Month: November 2011

18. Experiencing Intimate Knowledge of God

Mike Parsons –

Knowing our identity as sons of God begins with really knowing God and not just knowing about Him. Who are we? As sons of God, we are royalty. We have a royal identity. We are priests – those who have free and full access to the holy things of God. We are a habitation of God – the Father, Son and Holy Spirit have made their home in us and want to be expressed through us. Bill Johnson says that ‘God is locked up in unbelieving believers’. He doesn’t want to stay locked up any more – He wants us to let Him out.

And we don’t want to be unbelieving believers either. We want to be believing believers, those who know what God says about us and act on it without question, without hesitation. And there is a call for real intimacy, to know God’s love intimately on earth and in heaven. If we are a habitation of God, then we have God on the inside: more and more, He desires to open up His heart to us and for us to open up our heart to Him. This is increasing in intensity: we have seen that the initial outpouring of the Holy Spirit is as nothing compared to the latter rain that is coming.

Call to intimacy

We can struggle with the very concept of intimacy with God. The men in particular, even as we are singing ‘Romance me’ in our Sunday meeting, some are squirming because they don’t know how to take it, because they can’t get their head around being romanced by a man. But God is not a man, He is a spirit. Yes, He makes Himself known to us as Father, but God is a Spirit. ‘Hold me close, let Your love surround me’ – He wants to hug us, draw near to us, so that we can truly know Him, know what He is feeling, know what He is thinking, to feel His heartbeat. The Apostle John laid his head upon Jesus’ breast. Jesus is looking for a close, intimate relationship with us so that we can get revelation of His heart. He is drawing us into that intimacy. Sometimes we struggle, but our praise has the power to open up the heavenly portals so that we can have intimacy with Him, in the throne room, in the bridal chamber; so that we can find intimacy with the heart of God.

These and other chambers in the heavenly realms are places He wants to take us into, but we cannot enter into them unless we allow Him to open up that place of intimacy with us. We need to be willing, so that he can release truth to us, so that he can release our identity to us. The door is open in heaven, and God is calling us to love and identity. He is calling us to know by experience. We can read a book about God, we can even read the Bible, and know facts, but He wants more than that: He wants us to know Him by experience, to know what love really is, to know what acceptance really is, to know what forgiveness really is. He has made us a ‘kingdom and priests to our God’ (Revelation 1:2). And He says, ‘Behold I stand at the door and knock, if anyone opens to me I will come in and dine with him…’ As the Jesus Culture song ‘Come Away‘ says, we need to open up our hearts, and let Him in.

Open the door

Just as Adam walked with God in the Garden of Eden, so also we have a garden inside of us now, a place where God’s Spirit joins our spirit. He is wanting to open up a door for us so that we can have experience of heaven, but we have to open it up by opening up our heart to Him. And not just ajar, so that we get a brief glimpse; but to swing it wide and ‘let the King of Glory come in’. Jesus promises that if we will open up to His knock, He will come in and dine with us. Remember, dining is a very intimate thing in New Testament times; they would have reclined on the floor very close to one another; it was a place of sharing life. Jesus wants to do that with us so that we are able to hear His heart, to feel His heart, experience His love. And ‘Look, behold, a door open in heaven’ – as we open the door in our spirit, a  door in heaven opens and we hear a voice inviting us to ‘Come up here, experience my garden, experience the things of heaven with me’. We need to open the door in our spirits, daily, and when we open the door, a door opens for us to receive intimacy of relationship with Him.

I used to think I knew what His Presence was: now I know I didn’t have a clue. I don’t know all that much now, but I know more than I did, because I have experienced it for myself; because I have experienced going to heaven; because I have experienced what it is to look into His eyes, to look at Him on the cross, to see His eyes of love. There is so much for us to experience: let’s be hungry and thirsty, let’s not get stuck, let’s be eager for more. Because there is more to come. He is wanting to equip us to come into our destiny as sons of God. He wants to parade His sons before people and say, just like He did of Jesus, ‘This is my Son, whom I love, listen to Him’.

