Tag: Jesus

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

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott

In a world where what passes for ‘love’ often comes with strings attached, showing unconditional love can make a real impact. A while ago, someone sent me a link to a testimony that highlights the incredible result of demonstrating unconditional love in a real-world setting.

In a radio interview, Riaan Swiegelaar, the co-founder of the South African Satanic Church, said he did not believe that Jesus Christ existed. Afterwards, a lady from the radio station went up to him and just gave him a hug. He did not know it at the time, but she was a Christian. A week later, while he was doing a ritual with the SASC council, Jesus appeared before him. Riaan  challenged Him to prove He was Jesus, and was flooded with the most beautiful love and energy, which he recognised from the hug he had received the week before.

Now Riaan has a relationship with Jesus, converses with Him every day, and has resigned from his position in the Satanic Church. “I have for a long time believed that I am not worthy of God’s grace because I am gay. But the Kingdom of God is not a gated community, the kingdom of God is open to everybody,” he says.

Unconditional love has the power to break down barriers and transform even the most hardened hearts. Sadly, some reaction to this story has not been so accepting: Did he truly repent? Did he actually confess? Is he really a believer? Is he ‘saved’?

Grace and works

Most of us would agree that salvation is not dependent on our works, but on the unconditional love and limitless grace of God. Yet the evangelical view of salvation I was brought up with is not grace-based at all, however much it claims to be: it requires our works. You have to believe in your heart and confess with your mouth to be saved. I tried to believe and confess but I was never sure it was good enough to please God.

We have had it the wrong way around: in reality, believing is the consequence of our experiencing God’s love and grace. Evangelical theology makes forgiveness and salvation totally dependent on what man does. But all man’s religious works are dead: they can produce no life independently of God’s grace.

Reframing Confession

Another religious misconception is the idea that we must confess our sins in order to be forgiven. Jesus did not wait for those who were crucifying Him to be sorry or ‘confess’ their sin: He asked the Father to forgive them. He had taught His disciples the importance of forgiving from the heart and now He demonstrated it for them.

This understanding of ‘confession’ is heavily influenced by Catholic doctrine and can leave us feeling sin-conscious and burdened by guilt. However, the true meaning of ‘confession’ is not dwelling on our wrongdoings, but declaring and agreeing with what God says about us. We confess our righteousness, our forgiveness, and our new identity in Christ, rather than confessing our unrighteousness as perpetual sinners. Understanding this truth releases us from the cycle of guilt and allows us to fully embrace the forgiveness and grace which is lavished upon us.

Licence to sin?

Critics of limitless grace argue that it gives us the licence to sin, suggesting that if we are forgiven regardless of our actions, then we can just go ahead and do whatever we want. This is a misunderstanding of the purpose and power of grace. It is not a free pass to continue living according to our old nature: no, instead it is receiving God’s grace that enables us to walk in the freedom of our new nature. And sin, in its true definition, refers to lost identity, not wrong actions. Wrong actions do carry consequences, but they are not God’s punishment. Jesus has already defeated sin and its wages (which Paul says are death – not eternal torment), so His mercy always triumphs and His grace is always sufficient.

Metanoia, not repentance

We have seen before how ‘repentance’ (Greek metanoia) is often portrayed as remorse, with its accompanying guilt and shame, and doing penance. However, the true essence of metanoia is about returning to our true identity and restoring our relationship with the  Father. It is a transformative change of mind that aligns us with how God sees us and enables us to live in the fullness of who we were created to be. Rather than attempting to change our behaviour to earn acceptance, metanoia invites us to agree with God’s mind and embrace the truth of our identity as forgiven, righteous children of God. This shift in perspective empowers us to live a life that reflects our true nature in Christ.

Living loved is accepting the truth of being unconditionally forgiven,  celebrating it in joy and rejoicing in love. If we live in the truth that we are loved and forgiven unconditionally, we do not have to fear admitting we sometimes mess up, as we are still having our minds renewed. We can be real with the Father if we are struggling with something. We do not have to run away in fear and hide from our Father as Adam did, we can run to Him. We can come boldly to the throne of grace and receive limitless grace and triumphant mercy. We are only alienated in our own minds – that is why we need deep religious deprogramming.

Life-changing power

Riaan Swiegelaar’s transformation from a leader of the Satanic Church to a follower of Jesus serves as a powerful testament to the life-changing power of unconditional love. It is through God’s grace, not our works, that we are saved. Understanding the true meaning of confession, repentance, and grace liberates us from guilt and empowers us to live in the fullness of who we are in Christ.

Let’s embrace the truth of God’s unconditional love, extend it to others, and live in the freedom and joy of our salvation.

You can watch Riaan’s testimony and a sequel on YouTube.

Each of this series of blog posts is adapted from Mike’s latest FREE video series on ‘Unconditional Love’.
Why not become a patron and join us live for the next recording – they are normally on the second Sunday of each month at 6pm UK time.

Recent and related posts

286. Unconditional Love in Action

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott –

Two Covenants

We live in a new age, in a New Covenant that Jesus made with the Father. We and all mankind are included in it. Jesus warned his disciples of the religious and political spirit that would be like leaven, yet my experience, through the churches and movements in which I have been involved, is that our understanding of the New Covenant has invariably been tainted with Old Covenant concepts.

Unconditional love requires absolutely no sacrifices or offerings but an Old Covenant mindset always requires something: it requires our obedience, our obligation, our duty – which are all dead works and none of them have any value whatsoever before God. The Father does not require them (and actually He never did, which may be a shock to a lot of people. I will come back to that!).

