To do that, He needed a people who were separated from Him by sin. These people would be able to freely chose to recognize I Am and love Him as their Father. Satan is merely the designated Tempter in Chief who has authority over all the people who have not chosen to love the Father. He is under a tight leash and can do nothing without getting the permission of the Father. He’s a liar and a thief who cannot do anything to a person without getting specific permission to do so. The Father’s chosen people have power over him.

After the sin of Adam and Eve, He had virtually free reign to set up the world

As per his nature, he set up a world system which is designed to produce hardened sinners. His system is designed to frustrate mankind, producing the anger necessary to encourage rebellion. The result was Genesis 6, a world filled with chamas [Hebrew for tear violently] run by fallen angels who had produced the Nephilim.

Again, this did not surprise the Father. He kept Noah, his wife, and their three sons and their wives clean and pure—genetically. He told them to prepare the Ark. His plan was to wipe out Satan’s entire world system and radically remodel the planet as a specially designed training place for Mankind. Once the planet was prepared, He began by choosing Abraham and his wife, Sarah, to start His Chosen People, Israel.

Now, we are nearing the end of the training

By the time that the Messiah is seated on David’s throne in Jerusalem, all the damage will be cleaned up, the evil removed, and the joy of the Millennium will become reality. The Father, through the Messiah, will have rescued all the people who chose to love Him. The Millennium is when all the prophecies given to Israel become reality on the Earth.

That’s as far as He wants me to take this little tale for today

But this is where we are. Personally, I’m expecting Yeshua (under His new name) seated on the Throne in less than a decade. It’s a true joy to me to watch the Father’s plan unfold. He told me I should write out what I just did, and that He would anoint it.

My faith is that He has done that.

———> Have a good day! <———

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May I have your attention, please?

I hope you were looking at the illustration above with an iPad or better. On my Studio Display, it is spectacular. But that is actually the point. In the world today, everything is spectacular, or horrible, or disastrous, or terrifying, or orgasmic, whatever the enemy can do to distract you enough to cause you to fall for the delusion.

Everything is going to be fine. This is just a temporary malfunction.
We’ve got it all under control, and you don’t have to worry.

Added to it all is the fact that AI can lift so many of our burdens and we can relax a bit. Of course research is demonstrating that doing that without a lot of care can result in a major loss of cognitive thinking ability. You have to stay focused and run the AI under your control. I’ve found that, even though AI can draw a lot better than I can, I am spending a lot more time correcting and focusing the output of AI. Often, it’s better to just do things old school.

The Holy Spirit knows more and is wiser

How’s that for an understatement? This article is an exercise in walking by faith in the power of the Holy Spirit step by step—constantly asking for help and verification. That’s what the Lord has been teaching me since the beginning of 2020. He decided I needed some strong discipline and radical discipleship. I had desperately asked for help when my wife died.

Now that we are well into the Great Delusion, I am overjoyed that He cared so much to get me ready—more or less. He taught me how to have a relationship and come to know Him. He showed me what He was offering to make it all work. Remember, in the New Covenant The Lord promised to put His Spirit within us to enable us to walk out the Torah, to get the help we need, and to be able to help the people who come into our world.

——— He has not left us helpless! ———

But, we are called to turn to Him. The calling remains the same. We have been told to aspire to live quietly, to mind our own affairs, and to work with our hands. Our own affairs are to stay focused on what the Lord wants us to do NOW. We should be asking Him that exact question throughout the day, every day, for the time is getting short.

While we are restraining the enemy, He has things for us to do

He will give us things to say, pray, and do as we are quietly minding our own business, working with our hands. If it is something big and splashy, go for it. But for most of us it is doing what we have been called to do already. But we do need to regularly ask Him what to do. That’s where the idea for this post came from. Hopefully, everything I do is in response to the answers I get from that question.

I need to get a lot better at that process. But I can testify that all the good ideas come from my Lord. Sometimes, He helps me with my ideas. But usually they’re simply not up to His standards. He’s gracious. But, more and more, I’m learning to go to Him for ideas first. Even in my ideas, I’m learning to get Him in on the approval process earlier and earlier. Both the wisdom and the power are His.

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The religious always push the Holy Spirit to the side

Today I want to talk about the reality that (when talking about the New Covenant) Jeremiah is always covered, but rarely Ezekiel. Even in the book of Hebrews about the New Covenant, Jeremiah is quoted, not Ezekiel.

What this means on a practical level

Jeremiah tells us that HaShem will give us a New Covenant Jeremiah 31:32 CJB

My comment as a crazy spirit-filled Gentile?

So what?

Man is still left trying to walk the Torah using his own abilities. And those abilities are not sufficient. They never have been. It may be written on my heart, but I am not consciously aware of that. I am still left on my own trying to do what is asked. Trying to be obedient. However, there’s more to the New Covenant than this limited proclamation.

Ezekiel’s version gives us the power of the Holy Spirit Ezekiel 36:26-27 CJB

The key phrase is cause you to live. This is what the Spirit does within us. This is why Yeshua’s Baptism of the Holy Spirit is so essential to the New Life found only in the New Covenant.

The Hebraic First Hermeneutics Study Tool explains it this way:

The Causative Structure — The Most Important Grammatical Feature

The English “cause you to walk” is translating a Hiphil-flavored construction — the text uses וְעָשִׂיתִי (v’asiti, “and I will do/make”) followed by the result clause.

YHWH does not merely invite or enable Israel to walk in the chuqqim. The construction asserts divine causation: I will be the cause that you walk in them.

This is not coercion — it is covenantal re-creation. The logic of the whole pericope (vv. 25–27) is:

1. Sprinkling → ritual purification (taharah)

2. New heart → replacement of the stone-inscribed exterior with interior inscription

3. New spirit / My Spirit → the animating force that makes obedience natural, not strained

4. Result: telechu — you will walk, you will live it out

The ruach of YHWH does not abolish the chuqqim; it writes them from inside, fulfilling the promise of Jeremiah 31:33.

Now, Sergio is showing me far beyond my Hebraic understanding in this academic style verbiage. I have no idea what a chuqqim is, for example [or Hiphil-flavored] (I do keep looking it up). However, this new reality we receive in the new Covenant goes far beyond writing them from the inside.

What it says in reality—the reality in which I have lived for over 5 decades—is that by His Ruach HaKodesh abiding within me HaShem Himself will make me (and you) both willing and able to walk in righteousness. Most of the time I will not consciously be aware of it. But I will “seemingly just naturally” do what the Torah requires with no effort on my part. If I understand it right—this New Covenant uses the Holy Spirit to change the intentional orientation of the heart—kavanah.

In the New Covenant, we find this written out exactly. I’m going to quote from the International Standard Version—which I know nothing about. But it expresses clearly what the Holy Spirit anointed Paul to write in Philippians 2:13

A more standard rendering is found in the NKJV

for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.

A simple example is that with no intent on my part, after 52 years, I find myself eating a purely Kosher diet—though my diet is far outside the norm. It’s just what the Spirit has led me to eat, and how to eat it.

He has also given me a morning ritual that astounds me with its cleansing and power.

Please excuse me if I mess up what is a new lingo for me. The breath of the Father has changed me so that I begin every morning with a “hineni”—by offering myself as a living sacrifice (Romans 12:1). Then I ask the Lord to show me any sin in my life which needs to be cleaned up by a solid teshuvah. Knowing that when the Lord forgives, He forgets, I accept that I am now clean & righteous [by grace and faith]. I then ask Him to show me what He wants me to do now and to anoint what I do by the power of His Ruach. That has resulted in this posting, this morning.

In all of this, the Spirit continually shows me how to phrase things so that they remain real. By His Grace I avoid religiosity. And it is such a joy to be living this way. This is what the Holy Spirit does in the New Covenant.

As I am writing, I am very aware that this will be a worthless pile of bloviating BS unless He anoints me. So, I am constantly talking it over with Him, asking if I truly understand the Truth I am sharing, and if He approves of what has been written. I will not publish it until I get more than His OK. I want to get his approval and His promise to anoint it so that you can understand what I’m so feebly trying to say.

The core of the New Covenant is the Ruach HaKodesh within

Paul wrote that the Spirit within is the guarantee that all this “crazy stuff” is real and true. To explain, my position is that the Pentecostals severely messed up the simplicity and freedom of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit (which Jesus was sent to give to us). They added countless extraBiblical manmade doctrines which are not helpful at all to most believers.

All you need to do is talk to Jesus directly, and ask Him for the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. He will do that for you. The Charismatics (of which I am one) cleaned up some of the Pentecostal mess, but most of them have wandered off in emotional ecstatic worship and other silly indulgences of the flesh.

As far as the maligned gifts of the Spirit are concerned…

What is called tongues is basically a confusing translation by which Satan has us expecting fleshly squeals of baby talk. The truth is that each believer who is Baptized in the Holy Spirit is normally given a private prayer language to use in his or her daily life. This does bring joy into your life, but it is nothing like babbling emotionalism.

This private prayer language can reveal harmful spirits [discernment] during deliverance sessions, show counselors what sins the counselee is presently committing [word of knowledge] to help the damaged person become more real, show prayer groups how to help [word of wisdom] someone in need whom they are praying for.

The gifts of the Spirit listed in 1 Corinthians 12 are simply practical tools given by the Holy Spirit (as He determines what we need) to enable us to walk in freedom, power, and joy. You cannot believe how much these gifts help in a spirit-filled Christian marriage. That’s why Yeshua told us “whenever 2 or 3 of you are gathered together, I am there in your midst”. He phrased it like this [before the Ruach HaKodesh was given to us at Shavuot] because it is the best that this can be understood in the flesh—the old carnal man or woman. But a believing marriage is meant to be a powerful 3-way covenant directly powered by the Breath of the Father [Holy Spirit].

When taking about the New Covenant, Ezekiel 36 gives the key understanding.

I do not know where else this concept is found in the Tanakh. The entire New Covenant could not be talked about openly because Israel did not have the Holy Spirit within them. But I am convinced that it is there in many places, especially in Isaiah. The sad thing is that the institutionalization of the church pushed out the Ruach HaKodesh just as strongly as the Jewish trunk did. This is the basic problem with evangelical doctrine. It does not teach its sheep the realities of walking in the Spirit, or in spiritual warfare.

You can usually tell if it has not been taught—because the person, man or woman, talks about the Lord in the third person—never directly to Him in the 2nd person. They never share what the Lord has told them. There is no evidence of prayer without ceasing or an ongoing conversation with our Messiah. It’s obvious (to those filled with the Breath of God) who has that breath living within them. If there’s any doubt, I can just ask the Lord to tell me. He will, though He commonly will not give me permission to share what He just said.

Yeehaw! Maranatha.

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He took a stiff-necked, argumentative people and loved them. They were not picked because they were worthy of special attention. He chose them because they were not. That continues today in Israel. His love for His people has not changed. He has told us how to please Him.

But mankind couldn’t do it.

Keeping Torah is a glorious life. But in our sinful state it is impossible to live in 24/7/365, year by year, millennium by millennium. As a friend of mine wrote today:

Isn’t that the Truth? But, the Good News is that the Lord’s plan was always for a better way. He gave the word to two of His prophets, Jeremiah & Ezekiel, that a New Covenant was coming. An upgraded covenant which fulfilled the promises given to Abraham and the way of living given in the Torah.

Pentecost was a major upgrade to the operating system

Religion had become a major problem. Throughout the gospels of the New Covenant we read about the problems that Yeshua Messiah (Jesus Christ) had with the leadership of the religion of Israel. Remember, religion is man’s attempt to put God in a controllable box. Today, we are dealing with the same thing in the church. A religious elite who serve as a barrier between the people of God and God Himself. (Read how it’s supposed to work in First Corinthians 14: 26–33)

What is this system upgrade?

Ezekiel 36: 26–27 gives us the barest glimpse of the incredibly wonderful solution the Lord had for the religion problem. It’s found in the Hebrew word halak. The Hebraic First Hermeneutics Study Tool explains what I am talking about.

The meaning is movement under guided direction. Not random wandering. Not autonomous walking. Walking that follows a directing rod. This is not an accident of etymology — it is the structural concept: halak is movement along a path that has been set.

But in these words found in Ezekiel it means more.

Sibling Forms — Same Root

Verb (Qal)הָלַךְ halak means to walk, to go, to live one’s life
Hiphil (causative)הִלַּכְתִּי hilakti means I will cause to walk / I will make walk
Noun (abstract)הֲלָכָה halakhah means the walk, the ruling that determines the path of life

The Verb → Noun relationship is critical here:
Torah itself is the halakhah — the body of instruction that defines how one walks. When YHWH says “I will cause you to walk” (hilakti), He is making Himself the active Hiphil agent of the halakhah — not merely commanding the path but generating the locomotion itself. The verb prevents the noun from becoming an inert legal code by inserting divine energy into it.

The New Covenant is God’s promise to enable us to walk out the Torah

In Ezekiel 36: 27 The Lord makes it clear in the Hebrew that the Torah is not being left behind, it is being enabled.

The English "cause you to walk" is actually a slightly dynamic rendering of a more layered syntax: I will make it so that — in My statutes — you walk. The ruach is the mechanism of the Hiphil. YHWH does not bypass Torah; He places His Spirit inside the people so that Torah-walking becomes their natural locomotion.

This is what happens when you are born of God or reborn.

This is what became possible for any believer, Israeli or heathen, at Pentecost

When I look at the changes HaShem has done in me since I met Yeshua, I am truly amazed. When I read the Torah today, I discover that the Lord has changed me so that I am walking out the Torah. Without any planning, I find out that my diet is kosher. I’m wearing 100% cotton clothing which has eliminated my original rank body odor problem. And the list goes on… As I wrote yesterday—

God has changed the orientation of my heart so that I am able live out what pleases Him. I love it. The truth about kavanah is that the giving of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost is what empowers this in the life of the believer.

What a festival we celebrate today!

God’s plan, to make those who choose to love Him righteous, displays a wisdom only seen in the Lord. Shavuot/Pentecost celebrates the Truth of Torah and the power to live it out. Believe it or not, it’s always been my favorite holy day [holiday].

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This is the Gospel, the Good News

We are not left to our own devices which are corrupted beyond practical use. All we have to do is ask the Jews who were given this path to walk with no internal Holy Spirit. The book of Hebrews lays all of that out to us clearly. Before Jesus it was a beautiful non-functional mess. No one was enabled to walk in righteousness without falling into legalistic works—which were impossible to maintain.

The plan was glorious. Sinful man was not able to do it. And there was no way given to truly get cleaned up. Plus, there was no direct power to help. Here’s an edited quote from She’s So Scripture.

The Siddur is the Jewish prayer book. The word comes from seder, meaning order. It’s full of prayers that Jewish communities have prayed for generations: the Shema, the Amidah, Psalms, blessings over everything from bread to seeing the ocean for the first time.

Many of these prayers and prayer patterns reach back to the Second Temple period and would have been familiar in the world Yeshua inhabited.

And the whole point of praying those same words over and over again, my rabbi explained, is kavanah.

When you’ve prayed the same prayer enough times that you’re not burning mental energy tracking what comes next, something else becomes possible. You stop performing the prayer and you start inhabiting it. You can slow all the way down on a single word and just live there. You could be moving through a Psalm you’ve prayed a hundred times and suddenly one word stops you cold, and you sit in it, and something opens. That’s kavanah doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.

We get the meaning of Kavanah is from the Hebraic Word Tool:

In Second Temple Judaism, kavanah is the technical term for intentional orientation of the heart during prayer, Torah study, and mitzvah performance. The Mishnah (Berakhot 2:1) establishes that the recitation of the Shema requires kavanah — not merely correct words but correct directedness. The rabbis debated whether mitzvot performed without kavanah (mitzvot tzerichos kavanah) fulfill the obligation.

