White Water On the Inside

White Water On the Inside

by Earl Tyson

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

William Chadwick, who I was sharing with you last night, my first grandchild, was about three, I guess, and he left the ride on my arm seat in the front seat of my car. And he was riding there one day, and his mother was on this side of him, and I’m driving, and he’s loving on his mama. He’s pulling her hair. You know, just pull. Finally, Teresa said, “Chad, you must stop pulling my hair.” He said, “But Mama, I just love you so much.” I said, “Chad, give me some of that loving.” He turned around, he loved on me. I said, “Chad, where do you get all that love?” “I don’t know, Pawpaw. I keep giving it away, and it keeps coming back.”

The ways of God. The ways of God. The ways of God are that His heart is centered on man, on Adam. His seed, His bloodline. For you are marvelously and wonderfully made. The scripture says, made a little lower than God. Not more than angels. That’s a mistranslation. The word Elohim is the word for God. You’re made a little lower than God. And you are marvelously and wonderfully made. And that my soul knows right well. It’s just too much for me. I can’t comprehend it, the writer says. And I pray that in the time of CFO camp that that breaks on you in greater dimension than ever before. Of the unique preciousness of who you are.

That just has to break through to us. Or there’s no healing. There’s no wholeness. There’s no power. The power that is to be ours. And we are to have power. We are to have authority. That’s what God said to His children when He put them in charge. He said, “I put you in charge. Here’s the creation. You take charge and rule over it.” Well, you can’t rule without authority and power. And that’s His plan for us. And that authority and power begins in our humanity, in my humanity. If it doesn’t begin there, it will not be manifested anywhere.

That’s why Paul said to Timothy, and Timothy had some real identity problems. Timothy really needed a good cleansing and inner healing. Timothy had been born with a mixed family. His mother was Jewish and his father was a Greek. And in that world, identity was with the father. So here is Timothy growing up in Christian community, and he hadn’t been circumcised.

His dad, his father was Greek. His mother is the Jewish. And so Timothy grows up feeling somewhat unaccepted by both camps. And that’s an awful feeling as a child to feel unloved. You know? And we’re seeing that so rampant in our culture.

In a day when we are loaded down with things, and we express love by giving things to our children. And yet our children are growing up, so a panel of psychiatrists said, American children are filled with fear. Fear.

And the fear is desertion. “You don’t really love me.” Well, that’s not just American children. That’s the lie that the enemy of your soul whispered to you in the womb. “Yes, you may be a human, but they don’t really want you. You’re an invader into their world.”

And invariably, most of us have to deal with that. And if we grow up more than one, then you love that one better than me. Or if you’re just one, you can never measure up. So you’ll never love for yourself. And that brings forth all this fear. The basic fear of man is desertion.

I was in Houston, Texas, having lunch with a young artist. She had a showing in Houston. She’d just come from Paris where she’d had a showing. She’s at the peak of her career, 33 years old, and very successful in the art world. And as we had lunch, she began to weep. I said, “Nancy, what’s wrong?” And she says, “Periodically, it breaks in on me. I’m going to wind up 60 and alone. Because nobody really loves me.”

You don’t, you know, being 33 and successful doesn’t take care of that need to be loved. She was one child. She grew up one child. Her father was a physician. She was a rebel. Gave him a lot of trouble. She ran away from home. And a number of times, and he would go get her and punish her physically, restrict her, and she’d run away again. And about the third time this happened, the fact that she said it was Easter Sunday, he had gone to find me and physically picked me up and threw me in the car and took me back home. And as we walked in the house, he fell to the floor with a heart attack and died right before me.

And she said, “For years I walked around with the guilt of my father’s death.” And she said, “I’ve gotten over that, but the thing I can’t get over is the feeling no one really chooses me. No one really enjoys being with me. They like my heart, but if I didn’t have a picture, I wouldn’t be invited.”

And so, the work of God, the scripture says, is to undo the work of the devil in human personality and personhood. And the work of the enemy is to declare to you, “You’re not really loved. Therefore, you don’t really have place. You don’t have roots. You don’t have identity.” And that’s the big lie. Therefore, you are bound to fail.

And you hide out. Look, you have your Bibles and you… I want to read you a little bit in Genesis about Adam. And… When they blow it. They really blew it. Marvelous account there of how God has created the man and the woman.

We’re going to be reading chapter 3, Genesis. It puts them in charge. It gives them authority over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air and the creation. And I love that line where it says, “and over everything that creepeth upon the earth.” That means you’ve got authority over creeps.