It is time for us to open up our hearts. It is time for us to become superheroes of faith. I am telling you, Marvel Comics characters will have nothing on the church when we come into our inheritance as sons.

Father, release a hunger and a thirst in Your people.
Release in them a passion for intimacy, for love,
So that each of them will open up their heart
And let the King of Glory come in.

Let the Holy Spirit come in and stir us to receive You.
Touch us afresh,
Help us to know who we are, and who You are.
Teach us to flow together with You,
To open up those heavenly gates and welcome You in.

Let Your people see that door standing open in heaven,
And hear Your voice inviting them to ‘come up here’.
Let Your Spirit brood over us.
Empower us as sons of the Living God
To be those superheroes of faith
Who know their God, and do exploits.

Amen.

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Soundtrack: Jesus Culture – Come Away

17. Prophetic Timetable Overview (part 2)

Mike Parsons – 

Important note: at the time of writing this blog post, Mike had not yet received all the revelation he now has regarding the ‘hell‘ delusion, AD70 as the ‘end of the age’, happy eschatology and the restoration of all things, for example.

Last time we looked at the opening stages of what I have called the Prophetic Timetable – at what God is planning to do in our days. There is a call to intimacy, a gathering of stumbling blocks, a raising up of a Joshua generation, a judgment of God’s household, a harvest of labourers and a shaking of the world’s systems.

Final Harvest

And there is going to be a final harvest. I have told you before, at the very least there are going to be more people in heaven than not. If there are 6 billion people today on the planet, then I want most of those people to be swept into the kingdom of God – but we are going to need that earlier harvest of labourers to bring this harvest in.

The River of Life is flowing from the throne in heaven today. The crystal river is full of gems and other wonderful things, but it is flowing through the realms of the heavenlies, into the dimensions of the atmosphere of the earth, a kingdom in (not ‘of’) darkness, to a place called Nirvana. Some of you might know what that place is, it is a desolate place. The river is being dammed up in that dimensional realm. The River of Life continues to flow and build up pressure and so that dam is going to be broken when we take back possession, when we take back the authority that Adam lost. Satan became the prince of the power of the air in what was Adam’s sphere of influence. When we bring the dominion of the kingdom of God, opening the everlasting doors so that the light of the glory of God disperses the darkness, then that dam is going to break and the River of Life is going to be poured out on earth. That’s why this harvest is going to come, it is because the River of Life is going to be poured out. I have seen that place, it is desolate right now, waiting and waiting for us to get our act together, to take back authority, to release the things of God.

There is going to be increasing darkness, but increased light. Increasing darkness in the world; increasing light in the church. We are going to shine before people; we are going to demonstrate the light, to be children of light. There will be increased manifestations of the glory of God, signs and wonders, and full ministry and full miracles being released. As a result of all that, there is going to be persecution. When we start seeing the true church born out of the institutional church, there is going to be persecution. But we can rise above that. There is going to be an end-time transfer of wealth: we are going to need to be able to finance the end-time harvest.

The mountain of the house of the Lord (speaking of God’s Kingdom, administered through the church) is going to be raised up above every other mountain, every other hill, every one of those things that are being ruled right now by the enemy.

Return of Jesus

These paragraphs reflect Mike’s undersrtanding in 2011 (see note at the head of this blog post).

[Jesus is going to return. But in Acts 3:21 it says that Jesus will remain in heaven ‘until the restoration of all things about which God spoke by the mouth of His holy prophets from ancient time’. So everything prophetically spoken in the New and Old Testaments will be fulfilled before Jesus returns. That is going to blow some of your theologies out of the water. There is all sorts of nonsense talked about what is going to happen. Jesus said that He is coming back in the same way that He went. When He comes back on the last day, it will be the end of time and the ushering in of eternity. He is going to stay in heaven until He has restored everything on earth. So, everything promised to Adam and Eve: restored. Everything promised through the prophets: restored. Everything spoken of through Jesus: fulfilled, coming into its fullness before He returns. Not after He has returned, but before He returns. ‘He must remain in heaven until…’.