Operating under an Old Covenant works-based performance-orientated mindset towards God will wear us out; we will never be at rest if we think we have to earn His love and favour. There is no guilt, shame or condemnation within unconditional love: they are just religious concepts which will keep us coming back for more religion.

Foundations

The book of Hebrews is almost entirely about the differences between the two covenants. It was written to people who were so accustomed to the Old Covenant ways of thinking that they were in danger of missing out on the benefits of the New. And Hebrews 6:1-2 are very misunderstood verses. I totally misunderstood them for most of my life and taught the concepts they contain as foundations of the New Covenant.

What that passage actually says is this:

Therefore leaving the elementary teaching about the Christ, let us press on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, of instruction about washings and laying on of hands, and about the resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment. (Hebrews 6:1-2).

So the Old Covenant was immature, and the New Covenant will bring us to maturity, but only if we don’t lay another Old Covenant foundation. What is that Old Covenant foundation? Repentance from dead works, faith towards God, instructions about washings (baptisms), laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment. All those things are Old Covenant understandings and mindsets which have nothing to do with the New Covenant. And yet most of those things are what we habitually teach: repentance, faith, baptisms, laying on of hands, resurrection and judgment. Those subjects are part of most churches’ foundation courses (they were certainly the basis of ours).

So when I used to read Hebrews 6:1-2, I just thought the writer was enumerating the elementary principles of Jesus that we needed to lay – but in reality they were exactly the opposite of that. Now I realise that these were the very foundations that the writer advises us not to lay again in the New Covenant! It is so important that we do not mix covenants by embracing Old Covenant understandings. Let’s not lay that Old Covenant foundation in the New Covenant: the only foundation of the new covenant is love.

The completeness of the fulfilled promise

Look at the passage again in the Mirror Bible:

Consequently, as difficult as it may seem, you ought to divorce yourselves from sentimental attachment to the pre-figuring doctrine of the Messiah, which was designed to carry us like a vessel over the ocean of prophetic dispensation into the completeness of the fulfilled promise. A mind shift from attempts to impress God by your behaviour to faith righteousness in Christ is fundamental. There is no life left in the old system: it is dead and gone – you have to move on. All the Jewish teachings about ceremonial washings (baptisms), laying on of hands (in order to identify with the slain animal as a sacrifice) and all teachings pertaining to a sin consciousness, including the final resurrection of the dead in order to face judgment, are no longer relevant. [All of these types and shadows were concluded and fulfilled in Christ, their living substance. His resurrection bears testimony to the judgment that he faced on humanity’s behalf and the freedom from an obstructive consciousness of sin that he now proclaims.] (Hebrews 6:1-2 Mirror).

‘The completeness of the fulfilled promise’ – that is Jesus. He is the fulfilment of every promise and covenant: everything is fulfilled in him. He is the conclusion, the completeness of everything that God said, to bring us into the reality of that today. And yet for most of my life I unknowingly tried to live in that same Old Covenant system by doing the very things that I should have left behind. If only the children of God, right throughout the world, would come into a revelation of this reality: that we would not have a sin consciousness but a righteousness consciousness instead!

The Law of Moses

Every church I have ever been in has always focused on sin. But we know that the more we try not to do something, the harder it is not to do it. That is why the Law was ineffective. It is impossible to keep the Law: Jesus made that very clear. And if you failed in one thing, you failed in it all. From the very beginning of the birth of the church, the religious spirit, operating in the Judaizers, tried to get believers back under the Law of Moses (and is still pursuing the same agenda today). But as I mentioned earlier, the whole Old Covenant system of sacrifices and offerings associated with the Law, which was instituted by Moses, was never God’s idea.

For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ. (John 1:17).

“What are your many sacrifices to Me?” says the Lord.
“I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fattened cattle; and I take no pleasure in the blood of bulls, lambs, or goats.” (Isaiah 1:11).

For I did not speak to your fathers, or command them on the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices. (Jeremiah 7:22).

If God accepted their sacrifices and offerings, and if He accepts ours, it is only because He accepts us!

And the Holy Spirit also testifies to us; for after saying, “This is the covenant which I will make with them after those days, declares the Lord: I will put My laws upon their hearts, and write them on their mind,” He then says, “And their sins and their lawless deeds I will no longer remember.” Now where there is forgiveness of these things, an offering for sin is no longer required. (Hebrews 10:15-18).

The Mirror Bible again:

So when Jesus, the Messiah, arrives as the fulfilment of all the types and shadows, he quotes Psalm 40:6-8, and says, “In sacrifices and offerings God takes no pleasure; but you have ordained my incarnation! None of the prescribed offerings and sacrifices, including burnt offerings and sin offerings were your request…”
Having said what he did in the above quote, that the prescribed offerings and sacrifices were neither his desire nor delight, he condemned the entire sacrificial system upheld by the law. (These only served to sustain a sin-consciousness and was of no redemptive benefit to anyone.)
Also by saying, “I am commissioned to fulfil your will,” he announces the final closure of the first in order to introduce the second. (Grace replaces the law; innocence supersedes sin-consciousness.) (Hebrews 10:5-6, 8-9).

Mankind is declared innocent. You are innocent. Let that sink in.

The verdict of the judge, in light of the victory of Jesus through the cross, is that all mankind is innocent, not guilty, justified and righteous. That is unconditional love in action; and that is God in action. The cross was an amazing love transaction that dealt with the legal consequences of mankind’s lost identity. Jesus conquered sin and death with love. Love released full and total, unconditional forgiveness.

