Tag: choices

140. Pray Without Ceasing

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

All the flow of the life of God comes through us from the inside out. The choice is ours whether we surrender, and allow it to flow, or not.

Last time we looked at various prayers and declarations (you can read them by clicking here). I want to encourage you to use those declarations to unblock your conscience, reason, imagination, mind, and all the other gates; use them every day.

Spirit, soul and body

In this series on Preparing For Destiny, we are looking mainly at two areas: how to build up the spirit and how to restore and refine the soul. In today’s post we are looking mostly at building the spirit, but we need to have both things going on at the same time. It is no good trying to deal with the soul if the spirit is not strong enough to assume its rightful place. It is no good having a strong spirit if our soul is still battling to remain in control. We need to deal with both aspects together, so that we become spirit, soul and body (not body, soul and spirit).

If our spirit is really weak because it has never really been used, then it is going to find it difficult to rule. And if our soul is really strong because it has become accustomed to being in charge, it needs to submit. We have to learn how to build up our spirit and how to have our soul restored and refined so that everything is in its proper order in us.

When God created Adam, originally his spirit was in charge. His soul was not connected to the outside world but through his spirit and his relationship with God. He had no self-awareness apart from awareness of God, and God’s Spirit. God wants to restore us to that condition.

We looked before at a list of some things we can do to begin to build our spirit.

First of all we saw that we need to give God first place, first love, first priority.

Praying in tongues

The second area to focus on is praying and singing in tongues. This was probably the most important breakthrough for me in training my senses to engage the heavenly realms: learning to pray in tongues without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17).

People have taught it as if that verse just means we should pray regularly. That is not what it says. It says, ‘Pray without ceasing’. That means all the time. 24 hours a day, our soul can be directed by our spirit because our spirit is connected with God and praying without ceasing, and receiving a constant flow of revelation as it does so.

We begin by praying in tongues on the outside. We pray out loud in tongues, and we begin to train our spirit by praying in tongues and getting connected with God. And we can also pray in tongues on the inside. Most of us find it easy enough to pray inwardly in tongues when we are quiet and not doing anything else.

But we can train our spirit to pray in tongues on the inside whilst doing something else on the outside, and also to be praying in tongues on the outside whilst meditating on God’s word on the inside. It takes practice to do those things, and we have to take the time to do spiritual exercises so that we learn.

Two exercises

We can try two exercises now.

We begin by praying on the inside, silently, in tongues for a minute or so.

Then, as we begin to flow in that and our spirit engages (and without stopping praying in tongues on the inside), we read aloud Psalm 23:

The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside quiet waters.
He restores my soul;
He guides me in the paths of righteousness
For His name’s sake.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I fear no evil, for You are with me;
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
You have anointed my head with oil;
My cup overflows.
Surely goodness and lovingkindness will follow me all the days of my life,
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

It seems strange at first, but with practice it becomes easier!

Now we are going to pray in tongues on the outside, whilst meditating on this same scripture on the inside.

We begin again by praying in tongues, but this time out loud, for one minute.

Then, as we begin to flow in that once more and our spirit engages (and without stopping praying in tongues on the outside), we begin to meditate on the first verse of the psalm:

The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not want

We read it over slowly several times, a word at a time, on the inside, and allow God to speak to us about what we are reading, all the while continuing to pray in tongues out loud.

If this is new to us, we can feel that it is a stretch for our spirit, just like physical exercise is for our body if we are not used to it. But if we do this for a few minutes every day, then with practice and perseverance our spirit will grow stronger. And I now realise that the payoff for this is even more far-reaching than I understood when I first began doing it: we are rewiring our minds for living in dual realms of heaven and earth, aware of both at the same time, just as Jesus did.

The Night Watch

We are told to meditate on what God says day and night (Joshua 1:8, Psalm 1:2). How can you meditate when you are asleep? You can train your spirit to be awake, while your body is asleep. It is called the ‘night watch’ in the Psalms. We can be awake in our spirit and engaging with God even as our body sleeps. Then we need to have our soul be awake too, so that we can remember all the things we are engaged with, and all the revelation we receive.

Training, practice, discipline, exercise

When I was on the 40-day fast a few years ago, God told me that He wanted me to start each day by praying out loud in tongues for an hour. And as I was doing that, my spirit began to get really stirred so that I started to learn how to pray on the tongues on the inside. So now I can be praying in tongues while I am speaking to someone, or listening to them, so that I am receiving a flow of revelation.

Pursue love, yet desire earnestly spiritual gifts (1 Corinthians 14:1).

That means we need to desire them eagerly. They have to be really important to us. If building our spirit is not important to us, our spirit will remain as it was: weak and ineffective, subject to the whims of our soul.

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As we have said before, if you want a strong physical body; if you want to be in good shape with plenty of muscle, you have to get regular exercise. You cannot do it any other way. Maybe you have seen those advertisements for devices you can strap on while watching the TV and they promise you will get a six-pack? Save your money. They don’t work. You have to train your physical body, and it is the same with your spirit. If we want a spirit that is like Jesus’ spirit, able to do all the things that He was able to do here on earth, we need to train our spirit, and go to spiritual gym. Praying and singing in tongues, and using other spiritual gifts, is spiritual gym. It builds our spirit up. The more we use our muscles, the stronger they become.

Paul writes, Now I wish that you all spoke in tongues (1 Cor 14:5) and, I thank God, I speak in tongues more than you all (1 Cor 14:18). The spiritual language that we have might be a language of men, it might be a language of angels; but it is a language we are given to communicate with God.

Building, edifying, strengthening

One who speaks in a tongue edifies himself (1 Cor 14:4): he builds himself up, strengthens himself. If I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful (1 Cor 14:14). That is exactly how it is supposed to be with praying in tongues. We have to put our conscious mind in its rightful place, which is in subjection to our spirit. And sometimes we might wonder ‘what am I praying when I am praying in tongues?’ Actually we are not supposed to know, in our head, in our conscious mind. Our spirit will know, and we may get to know consciously if a flow of thought comes spontaneously to our mind from our spirit. But not the other way around.

