When we are born from above we become a divine human, we are supernatural; we are not of this world. Our spirit is one with the Lord, so we are never sure what is us and what is the lord. God has come to expand who we are, he desires for it to be 100% us and 100 % him. Supernatural means more than we could ever imagine.
The lord is not concerned about any mistakes we make, he has it covered. All he is asking of us is that we love the learning. The lord loves the struggle that we are in.
What do we do when our first child is learning to walk? It doesn’t matter how many times they fall down; they will get back up and try again. They may even cheat and crawl, but that is ok, that doesn’t bother us, we just pick them up and call them to come unto us. It is in their spirit to walk. God first gives us the desire and then the power, to walk in his word.
What is true in the natural is true in the spirit, the Lord is not concerned about our struggle to learn how to walk with him, and he just loves the process of being with us.
When it is our child’s birthday, we give them money to buy us a present. What God calls us to do; he gives us the power to do it. The Lord gives us a gift that he wants to receive from us. Everything comes from him, through him and to him.
When God commands us something, it is because he wants to give us the very thing, he is commanding of us. Whatever he wants from us he intends to give us first. He is the initiator.
WE HAVE TWO RELATIONSHIPS WITH GOD
We have two relationships with God, one in the realm of the spirit and one in the natural realm. Our relationship with the Lord is future-present.
By one sacrifice Jesus has already perfected those who are in the process of sanctification-Hebrews 10:14
To be continually sanctified means to be set apart unto the Lord, so that we can put on the next aspect of God’s nature that He wants us to learn and walk in.
Every problem or difficulty we experience in the natural realm points to the provision the Lord has made for us.
Every problem points to a promise the Lord has made to us in Christ.
2 Peter 1:3 According as his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge (experiential knowledge) of him that hath called us to glory and virtue: 4 Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.
By one sacrifice Jesus has already justified us and glorified us- romans 8:30.
The Holy Spirit is a prophetic Spirit. He sees who we are in the future and ministers that identity to us so that we can become it in the natural realm.
The Holy Spirit takes the provision of God and ministers it to us so that we can put on the New Man which means we are clothed with it, it becomes how we think, feel and act in the natural realm.
How are we known in heaven? We are known in heaven as someone who has been made complete in Christ.
How we are known in heaven impacts all that we are not yet on earth. We need to understand the journey we are on, and how to cooperate and stay in alignment with God.
This is what a walk with God is all about. We go from grace to grace, faith to faith, strength to strength, and glory to glory in the natural realm, when we learn how to look to the Lord and see who He is, and who He now wants to become to us, and we are changed into that image- 2 Corinthians 3:18
We don’t ask the lord to come, but to make his presence felt. As we speak, we ask that the Holy Spirit be brooding over those who hear, that the Holy Spirit would breathe upon it, and open up hearts to understand who we are in His eyes, that we would be connected to our identity in some way.
The Holy Spirit will do what he does best; he is a genius at life in the spirit. And he loves his job, his role in our lives. He is amazing and astonishing; he is the most exciting, enthusiastic, exuberant person we will ever meet. The lord laughs with us, and causes our hearts to smile and our faces to shine.
Math 16 When Jesus asked, who do people say that I am. He wasn’t looking for a complement. He was making a point about identity.
When we know who we are, then we also start to know how we are supposed to live. Our lifestyle must come in line with who God says that we are.
We know then how we are supposed to live in terms of our relationship with the Lord and towards the people who are around us. We must start acting in our families and our friendships and neighborhood and city in line with that identity, because we have something to contribute to all the people that God has put immediately around us. And when those people know our real identity, then they must act accordingly towards us.
JESUS SAID WHO DO PEOPLE SAY I AM?
When he said who do people say that I am, he got back four distorted images. There are distorted images of Jesus in people’s minds. Religion distorts the image of God; it distorts the nature of God.
That is its primary disposition, it is judgmental. We cannot represent a loving, kind, merciful God and be moving in judgment.
Mercy triumphs over judgment. It is the goodness and kindness of God that leads everyone to repent. When we are changed and transformed, it is because the goodness and kindness of God has made an impact upon our life, it is impressed upon our heart through a fresh encounter with the nature of God.
Everything in the kingdom is relational. Everything is about us knowing who God is for us and wants to be in us. When we experience God doing in our life what we could not do for ourselves, he has become more real in our life. We begin to experience God in our heart and in our circumstances.
We are learning how to be in Christ and become more Christ like.
If we have a distorted image of God, we are bound to have a distorted image of ourselves. If we cannot act in line with God’s nature, it is because we don’t understand our own nature in Christ, we don’t know what spirit we are of.
