relationship with God – Sons of Issachar

522. Allegory, Reality and Relationship: Finding the Balance

Mike Parsons –

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The Danger of Over-Spiritualising Everything

For me, the danger in allegorising everything in terms of the Bible is that it can make things that are actually real seem as if they are not real, and only spiritual. For instance, I have heard people like Kay Fairchild and others say, “Heaven is in you.” And in a sense, they are almost saying, “Well, there is no actual heaven. There is no actual real place that you can go to, because it is in you.”

Now, I know the kingdom of God is in us. And there is a sense where the presence of God in us is a manifestation of heaven with us, but it is not heaven. All of the heavenly realms, the spiritual realms, and the angelic do not live in me. They are a spiritual dynamic of a real place. It may not be physical as we know it, but it is no less real.

177. Heaven Around Us, Heaven Within Us

Literal Reality and Spiritual Truth

I think the danger in saying everything is just allegorical and spiritual about our lives means that we can end up saying those things are not really true, they are just ways of looking at life. So people say, “Well, we do not have to wait until we die to go to heaven.” But actually, they are not talking about heaven in the same way that I would say I can engage heaven now, as I can engage God within me now.

There is a danger in throwing out what is literal reality and spiritualising it all. People who take that view often do not believe in literal angels, or literal fallen angels, or a literal devil. They say it is just the accusations in my mind that cause me not to believe the truth. They do not see the devil as a personal being, and they do not see angels as personal beings. I think they are missing out on a lot if they make it purely a spiritual thing of ‘my relationship with God and nothing else’.

Finding Balance, Not Extremes

There is a danger if you do not get a balance in it. Often, when the pendulum swings back to where it should be, it swings too far the other way before it comes to rest in the right place. And sometimes people get caught in that swing and go too far. I do believe in a personal fallen angelic being, whatever you want to call him. I do believe in personal angels. And I do believe in a literal heavenly realm that you can encounter.

We are seated there with Christ in those heavenly realms. It is not just figurative, as in “I rule and reign with God in my life.” That is true, but there is also “on earth as it is in heaven,” which needs to be factored into the equation. There are extremes on both ends of everything. We need to be discerning, not go too far, and not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

We need to find the truth in the middle ground, and then live in the reality of that truth and experience the fullness of it.

Not “All Done” and Not “All Us”

You cannot just go from one extreme and say, “It is all done, I just have to believe it.” Most people who try that find it is not all done, and they struggle. Then they feel guilty because they think they do not have enough faith. And on the other end, “It is all about us, and we have to do everything, work out our salvation with fear and trembling.”

There are extremes on both ends.

God has done it all. We have to come into that reality.

Creation Is Waiting for Maturity

In Romans, it talks about creation longing, waiting for the sons of God to be revealed. It is not talking about us waiting to be revealed. It is talking about creation waiting for us to be mature enough that it can recognise our sonship, rather than recognising our immaturity.

Creation will be set free into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. That glory is who God says we are, in its fullness. That is what brings freedom to creation. If we are not fully embracing who we are, then creation is not fully going to be set free. It is down to us, with God, expressing oneness. We are one spirit with Him. In that union, creation can recognise our sonship in the relationship we have with our Father, not independently.

354. Heavenly Home? Revealing Our Sonship to Creation

Allegory and the Old Testament

Yes, some people say it is all allegory, and that is going too far. You can allegorise some of the Old Testament and say there is a spiritual story there that is not meant to be taken literally. But I think most of what we have in the Old Testament reflects that the people who wrote it did not really know God, and wrote from their own understanding.

The Holy Spirit can take any story and apply it to our lives and bring truth out of it. That can be true. But I do not think it is necessary if you have a relationship with the Holy Spirit, with Jesus, with the Father, where they can reveal that truth to you directly.

Relationship Over Interpretation

Why go through a mediator of a book, trying to understand God through stories? Jesus is the truth. He is the living Word of God.

There is too much focus on trying to find God in the Bible, in allegory, and in stories, when we can actually meet Him, follow Him, hear His voice, and encounter Him every day. I do not see the point of spending all that time trying to use a story to understand God. That is theology: understanding God through the Bible.

I would rather understand the Bible through God than try to understand God through the Bible. Whose version would we use? Whose allegorical interpretation?

Do We Need the Book?

I would focus on relationship.

God will reveal Himself and reveal who we are in that relationship without the need to focus on trying to understand the book, whether literal, allegorical, or anything else.

Why do we need it?