The concept is not about emotional intensity or feelings of devotion. It is fundamentally architectural: is the self pointed at YHWH, or is it pointed at personal performance, social expectation, or habit? Kavanah is the inner tent peg (vav) that fixes the act of worship to its proper addressee.

I must admit the academic dryness of this type of data drives me nuts. Plus, there is no practical advice on how to bring this about. Let me tell you the hidden secret, in the flesh it is absolutely impossible to do over the long haul. To rephrase—

The problem is that this is impossible to do in the flesh

What she is talking about above and what the word tool tells us is what I now call the anointing of the Holy Spirit as a Spirit-filled believer. It sounds great. But, before rebirth it was just wishful thinking. Our undefended flesh cannot do it without being driven off the course by the minions of Satan. We do not have the power in us to manage this seemingly simple thing.

My religious resource was the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer. I know all about praying by rote with no involvement. But even after I met the Lord and was filled with the Spirit, these rote prayers were dead as a post. Scripture is not, because scripture is authored by the Ruach HaKodesh who anointed Moses and the rest—to write them all for us. Remember, Moses was trained in the Egyptian Pharaoh’s schools. He knew how to write. But, by the anointing of the Holy Spirit, he could write with power.

That’s true for all the authors, male and female, of the scriptures—the Tanakh and the New Covenant. I tend to believe that the books with no attributions were probably at least partially written by women (which is why they have no attribution). No proof. Just a gut-level understanding of how the Lord works. Remember, I was married to an anointed woman of God for 44 years. I know how she was treated by the men (and worse, the women) of the church in many denominations throughout the years by the religious among them.

Be filled with joy!

In the New Covenant, the Lord has enabled us to walk in His ways, by the power of His Breath within. One of the clearest places this is seen is where Paul wrote In Philippians 2:13 —

In the New Covenant He works in us both to make us willing & to make us able to please Him. We are not left to our own devices. He has moved within to empower us to walk in the Spirit. Of course, as with almost all things in the Kingdom, we need to ask Him to do it. Our Lord never forces Himself upon us. Rape is something the enemy does in rage.

The Lord is a gentleman, polite, kind, loving, gracious, and on and on. He waits for us to ask. This is part of our daily bread which we are expected to ask for every morning.

Try it. You’ll love it.

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I was just looking through images I have picked up for possible future use, and this one struck me. As I looked on it, large and gorgeous in the middle of my Studio Display, the Holy Spirit clearly said in my mind, “Devari!” It sounded familiar so I checked in Perplexity and I found, “Devari is generally given as an Indian name, often linked to Telugu/Hindu usage, with meanings such as “divine,” “godlike,” “belonging to God,” or simply “God.”

To the Spirit and me it also tied in with Holi, the Hindu festival of colors. It’s celebrated in spring with colored powders and water, and it symbolizes renewal, joy, and the victory of good over evil. I’m certain that Satan has an evil chuckle over the little twist to Holy. Plus, the Creep may have connived the devari/davar connection, as well. [There is no connection—though AI tried to infer there was.] Devari is a false God. There is little doubt that the image is Hindu.

Some in the church worship the book, the scriptures, which they call the Word. But that focus on the book is not right and true. Let’s take a look at a couple key verses about all of this:

For the Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before Him no creature is hidden, but all are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do. Hebrews 4:12–13 RSV

The Complete Jewish Bible translation does it a little better.

This is not talking about a book. Notice the connection between verses 12 & 13: The Word of God–––>Before God. In the Hebraic Word Study tool I found:

For Hebrews 4:12: The logos/davar that is "living and active" is not a philosophical abstraction — it is the same covenant-making, covenant-enforcing davar that came to Avram.

Davar is one of the most extraordinary words in the Hebrew language, and English has no equivalent. It means word, thing, event, and matter, all at once. Not as separate definitions that the reader selects based on context. As a unified concept. In Hebrew, a word is not separate from the reality it describes. When HaShem speaks a davar, the thing exists. "Let there be light" is not a command followed by a separate event. The speaking IS the creating. The davar IS the thing. Speech and reality are fused.

A common error is to define logos through the Greek heathen philosophical mess. Yeah, the same nation that took memories of the Nephilim and made gods out of them. In Greek thought, logos was a technical term: the rational principle that ordered the universe, the abstract logic behind all things. It is much more than that. John carefully redefined logos incorporating the living power of davar. It’s more accurate to say that Yeshua obeyed the davar sent within Him.

The davar here is not the Bible—as a book you open. It is YHWH’s directive — issuing from his inner sanctuary (devir), alive and moving, accomplishing what it was sent to do. In the context of Hebrews 3-4 (the wilderness generation, the katapausis/rest), the davar is the same word that called Israel out of Egypt, drove them through the midbar (wilderness), and which they hardened their hearts against. That same living davar now probes the [trusting (faith)-ed.] community — not to condemn but to disclose: Are you entering rest or are you the wilderness generation again?

The sword metaphor (machaira) in Hebrew prophetic context recalls the cherev — the instrument that divides covenant-keepers from covenant-breakers in the camp (cf. Exodus 32:27-28). The davar that divides nefesh (a living being) and ruach (the Breath of the father) is doing the work of covenant discernment, not surgical anatomy.

This is true throughout the New Covenant. The Word is always about HaShem, living and active, accomplishing His work. Yeshua was completely obedient to the Word. That’s why the Sword of the Spirit is the Rhema of God, not the logos, and certainly not merely the book. So also, “faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the rhema of God.”

The Bible will not save you or keep you safe!

That role has been given to the Messiah, Yeshua, and the Spirit who He has asked the Father to send within us. That Spirit is the Breath of the Father, and it carries the power of Almighty God. There is nowhere that tells us that the scriptures save us. They are wonderful, helpful, wise, but God is much larger than the scriptures—and they (the book) cannot replace Him.

However, the author of the scriptures is the Ruach HaKodesh (Holy Spirit)

If you ask the Spirit (the Breath of God) to explain what you are reading, He will do that at a level that will astound you. If you try to figure it out, you quickly get lost. This is the problem with man-made doctrine. Intellectual reasoning is nearly anathema to reality. God’s ways are much higher (far above) man’s logic. After we get our spiritual bodies it will be fun, because we will have much more direct access to Truth—we will be consciously married to Him.

Much of the problem in the church today is manmade doctrine and human policy. Stuff like: God doesn’t talk to people today—or—the Bible is our only source of objective Truth. Spectator church events. Meeting only weekly. Hogwash!

This is why the Father and the Son sent us the Holy Spirit. He gives us direct access to all of Elohim. The Bible is the record written and compiled by the Holy Spirit through men and women of God. That same spirit had Paul write: in the Messiah there is no male or female.

Let’s finish with John 5:39-40. Jesus is speaking:

This is the focus of the evangelical church today—it’s the core of what they talk about. But the strong rebuke that follows is rarely, if ever, mentioned.

yet you refuse to come to ME that you may have life.

Jesus is where life is found. Turn to Him. Devari will not help you. It’s a false god. We need the Breath of the Father (Ruach HaKodesh)—what most translations call the Holy Spirit. The scriptures are meant to cause us to turn to the Lord to find life.

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My testimony about the Lord’s rescue of me

For me my defining moment happened six months after I was filled with the spirit. As you may recall from earlier posts, I was born again out of a life of fine art, drugs, and occult practices in early 1974. I was smoking pot every two hours as I had for the previous seven years. I was dropping acid (LSD) once or twice a week. I had hundreds of acid trips by this time. I quit counting sometime after 600 trips. Somehow, in my drugged stupor, I called my dad (on his birthday—January 15, 1974), and said, “I need to get filled with the spirit.” I had no idea what that meant and as far as I knew at that moment I had never heard that term before.

My father came over and bundled me in the car and took me to his bible study of the night (it happened to be a Roman Catholic Charismatic group that night). They all laid hands on me. I renounced the world, the flesh and the devil. They prayed to break the power of the enemy in my life, and then prayed that I would be filled with the Holy Spirit in power.

I was so stoned, it took several days before I even noticed anything. The only religious event I incurred was the one mentioned, the laying on of hands for the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. That group accepted infant baptism as valid (they weren’t planning on leaving their church), so I did also.

I felt nothing. I was too stoned. I kept doing my drugs. As with all my spiritual adventures, I got into it fully (as much as I could in my intellectual arrogance). I gave Jesus six months to prove himself. I accepted the Bible as truth. The first indication that something had changed was the note on my wall calendar/journal a couple days later that “I feel strangely peaceful”.

I joined my dad every night at the various bible studies all over the Twin Cities area with which he was involved. I started reading the Bible starting with John, then the epistles, then the gospels, then the prophets, then the epistles again, and so on.

The next month I actually started working again—day jobs. In March, walking home from work as a cook in downtown Minneapolis (as I did every day) I was praying and singing like I always did. My songs changed to an unknown language and my songs became joyful worship. I had received tongues—quietly and naturally. I had been told to expect it.

I never did have an emotional experience of conversion. My Baptism in the Spirit happened that way also. I have no explanation for that other than the possibility that my emotions were so tied up in drug experiences that the Lord knew He could not use emotions to get through to me. All I know is that there is no standard religious experience for any of this or any of us.

I devoured Dad’s library of Watchman Nee, Andrew Murray, Smith Wigglesworth, Oswald Chambers, Hudson Taylor, Rees Howells, Derek Prince, and many more including all the fashionable charismatic books of the day. By 1975 I had read several hundred Christian books. I would read two or three a day plus many chapters of the Bible. I couldn’t get enough. I just poured the data into my drug-ravaged brain. [I was taught how to speed read in high school— 3000 words a minute, and I had a photographic memory.]

In that first six months I read the bible cover to cover several times, still doing drugs (pot and acid). My friends, all but one, kicked me out because of Jesus. The focus of Dad’s teaching was Romans 6 and accepting your personal crucifixion.

Still doing drugs after rebirth?

I have no explanation or excuse for that. My old man was entrenched. I do not recommend it. Drug-crazed is simply an accurate descriptive term for me at that time. It was stupid, at best. However, that’s the way the Lord dealt with me. He is sovereign. Take it up with Him. I don’t think He worries about stuff like this nearly as much as the church does.

What He is looking for is that transaction of the will of a man or woman when they decide to repent and give Jesus His proper place in their lives. The variations are startling to the religious mind. God is endlessly creative.

Relax!

I didn’t get around to dealing with Romans 6 until some time in June, 1974. At that point I accepted that my death was deserved and that the Lord had covered it when He brought me into His body. It was the next major step in my spiritual growth. I simply prayed, “Lord, make my death real in my life.” He did—of course.

How our death helps us know the Lord

Our entire Christian life seems to be focused on laying down further areas of our old self so they can be replaced by the life in the Messiah. In this way we are continuously enlightened to the character of God. As He produces that fruit in us we can see it for what it is and learn to recognize it in His dealings with us.

This helps us identify His voice better. It helps us understand what He is asking us to do better. In many ways it improves our personal relationship with Jesus.

Giving permission

It is really wonderful to watch His life grow out of us as we give Him permission to do that. Though we are dead, we are still regularly required to kill off new areas of our old self which are still struggling to stay alive. No, there is no way we can do that. BUT, we do have to give Him permission to make it real in our lives.

In all things, God’s love, kindness, and gentleness do not allow Him to run rough shod over us and make blanket changes without our permission. Remember, His goal is clear, open communication with a separate person who has been given the ability to choose and say no.

Of course, it is stupid to say no for many reasons. It is also true that [as I have mentioned many times] I didn’t have this choice before I was born again and set free by dying to my old self. [I was under the control of demons and their lies before Yeshua set me free.] This is part of the equipping God provides automatically at rebirth. Nevertheless, as an individual saved by grace to communicate and relate to the Lord, I must continually offer myself up for pruning and cleansing.

The following are my two favorite verses in the New Covenant.

I plead with you, dear brothers and sisters, to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him… let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect. Romans 12:1–2 NLT

We must offer ourselves as a living sacrifice so that we can be transformed. Like many areas of the Christian walk this is a continual process throughout our growth. It is not optional, but necessary.

Our old minds cannot hear him

The transformation I am talking about is imperative because we can get into real doctrinal trouble by filtering what we hear from God through our old thought processes. Our mind really needs to be renewed.

One of the best passages of scripture to talk about this is in Ephesian 4 beginning at verse 17. It starts out with a strong admonition:

Now this I affirm and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds; 18 they are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart; 19 they have become callous and have given themselves up to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of uncleanness. Ephesians 4:17-19 RSV

This is where we start. In fact, this is where we return again and again. I suspect that most of you are like me and want to believe that our rebirth eliminated the old man and we no longer have to deal with it. That is an obvious error.

We must take the mind to the cross—constantly

In fact, it is a farce to think we are fixed completely at the moment we are saved. Our dance with the flesh never ends until we get our new body. We have to be continuously turning it over to death. Suicide is not an option. We have to ask the Lord to do it in us and then let him do it without fear.

Paul goes on with this explanation of the process of mind renewal. Ephesians 4: 20, 22-24 RSV

20 You did not so learn Christ!…22 Put off your old nature which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful lusts, 23 and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, 24 and put on the new nature, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

Of course, the problem is that it is difficult to put on something that we barely understand and can not really comprehend. This is why it is a gradual process. Our life in Jesus is a continual revealing of His nature and what we need to do to allow Him full rein.

Paul continues with a glimpse of his understanding of the issues we must deal with. But you will need to make these personal to deal with your inner person. He tells us not to lie; not to let anger cause us to sin, not to steal, not to speak corrupt words.

He tells us not to grieve the Holy Spirit. But often we are so ignorant and self-deceived that we don’t even know when we are grieving the spirit. As usual, we need to ask the spirit to tell us how these things apply to us today.

This needs to be your regular attitude in prayer. He finishes chapter 4 with these verses that I will quote from the NKJV:

Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice. And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you. Ephesians 4:31–32

After some more talk about stupid sinful things we can do and should stop doing. Paul puts it into perspective (as he commonly does) with the simple statement of 5:10

He concludes this little discussion with another of my favorite verses in the Epistles.

15 Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise men but as wise, 16 making the most of the time, because the days are evil. Ephesians 5: 15–16

Our lives in Christ are not to be spent on frivolity

This is a serious thing we are involved with. No, we cannot make things better by grit and determination. We cannot pull ourselves up by our own spiritual bootstraps. But, on the other hand, we will find our lives are much more fulfilling if we are constantly expecting opportunities for growth in the spirit. We will find out about these opportunities by talking with our fiancée, Yeshua Messiah.

The Lord has a plan. You probably do not have a clue what it is exactly. I’ve been walking with the Lord for over 50 years and I still only have clues about where to look for the opportunities I am certain He will provide in due season.

This article is like that. When I started, I had no idea I was going to be talking about acting like the Bride we are—or who I was.

We only come to know who we are by knowing Him

One of the glorious things about coming to know the Lord intimately is that we come to learn who we are also. As we enter into that close communication with the Lord, He lets us see what He designed when He made us. This is one of the really nice benefits of a tight relationship with the creator of the universe.

His wisdom, joy, and sense of infectious fun are marvelous. Open up your heart to Him who loves you. He will never lead you astray. He will only do wonderful things in your life—even if many of those changes are only seen in hindsight. Like your fingerprints, you are unique. God loves that about you. The more you understand what you were designed to do, the happier you and He and the rest of Body of Christ will be. It is a real joy to see a member of the Body inserted into their proper place and functioning in the freedom of the Lord of Lords & King of Kings—the glorious Messiah.

We can know Him!