Forgiveness is as unconditional as love; no works are required.

Each of this series of blog posts is adapted from Mike’s latest FREE video series on ‘Unconditional Love’.
Click the image or link above for the whole series, or scroll down to watch the video of the talk this post comes from.
Better still, become a patron and join us live for the next recording – they are normally on the second Sunday of each month at 7pm UK time.

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Support Freedom ARC

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282. Live loved, love living, live loving

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott –

Walking with God

I am really excited that more people are joining us on this amazing journey of discovering our sonship: who we are as sons of God, in relationship with Him, both the relational aspect and the governmental. It is a journey, not a destination. We are walking with God, not going ahead of Him nor getting behind Him; not going left or right, not running, but just walking closely with Him in intimate relationship. The path is not always straight and you cannot always see ahead but God knows where we are going: to a place of restoration and a deeper place of intimacy and creativity in our sonship.

It has been a wild ride so far and it shows no sign of slowing down! I believe you are probably reading this because you know there is more and are hungry for more; and you are probably willing to push the boundaries and go further and higher because of that. The Father desires that all the limitations and restrictions placed on us by religion are removed; everything that hinders us from going to the places God wants us to go and actually outworking our destiny. He does not want us to be limited or restricted in any way: therefore there are some challenges on the journey of deconstruction that challenge what we thought was true about God and about ourselves, and which will change our thinking.

My journey has been one of deepening intimacy which has revealed who God is as my Father, Mother, Brother and Friend. God is not male or female – God is a spirit, and encompasses everything because He is infinite. He knows all things and He is everywhere. So knowing the reality of the true nature of who God is can only come in an intimate face-to-face encounter; it cannot be intellectually known, it is relational and therefore we get to know God by experience. When we do encounter Him, then he reveals our true identity as sons.

So the God I thought I knew 20 years ago – or even 12 – is now a distant memory. He is not what religion taught me He was; He is not what I was conditioned to believe by church; He’s so much better than that. He is so good, so loving, so kind, so thoughtful, so passionate, beyond what I could have ever imagined until I met Him face to face and began to experience Him as He revealed Himself to me.

Now thankfully He did not do that all in one go because it would have completely shattered my mind (which is why the Father has therefore deconstructed my thinking and greatly expanded my consciousness).

Religious programming

Like most people, I was conditioned to believe you only went to heaven when you died. In fact, so many of the things I believed about God were programmed into me by religious doctrines and theological understandings which I know now were never true. But I believed they were true because that is what other people believed, at least in whatever stream I was in at the time. I started off in the Methodist church, went on to the Brethren and eventually started a charismatic church, so I had been on a journey of discovering things in a way, but that was nothing compared to engaging God face to face in the realms of heaven, or within me in a place of intimacy.

So all of the doctrines that were programmed into me about who He was – the angry God, the God who needs appeasing, the Old Testament God as opposed to the New Testament God – all of these confusing things – I finally realised I only believed they were true because I had never actually met Him. One day, He said to me “How much of what you know about me comes directly from Me and how much of it has come from reading, listening to sermons and other people?” And I had to admit that probably 99% of what I thought I knew was actually not from personal experience and therefore was only information, not true knowledge.

Unconditional love

The truth that God is love – and that His love is unconditional – is so difficult for people to grasp because of the way we have been programmed. And all of us have been programmed by what we have been taught, it is not restricted to religion: you could be brought up in an atheist household and programmed to believe that God does not exist or you could be brought up in religious settings which determined what you believe about God and the Bible (and everything else).

So for me this has been a long, sometimes arduous journey to come to the knowledge of the truth and come to a realisation that God really is love; that His love is unconditional and He wants us to experience it so we can come into a reality where we love as He loves. This programming has taken a long time for me to be free from and I’m sure there are things I still believe which may not be true but I do not yet know to be false. You only know what you know, but the more you spend time with Father, with Jesus, with the Holy Spirit, then what you know changes. And it always changes for the better: everything that I have experienced of God has only ever been better than I ever thought it could be.

The God that I now know is so much better than the previous one I thought I knew. Even the experiences I had, and some of them were good experiences on my journey, which were really fun at the time, but now I realise how limited it all was and that it was only drawing me to go further into something new and greater.

I believe actually this is probably the most important and the biggest key truth that has made the most impact in my life though over the last 10-12 years. The reason that this truth has been attacked and twisted in many different ways is because it is so important that we understand and experience it, because when we experience that unconditional love, it brings freedom. It releases us to be ourselves and it stops us from believing we have to perform to earn it or deserve it.

Live loved, love living, live loving

A phrase that I quote very often (because the Father said this to me so many times) is “Live loved, love living and live loving.” He said it as an encouragement and a motivation that this is simply how we can live. We can live loved: that does not mean live trying to be loved, or trying to earn love, or to deserve love, or to be good enough for love. Just live loved, accepting that we are loved in a completely unconditional way: that is the key to this understanding and this experience. And if we are living in that place of living loved, then we can love living. Life is joyous! I look forward to every day because there is more to experience, more to explore, more to just rest in and to just be.

And then we can live loving. This is where the rubber really hits the road because to live loving means we demonstrate the love that we have received to others. Jesus said, “Love one another as I have loved you”, and so people strive to love others, because it is hard sometimes when they are perhaps not very nice to you. When you look at how they are behaving, you may well think “I don’t want to love them. Look how they have treated me! Look how they hurt me!” If you have been involved in church for very long, you know how easy it is to be hurt by people, whether deliberately or by accident: in relationships it is hard to maintain a loving attitude to someone all the time. And to everybody? That is really difficult: but it is possible, because that is the way God has loved us and He wants us to love other people in the same way.

