender, the distressed sellers moved out of their home into rented facilities. When they got help from The Walk Show’s favorite short-sale negotiator, they were able to move back in and are still living there without making mortgage payments while they seek to get their cash flow back up to speed. Don’t hold your breath, but I actually know of one unusual case where the short-seller, without making a single payment, has maintained ownership of the house for over three years now and still has possession.

Short sales also provide an income-generating opportunity for investors (see #9’s “Income Generation Opportunities” below).

6)    Debt Consolidation/Refinance—If you’ve got enough income and equity and don’t need to move, you can often still benefit greatly through refinancing your house right now. Historically low interest rates will enable you to pay off high-interest credit cards and radically reduce your interest payments. Last month’s interest rates were still in the 4%’s, but the end will soon be in sight, as the nation’s fiscal choices already set in motion will soon present us with high rates. Again, The Walk Show’s “Loan Watch Program” can save you thousands while protecting you from the unscrupulous practices and players that greatly helped bring down the real estate and mortgage markets in the first place.

7)    Money- and Investment-Management and Accelerated Debt Amortization—Do you own your house? Do you still have a mortgage? Which one of those would you like to keep—your house or your mortgage? If you own your own home, want to stay in it, have more income than bills every month, and wish to manage your money and investments, while radically accelerating the pay-down of what debts you do have (including mortgages), The Walk Show has found the best known system for accomplishing those objectives. In fact, we’ve already put our listeners on the road to improving their bottom lines by over $100 million, and that’s just the beginning.

This approach takes discipline, which, in time, becomes a much lighter yoke than that carried by the undisciplined. I mentioned earlier one Walk Show listener who was blinded by the headlights of his wife’s fears (of a restraint on her lifestyle) in such a way as to throw away more than one million dollars of hard, cold cash by not availing themselves of this actuarially demonstrable remedy to their predicament.

Why not, instead, knock off those debts, including your mortgage, in a fraction of the time you might have thought without changing your lifestyle—or even more super-fast if you simultaneously choose to streamline your lifestyle.

8)    The “BK” Word—Irrational fear is often attached to bankruptcy (or BK). Actually, the process, although paper-intensive, irritating and humbling for those who pass through it without proper guidance, can become peace-infused for Jubileers going through it by the Spirit of the living God.

You see, there are still some vestiges of the grace and mercy of God contained in our nation’s bankruptcy laws. In fact, our Creator’s original Jubilee process afforded an “automatic bankruptcy,” so to speak, which is still apparently built right into the very nature of things every 50 years. Either do it voluntarily, or it happens to you involuntarily via a national economic collapse!

We must not be quick to falsely judge ourselves or others whom have gone or are going through bankruptcy, for often people are too shy, insecure, confused or godly to share with you all of the contributing factors. Usually their predicament flows from a combination of their own personal choices and sabotage from others. This might be the case, for example, where we receive overwhelming health care bills from physical conditions brought on by our own poor lifestyle choices, combined with the gouging at the hands of medical providers, insurers, or government. Sometimes it’s just sabotage alone . . . maybe an accident, theft, bureaucratic bungle, capricious and arbitrary government edict, or broken contract.

We may have asked for and received God’s forgiveness for our part in the problem, and done everything within our power to be responsible toward our creditors; nevertheless, sometimes it simply becomes necessary to ask or demand forgiveness of our debts from our creditors.

With the advanced state of corruption and delusion manifesting itself by every possible type of “creditor” in our Republic—from our governmental, economic, political, and spiritual abusers—eventually the day may well come when you just throw up your hands and say what is in effect a prayer for divine help: “Enough is enough! Lord, is it time for bankruptcy to become an option in my own personal Year of Jubilee?”

May I suggest that we can pass through this BK aspect of our personal Jubilee—if needed in 2010—without false guilt?

9)    Immune-System Boosting via Detox and Nutrition–The times they are a stressin’, and maintaining good health during the global economic upheaval ahead is going to become essential if we are to prosper both in and after our personal Jubilee.
In my opinion, few will make it even through their personal “Year of Jubilee” without a strong immune system. Therefore, of necessity I have felt constrained to insert a health care component into the Jubilee process.

There are many good nutritional companies, but in keeping with The Walk Show’s vision statement, we will only recommend those with whom we have had extensive experience and who have products unexcelled in their field. In my forthcoming book, Judo Politics, The Transformation of the Electorate that Upsets Big Brother, I reveal proprietary information about one company whose founding vision was and still is to build up our immune systems to prepare the church for the times of great shaking immediately ahead. I could only describe their patented products as “regenerative,” a label I could not apply to any other single nutritional company’s products.

In an age when it is permissible to lie your head off about drugs that might hurt you and cannot usually help, and it’s illegal for distributors to tell the truth about nutritional products that might help you and can’t hurt, in Judo Politics I will provide you information about nutritional products that have successfully contributed to the healing of over a hundred major disease conditions, when the very distributors of these products are prohibited from telling you one word about their efficacy.

10)    Income Generation Opportunities via Home-Based Business and Investments–It’s ancient and obvious advice, but if you’re in trouble financially, the problem can normally be solved either by reducing your debts and expenses, or increasing your income. From what I have gathered in conversations with Walk Show listeners, such things as the government-induced crushing of the private sector, thrashing of the dollar, and the resultant inevitability of depression or hyper-inflation, are combining to provoking kitchen-table discussions all across America to the effect:

We’ve just GOT to find a quality home-based business that will allow us to generate more cash for the family!

You may remember that we started out this Jubilee series by asserting that there is no such thing as a bad economy; it’s just a matter of which side of the economy you are working! Wherever there is crisis or even disaster, there is also an opportunity—a silver lining to every cloud.

The most robust start-up business we initially thought of was one for us baby boomers with adult children: a business that installs revolving doors on the front of our homes! One time I had three daughters back home, with our garage stuffed to the ceiling with the furniture to three complete apartments! With not even a pathway, we had to climb onto the pile to retrieve anything . . . and just forget about garaging a car!

All kidding aside, to search for this silver lining, a couple years back The Walk Show changed our first hour format to: “The Home-Based Business Hour,” where for the first hour we focused upon quality home-based businesses and equipping one another to succeed in the new “era of the home-based entrepreneur.”

The Walk Show did the homework in each field, then came up with what we felt was the very “best of the best” home-based businesses that would hopefully match with whom God made you to be. (See Judo Politics’ chapter on “Foundation Stone #1—Personal Identity.”)

Each featured business is bolstered by practical mentoring in the ideas, strategies and resources that will help the home-based entrepreneur efficiently and successfully grow their businesses. This is because the Walk Show team is unanimous in our opinion that the worst epitaph that could ever be on your tombstone is: “He (or she) died with the music still in them.”

As one of our sponsors mentioned to me today:

Home base business is the single most amazing tax shelter available to Americans . . . If you make money in your venture, it is imperative you understand corporate structure and apply it accordingly or find yourself subject to excess taxation . . . We can help with basic business advice on how to position yourself by selecting the correct structure to avoid excess taxes . . . Not only is it important how to make money but how to KEEP your money.

Your Personal Jubilee in 2010 is Just the Beginning

Perhaps it would help to sum up this Jubilee section of Judo Politics by asserting that your personal Jubilee is intended to help you get repositioned for the even-greater challenges and opportunities to come. The Jubilee phase of that larger process entailed getting ourselves out of debt in all ways—spiritually, relationally, financially, and politically, etc. We started with our acceptance of God’s forgiveness, paid for through Jesus Christ’s death on the cross. We continued with our forgiveness of others for their debts incurred against us. Then, we learned how to get forgiven of our various debts to fellow human beings and society’s institutions.

Many who don’t see themselves in trouble now will soon be up to their necks in alligators, so the premium is upon restructuring and repositioning now so as to be prepared for the financial crocodilians, whether now or later. Our personal Jubilee is only our first step.

Yes, God doesn’t stop there! In fact, our personal “Year of Jubilee” is just the beginning of a lifetime of explosive productivity! Like with its Old Covenant shadow, the Jubilee opens up the prospects of the “next fifty years” of phenomenal fruitfulness! Once you’ve gotten freed from the various types of debt that were dragging you down, you become useful in the times of great shaking immediately ahead.

I encourage you to call me and discuss the formation of your personal “Jubilee Master Plan.” Don’t worry, for there’s nothing you can say that could alarm me, as I am somebody who has plumbed the depths of every single Jubilee item on our checklist above. I may be able to help you get on course for your own personal Jubilee in 2010—whether you need help “building fences at the top of the cliff, or an ambulance service in the valley below.”

If you think I might be able to be of some help to you, I encourage you to call me at 1-877 WALK SHOW [1-877-925-5746—locally, 253-333-1813], or email Ken@KenTalbott.com for the best time and place for us to talk as fellow Jubileers.

Conclusion: Why Your Jubilee in 2010 is “Crucial”

It did not escape my attention that he word, “crucial,” as in “Crucial Steps Into Your Personal Jubilee,” means “cross-shaped.” Yes, it takes a type of “death” for us to abandon all of our soul-driven dreams, visions and expectations in favor of God’s true Jubilee/Liberty for each of us. It’s time for us Jubileers to pick up our crosses and follow Christ daily on the road into Jubilee, through it, and onto a whole new beginning thereafter.

Every single morning I get a “spiritual DNA tune-up” via an “Open Windows” daily e-letter quoting from the works of T. Austin-Sparks (TAS) at www.Austin-Sparks.net. In the April 21, 2010, excerpt, TAS points to this Jubileer’s ultimate objective in the purposes of God:

In the course of our spiritual history God deals with us in ever-deepening ways. Down, down, down, He goes, until He touches bottom to have things true at our very depth. He undercuts all our professions, doctrines, assumptions, pretensions, illusions, and customs… There is no mere formalism about this; no mere Jewish ritual in this; no mere outward observance of rites and ceremonies in this! No! This has got to go right into the inmost being, in the inward parts. God works toward that. God is ever working toward the most inward parts. Do you recognize that? Do you understand what He is doing with us? Oh, He will meet us with blessing on a certain level, as we walk before Him [like the man in Psalm 1]. He will meet us with His gracious provision when we transgress and trespass and fail, and do wrong - He will meet us there in grace [as in the Jubilee process]. But God is going to pursue this matter to the most inward place of our being, and register there His work of grace and redemption (from: “Truth In The Inward Parts”).

To access the first four articles in this “Your Jubilee in 2010″ Series, click on “Categories” to your right, then “Your Jubilee in 2010” Series.

Pullin’ and Prayin’ for and with you,

Ken

Ken Talbott
Host, The Walk Show
1-877-WALK SHOW [1-877-925-5746--locally 253-333-1813]
Ken@TheWalkShow.com

[Editor’s Note: This is the fourth of five articles in the "Your Jubilee in 2010" Series, with the first entitled, “‘Jubileer’ or ‘April Fool’?”; the second, "Our National Jubilee's Forgiveness Factors"; and the third, “Your Personal Jubilee’s Forgiveness Factors.” The fifth article will be titled, “Crucial Steps into Your Personal Year of Jubilee.” All together, they comprise the five chapters in one entire section at the heart of Ken’s forthcoming book, Judo Politics—The Transformation of the Electorate that Upsets Big Brother. To access the entire series, click on “Your Jubilee in 2010” Series under the Categories section to the right.

Christ has set us free to live a free life [of Jubilee/Liberty]. So take your stand! Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you (Galatians 5:1—The Message).

Dear Walk Show family,

Have you failed to understand what time it is? From forces already set in motion, everything you know is about to change. Right now is the best and only time to get “psyched up” (meaning, “mentally prepared”) for the hard choices of the year ahead. So, ask yourself these questions:

• Am I going to have a Year of Jubilee instead of Jumble?

• Am I going to be completely out of all kinds of debt and generating sufficient income a year from today, or stuck in the modern equivalent of a debtor’s prison?

• Am I going to hold onto the unshakable kingdom and the unchanging Person from this moment forth, or go down with a bang or a whimper when all those things that can be shaken are shaken?

• Am I going to thrive and “survive”—which means “to live above”—like Noah and his family lived above the flood?

Remember, it wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark. Unfortunately, the dew is already turning to drizzle and the ark roofers haven’t yet arrived. Yikes! I just heard it over the wireless that you and I were supposed to be the roofers!

The Jubilee as a Declaration of the Creator’s Reality

To summarize the last three articles, the Jubilee is the substance of the Liberty that is ours when we allow Jesus Christ to pay for our debts of every kind. It is only shadowed by the Old Testament accounts of a special celebration every fifty years for the forgiveness of financial debts. Yet, somehow the Old Covenant Law, though just a tutor to lead us to the Master, or a shadow to lead us to the substance, is also a declaration of God’s Reality—i.e., how He made things to work best. For example, you don’t murder, steal or commit adultery because it just works out best for everyone. And, in Christ, you’re given both the desire and the power not to do these evil things:

For God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him (Philippians 2:13—New Living Translation).

The Old Covenant shadow may picture something gloriously more substantive—to be found only in the New Covenant substance of Jesus Christ. Yet, the shadow is still there and still serves its good function—to point to Christ. And, if you’re fully engaged with the substance and walking in the light, you’re going to at least cast the shadow—that is, fulfill everything the Law might require of us!

As we have pointed out in the Judo Politics chapter entitled, “Why Aren’t You ‘Eating Your Own Tithe’?”, serving only the shadow—such as tithing—can easily become the “ministry of death.” Yet, if your heart is right toward God and you realize that 100% belongs to Christ, your giving will normally far outstrip the tithing tutor/shadow. Why? Because now you’re a giver, instead of a taker who begrudgingly thinks you just have to pay dues!

