Tag: responsibility

273. Sons Invested and Enthroned

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

A sound from heaven

For several years now, the Father has been releasing a sound from heaven designed to connect to the deep desire within us all for both relationship and responsibility. It is represented within much of the music being performed by Christian musicians in recent times but it is not itself necessarily a sound audible to the natural ear. Some have heard it in the spirit and responded already, but that sound frequency continues to intensify, encouraging all His children to be spiritually open and sensitive and to resonate with it. Let it penetrate as deep calls to deep to awaken your sonship. As you become aware of it, learn to rest and relax in it, to be immersed in His presence in it and to resonate with His intention for your life as that is conveyed to you in the sound.

Revealed sons

The Father has been calling us as His children to come and take our places in heaven; to find and fulfil our heavenly roles so that we can bring heaven to earth through our lives. All His children have a destiny that involves our inheritance and birthright so that we can all be mature sons of God, revealed out of heaven into the earth. He is always giving us opportunity to come to Him to obtain a deeper revelation of our identity, position and authority.

All of us are seated in heavenly places in Christ (Eph 2:6), but few are actively functioning from that position. We are called to a new level of sonship, to access the assemblies and councils of heaven and take up our governmental roles. We can be involved in the decision-making of heavenly government. No-one ever told me that! I thought that God did all the heavenly part and that He would tell me what He wanted me to do on earth. But then He invited me into heaven and I discovered that I had a part to play in establishing things there as well as in outworking them on the earth. We get to be involved in the ‘as it is in heaven’; the more we get involved, the more authority we receive and the more responsibility we carry. The mantles are prepared and the scrolls are ready: all that is needed is for us to accept responsibility as sons and be willing to pursue maturity.

Sometimes we need the old ways to stop working before we will even begin considering the new ones. At that point it can seem like nothing is working while we learn how to operate in the new. If that is you, you are not alone. Right now, we are all learning that. We are all in a transition period between what we have been used to, an old way of doing things, and the new way God is revealing.

Creation is groaning

Investiture, succession, enthronement, coronation: God gave me those four words many years ago. They describe the process of a king coming into the fullness of his power and authority. We are invested with authority as sons of God but for there to be succession the old king has to either die or abdicate. The old king in this context is our soul, in the sense that it has been controlling our lives (which was never its intended purpose). Then we can take up our throne(s) in heaven (enthronement) and be recognised by creation as the sons we truly are (coronation).

Creation is groaning in its bondage to corruption and decay (Rom 8:22). That groan demands an answer and we, the sons of God, are the only ones who can supply it. We are called to administrate and oversee the fruitfulness and increase which come from the face-to-face restored innocence of relationship, not the decay and death which are the consequences of independence.

Living in dual realms

Living in dual realms is the key. At a certain point in my process, I became aware that although my soul and spirit were engaging heaven together daily in a visionary cognitive experience, I was still stepping in through the veil and stepping back out again each time; I was visiting but not inhabiting and living in dual realms. I spent two years going in and out of heaven every day, learning about thrones, mountains and courts and at the end of that God took me through a four month period which led to my surrender. I surrendered my soul’s right to rule in my life; my soul and spirit were separated and reintegrated; and from that experience in 2012 until now, my spirit has been in the realm of heaven and I have learned to connect with that realm and flow from it all the time.

That separation and reintegration of my soul and spirit took place when I entered into the dark cloud of His Presence. You can read what I have written before on this blog about my dark cloud experience but we will look at it again in coming posts. It was a difficult process for me, because a forerunner goes through extremes to establish a way which makes it easier for others who follow. Easier, not easy: it is never going to be easy because the soul has been ruling for most of our lives. Our surrender has to be genuine, and in order to count the cost and enter into it freely, we need to understand what the consequences are. He will be in the process with us and will walk us through it but He cannot do it for us, nor make us surrender against our will. We have to choose.

