God the Father – Sons of Issachar

508. God’s Desire For You | Discovering True Intimacy

Mike Parsons –

This is the relationship God wants us to have: the deepest, most intimate relationship we could ever have with anyone.

He wants to reveal Himself in such a way that this relationship becomes possible, because we are no longer caught up in the issues that have separated us from Him or made us fearful of intimacy.

Often we are afraid of getting close because we think, well, He will really know me. But He already knows us, and He loves us anyway. That love is unconditional. Because of that, we do not need to be afraid to be real or honest with Him. We can share how we feel. We can learn how He feels towards us and be inspired by that. This is real relationship. It is not abstract or distant. It is real, and because it is real, it includes everything.

Sometimes we struggle. Sometimes it is difficult. Sometimes things happen that we do not understand and we ask, how could God allow that to happen? We have questions. We have doubts. At times, we even experience unbelief. God understands all of that. He is not threatened by it. He wants to draw us closer and closer, deeper and deeper, bringing us to a place where He truly reveals Himself.

As He does that, we begin to see ourselves reflected back in the wonderful mirror of His face. We see ourselves as He made us. He reveals who we really are. He wants us to live in that intimacy, but intimacy always brings change. It brings transformation. Sometimes the crucible gets hot, releasing the things in us that hinder relationship and closeness. But there is no guilt, no shame and no condemnation in that process. There is only love.

It was love that inspired me to trust God and to open my heart and my life fully to Him. It was love that brought me to the judgment seat, where the fire of His presence burned away the wood, hay and stubble of my scroll. It was love that brought me to a place of complete surrender. If I had feared Him, I could never have done that. He wants us to come to a place where the intimacy of His presence reveals the true nature of His heart, and we discover that this is home.

Not knowing who we are keeps us from Him. Sin is not primarily a verb, something we do, but a noun, something we are affected by. We lost our identity, and because we do not know who we are, we feel unworthy, undeserving or unqualified for relationship with God. Sometimes we even think we do not need it. All of these mindsets keep us from the relationship God always intended and has always prepared for us.

God’s desire has always been for us to return to restored innocence, to face-to-face relationship. The things that keep us from that are lies. Paul said that we are alienated in our own minds. God has never been separated from us. We think these things keep us from Him, but in reality, God embraces us as we are. In that intimacy, He reveals who we truly are.

As we come into agreement with that truth, we begin to resonate with it. The frequency of truth changes us. We are entrained into alignment with who we always were, but lost sight of and forgot. It is not behaviour that keeps us from God. It is mindset. It is the way we see ourselves.

That is why God wants to renew our minds, to the true nature of who He is and who we are. He wants us to realise that the only thing that keeps us from Him is our own perception. Once we begin to see rightly, we discover that nothing can separate us from God, not even ourselves, because His love never fails and never gives up.

As the psalmist David said, where can I go from Your presence? If I go into the grave, You are there. If I go into the highest heavens, You are there. In Him we live and move and have our being. We cannot be separated from Him except in our own minds. God has never separated Himself from us.

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284. His Love Never Fails

422. From Rejection to Acceptance | Understanding Your Identity in Christ

442. Unconditional Love – NO GUILT, NO SHAME

446. Embrace Love’s Fire

491. When I Let Go Of Penal Substitutionary Atonement

Mike Parsons

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Penal substitutionary atonement (PSA) was the first to go. When I began to express my doubts about it to others, one woman involved in mystic and mentoring groups emailed me, saying I was trying to take away ‘the cornerstone of her faith’. She was serious and angry at me because she wanted to hold onto PSA as the cornerstone of her belief.

I told her that if that’s where she wanted to remain, that was her choice, but I was moving on. Naturally, that upset some people, but many others resonated with the idea that it didn’t make sense for God as Father to kill or punish His Son. And when you investigate further, you find that PSA is actually a doctrine that only emerged in the tenth century…

299. PSA Sounds Nothing Like Jesus! (Penal Substitutionary Atonement [1])

304. Wrath is not the solution | Penal Substitutionary Atonement [2]

489. Nine Pillars That Shaped (And Shook) My Beliefs

Mike Parsons

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I’m not going to go far wrong if I interpret everything through love. I might get some minor things a bit mixed up or twisted, but the bottom line is that love won’t lead me too far astray if I lean that way. On the other hand, if I lean towards judgment, condemnation or other negative interpretations, I’m stepping beyond the scope of love.

I don’t go there any more.

It took a long time for my mind to be deprogrammed from my religious upbringing and the programming of evangelicalism, along with the other pillars of my thinking. He asked me if I wanted him to remove these pillars from my mind. About six of them were religious, as I was brought up very religiously, and three were cultural or scientific, influenced by an education that included cultural relativism and similar ideas.