Jesus said, “The Sabbath is made for man; not man for the Sabbath,” which would indicate that God has created His Reality in such a way that it is good for mankind to rest one day in seven. So also the sabbatical rest for the land and farmer every seven years is the way both the soil and mankind gets blessed best, with your getting the choice of either taking a voluntary sabbatical one year in seven or getting burned out, resulting in an “involuntary sabbatical” every seven years or so. (We go into this in depth in the Judo Politics chapter entitled, “Avoid Burnout with the ‘7-Year Mastery Cycle.’”)

And finally, we have discovered the Jubilee, too, to be a part of God’s created Reality: if you don’t voluntarily wipe out the debts every fifty years, the economy will crash and wipe them out for you in a much more crushing, bloody scenario! Yes, you don’t break God’s laws; you get broken upon them! So, why not roll with the Reality and have yourself a nice little Sabbath rest this weekend, a sabbatical rest one year in seven, and a “Year of Jubilee” in 2010?

Like an eagle, you can either remain in the nest and be beat to a pulp when the storm hits, or you can be buoyed up to soar effortlessly above the gale. It all depends upon the set of your wings. As a Jubileer, you can set your wings to make change happen before change happens to you. In so doing, the premium will be upon some “Prep Steps,” to get yourself “psyched up,” or “completely mentally ready,” for the amazing year to come. It will be amazing precisely because with every wave of disaster comes an opportunity . . . but you’ll have to learn how to ride the Jubilee surfboard.

Prep Step #1: Build Upon Your Understanding of Debts and Forgiveness

In our first three articles in this “Jubilee” series we initiated the mental preparations by proposing that the essence of the Jubilee is forgiveness of our debts—whether spiritually or financially, personally or nationally. That, as we saw, involved radical shifts away from several popular misconceptions concerning the very nature of debts and the process of forgiveness itself.

The first stage was to confess our rebellion against God and His created order. Through Jesus Christ’s payment of all our debts, we accepted God’s Jubilee forgiveness. The second stage was to erase all our brothers’ and sisters’ debts by passing the Jubilee forgiveness on to them. Finally, we are ready to look at the third stage: asking and accepting man’s forgiveness for our debts.

As with the first and second-stage mentality adjustments, disposing of your own debts in Stage three will entail some more shifts away from false misconceptions. That’s because being forgiven for our debts in this culture entails not just passively receiving forgiveness for our debts when offered, but sometimes, upon proper authority, proactively demanding deliverance. (We will get into this in some depth in our forthcoming, final article/chapter in this “Jubilee” section of Judo Politics, entitled, “Crucial Steps into Your Personal Jubilee.”)

The picture comes to mind of the Children of Israel, upon leaving their Egyptian captivity for their Promised Jubilee/Liberty, not only asking for their freedom, but employing various Judo Politics strategies (including the administration of plagues) to plunder the gold, silver, and fine clothing from their hosts!

All three types of forgiveness—forgiveness by God, forgiveness of others, and forgiveness by others—can become the platform upon which you build as you prep for your personalized Year of Jubilee.

Prep Step #2: “Abandon Your Agendas for God’s”

The “Jubilee” is actually Liberty from all things that would enslave or indebt us. The Old Testament “shadow” of the Year of Jubilee speaks of the New Covenant “substance” of Jesus Christ’s redemption from everything that would restrict our capacity to commune with the Father and carry out His purposes on this earth. That’s Liberty, or Jubilee!

What this means is that we have but one choice in all we do on this earth: either say “Your will be done” to the Father, or, as C. S. Lewis points out, hear the Father one day say to us, “Your will be done”—relegating us to the Christ-less hell we ourselves have already chosen by following our own autonomous will for our lives on this earth.

My friend, Ron Boehme, of the Revive America Project, recently described the essence of how he entered his own personal Jubilee by making this choice:

The essence of salvation was submission—”Thy will be done.” Why? Because the problem in my heart was the tendency toward autonomy and rebellion against God. The way to be reconciled to God—through an encounter with God’s grace through the Cross of Jesus Christ—was the road of repentance and faith. This turning away from a selfish life and turning to a Loving God was at its core an act of surrender and submission.

That night in Auckland, New Zealand nearly forty years ago, I said with great commitment to God, “Thy will be done!” When those words came out of my lips and heart, something happened in my soul. I found rest, peace, and completeness in my relationship to my Creator.

Ron found his personal Jubilee! Then follows a lifetime of exploring yet new dimensions of one’s personal Jubilee, most certainly including your personal, financial “Year of Jubilee” we are just now addressing.

Prep Step #3: Get Your Own, Unique, Divine Jubilee Directives

Throughout your Jubilee process, the key will be to hear and obey the divine directives for you personally. We have the mind of Christ, that we might know the will of the Father for our lives, so please maintain this mentality: everything we do in our personal Jubilee process must not follow Ken’s or anyone else’s formula. It must follow the unique Jubilee process God has designed for you, and that you can discover if you listen wholeheartedly to His instructions for your liberation. Remember, my or anyone else’s walk in the Spirit, if blindly imitated, can easily become your death march.

My introduction to my own, custom-designed, financial Jubilee process occurred about three years ago, when one day I thought I sensed a subtle, “divine flicker” in my spirit, saying to me: “Ken, I want you to get all your assets out of your name.”

Now, considering the massive, multi-faceted attack on free speech in our country, I could think of a multitude of reasons why a talk show host, political strategist, or anyone else willing to stick their neck up above the crowd, would do well to get their assets out of their name. Yet, being the thick-headed sort, I normally require not just a carrot but a stick when receiving such flickers. So, initially I hesitated . . . until God pulled out a 2” x 4” to, shall we say, “get this donkey’s attention!”

I call it “God’s push-pull method of guidance.” First He pulls us toward something in our spirits—like when “By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going” (Hebrews 11:8). Then comes the push, wherein God employs circumstances to kick us in the pants to make sure we get there! I evidently need not just the stick, but the kick, to get my Jubilee underway!

How about you?

As a young father, I thought I was being funny when I fashioned a spanking stick that had these words inscribed upon it: “I need Thee every hour!” My kids weren’t amused! The stick God used to invite me into my own personal Jubilee had the words, “Treachery, Cardio-Vascular Disease, and Personal/National Economic Crash!” written all over it. He finally got my attention.

If you’re suspecting God is trying to get something through to you about the shape of your own personal Jubilee, you may be heartened to discover that even the giants of Scripture often hesitated when they first thought they heard God speaking to them.

Take the Old Testament prophet, Jeremiah, for example. When he proclaimed in Jeremiah 32:6-8: “The word of the Lord came to me, saying . . .” (that he should do such-and-such), it was not until after he witnessed the prophesied event come to pass that he actually drew the conclusion as to its source: “Then I knew that this was the word of the Lord!”

How comforting to discover that we are not the only ones struggling to hear the sound of the fog horn in the fog! Yet, it is precisely at such moments—when we are straining the hardest to hear the Lord’s voice in the midst of the foggiest of situations—that we are found to have drawn closest to Him!

All we need do is move forward by faith with the measure of guidance we now have, and we will eventually land safely at Port Jubilee! Our Creator has each of our unique courses already well charted and lined with helpful fog horns.

Prep Step #4: Abdicate as “The Self-Appointed Fruit Inspector of the Universe”

As you start to get yourself psyched up for your own personal Jubilee, the next mental prep step is to move out from underneath the weight of both your own and other people’s judgment about your life, as well as your own judgments about them. After all, you’re forgiven by God and you’ve forgiven them, so what are you doing if you’re trying to assess who’s to blame for what?

Let’s face it: you and I have very limited perspectives of what’s actually going on anyway in other people’s lives, and sometimes even in our own! To add to the futility of assigning blame for the problem(s) that created our need for a Jubilee, is our complete incapacity to explain the inexplicable and tragic.

Let’s face it, “Stuff happens!” And, it’s not always spelled that way! Also, sometimes it’s just not the consequences of either our own choices or sins. With all those choices, sins, and consequences “under Christ’s blood,” an airplane can still drop out of the sky and hit your house! An evil institution or another type of virus can still bring you low. Even a McCain or an Obama can get elected! As they say, “Bad things happen to good people.”

After pointing out that nary a family in Europe made it through World War I without inexplicably losing at least one family member, Oswald Chambers indicated in his treatises on suffering entitled, Baffled to Fight Better:

There are things in our heavenly Father’s dealings with us which have no immediate explanation. There are inexplicable providences which test us to the limit and prove that rationalism is a mere mental pose. The Bible and our common sense agree that the basis of human life is tragic, not rational. . . . Facing facts as they are produces despair, not frenzy, but real downright despair, and God never blames a man for despair. . . . The wisest man that ever lived said that “he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.” The basis of things is not reasonable, but wild and tragic, and to face things as they are brings a man to the ordeal of despair. . . . When a man gets to despair he knows that all his thinking will never get him out. He will only get out by the sheer creative effort of God; consequently, he is in the right attitude to receive from God that which he cannot gain for himself (p. 17 & 21).

You may have discontinued judging others, but there will often be a chorus of “Job’s comforters” around you to add to your despair. They will be quick to lay the blame at your feet for any and all calamities that may have befallen you.

I’m sure Joseph’s brothers in their own minds had reason enough to blame Joseph for “getting himself thrown into that pit” (see Genesis 37)! People tend to pick their victims, then build a case to support their judgments against perceived enemies. How deserving were the Jews, for example, in being blamed by Hitler for all of Nazi Germany’s ills?

I wouldn’t be surprised if the suffering from such criticism is sometimes greater than the calamity itself. In dealing with the three fronts of my own recent perfect storm (sabotage of all my working capital; a major health challenge, therapy and bills; and loss of seven income streams in the economic meltdown and governmental encroachments upon my businesses), it is quite difficult to correctly identify all the culprits, but my best critics have had no such problem whatsoever!

Taking the blame for some bad judgment calls on my part, I still found myself struggling with all three dimensions referenced in Oswald Chambers’ Baffled to Fight Better book:

When I suffer and feel I am to blame for it, I can explain it to myself; when I suffer and know I am not to blame, it is a harder matter; but when I suffer and realize that my most intimate relations think I am to blame, that is the limit of suffering. That is where the scourge of suffering lashed Job, the power of the sneer of Satan has come now into his most intimate relationships (Ibid, p. 23).

Yes, it was Job’s own wife who recommended to her beloved husband, “Curse God and die!” In all such scenarios, instead of wasting life’s energy on ferreting out the blame, I found it’s best if we just leave the final analysis to the Lord and get on with the Jubilee forgiveness factors:

Will I trust the revelation given of God by Jesus Christ, when everything in my personal experience flatly contradicts it (Ibid., p. 18)?

Why don’t we just all resign as self-appointed fruit inspectors of the universe and allow God once again to be the Judge of the catastrophe’s cause and the Jubilee cure?

Prep Step #5: Acknowledge the Oppression

Having confessed and been forgiven for our divinely revealed implication in whatever crises we are experiencing that might demand a Jubilee, Jubileers are also those willing to acknowledge and reckon with the corruption and oppression of all of society’s institutions. I believe Jubileers will even be able to see the parallels between our own situation and the plight of the Children of Israel in Egyptian slavery.

In those days, the Pharaoh forced the Israelites to make bricks. When Moses and Aaron protested and asked that the people be set free, the Pharaoh increased the penalty by requiring that they scrounge for their own straw, as well, to make the bricks. Today when the government’s takes over our health care sector, the energy field, the banks, the car makers, and the creation of more dependent voters through their amnesty agenda for illegal aliens, the majority of the people complain. The government responds by drastically increasing their oppressive bureaucracy, regulations, taxes, penalties, and unpaid-for hand-outs, setting the stage for the inevitable rationing, the implosion of the economy, the threat of martial law, and very possibly, regime change.

When the people cry out under the interest rates of the credit card companies, those same companies increase the rates and penalties, as well. In recent times some companies have even granted themselves the right to radically jack up the interest rates if they discover you have experienced difficulty with any other credit account besides their own!

It’s called, “Hitting you when you’re down.”

I could provide countless examples of similar corruption and oppression among our mortgage, real estate, securities, and insurance brokers, as well. In a recent year, for example, we had a six percent increase in health care costs, but a 14 percent increase in health insurance costs. When I asked Dr. David McDonald, an industry insider, “Why the difference?” he answered, “Graft and corruption!” His company has been known to save companies up to 50% on their health-care insurance costs merely by showing them how to navigate around the graft and corruption!

We have, indeed, reached the place where nothing short of a Jubilee of some sort could avert a total crash nationally. On the personal level, absent a personal Jubilee experience, we, too, will be totally pulled down with the disintegrating economy, culture and enculturated “church.”

Americans and the American “church” are in survival mode, which has resulted in almost total paralysis and an unwillingness to engage proactively with the issues of the hour. Paul L. Cuny, Founder and President of MarketPlace Leadership International, described this in his article, “Changing Seasons”:

People in survival mode can only think short term. I’m sure praying people were saying “God, where are You? Have You forgotten us?” Imagine the heartbreak of a father watching his young children in forced labor doing the work of grown men. Yet, this was life as a Jew in Egypt in those days. These conditions still exist in many nations today. Oppression and slavery have always been a byproduct of the world’s system that Jesus spoke about, no matter what the generation. The prevailing system of that day was one of enslavement and oppression and it is still the same today. Yet the system that God had prepared for His people was one of freedom.

