Tag: Christ

440. Unconditional Love – NO LIMITS

Mike Parsons

Not seeing the video above? Click here.

The God I thought I knew twenty years ago—or even twelve years ago—is now a distant memory. He is not what religion taught me He was. He is not what I was conditioned to believe by church or anything else—He is so much better than that. He is so much better. He is so good, so loving, so kind, so thoughtful, so passionate—beyond what I could ever have imagined until I met Him face to face and began to experience how He revealed Himself to me.

Thankfully, He did not do that all in one go, because it would have completely shattered my mind, I expect. But the Father has deconstructed my thinking and expanded my consciousness beyond what I could ever have imagined or thought possible. God is so much bigger, better, further—and creation is beyond what I ever could have imagined. I was conditioned, like most people, to believe you went to heaven when you died. But when God opened up that realm to me, and the dimensions and all those things to engage with Him and to experience—it is just so awesome.

So many of the things I believed about God were programmed into me by religious doctrines and theological understandings that I now know were never true. But I believed they were true, because that was the stream I was in at the time. I started off in the Methodist Church, went to the Brethren Church, eventually started a charismatic church—and I have been on a journey of discovering things. But that was nothing compared to engaging God in the realms of heaven, face to face, or engaging God within me in a place of intimacy.

All the doctrines that were programmed into me about who He was—the angry God, the God who needs appeasing, the Old Testament God as opposed to the New Testament God—all those confusing things, I realised I believed were true because I had never actually met Him. One day, He said to me, “How much of what you know about Me comes directly from Me, and how much of it has come from reading, listening to sermons and other people?” I had to admit—probably ninety-nine percent of what I thought I knew was not from personal experience. Therefore, it was only information, not true knowledge.

All of us have been programmed by the things we have been taught and the things we have received. You could be programmed into a non-religious mindset that is just as religious. You could be in an atheist household and be programmed to believe God does not exist. Or you could be brought up in religious settings, church settings, that have, in a sense, determined what you believe about God, and the Bible, and everything else.

For me, this has been a long, sometimes arduous journey to come to the knowledge of the truth and come to the realisation that, actually, God is love. His love is unconditional. Experiencing that is what He wants us to do—so that we can come into a reality where we love as He loved.

This teaching forms part of Mike Parsons’ new book Unconditional Love, which is out in print on 20 June 2025. Order it from your favourite local or online bookseller today, or get the ebook from our website.  More details at eg.freedomarc.org/books.

Unconditional love is hard to grasp. It is so difficult for people to understand because of the way we have been programmed. For me, if God is love, and He is not unconditional love, then He is not love at all. Because if love is conditional, it cannot be love. You cannot earn love.

Understanding unconditional love—and the nature of it, and why it is so often challenged—is really, really important. I believe this is probably the most important and the biggest key truth that has made the most impact in my life over the last ten to twelve years. The truth that God is unconditional love has been attacked; it has been twisted in many different ways. That is because it is so important that we understand it and experience it. When we experience that unconditional love, it brings freedom. It releases us to be ourselves. It stops us from having to perform to earn it or deserve it.

A phrase any of you familiar with me for any length of time will have heard me say a lot—because the Father said it to me—is: “Live loved, live living, and live loving.” He has said that so many times as an encouragement and a motivation. This is simply how we can live: we can live loved. Now, that does not mean live trying to be loved, or trying to earn love, or deserve love, or be good enough for love. Just live loved. Just accept that we are loved in an unconditional way—in a completely unconditional way. That is the key to this understanding and this experience.

If we are living in that place of living loved, then we can love living. Life is joyous. I look forward to every day, because there is more to experience, more to explore, more to just resting—to just be. And then we can live loving. This is really where the rubber hits the road. To live loving means we have to demonstrate the love to others that we have received. Jesus said, “Love one another as I have loved you.” People strive to love other people—and it is hard sometimes—when they are not very nice to you, and they do things that really make you say, “Well, I do not want to love them. Look how they treated me. Look how they hurt me.”

Any of you who have been involved in church for very long will know how easy it is to be hurt by people—whether deliberately or by accident. It is hard in relationships to maintain a loving attitude to someone all the time and to everybody. That is really difficult. But it is possible, because that is the way God has loved us. God has loved us, and He wants us to love other people in the same way. So if God’s love towards us is unconditional, then our love towards other people should also be unconditional.

Now, I use the word should, and actually, that is a word I want to eliminate from my vocabulary when it comes to God, and relationship, and living life. I do not want to do things because I should do them. Who says I should do them? Did God say I should do them? If so, that is a condition—that I should do something. So what is the consequence of not doing something? If I do not do what God wants me to do, what will He do? So what sort of God do we believe in? What does He do when we do things that do not line up with what He wants us to do? Are there a whole load of things we should do?

On my journey, He has really challenged me about that word. So many of us have that word: “Well, I should do this… I should go to church, I should pray, I should read my Bible, I should witness… I should, I should, I should.” Why should I? Because I am conditioned to? Because I think it is the right thing to do?

God challenged me over things like obedience. Should I be obedient? And of course, I thought, “Well of course I should! Why would I not want to be obedient to God?” But He challenged me. My thinking around that was very old covenant. Because obedience is to something which is a law. God does not want us to obey Him. God wants us to have a relationship with Him in which we share, in which we cooperate with one another—and in which, of course, we would only want to do the things that we see the Father doing. But not because we should, but because we desire to. Because it is the desire of my heart to be in relationship with God, who loves me in such a wonderful way.

So many people accept that God is love—but there is always a but. Religion programmes buts. Yes, that is true, but… I had lots of buts myself in the past. Why? Because it is too good to be true for an independent, alienated mind to accept that God could love you without any condition. We have been programmed by religion to believe we have to do something to deserve or earn love, or to appease anger. That is what God really wants to change. That is the greatest deception. It fools people into trying to earn something that is already theirs by right of inheritance—because we are all His children. We are all co-heirs, whether we know it or not.

