Remember the famous words spoken from the wall: “I am doing a great work and I cannot come down. Why should the work cease while I come down to you?” (Nehemiah 6:3.) There has to be something of this attitude in our services. This is one of the major points that I want to bring out. I don’t want to give a divine order for things that would say, “Now this, this, and this is what you should do.” But I am going to give principles to follow by which a service should flow in a divine order. One of them is that there should never be a break in the focus that God is bringing to the Kingdom. We could do many other things, but maintaining that focus—that focus of spirit—is the most important.
One of the most important things is not, “Let’s devise a great strategy.” We have one. Nor is it, “Let’s see how we’re going to fight the battle next.” We are in it. We have gained so much victory. We must maintain that focus of spirit and not be pulled down to a focus or a communication on a soulish level—it is not important and it could do no good. The solution to everything we face has to be something that comes from the level of spirit.
As we move into the Kingdom more deeply, we are learning that the authority of intercession with a maintained focus is the big thing. We need to appreciate how far we have gone into this world of seeing the elemental spirits being brought around to Christ (Colossians 2:8–10, 20).
If you follow the weather reports, you see that the weather is just unbelievable. The world isn’t going to have any good weather. In fact, there will be nothing but unrest; there is going to be nothing but trouble until they say, “Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord” (Matthew 23:39).
This whole thing has just been a spiritual battle. We can get up in the morning oppressed and think that something is wrong. But it is a spiritual battle. We have to help the people into this very positive thing, because what scares me is that they may be hit with a battle that they do not know how to handle, and they may accept it as something wrong with them—self-condemnation and everything else. We have to constantly tell them that all of this is just very simply an illusion and a lie of the enemy. We have the victory; we are moving into it. We dare not forget for one split second that this is an assault of the enemy and we can reject it, and we have the victory. We have the victory. We have it, and we are moving deeper into it every day.
We have been in the process of a battle which has been so intense. And in that we determined that we were not going to lose our focus or our intensity. This is a time when the people should be freer and freer to exercise their faith. If they want to talk about their experiences and they have gone through something heavy but they have a real revelation of faith about it, then let them speak up. However, if they have gone through something heavy and they do not have any revelation about it, then we will just bless them and pray that they get a revelation about it; but we do not want to hear about it. We do not want the negative thing projected.
Someone could get up during a service and speak, “I’m going through this and I’m going through that.” But anything negative which has not voiced the victory of Christ becomes satanic propaganda. And it has a demoralizing effect on everybody. We have to break that—break it thoroughly. You are not going to speak anything negative. You are going to follow the Word that God gives.
Let the people keep voicing faith. When the negativity comes back, it is like enemy propaganda. It is a satanic thing, because the facts interpreted without faith always produce a lie. The facts interpreted without faith always produce a lie. I cannot speak the facts over any of you without speaking with faith and love for you (I Corinthians 13:1; Ephesians 4:15). Otherwise, I become critical and negative. I destroy you by the facts of your own life.
That is true even if you are not taking a negative approach. Speaking the facts in a neutral way is still satanic propaganda if it is not focused with faith.
You see, in the Kingdom whatever is not of faith is sin. That’s the Scripture. For whatsoever is not of faith is sin. Romans 14:23b, KJV. So if you cannot speak the truth in love, you cannot speak the truth at all (Ephesians 4:14–15).
If you cannot speak the truth in love, you cannot speak the truth at all, because for us in the Kingdom of God there is no truth without faith and love. That is why we have to see that we keep fostering the love, fostering the faith, and let the people speak it. They can talk about what they have gone through only if they have reached a point of absolute victory in it. If they get together and just hash over their problems, they will wipe each other out. But if they begin to talk about the promises of God, and claim them, and release one another, it really works. There is life in it. Factual knowledge can mean death to you.
I refuse to accept anything but the Word. Nothing else matters. When you said, “God spoke to me that I have created by a Word the instrument of my own release,” I took that. I said, “I don’t have to do anything more. I don’t have to wait for some perfection. I am already that instrument, and I refuse to accept anything more or less than just being that.”
