Category: Destiny: Identity

281. Scroll of Destiny: Just Being

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott –

What He saw the Father doing

Therefore Jesus answered and was saying to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in the same way.” (John 5:19).

We used to think of our Scroll of Destiny as having everything we are supposed to do written on it, and that we needed to see it to know what to do. I do not believe that anymore. I probably would have thought that way initially, and even taught it, but as I have discovered my relationship with God and discovered who I am, I am now just learning to rest, and be, and go with the flow.

Jesus only did what He saw the Father doing. It was not that He had a huge scroll with the detail of every miracle He was going to do written on it: what was on His scroll was “Here is My Son: I am in His heart and He is in My heart”. When we have that relationship then that state of being releases a flow of everything we do.

Mandate for the day

I used to go to God every day and ask what my mandate was for the day. After a while He simply would not give me any information about that: He stopped me from doing, in order to teach me to be. He just hugged me, for months. In the end, I stopped asking “what are we going to do?” because I started to enjoy being, and being in His presence, without the agenda. We tend to think God has an agenda that He is wanting us to accomplish. Rather, He wants relationship; and from that relationship, everything flows.

Now I am not looking anymore for my mandate for the day or how I am going to fulfil it. That was just putting myself under pressure, which removes the joy. Life is to be enjoyed and that enjoyment comes from relaxing and knowing the Father’s heart, and just being. Just being is so much more important than focusing on what I can do, what I need to do next and how to do it.

It became almost formulaic, and that is not how God intends our lives to be. If all we have is a formula, we will end up doing things in our own strength. Now I would say that it is far more important to have that union with the Father in which He reveals His heart for us. If we know who we are, then we do not need to do something written on a scroll. He wants to reveal His heart to us so that we can express His heart in a much more relational way. If we have a relational perspective rather than a performance perspective, we will not end up feeling like we are a slave to our destiny: “I have to fulfil it, or else…”

We do not have to get into guilt and shame over whether or not we have done certain things today. It is not about what we did or didn’t do, or what we did wrong. If we are constantly thinking that we have somehow ‘missed it’, that will draw us back into works rather than grace. It is not as if He cannot rewrite the script to enable His purposes to be fulfilled, in ways which are beyond our ability to understand. God is going to bring good out of everything, even the things where we may not have heard clearly (or even at all). He has it all in hand.

I used to think I would one day have to give account for all those things I haven’t fulfilled. I don’t buy into that anymore. God gives us a continual purification of that scroll of our life, and when we choose poorly or with wrong motive He does not hold it against us. We have come to understand that, contrary to what we may have been told, ‘carrot and stick’, punishment and reward, are not His way of doing things. He shares His heart and inspires and encourages us. He continually enables us to walk in our destiny: and it is more about who we are than what we do.

Predetermined, predestined

So I don’t believe that our scroll of destiny is a list of achievements that we need to accomplish. I think it is much more about our alignment with the heart of God in who we are as creative beings. That allows us to outwork our destiny in multiple different ways, rather than there being the one way which is the right way, predetermined and predestined.

What was predestined was relationship. We are predestined to a restored face-to-face relationship, not for a whole series of things that we should be trying to do. All the Father is looking for is relationship, in which we’re sharing heart together. He is unveiling His heart and intentions to us: we cooperate and outwork that through who He has made us to be. Every day, Jesus saw what the Father was doing and cooperated with it. And, like Him, we can do so in a very creative way. That is one reason why Jesus healed people in so many different ways. I think He was trying to get over the point that there is no formula: you have the Father’s heart, now express it through who you are.

I am only responsible to be who I am created to be. Everything else will flow out of that. So I fix my eyes on Jesus and on the Father and then I find that I just walk out every day and enjoy it. Life is so much more enjoyable when I am not pressured to perform some duty or obligation that religion has put on me: “You should be praying every day, reading the Bible every day, witnessing every day. You should be doing this, you shouldn’t be doing that…” The Father is the one who is going to direct me every day, and He does not give me specific directions very often, other than “Hey, let’s walk together” or “Let me show you something.”

Freely we receive

We tend to put a higher value on religious activities than God does. He would rather we learn to be an expression of love in every situation than get caught up in performance of any sort. Let’s not underestimate the value of love. Someone may appear to have done nothing in their life but love their family, yet He places such a high value on that. Let’s focus on being an expression of love ourselves.

This means we do not judge anyone else or where they are on their journey. When we rest in love, we can be an expression of love ourselves. Freely we receive, freely we give (see Matthew 10:8); so let’s make sure we freely receive, otherwise we have nothing to give. For a lot of people, they are wanting to give because the Bible says so or they are conditioned to believe they should, when they have never really focused on receiving, and being, and experiencing, and knowing the unconditional love the Father has for them. It is hard to love unconditionally if you have never really experienced unconditional love yourself.

A place of rest

Now all this is not to say that God doesn’t have things for us to accomplish in relationship with Him; but it is the way we do it rather than a series of things that we have to fulfil. I have engaged with the heart of God, discovering who I am and discovering that state of being at rest, that state of consciousness which is an awareness of the heart of God.

If we are trying to get our identity from the things we do, that will always result in feelings of condemnation because we will never do enough to satisfy ourselves. God just wants us to be, and the more we can just be, the more everything flows out of being. That is a wonderful state, such a place of rest: all the striving, all the performance, everything goes.

That place of rest is filled with joy. I just don’t find a lot of religion that is filled with joy: there is such pressure to perform and to avoid failure. We are never going to meet some magical mark of perfect performance. So let’s receive grace and mercy every day and know there is no mark to attain. We do have a destiny, but it is to be who we are. Bring it back to that simple thought: my destiny is to be the ‘me’ that God created me to be.

If I focus on how much transformation is still needed, that can put pressure on me, because I am not there yet. If I just enjoy being where I am and continue the journey, it will take me to where I will be. The journey itself is important, not a series of destinations, because it is a journey of relationship and that journey will inevitably bring me to a completely fully restored perspective.

The ‘me’ I am at the moment, I know, is not the ‘me’ that I will eventually be. But from God’s perspective I already am, because that is how He sees me. He does not see me the way I see myself or the way others see me. And when I agree with how He sees me, it enables me to become like that.

But He already sees me that way now, which is why He smiles. When I look into His face I see no condemnation of where I am, just the love and pleasure of His heart because He wants relationship. That is His highest agenda.

This post is based on Mike’s answers to questions in two YouTube Mystic Mentoring sessions:
Monday 26th July 2021 UK and Thursday 19th August 2021 US EST.

Available now – Mike’s latest FREE video series on ‘Unconditional Love’.
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Better still, become a patron and join us live for the next recording – they are normally on the second Sunday of each month at 7pm UK time.

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216. Twelve Steps to an Orphan Heart

Mike Parsons – 

We are coming into a revelation of who we are as sons of God, and learning how to live out of that revelation. But if instead, we listen to the whisperers, the familiar spirits which empower demonic strongholds and mindsets, then we can find ourselves on a downward spiral.

12 steps to an orphan heart

Humans are designed to be survivors. We develop coping mechanisms and protection mechanisms – layers, walls or skins that we believe keep us safe. But they quickly become behavioural blind-self prisons, and they are stumbling blocks to our destiny.

How does a slavery mentality or an orphan heart form?