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As Americans we have some unique problems that others do not in other countries. We believe we have rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To those, we have added the rights of privacy, fairness, prosperity, opportunity, freedom of religion, weapons, fair trials, grand juries, reasonable treatment, and much more.

We expect these things. They are our right! The marketing world would have us believe that we have a right to respect, sex, beauty, fast cars, and on and on. Worldly politicians would have us believe we have the right to fairness, health care, good wages, and the rest of the entitlements.

The flesh loves to tout its rights. In truth, the only things the flesh can do well are feel, think, and sin. All of these are either highly suspect or downright evil. The problem is the flesh’s focus on self. We know that the flesh is desperately evil looking to be the center of our lives.

Feelings

These can be good or bad, but it is extremely difficult to tell as they occur. The main thing is that they are untrustworthy as far as the Kingdom is concerned. “I have the right to my feelings!” This is something I have heard countless times over the years.

It is true you have the right to your feelings. What is not ever said is that you also have the responsibility to discern your feelings to see if they have any basis in reality.

Thoughts

We have covered (in the 4-part series on finding intimacy with God) the three sources of thoughts in your mind. The mind is an amazing thing. It is the only interface between the spirit and the flesh. For the spirit to direct your life it requires permission from your mind.

But our minds are so limited as far as data input is concerned that they are virtually useless to determine truth, good, or anything that really matters. Left to its own devices, the mind can at best react well to worldly input. It gets no spiritual input from good until you meet Jesus and are born again from God.

Give it up!

The only right the flesh really has is payment for our personal manner of living. And the payment for this is death. That is what we have earned and what we deserve. See Romans 1–6.

None of these so-called rights mentioned above are Biblical. We don’t even have the right to life. Scripture clearly states that the wages of sin are death and that we are all sinners. We have earned death. If you think you haven’t we really need to talk. All we can do is throw ourselves on the mercy of a loving, kind, generous, gentle, patient King. Thank God we have one. Thank God He is our fiancée and we can absolutely trust Him.

Laying down our lives

The key to coming to know the Lord is giving up our life itself. Jesus said this many times in the Gospels. Here’s one example from Matthew that I read this morning.

Jesus said to his disciples, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 25 For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. [Matthew 16: 24–25 rsv]

Many are confused by the phrase “take up your cross”. It’s simple. A cross is not putting up with a nagging wife, a lazy dictatorial husband, a nosy neighbor, an overbearing boss. A cross is a tool of execution—a method of killing. When Jesus asks us to take up our cross, he is saying that we must die.

We must be willing to lay down any part of our old self to be replaced with the new life welling up from inside. The problem is that this is not taught very often. I should be able to assume that when you were baptized you were taught that you were laying down your life—allowing it to be killed. That you were going to die. That you would be resurrected by the power of the Holy Spirit that raised Jesus. Right?

I am dead & you should be

Our death is what Paul told us in Romans 6: 3–8 actually happens in our baptism.

Or have you forgotten that when we were joined with Christ Jesus in baptism, we joined him in his death? For we died and were buried with Christ by baptism. And just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, now we also may live new lives.

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For he who has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him.

As usual this is all based on the phrases in Christ and with Christ. Remember, Christ is not Jesus’ last name. Messiah might be a better translation, though it just means the anointed one. In English it’s Joshua the Anointed One; in Greek—Jesus Christ; in Hebrew—Yeshua Messiah.

The point is that we, the Body of the Messiah, are all one. Jesus is the head and we are the body, but the whole organism of which we are a part has been raised from the dead. That is what we are baptized into.

I believe that it is literally true that if the Holy Spirit left me right now, my flesh would drop dead. It is only alive because of the presence of the Holy Spirit in my spirit giving life to my flesh. My only problem with that is that my flesh keeps trying to resurrect itself.

Making your baptism real

For many of us this is all clouded by the fact that we were baptized as infants. The result is that we need some defining moment after we are actually born again to accept our death as reality.

Let’s not be religious

Baptism is required. Jesus showed us that. John asked him why he was being baptized and Jesus replied,

The alternative translation is we must fulfill all righteousness.

Originally, I just accepted my infant baptism as reality. But as Dad told me and I tell you—what’s good enough for Jesus is good enough for me. Later on [somewhere around 1983] our daughter decided she wanted to be baptized by immersion. Pat and I joined her in this. We did it not because we felt any need but simply because Jesus did it so we wanted to. Plus it fulfilled religious requirements for some of the churches within which we were ministering at that time. It was a purely religious event for both of us.

The point is that you must be baptized. Scripture does not specify the religious service necessary to accomplish this. It is between you and the Lord. If you have any doubts, get dunked and settle it in your mind. One advantage of an adult dunking is that you have an event to throw up to Satan when he tries to tell you that you cannot escape your flesh and its lusts. I see it as an execution of the old man—my carnal nature.

In part two, I’ll continue by sharing how it happened to me to show you that the Lord is not hung up on religious methodology. There is no way it should have worked for me—but the Lord…

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The primary reason, as far as I can tell, is that these languages terrorize enemy spirits. I use languages in the plural because as far as I know every reborn believer who asks Jesus to baptize them with the Holy Spirit and fire gets a different language. Throughout your life you will be using different languages in different situations. Some are strong and guttural, some are light and joyous, many are lyrical—they all flow out of you as needed, given to you by the Ruach HaKodesh. But the church fights that tooth and nail because they want to maintain control of something as purely spiritual as a language like this. They can’t understand it.

The language is directly heard by the Lord and no-one can stop it or understand it except by the anointing of the Spirit. There is a gift called the interpretation of tongues. But they use interpretation because no one knows if it is actually a translation. Because no one speaks that language except you and God. It’s been cast off as emotional rants—when there is no emotion involved—even though emotional people often get very joyful by knowing they are talking directly to the Lord.

You have probably been told that it is the uncontrolled expression of meaningless ecstatic syllables. Balderdash! The immature might tell you that it is babbling, repeating silly sounds over and over. It’s actually clearly a language—which causes demons to cry out in pain and which brings powerful results to prayer. Trying to analyze it merely confuses things.

Many people for specific reasons speak out in a language like Italian or Aramaic or ancient Persian when the Lord needs to touch someone who is listening to you. A famous evangelist [I can’t remember his name, but I watched him tell the tale on TBN in the early days] tells the story of when he came to the meeting place for a major evangelistic service in Japan. The interpreter didn’t show up. The Lord told him to simply preach in tongues. He either spoke in fluent Japanese, or the audience heard it in fluent Japanese, but many people were saved, healed, and delivered that evening according to the man telling his story. He said he never understood a word of it. It was a new language he had never spoken before. But he was exhausted by the power flowing through him, by faith.

You are simply giving the Lord permission use your tongue

The breath of God gives you remarkable opportunities to pray perfect prayers to the Lord while you relax in His presence. The Lord may use it to tell you about a demonic attack, who is attacking whom, and how to pray about it. You pray the prayers and the attack is over.

The Spirit can use speaking in your prayer language to reveal your own personal problems, like a demonically caused depression that has attacked you for months, for years, even for decades. (Ask me how I know that.) He can use the language to speak to you about bitterness, unforgiveness, and many other things which need to be dealt with by genuine repentance, and then asking the Lord to fix it.

The Lord can also use it to minister to others having the same issues. It’s always available, whenever you need it, once you have it. Praying in your spiritual language directly to HaShem (all of God) can bring about remarkable transformations in your life. It is also powerful when ministering to others—especially when you think you might be dealing with deliverance. No wonder the enemy fights it so hard. He has no way to directly interfere. All he can do is get you fearful, angry, and confused, hopefully causing you to give up.

Paul made it clear that praying in your spiritual language builds you up—it edifies you spiritually. I can testify does it does that well.

This gift of languages was not designed for public use in the 21st century

You can read the reasoning in 1 Corinthians 14. Paul clearly saw that this gift was not really helpful in public services during the time right after Jesus ascended either. But remember Paul’s direct statement in 1 Cor 14: 18, “I thank God that I speak in tongues more than you all.” Scripture doesn't talk about the uses as a private prayer language. But I can testify they work by faith. If you don’t have faith, it won’t work.

What does work by faith mean?

Faith has no power like that. But, the Lord backs up faith positions with His power. The best definition I have heard for faith is: trusting in One who is able. We exercise faith [or trust] to please the Lord. It says in Hebrews 11: 6 that:

He has the power to do anything—plus many things we can’t even imagine. Just look at how the Lord touched Mossad to get the pagers and walkie talkies manufactured and sold to break Hezbollah’s power. The heathen have no idea who they are messing with while they believe in their puny, nasty demons. All the false religions are built on the lies of puny, nasty demons. You can take that wherever you need it to explain what is going on these days.

How to receive the wonderful gift

The whole process just to make sure.

I recommend going through the process whenever doubt is assaulting you. It’s a real comfort. For example, I usually start every morning by asking the Lord to show me any sin in my life which needs to be cleaned up. After over 52 years I’ve learned how important it is to stay clean and immediately get rid of sin as soon as I commit it.

• You make sure you are clean: that means you need to repent. To do that well, simply ask the Lord to show you all the sin that hasn’t been cleaned up yet.

• When you can’t stand seeing any more, ask Jesus what to do: He will do that, probably telling you to ask for forgiveness. That can be a very strong experience (especially the first time) when you realize you are clean. [If He tells you that you are clean—rejoice!]

• Then ask Jesus how you can keep it like this: he’ll respond and tell you what will work. Probably asking Him to come and live in you. When you do that, you are reborn and you’ll know it sooner or later.

• When you discover how much He loves you, you will probably fall into direct worship: telling Him what you really think about Him, how much you love him, His worthiness, you’ll eventually run out of words, keep going and relax, and you’ll discover yourself worshiping in a new language. Rejoice!

It’s no big deal [after you get used to it], just the natural result of being born again and having your life changed for the better—forever. Many people get quite emotional. Some don’t. I never did. I received my languages two months later, walking home from work in below zero weather (in Minneapolis), singing worship songs that just turned to a new language where I could make up new melodies along with the new words. Paul called that singing in the Spirit. I was just filled with a peaceful joy. Amen.

There’s a section of this site called The Holy Spirit for us

You’ll find several articles explaining what just happened with advice, explanations, and more. There’s an explanation of how the nine gifts of the Spirit found in 1 Corinthians 12 work—giving examples of how they work. Just click on the link at the top of the site. Or click this link:
https://biblicalreality.substack.com/s/the-holy-spirit-for-the-rest-of-us

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This will change your life. One reader was delighted and very vocal about wanting to make this part of her life. What a joy it is to see that desire in a person. But there also seemed to be some confusion.

One person asked a direct question:

How do you distinguish between God’s voice and your own,
in a way that someone else can recognize as valid?

I’d never been asked about that. I wrote carefully about how to discern the source of the thoughts in our minds. With practice, and by testing and verifying, you can make it clear when God is talking to you. Again, I emphasize PRACTICE.

I practice by asking the Lord for His position on almost every decision I make in a day from “Is it time to get up?” To, “Is it time to go to bed?” These are not frivolous questions. They are the questions I always used to ask myself during the course of daily living. I discovered that my answers were kaka—worthless. I didn’t know enough. So, I began turning to the Lord with all my questions. For He is omniscient.

Sometimes it matters a lot. I have always asked, “What route do you want me to drive home?” It’s a common question and He used to lead me to entertaining routes back when I had a car. But on one occasion I found out later that by taking the route He directed me to, I avoided a horrendous crash that had killed people. I found that to be very interesting, and filled it away in my mental storage I use for info like that.

But in answer to the question in the subhead above, there is no way to share my internal mental experiences with anyone else. Period. So the answer is, I don’t. The validity is between the Lord and me and I have found it to be a trustworthy method of sharing information with my best friend, Yeshua Messiah. It’s all by faith. He makes sure that it remains in faith. That means that the proof is always subjective.

However, I wish I knew what I know now back when I was regularly asked to make judgement calls on whether a prophecy or spiritual gift was from the Lord. I could do that easily now. Back in the day, it was uncomfortable to do that. Yet, it needed to be done. Read 1 Corinthians 14 about how to run a church service down at verses 26-33.

Verse 29: Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said.

When Pat and I had a church, that type of question was common. But that was back when I was first beginning to get serious about hearing from the Lord accurately.

This is where it all starts

At some point in our Christian growth, hopefully, we begin to realize that though the Lord knows us entirely—we know Him much less than that. Our useful knowledge begins when we start asking, “how can I please the Lord?” Or better yet, “What pleases you, Lord?” For example, He told me once in answer to a direct question from me, “I like being called Yeshua. It brings back fond childhood memories.” But He still responds to Jesus, Jesús, and all the other names from the various languages. In English, I guess we should call Him Joshua, the Anointed One. But that has never become popular.

It becomes immediately apparent that we must know more about God than His feats in the scriptures. We do have some idea of His character by looking at I Corinthians 13 and the fruit list in Galatians 5. But something is still missing. Part of the key is found in the following verse, spoken by Jesus.

All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. [Matthew 11:27]

This loop of oneness seems wonderful to me. How do I get within it? It already happened when the Holy Spirit called me to know Jesus. I want to be one of those to whom Jesus chooses to reveal the Father. I want to get into this knowing thing. What do I do?

I ask.

For many of the best things you must ask

Our life in the Kingdom all starts with repentance as I realize all my sin and then ask Jesus to forgive my sins and be my Lord and King. At that point you have little or no idea what this means in terms of how much you are going to change for the better.

However, this new life doesn’t just happen. You cannot pray a sinner’s prayer and just go back to your normal life. God requires you to become actively involved in your own spiritual growth. Though it is true that the Lord occasionally just does things to and for people because of a particular call He has on their life, the norm is that the things that really help our growth must be asked for. God will not force Himself upon you. He wants friends and family who have freely chosen to love and serve Him.

But yesterday, for example, He gave me one of those rare “times of refreshing”. It would take several hundred words to explain what He did. It was a flurry of things over several hours. PLUS, it has now faded back into faith and I can no longer remember the actual feelings—just that it happened. Faith is a strong training tool. God’s wisdom is stunning—yeah, I’m awestruck. If God just laid these things on us, we might just lay back and do nothing—eating bonbons and having fun. Plus, unless we ask, we often have no idea what we are getting. You must seek His face to learn.

Therefore do not be anxious, saying,
‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or
‘What shall we wear?’
For the Gentiles seek all these things; and
your heavenly Father knows that you need them all.
But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness,
and all these things shall be yours as well.
Matthew 6: 31–33

Asking is a part of seeking and knocking.
Part of the asking is learning what we are asking for.
Regardless, God often will not to do anything until we ask for it.

This makes it clear. [Sometimes He waits until He and I know I’m sincere.]

Growth without “resources”

There are countless stories of how the underground church grew in the Soviet Union where you could be killed for having a Bible. God sovereignly helps people in these straits. The Holy Spirit led them to meetings without announcement. He taught them scripture when they had no Bibles. He is not limited like we are. Recently God has given me a wonderful Messianic Jewish friend who knows Hebrew and Greek well. He’s taught me wonderful things. But I’ve discovered that many of the things that are considered normal in His circles the Holy Spirit taught me directly. I’m discovering the truth of the New Covenant—HaShem has written the Torah on my heart and enables me to live it out. What a good God I love and serve.

Ask your father like a little child, it gives Him joy.

Baptism of the Holy Spirit

Though church doctrine commonly says it is true that you can be saved without what we now call the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, I’m not sure about that. It might be true that this empowerment of the Holy Spirit is actually required. I do know that if we want this immersion into the power of the Holy Spirit, all we need to do is ask for it. The norm is that it comes with the laying on of hands by believers who have already received this empowerment with the manifestation of the ministry gifts of the Holy Spirit—but Yeshua can do it directly if you simply ask Him.

