Tag: meditation

159. Your Word, Treasured in My Heart

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott

In meditation, we position ourselves to hear God’s voice and experience His presence. When we meditate on the word God has spoken and revealed to us, so that we have that word firmly established in us and can live from it, it will enable us to prosper and have success in all we do.

This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it; for then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have success (Joshua 1:8).

Give attention

The process of meditation is as simple as giving attention to what God says:

My son, give attention to my words;
Incline your ear to my sayings.
Do not let them depart from your sight;
Keep them in the midst of your heart.
For they are life to those who find them
And health to all their body.
Watch over your heart with all diligence,
For from it flow the springs of life.
(Prov 4:20-23).

He wants our attention. Yes, we can relate to God in the busyness of life, but it is important for us to give Him quality time too. When we meditate, we repeatedly bring the things God has said into the forefront of our thinking. What we repeat gets stored in our heart, in our subconscious mind; and what is in our subconscious triggers our conscious mind: Out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth speaks (Luke 6:45).

Meditating on what God has said also ministers life and health to us. Certainly healing can come through the anointing and laying on of hands, but if we get the truth of health and healing in our hearts, we will not normally need anyone else to pray for us.

God’s life in us comes from our spirit, out through our heart and through our body to impact the world around us. So let’s keep watch over and guard our hearts. Worry and anxiety come from focusing on the wrong things, driven by fear. The word He has spoken to us and over us can protect us by guiding and directing us, but only if it becomes part of us, through meditation.

Your word I have treasured in my heart,
That I may not sin against You
(Psalm 119:11)

Remember

When I remember You on my bed,
I meditate on You in the night watches
(Psalm 63:6)

I shall remember the deeds of the LORD;
Surely I will remember Your wonders of old
(Psalm 77:11).

I remember the days of old;
I meditate on all Your doings;
I muse on the work of Your hands
(Psalm 143:5).

The Logos Word of God reveals God’s nature and His character. That Word is Jesus: He is Truth, and becomes our standard, our plumb-line. When we remember God, call Him to mind again and again, meditate on His character and nature, on the way He does things, we recognise Him in the world around us and He can flow through us out into that world to transform it.

We must be not only prepared to listen, but also to respond. God speaks truth into our spirits, into our hearts. We respond to that rhema word in obedience, we act on it and live it out. And God then always responds Himself to our living faith in His word.

In Psalm 119, verses 1-40, we read of meditating on God’s word, ways, testimonies, judgments, law, precepts, statutes, ordinances, commandments, and wonders. Then those verses speak of what we do with that word: how we walk, observe, seek, look, treasure, tell, rejoice, meditate, establish, delight, live, long for, cling, run, incline, reverence, give thanks. Finally we see the ways in which God responds to us: blesses, ordains, teaches, opens our eyes, rebukes our enemies, takes away reproach, revives us, answers us, strengthens us, grants us, enlarges our hearts, gives us understanding, and deals bountifully with us.

Beholding and becoming

[We,] beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory (2 Cor 3:18).

What we consistently look at, we become like. If we look at, focus on and meditate on the Lord, if we have an intimate relationship with Him, we will become more like Him. It does not happen overnight, but little by little, step by step, from glory to glory, until people can see God in us and in what we do.

Preparing to meditate

Here is a prayer we can use as we prepare to meditate:

Lord, cleanse and prepare my heart.
Give me a teachable attitude.
I surrender my senses to You
Open the eyes of my heart.

Lord, I present to you
My abilities to reason and imagine
For You to fill and flow through.

Lord, I focus my attention
On what You show me
And I thank You
For what you are revealing to me

Garden of our heart

In closing, here is another way of looking at meditation: every testimony we have, every encounter, every vision, every victory won, every revelation from God; every word God has spoken to us, we can take as a seed and plant it in the garden of our heart. The River of Life flows through our garden and waters it. We have the authority to speak life to what we plant, and command it to grow. So we can expect to receive fruit from it again and again – and not only fruit to eat, but more seeds to sow. These in turn will grow into more plants, producing fruit and seeds of their own.