We are all God’s children and, therefore by definition, we are all loved unconditionally by a loving Father, overflowing in loving kindness. To experience that and to know that is life-changing.

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231. Meet the Real God

282. Live loved, love living, live loving

285. God is Love… BUT

345. The Rapture of the Saints

Mike Parsons – 

“The Rapture’s Coming!”

Every time there’s any sort of sign in the heavens, people say, “Oh yeah, the rapture’s coming, blah blah blah blah blah.” I mean, half the Amazon rainforest has been cut down to produce books about the rapture, and none of them came true. I’ve got a whole shelf filled with those books that people have either sent me or I used to have, that I keep just as a reminder that it’s never going to happen.

It won’t. It’s all based in a wrong understanding of God’s purpose, based in a theology which was a rejection of the Holy Spirit back in the 1820s. The Brethren – dispensation, millennialism, rapture theology all came from the same source. Zionism also. It’s all the fruit of a poisonous tree, sadly, but people buy into it hook, line and sinker. Any time there’s any sort of thing that happens in the world, you get all the crazies coming out, sadly. They’re well-meaning, a lot of them. It’s deceiving. It’s just a huge deception.

Whenever you reject the Holy Spirit, you’re opening yourself up for demonic deception. The whole Brethren movement, which was inspired by God for the priesthood of all believers, saw many believers come out of the institutions to look for a simpler way of engaging house to house. The Holy Spirit fell on them with prophecy, tongues, and gifts in the 1820s.

Ultimately, they rejected that, some of them. Deception came upon them, and then they needed a theology that explained why the Holy Spirit wasn’t for today, which they came up with: dispensationalism and cessationism as part of that. Then, along with that, came the rapture, the whole deception of it. Scofield was paid by a Jewish source to promote that because it plays into the hands of those who are looking for a one-world governmental system on earth. All it does is rob us of our authority to bring the Kingdom now and promotes fear.

Cult-like Deception

There was a lady in the States who killed two of her children because she didn’t want them to go through the [tribulation]. That was last year [2021] because it was supposed to be February the 24th that the rapture was going to happen. She actually killed two children because she did not want them to go through the tribulation. That’s how deceptive it was, but it becomes very cult-like because it’s a very controlling thing. We need to see it exposed; more and more people need to be set free from that deception. People will throw out the rapture, but they’ll keep the millennium because they’ve not yet realised it came from the same source. Or they’ll keep Zionism, not realising it came from the same source. That’s part of the problem: people are not discerning, and they don’t find out. They just believe what they’re told, and if you hear it enough, you think it must be true. That’s true. People do believe it because they’ve been told, and they kept being told.

I was brought up with it. I was in the Brethren Church. I know the roots of it. I researched it. I found all the books of the early Brethren fathers and what they shared, and how good it was in the beginning. But you could see when it went off, and you could see when deception came in because the writings changed. The tone of them changed. They became judgmental. The love went out of them. You can see it in just what was written, how it was written. Everything changed from the inspiration that they had.

If they had continued, you would have had Azusa Street-type revival 80 years before it happened. But they rejected it, and it took 80 years for that to come round again. The most ironic thing, and this is a huge irony, the Brethren movement does not allow women to speak, and they don’t believe in prophecy. But when the Holy Spirit was moving on that group, a woman called Mary Margaret McDonald prophesied a vision, and they based the rapture teaching on that prophecy. But they don’t believe women can speak, and they don’t believe prophecy, but they based the teaching on it and mixed it with a Jesuit priest’s teaching, and came up with that whole system of belief which hijacked the seminaries around the world for the best part of a hundred years.

Impact on Mainstream Christianity

It is still taught in most seminaries around the world, unless you come from a Reformed background. Most of the other charismatic seminaries teach it because they were totally hoodwinked by it. The Scofield Bible, which was commissioned and paid for with an agenda that wasn’t from a Christian, promoted that. The Scofield was a King James Version that contained all the notes related to the rapture, the seven dispensations and cessationism, all in the notes. That infiltrated the seminaries around the world, and then most of the missionaries’ teaching, and the evangelical movement were actually taught from those seminaries.

That’s why it’s so infiltrated mainstream because it got in through the seminaries, and then that went out through and infiltrated most of the evangelical movement. It wasn’t really until the charismatic movement started to bring people back to a restored relationship where they could hear God for themselves, that people started to question some of those things.

When I got baptised in the Spirit in 1986, the first thing God said to me was, “You need to understand kingdom and covenant.” Well, I thought I knew what kingdom and covenant meant because I’d been brought up in the Brethren movement. That’s all they talked about: the kingdom coming a thousand years after all this stuff. It took me three years of going back with God through the Bible, because He just did it. I didn’t read another book: I just went through the Bible. He showed me the whole error of all of it, and I found a whole different view of what is going to happen, which has led me and helped me to come and embrace restoration and everything else. But that was a long time ago.

I already had a lot of deconstruction from futurist eschatology 40 years ago. Now, it’s so easy to see how all this works together with what God is doing to restore. I didn’t have all of that negative stuff. I had a lot of demons cast out of me. I had a lot of religious spirits specifically from that movement. It was a deceptive movement: it was birthed in God – and rejected God for an error. When you do that, you open yourself up to deception. It has had probably the biggest deceptive influence on mainstream Christianity in the last 200 years. A huge deception.

Mike goes into much more detail on these subjects in his book The Eschatology of the Restoration of All Things, available in paperback or as an ebook.  Click here or on the image above for details.

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324. Complete Salvation in Christ

Mike Parsons

The Finished Work of Christ

  • The finished work of Christ has accomplished everything necessary for our complete salvation. There is nothing else to be done.
  • All the promises and covenants of God are fully and completely fulfilled in Jesus. There is nothing and no one else who could complete or fulfil them.
  • We are all included in Jesus and have received life through him, just as all died in Adam.