But you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit… (Jude 1:20).

So praying in the Holy Spirit, when our spirit and the Spirit of God are joined together as we pray in tongues, builds us up in our faith and it strengthens our spirit. And we need a strong spirit that is able to rule, able to be in charge.

So I pray in tongues while meditating, while reading the Bible, while doing everything I can possibly do. I pray in tongues while I am ministering to people, so that I get a flow of revelation. I pray in tongues when I am seeking God for revelation and direction. Because it is a flow of the thoughts of God that flow from the spirit. Praying in tongues keeps me connected to God who is on the inside of me.

He knows everything, so if I need to know something, where is that going to come from? It is going to come from the revelation that flows from His boundless knowledge. He is all-powerful, so I can be connected to His power, so that His power can flow through me to change things around me. He is also omnipresent, and since I am in Him, I can see things outside of my physical domain. I can see things in other parts of the world (or cosmos), I can see things that are going on in the heavenly realms. I can do that because He is everywhere. He is in all things, past, present and future, and I can be connected to Him. But I have to be flowing, and my spirit (rather than my soul) has to be strong, in charge, and ruling.

Rivers of living water

Tongues keeps the flow of the life of God coming.The more I pray in tongues, the more the Spirit is filling me, moving me, leading me. The rivers of living water flow from within me (as Jesus promised in John 7:38), because my spirit is open and allowing the Spirit of God to flow out through my life to touch people around me.

This is just how it happened for Jesus. We are here, as Christians, to be ‘little Christs’. That is what the word means. Anointed ones, just as He was anointed: we are anointed by the Holy Spirit to fulfil the purposes of God.

You will be like a well-watered garden,
like an ever-flowing spring.
(Isa 58:11 NLT).

The flow of life comes from within our spirit out through our lives. We need to build our spirit up. I would encourage you, pray in tongues as much as you can. Even if you are doing something else, because you do not need to engage the left side of your brain to pray in tongues. It is a right-brained activity. That is the same area of our brain where visions can be projected, from the inside out, from our spirit onto the screen of our imagination. Then we can see them, see the things of God, and have visitations with Him.

Praying in tongues is absolutely key to developing all of this. We need to practise it.

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136. Gateways of the Soul

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

We have looked at the gates of our spirit, through which we want God to flow from the inside out. Now we are turning to our soul gates.

Soul gates

Our soul gates are: conscience, reason, imagination, mind, emotions, choice and will.

Conscience

Our conscience is the ears of our heart. It is our protector and our director, our guard, and our guide. Our conscience will keep us from wrong and direct us to good. Sadly, our conscience can be dulled or seared by repeated exposure to sin (Titus 1:15). We need  our conscience cleansed, clear and sharp.

Reason

It is not that we reason and try to work it out with intellect: this is about being able to translate and interpret what God says to us, whether in scripture or other ways God uses to communicate with us.

Imagination

The eyes of our heart. It is absolutely key that we develop our imagination.

Our western culture and education system have trained us to neither use nor value our imagination. But our imagination was given to us by God so that we could see what He is doing; so that we could see visions, see dreams, see the heavenly realms, on the screen of our imagination. We need to learn how to use it again and train it so that it grows and develops.

Mind

Our mind, conscious and subconscious, is where the storage programs are. Here we find our memories, the things God has said to us, and belief systems. It is like the hard drive of a computer. Everything is stored there. The subconscious mind, our heart, sits somewhere between our spirit and our conscious mind. Memories, beliefs, values, lies, truths, mindsets. Jesus called this ‘soil’ and it can have all kinds of seeds sown into it.

Our subconscious mind is affected by our DNA nature, from our parents, that sets up defence mechanisms and coping mechanisms. Our patterns of behaviour come from what we believe. Nurture has an effect too: we have had a whole lot of experiences of life during our upbringing and education which train us to operate in certain ways. Trauma too, the things that happen to us and cause us to make vows and decisions based on our experience. All those things also get connected with familiar spirits assigned to our life. They know us, and they lie to us, in order to get us to operate from a false belief system.

All those things on the inside of us manifest on the outside in the way we think. So things like our reactions, our attitudes, our responses, fear, worry: all come from the inside and manifest in our mind.

When revelation comes, from scripture, from heavenly or earthly experiences, from the Holy Spirit, things can start to change. Then we have an opportunity of surrendering to Him, and He can deal with familiar spirits who lie to us. Our behaviour patterns start to come from the revelation of the truthof what God says (or from Jesus, who is Himself the Truth), especially about who we are. Our mindsets are based on the truth of who God says we are. Our attitudes, suggestions, the ideas that flow from our spirit into our minds are flowing from the inside out.

But if we do not deal with all those things on the inside we will continually have triggers which set us off thinking in a particular way, and that is where the conflict takes place. We have to be willing to allow God to transform us from the inside out.

Emotions

Our soul has emotions, where our responses and our feelings are, where we are moved, where we get those gut feelings. Emotions affect our esteem, our worth, whether we feel love, security, acceptance and value.

We have all had unmet needs. Maybe as a child, or in relationships, we did not receive all we should have received in the way of love, security, acceptance, encouragement and so on. Then we end up with low self-esteem, or disappointment in our life. Those can result in our feeling insecure, rejected, being dependent on other people, or in co-dependent relationships.

We try to get our needs met in these ways because we have not been in right relationship with God, and He is the only one who can properly meet those needs. We have looked to the world, and been hurt. We experience guilt and shame, and carry lots of unhealed hurts where people have let us down, and caused pain in our life. Since we have not learned to forgive and release them, this has set up anger, resentment, and bitterness, which are all emotional things.

