547. How Do I Surrender to God?

Surrender, Rest, and Freedom of Relationship with God

Mike Parsons

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How do I surrender?

Well, you can set the desire of your heart and say, God, I just want to surrender. Show me how. Show me what it is I need to surrender from. It is relational, ask him. Engage him in that way. He may need to unveil things that you cannot see, and that is fine.

As a living sacrifice, I gave him permission to do whatever he needed in me, in my mind, in my inward parts, in my heart, in my everyday life. He had permission, and he used that permission to do what he needed to do in me and what I needed. It will be different for everybody.

515. From Self to Sonship | Understanding Living Sacrifice

So I think we can relax and trust him and know his unconditional love, that frees us from the need to perform, to meet a standard, to know his will and therefore try and fulfil it. It is so much more relational and relaxed than that. He is not judging you or measuring you to a particular standard of his will.

My religious upbringing told me that the will of God is one hundred percent, that we may attain to it to some degree but will always fail, and that he will judge us on it and we will one day have to face that judgment in a negative way. That is not what it is like at all. There is no measurement. There is just relationship. And he wants us to fully embrace who we are in our relationship with him and enjoy it. Joy and peace and love are really what it is all about. And that to me is rest. I am at rest. I am not striving. I am not trying to find what God’s will is because I feel I need to do it to please him or to be obedient to him.

Who we really are

All those mindsets are the things he had to deal with in me, because I wanted to obey him, because I thought that was what would please him, and therefore I would maintain the standard that was acceptable to him – while never feeling that I could ever make it, because it was impossible to be like God. Whereas we are already created in the image and likeness of God. We are already like him. He just wants us to relax and be an expression of him through who we are as individuals, who he has made us to be.

So we cannot fail.

He has not set us up to fail. He has set it up so we cannot fail. How can you fail to be you? The only way is if you do not know who you are. And that is what he wants to reveal to us: who we really are. If we do not know who we are, we are still living in lost identity. Jesus has already covered all of that. So it is a win all the way along with God.

379. Created in His Image | The Purpose of Our Existence

There is no losing with God. And we tend to think that there is, and that is what causes us to stress: I need to know his will, I need to try and do it, I am not good enough, I keep failing. And he is just saying, come and walk with me, come and enjoy fellowship with me today, let us enjoy today together. And if you are walking with me, there will be opportunities to express and outwork my heart as we together are looking to engage in a relational way with each other and with creation, and to help people also know the wonderful love of God, because he is so wonderful.

Find the joy

I understand that it is a process, and that our soul does need to find healing and wholeness through that relationship with him. But we do trust him, and we do not need to try and defend ourselves, protect ourselves, or cope with life on our own. We can truly find the joy that he wants us to experience and live in that joyful life.

It is so hard to be joyful when you have got to fulfil a whole lot of duties and obligations. Most of the time he is not really that concerned about where we are working or what we are doing. It is more a question of whether we can be ourselves in that dynamic. People have got this idea that they need to be in the right city doing the right thing, need to have the right job, need to do this and that, as if he cannot work within our choices. Most of the time he is not really that concerned about that level of detail. Some people are so bound up with detail that they are asking him what colour socks they should wear every day, as if he is bothered. He is not interested in that. He just wants whatever socks we are wearing to be comfortable, because he wants us to feel at rest. That is how it is with him.

473. Why Do We Assume? | Questioning Our Beliefs and Practices

Religion has a very different way of painting that picture, causing us to stress over getting it right, feeling like a failure all the time, and therefore having to perform some form of penance or religious duty to make amends. There is no penance with God.

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544. The Cloud of Witnesses: Alive, Active, and Cheering Us On!

Mike Parsons

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The cloud of witnesses: what do they do, what role do they have?

Part of the problem is that religious people will say, well, you cannot talk to dead people. But they are not dead to start with. They are alive in the spirit and they are in that realm. They are the church of the firstborn enrolled in heaven, as it says in Hebrews, and we can engage them. And when people say, well, that is necromancy, you are trying to speak to the dead, the answer is no: I am speaking to those who are alive, and Jesus did the same. On the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus spoke to Elijah, who never died physically, and he spoke to Moses. So Jesus validated the reality that we can engage the cloud of witnesses.

494. What Enoch Teaches Us about Readiness and Change

What role do they have? They are surrounding us. They are not visible most of the time, so they must be in the spiritual realm around us, observing, cheering us on, perhaps encouraging us to finish the race that they started. Hebrews 11 talks a lot about those who died in faith not having received the fullness of the promise, and they are part of those who are cheering us on. The illustration of a relay race works well: you pass the baton to the next generation, and then they pass it to the next runner. They have literally passed us their baton to finish the race. But they are not just sitting on a cloud somewhere playing a harp. They are active. They are the church enrolled in heaven, functioning as witnesses in that realm, and God has many things that they do.

