Welcome to FreedomMinistry Level 1! You are experiencing a Level 1 Concentrate. You will receive all the five sessions of Level 1, The Power of the Cross, and the teachings on three Root Issues of the IMPACT weekend in three sessions. You will hear basic Bible principles that will strengthen your will to surrender. Your surrender will set you up for the grace of the Cross.
The Bible makes it clear that the Power of the Cross is the Power of God! You come to this seminar with spiritual issues. These issues require a spiritual solution. Some of you have lived every day of your life with some of these issues but will experience a new level of personal, spiritual freedom in this seminar that will set up you for lasting life-change! How deeply this freedom goes and how powerfully it will be manifested in your life will depend upon your strength of will to surrender.
A Discipling Ministry
FreedomMinistry International materials and methods are not magical, nor does personal transformation derive from mere exposure to these principles. FreedomMinistry is a discipling ministry, and all discipling is transformational. This ministry is the foundation stone of our international assignment, and this is consistent with the assignment of the entire kingdom. Jesus has assigned kingdom leaders and the Ecclesia to disciple nations.” [Matthew 28:16-20]
Discipling is not “following.” We follow so we can be discipled. Being present to experience this ministry is necessary, but being present sets you up to receive the Power of the Cross. Discipling makes you like Jesus; through personal transformational experiences, He restores you to be the person you were created to be so you can do the thing you’ve been called to do. [Matthew 10:25]
Successful discipling requires good leadership. FreedomMinistry provides kingdom leadership, but the leaders have power and authority because they represent the methods and strategies of Jesus. He said His leaders who do what He did, and they would do greater than He did because He would send Holy Spirit. FreedomMinistry leaders have received spiritual power and authority, and they released spiritual power and authority. FreedomMinistry is a strategy given to Dr Don and Ruthanne Lynch. After more than a quarter million people experiencing this ministry, we are convinced it works! Now, it is your turn!
FreedomMinistry is a salvation ministry that blends several aspects of discipling available to the Ecclesia: teaching, deliverance, worship, cleansing, inner healing, revelation, discipline, and shared spiritual experience.
Tonight you will hear the first two sessions combined as well as the teaching on the Root of Pride. You will pray a prayer led by Dr Don, repenting for substitutes for the Power of the Cross and The Root of Pride, and you will receive anointing prayer at the close of this session, as you will in every session. Jesus laid hands upon people, taught His disciples to lay hands upon people, and authorized His kingdom leaders to lay hands upon people today! Laying hands upon people is a gesture and posture of kingdom authority, of claiming you – spirit, soul, and body – for the kingdom of God. Tonight, the kingdom of God is coming to you!
Strength of Will
The ultimate strength of will is the strength of will to surrender. You may become strong to survive, but you must become weak to be healed. So, the greatest strength of will engages trusting faith, a complete reliance upon Jesus and what He has provided in the Cross. Nothing you can do has the power or capacity of spiritual freedom. And, many Christians live as if Christ saves them but the power of the Cross has little or nothing to do with their lives and living after they are born again.
During these sessions, the increase of your strength of will positions you to receive everything the Cross of Jesus provides! Strength of will to surrender will set you up to receive what FreedomMinistry is releasing: the Power of the Cross of Jesus Christ!
Session 1 – The Power of the Cross
Paul says, “The message of the Cross is, for us who are being rescued, the power of God.” [I Corinthians 1:18] What Jesus Christ did at the Cross finished something God began before Creation. Jesus did everything at the Cross that was necessary for Him to fully redeem and restore all things He created.
Because of the Cross, Jesus has the right and authority to redeem your life. You do not rightfully belong to yourself; you belong to Him. When you surrender to Him, what He did at the Cross becomes fully available to redeem and restore your life. No matter what you’ve done, what other have done to you, or what hell has been or is doing against you right now, there is power in the Cross to fully restore your life!
You will receive the fullness of the Cross when you make it your only source, when you make a “surrender decision.” Galatians 6:14 says, “The cross of Christ alone can save.” It is the source of redemptive power. If you trust religion, you receive what religion can give you. When you trust yourself, you receive what you can give you. When you trust the Cross, you receive what the Cross can give you!
There is not substitute for the Cross. Paul says that he does not preach the Gospel with human wisdom and intellect because “the power of Cross of Christ would be limited in its power” through any substitute. Human wisdom and strength limit the power of the Cross.
Jesus told Nicodemus that He would be lifted up on the Cross to attract all men to Him. He reminded Nicodemus that Moses lifted up a bronze serpent in the desert when snakes came into the camp and bit the people: to stop certain death, people would position themselves so they could look at the bronze serpent; and when they saw it, they lived. In the same way, Jesus said, seeing the Cross as the only Source releases what Jesus did at the Cross into your life. Tonight, we are lifting up the Cross in our lives, making it the only source of our redemption and restoration, receiving its power to forgive sins, break the power of sin, and restore us.