So who is going to do the restoration? We are, His people. He gave the original mandate to Adam and Eve, and now He has given it back to His people, calling us to fulfil it – as he calls the church to fulfil it – calling us to bring His kingdom on earth, as it is in heaven.

There will be a last day, when Jesus comes, a day of resurrection, a day of judgment, when we will be changed in the twinkling of an eye, it says, and we will be drawn to meet him. On that last day, He is indeed coming back in the same way He went: on clouds of glory, with the cloud of witnesses who will be with Him, to receive us to himself.]1

The ages to come

And then we have the ages to come. All this that we are experiencing right now is just preparation for the ages to come. This is not the final deal; this is to prepare us for what is to come. And how you live here will determine what you do there. Jesus said some people are going to rule over ten cities, or five, or some over one – that was just an illustration of how there are going to be different roles to play, different levels of authority to exercise, and that will be dependent on our faithfulness here in doing the things Jesus did and the reward that He is going to release to us in that heavenly realm. Now, I want to rule over a universe, don’t you? Jesus said we could do the things He did, and greater; well, He created this universe, why not create another one? Take the limits off your thinking here: with God in eternity we are not going to be sitting around on a cloud with a little harp, plucking it and saying ‘Oooh isn’t this lovely!’. The ages to come are what we are being prepared for here and now; in the ages to come He is going to show us the fullness of everything.

Fire will come and purify the church. So anyone who is storing up stuff here, no matter how good it is, it is going to go into the fire. We need to be ready, because God has already begun.

In future posts we will begin to look in more detail at these periods, and first of all the call to intimacy.

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16. Prophetic Timetable Overview (part 1)

Mike Parsons  – 

This is the full version of the diagram we began to look at last time. In this post and the next one, I am just going to give you a brief overview of what God has shown me He is looking to do in each of these periods, and then we will begin to look at each stage in much more detail in coming days and weeks.

Firstly there is a call to intimacy: God started doing this a while ago, and it will continue. I know a lot of people struggle with intimacy. Even when we come together, when we are praising the whole place is heaving and full up at the front; as soon as we begin moving into intimacy you can see people start to drift off. There is something totally different about us giving God praise (which comes from our spirit) and real intimacy (which comes from His Spirit and our spirit joined together). God wants us to know intimacy. I am going to be going into that a lot more as we go on.

Second, there is going to be a gathering and removing of stumbling blocks. Angels have begun gathering here in our meetings. I have seen them, as have others. They are not just the trumpet angels, the healing angels, or the breakthrough angels: they are the gathering angels. They have been watching, waiting for an opportunity to gather and remove stumbling blocks from us, from the church. There is going to be a whole move where God does that.

There is judgment coming to the household of God: it is going to divide what is of God and what isn’t. However, judgment is not condemnation: with God, judgment is always an opportunity to change. Again, I will go into this more fully in future posts.

There are challenging times coming.

There is going to be a harvest of labourers. We are going to see thousands and thousands of people turning to Jesus, and that is not an end-time harvest, it is to prepare to send out labourers into the harvest fields to bring in the end-time harvest. Ask Jesus for them (Luke 10:2). There are going to be prodigals returning by their hundreds, streaming back to God. God is going to be drawing them.

Awesome times, but we need to be very careful to prepare and equip those people to do the things that God is calling them to do. There is going to be a raising up of the Joshua generation at this time – Caleb and Joshua were people of a different spirit who were able to take the people into their inheritance, the promised land. God is calling for a generation to be raised up, who will bring and equip those harvesters to bring in the final harvest. There are going to be apostolic centres to train those harvesters, and we are going to be one of those centres. There will be an increasing manifestation of the five-fold ministries and gifts of the Spirit to train people. There is going to be an increasing manifestation of people who seek first the Kingdom of God, people who live it, not just say it or know what it says, but who actually live it day by day and hour by hour.

