Consent is a valuable tool. It makes things happen. But it can also be taken away from us. In today’s episode, Amy Killingsworth breaks down the mechanics of consent as a continuation on the topic of sovereignty. There is so much in giving permission and giving authority. But when should we take responsibility? How can we prevent our consent from being taken away from us? Tune in as Amy defines consent and shares the ways that we may have inadvertently been giving it away and risking our sovereignty.

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The Mechanics Of Consent And How You Can Use It To Master Your Sovereignty 

This episode is all about consent. There is implied and expressed consent and all of it should be informed consent. Are there areas of your life where you’ve given your consent to things that maybe you don’t want and you are suffering for it? Let’s find out. Remember, God wants you healed you can wholeheartedly live your purpose and love your life. 

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In this episode, I’m going to be expanding out on the concept of sovereignty. I’m going to be expanding it out in the next two episodes. I know I said that I was going to move on to amnesty, which is forgiveness, but as I was preparing that content, I realized that there are a couple of key concepts within sovereignty that I didn’t do justice to. For us to move on to the next principle, they build line upon line and precept upon precept so we need to make sure and have a solid understanding before we move forward. There are two concepts that we need to handle that go with sovereignty. This could be sovereignty part two and the next episode will be sovereignty part three, but I’m specifically going to handle the concepts of consent and the state of being blameless. 

The Mechanics of Informed Consent

This episode is all about consent. Let’s start with the definition. Consent is acceptance or approval of what is planned or done by another. It’s also acquiescence or a synonym for consent would be permission. Consent is your yes. It is permission to be acted upon, to participate, have the consequences, the rewards or the resultant activity of that choice. It seems pretty straightforward, but it can get a little bit muddy. We’re going to talk about the different kinds of consent. There’s informed consent. This is when you give your consent after you have been presented honestly and truthfully with all the facts including potential drawbacks, benefits and that you haven’t been coerced in any way. 

You can give away your authority but you cannot give away your responsibility. Click To Tweet

It’s interesting right now about what’s going on in the medical field. After World War II, there was something called the Nuremberg trials. For those of you who aren’t familiar, many of the atrocities that took place in the Holocaust, World War II and Nazi Germany had to do with medical experimentation. When the rest of the world put the Nazi party on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity, most of those who were tried and executed were doctors and medical researchers. They took marginalized communities, the Jews, in this case and they did a bunch of experiments on them, obviously, without their consent. It happens a lot and throughout history, it has happened over and over again. History repeats itself again and again, as the saying goes. 

There’s another example of a lack of informed consent in our own country, the United States history and it’s called the Tuskegee Experiment. This is where the medical community infected black people with syphilis as a manner of experimentation. They were given a treatment that they were told would help them and they infected them with syphilis. They researched and did a study on them. This is super duper evil. When a medical professional or somebody else tells you, “This is going to help you,” and they don’t tell you, then it’s maybe not going to help you like syphilis was not going to help the poor black people that they were experimenting on. If they don’t tell you what the side effects are and what the potential drawbacks are, as well as the benefits, then you don’t have true informed consent. You can give your consent away thinking that you’ve been informed when you haven’t been. 

This happens and people are victimized in this way, but very often we give our consent away thinking that we’re informed, but we haven’t taken responsibility for getting informed. A lot of you may be realizing where I’m heading with this. We talk about sovereignty and how you can give your authority away, but you cannot give your responsibility away. What we have going on in our world right now and I’m going to be careful with the language that I use because I don’t want to trigger any fact-checking. There’s a therapy that is for all intents and purposes, it is experimental because it was rushed to market and it’s a completely different type of intervention that has never been done before as far as manipulating gene. It’s gene therapy. It has not had anywhere near the amount of research and study over the years that therapy or an intervention like that needs to have to be able to offer true informed consent. 

Beyond that, anytime you get one of these things or your kid gets one of these things, there’s an entire insert in the package. If you’ve never read that insert that comes with the delivery method, then you’d have not got informed consent. How many of you have read that? If your child has had these things or if you have taken the most recent one that’s available right now for free that they’re giving doughnuts away to take and entering you into lotteries to take, if you haven’t read the insert and its miles of fine print, then you aren’t informed. 

Remember, I said you can give your authority away to an expert. This happens all the time. It’s happened to me. I’ve done it. We all have. When an expert says, “It’ll be fine. This is what is needed. This is what you need to take. This is the drug you need to take. This is the procedure you need to have.” We trust that they have our best interests at heart, that they’re educated enough and that we can take their expertise. There’s a use for that in society. What happens when the people who are giving you their opinion are misinformed or back it up a few levels, what happens when the companies that are producing this product are A, not liable for injury and B, may be compromised by corporate greed or something even more nefarious? 