Reflect

So just take a moment to reflect and ask the Father: is there anything in your programming that hindering you from receiving and experiencing unconditional love as He really wants you to experience it? Then I encourage you to hand all those things over to Him so that you’re no longer holding onto your beliefs or any other thing which is contradictory to the reality that God loves you unconditionally. Only when you experience that unconditional love for yourself will it be possible for you to love others unconditionally too.

Each of this series of blog posts is adapted from Mike’s latest FREE video series on ‘Unconditional Love’.
Click the image or link above for the whole series, or scroll down to watch the video of the talk this post comes from.
Better still, become a patron and join us live for the next recording – they are normally on the second Sunday of each month at 7pm UK time.

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Support Freedom ARC

'Donate to Freedom ARC' button

Our Patreon patrons give a small amount each month and can join us for our monthly group Zooms, get exclusive or early access to Mike’s teaching and enjoy further patron-only benefits. Or you can use the blue button to support our work with a one-time gift*.
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*Note: This donation is securely handled through PayPal but you do not need to have a PayPal account yourself to make a one-time donation.
For repeating donations, if you do not have (or want) a PayPal account please support us through Patreon instead.

9850

280. Are We There Yet?

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

But do not let this one fact escape your notice, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day. (2 Peter 3:8).

Someone on a Mystic Mentoring session recently asked about this scripture, and about the seventh millennium (seventh day) therefore being a season of rest.

Personally, I don’t really hold too much to the ‘thousand years as seasons’ theory, that now we’re in the 7th millennium, we are in the season of rest. That is just adding up the years in the biblical genealogies and has little to do with reality.

But I do think rest is something which is built into creation, and it was previously revealed as one day in seven but now as all seven days. We have entered into Jesus: He is the rest and He is the fulfilment of all the promises. So we live in every day being a new day (so for me, we live in the eighth day, not the seventh). Every day is a new day, a new beginning. Every day has fresh mercies. Every day we live in rest and that is perpetual replenishment or restoration.

Light is slowing down

It does not say that a day is a thousand years, just that a day is like a thousand years. Everything in terms of time is related to the speed of light; and the speed of light has been slowing down as it has moved away from the speed of creative light. This was discovered by a couple of Christian astrophysicists, Trevor Norman and Barry Setterfield, who put together a scientific paper on the slowing down of the speed of light. It is really difficult to get a paper like that published when it has to be peer reviewed, because if it doesn’t agree with what scientists already believe then they won’t publish it. To start with, it wasn’t accepted and they were called cranks, but eventually some more mainstream scientists also discovered that light was slowing down.

They extrapolated that, at the speed of light in the beginning, seven days then would equate to something over 13 billion years now. But since it is relative to the observer, we would never know. That explains why the earth appears to be older than adding up the years in the Bible account would suggest: because it is! For man that has only appeared to be 7000 years because of the relativity of the speed of light.

So science actually indicates that the earth is not just 7000 years old, and in any case, no-one knows how long Adam and Eve lived before they fell and time really kicked in – time did not function in the same way as it does today until they stepped outside of God’s eternal now. Things changed significantly at that point on the earth.

This is not about there being a long period of evolution: I do not believe in evolution. Man was created and the animals were created, but the earth is not just 7000 years old either. Both can be true. People come up with all sorts of theories to account for any discrepancies, but I would prefer to focus on the fact that we can live in rest as a state of being (rather than just a period of rest associated with the 7th millennium).

Rest

What does it mean to be in rest? For me it is about not functioning under the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and therefore not functioning in works. Rest is the opposite of works, so when we live in the rest of what Jesus has done we don’t have to work for our own redemption and reconciliation. That has been done, so we rest in it: we can just be, we don’t have to do.

Everything in religion is about doing: you have to ‘do’ to earn rest. You work for six days so you can earn your rest for the seventh day. No, we are living in perpetual Sabbath. Essentially, we are continually in rest because now, Jesus is our rest.

“Come to Me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28).

That is the key for us, living in a state of being which is not functioning in an old system of works and therefore not being deceived into having to work for God’s favour and blessing; receiving it as His children through grace and mercy, not by works.

Every religious system will get you to try to do something to earn what you already have. So you just go round and round, because you already have it and doing something won’t actually make that true, it just stops you from realising that it is already true.

Are we there yet?

It’s like when you are travelling with your children and they keep asking, ‘Are we there yet?’ In religion, it’s always ‘not yet’. For some, it will be in this period or that period a thousand years in the future – it is coming, it’s just ‘not yet’. And to get there, you’ve got to do this and you’ve got to do that, otherwise it won’t happen. This just messes people up, gets them into a performance-orientated way of living, and so they don’t enjoy life. They are continually striving for something that already belongs to them; and if they would just stop, they would discover what it is to receive and be at rest.

We are already unconditionally loved and forgiven and everything has been accomplished, so we can live in rest and discover our true identity as sons from that place of rest, rather than doing all the things we are doing to prove we are sons.

The restoration of all things

With religion, you get a lot of ‘shoulds’. You should do this, you should do that. There are no ‘shoulds’. There is no ‘should do’ anything, it is just being. And then everything flows from being.

If we are in the seventh millennium, then why isn’t there rest? The world doesn’t exactly seem to be in the throes of rest. For most people, things are just as bad as they were in the sixth millennium. It is not as if we have crossed over into this millennium and now everything is at rest. That really doesn’t seem to be the experience of most people.