  • Nature – we can inherit it genetically from previous generations.
  • Nurture – upbringing, parental and relational influences. Words, attitudes and treatment can have a powerful effect on how we see and think about ourselves.
  • Traumatic events.

And we too can pass it on in our DNA to future generations. In the field of epigenetics, scientists are showing that genetic material can change, even within a single generation.

Here are the 12 steps:

  1. We are affected by faults in parental activity.
  2. We receive parental faults as disappointments, discouragement, grief, rejection or insecurity.
  3. We develop unmet needs and coping mechanisms.
  4. We move into the fear of receiving love, comfort and admonition from others.
  5. We develop a closed heart.
  6. We take on an independent, self-reliant attitude.
  7. We start controlling our relationships.
  8. Our relationships become superficial.
  9. We develop an ungodly belief that says no-one will be there to meet our needs.
  10. We begin to live life like a spiritual orphan.
  11. We begin chasing after counterfeit affections.
  12. We begin to daily battle a stronghold of oppression.

Counterfeit affections

Depending on individual circumstances we may have extreme or mild symptoms. But we are all born with a sense of separation from God, so our souls have unmet needs and an emptiness that must be filled. Until we come to a full revelation of being truly loved and accepted in God, the counterfeit affections we seek include:

  • Passions – addictions – food, alcohol, drugs, sex, pornography, escapism etc. – comforts for our needy hearts.
  • Possessions – security in materialism.
  • Performance – perfectionism, doing things to prove or feel better about ourselves.
  • People – looking to people to meet our needs as substitutes for God – whether being people-pleasers or abusers.
  • Places – needing somewhere better to be happy – wanderlust, looking for home.
  • Position – striving for acceptance and approval, especially from significant others, including God: praise of man.
  • Power – seeking to control life and our own destiny by controlling emotions, people, or circumstances so as never to be hurt or disappointed.

We have all tried these things, and we know they do not work. Only God can truly meet our needs. So how can we get free of this bondage?

We have a 20-part series on Transformation which will certainly help!

We need healing from our wounds. We need to surrender our defences and be willing for those coping and defence mechanisms to fall away. We need to experience the reality of being redeemed, reconciled and restored to our relationship with God. We need to open our hearts to God as our Father and receive His adoption, acceptance and affirmation. Nothing and no-one can replace our Father God, He wants us to receive our security and acceptance in the fullness of relationship with Him.

We need to desire an intimate relationship with God where trust develops; to pursue Him – to ask, seek, knock, as Jesus taught (and it takes persistence to overcome the obstacles). Let’s give Him our first love, give Him our priority time, and then we will get to know Him personally and feel His great love for us by experience.

Love languages

God desires to father us in such a way that we know we are truly loved as individuals. We are not just a ‘job lot’. We all have different love languages – the way we feel love is different. Our particular love languages may correspond to our different gift types or unmet needs. We need to find out which is ours:

  • Gift-giving
  • Quality time
  • Words of affirmation
  • Physical affection
  • Acts of service

Our love language with God may be different from the one we have in our natural relationships. It took me a long time to realise it, but quality time is my spiritual love language. Father God sharing revelation with me of His heart, mind, purpose, and word is what makes me feel loved, valued and appreciated. I am unique, special, and He fathers me uniquely, according to my destiny.

At one time we were ‘alienated and hostile in mind’ (Col 1:21), feeling separated and orphaned from God, and separated from our souls and bodies, and from our heavenly home too. That was the ‘reality’ we lived in until we realised the truth that we were included when ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them’ (2 Cor 5:19). The spirit was orphaned and the soul, therefore, had a slave mentality.  Satan was the first orphan spirit, and therefore disunity, disharmony and division is always his goal.

Meeting our soul’s needs

We have seen this diagram before:

orphan1

Our soul has natural needs but is accustomed to living in separation from God and from our spirit. Our body (flesh) reaches out to the world looking for love, acceptance, security, significance and purpose – it does not know where else to look. That causes damage (including hurt, pain, rejection, insecurity, fear, disappointment, guilt and shame).

orphan2

When we realise we are born again and our spirit is brought back to life, we then have access to the fountain of living water that is within us. We can find love, acceptance, security, significance and purpose in God and in our relationship with Him. We are connected to the source of life. So when we go through a process of transformation, in which we are restored and renewed to God’s original intended condition, we have this tension between how we have learned to meet our needs when disconnected from God and how we now know we can get those needs met in Him. After years and years of following the flesh, this is a battle we must persevere in and win. Once we learn to be cut off from the world, then we can be healed, restored and ultimately transfigured, so that the flow of life from heaven goes through our spirit, soul and body out to the world. We will begin to manifest God’s glory, His presence and His power to change the world in which we live.

We are supposed to be world-changers. It was always our destiny to bring God’s dominion and His blessing to the earth. But to fulfil that destiny we need to be willing to persevere and go through this process.

In Genesis 2 God said that it is not good for man to be alone, and that is because relationship is key to reflecting heaven on earth. Relationship is at the core of the life of the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God’s desire is for man to experience being joined, reunited, reconciled, and restored to Him in relationship. That is why unity is so important, as we see the early church of one mind, one heart, in one accord. They were together in their love for and their pursuit of God, and they changed and transformed their world.

Centre of our being

Here is another familiar diagram, representing the gateways in our spirit, soul and body.orphan3

But we have a black hole on the inside which absorbs everything, lets nothing in and nothing out, until we experience relationship with God through Jesus. Then we can connect with God’s glory and His Presence in the very centre of our being (see the next two images), so we can engage with God in our spirit. However, for far too many believers God is locked away in there.

orphan5
‘Gateways’ by Adam Butterick (Vimeo video). Click the image above to play (opens in new tab).

One spirit with Him

“But the person who is united (joined) to the Lord becomes one spirit with Him” (1 Cor 6:17).

That is God’s intention, that we become one spirit with Him by being joined or united to God. We do that by opening up our first love gate because that establishes a reconnection between our spirit and the Father and heaven. It also reconnects our spirit to our soul and body, so that we become one, holistic, unified piece. God’s desire is for us to be whole, that we would be completely reconnected to everything, to have the relationship with the Father and the Son that our spirit was designed to have in eternity.

Our spirit will be orphaned unless it finds its home with the Father and in heaven and God finds a home in us, which connects it all back together.

I encourage you to look at this picture right now, at the First Love door in the centre. Behind that door is the presence of God, the glory of God, God Himself. This is in the midst of your spirit.

orphan6
‘Gateways’ by Adam Butterick (Vimeo video). Click the image above to play (opens in new tab).

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me” (Rev 3:20).

That is an invitation to relationship, fellowship and intimacy. It is an invitation to all – whether or not we call ourselves ‘Christians’. Maybe you have never opened that door. The handle is on our side, so we have to open the door. Will you open that door today? Will you become joined and reconnected to God today?

Open the door

Close your eyes and imagine this picture in your mind’s eye. There is a door, and behind it is God: His love, His acceptance, His affirmation. If you have never opened it before, you can do so now. You can say, in your heart, “I open that door to you, God. I choose to let you into my life. I choose to receive Your love. I choose to follow you and become Your disciple. I choose You.”