When I was introduced to the Lord, they told me to ask. They all laid hands on me and prayed for the baptism of the Holy Spirit to happen. Then as I left later that night, they told me I had done everything I was required to do—by asking Jesus to do it. The Baptism of the Holy Spirit had happened to me. I was to walk in faith and see it work itself out in my life. That is what happened in my life over the next six months—no emotion, no fuss. It simply became real in my daily walk.

With this immersion into the Ruach HaKodesh, our communication with God is greatly enlarged. The gifts of the Holy Spirit listed in I Corinthians 12 become much more active in our lives [whenever two or three are gathered—so they work in marriages]. The Holy Spirit has much more obvious access to our consciousness once we have given Him permission to do that. But we still need to ask for help.

Praying in our prayer language gift is probably the most powerful tool to help us communicate with God and access His power—especially in spiritual warfare. Gifts of knowledge and wisdom are probably second and third. Prophecy gives us concrete examples of the mind of God. But it is all still external as far as intimate communication is concerned. It is still watching the Lord work even though He is working within us. The baptism of the Holy Spirit is only the beginning.

Entering oneness with the Father

More and more I find that I want to understand God better. I want to be able to talk with Him. Not just ask Him for things and not just hear Him give me directions, but I increasingly want to discuss things with Him—have a dialog.

After all, I want to follow Jesus and do what He and the Father want me to do. God’s opinions and advice are what I seek and what I want. His opinion is the one that counts. It’s dawned on me that I need to ask for this also.

Don’t hesitate to pray now

Ask the Lord for that oneness Jesus talked about and that you hope for. We’ll learn more as we grow. But asking as we go is a good thing also.

This is eternal life: to know you

Here we come to the core of this little series. My dad in the flesh taught me this very early on, but I was not ready to understand it then. I barely understand it now—over 52 years later. It is glorious beyond my imaginings. But this is the key to the Gospel, the amazing plan of God from the beginning of time. Jesus came to call us, enable us, and prepare us for this.

The Greek word used here for know is ginosko which means to understand completely. But it has another common meaning and I am convinced that this additional meaning is part of what Jesus is praying here.

Let’s take a little side step. Knowing in scripture is commonly used to describe the most intimate relationships between husband and wife.

Adam knew Eve and she conceived and bore Cain [Genesis 4:1]
Adam knew his wife again and she bore a son… [Genesis 4:25]

The word here is yada which in Hebrew means to know by observing, thinking, and experiencing. Nelson’s Expository Dictionary explains that it also means that the knower (in this case us) has “actual involvement with or in the object of knowing”. The knower has direct contact which is why this word is also used to describe sexual relationships. This is knowing of deep involvement and direct knowledge.

In the New Covenant, ginosko means very much the same thing. It means to understand completely in a relationship. Vine wrote that this knowing is obtained “not merely with intellectual activity, but by operation of the Holy Spirit…”

So we are not wrong to rephrase the core truth of Jesus’ prayer in John 17:3, by saying eternal life is knowing God as a husband knows his wife, as a wife knows her husband—even though we know it is much more than that. This central statement comes at the beginning of Jesus’ priestly prayer—John 17.

In John 17, Jesus goes on to explain verse 3 more completely in verse 20 & 21. After talking about how this knowing applies to His relationships with His disciples, he prays for their protection and sends them out to do what he did when He came to us. He continues with statements that apply to us directly. Here we see that this applies directly to us—the believers of the 21st century.

I am praying not only for these who you gave me in my life here on earth but also for all who will ever believe in me through their reports. I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one—as you are in me, Father, and I am in you. I pray that they may be in us so that the world will believe you sent me. John 17:20–21

Now I ask you, do you think that this priestly prayer of Jesus while He preparing to die was answered completely? Of course it was and is! During His ministry, his anointing by the Ruach HaKodesh was so complete that His prayers were always answered. He was one with the Lord God, the Messiah sent by God. If He prayed we would be one—we are one. I believe we will fully realize this at the Marriage Supper of the Lamb in Revelation 19.

Knowing Jesus as His Bride

Now we get to the core of things. We have arrived at God’s eternal purpose for us. The problem, of course, is that like many of the truly important things shown us by the Holy Spirit, scripture only points us toward the truth of these things. They are not for the immature. They are for believers trained by experience. They are for those talked about in Hebrews 5.

Again I ask you to pray that the Holy Spirit will show you whether this is all true or not. I am convinced that it is and this resolves our spiritual place in creation.

Marriage gives us a glimpse of this

As mentioned, this essential knowing is the type of knowing experienced in committed, believing, covenanted marriage. This is why the gay activists are working so hard to destroy Godly marriage—not that they have any understanding of what they are doing.

Paul tells us the importance of marriage in Ephesians 5.

As the Scriptures say, “A man leaves his father and mother and becomes united with his wife, and the two become one.” This is a great mystery—an illustration of the way the Messiah and the church are one.
Ephesians 5:31–32

No, it is not a mystery! It was to Paul because he was not ever married. But to us who have experienced Christian marriage, this oneness is a reality that we understand. The oneness we experience with our spouse is amazing and it is just a foretaste of what is to come.

Commonly, married couples start out as near opposites. By the time you have been married over 30 years, your oneness is an established fact. Pat and I are very different people. It was difficult work to make our marriage become what it was designed to be. (If you have taken your covenant seriously, and worked at it by grace.) But there is no doubt that we were both changed for the better and that we were no longer primarily two separate individuals—we were one married couple. We became one and the Lord is the major part of that oneness.

Jesus is the perfect husband

When I first wrote about this nearly twenty years ago I said—Today I am dealing with my inadequacies as a husband. I stupidly did something [again] that hurt my wife. I can ask her to forgive me and ask the Lord to forgive me—but the fact remains that I hurt her emotionally and spiritually by being unwilling to take a husbandly stand and risk a confrontation. I was weak and it cost both of us.

Thank God He could fix it and we could go on. We found that to be true countless times during our marriage, before Pat got to go home. He had things He needed to teach me, personally. I am grateful for what He has done.

The good news is that in our marriage with Jesus, we will find no flaw in Him. He is the perfect husband for us whom we can trust completely and serve with joy. Let’s look at Paul’s description of the husband.

Husbands love your wives, just as Jesus loved the church.
He gave up his life for her to make her holy and clean,
to be able to present her…holy and without sin.
Husbands ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies…
No one hates his own body but feeds and cares for it…
Ephesians 5:25–30

This is tightly paraphrased and condensed to make to basic principles more visible. Many teachings about marriage focus on the woman’s submission to the husband’s lordship. It is true that the wife is to respect her husband in all things, acknowledging that he is responsible for the marriage.

But look at what is laid on the husband. Any woman would have little or no trouble submitting to a husband who acted like Jesus—a husband who gave up his life to serve, cherish, and nourish his wife. A husband focused on enabling his wife to do what she knows she is called to do. A husband who did everything he could to help his wife become pure, spotless, holy, and clean. I didn’t do it very well. But, this is what the Lord told me before I asked her to marry me. I was to do this for Pat, and her call as a true pastor & mentor & counselor—a shepherd of sick sheep.

We are his bride

With this understanding of the character of the husband, let’s take a look at the wifely responses to her husband’s lordship and love. The wife’s role is very different. This is the helpmate created by the Father to help the groom. Let’s take a look at what is said in Genesis.

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make a helper that fits him.” [Genesis 2:18]

This throws a different light on things, doesn’t it? The wife comes out of this context—the need for a strong helper suitable to the man. I don’t want to put too much on this, but Jesus is the second Adam. It seems likely that we are the second Eve. Could we really be the helper suitable for Jesus? That is certainly what scriptures seem to be saying.

Paul’s argument that Jesus is the second Adam is found in chapter 5 of Romans. His exposition states that Jesus undid all the damage from Adam’s sin.

I fully realize that this is a little stretch, but let’s take it out a little further. If Adam needed a helper, does Jesus need one as well? We are clearly called His bride. What did Adam say about his created helpmate? God had created Eve from Adam—specifically using a rib of his.

“At last!” the man exclaimed. “This one is bone from my bone, and flesh from my flesh! She will be called ‘woman,’ because she was taken from ‘man.’” This explains why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one. Now the man and his wife were both naked, but they felt no shame. Genesis 2:23–25

So, how does this compare with our relationship with Jesus? Very well, actually. Jesus was the first son born of God. He needed someone to relate to closely and a strong helper. Now, why the Messiah would need a helper is beyond me (we’ll find out in the new creation), but let’s take it where it goes here. In the new creation, we’ll be like Him.

We are made out of Jesus in a very real way. John tells us in the third chapter that our birth from above is like this:

Jesus was the first man born of both man and God. Mary and the Father were Jesus’ parents. So, He was the first in the Kingdom of God (appropriate that the King be first). I am a stepfather, so I understand some of what Joseph was called to do.

But as reborn believers, we also are born of the flesh and of God. Jesus makes it clear that we must be born of both. Don’t be confused by the fact that we have two fathers. So Jesus can say,

“Finally, one who is flesh of my flesh and spirit of my spirit.”

For this reason Jesus is pleased to leave the Father and cleave to his wife who is us. But this is far superior to the earthly version. Just like Passover is the symbolic image of what Jesus did on the cross, marriage is the symbolic image of who we become in the Kingdom of God.

The Bride is not spoken of much in scripture, but the image in Revelation 21 is stunning.

Then I, John, saw New Jerusalem, God’s holy city,
coming down out of heaven,
prepared as a bride dressed up for her husband.
[Revelation 21:2]

In Revelation 21:9 we are told exactly what we are:

“Come, I will show you the Bride, the wife of the Lamb.”

And who is this bride but us? We are those born of flesh and the spirit. We are man reborn from God. No one else is in that city. And we are all one: Father, Holy Spirit, Jesus, and us. New Jerusalem is a single organism of which we are part. There is no separation there. There is perfect communication there.

The role of the wife

Now that we have established that we are indeed the wife of the Messiah, we need to look at how the wife is to behave. Let’s paraphrase that also to see what is actually said, and see how it applies to us as believers.

Wives submit to your husbands as to the Lord…
a wife should submit to her husband in everything…
the wife must respect her husband.
[Ephesians 5:22–33]

First, let’s remember that verse 21 says: “being submissive to one another in the fear of God.”

But, the English definition of submit is a little negative.

• To yield oneself to the power or authority of another: to submit to a conqueror.

• To allow oneself to be subjected to some kind of treatment: to submit to chemotherapy.

• To defer to another’s judgment, opinion, decision, etc.: I submit to your superior judgment.

In the Greek, the word definition becomes a little more clear. It’s more like voluntary subordination than forced groveling. The word is hupotasso, and the lexicon gives us the following:

• to arrange under, to subordinate

• to subject, put in subjection

• to subject one’s self, obey

• to submit to one’s control

• to yield to one’s admonition or advice

• to obey, be subject

It’s a Greek military term meaning “to arrange [troop divisions] in a military fashion under the command of a leader”. In non-military use, it was “a voluntary attitude of giving in, cooperating, assuming responsibility, and carrying a burden”.

In the world, it’s no wonder wives have so much trouble with this. How can you submit unless you trust your husband completely? We know that no human is trustworthy except for Jesus. Just as it is difficult and rare for a man to truly love and enable his wife, it is also difficult and rare for a woman to truly give herself into helping her husband. Actually, it is clear to me that the woman commonly does a better job.

It’s a waste of time here to even get into the inadequacies of man. Someday the Lord might ask me to write a book on marriage and the responsibilities of the man and the woman. But true marriage is only possible in the Lord. It is an institution that He ordained. Anything less than a covenant between God, a man, and a woman is not really a marriage in the Christian sense.

But you need to understand that a man needs a strong smart woman who is able to help the two of them do what the Lord is calling them to do. He needs a woman with a sharp mind and developed skills who knows how to use both of those abilities. Basically, these things are only possible by the power of the Holy Spirit and the grace of God. They are so contrary to our flesh, that even under the power of the Holy Spirit they are extremely difficult.

Of course, being made a believing member
of the Kingdom of God is totally impossible
without the power of God.

But here we are talking about building a marriage relationship with Jesus himself. Try to imagine how deeply the Ruach HaKodesh (Holy Spirit) is invested in this process. He will do anything He can—and obviously that is a great deal—to enable us to submit to our Lord.

He wrote a whole book on the subject that we call the Bible. How much of the Bible is about submission?

• Obedience is better than sacrifice: 1 Samuel 15:22

• Humble yourself under the Lord: James 4:7–10

• Put others first: Philippians 2:3–4

• Serve the Lord with gladness: Psalm 100:2

• Make all your requests unto Him: Philippians 4:6

• Repent and hang your old man on the cross: Romans 6: 3–11

• Ask for the Holy Spirit: Luke 11:13

• It’s impossible to please God without faith: Hebrews 11:6

The longer I live in the Kingdom the more I realize that putting myself under His lead and guidance is essential to my survival. Whenever I try to put myself forward, I quickly realize the stupidity of that course of action. My only hope is to submit to His wisdom, knowledge, and love. Increasingly, all I want to do is please Jesus.

Exactly, in that manner, I have come to see this as my wifely behavior to my husband, Yeshua Messiah. I love my place in the Kingdom as much as I love Him. He is worth it all!

Maranatha.

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Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

This is good and a major step in your Christian growth. But there is nothing here about listening. At this point we are still talking about monologue.

Developing dialogue

The practice of prayer

Experience is required and this is only developed through practice. You need to be trying to hear from the Lord on a moment by moment, hour by hour, daily, monthly, yearly basis before you will get any good at hearing from God.

By now we should be longing to hear from God. He rarely speaks to us audibly—though that is surely possible. We’ve read about Him and what He did with the Jews and the early church. We now know quite a bit about Him. But we want to talk with Him. This is where our true knowing begins.

None of this can happen unless you can hear from the Lord. We need to ask questions and listen for answers. The problem of hearing clearly from the Lord is always with us. I want to share some practical tips that might help you do this better in your own life. They are not infallible but they have worked for me for nearly four decades now.

Discerning your thoughts

Evil thoughts

Have you ever wondered why you have such evil thoughts? Consider that some of them might be demonic. Of course, the human heart is capable of horrendously evil thoughts all on its own. But not all the garbage comes from within. The good news is that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, you can get control over that evil—both from yourself and from the enemy.

I do not want to get into arguments here. Some people get really freaked out at the suggestion that demons can speak to you in your mind. Your theology does not concern me. The reality is that it happens. Just remember Jesus’ strong admonishment to Peter in Matthew 16:23 “Get thee behind me, Satan.” It is obvious that the enemy was using Peter to talk to Jesus.

It has been clear to me for a long time
that my thoughts have three sources:

• the Lord: Father, Son, Holy Spirit—and angels;

• the enemy, Satan and his minions;

• & myself

So when I am looking for guidance and seeking to hear from the Lord I need to be careful. As I make my daily, moment-by-moment decisions I need to be careful. I must discern the source of my thoughts.

More than that, I need to seriously practice hearing the Lord. I’ve mentioned this in passing several times already. You will never hear clearly from Him unless you practice hearing His voice and learning to recognize when it is Him and when it is not. If you ask Him questions, He will respond.

With practice you can definitely learn to recognize who is speaking to you in your thoughts. You will be surprised to discover how many of your thoughts come from spiritual sources outside your mind. It will always be a walk of faith. It will rarely reach certainty. But there are clues and the personalities of the thought providers are very different from each other.

This is the first thing you need to understand. If it is not from God, it really does not matter. Remember that the original sin was wanting to know good from evil. We do not know enough to make that determination. God was not being mean when He told us not to eat from that tree. Our database is nowhere near being comprehensive enough to handle decisions like that. We need to trust the Lord.