When I first went into heaven in 2010 and 2011, I met a number of the cloud of witnesses. They came to me with a message. Jesus obviously sent them. Jacob was one of the first ones I met. He came to me, and I was there, and he spoke to me. And he was digging, which was symbolic of something he was trying to convey. I said, what are you doing? He said, I am digging a well. And I had to think: Abraham dug wells, Isaac reopened them, and what did Jacob do? Well, Jacob’s well is the well of the Samaritan woman, the well that would become that well we could drink from. So Jacob was trying to convey to me, look, this is symbolic of the life that you have received.

And then he said, go and read my story about what happened at Bethel. So I went to read it in Genesis, and it was an open heaven, angels ascending and descending, which is in John as well: none other than the house of God. And all of a sudden it was like, I am the house of God! Angels are ascending and descending, and there is an open heaven over my life.

That changed things significantly for me, into realising that this is not just a one-off event. This is a living way we should live, engaged with the angelic realm who are bringing messages from heaven, guiding us, directing us, protecting us.

But also it is more than that: heaven is open. We have access not just when we die, because we do not need to die. We have access now to dwell in that realm because we are seated with Christ in the heavenly places. Where is Christ seated? On a throne, next to the Father. And we are also seated on thrones next to the Father.

422. From Rejection to Acceptance | Understanding Your Identity in Christ

I have had a number of encounters with the cloud of witnesses. A couple of them were by my own desire. I wanted to talk to Adam. And then Esther came to me once in a meeting, and I thought, what do you want? And she said, I have come to remind you that you are called to the kingdom for a time such as this. I then thought, well, I want more than that. So I went into the cloud of witnesses, into the court of the upright, and I asked to see Esther and said, can you tell me more? And she went to her life being prepared and said, I did not want what was my destiny. I resisted it because I thought it was a bad thing for a Hebrew girl to be given to a foreign king as a concubine. She said, I was prepared, but I then recognised that God had prepared me for that to save my people. So she said, do not resist what God is doing in your life. Quite interesting.

I have had many encounters, with David and others, but also with some people who have died more recently, like Bob Jones. Bob Jones died on a Thursday. On the Sunday, I was in a meeting in worship, and Bob Jones turned up in front of me with a big scroll in his hand and said, will you receive this scroll? I said, well, what is it? He said, this is the scroll for the billionfold harvest. And I said, yes, I will receive it. But it became clear that that was about raising up a Joshua generation to be ready for the harvest that is coming, ready to disciple the harvest that is coming, pointing them into a supernatural lifestyle.

271. Being the Joshua Generation

So it was not that it was just given to me and I am this great person who has a scroll. It was a responsibility. You have been called to participate in preparing to receive a harvest. And there are a lot of people embracing that, thousands upon thousands figuratively, in that they are embracing their identity as sons of God, as part of the Joshua generation, who have a different spirit, who function in a different way, and who are called to be ready for the harvest, to receive it and help it come into an intimacy with God in sonship.

Restored Sonship | Outworking the Father’s Heart

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538. How Praying In Tongues Transformed My Spiritual Life

Mike Parsons

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Praying in Tongues: Learning to Live in Dual Realms

Praying in tongues is a very interesting thing. When I first learned to pray in tongues in the spirit, particularly when I was engaging heaven and engaging supernatural dimensions, it was very much something that was going to help me understand how to do two things at once. I didn’t quite understand why, but God then showed me later that this was going to help me understand how to live in two places at once, how to operate in the soul and the spirit at the same time, how to function connected soul and spirit. So I did a lot of practising: praying in tongues while I was speaking out loud, praying in tongues in my mind while I was reading the Bible, praying in tongues in my head, all sorts of different things. I’ve practised a lot with it.

And then, as I became more intimate with God, and got to know God, my senses were more trained to engage him, and I was having daily encounters and conversations with God all the time. I felt that the praying in tongues aspect of it was something I didn’t need to do any more for this purpose. I stopped, though not as a deliberate decision that I wasn’t going to pray in tongues any more. I might sing in the spirit at times, or do different things, but the purpose of it was no longer something I was practising with. I was able to live in this way, so it lessened in how I would pray in tongues in that particular way. There are various things that also lessened while I was doing that, in terms of the ministry style I was involved in. God really challenged me on helping people to engage God themselves, rather than prophesying over them or ministering to them in that way. So praying in tongues in that context became unnecessary.