I encourage you, open up the door of your life to God. He is knocking, wanting relationship with you so that you can begin this journey from slavery to sonship, this journey of intimacy with God. Meet Jesus, meet the Father, meet the Holy Spirit; hear what they say to you.

Now for those who have done this before, maybe you too are feeling separated, distanced from God? Again, just open up that door right now, because Jesus is the source of life, and start drinking from the river of life that begins to flow. Get into that river of living water, allow it to envelop you. As you open the door, feel His love, feel His embrace, feel the joy that comes from His heart to you. Jump in the river. Let the energy of that source of life begin to flow in you, becoming rivers of living water, ready to flow out of you. Just spend some time there, if you just need that refreshing, enjoy the feel of His arms around you.

Perhaps you are used to opening this door, and you want to go further, then you can walk through the open door and follow that river back into heaven. You can get into the river of life there and follow it back to its source at the throne of grace, back to the Tree of Life, back to the garden of God. The atmosphere of heaven is the breath of life, the glory of God is the oxygen of heaven. You can experience Him in the realms of heaven because you have opened that door and it becomes a two-way flow of life.

Meet the Father today.

Wherever you are in your journey, just spend a few minutes today in the presence of God, in your own heart or in heaven, experiencing His presence and receiving His love and affirmation. Receive His acceptance. Hear these words of affirmation from your heavenly Father.

I love you, my child. Receive My words of affirmation.
I accept you. I affirm you. I embrace you.
Receive My peace. Receive My love.
Return to me. Return to your heavenly home. Return to the intimacy of relationship.
I love you.

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215. Revealing the Sons of God

Mike Parsons

We are all on a journey from slavery to sonship, and those two conditions are very different. Slavery breeds a poverty spirit, fear and lack of identity; sonship breeds faith, identity, resources and responsibility.

Empower a slave and it leads to rebellion, betrayal and treason, as with Israel in the wilderness. They were given freedom and responsibility, but they showed no loyalty to God or to Moses because they still had a mindset of slavery (see Exodus 15-17, 32, Numbers 21). On the other hand, restrict a son and it will hinder creativity. When someone knows who they are, God can inspire them to release their own creativity into His creation.

So we have to be careful not to empower people who don’t know who they are nor to restrict those who do. We need to put things in place which will help sons come into the fullness of sonship and to deal with any slavery mentality they may have.

The spirit of slavery vs the spirit of sonship.

The root issues of how we think are in our hearts, not our heads. To use a computer analogy, the heart is like the hard drive and the head is like the Random Access Memory (RAM): things get loaded from our heart into our conscious thinking and then we act out of them.

Our characteristics and behaviour will help us identify to what extent we are acting out of a spirit of slavery and to what extent out of a spirit of sonship. Almost none of us will fall completely into one category or the other. A spirit of slavery is often the product of poor nurture, unhealed wounds and brokenness in our own lives, but it can also be generational: particular ways of thinking handed down to us from previous generations.

We are going to look at a number of areas. It’s important to be honest with ourselves, not asking ‘how ought I to think?’ but ‘how do I in fact think?’ And please, let’s use this as a tool to assess our own condition, not to label or judge anyone else!

In the tables below, you will see a category in the centre column, and on either side of it, the characteristics typical of slaves and sons. You can download these tables as a PDF file to save or print if you wish.

slavery #1 Slavery #2 Slavery #3 Slavery #4

An opportunity to be transformed

Spend some time working through this. Use these checklists to ask yourself: “do I have more thinking on the left side as a slave or more on the right side as a son?” Then you will get an idea of where you are on this journey. Allow the Holy Spirit to bring conviction, so that you can change.

If you recognise demonic strongholds in your thinking, see it not as a criticism but as an opportunity to be transformed. Those strongholds are defended and empowered by familiar spirits – spirits that are familiar with your mindsets, your patterns and ways of thinking – and they constantly seek to ensure that you continue to think that way. Continuing in that way of thinking only results in continuing to demonstrate the same patterns of behaviour, or worse, a downward spiral that leads to an orphan heart, shaping us and blocking our destiny.

But God wants to do something about it. He is only showing you any slave-mentality you may have so that He can free you from it and enable you to think and act more and more like a son. Access to heaven and heaven’s blessing, heaven’s authority and heaven’s power all come from knowing who we are as sons.

In the heavenly realms we have places of authority that God has destined for us: mountains with thrones that God is calling us to possess. We can only possess them when we come into maturity (see Gal 4).

What do we do?

When we recognise that our mindset is not right, we:

  • forgive and release those whose words and deeds have resulted in us being the way we are. We don’t rationalise it away. We see that it happened and had an effect on us, and forgive and release them.
  • own the way of thinking or the behaviour. We don’t make excuses for it, it is sin to think like a slave when God has said you are a son, and if you don’t treat it as sin you will most likely carry on and be comfortable with thinking that way. Confess it, renounce it, repent of it (turn from it and turn to the truth). Take it to the courts, if you know how to do that, and get divorce papers which enforce separation from that way of thinking and behaviour.
  • meditate on the truth of God’s love for us and his acceptance of us. Meditate on the destiny He has for us. Get these things into our spirit by experience and encounter so that they become the basis of how we live. This is not an instant fix – it takes time.
  • attack the familiar spirits. Don’t let them lie to us and whisper into our minds. Take captive every thought. Deal with the thoughts that come, don’t entertain them and allow them to take root. Challenge them! We must be very careful about what is coming out of our mouth, not saying negative things that line up with the spirit of slavery. Speak out the truth.
  • get help if we need to. If we cannot deal with familiar spirits ourselves, we enlist the help of someone else who can minister deliverance to us. We may need healing from a wounded heart, and someone to minister that healing if we are not receiving it on our own.

Then we can be restored, and come back into a place of peace and rest, knowing who we are as children of God, knowing God’s love.

He really wants us to know our identity as His sons, and to renounce our slavery and orphan mentalities. He wants us to receive our security and acceptance from Him. Then we will be manifested as sons on the earth, to bring the whole of creation back into alignment with God’s eternal intentions before Satan fell.

For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God (Romans 8:19).

That’s us!

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214. The Hearts of the Children

Mike Parsons

Our fathers were unwilling to be obedient to him, but repudiated him and in their hearts turned back to Egypt (Acts 7:39).

A whole generation saw their home as Egypt and not the Promised Land, because they saw themselves as slaves, not sons. How do we see ourselves? Are we looking to our past to define us, or are we believing what God says about us and looking to our future? The fact is, we tend to look the way we’re going and go the way we’re looking.

Generations of slaves

They were generations of slaves. They had no understanding of freedom, and no understanding of godly leadership – they had to do what the taskmasters told them to do. They had no connection to God as Father, and had lost sight of their covenant family identity from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They had no sense of belonging, no sense of heritage, no sense of purpose. They had riches, because they came out with the gold of Egypt, and yet they had no wealth. Money does not bring happiness or fulfilment, and it does nothing to root out an underlying poverty mentality or an orphan spirit.

They had no loyalty either to God or to Moses, no faith or trust in God, and as a result they all died in the wilderness except Joshua and Caleb – including Moses himself. Joshua and Caleb had a different spirit, and a different relationship with God. They knew him as Father and were able to enter in, taking the next generation in with them.

Turn our hearts

He will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, so that I will not come and smite the land with a curse (Mal 4:6).