Now those emotions can completely rule our lives – if we let them. We have to deal with them. They affect what goes on in our conscious mind and then they trigger responses all the time. Our behaviour does not just happen. Our behaviour derives from the things which are on the inside of us and God wants us to operate in forgiveness, and to be  restored, changed and renewed so that the strongholds and all the hurt and pain in there get dealt with.

Will

We also have a will. If we sin, through stubbornness or rebellion, our will is damaged and effectively becomes a barrier to what God wants to do. That sets up such things as unbelief, indecision, control, doubt and fear. As we deal with them, God wants to replace them with humility, confidence, boldness, courage, persistence, determination, perseverance, self-control (which is a fruit of the Spirit). All those things can happen if we allow God from the inside out to transform our life.

It is really important for us to understand what is going on inside us and how we operate. Some of us have been taught to peel back the layers to expose what is going on deeper down; that is OK as long as we don’t try to change ourselves from the outside in, because  if we approach it from that direction it is a battle we will ultimately lose.

If we focus on the problem, the problem gets bigger. If we focus on the solution, the problem gets smaller. In Jesus, nothing is impossible. Nothing will prevent God from doing what He needs to do, if we surrender to Him.

Choice

The final gate is choice. In the end, it all comes down to one question. Once we have cleared out everything which would lead us away from surrendering to God and allowing our spirit to rule, we still have to make a conscious, daily choice. What will we choose to do?

Let us press in, and get to the place where all these gates are flowing with the life of God and transformed. At the moment most of them are not like that. We cannot change ourselves. We have to invite God to come into those gates and transform us.

It would be really dangerous if the glory of God started manifesting through us, through an unholy life; dangerous both for us and for the people around us. He will not allow His presence to be manifested out of us until there is a holy life for it to flow through.

But He does want to manifest His presence through us.

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134. Gateways of the Spirit

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott

This diagram is based on one shared with us at Freedom by Ian Clayton (sonofthunder.org)

“He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ‘From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water'” (John 7:38).

God has come to dwell in our innermost being. Now we want to allow Him to flow through us and out from us, transforming both ourselves and the world around us. As we open the gate of first love, we begin to allow Him to flood into our whole being.

And that is where some find the first blockage. As we have looked at our gate of first love, some of us have seen it blocked, closed, locked, even chained. But that is a projection of our soul. Even if our own experience of first love has caused us to put up barriers to intimacy (and I have written before about my own), we also have the ability to take them down again. We can clear it, unlock it, unchain it, open it. The enemy has no access here in our spirit. Jesus is knocking. Let’s let Him into our lives.

As we open that door of first love, the river flows out into our spirit. We surrender to the presence of God on the inside. In our spirit, there are different senses, or different actions of the spirit: we need to let the glory of God flow through these and activate them. It is the Holy Spirit coming through those gates, through those doorways in our spirit, coming out into our soul.

Fear of God, reverence, prayer, hope, faith, revelation, intuition, worship. And there is one more, our heavenly gate if you like, our access to heaven, which is back through that gate of first love into the heavenly realms, following the river of life back to its source.

The first few are to do with fellowship. The presence of God in us. Learning to identify and know God by experience of who He is, so we learn to fellowship and trust him in that place. And the others are to do with revelatory things, where God reveals Himself through us, where we see aspects of His kingdom, where we hear His voice, where we get to know what He is doing, and where He gives us visions and dreams and revelations of what He wants to do. Without the first, the second does not really function.

Fear of God

We need to understand that within us there is the all-seeing, all-knowing, omnipresent God. That is an awesome thing. God who has created the universe, and everything in it, has chosen to come and dwell within us. We become a habitation of God. We have to prepare that place for Him to dwell. The all-consuming fire of God is on the inside of us.

Fear of God is not the same as being afraid of Him. If I know God’s love, I will not be afraid of Him. But this is an awesome thing, to have Him dwell within us, and He wants us to know the awesomeness of His presence.

Reverence

Honouring and respecting God. We will do nothing that will bring His Name into disrepute or dishonour. We will seek to bring honour to Him.

Prayer

That is not getting on our knees, putting our hands together, and finishing it off with ‘Amen’. It is about two-way communication, where the Spirit of God, where the mind of Christ, where the heart of the Father, are flowing through us in relationship. That is why praying in tongues is so important: it is our spirit praying and communicating with God. And we can do that without ceasing, if we train it to continue even when our conscious mind is elsewhere.

Hope

That sense where visions and dreams and opportunities are flowing, where God shows us His will.

Faith

Harmony, concord, understanding, knowing: where we come together in agreement with God. We start to operate in the gifts of the Holy Spirit in the power of God as He flows through us.

Revelation

Inspiration, light, counsel, wisdom.

We need to activate these senses. They do not just automatically switch on.We need to be hungry and thirsty, desiring them.

Intuition

Gut feeling, instinct, knowing, as the Holy Spirit reveals the Father’s heart to us.

Heavenly

Back through our first love gate, our connection with the heavenly realms and a consciousness of what is going on in heaven.

Now all those are great, and you can have them all wonderfully working, but without one other thing, it doesn’t mean anything. And that is worship.

Worship

Worship is not singing. It is a state of complete obedience to God. It is complete surrender and total submission to the will of God for our lives, on a daily basis. Everything else that is flowing within us will lead to us saying, ‘God I choose to surrender myself to you’. That is what He wants us to do.

‘How to’

In the past, faced with this kind of exercise to work through, most of us would have thought and prayed about what might be blocking each gateway, and asked God for help in removing it. It might have been helpful for us too: peeling off outer layers of our issues, difficulties and blockages through traditional ministry.

But that is an outside-in approach. We want to allow the flow of God to work from the inside out.

I would encourage you to find Jesus on the inside of you, and take Him with you to stand in each gateway. Work through them one at a time, perhaps one a day. And not to assume that we know what any of the names of the gateways actually mean: ask Him to show you what that gateway means to you. Most of the blockages will have come from the outside in. Ask Him what they are. Ask Him to stand with you and work with you from the inside out to unblock them and allow the glory of God to flow through them.