So it is better to just focus on each individual living in rest, which will in turn bring rest to the planet. If we live in freedom, then the planet will become free (and not just the planet, but the whole of creation). So it’s about us as sons living in rest; being rather than doing. That will dial everything down so that all (all people, all beings, all things throughout creation) can begin to discover God’s original intention and purpose for them, which is what will be restored in the restoration of all things.

This post is based on Mike’s answer to a question on his YouTube channel: Mystic Mentoring Monday 9th August 2021 US Pacific.

Available now – Mike’s latest FREE video series on ‘Unconditional Love’.
Click the image or link above.
Better still, become a patron and join us live for the next recording – they are normally on the second Sunday of each month at 6pm UK time.

Recent and related posts

Support Freedom ARC

'Donate to Freedom ARC' button

Our Patreon patrons give a small amount each month and can join us for our monthly group Zooms, get exclusive or early access to Mike’s teaching and enjoy further patron-only benefits. Or you can use the blue button to support our work with a one-time gift*.
Thank you!

*Note: This donation is securely handled through PayPal but you do not need to have a PayPal account yourself to make a one-time donation.
For repeating donations, if you do not have (or want) a PayPal account please support us through Patreon instead. 

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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271. Being the Joshua Generation

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

Therefore let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (Heb 4:16).

Just like Jesus, our elder brother, we can engage with our heavenly Father and enjoy an intimate relationship with Him; just like Jesus, we have all the resources of heaven available to us to achieve all we are called to do in our lives. Being the Joshua Generation means embracing our inheritance and birthright as sons of God.

Positioned

Sonship (which is not gender-specific) is not just about having a restored soul and becoming whole, wonderful as that is. Sonship is about being positioned, seated, enthroned in heaven so that our governmental position can be expressed on the earth. Sonship is about being in the Father and the Father being in us. When we are positioned in the Father, He can position us as His express image into creation, anywhere in time and space.

For example, one night as I was about to go to sleep at home in the UK, I said to the Father, “Hey, I’m available for an adventure!” and I went back in time to the 1760s. Someone in America was praying for help because their child had died. I found myself there, outside the house; they invited me in; I prayed for the child, who was healed and restored; and I found myself back in my room at home.

I started to wonder, how could I have gone back into the past and changed it? I was facing the well-known time travel paradox: if I changed the past, surely I have changed the present! Then I realised that to God there is no past, present and future: to Him it is all ‘now’. If I am in Him, I am not limited by time or space any more than He is; He can allow me to travel wherever and whenever, as I make myself available to Him.

Father’s business

That may sound strange, but it is the kind of thing you get to do when you are a son. You get involved in the Father’s business. When people are praying, He directs you to act in response to people’s prayers. Sonship is about being part of a family, in relationship with the Father, with Jesus, with the Holy Spirit and with one another. As a family, we will be about the Father’s business: the restoration of all things back to His original desire and design.

The whole of creation responds to us as sons. Sonship is then about being a gateway for the Father to touch the earthly realm through our lives. Jesus said “the Father who lives in Me does His work through me” (John 14:10 NLT); that is, not independently but in complete cooperation and relationship with one another. They were one. We want to get to that point where we are ‘joined to the Lord and one spirit with Him’ (1 Cor 6:17 NLT); where we cannot tell whether it is us doing something or the Spirit doing it (and it really does not matter either way, because we are one).

Precision

Sonship is about being a gateway for the Father to touch others. The way we do that is changing. It used to be that the ‘man of power for the hour’ would stand up at the front, prophesying over people, laying hands on everyone and knocking them flat on the floor. I have done that. That is the old ‘mediator’ model. Often it was like a blunderbuss or a shotgun approach: blast everything out there, tag it with ‘in the name of Jesus’ and hope that some of it would stick.

Seeing into someone’s DNA, you can identify where trauma is trapped in cells, and bring healing as a precision instrument.

God does indeed want us all to be equipped to release His love and power into other people’s lives, but to do so because we actually see what is going on; then we can direct the flow of the grace of God to touch the precise areas that need healing. Most physical disorders are the result of emotional hurt and pain, so if you do not heal the emotions, the physical symptoms just keep returning. You need to get to the root of the issue – and it will be different every time! So how do you do that? By reading the thoughts and intentions of people’s hearts. Seeing into someone’s DNA, you can identify where trauma is trapped in cells, and where they are stuck and fragmented; not as some kind of magic party trick, but in order to bring healing as a precision instrument. If we can all be equipped to be like Jesus, to do the things Jesus did in the same way that He did them, then we will be able to go on to do the greater works like He promised we would (John 14:12).

A daily to-do list?

I asked Jesus one time how He knew what to do, and how He should do it. I had the idea that maybe He would go to the Father each morning and get a list, probably written on a scroll. And I thought it would be very specific: heal this blind person by spitting on the ground and making mud; heal this other one by speaking to them; and this one by touching their eyes. But that was not it at all – He just had the heart of the Father to heal people that day and then, creatively, as a son, chose which way to do it.

When we are in the heart of God, we can choose our reality. We like to have a formula, but if a formula always worked then we would not need a relationship. I cannot assume that because I did something in a particular way one day, then I should do the same thing in the same way the next. God has not set it up that way, because He only works through relationship – He is one God in three persons, and relationship is at the core of His nature. So my mandate for the day is not a list of things I should or should not do: I am seated with Him in heaven, knowing His heart; and throughout the day I am continually connected to His heart, so I can always be where I need to be and do what I need to do, flowing in relationship with Him.

