Category: Kingdom Realms

104. Questions of Destiny

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott –

God is doing something really exciting in the earth today: He is giving us revelation of how to step into the heavenly realms. He is showing us how we can choose to turn into the Kingdom of Light rather than into the kingdom which is in darkness. He is encouraging us to engage with what we find in that Kingdom – His presence, His power, all the resources of heaven – and to manifest those things here on the earth. That was always His intention:

Your kingdom come
Your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.

There are a number of keys to doing this effectively:

• Know God intimately
• Know our identity as kings & priests
• Live according to kingdom principles
• Rule over own sphere of authority (our house)
• Take charge over the courts for our own life
• Be transformed into a son from glory to glory
• Be manifested as sons on the earth (fulfil our destiny).

We saw last time how familiar spirits can seek to rob us of our destiny. If you read CS Lewis’ Screwtape Letters you will quickly grasp how demons scheme and operate to wreck our lives. But we are going to war against familiar spirits. We will rise up and deal with them, so that all of us can come into our destiny.

Destiny

Destiny is something which really stirs me, because God has given me a mandate to call forth other people’s destinies. Each of us has a scroll of destiny which mandates us to rule in our own lives. Each of our destinies is unique. For each of us, there are certain words – or sights or sounds, or even smells or sensations or experiences – which will stir us, and resonate in our spirit, because they are tied up with our destiny.

When I first got baptised in the Holy Spirit, God dropped a word in my heart. That word was ‘revival’. At that point, I didn’t even really know what it meant, but it resonated with me. It just stayed in my heart. And since then, words like ‘restoration’, ‘renewal’ or ‘reformation’ have had the same kind of effect: they vibrate somewhere deep down within me and cause me to start to stir. And there will be things which will start to stir you too. That is because they line up with what God has written about you in your scroll.

For each of us there will be at least seven spheres of dominion, or thrones, to rule in our own lives, but beyond that, we may be called to further degrees of authority. All of us need to see where our thrones are, what we are called to do, and deal with whatever is stopping us fulfilling our calling.

Prophetic acts

Over recent years, there have been a number of prophetic acts which I have felt to carry out with individuals or groups of people when ministering to them, acts which call forth their destiny and their place of authority.

I have placed crowns of destiny on people’s heads; I have used our rainbow banner as a cloak for people, symbolising a mantle, placing anointing of authority on them. I have given people sceptres of authority – that is how God identified those who would become part of our leadership team, though I did not know that at the time. In my office, on the wall, I have a big sword that God told me to get. Often I have used that sword to call people into what God intends them to do, and when Lindy Strong was here in 2014 she again did something similar, inviting people to take up the sword and speaking prophetically over them. I have given people other specific weapons and objects that God is giving them too, such as axes, maces, orbs and so on.

These are more than just symbolic of what is going on in the spiritual realm. We do things not symbolically, but prophetically. We have held or waved flags of particular colours or combinations or in particular ways. We have marched around our building and around our footprint as God has directed. These prophetic acts actually achieve something in the spiritual realm, they open up things in the heavenly realms for us. When we are obedient in carrying out a prophetic act, that act joins with something in heaven and causes something to open up here on earth.

We have to be obedient, because we often have no idea what doors they are going to open up. These are not things I would be naturally inclined to do, if you know my past, but I know they are effective when God leads me to do them, so I need to be obedient. The same is true for all of us.

‘Who am I?’

Some of the questions people ask when we start to talk about destiny are: ‘Who am I?’, ‘Where do I come from?’. They are good questions. I need to understand where I come from so that I can understand why I am here today. That will lead on to where I am going tomorrow. This is how our destiny gets outworked, one day at a time: yesterday, today, tomorrow.

We need to understand the nature of our creator, and our creation. ‘Who created me?’, ‘Why and how did He create me?’. All these questions will help us understand our destiny.

God is eternal. It may seem really obvious to say it, but it is important to grasp this. He has always been, He is, and He will always be (Rev 1:8). He is almighty, that is ‘all-mighty’. He is light (1 John 1:5). He is love (1 John 4:16). He is spirit (John 4:24).

If we meditate on these scriptures, and others like them, we will begin to understand who God is. And if we know Him, if we have that intimate relationship with Him, it will help us understand who we are.

‘I knew you’

Here is a key verse about who we are.

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, And before you were born I consecrated you; I have appointed you a prophet to the nations.” (Jer 1:5).

God is speaking here to Jeremiah, but He is also speaking to each of us. He knew me, and He knew you, before He formed you in the womb. Knowing, again, is a really intimate encounter. This was not some vague thought that God had. Therefore you existed even before you were in the womb, since God knew you then. And since intimacy is two-way, actually, you knew Him too.

He consecrated you. He set you apart. He had a purpose for your life that He knew, and that you knew, before you were actually formed. It is part of your very being. He has appointed each of us to a particular role, task, or position. For Jeremiah that was as a prophet to the nations. What has He appointed you for? What has He called you to do? Who has He called you to be?

The good news is, you can know. God knew, before you were even a physical being, and He wants you to know.

You can ask Him, and He will reveal it to you.

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103. Familiar Spirits: Throne-takers and Destiny-destroyers

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott –

In this series of blog posts we have seen how we need to enter into the realms of heaven and bring authority from that realm back into this one.

We need to know God intimately, and we need to know who we are. We cannot hope to rule unless we have a really close relationship with God. As His sons, His children, we can know our authority which comes from that place of intimacy.

We need to know our identity as kings and priests.

We need to live according to kingdom principles.

We need to rule in our own sphere, over our own house. We need to have authority in our own life, and it will overflow around us. That is our destiny. We are created, not to be failures or losers, but to succeed. When we rule as God intends, it will change our lives. Each of us can have charge of the courts in heaven which issue decrees over our own life. That is where God will deal with the accusations of Satan against us, in that realm. And in that realm we can receive court papers which enable us to rule and fulfil our destiny.

Sons of Light

God wants to display us as His sons on the earth: sons of light. Each of us can be transformed into a son, from glory to glory.