It is all about feeling, sensing and engaging with Him: a very different way of working, but in our experience, very much more effective.

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132. Broken Cisterns Hold No Water

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

Everything we are writing about in this series on Preparing For Destiny comes down to (or builds up to) one thing: what will we choose to do? Will we choose to do what Jesus would do? Or will we choose to do what our own flesh tells us to do?

Holy Spirit flow

If we are to choose right, we need to be flowing in the Holy Spirit.

We need a connection with the Holy Spirit. We need to be baptised in the Holy Spirit. We need to be speaking in tongues. Praying in tongues is a major flow of the life of God which is within us. It builds up an environment around us which draws the presence of God, so that God comes and fills that space.

Dead to God

This is what we were like before we came into the realisation of being born again:

We had a soul. Our heart had natural needs, we had a body of flesh through which it did its best to meet its natural needs, and we had a spirit that was dead to God, separated from Him in our own understanding. That is why we read in Jeremiah:

For My people have committed two evils:
They have forsaken Me
The fountain of living waters,
To hew for themselves cisterns,
Broken cisterns
That can hold no water.
(Jer 2:13).

diagram: Dead to God

Believing itself separated from God, our soul had no alternative but to try to get its needs met however it could. So it tried to meet those needs by drawing on the world. We all have a built-in need for love, acceptance, security, significance and purpose. But the world cannot fully meet those needs (it was never intended to) and as a result, our soul is damaged and we experience hurt, pain, rejection, insecurity, fear, disappointment, guilt, and shame.

Alive to God

Then we hear and respond to the gospel. Our spirit now comes alive to God, and suddenly we realise it is possible for us to have our needs met by Him. But we are used to getting them met by the world. So we have to transfer our source of acceptance and love; we need to transfer it from the world around us, to God, who is on the inside of us.

We start to look inwards, to God in us; not outwards, to the world.

As we do that, as we are transformed, as we are restored in our soul, then God deals with that damage. We do not need to look to the world to meet our needs. We look to Him. And we can then start to manifest through our body the life that flows from the spirit. You have seen Christians who positively glow with the life of God within them. More than that, we can be literally transfigured.

Spirit senses, soul senses

Diagram: Alive to God

Here is another way of looking at this: we are born again, in our spirit we have the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the glory of God in us, and we have nine spiritual senses that begin to develop through practice (we will look more at those another time). We know God’s love, we have access to the heavenly realms, and can enjoy real intimacy with Him, which enables that love to be outworked in our lives. Then our soul senses develop too, and eventually we start to manifest around us the glory of God: deliverance, the works of Jesus, miracles, supernatural works, healing, greater works (John 14:12), signs and wonders: all start to flow out through our lives. Or that is what should happen.

Blockages

But there are blockages. There is a blockage between our spirit and the heavenly realms, because probably no-one ever taught us we could go there (in fact mostly they taught us that we could not, at least until we die). There is a blockage between our soul and our spirit, because our soul is used to being in control. There is a blockage between our soul and our body, preventing the flow of life streaming out from us to the world.

But as we are transformed, these blockages are removed. Our spirit and soul start to work together. We begin to feel God’s love, as well as to just know God’s love for us. We learn to access the heavenly realms, so we can express God’s love and manifest God’s kingdom in and through our lives to the world around us. We are changed, transformed, transfigured.

And this last diagram sums it all up.

Diagram; Connected

With the new birth, the DNA of God is in our spirit: we have access to the fountain of life; we have access to our destiny; we are a dwelling-place of God, through relationship. Our spirit now needs to produce the fruit and the gifts. The river of life flows through the garden of our soul, so that our whole life is manifesting God’s glory. We have access to the kingdom of God within us, and the kingdom of God in the heavenly realms, and as we learn to operate there our life is transformed.

Practice

As we have said before, the key to this is practice. You have to practise to train your senses. You have to practise how you transform your soul.

But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil. (Heb 5:14)

We have to train our spiritual senses; we have to train our soul senses, to be connected up with the kingdom of God in heaven to outwork on earth.

So we are going to do that, over the coming weeks on this blog. We are going to help you train your spirit senses, train your soul senses, and we are going to see transformation taking place.

You have been invested with authority, but you have to come into that place of succession so that you can be enthroned. To bring God’s kingdom from heaven to earth, you have to dethrone the soul. Now that is not an easy process, but you can do it.

With God and our spirit working together, we can all do it.

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Featured image attribution: “Nabatean Well Negev 031812” by Mark A. Wilson (Wilson44691) – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons – https://goo.gl/ycuom2

Are you part of the Joshua Generation?

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Engaging God on the Heavenly Pathways of Relationship and Responsibility is our online school for equipping a Joshua Generation of supernatural sons of God to live according to the order of Melchizedek.

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129. Flesh vs Spirit

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

In seeking to restore the right relationship between the spirit and the soul, we saw yesterday that first of all we need to build a strong spirit. But we also need to deal with the soul. We need to understand what the soul is: other Bible words for it include flesh, mind, and heart. It is our self-awareness, it is what enables us to be aware of who we are as a person and as an individual.

This is what Paul wrote to the Galatian church:

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh. For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are in opposition to one another, so that you may not do the things that you please. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the Law.

Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these, of which I forewarn you, just as I have forewarned you, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit.
(Galatians 5:16-25).

From the inside out

We cannot change our soul from the outside in. If we want to ‘not carry out the desire of the flesh‘, we can only do that by walking by the Spirit. So we need our spirit, with the Holy Spirit, to flow out to change and transform us from the inside out.

We cannot fulfil our destiny if our soul is in charge of our life: it does not want to do the things the Spirit wants. When it submits to our spirit, it can then carry the life of the spirit, which then flows through our body, bringing the glory of God, and the kingdom, around us.

