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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344. Training Your Senses to Engage

Mike Parsons 

When you do an activation, there’s more happening than you realise!

Video Summary

When you do an activation, there’s more happening than you realise! Beyond just seeing or feeling, your spirit is engaging. These spiritual experiences form a foundation for your life, guiding you, even if you’re not consciously aware of that. If you struggle to picture or sense things, start simply and practise.

Most people haven’t learned to open the eyes of their heart. Your physical eyes receive information, and your brain interprets it, but ultimately, you’re seeing with your brain. As babies, we learn to focus and interpret visual information gradually. This information is stored in our brains for life. Similarly, in the spirit realm, we need to learn to see with the eyes of our heart—our imagination screen. Dreams are images projected by our soul, and whilst we don’t have to learn to dream, we do need to learn to remember and interpret them.

Training your spiritual senses through practice is necessary for engaging the eyes of your heart. Training your imagination starts with simple exercises, like visualising a door. By repeatedly thinking about familiar objects, you store this information in your memory; similarly, with practice, you can store and recall spiritual information. Some people are natural seers who can easily picture things with their eyes closed, but it’s not that simple for everyone. Many people get impressions rather than clear visuals. For example, if I think about my front door, it’s not a full-colour picture, but the impression is clear: the porch, wood on the right, the house name ‘Robins’ on the left, and so on. The more I focus, the clearer it becomes, but whether it’s visual or not doesn’t matter—it’s the information that’s important.

When you experience God, you might not see a whole vision, but you will receive something. Focusing on what you’re seeing helps it form. Perception is key; it starts simple and builds. During activation exercises, don’t strive to see—just be still and go with the experience. Then, reflecting on experiences helps store them in memory, forming a framework for future experiences. Repetition is crucial for ingraining these memories.

For example, I couldn’t describe a hotel I visited once years ago, but I could navigate my house with my eyes closed because I’ve walked around inside it many times. Exercises need to be repeated to fully develop the experience in your memory. Meditation helps by mulling over the experience, not by seeking an instant result like much of our world today. Extraordinary experiences, like my first visit to heaven, get etched in your memory because they’re so different.

Learning a new skill requires practice and patience, which many people lack. You need desire to persevere. If you have an agenda during engagement, it can limit what you receive from God; relaxing and just being helps the process. Find a comfortable position, maybe a favourite chair where you feel peaceful and can calm your thoughts. Keep practising and building on your experiences, taking time to assimilate information into experience. Racing through material like Engaging God without practising engagements over and over doesn’t work well; it takes time and patience.

341. Unlocking Hidden Abilities

Mike Parsons

There are abilities we all were intended to have that have become disconnected.

 

Video summary

We all have abilities that have been disconnected, and after deconstructing my mind, God wanted to reconnect me to them. I needed to change my thinking to believe in abilities beyond my current experience. God used the illustration of a perceived gulf to show me that there was no real separation, just my perception of it. Once I accepted this, I realised there were abilities to unlock, such as multi-dimensional reality and creative consciousness.

Like many, I had been programmed by religion and life, and deprogramming opened up new possibilities. He showed me a new way of thinking aligned with the mind of Christ. You don’t need my exact experience; it’s about your journey with God. It’s important to seek these revelations in relationship with God, not independently.

We were created with abilities to engage with sound, light and frequency, but over time, we moved away from our original reality. Jesus came to restore that, but it’s a process. Intimacy with the Father reveals who we really are and our potential for creating. I never thought I could create beings, but God showed me I could. He said there are things left for us to create as sons of God.

Sharing this with others, I found someone who had similar experiences. My journey has shown me that God wants us to form and create our own realities in alignment with His heart. We’re always creating stuff that is not in alignment with His heart; it’s just how we live. But when we start to choose realities aligned with His heart, our realities will be different from what we experience now.

340. Don’t Live on the Trickle!

Mike Parsons

Don’t live on the trickle flowing under the threshold of the gate. Open it to go ankle-deep, knee-deep, waist-deep until it floods and fills us with abundant life.

Series information: You can only get the full-length videos of Mike’s new monthly series “Restoring First Love” when you sign up at eg.freedomarc.org/first-love.

Video Summary

There was a long lead-up to these experiences, and God had been preparing me my whole life. Hindsight is wonderful, and looking back, I see many signposts on my journey. At the time, I didn’t understand the experiences, but they were all part of God’s plan.