Jesus defeated the claims and work of hell at the Cross. When you make the Cross your only Source, that defeat of hell begins to work in you! “Since you died with Christ, you are set free from the evil powers of this world.” [Colossians 2:20]
Limiting the Power of the Cross
If hell cannot keep you from the Cross in the first place, hell will work to limit the power of the Cross in your life. The Cross of which we speak is not a fetish, symbol, or religious relic. It is what Jesus did at the Cross that sets you free.
Limiting the power of the Cross by substituting human strength and wisdom, reaching for spiritual help toward any other source, or simply neglecting to make the Cross the source of your spiritual rescue and freedom, can frustrate the grace of the Cross. There is a constant, consistent effort upon the part of hell to limit and frustrate the power of the Cross in your life.
During the years you have learned to substitute other sources of help, rescue, and strength. You have substituted human wisdom and strength for the power of the Cross. You have trusted what you did and said, your religious and self-help achievements, and the assurances that come from other sources to measure your freedom. This is substitution has limited the power of the Cross in your life, and you have continued to live with root issues that produce wrong attitudes and behaviors.
To be free, you must repent, renounce, and break these substitutes off your life!
Session 2 – Closing Open Doors
For hell to operate within you, to influence and control you through spiritual darkness, you must have open doors of entry through which hell has access to your soul. When you open a door that gives access to a work of hell, you develop a way of coping or tolerating the work of hell in your life, and you become accustomed to this work of hell being part of your identity. You come to believe that this is just part of who you are when it foreign to the person God created you to be.
Sin opens doors for hell to operate in your life. Trauma, abuse, and betrayal by others opens doors for hell to operate in your life. The sins of your ancestors leaves a recompense in your generation that opens a door to the work of hell in your life. Open doors are made available to hell at the times we are most vulnerable because hell doesn’t play fair. Once we are born again, the process of salvation begins and a full rescue gets under way. When we begin to substitute for the power of the Cross, however, we short-circuit this process and limit the power of the Cross to deal with the work of hell within us.
FreedomMinistry is for born again people. Until you are born again, no internal spiritual freedom is available. Once you are born from above, a new life begins and you being learning how to live that new life; hell begins to work to limit the Cross’s power by providing you with substitutes for the Cross. So, Christians grow older without growing more mature. Christians “act up” and “act out.” Works of flesh open doors to works of darkness, and born again people learn to live with intrusions of darkness: anger, lust, fear, witchcraft, pride, shame, and rejection. They cannot overcome these works of darkness because they are not taking these issues to the Cross and closing the open doors through which hell is influencing and controlling aspects of their lives.
Jesus Had No Open Doors
Jesus told His disciples: “The prince of this world is coming, but he has nothing in Me.” Jesus had no open doors to the work of hell within Him. He certainly had battles with hell from the outside, through people, temptations, betrayal, and suffering. He never had any sin or work of flesh that opened a door for the work of hell within Him, even in the times of His greatest vulnerability.
He is the Champion who went to the Cross, with no open doors in Himself, to gain the authority to close the open doors in you! No door can remain open to hell once you surrender that area of your life to the power of the Cross! The Bible says Jesus destroyed the works of the devil. [1 John 3:8]
There is something destructive in redemption! The power of the Cross destroys the work of the devil. The Cross authorizes Jesus to close every open door, cancelling the right of hell to operate in your life. You surrendered some aspect of your life to the open door giving permission for hell to being to influence and control from within. You do not have the power and authority to overcome hell yourself. That is why Jesus did it for you. Now, you must surrender to His overcoming power and authority, surrender to the Cross, to close the open doors, and evict this work of hell within your life.
The Bible says that sin gets wages, payment for what is owed. This is the sense of generational recompense that affects our lives through an open door. We are born with an open door to the work of hell against our destinies, through no fault of our own. While this is unfair, open doors that authorize hell may be opened in our lives because we are victims. However, we are responsible for them because we allow them to remain open. We learn to cope, to deal with our issues on our own, or to substitute other means of survival and toleration instead of taking these issues to the only Source of spiritual power that can destroy the works of the devil.
Jesus says the thief arrives to kill, steal, and destroy. He gains access into the most sacred places of your life through so he can kill, steal, and destroy. Jesus says that He came that you might have life even more abundant than you would have had without Him or the thief. You get something that even the absence of the thief cannot provide! And, this becomes available to you when you surrender to the power of the Cross.