Fruit grows

‘But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control‘. Fruit grows, gifts are given. We can have the gifts of the Holy Spirit given in an instant, tongues, prophecy, miracles, healing and so on; fruit has to develop and grow. You have to nurture it, look after the soil, fertilise it, protect it, and it grows.

‘The deeds of the flesh are evident‘. They are evident because they are seen on the outside of us, in our behaviour. The kind of behaviour we have to eliminate from our lives is very obvious. And we have to replace that with the fruit of the Spirit which grows from the inside out. But we cannot change those things by our own self-effort. We have to surrender them to God and allow God’s Spirit to transform us from the inside.

The flesh profits nothing

That is why Paul goes on, ‘those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh’. Past tense. We have already been crucified with Christ. When he died, we died. But we have to live in the good of that by coming through the cross, and living by the Spirit. Live by the Spirit, walk by the Spirit, because the flesh profits nothing. It has no eternal value, and only negative value here in this realm. It is the spirit, flowing with the life of the Holy Spirit, that has value.

As Paul had previously written (and I would encourage you to meditate on this scripture, for it to become so much a part of your spirit that you are living it out all the time),

I have been crucified with Christ;
and it is no longer I who live,
but Christ lives in me;
and the life which I now live in the flesh
I live by faith in the Son of God,
who loved me and gave Himself up for me.
(Galatians 2:20).

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128. Building A Strong Spirit

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott –

God wants us to come into that place of relationship and responsibility into which Adam would have matured if he had not chosen to follow the DIY pathway of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

For that to happen, we have to build our spirit. If we are not strong in spirit, we will not be able to overcome and dethrone the soul.

We were created to be spirit, soul and body, with the spirit taking the lead. But because our spirit was dead to God, our soul has become accustomed to having its own way. When we are born again and our spirit comes alive, that has to change. The soul must submit to the spirit, but it will not do so willingly.

How to build our spirit

There are a number of things we can do to build our spirit. We will look at them in more detail later on in this series, but I will just list some of them for now:

1. Make sure we give God first place, first love, first priority.
2. Pray and sing in tongues.
3. Wait on the Lord and be still.
4. Meditate on Bible verses and passages.
5. Praise and adoration, soaking in the presence of God.
6. Come to God and ask Him to build our spirit. Often we do not have because we do not ask (James 4:2).
7. Confess and call things into being. Call forth our spirit. Speak it out.
8. Persevere. You don’t build your spirit in a day.

If you want to get fit and have rippling muscles in the natural, you have to go to the gym and train, session by session, week after week, until you build muscles. It is the same with your spirit. Your spirit grows stronger through exercise; spiritual exercises train and equip your spirit to connect with God, to flow in revelation, and to rule in your life. You have to persevere.

Desire, discipline, delight

If we give up on exercise, it is usually because we don’t enjoy the discipline. Discipline itself is not very pleasant. I would love to have a real six-pack, and the body of Mr Universe, but I have not got the discipline to go in and train myself to do it. It would take a lot of training, and I do not want it enough to submit to the discipline.

But what I do want enough is a strong spirit, and therefore I am willing to do whatever it takes to train it. I spend a lot of time training my spirit. Hours, every day, training my spirit to discern the words of God, to flow, and to build up my spiritual senses. You can do the same. We will look at each of them in more detail in coming posts, but there is nothing in the list of 8 things above that you cannot do. It just takes practice and perseverance.

It starts with a desire, it takes discipline, and then it becomes a delight.

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125. Preparing For Destiny

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

Our destiny, our scroll, the book of the life God has prepared for us, was written for us before the foundation of the world. It comes out of eternity; it is a decree, and a commission, and it carries both purpose and provision within it.

We can access it in the heavenly realms, and within our hearts. We have the choice whether to pursue it or not, but that choice has consequences, both for us personally and for the whole world. In fact it has eternal consequences.

Everything about that destiny is about bringing heaven to earth:
Your kingdom come,
Your will be done
On earth, as it is in heaven
(Matthew 6:10)

It is not about healing the sick, raising the dead, casting out demons – that is just the ordinary basic stuff we should all be doing anyway as disciples of Jesus. Those things are not what our destiny is about (unless having a healing ministry or a deliverance ministry is actually written on your particular scroll).

Jesus warned us that people would say to Him, ‘We prophesied in your Name, We did miracles’ but that He would reply, ‘Depart from me, I never knew you’. Not that He did not know them in the sense of salvation, but He didn’t recognise them compared to how they should have been, according to their destiny.

All of us are called to rule, that was God’s mandate to man from the beginning, to demonstrate dominion and authority. We need to do that in heaven and bring it to earth.

Your destiny, everyone’s destiny, is to administer heaven to earth. Each of us has a different part to play, but we each have a sphere of authority we are supposed to operate in. And God wants us to bring that to earth from heaven.

That destiny is in time and eternity (Jeremiah 1:5). He has appointed each of us for a purpose. What we do in time, in this earthly life, will determine what we do in eternity. It is vital for us that we fulfil what God has called us to do in this realm.

And your destiny is not something you can just do, it is not something that you can step into without any preparation. Over the next series of posts we will be looking at what it takes to prepare for our destiny.

We cannot do this half-heartedly. It will take time, and it will take commitment. But it will be worth it.

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108. Destiny and the Age To Come

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott –

There is a song by U2 that I really used to love: “Still haven’t found what I’m looking for”. I would sing that and really mean it from my heart, because I knew in my spirit that there was more, and I had not found it. I can’t sing it and mean it like that anymore, because actually I have begun to find and walk in my destiny. My destiny was out in the realms of the heavens. It is not ‘written in the stars’, but it is to be in the stars.

Three Scrolls

Here are three scrolls (or books) that we find referred to in scripture:

1. Scroll of destiny

First of all, there is the record of your eternal destiny.

Your eyes have seen my unformed substance;
And in Your book (scroll) were all written
The days that were ordained for me,
When as yet there was not one of them
(Psa 139:16).

2. Book of Life

Then there is the Book of Life.