But to have authority, you’ve got to know… You see, authority really is rooted in being loved and loving. Which is the basic rhythm of a human being. That’s the core. That’s the core of us. As God intended. And your authority comes up out of that. You know, you belong. You know.

Therefore, you’re able to present yourself each day and take your authority. Speak your words. Minister in His name. You know, that’s who you are. And something happened here with this couple that broke that rhythm, that pattern, that identity.

And what it was this, chapter 3. “Now, the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.” And he said to the woman… And let me freely translate here. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?” Now, in other words, question mark. See, the nature of the enemy is to draw a question mark over God’s exclamation point.

He didn’t come right out and say, “God did not say that.” He proposed the question. “Has God really said? That you shall not eat of any tree of the garden?” And the woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat.” There are 999 trees and we may eat of 999 trees. That’s a good arrangement. See?

“But from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, lest you die.’” And the serpent said to the woman, “You will not really die.” I mean, you’re not redneck enough to believe that, are you?

How can you believe that in today’s world? I mean, to make a statement like that. Don’t you know nothing is absolute? See, this is what they say. Don’t you know nothing is absolute? Everything is changing. And you got to change with it.

We sent one of our Emmaus girls off to college. And one of the beautiful things about our Emmaus ministry is it’s a long haul ministry. It’s not a temporary holding place. It’s a place where people come to find healing and they say, as long as they need to find healing. And in the early days of Emmaus, we only took high school age girls who could not function in public school, who came out of institutions. And we hired teachers to come in. Except their senior year, they had to function, they had to complete in the local high school. And so, a part of the joy was to see these girls not only graduate from high school, but to go off to college. And this particular girl, who had been the daughter of a criminal, her father was a professional criminal, and at that time was in prison for murder in South Carolina. And this father played a game with his children when they were small. Button, who’s got the button? Do you ever play that game?

Well, he played power, who’s got the power? And he’d point, he’d set his children down, there were three of them. He’d point to one and say, “You got the power.” And that meant the child could tell anybody in the family to do anything, and they had to do it, or he’d kill them.

And this little girl, when she was about four, was pointed to, and the father said, “You got the power.” And she turned to her mother and said, “Mommy, go in the kitchen and get a glass. Now, mommy, go in the bathroom and fill it up with water from the commode. Now, mommy, you drink it.”

Now, she had never seen that on TV. She didn’t read it in the comic books. This idea just came to her. So she subjected her mother to that abuse, which is demonic. Time and time again, Betty and I have been subjected to the effort of people to whom we are ministering, to make us either eat or drink human waste.

And the spiritual principle is to make you animalistic. You understand? That’s the game plan of the kingdom of darkness, to come against sons and daughters of God and make us as animals. And you give sin its way, and it will make you an animal. It will make you animalistic.

And so here’s this little girl who’s been exposed to darkness. And so at four, she fleshes that out without even knowing what she’s fleshing out. I was reading one day in the Gospels when Jesus is on the cross.

And you really need to go and to read the nature of crucifixion. Crucifixion. Crucifixion was the most cruel method of putting someone to death that the world had devised. I think it was an Eastern creation, but the Romans took it and used it throughout the empire because it was so cruel. And so when they had completed their job on Jesus, they had done a good job of brutalizing a human being. There was not anything nice about this experience. You understand? They did everything to degrade you.

And so here He is hanging on the cross. And He cries out, “I thirst.” And the scripture says one of the soldiers offers Him a sponge dipped in wine or vinegar and gall. And I was taught in school that the gall was a deadening drug. And it ain’t so. And it ain’t so. But I trace the word back in my scriptures. Gall is the fruit of the vine of Sodom and Gomorrah.

And Sodom and Gomorrah was all about dehumanizing human beings. And calling it love. Paul says, beware of the wiles of the devil. W-I-L-E-S. Methodical method. That the devil has a method. He works in human society. And what they offered to Jesus was the final contemptuous act. If you are thirsty, have some gall to drink. You know?

That’s the nature of that darkness. Just utter contempt for children of God. And you see, that’s the nature of evil. For instance, this is why in our society children are so abused. We have loosed darkness. Darkness. And darkness delights to come against innocence.

Why would you molest a prostitute when you can molest a little innocent child? Darkness likes to molest innocence. To use that child. You see? And that’s what’s loose in our environment. In our society. And it’s like Pandora’s box. Once you let it out, how do you get it back in?

