Bill Johnson – Sons of Issachar

44. The Supernatural Kingdom of God

Mike Parsons–

We are continuing to look at the kingdom of God as prophesied in the book of Daniel.

How great are His signs
And how mighty are His wonders!
His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom
And His dominion is from generation to generation

(Daniel 4:3).

Supernatural

The kingdom of God is a kingdom of power and supernatural manifestations. Jesus said that His kingdom is not of this world. That is because it is heaven being manifested on the earth:

… For He is the living God and enduring forever,
And His kingdom is one which will not be destroyed,
And His dominion will be forever.
He delivers and rescues and performs signs and wonders
In heaven and on earth…
(Dan 6:26-27).

What He does in heaven, he also does on earth, including signs and wonders.

We encourage people to get hold of Bill Johnson’s books, because he talks about how heaven invades earth through God’s people. People are only going to be convinced of the truth of the gospel, as Paul tells us, not by wise and persuasive words but by demonstration of the Spirit and of power – in other words, with signs, wonders and miracles.

Greater works

Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I go to the Father (John 14:12).

I spent a whole year teaching on this verse not so long ago. It is Jesus’ mandate to us, to His disciples, to His church. It is the same mandate of kingdom authority which was originally given to Adam and Eve in the Garden, but which they lost.

That is why I am not just looking for us to get back to the level of power and authority which the disciples displayed in the book of Acts. The level of the supernatural power of God that Adam and Eve possessed was vastly superior to that. They would have been capable of supernatural manifestations way beyond anything we see in the early church. And if Jesus will remain in heaven until the restoration of all things (Acts 3:21), then we are going to see that level of power and authority restored.

Freely give

Freely you have received: freely give (Matt 10:8).

As we go out with the message of this kingdom, we are to give away what we have received. This encourages us to seek God for more manifestations of the supernatural in our own lives, because the more signs and wonders and supernatural manifestations of God’s power we have received, the more we can give away. Signs and wonders should overflow from our lives as we engage with God in the heavenly realms and live out that reality in our daily lives. One of the phrases God spoke to me while I was on the fast was about ‘living in and living out the manifest presence of God’.

The glory of God is no good to people if it is locked up inside us. It is time for us to shine. And I do believe we will literally shine, that our faces will glow with the radiance of God’s glory. It happened to Moses – it can happen again. And that will cause people to sit up and take notice.

We will find that when the shaking comes, as it will, then words will not be enough. We will need to be able to live demonstrating the truth by the manifestation of God’s kingdom. So we must get ready for that time, we must throw off all the idols, all the hurt and disappointment with which the enemy seeks to weigh us down. He is just trying to intimidate us, just trying to cause us to back off. We cannot allow that to happen.

Hungry

We need to be increasingly hungry and thirsty to pursue God. We need to get everything going, everything God has for us. When prayer and impartation are being offered, I always encourage people to come forward for everything. In a sense it doesn’t matter what it is! For myself, I always try to find a way I can fit into the category of people who are being called forward. I want more; I want everything there is which will empower me, prepare me and equip me to be manifested as a son of God, as a joint heir with Christ.

We need to grasp the reality of this: sons of God, joint heirs with Christ:that is what we are (Rom 8:14-17).

Superheroes

Let’s be willing to be superheroes. Some of you know how much I love science fiction. Some of the super-powers that those characters have on films and in TV series, I believe we will literally be like that. People will see the power coming from our fingers. We will be able to move instantly from one place to another. In the Spirit. And yes, we will shine. People will either run from us or fall on their faces asking, ‘what must we do to be saved?‘

Honestly, I believe that is what it will be like when we are truly ‘living in and living out’ the supernatural kingdom of God.

Soundtrack: Jesus Culture – We Are Hungry via YouTube

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40. Challenging the Sacred Cows

Mike Parsons –

I pointed out last time that there are widespread demonic doctrines entrenched in the church, which attempt to place the kingdom of God and the authority of that kingdom in another time, or give them to another people.

Old Covenant

The enemy will always try to take us back to an Old Covenant system. The Old Covenant system was one country, one city, one temple. That is where God was, He wasn’t manifest anywhere else, whereas in the New Covenant God is everywhere. He is in His people; we are the temple and we don’t need another temple. But to try to rob the church of power and authority, the enemy has tried to make the church equal a building, a temple somewhere. That is not what the church is. It is a people called out by God, in relationship with Him and with one another in the kingdom of God.

Again, the enemy will always try to bring us back to an Old Covenant system where there is a priest, rather than all of us being priests, all of us having access to God. God does not want us to have any mediator other than Jesus; He is the only one we need. Yes, there are people with different gifts and calls within the church, but every one of us has the capacity to hear God for ourselves. Leadership in the church does not need to hear God for you. You need to hear God for yourself, otherwise all you are doing is obeying somebody else.

Destiny

God wants to inspire and touch each of our hearts, and release everyone into their personal destiny. Every person reading this has a destiny in God to fulfil, but the enemy has tried to rob us of that destiny by all sorts of methods and means. So God is saying, ‘Rise up, fulfil your destiny.’

Now there are a whole herd of sacred cows in the church that we are going to have to challenge. I am only doing this because God told me to challenge them. Left to myself, I really didn’t want to do it. But as I have mentioned before, I went to a conference with Bill Johnson and Jill Austin, and I shook for a whole day until I stopped resisting what God was telling me to do. God was wanting to put a sword in my hand, and I knew what that would mean. But if persecution comes because of it then we need to be prepared and we need to have the answers. We need to know what God is saying, we need to know where we fit into that, what God is calling us to. We need to know what we believe and why we believe it.

Kingdom dominion

We have to prepare for kingdom dominion. Kingdom dominion is what God’s intention was from the beginning. ‘Now it will come about in the last days that the mountain of the house of the Lord will be established as the chief of the mountains and will be raised above the hills, and all nations will stream to it (Is 2:2). This is one of the key scriptures to understand, and this truth runs right throughout the bible, yet the enemy tries to put it off so that we think it is not for us.

We are going to see that it is indeed for us. This scripture is talking about the kingdom of God operating through the church. It will be chief of all the mountains, and mountains speak of authority. Authority will operate through the church; I am not talking about political authority, but about spiritual authority in the earth. We are to have spiritual dominion over all the works of the enemy, which will bring the blessing of God to the earth. That is what Adam and Eve were called to do.

Centre of the world stage

All the systems of the world culture will fail – they are only ‘hills’, you notice – they will come to nothing, and in the shaking of the world’s systems we will need to be ready to be raised up. I am sure that shaking will be beyond anything we can imagine right now, and in the midst of that, the church must be ready to rise up to provide the answers that all those worldly systems were unable to provide.

We need medical answers, financial answers, spiritual answers, governmental answers, societal answers; we need demonstrations of wisdom and knowledge and authority and power. Ryan Wyatt says (quoting Bobby Conner, I think), ‘The church is going to be taken out of the corner of the field and placed right in the center of the world stage’. When the medical systems fail people are going to be desperate for healing. Who is going to be able to heal? We are. We can lay hands on the sick and see them recover. When the financial systems start to fall, folk are going to be drawn to a people who are flourishing and being blessed. Again, that will be us, because we have supernatural provision and supernatural transfer of wealth to us.

We need to be ready to receive all these things and operate in them, because we are blessed to be a blessing and to bring heaven to earth.

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18. Experiencing Intimate Knowledge of God

Mike Parsons –

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

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

Call to intimacy

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

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

Open the door

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.