Then I saw a great white throne and Him who sat upon it… and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged from the things which were written in the books, according to their deeds… And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire (Rev 20:11-15).

Richard Murray explains:

All our false names/natures are NOT written in the book of life, while all our authentic God-crafted names/natures ARE written in the book of life… What gets excluded from the book of life gets cast into the lake of fire. These elements are not our whole beings, but rather are toxic aspects of our non-being – false identities, sin masks which have deformed, debilitated, and impoverished us from manifesting our original created purpose. These forged identity masks have grafted themselves, with our consent, onto our souls and must be carefully irradiated and excised by the curative and corrective knife of divine love.

…to say that the personification of all the dark dynamics within us will be destroyed (i.e. NOT written in the book of life) is ultimately a wonderful thing, all our false sin-identities cast into the lake of fire nevermore to trouble us again1.

3. Scroll of your life

But there is also a scroll of your life, the record of the life you have lived. We know that Jesus took away the power of sin and death and there is no further judgment for sin, but we will be judged according to whether we have come into our destiny or not, whether we fulfilled God’s purpose for our lives. What is written on the scroll of your life? Does it match up exactly with what is written on your scroll of destiny?

My personal experience is that it does not. But we can change that too. We can come into agreement with our destiny, and God can change what is written on the scroll of our life.

For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad (2 Cor 5:10).

Where it mentions ‘good or bad’. it is not speaking about sin, but about the motives of our hearts.

You do not have to wait until you die, or until Jesus comes, to go to the judgment seat of Christ. I have been there, the scariest place I have ever been in the heavenly realms. It is a place of living, consuming fire, with eyes coming out of that fire. I was shaking – in fact, everything was shaking. The scroll, which was written on front and back, was opened, and I saw my life. God showed me all the good things, where I had lined my life up according to my destiny. But I also saw all the rest too, the missed opportunities to be obedient. The fire of God came and purged it, and I was given a fresh opportunity.

Every one of us can go to that place and see, does our life match up with our scroll of destiny? That is God’s intention, and He wants us all to make sure it does. Whether we are to be in the outer courts, the inner courts, the Holy Place, or the Holy of Holies: that will be decided by what is on those scrolls and how they match up. I know where I want to be.

The Age to Come

We will also have responsibilities in the age to come, which are determined by whether we are faithful here.

Our destiny is not just something which is to be accomplished in the here and now, in this physical realm. When Jesus returns, He will put the earth back into its central place in the Kingdom of God. It was removed from that place and put into time, in order to restrict the effect of sin. As we move into the age to come, the whole world will be cleansed with fire and brought back into the place where the physical and spiritual realms overlap and interact. And we will have new physical bodies, which are immortal, in order to operate in that realm.

When Satan fell, the light-bearer, light was removed from galaxies. In the age to come, those black holes which are at the centre of many galaxies will once again be filled with light. Who will get the opportunity of doing that? We will: the sons of light.

At present there is a river of dark matter flowing through the universe which needs to be transformed. Who gets to transform it? We do.

If Jesus created galaxies, who else gets to create galaxies? We do.

We need to take the blinkers off our understanding, and grasp what God actually says about these things. Our destiny goes way beyond this physical realm. It is awesome. When we first begin to go into the heavenly realms, our mind often gets in the way until we learn to see and operate there. He wants us to be free of the restraints which hold us back because of our mind and the way we think.

Choices

There is a preparation we need to go through so that we will be ready for Jesus’ return and for our destiny in the age to come. We need a transformation in order to be manifested as the sons of God – on earth as it is in heaven, and then beyond.

We all have a choice about whether we will be transformed; a choice about how we will spend eternity; a choice about whether we will fulfil our destiny. God gives us that choice, and the opportunity to outwork it day by day. There is always, has always been, a choice. There have always been two pathways: the Tree of Life, or the Tree of the Knowledge of good and evil; the kingdom of God or the kingdom that is in darkness (which is just as close).

Kingdom in darkness, by the way, not kingdom of darkness. Satan has no kingdom. He only occupies the kingdom we were meant to be ruling over. He has brought darkness to that kingdom, and it is up to us to bring light into it. God wants us to transform the atmosphere of the earth and to bring light to that place of darkness, and to the places under the earth too. It is our right to rule there.

We need to rule and manifest the kingdom around us. We also need to preside over the heavenly courts for our own lives to bring the mandates that are ours into physical manifestation. This is something we can all learn. It is not magic, it is not mysticism, it is just our birthright to have access to the heavenly realms because we are spirit. We were all made a spirit, but now we need to be transformed into a son from glory to glory (that is the process we are in right now), and to be manifested as sons on the earth

God’s Prophetic Timetable all leads up to the time of Jesus’ return. After Jesus returns, we will go into our eternal destiny in the age to come. And that age to come is beyond most people’s capacity to imagine. Every one of us has been appointed to a purpose in the whole eternal destiny of God. Will we fulfil it? The choice is ours.

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1 Richard Murray, Saul’s “name” was NOT written in “the book of life.” https://www.facebook.com/richard.murray.1840/posts/1500495100010535

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85. Characteristics of the Joshua Generation (#36-40)

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott –

36. The Joshua Generation will bring revelation that wherever the next generation place their feet they will possess.

That possession includes not only this world but also the heavenlies. Both are their inheritance and destiny.

So Moses swore on that day, saying, “Surely the land on which your foot has trodden will be an inheritance to you and to your children forever, because you have followed the LORD my God fully”(Joshua 14:9).

Now as we know, God did not intend that inheritance just to be a piece of land, but the whole world. ‘For the promise to Abraham or to his descendants that he would be heir of the world…’ (Romans 4:13). And Jesus said that all authority had been given to Him both in the heavens in the earth (Matt 28:18-20).

