Tag: God

319. Face to Face with God

Mike Parsons –

I am not against miracles, and God still does them: He works to bring people into a relationship with Him. I have experienced all sorts of amazing things, like rolling around on the floor and laughing, being translated in the Spirit and more. These experiences were part of my journey, part of my coming of age, or maturing; but they did not change me in any dimension compared to encountering God face to face.

I can do anything I see the Father doing, and if that’s a miracle or a healing, then that’s great. However, I wouldn’t do it just because I thought it was something I should do. I am only going to function out of what I know the Father’s heart is expressing. I will ask Him and be directed by Him on every occasion, rather than just doing something.

I am not trying to put you off ministering healing or other miracles to people. I would not say you need to do it as ‘gifts of the spirit’: your spirit is quite capable of operating in those things. Discernment comes through training our senses to experience how to see in the spiritual realm, and obviously I am not against engaging in the angelic realm or any of those activities. I just feel we have to be careful that we don’t create another mediatorial system which people need to enter God’s presence.

Let’s bring people directly to God and let them experience God for themselves: then they will find the power of His presence and His love transforming their lives. There is no need for a mediator or a third party. We have to be careful that we don’t become the third party that other people become dependent on.

The prophetic movement has created a “you need to come and have us prophesy over you” mentality, rather than teaching people how to prophesy themselves. We mystics need to teach people to be mystics, to be able to live in intimacy with the Father, to have an experience of Heaven and Earth. In that way they can demonstrate God’s power and love in that way to others by leading them into an experience of Him, rather than doing things for them.

There is a real a danger in mixing the covenants, and mixing what was in the transition (between the old and the new covenants, in the first century AD)  with what God wants for today: which is that Heaven is open, Jesus is the door; anyone can walk through that door at any time and experience God for themselves. Therefore they don’t need faith. Faith is the evidence of things not seen: I have seen God, therefore I don’t need faith. I experience Him. It’s His faith that I am living in, His faith in me. I live by the faith of the Son of God: who He says I am as a child of God. I don’t live by my faith in Him – that is all about works!
and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20 NRSVUE).
How much faith do I have? And some of the healing ministry, especially the Word of Faith movement, was about generating faith. I live in an awareness of my sonship; therefore I don’t need to have faith. All those people in Hebrews 11 died in faith, having not seen the promises. You don’t need faith when you have experience. When I encounter God, that experience brings a realisation of what is true. That generates faith, if you like; but in what is true, not how much faith I’ve got in something.
I live by the faith of the Son of God; I don’t live by my faith in Him – that is all about works!

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318. Not the End of the World

Mike Parsons – 

Understanding Realised Eschatology

Realised eschatology, for me, is also heading for an understanding of Christian universalism. The same scriptures Jesus referred to concerning hell (Gehenna) are in the same passage as those that speak of the end of the age – not the end of the world, but the conclusion of their Old Covenant age. People faced being cast into Gehenna if they remained in Jerusalem when the Roman armies invaded. They would be crucified, and a few hundred thousand were thrown into the literal Gehenna.

This is the concept of hell, as commonly understood in English. Of course, Christian Universalists would say hell is a different thing, and some deny its existence altogether. Personally, I see it as a place where those who haven’t come to know Jesus in life still have the opportunity to choose him after death – death is not the end of choice. Rather than a realm of punishment and torment, I see it as the fire of God’s loving presence which purifies and refines.

The scriptures that mention Gehenna portray it as a consequence of staying entrenched in the old covenant ways, not some future judgment scenario. It was a warning of a physical manifestation of death. Jesus warned his followers to flee Jerusalem when they saw certain signs: they understood this and ran to the hills, to find safety in Pella. By heeding his words, they were physically saved from the destruction that befell Jerusalem.

Signs

All that being said, I believe God introduces concepts like this to steer the church back to first principles, into a deeper relationship in which we experience Him intimately, face to face. Once we do, we no longer need the signs which pointed us towards this reality.

Experiential connection

In my preaching of the gospel, I aim to introduce people to Jesus in a way that facilitates a tangible, experiential connection with the Father. It is only  through this intimate relationship that someone can truly understand and experience God’s unconditional love, find spiritual healing and wholeness, and embrace their identity and inheritance as a child of God. I believe God is gradually weaning us off an over-reliance on healings and miracles, so we can live in mystical experience with Him. This shift is not about abandoning miraculous manifestations altogether but that we use them for the purpose of outworking what God is doing in the earth.