I really do think that this is going to be a watershed thing in the history of this nation. Our mind concerning children, life in the womb, will determine where this nation stands or falls. See, I live on the James River. If you want to pollute my river, go to the headwaters. Go up to the beginning. And poison it there. And you’ve got the whole river. And this is what we’ve done. We’ve gone to the very headwaters. To the source of humankind. You see? The place that should be the most protected, the most holy place has become desecrated by modern man.

I read an article on a plane. It was talking about the most dangerous places in our society. And it was talking about the dangers of flying. There’s not a very good article to read while you’re flying. You know? And I really didn’t know where the article was going. But in the last couple of paragraphs, it said, “Here’s the most dangerous place in our society: the mother’s womb.”

The place that ought to be the safest place is today the most dangerous place. What is that? That’s life in its root system, being perverted, out of order. You see? How did that come about? We went through the 50s and 60s. We came out of World War II so glad to be alive that anything goes. Well, we’re going to enjoy freedom. So it wasn’t just the 60s. It started up out of World War II. That was a part of it. And we’re going to enjoy ourselves. No one is going to tell us what not to do. And so there came the 60s and what we call the sexual revolution.

When it was firmly established in American life, that sexuality is not important. It doesn’t matter who you sleep with. It’s like shaking hands. And that was insisted on, you see. Well then, if sexuality is not important, if my sexuality as a male is not important, if yours as a woman is not important, and that’s not treasured, that’s not sacred, then the fruit of that is not sacred. I mean, that just naturally follows. See? If my sexuality has… You know, I sleep with 30 people before I finally marry, what’s a honeymoon?

Man alive, you see, we’ve lost our sense of awe of human sexuality. And I don’t know how you’d do that. I don’t know how my family did it. My mother and father were not prudes. They didn’t say to me, “Now you must not get sexual, you must not touch a woman, you know, no, no, no, you must not do that.” No, it was none of that. And yet, in my maturing as a sexual being, there were lines drawn in my own consciousness. No, you don’t cross that line because it’s so awesome. There’s such a commitment there. And you’re not ready for that commitment. And I didn’t have anybody say, “Thou shalt not.” See? I wasn’t being warped. Bless God. And like Bishop Spong, the Episcopal Bishop, who now decrees, well, you really can’t expect teenagers to wait to marriage to have sex, you see. So the Bishop says, we’ve got to bless our children premarital sex. Well, I must have lived in a perverted generation because it was assumed you had waited to marriage to have sex. And I was 25 when I got married. And I didn’t walk around protesting, “I got my rights. I demand to have sex before marriage.” You see? Didn’t feel like I would have been put down. It was that here was a treasure.

Here was something precious and sacred. And so my wife and I came to the marriage bed with awe. And I’m still in awe of that woman. You see? And the fruit of her womb. And you see, in the history, in the history of Jewish people, God’s dealing with people. He takes the man and at the point of begetting his children, He puts the sign of the covenant.

Which says, your seed is sacred. See? So here our society says to a father, “You have no right to say anything about the life in your wife’s womb. You don’t have any authority. Who do you think you are? Trying to say something about the life in the mother’s womb.” Why, God said, my sperm is sacred. And the fruit of my sperm belongs to God. Not to the Supreme Court.

Not one woman on the Supreme Court who made that ruling. And yet, the feminists say today, “No man is going to tell me what knew my body.” It was a bunch of men who declared your body is garbage. The fruit of your womb is garbage. That’s what it is. It has no meaning. That’s the legal ruling they made.

Didn’t quote any scientists. Didn’t quote any discovery. In 1973, they just decreed that’s not a human being. And bless God now, we do have enough evidence to know that the court didn’t know what they’re talking about, that that is a human being. It just announced last week, the University of Virginia Hospital, which is Mr. Jefferson’s university, no longer will do second trimester abortions because the staff will not do it. That’s the doctors and nurses. They cannot find doctors and nurses who will do second trimester abortions anymore. So a great university hospital just said, “We can’t do it because we can’t get medical people who will do it.” Why? They know that’s a human being. But the court said, and here’s the lie, that’s not a human being. You see? And so the fruit of our sexuality has no meaning if sexuality has no meaning. And the Bible says God made them male and female, and it was beautiful.