Stop agreeing with your enemy! Stop tolerating his lies, deceptions, and works of darkness within you! Stop puffing up the pillow every night for your favorite demon to ruin your sleep! Stop limping through life accepting limitations that are inconsistent with your destiny! Stop putting up with cycles of behavior, patterns of behavior, and demonic distractions that keep the doors open to the work of hell! The Bible says, “Do not give the devil a place or opportunity.“ [Ephesians 4:27]
Doors are open through sin. Stop the patterns of sinful behavior. Doors are open through agreements, oaths, or dedications. Renounce the words that gives hell opportunity to function inside you. Doors are open through false religion and idols. The contact you have with idols and false religion must be destroyed. Some things can be redeemed but some things must be destroyed. When you repent for possessing the idol, worshipping the false, and maintaining an inner tie to the old life of sin, you keep the door open to the work of hell.
You may need to do a spiritual housecleaning to close the doors of hell that are open in your life.
Repentance closes the door. We renounce the right of hell to function within us. We break the power of hell to maintain influence and control. We strengthen our wills to greater surrender to the power of the Cross.
IMPACT Weekend – The Root of Pride
There are many fruits or behaviors produced by root issues. Roots grow up and branch out. There are roots of sinful behaviors and works of darkness established during the time we are surrendered to the prince of the power of the air. [See Ephesians 2:2]
The deepest root is pride. It is the beginning point of hell’s rebellion against God and the source of our greatest limitations to the power of the Cross. Pride was the motivation behind the devil’s first rebellion. Pride is deception. The devil was an angel who decided he would be equal with God. This deception of pride was that he was more than an angel, that he could be whoever he wanted to be, and he would tell his Creator who he was.
Pride is a terrible disease that makes everyone sick but the one who has it. It is a delusion of identity that allows for the complete substitution of God’s power, God’s will, and God’s work in our lives. Through pride, we become someone we were not intended to be, assume we can do whatever we determine is proper, and tell our Creator who we are. Pride produces the self-made made, and the self-made man is always a deception no matter how awesome anyone else thinks it is.
Pride is a great limiter, especially for believers, because it causes us to think of ourselves as more than we are, to understand ourselves as someone we are not, and pushing back the power of the Cross to change us inside so we can live outside what God created us to be.
Paul says, “I am what I am by God’s grace.” Now that is humility! Not the false humility that says I am nothing but a worm. Not the false humility that says I don’t exist. Not the false humility that says I can’t be or do much. No, humility is becoming the person Jesus created you to be through the grace He provided in the power of the Cross.
Pride will cause you to think that you are in charge of your own redemption and restoration. You become your own spiritual career manager. You position yourself to be complete within yourself, redeemed to be all you can be as if you were born again so God could give you back to yourself. No! Hopeless and helpless continues after you are born again outside the power of the Cross! Pride will limit the power of the Cross and limit the redemption and restoration of your destiny.
Naaman’s Obedient Surrender
Naaman was a great general and conqueror that had a little maid from Israel working in his home. Naaman became a leper, contracting a horrible, disfiguring skin disease. The little maid from Israel told him that a prophet in Israel could heal him of the leprosy. So, Naaman went to Israel and knocked on the prophet’s door, so to speak, with great pomp and circumstance. Instead of coming to the door, however, the prophet sent his servant to tell Naaman that he was aware of his arrival. The prophet’s instructions were that the great general should take a bath. After washing seven times in the Jordan River, he would come up the seventh time completely whole and healed!
Naaman went berserk because he thought his greatness required a great response from the prophet. He demanded that the prophet come out and do momentous thing equal to the momentous image he had of himself. He didn’t like the strategy for his healing, and claimed that the rivers they had in his own country were better than the Jordan…
His servant was a bit more sensible. So, Naaman agreed to at least try out the strategy. Naaman was pretty certain that he had a better way of getting healed than God did, but he reluctantly surrendered to the process. He bathed once and surfaced to find little improvement; he reasoned that one dip should produce a seventh of the healing. He was ready to quit. After a great deal of prideful clamor, Naaman went back into the muddy water to bath a second, third, and fourth time. Each time Naaman expected to see considerable improvement but nothing seemed different. He was learning about full obedience as surrender to God’s strategy for his redemption.
The sixth time seemed a massive stretch of his patience. His own estimation of things told him that after six times, he should be nearly healed. Yet, his familiar wounds and stinking, rotting flesh was no better. The full surrender of his obedience alone took him down a seventh time and the mighty general came up out of the water fully restored!
Pride will keep you from the strategy of God for your full redemption and restoration. Your pride will tell you that you can figure it out, conjure it up, and make it happen. You will clench your jaw and flex your muscle and tighten your fist, only to see little or no improvement through the self-help method. God will not make a little better through your own efforts because you will only cling to your own strength and wisdom even more and boast in what you have done.
Paul says, “I will boast in nothing but the Cross of Jesus Christ.” Whatever you are boasting in beside your obedient surrender is a substitute for the power of the Cross.