443. Unconditional Love – NO RECORD OF WRONGS

363. Deconstructing the Pillars of Your Mind

488. Do You Only See What You Expect To See?

Mike Parsons

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All those people who say they have been in hell for ten minutes, or whatever, are framing their experience through their theological understanding of hell rather than the truth. They see what they expect to see. That is the problem. We can be confirmation-biased and create our own scenario around what God is really trying to show us.

This is why we need to let God renew our minds and trust him in that process, rather than resisting him. At the same time, we should not be naive enough to think that everything we are thinking is already correct, because we are all still in the process. Even so, I would rather err on the side of love in everything I think than lean towards anything else. If I interpret everything through love, I will not go far wrong.

243. Not Counting Their Trespasses

434. God’s Fiery Love

253. Framing Your Reality

487. My First Hand Experiences Of Hell

Mike Parsons

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So between 2005 and 2010, I had a number of experiences which I described at the time as hell-like, simply because I had no other reference point in my life. I thought I had encountered hell, and so my framework for understanding was the usual concept of hell. That’s what I believed the experience meant, because I couldn’t see it any other way; I had no other frame of reference.

Once I actually encountered God and encountered love, I was able to revisit those experiences and see what he had really been showing me through them. I came to realise that I had completely misunderstood and misinterpreted what had happened, just as many others do when they claim to have been in hell for a few minutes. They are framing their experience through their theological understanding of hell.

404. Framing Hell in a New Light

244. The Hell Delusion

486. Take It Back To The Father

Mike Parsons

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We should weigh both what we feel and what we believe God has said. Does this align with love? If it does, we can wholeheartedly accept it. If it does not, then something has gone wrong in how we’ve understood it. In that case, we can take it back to the Father and ask why we misinterpreted it, recognising that often it is our own mindset that causes misunderstanding.

I had to do that many times when my experiences did not line up with what I thought to be true. When that happened, cognitive dissonance arose, and I was left with a choice: which should I trust—my experience, or my belief system? Over time I came to see that when my experience was aligned with love, that was what I needed to trust. And when it was not aligned with love, it was usually my interpretation of the experience that was the real issue.

330. Find Truth Within: Trust Your Own Connection with God

421. Belief to Reality | Living in the Truth

485. Having Our Minds Renewed

Mike Parsons

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We’re all in a process of having our minds renewed so that we won’t be moulded and shaped by the upbringing, conditioning and programming we’ve received. Our minds are renewed so we’re not pressed into that mould, but instead transformed into who He said we were from the beginning.

That process is relational. By experiencing Him, our minds are changed. We can’t make it happen by trying to use the Bible as a tool, since misunderstanding it was what created the problem in the first place. Our minds are changed when we let Him do it, as we submit ourselves to the relationship He gives us—always weighing everything with love as our measuring stick.

287. Unconditional Love, Grace, and the truth about salvation

431. Breaking Free from Deceptive Teaching | Rediscovering God’s Love

484. Measure Everything Against Love

Mike Parsons

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We should weigh the things that we feel and what we think God has said. We should weigh them. We shouldn’t just accept them carte blanche. We should weigh it.

What do we weigh it with? How do we measure it? I measure it with love. Is this loving? Is this going to help people experience God and experience His love? So I’m measuring it against that.

So I know that if I thought God told me to do something which was contradictory to love, I know it couldn’t be Him. And people say, but you’re now saying that God can’t do something! Yes, I am. He can’t contradict Himself as being love, and he wouldn’t ask us to contradict himself and contradict what love is either.

So whenever something we think God said is not aligned to true love – true unconditional love – then we’ve got to question it.

431. Breaking Free from Deceptive Teaching | Rediscovering God’s Love

365. I Don’t ‘Believe’ In Unconditional Love

482. Is Your Heart Aligned with God’s Kingdom or Culture?

Mike Parsons

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There are many questions we should be asking and signs we should be looking for. If God is doing something—like Enoch appearing or other unusual things—what is that about? I cannot give a hard, fast answer, but I do believe God is challenging us to think and to question what we believe. What are the foundations of our lives and the way we live? Are they kingdom foundations, or are they cultural?

If they are cultural and oppose God’s kingdom, which is love, then we must ask, where is my heart? Is it aligned with God’s heart, or with the culture where I live? I do not want to be known culturally as British. Yes, I was born in Britain, it is on my passport, but I do not want to be subject to the culture of Britain if it is anti-kingdom. I would never call myself a British Christian, or even a Christian. I just want to be seen as a follower of God, of the Father.