The whole of creation groans as it waits for the sons of God to be revealed. When you take your place as sons in the heavenly realms, you are beginning to step up into your inheritance, which is the whole creation. And you will find that you can go anywhere in creation, you will see the galaxies – and actually we are supposed to create too. We are supposed to do the works that Jesus did. Who created the stars, the galaxies? Jesus did. You can go and do the same, and you will. Yes, in eternity, but you can actually go and do it now, if you access some of these realms and especially the courts.

The courts of heaven issue papers which confer upon you the authority to act, here on earth. That is sometimes the reason we have been unable to do things we know we ought to have been able to do: we have neglected to go to the courts of heaven to get the necessary authority.

Yes, that was because we didn’t know we were supposed to. We do now.

37. The Joshua Generation will encourage a passion to love God, and walk in His ways, and serve Him will all our hearts and souls.

Only be very careful to observe the commandment and the law which Moses the servant of the LORD commanded you, to love the LORD your God and walk in all His ways and keep His commandments and hold fast to Him and serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul (Joshua 22: 5).

So take diligent heed to yourselves to love the LORD your God (Josh 23:11)

God hates mixture and lukewarmness – and so will we. It will take diligence, and self-discipline, and perseverance, but the Joshua generation will become so focused on walking in His ways and serving Him wholeheartedly that it will set us apart and cause others to take notice. The love of God will become a passion for us: it will burn in our hearts; and it will be unthinkable for us to offer Him anything less than complete obedience and dedication. Joshua the High Priest was promised access to heavenly realms if he would walk in God’s ways and perform Gods laws: we know the same offer is open to us. Once we have tasted of that, how could we turn away?

38. The Joshua Generation will warn the next generation about the dangers of compromise and going backwards.

There is a real danger if you see all this and choose to walk away from it. Ian Clayton has talked about how the spirit of antichrist is those who walked with the church and then turned away to start sowing false teaching. Once we get here, there is no going back.

For if you ever go back and cling to the rest of these nations, these which remain among you, and intermarry with them, so that you associate with them and they with you, know with certainty that the LORD your God will not continue to drive these nations out from before you; but they will be a snare and a trap to you, and a whip on your sides and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from off this good land which the LORD your God has given you (Joshua 23:12-13).

39. The Joshua Generation will charge the next generation to never stop waging war.

The fight goes on until the Kingdom of God fills the earth, until the glory of God fills the earth, and Jesus returns. Meanwhile, we cannot let up, we cannot compromise, we cannot stop fighting, we cannot let down our guard; and neither can the generation that follows us.

Now it came about after the death of Joshua that the sons of Israel inquired of the LORD, saying, “Who shall go up first for us against the Canaanites, to fight against them?” (Judges 1:1).

They continued to enquire of the Lord. They did not say, ‘Now that Joshua has gone, we can do our own thing’. The war was still ongoing, even though we have read that Joshua gave them the whole land (Joshua 11:23). The Canaanites were still out there in the rest of the world, and they were still enemies of Israel, and of God. Israel were heirs of the world, intended to be a blessing to it. They were supposed to take that blessing out into the whole world. Obviously, they didn’t do that. They stopped short, even though God had said “but indeed, as I live, all the earth will be filled with the glory of the LORD” (Num 14:21).

Yet that is still God’s plan – as Isaiah says:

Now it will come about that In the last days 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 the nations will stream to it (Isa 2:2).

The mountain, the place of authority; the house of the Lord – these are all in the heavenly realms. Then it is worked out in this realm, as all the hills – all the other earthly authorities – start streaming to the church. Because we are living in the fullness of our sonship, because we start to radiate the goodness of God, because we start to manifest light, and live in creative light, not just created light. There is some awesome stuff coming, but we need to be prepared.

There will be no end to the increase of His government and peace, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness from then on and forevermore. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will accomplish this (Isa 9:7).

Justice and righteousness are the foundations of the throne of heaven, foundations of the throne of the kingdom. God is going to accomplish this: He will have His way.

40. The Joshua Generation will set a clear choice before the next generation.

They can choose the past, or they can choose to walk in their future destiny.

There is so much that we already have, that we already know and enjoy, and it is good. People can choose to stick with that – but if they do, they will miss God’s best. We don’t want to take possession of what God has given us, and then settle. Our influence has to increase and grow, because it is the nature of God that He wants to fill the earth with His glory.

Now, therefore, fear the LORD and serve Him in sincerity and truth; and put away the gods which your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the LORD. If it is disagreeable in your sight to serve the LORD, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served which were beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD (Joshua 24:14-15).

We are coming to a close now, not just of these posts about the Joshua Generation, but of the whole 15-month series on the Prophetic Timetable. Next time we will begin something new, but for now I want to leave you with this: Joshua was 110 years old before he died, having fulfilled his destiny. There is time for all of us who are called to this purpose to raise up and release the next harvesting generation. Joshua did it: God wants us to do it.

Whether it is to be that Joshua generation who take our inheritance and bring others in, or whether it is to be part of the next generation, the Jesus generation, who will see Him return: God wants to reveal to us our destiny, and to see us fulfil it.

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83. Characteristics of the Joshua Generation (#26-30)

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

Joshua led the children of Israel into their inheritance. If we want to do the same, what kind of people should we be?

26. The Joshua generation will start to be known and get public attention.

Before the revival we experienced here in 2011, virtually no-one outside of North Devon knew we even existed. Suddenly, because of what God began to do here, all kinds of people noticed us, from all over the country, and began to look to build relationship with us.

And some of the other things which have happened since – not least Ian Clayton coming here, and then mentioning us wherever he went – have made us known in countries all over the world. This blog gets hits from the UK and Europe, but also from Africa, America, Australia, Russia and the Far East. Hundreds worldwide have joined our Engaging God programme, and thousands subscribe to the YouTube channel.

Who would have expected that? It certainly was not of our own devising. God has a reason for it. He wants us to help other people come into the revelation we have received, and He wants us to equip and enable them to enter into their own inheritance.

So the LORD was with Joshua, and his fame was in all the land (Joshua 6:27).