God’s desire is to turn our hearts back to our Father in heaven, and to see that His heart is for us. This is a fatherless generation, a strategy of the enemy to steal destiny by separating and removing fathers from their families, but we do not have to be part of it. We do not need to have an orphan spirit.

  • Orphans have no parents
  • Orphans have no inheritance
  • Orphans have no home
  • Orphans have no connection to heritage
  • Orphans think like slaves

A son or a slave?

Let’s ask ourselves, do we think and act like a son or a slave? It may not be black-and-white: perhaps sometimes we think and act like sons but then slip back into thinking and acting as slaves. De we identify with slavery or sonship? Do we know our identity as a son, our royal identity as a son of the king?

God wants to heal your father- (or mother-, or other relationship-) wounds. He wants to remove the scars that are on your life. He wants you to have a home in Him. He wants you to know you are adopted, accepted, and loved. He wants you to know and fulfil your destiny.

Will you allow God to be your Father? Or will you allow your relationship with your earthly father to rob you of that intimacy?

Will you trust Him with your heart? If your heart has been damaged, if you have been betrayed, disappointed, let down and hurt, then it is no small thing to trust someone with your heart again (even if that someone is God). It is a choice, and a choice that comes with risk attached.

Will you allow him to deliver you from an orphan spirit? Will you lay down your old natural identity? Will you pick up your new supernatural identity?

Stand and speak

If you will, then stand and speak these declarations out loud (if you can’t do that now, please be sure to come back and do it later, because speaking these things out carries power). When we have made these declarations, God is going to minister to us and speak to us in our hearts.

I choose to lay down my old identity as an orphan and slave
I choose to turn away from my past
I choose to forgive and release my earthly father for not representing true fatherhood to me
I choose to look to my heavenly Father for my acceptance

I choose to let go of rejection, fear and insecurity
I choose to embrace my destiny
I choose to give my heart to You, Father, afresh today
I choose to allow you to heal, deliver and restore me.

Now receive what God is going to do for you.

In the authority you have released I loose each person who made those declarations from an orphan spirit and a spirit of slavery and a spirit of rejection. I pray for the power of the anointing of the Holy Spirit to break those yokes, destroy those burdens and loose them from the control of their mind, their emotion and their will, from that orphan spirit and that spirit of slavery.

I loose them from it in Jesus’ name, in the power that Jesus is releasing today under an open heaven.
I bind each of them to their full destinies in heaven and on earth as sons of God

Now I want you to close your eyes for a few moments and see with the eyes of your heart the scars that may be over your heart from the past. You may picture them, you may feel them, or just sense that they are there.

Now hear the voice of Father God speaking to you and to those wounded areas of your heart. And this is what God says to you:

‘I love you my child – I love you, I love you.
I love you my child – I love you, I love you.
I love you my child – I love you, I love you’.

Over and over, hear Him repeat those words. Allow His words of love and acceptance and affirmation to heal the wounds and remove the scar tissue from your heart.

I release the angels, release the Holy Spirit’s presence and power, to bring that healing oil to heal the wounded hearts. Receive the love of God, receive the Father’s embrace, as He says:

‘I accept you as my child
I affirm who you truly are
I call out your spiritual identity as my son
I invest you with the authority as a prince (or princess) to subdue, rule, and manifest My kingdom on earth as it is in heaven’.

Receive that into your spirit. Let your spirit embrace and begin to expand and grow and mature. Let it bring God’s blessing into your life.

Receive a revelation of who you truly are as a son of God, and allow Him to continue that process of conforming you into His image, into the image He always had of you from eternity, into the image of Jesus. A son of God, taking up the full responsibility of who you are in the heavens and on earth.

God’s desire is for you to truly know that you have a home, that you have a family, that you are accepted, that you are loved.

Related articles from Freedom ARC
Other resources from Freedom ARC

SoundTrack: Identity in A (SML Music) – Engagement and meditation music composed and performed by Samuel Lane.

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213. Embrace the New!

Mike Parsons –

Moses had an orphan mentality. Imagine what it was like for him, growing up in Egypt. He didn’t look like one of them, didn’t feel like one of them, and probably got sick of hearing the story of how he was found floating in a basket. Apparently abandoned by his parents, he was adopted by the Egyptian royal court, adopted by an enemy system, and he was even a prince within it. Many of us have sought for success in the world’s system, and maybe even been quite successful, but it will never satisfy our eternal destiny. At the age of 40, something rose up in him, calling him to his destiny, but we saw last time how he tried to do it his own way, failed spectacularly, and ran away into the wilderness.

The wilderness prepared Moses for his future, and after another 40 years God called him again to embrace his destiny. His natural identity was as a shepherd, looking after sheep in the wilderness for his father-in-law. Sheep are really awkward and certainly do not always readily go where you want them to, which meant he was well prepared to lead a bunch of obstinate, ill-tempered, quarrelsome people through the wilderness into the Promised Land.

But when he met God at the burning bush, God took something from him: his badge of office and all-purpose tool-of-the-trade, his staff. His natural identity as a shepherd was stripped away from him, and he was given a new, supernatural ‘shepherd-identity’. No longer an orphan or a slave, no longer a success in the systems of the world, instead he was to be the deliverer for a nation. But Moses still had issues.

Let go of the old, embrace the new

Now God was asking him to lay down that symbol of his natural abilities and identity – not just a staff but all it represented: his job, his well-being, his financial welfare and his future. That was the choice he faced.

When he picked it up again, it had become a powerful symbol of all that God was going to do through him. He used that staff supernaturally in the years that followed – he threw it on the ground and it transformed into a snake (Exodus chapter 4); he used it to split the Red Sea (Ex 14:16), to bring water from a rock (Ex 17:6), and throughout Israel’s wilderness journey.

But he had to choose to let go of the old, and embrace the new. It is a choice many of us have to make. Even when we become Christians, we still face that ongoing choice: am I going to do things my way, or God’s way? And your own way never works – you feel uncomfortable around ungodly people and uncomfortable with God – you have one foot in one camp and one foot in the other.

Who am I?

But Moses said to God, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh, and that I should bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt?” (Ex 3:11).

Moses began to reject his destiny, to avoid doing what God was calling him to do. God was going to use his position and experience, but Moses didn’t think much of God’s HR skills. And ‘who am I?’ – well, he was a prince of Egypt, so naturally speaking he was well-placed for the task God was giving him, but he didn’t want to do it. Certainly he had things in his past which were holding him back, but God is always ready to deal with issues like that. Unlike Moses, let’s not allow our past to spoil our present and hinder our future.

Here am I – send somebody else!

Then Moses said to the Lord, “Please, Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither recently nor in time past, nor since You have spoken to Your servant; for I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” The Lord said to him… “Now then go, and I, even I, will be with your mouth, and teach you what you are to say.” But he said, “Please, Lord, now send the message by whomever You will.” (Ex 4:10-13).

Either he was unaware of his own abilities, or he was lying to God to try to get out of his destiny (the New Testament tells us “Moses was educated in all the learning of the Egyptians, and he was a man of power in words and deeds” (Acts 7:22)). And finally he asked God to please send someone else! But God swept aside all his objections and every obstacle he tried to put in the way, eventually agreeing to send Aaron to speak for him.

