Lessons in the Ladder Days

Candace Long: I'm Candace Long with Lessons in the Latter Days, offering biblical commentary to make sense of the times that we're living in. Today, I begin a two-parter called God's Call for Repentance. I need to provide a disclaimer for you because this may not be easy listening. It may make you uncomfortable, but give me a minute and you will understand why this topic is so important to God as we are living in a timeframe right before the most difficult time in the history of mankind, known as the Day of the Lord.

I'm going to introduce some concepts to you today that you may not be familiar with because a lot of churches do not look for understanding of the last days through a Jewish lens. But that's where the Lord gave this wisdom to our Jewish forefathers. Our Bible was written by Jews, for Jews, about Jewish things, and I think it would be wise to see things through that lens because our Messiah is Jewish.

This programming series is all about understanding what God says will happen during the time we're living in now, which I believe is just a few years away from the Messianic Kingdom. In an earlier episode called How Close Are We to the Kingdom, I introduced the concept that is key to today's topic of repentance. The concept is a Hebrew word called tavneot, which means pictures. It is a much stronger word than a type or shadow representing a deeper spiritual truth. Rather, tavneot, or the singular word tavnit, means an exact pattern or replica.

I have been a follower of Jesus since 1969 and have walked with the Lord and studied His ways for over 50 years. But through very specific leadings by the Lord in 2005, He led me to begin studying Judaism. He put inside of me a longing to reconnect with our Jewish roots. This part of my journey, especially as it relates to the latter days, has been life-changing, and I'll be speaking some through this lens.

The biblical understanding of repentance is one of these tavneot. The holiest day of the entire Hebrew calendar is the seventh month, which is a tavnit or picture of the seventh day, which is the day that is all Sabbath, or better known as the Kingdom. So if we want to understand how to get prepared for this seventh day, we need to look for insight into month six, the period right before.

So what happens in month six? God, in His mercy, wants His children to be ready for the seventh month, which is Tishrei, because the first day of that month, Tishrei 1, is actually recorded for thousands of years as the birthday of the world, the day that creation began. So on that very day, Tishrei 1, when the world or mankind has been in existence for 6,000 years, two things happen simultaneously. First, believers will be called up to Messiah at the resurrection, which Christians know as the Rapture.

This day is also called the Feast of Trumpets, in which we celebrate the coronation of the King. At the exact moment that millions of the faithful are taken from the earth to heaven in the twinkling of an eye, the Day of the Lord begins on earth, which triggers the seven horrible years of birth pangs known by most Christians as the Tribulation.

The picture or tavnit that we'll be looking at today is the month of Elul, E-L-U-L, which is the sixth month in the Hebrew calendar. This is the month of teshuvah, which is Hebrew for repentance. The word teshuvah means to turn or to reverse oneself, to go the other way. And this is what the entire month of Elul is all about.

The reason most Christians have little understanding about this is that we have divorced ourselves from the Hebrew calendar, which is a cyclical pattern of pictures seen in the various festivals by which the people act out the details of the picture so we can learn from it. Now, just to put Elul in perspective, the two months before Elul are Tammuz and Av, and they were pictures of such spiritual warfare going on in the heavens over the centuries that God's people were driven to hide in God.

You should know that the ninth of Av, which falls within our July-August timeframe on our calendar, is the very day when both temples were destroyed. The same day, both temples, hundreds of years apart. Now, that is not by chance. It is a horrible time in the Jewish life cycle whereby God trained His children how to live by rehearsing how to survive as we approach the Day of the Lord.

So the next month after Av is Elul, which is a breather from the spiritual oppression that the people have been through. And God gives them 30 days of preparation to get their hearts right before Tishrei 1 when they rehearse what it will be like to stand before God when His books are opened. I want to quote Rabbi Michael Washer's description of Elul in his 1,000-page book, *When All the Pictures are Restored*.

This month of Elul represents the period right before the Day of the Lord kicks off. This is what the month of Elul is all about. It is the first part of a 40-day period of restoration and repentance. A lot can happen in a year. We can be bruised and battered by life. We can be hurt by people, situations, and relationships, by demons that attack us, even hurt by God.

We can become tarnished like silver vessels sitting in a house, and we need to be restored. We need a time when we can remove all of the filthiness, the bitterness, anger, and hatred, resentment and pride and hurt that we have taken on throughout our journey through the calendar year. And Elul is the sixth month. Tishrei is the seventh month when all things change.

A marriage will take place, which is what the rabbis and sages of ancient Israel taught. They taught it with such conviction that it became embedded in the teachings and doctrines of the first day of Tishrei, which is the festival called Rosh Hashanah. The month of Elul is the courtship that leads to that marriage between God and ourselves.