Before we were born again as Christians, we were human beings. Adam did not start out as a human being, you might be surprised to learn. He did not look like us when he was created. The glory, the light that was on him, was on the outside of his body. He did not have skin or blood as we do. God created him a ‘living being’, because the breath of God was breathed into him. But when he sinned and fell, he became a human being.

If he had not sinned but had followed God, he would have become a son of God, a godlike being, a being of light. God wants us all to be beings of light. He wants us all to be demonstrated and manifested as His sons on the earth. We can be transformed – the same word that is translated ‘transfigured’, by the way – we can shine, we can do the things that Jesus did, and greater things. We can rule, and bring this earth back into what was God’s intention before Adam fell.

Scroll Of Destiny

Each of us has a scroll of destiny. On that scroll God has written everything that we are to do in our life, everything that God has called us to. It was agreed and mandated before the foundation of the world.

Each of us has at least seven spheres of dominion and authority: seven thrones to rule on in our own life. Family, workplace, marketplace, school, college, street, neighbourhood, government: all kinds of places where we may be called to rule. For some of us, it is in our gift area: prophetic or evangelistic or administration and so on. For others it is in the church, where we are to rule in leadership, or one of the five-fold ministries, or youth or children’s ministries. Some are called into the education system, or the financial or government systems, where they are to demonstrate God’s kingdom.

There are many other areas where God might call us to dominion, and we need to know for ourselves where we are called. God’s call confers authority upon us to bring change and see things come into line with His purposes. Every one of us can transform the world in which we live; but only if we receive our authority in the heavenly realms and learn to exercise it here on the earth.

Most people have not seen that scroll. We can see it, we can read it, we can ask God to show it to us. It is on the inside of us, and He really wants us to know what is written on it because He wants us to fulfil it. Our scroll is unique, because God created each of us a unique person, with a destiny to fulfil. Let’s get hold of it. Let’s not be robbed of it.

What could rob us of it?

Familiar spirits

Some of you will have heard Ian Clayton speak about familiar spirits, and he has a really powerful teaching about them. I tell you now, we are going to war against familiar spirits, because familiar spirits are robbing God’s people of their identity, robbing them of their destiny to rule.

For I have heard many whispering and defaming, [There is] terror on every side! Denounce him! Let us denounce him! Say all my familiars, they who watch for my fall, Perhaps he will be persuaded and deceived (Jeremiah 20:10).

This is exactly what familiar spirits do. They can be on the inside or the outside of you: little voices whispering, defaming you, telling you that you are useless, bringing doubt and confusion. They tell you that you cannot be successful. They tell you that you are a failure. They tell you that you are going to stay in fear for the rest of your life. They tell you that you are no good. They lie.

Most of us will have at least half a dozen familiar spirits who speak to us regularly, unless we have dealt with them. We need to deal with them, because they are robbing us. They are the little things that you cannot seem to get over, but you need to. God is giving authority and mandating authority for us to deal with them. And we are going to war against them.

Throne-takers, Blessing-blockers, Rest-robbers, Destiny-destroyers

They are throne-takers. They deny your authority, they tell you that you are unworthy to rule.

They are blessing blockers. They cut you off from the blessing of God, from His empowerment in your life, and tell you that you will not succeed.

They are rest robbers. They stop you from enjoying the rest of God by getting you to strive and struggle in your own strength, whereas Jesus said “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt 11:28).

They are destiny destroyers. They know that if you fulfil your destiny, their days are numbered. You will destroy them, together with their masters, and their masters too.

So we need to deal with these.

Fear

This is a big one for many. All our lives we are subject to the fear of death, as it says in Hebrews 2:15.

Rejection

Since Adam and Eve hid from God in the Garden, we are all born with that misplaced sense of separation which they have passed on to every one of us. No wonder we feel rejected – and the world just piles it on. Is there anyone who has not experienced rejection in some form in their life?

Pride

Pride will stop you from acknowledging who you are as a child of God. Pride is not only thinking you are something better than you are, it is about disagreeing with who God says you are. It is about agreeing with the enemy, who says you are useless, that you will never amount to anything.

Low self-esteem, worth, value

This will keep you from the success God intends for you. It will keep you down, make you believe you are worthless.

Insecurity

This will make you blind to who you really are: a child of the king, and heir to all that He has for you.

Doubt, unbelief

If you don’t believe it, you can never have it. Familiar spirits want to keep you in that place where you are no danger to them, where every word that comes out of your mouth builds a world of uncertainty and delusion around you.

Anxiety, worry

Those are just another manifestation of fear. They will seek to take your eyes off your destiny and fasten them onto short term difficulties in order to keep you from being effective.

Strongholds, mindsets, belief systems

These are more subtle, but if we allow God to reveal them, we will see how they have robbed us and caused us to miss what is going on right before our eyes.

God wants to deal with these things in your life. He wants you to receive a crown of royal identity. He wants you to receive your destiny. The trophy room of Satan is filled with those crowns, and it is filled with destinies of people who have missed theirs. We are going to go and get them back. Everything that belongs to us, everything that belongs to our family line that has been robbed in past generations, God is going to restore them to us. We are going to get things back we didn’t even know we had lost.

Rise up!

This is the day when all the mantles Satan has stolen are coming back to God’s people.

I want to see you go there and get it all back, because you need everything that has been stolen from you. You need to rise up in your spirit, and start moving. You need to rise up and get hold of your authority. You cannot read this and say, ‘well, that’s very interesting’, then carry on exactly as before and expect it to just happen. If you stay with this blog, you will not be able to do that; because we will be constantly stirring you up to pursue these things. God wants you to get militant about this, to get serious and not to allow yourself to become passive. It is the violent who take the kingdom, by force (Matt 11:12).

What do you want? To be under the enemy’s feet, or have him under your feet? Then you need to enter into the realms of heaven and take up your authority to rule in your life. You need to stop listening to the rubbish that is being whispered into your head. Listen instead to what God says to you, that you have authority to succeed because He has destined you for success.

Let’s pray together.

Father, I pray
with the power and the authority that you have mandated to me.