Questions

Questions worth asking include: Where is my first love gate? Where is the Garden of our heart? Are these literal places? They describe our soul and how God engages us. They are figurative, yet they are places of engagement within us that relate to spirit, soul and body. My experiences in revelation were progressive. The relationship deepened over time, and as I progressed, I understood more of who God is and who I am.

Jesus is knocking

Revelation 3:20, the first verse I ever spoke about publicly, says, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and dine with him, and he with me.” Initially, I interpreted this as a salvation experience, but it’s more about an inside-out experience, where God, already within us, seeks to engage our soul and body. This is about God working inside us, filling us, and sharing life with us.

Paul’s experience of God revealing His Son within him illustrates this. Paul’s revelation was a shift from his religious path to a relationship with God. He preached about God ‘in’ the Gentiles, a message of inclusion and mystic union. Initially, I rejected this concept, but over the years, God showed me the finished work of Christ and the grace message, which I now fully embrace.

Open the gate

Opening the gate of first love daily is a choice. It’s about welcoming God into an intimate relationship, which for me was like a romance. To experience God’s first love, we need to open and accept the invitation. This is a mutual relationship, not one-sided.

How do we receive and experience His love? By choosing to open the gate for an intimate, interactive love relationship. Don’t live on the trickle, but open the gate to go deeper until it floods us with abundant life.

Expressing our love for God goes beyond praise and worship; it’s about making it a priority in our lives. God is always available and promises never to leave us. He’s speaking—are we listening?

Activation: Be Entwined In Love’s Embrace

Take a moment to close your eyes, breathe slowly and deeply, and meditate on opening the first love gate. Picture a door, whether your front door or another familiar one. By choice, open that door and welcome the presence of God. Embrace this intimate relationship, stay in that embrace, and listen to God’s words of love and calling.

God calls us to step out of independence and into His ocean of love, joy, and peace. He calls forth our true identity as His sons and co-heirs, to manifest His Kingdom on Earth. Rest in His unconditional love, joy, and peace. Let this place of rest be your abiding dwelling place. Stay there as long as you need, and let it be a constant in your life.

333. Unveiling Our Divine Identity

Mike Parsons – 

There’s so much more in sonship to our role in bringing creation into freedom from its corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. If we do not know the fullness of our glory, our true identity, then we will only be limited to what we can do on earth or what we can do in heaven. But we’re called to be multi-dimensional beings, immortal in both quantity and quality.

My heart filled with joy when I experienced this. I sank deeper and blissfully into rest, but at the same time, I was so excited by this revelation that I could hardly contain myself. I mean, can you imagine, in a moment, God showing you all that I’ve described? It was mind-expanding in that I was able to contain and believe what He was revealing. That is the reality of who I really am.

And the Father said, “See how easy it is to just be.” There’s a statement! And it was like, wow. When this happened to me, it didn’t feel easy. It was just like, whoa, my mind was going round and round, but I was also at rest in the same moment. So, “It’s easy just to be. This is just a glimpse of what it is to be I AM that I AM, that you will ascend to when you become an ascended father”. And I think for all of us, don’t be limited to just the thought of being a good son. God wants us to become co-creators in an ascended state of fatherhood. Do I understand that? No, but it’s in my heart, and I know that that is the reality of His intention for us.

“Son, learn to become aware of multi-dimensional reality but always stay in rest, living in love, joy, and peace within. Be balanced by the tree of life in the union between your spirit, soul and body”. I always anchor myself within that core of my being, with spirit and soul and body being equally in union and oneness and in harmony. I don’t put a value of the spirit or the soul above the body: I equally value every part. And that tree of life brings a balance between soul and spirit so we don’t just get caught up in all the spiritual, or get caught up in all the things in the world around us, but we are balanced and in harmony, one with the other.

“As you expand your spirit’s boundaries, practise expanding your consciousness to become more aware of the dimensional realities that you are mandated to govern in”. I have done that. It’s not something that I do all the time, but it’s something that I am aware of, and I am rejoicing, thankful, and grateful for all of that.

“All you learn to do as a son, made in our image with creative abilities, will equip you to become an ascended father in the ages to come. Son, the true authority of a son is realised through surrender, not service. So abandon yourself totally to just being.” Which is why I’m not focusing on all the doing, I’m focusing on ‘this is who I am, this is who you are, this is who we are’. We are called to embrace this level of expanded awareness and consciousness that frees us from being earthbound (or even heavenbound). God is unconditional love; that is why we can trust in His faithfulness, trustworthiness, dependability, reliability, consistency, constancy, steadfastness, diligence, and perseverance.