Love

We are called as sons to be part of the Joshua Generation, forerunners of heavenly intimacy, who have spied out the land beyond the veil; who have been wooed by the Father into restored sonship. The Joshua Generation are called to experience the precepts, character and nature of God Himself; to experience – and demonstrate – the reality of the very essence of God who truly is love.

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. 

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268. Beyond the Physical Realm

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott –

The more we engage with the Father, the more we are transfigured and transformed, growing and maturing in wisdom and grace. The first dimension in which we engage is in the Earth, the physical realm, but in the spiritual atmosphere of an open heaven.

Convergence of time and eternity

The cloud of His Presence, the cloud of the Father’s glory, comes around us and God speaks to us from where He is, out of eternity. Truth will be revealed to us from His perspective, not necessarily ours. That is why I suggest we do not try to figure it all out or try to understand it, just to receive. Your spirit will receive and digest it, and the Holy Spirit will bring it to your mind when you need it.

That goes for all the things that He has spoken to you throughout time and eternity, even if you have not heard or understood them! There is a convergence of time and eternity in the moment that He speaks. He is always speaking from the eternal now, so He is not restricted by the constraints of time. He may speak words you understand, or He may speak directly to your spirit.

“When the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, that is the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify about Me, and you will testify also, because you have been with Me from the beginning” (John 15:26).

“But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; He will glorify Me, for He will take of Mine and will disclose it to you. All things that the Father has are Mine; therefore I said that He takes of Mine and will disclose it to you” (John 16:13-15).

He will reveal all that you need to know to fulfil your destiny as a son of God.

Intimacy within

Beyond the physical realm, we can also engage in our spirit and hearts, the spiritual dimension. Wherever we are, we can experience the same intimacy within, all the time. We never have to feel in any way separated from God because Father, Son and Holy Spirit have chosen to come and dwell within us. We can learn to engage them there.

Our soul and spirit are contained within our physical body but the dimension of our spirit is a little like Dr Who’s Tardis – bigger on the inside than it appears on the outside. So you can have a garden within your soul, within your heart, acres and acres of soil to be cultivated. Jesus talked about the different conditions of the soil of our heart in the Parable of the Sower, and you may find there are beautiful areas in your soul but also some parts that are not so good. God desires us to cultivate it all so that none of it is hard, stony or weedy. So, as a house of God and a gateway of heaven, the Father dwells in us.

We should develop and nurture this ‘first love’ relationship, experiencing how much He loves us. Within that relationship God is looking to restore our hearts. Then we are able to love Him in return; able to fully express our love towards Him without any restrictions, limitations or hindrances caused by the hurt and damage most of us have incurred in our lives. Everything you encounter in God can be planted in the good soil of your heart, where you water it, and in due course you see young shoots coming through which grow up and produce fruit in your life.

Jesus invites us

Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me. He who overcomes, I will grant to him to sit down with Me on My throne, as I also overcame and sat down with My Father on His throne. (Rev 3:20-1).

So Jesus invites us to open the door in our spirit to allow the presence of God to fill us. When our spirit is full, that presence overflows and fills the garden of our heart, fills our soul with His presence. This is essential to the promise that follows, that we will be seated with Him on His throne, exercising authority and participating in the government of the Kingdom.

Most of us have lived off the trickle that flows under the doorway that Ezekiel describes. Therefore we do not yet have rivers of water flowing out of our innermost being, we have a trickle. All the gifts of the Spirit and the fruit of the Spirit that we have experienced so far have been as a result of that trickle. Imagine what our lives would be like if the flow of the river of life in us were ankle-deep, knee-deep, waist-deep, over our heads! That trickle is amazing, but what would it be like if it were a flood?

The Lord is my best friend and my shepherd.[b]
I always have more than enough.
He offers a resting place for me in his luxurious love.[c]
His tracks take me to an oasis of peace, the quiet brook of bliss.[d]
That’s where he restores and revives my life.[e]
(Ps 23:1-3a, TPT).

Close your eyes1 and think of that door in your spirit.
Let that door form in your imagination.
By faith reach out to the handle and choose to open the first love gate.

Welcome the Father’s presence into your spirit
Allow your whole being, spirit, soul and body,
to engage Him in a loving embrace.
Invite the Father into the garden of your heart

Let Him lead you to the green pastures or to your secret place.
As you are lying in the Father’s presence in your garden
Let Him begin to restore your soul
to face-to-face blameless innocence,
revealing wonderful truths to you of who you are.

Every night I send my soul into the garden of my heart to lie down with my Shepherd in green pastures. My spirit is active in heaven, and I go to sleep. When I wake up, sometimes I am aware of the conversation we have had during the night, and sometimes not. But I have set my soul in a place where it can engage with God all night; you can do the same. Why not try it tonight?

(1) Listen to an audio version of this activation:

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This post is condensed and edited from Mike’s teaching during the Sons Arise! Engaging The Father conference held at the Freedom Centre in 2018. When leading the Psalm 23 activation at that event, Mike played Identity in A by SML music, as heard in the audio clip above.

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*Note Sadly, because of abuse by scammers we can no longer offer a ‘click to donate’ option. However, if you contact us, we will get back to you with a simple means of giving. 

267. Engaging the Father

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

The cry from the Father’s heart

“Sons Arise!” is the cry from the Father’s heart to unveil, reveal and release His children into their full, glorious identity and inheritance as mature sons of God: the Elohim, god-like ones.

It is also the groan of all creation which is longing to be set free when we are revealed. Through the intimacy of a deeper relationship with the Father, let’s embrace our destinies as sons: let’s answer the groan of creation by revealing the true nature of God and the true essence of love expressed in our glorious freedom.