I exercise that authority
and I challenge the familiar spirits
that are operating in the lives of those praying with me.
I declare that you familiar spirits will not whisper,
defame and denounce the people of God,
but that you will come under their feet
and you will be crushed
and sent back where you belong.

Father, I declare in the name of Jesus
a revelation of sonship and authority and power
on these Your people today.

And I pray that you release their crowns of royal identity.
Cause them to rise up
to take hold of their destiny
and pursue it until it is fulfilled

Right now I declare the destiny of God
released over Your people
for them to get hold of in the heavenly realms.

In Jesus’ name.

Amen

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102. Investiture, Succession, Enthronement, Coronation.

Mike Parsons
and Jeremy Westcott – 

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light (1 Pet 2:9).

We are royal, and we are a priesthood.

What kings do is rule. And as priests, as we saw last time, we have access to stand in the courts of heaven.

“The kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force” (Matt 11:12). This does not happen easily. God commanded Adam to subdue the earth and rule (Gen 1:28). You do not just rule, without going through a battle; you do not subdue unless there is something to be subdued; you do not have dominion unless there is something to have dominion over. In our own lives we all have plenty that needs subduing and dealing with.

We must be militant about this. We cannot sit back and be passive, then expect to enter into rulership. Coming into our identity, coming into our destiny: those things happen when we pursue them, grasp hold of them, and fight for them. Paul said “I take hold of that for which Christ has taken hold of me” (Phil 3:12). The kingdom suffers under forceful ones, and forceful ones occupy by force. There are opposing forces in the heavenly realms whose aim it is to stop us ruling, and we have to deal with them.

It must have been in late 2008 or early 2009 that God gave me four words. I understood them (up to a point) but I did not immediately understand all the implications of them. Those words were:

  • Investiture
  • Succession
  • Enthronement
  • Coronation

Investiture

God wants to invest us with authority. I still remember King Charles III’s investiture as Prince of Wales in Caernarfon Castle in 1969. In the UK, being Prince of Wales goes along with being heir to the throne.

Succession

But you also have to come into your authority. Prince Charles did not succeed to the throne and become King while Queen Elizabeth II was still alive and reigning. He did not succeed until she died. In the same way, we will not succeed until some things die. Some of those things will be in our lives, but some of them will be in the heavenly realms. We need to see those things defeated so that we can come into that succession.

Enthronement

And succession is not enough. We are called to occupy thrones, as we have seen. Put simply, thrones are where we rule from. If we leave those thrones unoccupied, there will be no government in those areas. Or, worse still, the thrones will be usurped by others who do want to rule, but draw their authority from the kingdom in darkness.

Coronation

Ultimately, God will display our rulership on the earth. The sons of God will be manifest. The kingdom will be on earth as it is in heaven. Heavenly authority is higher than earthly authority. That is why we need to rule in the heavens. It supercedes all the authority that operates here. The laws of the spiritual kingdom are higher than (and have precedence over) the  laws of the natural kingdom.

Heaven to earth

The traditional (Greek) view of the heavens goes something like this:

We live in the first heaven. The Bible tells us that Paul visited the third heaven, the realm where God is (2Cor 12:2). In between there must obviously be a second heaven – so says Greek, linear thinking – and that is where Satan and his angels and demons operate. The enemy has used this broken imagery to his advantage: if we are in the first heaven and God is in the third, then we have to go through that second heaven to get to God. And it is full of darkness. That whole pattern of thinking has stopped us from even thinking we could possibly access the heavenly realms.

Some people have tried to do it. They have attempted to go through the second heaven, but have usually been beaten up because they were coming against a higher level of authority with only their earthly authority.

The reality is different. The heavens are not linear, and we do not need to go through anything to get there. Here again is my representation of what the heavenly realms are really like. If this is the first time you have seen it, you might find it helpful to go back through the past few blog posts and read more about it:

Realms Of Heaven 20130809

As we saw before, we can choose to turn into the kingdom of light, or into the kingdom that is in darkness. This earthly realm is connected to a spiritual realm which is where God created it from. In fact it is only the word of God that holds this realm together.

He is inviting us to go into the heavenly realms so that we can bring higher authority from those realms into this one. When we do, then nothing here or in the atmosphere of the earth will be able to stand against us.

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101. Filthy Garments and Festal Robes

Mike Parsons
and Jeremy Westcott –

The kingdom of God is all around us. Not separate, not a long way away. So close that we can turn and look into it.

So, too, is the kingdom that is in darkness.

Which will we draw from?

Depending on where we look, that is where we will draw our resources from. Our spirit has access to the kingdom which is in light. God wants us to access all that He has for us in that kingdom and to draw all our power and authority from it every day, so that we can live abundantly.

If we do not, we will inevitably draw our resources from the other kingdom. The soul and the flesh will look to meet their own needs in their own way, and will look to obtain their resources from the kingdom that is in darkness.

Every time we try to do something in our own strength, according to our soul power, it will ultimately prove unsuccessful. We have to get over the fact that we can do nothing in our own strength. So we can turn and engage the kingdom of light or we can turn into the kingdom in darkness. It is a choice we all have, but co-operating with God is much more productive than resisting Him.

God’s desire was for Adam and Eve to be successful in carrying out His plan for them and for the earth. So He made available to them everything they needed to fill the earth and subdue it. They chose to look for resources elsewhere, and failed to fulfil their destiny.

“The Lord rebuke you, Satan”

We have looked briefly before at Zechariah 3, and it is a really important chapter in understanding this:

Then he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him. The Lord said to Satan, “The Lord rebuke you, Satan! Indeed, the Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is this not a brand plucked from the fire?” Now Joshua was clothed with filthy garments and standing before the angel. He spoke and said to those who were standing before him, saying, “Remove the filthy garments from him.” Again he said to him, “See, I have taken your iniquity away from you and will clothe you with festal robes.” Then I said, “Let them put a clean turban on his head.” So they put a clean turban on his head and clothed him with garments, while the angel of the Lord was standing by (Zech 3:1-7).

This scene is set, not on the earth, but in the heavenly realms. Joshua was a man, a priest just as we are, and he had access to the presence of God. But Satan was there to accuse him. So we understand that we are looking at a courtroom in heaven, because courtrooms are where accusations are made and verdicts delivered.