Unconditional Love

God is good. This is the dimension of the whole dynamic of unconditional love. There’s more I could probably go on to, but I feel that I want to move to something else. But unconditional love—stay in it, embrace it, experience it. Go beyond. Rest is that state of being where we are totally trusting in the Father’s love, His goodness, kindness, faithfulness, loving-kindness. The Father is 100% totally reliable, trustworthy, and dependable. To rest is to be in a state where there is no fear, worry, doubt, or unbelief. We just dwell, abide, and rest within that place—face to face, heart to heart, mind to mind.

All that I’ve experienced and discovered has deconstructed my mind, thinking, and beliefs, totally transforming my worldview, unlocking my identity as a son, and revealing my creative sonship abilities. I’m absolutely no different from you. You have the same abilities, capacity: the same sonship. You are unique and wonderfully made, and God wants you to experience and know that reality and truth for yourselves.

So I ask the question: Have you experienced unconditional love? Are you living in unconditional love? Are you demonstrating unconditional love by the way you live? Do you have this heavenly vision of unconditional love and the reality of who you really are? Do you know the vast sum of God’s thoughts about you? Embrace them, pursue them, seek them, and you will find them. Keep knocking, keep seeking, keep looking. Don’t give up, but be at rest and let Him lead you so that you follow Him by walking together with Him. This gets outworked in love, in that experience.


(This video clip and blog post are taken from the conclusion of Mike’s teaching series Unconditional Love.)


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331. Embracing Being Over Doing

Mike Parsons – 

When you’re in the process of transitioning from being a doer to ‘be-er’, it can be quite disorientating because the previous ways you learned were mostly about being directed or feeling that you needed to do what God said—the dos and the shoulds. When you come to a more intimate place, there’s a transition into knowing, sensing, and being connected to the Father’s heart.

You start feeling His heart, and He gives you more space just to be, often removing a lot of the ‘doing’. It’s not that doing things is the issue, but they can be driving you if you’re so used to living that way. Until you get some space to find this other way and become more comfortable with it, sometimes God removes some of the doings. You find you’re losing some of your anchor points, which were likely based on the familiarity of the shoulds and dos, and your mindset towards God probably came from a more works-based way of thinking.

Hearing His voice does become more instinctive, more about knowing and being at one with Him. Instead of external directions to go this way or do that, He’s giving you more freedom to be you, to mature, and to grow in sonship. That is a great thing, although I understand it can be disorientating, and I’ve gone through it myself. However, the closer you are to Him, the more your heart’s desires will align with His heart’s desires and with your destiny and the way He made you to be. You’ll find you operate more in a way of rest. You won’t need the absolute confirmation of everything; you will just know and be at peace and at rest. That stems from dwelling in His presence, where your spirit is continually engaged in and living from that realm, even if your soul comes in and out.

Living from that realm might feel scary and different at first, but that’s what it feels like when the old goes and the new is not fully come. It feels like a vacuum. But that vacuum will be filled with what is coming out of heaven and out of your relationship with God. You’ll begin to feel whole and one as you pursue it. When people talk to you, you’ll resonate with it or you won’t, so you won’t need direct confirmation in the way you used to. You won’t need the Father to tell you everything; you will know His heart, feel His heart, and engage His heart in a more intimate and knowing way.

As you grow into this, things will begin to open up because you’ll see more possibilities and realities. You’ll begin to choose and find more creativity released in those choices. You’ll start seeing things from the multiple perspectives of all the possibilities that exist, rather than feeling restricted to one thing God says. He is giving you a lot more opportunity to choose from a wider spectrum of choices, rather than the one path that may keep you safe but may restrict you if you only see the one thing He says rather than the multiple possibilities that do exist and that you can enter into.

Summary

God is offering you more freedom, based on your heart-to-heart intimacy with Him, rather than just one safe path. This might feel risky, but it allows you to see and choose from multiple possibilities as a son, expanding your understanding and experience of living in relationship with Him.

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

Mike Parsons

[In this online conversation Mike was talking to a particular individual, but it has relevance for all of us.]

Stop Listening to Others’ Opinions

You need to stop listening to other people – that would be where I would start! People have different views based on where they are in their journey, so some of the things they are saying are from their own perspective. They may say “the Father said this,” when actually He didn’t. Not every time someone says “the Father showed me this” is it the truth. Jesus is The Truth, not everything people say.