There is going to be a shaking of the world’s systems, a storm of judgment coming on the earth, and we have to be ready, because we must have the answers in the judgment that is coming. When the world’s systems have fallen apart, the church is going to be raised up in authority, with answers. When the medical experts have no cure for some of the diseases that are going to be released, we will have healing in our hands. We have already seen a minor shaking of the financial system, a little tremor, causing a crisis the experts could hardly manage, which turned into a worldwide recession: when it all collapses, we will be people who can say, ‘Oh, over there in that fish’s mouth there is a roll of £50 notes!’ Or, ‘You need food this week? Oh, OK, there you go, I’ll just multiply what you have.’

Do you remember Elisha and that story about the widow and her son, and the oil that didn’t stop flowing until they ran out of pots to fill? Oil was a precious substance, you could use it for cooking but you could also sell it. As soon as they ran out of pots, the oil stopped flowing. That is a picture of what God is doing here. If you don’t want the oil to stop flowing, you have to keep coming for more, and bring more people who come as empty pots to be filled. People from the churches round here come to be filled, people find us on social media and YouTube and catch God’s heart in what we are saying, and they go on to fill others who are hungry and thirsty for more.

Returning to what I was saying, these world systems are all going to be shaken. Increasingly, we are going to see more ‘little’ examples of shaking which build up to a great shaking.

Next time we will look at the remaining periods in this diagram: the final harvest, the last day, the return of Jesus and the age to come.

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15. Revelation of God’s Prophetic Timetable

Mike Parsons – 

We are getting to the core part of what we set out to share with you. Everything we have posted so far has really been by way of introduction. We are now beginning to look in detail at the prophetic timetable that God is opening up to us, the revelation of His plans and purposes over the coming months and years. Let’s remember, there are no specific dates or times here, just a sense of different phases or periods in which God will be working in particular ways, which He is calling us to recognise so that we can cooperate and participate with Him.

This is the first part of that prophetic timetable:

Each of these is a period of time which does not end, but continues alongside the other periods of time. Over these periods, there are going to be an increasing number of apostolic centres, where God is equipping people in apostolic power and ministry, and in the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Increasingly, fivefold ministry gifts are going to be released to the body of Christ. There will be increasing manifestation of a people who are seeking first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. There is going to be an increased shaking of every worldly system: financial, medical, political; in fact any system that is out there is going to be shaken. And the only things that can remain are the things that are based on the Kingdom of God. There is going to be increasing world darkness, but church light. We are going to shine in the darkness and there are going to be increasing manifestations of the glory in signs and wonders, which is going to demonstrate God’s Kingdom in heaven here on earth.

This second diagram is just a different way of looking at those same periods.

Now there are a couple of things I want to touch on. The first one of those periods has already started, it is already here, a call to intimacy and love. Again, you can see it will not stop, it will go on underneath all the other things God will be doing, until Jesus returns. You can read Song of Solomon and just get information, or you can catch His desire for intimacy; you can read it and expect to experience the presence of God for yourself. Many people are experiencing the presence of God and his love today far more than they were last year.

That is happening, and it is to prepare us for the coming of the sword, because there is going to be a gathering of stumbling blocks and the refiner’s fire. You do not need to be frightened of that, you can fall on the rock and be broken! I would rather do that than the rock fall on me and be crushed, but whatever way, God is going to do it, and it is up to us which way it is to be (see Matt 21:44). We can surrender to it, and allow God to do it, or not.

We need to be a habitation of God, a dwelling place of God’s Presence. We need to know God is in us. Father, Son and Spirit came to dwell in us: as it says in John 14, ‘they made their abode’. Jesus went to prepare us to be a place where the Holy Spirit could dwell, and the Father and the Son could dwell.

In Acts 2 there was wine, fire, and wind of the Spirit. The early rain was great, but there is going to be a latter rain which is even better. So all the wind and the fire and the rain of the first outpouring of the Holy Spirit is only a taster of what is going to be poured out in the end. ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet’.