Jesus did not say we were going to have a book. He said we were going to have a relationship. A lot of time is spent trying to understand a book that we do not really need to spend. However, if people are used to the book, then you can use it as a frame of reference for them, because they do not yet have the experience.

The Missing Dimension: Experience

My perspective on people who teach like this is that they do not have a personal experience of heaven. They do not have a personal experience of engaging God on the inside. They are trying to explain relationship using the allegories of the book. I am not saying the truth they teach about grace, love, and the finished work is not true. It is wonderful. But the relationship is the relationship. The mystical dimension is missing from a lot of their experience. They have not gone to heaven. They have not had face-to-face encounters with God. They are not dwelling and abiding in that face-to-face presence.

Or if they have, they are not sharing it.

I am not saying they have not had those experiences. I do not know them well enough. But they are not sharing that relational encounter dimension. Instead, they are presenting a different belief system.

406. Recognise the Finished Work of Jesus

Belief Versus Experience

It is not about believing something differently about God. It is about experiencing it. When you experience it, you will believe it. If you are just trying to believe it, it becomes another belief system that you are trying to have faith in.

There is a danger in creating another good belief system that may be mostly true, but is not fully encountered. Experiencing the truth is very different from believing the truth. If you have experienced Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life, if you have encountered Him face to face, spoken with Him, and He has spoken with you, that is very different from believing what the Bible says He said.

Encouraging Real Encounter

I resonate with a lot of what these teachers say about the love of God, the unconditional nature of His love, and grace. But something may be missing if people are not being encouraged to have real encounters that are actually experienced, not just believed.

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483. Is God Bored? A New Perspective on Church Practices

Mike Parsons

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Bored with this church stuff

God spoke to me and said, “I am really bored with this church stuff.” And I thought, you cannot say that. That cannot be you. How can you be bored with people worshipping you? But he was not saying he was bored of people, or of their desire to worship. He was saying he was bored of the format, the same things, week after week.

So I pressed him. “What do you mean, bored?” He said, “Why do you not ask me what I would like you to do?” I said, “We do. We ask you every week.” And he replied, “Yes, but you are only giving me a menu of five things to choose from. What you are really asking is: what order do you want to do those five things?”

I had to admit he was right. We claimed to be led by the Spirit, but only within the boundaries of those five things. That realisation shocked me. I kept quiet at first, because I knew it would cause an uproar. Instead, I began teaching the Engaging God programme in my office on Sunday mornings. The main meetings had to stay at a basic level for the newer people and those from the rehabilitation unit, so others handled that.

I would spend the first part of the service downstairs teaching, then went upstairs to join the main gathering. And when I did, I felt the same as God had said. This is really boring, is it not? I enjoyed myself more in the office than in the service. It was not the people—I loved the people. But while we were on the cutting edge of engaging God, with angels and portals into heaven, we were still doing everything in the same tired format. Someone would say something, we would sing, there would be ministry, and perhaps something else—but always within the same framework.

What is church?

I began to understand what God was saying, and I felt it too: this is not it, is it? He took me out of that scenario and began to press the deeper question: what is church? Why do we run a meeting? Because church is not a meeting. Church is people in relationship—with each other and with God. But what we had built, with worship, a preach and the rest, was the very thing God was challenging. “Why are you doing this? Who said I wanted you to?” And that challenge shook us.

It challenged people. What was this going to look like? So then we did not do any of that. We turned up on a Sunday and asked, “Oh, what does God want to do then? What do you want to do, God?”

God said, “If you had asked me before you got here, I would have told you I did not want you to come and do this today.” Ah. So it is not about meeting this way and turning up in a building then? No. Not every Sunday. No. If you had asked me, I would have told you I wanted you to go and do something yesterday, to go for a walk and enjoy the beautiful fresh air.

That was a very different challenge to our thinking. This was not just, “Oh well, we will turn up in the building and then ask you what to do.” This was actually, “Do you even want us to meet this way this week?” People struggled with that because they were so conditioned to being told they had to turn up on the day to do whatever was going to happen. That was ‘church’, and they were expected to be there if they were part of church.

What is the way forward?

So it was very challenging, and we got to the point where those who were meeting together began saying, “Well, let’s just seek God and ask Him to show us the way forward. What is the way forward?” This was November–December 2019. Then God used COVID to show us the way forward, because suddenly we could not meet anymore anyway. We had all the technology to meet online, but we asked God, “Do you want us to meet online?” No, because all you would be doing is recreating something online that you cannot do in person.