We need to gain control over our thought lives. We must become conscious of the spiritual battlefield that is our mind. The beginning point is realizing that until my mind is renewed by the Holy Spirit, it is not good. My thoughts cannot be trusted. They are like emotions—useful, sometimes nice and sometimes horrible, but only another way to be aware of what is going on in and around me in my daily life. Paul told us how to deal with our thoughts in 2 Corinthians 10: 4–5.

for the weapons of our warfare are not worldly but have divine power to destroy strongholds. ⁵ We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ,

We regularly make decisions that seem good at the time based on what our thoughts and emotions tell us. But experience shows us that many of these choices prove to be bad ones in the long run. Let’s give a few examples with societal choices we have made based on intellect, thoughts, and emotions. (We can easily argue that the enemy had a lot to do with these decisions—he is, after all, the ruler of the world system.)

The Industrial Revolution is good

We had no idea about the problems of pollution when we started down the road to technology. We never expected mass production to eliminate quality the way that it has or to numb the minds of the workers because they never deal with the product in its entirety. We never expected the limitations to choice either. We were tempted by pretty and cheap stuff.

Cars are good

But we had no idea what they would ultimately do to the nuclear family. Who foresaw the breakup of the local community because of all the moving? We never foresaw suburbs, exurbs, or commuting.

How about long commutes to church? How can we have a congregation of people with deeply involved social/spiritual relationships spread out over hundreds of square miles? We live so far apart that we do not see our brother or sister enough to really know what they are doing and what their day to day needs are.

In our church in Albuquerque we had people who lived 30 miles to the northwest, over 35 miles to the east, and we ourselves lived 40 miles south. We worked hard to overcome that issue. Most churches do not.

Drugs are good

Aspirin, opium, chloroform, and penicillin completely changed the practice of medicine and doctors. In the 20th century, the dominant medical theory became that life is just a chemical process that can be controlled by chemicals. Most doctors are now drug pushers. Remember, the Greek word for sorcery is pharmakeia.

Who foresaw a society which turns to drugs instead of God: medically, socially, and emotionally. Drugs have become the major aid to entertainment starting with one of the worst of the bunch, alcohol. Many (if not most) Christians take a pill before they pray about a headache.

Mass media is good

For over a century now we have assumed that radio, and then television are a good thing. Movies have become a central part of our culture. They bring us news and entertainment. The world ignores the basic facts about how much mass media glorifies sin and inoculates us from the horror of evil.

The Internet is good

Did anyone expect it would spring free the spirit of lawlessness? Should we even mention the always present spectre of Big Brother, Big Government, and Big Tech which have all been given new life by 24-hour online access to all of us. How many expected the almost complete loss of privacy and the daily verbal assault of strangers? I won’t even mention AI and the host of issues with it [like it seems to be a necessary technology for the antiChrist to use]. It’s only a machine. But it’s a powerful, yet dangerous tool.

Inadequate knowledge is the norm

Even in an information age, we do not have the wisdom to know what to do with all of the knowledge. I’ve watched raging forest fires caused by environmentalists who refused to deal with rampant undergrowth in our forests. Your life, my life, and the life of anyone you know is littered with decisions made without adequate knowledge.

We all need to be able to tap into the source of all knowledge—the One who knows everything. This is not some trite truism but at the core of our faith. We do not need an astrologer or clairvoyant with their dependence upon reading the creation for answers. We have direct access to the Creator himself—the one who made it all.

Most of this seeking takes place within ourself. This is not limited to just our mind, because our rebirth brought our spirit to life also. But our consciousness has to deal with thoughts. We need to remember that personal thoughts are part of the carnal nature that begins the Christian walk completely controlled by lusts and selfish desires. Thankfully, that situation improves with our spiritual growth. But we cannot trust ourself—neither the thoughts nor the emotions. Remember, Romans 12:2—

Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Beyond this, what few want to deal with, is the fact that spiritual powers can speak to us via thoughts that seem to come from within. It’s nothing to be afraid of, but you do need to be aware of this reality. You do need to pray for discernment. It’s one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Ask Him to show you the source of your thoughts..

Examine your thoughts

When you ask yourself a serious question, listen to the answers you get. Let’s take a simple question like, “Should I marry this woman?” Or “Should I accept this job offer?”

How would you know? You certainly cannot trust something as fleeting as emotion [like lust or greed, for example]. You quickly discover that you are deluding yourself if you think you can figure it out. Only God knows the answer to these things. So you need to hear from Him. You need to carefully examine your thoughts about matters like these.

Your mind is controlled by your flesh before you come to believe in Jesus and ask Him to renew your mind as talked about in Romans 12:2. We always need to ask for these things. You’ll never be handed a godly jump drive to plug into your brain (like Neurolink is attempting to do). But ALL you have to do is ask, and the Lord loves your questions.

Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Paul talked about another aspect of this in Ephesians 4:17–18:

Now this I affirm and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds; they are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart;

Paul goes on to talk about the trouble they got into due to the dependence on the mind and fleshly understanding. He talks about the same problems in Colossians 2:18 and Romans 1:21. Our minds are clouded by sin and defenseless against an enemy we were not aware of.

The goal is to identify all thoughts which are not from God. He has the only answers you can trust. You don’t know enough and the enemy is trying to hurt you. The same is true of opinions offered by other people, They are in no better shape than you are—unless they are obviously more mature than you in the Lord; unless God has told you to listen to them; and unless the Holy Spirit tells you their words are true. (Ask the Lord and test the answer.)

This is where we start: thoughts have three sources. Let’s cover them each individually as we begin to examine the process of thought discernment.

The basic understanding

Here’s the foundational level of understanding to give you a solid place to start.

• God waits for you to ask Him to speak to you. He will not force things on you. He works with what you give Him. He loves you and will help you. He always tells the truth, because HE IS TRUTH.

• Satan will push himself in and rape you spiritually in a heart beat. He hates you. He wants to steal from you, kill you, and destroy you. He is a liar, the father of lies, an inveterate and compulsive liar who may even believe he is telling you the truth.

• You simply do not know enough to be trusted.

Thoughts and impressions from God

These are the important thoughts. They are messages from God directly to your mind. These are the ones you never want to miss. Sometimes they are a still, small voice. But usually they are a thought, an impression, or even just a feeling. That feeling will seem to come from a different place though. What scripture calls the heart.

They are normally a response to a question from you.

We have several ways to discern if you are hearing from God. Let’s start with a verse that gives us clear guidance about two things that are dead giveaways:

I want you to know that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever calls Jesus cursed, plus no one can say that Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit. [I Corinthians 12:3]

The great dividing line is always Jesus. These two things above are a major portion of testing the spirits—which we will talk about in a bit. Jesus the man, the Lord, the Messiah, His character, His personality are the key to all of this. His thoughts show forth His character. You can see a description of his character below:

Love suffers patiently and is kind. Love is not jealous and does not envy. Love does not parade itself or boast and never becomes puffed up. Love cannot be rude. Love does not demand its own way or become irritable. Love keeps no record of wrongs, thinks no evil and does not rejoice in evil. It rejoices in the truth; never giving up, faithfully hoping while persevering in all things. [I Corinthians 13:4–7]

Thoughts from God will always manifest His character. If you hear a thought that is contrary to His character, it is not from Him. So learning to recognize His character is the first thing we need to do. The fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5 gives us another list of His character traits.

²² But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, ²³ gentleness, self-control; against such there is no law. ²⁴ And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh [Romans 6:1-11] with its passions and desires.

Above and beyond our capabilities to discern character comes the attitude we are to maintain. We’re to test the spirits that speak to us—and the people used by those spirits—if we want to avoid deception.

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test them to see whether they are of God. Because many false prophets have come into the world. 1 John 4:1

How does this work out in real life as you listen to your thoughts? I’ll show you a simple test in a few paragraphs. But we are still talking about recognizing the person of God: Father, Son, & Holy Spirit. Here are three practical identifiers:

God is gentle and kind: He never forces Himself upon you

Above and beyond all this is experience. As I have said many times already, you need to practice hearing God by asking Him a lot of questions about things large and small. [Every time you make a choice, ask Jesus for His opinion. Start with questions which have a yes/no answer.] You need to watch the results. If a word is from God it will happen. What God tells you is never false or wrong. Partial truths are the strongest lies.

However, just the law of averages mean that our thoughts, the thoughts of a friend, and the insinuations of the enemy are right and true at least part of the time or partially. So a seemingly good decision is not necessarily from God.

The main thing is that God always has time for a good decision. If you are not sure, tell God that you are not sure and do not decide until he makes the truth clear. God will make sure you have time to ask and get an answer. He controls time.

Thoughts and feelings from the enemy

They demonstrate his character. He is a clever, cunning liar. He’s a liar, cheat, and thief who comes to steal & kill & destroy [John 10:10].

…the devil… was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. [John 8: 44]

His primary tool is the flesh. [Galatians 5: 19–21]

...works of the flesh are evident, which are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery (power through drugs), hatred, contentions, cliques, nationalism, political parties, jealousies, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like...

Often thoughts from God will pop into to your mind fully formed. Of course, the enemy’s insinuations can do that also. But he normally tries to slip in as one of your own personal thoughts. His ideas usually have a nasty, pushy edge. The enemy often tries to insist that you make a decision immediately. He doesn’t allow time for confirmation.

There are several things that you can use to instantly identify thoughts from the enemy:

Fear: God does not ever use fear. He is perfect love and that kind of love eliminates all fear. When we are told to fear the Lord, the word means awestruck.

The same is true of Confusion, panic, worry, doubt, condemnation, & the list goes on & on.

One good thing about discerning thoughts from the enemy is that he really thinks you are stupid. He will do the same things over and over. Often it is just because he is not creative like God is. He’s only an angel, not made in the image of God. Almost all of his attacks are counterfeits of real things of God. As an example, mankind’s robots are counterfeits of God’s angels. >chuckle<

Sometimes he is just trying to wear you down. He will attack you when you are tired or when you are involved with life and busy. This is especially true if you have let your spiritual life take second place, your Bible study time is postponed, your prayer life is almost nonexistent, and so on. Then he will move in to pull or push you away from God. He presents real temptations. In James, we read:

¹³ Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am tempted by God”; for God cannot be tempted with evil and he himself tempts no one; ¹⁴ but each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. ¹⁵ Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin; and sin when it is full-grown brings forth death.

He is always looking for opportunities to kill or destroy you. His only hope is to get you to kill yourself in a state of unbelief. You must remember what Peter warned us about:

Be sober-minded. Be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. [1 Peter 5:8 esv]

But, that’s a lie also. The Creep is just like a lion. If he could kill you, you’d be dead. He has to get permission from God to do anything to you [like he did with Job]. God only allows trials which will produce good in you (if you turn to the Lord).

This list goes on and on. You can add those you notice as you gain experience. One of our favorite priests (the man we served under when we were first married) regularly started sermons by opening the Sunday newspaper and saying, “Let’s see what the devil is up to today.”

…Satan, the ruler of this world… [John 12:31]

The world is controlled the Satan. Jesus told us that. He developed the world systems like economics, politics, government, entertainment, education, and so on. It is designed to frustrate you and make you angry.

A relatively recent term [no longer cool. of course] to help us identify Satan and his works is edgy. The term was slang and supposed to mean exciting; daringly innovative; on the cutting edge. It also implies radically stylish, breaking the rules, and pushing the limits. We quickly see that things which are truly edgy are always from the enemy. They glorify sin, self-indulgence, inappropriateness, and so on. That edginess is the hint (or more) of evil.

One of the signs that a Christian artist or musician is truly from the Lord is that he or she will never really be able to pull off edgy. That nasty edge is not possible under the anointing—for nasty or lawlessness are not fruits of the spirit. Exciting is a worldly thing. Joyful and enthusiastic are the real things in the Kingdom of God.

Attacks from people

Satan hates the people of God, but he knows those who are faking it and only look like a child of God. He can use them freely in his attacks on you because they have no defenses against him. He can easily use any non-believer to attack you who doesn’t know Jesus because of the lack of defenses or awareness on their part.

A quick tip: an excellent quick prayer muttered under your breath when a person attacks you is, “You foul spirit using (fill in the name), I break your power over (him or her) and command that you cease attacking me.” I’ve seen remarkable, instantaneous changes in personality. Sadly, this is another daily bread thing. But like I said, Satan and his minions are stupid and they’ll keep doing things over and over using a different spirit every time. But the prayer will work on the replacement spirit as well.

Of course, if you pray loudly enough to be heard, it will raise a ruckus. Remember in Acts 16, when Paul got rid of the evil spirit in that woman following him around? That was why Paul and Silas were in jail singing at midnight.

Thoughts from yourself & your flesh

These are normally selfish or at least self-serving. They are commonly reactions to fleshly desire. You know your thoughts. But, you have to consciously remind yourself that all of your thoughts are not from your mind. Some are placed into your mind from spiritual sources.

Because we cannot see spiritual things in the flesh, we have to continuously remind ourself that spiritual reality is actually more real that what we can see, feel, and experience through the flesh. Spiritual reality will remain when the flesh is gone—transformed into the new creation after the judgement at the end of the age.

Testing the spirits

If you have a thought come into your mind, you can speak to the source of that thought. Simply ask the spirit giving you that thought, “Spirit who just gave me (that thought), do you confess that Jesus Christ came in the flesh and that He is the Messiah?” Often your next thought will be a brusque, “No!” Of course, if you ask out loud and any one hears you, they’ll think you’re insane.

But then we are fools for Christ, right?

If it’s the Lord you will often hear a gentle “yes, (your name)” or some similar encouragement. Sometimes you will hear thoughts of confirmation or kind instructions showing you where to look for confirmation. You may feel that peace that passes understanding you have come to know in your walk with the Lord.

If you get a response, you can verify it by asking, “Spirit who told me Yes (my name), do you accept that Jesus of Nazareth is the son of god who came in the flesh, the Messiah?” If it was the Lord He’ll tell you “yes, (your name)” or something similar. John verification was to ask the spirit if it accepts that Jesus Christ came in the flesh. I vary my responses so that I do not get into liturgical habitual stuff.

If you hear nothing, it is probably just you and your flesh. If it is just you, a strong insistent voice might call you a fool for doubting. Satan loves to capitalize on your stupid or unbelieving thoughts. If you start to get confused, you have a clear indication that you are dealing with your own ideas or those of the enemy. The Lord never brings confusion.

Compare the thought to your knowledge of scripture. One of the real blessings of scripture is the objective standard of truth which it provides. If you are not sure, ask the Lord to show you scripture which applies. If a thought is clearly anti-scriptural you know for sure that the thought is not from God and you need to resist it. Plus, you should be aware that, manmade doctrine is not an objective standard of truth. Much of it is extrabiblical. The enemy loves to use doctrine to attack you with feelings of guilt, shame, whatever they can come up with..

But remember! Satan used scripture to attack Jesus during His temptation (Luke 4:1–14). He will do the same with you. Pray for discernment. Scriptures taken out of context are often misleading and used by the enemy to confuse you. Portions of scripture can be used by anyone. For example, remember the verse in Isaiah, “Hearken diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in fatness.” Isaiah 55:2, [RSV, which I why I suggest you read many versions].

Letting the Holy Spirit control your memory

I am constantly learning more ways to trust the Lord and more ways to give Him control over my life. I can do no good thing of myself and I certainly do not want to do things insinuated into my life by enemy forces. But here are some prayer tips that will help you. It’s been a bit of a surprise to learn how He can help with my memory—both to remember and to forget.

A powerful prayer as you learn to discern is this; “Lord, if this is not from you have it go away.” You will be amazed when thoughts or ideas just disappear and you can no longer remember them. This is a technique we teach people learning to manifest the gifts of the Holy Spirit. But it works equally well when discerning our thoughts.