We have the ability to govern and rule, to establish the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. This process begins first within our own lives, then thorough our lives, and ultimately leads to the creation of places on earth which do not operate under the government of earth but under the government of heaven. There will be no sickness there, no disease, no lack, no poverty: nothing contradictory to the fullness of life as children of God.

Cultivating relationship

In the Mystic movement, there is a shift away from seeking outward manifestations like healings towards cultivating a deeper relationship with God in which health and wholeness naturally flow, and the focus is no longer on individuals performing healing. God is our healer.

Early Christians underwent a profound shift in their understanding of God, moving moved away from viewing Him through the lens of an outdated religious and political system. Instead, Jesus revealed God as love incarnate, challenging their preconceptions and inviting them into a relational encounter with the Father. He came to undo their whole understanding of God from an Old Covenant mentality. This shift from a legalistic mindset to one grounded in relationship and experience to which Jesus is the door,  empowered them to operate in sonship, seated in heavenly places, and to manifest the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.

The God that we know

When we are introducing the reality of who God is, we do not need to do so through miraculous healing, but through introducing the God that we know. They can experience the God that they will then know, and then they can enter into that life themselves. Now I am not saying there are not amazing things. I have done all sorts of transrelocation, time miracles and other things; but in the purposes of outworking my relationship with God, not to prove who God is or to demonstrate to others how good God is. I can help them experience God themselves, so they are not dependent on me testifying by doing anything like that.

Key takeaway

Preaching the gospel is about leading people to encounter the God we know, so that they can embark on their own journey of discovering His love and life-changing power for themselves.

Want to learn more about ‘happy’ or realised eschatology? Get Mike’s book The Eschatology of the Restoration of All Things from your favourite bookseller, or download the ebook from our website at https://eg.freedomarc.org/course/eschatology-ebook

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291. Can Yoga be ‘Christian’?

Mike Parsons

This is a question someone asked me in an online mentoring session: “Can yoga be Christian?”

We would do well to ask God for guidance and discernment, and to look at the heart and motive of the person doing yoga or any sort of healing.

Seeking the guidance of the Father and discerning the frequency of truth through spending time with Him is crucial. While some argue there is a ‘righteous real’ that is counterfeited by various practices, the key is understanding the heart and philosophy behind it. If someone approaches yoga as a stretching exercise or a means of finding a quiet place from a Christian perspective, it may not be inherently wrong. Checking the practitioner’s motives, philosophy, and whether they align with Christian beliefs is essential.

Meditation also is itself neutral, but can be positive or dangerous based on whether it invites positive focus or an open mind. Questioning practitioners about their perspective is a sensible precaution – but beware of dismissing anything based solely on others’ opinions of it. Asking questions and seeking peace and rest through personal discernment is key.

Key Takeaway

Don’t just believe what I say – or what anyone else  says – develop a relationship with Father, Son and Holy Spirit in which you can ask and receive revelation for yourself.

Recent posts from Freedom ARC

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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272. One Conclusion: God Is Love

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

So much better

What is the Father really like? Because if we are going to enter into a relationship with Him, we need to know that. And you can only get to know what He is really like by meeting Him and engaging with Him yourself.

As I began to meet Him, I discovered that He was not at all like I thought He was. And the more I get to know Him, the more I realise He is less and less like I thought. He is so much better!

Who He is not

In fact, the Father is not at all who religion or culture makes Him out to be.

The Father is not an old man with a long white beard, some Santa Claus type figure, generous with presents if you have been good – but if not, ‘You’d better watch out’, as the popular Christmas song says. He is not watching, waiting for us to get something wrong so that He can punish us.

The Father is not a wrathful, distant deity who needs appeasing with animal sacrifices, as you might think from a superficial reading of the Old Testament (see Heb 10:1-10). He is not the angry face of a two-faced God (with Jesus as the good-natured side). They are both exactly the same. Jesus said, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father” (Jn 14:9). So the Father is not a cosmic child abuser who killed His Son to satisfy His anger and wrath. He is not a parent who turned His back on His Son on the cross but one who went through it all with Him.