508. God’s Desire For You | Discovering True Intimacy

But what I did find was that, as my spirit was engaging and dwelling in the realms of heaven all the time, it began to engage on its own, and I found myself praying in tongues, like when I woke up, or at a particular time, all of a sudden I would be praying in tongues. I didn’t choose to do that. It wasn’t something I thought, I’m going to pray in tongues now because this is a gift I have, I can use this gift. It didn’t happen that way. I just found myself praying in tongues. So then I would wonder, what’s going on? It felt like my spirit was communicating, “Hey, pay attention. There’s something here for you!” Maybe I’ve encountered something during the night, or whatever, now just tune into it. So I found that whenever I started praying in tongues like that, it was a signal: what’s going on, what do I need to look into, is there something I need to focus on here? I became sensitive to the fact that my spirit could be functioning and doing all sorts of things while I wasn’t consciously aware of it. And this gave me the sense that maybe I needed to engage, that my consciousness needed to be aware of this. So I would tune into it, look into it, and maybe go and engage where my spirit was. I sort of felt that was part of where I was then.

523. How We Can All Connect with God

So I think there’s definitely a decreased need to pray in the spirit in tongues when you’re engaging in the spirit, because you’re dwelling there. You’re not talking to God in another language, because you’re engaging with God face to face. I believe, as we mature and increase in our experience of God in the spirit, and dwell with him and abide with him there, there’s definitely less need to pray in tongues the way we did before. It talks about edifying your spirit, building up your spirit, and I certainly used it for that. I used it to pray all the time, in my mind or out loud. But I found my spirit had this bubbling energy within, as it got activated, that I felt all the time; it felt like my spirit was engaged. That was the sort of residue of the fact that I could live in dual realms.

276. Living In Dual Realms

I was dwelling in dual realms, so my spirit was always active, and I just felt that connection. Even though I wasn’t always conscious of it, it certainly was something I felt was very real, a sign that my spirit was active and functioning as it was intended. We live in multiple realms in that way.

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537. The Dance of Perichoresis | Embracing the Eternal Now

Mike Parsons

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The eternal now

God dwells within the eternal now, which would be outside of time and space, but not disconnected from it. I’ve found that there are ways God has drawn me into the eternal now to experience his presence in that pure essence, and I describe it as perichoresis: the circle of the dance, the conversation between Father, Son, and Spirit, where there is pure relationship, pure love, pure everything that God is that he has invited us into. We came from that place, out of his heart. He created us there within his heart, and we were not separated from his heart until he formed creation. And when he made creation, he then formed us to engage with creation, both in the spirit but also when we become living beings on earth, and therefore we can go back to the place which I call home.

536. Reframe Your Reality: The Process of Mind Renewal

You know, it’s sort of, for me, the place of pure intimacy, pure face-to-face engagement, but outside of time and space, and therefore disconnected from this realm in a way that means I’m not distracted or affected by this realm when I’m in that realm, and I can be in that realm in the purity of God. I find that it’s very difficult to engage it cognitively, in that I can’t figure it out or work it out, because it’s nonlinear and it’s not like this realm. But the relationship is there. Now, that realm relates to the created realm, and there also I can engage God in the realm of perfection in light, which is connected to this realm and that realm, and I find I engage God’s heart there for the outworking of his heart into this realm, the created realm where I can engage God face to face. In that realm, in the purity of light, but it’s connected with this realm in its governmental aspect.

I engage in the relational aspect within the purity of God in what I call the eternal now, and it is pure relational love. But I also engage God relationally in relation to his government in the realm of light and perfection. So I am face to face, heart to heart, mind to mind with him there. Jesus said he only did what he saw the Father doing. You know Jesus said, I am in the Father and the Father is in me. That is the place where I engage, where I only outwork what I feel the father’s heart is. I’m engaged relationally, but I’m also engaged governmentally.

293. Expanding God’s Government of Peace

Pure love relationship

When I engage outside of time and space within the eternal now, it is pure, intimate relationship. If God is infinite and eternal, then everything that he has created has been created within a space within him. So it isn’t separate from him, but it is in a space within him which is within him in a different way.

This is where, it’s like, God is everything in everything, and all that, we live and move and have our being in him, and he fills all in all, and there are lots of Bible verses that indicate his connection with creation. But for me, the pure essence of God, in what I call perichoresis, is what the early church fathers used for the description of the trinitarian relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit in pure love relationship, and we are invited to be in the midst of that. That’s where we were formed within the Father’s heart, and that’s where we can learn to dwell and engage. And because we are made in his image and likeness as sons, we have access there that the other angelic beings don’t.