God wants to set us free

God is calling each of us to embrace who we really are and what He has called us to do. He wants to set us free from everything that would seek to hold us back from fulfilling our destiny: our mind-sets, our slavery mentality, any way of thinking that prevents us knowing who we truly are as His sons.

This Moses whom they disowned, saying, ‘Who made you a ruler and a judge?’ is the one whom God sent to be both a ruler and a deliverer with the help of the angel who appeared to him in the thorn bush. This man led them out, performing wonders and signs in the land of Egypt and in the Red Sea and in the wilderness for forty years. (Acts 7:35-36).

How many of us have felt rejected, even disowned, as Moses was? Yet God called him to be exactly what others failed to recognise in him, and even sent an angel with him for the rest of his life to ensure that he accomplished everything He intended for him. And we, too, have angels assigned to us, ready to supernaturally help us fulfil our destiny.

Familiar slavery

All the sons of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron; and the whole congregation said to them, “Would that we had died in the land of Egypt! Or would that we had died in this wilderness! Why is the Lord bringing us into this land, to fall by the sword? Our wives and our little ones will become plunder; would it not be better for us to return to Egypt?” So they said to one another, “Let us appoint a leader and return to Egypt” (Num 14:2-4).

God does not want us to miss out on receiving our full inheritance because of the issues in our lives. He wants us to deal with them. Israel saw God come down on a mountain; the Red Sea part (and close behind them, drowning their pursuers); clothes and sandals not wear out; food provided for them every day; and water spring from a rock (twice). Yet they still felt like slaves, and they wanted to go back to the ‘comfort’ of their familiar slavery instead of going in to possess the inheritance God had lined up for them. They continually rejected Moses’ authority, grumbling and complaining.

Robbed of his destiny

That rejection eventually caused Moses to react out of his insecurity. Instead of speaking to the rock (a further dimension of the supernatural that God was calling him into), he went back into his own familiar comfort zone and struck it instead. As a result, he missed out on leading Israel into the Promised Land, and there is no record of him ever doing another miracle.

Moses allowed his need for acceptance and approval from people to rob him of his full destiny. Little wonder, then, that those he led also allowed their issues to rob them of their own inheritance and destiny by refusing to go into the Promised Land.

It is possible to perform amazing miracles and enjoy remarkable encounters with God, and yet still miss out on the fullness of our inheritance. Instead, let’s allow God to reveal and deal with our issues, to heal us of past hurts and transform us into the image He has of us from eternity past.

Search me, O God, and know my heart;
Try me and know my anxious thoughts;
And see if there be any hurtful way in me,
And lead me in the everlasting way (Psalm 139:23-24).

Related articles from Freedom ARC
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SoundTrack: Identity in A (SML Music) – Engagement and meditation music composed and performed by Samuel Lane.

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212. Who We Really Are

Mike Parsons

We are on a journey from slavery into our full inheritance as children of God. Even as natural children, we start out as babies, infants, and coming into maturity is a process that takes time and perseverance. Yet God has always intended us to have a relationship of intimacy with Him, our Heavenly Father: and He wants to embrace us and reveal Himself to us as Father so that we can begin to feel, think, and act like sons.

As we saw last time, we need to be willing to allow Him to heal any relationship wounds which hinder us from having a proper child-to-father relationship with Him.

Characteristics of slaves

Our journey has many parallels with the history of Israel coming out of slavery into their Promised Land. Like them, we may have generational slavery in our family line, yet God wants to bring us into something entirely new. Our journey is from a slavery mentality to a mentality of royalty, knowing our identity as sons of the King. There is both blessing and responsibility associated with that, and so different from thinking of ourselves as slaves:

  • Slaves own nothing
  • Slaves live in survival mode
  • Slaves have no hope
  • Slaves have no expectations
  • Slaves have a poverty mentality

God wants to deal with those slave characteristics in us so that we can know the fullness of who we are and what we have in Him. Otherwise, that spirit of slavery, or orphan spirit, will effectively prevent us from being who God created us to be. If we persist in poverty thinking, our mind will stop us fully engaging with the truth of who we really are.

If you are a slave and an orphan, with a poverty mindset, it demonstrates a lack of trust in relationship. The children of Israel knew God’s works, they saw some of the things He did, but they did not know His ways. As a result, they did not trust Him, as we read over and over again in the story of their wilderness experiences. They had been set free from Egypt, but were still thinking like the slaves they had always been. It is the same for us. We have been set free from sin, and from slavery to a world system that exists to keep us enslaved and rob us of our inheritance, but sometimes it is a real struggle to trust and to enter into a deeper relationship with God.

Every time they faced an obstacle, they blamed God, or Moses, or both. They were motivated by fear. At the Red Sea, it was “Oh! You have brought us out of Egypt and now we’re all going to die. We might as well go back”. On the mountain, when God came down, they wouldn’t go to meet Him themselves and told Moses, “we can’t go, you go for us”. Whenever there was no water, or no food, they kept on grumbling and complaining instead of trusting that God would meet their needs.

They did not know God well enough to trust Him to be their deliverer and provider: they made Moses their intermediary and then gave him a hard time as well, because he represented God to them. Authority figures are always obstacles to people who think like slaves, because they think they are being robbed by people in authority, when in reality those in authority are there to release them into sonship.

Destiny

You see, Moses had a destiny but the enemy tried to destroy it by wiping out a generation of children, just as he would later try against Jesus (with a similar lack of success). When Moses then tried to fulfil his destiny independently from God, using his own natural strength and resources to fulfil the call he knew in his heart, he experienced rejection by his own people, which caused him to run and hide from his destiny.

But when he was approaching the age of forty, it entered his mind to visit his brethren, the sons of Israel. And when he saw one of them being treated unjustly, he defended him and took vengeance for the oppressed by striking down the Egyptian. And he supposed that his brethren understood that God was granting them deliverance through him, but they did not understand (Acts 7:23-25).

Many people will not understand who we are, will not understand our destiny. Many people will try to get in the way and prevent us from fulfilling what we are called to do. But we must not try to fulfil it in our own strength, as Moses did. If we have been trying to make our way in life by doing things that make us feel accepted, loved, approved of and valued by others, rather than depending upon God, that will always cause problems.

On the following day he appeared to them as they were fighting together, and he tried to reconcile them in peace, saying, ‘Men, you are brethren, why do you injure one another?’ But the one who was injuring his neighbour pushed him away, saying, ‘Who made you a ruler and judge over us? You do not mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday, do you?’ At this remark, Moses fled… (Acts 7:26-29).

How many times have we baulked at the obstacles people have put in our path? How many rejections have we experienced? Have we given up, and fled from what we know is in our heart, just because something difficult happened? If we are not actively pursuing our destiny, what happened to deflect us from it? Every one of us has a destiny from God: when He started to reveal it to us and draw us towards that destiny, did we start to try to make it happen our own way, and mess up?

After forty years had passed, an angel appeared to him in the wilderness of Mount Sinai, in the flame of a burning thorn bush. When Moses saw it, he marvelled at the sight; and as he approached to look more closely, there came the voice of the Lord: ‘I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.’ Moses shook with fear and would not venture to look (Acts 7:30-32).

Forty years on, God appeared to Moses again, reminding him of where his heritage lay and where his destiny came from – ‘I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.’

And this time, he would do it God’s way.

