tree of knowledge – Sons of Issachar

354. Heavenly Home? Revealing Our Sonship to Creation

Mike Parsons explores the profound concept of our true identity as spiritual beings created by God and emphasises that while we exist in a fallen world, we are not defined by it. Instead, our purpose is to reconnect our spirit, soul and body, to restore creation, and reveal our identity as sons of God.

Understanding Our True Identity

We didn’t leave our heavenly home. Heaven isn’t our home; creation is our home, within God. God is our home, if you like. We’ve come out of Him; we are spirit, and we’ve come out of Spirit. We haven’t taken on Satan’s fallen identity. We have come into a realm that has fallen, and our role within that realm is to bring restoration to it. But we are not fallen as Satan fell.

So, we may come into this realm and need to reconnect with ourselves. In this realm, we have to connect spirit, soul and body as a way of understanding that as we are restored, creation will be restored. Creation is waiting and longing for the revealing of the sons of God. So, we need to reveal our sonship to creation, which is why we need to be in this realm connected to all the realms, so that we can be a demonstration of God’s heart and desire within the realms of heaven. “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, in creation as it is in heaven.” But we haven’t taken on the fallen identity of the accuser. We have just entered into a world that was created, in a sense, by Adam and Eve’s choice to be independent. So, it is a world shaped after the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. As we come into that, we are then to bring it back into relationship with the Tree of Life, if you like.

Reconnecting Spirit, Soul and Body

There is a purpose. The sonship mandate was to overcome and to rule, to have dominion. That dominion has just been taken, through humanism, to mean control, empire, and everything else. So, God wants us to restore the relationship with the sons of God. God created us, not to live in Heaven—that’s not our home—God created us to co-heir and co-create with Him in the whole of creation, and therefore there is a role for that.

Is there a heavenly purification or purging of creation? Well, there is us coming into our identity, which enables creation to be set free into our identity. It’s like creation is longing and waiting for the revealing of the sons of God. But it also talks about creation being set free into the glory of the children of God. As we come into that true sense of our sonship, which is the glory—the weight of who we are—then there is a process for us to have our soul, which has been connected to this realm, aligned to our spirit, which is coming from our identity out of heaven. Of course, there is a renewing of the mind that comes because when we come into this world, although we’re alive in the spirit, our spirit and soul are not connected correctly. That is what bringing us back into wholeness and oneness is about.

The Mandate of Sonship

So, I would encourage you, when you’re looking at things like this, just relax and enjoy becoming the son that God created you to be—becoming the person and listening to the vast sum of His thoughts about you, tuning into the reality of who you really are. That will have a positive effect on creation in that it will be a revealing of your true identity and your role within creation itself.

You are being restored; you are learning to breathe easily again, to find that place where life is flowing through you and in you, and then creation begins to respond to you in your sonship. Now, yes, there is the opposite going on—there are the accusations of the enemy, which will try to keep people from their true identity. But Satan fell because he said, “I will be like God.” Eve bought the lie that she could be like God, but without God. Therefore, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is really the choice that man has made to follow independence. Jesus came to enable that independence to come to an end, for the lost identity to be recovered, so that people could fully understand who they really are. Their identity with the world will be redefined through our identity—not with a fallen or broken world, but with the restored desire that God has as the Creator of the world, of creation, so that we can participate with Him in its full restoration.

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274. Separating and reintegrating soul and spirit (1)

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott –

Live in dual realms

If we are to mature into our heavenly roles as sons of God, we cannot continually be stepping in through the veil and then out again: we will need the ability to live in dual realms of heaven and earth at the same time. For that to happen, our soul and spirit must be separated and then properly reintegrated so that our spirit is able to take the lead, as it was always intended to do.

Cleansing our soul gates

Opening and cleansing our soul gates creates that opportunity for our spirit to overshadow our soul and body and reclaim its role as our interface with the world around us, as it was in the beginning. Although I had worked through them all before, I revisited all my soul gateways with Jesus, who is Love, Truth and Peace. Love casts out fear from each gateway in turn; Truth challenges all the lies which have programmed us; Peace brings wholeness to cleanse our gates and enable the flow.

Motives and intentions

But there is deeper level of preparation needed to deal with the thoughts, motives and intentions of our heart because we must only rule, govern and legislate from the motivation of love (we covered this at some length in the Transformation series). Our existing motives may come from programming, through personal experiences and environmental lacks; from past decisions that have formed behavioural patterns within our hearts; or from generational epigenetic memories attached to our DNA. Ultimately, they have come from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the pathway and source of all independence. The roots of that tree are sourced from Satan’s trading – “I will ascend, I will be like God”.

Search me

Search me thoroughly, O God, and know my heart; Try me and know my anxious thoughts; And see if there be any hurtful way in me, And lead me in the everlasting way (Psa 139:23-24).

Transformation is a process of change which we choose to engage with so that we can display the glory of our sonship: the manifest presence of God on earth as it is in heaven through us. We can choose to embrace and pursue this process of change into maturity or stay babies, toddlers or infants. Those are our options! I decided to ask God to examine, try, reveal and transform. These are my words: you can borrow them, or use your own; but take your time and don’t rush through this – it may take days, or weeks, or longer, depending on what He highlights to you.

Father I thank you that you have made a way for me to access your heavenly presence
By faith I step in through the veil of Jesus through the way of the cross
I present myself to you, Jesus my high priest, in surrender as a living sacrifice

I submit to your authority as the living word in my life
I step through the veil of truth into the Holy Place
I stand in the light of your truth
I ask you to search me
Reveal my blind self to me, show me the hidden motives of my heart

I stand in the light of your truth
Show me the pathways of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that I have followed
Show me where I have accepted deceptions as truth
Reveal where I have followed earthly, natural or demonic wisdom to meet my own needs

Show me where I have traded by taking the shortcut to gratification through relationships, success, money, position, influence or power
Show me where I received my identity from performance, work and ministry

Show me where I have formed relationships to meet my own needs for love, acceptance, affirmation and approval
Show me where I have sought to meet my own needs through humanism and rationalism, following the pathway of self-identity.