There were various routes that I found, that God took me to that place, even though I didn’t understand it, and I couldn’t figure it out. So to start with I just had to park my intellect outside, if you like, and not try and figure it out. It was an experience, not knowledge; so it’s not knowledge as intellectual knowledge, it was experiential knowledge. I couldn’t describe it in a visual sense, because it was beyond a visual expression. I couldn’t describe it, as an image, but I can describe the intensity of the love relationship that I’m included in. And it’s the pure, absolute essence of who God is, relationally, that we all are invited to participate within, in the purity of it.

390. The Essence of Wisdom: Living in Union with the Father

And that, I think, is why we can’t try and figure it out or understand it — you just have to experience it — and it is life-changing, because what you find within that is who you are. God reveals… I mean, that really is the sort of mirror that we look into, in its purest essence, to discover who we are, free from any connection to what’s happened to us in this realm.

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531. When the Bible Becomes a Barrier

Mike Parsons

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Moving Beyond the Need for Proof

When I started this journey, everything for me had to be focused in the Bible because that was what I was brought up with in the evangelical system of thinking. And that was limiting what God was able to show me, which were things beyond the Bible. But because I needed it grounded there, that grounding then was outworked in what I knew. And so I would try to do it myself because I knew and I was confident, well, the Bible says this.

481. Beyond The Pages | Finding Truth Outside the Bible

Now, at that point, I had not gone through deconstruction, and that was still what was framing my relationship with God. But God wanted to take me beyond that, so he had to start weaning me off needing proof, biblical proof, which was where my proof came from, you know, because there were things then he started to show me. Well, if you want biblical proof about this, your understanding of the Bible needs to change because the way you see the Bible now is not going to give you the proof, which is actually the truth. Because you are framing it with a wrong expectation of me.

And I suddenly started to realise that what God was saying to me is, “You do not have to do this yourself. You just let me do it.” So presenting myself as a living sacrifice, as a priest, meant for me I was doing what I needed to do to be a good sacrifice. Whereas actually Jesus my high priest prepares me in my life. But I was doing the preparation.

Trust Jesus Rather Than Knowledge

So every day I would want to go into the tabernacle in heaven and I would want to look into the bronze laver and see a reflection. But what I was looking at was a reflection of my understanding of the Bible. I did not know at that point that Jesus was the Word of God. Of course, I knew it intellectually, but actually the Bible was the word of God. So for me, that is how it was.

403. So you think the ‘Word of God’ is the Bible? Think again!

Therefore being washed by the water of the word was not Jesus doing that. It was me, reading the Bible, who was doing it. So I was actually trying to wash myself. You know, when I was trying to renew my mind, I was using the Bible to try and renew my mind. And all of the things like “the word of God is like a sharp two-edged sword just dividing soul and spirit,” – I was trying to divide my soul and spirit using the Bible to do it.

And actually what Jesus was trying to say is “No, I am the living Word. So trust me, not in your knowledge, because your knowledge will not be enough to do it because you do not know enough, and also some of the things you think you know are not true.”

So it was quite a challenge, you know, to go through that process of him removing the evangelical framework of my thinking to trust him rather than to trust my knowledge. Ultimately that took me through a whole process where I had to accept that I was in control and I was doing it myself. And I was not trying to do a bad thing, but I was still doing it in works, and I was still doing it in the power of my soul, and I was still doing it actually because I trusted myself more than God.

489. Nine Pillars That Shaped (And Shook) My Beliefs

You know, because of the [understanding of the] nature I still had of God who was to be feared, because that was before my understanding of God was deconstructed into unconditional love. So I was still functioning in penal substitutionary atonement and all of those doctrines which were my understanding of framing the Bible. So I was framing the Bible wrongly all of that time.

Surrender, Deconstruction and Trust

So he decided to wean me off the need for biblical truth and biblical proof and show me that a lot of my understanding of what I thought was true based on the Bible was not true because it was based in a false system of belief based around a god who is not actually who God is.

So you go through seasons, and it is not always easy if we do not surrender. So what I have learned to do is just surrender and trust. If it seems to be a season of inactivity, it is okay: I trust you, and I trust you enough that if there is anything you want me to do, then you will show me. And when this season changes, then I will actually sense and feel something has shifted and now something else is happening.

But it is not an easy process when you are conditioned. And I was certainly conditioned. And I had to go through a lot of deconstruction. And I had to surrender to trust God before that deconstruction could really take place. You know, there was a degree where I had experiences that challenged some of the things I believed about God, but that was not sufficient at that point without a surrendering of my soul’s need to understand and to know and effectively to be in control.

