345. The Rapture of the Saints

Mike Parsons – 

“The Rapture’s Coming!”

Every time there’s any sort of sign in the heavens, people say, “Oh yeah, the rapture’s coming, blah blah blah blah blah.” I mean, half the Amazon rainforest has been cut down to produce books about the rapture, and none of them came true. I’ve got a whole shelf filled with those books that people have either sent me or I used to have, that I keep just as a reminder that it’s never going to happen.

It won’t. It’s all based in a wrong understanding of God’s purpose, based in a theology which was a rejection of the Holy Spirit back in the 1820s. The Brethren – dispensation, millennialism, rapture theology all came from the same source. Zionism also. It’s all the fruit of a poisonous tree, sadly, but people buy into it hook, line and sinker. Any time there’s any sort of thing that happens in the world, you get all the crazies coming out, sadly. They’re well-meaning, a lot of them. It’s deceiving. It’s just a huge deception.

Whenever you reject the Holy Spirit, you’re opening yourself up for demonic deception. The whole Brethren movement, which was inspired by God for the priesthood of all believers, saw many believers come out of the institutions to look for a simpler way of engaging house to house. The Holy Spirit fell on them with prophecy, tongues, and gifts in the 1820s.

Ultimately, they rejected that, some of them. Deception came upon them, and then they needed a theology that explained why the Holy Spirit wasn’t for today, which they came up with: dispensationalism and cessationism as part of that. Then, along with that, came the rapture, the whole deception of it. Scofield was paid by a Jewish source to promote that because it plays into the hands of those who are looking for a one-world governmental system on earth. All it does is rob us of our authority to bring the Kingdom now and promotes fear.

Cult-like Deception

There was a lady in the States who killed two of her children because she didn’t want them to go through the [tribulation]. That was last year [2021] because it was supposed to be February the 24th that the rapture was going to happen. She actually killed two children because she did not want them to go through the tribulation. That’s how deceptive it was, but it becomes very cult-like because it’s a very controlling thing. We need to see it exposed; more and more people need to be set free from that deception. People will throw out the rapture, but they’ll keep the millennium because they’ve not yet realised it came from the same source. Or they’ll keep Zionism, not realising it came from the same source. That’s part of the problem: people are not discerning, and they don’t find out. They just believe what they’re told, and if you hear it enough, you think it must be true. That’s true. People do believe it because they’ve been told, and they kept being told.

I was brought up with it. I was in the Brethren Church. I know the roots of it. I researched it. I found all the books of the early Brethren fathers and what they shared, and how good it was in the beginning. But you could see when it went off, and you could see when deception came in because the writings changed. The tone of them changed. They became judgmental. The love went out of them. You can see it in just what was written, how it was written. Everything changed from the inspiration that they had.

If they had continued, you would have had Azusa Street-type revival 80 years before it happened. But they rejected it, and it took 80 years for that to come round again. The most ironic thing, and this is a huge irony, the Brethren movement does not allow women to speak, and they don’t believe in prophecy. But when the Holy Spirit was moving on that group, a woman called Mary Margaret McDonald prophesied a vision, and they based the rapture teaching on that prophecy. But they don’t believe women can speak, and they don’t believe prophecy, but they based the teaching on it and mixed it with a Jesuit priest’s teaching, and came up with that whole system of belief which hijacked the seminaries around the world for the best part of a hundred years.

Impact on Mainstream Christianity

It is still taught in most seminaries around the world, unless you come from a Reformed background. Most of the other charismatic seminaries teach it because they were totally hoodwinked by it. The Scofield Bible, which was commissioned and paid for with an agenda that wasn’t from a Christian, promoted that. The Scofield was a King James Version that contained all the notes related to the rapture, the seven dispensations and cessationism, all in the notes. That infiltrated the seminaries around the world, and then most of the missionaries’ teaching, and the evangelical movement were actually taught from those seminaries.

That’s why it’s so infiltrated mainstream because it got in through the seminaries, and then that went out through and infiltrated most of the evangelical movement. It wasn’t really until the charismatic movement started to bring people back to a restored relationship where they could hear God for themselves, that people started to question some of those things.

When I got baptised in the Spirit in 1986, the first thing God said to me was, “You need to understand kingdom and covenant.” Well, I thought I knew what kingdom and covenant meant because I’d been brought up in the Brethren movement. That’s all they talked about: the kingdom coming a thousand years after all this stuff. It took me three years of going back with God through the Bible, because He just did it. I didn’t read another book: I just went through the Bible. He showed me the whole error of all of it, and I found a whole different view of what is going to happen, which has led me and helped me to come and embrace restoration and everything else. But that was a long time ago.