I submit and surrender my life to follow the pathway of the tree of life as my source
I commit myself to a lifestyle of truth and intimacy
I renounce all negative trading to meet my own needs.

I renounce where I have followed the pathway of good and evil as my way of life
I renounce the patterns of lost identity in my heart
I renounce all my defence, coping and survival mechanisms

Father, give me revelation of my true identity as a son of God, that my heart can be secure
Renew my mind to the mind of Christ
Meet my unmet needs in yourself
Heal my unhealed hurts
Restore my soul to original condition.

Father I receive your unconditional love, acceptance, affirmation and approval
From the source of the tree of life
I stand transparent, naked and unafraid before you
I hear you say “I see you and I love you”
I receive your value, esteem and worth that affirms my sonship.

I choose to follow the pathway that leads to my source, the tree of life – Jesus
I choose to walk in the ways of your kingdom
Manifest your glory through me on earth as it is in heaven, so I will fulfil my eternal destiny.

Note: the previous post, this one, and the one which will follow it are all 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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232. The Greatest Scandal of the Age

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott

New things

“Behold, the former things have come to pass,
Now I declare new things;
Before they spring forth I proclaim them to you.”
(Isa 42:9)

Think of everything in your life that has already come to pass… and now God is saying ‘I declare new things’. Everything that is old has gone, everything that may have brought feelings of unworthiness, guilt and shame, and it has all gone because of the power of the cross.

The old things can no longer be of any use to us, if in fact they ever were. God has already decreed and declared for us a new place of relationship. We need to be aware that the old things have gone, so that we can accept the new things that the power of Jesus’ resurrection has opened up for us.

As those who are called to rule and reign as sons of God, we need to know God as our Father, otherwise we will operate as if we were orphans, as if we did not have a relationship with Him. What is more, we are made in God’s image, but if the image we have of Him is distorted then we will act in a distorted way. So if our view of God has Him as angry and vengeful, that is exactly how we will be as sons – and if you look at the world, it is an angry, vengeful place. Much of that has come from the way religion has presented Him: even though people may not ‘believe in God’, that is still the image they have of the God they don’t believe in. So God wants to reveal Himself to us, and to the world, in a completely different way.

Scandal

God spoke to me towards the end of 2016 and said,

“Son, the greatest scandal of the age is about to be exposed. Many will not believe it but the truth of who I am (and therefore who you are as My sons) will be revealed. The lies of religion will be exposed to the pure light of truth. The great I am is about to reveal Himself as the lover of your souls in what will amount to a whole new reality”.

Much that we have believed about God and the version of reality that religion has presented to the church and the world, God is about to expose as a complete lie. And when it is exposed we will be able to see the truth of who God is and who we are.

The sin

We can engage God face to face, because it was never Him who hid from us, only the other way round. When Adam and Eve fell, and God came to find them in the Garden, He did not say ‘What have you done?’ He said, ‘Where are you?’ They were hiding because they were focussed on what they had done, but He was still looking for relationship. The enemy will always try to keep us focussed on what we have done, but God never is.

Sin is not really about behaviour, it is not about what we have done wrong. The most common word for ‘sin’, used 174 times in the New Testament, is ‘hamartia’. It is a noun, not a verb, ‘the sin’ rather than ‘to sin’, and it is not about our ‘doings’ at all. Religion is mostly concerned with ‘doings’: as if all these bad things we have done mean that God does not really like us, and does not want a relationship with us. But whatever we may have done does not affect how God sees us or how much He loves us. We just think it does.

The DIY tree

Sin brings its own consequences. Young’s literal translation of Romans 6:23 says,

For the wages of the sin [is] death, and the gift of God [is] life age-during in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The sin did not need to be punished but forgiven, corrected, dealt with and removed. This is what Jesus accomplished by his death and resurrection. He did not come to deal with our individual actions, as much as He came to deal with sin as a power, something that was at the very root of our situation. It was the sin of Adam in following the DIY path of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, trying to become like God by his own do-it-yourself efforts. That is what Jesus came to deal with; everything else is just a consequence of that.

Although the serpent said “If you eat of this tree you will become like God”, the truth was that Adam was already created in the likeness and image of God. Adam failed to grasp and hold onto his true identity and likeness from God’s perspective. So whilst God has never changed how He sees us, Adam suddenly saw himself as less than he was. In this spiritual blindness about himself and about God, he lost sight of the fact that he shared and participated in God’s own image and likeness.

That blindness has affected everyone ever since. We try to hide and cover up our nakedness with fig leaves because we have believed a lie about how God sees us. We do not see ourselves the way God really sees us or the way He created us to be. The spiritual death we have inherited is fundamentally a loss of relationship with God and a loss of personal identity.

For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive (1 Cor 15:22).

Read that scripture again, and this time consider the two alls. Just as all inherited that spiritual death and blindness from Adam; just as all shared in the spiritual-soul-death that it created, so all share in the victory of the cross and Jesus’ resurrection life.

Love

When we do engage God face to face, we will see what He is really like. God is love. Everything He does is love. Think of that, then compare how religion has depicted Him! Often those non-believers I mentioned earlier seem to be fine with Jesus but they are not so sure about ‘God’. Jesus came to share the truth of who He was and who His Father was. In reality, He is not some sort of schizophrenic, He does not have a split personality. Father, Son and Spirit are in complete unity, and if you have seen Jesus you have seen the Father.

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