I would not look for people to affirm what you are hearing from the Father yourself. That is what you need to focus on. Maybe you had a wonderful experience, and then it feels like you let that be robbed from you because other people were telling you different things about certain important matters. But there is nothing more important than having time with God and enjoying His presence.

Measuring Truth by God’s Love

How do I measure whether something has the frequency of God on it or not? I use love. Is this loving? Is this a reflection of a loving God? If not, I am not going to believe it. There’s an American prophet who recently said horrible things towards the US President. He is not a prophet that spoke from God (that time). Has he spoken from God before? I’m sure he probably has, but that was not from God – it was coming from his own political agenda on the inside. That doesn’t faze me – because I don’t accept it as God since it’s not love. You can’t be cursing someone and it be from God. Sometimes you have to use love as the measure and say “okay, is this aligned with love?” If not, just reject it. But I would stop looking to a lot of different people to talk to you about different things.

Focus on Your Own Relationship with God

Personally, I don’t listen to anybody. I’m not saying that arrogantly – I spend time listening to God. Yes, I hang out with some people sometimes and talk, but I don’t listen to other people’s sermons, messages, or read their books generally. I have too much invested in my time with God and enjoying life to spend all that time looking at what God said to somebody else. Now if God asked me to listen to something, I would. I did listen to something recently from Brad Jersak on understanding why God seems so different in the Old Testament versus the New, and it was very helpful – it affirmed what I already knew. But generally, I am not looking for other people to give me that. You can become double-minded because you’re trying to understand what others are thinking and come into agreement with it, but you have to accept that some people are not talking from God, although they say they are.

The less you hear from people, the less you have that problem. It is not a problem to question what someone is saying and measure it against love. I am not going to publicly criticise those people, but inside I’m not going to accept what they’re saying because I’m questioning it and measuring against love. I would absolutely doubt what those people are saying. That’s not a problem… but doubting what God is saying to you because others are saying something contradictory or trying to sway you – or tell you what god ‘must’ be saying – now that is a problem. Don’t be swayed by the fear of man. Don’t think you need someone to affirm what God is telling you, because maybe He’s not saying it to anybody else. You need the courage of your convictions to say “I’m going to trust You, that when I come to You, what You’re saying to me is true.”

Think on the pure, lovely and good

So don’t allow things to make you crazy by letting other people affect you, whereas I won’t allow other people to affect me. Maybe the cloud of witnesses speaking to someone has a different message for that person at that point on their journey than for somebody else. Or maybe that person is just interpreting what they thought they heard through their own filters, coming to their own conclusion – it may not be what was intended at all. I don’t believe it is for us to judge somebody else, so don’t let it make you crazy. Just say “Okay, I don’t know, it doesn’t sound loving to me so I’m not going to listen to it.” Leave it there – you don’t have to go through it, it’s not your responsibility.

If it’s making you crazy, it is because you are allowing it to. Don’t focus on it. As Paul said, think on things that are pure, lovely and good. Where there is conflict, confrontation and differences of opinion – those are not good things to think about. Just let it go. Focus on the good. Focus on being that bride, that person who Jesus just wanted to make feel special, because you are special and He wants you to feel that way. Other people may not want you to feel so special – some will always be negative. Don’t doubt your own experiences and thoughts with God just because someone else contradicts it. Don’t allow them to make you sad, or struggle thinking “this isn’t right.” You had that experience, you know it was right, you know how good it was. Don’t be robbed!

Conclusion

So I feel that for a time or season, it might be good to have a period where you shut off listening to other people, including me! You don’t need to listen to anybody – give all that time to just listening to the Lord, just listening to the Father, engaging Him. Set aside a day, week, month – whatever time you want – and just focus on that, excluding all the other voices from your head. Listen to the one voice – the Voice of Love, the Voice of Truth. Then I think a lot of these things will fall into place, and you’ll realise “Hey, I don’t need this. I don’t need other people’s opinions in my life. I’m just looking at God’s opinion – that’s all that counts.”

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329. Evangelising Non-Christians: A Fresh Perspective

Mike Parsons

In the last post, I talked about evangelising Christians. Now I turn to those who do not consider themselves Christians at all.

Challenging Preconceptions for Non-Christians

When it comes to talking to people who are not yet Christians or not yet believing, or have not yet realised what Jesus has done for them, I would start at a different place. I would probably begin by challenging what they think they know about Jesus and God, because it is probably not the truth. I would likely challenge some of the preconceptions they think they know from whatever religious upbringing they have had. I would say, “You may have thought you needed to do this or this or this, but actually God has done it all – you just have to receive it.” I would use illustrations like: “When someone buys a gift for you, they wrap it nicely, present it well, put your name on it, and then hand it to you. You didn’t buy it, you didn’t deserve it – it was a gift they gave you. But it wasn’t yours until you received it, even though your name was on it. Only when you reached out, took it, opened it, and received it as a gift could you say ‘this is now mine.’ Until then, you haven’t received anything, even though the gift is there.”