Wine, fire, wind

I have engaged with three of these periods so far personally.

I experienced the wine of the Spirit in 1993 through a guy called Rodney Howard-Browne. He was known as ‘Joel’s bartender’ because he brought the pouring out of the wine of the Spirit to the Pentecostal arm of the church, with a lot of laughter. In Toronto they picked up on that, and it was wild. As a church, Freedom was birthed from that in More for ’94: and it really was wild, it was like a zoo. Bob Jones prophesied in 1983 that this was going to take place, and when it did it caused warfare in the church; it caused division. Most of the people in the UK were on the side of God: for instance the Church of England came out and said ‘These are manifestations of the Holy Spirit – we are going for it’; Holy Trinity Brompton, particularly, were in the forefront of that. Awesome! But in America it was totally different. It caused division, so much so that the Vineyard church threw out Toronto from their whole movement… and in my view have never been the same since.

Pensacola. The fire. Now I went to Pensacola and it was the most intense fire of the Presence of God I have ever experienced anywhere. You could not walk into that place without wanting to get on your knees in repentance. People ran to the front, including me, to repent; and I couldn’t even think of anything to repent of! I ran to the front and just got on my knees and cried to God because my spirit was so touched by the fire of his Presence. That was just a flicker of what is coming.

Lakeland: the wind. Some of us were touched by what happened in Lakeland. Whatever you believe about what went on in Lakeland, it was God. Man got involved and there were unwise things that happened but it was God. You can’t reach out and touch your TV screen and be changed if it isn’t God. How many of us did that? We did that. It was the Presence of God, it was the wind. Now that disrupted everything, it was a worldwide phenomenon, thanks to God TV and the internet. The wind blew, but that was just a breeze compared to what is coming. A wind is going to blow, and nothing is going to stop it. You can’t tell where it’s coming from, you don’t know where it’s going; but it is going to blow powerfully, more powerfully than any of us really know. Before Jesus returns, that wind is going to blow. The former glory is going to be nothing compared to the latter glory of the house: the Kingdom of God revealed, on earth as it is in heaven.

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Engaging God

 

Engaging God on the Heavenly Pathways of Relationship and Responsibility
Equipping a Joshua Generation of supernatural sons of God to live according to the order of Melchizedek.

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14. Doing Greater Things Than Jesus

Mike Parsons – 

If you have been following this blog for a while, you will know that in 1 Chronicles 12:32, the Sons of Issachar were men who understood the times, with the knowledge of what to do. Sue Davies prophesied that scripture over us here in Freedom Church, that we would be people who understood the times we are in, who would understand the times that are going to come, and that we would know what to do when those times came.

Miracles

We are going to need to know what to do, because those times are coming. The things that Jesus did here on earth were the template (or the pattern) of the things that we are going to be called upon to do in the times ahead. Jesus was able to do the things He did because He was able to operate in the supernatural realm, connected with heaven and earth at the same time. He brought the power of heaven into earth and manifested supernatural signs, wonders and miracles.

So He was able to turn water into wine; He could manipulate matter; He was able to walk through people so they couldn’t hold Him; and He was able to disappear – He became invisible at times, so they couldn’t stone Him. He was able to speak to a fig tree and it died; He was able to turn to Peter and say ‘there is money in the mouth of that fish’; He was able to provide supernaturally, to feed thousands of people from a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish – He was able to multiply them, to manipulate matter.

Jesus did miracles, and He said that we would do the things He did, and greater things. We are going to need to do even greater things than Jesus did because the enemy is going to be manifesting to a greater degree on earth, and we are going to have to overcome him. So we are going to have to be able to walk on water, still storms, challenge the prophets of our day (like Elijah did with the prophets of Baal when he called down fire from heaven). Those are stories which were written for us, to actually demonstrate what God can and will do. He is going to need to do them again, and He is going to want to do them through us. The healings, the miracles; everything that Jesus did is available for us to do too.