Pursue and choose

We can be proactive. God had to manoeuvre me into a position where I was faced with making the choice (one way or the other), but once you know the choice is there to be made, then you can choose when to make it. That is why I share about it and teach about it. You can pursue it if you want to. You can ask God to take you into the place where you can surrender and then learn to operate in dual realms. The process for you may be different than it was for me, but the principle will be the same: your soul needs to surrender. Whatever that looks like for you, your soul and spirit will be separated from the control the soul has on the spirit so that they can then be reconnected to flow from the inside out, the spirit to the soul, and not the outside in.

Will you accept God’s call and actively take your place of heavenly government? Your new covenant inheritance gives you access to an open heaven through the torn veil: do not let the veils of the old religious restrictions limit the full scope of your sonship. The call is not just to keep ascending but to dwell in dual realms, consistently functioning in heaven and on earth as responsible, mature sons. Until that happens, and new order ekklesias and embassies of heaven multiply on the earth, the true mountain of the house of the Lord will remain in the shadow of the religious systems of men.

Note: this post and the two which will follow it are drawn from Mike’s teaching in the Sons Arise! Into the Dark Cloud intensive, the Sons Arise! Invested and Enthroned conference and our Engaging God subscription programme.

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237. New Things Have Come

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

Comparing the old and the new

Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come (2 Cor 5:17).

Two thousand years ago, Jesus came with a completely new perspective and radically reinterpreted everything the religious people thought they knew. In my experience, He still does the same today. Here are a few things He has shown us in a totally new light:

Prayer – we used to pray from earth asking for God’s help from heaven, hoping that God would hear us from a distance. The new way is to come to meet Him face to face, to come boldly to the throne of grace, sit on His lap and talk to Him.

Revival – this is such a huge desire and expectation among the Christian community, but we have been praying in the way of the old: “Oh, that You would rend the heavens and come down” (Isaiah 64:1). In the new, we see that God has already come down, He has already rent the heavens. What is more, He has gone back up into the heavens and opened up the veil for us to come. We have been asking Him to come and do what He is asking us to come and do!

In the old, access to holy places and the holy things of God is limited to only some special people – mediatorial priests. In the new, access is open to all of us. Now we can all enjoy the intimacy and rest of relationship and out of that flows our ability to fulfil positions of government as sons in responsibility.

After these things I looked, and behold, a door standing open in heaven, and the first voice which I had heard, like the sound of a trumpet speaking with me, said, “Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after these things” (Rev 4:1).

Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God… 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 4:14, 16).

There are going to be times of need, but we don’t need to be cowering, pleading with God to come and rescue us. His help is about empowering us to overcome the obstacles we face in restoring all things to His original design and purpose.

…that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God (Rom 8:21).

Operating as lords, kings and sons

The old is like being in the wilderness and expecting God to do it for us from heaven. In the new God has given us responsibility to be co-heirs, partners in heaven operating as lords, kings and sons. As transfigured sons we are going to radiate glory to bring the whole of creation into its freedom, to restore it so that heaven and earth are in complete harmony.

Spiritual warfare as we have previously known it was never very effective because it was attempting to pull down something from below. There was a lot of shouting into the heavens or into the atmosphere of the earth, binding this and that, but no-one ever went into heaven first to bind things there. In the new, all that is now replaced with judicial verdicts from above in the courts, which have heavenly authority to bind and to loose (to bind things to what they should be and to loose them from what they should not be). We have gone from houses of prayer and prayer closets on the earth to having charge of the courts of heaven, a completely different mindset, and we have learnt that everything must now first be done beyond the veil to be effective.

“Your Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven”: in the old way of thinking, God sovereignly administers from His throne whilst we just obey here on earth. In the new, God has chosen to operate His sovereignty through us, having given us authority over this whole created order:

…and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus (Eph 2:6).

If we are seated with Christ, we are seated on thrones from which we administer in heaven.

Mature sons

The old way is like being children whose parent does everything for them and on their behalf. It is time for us to mature and become responsible adults. Like a parent encouraging His adolescent children to take responsibility for more and more of their own lives, God is withdrawing His support for the old, which will slowly but surely (or perhaps sometimes suddenly) stop being effective. What once worked for us will no longer do so, even if it is still seems to be working for others. At that point we will have no choice but to embrace the new. If we are really forerunners, we will not wait until that happens.