The Universality of Salvation

  • As in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive. All have received life, though not everyone is aware of this reality yet.
  • The ministry of believers is to help people understand this amazing inclusion and reality that all have been given life in Christ.

The Universality of Sin

  • The Bible verse “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23) is often used to tell people they are not good enough and need God.
  • The reality is that all have outworked their lost identity, which is short of the glory God intended for us.

Justification by Grace

  • The ‘all’ who have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory (in Romans 3:23) are “justified as a gift by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24).
  • This means that all who have sinned (which is everyone) have also been justified, not by their own merit, but as a free gift of God’s grace through Christ’s redemption.

The Universality of Justification

  • The “all” who have sinned are the same “all” who have been justified. There is a universality to both the problem of sin and the solution of justification.
  • Romans 5:18  states that just as condemnation came to all through one man’s transgression (Adam), so also justification of life has come to all through one act of righteousness (Christ).
  • The condemnation referred to here is not eternal punishment, but the state of living in lost identity apart from God, and the consequences that brings. 

Jesus’ Authority over All Mankind

  • According to John 17:2, Jesus is given authority over all mankind, so that he may give eternal life to all whom the Father has given him.

Eternal Life for All Mankind

  • In John 17:2-3, Jesus states that eternal life is to know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom God has sent.
  • God has given Jesus authority over all mankind: the same “all” who were condemned in their lost identity and the same “all” who would be made righteous and justified.
  • Some may try to separate the “all” to whom Jesus has authority over, and the “all” to whom he gives eternal life. That is illogical. The same “all” applies to both – Jesus has authority over all mankind, and he will give eternal life to all whom the Father has given him.

The Supremacy of Christ

  • Colossians 1:15-20 speaks of the supremacy of Christ, and that all things were created through him and for him.
  • Note again the inclusive nature of the “all” – nothing is left out, as all things have been created through Christ and hold together in him.
  • And it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Christ, and through him to reconcile ‘all things’ to himself, whether on earth or in heaven.

The Universality of Reconciliation

  • Christ has reconciled all things, not just people, but everything that he created.
  • This reinforces the universal scope of Christ’s work: he has reconciled all of creation to the Father through the blood of his cross.

The Universality of Christ’s Work

  • John 1:7 – Jesus came as a witness to testify about the light, so that all might believe through him.
  • John 1:16 – Of Christ’s fullness, we have all received grace upon grace.
  • John 3:35 – The Father loves the Son and has placed all things in his hands.
  • John 5:28 – A time is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice.

The Reconciliation of All Things

  • In John 12:32, Jesus says that when he is lifted up on the cross, he will draw all people to himself.
  • “All” does not leave anyone out, and there are many instances of the word “all” used throughout the teachings of Jesus and the Scriptures.

The Fulfillment of the Law

  • In Matthew 5:18, Jesus states that not the smallest letter or stroke of the law will pass away until all is accomplished.
  • The “heaven and earth” referred to in this verse represent the old covenant system, which was fulfilled; and it passed away when the temple was destroyed in AD 70.

Key Takeaway

All has been accomplished through the finished work of Christ; there is nothing left to be done for the full and complete salvation not only of mankind but of all creation.

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323. The Judgment Seat of Christ

Mike Parsons –

Video summary

Some people may not fully live out their intended destiny, but encounter purification at the Judgment Seat of Christ, where that which is of lasting value is distinguished from what is not. The Lake of Fire symbolises purification rather than eternal damnation, a place of refining in God’s presence, not the end of the world or the fate of the devil and fallen angels. In context, it relates to the persecution faced by early Christians, particularly at the hands of non-believing Jews in Jerusalem.

Entering the realms of heaven involves engaging with the Father, who comforts and purifies. Regrets are addressed, tears are wiped away, and the scroll of your life is cleansed. This leads to an ongoing relationship marked by unfolding knowledge, truth and engagement as part of the cloud of witnesses.

I do not subscribe to the concept of Purgatory, but I do believe in the Judgment Seat. I have experienced it personally, engaging with my scroll under the fire of God’s scrutiny. However, there was no guilt, shame, or condemnation – only love and a process of addressing missed opportunities and wrong motives. Our sins are forgiven through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, and every accusation against us is nullified. From God’s perspective, He always sees us as innocent, justified and righteous.

When we engage with God relationally, we begin to understand our true identity and undergo transformation through the renewal of our minds. I encourage you to spend time with the Father, seeking to discover the truth about Him and yourself. This understanding frees us from negative thoughts about our imperfections: perfection, to God, is simply being who He made us to be. It’s not about striving or achieving but about resting in our identity as His children.

Unconditional love and forgiveness are in God’s nature, freely given without the need for works or religious practices. As children of God, we already enjoy His love; and our Dad delights in us. Drawing nearer to God’s heart unveils the depth of His boundless love, liberating us from guilt and performance-driven mindsets. This freedom allows us to rest in our identity and embrace life fully.

Jesus promised complete joy, and left us His transcendent peace. He loves us without conditions, empowering us to love Him and others in return. The key is to allow Him to shower His love upon you, revealing it in ever-deeper ways, leading you into true freedom. The truth that you know will set you free: not mere intellectual knowledge but personal experience. Encountering the Truth embodied in Jesus renews our minds, enabling us to embrace our true selves, live abundantly, and flourish in every aspect of our being.

Key Takeaway

Perfection, from God’s perspective, is simply being who He made us to be.

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294. To celebrate or not to celebrate? | The Christmas Question

Mike Parsons

Did Jesus explicitly instruct us to celebrate his birth? No, but the angels seemed to have a bit of fun with it. So, there was a sense of festivity. It is not a religious obligation, but rather an opportunity to focus on our relationship with Him. You might argue that there are pagan elements in the symbolism of these celebrations. It is religion that tends to focus on externals, embracing or rejecting certain celebrations as pagan or Christian without looking at the heart.