You have this element of a lack of information that’s intentional. When you don’t read that insert and you get that therapy or that intervention and you get sick or you have a side effect or you die, remember you can give away your authority by not reading the insert, but you cannot give away your responsibility. That’s you or your child that’s going to suffer from the ill effects. This comes right back around to sovereignty and to radical responsibility. Whose responsibility is it to be informed in order to give informed consent? It’s yours. 

If somebody is trying to block you from getting informed like censoring information on social media or having a specific narrative of the science that can’t be questioned, then you are looking at something that is nefarious and that is not in your best interests. After the Nuremberg trials happened, there is a universal requirement that medical professionals specifically must gain informed consent before they give you any procedure or drug or therapy of any kind. If you are not sat down and given the insert and read it cover to cover, then you haven’t been informed. You may have given away your authority, but you’re still going to have to bear that responsibility. 

 

There is this logical fallacy or this cognitive dissonance in our culture right now where we have been brainwashed or our culture has developed in a way to where this is how we do it. If the experts say it’s okay or if the news reports say, “You should do it this way,” then it’s okay. You should do it that way and you’re maligned or cast out of the tribe if you don’t do it according to the narrative. To me, if you’re coming from a place of radical responsibility and when you’ve been harmed very seriously, like my family and I have been harmed by medical interventions, I’m looking at this thinking, “Why aren’t people asking questions? Why isn’t this more obvious?” 

It’s hard for me not to, but I don’t mean to get on a soapbox about medical informed consent because consent for The Rise to Reign purposes goes way beyond that, but it’s a great little snapshot in time of what’s going on right now. That’s like, “This politician said that I should do this so I’m going to do it,” or “This expert on TV said that I should do it.” Right now, we have those emails coming out from the foremost viral expert that said all of these things and now there’s this whole backstory that a lot of that was lies and that a lot of it was manufactured and you have to ask yourself why. 

Expressed Consent VS Implied Consent 

Informed consent requires that you be informed and not coerced. All of the facts, the potential drawbacks and benefits without coercion. That’s informed consent. There’s also express consent. It is when you give consent verbally, written or by obvious gestures such as nodding your head, yes. Express consent is consent that you have expressed and that you have said yes to. There’s also implied consent. This happens when you seem by your behavior to appear to have no objections and informed consent is pretty obvious. It’s a little less obvious than I feel like it should be, “Expressed consent is very obvious.” It’s like did you say yes or did you not say yes? Implied consent is where I want to hone in and spend the bulk of our time because this is the piece that gets most of us into trouble and we don’t even know why we’re in trouble. 

We have this result in our life and we can’t necessarily connect it to where we gave our consent to something. Because if you have a difficulty, if you have a challenge, if you have an illness, there is consent involved somewhere. I’m going to unpack this a lot this season, but we have to lay this foundation of consent because I need you to see how powerful you are as a sovereign individual created in the image of almighty God. With that, your sovereignty is a very highly prized commodity and there are many forces that want to get your sovereignty and they trick you. They do not play fair. They trick you to come into agreement by getting your implied consent without being informed. Once you give your consent away, whether you’re informed or not, it doesn’t matter. There’s no fairness to this. 

You need to see how powerful you are as a sovereign individual created in the image of Almighty God. Click To Tweet

Darkness doesn’t play fair and darkness desperately wants your consent, your sovereignty and wants to steal that away from you. You must be wise to this and you must be very conscientious about giving your consent. I’m going to tell you how to do that in a moment. Implied consent is when you seem by your behavior to appear to have no objections. A great example that I can give here is from my younger years. I know I’ve talked to so many young women and girls who can relate to this. When I was younger, I got myself into multiple situations of a sexual nature where I went way farther than I wanted to go because I didn’t say, “No,” I didn’t say, “Stop.” It wasn’t something that I wanted. Inside, I’m having this internal freak-out, but there was something in me that wanted to be accepted and that didn’t want to be rejected that couldn’t rise up and say, “No.” 

There’s this whole contingency of the #MeTooMovement and what could be considered modern-day feminism that says that it’s rape. Usually, it’s the woman not always, but if the woman doesn’t want it and she doesn’t say she doesn’t want it, then she hasn’t given her consent. There’s this whole movement that wants to make the sexual encounter like a contract, “Yes, I consent to this.” How often is that going to happen? Usually, the other party is requiring or going off of your cues and by your behavior assuming consent if you don’t say, “No.” Now, if you say, “No,” and they continued, that is rape. That’s being victimized. That’s victimization. 