So, what might cause me to have views which may be contradictory to the kingdom? We need to ask: what has shaped my life, my thinking, my belief systems, my worldview? Are they aligned with God’s heart, or do they need deconstruction? I see three main areas where God is challenging people (there may be more): religious deconstruction, political deconstruction, and financial deconstruction. A friend of mine said God was taking him through those things, and I realised he was doing the same with me. I now know to look at things differently in those areas and make sure that I am not thinking in a cultural way that puts me into contradiction to God.

So, financially, my views have changed from religious rules about tithing to simply asking, “God, what do you want me to do?” Politically, I had to face assumptions about why I voted as I did. I had assumed God agreed with me, but he showed me I had never asked him. I had to be completely unravelled and deconstructed in that area. Now I ask, “Is there a way you want me to vote?” And if he says it does not matter, then I examine my own heart and motives. Each of us may have a different way of looking at that question.

God wants our whole mindset aligned with the kingdom and with one another, to become one mind, the mind of Christ. That requires major shifts, deconstruction, and honest questioning of why we think, believe and act as we do. Most people never really consider these things, but I believe it is part of the process God is taking us through so that heaven can be established on earth.

For the past ten years, God has been deconstructing most of my old assumptions. My thinking has changed in many areas. This does not mean there are simple answers, because each of us must discover what God is asking of us in our own sonship. But it does mean we must begin to make decisions based not on selfishness, economics or cultural conditioning, but on God’s heart.

Strong opinions are often shaped by culture rather than by God. Even in raising my children, I tried to let them think for themselves, yet they still reflected my political views. That made me wonder whether I had been more vocal than I thought. The key is not to pass on political perspectives but to help people find God’s heart.

Some people vote based on economics, others on compassion, but the real question is whether our choices reflect God’s heart or merely our conditioning. I am not convinced God is as invested in political systems as solutions as we might think. Much of the prophetic movement seems to have become politicised in a way it never was 20 years or so ago, perhaps out of disillusionment when promised revivals did not happen as expected. Whatever the reason, it seems to have become blind to the real issues in some way…

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288. Enoch’s Secret to Walking with God

241. You Have Not Desired

277. On Earth as in Heaven

481. Beyond The Pages | Finding Truth Outside the Bible

Mike Parsons –

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We are following a book which has been translated by people with an agenda and a preconceived confirmational bias, rather than out of relationship with Jesus. Yet Jesus said he would speak to us and that we could follow him. We have the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, within us. We do not need another teacher.

So why are we telling people they must follow a book, when they can be guided by the Holy Spirit and through Jesus, who is the Truth? Jesus is the Word of God. The Bible is not the Word of God. The problem is that we have been taught otherwise. I hear people say, “We are going to read the Word.” But they are reading a book, half of which was never intended for them, the other half written for people in the first century preparing for the end. We are not those people.

That does not mean God has not used the Bible. He has used it in my life, but it has also caused huge confusion. I was deceived into believing things simply because I was taught that was what the Bible said. Now, I go with what Jesus says. I will not live by an interpretation of a book; I will follow a person in relationship. He is the Way, the Truth and the Life. The Bible is not. Even if someone had never read a verse, never seen a Bible, they could still encounter Jesus and through him engage the Father.

This is why I would never encourage a new believer to start with the Bible. It will only confuse them, as they are faced with conflicting interpretations and even two seemingly different versions of God. But it was always just people’s limited view of God, not who he truly is. Relationship is what matters. I can walk in relationship even with those I disagree with, because I do not need to prove them wrong. My faith is grounded in personal experience and testimony, not in the teaching of a book.

I use the Bible only as a frame of reference, because that is how people have been taught. Yet I can count fewer than five times when the Father or Jesus has actually quoted a Bible verse to me. When they did, it was revelatory. For example, “Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden…” was spoken to me when I was striving to be good enough and keep a behavioural standard. It showed me why I was weary and how I could come into his rest. The principle was what mattered, not the verse.

Jesus is quite capable of saying directly, “Follow me and enter rest.” He does not need to quote Matthew 11:28. People can and do go astray, but many have also gone astray while following the Bible. History shows how it has been used to persecute, to endorse slavery, the Inquisition and Christendom itself. The Bible is not safe. Only Jesus and the Holy Spirit, as the Way, the Truth and the Life, keep us on a safe path. If you use love as the plumb line, you will not go far wrong.

This is what God showed me when he challenged my views of the Bible. He brought me back to the relationship I had with him, and how he speaks directly. He weaned me off my need for Bible confirmation. I know many still need that, but their thinking must eventually shift. They were told “the Bible says this,” but that has to be undone if they are to truly follow God.

Some quote verses about people falling away from sound teaching in the last days. But those last days were AD 66 to 70, when many fell away under persecution. That does not apply to us in the same way today. And this is the issue.