All of us, every single person reading or listening to this now or in the future, are children of God. You are the apple of God’s eye, the treasure of His heart and the object of His desire.
For some people, that is very hard to believe. The way they have been taught through religion, family upbringing or personal experience has shaped how they think about themselves and how they think about God. Many people struggle to accept that they are loved unconditionally, or to believe that God truly thinks about them in this way.
To know the truth, we need to stop trying to set our own course. We need to stop rowing the boat, even when we have no oars and try to make something work anyway. Instead, we are invited to jump into the vast ocean of unconditional love and allow ourselves to be consumed by it. What that love consumes is everything that hinders us from discovering the truth of who God is and who we are.
So who are you?
I would encourage you to go on a journey of discovery, to discover who you truly are as you walk through the garden of your heart towards intimacy. This was the path that I took, though each of us will engage this journey in different ways.
When I first began to engage God more intimately, and in what some might describe as a more supernatural way, I also became aware of something happening within me. I discovered that I had a garden in my heart. I did not know it was there, although Scripture is full of imagery that points to this. God began to show me this garden, and that marked the beginning of a deeper relationship that led me into greater intimacy with Him.
From there, you can step onto the dance floor of discovery, enter the soaking room of transformation, and eventually engage the bridal chamber for the consummation of first love. This is where we begin to experience, in a much deeper way, a heart-to-heart, face-to-face encounter with true reality.
Restoring first love restores our true identity. It restores our origin and our sonship, both in relationship and in position. This is where first love is found, at our beginning, our true origin. From that place, we begin to recover our inheritance and our authority as sons of God and co-heirs of creation.
There is a vast realm still to be discovered concerning creation and our role within it, as God always intended. We are rediscovering this as we come to identify ourselves as sons. It is essential that we embrace this reality.
Restoring first love restores our creative power and our position within the order of Melchizedek. This order restores our identity as priests, kings, oracles and legislators. It is a governmental function that flows from relationship with God, restoring our destiny and our true creational purpose as sons.
Our sonship is meant to reflect our Father. We are not called to independence, but to reflection, to reveal the nature of our heavenly Father as His sons.
Unconditional love is meant to be experienced, not merely believed or understood intellectually. My hope is that after many sessions, people are moving beyond simply believing that God is unconditional love, and that He loves us unconditionally, into actually knowing this through personal experience.
We are invited to move beyond intellectual and theoretical knowledge into experiential truth. True knowledge is experiential. It was never meant to be information alone, but lived experience, grounded in reality. This is what we call testimony. The power of testimony is that it is something we have truly experienced.
The Holy Spirit testifies with our spirit about who we really are, enabling us to grasp this truth in a much deeper way.
Ephesians 1:4 tells us that God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him in love. This was something God initiated. He was proactive. He did not wait for us to realise that we needed restoration. From the beginning, He had already set this in motion within His heart.
The Mirror Bible expresses this by saying that God associated us in Christ before the fall of the world. Jesus is God’s mind made up about us. In His love, He always knew that He would present us again face to face with Him in blameless innocence.
This is the state to which we are being restored. It is the state of first love, where we fully embrace how God felt about us and engaged with us before we ever entered this physical realm.
God is not passive. He is active and proactive, continually reaching out to restore us to first love. He is not waiting for us to make the first move. He is already acting, already pursuing, already inviting us into this restoration.
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Going in to meet the person of God—that is an experience beyond any other I’ve ever had. I could never have entered into that in the state I was in, but God began to change me, prepare me, in all those things in the soaking room, so I could get to that place where I was able to meet Him face to face. Now, I’d met God in many different ways, but there’s a difference between engaging the presence of God and engaging the person of God.
Metamorphosis
Metamorphosis is a process that produces transformation. Not only do things get removed, but things also get changed, added, to enable us to go into deeper levels of intimacy. So we have the ability to live in multi-dimensional realms, in the fullness of our eternal nature and identity.
An example in nature of metamorphosis is the transformation of a tadpole into a frog. It hatches from spawn and begins life restricted to water, breathing through gills—but that’s not God’s intention for it, that’s just the beginning. The tadpole eventually loses its gills and tail, develops legs and a new respiratory system, so as a frog it can be free from restrictions and live in both water and on land. A butterfly goes through a similar process—starting as a caterpillar, restricted to crawling on the earth, but changing through the chrysalis into something that is free to fly.
These are symbolic of the change and transformation that’s needed. We also go through a similar transformation that removes, adds, and restores abilities.
Many times in the Bible, you’ll find characters placed in a place of restriction to prepare them for their destiny. Now, sometimes people really struggle with that. They find it really difficult—to be restricted. They think God is putting that restriction on them in a negative way. But it is a positive thing when God places us in a position that brings about the change and transformation needed in our lives.
Some examples of that—Jacob under Laban, where he was looking to receive his wife, and there were all these conditions put on him, and tricks and everything else, but it produced character in him. Moses in the wilderness—he was called, but lived in the wilderness until he was able to take his position, after he had matured. David in Adullam’s cave—called for the kingdom, but in this place with a group of misfits, and God used that. Jeremiah was in anguish of soul, but came out into a place of fulfilling his destiny.
And then Joseph and Esther—they were also prepared. Joseph was prepared in the pit—his brothers threw him into the pit. How difficult must that have been? Then in slavery, in stewardship, and in prison—the prison of obscurity—until the time was right when his dreams and destiny would be fulfilled. Joseph, in his father’s house, was never going to fulfil his destiny. It was Joseph who’d gone through the process of change and transformation, who grew, who matured, who would end up in leadership in Egypt—in a way beyond what we’d have thought possible. But God prepared him, took him through seeming injustice and different situations that so challenged him—and yet he remained humble through those situations.