If you didn’t say no out outwardly, but internally you were having this conflict, but you didn’t stop it that’s on you. That was on me because I did not rise up and say, “No.” How far it went is like that other person’s not a mind-reader. Remember, you can give away your authority, but you can’t give away your responsibility. I can’t make that boy in this situation responsible for me not speaking up and speaking my mind. That’s an issue that we see in our world right now around consent. Implied consent is valid. If you don’t say no and you’re going along to get along, then that’s consent. Implied consent is consent. 

How Deception Deprives Us Of Consent

Let’s talk about free will and consent. Remember that you’re created in the image of God and you have sovereignty as such. The sea of your sovereignty is your free will. In order to give your power or your agency or your authority away, you must in a manner of speaking, give your consent. The spiritual realm functions on consent. You are sovereign so you are the ruler, whether you are reigning and ruling or not. You are the ruler of your domain unless you’ve given away your sovereignty and your power to someone or something else. You have to do that. You have to give it away. You’re sovereign. It’s like gravity. It’s the Law of the Universe. If you are a human being, you are a sovereign individual and in order for something else to be usurping your sovereignty, you have to have given it away, but you usually don’t know you gave it away. That’s the thing. 

You usually were tricked, deceived or had it taken from you and you gave your consent without knowing. When you consent to give away your sovereignty, your power, your agency and your authority, it’s almost always by implied consent. Sometimes we give it away expressly. Sometimes we give it away informed. That’s unfortunate, but almost always, we don’t know what we’re signing up for. We don’t know. An example of this from the scripture is Adam and Eve. God created man and woman. He put them in the garden and he said, “You can eat from any of the trees except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” 

God said that and then God goes somewhere else the serpent comes in and says, “That’s not true.” Like, “Did God say that? This is what he meant or it’s okay. God knows he’s holding out on you and he knows that when you eat it, you’re going to become like him. There’s a benefit for you here. He’s trying to keep this goodness away from you.” That’s the lie right there. That’s the master lie that is used to deprive us of our consent. I want you to write that down and put it in your pocket because that concept is going to come up again and again. The serpent comes, it’s Satan in the garden and convinces her by lying to her to give away her sovereignty. She gives away her sovereignty by eating the fruit and then she gets the result of that and so does Adam.  

 

They get kicked out of the garden. They come under a curse. They basically enslaved the entire humanity because they gave mankind’s authority over to the evil one. Was that informed consent? No, it wasn’t because they were lied to. They weren’t informed. That’s usually the case when we give away our sovereignty is that we’re believing a lie. The second thing is that it was not expressed consent because the evil one did not come and say, “Here, sign on the contract on the bottom line. Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re to eat the apple and then we’re, I’m going take your authority I’m going to bring the whole world under a curse of sin and death. If you agree to this, sign on the dotted line.” 

How You Are Giving Away Your Consent

No, he promised her a great outcome and by taking and biting the apple, that’s implied consent. She gave her implied consent by her action. It’s not expressed and it’s not informed. It should be, but darkness doesn’t play fair because it’s darkness. You can’t expect the light to act like darkness because it’s evil. It’s not good. Here are some ways that we give away our consent. When you violate God’s universal laws, you give implied consent. This is the open door method of giving away your power. I say to my children all the time that your choice is like a stick and on one hand is the choice that you’re making, the activity, the behavior, and on the other end is the consequence, whether they’re good or bad of that particular choice. 

If you pick up one, you pick up the other, you can’t pick up the choice piece of the stick. You have to pick up both. You get the consequence with the choice always. In this case, when you violate God’s universal laws, you give implied consent for the activity of darkness in your life. What are some of God’s universal laws? One of them is, “You reap what you sow.” If you sow negativity, strife, theft and lies, you’re going to reap those things. That’s a universal law. When you are sowing those things, you’re consenting to a harvest of that. I can go deep into this and I’m going to be explaining these concepts out over, mostly when we get into the categories where we’re talking about the body, the mind, the emotions and the spiritual aspect and our money. I’ll be expanding it out more into real-life situations and how these apply but I want to build this foundation so you start thinking about, “What am I giving my consent to with my choices?” 

Another way you give your consent is false worship. This is idol worship and very few of you are probably bowing down before little statues. Some of you may be and that’s false worship. Any worship that you give to anything, that’s not God, the one true God, Yahweh, the one prime source creator, God is idolatry or false worship. How many of you have seen that show on the History Channel, the Vikings? There’s this conflict between the Christians in England and the Vikings in the Norwegian areas. The Christians purport to worship Christ and the Vikings have all of these other gods. 