Beautiful! I didn’t know that. I thought it was dirty, guilty. Any of you fellows ever feel guilty about your sexuality? I grew up feeling that way. I had to be healed of how I felt about myself. And ten years of my marriage, after I was baptized in the Holy Spirit, I got healed in my sexual identity. I no longer felt guilty, somehow felt guilty when I made love to my wife. And I was a virgin when I got married. I mean, how good can you be? You know? And you still feel guilty? Yeah. Why? That lie about human sexuality. You feel like you’ve got to hide. And that’s what happens to the man and the woman in the garden. Because the lie has come now, and the lie is rampant. Now it’s not just affecting how they see the tree, the fruit of the tree. It’s affecting how they see themselves. And others. And so this is what we’re finding here. “You’ll not really die.” Oh yes. “God said that, but… But…” I have a friend who says in the day of judgment, it’s not going to be in difficulty for God to distinguish the sheep from the goats. The goats are the butters.

The other says, “Oh yes, God, I know You said that, but…” You know. So the serpent said, “Yes, God said that, but… You won’t really die. You won’t really die.” And what else did he say? He said, “Listen. Don’t you know that one tree is where the action is, man? You missed that, you’re going to miss it. But we got 999, I know that, but… God just don’t want you to really have fun. Now the real fun is in that one tree.”

“You missed that, you’re going to miss it. You only go around once. But agree, while you’re going around.” And so she reached out, and listen to what it says. It says, she looked at the fruit, and it was pleasing to the eye. It had aesthetic beauty. We were talking about Satan yesterday in our prayer group.

And we pointed out that Satan doesn’t come with horns and a long tail. Satan comes dressed beautifully. Aesthetic beauty. He knows exactly what will please your aesthetic sense. Your judgment of beauty. So we have a saying in America. How could anything so lovely be bad?

How could anything that beautiful hurt? You understand? And so she looked at the fruit, which God said, no, you’ll not touch that. And it had… Well, let’s see what it says here. Verse 4. “And the serpent said to the woman, ‘You surely shall not die. But God knows that in the day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’” And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, I guess that’s number one. I have a natural appetite, and that’s all. I have a right to satisfy my appetite, and it’s good for food. You know, Lord, it’s just food on the table. I really wasn’t trying to take Your power, Lord. I just wanted food on the table.

Two, that it was a delight to the eyes that it had aesthetic beauty. And that it would make her wise. How can you not wisdom? Call me anything, don’t call me a fool. We like to appear to have wisdom. Seek at the wisdom. She took from its fruit and ate it.

She gave also to her husband with her, and he ate. Well, they didn’t drop over dead, so the serpent was right. They didn’t really die. Because we think death is just physical. Well, didn’t they die? Did death come in? You bet it did. “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings.” That is, they felt guilty at the point of their sexuality.

Why? That’s where you beget your children. What are you going to pass off to your children? Guilt. That’s identity. That’s identity. My identity. In Kansas last week, I was invited to go play golf. I said, “I’d love to go if you can find me some left-handed golf clubs.” “Left-handed? Lord, I don’t want to play with a lefty.” And they said, “Earl, I didn’t know you were left-handed.” I said, “I’m not left-handed. I’m right-handed.” “What do you want with left-handed golf clubs?” I said, “I hit left-handed.” “Well, if you’re not left-handed, why do you hit left-handed?” I called my brother right before me and was left-handed.

And he lined up on that side of the plate. And so I did it just like he did it. Why? That’s my identity. And to this day, I cannot hit a ball right-handed. I’ve got to get on this side of the plate to hit that ball. That’s identity.

So what’s the identity going to come down to the children of Adam? Any guilt? What comes out of guilt? Anger? Do you want to know why Cain killed Abel? Guilt? Anger? And so it was, they covered themselves. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

And the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord. So we see right here where humankind become hiders. They hide from God and one another. So today, man and woman can live together 30 years, and then one of them can do something, and the other will say, “I never knew that was in them.”

I never knew that was in them. We hide. Barbara mentioned that, I think, about how something can come out. Why? Because we’ve been hiding from ourselves. We don’t even know ourselves. I was home. I’d been away for three weeks. I was glad to get home. And when I got home, we had a house full of company. Some friends from Roanoke, my last parish, had come to see us. And Betty had two carloads of the Emmaus family at our house. And I rushed upstairs to get dressed more comfortably.

And my firstborn, Anthony Earl, was at home. And he was 19 at that time, in and out of college, mostly out, because he couldn’t give up his career of banging that guitar. And he was home, and he and I had this controversy. I thought he ought to grow up at 6, and he wanted to wait to 60.