My shot is that such freedom only comes through the Jubilee process.

Prep Step #6: Start Speaking the Truth in Love

So Moses spoke thus to the sons of Israel, but they did not listen to Moses on account of their despondency and cruel bondage (Exodus 6:9).

Having acknowledged the oppression and started to walk into our own Jubilee, we must also start speaking out the truth about it. . . in love. At first, you will be likely to encounter resistance, but, remember, in the long run it is the meek Jubileers that inherit the earth (cf., Christ’s “Sermon on the Mount,” recorded in Matthew 5:5).

From my own vantage point, I see no indication that anyone much has connected with the Jubilee message that I’ve been trying so earnestly to communicate for three years now. I now know how Moses must have felt when he made the same Jubilee-type offer to the Children of Israel; how Jeremiah must have felt when God told him to speak but warned him nobody would listen; and, in accordance with my initial exasperation, probably how Eli Whitney felt when he drank his first cotton gin!

I speak; nobody listens; I stop speaking; it burns within me; I can’t remain silent; I speak again; nobody listens; and so forth! “Get used to it, Ken, it’s an initial occupational hazard of being a Jubileer!” After my youthful years of speaking the truth in an unloving manner, then repenting; followed by my mid-life years of remaining silent and calling that love; it’s now time for the Jubilee, where it’s: “Take the gloves off and boldly speak the truth in love.” Consider, for a moment, the stakes:

God’s Message came to me: “Son of man, speak to your people. Tell them, ‘If I bring war on this land and the people take one of their citizens and make him their watchman, and if the watchman sees war coming and blows the trumpet, warning the people, then if anyone hears the sound of the trumpet and ignores it and war comes and takes him off, it’s his own fault. He heard the alarm, he ignored it—it’s his own fault. If he had listened, he would have saved his life.

“‘But if the watchman sees war coming and doesn’t blow the trumpet, warning the people, and war comes and takes anyone off, I’ll hold the watchman responsible for the bloodshed of any unwarned sinner.’”

MarketPlace Leadership International founder, Paul Cuny, describes the predicament faced by a truth-telling Jubileer in this modern age:

The Hebrew word for despondency means “shortness of breath”. These people were working so hard under the bondage of this system of slavery and oppression, they simply could not hear the message of freedom and deliverance that Moses was bringing. They were laboring to keep pace with the demands of an unforgiving system and were locked into meeting their daily quotas. God’s people were in survival mode, and survival mode forced them to think short term. Yet in spite of their survival mode, God displayed His sovereignty, the Passover took place and a new season of history began.

The pattern seems to repeat itself throughout human history. In World War II, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed for trying to be a Jubileer for the Jews, but the Nazi-intimidated Christian “church” in Germany was frozen in a “see no evil, hear no evil, do no good” stupor.

On this side of the Atlantic, one hundred years of power abuse on both sides of the political aisle confirms Americans to be in a similar stupor, and what calls itself the American “church” appears to be in no less of a trance. Some naïve Christians dream, for example, that the Republicans, if granted power once again, will bring a course-correction to our current “secular, socialist machine.” If I hear one more argument for a second Republican “Contract with America,” like their abortive attempt in 1994 prior to their betrayal of the American public shortly thereafter, I think I’ll lose my lunch!

Having initially concluded that there were no apparent signs of hope for my communications, one day I reread Garth Lean’s God’s Politician—William Wilberforce’s Struggle, and, lo and behold, mein kampf proved to be parallel to William Wilberforce’s struggle! Wilberforce confessed he was in the exact same exasperating position in his abolitionist initiatives with the slave trade and the slavery issue. Year after year, it appeared no one was listening.

Unexpectedly, another type of tidal wave appeared: a wave of the Holy Spirit welling up in the hearts and minds of the Britishers across the Empire. That wave undergirded Wilberforce’s words, resulting in the British bloodlessly throwing off the chains of the slave trade and slavery itself, whereas the U. S. had to fight a bloody Civil War in an ill-fated attempt to throw off the same spiritual chains of racial prejudice and oppression.

To become a Jubileer like the great men of faith above, you can start right now by learning to speak the truth in love—out to the full extent of your sphere of influence.

Prep Step #7: Position Fences at the Top of the Cliff and Ambulances at the Bottom!

After I had ridden seven income-stream “horses” to the ground in the past three years of economic instability and governmental encroachments, Robin asked me recently, “What makes you think the new horses will ride this time?” I always listen to Robin very carefully, but she doesn’t always realize it because it is sometimes days, weeks, or months before I digest what it is she has said, and by that time she thinks I have ignored her completely. Her love is long-suffering. Yet, her comment above got me to meditating:

By the end of 2007 when I retired from the financial services industry and started monitoring the performance of our various financial services sponsors, I had noticed a developing pattern: I was spending more and more of my time—until I found myself spending almost all of my time—helping people out of various disaster scenarios!

The unique twist in the phenomenon was that some of these panicked home-owners, investors, and/or business people were asking me to help repair the damage incurred from ignoring The Walk Show team’s previous advice! I’m not kidding you when I say that the losses some of these people were unnecessarily sustaining totaled in the millions! One man simply (and I do mean simply) threw away well over one million dollars by passing on Walk Show sponsor, Richard Harter’s, sage advice!

Of course, there was no money in my volunteerism. The clients had usually already lost or spent their money on the competitors to our Walk Show sponsors, and fewer than Christ’s “one in ten lepers” remembered to thank us. But, at least I found the “warm fuzzies” I received for bailing out so many people to be low-calorie!

We had tried with everything within us to build fences at the top of the cliff, so to speak, but the townsfolk jumped, circumvented or crashed through the fences, insisting instead that The Walk Show provide them ambulance service in the valley below! With no training an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) and no ambulance, I erroneously concluded that there was no money in the ambulance business.

Now there is.

My own Jubilee process helped “push-pull” me into the creation of a Jubilee “business-ministry” startup that both builds stronger fences and runs a great ambulance service simultaneously! The Walk Show team of sponsors is solidifying a full complement of financial “emergency services” to go along with its line of great financial “fences”—with startup business-ministry income opportunities built in for fellow Jubileers—to be outlined in the fifth and last Jubilee article to come: “Crucial Steps into Your Personal Year of Jubilee.” We’re coming through our Jubilee by helping others come through theirs!

Prep Step #8: Eradicate All Man-Pleasing and Man-Fearing Tendencies

As a young man I fancied myself to be fearless, requiring, I would surmise, the Lord assigning me extra angelic body guards! Then, in my forties the Holy Spirit started showing me the many ways in which I had become fear-motivated. Let me tell you right out of the gun: fear doth not good decisions make—whether in one’s personal life or business-ministry!

When I confessed this struggle to my friends, American men were just starting to wake up spiritually during the Promise Keepers era. I was surprised at how many of them confessed that they were identifying serious, if not central, fear-motivations in their own lives, as well.

For several years thereafter, I was led to start each new day with the prayer, “Lord, eradicate all man-pleasing and man-fearing tendencies in me!” Now, decades later, in my weakness I am so fearless that sometimes I just scare myself!

Why, I’ve even found myself, under authority, becoming passively aggressive on occasions! I recall one instance that’s far enough back to keep me out of trouble: In true Judo Politics style, I waited a full six months for a much larger opponent to gain sufficient momentum. Then, with divine timing, a little truth spoken in love, and an expenditure of about $35, I was able to successfully flip out of office the second most powerful person in an entire nation with the force and momentum of their own weight!

As the nations are like dust on the Lord’s scales, I suppose that would make my Judo Politics feat about as heavy as the atoms in the dust on the scales (cf., Isaiah 30:15)!

Once again, the key in all this is “Who is authoring your Jubilee initiatives?” If it had been Moses and Aaron’s idea to have the Israelites rip off the Egyptians of all their fine gold and silver jewelry and elegant clothes, how flat might that idea have fallen on its face! But, because God authored the “Jubilee” initiative, it was backed by the force of the universe! In the process, the passive-aggressive Jews/Jubileers effectively plundered their oppressors.

The Israelites did as Moses instructed and asked the Egyptians for articles of silver and gold and for clothing. The LORD had made the Egyptians favorably disposed toward the people, and they gave them what they asked for; so they plundered the Egyptians (Exodus 12:35-36).

Prep Step #9: Fiercely Love and Serve the Fiercely Loyal Minority

As the Republic continues to disintegrate, I am reminded of the recent TV special about “Hitler and the Occult.” I believe it was in there that the narrator suggested it wasn’t until Hitler was reported to have shot himself in the bunker that the spell was broken off the minds of the German people. That was, as with all deception, a spell that the Germans didn’t know was there. Yet, I believe it was real, and it was not unlike the spell under which our culture and largely assimilated “church” are held transfixed in the headlights.

Things are accelerating so fast, and the American “church,” in the main, seems to be so fast, fast, fast asleep, that I am no longer focused on speaking to the masses. There is no more moral majority, not that there ever was in our lifetime. I am rifling in on locating the powerful Jubileer/Judo Politician minority of the minority.

What if a fiercely proactive minority had awakened in Europe prior to Hitler’s invasion and taken pre-emptive action? What if they had not awaited the invasion of France before consolidating the French underground? I should think there might have been some fifty to seventy million people that could have been saved from the WWII slaughter. Call me an alarmist if you will, but I see no smaller stakes for America and the world if a few of the fiercely loyal minority don’t awaken, find one another, and become extremely proactive right this moment.

In every generation the number of the righteous is few; make certain you are found among them (A. W. Tozer).

This is the real Jubilee! Just as you know you’re a servant when people treat you like one, and you know you’ve thrown enough pebbles in the forgiveness cleansing stream when you can recount your past without feelings of bitterness resurrecting, so also you’ll know when your Jubilee is underway when you find yourself looking out for the welfare of other Jubileers as much as you are looking out for your own.

Just like the amazing feeling when, as you’re struggling to learn another language and all of a sudden you realize you’ve been hit with a thought in the new language, so also the day will come when you find yourself rejoicing over other people’s agendas getting met instead of your own. It’s when you’ve moved from the world of grasping and getting to the world of giving and serving. It’s when you’re disconnecting from the self-serving self of this world’s system and connecting with the other-loving-love that is the essence of true Jubilee in the kingdom of God:

It is this element of “grasping,” this fallen attitude of mind that comes from feeling “less than,” this desire for more, that is our unstated or hidden agenda as we relate to others. It is a self-consciousness that is contrary to the other-consciousness of Christ. Lovers at their best are not self-conscious; they are other-conscious (Jay Ferris, Are You Worried Yet?, Chapter 17, “Time Out for a Brain Adjustment”).

Then, on we go to the next Jubilee stage: getting all of the liabilities out of our name, as covered in our next and final chapter in this “Jubilee” Section of Judo Politics, entitled, “Crucial Steps into Your Personal Jubilee.” It will present some immediate decisions “We the People” must face if we are to experience our personal Year of Jubilee in 2010—including the possible need for asset protection, downsizing, real estate acquisitions, loss mitigation, short selling, bankruptcy, debt consolidation/refinancing, accelerated debt amortization, money and investment management, the genuine hope of home-based “business-ministry” startups for income generation, and the detox and nutritional aspects of real health care you can believe in.

If you haven’t done it already, the time is ripe for simply crying out with so many others, “Lord, deliver me! I must have a personal Jubilee; I must have it now; and through submission to Jesus Christ I will have it . . . with peace and without any false guilt!”

Again, to access the entire Jubilee series, see www.TheWalkShow.com, clicking on “Categories,” then “Your Jubilee in 2010” Series.

Pullin’ and Prayin’ for and with you,

Ken

Ken Talbott
Host, The Walk Show
1-877-WALK SHOW [1-877-925-5746--locally 253-333-1813]
Ken@TheWalkShow.com

Editor’s Note: The author considers this third article in the “Your Jubilee in 2010″ Series to be the most important in this five-part series, as it initiates the personal “Year of Jubilee” available to us in 2010. The five articles are: (1) “‘Jubileer’ or ‘April Fool’?”; (2) “Our National Jubilee’s Forgiveness Factors,” (3) today’s “Your Personal Jubilee’s Forgiveness Factors,” and to still to come, (4) “Getting Psyched Up for Your Personal Year of Jubilee,” and (5) “Crucial Steps into Your Personal Jubilee.” All five articles will be available at www.TheWalkShow.com immediately upon release. Ken sees this article as “at the very heart of the message” in his forthcoming book, Judo Politics—The Transformation of the Electorate that Upsets Big Brother, due to be released this Spring. If you have time for nothing else, Ken suggests that you read this article. To access the entire series, click on “Your Jubilee in 2010” Series under the Categories section to the right.

Healing and reconciliation take place essentially by means of compassion. . . . The one who takes away the consciousness of sin and gives the consciousness of forgiveness instead—he indeed takes away the heavy burden and gives the light one in its place. . . . Forgiveness . . .  requires more courage to suffer than to act, more courage to forget than to remember, and perhaps the most wonderful thing about God is that he can forget man’s sins. —Søren Kierkegaard

Dear Walk Show Family,

At the beginning of a recent speech to a local gathering of believers, I started by asking, “How many of you are struggling with a personal forgiveness issue with someone who has sinned against you?” Not one hand was raised! At the end of my speech to this dear group of compulsive liars, veritably everyone in the audience came out of the woodwork to confess how much the “Jubilee message” (which is exactly the message of today’s article) applied directly to their lives!

