Spiritual Transformation – Sons of Issachar

509. What is Love? Understanding Our First Connection with God

Mike Parsons –

What is love? If we are talking about first love, we need to ask what love actually is, and what makes first love different. Why is first love so important?

Our eternal destiny is established on the restoration of our first love experience with our heavenly Father. We will never fully become who we truly are unless we know who we truly are. That makes it essential that we discover our true origin and our true identity.

Praying a prayer?

First love, in this context, is not the emotional state we may have experienced when we first encountered salvation. Some people have very emotional conversion experiences. I did not. I had no emotions or feelings associated with praying a prayer and asking Jesus to come into my life. That was shaped by who I was at the time, my relationship with my own father and my life experiences, even though I was only twelve. Those things had already shaped and programmed me.

I prayed the prayer believing it was the right thing to do, but there was no emotion, no ecstasy and no sense of exhilaration. Later in my life, I did have many profound experiences that helped me understand love at a deeper level, so I know that I am loved. But at the beginning, I simply prayed a prayer.

You may have had a very emotional and dramatic salvation experience, and that is wonderful. But when I speak about first love, I am not talking about going back to those initial emotions. Emotions can be valuable, but that is not what first love truly means.

First love is our origin in God before we ever lived in a physical body. First love is our eternal identity, originating in the Spirit of God. In Revelation 2:4, speaking to the church in Ephesus, it says, “You have left your first love.”

The Ephesian church may have once had a powerful and emotional experience of God’s love, grace and mercy, but over time they fell into the trap of religion, works, duty and obligation. Their relationship with God was no longer the priority. Duty replaced intimacy. They were no longer in love with God but were working for Him, almost as if it were a family business. That is not how God intends relationship to be.

Whatever our initial experience of God, He wants to take us beyond it into a deeper reality, one rooted not just in emotion but in depth of relationship. The intention is that we never leave it.

Do you remember?

Do you remember your own first love experience with God? Was it dramatic or deeply emotional? Did it feel like a completely new life? What about your first love relationship with another person? God designed us for depth, passion and intimacy in relationship.

In my own upbringing and insecurities, I never really had a true first love experience, because my understanding of love was distorted by emotional needs, physical needs and teenage hormones. I felt cheated of what love could be. God restored that for me, and I believe He can restore it for anyone.

When we experience first love, whether with God or with another person, there is passion, desire and fascination. Our minds are captivated. We long for connection. My salvation experience was not like that, so God took me into something I had never experienced, at a level I had never imagined.

There are many words associated with first love: besotted, infatuated, enamoured, love-struck, smitten, passionate, consumed with desire, captivated, enthralled, devoted. It is like springtime, when life begins to emerge again after winter. There is freshness, newness and vitality.

I had never felt that towards God, nor believed He felt that way towards me, until He took me on a journey of restoring my first love relationship with Him. That restoration enabled me to understand how that depth of love could also be expressed in human relationships.

So what does first actually mean? It means coming before all others in time and order. It is paramount, supreme and preeminent. It is above every other kind of love. When I consider that, I realise that this is the love God has for me, and it is the love that enables me to love Him and others in the same way.

The priority in my life

First love comes before family, relationships, work, leisure, needs, worries, anxiety, fear, depression or despair. It precedes everything, both in priority and in time. It reaches back to our origin and brings healing and restoration to everything that has happened in our lives. Even painful experiences can be healed when our spirit reconnects with its origin in God.

If first love with God is the priority of my life, everything else flows from that relationship.

In Luke 14:33, Jesus said that no one can be His disciple without giving up all they possess. He was not talking about literal possessions in every case, but about priorities. When God becomes our highest priority, everything else finds its proper place. Earthly possessions and relationships pale in comparison, but they are also enriched by our relationship with our Father, enabling us to love others more fully.

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400. Living in Union with God: Embracing Our Original Design

282. Live loved, love living, live loving

206. God’s Eternal Purpose

498. Trapped In Fear: Evangelical Mind Control Exposed!

Mike Parsons –

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We don’t know to what degree we have been programmed until God starts to deprogram us. And I would say that evangelicalism is very cult-like in the way in which it uses guilt and shame and condemnation to control people, and keep people in line; get people to toe the denominational line or the church line or whatever those beliefs are. Because, “You can’t belong unless you believe like us,” which is the fear, “Oh, I’m going to be on my own!”

And how many have been told, “Well, if you leave the church, or you’re coming out from under the covering, then Satan will get you!” And all of those fear-based things that we have all been told.

Well, God is love and God loves us unconditionally. And he wants us to enter into the fullness of that. And that will change our thinking.

And we will find that we get deconstructed from all of those belief systems, if we cooperate with him and we don’t keep resisting and fighting to hold on to our previous beliefs, which, you know, I discovered most of them were warped at least, if not completely wrong.