God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them (2 Cor 5:19).

The Father is not a disinterested creator who, having made everything, then just sits back and allows it to work out however it will. Nor is He a script writer who sovereignly and fatalistically decided how everything should be.

The Father is not a parent who has favourites amongst His children, so that He has chosen some to be with Him forever and others to be separated from Him and punished forever. He is not a torturer who will be endlessly tormenting most of His children because they did not do things His way. He is not the kind of parent who abandons, disinherits and disowns His children when they turn away from Him and ignore His advice because they think they know better.

The Father is not a cosmic heavenly sugar daddy that we can manipulate to give us anything we want by trying to please or appease Him with our good behaviour. Nor is He impressed by our tantrums.

Do you see how the Father has been misunderstood and misrepresented by religion to be someone He is not?

A loving Dad

Jesus is His express image and likeness and we can come to the Father for ourselves through Him. He is fully represented in and by His Son and is a loving, caring, compassionate Dad who deeply desires for all His children to enjoy an intimate love relationship with Him. He does not look at us the way we look at ourselves, or the way anyone else sees us. We are all the apple of His eye and the treasure of His heart, and He wants only good things for us. He desires to constantly bless us.

He is a loving parent, who will never force His children to do anything but is patient, tolerant and kind. He has a love for all His children that will never end, will never fail and will never give up on any of us. He is passionate about all His children and is patiently working and waiting for all of them to return to an intimate loving relationship with Him. His discipline is not punishment but loving correction, to help us make better decisions in future.

We are His passion. He does not hold Himself aloof from us because ‘He cannot look upon sin’. That is religious dogma built on half a verse in the Old Testament. Read the other half: the prophet is complaining that, somehow, He still does (Hab 1:13).

The Father allows us to make our choices. He so loves all His children that He is constantly working with all our choices and decisions, even the worst and most stupid of them, to produce something good that can even be woven into the fulfilment of His heart’s desire.

Conversation

One time, the Father said to me, “I want to show you My mind”. I thought “Wow! I’m going to be in the firing neurons of the creativity of God” but it was not like that at all. I found myself in the midst of a conversation between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And I kept hearing my name, which got my attention. He was constantly connecting and reconnecting with me, making corrections to ensure that I could still follow the path, even if I have gone off into some side track. He will even use the side track that I walked on as part of the story. He engages with us in the ‘eternal now’ – it is not past, not present, not future for Him, it is just ‘now’.

He is my Dad and is always available, never too busy for me, never leaves me, always wants the best for me, is always interested in me, always welcomes me into His open arms of love. My loving Dad is the most wonderful, faithful, trustworthy, patient, kind, good, joyful, peaceful, fun-loving, awesome Father who is always sharing His heart and thoughts with me. I love spending time with Him. He is fathering me.

And He is your Dad too.

Circle of the dance

So you do not need to be concerned with the arguments of those who do not know Him face to face or with the opinions of those who are conditioned to think they know Him because of what they have been taught by religion. Some people will always believe what they have always believed because they interpret everything in a way which backs up what they already believe. But if you are open to new revelation, God will show you who He really is.

You can see the Father if you can see Jesus, the Son. Get to know Him. Allow Him to deconstruct the false images you have of Him. This will inevitably stretch your understanding. But once you have been in the circle of the dance of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, you know there is only one conclusion: God is love.

He asked me, “And what does 1 Cor 13 say about love? That it torments and punishes? No! Love is kind and bears all things”. Those ‘all things’ are the ‘all things’ He is looking to see restored, by the way.

Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails… (1 Cor 13:4-7a).

This post was extracted and edited from Mike’s teaching during the Sons Arise! Engaging The Father conference held at the Freedom Centre, Barnstaple, UK in 2018. Material from this event also features in Mike’s new book, ‘Engaging the Father’, the first volume in the Sons Arise! series, due to be published on 7th June 2023.  You can (pre-)order the paperback from your favourite local or online bookshop or get the ebook NOW from our website. More info: eg.freedomarc.org/books

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265. Love’s Good News

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott

If we are to fulfil our sonship mandate and bring restoration to the earth, we need to mature as sons and take our places enthroned in the heavenly realms. As we mature, we will grow in confidence in our relationship with Father, Son and Spirit so that we come to know each of them intimately and spontaneously recognise their voices and their shared heart. This will be key as we explore and journey beyond our present knowledge and experience.