As we have already intimated, our personal Jubilee always starts with forgiveness. Forgiveness involves the release of a debt, and it is the release of a debt that affords true “Liberty,” which, again, is the very meaning of the word, “Jubilee”!

Seven Misconceptions Concerning Jubilee Forgiveness

These articles are designed to help you through seven key misconceptions that have prevented so many individuals, and our nation itself, from entering our “Year of Jubilee.”

Misconception #1: “I Can Move Forward with My Life without Jubilee Forgiveness”

A long time ago a wise old counselor told me a story that graphically illustrates why forgiveness is so central to any progress we would wish to make as a “Jubileer” on just about any front–from personal to national. The counselor said that a teen-age counselee came to him with a jumble of problems. Tracing the problems to their apparent source, it was revealed that the boy had been abandoned before birth by his father, and as the boy reached his teenage years he began to act out his pain and anger from an intense sense of rejection.

The counselor helped the young man to see that the real problem was his lack of forgiveness toward his Dad. As the boy knew his Bible, he responded with, “The Bible tells me I have the power to bind or loose people from their sins, and that God in heaven will stand behind anything I do to bind or loose here on earth. [The boy was referring to Jesus Christ's words recorded in Matthew 18:18.]

“Therefore, I choose not to forgive my Dad, so as to hold him in his sins!”

The counselor, in turn, responded with, “Yes, you most certainly have the power to do that, yet that leaves you with one further problem.”

“What’s that?”

“You will never grow emotionally past this moment.”

I’m told that that “boy”–now a full-grown man decades later–is still a teenager emotionally today.

This leads me to an emphatic punch line to the Jubilee issue, which I wish to tell you even before we go into the whole story:

You and I will be locked out from our own personal Jubilee if we either resist God’s forgiveness and the cleansing that goes with it, and/or if we fail to release others from whatever emotional, relational, financial, sexual, political, or any other kind of debts they may have incurred with us. It’s either Jubilee forgiveness or paralysis.

Misconception #2: “God’s Forgiveness Can be Separated from Cleansing”

Most of us would agree that merely getting a free bus token to heaven could hardly be seen as the full measure of what is referred to as “conversion” to Jesus Christ. Accepting God’s forgiveness for our rebellion against Him and against His created order entails giving Him permission to reveal what that Lordship means in all areas of that created order, starting with our very lives.

The forgiveness that comes when we accept Christ’s atonement for our sins results in our spirits becoming fused with the Lord’s Holy Spirit in a process that is instantaneous and complete. The transformation of our souls and bodies, however, always involves a gradual process, for it must entail the two major components of healing: cleansing and nutrition. His Lordship incrementally extends to more and more aspects of our lifestyle. That process never finishes in this short lifespan on this earth.

Yet, many, many “believers” somehow erroneously conclude that we can accept the Lord’s forgiveness without contending for a corresponding cleansing that can only be accomplished at the expense of our self life. They are dead wrong. The truth could not be better stated than did the early 18th Century Austrian physician, Johann Schroth, when he said:

There is no victory without battle,
No healing without cleansing,
And no satisfaction without self-denial.

That we have settled for the passive acceptance of Christ’s forgiveness, but failed to deny ourselves by contending for personal cleansing, is clearly evidenced by the very terminology we employ to describe “church.” Although we all know better, most American Christians still refer to a building on the corner as “the church,” as in the uncleansed statement, “What church do you go to?”

The Creator, as well as our own spirits, have instructed us long ago that we are the house of the Lord. Yes, the church is a temple made up of living stones, and we are those stones! Yet, we still allow some uncleansed, control freak to get away by greeting us when we gather with the words, “Welcome to the house of the Lord!” May I suggest that those words issue from an unclean and uncleansed agenda?

My friend, Michael Wells, has it right when somebody asks him, “Mike, what church do you go to?” He says he always answers, “Is there another?” I think I’ll try that response for awhile myself!

Evidently the true house of the Lord desperately requires cleansing from this type of evil terminology that has been used by the deceiver and his pastoral hired hands to to rob millions upon millions of believers of their Jubilee/Liberty in Jesus Christ.

Yes, the true house of the Lord needs cleansing–room by room–often starting with our despicable terminology!

One day as a young man I was on staff at a local church’s drug-rehabilitation center. The leader, pastor Gib Martin, arrived at the house shortly after the discovery that two of the young residents, themselves professing new Christians, had been hiding drugs and drug paraphernalia under the bathroom sink! As he opened the door to the center, this mild-mannered pastor sent a shock wave through the house by shouting at the top of his lungs:

“Satan . . . will . . . not . . . run . . . this . . . house!!!”

I know Gib enough to know that he was not just speaking of the center’s building! He was referring to the real house of the Lord–including these two druggie dudes! One of these two young offenders later confessed to me, “Instantly I had had my own ‘Road to Damascus experience’! I saw the horribleness of my rebellion! When I heard Gib’s words, the revelation hit me like a bolt of lightning, and I walked out of there a totally changed man, and a free one!”

Almost forty years later that man is still walking with Jesus in the Spirit of Jubilee! His progress has always been in direct proportion to the degree in which he will allow Christ’s forgiveness to be coupled with cleansing.

A Confession about My Futile Attempts to Separate Forgiveness from Cleansing

Robin and I have invested in a succession of young men and women in our home over the years. As the decades have past, we have noticed an embarrassing pattern: Whereas Jesus said He appointed us to go out, “make disciples,” and “bear fruit that will last” (Matthew 28:19 & John 15:16), we have noted that several have left our home apparently no better off spiritually than when they first arrived. To be specific, they have left with the same demons with which they came. We may have helped them physically, financially, emotionally, mentally, or even theologically, but when we run into them years later they are found to be either the same or worse off than when they left us, which wasn’t much better than when they first arrived!

Simultaneously, we have discerned the pattern that only those who have been cleansed spiritually at the beginning of the process with us have fared well in the long run. Such cleansing does not come about by falling off a log, as it were. It entails the Holy Spirit’s conviction concerning sin, righteousness, and judgment in these dear people’s lives, followed by much more than mere confession and remorse, but an actual commitment to engage the name of Jesus Christ and His blood to defeat entrenched spiritual forces. (We go into this process in greater detail in the Judo Politics chapter entitled, “How Healthy Homophobes Can Help Set Homosexuals Free.”)

Our remaining time on this earth is so short that Robin and I have resolved that a person’s disinterest in getting cleansed right up front is reason enough for us to move on down the road without them for a season (cf., Matthew 10:14)—perhaps until they get their stomach full and come back wishing to do business with God by combining God’s Jubilee forgiveness with spiritual cleansing.

Misconception #3: “Bitterness is Logical”

A major misunderstanding concerning forgiveness was corrected for me by a wise older man, who at that time was the most powerful media mogul on the planet. Having perceived that I was bitter toward him for what I perceived at the time as a broken promise to me,  John Broger gently suggested that I meditate upon three words for three days before reporting back to him. These three words changed the life of this young zealot forever:

“Bitterness is logical!”

What else could I do but comply, for the older man was my boss’ boss’ boss, and I had been assigned to work directly for him in the military mass media! So, for three days while I served as his escort officer during his keynote speeches at Campus Crusade for Christ’s Space Age Communications Conference in San Bernadino, California, I repeated to myself day and night: “Bitterness is logical; bitterness is logical; indeed, bitterness is logical!”

Finally, I blurted out: “Yes, bitterness has an iron-clad logic to it precisely because people do really nasty things to us! They lie, cheat, and steal from us, then gossip about us! They get revelations in the night to make their contractual “yes’s” into “no’s”, with a greater regularity than I would wish to report!”

By the time my three days were up, I had drawn the conclusion humankind was in desperate need for some kind of higher power to bust through the lower, apparently iron-clad logic to, as it were, a higher type of logic–a true Jubilee logic that supersedes and transcends the lower.

If you allow the lower logic of bitterness to drive you—especially when you’re still suffering 24/7 from the painful consequences of injustices committed days, weeks, months, years, or even decades ago—you should eventually find yourself needing something or Someone who can deliver you from bitterness’, lower, iron-clad logic!

Enter Jesus Christ! He and He only offers you Jubilee power over the lower, apparently iron-clad logic of bitterness that would otherwise do you in! That was precisely the message my boss’ boss’ boss in his wisdom wished me to get.

Misconception #4: “Your Sin Against Me is Bigger than My Sins that I Have Been Forgiven of by God”

A second misconception in our understanding of forgiveness entails yet one more realm of inverted logic. Decades of counseling others have convinced me that most people start out with the forgiveness thing all upside down. In specific, they fancy that the sins of others against them are much greater than their own sins against others. This mentality prevents a lot of forgiveness from ever getting underway.

Between sessions at a conference where I was speaking, an older lady accosted me to share about the bitterness she held toward her sister. It appeared even possible that her severe obesity and crippling arthritis might somehow be linked with her deep root of bitterness. Yet, the shock of all shocks came when she confessed that her sister had died 50 years previously! For a full 50 years this lady had held tightly to the inverted logic that the speck of sawdust in her dead sister’s eye was still larger than the log in her own eye (cf., Matthew 7:3)!

As I often have to do in similar cases, I referred her to Jesus Christ’s Matthew 18:21-35 parable of the servant who was forgiven by his Lord of his ten-million-dollar sins, but who wouldn’t forgive his peer for a paltry $18 offense. That parable should lead us to this uncomfortable conclusion that I think Christ wanted us thick-headed sheep to know:

Any sin that man can do to me is an $18 sin in comparison to the $10 million sins I have been forgiven of by God through Jesus Christ.

I have always found it interesting that King David, after committing adultery with his neighbor’s wife, then arranging for his neighbor to be killed in the army, actually had the audacity to pray, “Against You, and You only, have I sinned, Oh God” (Psalm 51:4)! Strange as that sounds in light of the monstrous sins David committed against his fellow man, I really think that David got it right! He saw his sins against God as infinitely larger than his sins against mankind. And, God called David, “a man after my own heart” (Acts 13:22).

What that means is that my counseling sessions really don’t get underway until the counselee inverts their knee-jerk concept of forgiveness—often on those same knees. Only when the offended confesses their greater offense against God for not forgiving others, does the real Jubilee forgiveness power kick in.  This Liberty often does not come without a fight—if not with me, with the counselee’s own preconceptions, and sometimes even with the Lord!

“But, I don’t feel like forgiving so-and-so! In fact, I feel like punching their lights out!” is the type of statement I have heard so many times. To which I have learned to reply:

“Where does Jesus Christ live right now?”

“Why, He lives in me!”

“And how many of your sins—past, present, and future—has Jesus’ blood atonement forgiven?”

“Well, I guess all!”

“Then, how many of the sins that others can do to you—past, present, or even future—are covered by Christ’s forgiveness?”

“All of them?”

“Yes! So, regardless of your feelings, are you willing to allow yourself to become a channel of Christ’s forgiveness to so-and-so?”

If they have the guts and humility to reply with a “Yes!” then the real action begins!

Misconception #5: “The Penalty for My Unforgiveness is Less than for the Sins You Might Have Done Against Me”

Let’s let this sink in for a moment: When we fail to forgive one who has sinned against us, in God’s eyes we are actually committing a greater sin than any sin that they could ever possibly do against us. (“Now you’re really meddlin’, Ken!”) Even further, the non-forgiveness actually carries a higher penalty than does the sin done against you! (“Outrageous!”)

Remember, in Christ’s teaching in Matthew 18, He concluded in verses 32-35 with:

Then his master called him and said to him, “You contemptible and wicked attendant! I forgave and cancelled all that [great] debt of yours because you begged me to. And should you not have had pity and mercy on your fellow attendant, as I had pity and mercy on you?” And in wrath his master turned him over to the torturers (the jailers), till he should pay all that he owed. So also My heavenly Father will deal with every one of you if you do not freely forgive your brother from your heart his offenses (Amplified Bible).

Misconception #6: “I Have the Right to Build ‘Retaining Walls’ that Hold You in your Sin and Guilt”

As G. K. Chesterton commented, “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.” In fact, the closer we are to a person—and the more that we know about their secret weaknesses or sins—the more effective we are in personally constructing what might be called “retaining walls” between us and them so as to hold them fast in their guilt and sin.

When we fail to forgive others, we are also, in effect, getting them to focus upon us as their accusers, or “the enemy!” To the degree that you act as a stand-in for the accuser (that’s the Devil), the non-forgiven tends to focus on you as their problem instead of upon their real guilt and estrangement from God. You have effectively built a “retaining wall” around them to separate them from you and from God, while retaining them in their sins by constantly engender guilty feelings in them.

Should it not be expected that the closer we get to them, the more they will be reminded of their offenses, and the more they might wish to get away from us? Why should a judgmental, nagging wife be surprised, for instance, when her husband wants to slink off to the bar or a mistress, or both, to complain about “that old hag, old nag wife of mine”? Whereas the wife would not, the people at the bar simply accept you in your sins! Cheers!

When through forgiveness we remove the retaining wall, the people are free to be dealt with directly by God. The real guilt, not the man-made guilt feelings, can now be dealt with between God and the sinner directly, without unwanted human interference.

Although the following story about a separated couple, “Jim and Sally,” reveals the Jubilee forgiveness factors in pretty fast sequence, it nevertheless serves to illustrate the tremendous power in the process. So, at the risk of sounding simplistic, I will share it:

Sally’s borderline-alcoholic husband, Jim, first started by drinking off the paycheck. Then, he ran off with another woman, leaving the angry wife and their four children bewildered and destitute for a full year. Sally didn’t even know where Jim was, although she had heard he had left the state!