Now, ultimately none of this is really about our fame – it is about God’s fame. We are here to make God known in all the earth. But we will have public recognition along the way, and that will bring public battles. Those battles will happen because what we are bringing will cause a reaction both in the spiritual realm and in this one.

All sorts of criticism and all sorts of accusations will be made because of what we are doing. A lot of people do not understand, yet. They will say we are doing things by New Age or occult power. They said that about Jesus, too, and we need to be ready for it. We need to be confident in our identity and in the revelation God has given us. We will be in the public eye, one way or another. So we have to make sure there is absolutely no pride in what we do. We need to be humble. It is about what God is doing, not about what we are doing. It is all about Him, but he uses us. Therefore we must rule our house, and deal with anything of sin or iniquity in us, deal with any stumbling blocks in our own lives.

If we have a need for affirmation or recognition from men, we are going to have to deal with that, because it is affirmation from God that we really need. And if we do receive affirmation and recognition from people, let us receive it with thanks, but then go and trade with it on the trading floors of heaven. Go and cast your crowns before Him.

27. The Joshua generation will take a radical stand against sin.

Sin is going to get exposed. It is already happening, always has. But the whole angelic realm are going to become active in exposing sin.

“Rise up! Consecrate the people and say, ‘Consecrate yourselves for tomorrow, for thus the LORD, the God of Israel, has said, “There are things under the ban in your midst, O Israel. You cannot stand before your enemies until you have removed the things under the ban from your midst.”’ … It shall be that the one who is taken with the things under the ban shall be burned with fire, he and all that belongs to him, because he has transgressed the covenant of the LORD, and because he has committed a disgraceful thing in Israel” (Joshua 7:13, 15).

We cannot have things in our midst which stop us standing in victory against the enemy. We need to see those things removed. That is part of the function of those gathering angels, who are removing stumbling blocks from among us. Purification, refining: the heat of God’s furnace is being turned up, in order to bring all the impurities in the gold to the surface. Then, when they are skimmed off, the surface of gold is an absolute mirror which is reflecting the glory of God. That is what our lives are there to do: to reflect the glory of God – to reflect what is in heaven – on earth.

We are coming into a time when the story of Ananias and Sapphira is going to become very important to understand. They lied to the Holy Spirit and dropped down dead. When we start to enter into these things which God is revealing, suddenly the levels of responsibility go up. And with more responsibility, certainly there is more authority and power – but the level of purity and holiness required to operate in that dimension also is greatly increased.

I am responsible to enter into the fire of God myself. And I am putting it out there for you too, but it is up to you what you do with it. I have discharged my responsibility, you must decide how you will respond. Are you going to enter the fire? Either way, the consequences are yours.

28 The Joshua generation will be careful to always seek counsel from God before making decisions.

It is dangerous for us to do things here on earth (going to and fro) without first having been in heaven. We must not do it.

So the men of Israel took some of their provisions, and did not ask for the counsel of the LORD. Joshua made peace with them and made a covenant with them, to let them live; and the leaders of the congregation swore an oath to them (Joshua 9:14-15).

They made a covenant with a people who tricked them, who pretended not to be inhabitants of the land, but to have come from a long way off. And Joshua did not lift up his eyes into the heavens to see. This covenant with the Gibeonites was a problem for Israel for generations to come. They made a covenant with the enemy, because they did not seek God first.

We must not make decisions based on what looks right. Looks can be deceiving. We cannot trust our natural eyes: we need to see in the realms of the spirit if we are to make right decisions. Getting our strategy direct from heaven is the only course that will keep us safe.

29. The Joshua generation will put the enemy under their feet.

The enemy here is not people. We do not put people under our feet. We do not tread all over people. We do not tread people down. We honour and respect people. We bring people from captivity into freedom. That means we do cast out demons, we do demolish strongholds, we deal with a spiritual reality which is beyond what we see in the natural. We need to see the giants defeated, and the dragons, and all the other principalities and powers and rulers in those dark realms. So we have to put the enemy under our feet.

In this passage, the kings represent those rulers in the heavenly realms:

When they brought these kings out to Joshua, Joshua called for all the men of Israel, and said to the chiefs of the men of war who had gone with him, “Come near, put your feet on the necks of these kings.” So they came near and put their feet on their necks. Joshua then said to them, “Do not fear or be dismayed! Be strong and courageous, for thus the LORD will do to all your enemies with whom you fight” (Joshua 10:24-25).

Through the power and victory of the cross, Jesus made a public spectacle of all the demonic realms, and they are no longer in authority. We have authority over them. We may not yet have taken proper hold of that authority, but we are beginning to do so.

We have to rule over them, and put the rulers in those realms under our feet.

30. The Joshua generation will operate in great signs and wonders.

Then Joshua spoke to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the sons of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel,  “O sun, stand still at Gibeon, And O moon in the valley of Aijalon.” So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, Until the nation avenged themselves of their enemies. Is it not written in the book of Jashar?  (Joshua 10:12-13a).

A supernatural event: time stood still. It gave them opportunity to defeat their enemy.

(The book of Jashar mentioned here, by the way, was excluded from the canon of scripture by the Nicene Council, operating under the authority of the Emperor Constantine. He did not want any of this stuff to be known, because he did not want ordinary believers to know they could rule. He wanted to rule, through the pastors in the church whom he paid; and that gave rise to the institutional structure that we still have to see dismantled today. Get the CD, as Ian Clayton says – he did a whole session on that. They tried and failed to get 1 and 2 Peter thrown out too, and the book of Jude (which says some very interesting things you don’t find elsewhere in scripture). Those books talk about entering these realms, about operating in authority and power in the heavenlies. But there are a whole lot of books that used to be regarded as scripture which did not make it into our canon because the enemy did not want them there).

And the sun stopped in the middle of the sky and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day. There was no day like that before it or after it, when the LORD listened to the voice of a man; for the LORD fought for Israel (Joshua 10:13b-14).

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