501. Deconstructing Beliefs: A Journey to Authentic Faith

So God took me through a whole process of softening me up, preparing me, a lot of refining experiences of going into fire and going into being soaked and getting ready for the most difficult thing that ever happened when I got to the point where I had to surrender my right and need to know to just trust him. And that was such a hard thing back in 2012. But since then, my relationship with God, my understanding of who God is, my understanding of who I am has been totally transformed because I now know God at a completely different level.

So go for it, you know, go for resting. And it does not mean that you cannot say to God, okay, if you want to tell me what is going on or show me what you are doing, I am open. But that is not the driving force behind what you do when you engage God. Because there is no problem, God is quite happy for us to talk to him and ask him questions, but he is quite at liberty not to give us the answer if he does not want to. And we have to accept that there is a reason for that, whatever it might be. That is what we have to trust God in, the process.

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522. Allegory, Reality and Relationship: Finding the Balance

Mike Parsons –

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The Danger of Over-Spiritualising Everything

For me, the danger in allegorising everything in terms of the Bible is that it can make things that are actually real seem as if they are not real, and only spiritual. For instance, I have heard people like Kay Fairchild and others say, “Heaven is in you.” And in a sense, they are almost saying, “Well, there is no actual heaven. There is no actual real place that you can go to, because it is in you.”

Now, I know the kingdom of God is in us. And there is a sense where the presence of God in us is a manifestation of heaven with us, but it is not heaven. All of the heavenly realms, the spiritual realms, and the angelic do not live in me. They are a spiritual dynamic of a real place. It may not be physical as we know it, but it is no less real.

177. Heaven Around Us, Heaven Within Us

Literal Reality and Spiritual Truth

I think the danger in saying everything is just allegorical and spiritual about our lives means that we can end up saying those things are not really true, they are just ways of looking at life. So people say, “Well, we do not have to wait until we die to go to heaven.” But actually, they are not talking about heaven in the same way that I would say I can engage heaven now, as I can engage God within me now.

There is a danger in throwing out what is literal reality and spiritualising it all. People who take that view often do not believe in literal angels, or literal fallen angels, or a literal devil. They say it is just the accusations in my mind that cause me not to believe the truth. They do not see the devil as a personal being, and they do not see angels as personal beings. I think they are missing out on a lot if they make it purely a spiritual thing of ‘my relationship with God and nothing else’.

Finding Balance, Not Extremes

There is a danger if you do not get a balance in it. Often, when the pendulum swings back to where it should be, it swings too far the other way before it comes to rest in the right place. And sometimes people get caught in that swing and go too far. I do believe in a personal fallen angelic being, whatever you want to call him. I do believe in personal angels. And I do believe in a literal heavenly realm that you can encounter.

We are seated there with Christ in those heavenly realms. It is not just figurative, as in “I rule and reign with God in my life.” That is true, but there is also “on earth as it is in heaven,” which needs to be factored into the equation. There are extremes on both ends of everything. We need to be discerning, not go too far, and not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

We need to find the truth in the middle ground, and then live in the reality of that truth and experience the fullness of it.

Not “All Done” and Not “All Us”

You cannot just go from one extreme and say, “It is all done, I just have to believe it.” Most people who try that find it is not all done, and they struggle. Then they feel guilty because they think they do not have enough faith. And on the other end, “It is all about us, and we have to do everything, work out our salvation with fear and trembling.”

There are extremes on both ends.

God has done it all. We have to come into that reality.

Creation Is Waiting for Maturity

In Romans, it talks about creation longing, waiting for the sons of God to be revealed. It is not talking about us waiting to be revealed. It is talking about creation waiting for us to be mature enough that it can recognise our sonship, rather than recognising our immaturity.

Creation will be set free into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. That glory is who God says we are, in its fullness. That is what brings freedom to creation. If we are not fully embracing who we are, then creation is not fully going to be set free. It is down to us, with God, expressing oneness. We are one spirit with Him. In that union, creation can recognise our sonship in the relationship we have with our Father, not independently.

354. Heavenly Home? Revealing Our Sonship to Creation

Allegory and the Old Testament

Yes, some people say it is all allegory, and that is going too far. You can allegorise some of the Old Testament and say there is a spiritual story there that is not meant to be taken literally. But I think most of what we have in the Old Testament reflects that the people who wrote it did not really know God, and wrote from their own understanding.

The Holy Spirit can take any story and apply it to our lives and bring truth out of it. That can be true. But I do not think it is necessary if you have a relationship with the Holy Spirit, with Jesus, with the Father, where they can reveal that truth to you directly.

Relationship Over Interpretation

Why go through a mediator of a book, trying to understand God through stories? Jesus is the truth. He is the living Word of God.