‘Sons’ is not gender-specific. We are all children of God who have an inheritance and are training in the family business. As sons, we are included in the circle of relationship that is Father, Son and Spirit, reconnected to the true reality of God’s original intention for our identity and destiny. Yet we cannot be recognised as sons until we recognise that we have a Father.

Engaging the Father

God is calling His children, His sons, to come out of the wilderness. He is calling His sons to cross over into their supernatural inheritance beyond the veil. He is calling His sons into deeper levels of intimacy, calling us to know Him.

As you begin to respond, you may find that He uncovers areas of brokenness and fragmentation within your soul which require healing and restoration. Don’t resist that; go with it. I recommend you journal everything the Father speaks to you as He reveals His truth and heals your wounds.

There are four dimensions in which I encourage you to engage with the Father:

  1. Engage in the Earth, the physical realm, but in the spiritual atmosphere of an open heaven.
  2. Engage in our spirit and heart, the spiritual dimension.
  3. Engage in the Heavenly realms – in the Father’s garden and other places He may take you.
  4. Engage God’s heart in eternity, outside of time and space.

When we engage the Father in four different dimensions we create a window where eternity (what was before there was) can manifest here and now to create what will be; so the end and beginning will be in agreement and history will unfold in alignment with the heart of the Father.

Let’s practice the first of those now with an activation based on a story Jesus told. We can all encounter the loving Father just as the prodigal son did, be accepted and given a ring of sonship.

I call these practice exercises ‘activations’ because they activate our imagination, which is the ‘screen’ on which we ‘see’ what is happening in the spirit. In all activations, relax, breathe deeply, loose your body from tension and loose your mind from over-analysing. Focus your conscious thoughts on whatever you are seeking to engage, but don’t strive to see visually; just go with what forms in your imagination when it is focused on the Father (or at other times it might be on Jesus or on the Holy Spirit).

You may be aware of having thoughts, of seeing, hearing, feeling, sensing or knowing cognitively – or not – but your spirit will always receive more than you are consciously aware of. Our spirits process different revelation at different rates, but at some future time you will eventually discover that you know something without being aware of when you acquired that knowledge: your spirit has digested what it received by revelation and has communicated it to your consciousness.

Prodigal son and loving Father

So he got up and came to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion for him, and ran and embraced him and kissed him (Luke 15:20).

Relax. Focus on the Father, who has been waiting for you to come to Him. Close your eyes if you can (read through the following paragraphs first, or listen to the audio version – at least the first 5 minutes, the full 10 if possible!).

Now think of Your loving heavenly Father running towards you, welcoming you with open arms to embrace and kiss you. That is what God longs to do with you! Let that image form in your imagination.

But there may be some obstacles in the way, some issues that come between you and prevent you engaging the Father in that way. Allow any obstacles, any negative thoughts or negative emotions, to come to your mind. Take sin, guilt, shame, condemnation, disappointment, inadequacy, worry, anxiety, fear, disapproval, whatever; put them in a bag and hand them all over to Him.

Let Him embrace you in His arms of love.
Let Him speak words of life over you; words of forgiveness and blessing.
Feel His love penetrate deeply into your heart.

Let Him clothe you with His love.
Let Him put a ring of sonship on your finger.
Feel the joy and pleasure of His heart for you.
Let Him release His love, joy and peace to you.

Let Him draw you deeper into His heart.
Let Him reveal more of His love for you.

Stay there as long as you want. If you fall asleep in any of these engagements, don’t worry! The best place to be is in a place of rest, and sometimes when you drift into that edge-of-sleep condition your spirit becomes more open.

Affirmed as sons

When we engage with the Father in this earthly realm under an open heaven, we can also be affirmed as sons:

“Receive my acceptance, affirmation, approval, recognition;
My recommendation, commendation, blessing, endorsement, validation.”

You can hear the Father speak to you as He spoke to Jesus at His baptism: “You are my son; in you I am well pleased. My soul delights in you.” When you hear Him speak words like that to you, don’t fight against them or argue with Him. Receive them. What He speaks over you is the truth.

Jesus went on to have further experiences of engaging with His Father in this realm. It got to the point where He began to shine. He demonstrated what sonship looks like by being transfigured, radiating the light of God. As sons, we will do the same (it is already happening for some). Don’t limit the possibilities. As you engage with the Father, He is transforming you (transform and transfigure are translations of exactly the same Greek word). You are being changed from one degree of glory to another: from human beings to living beings, to spirit beings, to godlike beings.

And the child grew and was strengthened in spirit, being filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him… And Jesus kept increasing in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and men. (Lk 2:40, 52).

The more we engage with the Father, the more we will grow and mature in wisdom and grace.

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This post is condensed and edited from the first teaching session of the Sons Arise! Engaging The Father conference held at the Freedom Centre in 2018. When leading the Prodigal Son activation at that event, Mike played Restoration Through Harmony by SML music, as heard in the audio clip above.

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*Note Sadly, because of abuse by scammers we can no longer offer a ‘click to donate’ option. However, if you contact us, we will get back to you with a simple means of giving. 

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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264. Relationship Replaced

Mike Parsons
and Jeremy Westcott –

A book they didn’t have

If you have spent any time at all in evangelical Christianity, you have probably been taught something like this:

“The Bible is ‘God-breathed’ (2 Timothy 3:16). The human authors wrote exactly what God wanted them to write, and the result was the perfect and holy Word of God (Psalm 12:6; 2 Peter 1:21).” [1]

As we saw last time, the Bible makes no such claims for itself. The verses quoted are not talking about ‘the Bible’ at all. Jesus is the Word of God, so to describe the Bible as the ‘Word of God’ (especially with a capital ‘W’) is little short of idolatry. We can all have an intimate face to face relationship with the Living Word of God – Jesus – today. Sadly, for many believers, knowledge of the Bible has replaced that intimate relationship with God Himself.