It is God, not Joshua, who deals with Satan here.The Lord said to Satan, “The Lord rebuke you, Satan!”. So if there are accusations against us it is God who will deal with them.

Filthy garments

Notice that Joshua was ‘clothed with filthy garments’. Surely you cannot come into the presence of God wearing filthy garments? Actually that is exactly what you must do: He spoke and said to those who were standing before him, saying, “Remove the filthy garments from him.” Again he said to him, “See, I have taken your iniquity away from you and will clothe you with festal robes.”

God does the cleansing and cleaning up. We do not have to try to make ourselves clean in our own strength, by our own effort and initiative. That is just what Adam did when he messed up. He hid from God in the bushes and tried to cover himself with leaves. It does not work, and it is not our place to clean ourselves up. There is no need to feel guilty or condemned, or try to make amends for our sin in our own strength.

We just have to come into the presence of God, and He takes all the filthy garments off us and gives us a new robe.

Run to Him, not from Him

Now this all sounds very familiar, I know. But what we have maybe not realised before now is where this takes place. It takes place in the realms of heaven. That is why it is so important for us to access the heavenly realms: we can get clean every time we go in there, and when we are clean, we are confident to exercise the authority that God has given us and see the enemy defeated. If we feel guilty and condemned because of the accusations brought against us, then we lose our confidence, and are unlikely to overcome. So when we mess up – and we all do – we can step into the place of God’s presence. We can run to Him, not from Him.

He will deal with the accusations against us. He rebukes Satan. He does so because the blood of Jesus is constantly before Him as a testimony of what Jesus did on the cross:

God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them (2 Corinthians 5:19).

From God’s perspective, there is no sin outstanding against any of us. Jesus completely undid the consequence of Adam’s sin which produced spiritual death in us.

For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 6:23).

For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive (1 Cor 15:22).

Just as we all inherited that spiritual death and blindness from Adam, so we all share in the victory of the cross and resurrection life. When we take the bread and the wine in communion we are partaking of the life of God, His very essence, His DNA, and we are transformed. The blood of Jesus cleanses us from all our sin and all our iniquity is done away with.

One of the enemy’s favourite tactics is to make us believe that we cannot come to God because we have sinned, whereas in fact it is the very thing that we need to do, and as quickly as we possibly can, to benefit from God’s forgiveness and receive His cleansing.

If you confess your sin, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9).  ‘Faithful’ means that He will always do it. He will ‘clothe [us] with festal robes’ (Zech 3:4).

 Free access to stand 

We will never enjoy our free access to the realms of heaven if we think we have to be worthy. The enemy will always tell us we are unworthy. That is how he operates. We need to know the truth, because then we find the promise:

And the angel of the Lord admonished Joshua, saying, “Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘If you will walk in My ways and if you will perform My service, then you will also govern My house and also have charge of My courts, and I will grant you free access among these who are standing here” (Zech 3:6).

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100. The Door of Heaven Stands Open

Mike Parsons
and Jeremy Westcott

We looked in the last post at Jacob’s dream of a ladder set on earth and reaching into heaven. Now, let’s see how this worked out in the life of Jesus.

And He said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see the heavens opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man” (John 1:51).

This is what happened in Jesus’ ministry, and it is why He was able to do what He did. We are also to do what He did, and greater things (John 14:12). If Jesus needed the heavens open and angels ascending and descending, then God does not expect us to make do with less.

Jesus lived in dual realms

“No one has ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven, that is, the Son of Man who is in heaven” (John 3:13).

Jesus says that He is in heaven, although He is also at that moment speaking to Nicodemus on the earth. He was there then; He is there now. We too can be living in that realm of heaven and also living on the earth. We too can live in dual realms of authority, outworking heaven on the earth, here and now.

“If anyone serves Me, he must follow Me; and where I am, there My servant will be also; if anyone serves Me, the Father will honour him” (John 12:26).

If Jesus is in the heavens, we can be in the heavens; and that is where we occupy thrones and mountains. It is where our authority comes from to rule in this earthly realm.

“In that day you will know that I am in my Father. You are in Me, and I am in You” (John 14:20). That is the relationship that makes us the house of God: “We will come and make our home (our dwelling-place) with him” (v23 Amp).

A habitation of God

The kingdom of God is within us (Luke 17:21). We are a habitation of God – a place where He lives, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We are connected to God, and a gate of God’s glory.

The key to understanding this is for each of us to know that we are a dwelling place of God here on earth and that the door of heaven stands open for us to access the heavenly realms. We can experience that place and bring the authority of those heavenly realms back from there to here. Then it can be ‘on earth, as it is in heaven’. We have to manifest the kingdom of God, just as Jesus did.

Continual revival

For some time now here at Freedom we have been experiencing an everlasting door which is open. One door which is open over us here as a church, and it is manifesting as the glory of God. Sometimes in our worship and in what we do with the flags and streamers and rhythm and dance there are flashes, glimpses of the glory of God coming down through those realms. We have become a landing strip for angels. And that is with one door, not even fully open, over one local church. Imagine how it would be if all seven were fully open! It would be like heaven on earth.

God’s church around the world needs to have all those doors open; to have continual revival, which will not stop. We need to see unrestricted manifestations of the glory of God for healing and health, for deliverance and freedom, for mandating us to come into the fullness of our destiny. To get to that point, everyone is needed. None of us can do it on our own; and we cannot do it with just a handful of people: the whole church needs to be involved in these things. God is calling all of us to do the works that Jesus did. Every single one of us has been called and mandated with an authority to bring heaven to earth.

God is calling you

Let us put it plainly: God is calling you to take your realm of authority in your life on the inside and in the heavenly realms, and to start occupying God’s kingdom and bringing it here on earth as it is in heaven. Are you up for that?

Do not think, ‘Oh, that kind of thing is not for me; I never get anything like that’. Start operating with God, in the garden that you have on the inside. A door will begin to open up for you into the heavenly realms: step in and you will start to experience more and more.