What I am saying is that before we arrive at the Kingdom, God will give each of us an opportunity for deep soul-searching repentance. Now, this program and the next, I'm going to share some very personal stories involving repentance. Genuine teshuvah involves so much more than just telling someone, "I'm sorry." In God's eyes, that doesn't cut it and will not prepare you to stand before Him to give account of your life.

I need to say here that each person's walk is different. God knows where you've been and what you have struggled with. I cannot tell you what to repent for, but I can teach general principles in how you can know that God is calling you to do teshuvah and how to go about it. Some of what I share may be difficult for you. You may totally disagree with what I felt called to repent for. This is God's work in my life, and I respect His work in yours.

The first thing I need to do, though, is to tell you a story to illustrate what repentance is not. It involves a close friend that I'll call Sarah, and Sarah has given me permission to share her story. Sarah was married to a minister named Paul, who began having an affair with a younger woman involved in the ministry. When the truth finally came to light, he left Sarah and their child and the couple divorced.

Sarah's life was shattered. A year or so went by and one day she got a call from Carlyle, the woman who had broken up her family. And Carlyle asked if she could please see Sarah and talk with her. And Sarah replied, "I have nothing to say to you." Carlyle's voice was unusually tender and humble and said, "It would mean so much to me if you would agree to meet. I really need to tell you some things."

It was a tough decision for Sarah, but she finally agreed to meet with Carlyle at a secluded park. When Sarah pulled into the park, Carlyle was already there with her Bible and lots of notes spread out on the table. Carlyle began the conversation by saying, "Sarah, I needed to meet with you to ask your forgiveness. I know how much you have been hurt."

Sarah told me that she sat across from Carlyle with her arms tightly folded in front of her. And after some silence, she replied, "What are you asking my forgiveness for?" A little taken aback, Carlyle said, "Well, for the adultery and the lies that I told about you." And without hesitation, Sarah countered and said, "Then are you releasing Paul to return to his marriage and family?"

Carlyle stumbled to find words. "Well, no, Paul and I are going to be married." Sarah then said, "You are not asking my forgiveness. You want my permission to marry my husband and take away my child's father. And I won't give that." She then got up from the table and left the park.

Now, what Carlyle did in this story is not teshuvah. Remember teshuvah means turning back, to go the other way. If there had been true repentance, Carlyle would have told Paul that she could not in all conscience marry him because she was guilty of coming between him and his wife. She would have sacrificed her desire for happiness because the weight of the wrong that she had done was too great.

That is teshuvah. It is when God's standards of holiness and righteousness come before our own needs. When we are under conviction from the Holy Spirit, there is a limited window of time to turn from that sin. Destroying a marriage and a family is no light thing, nor is it an easy fix. We read in Hebrews 10, "The Lord will judge His people. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God."

In the time remaining, I'll share some stories of some hard things that I needed to repent for. The first one is anger toward God. In 1990, I was sitting on my washing machine listening to a Bible conference cassette tape series from Friends of Israel about the coming of the Lord. Now, I had never had an experience quite like what I'm about to tell you, where I sensed with every fiber of my being that I was to write a screenplay based on Daniel's prophecy concerning the last seven years of mankind in preparation for the Lord's return.

I was absolutely overwhelmed by this experience and by what appeared to be God's request of me. And quite frankly, I was shaking. Yes, I had written a musical that had been produced the year before, but I knew nothing about writing screenplays. With tears streaming down my face, I pleaded, "Lord, surely You have somebody more experienced in Hollywood to do this. I don't know anybody there or anything about doing what You're asking me to do."

The very next day, my devotional happened to be from Oswald Chambers' classic *My Utmost for His Highest*, and that day's lesson was in Isaiah 6, which reads, "And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, 'Who will go for us?'" And then I said, speaking from Isaiah, "Here am I, send me." These verses jumped off the page to me and God spoke to my heart and He said, "I didn't say Isaiah, I want you to do such and such. I simply revealed my heart. Isaiah heard it and responded and was willing to go."

For the first time, I began to understand that for that season of time in 1990, I was tapped into the heart of God. I heard what was on it. His heart was bent on preparing the world and His people for what was to come. My responsibility was simply to respond. I had the same free-will choice that Isaiah had. Would I heed God's request and actually follow through?

That day, I told the Lord, "Yes, I will commit to do this." For the next seven years, I worked on this project. Now, nobody was paying me to do this and I was a single mother. So doing this required me to take time away from my ad agency and devote at least three hours a day, Monday through Friday, to this task week after week and cut my income-earning potential in half.

Not only did I have to research the biblical prophecies concerning the last days, but I also had to learn about global world affairs and the Middle East crisis, the New Age movement and international banking systems, as well as figure out how the entertainment industry operated because once this screenplay was finished, how was I going to pitch it? And to whom? How is pitching even done in Hollywood? I mean, the questions and the challenges were endless.