God wants to manifest us as His sons to fulfil our destiny and restore creation. Each of us has a destiny, and those destinies interact with one another to bring about God’s purpose. We have been called at the end of the ages. Each of us has a role specifically chosen and designed for us by God. Like Esther, He has chosen us for such a time as this.

Why can’t I keep the old ways?

When Israel crossed over into the Promised Land, 2½ tribes chose to go back across the Jordan. From that time on there is no record of them in scripture and no evidence that the old ways continued to work for them. We might all long for the simplicity of childhood with few responsibilities but we are called to grow up. We can’t just keep drinking milk like babies if we want to be mature sons.

If you decide to stay in the old you risk dying in the wilderness with those who do not want you to cross over into your inheritance. The old order has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. They don’t want you to hear God yourself, because then you would not keep coming to the prophetic conferences they are putting on (the ones where they will hear God for you rather than equipping you to hear Him for yourself). The lure of the familiar and comfortable is powerful, but it is an illusion: once God begins to challenge you, you may never be comfortable with the old and familiar again.

The old order

The old Moses order has failed to prepare for the harvest. The 5-fold ministries have failed to equip the church but instead built empires. They have failed to lead people into their destinies or help them access their scrolls and their true calling, making a generation of dependent slaves rather than manifest sons. They have failed to honour people, instead making them spectators or servants of their visions. They have not released people into their highest calling or recognised their spheres of authority. They have created religious systems from the pathway of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, establishing businesses out of worship and making celebrity idols out of servants.

Prophets, apostles, pastors, teachers and evangelists have become professionals. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, they have made people dependent on them as mediators who hear God for them, fuelling a dependency and co-dependency mentality. There are no rabbis in the new day but Jesus. Please stop trying to follow earthly rabbis – and whatever you do, don’t treat me as one.

We cannot keep trying to use wilderness methodologies expecting Promised Land results. We have to change, to align ourselves with what God is saying and doing now. He is changing the way we do things. We are no longer to expect others to tell us what to think but to be taught how to engage God for ourselves. We evaluate everything we do on the basis of whether it is ‘as it is in heaven’: have we established it in heaven first before we try to work it out on earth?

We are called to be forerunners and, like Joshua and Caleb alone among the Promised Land spies, we need to give a good report. In the next post, we will look at how we do that – in the new.

This blog post is adapted from Mike’s teaching in the ‘Engaging God‘ subscription programme. Find out more…

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152. Resources and Responsibilities

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott

The first step in our ‘training for reigning’, as we saw last time, is to give up control of our own life and learn to be an obedient and willing servant.

Stewards

Beyond servanthood, there is training to be a steward. A steward has responsibilities – and access to resources – that a servant does not. Stewardship carries a higher level of authority and responsibility, and Jesus will train us to be stewards of all the resources He has made available to us for our lives and for the works He has prepared for us to do.

In Matthew 25 Jesus taught about responsibility in the kingdom:

Then the kingdom of heaven will be comparable to ten virgins, who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five were prudent. For when the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them (Matt 25:1-3).

All ten were entrusted with a task, but only five of them took their responsibility seriously. Five did not, and Jesus’ response to them was ‘I do not know you’ (Matt 25:12). I do not believe He meant that they were not in relationship with Him, He meant that He did not recognise Himself in them. They were not operating in good stewardship.

Talents

For it is just like a man about to go on a journey, who called his own servants and entrusted his possessions to them. To one he gave five talents, to another, two, and to another, one, each according to his own ability (Matt 25:14-15).

We have been entrusted with Jesus’ possessions while He has gone back into heaven. All of us have calls and destinies in God, which He will give us the resources to fulfil. A talent was an amount of money, and each of us needs a different level of resource to achieve our particular calling.