Related articles from Freedom ARC
Other resources from Freedom ARC

SoundTrack: Identity in A (SML Music) – Engagement and meditation music composed and performed by Samuel Lane.

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211. The Father’s Hug

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott

Behold I am going to send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord. He will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, so that I will not come and smite their land with a curse (Malachi 4:5-6).

There is a curse, in the world, and the curse is fatherlessness: for some, not even knowing that they have a father. For others, the father they do know does not match up to the fullness of God’s intention. God wants us to know Him as a real Father and wants us to feel loved and accepted as His real children. He is releasing His Spirit to turn the world back to Him, in an outpouring that embraces who we are as God’s children and releases that out to the world in an experiential and practical way so that everyone can experience His love.

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another (John 13:34-35).

Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you. Abide in My love (John 15:9).

This is Jesus’ call to us to live in His love, and it has to be practical. It has to work: as God loves us then we love each other.

My testimony

I want to share briefly from my testimony, from my journey in which I have come to know something deeper about the heart of God.

With my natural dad, I didn’t know love, affection, affirmation, approval, encouragement: really no fathering at all. Even while he was there physically, emotionally he wasn’t; and then he physically left too, leaving a big hole on the inside of me. Not knowing what a father should be, I just thought that was what fathers were like because I didn’t know any better.

So when I became a Christian I didn’t have a relationship with God as Father. I knew Jesus, because Jesus died on the cross for me. And I know He was supposed to be my Lord. So I knew Him as Lord, but ‘Father’? It didn’t even compute. It wasn’t that I struggled with it. I didn’t even know that God could be my Father: it was such an alien concept to me. When I was baptised in the Spirit it was like liquid love poured into me. It was an amazing experience. Yet although I felt called to something because I felt love, I still didn’t know where it was from.

The Father’s hug

My first real encounter of the love of God as Father was in a time of worship. It was like God came and put His arms around me and hugged me. I knew that was the Father’s hug. I just felt it in my spirit. Now that really challenged me: how could that be a father? And I suddenly started to realise more about fatherhood. I had a revelation of the truth that God was not like my earthly father. Now you might think that’s really simple but actually, you don’t know it, until you know it.

And I had a revelation of that. God started to work that in me, but I needed ministry, I needed help because I could not break through into this whole area. So I had some ministry sessions, and God gave me a picture. It was a picture of a photograph, a real photograph that was in our kitchen when I was growing up. It was a photograph of me sat on my dad’s knee. It just hit me like a ton of bricks that this was a posed picture, a sham that never actually happened in reality. And it really, really got to me emotionally. In fact, my whole relationship with my earthly father was a total sham.

Forgive and Release

Emotionally it was a really hard thing to do, and I had to really choose to do it as an act of will, but it caused me to choose to forgive him and release him from not being a real dad to me.

It was hard because I didn’t want to do it: it suddenly hit me that he didn’t deserve it, that he had screwed me over for years – that’s literally how I felt. It really hit me hard. I didn’t let those emotions out right then, but I chose to forgive and release him, and God enabled me to go and see him and give him a hug. He did not know what to do, he stood there frozen as I gave him a hug and told him I loved him. He didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t have a problem with that because I knew the reason was that he’d never been loved by his own father. But when I chose to forgive him, it opened up a whole different relationship with God for me.

Now that was back in the early 1990s. Then, just before we moved here in 1994, we had a series of meetings in the Castle Centre in the town called More for ’94. One evening I had come up and I was doing some teaching as a prelude to setting up the church. We had a time of worship and all the emotion I hadn’t been able to let out from this whole thing with my dad all of a sudden just spilled out like a torrent. I wailed and I wailed and I wailed on the floor, and all the emotions flooded out. I realised it had all been stored up inside me; and at the end of it, I was glad it was gone. That was a powerful experience.

Encounter

Then about a year or so later, I had what I now know was my first encounter in heaven. Again, it was in a time of worship, and this one long note on the saxophone just took me into heaven. God took me on his knee, just like in that sham photograph with my earthly father, but this time gave me a real experience of what it was to be bounced on a father’s knee and played with. It restored something deeper again of the relationship I had missed with my father. God is a great God and wants to restore us.

A father-wound

But in spite of all this, years later when I was on a 40-day fast, going into heaven and seeing God and meeting with Him for 2 weeks, it was Jesus and the Holy Spirit I was meeting with, not the Father. Then Jesus came to me and said: “You need to meet with the Father”. I knew in my own heart I needed to meet with the Father, and yet I couldn’t. Then Jesus showed me a big scar that went right over my heart. I was looking down at this wound and He said, “you have a father-wound.”

And I started to argue: “I’ve forgiven my father. I’ve done everything I can.” He said again, “You have a father-wound.” He spoke to me in that encounter and told me He loved me over and over and over again. And each time He said loved me and I received it, that wound began to disappear bit by bit until it was completely gone. It took about 45 minutes in earthly time (I don’t know how long it took in heavenly time) but it just went on and on, because He just would not relent until that wound was gone. And it went.

Back to zero

Since then my whole intimacy with my heavenly Father has been restored. I hang out with Him in His garden, He hangs out with me in the garden of my own heart. Now that was just the wounds being healed. You see, I might have been minus 60 on a woundedness scale, and some people are a lot worse than that if they have experienced real abuse from their earthly fathers and others. But although all my wounds were healed, that just brought me back to zero on the scale. I didn’t want to be zero. Zero is better than being minus 60, but I wanted to be on the plus side!

Intimacy

I still needed to be fathered. What was it to be fathered? I did not know because I had never been fathered. So then I had to learn, how does God father me? I had an encounter with Him one morning and I was talking to Him, but I felt something was missing: I didn’t feel intimate. And He spoke to me and asked me “Why do you feel that?”

I struggled to explain, “Because I don’t feel it felt intimate”. He said, “Well, what is intimacy?” Now I was looking for the kind of experiences that other people had described. I was looking for intimacy to have all the ‘warm and fuzzies’, and to feel lovely (and actually, sometimes you do get that, which is great).

But God said “When is it you really feel alive? When do you really feel close to me?” So I thought about it. “When You are talking to me and You’re sharing Your heart with me and when You are revealing the Word to me”. He said, “That’s me fathering you.” It totally freaked me out to think that I didn’t have to have a relationship like anybody else’s or experience what other people said intimacy was. I could just be me.

And for me, with my redemptive gift, God’s love language to me is sharing with me and just having quality time with Him, quality time in which we just get to hang out together. It doesn’t matter if I feel all warm and fuzzy. Sometimes I just spend an hour with Him and come out of that time with pages of notes, because He has talked to me about stuff. I know He loves me. That is for me what has brought me into a place of freedom. We all need to find the love languages of our Father: how does God love you? What is (or would be) intimacy with Him to you?

Lavished on us

Do you feel like you don’t belong? Do you feel you don’t fit anywhere? Do you still feel like an orphan? Do you feel that no one loves you? Do you still feel rejected? If you do feel any of those things (and others), God wants you to feel His love and acceptance today.