What are we growing in our garden?

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158. A Flow of Spontaneous Revelation

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

God speaks to us in a flow of spontaneous revelation. He communicates through thoughts, pictures, feelings, and impressions which we need to pick up. We need to be able to tune in to them; to see, feel, hear, and touch them. Reading scripture may a good place to start, but the Bible is the beginning of experience, not the end of it.

The scripture becomes a doorway to encounters with Jesus, with the Holy Spirit, with our Father. It also becomes an anchor for experiences we have now and a platform for further experiences still to come. We can go to the Bible, and find out if there is a scripture which talks about aspects of our experience. That is what I mean by finding an anchor in it.

We sing that we want to meet Him ‘face to face’. That is a reality we can all enjoy, here and now.

Journal everything

The Hebrew word for ‘know’ means ‘to experience by personal encounter’, and it is possible for us to have experiences, encounters, visions, dreams, and revelation. Scripture is full of examples of such things.

I want to encourage you, if you want to benefit from encounters with God, write them down. Journal everything so that you can go back to it, review it, meditate upon it, and draw further revelation. You can also revisit the experience. The more we repeat experiences, the more our brain learns to value and store those experiences, rather than forgetting and shredding the memories.

There are three stages of experience with God that we might identify:

1. Visions

These are snapshot pictures or moving pictures, as seen from the outside, a kind of 3rd person experience of seeing ourselves or someone else.

2. Visitations

In these we experience something in the 1st person, and are involved ourselves in the ‘action’. This may involve being in a trance, such as the one Peter had on the rooftop when God showed him a sheet coming down from heaven full of animals; or even being translated.

If you think all this sounds very much like the New Age, that is because devotees of the New Age have experienced something of what the Bible talks about, but have experienced it in a way that does not connect it with God (to be fair, that is hardly surprising when we have done such a good job of telling them that they are themselves separated from Him. They are not). And now religion tells us that we cannot touch it. Huge sections of the church have swallowed – and proliferated – that particular lie. And if you are worried it is too much like eastern religion, ask yourself where the Bible comes from. Not America. Not the UK. It comes from the Middle East, and that is the cultural setting which must inform our grasp of what it says.

Paul wrote that he didn’t know whether he was in or out of his body when he went into the heavens. The western mindset has a hard time with statements like that. Ezekiel was taken out of his body, and his spirit was transported into Jerusalem so that he could see what was happening there. These experiences are for us, too. The Holy Spirit can come and take us to different places on the earth, and to different places in heaven, and we may not know whether we were there in body, or in spirit, or both.

The reason for all this is to enable us to bring heaven to earth.

3. Habitations

This is when we live in the dual realms of heaven and earth simultaneously, as Jesus did:

No one has ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven, that is, the Son of Man who is in heaven (John 3:13, my emphasis). Jesus was on earth, speaking to Nicodemus, but said He was in heaven at the same time.

That is how Jesus was able to see the things the Father was doing, because He was in constant spiritual connection with the Father in the heavenly realms. Whatever Jesus did, He has made available for us. He said “You will do the works that I do, and greater works than these, because I go to the Father” (John 14:12).  He went to open up this door for us, this avenue into the heavenly realms.

Open the eyes of our heart

We can see with our natural eyes, but at the same time we can also see with our spiritual eyes, and flow in revelation which comes from God’s presence. This is where meditation becomes so important. Meditation is a process we can use to open the eyes of our heart to see; to encounter the truth of who God is  in practical, experiential ways.

Definitions

Here are some dictionary definitions of meditation: the act of focusing one’s thoughts: to ponder, think on, muse, reflect, contemplate, babble, mutter, imagine; to murmur; to converse with oneself; to ruminate (chew the cud and extract all the goodness from it).

It is not madness to speak to yourself. I speak to myself all the time. As we speak aloud, we are communicating the things of God to our spirit, which will grow and engage with them. And using our imagination is very much part of the process of meditation. If we are ‘just imagining it’, what is wrong with that? It is how God speaks to us.