A journey of discovery

And there is so much more for us to discover. We are walking with God on a relational journey to discover Him and ourselves, and He will guide us through our experiential encounters with Him. The more I have engaged Him, the more He has exploded out of the box that I was unknowingly trying to put Him in. There are many things He has shown me that I do not yet fully understand cognitively but I park them and move on, trusting that the revelation will be uncovered when the time is right. There have been many things that I was convinced were true that I now realise were merely someone else’s opinions masquerading as objective truth.

We do not need to fear being deceived as long as we are not blindly following man’s DIY doctrines but are checking everything out with God ourselves. Please do not believe something just because I say it, or someone else says it. All of us have the Spirit of Truth Himself in us and with us as our guide. We have Jesus the way, truth and life in us and with us to disciple us. We have our loving Father in us and with us to father us into our sonship. If there is a plumb line we measure and test everything against, then that plumb line is not the Bible (as many of us were taught) but Agape Love, the very nature of God.

The Bible narrative

This does not mean that we reject the Bible. Far from it! It is just that we need to go beyond the limitations of sola scriptura. We need the Truth, the living Word of God, Jesus, as our only mediator.

“We came up with the idea of inerrancy because we needed another mediator between God and man other than Jesus.” – T.F. Torrance.

The Bible’s narrative covers God, Creation, Man, the Fall, redemption and restoration. Various writers contribute to the story, using their own perspectives of their encounters with God and with other people. The love story of God’s relationship with mankind is its overarching theme, the big-picture metanarrative which unites all the micronarratives of smaller themes and individual stories. We are all involved, woven into the story like a big tapestry.

Our own micronarratives derive from those things we believe about ourselves and the world, influenced by the metanarratives we adopt. Everything we believe about ourselves is framed by the bigger picture, paradigm or worldview. The gospel reframes all history in a light that directly affects our own stories.

Choices

No one really has free will. We are all influenced by something. What we do all have is choice. Religion of all types is a type of metanarrative that frames people’s lives from the particular viewpoint that they have been exposed to. If we have been around Christians for any length of time, that applies to us, too.

So what is it that influences our choices and frames our lives? A set of values, ideals or principles revealed in a book (that may be called the Bible, Torah, Koran or Veda etc.) or a personal, experiential, love relationship with God? God desires all of us to have a face to face relationship with Him.

Religion hates that idea. It fears subjective, experiential relationship and seeks to impose external checks and balances upon us. Without an objective reference point, it expects that we will fall into skewed DIY behaviour and selfish, man-centred micronarratives. Religion thrives on law and on the identity derived from a set of shared behaviours which line up with that law.

But there is nothing to fear when a love relationship with God gives us a healthy understanding of our true identity.

Just like our Dad

It is our responsibility to discover who we really are, and who God made us to be. We will find our identity, position and authority by beholding God in the mirror of a face to face relationship that fully reveals our sonship. We are called to be restored into that image and to participate in the restoration of all things. Creation is waiting to be set free from its bondage to decay into the freedom of our glory as sons.

“Jesus is God’s mind made up about us” (Francois du Toit, Ephesians 1:4 Mirror Bible). If our thinking does not line up with His, then our thinking needs to be renewed. This is what metanoia (repentance) really means.

When we know our true identity we will express God’s love through our lives in ministering to others. To be a follower of Jesus is to be part of the story by being the good news, not just in our behaviour, in our outward actions, but also in how our story reveals our value and worth as a son of God; in how it reveals just how much we are loved.

Then, much of our story will be that of our restoration from brokenness. The truth of love’s good news will be embedded into the fabric of our being; we will sum up our love stories, not in a superficial “Jesus loves me” kind of way, but in a way that emphasises accepting and embracing our brokenness and fragmentation, retelling our story of receiving ever greater levels of healing and peace in a way that releases hope to others.

God does not expect us to be perfect (and so condemn us to the bondage of continual, repeated failure because we feel obligated to an external standard of perfection). He wants us to mature through an internal desire to be sons who are just like our loving Dad.

