Hi I am Dennis Rhodes – father of 4 children – married to Carmel Henley/Rhodes since 1996. I work in the Transport industry driving B-Doubles and Road-Trains between Perth Western Australia and Manjimup 300km away to the south. I came to faith in Jesus in 1989 when my first wife and mother of our only child Jasmine split up when she was 2 and a half. We eventually divorced in 1990 as I pursued my walk with Jesus and she found someone else within a few months of our separation. I remained single until in 1996 I felt ready to be married again and asked Father God for a wife.
Now after 27 years of being with Carmel as a Christian couple I look back at the train wreckage of my performance as a husband and father with regrets. In fact regret and shame and condemnation have dogged me as long as I can remember! It seemed that no matter how well I performed and tried hard to get things right I always botched it.
Coming to Jesus was supposed to fix things I thought…But things only got worse or so it seemed to me. Thus I have always been contending with God about this seeming paradox and what the answer could be. The prayers I have been led to pray over the years as a result of such inner turmoil and dissatisfaction have led us out of church involvement mostly as He dealt with me and us. During those years I have known the depths of despair and deep discouragement which almost took my life one day with a rope in our back garage.
For months I would walk to a favourite forest and vent all that troubled me to God and complained mostly about His lack of help. I know that a cloud of demons, like flies were swarming around my head daily but I could not get out of the habit I had fallen into.
Negative self talk and self loathing –complaining to God, unbelief, doubts and just total negativity would swamp me till I was a basket-case unable to function as a husband or father to our 3 little children. God in His mercy carried me through all this valley of the shadow of death and put up with me…to bring me through with a deep understanding of condemnation and shame based lies and thinking.
There is a place we can come to where we know no more condemnation. To the religious mind that place seems only a fantasy or perhaps a delusion and deception. The things of God can be very divisive and grappling with God himself is necessary just as Jacob found out. And as Jacob became Israel through that wrestling with God so we must go the same way. The Father wants you to know Him personally…
A far off God in heaven –up there…cannot be known RIGHT NOW. But that is what your heart needs right now–To Know God alive inside of you. The knowing of God is meant to set us free into the liberty of Jesus Christ…Yet we find that our knowledge of God often times leaves us in despair and discouragement so that we must pretend to have it all together.
Pretending to have it all together is to live in condemnation and shame.
Father wants you free inside Him…where there is no shame..no condemnation…no blaming self or others or God…Peace Rest Joy …
He created you in His image to be one with Himself just as Jesus is one with the Father so He wants you to KNOW that you ARE one with Him.
This is truly an awakening! Follow along as we share Jesus and the Father with you.
Den Rhodes
For the last 13 years or so I have been tracking along with Brother Daniel Yordy in the word that he shares over at Christ Revealed Here and there you will find mention of his writings in my writings. The Lord tends to show me things in the word at what seems to me a very shallow level but I am so grateful for anything Jesus shares with me. I share this word with an open heart wanting to encourage and bless others who have struggled at the various Doors of entry into the “new” place Jesus would want them to come to in their understanding and seeing.
I make no claim to being anything or a “someone” in God other than his child through Jesus in my heart. This journey we are all on is incredible isn’t it? Thankfully along the way Father in Jesus is guiding and carrying us all the way! I think I have wandered all over the place in my journey and out of that wandering I have learned a few lessons– 😉 This journey we are on is eternal life…that is to say it like Daniel says–It is age unfolding life– knowing the Father and Jesus Whom He sent into our hearts.
A dream I had in 1998 gives the reader some idea of my journey for everything in it came to pass and it still prophesies to me today.
A dream I had in 1998 speaks of the cultish religious spirit even today