Esther went through 12 months of preparation before she could come before the king. That was so difficult. I’ve engaged Esther in the spirit—I’ve engaged her in the cloud of witnesses. I asked her, “What was it like?” And she said, “I didn’t want to be prepared to go and see the king.” That was not something a young Jewish girl would ever have wanted—to be a concubine of a king, a foreign king. But God had a purpose for Esther that would bring about the salvation of her people.
So it’s really important we don’t just look at the external circumstances of our life and think, “This is terrible. How can I get out of this?” We need to understand that sometimes, places of restriction are the places of greatest transformation.
For our soul to be prepared, there needs to be an identification of the things in our lives that are hindrances—coping mechanisms, defence mechanisms, trauma—and all of that leads us to a place of surrender. We surrender our independence. We learn to trust the Father for our provision, protection and direction in life. We’re no longer going to do it by the DIY tree path.
This video and blog post are taken from Mike’s current teaching series, Restoring First Love. Get the full-length videos every month, ad-free and with many extras, only at eg.freedomarc.org/first-love
Realign with our divine origin
Our spirits, souls and bodies realign with our divine origin—get realigned and brought into union and oneness with each other and with God. The identification of our false identity and any works- or performance-based orientation gives us the opportunity to find our true origin and redemptive gifts.
There’s preparation for glorious sonship in restored First Love, and creation is longing and waiting for the revealing of the sons of God—for the revealing of our true nature and how that can bring freedom to the whole of creation.
So the soaking room experiences began to engage my body, they began to engage my soul, to prepare my body to radiate glory and my soul to operate in light. This soaking begins to realign the frequencies of our being, to restore resonance with God, with our true identity—harmony and balance to our whole being.
We experience the sound and light frequencies of glory—God’s nature—for transfiguration from one degree of glory to another. We don’t stay the same. We increase in glory. So we increase in the full revelation of who we are, and begin to express that and live from that place.
Now literally, excitation of light waves of specific frequencies causes our DNA photons to be energised and transformed. That light is God Himself. We begin to be transfigured in light by God, who is light. We become sons of light, living in physical and emotional harmony, health and wholeness—and it all happens by the presence of God.
The symbols of the things in soaking are symbols of God’s presence—of God Himself. God as our Father is calling us to embrace the restrictions of transformation, to receive the freedom of our sonship. And it’s so important that we receive that freedom, so we can receive the full revelation of our eternal destiny—to live trans- and multi-dimensional existences, fully embracing all of the eternal characteristics of sonship that are our eternal identity, our true authentic self.
John 3:30 says, “He must increase, but I must decrease.” Now I’ve heard that preached as if it’s something we need to beat ourselves up about—as if we need to put ourselves on the cross every day. It doesn’t mean that. He reveals in me what is like Him—I embrace that. He takes away from me what is not like Him—I embrace that. It’s not something I have to try and do, like “I’ve got to decrease,” as if I’m nobody and nothing and with this sort of false humility. No—this is allowing Him to increase. Therefore, if He increases, then everything that’s not like Him falls away.
So I learn to surrender, where I can present myself to Him—I can be changed, conformed to sonship through this whole process by allowing Him to soak me in His presence.
So, what is soaking? Soaking is to make or allow something to become thoroughly wet by immersing it in liquid—that’s the dictionary definition: to immerse, to steep, to submerge, to submerse, to dip, to sink, to dunk, to bathe, to wet, to rinse, to douse, to marinate, to steep, to pickle. I mean, some of it’s really important.
To baptise in water, to baptise in the Spirit, to baptise in fire—in which we are immersed in those things which bring about the changes. I’ll go into that in more detail in a future session when I look at the heat and how heat transforms us. But the soaking room is the place of preparation that has parallel heavenly encounters in the River of Life, which is a river of energy—of Spirit—and in the river of fire.
God is a consuming fire. His love is a consuming fire. We can be baptised in the River of Life and in the associated waterfalls that cascade down. We can be baptised in the river of fire, engage the altars of fire, engage the process. See, the River of Life is Spirit energy—living water. It’s not H₂O, but the very essence of life, encoded with the frequencies of God—God’s essence. And when we are baptised into it, when we submerge ourselves into it, it begins to change and transform us.
The sound of many waters—it says God’s voice is like the sound of many waters. The sound of many waters are the creational frequencies of God’s voice that will realign us to who God created us to be.
I encourage you right now
just to close your eyes.
Get comfortable.
Begin to relax.
To focus your thinking on God.
Focus your thinking
on God’s love, grace, mercy for you.
Focus your breathing by slowing down.
Breathe in more slowly.
Breathe in more deeply.
And as you’re breathing in,
you’re breathing in
the unconditional love of the Father.
You’re breathing in love.
You’re breathing in joy, and peace.
And as you breathe it in, just receive.
Let it flow into your being.
Whether you feel it, or sense it,
just let it flow.
Continue to be still.
Breathe in
and breathe out slowly.
Breathe in slowly
and breathe out slowly.
Slow everything down and totally relax.
Just become mindful
that you’re cocooned
right now
in God’s presence.
As you are still,
He is cocooning you in love.
He’s loving on you.
Consciously invite love,
invite joy,
invite peace,
to come upon you,
to flow in you,
to flow through you—
to create an atmosphere of rest around you
that you are completely submerged in –
baptised into the higher frequency of love.
Vibrating in that energy.
Vibrating in peace and joy.
Overshadowed with the presence of the Holy Spirit,
energising you,
transforming you,
changing you.
Be open to that overshadowing.
For the presence of God
to rest upon you.
Sons of Issachar 