It is God’s intention to do this with you. It is for every single person reading this: that is why we began writing this blog back in 2011, trusting that God would help you find it. And part of the reason God is raising us up as a resource centre is that we are called to support you and encourage you and help you as you find your way in these things. Time is speeding up, there is an acceleration happening. When God suddenly comes and starts doing something different, what used to take years can take months, weeks, or even days.

Will you run with Him?

Let’s pray.

Father we pray for all the frazzled minds that are out there.
By Your Spirit, from their spirit, bring revelation knowledge of the truth
Of each person’s identity,
As a lord, as a king and as a son of God.
The full realm of authority that each person has,
To manifest the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven
Through their lives
To do the works of Jesus here on earth.

We thank You and praise You, Lord God,
For all that You are doing in these days
For the exciting times we are living in
Times when Your kingdom is going to come and manifest
On earth as it is in heaven.

We pray that You would call and choose and invest
Each of the people reading this
With the authority they have in that realm to occupy those thrones.
That they will be enthroned and begin to rule
And to manifest Your kingdom through their lives.

Let the spirit of wisdom and revelation and the knowledge of God
Open the eyes of our hearts that we can start to see
And experience the fullness of our inheritance
On earth, and in the heavens.

Dreams, visions, revelations: we pray that they will be released
Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty:
Freedom to come into the revelation of God
That we can step into Your kingdom
And step out of your kingdom by faith every second of every day.

Stir us and draw us to that place
Where we can fully be the manifest sons of God on the earth.
Holy Spirit, we pray You would do that in our lives.
Draw us into intimacy, remove the stumbling blocks
And let us be lifted up as the gates of heaven.

Amen.

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Image attribution: Detail from Jacob’s Dream by William Blake (c. 1805, British Museum) – William Blake Archive, Public Domain,
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99. Everlasting Doors

Mike Parsons
and Jeremy Westcott – 

Between the heavens and the earth are the everlasting doors. These are the portals that were open when Adam was first created, so that he could manifest God’s glory. The earth still retains the residual memory of when they were open – the grid pattern of ley lines whose power is recognised by New Age people and those who practise the occult. But it is only a memory – they have now been guarded and mostly blocked by territorial spirits in the atmosphere of the earth. We find them in Psalm 24, (and we often sing a song based on this passage):

Lift up your heads, O you gates!
And be lifted up, you everlasting doors!
And the King of glory shall come in.

Who is this King of glory?
The LORD strong and mighty, The LORD mighty in battle.

Lift up your heads, O you gates!
Even lift them up, you everlasting doors!
And the King of glory shall come in.

Who is this King of glory?
The LORD of hosts, He is the King of glory.
(Ps24:7-10).

The glory of God

‘The King of Glory shall come in’. The King of Glory will come through those doors from the heavenly realms into this realm, bringing with Him the glory of God. This still happens from time to time, and we call it revival, transformation, awakenings. These are all manifestations of the power of God and the presence of God through the angelic which come through those doors.

We are the gates

Who is the King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle. Things begin to happen as soon as we start lifting up our heads, as gates. We understand that each of us is a gate for the presence of God to come through, a gateway between heaven and earth.

By now we know to think Hebrew not Greek, function not form. Your head is the place of government, authority and rule. The function of the head is to rule, and to lift it up is to rule at a higher level. Once we start to lift up our government to a higher level, then the lifting up of the everlasting doors starts to take place and the glory of God begins to manifest.

God stands in the gateway

As often in the psalms, the phrases are repeated, but with subtle changes. Next time around, in verse 9, we notice that it says, ‘even lift them up, you everlasting doors’. Once you have been lifted up to a realm in the heavenlies, once the gateway is open, God comes and stands in the gateway. I’ll show you that from scripture in a moment. When God comes and stands in the everlasting door, that whole realm lifts up the gate to a higher level.  It is the fact that God is standing there in the doorway that enables things to go to an even higher level of authority in the Kingdom of God.

Lord of the Angel Armies

Who is the King of Glory? The Lord of hosts. Now we have a name. Before, we had what He did, but now we have His Name. Do we understand the Name of the Lord of Hosts? It means ‘Lord of the Angel Armies’. Once we start accessing the courts in the heavenly realms, the Lord of the Angel Armies is actually releasing the angelic to operate amongst us. Some of us know this by experience. In fact, more and more of us are starting to see angels, and experience the reality of angelic activity, and recognise what is going on in these realms. He is the King of Glory, and the King of Glory is going to manifest Himself through the angelic in these days.

Jacob’s dream

Where in scripture do I see God standing in the gateway? Genesis 28:12-15 talks about Jacob.

He had a dream, and behold, a ladder was set on the earth with its top reaching to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And behold, the LORD stood above it and said, “I am the LORD, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac… Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go”.

I met Jacob in the heavenly realms – he was the first of the ‘cloud of witnesses’ that I met, one of the men in white linen who are there to help us from past generations. He spoke to me about this passage and told me to study it and to understand how this works. So I have been looking at his experience and his life (and talking to him about it).

That ladder was set here, on the earth, not in heaven. Its top reached into heaven, which means we have access here to reach into heaven. The angels are mentioned first as ‘ascending’, so they were already here. They were going up, and they were coming back down bringing the kingdom and the revelation of the glory of God back down with them. And here is where we see God in the gateway: “the LORD stood above it” (v13) – He was standing at the top of the ladder. He promised to be with Jacob and keep him – the King of Glory starting to manifest His presence.

Bethel, the house of God

He was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven” (Gen 28:17).

Each of us as an individual is now the house of God, because God dwells in us. We are also a gate of heaven, and we need to be lifted up as a gate into the heavenly realms to manifest the glory of God

Then God said to Jacob, “Arise, go up to Bethel and live there, and make an altar there to God”. So Jacob said “Put away the idols which are among you, and purify yourselves and change your garments” (Gen 35:1-2),

Jacob had called this place Bethel, meaning ‘house of God’, and God told him to go and live there. We have to go and live in the place where we are the house of God and where we are a manifestation of the gate of heaven. “Make an altar there”, a place of sacrifice. “Put away the idols which are among you, and purify yourselves and change your garments” – that is a description of what is going on with us right now in God’s Prophetic Timetable.