There is too much focus on trying to find God in the Bible, in allegory, and in stories, when we can actually meet Him, follow Him, hear His voice, and encounter Him every day. I do not see the point of spending all that time trying to use a story to understand God. That is theology: understanding God through the Bible.

I would rather understand the Bible through God than try to understand God through the Bible. Whose version would we use? Whose allegorical interpretation?

Do We Need the Book?

I would focus on relationship.

God will reveal Himself and reveal who we are in that relationship without the need to focus on trying to understand the book, whether literal, allegorical, or anything else.

Why do we need it?

Jesus did not say we were going to have a book. He said we were going to have a relationship. A lot of time is spent trying to understand a book that we do not really need to spend. However, if people are used to the book, then you can use it as a frame of reference for them, because they do not yet have the experience.

The Missing Dimension: Experience

My perspective on people who teach like this is that they do not have a personal experience of heaven. They do not have a personal experience of engaging God on the inside. They are trying to explain relationship using the allegories of the book. I am not saying the truth they teach about grace, love, and the finished work is not true. It is wonderful. But the relationship is the relationship. The mystical dimension is missing from a lot of their experience. They have not gone to heaven. They have not had face-to-face encounters with God. They are not dwelling and abiding in that face-to-face presence.

Or if they have, they are not sharing it.

I am not saying they have not had those experiences. I do not know them well enough. But they are not sharing that relational encounter dimension. Instead, they are presenting a different belief system.

406. Recognise the Finished Work of Jesus

Belief Versus Experience

It is not about believing something differently about God. It is about experiencing it. When you experience it, you will believe it. If you are just trying to believe it, it becomes another belief system that you are trying to have faith in.

There is a danger in creating another good belief system that may be mostly true, but is not fully encountered. Experiencing the truth is very different from believing the truth. If you have experienced Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life, if you have encountered Him face to face, spoken with Him, and He has spoken with you, that is very different from believing what the Bible says He said.

Encouraging Real Encounter

I resonate with a lot of what these teachers say about the love of God, the unconditional nature of His love, and grace. But something may be missing if people are not being encouraged to have real encounters that are actually experienced, not just believed.

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510. Discovering Your Worth: The Truth of Being a Child of God

Mike Parsons –

All of us, every single person reading or listening to this now or in the future, are children of God. You are the apple of God’s eye, the treasure of His heart and the object of His desire.

For some people, that is very hard to believe. The way they have been taught through religion, family upbringing or personal experience has shaped how they think about themselves and how they think about God. Many people struggle to accept that they are loved unconditionally, or to believe that God truly thinks about them in this way.

To know the truth, we need to stop trying to set our own course. We need to stop rowing the boat, even when we have no oars and try to make something work anyway. Instead, we are invited to jump into the vast ocean of unconditional love and allow ourselves to be consumed by it. What that love consumes is everything that hinders us from discovering the truth of who God is and who we are.

So who are you?

I would encourage you to go on a journey of discovery, to discover who you truly are as you walk through the garden of your heart towards intimacy. This was the path that I took, though each of us will engage this journey in different ways.

When I first began to engage God more intimately, and in what some might describe as a more supernatural way, I also became aware of something happening within me. I discovered that I had a garden in my heart. I did not know it was there, although Scripture is full of imagery that points to this. God began to show me this garden, and that marked the beginning of a deeper relationship that led me into greater intimacy with Him.

From there, you can step onto the dance floor of discovery, enter the soaking room of transformation, and eventually engage the bridal chamber for the consummation of first love. This is where we begin to experience, in a much deeper way, a heart-to-heart, face-to-face encounter with true reality.

Restoring first love restores our true identity. It restores our origin and our sonship, both in relationship and in position. This is where first love is found, at our beginning, our true origin. From that place, we begin to recover our inheritance and our authority as sons of God and co-heirs of creation.

There is a vast realm still to be discovered concerning creation and our role within it, as God always intended. We are rediscovering this as we come to identify ourselves as sons. It is essential that we embrace this reality.

Restoring first love restores our creative power and our position within the order of Melchizedek. This order restores our identity as priests, kings, oracles and legislators. It is a governmental function that flows from relationship with God, restoring our destiny and our true creational purpose as sons.

Our sonship is meant to reflect our Father. We are not called to independence, but to reflection, to reveal the nature of our heavenly Father as His sons.

Unconditional love is meant to be experienced, not merely believed or understood intellectually. My hope is that after many sessions, people are moving beyond simply believing that God is unconditional love, and that He loves us unconditionally, into actually knowing this through personal experience.

We are invited to move beyond intellectual and theoretical knowledge into experiential truth. True knowledge is experiential. It was never meant to be information alone, but lived experience, grounded in reality. This is what we call testimony. The power of testimony is that it is something we have truly experienced.