I already had a lot of deconstruction from futurist eschatology 40 years ago. Now, it’s so easy to see how all this works together with what God is doing to restore. I didn’t have all of that negative stuff. I had a lot of demons cast out of me. I had a lot of religious spirits specifically from that movement. It was a deceptive movement: it was birthed in God – and rejected God for an error. When you do that, you open yourself up to deception. It has had probably the biggest deceptive influence on mainstream Christianity in the last 200 years. A huge deception.

Mike goes into much more detail on these subjects in his book The Eschatology of the Restoration of All Things, available in paperback or as an ebook.  Click here or on the image above for details.

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344. Training Your Senses to Engage

Mike Parsons 

When you do an activation, there’s more happening than you realise!

Video Summary

When you do an activation, there’s more happening than you realise! Beyond just seeing or feeling, your spirit is engaging. These spiritual experiences form a foundation for your life, guiding you, even if you’re not consciously aware of that. If you struggle to picture or sense things, start simply and practise.

Most people haven’t learned to open the eyes of their heart. Your physical eyes receive information, and your brain interprets it, but ultimately, you’re seeing with your brain. As babies, we learn to focus and interpret visual information gradually. This information is stored in our brains for life. Similarly, in the spirit realm, we need to learn to see with the eyes of our heart—our imagination screen. Dreams are images projected by our soul, and whilst we don’t have to learn to dream, we do need to learn to remember and interpret them.

Training your spiritual senses through practice is necessary for engaging the eyes of your heart. Training your imagination starts with simple exercises, like visualising a door. By repeatedly thinking about familiar objects, you store this information in your memory; similarly, with practice, you can store and recall spiritual information. Some people are natural seers who can easily picture things with their eyes closed, but it’s not that simple for everyone. Many people get impressions rather than clear visuals. For example, if I think about my front door, it’s not a full-colour picture, but the impression is clear: the porch, wood on the right, the house name ‘Robins’ on the left, and so on. The more I focus, the clearer it becomes, but whether it’s visual or not doesn’t matter—it’s the information that’s important.

When you experience God, you might not see a whole vision, but you will receive something. Focusing on what you’re seeing helps it form. Perception is key; it starts simple and builds. During activation exercises, don’t strive to see—just be still and go with the experience. Then, reflecting on experiences helps store them in memory, forming a framework for future experiences. Repetition is crucial for ingraining these memories.

For example, I couldn’t describe a hotel I visited once years ago, but I could navigate my house with my eyes closed because I’ve walked around inside it many times. Exercises need to be repeated to fully develop the experience in your memory. Meditation helps by mulling over the experience, not by seeking an instant result like much of our world today. Extraordinary experiences, like my first visit to heaven, get etched in your memory because they’re so different.

Learning a new skill requires practice and patience, which many people lack. You need desire to persevere. If you have an agenda during engagement, it can limit what you receive from God; relaxing and just being helps the process. Find a comfortable position, maybe a favourite chair where you feel peaceful and can calm your thoughts. Keep practising and building on your experiences, taking time to assimilate information into experience. Racing through material like Engaging God without practising engagements over and over doesn’t work well; it takes time and patience.

343. The Power of Intention

Mike Parsons 

It comes down a lot to intention and how you focus your intention to bring about the outcome that you desire. Most people struggle with this because they’re trying to overcome a negative way of thinking, a negative mindset, a belief system, or even the facts.

Encounter truth

For instance, if you’re looking for a change in health, and the doctors say you have a particular condition, but you choose to believe in a reality where you don’t have it, you often feel doubt or unbelief. You might wonder how to get rid of this diagnosis or how to renew your mind. To be honest, you can’t really renew your own mind. Your mind gets renewed by encountering truth, which changes the lies you’ve believed. The more you encounter truth, the less hold the lies have on you because you realise they aren’t true.

In my relationship with God, the things I believed about myself, the world, and God were programmed into me by religion, culture, and upbringing. It wasn’t enough for me to just read the Bible or to try and think differently. The more I tried to think differently against something I previously believed, the more I focused on trying not to believe it.

When considering how to change your thinking to believe something different and operate out of that belief system, it requires encounters to change. It isn’t enough to have facts or information. I found that when I’ve encountered God, these encounters radically challenged what I previously believed, and the encounters changed my beliefs. If God had just told me something, it might not have been enough because I wouldn’t have experienced it. He has said many things to me that took a long time for me to realise because it’s only through experience that I could come into that reality.