See what great love the Father has lavished on us... (1 John 3:1 NIV)

He wants to lavish His love on you today so that you will know you’re His child. ‘Lavish’: He wants His love to just overflow, so much that it almost seems wasteful. Another version says:

See what an incredible quality of love the Father has given, shown us, bestowed on us, that we should be given, and named and called and counted the children of God (1 John 3:1 AMP).

prodigal

We are called children of God, and that is who we really are. God’s desire for us is intimacy with Him. The story of the prodigal son is a story of reconciliation back to the Father, and He wants us to experience that reconciliation and restoration of relationship today; not as a slave, or a servant, but as a son, with the full rights of sonship.

I believe that just like the father in that story, God wants to meet you with a hug. If you need a hug from the Father today, come to Him. If maybe you have never embraced the Father in a personal way, take that step today. He wants to hug you and tell you how much He loves you, as His child. And allow the Holy Spirit to fill you, to shed that love abroad in your heart, so that you feel accepted, valued and appreciated; so that you feel loved.

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SoundTrack (also from 1994)

We are the Fatherless – Brian Doerksen

210. A Beloved Child

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

However at that time, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are no gods. But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how is it that you turn back to the weak and elemental things, to which you desire to be enslaved all over again? (Gal 4:8-9).

Relationship releases us and empowers us. Religion enslaves us. Are we serving God in order to have a relationship with Him? If we are, we will end up in religious bondage. Or do we serve because of our relationship? That will bring us into life.

Every one of us can enjoy a relationship with God. He has reconciled us to Himself through the cross. It is a free gift of grace. Sadly, though, we can be enslaved all over again by going back into religion, back into dead works, trying to please God – and trying to get a relationship with Him (when we already have one) – by what we do.

We serve God not so that we can have a relationship with Him but because we already have a relationship with Him in Christ. We serve from the security of our relationship with Him, so we are co-heirs with Him. We work with Him, not for Him. If we are working for God then we will be looking to get something in return. But if we’re working with God, we’re working in partnership with Him and simply enjoying all the blessings that brings.

Who has labelled us?

Who has given us our identity? Who has labelled us? What labels have people put on us? Parents, siblings, friends? Authority figures, society? What has labelled us – and do we still believe the label? How do we label ourselves? Is it according to our past and what other people say? Or is it according to what God says about us?

If we label ourselves ‘sons’ then we will think, feel and act like sons. If we give ourselves some other label then we’ll think, feel and act the way we labelled ourselves instead. Who are we agreeing with? With God, or with what other people say?

Identity

Where do we get our identity from? From what we do? From our work? How do you introduce yourself? I’m a doctor, I’m a housewife, I’m a cleaner… If your identity is so tied up with what you do that you cannot separate it, then what you do has power over you.

Some of us will get our identity from relationships, with a father, mother or husband, wife, friend… Those relationships can define us. People join clubs – or even gangs – because they are looking for identity. They are looking to belong. Whereas, in God, we already belong.

Culture itself can provide our identity. I am British, and British people have a reputation for being stiff-upper-lipped. Is that who I am? We can adopt those traits and it can affect how we are when we could be seeing and hearing what God says about us and getting our identity from Him.

Too often people base their identities on what they do, on anything from their jobs to their roles in relationships and their pursuits, and by doing so they significantly limit their lives. The truth is God intends for all people to find their identity in Christ. That is where we will find the truth of who we are and embrace it.

beloved child logo2

The abundance of a beloved child

Mark Driscoll says, “if you’re a Christian, your identity encompasses all the abundance of being a beloved child of God”. It encompasses the abundance, the overflow… everything it means to be a child of God (in reality, that was the case even before you became a Christian). But our spirit has to grow and overrule the soul. It must overrule everything that has told us who we are, everything that has naturally defined us, so that our spirit decrees who we are, based on what God says. Then we can live in the truth of that identity and revelation of who we are and why we are here, and we can start living our lives fully in Christ.

Blessed

You are reconciled to God; you are accepted as a child of God; you are adopted into His family. You are a saint, not a sinner;  you’re blessed; you have a new spiritual identity as a son and an heir. Believe it. Start thinking that way, start meditating on that. Start embracing what God says about you!

By virtue of our adoption, we have been given a new name, as a son, not a slave, a new legal standing and status. Accepted; not alienated nor condemned. A new family relationship: God is our Father, not our Judge. A new image: the image of Christ. these are awesome things that God has done for us.

Destiny

Knowing your identity is the key to knowing and fulfilling your destiny. Because if you don’t experientially know who you are (that means actually know it by experience, not just know about it), then how can you know what belongs to you and what you are called to do? If you were the son of the Queen of England but you were taken as a baby and put into another family, you would never know who you really were. And we have been robbed, we were taken into captivity, so (even though we have now been released) we have never known the fullness of who we really are.

But God is revealing to us in these days who we really are as His children; what sons really do in the kingdom of God; and what our inheritance really is in that kingdom.

Related articles from Freedom ARC
Other resources from Freedom ARC

SoundTrack: Identity in A (SML Music) – Engagement and meditation music composed and performed by Samuel Lane.

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Our Patreon patrons give a small amount each month and can join us for our monthly group Zooms, get exclusive or early access to Mike’s teaching and enjoy further patron-only benefits. Or you can use the blue button to contact us about making a one-time gift.
Thank you!
*Note Sadly, because of abuse by scammers we can no longer offer a ‘click to donate’ option. However, if you contact us, we will get back to you with a simple means of giving. 

209. The Right to Become Children of God

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott –

God the Father sent Jesus to ‘redeem those who were in bondage to sin’, to buy us back from slavery. He set us free, but it does not stop there – we are adopted into His royal family, and become His heirs. In this family relationship, we find and enjoy acceptance, affection, affirmation, approval – and unlimited access to our Father, to Jesus, and to the Holy Spirit.

The right to become children of God

But to all who believed him and accepted him, he gave the right to become children of God (John 1:12).

Everyone reading this has the right to become a child of God. That is astonishing! Everything we have done in our past has been overcome because of Jesus’ death on the cross.

See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God (1 John 3:1)

We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him (1 John 4:16).

That word ‘know’ means ‘experience’. If God is love, and God is in us, then love is in us, and we can experience it for ourselves. In fact, we can live in it, every moment of every day.

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. So you have not received a spirit that makes you fearful slaves. Instead, you received God’s Spirit when he adopted you as his own children (Rom 8:14).

Therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God (Gal 4:7).

An inheritance for you

You are the son of a Father who has an inheritance for you. Not only that, but He has released that inheritance to you so that you can experience the fullness of that relationship. That relationship of intimacy in sonship is something He has always wanted and planned for each of us:

He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will (Eph 1:5).

Slaves and orphans struggle with the fear of trusting, and therefore live a life of independence. If we cannot trust anyone else, we will feel we are on their own. God does not want us to feel alone. If, because of that fear, we fail to fully grasp that we are sons, then there is no way we will act like sons either.

We may find it hard to trust because of past experience. We have all been hurt, all been damaged, all been let down by people. We may be afraid of being hurt, rejected, or disappointed.  We may suffer from fear of failure, or fear of losing control.

But losing control is the very thing we need to do. We need to surrender control to God, and trust Him to have our best interests at heart. We have to stop being independent and learn to trust Him as our Father. When we do, we embrace everything He has for us, because he will cause our destiny to be outworked in our lives.