If we don’t know the identity of who God really is, and what God is really like, we cannot get a handle on ourselves.
If we do not know who we are, we are always going to be hitting a ceiling and our spirituality is going to be leveling off and if we make any moves up into a new place we are going to hit this plateau and sooner or later we are going to come down again into where we have always been. Knowing our identity lifts us higher and higher into the things of the Lord.
There are two battles we face over everything. There is one battle to get free, and another to stay free. Many people have got free but did not stay free. In warfare it is one battle to take ground, it is a different battle to hold that ground.
We take the ground and then six months later we lose it. It is often our failure to abide in the nature of God. It is our failure to abide in breakthrough. There is no breakthrough without follow through. Whatever God opens up to us in freedom must be established in lifestyle. If it is not established in our lifestyle, we will lose that freedom.
Jesus wanted his disciples to understand his true identity, because that revelation would shape their relationship with him. Our true identity in the kingdom is made up of two things. Who we are on earth and how we are known in heaven. It is made up of our personality and who we are in the spiritual realm.
Each one of us has multiple identities, but one personality. We relate to people differently. We relate to our father differently than our son. Whenever we meet a different member of our family, we immediately fall into the identity that we have with that person and we don’t even recognize that we are doing it. We do it automatically. What is true in the natural is true in the spirit.
In the spirit we have multiple identities, and one personality. To some people we are a prophet, apostolic, teacher, author, speaker, and warrior. We love the odds especially when they are high against us. We love the power of the one with the one. One person walking with God is a majority.
God fills up his army all by himself. God dropped Gideon’s army which meant God had to be bigger for him on the battlefield, this is how it works in the spirit. We get comfortable with majesty.
We all have multiple identities but one personality. In the spirit we have multiple identities in terms of all the relationships and people that God has put around us.
Our calling is never one dimensional. And our calling is never something that we could do by ourselves. God has not called us to do something reasonable, possible, or even attainable. He has called us to do something unreasonable, impossible, and incredibly difficult for us to do outside of the anointing.
None of us are wired naturally to do what God wants us to do spiritually. So, we are going to have to learn how to get over ourselves.
God wants to show us who we are, how we are known in heaven. So as part of that he always introduces himself, he tells us who he is to us. Who he is generally and who he is specifically for us.
Jesus walks into his hometown church and he is given the scroll, he is supposed to read where they left off last week, but he finds the place of Isaiah 61 and begins to read it out.
He is saying this is how I am known in heaven. The Spirit of the lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the afflicted, he sent me to bind up the broken hearted, he sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and freedom to prisoners, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord and the day of vengeance of the lord our God. I am here to comfort all who mourn, to those who mourn in Zion,
I am going to give them a garland instead of ashes, The oil of gladness instead of mourning. I am going to give them a mantel of praise instead of that spirit of fainting.
Because of all that I am doing they will be called the oaks of righteousness, the planting of the lord that he might be glorified. And then they will rebuild the ancient ruins. They will raise up the former devastations, they will repair the ruined cities, And the desolations of many generations.
And strangers will stand and pastor our flocks. And foreigners will be our farmers and our vinedressers. But we will be called the priests of the Lord, the ministers of our God. We will eat the wealth of nations and in their riches we will boast. Instead of our shame we will have a double portion. Instead of humiliation we will shout for joy over our portion. Therefore, they will possess a double portion in their land and everlasting joy will be upon their heads. Jesus is saying this is what I am here for, this is how I am known in heaven.
When the Spirit of the Lord comes upon us, our soul comes into alignment with the flow of the Spirit in our spirit.
A spirit is the source, either God is flowing in our spirit, or another spirit is operating in our soul. A spirit outside of the Spirit of God in us, has taken over our mind and emotions.
The Spirit of God, the perfect provision is in us, permeates our soul and the atmosphere around us is charged with God, God in now inhabiting the atmosphere around us.
When our spirit is reaching out to God, his spirit is descending upon us, God in us through us and around us. The provision is in our spirit, but also the heavenly places above us. The breakthrough is always from our spirit through our soul to God, or God coming from what we hear and see outside of us through our soul into our spirit. The soul is what stands between us and the God inside of us and outside of us.
When God connected with Moses and he brought him up to Mount Sinai, it was because God wanted to show him something about himself. There is always going to be critical moments in our life when God will want to tell us, this is who I am for you. He will do it generally, but he always wants to do it specifically.
When we are going through a time of transition, that transition must be accompanied by a fresh revelation of who God is for us.
In spiritual life and warfare, we are not being challenged by the enemy, by wicked people, or oppositional forces. This is the truth of the kingdom; we are only ever challenged by the goodness of God.