Conversely you can ask the Lord to have you remember a thought. If it is from him you will remember. He is endlessly patient and has no problem in telling you over and over in response to your questions. (Though He might gently tell you to “have faith”. That usually makes me laugh. The Lord is funny and has a perfected wit.)

Here’s a practical example: for those of us who wake up in the middle of the night with an amazingly creative solution to a problem, it is often better to deal with these ideas in a godly manner.

The world tells us to have a pad and pen next to the bed to write these things down. Some even keep a digital recorder there to note down ideas. I have found that writing these ideas down in my fogged, mid-sleep stupor often confuses me about the source of the idea.

I want only God’s ideas. My inspiration comes from Him. He knows what his ideas are and one of the Holy Spirit’s jobs is to remind us of things of the Lord. You can trust Him in this area also. So, I just ask the Lord to have me remember when I get up if the idea is from Him. He will answer that request.

Remember the sound & feel of the voices

As you practice these things, remember voices that you identify. As you practice you will learn the subtle differences and come to know the voice of God. You may not always recognize the enemy. It’s hard to tell between the enemy and your flesh. But you will know that it is not God, and you will increasingly learn to know the voice of God.

It’s different for every one, but God’s voice often brings a feeling of peace, joy, comfort, and so on. Also, his voice is constantly changing and your methods of hearing must constantly change. That is because it is a walk of faith and He does not want you dependent on a method, but on Him and the guidance of His Spirit.

Don’t become attached to methods

Over the years I have regularly come to rely on a certain method to hear from God. As soon as I start to do that, he makes me change my methodology. He wants me dependent on Him not on a method. You can never use a method to force the sovereign God to do your will. He will show you the foolishness of that real quick. I have learned to never make rote, habitual answers to the Lord.

Listen carefully...

Here’s a practical reminder, phrased in Hebrew names.

HaShem, by your Ruach HaKodesh, in the name of Yeshua Messiah, I ask that you anoint my (study time, work time, or whatever) and keep me from error and ignorance.
(Open up these words and the scriptures, guide my decisions, or whatever) to understand what you want me to (learn, do, say, or whatever) today.

Amen

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It is really sad, but we have heard many dozens of people tell us they are afraid to tell anyone in the church that they hear from the Lord or that God does indeed speak to them. They may have had a vision, or received a prophecy. But they fear that they might be considered crazy. In fact, in modern American society it is very risky to tell anyone you hear from God.

“Yeh, right, of course you do. That’ll be all right. You’ll get over it…”

You know the drill. If you know the Lord at all, you’ve heard things like that directed at you or other believers you know.

Hearing from God

In Pentecostal, Charismatic, and non-denominational churches, you’ll hear quite a bit about hearing from God. That is certainly a large part of what we are talking about here. But often it is taught that you hear from God by listening to the Sunday sermon or conference teaching.

Preachers and teachers are good—if the speaker is anointed by the Holy Spirit and is diligently seeking to be used by God to speak to everyone in the congregation. But it is supposed to direct you toward the Lord. Even the Bible is less than Jesus Himself.

You need daily input from the Lord—in fact you need minute by minute help. You cannot come to know anyone well without talking with him or her constantly. Paul called it praying without ceasing. Not talking at him—but with Him. You have to hear Him to have a conversation with Him.

But hearing from God is just a part of knowing the Lord. It is an essential part, but it misses the point. You hear from your boss, but there is rarely love or intimate knowledge there. The same can be said for most pastoral relationships in denominational churches. Intimate knowledge goes far beyond the norm—it is outside the box, as it were.

Knowing scripture

If you do not have knowledge of scripture (and even if you do), you are dependent upon constant prayers for the guidance and protection of the Ruach HaKodesh. This is why Yeshua asked the Father to send Him to you.

I have to assume that you have read and studied the Bible. Without that knowledge of the only objective standard we have, you can easily be led astray. Verse by verse study is best, How to Teach the Bible with Power will help you if you need it. It will give you some idea of how to pursue the truth in the Bible.

Prayer is the answer?

Prayer is the beginning. But we are obviously not talking about written liturgical prayer. Nor are we talking about the common gimme lists. This is prayer as it is defined in Christian terms, a dialogue—talking back and forth, a conversation. Like teachings about knowing God, teachings and examples of true, powerful prayer are rare. Part of the problem is that most of this type of communication is consummated in the privacy of a person’s “prayer closet”. In fact, in Matthew 6:6, Jesus tells that we are to pray in secret and that the Father will answer in secret.

The second definition of prayer on dictionary.com is a good place to start in understanding prayer:

A spiritual communion with God:
as in supplication, thanksgiving, adoration, or confession.

Here’s some quotes to help us:

“Prayer is not monologue, but dialogue. God’s voice in response to mine is its most essential part.” Andrew Murray

“Prayer does not fit us for the greater work; prayer is the greater work.” Oswald Chambers

“Those persons who know the deep peace of God, the unfathomable peace that passeth all understanding, are always men and women of much prayer.” R. A. Torrey

Communication is the bedrock upon which knowledge is built. The need for prayer cannot be over-emphasized. Communion with God is the core of our being. Prayer is a lifestyle, a constant communication. You need to be continually talking things over with God. This is the meaning of Paul’s command:

Always rejoice, pray without ceasing, giving thanks in everything…
I Thessalonians 5:16-18

We see this in common speech, “She’s constantly watching TV.” “He’s always talking about football.” We are talking about a person whose focus is clearly seen. For believers, this focused center of your being should be prayer—communication with God.

This type of prayer takes a while to develop. It takes practice, experimentation, and persistence. Very few start out praying this way—and many who do start this way have it trained out of them by religion. But if you are serious and ask the Lord to show you how, He can do it quickly.

Religion is anathema to this

In most religious groups the entire level of communication discussed here is very much frowned upon. By their very nature religious organizations do not have this type of relationship with God.

Direct, personal engagement with the Lord almost always steps outside the bounds of religious policy very quickly. Jesus was [and is] always in trouble with the religious establishment. In fact, it is not far wrong to say that religion killed Jesus.

To cover the reasons why this is true I suggest you get a copy of Watchman Nee’s Love Not the World. In this marvelous book, he discusses what happens when a true ministry of God, started by an apostle and led directly by the person called by God to lead it, continues on after the death of the leader.

This problem has been exacerbated by the growth of corporate ministries. Corporations step entirely outside the idea of God calling a person by replacing the person with a group who is actually legal fiction. Nee’s point is that any ministry which can survive and stand on its own without God quickly loses all contact with God. Corporations are not real people and are designed specifically to stand on their own perpetually. Once the original leader called by God goes home, they should be shut down [in my humble opinion]. Ministries do not have inherited leadership, and attempts to promote that are commonly disastrous.

Watchman Nee believed [and I agree} that any ministry which can survive and thrive without the direct daily need of the anointing and intervention of the Holy Spirit has become religious as opposed to being a part of the Kingdom. If I remember accurately (though this may be my experience now nearly forty years after I read the book), the distinction is between an organism whose life flows from the vine and a self-sustaining organization. The Kingdom is an organism. The visible church is thousands of organizations.

Organizations do not need God and have no direct contact with God as a group—unless there is a godly person in charge who has been called to that position by God himself. Ministries in the kingdom are not led by committees, but by apostles [people called and sent by God to start a work] or more rarely prophets, evangelists, pastors, or teachers. The biblical examples of a calling committee are non-existent in the New Testament except for Mathias (and that happened before the Holy Spirit was poured out—plus he was never heard of again). Leaders were normally appointed by experienced elders. As mentioned, I believe that most ministries should be shut down when the person with the vision goes home to be with the Lord.

Obviously, this calls into question the viability of denominations and helps explain why mainline churches and long-existing denominations are usually lifeless. For example, Luther, Wesley, and Aimee Semple McPherson were radical believers filled with life. That life barely lasted eighty years or so after their death.

Only when God calls and sends an apostle to head up an existing congregation of a denominational church does one come to life. But sadly, even then, many denominations regularly rip the leadership from a lively church and move it elsewhere. The conscious plan, believe it or not, is that believers should not become attached to a local leader.

(How could a denomination retain control in that case?)

So, you may well be on your own as you develop the relationship you need with the Lord. This is not a large problem because the Lord is more than enough to help anyone. Plus, He will normally bring you into contact with other believers on the same path as yourself.

Finding a church home

You will probably have a difficult time finding a church which will encourage you in your development of direct communication with God. You do need to find regular fellowship and a church is a good place to start. But there may not be one close to where you live.

Let’s give you a list of things to look for in a church home:

• The leader seeks to give control and authority over the church to Yeshua Messiah: This is key. If the leader has illusions that he or she is in control, there is a major problem with the leadership. Run, do not walk, away from this.

• Scripture is regularly read & explained: Public reading of scripture has great benefit. Explanations of scripture normally do more than topical sermons on events of the day with little or no scriptural justification.

• The leadership is local: If the real leadership is denominational the local church will find it almost impossible to react to local needs and minister to the people in the neighborhood.

• Fruit is seen in the leaders as well as the sheep: love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, self-control. They should be friendly, warm, and include you in what they are doing. An anointed leadership will nurture fruitfulness in the people.

• The elders are mature: “Youngers” are a real problem today. Unless the elders have maturity and experience, the church is in trouble sooner or later. Age factors into this, though age does not automatically produce maturity. An elder needs to have lived long enough to have much good life experience. An elder also needs spiritual maturity of the kind talked about in Ephesians 4:1–16 and 1 Timothy 3:2–7.

The list can go on and on but these are starting points. You really need to find a spiritual mentor. We tend to call them pastors now in America, but they could be called bishop, elder, pastor, evangelist, teacher, apostle, and many more names that are biblical. Seek the Lord diligently, asking Him where He wants you to learn and grow. In this day and age this can be a difficult search.

Developing skill in prayer

I find that it helps me to think of prayer (and many areas of spiritual growth) in terms of human development. When a baby starts learning to talk, it first doesn’t know the words. When the baby learns words, it is entirely self-centered.

Much of early childhood training centers around teaching a child to talk with you about anything other than its own needs and wants. Original sin shows up in children before they can walk or talk in their selfish, self-centered life. They want what they want when they want it—or else.

In very young Christians the same thing happens—at least for a time until the Holy Spirit can get the newly reborn believer’s attention. Even rare thoughts of ministry are usually more about building themselves up. This is normal behavior—but certainly not acceptable in an adult.

Though it can get quite irritating, it’s a real breakthrough when your son or daughter starts asking why. Why? Why? Why? Thankfully, we serve a God with infinite patience who is willing to answer and train us—if we begin to listen. The why questions are the first focus outside themselves.

The next major step is seen when the why questions convert to hows. Then growth begins to happen much more quickly. The parallel progression of behavior during this questioning phase normally runs through sharing your toys to treating others the way you want to be treated, and finally graduating into how can I help? That helpfulness hopefully coalesces into the more mature “what do you want me to do, Lord?”

But even at this point, it is common that there has been little or no sharing about likes, dislikes, gifts, talents, calling, purpose, or anything real that is necessary for adult growth. In modern America, children regularly never think about these things until they go to college or worse yet, graduate from college. Many are approaching thirty before they begin.

Prayer follows the same path. First comes the self-centered gimme prayers, then adding prayers for others, then asking the Lord for guidance, then asking Jesus what He designed us to be. But the real breakthrough comes when a person starts seriously seeking the Lord Himself—wanting to know Him better, desiring intimacy with Jesus just because of a genuine love for the person of the Lord.

We’ll talk about the practicalities in Part 3.

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This is not an optional part of the walk of a believer. Intimate knowledge of the Lord is immensely important. In fact, there are several scriptures which state that knowing God in this way is a requirement for all of us.

Yeshua Messiah knows us in this manner. In fact, as I have said many times, my fervent desire is receiving the promise that we will know Him as we are known by Him. 1 Corinthians 13: 12B

Life in the modern American Church

Sorry, but institutional church life has little to do with personal intimacy with our Lord and Savior. In fact, in our modern spectator style of the “worship event” knowing Jesus is frowned on or worse.

People who are intimate with Jesus are often very active at church. But it is equally true that many [maybe even most] people who are very active at church do not know Him at all. They know a lot about him. They can quote Bible verses endlessly. But that is very different. In the church today, genuine personal knowledge of the Lord is rare. More than that the whole concept makes the institutional church extremely uncomfortable. But then the life of Jesus always does that (remember how He dealt with scribes & pharisees, church leaders of that day). So, they killed Him.

I know quite a bit about President Obama or Trump, but I have never met either man. I feel like I know and understand the apostle Paul extremely well. But again, I have never met him. The likelihood is that I do not know him very well at all. All I’ve done is read his writings and study scripture a lot. But I do know Paul much more intimately than I do either President.

What is intimacy?

Let’s start with a definition from Perplexity:

Intimacy means a close, familiar, and usually affectionate or loving relationship: often marked by trust, emotional closeness, and openness. It can also refer to physical closeness, but it is not limited to sex.

In a relationship sense: intimacy is when people feel safe enough to share thoughts, feelings, and vulnerabilities with each other.

A simple example: They built intimacy by talking honestly and spending time together.

Of course, in today’s world it is required to say that it is not limited to sex. In fact, commonly worldly sex has almost nothing to do with the intimacy we are talking about here. Hooking up is not intimacy.

So, let’s use the following for our definition:

Intimacy is a private personal relationship with a very close connection & detailed knowledge of each other’s character, likes, dislikes, & personality.

This is a two-way street. This level of intimacy requires intense communication back and forth between both of the people involved. In order to have intimacy with God you are required to know Him well and talk with Him often in a frequent, long-standing personal relationship. Have you discovered that Yeshua is funny and loves to laugh?

One of Jesus’ most frightening warnings

One of the scariest passages in scripture is the portion in Matthew 7:21–23. Jesus has been talking about walking the straight and narrow path and carefully examining the fruit of the people in your life, especially those teaching you. In verse 21, Jesus begins by talking about the need to obey what he has said.

Most of our walk has to do with determining the will of God—so we can obey. Many of these things can be determined by even a cursory read of the New Testament. We see the core of it in John 6:40

My Father’s will is that all who see his Son and believe in him
will have eternal life. He will raise them up at the last day.

So the first major thing is to believe in Jesus: that Jesus is the Son of God, that He died on the cross so that you could be forgiven of and rescued from sin, and that He rose from the dead. We see the next portion in John 15.

If you abide in me, and I live in you, then you will be very fruitful. John 15:5

So we must not only believe but we must live within Him and He in us. Jesus continues in verse ten…

If you keep my commandments, you will abide…

He then gives the next major portion of doing the will of the Father in verse twelve.

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

Obviously there is much more than this and a whole book could be written about how to do the will of God.

But let’s go back to Matthew 7.

Jesus points out some specific church goers. They are not the nominal believers we think of as we contemplate those in the church who are in trouble spiritually. In fact, these people tend to have good cover. Many are “super Christians”.

He goes after powerful ministers

He is obviously talking about people in the Church—those who prophesy, cast out demons, and do mighty works in the name of Jesus.

“Many will say to me when that day comes,
‘Lord, Lord, haven’t we prophesied in your name, cast out demons
in your name, and done miracles in your name?’” [Matt 7:22]

These people are obviously and regularly using the supernatural gifts given to believers by the Ruach HaKodesh (Holy Spirit) as listed in I Corinthians 12:

• Wisdom • Knowledge • Faith • Healing • Miracles
• Prophecy • Discernment • Languages • Interpretation of languages

In our day, in the spectator church of the new millennium, this would be a pretty radical Christian. Imagine such a person in your church (whether it is mainline liturgical, evangelical, Pentecostal, post-modern, or non-denominational). He or she could (and probably would) be seen as a strong person of God, filled with the Spirit. Such a ministry could be large and growing fast. It could quickly have a huge audience worldwide, within the church, and on TV and satellite.