There is sacrifice, a purifying, a removing of idols, and a change of garments taking place. And no, it is not necessarily a painless process.

SoundTrack

Jeremy Riddle (Bethel Music) – We Will Dance (For Your Glory) via YouTube

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Image attribution: Detail from Jacob’s Dream by William Blake (c. 1805, British Museum) – William Blake Archive, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1869973


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98. Seven Mountains, Seven Thrones

Mike Parsons 
and Jeremy Westcott – 

Heavenly Realms.eng

The diagram above is a representation of the realms of heaven we have been exploring.

You may have heard people talk about the first, second and third heavens. In the past, that may have helped us to get some understanding of where we were, and how we could interact with heaven, but it was very basic, and in fact it was very flawed. With our Greek (rather than Hebrew) understanding, we assumed that we had to go through the second heaven to get to the third, and that is not the case at all. Instead of layers, we now think realms, or dimensions. We have spoken before about seven realms, three into the earth, the atmosphere of the earth, and three into the heavens.

Seven realms

Looking at the diagram above, we live our physical lives here in the Kingdom of Earth, where we can experience God’s Presence. We are also aware of the atmosphere of the earth – remember that Satan was called ‘the prince of the power of the air’. There are actually three spheres within the atmosphere of the earth: rulers, powers and principalities. These were created by God, but are currently occupied by the forces of evil. Up to now they have been reasonably successful in blocking the flow of God’s glory from coming to us through the Everlasting Doors (we will consider these Everlasting Doors in the next post).

Moving into the heavenly realms, we see the Kingdom of God, the place of God’s government. Fallen angels and the demonic still have access there, but they do not have access to the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom of God is where the court is in which Satan accuses the brethren. But the devil and his angels have no access beyond this, to the Kingdom of Heaven, or to Heaven God’s abode – though we do; it is where we are seated with Christ in authority. And beyond that, there are other realms as you see.

Under the earth there are also three realms. These were all created by God, but are now occupied by fallen angels:  Sheol is the place of the dead; Tartarus is where the ‘angels who did not keep their proper place’ are chained up; and Satan’s Lair. There are other places down here as well, including Satan’s trophy room that we have written about before.

God’s intention is that we take back all the realms currently occupied by the enemy. But it is not for us to engage fallen angels – there are twice as many angels on God’s side who will do that for us if we learn how to interact with them. Our role is to take up our mantles and operate in the authority that God has called us to exercise.

Seven mountains, seven thrones

In the heavenly places there are mountains, and thrones on those mountains. That is to say, there are places of authority, and seats of rulership. Associated with those mountains and thrones are scrolls: decrees, mandates, and resources we can draw upon. Freedom Church has seven mountains and seven thrones. They were not unoccupied – giants were sitting on them, and they have had to be unseated. In fact every church has mountains and thrones of its own which relate to God’s purpose and calling for that particular body of believers, so every church needs its giant-killers.

And we all as individuals have seven thrones, which we need to go and occupy. Family, marketplace, gifts, ministry, calling, and so on – there are many different thrones we might have, and we only find out through revelation, from God showing us. Remember, if we are not sitting on them, something else is, and it will need to be battled with and dethroned. Killing a giant is not difficult, but it takes spiritual effort:  we are going to need to build up our spiritual muscles. If the throne is rightfully yours, you can dethrone the giant and occupy it. But you have to have the authority to rule there – you can’t just go and take someone else’s mountain and throne for them.

I know this may all seem a bit ‘out there’, a bit Lord of the Rings, but actually Tolkein understood some of these things. Giants, dragons – you have to chop off their heads, rip open their bellies, and recover their spoil.

A different kind of authority

With all this talk about rule and authority, please understand we are not being arrogant. In the kingdom, the last will be first and the first last. The ruler will be the servant of all. We are not rulers to lord it over people. It is a different kind of authority. We are there to support people, serve them, help them discover their gifting and their own God-given mandates, to bring others where we are and beyond. That is how it is with the Joshua Generation.

Heaven to earth

The plain truth is that if we are to bring heaven to earth, as we have said before, we need to access heaven. That is how Jesus did it. He brought heaven to earth in the form of miracles, deliverance, healing, salvation, transformation, signs and wonders – and He did so by operating in dual realms (look at the present tense of the verb ‘is’, in John 3:13).

There are higher levels of mountains within the Kingdom of God, and dragons occupy those thrones. I have been there, fought dragons, but I can’t do it all myself. No-one can. As yet I have only seen a handful of others there, but it is time for us all to step up and begin to occupy the places of authority God has given us.

There are yet higher mountains and higher thrones in the realm of the Kingdom of Heaven (a yet greater degree of authority and  rule).

The mountains actually represent our governmental positions of authority, we are mountains. When we occupy the top mountain, our governmental position,  we can rule all the other mountains from there.

It is time for us all to act as the lords, and kings, and sons we are called to be.

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97. Image-Bearers of the Heavenly

Mike Parsons
and Jeremy Westcott –

Purifying, refining fire

For some time now, the church has been at that point in God’s Prophetic Timetable which is characterised by the coming of fire, refining and purifying; the gathering and removing of stumbling blocks from the church and from our lives. It is not an easy time. Those stumbling blocks can be idols, they can be other things – and even people – that are hindering the flow of God’s kingdom. The gathering angels are here, to see if we are willing to open up our hearts and allow them to be removed from our lives. We can co-operate, or not: but it will be less painful if we do.

Raising up of a Joshua Generation

This time is also characterised by the raising up of a Joshua Generation, a people of a different spirit, a generation of people who will inherit the land and bring another generation in with them. Joshua and Caleb brought a whole new generation into a physical, geographical land, and also into a new spiritual land. We have spent some time looking at 40 Characteristics of the Joshua Generation on this blog, and it is important for us to know if we are called to be part of that generation.

That is where we are now. But we know that what God is calling us to do is to move forward. Refining, purifying, coming into the furnace of God’s Presence: that is all preparation for moving on with God.