What is God doing in our life when someone opposes us, he is teaching us how to be good. He is teaching us in that moment how to give some goodness away to somebody that doesn’t like us. When we don’t have enough money, we are being challenged by the goodness of God to believe him for something more.
In times of warfare, we overcome evil with good. The critical thing is can we really love our enemy when it matters most. We are only ever being challenged by goodness. We are citizens of heaven here on earth; we are being challenged by heaven to live like heaven on earth.
We must ask ourselves a question all the time, does this exist in heaven. Like frustration, is there any frustration in heaven? Then it is not to exist on earth.
What if we are not frustrated, but we have not yet fully learned how to be patient. So, we rejoice in this opportunity, to experience God’s patience.
We can never be challenged by a negative, ever! We can only be challenged by the fruit God’s Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is our primary weapon against all opposition.
We defeat the enemy by being joyful. There is a place set aside for us in the Spirit, where we defeat the enemy by grace. We overwhelm him with our peace. We weary him with our restfulness and joy. We depress him by the love we have in the heart of God.
If there is no such place in the Spirit, then Jesus is not lord. It is all about majesty. Warfare is not about taking authority over the devil, that is a consequence of warfare, real warfare is discovering the sovereignty, the supremacy, and the majesty of Jesus.
Real warfare is about being involved with Jesus to such an extent that the enemy looks at us, realizes he cannot win, and he creeps away before we see him.
If we have been in ministry for 20 years and we are still overcoming there is something wrong with us, for by this stage we should be more than a conqueror.
I am going to cover you with my hand because my goodness is so powerful it could incinerate you. So, the lord shows him his backside, all his glorious attributes.
He proclaims who he is, I am compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, merciful, faithful, forgiving, I am this and this and this. The lord is full of himself, in the nicest possible way. He wants us to get who he is to us. He is saying to Moses this is how I am known in heaven. These are the reasons that people worship me from morning to evening.
Jesus taught his disciple how to do signs and wonders and how to cast out devils and how to give a message about the good news and none of them were saved because he hadn’t died. They were pre-Christians.
We are never to underestimate what God wants to do with someone who doesn’t properly know him yet.
It is better for you if I go away, because if I go away, he can come. The Holy Spirit is better than me at this next stage in your life. I will be interceding in heaven that you make it, that you get it, that you become it, reminding the father of everything we want to do in your life.
I will be lord over the church, and he will be lord in the church, because he will take everything that belongs to me and he is going to give it to you.
In john 16 it tells us how the Holy Spirit is known in heaven; he is going to be your helper in all things. He will convict the world system of sin, so that we don’t have to do it. He convinces people of their need for righteousness. He has judged the ruler of this world on your behalf, and we can be set free.
He will lead us by experience into all truth. He will disclose what is to come because he is a prophetic Spirit. He will glorify Jesus to us and in us. He will take the possessions of Jesus and reveal them to us. This is how the Holy Spirit is known in heaven.
Jesus is the radiance of the father’s glory, the exact representation of his nature. That is his persona; he is the persona, the image of the invisible God, and the firstborn of the new creation.
When God gives us a prophetic word, he is saying to us this is how you are known in heaven, these are your permissions here on earth, this is what God wants you to become and this is what he is going to be for you while you are becoming it.
Gabriel prophesies over john, he will be great in the sight of God; he will be filled with the Holy Spirit while in His mother’s womb. He will turn many of the sons of Israel back to the Lord. He will go as a forerunner in the spirit and the power of Elijah. He will turn the hearts of the fathers back to the children. And the disobedient to the attitude of the righteous, He will make a people ready for the Lord. That is a persona. This is how your son is known in heaven. And he isn’t even born yet, and he has a persona.
Every single one of us should understand how we are known in heaven. There is a huge battle against the prophetic ministry. The enemy does not want us to know how we are known in heaven. Later john quotes his own prophecy; I am a voice in the wilderness that is why we have a prophecy. He was in touch with his identity, Doing the will of God having a powerful effect.
When the bible talks about knowledge it is not talking about head knowledge, or academic knowledge. When God said search the scriptures he didn’t mean academically, search them so that you can have an experience of them. Knowledge is always equated with experience. When it says we need the knowledge of God what it means is that we need an experience of God in this particular passage. This is how God uses scripture; Jesus demonstrated it in Luke 4, when he read Isaiah 61. He was reading his inheritance word. This is my inheritance.
Read psalm 91 and nothing else for the next six months. Everything in that psalm God wants to give us. It is called an inheritance word. When God gives us an inheritance word what he is saying is that every promise in that passage now belongs to you. Every permission in that passage now belongs to you.
The whole identity of the person in that passage now belongs to you, and so do all the resources that come with it. If a person’s name is mentioned in that passage, then we can have the same experiences and encounters that they had.