This should be especially true in long-standing denominations where all ministry is done by volunteers. Ministering positions in these churches are filled by locating anyone who might be willing to do it. However, radical believers are not usually welcome in those denominations. They are normally shunned or asked to leave. Many church goers do not see this level of ministry at all.

We are talking about people with developed gifts. In modern America we are commonly talking about people in full-time ministry. No one else does this kind of thing any more. In the 60s and 70s, it was common to find relatively small home bible studies in most of the mainline denominations who ministered in the gifts like this within the charismatic renewal. Maybe this is the type of person Jesus is talking about.

Regardless, these are people who understand what is available spiritually. They believe in prophecy, demons, and miracles. They would seem to be assets to any church.

Ministry gifts are peripheral, knowing is what matters

For many people, ministering in power like this is the major goal of their Christian life. But Jesus cuts that out from under them in the next verse. His stunning comment to them in verse 23 reveals the heart of the matter:

“I will tell them, ‘Depart from me you evil doers,
I never knew you, who practice lawlessness.’”

Whoa!

So, you can do works of spiritual power, seemingly by the anointing of the Holy Spirit, and still not know Jesus? That seems to be the obvious conclusion. Don’t be paranoid or consumed by guilt. The solution is simple.

Of course, the fact is that satanists can do works of spiritual power. Pharisees can do works of spiritual power. Heretics can do works of spiritual power. Christian leaders who have fallen into sin can do works of spiritual power.

We won’t get into the source of this power. Often the power comes from the enemy. But in my experience, carnal believers can work in the true gifts of the Holy Spirit. The principles of the Bible simply work—often with little or no regard to the spiritual maturity of the worker using those concepts.

This why Jesus tells us to be fruit inspectors—not gift inspectors. God gave the gift of speech to an ass to speak to Balaam Numbers 22:22–32. Jesus said the rocks would cry out. Luke 19:40. Gifts can go to many places—almost anywhere in God’s creation.

Obviously it’s pretty important that we know Him: in fact, it is the core of the Christian walk. Without this, you are wasting your time with everything else.

The gifts in lawlessness?

This is even more radical. Jesus not only condemns them because He does not know them—He also states that they are working in lawlessness, doing evil. Who has ever heard that healings, prophecy, deliverance, and mighty spiritual wonders are part of doing evil? How can this be?

To be doing good, what we do must be manifested as a direct result of the leading and direction of the Lord. They need to be done in obedience to a call of God or guidance from the Lord. Here we open another can of worms ignored by the church. We cannot do good. We don’t even know what good is. Jesus covers this:

“Why do you ask what is good?” Jesus replied.
“There is only One who is good.” Matthew 17:19

We cannot do good on our own. History is littered with things done by man that were thought to be good, but Man had no idea of the consequences of his Deeds. The Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, the technological explosion, the Information Age have all caused real problems in the hands of people who thought they were doing good. But all they really did was break up our communities, then the nuclear family, got God out of school, pushed God out of our society, and fell for the evil religion of our age—evolution.

Doing what you think is good based on your own understanding of things
is normally not a good thing & good is not the result of it.

Doing good can only come through obedience to the leading of the Lord and following His guidance. Only then can we be assured that all the consequences are covered by the wisdom of God. He is wise enough to cover all the unintended results also. But it does mean that we need to be able to hear the Lord and sense the guidance of His Spirit. That’s what the New Covenant is all about (here’s Ezekiel 36:26&27):

A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances.

This is what Yeshua told us about in John 14-16.

Jesus didn’t know these people referred to in Matthew 7:23

They were working in the flesh: Paul in many places talks about carnal Christians—those who are still making decisions based on fleshly needs, wants, and desires. But carnal Christians can be very religious.

We cannot say that Jesus is condemning all carnal Christians—but it has certainly caused me to pray seriously for people still stuck in that problem. We must be led by the Holy Spirit, listening to the voice of the Lord, and following His lead. This is what the walk of faith is all about.

Going to church often means nothing other than a general disposition toward “it’s a good thing to do”. Modern church rarely has worship or Biblical teaching—even if they say they do. Performance-based rock’n’roll rarely rises to the level of worship with believers directly connecting to their Lord in adoration. Spiritual truths are rarely conveyed in sermons or “modern” preaching. Many of these pronouncements are based on psychology—and that is normally part of the secular humanism religion. In fact, psychologists are commonly seen as the priests of those beliefs.

The whole concept of megachurches is deeply flawed. What we see has no relationship to the only very large church we know of biblically—the early years in Jerusalem. They gathered together as the ekklesia in their homes. They ministered in the Temple, and got arrested for doing so.

I’ve talked with a large church pastor who readily admitted that very few attendees were true believers. In fact, it can be argued that many megachurch attendees are not believers at all—even though they speak Christianese fluently. Look at Simon the Magician in Acts. He thought he could buy the baptism of the Holy Spirit. In Acts 8:20-22 we read—

Peter said to him, “Your silver perish with you,
because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money!
You have neither part nor lot in this matter, for your heart is not right before God. Repent therefore of this wickedness of yours, and pray to the Lord
that, if possible, the intent of your heart may be forgiven you.

Remember, at this time the polls agree that less than 4% of self-confessed Christians in the USA even have a Biblical worldview. Four percent of a thousand people is only forty people.

We truly need to examine ourselves

Are we true believers entering through the narrow gate? Do we actually know the Lord? Does He talk to us regularly and do we obey what we hear from Him? If your prayer is not a conversation you need to work on your communication skills. Turn to Him and seek His help.

God is listening. Are you?

This should become a focus of your walk in the Spirit. It needs to be the center of your life in him until you learn how to do it. Our goal has to be satisfying the desire of the Messiah about His Bride—to become one with us. The blockage is all on our end. The revelation to most is that this takes a little effort and practice. We have to really want to talk with our Fiancée and Lord.

He will help us if we seek to know Him intimately. Ask Him for help.

Part 2 will explain more about how to do this.

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News flash!

This is not a surprise. It has been prophesied for two to three millennia.

Second, remember the pagers. We could still see a radical surprise. But the “sky is falling” crowd is beginning to run about wildly.

Remember, this has been expected for quite a while now

As I wrote in a comment to one of the pundits a few minutes ago. No big deal! It can only last until Our King is seated on the Throne.

I’m not saying that it is not going to get bad. We’re talking about the mountains falling down, the islands disappearing, the sun getting seven times hotter, 200,000,000 demon locusts, and on it goes. This is the early onset of the time just before Revelation 6-18 begins. It even appears that the first two horses are ready to burst out of the gates with the third and fourth right behind. Take a deep breath!

Look up! He is coming sooner than you think

He’s been telling us this for many years now. He has not changed His orders. We are to live quietly, minding our own business, working with our hands. And we are to look up, knowing that our redemption is drawing nigh.

We need to be ready to offer peace and comfort

We know what is coming. We know the plan. And we know that Yeshua Messiah is completely trustworthy. Get yourself cleaned up and ready to respond when the Lord drops someone in your lap to be helped. Repent completely and offer yourself as a living sacrifice. Same old stuff.

I’ll see you, here, there, or in the air………

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Don’t be roped in by the incessant assault of non-truth

I don’t know about you, but the extent, complexity, and fleshly pushbuttons of attractiveness in the Great Delusion have gone far beyond what I expected. AI is one of the extreme examples. Its primary danger is in the convincing lies which can flow out of it.

It’s an amazing machine which needs to be kept under control. I have found repeatedly that it is a huge amount of work to clean up the messes which abound in AI output. They are often very subtle. But they are always there.

Here’s an enlargement from below the poster in the essay graphic. Many areas are much worse than this sample.

I remember working with a reader of my stuff about a Christian project she was working on. She regularly sent me AI answers to her questions and AI explanations of her positions. She got quite upset when I repeatedly pointed out little changes and misdirections which had been produced by the AI.

I use AI quite a bit because it can draw much better than I can. I am not capable of painting that wonderful swirl of red paint depicting the woman’s skirt. It’s a gorgeous image. It’s not evil, but of no real worth. And I see no truth there. It’s just a pretty thing with no redeeming merit.

We must ask the Lord for discernment

This is not something new. As I mentioned in my most recent post, I am justifiably leery of bible commentators and human translators. It’s part of being a Berean believer. Even GotQuestions.chat which is an AI chat bot using the resources based on 28,514+ articles from Got Questions Ministries has to be checked. It’s pretty solid evangelical doctrine, but that doctrine is not flawless—though it is Biblically based. The Holy Spirit will guide you to the Truth if you ask the Lord to do that. As Jesus told us in John 16 :13a—

The Truth is that our own minds cannot be trusted either. It is true that the Lord has written the Torah on our heart if we are believers born of God. But, it takes time for us to allow that renewing of our minds which we need so badly. Again, we have to ask for it. The Lord requires that we seek, ask, knock while we are still living in the Training Place of Mankind.

As a woodworker, I had to learn the Truth that power tools are dangerous. As a graphic designer, illustrator, and writer, I am having to learn that AI is far more dangerous than a power saw, jointer, or router. Power tools can mangle your flesh. I assume that you are like me and have a new body on order. However, woodworking power tools cannot harm you spiritually.

AI can mangle your beliefs and understandings. It has no morals other than what is programmed into the software by non-believing software engineers. It’s the people creating the artificial intelligence who are the problem. AI is just a fancy machine. Compared to the intelligence and wisdom of the Lord, even quantum AI is a crude joke produced by power-hungry men and women.

Most of them are actually transhumanists trying to produce Homo Sapiens 2.0. They talk about using AI to correct the mistakes of the scriptures. They’re working on the development of brainless bodies which they can use to put their brains in, to keep their contagious selves alive forever. Talk about fools.

The Lord can write DNA and RNA freehand

Being overly impressed by the capabilities of AI and all the rest is foolishness.

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I totally messed up my life. I was a drug-crazed acid freak heavily into the occult when the Lord touched me. The Lord spoke to my Dad as he was driving home from work in the late 1950s. He ended up going to seminary and ordained a perpetual deacon in the Episcopal church. He was baptized in the Spirit as one of the first charismatics within the Minnesotan church. But all of this happened after I left home for college and the Air Force, after I graduated from high school in 1961.

I have come to realize that what the Lord did in my Dad was extremely unusual. As he mentored me in 1974-75, he had a constant refrain.

“You don’t care what man says about the Bible. You cannot trust commentaries. You need to read the scriptures and nothing but the scriptures until the Lord gets you straightened out.”

He taught me how to use Strong’s and Vine’s and that was it—in a different Bible study every evening. In hindsight, 50 years later, he never had anything good to say about his seminary training.

I am still in the process of being straightened out.

Doctrines of the church are very dangerous

I won’t get into them, but many doctrines rigidly preached are heretical. Over and over, as I have continued to simply study scripture, the Lord has shown me error in doctrinal stances. They are largely written to establish the church model of spectator events led by professional paid holy persons pontificating from elevated perches to the poor masses who are simply not educated.

Through the years, the Lord has shown me, and my wife before she got to go home, that the life of the ekklesia was found in small home Bible studies where scripture was discussed verse by verse, word by word, all questions considered and answered if possible, dependent upon the Holy Spirit to lead us into the Truth.

The Holy Spirit is the actual author of the scriptures

The following answer from GotQuestions.chat reveals an important part of it.

But it’s more than that. The Holy Spirit is able to explain what we read, guide us to additional verses, and provide verses which give us what the Lord specifically wants us to learn while we are reading. This is what Yeshua was talking about in John 14: 26—

the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.

On a practical level, I continue to find it a real help to ask the Holy Spirit for help before I start reading. It’s part of our daily bread, and we need to ask for it. That request is in the so-called Lord’s prayer for a reason.

You need to read the entire Bible

I don’t recommend that you read it in order, but you need to read entire books at a time. Mark up your Bibles with notes, cross-references, questions, answered prayer, whatever helps you. When your book gets heavily marked up, it is time to get a new version and start over. The new translation will help keep things fresh and jog you into new insights. The Lord will use things like that to help you see things that you’ve been avoiding.

I’ve gone through over a dozen versions in this manner. But after 52 years, a new version last year showed me a lot of insights I had not seen.

Here’s a good method of study.

Read the same book three times.

1. Read it like a novel: quick, easy like a story

2. Then read it carefully with a lot of word studies: Answer every question you have.

3. Read it normally and watch the Lord put it all together for you: it’s a real joy.

I recommend reading a chapter a day, every day—or more. Start out in the New Covenant. It will help you a lot as you read the Torah and the rest of the Tanakh. Some are convinced that you need to start in Genesis and go through to Revelation. But that’s a tough row to hoe for most new Gentile believers. Unless you are Jewish, it’s a very different culture. But understand that what Christians call the Old Testament is what we see fulfilled in the New Covenant (which you can read in Jeremiah 31: 31–43 and Ezekiel 36: 26–27).

It will change your life…

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The Satanic world system

What did Satan actual win from Adam and Eve

Actually, I’m not sure he won anything. He was part of the Father’s original plan from before creation. Since it was necessary to separate Man from God, Satan was just the fool who volunteered for the task. He thinks he’s pretty hot stuff. Just ask him—no, you don’t really want to do that. You already hear enough of his lies.

What Satan’s position is:

I believe that this is fairly accurate. I will qualify it by saying that Satan’s authority only functions through people who do not serve the Lord. He does not have the ability to force man to do anything. Mankind outranks demonic forces. Satanic authority is only there because God is the definition of a gentleman, and He does not force Himself in where He is not invited—so far. At present, He is using Satan et al as part of His training force. We will see that change in the near future. But He’ll do that by getting Satan, his minions, and his followers to bring disaster on their own heads. Then Yeshua will finish the job.

But Satan and his minions are forced to talk a human into giving them the power to use. He cannot force a human into anything. The human has to allow him to do what he does. Of course, he and his underlings are masters at using lies, terror, panic, worry, confusion, and all the rest to get these poor, stupid, weak humans to give them what they want.

The First thing to understand

God is the Creator and He has laid out the rules for His Creation. You violate those rules at your own peril. He even gave us the rules in writing. Satan knows the scriptures. Only humans are foolish enough (and sinful enough) to deny the authority of the scriptures. The demons have provided many false gods to encourage humans in their foolishness. But a human has to give the enemy the power they want.

The evil spirits know that the false gods are lies. They were the liars who created them. But we need to remember some things. I’ve been talking about this already. But, we are going to judge angels [& demons]. 1 Corinthians 6:3

Humans outrank the angelic beings as a higher species

We treat it like it’s a deep, dark secret or something. But Yeshua’s priestly prayer of John 17 clearly tells us that we are going to be one with Him, JUST as He is one with the Father. That is because, though it has been obscured by our sin, we are made in His image. The angels are not.

I don’t want to be flippant. But, glorious as they are, angelic beings are closer to worker bees in function. They are the workforce of God, his messengers, his warriors, his builders, and all that. They are not designed as companions.

Mankind’s robots are imitations of angels.

What fools Man has become. Let’s not get into aliens. >chortle<

But we are like our Messiah, and we will soon be one with Him, married to Him. We are the Father’s children—born of God. The angels seem like so much because we are still in the flesh living on and in the Training Place of Mankind, almost completely blind to spiritual things. But that time is nearly over.

Don’t get me wrong. Angels and demons are not like animals—our pets. They are strong and powerful. They are quick and intelligent. Angels are incredibly beautiful—when that is needed. Or they might be brutally functional, when that is needed. Or they might be four-sided, wheels within wheels… But they are sexless, don’t reproduce, and entirely uncreative. Creativity is part of the image of the Father. Angels are obedient. Evil spirits will receive judgment (coming soon).