The Holy Spirit testifies with our spirit about who we really are, enabling us to grasp this truth in a much deeper way.

Ephesians 1:4 tells us that God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him in love. This was something God initiated. He was proactive. He did not wait for us to realise that we needed restoration. From the beginning, He had already set this in motion within His heart.

The Mirror Bible expresses this by saying that God associated us in Christ before the fall of the world. Jesus is God’s mind made up about us. In His love, He always knew that He would present us again face to face with Him in blameless innocence.

This is the state to which we are being restored. It is the state of first love, where we fully embrace how God felt about us and engaged with us before we ever entered this physical realm.

God is not passive. He is active and proactive, continually reaching out to restore us to first love. He is not waiting for us to make the first move. He is already acting, already pursuing, already inviting us into this restoration.

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430. Being You | The Heart of Your Relationship With God

400. Living in Union with God: Embracing Our Original Design

336. Get out of the boat… and SINK!

122. The Power Of Testimony

504. Lucid Dreams and Divine Visions

Mike Parsons –

The difference between a lucid dream and a vision is really only that you are asleep rather than awake when you have it.

The difference between a lucid dream and a vision is really only that you are asleep rather than awake when you have it. They are basically the same thing, just in a different format, one being asleep and one being awake. If you are conscious of what is going on in the dream and you are engaging with the dream, there is no real difference to being conscious in a vision, having an encounter and engaging that vision.

Sometimes it is simply a way that God can engage with us when we are not in control of our conscious thinking, like when we are asleep. If it is a lucid dream and you are interacting with it, then is it a dream that God is giving you and you are in an encounter with God, and are the other people who come into the dream part of that encounter? Either they are visionary, in that God is showing you a person and interacting with you, or that person’s spirit is engaging in your dream.

Again, it all comes down to what God’s purpose is. Therefore you have to go back to God and ask him to show you what he was trying to communicate, what the significance was of a particular person, whether known or unknown, within your dream. Just like a lot of people have visionary experiences but do not know what they are about, they then have to go back to God and ask him.

If you are interacting with the dream and things are happening, those things can be actual things that are going on, or they could be symbolic of something that is going on. Again, you have to discern that. On many occasions where I was engaging things, visionary encounters and experiences, I was there engaging them and things were happening to me. If I was in conversation with God within that experience, then I could trust what he was saying. If God was not there and I was seeing things or doing things, then I would be more cautious in my interpretation of what was happening.

Usually I would then check out what happened with God to ensure that I was not putting my own spin on it. When I first encountered, for example, the high chancellors’ houses, and wisdom took me there and I engaged with the high chancellors and all of the houses, God was nowhere in that encounter. I believe God totally inspired that encounter and wisdom interacted with me in many different ways on God’s behalf. But I always went back and said, “Okay, I need deeper insight into this. What were you trying to show me?” I wanted to make sure that it was a pure experience, not something I was spinning through my own filters or trying to understand through my own experiences.

When God was with me, showing me something and speaking to me, I was more confident. I was sure this was God. Sometimes he told me things that were very clear. He has also told me things that were not very clear. I did not mistrust what he said, I just did not understand it at that point. That usually lodges in my heart and then works out in a future situation, where suddenly I understand what it was about. God will say something to stimulate my attention, where I think, I do not know what he is talking about, or I am not fully understanding this, and then I pursue the understanding of it.

When it comes to people, I have encountered people, or people have told me that they have encountered me in a vision or a heavenly experience. I did not remember those experiences because I was asleep at the time, usually at night, and my spirit engaged them. But when I focused on it, sometimes my spirit gave me information that affirmed that encounter. It was like my spirit said, yes, we did. Sometimes I would say, well, what did we talk about? When they described the conversation and what went on, it was very much in sync with what they said I had said. It was like, yes, that was exactly what I would have said if we had had that conversation.

There are different ways in which you experience and encounter things, and they are all good. Every time I go to sleep at night, I make my spirit available for whatever God might want me to do, outside of all the other things I am doing. It is simply saying, I am available for anything you might want me to engage with. That could include engaging other people. Often those people will gain something from the experience that they are seeking.

I cannot remember engaging a person in that type of visionary experience where I was seeking them, but I have engaged the cloud of witnesses for specific things where I felt there might be some insight. I have engaged people like Esther, David, Daniel, Jacob and Joshua at various times during my journey, and then gone back and re-engaged them at a future date to find out more. There is no real difference between a person who is alive and you engaging their spirit in a dream or a vision, and someone who is physically dead but you are still engaging their spirit and soul within a vision. Hebrews describes them as the firstborn enrolled in heaven. They are still active and we can still engage them.