That’s what you put on firstborn. And so we had this running controversy. And once in a while, I’d say to him, “Have you ever thought of turning your life over to the Lord?” He said, “Now back up, Daddy. Back up. Me and the Lord’s got an understanding,” he’d say. I said, “Yeah, it must be you can do what you blame want to do. I sure don’t see you doing God’s thing.” And so that was sort of our relationship. And he was at home, and I knew what he was doing. He was looking for a fix. He either wanted some money or he wanted somebody’s car, you know. And so I got by him and got upstairs undressing. And suddenly I hear someone shouting out in the front yard. And we live on 30 acres out in the middle of the woods that are owned by West Virginia Pulp and Paper. And our nearest neighbor is over a mile away. So it’s all right to yell once in a while. Your neighbors can’t hear you. But not angry yells. And this was an angry yell. And I walked over to the window and there… We have a driveway in front of the house. And there sat Betty, my wife, in her car behind the steering wheel in the car filled with the Emmaus women.

Behind her was the car of our guest and that was filled. And here is Tony at the window of his mother’s car berating his mother because she will not let him have her car. And she will say, “But Tony, I need my car, son.” You know how you talk to your children when the company’s there. “I really need my car. If I could, I’d let you… Well, I need my car!” Oh! You know, just all this garbage on everybody. And before I knew what I was doing, I threw up the window and said, “Tony, you’re an SOB!” Except if I didn’t say SOB, I said, the real thing.

Now listen, I didn’t talk that way when I was a pagan. It had never… It had never been my custom to use profanity of any kind. I just never did that. But up it came. And he just turned and said, “I know it!”

And when he turned, Betty drove off. And the other car right behind her and so Tony and I stand looking at one another and left alone on the 30 acres. So I thought, well, I better go down and get him straightened out right now. So I went downstairs and walked out to the kitchen on the patio and he came around the house. I just looked at him and I said, “Aren’t you going to ever grow up? You still need a mama?”

You know, we adults know how to cut when we want to. He just said, “Well, I never had one.” Oh, Lord, there came that line again. And I looked back at him to let him have my sword again and I saw it. I saw it. I’d never seen him before. He was alone. He was unloved. He was lost. Boy, was that boy lost. And I saw him in his lostness and I realized I had never loved him.

I had never really loved that boy for who he was. I was always waiting for him to become who I knew he was going to be. You see? The firstborn. IQ of 140, you know? As a two-year-old, he could tell me how to do things. “Daddy, radio doesn’t work like TV. Let me show you how radio works.” You know, he’d instruct you on, you know, knew it all. Expert and everything knew nothing. You know?

And he just never did what I thought he was going to do. And boy, he hit me like a ton of bricks. The Lord just said you’ve never loved him. You’ve never enjoyed five minutes in his presence. And boy, it just, it crushed me. And I just started weeping. I mean, the tears just flew. Oh, Tony, he had never seen anything like that coming from his big old dad before. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He just stood, mouth fell open, and he looked at me. I was standing there weeping. Is that where I could stand up or not? He began to go like this around me, just made circles. He reached up. “You’re a good daddy. You’re a good daddy.”

About the third time around, I just held out my arms and he walked into my arms. And we just loved one another. And we got healed right there. The Lord just shed all that garbage in me so I could get healed. And to this day, Tony’s 35 now. He’s the only one of my four children. I don’t care if he’s going to leave for 30 minutes to go to the drugstore. He’ll come and hug me and give me a kiss on the cheek.

We finally are able to love each other. No demands put on him. The Lord has really cut that thing so that Tony is free to become whom the Lord calls him to be. And he’s able to minister to me. He ministers to me. And it’s beautiful how that happens. Because before death reigned, separation was there. And that was the kind of separation that was between the man and the woman and God and the garden. They drew back. You see. Now they felt guilty. Now they felt unworthy. “Who told you you were naked?” Who? The accuser.

The accuser. You don’t dare come into the presence of God. You’re naked. You’re guilty. You see. You’re ugly. You’re vile. You see. And so it was. They said, when God said, “Where are you?” They said, “Over here behind the bushes, Lord.” “Where are you going behind the bushes?” “Well, we just felt like we ought to hide.”

And so that’s how it began. And that went on down to their seed to Cain and Abel. Did you ever read about Cain and Abel bringing their sacrifices to the Lord? And Cain brings his offering. Abel brings his. Abel’s offering is accepted and Cain is not accepted.