In fact, when you get right down to it, you cannot speak of the facts or the truth with love and faith but what you believe the Word about what we are—what we are, what you are, what I am. You are the instrument of my deliverance.
Everything of truth is relative to what God is creating us or has created us to be. Every truth that we speak in love and faith has to be relative to what God has created us to be. There is no such thing as saying, “I believe God for your deliverance,” unless you have a revelation of me and a revelation of yourself in relation to me.
We have been a long time coming to this place, but it is not too late. We can do it. It just takes a moment. Time is not a factor; space is not a factor; facilities are not a factor. In the realm of spirit you transcend the limitations of the natural, material world. We can do anything because of what we are in God. This is a positive faith. It is very, very positive. And it is going to have to get a lot more positive than what we have even seen. We are going to have to be absolutely positive about this.
We saw a long time ago that we would create in the spirit by a positive determination that is held with a concentration, where we do not let go of it. When you let go of it, that is where you waver; that is where you have stopped your creative flow (James 1:5–8). What we are saying now is that we are going to start this flow to create, even if we are creating destruction in areas that God wants to bring down (Jeremiah 1:10). Every time we keep this fixed focus and we do not let go, we can complete something at the other end.
The fixed focus—we have talked about that for years, but people are finally getting it. I have been twenty-five years ahead of what the people could grasp. I began years ago to tell them about this thing of the fixed focus, about living in the presence of the Lord, all of these things. Now they can go back and listen to the tapes in the Old Library and it begins to come alive. But it has taken such a long time for God to take the layers off of our awareness, until we become aware of it. We have to walk in this. We have to know who we are; we have to do it. We are the Kingdom. We do not take the Kingdom; we are it! We just have to manifest ourselves in the focus of our faith (Luke 17:20–21).
This is our address, right here. This is where we live. We are simply not going to lose this focus! We are in it and we are going to walk in it. We have had that challenged; the enemy has done everything he could to break that focus down. If we could just count or measure or have some gauge for the intensity of the energy Satan has thrown at us, we would be appalled at it.
We very definitely, positively have entered into a new level. What a tremendous release from the religious spirit we have attained to! There isn’t any difference now between the first, second, third, and fourth generations. There just isn’t any. The Lord is releasing us from those distinctions and we have had services that were so much fun.
I have been aware of the intensity of the assault, but there is also great capacity for us to reject it. If we are very negative and start speaking the depth of it, we will have a bigger problem. But instead we can be totally entrenched with the idea of our victory.
It goes back to that fixed focus. We refuse to let go of our victory no matter how intense the battle gets. I know for myself that I just refused to accept that it had the ability to knock us off track.
JOHN: Even when there seemed to be certain symptoms in it, we would keep saying, “This is not valid. We reject it.”
In my thinking, the battle is so obviously a spiritual battle; it only touches the physical level. But with it comes an awesome psychic assault that tries to totally cloud your thinking and the awareness of what you have actually attained. However, that cloud can be dispelled and nothing will touch the faith and our positive fixed focus. When we exercise this, no oppression has to stay; within a very short time it can be gone!
Within just a few minutes, it can be gone. You can be under something, but if you know that it is a lie, then don’t speak it as though it were the truth. This is what we are trying to get at. Don’t say, “Oh, I was so sick today!” Say, “No, there was a lying symptom I had today. I rejected it. It looked like everything broke loose upon me, but I know it is not true. The facts have to be expressed in the word of my faith. What has God said?”
Old pastors tend to be fearful, and because they are fearful they don’t produce anything. I know of one pastor in particular who was like that. He was so fearful all the time; fear was ingrained into the whole structure of his being. The result was that his fear restrained everyone who came under his hand. We had laid hands on at least a hundred men to set them into offices of responsibility and ministry; but they are just now functioning because they are out from under his hand.
We have to have faith that this thing is going to take off—that it already has. We keep facing the truth that is so difficult for us to accept: we are so much deeper into the Kingdom than we know. If we just have faith, now we can manifest it. We are positioned. We are entrenched in certain things that can never be defeated. We are entrenched in things that God has created in us and through us that can never be violated, that can never be changed. But it is so difficult for our thinking to drop this negativity of continually looking at the circumstances.