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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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247. Limitless Grace and Mercy

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott –  

And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God (2 Cor 4:3-4).

…for their minds have been blinded by the god of this age, leaving them in unbelief. Their blindness keeps them from seeing the dayspring light of the wonderful news of the glory of Jesus Christ, who is the divine image of God (2 Cor 4:4 TPT).

The ‘god of this age’ refers to the religious systems, governing structures and self-help solutions of this world. A religious veil has blinded many to God who is love, light, spirit and fire. The true image of God has been veiled, with the result that some people, perhaps ourselves included, have not been able to see the reality of who He truly is. Does our ‘God’ look exactly like Jesus? Does our ‘God’ look exactly like love?

The DIY tree path

This veil began to be drawn over the truth when Adam and Eve chose to follow the wrong path, the path of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, what I have called the DIY tree path. In losing sight of God they also lost sight of themselves and the true image of their sonship. They became slaves to their own do-it-yourself efforts to restore what they already had: love, acceptance, approval, affirmation, significance and purpose in relationship.

Mankind has been doing the same ever since.

We have tried many solutions, including power, position, money, materialism, religion and other relationships. All that DIY has done is cause us more pain, leading to more unsuccessful self-medication. All our religious systems are DIY attempts to please or appease God, hoping to get back what was lost. Sadly, if we do not know the relational truth about God and ourselves, we are actually helping to keep the veils in place:

“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden” (Matt 5:14).

We are supposed to be the light that enables people to see God but that light will be dimmed or distorted if we are hidden behind a mask or a veil of religious deception ourselves.

False reality

Our own minds are inevitably veiled by the things we already believe. Our mindsets, world-views and strongholds can all be veils or filters over our minds that obstruct and filter how we process reality. These constructs within our minds and consciousness frame our world, what we believe and how we interact. We see the world – and God –  through the lens of our own understanding. It is a distorted view, a false reality, but while it persists it is real to us.

Confirmation bias

To make matters worse, we often have confirmation bias operating. Defined as ‘the tendency to interpret new evidence as a confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories’, confirmation bias is particularly prevalent in the area of religious beliefs. Our theology and doctrines tend to cause us to interpret everything through their filters. It takes a significant experience, often almost a trauma, to shake us loose from the limitations of what we already believe.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own understanding (Prov 3:5).

God is wooing us into a deeper level of intimacy with Him in relationship. When we encounter God we want to make sure that we are not relying on our existing understanding but only on continual living relationship (so we must beware of replacing our existing understanding with a new, equally flawed one). There is a new level of experiential relationship with God (Father, Son and Spirit) that is being unveiled to us, a new level of communication with God (the ability to hear and see what God is revealing); a new mind, the mind of Christ, continually flowing from our relationship with Him rather than just new theology or doctrines (a new DIY construct).

When we are able to behold God (Father, Son and Spirit) as He really is, then we can become conformed to the image of sonship that we see within Him.

And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect (Rom 12:2).

In the past, I believed I could renew my mind by memorising Bible verses and confessing them trying to believe them. I have come to understand that we are renewed from within, not from the outside, as we relate to God who is Father, Son and Spirit in us (and we are in Him).

Beyond all expectations

This is my testimony of how this came about for me. Early in 2016 I heard God say:

The mists around the closed and clouded minds must be dissipated. The hindrances and entanglements must be removed so that the limitations of minds that are stuck in what has been can become free to embrace what can be so that it can become what will be. The veils must be removed and restrictions lifted to embrace the limitless potential of My reality. The Way, Truth and Life are to be experienced not conceptualised and contained.

The limits of what is possible must be removed for My purpose to be achieved. You must begin to entertain limitless grace and mercy to be able to grasp what is true reality, beyond all expectations. New dimensions of everything can be yours if you are willing to let go of the old and embrace the challenge of the new.

A radical shift

In order to know God who is Father, Son and Spirit, and to know our identity in sonship in Him, we need our minds deconstructed from the wrong frameworks, from all our limited, restricting belief systems.

Or do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and tolerance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to metanoia? (Rom 2:4).