This dear lady, like most people in such a position, had the forgiveness thing all backwards. When the counselor asked her to forgive her husband, she figured it was he who had committed, as it were, “the $10-million sins” against her, when hers were only paltry, “$18 sins,” you know.

With the counselor’s help she discovered that her non-forgiveness was actually the larger sin, and that by it she had effectively retained her husband in his guilt and sins, actually helping to drive him out the door by an attitude typified by her standing in the doorway of the kitchen back door with her hands on her hips, accusing, “You drunk!” “You adulterer!” or whatever.

After quite an emotional display in the counseling session, finally Sally got on her knees in tears of repentance, whereupon she prayed a prayer something like this:

“Lord, forgive me for not releasing Jim from his debt to me [Note: this is the very essence of the Jubilee transaction—the liberty that comes from the release of a debt].”

Then, she adamantly continued as if Jim were right there in the room with her: “Jim, Jesus Christ lives in me, and He forgives you through me, so I forgive you! Even though I feel like scratching your eyes out, I’ll leave it at that: you’re forgiven—not because of how I feel, but because of what Jesus did for the two of us on the cross!”

It was as if Sally had vomited after going through both stages of seasickness—you know, the stage when you’re afraid you’re going to die, followed by the stage you’re afraid you’re not going to die! Take my word for it: it usually feels a lot better after the cleansing purge, as it did for Sally.

Removing “the Retaining Wall” that Holds Others in their Sin and Guilt

Spiritually Sally had removed the toxins, along with crushing the retaining wall she had so methodically built between her and Jim. She removed herself from the position of standing in the way of Jim’s restoration, as she freed Jim to be able to be dealt with directly by his Creator. Now, God was fully free to get out an even bigger stick, if necessary, to get Jim’s attention!

The next morning Sally received a call from an animated Jim, who was in another state. Jim exclaimed, “Sally! I had a dream about you and me last night! I was with you, and you were the most ravishing, sweetheart of a wife a man could ever find on this earth! Is that true?”

Here comes the funny part. Not at all wanting to say it, Sally found these ridiculous words welling up from within her and spouting out her mouth: “Why, yes, Jim, that’s true! Come and see!”

After they hung up, Sally panicked and started kicking herself! “What have I done? How stupid of me! Why did those crazy words pop out of my mouth?”

About seven hours later there was a knock on her kitchen door. Jim had driven non-stop from another state. He walked into the kitchen and immediately collapsed on the floor at her feet, wailing out his confession of his terrible sin—not just to her and the children, but to his Creator Himself.

With her husband’s eyes now wide open to his departure from the Creator’s perfect plan, Sally had an opportunity that surpassed her wildest dreams: there on the kitchen floor she held Jim’s hands as, for the first time in his life, he committed his life to Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior!

Last I heard of Jim and Sally they had been growing for several years in their love for one another as a family . . . with Jesus right there in the midst!

The very day I was finishing this article, yet another lady told me this story about her alcoholic husband: “I had a very vivid dream, in which I could see my husband staggering about with a beer can in his hand. Yet, in front of him stood a crazy woman who was jumping up and down with shrieks of disapproval at his actions. Then, all of a sudden I realized that I was that woman! Simultaneously, an angel of the Lord drew up next to me, and with one broad motion of his wing, swept me around to behind the angel’s back. With my husband shielded from having to look at me, he was then enabled to be directly dealt with by God. This led to his complete release and restoration–both in my dream and in our actual marriage thereafter!”

Because the power of Jubilee is not always demonstrated so suddenly, I’ll give you yet another case that shows more of the process of tearing down the retaining wall between any two people. Yet another lady, Judy, whose husband, George, had taken up with a mistress, came to me with the usual, inverted concept of whose sins were greater.

Once she got that erroneous understanding of forgiveness re-inverted, she prayed a similar Jubilee prayer. She first removing herself as the “accuser,” then released her husband to be dealt with by God’s “bigger stick.” With “the Hound of Heaven” on her husband’s trail, shortly thereafter Judy came to me with an especially loud and emotional complaint:

“I just don’t know if I can take it anymore! When George sees me, he’s started to complain to me about his bitchy mistress! It just hurts me so much to hear him talk about that witch!”

“Don’t you see what’s happening here?” I queried. She didn’t.

“Well, by the very nature of the alliance, a mistress is someone who accepts you in your sins! That’s why adulterous relationships are started so easily—sometimes even in church pews! Because all the potential mistress has to do is commiserate with you as you share what a jerk your spouse is, and what a misunderstood or abused person you really are!

“Spiritual, then physical, adultery can fire up pretty quickly when the spouse is busily building retaining walls of guilt and shame, and the tempter offers nothing but “love,” acceptance and forgiveness—initially, at least!

“But, what is happening here is that you and George’s mistress are in the process of trading places once again! You are regaining your rightful position as his mate, and she is becoming the ‘old hag, old nag’ you once were trying your best to become!”

Indeed, the mystique had melted, with the mistress eventually taking on the same judgmental, non-forgiving role that Judy had formerly used to control George, hold him in his guilt, and drive him away from herself and God. Once the wife removed the “retaining wall” which had held her husband in his sins, the mistress started building a retaining wall of her own!

Eventually, the husband saw the light, repented, and returned to his wife. Had she not embraced the suffering of exercising her Jubilee power to forgive, neither she nor her estranged husband would have ever been restored to one another.

Misconception #7: Forgiveness is a One-Stage Process

When you claim the name of Christ to once-for-all forgive offending parties, why is it that the feelings and the logic of bitterness so often reemerge soon thereafter, even welling up from time to time as if they had just happened for the first time? May I suggest it’s because forgiveness is double-faceted, or two-staged?

The first time you forgive, what you have loosed on earth is released in heaven (cf., Matthew 18:15-19). That is sudden, permanent, and takes place in your spirit, which, we are told, is of “one spirit” with the Spirit of God and the spirit of the forgiven.

The soul, however—your mind, will, and emotions—like your body, is not normally healed instantly as is your spirit; rather, it takes a slower healing process. . . . So, your soul will often require a second stage of forgiveness—one in which you must participate in continuous “washings” in what we might call “forgiveness reaffirmations” every time the memory of the wrong re-surfaces in your mind or emotions. . . and it will!

When the feelings of non-forgiveness reemerge, it is altogether too easy for disciples of Jesus Christ to falsely conclude that the forgiveness itself might not have worked! So, they stop the second-stage forgiveness-reaffirming “washings”–not in the lives of the forgiven, but in their own lives! The net result is paralysis at the least, and further bitterness and disillusionment at the worst. Either way, the work of the Jubileer is stopped dead in its tracks!

We all know that a second, multiple-forgiveness stage is necessary when we encounter re-offenses. With re-offenses, Jesus said that we should be willing to forgive 70 times 70 (cf., Matthew 18:21-23). Jay Ferris, The Walk Show’s “resident economist,” helps to clarify our response when multiple re-offenses occur:

When Jesus indicated to Peter that we should forgive seventy times seven in a single day, it can only mean that we ought to be unoffendable. It could hardly mean that we should become accountants, adding up the offenses that come our way.

However, there are still many instances wherein the offense has been forgiven and is not reoccurring, but where the forgiver still needs second-stage reaffirmations, or washings, in order to be healed. I like to think of each such forgiveness reaffirmation as being like one more pebble thrown in the stream of polluted and bitter memories. If enough pebbles get thrown in, they eventually can become the gravel that purifies the stream.

So, the Jubileer’s remedy is: forgive, forgive, and forgive. The following story may help illustrate how multiple forgivenesses can actually work. The scenario is in the aftermath of a financial sabotage, and the Jubilee remedy will be shown to be spiritual long before it becomes financial:

Just two years ago, after a particularly pernicious financial fiasco, I was awakening at 3:00 a.m. every day, suddenly finding it necessary to forgive. This enabled me to fall back to sleep by about 3:30, until I found myself awake again at 4:00! I’d have to reaffirm my forgiveness yet another time, falling asleep again around 4:30. Then, I’d need to go through the same process all over again at 5:00, 6:00, and 7:00! With forgiveness I got about a half of a night of sleep, but without it I would have probably gotten no sleep at all, plus probably fallen ill! So, that was a good start.

Eventually, however, such forgiveness “pebble throwing in the polluted stream” was necessary only about once per day. Then, once per week. Now, it’s about once per month or more. I don’t want to gloss over this, as I must note that the pain from the continuing consequences of the financial injury still persists 24/7 to this day. However, somehow it tempts me less and less to resurrect the bitterness of an unwashed, unforgiving heart.

Eventually, that’s a lot of pebbles in the stream! Just recently, I discovered this persistent forgiveness to be morphing my prayers from pebble tossing to, of all things, blessing the very people who sabotaged my finances . . . sort of like Joseph, who must have needed to cast thousands of pebbles in the forgiveness stream before his years of 24/7 pain was converted into a pure stream of blessing toward his brothers who threw him into the pit and a life of slavery and imprisonment. At last, he was able to bless them, while genuinely declaring his forgiveness in person:

You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives (Genesis 50:20).

Eventually the pebbles become the gravel in the stream bed that cleanses the bitter, polluted memories and emotions and produces a pure stream. You’ll know when the stream is pure when you have forgiven so often that you can eventually speak of your past experience without ending up in a pile of tears, anger, bitterness, or regrets! The Lord is, indeed, making all things new.

Robin and I have both worked through major forgiveness in the distant past and even quite recently—sometimes (gasp!) even toward each other! (Can you believe? Of course, she has to forgive me infinitely more than the other way around. Why, I am currently basking in her forgiveness for abandoning her while I went into the woods to write this love letter to “the other woman”—you, the bride of Christ!)

Some Caveats, Fences, Bridges, and Loose Ends

These few insights I have shared on the Jubilee forgiveness factor are not to be construed as a formula of any kind. That’s because any person’s walk in the Spirit, if blindly imitated, can easily become the next person’s death march.

Let me tell you about the man who charged the podium one night after I had sought to chip away at this theme in a speech. I kid you not, these are the exact words he blurted out: “Wow! If this forgiveness thing works as well as ‘praising the Lord’ did, I’ll really be cruising!” I pity the next victims of this Jubileer wannabee!

What I have shared are some general principles that hopefully press you toward seeking Christ’s mind on how you deal with the many tricky variations you will encounter in your diverse relationships along life’s rocky road. As Jesus said, “My sheep hear My voice.” The Apostle Paul amplified Christ’s statement with:

All who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons and daughters of God (Romans 8:14).

So, here are a few random qualifications or modifications that might help you if what I have shared above does not precisely fit your situation:

1)    In Jesus Christ, be willing to embrace the legitimate suffering in Jubilee forgiveness. Dr. M. Scott Peck helped me see that all neuroses, in fact all psychoses, spring from an unwillingness to embrace legitimate suffering—the legitimate suffering of growth. Don’t be neurotic or psychotic. You will normally suffer when you forgive, so get used to suffering redemptively! In doing so, I believe you will be “filling up the fullness of the sufferings of Christ” (Colossians 1:24)—not a bad pursuit!

2)    Don’t get any ideas that these stories prove anyone should be soft on sin. I recall one situation where the super-wealthy husband blew his wife away with the request that he continue to live with his wife and children part time, while setting up a separate household with his homosexual lover!

When she came for counsel, she was in the process of rolling over and playing dead as her SAD (Sexually Addicted Deviant), not gay, husband tried to abuse her yet once more in the divorce courts. A fellow counselor gave her some good advice, which I agreed with:  “Get a Jewish attorney who eats bloody pork for breakfast!” She did, and she cleaned his SAD, multi-million-dollar clock! Instead of quickly becoming destitute, she and her children were set up financially for life.

That reminds me of the old Jewish Rabbi, who once said of his teaching, “If they don’t respond to grace, I hit them with the Law!” Well put! Well put!

3)    By saying, “I forgive you,” remember that in no way are you stating that what the offender did was right.

4)    Be wary of people who are always quick to ask forgiveness, as merely a device to ingratiate themselves back into your life so that they can resume new, creative expressions of sucking the life out of you. Co-dependents are particularly adept at this maneuver, and they sometimes need to be avoided for even years before you can independently verify that they are bringing forth fruit in accordance with their professed “repentance” (cf., Luke 3:8).

There can be a huge gap between their confession/expressions of remorse and your assessment of their true repentance. Take your time! As a rule of thumb in business-ministry relationships, my associates and I have noticed that it might be good to take five years before making that determination.

This casts you squarely upon the Holy Spirit, who is the only One with the true discernment of your situation and what you should be doing about it. You might also consult mature counselors in the making of your assessments. Again, there is no need to prematurely re-establish a relationship until you know you’re dealing with bona fide repentance, and that it’s going to be safe for you.

5)    Always, the critical issue is that you are led by the Spirit, as the woman in the story above was led, to say what she said on the phone and to allow her estranged husband in the kitchen back door. The key is your participation in the Jubilee cleansing process to the degree that you can start differentiating between your own soul-driven reactions and your responses to the Spirit’s initiatives both in and through you.

One lady might be led to speak on the phone and let the estranged husband in the kitchen back door. Another might be directed to slam down the phone, bolt the door, and call the cops! Only those who are growing in the Spirit’s ways and learning to hear His voice are going to know what to do when the need to know is crucial. Indeed, the only formula is that “There ain’t no formula!” But, we have the Holy Spirit:

Your ears will hear a word behind you, “This is the way, walk in it,” whenever you turn to the right or to the left (Isaiah 30:21).