We have lived by the obvious, by the senses. We have lived that way, and that is what you have totally changed by this Word. This is the bottom line. We say, “I change an age,” and it changes.
Every fact that is presented without faith and love is Satan’s propaganda. Everything that you view without revelation is propaganda, a fiery dart of the enemy to try to disturb your faith (Ephesians 6:16). I don’t care if they document it and say, “These are the facts.” Facts cannot be anything but a lie unless they are interpreted with the wisdom and the faith of Christ Jesus the Lord. Let me repeat that: Facts cannot be anything but a lie unless they are interpreted by the wisdom and faith of Jesus Christ the Lord. We must be believers; we just have to believe.
You finally realize that faith and love are not something that you try to work up. It is a decision of your spirit. That makes it easy. I decide. In my spirit, I decide to love. I decide to believe. I am determined to be a believer. It is not something that I pump up or work up; it is not an emotional thing. It is something in my spirit that is going to be expressed in faith and love.
We are getting something really important, because I think Satan’s whole tactic is not so much to hit us physically, or to get us off in our thinking. But if he can just knock us out of our faith, it nullifies everything.
What is the purpose of the battle, and what is the purpose of your being hit? Satan could hit you with symptoms so that you think you are sick; then all of a sudden it is gone and you realize that the source of it was totally spiritual. But if you look at symptoms that are injected and produced from the spirit realm—spirits do that to you—and if you accept them as a true condition, you will be sick.
This is resurrection life totally. We are going to create the atmosphere where you are always going to think this way. Behind everything that hits us physically there is a spirit.
I said, “Why is it that we see all of these Scriptures about divine healing, and yet our people go through these various symptoms and problems?” And the wisdom of God said, “They are not sick; it is the assault of Satan.” I think we have more health than we know; but the enemy tries to hit us, and we accept the illusion of illness.
We accept the symptoms, and therefore we have it. That’s when we get it.
And we especially accept those symptoms if we think that we have opened up a door someplace to get hit by them—such as through condemnation.
You may know that you are fighting a spirit, but it is difficult to get rid of it until you get it clear in your mind that you have not done something wrong that made God mad at you. That does it. Once you get rid of that condemnation and you come to decide, “There is absolutely no basis for this, and it’s not mine,” then you can get rid of it.
Satan will stack the deck with what appear to be facts, lying symptoms; and then he will give you a nice manual on how to interpret them that will cause you to wind up in self-condemnation and no faith.
He tries to make us spiritual hypochondriacs by suggesting, “You are really a mess. You have an ailment here.” And we can say, “Oh, I had better really look to see what I’ve done wrong.” And for a while you can sit there believing that you really do have a problem.
We are going to get to the root. It doesn’t seem to make the symptoms go away yet, but we are plowing, and we’re going deeper, and getting close. We are going to hit it.
There must be no “ifs,” because you can come to the place where an “if” can open the door to a fact that is interpreted negatively in unbelief.
Then you can’t get rid of it. That is the open door.
It is like saying, “ ‘If’ you don’t take proper care of your body, you are going to be sick or something.”
Why is it that there are areas in the world where people do not have cancer? They don’t have vitamin and mineral supplements. They don’t have much of anything. They have what is interpreted by nutritionists as being very inadequate diets, and yet they live very healthy lives. They don’t believe in being sick.
I have come to the place where I don’t even care what you think; I don’t believe the symptoms. We know the Word. And there is a deliverance that God is bringing to us. It is our job to create the release for you just as you have created the release for us a million times. It is a faith; it is an atmosphere that we are creating around you that does not depend on anything except the fact that we have finally accepted the Word by faith.
I am feeling that so much. I got hold of a Scripture that I don’t believe I had ever interpreted the same way before. In the American Standard Version I Timothy 4:8 reads, “Bodily exercise profiteth a little.” In another translation it says, “profiteth little.” But godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come. I Timothy 4:8b, KJV. And I have watched the way that the focus of interpreting that Scripture has been: “Well, does exercise profit little—or a little? What is exercise then?” That is not what Paul was trying to say! He was saying that it is walking with God that is profitable for everything!