Music is very useful in meditation. It provides a platform which engages our imagination. The right side of our brain is where creativity and imagination reside. When we speak in tongues, scientists have found that it is the right side of our brain which is engaged in that activity. And the right side of the brain activates better, and more blood physically flows there, when we are at rest. So it is best to meditate when we are in a state of relaxation, which we can achieve by calming ourselves, taking deep breaths, and so on. Again, this is not wrong: it is simple and sensible preparation of our body.

Logos to rhema

Meditation turns the logos (written, fixed word) into the rhema word (spoken, to us, now), stirring faith from which we can live. It turns head knowledge into personal experience, and enables us to hear the voice of God. In meditation, God can use a scripture to speak to us (sometimes completely out of context – He wrote it and He can use it however He wishes), to get across to us something He wants us to hear and understand.

This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it; for then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have success (Joshua 1:8).

Meditating will enable me to prosper. In my destiny, in what God has called me to do in my life, I want to prosper; I want to succeed and excel to the highest level.

Don’t you want the same?

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Check out Rest, a piece of music intended for use in meditation, composed and performed by Samuel Lane (SML Music) via Soundcloud. This piece is featured in Mike’s ‘Meditation For Rest’ (see below).

MEDITATION FOR REST

In this single-session teaching, Mike talks us through his foundational daily meditative practice. Get it here: Meditation For Rest

“I did not set out to create a 7-step meditative exercise, I just discovered that I was doing this myself. You can use this as a way of bringing yourself to a place of rest and to live from a place of rest; but I would encourage you more to use it as a basis for developing your own process.”

Cost: £5 GBP (typically around $7 USD depending on exchange rate).

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156. Store, or shred?

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott –

We are continuing to look at building our spirit.

Everything we perceive goes into the brain. Whatever we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch, the information comes in through our senses and is relayed there via various pathways. When we see something, for example, light comes in through our eye and is projected, upside down, onto our retina. That information travels along the optic nerve to the brain, which then interprets it – in this case, turning it the right way up.

So if I am teaching on a Sunday (not that I do that much anymore), looking at a room full of people, I am not really seeing them where they are, out there seated in their chairs. I am actually seeing them in my own brain. But I have learnt to interpret those messages to mean that there are people are out there, and I can tell pretty accurately how far away they are. We all do that, all the time. But we had to learn that spatial awareness as we were growing up.

Sorting by relevance

There is a part of the brain called the hippocampus which is like a shredder machine. All the irrelevant information that goes into your brain, everything that is not important to you, gets shredded. You may see everything, hear everything, feel everything – but you don’t retain it because most of it doesn’t really matter too much. Those things that do matter can be stored. The sorting happens by repetition.

For instance if I walked into a room in a building where I had never been before and the lights went off I would struggle to find my way out. But if I walked into the Freedom Centre and all the lights went off, even if it was pitch black, no problem. That’s because I have been in the Freedom Centre hundreds of times and I know my way around. My imagination would be able to show me, even though I couldn’t see naturally, because that information has been stored in my brain. I could describe the building to someone, and where everything is in it, because I’ve been here many times and I remember. My brain knows that the information has some value because I have repeated it over and over again.

Again, most of our church members could not tell you what the pattern is on the carpet in the main hall of the Freedom Centre, even though they may have seen it many times and walked over it every time they have been here. I can tell you exactly what the pattern is: I know because I have been face down on it so often that I remember it. It is three little dots going at different angles in different colours. That information may not actually be all that important to me, but my brain has assigned it relevance because of repetition.

Meditation

Meditation is going over and over something in your mind, drawing the truth from it. As time goes on, because of the constant repetition, your brain learns that this is something important to you, and stores the information instead of shredding it. When it comes to meditating on what God has revealed to you, whether from scripture or interacting with the Spirit of God, I know that if you don’t repeat these things regularly then your brain will not treat the information you acquire as something that’s important or valuable to you. It that happens, you risk losing it.