Refiner’s fire

“And the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to His temple; and the messenger of the covenant .. behold, He is coming,” says the LORD of hosts. But who can endure the day of His coming? And who can stand when He appears? For He is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap. He will sit as a smelter and purifier of silver, and He will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, so that they may present to the LORD offerings in righteousness (Mal 3:1-3).

God wants to prepare us, that we may be the offering of the Lord. A refiner’s fire gets pretty hot: the melting point of gold is around 1064°C (1945°F). As the heat is maintained, the impurities come to the surface and can be scooped off. If you are experiencing this, you will know exactly what we are talking about – when something comes to the surface in your life, you have a choice: you can allow God to remove it, or you can just push it all back under again. The trouble is, until you allow God to remove it, it will just keep on coming back to the surface. And the very worst thing you can do, if you want to fulfil your destiny in God, is get out of the fire.

When gold is really pure, the surface is like a mirror. It gives an absolutely perfect reflection. And God wants us to reflect Him, so that others see Him in us. But during that process we need to know that God is with us in it.

We open our door to Him, He opens His door to us

“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).

In other words, He is offering us an intimate relationship with Him in which He will reveal Himself to us and we will be close to Him. And a few verses later:

After these things I looked, and behold, a door standing open in heaven, He said, “Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after these things.”  Immediately I was in the Spirit; and behold, a throne was standing in heaven, and One sitting on the throne (Rev 4:1).

As we surrender our lives to God; as we open up our lives to the lordship of Jesus (and submit to the process of refining), He opens up the door into the heavenly realms for us to engage and ‘Come up here’. Some people have been translated physically, I know, but for most of us it will be a spiritual experience, and that is what we have been looking at on this blog in recent posts.

With practice we can learn to turn into that realm of heaven, because it is ‘at hand’ – or as close to us as if we put our hand in front of our face. We step in, and we step out of the heavenly realms. When we step back out, we bring with us what is there and manifest it here. That is what we understand by Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven (Matt 6:10). Jesus Himself brought the kingdom, and the will of God, as it is in heaven, to the earth – and He intends his disciples to do the same. If we are to bring heaven to earth, we have to access heaven – and the door is open.

Bear the image of the heavenly

As is the earthy, so also are those who are earthy; and as is the heavenly, so also are those who are heavenly. Just as we have borne the image of the earthy, we will also bear the image of the heavenly (1 Cor 15:48-49).

Just as we were born in an earthly body, now we have been born again and our spirit is now active and alive to God. So we will now bear the image of the heavenly. We need to be bearing the image of the things that are going on in the heavenlies, and outworking them here on the earth. God is opening up the door for us to engage with the heavenly realms, so that we can both see and reflect what is going on.

Through the church… in the heavenly places

…and to bring to light what is the administration of the mystery which for ages has been hidden in God who created all things; so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places. This was in accordance with the eternal purpose which He carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord (Eph 3:9-11).

There is so much more to God than we can even imagine. He is infinite and eternal. And there is so much that He is revealing today which has not been revealed before. He is opening the realms of heaven so that His people can see. That manifold, multi-faceted, wisdom of God is to be made known through the church – through us – to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places.

That kingdom which is in darkness – it, too, is that close to us. We are not to draw from it, but we are to manifest the manifold wisdom and authority of God to its rulers and authorities in heavenly places. This was always His intention:

This was in accordance with the eternal purpose which He carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord (v11).

Adam was to have enjoyed free access to the heavenly realms, but he chose a different path. In Christ, that access is now restored to us.

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96. Surrender and Rule

 

Mike Parsons 
and Jeremy Westcott –

Surrender

When we open the door of our heart, when we open that First Love gate and let Jesus come in, He comes in and He rules. We can rule here in this realm on our own mountain, in our own house, but we rule through surrender. We give Him rulership of our life. Now as we are renewed in our mind, and as He begins to transform us, as our emotions and our soul get restored, He gives back more and more rulership to us, so that our spirit starts to rule in us as a joint heir with Him.

Initially he comes and rules: we hand our lives over to Him. But as He starts to equip us, He gives us more and more authority to rule with Him as a son of our Father. In the early days He can’t trust us with it all because we wouldn’t know how to handle it. It would be like giving a child a machine gun. But as time goes on, the more we allow God to transform us into His image, the more authority we start to come into. The more we allow God to deal with what is in our hearts and see that worked out in our lives, the more He begins to bring us into the delegated authority associated with our destiny, so that we rule with Him in that place.

What is our destiny?

We really need to find out what is on our scroll of destiny. We can get a sense of what is on it by looking at what we are consistently drawn towards. But as we get to know God intimately, we can talk to Him about it and ask Him to show it to us. I have mentioned this before, and I will go into it some more on another occasion.

For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren (Rom 8:29).

This is ordained for us, our destiny has been put in place: we are called to be conformed to the image of Jesus. To be like Him. There are not supposed to be just one or two people ruling in the heavenly places: Jesus is to be the firstborn among many brethren. We are all supposed to rule as joint heirs with Christ. We need to take up our authority.

Rule as a lord…

So we become a lord when we dispossess the giants and rule on the mountain thrones in the ‘kingdom of God’ heavenly realm. That is where we are ruling the house. That is our house, our level of authority; our mountain, our throne. That is all to do with our destiny and our mandate. We can even become a lord of lords as we disciple and raise up other lords. We give away what we have received. We raise up others and bring them into their destinies as well.

…a king…

Then we become a king, when we dispossess the dragon and we rule on that mountain throne in the ‘kingdom of heaven’ heavenly realm. We start to administer righteousness and justice from the heavenly courts.

When we start operating in the courts, we will find them to be awesome places of authority. There is a whole court system, with higher and lower courts, and I have been to many of them myself. There are divorce courts where we are able to legally separate ourselves from things in our past. There are courts of accusation where Satan accuses the brethren, and we have to go and deal with those accusations over ourselves (how we deal with accusations against us, by the way, is to agree with them, accept the judgment of God, and go free because Jesus has already paid for us). Some of those reading this are called to be intercessors: they are called to go to the courts and deal with accusations on behalf of other places, people or regions.