6)    Remember, the closer the person you have forgiven (and continue to wash in forgiveness) is to you, the more likely it is that they will have justified their sin against you due to a perceived sin they feel you have committed against them. (“Ouch!”) So, if you do wish to initiate direct contact with them, it should only be to ask for forgiveness yourself and not to talk about their now-forgiven, washed-away, “as-far-as-the-East-is-from-the-West,” forever-eradicated, long-gone, former sin(s). Again, despite your feelings, as you embrace the legitimate suffering of Jubilee forgiveness.

7)    So, should you be inclined to forward this article, please forward it to everyone except the persons you feel have sinned against you—you know, the ones you have forgiven as the first and foremost step in your own Year of Jubilee. (If you wish to be “wise as a serpent and gentle as a dove” [cf., Matthew 10:16], however, you might employ the subterfuge of enlisting a friend to forward this article to the person you’ve forgiven, making absolutely certain they first remove your contact information.)

8)    Recognize that you are not fighting with flesh and blood, and that many people’s conduct nowadays is not based on seen factors, but rather unseen spiritual powers that have taken hold of their lives and reactions. In other words, some people will abuse you without even any provocation on your part, except that their enslavement to dark powers has so intensified that they will despise you simply because you are the Lord’s. This can manifest itself even where you have not “witnessed” to them in any significant verbal way. Remember, Cain didn’t kill his brother, Abel, because Abel had punched Cain’s lights out in some way; he killed his brother “because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous.” (1 John 3:1).

9)    Forgive yourself! Yes, I saved “THE BIG ONE” for the last! Until you can apply everything I have said above about forgiveness to yourself, you can simply kiss your other, personal-Jubilee visions good-bye! That means you will have to go through both stages of forgiveness toward yourself:

a.    exercising your divine empowerment in Christ to once-and-for-all forgive yourself, permanently releasing your spirit from self-hate in heaven as it is on earth, and

b.    cleansing out bad memories and bitternesses from your soul (mind, will, and emotions) through casting self-forgiving pebble after self-forgiving pebble after self-forgiving pebble into God’s cleansing, Jubilee (Liberty) stream.

I have written a chapter that further touches on self-forgiveness in my forthcoming Judo Politics book, under the heading, “The Crux of the Problem—Falsely Atoning for Our Real Guilt.” In the meantime, by faith just quit whipping yourself with the chains of your own attempts at self-atonement. The extra blood makes you look a lot less attractive.

God-Forgiven Jubileers Forgive Debtors First, then Get Forgiven by Creditors

My whole life I have viewed the Year of Jubilee with the joys of the forgiven debtor being my focus. For some reason, I liked the idea of being forgiven of my debts, but nothing happens without the initiative of the creditor first. So, I found myself being drawn toward dealing with my debtors first as I walked toward my own personal Year of Jubilee. Finally, my Jubilee forgiveness turned from the spiritual foundation to the financial expression of that forgiveness.

Robin and I sat down and totaled up the amount of money that people had contractually promised to us, but never paid. It came to an astronomical number–approximately 60 times the financial debts we had incurred!

You can imagine that these never-received “accounts receivable” were not that easy to forgive! Yet, in our spirits we felt that this was where we were supposed to start. After all, it was Christ’s forgiveness we were talking about here, and we were now merely to become channels of His Jubilee to others. With the new desire He places in all of us to forgive the debts of others, He also includes the power to implement those desires. I just love this verse:

For God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him (Philippians 2:13—New Living Translation)

Resisting the nuclear options that had been such huge temptations in earlier days, I sent a gift instead to my single largest debtor. I then delivered an unsolicited “hold harmless agreement” to yet another party, when I just as well might have dropped a “Little Boy” on their Hiroshima.

By the time I had passed through this spiritual, then financial, Jubilee on the creditor’s side of the equation, I discovered the strangest promptings welling up from my inner being. First, my pebble tossing had morphed into prayers of blessing for my now-forgiven, forgiven, and forgiven again oppressors. Then, of all the unimaginable things, one day I started getting a real compassion for my former tormentors. It’s almost as if I had the urge to kiss their feet, so to speak, for what they had done for me!

After all, they had not only facilitated a major work in the responses of my inner heart; they had ushered me into a whole new life and career path that I may well have missed without the “gift” of their sabotage. To me, that gift was ever so valuable as the gift Joseph’s brothers gave him in throwing him into his pit.

Think about it: Joseph’s betrayal into captivity, slavery, and incarceration eventually enabled Joseph to be exalted into the very courts of Pharaoh! In turn, it provided Joseph with the opportunity to bless the very brothers who had thought they were doing him harm and save the lives of their entire clan. I began to anticipate an end result in my life that would be no less spectacular to me in my unique situation.

I now suspect that the urge to kiss their feet was really a desire to kiss my Savior’s feet, as it were–akin to what Mary Magdalene must have felt when she kissed the feet of Jesus Christ.

Once my debtors were dispensed with (a la spiritual and financial forgiveness), I turned my attention to the other, lesser factors, of my personal Jubilee: dealing with my own debts by sorting through a whole list of Jubilee options, as contained in our next email entitled, “Crucial Steps into Your Year of Jubilee.”

So, how will Judo Politics eventually bridge the gap between this personal Jubilee process and the national one that is necessary if our Constitutional Republic is to survive? Well, as a taste of what’s to come, you may have heard about the 19th century Judo Politician, British Member of Parliament, William Wilberforce, about whom the recent film “Amazing Grace,” was recently produced.

A man of the kingdom of God, Wilberforce tapped this very Jubilee forgiveness energy when he led the 50-year battle first against the slave trade and then slavery itself in the British Empire. He and his “fiercely loyal and proactive minority” were thereby enabled to accomplish bloodlessly what America fought a bloody Civil War over without really achieving success with the core, spiritual issues of racism and slavery.

Breaking the Spell over the Culture and Enculturated Church

As the Republic and the enculturated church continues to disintegrate, I am reminded of a recent TV special I saw about “Hitler and the Occult.” I believe it was in there that the narrator suggested it wasn’t until Hitler was reported to have shot himself in the bunker at the very end of WWII that “the spell was broken off the minds of the German people.” That was, as with all deception, a spell that the Germans didn’t know was there. Yet, I believe it was real, and it was not unlike the spell under which our culture and largely assimilated church are being held transfixed in the headlights today.

What if a fiercely loyal and proactive minority had awakened in Europe prior to Hitler’s invasion and had taken preemptive action? What if, for example, they had heeded that “doddering old man,” Churchill’s advice and not capitulated to P. M. Neville Chamberlain’s capitulation to Hitler? What if the French, for example, had not awaited the invasion of France before consolidating the fiercely loyal minority known as the French underground? I should think there might have been some fifty to seventy million people that could have been saved from the WWII slaughter. Call me an alarmist if you will, but I see no smaller stakes for America and the world if a few of the fiercely loyal minority don’t awaken, find one another, and become extremely proactive right this moment.

Having explored some foundational forgiveness factors and exploded some typical misconceptions for your personal Year of Jubilee, we now move forward toward “Getting Psyched Up for Your Personal Year of Jubilee,” followed by some specific, “Crucial Steps into Your Year of Jubilee.” To access the entire Jubilee series, see www.TheWalkShow.com, clicking on “Categories,” then “Your Jubilee in 2010” Series.

Pullin’ and prayin’ for and with you,

Ken

Ken Talbott
Host, The Walk Show
1-877-WALK SHOW [1-877-925-5746--locally 253-333-1813]
Ken@TheWalkShow.com

P. S. Here’s a Prayer Regarding Critics and Enemies by Bishop Nikolai Velimirovic, Serbian Orthodox Bishop, who spoke out against Nazism, was arrested, and taken to Dachau.

Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.
Enemies have driven me into your embrace more than friends have.
Friends have bound me to earth;
enemies have loosed me from earth and have demolished all my aspirations in the world.
Enemies have made me a stranger in worldly realms and an extraneous inhabitant of the world.
Just as a hunted animal finds safer shelter than an unhunted animal does,
so have I, persecuted by enemies, found the safest sanctuary,
having ensconced myself beneath Your tabernacle,
where neither friends nor enemies can slay my soul.

Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless and do not curse them.
They, rather than I, have confessed my sins before the world.
They have punished me, whenever I have hesitated to punish myself.
They have tormented me, whenever I have tried to flee torments.
They have scolded me, whenever I have flattered myself.
They have spat upon me, whenever I have filled myself with arrogance.

Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.
Whenever I have made myself wise, they have called me foolish.
Whenever I have made myself mighty, they have mocked me as though I were a [fly].
Whenever I have wanted to lead people, they have shoved me into the background.
Whenever I have rushed to enrich myself, they have prevented me with an iron hand.
Whenever I thought that I would sleep peacefully, they have wakened me from sleep.
Whenever I have tried to build a home for a long and tranquil life, they have demolished it and driven me out.
Truly, enemies have cut me loose from the world and have stretched out my hands to the hem of your garment.

Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.
Bless them and multiply them; multiply them and make them even more bitterly against me:
So that my fleeing will have no return;
So that all my hope in men may be scattered like cobwebs;
So that absolute serenity may begin to reign in my soul;
So that my heart may become the grave of my two evil twins: arrogance and anger;
So that I might amass all my treasure in heaven;

Ah, so that I may for once be freed from self-deception,
which has entangled me in the dreadful web of illusory life.
Enemies have taught me to know what hardly anyone knows,
that a person has no enemies in the world except himself.
One hates his enemies only when he fails to realize that they are not enemies, but cruel friends.

It is truly difficult for me to say who has done me more good and who has done me more evil in the world: friends or enemies.
Therefore bless, O Lord, both my friends and my enemies.
A slave curses enemies, for he does not understand.
But a son blesses them, for he understands.
For a son knows that his enemies cannot touch his life.
Therefore he freely steps among them and prays to God for them.

Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.

[Editor’s Note: This is the second of five articles in the "Your Jubilee in 2010" Series, with the first entitled, “'Jubileer' or ‘April Fool’?”; the third, "Your Personal Jubilee's Forgiveness Factors"; the fourth, "Getting Psyched Up for Your Personal Year of Jubilee," and the fifth, "Crucial Steps into Your Personal Year of Jubilee." All comprise a section at the heart of Ken's forthcoming book, Judo Politics--The Transformation of the Electorate that Upsets Big Brother. To access the entire series, click on “Your Jubilee in 2010” Series under the Categories section to the right.

And He opened their understanding, that they might comprehend the Scriptures (Luke 24:45).

As we contemplate the state of things in the world today, we are very deeply impressed and oppressed with the prevailing malady of spiritual blindness. It is the root malady of the time. We should not be far wrong if we said that most, if not all, of the troubles from which the world is suffering, are traceable to that root, namely, blindness. The masses are blind; there is no doubt about that. In a day which is supposed to be a day of unequalled enlightenment, the masses are blind... The leaders are blind, blind leaders of the blind. But in a very large measure, the same is true of the Lord’s people. Speaking quite generally, Christians are today very blind.

--T. Austin-Sparks, Spiritual Sight, Chapter One

Dear Walk Show Family,

The five articles in this "Jubilee" series contains the essence of what I have been taught by the Holy Spirit in over 44 years of intently listening for the Savior’s voice. I decided to release this section from my Judo Politics book even before the book is published, due to what I believe to be the urgency of this message. That way, you can experience the heartbeat of the "Jubilee" message without even having to buy the book!

I hope this series is for a very limited readership, for these reasons: It all started when my favorite childhood TV show, “The Man and the Challenge,” was canceled in 1960 for lack of public interest. I was devastated and perplexed. However, it alerted me to the phenomenon of inverse relationships, which I have observed and noted a myriad of times since. Take, for example, the study on the French Riviera, wherein it was discovered that there’s an inverse proportion between the size of the yacht and the number of people on it. Then, there’s the inverse relationship between the number of lawyers and the cultural integrity of a nation.

My own personal suspicion is that I either have something like leprosy and halitosis combined, or there’s an inverse ratio between the things that are most important to me and the interest of my audiences in those same things. When flexing my fleshly propensities as a young communicator, it earned for me what was at that time the world’s largest radio and TV audience: with a daily potential audience of 500 million people in 30-some countries of the world.

Yet, through the decades since, the more I sensed my message was being conformed to the mind of Christ, I noticed that it becomes of less and less interest to my mass-media audiences--especially in what calls itself the American "church." In recent times, for example, I have received approximately ten times as many “REMOVE!” requests for The Walk Show’s email list than new subscriptions!

Isn’t that wonderful?!

That means at long last we’re shedding the dead weight and getting down to the “fiercely loyal and proactive minority” that we’ve all been longing for for so long! Remember, in Part One of this three-part series, under the heading, “Your Own Personal Jubilee in 2010 or ‘April Fool’?”, I said, “All it takes is a tiny minority within a minority to become the salt and light of a culture, to become the ‘little leaven that leavens the whole lump,’ to become the tail that wags the dog, to become what I call ‘the three percenters’—the history-makers who bring about genuine hope and real change you can believe in.”

It is not the many, but the few, who will do the great and might work with which we are now presented. Yes, you can kiss “The Moral Majority” goodbye, ‘cause in our lifetime it never existed! Then, please welcome the awakening of the three-percenter "Jubileers"!

