Grant to them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He might be glorified. Isaiah 61:3

We’ve been talking in recent weeks about Christian kindness and some of the things that make kindness happen; some of the things that hinder it. One of the foundations for any of us practicing kindness is how we see reality around us—and that has a lot to do with how we see ourselves…and how we see God.

Kindness is a weapon in the spirit realm. So when it comes to spiritual warfare, the enemy wants to give us a lens—a way that we see things—that gives the side of evil an advantage. These lenses are not necessarily a just a temptation or an accusation, even though the enemy is good at both. But with a lens, the enemy gives us a way of thinking that envelops us, and a filter through which we see everything else— how we see others, how we see ourselves, how we see God.

In today’s verse, a ‘spirit of heaviness’ is talking about a lens through which we see everything else. Someone with the garment of praise and someone else with a spirit of heaviness look at the same thing and perceive it in totally different ways.

How do we know there’s a spirit of heaviness in our lives? It goes beyond feelings. A spirit of heaviness is an atmosphere that we carry that affects us and it affects the people and events around us. The opposite is true for those wearing a garment of praise. It affects themselves and their environment.

There are other spirits or atmospheres that we can carry around with us; there are other positive and negative lenses that can affect the whole mood we project and the actual way we perceive the people and events around us.

One such lens is a spirit of rejection and its opposite: a spirit of sonship/daughtership. So often Christian teaching deals with what to do when someone rejects us; and we need that teaching because we’re all going to be rejected at times in our lives. But a spirit of rejection can have very little to do with an occasion when someone rejects us. It’s a rejection mindset—it’s a whole way of thinking that follows us around. It influences our view of life, how we interact with life, our decisions.

But it also affects our view of God…and that’s what the enemy’s real goal is in giving us lenses like heaviness or rejection, etc. Do we constantly feel insecure in relationships? Do we find it hard to believe people love us? Do we feel the need to keep testing another person’s love for us?

A different way to experience the same lens of rejection is offendablity. Are we easily offended? Are our feelings easily hurt? Now, I’m not trying to be condemning here. These sorts of things are often because we haven’t been loved appropriately so we don’t know how to land when someone does something hurtful or offensive to us. So we withdraw, or we constantly replay the offense or the hurt over and over in our minds. We mope on it.

So when it comes down to foundational truths in our lives, when we talk about walking in kindness (as opposed to performing a kind act), we’re really talking about … a spirit of heaviness … a garment of praise … a spirit of rejection … a spirit of sonship/daughtership…

And all of this has a lot of it has to do with lenses. Our lens defines who we are. (More on this next time.)