Now we may well think, ‘how can I do all that stuff?’  We need to become more like Jesus. That is how we can do it: we have to become more like Him, transformed from glory to glory. We need to be ready  to move and to act decisively. When God says ‘jump’, we jump: and He is going to direct us clearly like that.

Stuck

When Mike Bryant was here, one Thursday night, he prayed for me and I got stuck. The power of God hit me, and I went down like a sack of potatoes. Sometimes people kind of float down gently, but this was just ‘bang!’.

And for the next hour I could not move a muscle, I was totally fixed to the floor. I wanted to get up but I couldn’t; I could just about move my head maybe half an inch. Other people were responding to Mike calling them forward to receive more of God – I wanted to go forward for that too, but there I was, stuck to the floor. Eventually I managed to prop myself up on my elbows, but the bottom half of my body was still not moving. I made it up onto a chair with my elbows, and then I got stuck there – again, I couldn’t move.

By this time I was pretty fed up, because everyone else was being prayed for and meeting with God, and I couldn’t get up. I got someone to pull me up onto my feet, but my legs were totally rigid, I was standing up but I couldn’t walk – in fact I couldn’t even move my foot. I persevered and succeeded in shuffling one foot forward a few inches, but then I got stuck again. Absolutely, completely stuck. After a bit, I thought, ‘I really need to move my leg’ so I reached down and lifted my knee up with my hand… and fell over. Some people found all this highly amusing.

Now what was God doing?  It wasn’t just a sign – by this time there were only about five of us left in the building, and three of us were stuck on the floor! Now sometimes God doesn’t want us to move, he wants us to stay there and get stuff sorted out; sometimes that is why we are stuck like that. Sometimes we are stubborn, and it is God saying, ‘I can be more stubborn than you, and you are not going anywhere until you have surrendered’. But this wasn’t one of those occasions.

Protect, maintain, or move?

God actually told me what he was doing; he spoke to me really clearly, and one of the ladies from Folkestone that had come with Mike also came to me with a prophetic word which confirmed what I heard God say. He said, “This is what the church is like. It is paralysed. It is stuck. Every move of God in the past has got stuck; it has got so far, and then it has got stuck. It has said ‘Wow! Look what we’ve got! Let’s maintain it! Let’s protect it! Let’s keep it!'” But it isn’t ours, we have to give it away. Every one of those moves of God has become a denomination or a movement that has got stuck, can’t go any further. Every time I got to a new place, I got stuck. So what God is doing here at Freedom, and with others around the world, we cannot afford to get stuck with it. We have to be continually moving forward.

We cannot turn it into a tradition. Let me give you an example of how traditions work. I heard of a church in America where the power of God came one Sunday and split their plexiglass lectern in two, straight down the middle, and it opened up a massive move of God. Do you know where that lectern is now? In a case, on show, and that’s all that’s left of that move of God, just a broken lectern in a case. And they look at it and say ‘Oh, wasn’t it wonderful when God came and did that’.

We don’t want anything that we are doing to get stuck. We are not going to protect it, we are not going to maintain it, we are going to move with it. I don’t want a movement of God that fizzles out, I want something that brings Jesus back. That’s why we have to get prepared.

We don’t want a church that is paralysed – and a lot of it is paralysed. I think it is wonderful that some of the guys who were coming from the Methodist church were getting touched by God, because what would Wesley think if he walked into some of the Methodist churches today? I was brought up in the Methodist church in St Ives, it was the Bible Christian church in actual fact, which started from a move of God just down the road here in Shebbear. There was a revival in Shebbear, and they started the Bible Christian Methodist movement. I was brought up in that church for about 15 years, and no-one ever told me it had its roots in revival. In fact, I am not sure they even knew because they were so far removed from what God had done. We cannot afford that to happen. We cannot create a new tradition, or a new religious doctrine, or something which is a doctrine of demons and robs us of what God is doing. We have got to be willing to move forward and be prepared, we have got to look at the signs of the times and understand what God is doing and saying.

There is so much that God is going to do through us… if we are obedient.

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