We need a metanoia, a radical shift of thinking, to enable a relationship with the Truth to reveal true reality. Most Bible versions translate the word as ‘repentance’, but metanoia has nothing to do with saying sorry or doing penance for our past: Jesus dealt with that on the cross and made us righteous once and for all.

Conversations with God

He called me to make some laws and legislative decrees on the basis of what He had told me. As I did, I expected Him to use them to free others from their worldly and religious mindsets. I had no idea that He was instead going to use my own words to iconoclastically deconstruct my conscious, subconscious and unconscious mind!

It began with Brexit, the vote about whether the UK should remain within the European Union or leave it. I was pondering how to vote when He asked me “Why do you normally vote the way you do?”

In the conversation that followed, I realised that I had made huge assumptions about which party He would want me to support, not only over this issue but more generally. I had always voted on principle, but God showed me that the principles I was voting on were my own, not His.

So I asked Him which way the Brexit vote would go. He told me, and asked me which way I was going to vote. “Leave,” I replied, “because You have told me that is the way the vote is going to go.” Another assumption! It turned out that God wanted me to vote the opposite way so that He could teach me how to respond when my choice was defeated.

This series of conversations with God (and I will write about them in more detail elsewhere) opened the door to the possibility that I had many more assumptions and presumptions about God, the Bible, theology and doctrine than I thought, and they were acting as veils and filters in my mind.

So the process of my deconstruction and renewal began in earnest.

Cognitive dissonance

It is impossible to see Him as He is when our minds are confused with our own distorted ideas about Him. Every time a stronghold in the mind is broken down, it makes way for a resurrection of fresh revelation. This is not an easy process; there is a lot of eating humble pie to do. And some of those strongholds are beliefs deeply cherished by ourselves and by others; one reason I initially held back was that I knew this was going to cause trouble.

Cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort we experience when we realise that we hold two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values simultaneously. This often happens when new information manages to get through the filter of confirmation bias and threatens to disrupt the balancing act in our minds.

The encounters I had with God challenged what I believed about Him. This put a stress on my brain that felt like a restrictive band around my head. The pressure was only released when I gave in and stopped trying to hold on to my old way of thinking.

‘The Great Iconoclast’

Andre Rabe writes, “Jesus comes to make you an atheist to the god of your own making. He comes to bring an end to your way of subjecting God to your own understanding”. John Crowder says, “It is only at this place where our ideas and our faith are completely devastated that we have an opportunity to meet the God who transcends all our ideas about God.”

Jesus Himself constantly challenged the accepted thinking of His day: “You have heard it said (rabbinical tradition) but I say to you…” He turned their religion on its head; love replaced religious duty and obligation.

C.S. Lewis called God ‘the Great Iconoclast’ and wrote, “There are three images in my mind which I must continually forsake and replace by better ones: the false image of God, the false image of my neighbours, and the false image of myself.” (The Great Divorce).

Are we ready to let God renew and transform our thinking? He will not be confined to our limited, static perceptions of Him. We cannot keep an infinite God in a box made by the finite capacities of our understanding. God does not dwell in manmade temples, theological constructs or ideologies. God dwells in our spirits and in our hearts.

We need a transformation, a revolutionary change of mind. We need the veils of our understanding exploded and stripped away. We have a relationship with the Living Word, the ultimate source of revelation who searches the deep things of God and makes them known to us. We must not let our current understanding keep us in bondage to the limitations of our past experience.

Everything we receive must come through personal encounters with God. Our encounters will never contradict scripture but may not be directly found in it. They will definitely challenge the religious belief systems which reduce everything to a set of rules or doctrines.

Our old mindsets, thinking patterns and religious world views will keep us in old trusted ways of behaviour and will limit our abilities to engage in the heavenly spiritual realities that are being unveiled in our day. Are we prepared to embrace and spread the revolution? Some of the doctrines and beliefs we once deemed foundational may turn out to be just the skewed projections of our own fearful, fallen assumptions about God. He is about to explode the DIY myths we have invented; myths which actually obscure who He really is from our view.

Love bombs

I saw angels with light wands marking us out, and others, for laser-guided love bombs. God wants to explode those love bombs over you, penetrating your mind, your heart, your whole being with His love for you, revealing your true identity as a beloved son.

Live loved, love living and live loving.