We can become a king of kings as we disciple and raise up other kings. Everything is about reproducing in others what God produces in us. Everything God is and has in heaven, He wants to be reproduced on earth. That is why Jesus had disciples around Him.

…a son

As we are diligent to rule as lords and kings, God will bring us into our place as sons. Then we rule on a mountain on a throne in the heavenly realm of ‘Heaven’. And God manifests us as sons of light on the earth (as it is in heaven). As in heaven, so on earth: the application of that here is that only as we rule in the heavens first can we then outwork that rule on the earth. We cannot expect to do it the other way round.

We will live as manifest sons of God, restoring the earth to its original purpose – the original purpose even in the first creation – to bring us into fullness of sonship.

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By Yelkrokoyade (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

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95. Manifestation of the Sons of God

Mike Parsons
and Jeremy Westcott

Heavenly places

In this series of posts we are considering the heavenly places. We have seen that there are indeed different places or realms in the heavens, and that we can access them even while we are living on the earth, just as Jesus did.

And angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode, He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day (Jude v6).

This is talking about the fallen watcher angels who left their proper place, and came to the earth to produce the Nephilim. Those 200 watcher angels are now bound, in a place called Tartarus. I have seen them there, and they are bound because of what they did.

In quoting Bible verses, what I am trying to show you is that all these different places in the heavenlies have a scriptural background. Sometimes you have to look closely at familiar scriptures to see that maybe they have more to say than we have seen before. So we saw last time that there is a trophy room of Satan which we can plunder, and here there is a domain where angels are bound.

Seven

Now, seven is an important number in scripture. There were seven days of creation, there are seven systems of government. Seven is always the perfect number, the number of completion, the number of God. We have seen that there are seven realms, three into the heavens, three into the earth, and the seventh is the atmosphere of the earth in which there are principalities, powers and rulers.

But the very first realm of government for us has to be in our own life. To rule there we must bring spirit, soul and body back into proper order. We are a house of the Lord, and we rule with Him from a place of our spirit, not our soul, not our body, bringing it back into wholeness and completeness. That is why we need to access our own garden, soaking room, bridal chamber and the dance floor – the four chambers of our heart – to actually deal with things in our own life. There are areas of government: in us, and through us, and in the heavenly realms.

King of kings and Lord of lords

He who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords (1 Tim 6:15).

These will wage war against the Lamb, and the Lamb will overcome them, because He is Lord of lords and King of kings, and those who are with Him are the called and chosen and faithful (Rev 17:14).

Jesus is described as the King of kings and Lord of lords in these two passages. So there are kings of whom He is King, and lords of whom He is Lord. The second passage tells us that those who are with Him are called, chosen and faithful. We are the called, we are the chosen, we are the faithful: we are the kings, and we are the lords.

We need to take our place as lords and kings who rule in the heavenly realm. The warfare is still going on, but we are followers of Jesus, and we will triumph over the works of the enemy and come into victory and dominion.

God’s people have never accessed the heavenly realms properly, or consistently, and so the enemy has had free rein to do what he likes. We are now starting to do so, and the enemy is losing ground as God causes us to overcome and take back dominion.

Rule as Lords

So the heavenly realm called ‘the kingdom of God’ is where lords rule. But in order to rule, we have to dispossess the giants because they occupy the place of our authority. So we have to do just as Caleb did when he went into the Promised Land, into the hill country that was to be his possession, and drove out the sons of Anak. We have to do as David did to Goliath – after he hit him in the head with a stone from his sling, he cut his head off (and that is what caused the enemy army to turn and flee – there was no doubt that their champion had been defeated).

This all sounds a bit gory, I know, but we have to cut their heads off, and we have to split them open so that all the stuff inside them spills out, everything they have robbed from us and that they have consumed. Then we can take it and eat it and place it within us. It was always intended for us, and we are going to need it if we are going to start occupying a place of authority and power.

It is not difficult for us to kill a giant once we know who we are, when we know what authority we have, what belongs to us, and what mandates we hold. We need to know what we are called to, and then we can fulfil that calling. Confident in our identity as sons of God, and knowing what is on the scroll that is written about us, we can enter into our destiny. We cannot take someone else’s scroll, or operate on someone else’s mandate, or take someone else’s throne – it doesn’t belong to us. We need to lay hold of what is our own destiny in God, and then we can go for it.

Rule as Kings

The ‘kingdom of heaven’ heavenly realm is where kings rule, and that is also where the dragons are. They operate in a higher level of authority, and they have more stuff in them. Again, in the realm of the spirit we can go and kill dragons, split open their belly and recover everything that should be ours. I have done that, and so have others here at Freedom. The first time, even though it didn’t seem to take long, afterwards I was really tired! So I knew that I had to get stronger, to build up some more spiritual muscle, and more stamina.

Stand as Sons

And then there is the heavenly realm called simply ‘heaven’, where sons rule. We have thrones there, and it is where we are seated with Christ. When we begin to occupy that place, God starts to cause us to be manifest as sons on the earth – and I’m really looking forward to that. That’s when we start getting transfigured, when we start demonstrating the manifest presence of God in our lives. That’s when things get really exciting.

Most of what is in these realms is to do with manifesting the authority of the kingdom. There isn’t much on our scrolls that is to do with casting out demons, healing the sick, or even doing all kinds of miracles. That is just basic stuff really, that any Christian ought to be able to do. Our scrolls are mandating each of us to do particular things in the realms of heaven, they confer on us particular responsibility for the administration of the realms of heaven.

In the future, we are going to rule galaxies: that is our destiny. If you read in the book of Daniel, you can see how it refers to different levels of heavenly authority. In the same way, when Jesus talked about good and faithful servants who will rule over ten cities, He was talking about much wider dimensions than what we might previously have understood by ‘cities’. Every galaxy has a black hole in it that is just waiting for the manifestation of the light of the sons of God to go and occupy it.

Joshua generation, this is what we are called to: to walk in the way of the Lord, to perform His service, to govern His house, to take charge of the courts, and to start acting as – and standing in the place of – sons (Zech 3:6-7).

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