“It’s difficult to expect the same fruit of the early church when we value a book they didn’t have more than the Holy Spirit they did have.” – Bill Johnson[2]

The Holy Spirit

The Holy Spirit will lead us to Jesus (the Truth and Living Word of God) who leads us to the Father in relationship:

“But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you” (John 14:26).

“I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come” (John 16:12-13).

Jesus promised that more revelation would come through the Holy Spirit. There is no end to that revelation, no caveat that says ‘until the Bible is complete’. Is it possible that God never intended to limit revelation of who He is to the books of what we call the Old and New Testaments? Should the Bible ever ‘be complete’? Was that God’s intention? Did He even intend for us to have a Bible? Is it possible that insights today can be progressively added by the Holy Spirit?

Questions

I began to ask some questions of myself. I encourage you to do the same.

  • How much of what I believe came through direct face to face encounter with God Himself?
  • How much of what I currently believe has come through other people’s teaching and preaching?
  • How much of what I currently believe has come through my own study, leaning on my own understanding, and therefore comes through the confirmation-biased filter of my pre-existing knowledge?
  • How many things that I currently believe are different from the understanding that I have previously held? What are those things?
  • What do I now believe that contradicts something I strongly believed in the past?
  • How much of what I currently believe may change in the future if God continues to renew my mind?

Replacements

In my own conversations with the Father, He made some statements to me about some of the replacements we have made. His intention was to challenge any religious mindset in me. I offer them here so that if any of these statements resonate with you, or if they arouse anger, indignation or some other strong emotional response, you can take them back to the Father, ask Him why and ask Him to reveal the truth of His heart.

Relationship has been replaced by religion
The Spirit has been replaced by a book
The Living Word has been replaced by the written word
The Truth as a person has been replaced by theological and doctrinal belief systems
Hearing My voice has been replaced by studying a book

The truth of the cross that has reconciled creation has been distorted into a lie that has excluded creation
The perfect picture of love has been twisted to express penal, retributive punishment and torment
The love so perfectly displayed for My children and My creation in the self-sacrifice and offering of My Son has been distorted into a disgusting image of cosmic child abuse
Love that brings life has been perverted into hateful punishment that brings death

The correction and refining that purifies in fire has been replaced by eternal conscious torment
The Perichoresis of a relational loving God has been replaced by Augustinian theology of an angry God
Loving, substitutionary atonement has been replaced by penal, retributive atonement

Restoration has been replaced by punishment
Testing has been replaced by torment
Repentance has become re-penance instead of the renewal of the mind.
The wages of sin have become eternal punishment instead of death
The cross has become penal instead of restorative

Love has been replaced by anger
The grave has been replaced by Hell
The Spirit has been replaced by the letter
The torn veil of the temple has been replaced by the mediatorial coverings of men

Heaven and earth have been separated
An open heaven has been deceptively made a closed heaven
The literal truth of an open heaven has been replaced by analogy and metaphor
Access to heaven through the Way, Truth and Life of Jesus, the Door, has been replaced by access through death
The new covenant of life has been replaced by the old covenant of death

Grace has been replaced by the law
The faith of Jesus has been replaced by faith in Jesus
Salvation by grace has been replaced by the salvation of works
The heavenly priesthood of Melchizedek has been replaced by the earthly Aaronic priesthood

Future fulfilment has replaced past fulfilment
The end of the old covenant has been replaced by the end of the world
The celebration and joy of love have been replaced by the tribulation of fear
Victory has been replaced by rescue
The restoration of all things has been replaced by the destruction of all things

The new heavens and new earth, representing a new temple wineskin, has been replaced by the literal destruction of the world
Parousia of presence has been replaced by parousia of coming
Inclusion has been replaced by exclusion
Reconciliation has been replaced by separation

Preaching the good news of Jesus in people has been replaced by preaching the bad news of exclusion among people
The priesthood of all believers has been replaced by the priesthood of one believer

The bride has replaced the wife: the marriage has been made future not past
The present New Jerusalem on earth has been replaced by a future New Jerusalem coming out of heaven
The past resurrection has been replaced with a future resurrection
The past judgment of the cross declaring that all are innocent has been replaced with a future judgment of only the guilty

‘All are made alive in Christ’ [inclusive] has been replaced by ‘only those in Christ are made alive’ [exclusive]
‘All will confess Jesus as Lord’ has been replaced by ‘some will confess Jesus as Lord’
Being ‘born from above’ has been replaced with being ‘born again’
Being ‘born from above’ through the resurrection has been replaced by being ‘born again’ by praying a prayer of salvation

Salvation of all by grace through the gift of Jesus’ faith has been replaced by the salvation of some by their own faith

Take it back to Him

I am not asking you whether you agree or disagree. Whatever your response as you read through that list, I encourage you to take it back to the Father.

Ask the Living Word of God, Jesus, to give you a true revelation of Himself as the Truth and to deconstruct any pillar of sola scriptura from your mind.

Invite the Truth, Jesus, to deconstruct any lies you believe about the Bible, God, others and yourself.

[1] source: www . gotquestions.org
[2]When Heaven Invades Earth by Bill Johnson, Destiny Image Publishers 2013.

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