Invite Him to release those love bombs over you. Let your heart and mind be cocooned in love. Let Jesus reveal His love for you. Let the Father reveal His love for you. Let the Spirit explode His love in you. Let the love of God touch your mind. Let Him encounter you with love that will explode and destroy any wrong image of Him. Let Him remove the veils that obscure and distort Him.

Let Him explode your limited reality.

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141. The Flesh Profits Nothing

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

God intends us to be spirit, soul and body, in that order. Our soul and body should be subject to our spirit, now that our spirit has come alive to God. If we want to build a strong spirit, we saw last time how praying in tongues on the inside and on the outside is something we need to practise.

Meanwhile we also need to deal with the soul.

Nothing good

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh.
(Gal 5:16).

Our spirit needs to be strong to lead, direct and guide us in our everyday life so that we will not carry out the desires of the flesh. The desires of the flesh are not good, and we have to accept that. We want to believe there is a bit of good in there somewhere, but there is not. There is nothing good about our flesh whatsoever. It always gets us in a mess.

For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are in opposition to one another, so that you may not do the things that you please (Gal 5:17).

So whilst my spirit is flowing from the Holy Spirit, and the purposes of God for my life and my destiny, my flesh has tried to get in the way and has to be brought into line. Our flesh wants to please itself; our spirit desires to please God.

Two completely different agendas, because if you please yourself you cannot please God (and our flesh does not even want us to understand that).

“I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing”
(John 15:5).

Nothing of any eternal value or significance can be done apart from Jesus; apart from Him who dwells in our spirit, and flows through our life.

“It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing…” (John 6:63).

Trust

That is really hard for the flesh to take. We really like to think we can at least do something. I went through a time in my personal times with God in which I was engaging Him in the garden of my heart, but I was in complete pitch-black darkness. It was not a place of fear, just of not being able to see anything and resting in complete stillness before Him. I found it so hard. I really wanted to know what was happening.

But God said, “Will you just trust Me? Just stay still, and let Me do what I need to do to prepare you for what is to come.” I thought, “Of course I can do that.” But when it came to it, my flesh was desperate to know what was going on. I remember one day I cried out to Him, “O God, what is going on?” And He answered me, “I don’t need your assistance, just your surrender.” It was really difficult. But what it came down to was this:

Trust in the Lord with all your heart
And do not lean on your own understanding
(Proverbs 3:5).

I had to realise that maybe I did not trust Him as much as I thought I did. I had to die to that need to know what was going on. I had to choose to trust God even if I could not see anything. I had to trust that whatever He would do would be the best thing for me. So I know it is hard when we have to deal with the flesh.

Humanism is independence from God. It is doing things without God. That is what Adam and Eve bought into when they sinned. Satan offered them the opportunity to gain knowledge without God. Everything in dealing with the flesh is dealing with humanism and dealing with independence. There is nothing good that comes from independence.

Self

We need to die to self.

Self-centredness: it is very difficult because of course we are at the centre of all that goes on in our life, but that has to flow from the spirit, not the flesh. Selfishness is wanting to put myself first above everybody else, whereas when Jesus came He said, “I have not come to be served, but to serve.” That is a completely different attitude, and I should also seek to serve rather than be served. There is no place for selfishness or self-centredness in that. We are so accustomed to being self-centred, and life revolving around us.

Anyone who is married knows that when you get married, life does not revolve around you as a single person any more. You have to think about somebody else. When we become Christians, we enter into a relationship with God in which we are no longer in first place: He is. When we become Christians, we say that we make Him Lord of our life: we must make sure that He really is.

We need to die to self-importance, self-promotion, self-reliance, self-sufficiency, even self-belief. There is nothing of the spirit in these. We can have no self-righteousness. Self-help, self-expression.

You might think, ‘Surely they are not all negative?’ Anything that comes from the flesh is negative, and however hard we find that, we have to surrender.

Self-respect, self-esteem, self-worth. If my self-respect comes from what I have done in the flesh, if my self-esteem comes from what I can do, they are not good. I want my esteem to come from how God sees me; from knowing who I am as a child of God, knowing the love of God, knowing the value He places upon me. My worth comes from knowing that I am God’s child, that He loves me and has a purpose for me. My self-image is not how I view myself, but it is seeing myself as God sees me. If we could really see ourselves as God sees us, it would transform everything about our lives.