One of the questions I would ask is whether I can have these experiences when I am awake and not sleeping, because then I can engage the experience more fully. I journal everything. I want a record of the things I have encountered. If you wake up having had that experience, it can be harder to journal exactly what happened in a dream or visionary setting. I have come back and written those things out, but mostly what I do is journal while I am having the experience, so that I am totally aware and completely lucid, writing down what is happening during that experience with God or any other encounter.

Occasionally I go back to an experience because I feel there may be some detail I missed. Often when I am listening and talking to God, I am not paying attention to what is going on around me unless he is pointing something out. Particularly in the early days, when all this was new, I would revisit experiences to make sure I had not missed something. As time went on, I became much more confident in my ability to discern, write down and engage.

So ask God whether you can have these experiences when you are not sleeping, and see what happens. If there is a particular person you are unsure about, ask the Father to show you what to do. Sometimes a person may appear in a dream and prompt you to pray for them, protect them, or respond in some way. Until you get into the flow of it and discover what was behind it, there can be many different specifics.

Sometimes a person may speak to you and tell you something, just as a prophet might come and prophesy. Sometimes a person can be speaking on God’s behalf. That is something I believe I have done on a number of occasions when engaging people in that realm.

Ultimately there is no right or wrong in this. It is all part of learning to discover and journey through encounters and experiences, becoming more discerning and more able to pick these things up. If we are open and we have a lucid dream experience, then it is because God wants to speak to us that way. It may be more difficult for him to speak to us while we are awake, perhaps because we are distracted. When you are asleep there is less conscious activity to interfere.

So ask him, and see if he has insight for you and a purpose for each encounter you are having. I do not see a difference between lucid dreams and visions or lucid visions. They are essentially the same sort of encounter, one when you are asleep and one when you are awake.

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499. Hook, Line and Sinker: Why Do We Believe False Prophecies?

Mike Parsons –

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Once you are susceptible to programming because of the nature of the organisations you trust – being fed by your pastor, and being fed by the apostle, or being fed by the prophet – and that they hear from God and tell you that God said this, then you are susceptible to receiving beliefs which are clearly not true. But because you trust the system you’re in, you believe them.

Hence, all sorts of conspiracies.

Hence, all these prophetic people come out with all this political stuff. It gets bought hook, line and sinker by people because they are conditioned that those people must be right because they are prophets: they must hear God.

And the reality is, we need to hear God for ourselves.

And don’t buy anything anyone else says, including me and anybody else, unless God affirms it to you.

426. The Nature of God: Rethinking Our Beliefs

231. Meet the Real God

154. Grow Your Own

480. The Heart of Evangelism | Meeting People Where They Are

Mike Parsons

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The Importance of Showing Real Interest

God loves people and takes a genuine interest in their lives. If we fail to show any interest ourselves, how will they ever believe that God is truly interested in them? Demonstrating care means asking about their situation and engaging with their story. It is not about forcing a single message upon someone, insisting that they must receive it whether they want to or not.

Instead, it is about recognising that God personally meets each person in their own circumstances. He cares, He desires to help, and He longs for them to discover who they truly are. In doing so, they can understand that God already loves them. This is a very different approach, one that treats each individual as unique rather than as a commodity, project or statistic.

Meeting People Where They Are

In the past, many forms of evangelism tended to focus on strategies and techniques. Courses often emphasised how to deliver a message and how to ensure that people listened. Yet this approach often missed the point. Evangelism should not be about ticking boxes or securing conversions. It ought to begin with real interest in people themselves—the realities of their lives and the struggles they face.

Rather than asking, “How can I insert this message into a conversation?”, we should be asking, “How can I develop a genuine relationship with this person, one that may open the door for them to encounter God for themselves?”

A Personal Approach

People need to meet God in us. They need to see and sense something of Jesus expressed through our lives. This may not always be conscious on their part, and sometimes it may not even be conscious on ours, yet God shines through us all the same. In this way, we carry His presence into every encounter.

As Scripture explains, Jesus was the clear image of the Father, revealing to those around Him what God was really like. Many have no true idea of God’s character until they encounter Christ.

Treating Individuals as Unique

In the same way, we are called to be ambassadors of reconciliation. Our role is to represent God’s heart faithfully and to help others to see that He has already done everything needed to restore their relationship with Him.

Summary: When our lives reflect His presence, others can begin to sense His love and discover for themselves the truth of who they are in Him. By treating people as individuals rather than commodities, we embody the message that God cares deeply for them. Evangelism then becomes not about delivering a formulaic message, but about relationship, love and presence.

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