In Matthew 5:37 Jesus says, “Let your no be no, and your yes be yes.” Click To Tweet

They have Odin, Thor and Freya and the complex of the Norwegian mythology and gods. What I want you to see here is that we look at that and we’re like and even Christians, “Those are fairytale gods,” but they’re not. They are fallen angels and they’re demonic principalities that are very real. False gods are real, but they’re demonic. They’re darkness and it’s God little G. They aren’t gods. They’re spiritual entities and beings that have been created, but then rebelled against the one true God. When you worship those things, you’re engaging in the worship of the demonic that is a massive open door but there are other ways that we open the false worship door that is a lot more subtle than actually building an altar to a false god. 

This is what has priority in our life. Anything that you look to meet a need, which you’re only free to get met in God is an idol and it’s false worship. Another thing is what we give our affection to, what we give our attention to and we’re free to give our affection and our attention away to lots of things that are good, that are not necessarily bad. Like for instance, loving our children is a healthy place to give her affection but when our children become the creator and sustainer of our identity, that’s false worship because we’re only free to get our identity created and sustained in the one true God. Hopefully, that makes sense so you can expand that idea. 

I’m going to do an entire show, probably a series of shows on spirituality and how this works, but I need to tie this in so you give a clear idea of how you give your consent away. I already mentioned the story about consent, where it has to do with sexuality. This is when you go along to get along or don’t speak up for fear of being rejected. That is a major area where we give our consent away. A perfect example of this right now is mask-wearing. I have wrestled with this over the last year or so, because I have never believed that masking is effective for health safety. Now, we’re seeing the emails come out that neither did the foremost expert think that either. It’s about control and I sense that all along in my spirit. I had such a wrestling match because I couldn’t get groceries without putting a mask on. 

I was wearing a mask and being way out of integrity. We’re going to talk about integrity in a couple of episodes down the line, but I was way out of integrity with a mask on, because I’m giving my consent to this by putting the mask on. Do you guys see that? I’m giving consent to the powers that are trying to control by putting the mask on. Many of us did that and we felt like we were losing a bit of our soul because you’re going against what you know and what you believe to be true, but in a way, you’re going along to get along. You’re not speaking up and taking a stand for fear of being rejected, people-pleasing. It’s idol and it’s absolutely a way that we give away our consent. 

Two more ways that we give our consent. One is a huge one and it’s with our words. Many times, we are speaking curses over ourselves and consenting to things that we don’t have to have, but our words give consent. They come into agreement. An example of this is, “I am so sick and tired.” You’re speaking it, you’re calling for it, you’re going to get it. Your words are incredibly powerful because you’re a sovereign being. You create with your words. You were made in the image of God and you create with your words. When you speak something out, you are consenting to the activity of that thing in your life. It’s so important what you say and what you verbally come into agreement with. 

One of the things that was said in my household growing up and my parents didn’t know any better and I’m sure their parents said it too, but it was that we messed up. It was, “Shame on you.” That is a big one and is a great segue into what we’re going to talk about next is that your words carry your consent. Speaking of appearance, speaking over a child, the last way that I want to cover that we giveaway our consent is bloodline consent. When our parents speak something over us or they’re involved in certain activities like false worship or even different partnering with, consenting to different types of illnesses, addictions and things that our parents and our ancestors have given their consent to, it can follow us down in the bloodline. Remember, darkness doesn’t play fair. The evil one is always looking for a legal entry point and he has to have consent to do what he wants to do. 

 

He has to have your consent. A big part of our sovereignty is understanding consent, being very intentional, conscientious about where we give it and withdrawing it when we’ve given it. When we realize we’ve given it away unconsciously, we can withdraw it. Thank goodness we can take back our consent and we can take back our power and that’s what the show is about. It’s to take back your power and take the limits off your life. There’s a scripture in Matthew 5:37 where Jesus says, “Let your no be no and your yes be yes.” With your choices and your words, you need to be very intentional about what you are giving your consent to. That is it for this episode. We’re going to be going into blamelessness or the state and quality of being blameless next week. 

If you have questions about this or if you want to be a guest on the show, you can go to AmyKillingsworth.com/podcast. There’s an option there to send me a voicemail. You can ask me a question. I will answer it anonymously in a subsequent episode or you can sign up and apply to be a guest on the show there if you feel like you have something that would be useful to add to this topic or our audience. I thank you for your time. I don’t take it lightly. I’ll see you in the next episode. Until that, remember that God wants you healed so you can wholeheartedly live your purpose and love your life. 

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