With repetition, synapses close and form a neural pathway to the memories, which are stored in our heart, in our subconscious. Trauma can cause the same thing to happen instantly. Sometimes something happens to you which is so severe that you form an instant memory and you can’t get rid of it. This often happens to people involved in wars or serious accidents. You may have experienced it yourself. Sometimes, though, the trauma can be so severe that your brain actually forms pathways around the memory of the event so that you can’t remember it at all. You block it out, or you dissociate from it – that’s what happens with people who have multiple personality disorder. It is a form of protection against the effects of severe trauma.

Just as we may sense everything physical but don’t retain it all, we also sense everything spiritual. But most of us can’t remember spiritual sensations or information because we have no anchor for it. That is because we don’t go back and repeat the experiences, nor do we have them often enough. If we want to grow in the realms of the spirit we need to stimulate the right side of our brain by speaking in tongues and meditating regularly and on purpose. As we do, we will find that we are having (and retaining memory of) visions, dreams, pictures and so on. The more we repeat the process the more the information gets stored rather than shredded.

Through meditation, through repetition, through agreement with the Truth (Jesus), those memories get stored and become something we are able to use. The revelation that comes from personal engagement with Father, Son and Spirit in this way becomes something that we start to live from. As we operate in it, we experience it in increased measure and begin to manifest the Kingdom of God around our lives.

If you don’t know by experience the things you may read in the scriptures, then you are simply acting like a parrot when you talk about it. A parrot can speak words but it does not know what they mean. If we know the Word of God (that is, Jesus) personally, by experience, then we can speak words of authority and power. That, too, comes by learning how to meditate.

Use it or lose it

We can help the process by writing out what God has revealed to us, reviewing it and revisiting it. I make a practice of journaling everything. Experiences, evenly heavenly ones, are easily forgotten. The principle of ‘use it or lose it’ definitely applies in this case.

God used to speak to me all the time through the Bible (because that is how I expected Him to speak to me. Nowadays He uses plenty of other means as well). Whenever He would speak, the words would jump off the page and I would think ‘oh that’s very good’, and I would underline the passage or highlight it and then go on to read something else. One day He said, ‘Why do you use your Bible as a filing cabinet? When are you going to live from the truth of the words that I speak to you?’

That changed my whole understanding. When I read a scripture that speaks to me, or when I have an encounter with Father, Son or Spirit in the realms of heaven or in my own heart, I will draw every bit of truth that I can out of it. And now those have become fundamental truths to my life. I live out of the revelation that God has given me because I took what He said and spoke it to myself, going over and over it, drawing revelation from it.

Now when I read the Bible I don’t always read a whole chapter or a whole section. I might sometimes read one word. God can give me revelation from that one word and it changes my life. I have His revelation as a deposit in my life because I walk around full of it. When I meditate on what God says, it starts forming pictures and visions. It joins up and links up and forms connections because I carry a deposit of the truth within me through meditating over it for a long time.

All of us need to have that. Meditation opens a doorway to vision, encounter and experience. When we engage with visions, encounters and experience, when we go over them again and again, our brain will then categorise them as important to us, and store them.

Store or shred? The choice is ours.

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86. Kingdom Realms

The story so far

[February 2013]

Back in the summer of 2010, Mike went on a 40-day fast. God revealed much to him during that time, and over the months that followed, he began to share some of it with Freedom Church here in Barnstaple. Meanwhile, Jeremy had been looking at social media and blogging in another context, and in September 2011 began to sense that God was inviting us to use those newly available means to make that revelation and teaching available to the wider church.

So we set up this Sons Of Issachar blog, the @FreedomARC Twitter account, and the Facebook Page. Later on we also began posting on Pinterest, and added a YouTube channel, a new, much improved website and our structured introduction to living in the dual realms of heaven and earth, the Engaging God programme.