I tell you, you don’t even have to twitch a finger and you can have health surging through your body. You don’t have to get up in the morning and do dance exercises with the people on television. You don’t have to eat certain foods, or do this and that other thing. I agree that you should not deliberately eat poison. But you have a promise that when you are doing the gospel work to the ends of the world, if you drink any deadly thing it will not hurt you (Mark 16:15–18). That destroys forever the tenet of every religion which says that God will accept you if you conform to a certain code. The thing is that God does not even care about that. What God is saying is that the only thing that really counts is that you believe. You will be sick, you will be whatever wrong thing you can be, if you believe it. Don’t accept yourself that way.
It really is according to your faith—whatever you believe.
What does the Lord say? We will never get to the depth of these words: According to your faith be it unto you. Matthew 9:29b, KJV.
But it is so hard to get to that point, because the enemy has set so much against us in this. Even in the last one hundred years of the Restoration nothing has been able to break out of it. Only one fine little line breaks you through.
That’s why this Word is our address now. This changes everything. We are never going to go back to living that other way.
We should just take this Word and go over it again and again. Let the people get this thing. Let them really get it.
Problems come, and they produce an endless search for a solution when you believe in the problem rather than believing in the perfect provision of the Lord for us. Doesn’t that make a lot of sense? Okay, You have a problem. Do you believe that the Lord provided all things that pertain to life and godliness? (II Peter 1:2–4.) Godliness is profitable for everything pertaining to the life that now is and the life that is to come (I Timothy 4:8). Here, and in the hereafter, the whole thing is taken care of.
Where did this idea, “You just have to grin and bear it,” come into the thinking of people? Where did it come from?
Where was it that the people finally accepted, “I’m going to have my problem, but I’ll try to be cheerful”?
That is one thing that you have never accepted. You have been such a fighter. I had never realized it before, and it almost frightened me when I first got to be around you to see what you were like behind the scenes, because you were furious at everything that held you. I have studied that for years. You do not accept anything other than the perfect provision of the Lord.
We are bringing forth the greatest Word that has come since the early Church. The Word was not bound. I was free. I fought restriction and oppression. I fought it. And it may have taken a time before my freedom and liberty were manifested.
Paul said, “I am in prison like a criminal, but the Word is not bound” (II Timothy 2:9). That is true today, but the Word is not bound; and it is not going to be bound. I am a free agent of Christ Jesus the Lord (I Corinthians 9:1, 19). I am going to break the chains on the people. Do you know what you have to do to break a chain? Just say, “Look at your chains. They’re illusions, aren’t they?”
That is the Word for you. By your Word you created the instrument of your own release. The drive has been for you to bring the Word to create that which would bring your release. The Lord showed me that, and yet I didn’t think it would take so long. Yet I can see God moving so thoroughly, and what He did is greater than I ever could have imagined. But it is interesting that we have created, at this point, a faith to come back to minister to you (grampa).
I think there is a principle that you are getting at. I have had a great gift of faith from God. It is a great gift. I have spoken the Word; and by my faith which God gave me in the Word I have created you. And in that creating of you, you have found a faith to create me.
Now the whole issue comes right down to something that sounds simple. I don’t say in a general way, “I have faith in the Lord,” but I have faith in your faith. I have faith in the faith that God has put in you. So what you are saying is that we have finally reached the level, we have finally reached the stage where I have faith in the faith that God has put in you for me.
God simply is not letting this be without a flow. The faith has to be a flow. He will not let it happen any other way. And you must believe the same way. Recently two or three people reminded me, “You said that you would not take the deliverance without all of us having it.” So they are having faith for me, but they also are having faith in my faith for them.