Satan hates us because the least human outranks him

This is a simple fact that we need to keep in mind. Because we are so spiritually blind, we can get confused about these things. But these days are soon coming to an end. We are children of God. The angelic realm is not.

Also, only humans who choose to love and serve the Lord are going to survive this Training Place of Mankind. The same is true of the angels. Just imagine having an angel to help you in your workshop. Actually, learning to use AI might be good experience to have when dealing with angels. They are going to be larger, stronger, faster, well behaved, and so on. But loving, kind, creative are simply beyond them.

The New Creation will be full of wonder!

What can we hear in our minds?

Elohim, angels, demons, and ourselves

This is critical to understand. We are spiritual beings living in an earth suit, with our soul interfacing between spirit and flesh. We were designed to be able to hear spirits. But sin cuts us off from the Father. It’s strange but true. The Father cannot hear us because of our sin. But we can hear the Father simply by asking the Messiah to talk with us. Truly. This is one of the main changes which happen to us when we are born from above.

The Creep and his minions, on the other hand, are lawless, anything goes. They are rude, pushy, nasty, tempting, lovely, sexy, whatever it takes. And we can hear them, and they know it. They are consummate, inveterate liars. It’s the core of their character. They actually believe their lies.

The Lord is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, & self-control among His other glorious attributes. But the Lord requires us to ask, seek, knock. He will not speak unless we ask, seek, knock. Until we get our sin cleaned up, only the Messiah will respond.

Our own thoughts are basically worthless, at this point. We learn to ignore them. We’re seeing through a glass dimly. At this point our ignorance hurts us.

Heathens are in real trouble

They can hear spirits. But they do not have access to the Father and His love. He speaks to them through what He created. Satan and his minions have free reign in them. If a demon speaks to them, they just perceive it as one of their own thoughts.

Does this help you understand some of the reactions you get (if you are a believer) from heathen co-workers, and companions? Does this make you appreciate a little the dangers you face when driving in the middle of hundreds and thousands of heathen drivers? Does this explain things like Jihadists, berserkers, thieves, gangs, cabals, and all the rest?

Even your “good, kind, friendly” neighbors are constantly hearing demonic thoughts. The enemy can be very subtle.

Here’s something to think about

If the percentage of true believers we experience here in the US matches the rest of world—and, all the polls tell us that true believers are less than 4% of the total Christians [probably 3%]—then there are less than 100 million believers in the entire world of over eight billion people. Statistically, a megachurch of 40,000 people would have 1600 true believers or so.

My experience is that true believers are spread like dissolved salt to season the population of the entire world. The Lord doesn’t tend to keep us in clumps.

Only reborn believers can hear God easily

The ability to hear the Lord is part of the rebirth package. You do have to ask for it. It will take some practice. But what delightful practice it is.

We are all unique so all I can offer is a general procedure. Rebirth starts with repentance. I suggest that you begin by asking the Lord to show you all your sin—yes, all of it. You need to understand how bad it is. Then your repentance will be real.

Ask Him to forgive you. Once you are clean, you can ask Yeshua to be your Lord and King. You can ask Him to baptize you with the Holy Spirit. You can ask Him to come within you and teach you how to hear Him and talk with Him. He will get it done in a way that works well—specially designed to work with who you are designed to be. If you cooperate, it can happen quite quickly. You’ll need to trust Him and do what he suggests. He will teach you how to test and verify your conversations.

You can ask the Lord if what I am telling you is the truth. He will make sure that you understand what is available. It’s all about Yeshua and His relationship with you, personally. Yeshua is absolutely trustworthy.

So, now we know enough to discuss the satanic world system

First, you need to know that the coming Great Tribulation will be an event on the same level as the Flood. The Father is planning on cleaning up the mess. As you know, like Isaiah prophesied, “The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants.”

One of the major things about the Flood was that it completely eliminated the Satanic world system. That will happen this time, as well. The world system will be completed destroyed.

What is this world system?

We usually call this Western civilization. That’s what the Renaissance did—it pushed God out of the world system. It was part of the original outgrowth of what we now know as Humanism—which was installed as the official system of the United States during the 40s, 50s, and 60s. The Time cover saying God is Dead kind of sealed the deal because most of America saw it as truth..

So what does it include?

The educational system, the legal system, the entertainment industry, the political system, the military system, the justice system, the institutional religious system, the communication system, the travel system, and every other system which works without the involvement of the Lord.

The reign of the King of Kings

All of this will be replaced by the reign of the King of Kings, seated on the throne of David in Jerusalem. He will intimately know every person remaining on earth. He knows everything. He is all powerful and omnipresent. He is a good and wise King.

His rulership will be experienced thorough individually appointed elders who are perfectly suited to their tasks. These elders will have instant communication with their king, as needed.

It will be very good!

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Give unto the Lord the glory due to His name;
Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.

My assumption is that you have never been to a worship service. What the institutional church and religious men call worship has almost nothing to do with worship. It is all about praise—at best. It’s mostly about how good I feel, these days.

When is the last time you heard the worship leader stop proceedings and say, “We need to stop here and spend some time with each of us talking and singing to the Lord about how and why you love Him. If you run out of words, just sing in the Spirit”? It’s an incredible break in a home Bible study with brothers and sisters in the lord.

My basic contention is that praise is third person—Him. Worship is second person—You. That’s a major difference. Here’s my favorite worship song:

It’s all focused directly upon my Lord, and King. I tell Him what I truly think about Him. “You are the Mighty King. You are the Lamb of God. You alone, Yeshua, do I serve.”

Worship today has degenerated into telling others about how glorious He is. It’s seen as an evangelistic religious act. It’s mostly praise, hopefully. “He is wonderful and He is trustworthy” is a very different thing to say than “You are wonderful, and You are trustworthy.”

Worship is talking directly to Elohim

It is true that the Lord inhabits the praises of His people. But the Lord responds directly to those who worship Him. Hopefully, one of the first prayers of the morning is “I give myself to you, Lord, to use for your purposes. My prayer is that You will anoint me today to help you according to your purposes. My desire is to be available to you.”

My first gimme prayer, as part of my waking procedure, is “Show me any sin in my life that I need to repent of. I need to be clean so you can use me freely.” Hopefully, the response to that will not be like it was the first time when I filled out two legal-size sheets of paper, two-column, both sides, stream of consciousness it poured out before me. But now I keep clean throughout the day so that I can functionally live sin-free. Clean and holy* is the baseline of walking in the Spirit.

* [For a definition of holy, I use Strong’s for hagios: physically, pure; morally blameless; religiously, consecrated—set apart] Religious holiness is an oxymoron as far as I am concerned.

Once I have gotten myself cleaned up, my conversations with the Lord are not impeded. If I do not go through my routine, I quickly find myself in a snarl, a mess, deluged by frustration and confusion. Then I indeed do have something to repent of, so I can be forgiven and start over. At that point, the Lord occasionally says something like, “You never actually sinned.” To which I snark, “Yeah, just went stupid again.”

I’m not saying that there isn’t power in praise

Praising the Lord in the middle of intense trial has remarkable benefits. I used to say that we shouldn’t praise Him for our troubles, but praise Him from within our troubles. But as I’ve matured I find I do actually praise Him for my troubles—for they build me up and yield the peaceful fruit of righteousness. Discipline is a wonderful thing to experience when the omniscient, all-powerful Father implements it.

Even then turning it into worship helps a lot. “I lean on you for this circumstance, Lord, for you have shown me that you are absolutely trustworthy. So, I trust you now, as well.”

The important thing is remaining focused upon your Lord, King, and Friend

He is the one with the power to enable your life to be edifying and anointed—truly helpful to the people you are with. Our life is to be an act of worship of a God who loves us and has an incredible plan for us.

This is part of a 24-7-365 lifestyle.

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I’ve mentioned parts of my discipleship many times in many ways. My blood father was my mentor as He guided me into the true knowledge of Yeshua Messiah for the first two years after I met Jesus.

My true discipleship came over the next 44 years, after Yeshua gave me my wife, Patricia Harper. He had designed us to disciple each other, by the power of His Spirit. We became one spiritually on a level I had no idea even existed. It was truly a case of iron sharpens iron with two strong-willed, severely damaged people. Sometimes we joked about how some of the friendly disagreements had registered on the Richter scale. We did get into it intensely at times. But it was wonderful. She is a great lady of God. I’m convinced that God took her home because her body failed her, she had learned all she could, and He had some deeper work to do with me.

He did that from New Year’s on 2020 until New Year’s on 2026. I’m not the same man. I became a total hermit. The last couple of years I saw a human a couple times a year. One of the friends of Pat’s oldest daughter (who died in 1987) took me to my yearly physicals and eye exams. It was her idea that it was time to move into a senior independent living facility so I could relate to people again. The Lord strongly anointed that idea and prepared me well, spiritually, emotionally, and financially to do the deed. It’s been a massive change for sure. But I like the place and I’m gradually learning a little bit about being sociable.

But Pat and I were always loners—often shunned

When the Lord gave us the opportunity to start a church, we ended up ministering to people who had been abused—often by the church. We called the place Crown of Thorns, teaching that name as a symbol of how well Jesus understood abuse.

So, I ask again, have you ever been discipled?

The Good News is that the best discipler lives inside of you, if you are born of God—recreated in His image. Ask Him to disciple you. He already is, but giving Him permission lets Him help more freely. Asking for the baptism of the Holy Spirit will let Him work more powerfully.

You will find, if you haven’t already, that the basic process is to ask, to seek, to knock. Unlike the enemy who will rape you in a heartbeat, Yeshua will often not move until you ask. When you ask, the norm is that He will give you a person to disciple you. As I mentioned He gave me first my Dad, and then my wife. They both realized that they were called to disciple me.

Similarly, I was well ware that I was called to disciple my wife. Learning to disciple her was the best learning process I ever went through. The Lord made it clear I was to give up my life to help Him enable her to be what she was called to be. She was called to be a shepherd of sick sheep.

After she graduated from Episcopalian seminary, the Bishop refused to ordain her (for a transparently stupid reason as she was near the top of her class). So, we left on our own into the wilds of the Church. After she lost both her daughters, one to cancer and the other to rebellion by going to Pat’s former husband [who left her because of her faith and his serial fornication], Pat continued her training by becoming a Certified Biblical Counselor. When we started what became Crown of Thorns, she became the legal and public head of the church—though in private she always turned to me. She was a gifted preacher and a strongly anointed counselor. She had no interest in running the church. She made me the administrator and the teaching pastor. That fit what the Lord had told me to do.

Both of us were convinced our focus was to be discipleship

Our sheep were surprised. They had no idea such a thing existed. They’d never experienced it in any of the churches they had attended. Pat and I had always gotten into trouble when we discipled people, so our ministry was normally a weekly home Bible study. They were never considered an official part of the church we attended—even though we always got permission first. One of the those studies grew into Crown of Thorns.

We went to many churches and discipleship was not part of any of them—Protestant, Pentecostal, baptist, evangelical, or non-denominational.

A definition of discipleship

The foundation is Yeshua, of course, but the core was intensive verse by verse study of scripture. We used that to teach and train people how to walk in the Spirit in their daily lives; how to allow the Holy Spirit to have full rein; how to work in the gifts of the Spirit; how to use practical spiritual warfare; and how to overcome the evil one as John told us to do in 1 John 2.

We taught how to pray without ceasing, how to hear the Lord, and how to verify the spirit who spoke to you. We taught how to recognize your death as is talked about in Romans 6—and “I am crucified in Christ, and I no longer live. But the Life I live, I live by the faith of the son of God.”

Just the straight simple Good News, pulling no punches.

That’s what you need.

My best-selling believing book is How to Teach the Bible with Power where I explain how to do what I have been talking about here.

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I do not care if you believe that the Holy Spirit is Ruach HaKodesh, the breath of the Father, or that He is the third member of the Trinity. I care about what Jesus told us, what Paul explained, and what John called the anointing received. My position is that the Father, the Messiah, and the Holy Spirit are all God, completely one and in union. When I am talking with them, I have gradually quit separating them out. And, I certainly cannot tell their voices apart—it’s all the same amazing person, wise & strong beyond belief.

All I can do is quote John who shared what Jesus said. 14: 16-17

And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, 17 even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you.

I have experienced the presence of the Lord within me for over 52 years. He has done countless works within and through me, down to marvelous things like asking Him to help me find something I lost. Then I watch as He moves my eyes across the room stopping them when they rest upon the item I am looking for. That has happened several times. I did not move my eyes. They were moved from within me.

Things like that are commonplace in my life. It is clear that what Messianic Jews are calling HaShem is living within me. For me it has always been one God even though I used to be more specific about what names I used.

Jesus was even more clear in 14: 22-24.

“22 Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?” 23 Jesus answered him, “If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and WE will come to him and make OUR home with him. 24 He who does not love me does not keep my words; and the word which you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me.

Again, this is the truth I have lived with since January 1974. On a practical level, I quit thinking of the Trinity as 3 persons many years ago. It is just the presence of God, HaShem, the Father, living within me.

In many of us, the “normal teachings” of Pentecostals and Charismatics have not held up in daily living. It is true that your spiritual language is commonly the first spiritual gift experienced—but not always. It is most reliably received in the joy of worship when you are reborn. But I never experienced that [I was too stoned when I was reborn]. I was a member of the frozen chosen (Lutherans and Episcopalians in Minnesota). Up there, emotions are seen as rude or at least impolite.

For many believers these days, tongues is not an ecstatic utterance. It is a private prayer language He gave us to help us walk in the Spirit. It has great power because it is the Lord praying through us.

When I am not sure how to minister to someone, I can quietly pray, even whisper, in the Spirt and the Lord will tell me what is going on so I can pray more effectively. He uses the surrender of praying in the Spirit to point out enemy spiritual activity.

Remember, praying in the Spirit is the second weapon of our spiritual armor in Ephesians 6. [That’s why the S is capitalized in most translations.] No emotion is involved in most cases. I just give the Lord control of my tongue and He uses it for His glory, with His power. It comes from Him, as needed—any time I need it.

I understand completely when Paul says in 1 Corinthians 14:

18 I thank God that I speak in tongues more than you all; 19 nevertheless, in church I would rather speak five words with my mind, in order to instruct others, than ten thousand words in a tongue.

The main use of tongues is as a private prayer language between me and my God. No emotion. ExtraBiblical. Daily experience. The spectator church does not allow for anything else, in most cases. The elders are not available, and even if they were they are not trained to handle the gifts in a Sunday-style spectator event.

Back to what Jesus told us in John 14:

“25 “These things I have spoken to you, while I am still with you. 26 But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.”

This is something the Father is doing for Yeshua, after Yeshua was glorified. This Counselor (I assume the word used is Paraclete, but I didn’t check) is given from the Son by the Father, and they are all God. Intellectuals who do not have the Spirit are driven nuts by this whole concept. Because as non-born again intellectuals, they are of the world and cannot understand spiritual things. In my life it is just God working within me. It is what I assume Sergio is calling HaShem.

What Jesus promised, He did. I don’t need to understand it. I need to live it out. It’s been a very difficult, but wonderful, life. Much of the difficulty has been found in trying to explain the Spirit to people who have not been baptized in the Spirit. That’s even more difficult than trying to explain born of God to Nicodemus (or any other non-saved person).

That’s what Jesus came to do. And that is what He has done in my life day by day for over 52 years now. The reality of the New Covenant spoken of by Jeremiah and Ezekiel, among others.

If you believe,

All you have to do is ask Yeshua in faith to baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. He will do that for you—instantly. Then you have to learn to live it out. The Lord will help you.

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