Here on the blog, 15 months in, we finally wrapped up Mike’s teaching on the Prophetic Timetable. That series closed with the 40 Characteristics of the Joshua Generation, which seem to have been widely shared and appreciated around the world.

Towards the end of that, Mike began to open up some further revelation about how we can obtain access to the realms of heaven, and why we need to do so. In this next ‘Kingdom Realms’ series, we will explore some of that in more detail, and to encourage you as you read to step into the realms of heaven and experience this for yourself.

[Feb 2020: If you want to keep up to date, you can usually catch one of Mike’s latest published ‘Mystic Mentoring’ sessions each Monday. Just visit our main website home page, scroll down and you will see the Mystic Mentoring video. These sessions often deal with current events and hot topics. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel so you don’t miss anythuing!

You can purchase recordings of many of Mike’s historic teaching series from our engaging God website too. The annual ‘Vision Destiny‘ sets (dated 2017 to 2022) are available free of charge.

Mike’s more recent teaching can be found as part of our Engaging God subscription programme – you get a two-week free trial period and we promise it is well worth a look!]
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Free Access to the Realms of Heaven

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott

When you first hear teaching about the heavenly realms you might find it rather challenging to begin with. You may never have heard anything quite like this in the church before. Don’t be surprised if your spirit starts to respond before your mind has caught up. It is easy to get confused, or bogged down by trying to make sense of it all from a logical point of view. Not to mention the fact that some of you are probably trying to work out if we have gone completely off the rails…

Please set your mind at rest, and let your spirit lead. We are not going to ask you to do anything that is not firmly rooted in Jesus. Jesus is the Logos Word, and you need an ever-deepening relationship with Him. The Bible is an introduction to Him, a springboard from which you can encounter Him. It is only by experience that you can truly know Him: an experience you can have for yourself in increasing measure.

“I will grant you free access…”

We saw a few posts ago a passage in Zechariah about Joshua the High Priest:

And the angel of the LORD admonished Joshua, saying, “Thus says the LORD of hosts, ‘If you will walk in My ways and if you will perform My service, then you will also govern My house and also have charge of My courts, and I will grant you free access among these who are standing here” (Zechariah 3:6-7).

At that point Joshua is in the heavenly realms, not on the earth, and the others standing there are heavenly beings. This is where God promises Joshua that he can have ‘free access’.

But there are conditions. Since God does not show favouritism (Rom 2:11), we know that if we fulfil those conditions, the same offer is open to us. And in those conditions we can see a distinct progression. Walk in His ways; perform His service; govern His house; have charge of His courts: then we will be able to stand in His Presence in a different realm.

Moses knew the ways of God

He revealed His ways to Moses, his works (or His acts) to the children of Israel (Psalm 103:7).

Moses knew the ways of God. There was a reason for that: He was prepared to risk engaging with God, to meet with Him face to face, when the rest of Israel kept their distance from the fire and the smoke on the mountaintop. It is not an easy thing to get to know God’s ways. But He invites us to come as Moses did, into the heavenly realms, into His Presence, into His glory.

Remember how Moses asked God to show him His glory, how God passed by before him and he was not able to see God’s face, but only what the King James Bible calls His ‘back parts’? Now, when we read that with a Greek (western) mindset, we probably think it means he saw God’s physical back. Whatever would God’s back look like? But with a Hebrew worldview we understand that what Moses saw was history, the things God had done, everything that had happened up to that time. That is how Moses was able to write the first five books of the Bible, including the story of creation and all the other events which happened before his lifetime.

But the rest of the nation of Israel did not go up that mountain, and all they saw was what God did. They saw His works, they saw His miracles, but they didn’t really begin to understand who He is, what He is like. God is inviting us to do as Moses did, so that we can know His ways. And when we know His ways, we can do the works that He does.

Moses performed miracles. He brought water out of the rock: he used his staff, he exercised power. Israel just received. The whole nation saw the works, but none of them ever actually did the works like Moses did. Jesus said that He did what He saw the Father doing (John 5:19): and He expects us to do the works He did (and greater ones).