And Cain gets angry. He’s angry at God when he will take his anger out on his brother. And he goes to the field where his brother is. And I know what he did. He instigated an argument. Anger will instigate justification for violence. So he instigated an argument and killed his brother.

And then God said to Cain that eternal question, “Where is your brother?” And that eternal response of centerman, “Why are you asking me? Am I my brother’s keeper?” And God’s answer rang, “You better believe you are.” That’s why Jesus said if your brother has ought against you, go make it right. Why? You’re your brother’s keeper.

You see? Let’s say if you’ve got something against your brother, says if he’s got something against you, go make it right. And then God says something, “The blood of your brother cries out from the ground. The blood of your brother cries out from the ground.”

Can blood cry out? Can the blood of six million Jews in Germany cry out? Can the blood of the American Indians massacred by the white man cry out? And demand justice in another generation? See, we don’t have any trouble passing on the five hundred billion dollar debt to our grandchildren for S&L. Let our grandchildren pay for it. But if somebody two generations ago says, “How about you all paying this debt,” but, “Am I my brother’s keeper? We didn’t do that. You see, I’m innocent.”

But you see, we’re not innocent. Because we’re part of that human family that still break each other, judge each other, put away each other, you know, and are separated. And God comes walking and wanting to bring us together. We’re hiding out from one another.

And that’s why healing is so important. That’s why repentance is so important. Repentance is not feeling sorry. Repentance is changing your mind. Change the way you’re thinking, man. You see? As we say down south, change your cotton picking mind.

Get a new mindset. Well, what mind am I to have? The mind that’s in Christ Jesus. That’s what I love about the Apostle Paul. He said, look, man, if you’re in Christ, everything becomes new, even how you see people. He said, I used to look through my own understanding. I don’t do that anymore, he said.

Now I look through the eyes of Christ, and lo, everything is a gift. All of life is a gift to be treasured, to be received. And the old is passing away. Good news, the new has come, and the new is better than the old, so you can let go of the old. See, that’s why we hold on to the old, to the old identities. You know, it was our hiding place. “Hello darkness, my old friend.” Oh, my God, darkness our friend. Yeah, hide out there, Lord. Those who sat in darkness, on them that the light shines. And man, that’s a resurrection, that’s what that is.

That makes us children of the resurrection. And that’s what we’re called to, and that’s what we’re invited to. And the beauty of it is it never ends. I haven’t yet heard the Lord say, “Good news, Earl, you’ve arrived. You’re complete now, son.

“You go ahead and sign out. We don’t… nothing else for you.” No, every waiting moment is an opportunity to behold something new. Every waiting moment is an opportunity to behold something new. She wrote a poem when she first came to us. She was 13, and here was the poem.

I… Fury burns in me. Hatred wells and churns in me. I despise the change you put on me. You think you’ve defeated me. Have you ever seen me cry? I hate every one of you and spit and curse at the thought of you. Disgusted, I am one of you. Satisfied to die. 13 years old.

Talk about… And she said, “The first week I came to Emmaus, I found five hiding places that you couldn’t find me.” And she said, “My favorite hiding place,” she was like a little weed anyway. She walked in the front door and said, “You can call me Sam.” Just straight hair, straight body, like a little weed, you know. 13. She said, “My favorite hiding place, this old house has an English basement. It was built… The original house was built in the 1700s.” And then the war came along. We called it the Civil War, a war between the states. And then blankety-blank Yankees burned down that house. Because it’s the high point between the Potomac and the Rappahannock River. And so some good general rebuilt this house in 1876. So this is the old house that is our Emmaus house. And in the English basement is the original from the 1700s foundation. She said, “I found a hole I could crawl into and wiggle all the way back to the outside wall. And I could just lie there with the spider webs and the spiders and the rats.” And she said, “I could hear you all running all over the place saying, ‘Sam, where are you, Sam?’” And she said, “I knew you could not find me.”