I do not see an issue with a time of year that provides an opportunity for us to spend quality time together with our loved ones. Some may advocate putting Christ back into Christmas, but I do not get entangled in those debates. Intent matters, and we are free to engage in the festivities as long as they do not become a bondage. Life is about freedom, not restriction.

One Christmas I insisted on avoiding any festivities, even having a tree – and my children still remember it. I had adopted someone else’s convictions without considering the intent. Any sense of obligation or duty, whether from avoiding or blindly following traditions, is a trap. Celebrating a holiday does not necessarily carry religious significance for us, but if it provides an opportunity to connect with people and share the message of God’s love, why not embrace it?

Key takeaway

Life is about freedom, not restriction. Embrace it!

Recent posts from Freedom ARC

293. Expanding God’s Government of Peace
292. Is God Shocking People into Embracing Love?
291. Can Yoga be ‘Christian’?
290. Discovering the Reality of Salvation
289. One New Man In Christ
288. Enoch’s Secret to Walking with God
287. Unconditional Love, Grace, and the truth about salvation

 

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262. Life and Immortality

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

In this series of posts about the ‘Restoration of All Things’, we have seen that restoration deals with the sin that occurred at the fall when mankind lost their identity, and with the death which came as a result. In fact, Jesus’ death and resurrection dealt with everything that happened because we chose the DIY path.

Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus… For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace (Rom 6 8-11, 14).

…our Saviour Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel (2 Tim 1:10).

Jesus holds the keys of death and Hades for all ages to come (see Rev 1:17-18), and He uses them to free everyone, not lock them up!

Death and resurrection

“Blessed and holy is the one who has a part in the first resurrection; over these the second death has no power” (Rev 20:6).

There are several questions to consider here:

  • What is the second death?
  • What is the first death?
  • Who has a part in the first resurrection?

The second death

Some see the ‘second death’ as eternal separation from God. They believe either that when the unsaved physically die they will go to eternal conscious torment in hell or that when they die physically they will cease to exist (annihilation).

Neither of these views allow for ‘the restoration of all things’, nor do they accurately reflect the merciful, just, loving nature of God.

The Bible itself tells us what the second death actually is:

Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire (Rev 20:14).

The lake of fire is not ‘hell’. In fact, if you insist on translating the Greek word Hades as ‘hell’ then it is where ‘hell’ ends up! It is the death of death itself, the destruction of all that prevents us experiencing fullness of life.  In the first death, Christ died the death of all men, receiving the ‘wages of sin’ on our behalf. The second death is the death of death itself. The second death cannot mean some kind of endless death, because Jesus destroyed death and “death is swallowed up in victory” (1 Cor 15:54).

We are not subject to the second death if we have experienced the first death (being co-crucified with Jesus) and the first resurrection (being made alive together with Him). Death is defeated. It will not triumph over billions of people forever by consigning them to a ‘lost eternity’. Jesus’ resurrection life brings an end to death, either through water (baptism) in this life or through fire (the consuming fire of God’s love) after this life is over. In place of death, He has given us life:

The wages of sin is death. But the gift of God is age-enduring life, through Jesus Christ our Lord (Rom 6:23).

We can voluntarily embrace being buried and resurrected with Jesus (which we acknowledge and identify with in baptism) or through fire. God Himself is that consuming fire. If we have died to self in this life, the second death has no jurisdiction over us.

Consuming fire

But many people are blind to the truth, and are unnecessarily living in their own DIY mindsets of lostness. They continue to live separated from God, although He has done everything necessary for their reconciliation, so they continue to experience the resultant sin and death. So what happens to them when they die physically and end up in the consuming fire of God’s love?

What is the purpose of fire? Fire refines and makes pure. The dross in their lives will be burned away until each person chooses life through Jesus and receives their new name which was written in the book of life from the foundation of the world. What has been stolen from them is restored to them. How long it takes is dependent on each individual’s resistance to the working of that consuming fire.

The end of choice?

…then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it (Eccl 12:7).

The physical body of everyone who dies returns to the earth, and everyone’s spirit returns to God. But what happens to the soul, our conscious understanding of who we are?

If people do not choose life through Jesus in this life, there is not an automatic ‘free pass’ to relationship with God in the next. But I cannot find even one Bible verse which indicates that physical death is the end of choice. I have asked others, especially those who contend that unbelievers go straight to the eternal conscious torment of hell when they die, and none of them can only come up with anything except a verse taken entirely out of context:

And inasmuch as it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment… (Heb 9:27).

In context, the ‘once’ is the death of Jesus with which we identify. The word ‘judgment’ is not a synonym for ‘punishment’, it means ‘reaching a verdict’; and the verdict is ‘blamelessly innocent‘. The only death that everyone needs to experience is inclusion in Jesus’ death.

On the other hand, there are plenty of Bible verses which speak of God rescuing people from the grave.

The Lord kills and makes alive; He brings down to Sheol and raises up (1 Sam 2:6).

For the Lord will not reject forever, For if He causes grief, Then He will have compassion according to His abundant loving kindness. For He does not afflict willingly or grieve the sons of men (Lam 3:31-33).

For we will surely die and are like water spilled on the ground which cannot be gathered up again. Yet God does not take away life, but plans ways so that the banished one will not be cast out from him (2 Sam 14:14).

Jesus went into Hades, preached there and led captivity captive: see Eph 4:8,9; Psalm 68:18; 1 Peter 3:18-20. Death is not the end of God’s power or desire to save. I have testimony of this myself, which I have posted about before.

A covenant with death

Jesus has restored what death robbed us of: access into God’s loving presence to experience restored face-to-face relationship.

Religion, meanwhile, has a covenant with death. To enter heaven and experience eternity, it teaches, you have to die. So even believers are expecting to have to die before they go to heaven.

Heaven is open now because we already died with Christ! The covenant with death needs to be broken so that we can live the abundant life that God intends. If you have a covenant with death, go ahead and break it! Do not agree that you have to die.

“Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal [lit: age-enduring] life. I am the bread of life.Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread which comes down out of heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.I am the living bread that came down out of heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever [lit: to the age]; and the bread also which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh” (John 6:47-51).

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249. The Veil is Taken Away

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

Acquainted with perfection

Live consistent with who you really are, inspired by the loving kindness of God. Do not allow current religious tradition to mould you into its pattern of reasoning. Like an inspired artist, give attention to the detail of God’s desire to find expression in you. Become acquainted with perfection. To accommodate yourself to the delight and good pleasure of him will transform your thoughts afresh from within (Rom 12:1-2 Mirror Bible).

“Become acquainted with perfection”. We know that God is perfection. But have you ever considered this? His image of us is also perfection! Perfection is what He sees in us when He calls us and gives us a destiny in sonship. Our own view may have been distorted by our experiences of life and the things we believe, but His original intent and purpose remain unchanged. He still sees us as we really are, therefore only He can bring about the transformation in our thinking that will enable us to ‘live consistent’ with that.

We have to get to know Him. There is no methodology that will achieve this consistency outside of relationship with Him. If we do not see God as He really is, there is no possibility of seeing ourselves as we really are. Our unrenewed minds are veiled by the constructs of our own consciousness. And even though we may ditch our old understanding of who God is, if we merely replace it with a new understanding which is also a construct of our own minds, then that will not be accurate either. What we need is a renewed mind and a continual, living relationship.

Taught to conform

But their minds were hardened; for until this very day at the reading of the old covenant the same veil remains unlifted, because it is removed in Christ. But to this day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their heart; but whenever a person turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away (2 Cor 3:14-16).

This veil is our old religious or DIY belief system that causes a hardened mind. Justin Paul Abraham points out that in the church we have been very good at teaching people what to think, but not how to think. Most of us have been taught to conform, either explicitly or implicitly. But conformity to ideology, theology, doctrine and cultural norms actually limits our creative thinking and our sonship. We must turn to the Lord for the veil to be taken away.

To turn is to engage metanoia, the word which is normally translated ‘repentance’ but which really means a radical shift of thinking. We know that the more we try to turn away from something, the more we will focus on the thing we are trying to turn away from. The solution is to turn towards something else instead, and to focus on that. To remove the veils and renew our minds we need to behold God face to face, to engage Him heart to heart and mind to mind, so that we can become like Him. We can do this through meditative encounters. As we open the eyes of our heart, as our imagination is activated, we can begin to see, hear and perceive true reality. Our encounters with God will begin to challenge what we thought we knew about Him.

Expand my reality

I had a number of encounters with God which created cognitive dissonance within me. Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort (or psychological stress) experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas or values, especially when something happens to highlight the contradiction. This was very distressing, but it served to expand my reality of God and myself. I had a choice, to fight to hold onto what I had always thought to be true or allow the Truth, Jesus, to renew my mind.

I had engaged God’s heart many times with my spirit, outside the limitations of time and space, where my unrenewed mind could not function rationally. Then one day God said “Let me show you My mind.” I am not going to describe it visually, but it felt like being in the middle of a continuous, harmonious conversation between Father, Son and Spirit, in which I could hear faint echoes of my own name.

Again I heard the Father say ”Let Me show you something” and I briefly glimpsed reality from His perspective. I saw that He was connected to everyone that had ever lived, is living or will live, all at once; that is around 108 billion people and counting. He was connected to everyone in the ‘now’, knowing every choice and every decision made every microsecond, and His loving desire was to bring good out of every choice, to redeem even the most stupid decisions of every single person. What amazing love!

Meanwhile we know that the love of God causes everything to mutually contribute to our advantage (Rom 8:28 Mirror Bible).

Same old

Unless our minds are renewed we will find ourselves stuck in the ‘same old, same old’ life. We want to know who God really is and who we really are in Him, yet our past belief and experience limit our capacity to grasp what is really true. Our mind has the capacity to go way beyond its present conscious awareness. We need our minds expanded, though not with psychedelic drugs or anything of that kind: engaging the mind of God will do it. He is omniscient, He knows all there is to know, so engaging His mind will likely be an image-busting experience for us. Are you willing?

Communion

One simple way we can encounter the mind of God is through communion. Renewal of the mind through communion breaks the neural pathways linked to old mindsets and establishes new neural networks, new perspectives, that can be continually renewed. I have shared my original communion prayer with you on this blog before, but I will close this post with a version I wrote to help me renew my mind through engaging with the body and blood of Jesus.

When we take communion we fellowship, sharing life, partaking of His life by focusing and fixing our eyes on Him. As we eat His flesh and drink His blood we are engaging with His life, His essence, His mind and His thoughts.  We engage by faith: not just reciting the words parrot-fashion but meditating on what we are asking and experiencing the reality.

Applying the Body and Blood of Jesus to the renewal of the mind:

I eat your flesh and drink your blood so that I will have the Mind of Christ.

I engage in the body and blood of Jesus and I embrace the transforming power of the Mind of Christ contained within it.

I engage the record containing the light, sound and frequency of God’s consciousness for the renewal of my mind, back to its eternal condition.

I embrace the record of the dimensions of the kingdom released in my mind by the thoughts of God to renew, rewire and restore my brain and thinking.

I engage God’s thoughts and apply them to my mind for health and wholeness, to break and remove all negative neural pathways linked to my conscience.

I speak to my marrow and command it to be a new source of blood that will renew and rewire the cells of my brain so that I can think like a son of God.

I apply the frequency of God’s thoughts resonating with truth to transform my mind into the Mind of Christ by removing all lies and breaking all strongholds.

I command every neural pathway attached to negative memories and ungodly behaviours to be broken and new neural pathways aligned to truth to be formed.

I apply the blood of Jesus to all negative and impure memories and break all connections to sin and trauma – Mind and thinking, be renewed!