Think about it: all of the above-mentioned inverse relationships—from yachters to lawyers—appear to have as their common denominator unseen, spiritual factors. This Jubilee series of five articles seeks to address the most central and powerful of all such spiritual factors: forgiveness. Forgiveness does, indeed, make the whole world go around, and the lack of it incrementally disintegrates culture, eventually resulting in “world wars” of various sorts.

The “Jubilee forgiveness factor” of which we will speak will entail not just fiscal debts, but all other types of debts, as well. As I see this as a matter of Lifestyle or Deathstyle for all of us, I am praying that fiercely loyal and proactive Jubileers will grab a hold of it like a dog on a bone!  I believe it not only holds the combination for each of us, our marriages, our families, our communities, and our churches; it holds the key to any future Liberty (“Jubilee”) we might envision for our American Constitutional Republic. So, here we go again!

Historical Perspective for Your Personal “Year of Jubilee”

As we said in our first article, "In Old Testament times God instructed the Children of Israel to observe a Jubilee (meaning, 'Liberty') every fifty years, in which all debts were erased, prisoners and slaves were set free, and all land returned to its original owners." Although there is no historical evidence that Israel ever obeyed this divine mandate, there is certainly lots of evidence that they paid dearly for not observing the Jubilee!

In "The Jubilee Principle: God's Plan For Economic Freedom," Dan L. White, billed as “an expert on Christian stewardship,” describes the connection between the Bible and the marketplace. White delves into Old Testament history and shows how God's relationship with the Israelites is a model, or a shadow, of the substantive spiritual and economic liberation being offered to the fiercely loyal, proactive followers of Jesus Christ today.

As White examines the economic "long wave"—a boom-and-bust cycle that happens roughly twice a century in free economies—he uncovers the wisdom of the fifty-year Jubilee cycle intended for the Hebrew economy. Simply put, this was God's plan to spare Israel of the tumult of financial crises, and we can still learn something valuable from our Creator’s timeless Jubilee wisdom today.

Some pretty basic economic thinking might lead one to conclude that any nation that practiced the Jubilee would experience tremendous blessing instead of the boom-bust curse like that experienced by Israel and other countries right up through our own Republic today. The Jubilee might eliminate all crushing debt, would certainly gravitate against an imbalance between the super rich and very poor, and would probably eradicate altogether inflation and those economic depressions that occur approximately every fifty years when we fail to implement the Jubilee.

The Jubilee as a Declaration of Reality

From my perspective on history, it would seem that the Jubilee, like the entire Old Testament Law, is not just some arbitrary, religious code superimposed upon a people by an absentee god; rather, it is backed up by the Reality a very personal God has actually built into the very nature of things. In other words, you don’t break such laws as the Jubilee; you get broken on them! The same holds true of the Sabbath, which Jesus described as being “made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). Human history verifies that it is good for every person to rest one day in seven. And, if he doesn’t, he eventually pays big time!

“Consider therefore the kindness and sternness of God” (Romans 11:22), for He not only blesses us with the Sabbath rest (a shadow of our substantive rest in Jesus Christ), but in Old Covenant times the penalty for breaking the Sabbath was death. (“Whoa!”)

We can also witness the Creator’s blessing, His Reality-backing, and his built-in penalties in the seven-year Sabbatical rest (see the forthcoming, Judo Politics chapter on “Avoid Burnout with ‘The Seven-Year Mastery Cycle’”).  The penalty for breaking with that blessing was not just the built-in losses to soil and sower alike; it was experienced when God sentenced the Israelites to 70 years of slavery for failing to allow the land (and the farmer) to rest one year in seven. Yes, they were held in captivity until the land had been given its full 70 years of missed Sabbatical rests (i.e., 70 Sabbath Years)! Leviticus 26:33-34 says:

I will scatter you among the nations and will draw out my sword and pursue you. Your land will be laid waste, and your cities will lie in ruins. Then the land will enjoy its Sabbath years all the time that it lies desolate and you are in the country of your enemies; then the land will rest and enjoy its Sabbaths.

Through the Jubilee God provides us with a perfect picture of the kingdom of God, in which the King, Jesus Christ, makes the ultimate sacrifice to set the captives free, including the provision of a universal pardon for all of us sinners.

Apart from the Jubilee Year reflecting the very loving character of God, I can also imagine that it was instituted to protect the culture from the encroachments of sin. It is most certain, for example, that, given enough time, the rich will normally parlay their wealth to oppress the poor, and the poor will fall to many a temptation to make stupid financial decisions (like playing the State’s Lotto or drinking the State’s liquor). So, “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” until the liberty-granting Spirit behind the Jubilee is suppressed to the point of an implosion, otherwise known as a crash or depression.

The fact that there is no evidence that either Israel or other nations up through our time ever actually practiced the Jubilee concept is testimony to the stranglehold the god of riches, “Mammon,” has on the nations, including both Israel and our own.

I was somewhat stumped not to witness the major crash I anticipated about fifty years after 1930’s Great Depression, yet the powers that be now have new tools to manipulate the economy much like chemotherapy does to a cancer: it can sometimes buy you time in the short haul, granting you a temporary, artificial sense of relief (what Judo Politics calls, “The Deathstyle Remission Curve”), but in the long run assures an even more complete and total destruction.

One of those financial tools of destruction is inflation, a beautiful mechanism for a slow-motion crash. What baby boomer does not remember the day of one breadwinner per household and $7 tanks of gas?

[Working the other side of the equation (which is always an option during even the greatest of busts), I know of some who made millions or billions by borrowing vast sums at a rate equal to the inflation rate—what became for them, in effect, “free money.” Too bad, as Christ said, that “the sons of this age are shrewder and more prudent and wiser in (relation to) their own generation (to their own age and kind) than are the sons of light” (Luke 16:8—Amplified Bible).]

Inflation is achieved by removing the intrinsic value behind our currency, then simply turning on the printing presses. As economist Jay Ferris points out in his Inflation: The Ultimate Graven Image, any such created “idol,” or “graven image,” will sooner-or-later always return to its intrinsic value. In the case of the U. S. dollar, as more and more paper dollars chase the same amount of goods and services, the value of the dollar is driven down, and consequently, prices go up. Republican President Nixon took the U. S. off the gold standard in 1971, forcing our fiat money on its death march back toward its intrinsic value—that is, the price of the paper and ink alone! Ask the Weimar Republic, Argentina, or modern-day Zimbabwe, who have preceded us along this inexorable pathway.

As a NAUI SCUBA instructor, I discovered a good metaphor for the inviolable side of what is called “inflation.” In diving there is a phenomenon known as an “oxygen deficit.” The novice diver would often encounter this reality by entertaining this common thought process: “If I can stay down a half an hour with my tank, why don’t I just take every other breath and be able to stay down twice as long?” Yet, for every amount of work performed, there is an exact number of molecules of oxygen required. So, when the diver starts “building up an oxygen deficit,” so to speak, the body will get back every single molecule it needs—even, if necessary, at the expense of your life!

The same holds true with inflating the money supply. For every dollar of funny money injected into an economic system, a “dollar deficit” is built up which must be paid back in the proportionate depreciation of the value of the dollar itself, known for some reason as inflation.

Joined at the hip with the funny money problem is our lust for deficit spending. As the 20th Century Catholic sage, G. K. Chesterton opined:

No society can survive the socialist fallacy that there is an absolutely unlimited number of inspired officials and an absolutely unlimited amount of money to pay them.

[Note to self: “Maybe they never intended to pay it back!”]

I like the former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher’s words even better, in a bitter-sweet sorta way:

The trouble with socialism is, sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.

As we have already entered a second, great depression, and we hang on the edge of a hyper-inflation that will once again illustrate the lessons of history we have chosen to ignore, perhaps we might also notice that the need for a Jubilee adjustment has been created by the corruption of our society on almost all fronts.

It’s not just our criminal government that has relentlessly, treasonously, betrayed, raped and pillaged the American taxpayer and trampled our Constitution, but theFederal Reserve’s international bankers that control our monetary system have done the same. Our mortgage and real estate industries have been rife with corruption (I once wrote my “Seven Mortgage Secrets” chronicling their scams), and our banks have proven themselves corrupt to a degree not yet fully understood (unless you understand derivatives).

Add to that our credit card companies, who have put the mafia out of the usury business. And, we must not forget Big Pharma, who has charged exorbitant prices to poison the populous. Of course, whatever the scam, the government is always right there in the middle of it, purchased more votes with free bread and circuses—whoops, I meant “free poisonous drugs”! All in all, we have, indeed, reached the place where nothing short of a Jubilee of some sort could avert a total crash.

With God’s Jubilee idea being a means of restraint upon a culture’s sins, and with those sins having reached the point where the stench has wafted to the heavens, do I detect the glimmer of the hope in a personal Jubilee for many who have been abused by “Our Enemy, the System” (chapter title in the forthcoming Judo Politics)?

Yes, I do!

So, I would guess that the basic question now is: “Do we want a voluntary or involuntary ‘Jubilee’?” It is quite apparent that we are presently experiencing an involuntary one nationally.

So, to deal with the national phenomenon, we shall need to delve next into the subject: “Your Personal Jubilee’s Forgiveness Factors.” Again, to access the entire Jubilee series, see www.TheWalkShow.com, clicking on “Categories,” then “Your Jubilee in 2010” Series.

Pullin’ and Prayin’ for and with you,

Ken

Ken Talbott
Host, The Walk Show
1-877-WALK SHOW [1-877-925-5746--locally 253-333-1813]
Ken@TheWalkShow.com

[Editor’s Note: This is the first of five "Your Jubilee in 2010" articles being released, with the second entitled, "Our National Jubilee's Forgiveness Factors"; the third, "Your Personal Jubilee’s Forgiveness Factors”; the fourth, “Getting Psyched Up for Your Personal Year of Jubilee; and the fifth, "Crucial Steps into Your Personal Year of Jubilee.” The Jubilee Series is a section at the heart of Ken Talbott's forthcoming book, Judo Politics--The Transformation of the Electorate that Upsets Big Brother, to be published this Spring. To access the entire series, click on “Your Jubilee in 2010” Series under the Categories section to the right.

MR. PRESIDENT: It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth—and listen to the song of that siren, till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those, who having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it. . . . Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

—The introduction and conclusion of Patrick Henry’s famous 1775 speech to America’s founders about the immanent British military threat.

April 1, 2010

Dear Walk Show family,

Speaking of liberty versus death, I re-checked the mortality rates in Washington, and they’re still hovering somewhere around 100 percent—at “one death per person.” If I were to drop dead tomorrow—and that is always a possibility, for I, like you, am living on borrowed time—the following is the central message of liberty I would wish to share with you today and in the next four articles in this "Jubilee" (meaning, "Liberty") series. Here’s just a tip-off in advance: such liberty starts with you and me personally!

What I wish to sound is a liberty-or-death warning concerning your life and role in what we might call The Second American Revolution. Yet, the Revolution being called for is quite unlike any revolution we have ever seen before. If you are to be a fighter in this type of revolution, I maintain that you must first and foremost become a "Jubileer." So, what's that?

In Old Testament times God instructed the Children of Israel to observe a Jubilee (meaning, “Liberty”) every fifty years, in which all debts were erased, prisoners and slaves were set free, and all land returned to its original owners. From my viewpoint, Americans and American Christians, in particular, are in desperate need of a Jubilee of their own, if, indeed, there is to be a future for our Republic.

What will that Jubilee look like, and what will it take for us to become the "Jubileers" who experience the Jubilee's liberty for ourselves? And, what must us Jubileers do if we are to help others into their personal and national Jubilee, as well?

What I am about to say just happens to be the very distilled essence of my forthcoming book, Judo Politics—The Transformation of the Electorate that Upsets Big Brother. So much so that if you really “get” what I’m trying to say in this, the heartbeat of the book, you might not even need to read Judo Politics! Literally all the issues of life in our nation will, I believe, be found to flow out of this distilled essence.

The threats now facing those of us in our American Constitutional Republic are no less serious today than were the threats spoken of by Patrick Henry at the emergence of the first American Revolution. This call to “Your Personal Jubilee,” or “liberty,” followed by a national expression of the Jubilee, is, in my opinion, our only remaining, viable response to these threats—perhaps hidden right in plain sight.

Look! What's that Funny Line on the Horizon?

The driving energy of a tsunami, as very distinct from a normal wave, moves through the open ocean water, as opposed to on top of it, at speeds of up to 600 miles per hour--the speed of a commercial airliner. Largely undetectable in the open ocean, a tsunami is typically no more than three feet high until it gets close to shore. Not until it piles up into a tidal wave close to the beach can it be seen, and by that time it is usually too late to get out of its destructive path.

Multiple global earthquakes have already occurred. Just tracking the effects of the financial earthquake alone, the tsunami is seen to be rushing right toward us. Most Americans, rejoicing over the many economic-recovery predictions as well as the unexpectedly super-low tide of interest rates, eagerly dig for clams on the beach with their heads almost completely in the sand. Yet, there's a strange-looking line forming up on the ocean horizon. "Look! It's just about to crash in on the last two rings of reefs protecting our shores--derivatives and commercial real estate!"

Cresting current events have already narrowly limited our options. As I see it, today, April 1st, 2010, we only have two choices remaining: either start functioning immediately as what I like to call, “Jubileers” (a type of fiercely loyal and proactive minority) who will fight ourselves to higher ground, or prove ourselves “April Fools”!

The list of optional choices presented in this series of five “Jubilee” articles could well usher you into your own personal Jubilee over the next twelve months--including seeing you released from all of your various types of debts, should you be willing to make the tougher of the choices presented to you. Your Jubilee choices could allow you to take full advantage of all of the challenges and opportunities in the time of great waves immediately ahead.