363. Deconstructing the Pillars of Your Mind

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

441. Unconditional Love – NO BUTS | God definitely IS Love!

497. Escaping the Cult of Fear-Based Religion

Mike Parsons –

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Deconstruction has continued to go on all the way through that period, so that I could be free from the religious perspectives that had kept me in bondage; kept me from knowing the true nature of God, the true nature of myself as a son of God and the true nature of creation and all of the wonderful things that we have embraced as being part of that. But it’s not an easy thing. You know, I’ve got to be honest, it is indoctrination.

People who have been in a cult and come out of that cult, it’s very difficult to get the cult out of them. They have to go through a process of deprogramming, which is not easy because the programs are based on reward and fear, which is exactly what the evangelical programming is based on. Fear of hell, fear of losing your salvation, fear of being punished, fear, fear, fear. But perfect love casts out fear. So where is God within that?

479. Unmasking Fear: How Religion Manipulates Belief

342. “God Punishes Those He Loves!”

254. Restored to Sonship

496. When Love Rewired My Mind, Goodbye Religion!

Mike Parsons –

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There is a new reality: that love now frames my thinking; that God frames my thinking from a totally different perspective. That religion has been removed.

Now, I am not saying that there are not still things to do, and God still did things along the way, but He could do things because my mind was now open to him.

So when the whole hell issue came up, my mind was open to him. And when he started to challenge my understanding of old covenant and my old covenant thinking of trying to be obedient to God and trying to please God and trying to earn… (really again by being obedient).

“I am not under the Law. Oh! Oh, yeah! Why am I trying to be obedient to a law when I’m not under a law?”

Because I was framed that way by evangelicalism.

So I had to realise that there are layers and layers of thinking that still needed renewing. Even when the system of belief was removed, there were still neural pathways that took me to beliefs that needed to be renewed and undone. And deconstruction has continued.

444. NO FEAR OF HELL – Unconditional Love

440. Unconditional Love – NO LIMITS

495. The Implosion of a Religious Mind

Mike Parsons –

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One by one all those pillars began to collapse and fall. Augustinianism was another pillar. I mean, I’ve never studied Augustine. I knew a little bit about Augustine and but I never studied him. I didn’t know what Augustinianism was. So I had to go and look it up.

When God said, “One of the pillars is Augustinianism,” I thought “How did I get that as a mindset?” Because it was embraced within Brethrenism and other streams of thought.

Hebrew mindsets, Greek mindsets, both included within the pillar system of my mind. Again, I thought, how did I get those? Because they’re based within the system of teaching that I had received all the way through.

So eventually when all those pillars collapse, what is there now?

The Mind of Christ.

363. Deconstructing the Pillars of Your Mind

476. Love As A Movement: Challenging the Status Quo

Mike Parsons

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We need to see people restored—brought out of darkness into light. That will not happen by trying to destroy them or confronting them with the same spirit in which they operate. True change comes through love. However, this does not mean that we just sit back and allow them to do what they like—we can and should stand for what is good, for righteousness, and for peace and joy. Importantly, we are not required to cooperate with those who use their power for selfish ends. These individuals typically control vast amounts of money, the media, and many of our major systems.

Therefore, we must begin to consider how we can legitimately remove their power—by refusing to participate in their ways of doing things. Real change starts as a grassroots movement; you cannot simply remove individuals, as new people will always fill the vacuum. What we actually need is systemic change, so when people see that our current financial system only enriches the same few and keeps the rest in poverty, they must stop supporting and engaging with that system.

To achieve this, alternative systems—kingdom government, kingdom banks—are needed, systems where money is not used for usury or lining the pockets of the wealthy, but for good. It may mean moving money out of institutions that fund selfish agendas and into systems set up for the benefit of all. When the time is right, if people withdraw their money, those individuals lose much of their practical power.

But it is crucial that there be something positive to replace the existing system—one truly governed according to godly, heavenly principles. Chasing every new “prophetic” financial trend, such as cryptocurrency, is not the answer; these rely on infrastructures that could fail or be manipulated in much the same way as traditional systems. Instead, there are established alternatives already in place—cooperatives and credit unions, for example—which are designed to support people and communities rather than corporate profit.

Ultimately, genuine change is possible only as people themselves are transformed. When enough people change, society will inevitably move away from corrupt systems. We should expect resistance from those benefiting from the status quo, especially when new technologies such as free energy threaten entrenched interests. Historically, those with power have bought up, suppressed, or blocked such advances to protect their profits. If technologies that advance the common good are to be released, we need the right people administering them and providing the necessary finance—including for practical matters like community-controlled water sources, so no one can monopolise such basic assets when their value increases.

We must plan wisely, ensuring that whatever solution we pursue does not create a new set of problems, but genuinely serves people and fosters a just and sustainable future.

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All Mike’s books, including Into the Dark Cloud and Unconditional Love, are available to order from online and local booksellers; or you can buy them as ebooks and download them instantly from our website.
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