I apply the blood of Jesus to all negative images within my imagination and all negative belief systems within my reason centre – Mind, be cleansed!

I call my mind to resonate with the thoughts of God contained within the Mind of Christ and come into alignment and agreement with an eternal perspective.

I choose that my brain and mind be conformed to the likeness of my Father and Brother in heaven to release the creative capacity of sonship

Let the word of God be breathed into my mind, unlocking its true capacity and releasing the supernatural abilities of God.

I trigger the ability for telepathic communication, telekinetic power and transmutation abilities.

I trigger the ability of creative thought, translation, bilocation, pre- and post-cognition and time travel.

[Click here to download a copy of this prayer to print for your own use or to share with others. Opens in a new tab or window.]

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248. Multicoloured, Multifaceted Reality

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

We have looked at the mind in various ways within previous teaching. The Transformation series dealt with ‘trauma to transformation’. In Gateways, we considered the subconscious mind, the heart and the negative effects of our memories. The gateway of imagination was about activating the eyes of our heart to see the spiritual realms and in the gateway of reason we began detoxing our minds from the poisonous lies of destructive thinking.

These are all important processes in maturing as sons. But now we will be asking God to actually rewire our brain and the construction of our minds and our consciousness. Adam had abilities we have now lost. As sons of God, we should expect our mental abilities to be far superior to those we currently enjoy. It is our framework of beliefs which creates that limitation.

Savant syndrome is a condition in which a person with a developmental difference demonstrates abilities far in excess of what would be considered normal, often at the cost of healthy emotional development. The savant’s mind is wired differently. God wants to restore a whole range of abilities to his sons but in the wholeness and oneness of spirit, soul and body.

Religious tradition

And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind (Rom 12:2).

These two processes, not conforming and being transformed, must run in parallel if our minds are to be renewed. We need to let go of the old DIY ways to embrace the new reality of our sonship with a new mind.

Live consistent with who you really are, inspired by the loving kindness of God. Do not allow current religious tradition to mould you into its pattern of reasoning. Like an inspired artist, give attention to the detail of God’s desire to find expression in you. Become acquainted with perfection. To accommodate yourself to the delight and good pleasure of him will transform your thoughts afresh from within (Rom 12:1-2 Mirror Bible)

Renewing our minds will enable us to know God and therefore know our true selves so that we can live in a new level of reality. So far we know only a tiny fraction of what there is to know. Patterns of belief have formed in us because of what we have been taught: religious tradition can be a big problem for Christians, even for those of us who thought we had escaped the bounds of religion decades ago!

When we align ourselves in relationship and engage personally with God’s good pleasure in us, He will transform our thoughts from within and give us a whole new way of thinking – about Him, about ourselves, about everything.

The mind of Christ

For who has known the mind of the Lord, that he will instruct Him? But we have the mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:16).

This is not ‘might have’ or ‘will one day have’. We have the mind of Christ. Christ is the anointed one and the anointing is the divine enabling power of God. It is not a brain transplant: we do not have the actual mind of Jesus but we can have the restored, equipped mind of a son of God.

Jesus demonstrated an amazing range of unexpected abilities including telepathy, transmutation, pre- and post- cognition, telekinesis, becoming invisible, quantum tunnelling and creating reality.

Since we have the same empowerment that He had, we can do the same kind things He did. In fact, He told us we could do greater!

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).

We have the mind of Christ to enable us to do things like that. Do we believe it?

When we really believe something, we will act on it. What we believe, whether truth or lies, will actually influence our behaviour. God does not want our intellectual assent but rather a belief that transforms the way we live. Lies will never enable us to be who God created us to be; only the Truth we know by personal experience (Jesus) will enable us to be free to be the real us.

So does what we claim to believe match up with what our actions indicate we really believe? If we find ourselves living in opposition with our supposed beliefs, let’s be willing to ask what the real truth is. Let’s be proactive and engage the Truth and let the Truth expand our reality to transform our lives. Let’s be willing to ask the questions that will bring a truth that we can live by.

Wired up

Even if we do believe that we can do greater things than Jesus, do we know how? Is our mind wired up correctly and connected to those abilities?

There is a popular myth that we only use 10% of our brains. That is not true, we actually use most of our brains but we only understand how 10% of the brain functions. We do not know how neurons from different areas of the brain collaborate to form consciousness or why some areas of the brain appear disconnected and some abilities are not yet (re)activated. I am sure that God does not want them to remain dormant in us, but He desires that we come into the fullness of our sonship.

Neural pathways are like superhighways of nerve cells that transmit messages. As messages travel over the superhighway many times, the pathway becomes more and more defined so that habits and beliefs form. Most of our pathways are formed by repetition, but trauma can cause a pathway to form instantly, as we saw before.

Deconstruction and Renewing

God spoke to me: “Allow your mind and your consciousness to be expanded beyond all that you presently know and have experienced. Experience the reality of all that is, all that will be and most importantly all that can be within My heart. Son, let your monochrome existence become filled with my multicoloured, multifaceted reality.”

It is always exciting when God says something like that, but I know by now that usually these things do not come without cost (and probably some unforeseen consequences as well). Expansion means being stretched, it causes tension. It is much more comfortable only to look at things the way we have always looked at them, only to see what we have always seen, and therefore only experience what we have always experienced. When God asks us to look at what can be, at things we have never seen, that creates the possibility that we will experience things we have never experienced before.

The way my mind was constructed made it impossible for me to experience that reality. It was not something that could change gradually and imperceptibly; something dramatic was called for. And so for me the whole of 2017 was a year of deconstruction and renewing. I experienced what I can only describe as a head explosion. I will share more about that in future posts.

God shows no favouritism, and everything He offered me He will offer you. Are you prepared to submit to whatever God needs to do in you? If not exactly prepared, are you at least willing? If so, tell Him and cooperate with what He says and does to make it a reality for you.