Yes, whether or not you enter into your personal Year of Jubilee right now could well become a matter of Lifestyle or Deathstyle—not just for your life, family, friends, community, and nation, but for the very Republic itself.

Please allow me to start with the bold assertion that the tsunami heading straight for us appears to be rapidly increasing in force and momentum, so we simply must snap out of our stupor right this instant and make a giant, Jubilee leap—while the vast majority of Americans (and what calls itself the American church) remain frozen in their tracks like deer caught in the headlights. In a nutshell, here’s my thesis:

You have only a matter of days or weeks now to take whatever action you need to take to get yourself re-structured and re-positioned for the upcoming social, economic, political, and spiritual upheaval and the fantastic opportunities it will carry with it. In other words, it’s either a personal “Jubilee” for you, starting today, or “April Fools!”

With Every Challenge Comes an Opportunity (Often in Disguise)

As the perfect financial storm approaches with its tidal wave in front, do you think that God is worried about the economy? Should you and I be? My good friend and business associate, the late Arvis B. (”A. B.”) Walker, used to say, “It doesn’t matter what the economy is doing; what matters is what side of it you are working!”

To underline his thought, I remember meeting the late Ruth Kerr, president of Kerr Glass Manufacturing Company, when she was in her 90’s. When her husband, Alex, died just before the 1929 start of the first Great Depression, Ruth found herself running her company on the right side of the market! Everybody was canning, and the canning operations in the agricultural sections of the country gave her company the largest volume on record two years into the Depression in 1931! She boomed while millions went bust!

I’m told canning is up 35% in America over this past year.

As the inevitable tsunami approaches, I trust you will soon see that Judo Politics is my own faith-filled attempt at finding the opportunity in the cataclysm. You see, while others have been digging clams, the Jubilee process to be described herein will be like fashioning a surfboard! And, the message of this "Jubilee" section is: "Get yourself ready for a wild ride!"

Like that surfboard, your first and foremost “secret weapon” in this cataclysmic struggle is one entirely within your grasp—the awe-inspiring, life-transforming, Big-Brother-upsetting power of forgiveness in Jesus Christ! That may sound vague or even esoteric, but what I am going to speak of is the your means of riding the crest of the wave of destruction. Please let me explain by starting with the “apparent” crisis threatening our Constitutional Republic, then delving down to some of the real issues below the apparent issues—issues that involve you and yours personally.

“Unsustainable-but-Reversible” or “Irreversible”?

I can no longer see the situation as “unsustainable-but-reversible,” as the Congressional Budget Office Director, the White House Budget Director, and even the Fed Chairman (representing those who have created this fiscal mess) have all recently intimated. I am now thoroughly convinced that it has become “irreversible.”

Not only does the government now control more than half of the American economy, the government is easily construable to be technically bankrupt. Over $110 trillion in unfunded liabilities is yet one more witness against the government leach, which has already convincingly demonstrated for us all that it has no regard whatsoever for the life of its host—“We the People.”

In the remote case that you don’t think we’re past the tipping point, just consider these two, telling indicators (among dozens) that the leach continues to suck the life out of our Republic:

1) Our U. S. Congress has plundered your life’s savings in the Social Security “Trust” Fund. Is there any other way of viewing them than as the greatest thieves in the history of the planet? The fact that they altruistically fancy themselves as “Robin Hoods” in no way masks their theft and redistribution efforts, and it most certainly tempts one to conclude that simply voting them out of office alone could in no way atone for the irreparable damage they have done to all of us American citizens.

2) As of 2008, the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis reveals that the average federal government salary is now $119,982, compared with the average private-sector salary $59,909. Add to that benefits like health care and pensions, and the fed workers get an additional $40,785, as compared to the average working taxpayer, who gets only $9,881 in benefits. What this means is that federal workers get twice the salary and four times the benefits of the citizens who hire them. State and local government compensation works out to be at about the same ratio to working taxpayers' compensation.

Should that not be a signal to all (except perhaps the deer in the headlights) who it is that is already wielding the greater power--"We the People" or the government leech?

Effective last month’s health care tipping point, I see no way around the disaster—only through it. The “British” have already invaded the colonies. The “World War” has already started in Poland. The “Titanic” has already hit the iceberg at flank speed, while Americans busy themselves re-arranging the deck chairs, and the ship’s worship band amps up the volume as the parishioners scatter from the ship’s ornate, “super church” salon.

Churchill’s warnings about Hitler’s intentions, as it were, have gone unheeded, and the claptrap about “hope and change we can believe in” is already as empty as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s promise of “peace in our time.” Europe, as it were, is under siege and soon bombs will be raining down on London and Pearl Harbor, sucking us all into the War. Yet, it’s as if a deep, deluding spell is over the minds of the whole culture and its enculturated church.

I sure hope this doesn’t apply to you, but as a talk show host with extensive contact with the American public—and with American “Christians,” in particular—I simply must ask this question right out of the gun: “What’s it gonna take to wake you up to the seriousness of what is facing us? Are you able to hear the Holy Spirit’s still, small voice in this warning, or would something like an EMP be required to get you to wake up and smell the cold-brewed coffee?”

“If the Rapture Comes, Will You Take My Sunday School Class?”

In the spirit of the Apostle Paul’s words—“Remember that for three years I never stopped warning each of you night and day with tears” (cf., Acts 20:31)—just what is it that I have similarly warned you about  and cried over these past three years? It might be summed up with, “Repent, Restructure, Reposition!” Yes, and do so quickly—not in the way Ken Talbott might suggest, but in accordance with what the Spirit directs you—culturally, financially, geographically, politically, etc.—but first and foremost, spiritually!”

Everywhere I look Americans (and Christians, in particular) are deep in fear, asleep, in paralysis, or even in apparent outright delusion. These multitudes of the somnolent are curled up in prenatal positions, thumbs inserted in mouth, as the consequences of their indecision letter-by-letter spell out the word: “D I S A S T E R!” Many of those who call themselves Christians are completely bailed out, hoping like hell to be raptured out of their Mercedes on the way to a Seahawks game.

Jesus predicted this very phenomenon, explaining in Matthew 24:37-41 how the evil ones will be taken away, whether it be the evil man working in the field (v.40) or the evil woman grinding with a hand mill (v.41) . . . just like they were in the days of Noah:

. . . they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took [or swept, or took away] them all away to judgment. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man (v. 39).

The Walk Show’s “resident Biblical scholar,” Dr. Stephen Crosby, comes down on this one with:

Matt 24:37 ff., is one of those passages that ruins a lot of tidy eschatology [i.e., the understanding of “the last days”]. Jesus is making a comparison. The question is, comparing what to what? It seems plain that whatever is going on, it is not the righteous being removed from the earth, but the wicked in judgment. The last days, whatever one thinks of them, are being compared to the days of Noah, in which the righteous were spared and remained and the wicked removed.

This has implications for what one believes about eternal destiny. I have always found it odd that so many people who are literal futurists want to get out of the place Jesus is supposedly returning to, and want to spend eternity in a place Jesus has left (if the literal futurists are correct).

It is pretty sobering news that believers would allow the spirit of the age over the past century to morph their eschatology so completely. Our “bail-out theology” certainly bears witness to our advanced stage of assimilation by a surrounding, decaying culture, that wants to avoid pain at all costs in its vain pursuit of pleasure. What tipping point must the church itself have passed if we are willing to be manipulated and manipulate others into including ourselves among the evil ones who get swept off the face of the earth?  Here’s hoping that this mass delusion already permeating our age and its corrupted church will soon be “left behind” by the Jubileers!

We’re told that Luther, when asked what he’d do if he knew Jesus were coming tomorrow, responded with, “I’d plant a tree today!” Yes, Jesus wants us to “occupy until I return” (Luke 19:13), and when He does, the evil ones may be swept away to some hot spot somewhere, but the church will be quite busy reigning with Christ for at least the first 1,000 years.

Speaking of life down here on earth, “acts of God” recently gave us “the parable of the earthquakes,” in which the Chilean quake was 500 times stronger than the Haitian quake, but the lesser shaking did so much more damage than the greater shaking. How could this be?

Our friend, Pat Robertson, was almost universally mocked (including in the church, which lustily sucks in the worldview of its secular media mentors) when all Pat did was suggest the plight of Haitians might be spiritual at its core. What else could explain the fact that two nations share the same island, but Haiti even before the quake was a barren wasteland in every sense of the word, while its neighboring Dominican Republic is verdant and prosperous in comparison?

The spiritual plague that has devastated Haiti could easily be characterized as a lack of “repentance, restructuring, and repositioning.” That might not only make Pat a prophet; it could render America, and what calls itself the American church, the “Haiti” in the parable. Or, shall we say, “the April Fools”?

“Rise Up, O Fiercely Loyal Minority!”

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery (Galatians 5:1).

On the other hand, our God is a God of true hope, of genuine change we can really believe in, and of resurrection power. I believe He’s on the lookout for that “remnant” somewhere out there who are ready to be resurrected and mobilized via their own personal Jubilees! While the Bible describes the “remnant” as a small group who will find salvation, survive, and eventually thrive after an enemy invasion, Eugene Peterson in his The Message (Bible translation) refers to the remnant as the “fiercely loyal minority.” I like that.

In accordance with our theme that our problem is much more with the professing church than with the culture, T. Austin Sparks stops the buck right where it belongs:

There is another word which just means that which has escaped from slavery and is breathing free air. That is a fine picture, a fine portrait for Overcomers - that which has escaped from slavery and is breathing free air. . . . Some of us, even in our Christian lives and histories, know what it is to escape from slavery. Oh, the old bondage of the Christian system and order, expectation and demand, all the old rota and legality!- -to be free of it all! Not only to be raised with Christ, but to have the grave-clothes taken off and to be breathing the free air of the spiritually emancipated! That is what this word calls a remnant, and that is not something extra to Christianity. It is exactly what you find at the beginning with the Church (Overcomer Testimony, Chapter 2).

Through a lengthy process characterized by much agony and ecstasy, this fiercely loyal minority is being refined, coming to know who they are, and beginning to discover one another–both within and without the framework of the apostate American institutional expressions of the church. Thereby they are becoming the “seers” of our age, as well as the “doers”—indeed, the “fiercely loyal and proactive minority”! I have met and am daily meeting a tiny portion of them—a minority within the minority.

“Oh, God, help us find and build up one another!”

I am heartened by my study of Jubileers throughout history, which leads me to believe that all it takes is a tiny minority within a minority to become the salt and light of a culture, to become the “little leaven that leavens the whole lump,” to become the tail that wags the dog, to become what I call “the three percenters”—the history-makers who bring about genuine hope and real change you can believe in. Even the dark side of history has been molded by three percenters of another stripe.

Has someone masquerading as an angel of light blinded your eyes into becoming an April Fool, or are you already (or do you desire to become) a part of the fiercely loyal minority known as Jubileers? To become the latter, I believe you must be willing to become fiercely proactive . . . now, today, this week, and most certainly starting within this month of April, 2010!

You must quickly make major life’s decisions that you have perhaps put off for weeks, months, or maybe even years now. There’s no more time for procrastination. That’s because from now on ignorance will no longer be bliss, and procrastination will no longer be just the thief of time; it will now become the thief of your family, your finances, and quite possibly, even your ministry or your very life!

To the blind all things are sudden!

America is about to be fundamentally transformed to a much greater degree than you may have imagined. Your worst enemy has been that arrogant, evil spirit who has spawned the all-American, twin mentalities—either “Things will always be as they have been” or “Things are so bad I think I’ll find some drug—like crack, porn, or a pre-mature Rapture doctrine—that lets me bail out!”

Perhaps by sifting through the “Jubilee” articles to follow, entitled, “Our National Jubilee’s Forgiveness Factors,” “Your Personal Jubilee’s Forgiveness Factors,” “Getting Psyched Up for Your Personal Year of Jubilee,” and “Crucial Steps into Your Personal Year of Jubilee,” you will find out if there’s still time for you to restructure and reposition yourself. To access the entire Jubilee series, see www.TheWalkShow.com, clicking on “Categories,” then “Your Jubilee in 2010” Series.

In my opinion, things have deteriorated to such a degree and on such an accelerated basis that nothing less than a “Year of Jubilee” in 2010 has the chance of saving, then prospering, most of us now. As we will see, your Jubilee and the nation’s Jubilee must always start first and foremost with forgiveness, which is the removal of all sorts of debts.

Pullin’ and Prayin’ with and for you,

Ken

Ken Talbott
Host, The Walk Show
1-877-WALK SHOW [1-877-925-5746--locally 253-333-1813]
Ken@TheWalkShow.com

“Should the American Church be Taken Off Life Support?”

After a one-year sabbatical, The Walk Show is back! Our first online broadcast features my interaction with author/speaker, Dr. Steve Crosby, who today discusses with me how our churches have not only paralyzed the parishioners in the pews, but even the pastors are being chewed up and spit out by the monster they have been feeding for so long. Incisive, yet compassionate to parishioner and pastor alike, Dr. Crosby describes the artificial heart-lung machinery being presently employed to keep the American local church looking animated, while pointing the way to a wonderful, resurrected expression of the American church. In other words, Steve calls American Christians away from the “recruit, corral, and fleece” mentality of recent church leadership to the new “release, coach, and free” paradigm. Your family, friends, and associates will want to hear this!  You can either play this show online or download it to your computer or iPod for later listening or sharing with others.