Eventually, people were weaned off church — the meetings, the format, the structure that we called church. They were still relating to one another, still building relationships, still pursuing the mission God had given to care for people. Some people could not cope with not having a church service, so they went off and found one that made them feel comfortable. Great. If that is what they want to do, no problem. They were free to do that. But some people were so free that they realised they did not have to go to a meeting on a Sunday — or two meetings, or whatever it might have been. They would never want to go back to that. They discovered that being church is very different to going to a meeting that we call church.

That deconstruction took place in people’s understanding of church over quite a long period. I did not turn around and say, “You can’t do this anymore.” I did not say, “You can’t meet this way anymore,” because that would have been forcing them. I said, “Okay, I am not making these decisions. I am not going to be a leader anymore who tells you what God might be saying or not saying. You are responsible to hear God for yourself. So you decide what you are going to do.”

An everyday relationship

When COVID came, with all the restrictions, we could not meet the way we had been meeting, and for a time, we could not even meet together individually. People realised their relationship with God was just as strong, if not stronger, after they stopped doing Sunday church meetings than it had been before. They found their relationship with God was an everyday relationship, not based on the structure we had put in place to ‘help’ them.

Some people struggled. Some wanted the fellowship of meeting together in a bigger setting, and they found that elsewhere. But others found their relationship with God growing anyway. They discovered that their relationship with others, if genuine, is not dependent on meeting on a Sunday. They still had relationships and friends.

It is very interesting to see the process God takes us through to challenge our preconceived ideas about the Christian life, about what church is, about what we ‘should’ or ‘should not’ do. And when we are free from it, we find freedom. Now, I am free to go, free not to go, free to do whatever I feel in God. And I know God enjoys me watching the football just as much as He enjoys it if I went to a home group!

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473. Why Do We Assume? | Questioning Our Beliefs and Practices

Engaging God

430. Being You | The Heart of Your Relationship With God

430. Being You | The Heart of Your Relationship With God

Mike Parsons

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God isn’t commending you, endorsing you or recommending you based on what you’ve done—but on who you are, and who he created you to be. Your destiny isn’t a long checklist of things you have to accomplish in order to be good enough. It’s about being you. That’s really the heart of it—discovering and becoming your true self in relationship with him.

So God’s not looking at your performance and saying, “Well, I can’t work with them, they’ve not done a good enough job.” He’s looking at you as his son, as his beloved creation. You’re the apple of his eye, the treasure of his heart. His desire is for you to be you. And as you live out of that true identity, you’ll naturally express things through creative sonship that reflect who you are—and that’s what’s truly worthy.

So when he says, “Well done, my son,” it’s not because you ticked off a list of achievements. It’s more like, “You had a go. You used your creativity. I’m pleased with you.” Think about Jesus—God spoke over him and said, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I’m well pleased” before he even began his ministry. God’s approval wasn’t based on what Jesus had done. It was based on who he was. And that’s the same for us. God wants us to rest in who we are. That rest then becomes the source of everything that flows out of our lives. Just being, without striving or doing, releases the doing in a natural and authentic way.

Now, when it comes to things like creating wealth, we don’t need to strive for it. God is our provider. If we’re in tune with him—moving with his heart, doing what we sense he’s doing—then everything we need will be provided. He’s already promised that we have more than enough for all our needs, and abundance for every good deed. And those good deeds aren’t random acts—they’re connected to who we are. They’re expressions of our true self in a world that needs it.

If I’m striving to make money or create wealth in my own strength, it’s probably because I’ve moved out of that place of trust and into anxiety. But when we’re at rest—when we’re not worried or fearful—we draw provision to us. We’re not grasping, we’re receiving. There are people out there—Joe Dispenza, Sadhguru and others—who’ve tapped into some of the principles that God operates by. Things like sowing and reaping, or what some might call “heavenly technology.” They may be working with these principles, but not necessarily in relationship with God. So while they might be doing generally good things, it can have a kind of humanistic flavour—because it’s often built on information, not revelation. It’s not flowing from intimacy with the Father.

And look, I’m not heavily into any of that stuff—I’m just aware of it because people talk about it, and I have friends who are really into those ideas. And in many ways, there’s nothing inherently wrong with what’s being said. But the problem is, without relationship, it becomes a formula or a technique. And that’s not what God wants from us. He wants union—a living relationship with him as our Creator.

That’s totally different from working a technique to get a healing, or meet a financial need. Being in relationship with him draws all that we need to us. We don’t have to chase after it. When we live from rest, we don’t fall into striving or performance to try and earn his blessing or approval. He already wants to bless us because we’re his children. And he wants us to relax into that identity; to be at peace with who we are. From there, everything else flows.

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