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239. The Things They Now Believe

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

“Good souls many will one day be horrified at the things they now believe of God” (George Macdonald, 1824-1905).

For me, that day has come. As I have encountered God, He has shown me that more and more of the things I believed about Him were not really true. He has been really considerate and taken me in stages through this process, because it would have been too much for me if He had done it all in one go. Will you let Him do the same for you?

Jesus is the exact representation of the Father, but that is not the picture religion paints at all. A whole host of doctrines widely accepted without question by most believers today do not really line up with a God who looks like Jesus. Since God is love, I am now very suspicious of any image of God that does not look like love.

Penal Substitutionary Atonement

One such doctrine is ‘penal substitutionary atonement’ (PSA): that Jesus died to appease God’s wrath. We will look at God’s wrath, anger, eternal judgment, punishment, eternal conscious torment and hell later in this series of posts, but PSA is the key to all these others. It is a really warped view of God which has Him saying ‘I will kill My Son to show you how good I am’.

Does God’s anger really need to be appeased? Almost all human justice systems come from the DIY tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and are based on retributive justice, making offenders pay for their crimes one way or another. If we are hearing a little more about restorative justice today, it is because people are realising that retributive justice does not work. But God’s justice is and has always been restorative. The fear of punishment is not a good motivator. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love (1 John 4:18). Why would God use fear of punishment to keep us in line?

It was man who came up with a ‘GOD’ who required appeasement (look at any primitive religion). But the truth is that ‘Sacrifice and offering you did not desire’ (Ps 40:6, quoted in Heb 10:5) and ‘You do not delight in sacrifice, otherwise I would give it; You are not pleased with burnt offering’ (Ps 51:16).

‘Redemptive violence’

“You have neglected the weightier provisions of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness…” (Matt 23:23).

The Pharisees’ religion was all legalism, missing out truth, justice and mercy altogether, and in the ‘Christian religion’ (itself a contradiction in terms), a belief system of so-called ‘redemptive violence’ will inevitably affect the way we relate to others. We will steward the cosmos from that angry, retributive perspective. That is the ‘GOD’ image we will reflect to a broken world which needs healing, not punishment.

But God is not as we have been led to believe. The corrections of God are always restorative. The judgments of God are pure and bring mercy and life:

Righteousness and justice are the foundation of Your throne;
Mercy and truth go before Your face. (Ps 89:14 NKJV).

Mercy and truth always go before Him. His justice is mercy and love, not punishment and retribution. Even painful truth is revealed only for our good and healing.

“God is a God of fierce judgement. I sense God’s burning judgement falling upon many of you today. He has made up His mind and the verdict is unchangeable. His judgement is: ‘You are forgiven, loved and accepted’. So, enjoy your judgement” (Benjamin David, Facebook post).

The cross

Jesus warned his disciples that He was going to the cross. He did not say He would suffer the just punishment for our sins at the hands of His Father but that He would suffer at the hands of men:

“Let these words sink into your ears; for the Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men” (Luke 9:44).

“From that time Jesus began to show His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised up on the third day” (Matt 16:21).

For He was teaching His disciples and telling them: “The Son of Man is to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill Him. And when He has been killed, He will rise three days later.” (Mark 9:31).

“Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem; and the Son of Man will be delivered to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn Him to death, and will hand Him over to the Gentiles to mock and scourge and crucify Him, and on the third day He will be raised up” (Matt 20:18-19).

Look also at Mark 10:33-34, Luke 18:31-33, Luke 24:6-7, John 18:3-6, John 18:12, John 19:14-18, Acts 2:23, Acts 2:36, and Heb 12:2.

Jesus suffered at the hands of ruthless men, Jews and Gentiles, representing the religious and political systems. They agreed to condemn Him to keep their DIY system in control. Men crucified Jesus, and God used our punishment of Him to bring restoration and reconciliation.

He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and like one from whom men hide their face He was despised, and we did not esteem Him. Surely our griefs He Himself bore, and our sorrows He carried; Yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But He was pierced through by our transgressions, He was crushed by our iniquities; the chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, and by His scourging we are healed (Isa 53:3-5).

There is simply nothing in scripture to support the idea that Jesus went to the cross to suffer the fiery wrath of His Father so that we could escape it. ‘We ourselves esteemed Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted’ but that is not how it really was.

The purpose of the cross was to undo the consequence of Adam’s sin, a loss of identity which produced spiritual death. It was a demonstration not of God’s wrath against humanity, but of His love towards humanity. When Jesus took the sin of the whole world upon his shoulders He was showing us the depths of God’s love.

“Our Father never needed a sacrifice; we did. And we, as one man, with one accord damned His Son, and our Father accepted our ‘faith’ and our ‘will,’ and our ‘decision’ to crucify His Son as the means to establish a real and everlasting relationship with us inside our faithless betrayal. This is salvation. This is adoption. This is redeeming genius and love almost beyond our wildest imaginations” – C. Baxter Kruger.

Atonement, propitiation

In the New Testament the Greek word katallagé (reconciliation) is often misleadingly translated ‘atonement’. ‘To atone’ is to make amends, to make reparation for wrongdoing. However, this old covenant word used to describe how a sacrificial animal covered people’s sin is not a word used in the new covenant. And animal sacrifices were not tortured by the priest, they were just killed.

Hilasmos (‘propitiation’) is another word which has been translated in a way which assumes an angry deity who needs to be appeased. It comes from the verb hilaskomai, meaning ‘to conciliate, be merciful, forgive, show favour’. It does not mean ‘atone’.

“But the church has always believed this!”

It hasn’t. Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA) may be a commonly held view in evangelical circles today but it was not formulated until the 11th century, by Anselm of Canterbury. Personal encounter with God could never lead us to the conclusion he reached through scholasticism, a method of study that emphasises reason, research and constructive criticism.

PSA is a man-made, demonically inspired doctrine of distortion. It only sounds plausible to us because we have been conditioned to accept that God is angry with us.