Some things are more obviously negative: self-gratification, self-indulgence. Making ourselves feel good, using food, shopping, sex, drugs, alcohol. Whatever it is, if the self is involved, it needs to die. It needs to go on the cross.

The cross

The cross is not a pleasant place. When Jesus went to face the cross, when He was in the Garden of Gethsemane, His soul was in anguish. Literally, He sweat drops of blood, He was in so much anguish. He saw what He was going to have to carry on the cross; He looked into the cup, and in that cup was every sin we have ever committed, every negative thought, every sickness that has been on our body, every sin committed against us: He took it all physically upon Himself, because He loved us so much.

He chose to say, ‘Not My will, but Yours be done’ even when His flesh, His soul, looked into what it was going to have to carry. Being sinless, because He loved us so much, He was willing to go to the cross and take our sin, our flesh, our self, and be crucified. He also represented us there so that we could identify with Him through the bread and the wine.

I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me
(Gal 2:20 JUB)

He died so that we could be free from the flesh, because our flesh died with Him.

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127. Relationship and Responsibility

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

On this blog we are just at the beginning of a new series of posts about preparing for our destiny.

We prepare according to God’s Prophetic Timetable of events for the future, so that we will be ready for what he is doing and ready to play our part in it. From a place of intimacy with God, we will allow Him to change and transform our lives, removing from us everything that is a hindrance or a stumbling-block.

prophetic-timetable-overview20

He is raising up a Joshua generation who will press into their own inheritance, and lead the following generation into receiving theirs too. We need to receive that inheritance so that in the situations we will face in the coming days and years, when the world’s systems have broken down, we will be ready with the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit operating in our lives. We must be like Jesus: He brought the kingdom, and He calls us to do the same.

From eternity, God has a destiny appointed for us to fulfil, and we have been invested with authority to fulfil it. We need to wake up and take hold of who we are as the sons of God.

Man’s destiny has always been to rule, to bring heaven to earth (Gen 1:28). We bring the rule of heaven to earth so that we transform not just this planet but the whole of creation – our universe and even beyond that – which is groaning and longing for the sons of God to be fully revealed.

Psalm 24:7 says ‘Lift up your heads, O you gates’. It is talking about us being lifted up to that place of rulership and authority, so that we become a gateway for the King of Glory to come in and fill this world through our lives. That is what God wants to do through us: everything He is, grace, power, mercy, would be channelled through us, and that we would manifest them here on earth.

The Angel of the Lord admonished Joshua, the High Priest, who was standing in the presence of God in the heavens and said,

“If you will walk in My ways
and if you will perform My service,
then you will also govern My house
and also have charge of My courts,
and I will grant you free access
among these who are standing here”
(Zechariah 3:6-7).

This involves a progression of relationship and of levels of authority and responsibility that would bring us to our sonship.

We live here on the earth, with the atmosphere of the earth around us. In that atmosphere at present are the principalities, powers and rulers of wickedness. It is a kingdom in darkness. We ‘walk in His ways’ here, and we recognise that the kingdom of God is within us, but that we are also connected to the kingdom of God realm in the heavens.

As we keep the laws, the principles of the kingdom, as we administer righteousness and justice, so we learn to be lords, kings, and sons at that level in the heavenly realms (and also within us). Once we understand who we are and what our identity is, we can start ruling the house (our own house, but also the house of the Lord).

Then we can start judging the courts. The kingdom has foundations of righteousness, and justice, and it is God’s people who are eventually going to judge angels, and fallen angels. We have a right to bring judgment to change things in this realm, and eventually to have access to stand among those who are operating in the heaven of heavens.

When we start doing that, we remove those hierarchical authorities from the atmosphere of the earth, and we can rule. We rule in light, rule in love, rule in righteous power. The influence we have in the heavens will be manifested here on earth. God wants us to understand and to access those realms. The more we do so, the more we will bring the kingdom of God on the earth, both in us and through us, so that we shine with the glory of God.

That will deal with sickness, disease, poverty – all the things which rob God’s people (and the world) of their inheritance – and all that stolen inheritance will be restored.

We will manifest the rule of heaven on earth, just as Jesus did.

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125. Preparing For Destiny

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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