If we are to walk in His ways, we first have to know His ways. To do the works of God, we need to know the ways of God. Then we can be among those who bring the kingdom from heaven to earth.

Walk in the ways of God

The Logos Word of God will be a safeguard for us, to keep us in the truth. The Word of God will be an anchor for all we do: Jesus is the Logos Word of God, the living Word. He is the exact image and likeness of the Father. If we have seen Him, we have seen the Father. If we get to know Jesus in relationship we can get to know the ways of God.  The ways of God reveal His character, so it is really important for us to become familiar with His ways.

If we look at Psalm 119, the first 40 verses in particular speak of His word, ways, testimonies, judgments, law, precepts, statutes, ordinances, commandments, and wonders. If we will meditate on those facets of His revelation, we realise they are all different, and that they each express some different aspect of His character.

Meditate on scripture

Meditation on scripture is really key for unlocking this. We, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory (2 Cor 3:18). As we meditate on a Bible verse or passage, what is written becomes a doorway to experience, and we become what we behold. And the more we behold, the more we become like what – or whom – we behold. We are transformed. That word is ‘metamorphosed’, like a caterpillar changing into a butterfly. A change in its DNA takes place. Meditation like this can transform us that deeply.

Similarly, as we receive the DNA of God in breaking bread, the light comes into our DNA and we are changed.

We need to hear the rhema word, the word that God speaks right now, straight to our heart. When we meditate on scripture, we can receive a rhema word as the Holy Spirit teaches us and draws out for us a message which speaks to us in our situation. And we can also have face-to-face encounters with God where He speaks a word to us directly. When that happens, we will know it is God because that revelation will line up with the truth of His nature that we already know: God is love. While we learn to recognise His voice for ourselves, we can use love as our plumbline, our standard. If it is not love, it is not God.

If you go back to the first 40 verses of Psalm 119 again, you will see another set of words which express things we need to do in order to know and experience and press into His ways. Those are words such as: walk, observe, seek, look, treasure, tell, rejoice, meditate, establish, delight, live, long for, cling, run, incline, reverence, and give thanks.

Again, there are yet other words in those verses which describe how God will respond to our walking and seeking: He will bless (that is, He will empower us to prosper, to succeed to the highest level), ordain, teach, open eyes, rebuke, take away reproach, revive, answer, strengthen, grant, enlarge our heart, give understanding, and deal bountifully.

These are some of the pathways and the protocols, the processes we will need to follow if we want to fully experience and demonstrate the life of God.

We need to take the time to read and meditate on scriptures like these for ourselves. Why not use the ‘Leave a Reply’ section below to share the insights you receive when you do, and encourage others?

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20. Meditating on Psalm 23

Mike Parsons – 

God wants us to know Him and to know the reality of how He is revealed in the scriptures. Psalm 23 is a powerful psalm which talks about the intimate relationship God desires to have with us. We will just look at a couple of phrases but I want to encourage you to take the time to meditate on the whole psalm.

‘The Lord is my Shepherd’

‘The Lord’ is a term that God has chosen to use to describe His character and nature. There are seven Names of God that help us to grasp different aspects of that character and nature. I could probably spend weeks on each one, but I won’t do that. I will just urge you to seek God for yourselves to gain revelation about each of them.

  • The Lord my Righteousness. That is right standing with God, or the right to stand in his Presence.
  • The Lord my Sanctification. That is the process of transformation and change that God wants to take us through.
  • The Lord is There. He wants us to be conscious of His very Presence with us all the time, Father, Son and Spirit.
  • The Lord my Peace. his peace is far more than being chilled out. His peace is wholeness, and absolute perfect rest. Everything we need is complete in Him.
  • The Lord my Healer. God wants us to come to Him to find perfect health, in body, soul and spirit.
  • The Lord my Provider. We no longer need to struggle just to have enough. We can know that in everything – not just money – He will provide all that we need and more. He wants us to look to Him for love, and to know that we are accepted, not rejected. Why would we even look for love and acceptance from the world? The world has nothing to offer us compared to knowing God. He is our Provider in everything we could ever need for our lives.
  • The Lord my Banner of Victory. In Him we are overcomers. We can overcome everything that would hinder us bringing heaven to earth through our lives.