An infinite number of choices

When it comes to choosing a reality, quantum physics indicates that if you choose something, the universe responds to you, or creation responds to you, and begins to manifest that. The problem is, you have an infinite number of choices every second of every day. Which ones do you make? Usually, you make the ones aligned with what you already expect to happen. So most people keep getting what they’ve always got because they align their choices with what they’ve always expected to happen. If you want something different, you have to learn to focus on that one thing and exclude all other possibilities so they no longer exist in your expectation.

Manifesting the desired reality

This is what hope is about—manifesting something. You’re essentially saying, “Here are all these possibilities, and I’m going to narrow them down and choose one to the exclusion of all the others.” In a quantum physics sense, what happens is that choice, out of all the others, collapses the wave function into that reality. All other possibilities cease to exist at that moment until the next moment. If you continually choose each moment to focus your intention on that, eventually, you won’t believe anything else, and that’s when it begins to manifest.

There is usually a period between choosing that reality and it becoming what you truly believe rather than just what you want. There’s a huge difference between wanting something to happen and totally believing it is going to happen. That’s where intention needs to be focused, and you need to be able to focus that intention consistently.

By continually focusing your intention, eventually nothing else will hold your belief, and you will find that the desired reality begins to manifest.

342. “God Punishes Those He Loves!”

Mike Parsons

In this session, I continue my series Restoring First Love.

Misunderstandings about God’s nature, such as this belief that He punishes those He loves, often stem from incorrect interpretations of scripture. Hebrews 12:5-6, commonly cited to support this view, is actually a misquotation of Proverbs 3:11-12, which speaks of God’s discipline as loving guidance, not punishment. Evangelical theology, influenced by doctrines like penal substitution and eternal conscious torment in ‘hell’, has misrepresented God’s character, which can distort our understanding of His love and lead to harmful practices such as corporal punishment.

When I reflect on my own experience with spanking, I acknowledge that it was based on incorrect teachings about God’s nature. True discipline from God is about correction and guidance, not punishment. God’s desire is to help us grow and align with our true identity in Him.

Finally, an activation exercise will help us connect more deeply with God’s love. By focusing on Him and breathing in His unconditional love, you can experience intimacy and healing. Visualise opening the door to your spirit and inviting the Father in, allowing His love to heal wounds and remove negative feelings. Rest in His presence and experience His love more fully.

341. Unlocking Hidden Abilities

Mike Parsons

There are abilities we all were intended to have that have become disconnected.

 

Video summary

We all have abilities that have been disconnected, and after deconstructing my mind, God wanted to reconnect me to them. I needed to change my thinking to believe in abilities beyond my current experience. God used the illustration of a perceived gulf to show me that there was no real separation, just my perception of it. Once I accepted this, I realised there were abilities to unlock, such as multi-dimensional reality and creative consciousness.

Like many, I had been programmed by religion and life, and deprogramming opened up new possibilities. He showed me a new way of thinking aligned with the mind of Christ. You don’t need my exact experience; it’s about your journey with God. It’s important to seek these revelations in relationship with God, not independently.

We were created with abilities to engage with sound, light and frequency, but over time, we moved away from our original reality. Jesus came to restore that, but it’s a process. Intimacy with the Father reveals who we really are and our potential for creating. I never thought I could create beings, but God showed me I could. He said there are things left for us to create as sons of God.

Sharing this with others, I found someone who had similar experiences. My journey has shown me that God wants us to form and create our own realities in alignment with His heart. We’re always creating stuff that is not in alignment with His heart; it’s just how we live. But when we start to choose realities aligned with His heart, our realities will be different from what we experience now.

340. Don’t Live on the Trickle!

Mike Parsons

Don’t live on the trickle flowing under the threshold of the gate. Open it to go ankle-deep, knee-deep, waist-deep until it floods and fills us with abundant life.

Series information: You can only get the full-length videos of Mike’s new monthly series “Restoring First Love” when you sign up at eg.freedomarc.org/first-love.

Video Summary

There was a long lead-up to these experiences, and God had been preparing me my whole life. Hindsight is wonderful, and looking back, I see many signposts on my journey. At the time, I didn’t understand the experiences, but they were all part of God’s plan.