The Gift of God’s Grace

That is essentially what God has done. Jesus has reconciled everybody. He has taken away ‘the sin’ – the lost identity, their amnesia from who they really are. He has revealed the Father (as Jesus is the express image of the Father). He has shown people that it is all about love: He has called people to love one another, forgive one another. I would challenge them to see what Jesus said in light of our religious thinking – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, vengeance, God being angry and needing appeasing. To say, “It’s already been done! God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. He’s already made a relationship, already given you the Spirit and made you alive so you can know Him. He’s already done all these amazing things – why don’t you just let Him give you that experience?”

Receiving the Gift

So give them the opportunity of having that experience as well. Probably having knocked down some religious ideas like “you have to go to church, pray, read the Bible” and so on. You can say, “Who said you have to do any of those things?”  and open up a whole different vista of who God really is. It’s like the book “The Jesus I Never Knew” by Philip Yancey – he was probably brought up in the Bible Belt but never knew Jesus for who He really was. I would try to present Jesus as someone they may have thought they knew, but there’s more – a truth that probably challenges what they thought they knew.

Then I would stress the need for experience – that it is a relationship, God with us. God is in them already, wanting to reveal Himself to them. Ask them to give Him a chance. Then you can use something like “Behold I stand at the door and knock,” and say, “God is in you, within your spirit. He wants you to let Him into the rest of your life – to bless you, heal you, make you whole, remove all guilt, shame, condemnation, give you your true identity as His son, empower you to succeed and prosper.” Then get them to close their eyes, picture a door, open it, and see what happens.

Conclusion

So ultimately it all comes down to the same point – encouraging both Christians and non-Christians to experience things. But in both groups you may need to remove some preconceived ideas about what they think it is all  about and what they think might be the truth. Then help them find The Truth as a person – Jesus – through that experiential encounter with the reality of who God is and what He has already done.

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328. Experiencing God’s Love: A New Approach to Evangelising Christians

Mike Parsons

If you are starting with people who are already professing to be Christians, you will begin in a different place than if you are engaging those who don’t.
I will get on to evangelising non-Christians in my next post. Ultimately though, both need to know the love of God and experience that love themselves, through a revelation of who He is, to fully come into the knowledge of who they are. 

Beyond Religious Conditioning

I would always start in an experiential way. If they are Christians, I will quote scriptures that point to the fact that Jesus and the Father very clearly desire an intimacy that is not religious and not based on works, performance or the old covenant. I would definitely look at the New Covenant wineskin for believers who may be conditioned or programmed by various religious beliefs. What did Jesus say we should expect? We should expect to be where He was, in the “I AM” relationship with the Father. He came and breathed on them to receive the Holy Spirit on the day of resurrection, affirming them as the new representatives of humanity: just as Adam was the first representative through whom all died, now they were the new representatives where all are made alive.

Experiential Encounters

I would emphasise that Jesus wanted them to experience His presence. Even when He told the disciples to wait in Jerusalem, it was so they would be clothed with power from on high – an experiential encounter affirming what they had already experienced in being indwelt by the Holy Spirit and received new life when He breathed on them, just as the Father breathed life into Adam. This challenges the idea of a certain number of people being “born again” at some future point, when the reality is that all were born again at that resurrection moment, affirmed when He breathed on them. As He said in John 14, “On that [resurrection] day you will know I am in you and you are in me, and we are in the Father.”

Challenge the conventional

I think always stressing the experiential side is key – that we have been called to hear His voice, come boldly to the throne of grace, and enter the realms of heaven experientially because they are open. Expressing this in a practical way removes the spiritualisation of the concept and sets the expectation for what our relationship with God should be. We can challenge the conventional vaguely hopeful expectations of ‘going to heaven when we die’ with affirmations of what Jesus said we should expect in this life – being in union with each other, our love relationship allowing the world to see what it means to be in relationship with God.

Summary

In conclusion, I would definitely give people an opportunity to have their own experience of God. Make it simple, easy and accessible – don’t complicate it. Give them the opportunity of encountering God through experience, and from that point, you can open the door for them to understand so much more.

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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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