And then she said, “If you couldn’t find me, you couldn’t hurt me.” She’d had five stepdaddies by the time she was 13. Every one of them molested her. She wouldn’t let you touch her. She’s like a wild animal. She’d been there about nine months. And one day she walked out the back door and she said, “Where did that come from?” I said, “What, Sam?” She said, “That rose bush. Where did it come from?” I said, “It’s been there, Sam.” “It has not. I have never seen it before.” Beautiful rose. I said, “Sam, the rose bush has been there. I mean, look, you can see it’s not transplanted.” “Well, I have never seen it before.” I mean, she was exasperated. I knew the Lord was breaking that wall. She saw a rose bush. We were sitting on the front porch. It is a high point. You can look over the Rappahannock River Valley. And the sun was setting. And I said to Sam, “Isn’t that beautiful?” She said, “I think it’s hideous.” I said, “Why would you say that, Sam?” She said, “Because it means night is coming, and night comes, the demons come out.”

And it did for her. She said, “I’ve never had a dream. It was not a nightmare. I have never awakened,” she said, “in my life, glad to be alive. I always wish I had died in my sleep.” She said, “Most people have a bad day once in a while. I’ve never had a good day that I enjoyed being alive.” And she saw the rose bush, and I knew the Lord was getting through.

She fell in love with a horse named Cloud. If you have animals around, people who hurt will attach to animals when they can’t attach to humans. And she would get Cloud bareback, and she’d ride Cloud through the field, no saddle. And I can see her now with her hair flying. And she pushed that horse to his extremes. And she just lived dangerously like that.

Like the wind. And she said to me one time, “I feel like white water on the inside. And you’re trying to dam me up.” And then we went one night to hear E. Stanley Jones, who was in his 80s, then elderly, sat in a chair.

And E. Stanley Jones had finished speaking. This girl ran out of the auditorium across the campus. We were on little Bridgewater College, Bridgewater, Virginia. She ran across the campus. And my wife ran to her. And sat down on the curb. She said, “Miss Tyson, if I tell you something, you won’t think I’m crazy, will you?” And Betty said, “No, Sam, I’m not.” She said, “Tonight, while that old man was talking, I saw Jesus walk up on stage and stand behind him and put his arms around him and hug him. Do you think I’m crazy?” I was there. I didn’t see any Jesus. She did. And Betty said, “No, Sam, you’re not crazy. Jesus is just trying to let you know Him.” But she said, “But I don’t want to know Him.” And Betty said, “Well, Sam, He wants to know you.” “Well, what does He want me to do?” And Betty said, “Well, what He wants you to do is surrender.”

Just give yourself. Lay your arms down. Quit fighting. Just surrender. And she sat silently. I was standing about 50 feet away in case she became violent, because often she was violent. She sat there, and she was just sort of looking at the pavement. And she started hitting her fist like this.

“Oh, Jesus, I give up.” And she just went… And she just… And it was quiet. It was hush. It was a holy hush. It was like hearing a river in the forest. I could just hear Holy Spirit come into her.

Holy Spirit just came into that darkness and blew it out of the saddle. And that child jumped up and started shouting. Just shouting. And then she would cry, but it was cries of joy. And she would laugh. And laughter just rolled out of her.

And she wouldn’t be still for a couple of hours, you know. Just couldn’t calm down. Lord, have mercy. And I knew how that woman at the well must have felt when she went running back to the village and said, “Come, come meet a man who knew everything I ever did and still loved me.”

And that’s the healing that God has for us. When we hide from one another and when we hurt and the darkness has its way in us, He comes to blow it out of the saddle. He comes to who we are and where we are. You see. He initiates. He’s the aggressor. He’s the wooer. He’s the seeker. He’s the healer. He’s your deliverer.

And what we really need to do is to surrender. Surrender means I stop struggling. I stop trying to achieve. I stop trying to prove anything. I give up. I stack my arms. You know, the term “Be still and know that I am God” is a military term which means stack your arms.

When you conquer an army, the conquered army have to come and stack their weapons before the conqueror. To be still before God means stack your arms. Stop your struggling. Stop fighting. Stop resisting. Surrender. And that’s the key. That’s the doorway. We walk into healing and wholeness.

And it’s before us today if we walk through it. He has made a way and Jesus is that way. And we come and lay it down to Him. We thank You, Lord, that You haven’t left us alone. You said, “I’ll not leave you as an orphan. I’ll come to you.”

And we wait for the coming as the watchman waited for the morning. For You are that bright and morning star that shall break in upon us. Hallelujah. And Your kingdom comes like the sunlight to bathe us, to wash over us, and to establish the rule of love and righteousness.

There’s a hymn we sing in the day. I trust you know it. Have Thine own way, Lord. Have Thine own way. Thou art the potter, I am the clay. Mold me and make me after Thy will while I am waiting.

Yielded and still. And all the people said, Amen.