Questions

Questions worth asking include: Where is my first love gate? Where is the Garden of our heart? Are these literal places? They describe our soul and how God engages us. They are figurative, yet they are places of engagement within us that relate to spirit, soul and body. My experiences in revelation were progressive. The relationship deepened over time, and as I progressed, I understood more of who God is and who I am.

Jesus is knocking

Revelation 3:20, the first verse I ever spoke about publicly, says, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and dine with him, and he with me.” Initially, I interpreted this as a salvation experience, but it’s more about an inside-out experience, where God, already within us, seeks to engage our soul and body. This is about God working inside us, filling us, and sharing life with us.

Paul’s experience of God revealing His Son within him illustrates this. Paul’s revelation was a shift from his religious path to a relationship with God. He preached about God ‘in’ the Gentiles, a message of inclusion and mystic union. Initially, I rejected this concept, but over the years, God showed me the finished work of Christ and the grace message, which I now fully embrace.

Open the gate

Opening the gate of first love daily is a choice. It’s about welcoming God into an intimate relationship, which for me was like a romance. To experience God’s first love, we need to open and accept the invitation. This is a mutual relationship, not one-sided.

How do we receive and experience His love? By choosing to open the gate for an intimate, interactive love relationship. Don’t live on the trickle, but open the gate to go deeper until it floods us with abundant life.

Expressing our love for God goes beyond praise and worship; it’s about making it a priority in our lives. God is always available and promises never to leave us. He’s speaking—are we listening?

Activation: Be Entwined In Love’s Embrace

Take a moment to close your eyes, breathe slowly and deeply, and meditate on opening the first love gate. Picture a door, whether your front door or another familiar one. By choice, open that door and welcome the presence of God. Embrace this intimate relationship, stay in that embrace, and listen to God’s words of love and calling.

God calls us to step out of independence and into His ocean of love, joy, and peace. He calls forth our true identity as His sons and co-heirs, to manifest His Kingdom on Earth. Rest in His unconditional love, joy, and peace. Let this place of rest be your abiding dwelling place. Stay there as long as you need, and let it be a constant in your life.

339. Universal Inclusion in Christ

Mike Parsons

Some are in Christ and some are not? I personally don’t believe that because everyone’s in Christ through the resurrection.

Everyone was born from above, so everyone’s included in Christ. That might have been true before the cross, but post-cross, everyone is now in Christ and everyone has been born from above. I don’t see that there are those who aren’t. There are those who don’t know they’re in Christ and wouldn’t go to the Father because they don’t realise their position as sons of God, and there are those who do have that revelation.

Limited atonement

From my perspective, what Jesus did on the cross was reconciling the whole cosmos to himself, not just some. That view is a limited atonement view, or an Arminian view, where only those who accept what Jesus has done are born again after they accept it. This is an old covenant, works-based mentality rather than a grace mentality. Essentially, what Jesus did was reconcile the cosmos to himself, which did not require us to do anything. He did it all; he finished the work before we had to do anything.

When Jesus breathed into the disciples, they were representative of that resurrected, born-from-above, new creation. The reality is most people haven’t realised it yet. I don’t believe in an evangelical view of salvation, where we do something and then we’re saved. I believe we’ve been saved and we realise that we’re already saved; otherwise, it’s works-based.

I don’t believe that only those in Christ are saved, assuming they’re outside of Christ. I would say only those who know they’re in Christ would access the Father. If you didn’t know you were in Christ, you wouldn’t access the Father, would you? It may just be semantics, but I would say that is coming from a very evangelical perspective of “get born again when you pray a prayer,” whereas I would say no, you might pray a prayer that brings a realisation of what you already are, but it doesn’t happen after you do something. It’s already happened when Jesus did what he did.

Who we actually are

Before the cross, there were all sorts of people who were not following God. Although God hasn’t changed, and the Father hasn’t changed towards his creation and towards all people, Jesus came to rescue us or restore our ability to know who we actually are. We lost that ability through walking in independence, which affected who we really are. Jesus came to unveil and reveal who we really are so we can know that. In Corinthians, it says that you can’t really understand anything spiritually unless it’s in the spirit. If our spirit was dead, how would we ever come to a point where we wanted to accept Jesus? But if our spirit is alive and able to enter into that relationship that God has already provided for us, then it comes after realisation.

In an evangelical view, salvation is based on what we do and then God does something if we do something. I believe God’s already done it; the work’s already finished, and we enter into what has already been done by realisation of that. I don’t believe some are in Christ and some are outside of Christ: some know they’re in Christ, and some don’t know they’re in Christ.