Doors began to open for me in the entertainment industry. Through it, I began to pitch this screenplay. It received considerable interest, but it was a high-budget film and I was very much an industry nobody. More doors opened, however, I became president of Georgia's Women in Film and served several years on the board of Women in Film and Television International.

Now, you can imagine my disappointment watching other films surface and achieve a measure of box office success. First, there was *The Omega Code*, the *Left Behind* series, each work touching on the similar themes that God had impressed on my heart to do. And frankly, I was disgruntled and I felt betrayed. After all, I started my project before they did. I heard God first.

I became angry with God. I remember saying, "Why did You ask me to do this if You were going to have somebody else come along and do it first?" His answer: "You heard my heart. So did they. You were obedient to my call. So were they. I care more about your obedience and your perseverance than I care that you beat them to the punch."

This was the first of many lessons in understanding the farther-reaching purposes of God because to Him, it's all about the process, the journey, testing someone's character and personal obedience, not who becomes famous or prospers. *The 70th Week* sat on a shelf for several more years. Now, from time to time, I would ask the Lord about it, but I was involved in producing my musical, *A Time to Dance*, which premiered on September 11, and I ended up losing almost everything.

After that experience, I was absolutely broken. I never wanted to pitch anything again. What I had to do then was to release my hurt with God and choose to go on with my life, trusting that He had my future in His hands. Now, as I look back on this experience, everything that I learned during those years and years writing and researching the end times prepared me to produce this series.

Had I been a huge success then, I probably would not be open to teach and write and coach others because I would be sitting pretty earning residuals. But God had another path for me. He was testing my character and my work ethic. Everything I learned equipped me for now. If I had hung on to my anger, I never would have created this series.

So the lesson for you is if you have been sidelined, derailed, your career turned upside down, and you're harboring anger and disappointment at God for messing up your life, consider teshuvah. His ways are so much higher than ours. The last story that I'll share with you today falls in the area of ancestral sins. Now, these are things that pass down from one generation to another.

In my book, *Letters to Aleah: A Personal Journey of Generational Healing*, I describe how God took me through a long period learning to spot generational iniquity. These are patterns of ungodly behavior that show up from one generation to the next, and they can really mess up your life. As women, we can have all kinds of behavior passed down to us.

Controlling, manipulative behavior, physical abuse, promiscuity, alcoholism, drug addiction, unwed motherhood, etc. God is waiting for someone in that ancestral line to stand in the gap and to confess the sin and renounce it. You and I have authority to break the ancestral curses off of our family lines. You see, families have destiny, too.

God began to teach me about six of our collective female ancestral strongholds, and these are not pretty, but they are alive and well in every woman. As I was studying these, the one that really hit home with me was the Athaliah spirit. Athaliah was King Ahab's sister. She was absolutely evil and ended up killing all of the king's sons because she wanted to be queen.

Now, a woman with the Athaliah spirit has little regard for the leadership destiny of the men in her family. She takes every opportunity to minimize them, to put them down, to mock them and make fun of how useless they are. This is a very subtle spirit, but one of the unspoken messages that I received from my female ancestors was, "You can't trust men. They are weak and you will have to do everything yourself if you want anything done."

Now, I need to say here that I'm not blaming my female ancestors because these traits were passed down for generations. And that's what ancestral iniquity is all about. The good news is that we can break this cycle through teshuvah. We can repent for this behavior and keep it from passing down to the next generation. Male-bashing is not godly. It is a spirit.

And I was under conviction and I began studying the biblical disciplines of binding and loosing when it came to spirits. And I prayed, "Father, I confess and renounce the emasculating spirit in my ancestral line and the sense of entitlement and arrogance that I developed as a woman. By an act of my will, I loose myself from the lie that men are weak and not dependable. And I bind myself to the truth of Your word for the men in my life."

And I named each one to God and I prayed for them. I said, "Lord, let them grow in righteousness, to walk worthy of Your calling." And I asked that my husband regard me as one who loves You and desires to serve You with all my heart. Let my heart be filled with Your love and understanding as these men become all that You ordained them to be. That is teshuvah.

If you'd like more information about ancestral sins, I want to refer you to my website at candacelong.com. Look at my book on generational healing as well as my online store for a monograph called *God's Call to Heal His Women*. In this time of repentance, I want to remind you that the Lord does not want us to walk in anxiety and introspection, worried about things we may have done wrong.

That's the job of the Holy Spirit who lives inside of all of us who belong to Jesus. The apostle John wrote in 1 John 3, "If our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God." This means that if you have given the Father access to your heart, just walk out your life in freedom. Believe me, He will let you know when you need to confess something. You will feel unsettled and out of sorts. And when that happens, simply ask God to show you what's wrong and He will.

I'm Candace Long. I want to thank you for sharing this time with me. I'm called to help you fulfill your divine calling and destiny in these end times. Join me again next time with more stories about repentance on Lessons in the Latter Days.