That is the issue of the Kingdom, because that statement committed you to something—that we would make it. And that’s why it has always been important to you that we make it, because you knew that we were the instruments of your release. But now it is happening. And I have never felt so separate from you and yet so one with you at the same time, as I have during these days when I know that my faith for you is not dependent on anything about you. It is totally dependent on the Word that you have already ministered to me, and I believe it. It is not connected with your day-to-day activity or anything else; I know that Word is true. For the first time I feel that I know who you are, that I know what God has said; and I know that we already have it right now by the victory of Christ. It is settled (Psalm 119:89). In my heart it is settled. And if it is settled in my heart, then it is done—totally done.
You made one statement: “I have never felt so separate from you and yet so one with you.” We have failed to understand that in the Kingdom we must function as individuals or we are not one (I Corinthians 12:12–19). And that is what you are doing. You are seeing that. We have to function as individuals. You will have to be something else besides someone hovering under my arm. You have to be sons yourself. The umbilical cord that seems to be so mystical has to be broken. And then we begin to stand as an exceeding great army—all of us, as individuals, reaching maturity (Ezekiel 37:10).
There is a separateness that comes, but it is not independence. It is an individual separateness before God that is related to our being all one. In other words, God is not creating one man and covering him with barnacles. You are not hanging on to me as a person. You cannot create me that way; you would just suck.
You have to be what you are to be, so that you can be to me what you are to be. Some would say that we have this thing of “control.” But we are coming into something that is so mystical; it is a spiritual control by the Holy Spirit. We have come into the leaderless period, where there are not the leaders leading it on, but we are all walking together.
The thing that is so significant is that this is where our love for each other comes from. We are finally seeing that. You start to love people so much because you realize what they are: they are individuals, walking with God, who are so important to your release. And you just love them because you realize that you could never be what they are in a million years; but you see what they are being to you and the faith that they supply to you (Ephesians 4:15–16). It is a whole release. And you love them so much that you can barely stand it.
This is what you must see: A father is not to be just someone who blows his kids’ noses. He is concerned about their reaching maturity and all that they can be. And we have to push to see that the spirit of this thing goes from here throughout the whole Body. Everyone must feel this; we cannot stress it too much. The promise that God gave me was that I would be like Abraham, the father of a great multitude (Genesis 15:5). And it is coming. Everywhere you look the Body is turning to family; and you cannot become family without having the true spirit of the father.
The spirit of the mother is solicitous and worries. Long after the milk dries up the mother is still trying to sustain something with the child. The father should come with one thing in mind, and that is to do the opposite. He is not to suppress, but to shelter them only as long as necessary, until they are moving out on their own. Mothers do not know how to turn a release to the child, which is understandable; but fathers do not know how to do anything but suppress. They are always worrying that a child is going to go wrong, so they suppress him. But the true father ministry takes over where the mother relinquishes. Many times Marilyn has said, “This is in your hands,” and walked away. She said, “You are going to be the father, and I’m not going to interfere.”
When there is the fathering, this means that suppression ends, and there is a very progressive supervision of maturity: “You are going to be something.” You ask, “What do we do?” You prophesy; you function. The sons are like arrows in the quiver of a mighty man (Psalm 127:3–5). You become the weapons. You become the instrument of my deliverance. You become my defense, my aggressiveness, my warfare. But you are not suppressed. It is a kind of submission to each other that we are learning. It is not the submission of suppression; it is a submission of initiative.
Let me define the difference. A submission of oppression allows someone to become nothing but just a “yes” man: “Yes sir, no sir”; he is suppressed. But the submission of initiative differs. It is a kind of submission that a general has in his troops as he says, “Take that mountain.” And they say, “Yes sir,” and do it. It is a submission of initiative. “Be this instrument. Be this person.” It is the same kind of faith that the centurion had (Matthew 8:5–10). He said to Christ, “Speak the Word only. I tell a man, ‘Do this,’ and he does it. You speak the Word and it is done.” He said, “I am a man under authority.” He did what he was told, and the men under him did what they were told. He said, “Jesus, You just say it and it’s done.” His submission was the submission of initiative.
I don’t know if we have put this in words before. We’re going after it; we have one focus. We are learning what faith is. Don’t be negative. We have to do one thing: Insist on that positive faith. What we have gained is right within this body of truth.