We can know Him intimately, experientially, personally. He is wooing us, calling us to come away with Him, to know Him, to surrender all to Him. ‘Be still and know that I am God’. We can find rest. Deep calls out to deep. In our soul we are crying out for Him, longing to know Him, and He really wants us to know Him, ‘The Lord’.

‘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’ (Rev 3:20).

Jesus is saying that He is standing at your door and knocking. He is calling you to that place of love. Open the door to Him every day. Every day, invite Him to come in, find new and fresh revelation in His Presence. Dine with Him: as we have said, that was a very intimate occasion in biblical times.

‘He makes me lie down in green pastures’

He invites us into that relationship every single day. He is crying out to us, wooing us, desiring so much more for us. There is so much more of Him that we can experience and know. As we open the door in our hearts, He opens the door in heaven. And there is so much greater intimacy there in heaven. ‘Come up here’ is His invitation to all of us.

Come up to the Holy Place, to the throne room, the Tabernacle, the garden, the River of Life, to the waterfalls. Come and meet the seven spirits of God. This is what God is doing in our day, inviting us to come. He wants our hearts and He won’t relent until He gets them. We need to surrender completely, wholly, to Him.

‘But the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with Him’ (1 Cor 6:17).

That is an amazing promise. He is inviting us to flow together with Him, to be one spirit with Him. When we flow together His voice becomes our voice as He speaks through us. And we can join ourselves with him every day.

‘Where I am, there My servant will be also’ (Jn 12:26),

And where is Jesus? He is in His Father’s House (Jn 14:2). John chapter 14 is one of my favourite chapters: it is literally falling out of my Bible because I have read it so much. He is in His Father’s House, and the Father’s House is not heaven, it is us, the church.

‘If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also’ (Jn 14:3).

Jesus was not saying he was going to prepare a mansion for us. The place he was talking about going to for us was the cross, so that we could become a place where God could dwell. And the place where Jesus is? Intimacy, intimacy with the Father:

‘I am in the Father and He is in Me’ (v10).

We can do nothing apart from Him.

‘The works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I go to the Father’ (v12).

I want you to put your own name into that scripture – you will do greater works than Jesus because it is the Father abiding in you that does the works (v10 again).

‘After a little while the world will no longer see Me, but you will see Me; because I live, you will live also. In that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you’ (vv.19-20).

‘I in the Father, you in Me, I in You’. That is where we can be now, in that place of intimacy where we are at one with Him.

‘We will come to him and make Our home (abode, special dwelling place) with him’ (v23).

The Father, Son and Holy Spirit dwell in our spirit. Our spirits are like the Tardis in Doctor Who, bigger on the inside than on the outside. Our spirits are connected to heaven, outside of time and space as we know it, and they are connected to earth, in our body.

‘You know Him because He abides with you and will be in you’ (v17).

‘For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you’ (Luke 17:21).

If the Kingdom of God is within us, then we will be manifesting heaven on earth; His power will flow from us; we will shine. And if we are to demonstrate God’s Kingdom, we cannot do it without knowing him intimately.

We are a habitation of God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – connected to heaven and to the three O’s of God: Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Omniscient. All-powerful, present everywhere, knowing all things. If we are connected to Him, there is nowhere we cannot go, nothing we cannot do: we are connected to all of time and space.

What is it like to know the Presence of God in our lives?

‘The LORD bless you, and keep you; The LORD make His face shine on you And be gracious to you; The LORD lift up His countenance on you, And give you peace’ (Num 6:24-26).

That is what He wants for us, to know and experience Him as He really is, smiling upon us with love and acceptance, bestowing His wonderful peace, wholeness, completeness, and perfect rest.

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