Immediately the one who had received the five talents went and traded with them, and gained five more talents. In the same manner the one who had received the two talents gained two more. But he who received the one talent went away, and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money (Matt 25:16-18).

Trading is taking something God gives us and putting it to work to achieve a desired result. Here, the two servants who traded with their master’s money acted responsibly, and doubled his money for him. The one who hid it in the ground was an irresponsible steward.

Whatever God has given, He has given for a purpose. We can hide it in many ways: ‘I’m not good enough’, ‘I’m not worthy’, ‘I can’t do it because of my past’ and so on. We can come up with any number of excuses why it is too difficult or too risky to go after our destiny in God, but Jesus will not accept any of them. He knows what He has called us to do, and He has given us the means of achieving it. He expects us to use our gifts for His glory.

Now after a long time the master of those servants came and settled accounts with them. The one who had received the five talents came up and brought five more talents, saying, ‘Master, you entrusted five talents to me. See, I have gained five more talents.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You were faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master. (Matt 25:19-21).

All of us will have to settle the account of our life, before the judgment seat of God. I have been there, and I know it is not somewhere you want to go if you have messed up, and not used the resources God has given in the way He intended. God wants to train us to be faithful in using what he has given us. If we are faithful with a little, He will entrust us with more. That is a principle of good stewardship in the kingdom, and it applies both in this age and in the age to come.

As for the servant who did not act responsibly with His master’s resources:

But his master answered and said to him, ‘You wicked, lazy servant… you ought to have put my money in the bank, and on my arrival I would have received my money back with interest. Therefore take away the talent from him, and give it to the one who has the ten talents.’ For to everyone who has, more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away. Throw out the worthless servant into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matt 25:26-30).

This is not ‘hell’, but the outer courts. The weeping and gnashing of teeth will come as people realise how they have failed to fulfil the call of God and squandered His resources. The good news is that we can go before that judgment seat now, repent and pursue our destiny, beginning to act as faithful stewards. Then we do not need to find ourselves in that situation.

Faithful

He who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much; and he who is unrighteous in a very little thing is unrighteous also in much (Luke 16:10).

God tests us. He gives us opportunities to demonstrate whether we are going to be faithful with what he has given us. Those of us who are looking for something from God, whether it is anointing, finances, gifts or anything else, need to be faithful with the little things first. God will not give us a huge international healing ministry if we are not prepared to minister healing to the person next door. God’s training involves giving us opportunities to grow.

Authority comes as a result of learning to be a good steward:

And he said to him, ‘Well done, good servant, because you have been faithful in a very little thing, you are to be in authority over ten cities (Luke 19:17).

Trustworthy

And here is Paul, talking about the things that God revealed to him when he went to heaven and had a face to face encounter with Him. He sees himself as a steward, who would wisely use those resources to bring blessing to others:

Let a man regard us in this manner, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. In this case, moreover, it is required of stewards that one be found trustworthy (1 Cor 4:1-2).

God wants to entrust us with all that He has for us, but He starts us off with a little, so that we can learn to be faithful, and acquire the wisdom to handle greater anointing, greater revelation, greater levels of finance, greater honour.

As each one has received a special gift, employ it in serving one another as good stewards of the manifold grace of God (1 Peter 4:10).

In our finances, if we are faithful with what we have, He will give us more. When we honour Him by faithfully administering a little, He is able to entrust us with everything. Are we faithfully using our gifts and abilities, whether spiritual or natural, for the purposes for which God has given them? How are we using our covenant relationships, with one another and with Him?

Heart attitude

Everything we have belongs to God, and He wants to train us to be good, faithful stewards. After all, we are only stewards of everything we have. Our money, homes, cars and possessions all belong to Him. When we make Jesus Lord, we make everything we have  available for His use. If it all belongs to him, then He has first claim on it, whatever and whenever He wants. When He asks us to give something away, it will reveal the attitude of our heart (particularly if He asks us to give something precious).

Are we willing to surrender everything to Him? An attitude which says ‘It all belongs to You’ – that is the hallmark of a good and faithful steward.

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