Forsaken

“My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Ps 22, quoted by Jesus on the cross in Matt 27:46; Mark 15:34).

This was Jesus’ cry of true identification with us in our brokenness and in our deepest, darkest pain. It was our separation He felt. Most of those who heard Him would know the rest of the psalm, including v24:

For He has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; nor has He hidden His face from him; but when he cried to Him for help, He heard.

We have seen before that God the Father never left Jesus the Son. Do we really imagine that the Triune God was somehow pulled apart at the cross? Whose side was the Holy Spirit on? The whole concept is preposterous when you know God for yourself. And yet we happily sing:

“One final breath He gave
As heaven looked away…”
(Forever by Brian Johnson, Kari Jobe, Christa Black Gifford, and Gabriel Wilson).

Heaven did no such thing.

The wages of sin

The cross was God showing the world that He was willing to take on flesh and die – for us and as us – not to pay off an angry God who couldn’t stand the sight of us. Jesus did not save us from God, He saved us from death (the wages of sin). The aim of Jesus’ death was to make personal, healing, life-giving, forgiving contact with us sinners, at the root of our sin and alienation.

A battered reed He will not break off, and a smouldering wick He will not put out, until He leads justice to victory (Matt 12:20, quoting Isa 42:3).

God’s justice does not break people; it heals those who are broken.

“God doesn’t need to punish anyone. “Sin is its own punishment.” … No one gets away with anything. There are terrible consequences for our actions, but God is forever with us, weaving grace into our stories to redeem even the worst situations for our good” (Brad Jerzak, ‘Unfundamentalist Parenting in The Shack – Part 1’).

Meet God

But please, don’t believe anything I say. Not without meeting God for yourself.

How much of what we believe has been handed onto us by someone else? Reading books, hearing sermons, just picking it up from being in a particular stream or community… none of that is a valid substitute. Get your revelation direct from Him, otherwise you are just leaning on someone else’s understanding (when, according to Proverbs 3:5, you ought not to even lean on your own). My understanding has come from my own personal experience, but it is no good to you. You need your own experience.

So meet God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Meet Him face to face and find out what He is really like. Let Him reveal Himself as the Truth. And be prepared to lay aside anything which does not line up with Who He is.

This blog post is adapted from Mike’s teaching in the ‘Engaging God‘ subscription programme. Find out more…

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68. As He Is, So Are We

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott –

When Jesus comes back, He is coming for His bride, the church. So this scripture is talking about us:

That He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless (Eph 5:27).

And since each of us are part of that bride, we have to be ready. That is why we are experiencing a season of purification and refining in our lives. For some of us, we may well have been here before. But we have a sense that God is doing something at a deeper level this time. God is removing stumbling blocks, He is removing all the idols we have in our lives. We are praying Psalm 139, ‘Search me O God, and know my heart’. And it is so that He can make us into that holy church that Jesus can inhabit in fullness, releasing His power onto the earth.

Confidence

Now, what does it take to be ready? There are some scriptures in the first letter of John that I want to look at:

By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world (1 John 4:17).

So we can have confidence, because ‘as He is, so also are we in this world’. As Jesus is: not as He was, but as He is now. He is enthroned in heaven: and we are outworking that kingdom, that enthronement, here on the earth. Our confidence comes from knowing that He is on the throne. His position as King is what gives us the confidence to outwork that kingdom, here in our lives, on earth.

‘Now, little children, abide in Him, so that when He appears, we may have confidence and not shrink away from Him in shame at His coming’ (1 John 2:28).

There is a relationship here: we abide in Him and He in us. It is an intimate relationship. And when He appears, as long as we are remaining in that relationship of intimacy, hearing and obeying His voice daily, doing the things we see the Father doing, then of course we will greet Him with confidence. It would be terrible to flinch away from Him when He comes in glory, not to be able to look at Him because we are ashamed of the way we have been living. If we stay close to Him now, we can have confidence when He comes.

Like Him

‘Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is. And everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure’ (1 John 3:2-3).

So when Jesus actually appears, we will be like Him. We will be transformed. We will have a new resurrection body, and be transformed into an eternal being. In His resurrection body Jesus was able to appear to His disciples, walk through walls, eat a fish supper. We will be just like that: ‘we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is.’ But because we have this hope, we also need to purify ourselves, just as He is pure. So we do have some work to do.

Baggage

When we see Him, we do not want to be carrying all the baggage that we might presently be going around with. We have an opportunity, right now, to be purified. We can allow Jesus to refine us, to prepare us to meet Him. All that holds us back and weighs us down, we have an opportunity to get it sorted out ahead of time.

I want to be properly prepared to meet Him face to face. I have my life here and now to work on that. And how do I make myself ready? I just surrender to Him. I allow Him to do whatever he wants to do in me. It is not something I have to somehow try to rack my brains and get all figured out. I just have to give Him my life on a daily basis. I need to present myself as a living sacrifice. I need to reckon myself dead to sin and alive to Him. I need to be crucified with Christ so that I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. My flesh no longer determines what I do.

Anointed One

‘Christ’ is not Jesus’ surname, remember. Whenever the word ‘Christ’ is used in scripture it refers to the anointing he carries. When it says ‘Jesus’, it is referring to the person of Jesus; when it says ‘the Lord Jesus Christ’, it is giving Him His full title and emphasising His lordship. So each time we read about Jesus in scripture, the name(s) used to describe Him emphasise what aspect we particularly need to understand about Him.

So it is Christ, the Anointed One and His anointing, who lives in me. I have been crucified – past tense – but I need to outwork that in a daily relationship, by presenting myself as a living sacrifice before God. I have written about how we do that in an earlier post. This may be stating the obvious, but the thing about a living sacrifice is that it is actually alive. I present myself on a daily basis, so that my life can be used for His kingdom purposes, so that I can be pure as He is pure.

That is how He would like me to be; how He would like all of us to be. How we need to be, because He is coming.

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