A loving, affectionate Father

You see, the completed work of salvation does not make us slaves (servile followers of a tyrannical God). That is what religion presents, and it is the lie which leads astray so many people who would otherwise turn to God. No, this great salvation makes us sons (grateful children of a loving, affectionate Father). That is the difference between religion and relationship. Religion will always put us into bondage (the word ‘religion’ even comes from a Latin word meaning ‘bound up’), but relationship will bring us freedom.

To be liberated from slavery is wonderful. But to find that we have been adopted as a son and made a co-heir of the Father’s entire estate is absolutely astounding! If we were to fully understand what it is to have access to the wealth of our Father (and I’m really not talking about money), it would totally transform our lives. Because of our adoption, the nature of our whole relationship with God has radically changed. We are set free from that religious perception of God as a hard taskmaster just looking for every opportunity to punish us, a God we have to somehow try to appease by doing our good works (only to find that nothing we can do is ever quite good enough).

There is no punishment in store for us as His children, just love and acceptance, forgiveness, grace and mercy.

Reserved in heaven for you

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, who are protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time (1 Peter 1:3-5).

I hope we all understand by now that ‘reserved in heaven for you’ does not mean that you have to wait until you die to go and enjoy it. Jesus has opened up heaven for us and we are seated there with Him: everything there is for us to discover, and we can walk in that inheritance as sons right now. And God is looking to reveal more and more of what it means to be sons, what it means to be part of His family, what it means to have a relationship with Him.

In the past, I have ministered to people who had been adopted, and they can struggle, in a natural sense. In spite of much love from their adoptive parents, they can still have a feeling of not belonging, of not fitting in (and especially if they come from a different country, race or colour). But when we experience adoption by God it is like we have found our eternal home, as if we have come back to how things should always have been. Because that is the reality of it.

Steal and kill and destroy

But (and it is a big ‘but’)…

The thief comes only in order to steal and kill and destroy… (John 10:10a AMP).

The accuser, the father of lies, wants to remind us of our past and our history in order to rob us of our present and our future. He wants to rob us of our adoptive inheritance and destroy our relationship with God. Yet Jesus said,

I came that they may have and enjoy life, and have it in abundance (to the full, till it overflows) (John 10:10b AMP).

Who are we going to listen to? If we are smart, we will listen to Jesus and embrace the fullness of what the Father has destined and provided for us.

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SoundTrack: Identity in A (SML Music) – Engagement and meditation music composed and performed by Samuel Lane.

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208. Whose Slave Are You?

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott –

We are on a quest, and in a battle, to lay hold of and possess all that God destined for us (and destined us to be). That quest and that battle will lead us into deeper intimacy with God.

Jesus is the firstborn Son, but the Father always desired a larger family.

For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers (Rom 8:29).

It is my destiny and yours to be His son (this is not about male or female but about our relationship with our Father and our position as heir). Now, it is all very well knowing as a piece of factual information that we are sons, and even knowing in our head that God sees it that way, but the question we must ask ourselves is, do I feel, think, and act like His son? Am I experiencing that, and living it out? And if not why not? If I am not fully embracing everything God says about me and thinks about me, then I need to know what is preventing me so that I can overcome it, and enter in.

A heritage of slavery

We all started out as slaves. Mankind was in slavery because of what our ancestors, Adam and Eve, did in the Garden. Therefore we are all born into slavery, and we are all spiritual orphans, with a sense of separation from God. Adam and Eve became spiritual orphans because they chose to follow the DIY pathway of the knowledge of good and evil, rather than the pathway of the tree of life that God had designed for them. God wants us to turn away from following the pathway of the knowledge of good and evil, to come back and embrace the tree of life. Even good things, if we do not get them from God, can still lead us into slavery.

So because of Adam and Eve’s sin (that is, loss of identity), naturally speaking slavery is our heritage. It affects how we feel and think about ourselves and about God. Keep going that way and we end up with a wounded soul as a result of trying to meet our own needs in the only way we know how – from the world – and our spirit is disengaged from God and dead to Him. That is what is in our natural family line, and ‘sons of disobedience’ carry on the family tradition.

And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest (Eph 2:1-3).

People who do not know God as Father, and do not have a relationship with Him, will carry on in the pattern set up by Adam and Eve. All of us either have lived or do live like that. Yet He never intended any of us to be ‘children of wrath’, and that is why He has made a way for us to live differently.

Whose slave are you?

Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness? (Rom 6:16).

Adam and Eve chose to present themselves as slaves to sin, and the result was death, both physical and spiritual. But Jesus has given us a choice now: we can present ourselves to God.

So, whose slave are you? Who is your master?

One master brings life; the other brings death. We have a choice about who we serve, and it is a choice offered to every one of us. I choose to serve the perfect God of love rather than a fallen being who wants only to destroy me.

God so loved

This is how God made that choice possible for us:.

For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life (John 3:16).

Take out ‘the world’ and substitute ‘me’. It is too easy to read the words ‘the world’ and think it means other people, everybody else, but not ourselves. No, it means ‘God so loved me’. It means that by believing in Jesus I can enter into life rather than continuing in death.

The Amplified version says that ‘God so dearly loved and prized…’ You are a prize, to God. He deeply desires intimacy and relationship with you. As a result of that, He was willing to give His Son so that you could become His child.

Paul puts it this way:

But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved) (Eph 2:4-5).

And,

God sent him [Jesus] to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law, so that he could adopt us as his very own children (Gal 4:4).

It is by God’s grace and God’s power, through the victory of Jesus on the cross, that we were saved from the path we were going down and brought into this relationship with Him: from death to life, from slavery into freedom, from separation to intimacy.

We are royalty

God has paid the price, and bought us back so that he could adopt us as His own children, just like Jesus. Awesome! How would we feel if the Queen of England adopted us, gave us the run of the palace and access to all the people she has advising her and looking after her? If she said to us, ‘I want you to inherit all that I have’? How special would we feel? That is what the God who made the whole universe and keeps it all together has done for us!

We have been redeemed, bought back from slavery by Jesus, given a new home and a family. We are adopted as sons into the family of the King. We are royalty: princes and princesses, regardless of our history or background. What we have done, what has been done to us, none of that has any effect whatsoever on how God sees us. We look just like Jesus to Him, holy and perfect and righteous. God does not hold our past against us, unlike the devil who constantly accuses us and tries to cause us to remember our past. Since God chooses not to remember it, neither should we!

We have been born again into a new family with a new identity. We have a new heavenly home (which we can engage with now, not only when we die) and are ourselves a home of God. We have a new, heavenly citizenship, and a new (yet eternal) identity and purpose. We have come into sonship, into a relationship with our Father.

I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. After a little while the world will no longer see Me, but you will see Me; because I live, you will live also. In that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you (John 14:18-20).

…and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us (Rom 5:5).

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom 8:35-39).

So let’s fully embrace all that God has done for us in His love, so that nothing, nothing, nothing will ever remove us or separate us from the fullness of all that He has for us as His dearly loved children.

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Our Patreon patrons give a small amount each month and can join us for our monthly group Zooms, get exclusive or early access to Mike’s teaching and enjoy further patron-only benefits. Or you can use the blue button to contact us about making a one-time gift.
Thank you!
*Note Sadly, because of abuse by scammers we can no longer offer a ‘click to donate’ option. However, if you contact us, we will get back to you with a simple means of giving. 

Soundtrack: Jake Hamilton – The Anthem

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