This is how God likes to use scripture. He likes to make it personal. For where the lord wants to take us, we need to be living as a lifestyle of psalm 91. We need to learn what the secret place is, to learn how to abide under the shadow of his wings. The lord wants to put us on certain battle fields, and we are always going to be outnumbered so we need a revelation and encounter and experience of God as our refuge and fortress. We need to learn the power of the one with the one.
The bible is not a manual (a book that contains information and instructions about the operation of a machine or how to do something); it is a book about encounters and experiences, A book about the story of God walking with men and women. A book about the experiences we can have in the presence of God.
A story about our journey into places that we have never imagined, a book about us journeying into a territory that God has set aside for us. A book that empowers us through the Holy Spirit to understand our identity and our destiny. It is a book of encounters and experiences. A book of permissions, a book about provision, that tells us this is what God has called us to and these are the resources that he has allocated. A book when used in conjunction with the Holy Spirit opens a whole new dimension of life before us. It makes us supernatural and makes us to be more than we ever thought possible.
When we read the word and when we know God is speaking to us through a passage where we receive revelation and an awareness of his presence, it becomes an inheritance word. An inheritance word carries an upgrade with it.
God is always previous, when we got prophetic words years ago, we may not have understood them, but they make sense now.
In our current situation we may be asking for a word, but he may have given it to us years ago. Inheritance words should rule our life. Psalm 91, we love warfare when we have all these promises. We have a word about what we are going through. Inheritance words dominate our life. This is one of the ways that God governs us. He doesn’t govern us by rules or commands, he governs us by promises and permissions.
Psalm 84, turning a place of weeping into springs. Hosea 2:14, 15 we are captivated, the lord brings us into the wilderness to speak kindly to us and give us all our gifts from that place. Numbers 13, 14 the story of Caleb. A man of a different spirit it is who I am. We expect to show up differently. We rejoice in giants of opposition, we love it. 10 Others are diminishing, he is expanding.
Ps 27, it is about fearless trust. We want to know how the lord thinks about things, how he sees things and how he speaks about things, how he likes to do things.
The lord will give us key scriptures, he wants us to look at all the key words and phrases because they all describe who we are, or what God wants to be for us, or the resources that are available to us, the promises that are ours or the permissions he wants us to have.
The moment we receive a word from God in our spirit, that moment God begins to think like that to us. He starts to act toward us in that way. God gives us a now word we take with us on the journey into our future.
Some aspects of the word are for now and some are for the future. God looks outside of time and can see our future and give us a word about it. David had a word about his future so goliath could not kill him.
Every problem, every difficulty, every obstacle, every giant between where we are now and our future has already been taken care of, that is why we have gotten this prophecy. So, we embrace the prophecy, we embrace that inheritance word.
Psalm 91 has been reverberating in my life. When the devil comes against us, the refuge, and the fortress in us will become bigger because of what he is doing. We are learning who we are in Jesus, but more specifically we are learning who Jesus is in us.
We receive an inheritance word when the Holy Spirit illuminates it.
If you don’t know how to speak in tongues, listen to your friend and repeat what he says. It is just a language. You copy it and you get into a flow and your own language starts to develop. Everything is real simply let’s not be complicating this.
We have inheritance words. Every time we grow, we must revisit our inheritance world because we will see something more. Our inheritance word of our persona gives us elevated status in Christ. It gives us legal authority over the enemy, and it gives us permission to overcome every obstacle that is against us. God puts things deliberately into our hands that are going to help us and shape us for the life to come, for the story that he wants us to have, for the journey he wants us to go on.
If people do not see our true identity, it is hard for us to walk with them. Jesus asked his disciples who do you say that I am.
Church is made up of interconnecting relationships where we all know who we are in Jesus. And the great thing is that we don’t get to relate to people according to their behavior, we get to relate to them according to their identity.
Speaking the truth in love is not telling a person what you don’t like about them in a loving way. There is a difference between what truth is and what is true.
It may be true a person has a bad temper, but the truth is that if they are in Christ, they are a new creation.
When we tell people what is wrong with them or what you don’t like about them, you are not speaking the truth about them, you are speaking what is true for the moment. It is the truth which sets us free.
The truth is something that is eternal or unchanging. Speaking something true over somebody will not set them free; it just makes them shackled even more in their difficulty and their problem.
Speaking the truth in love is saying to people you don’t need to be doing that, because this is who you are, and you tell them their identity.
Whenever the lord connects with us, he connects with us the way He sees us in the spirit, not in how we are behaving. He is always speaking to our identity. He is always speaking to who we are.
Once he tells us our persona. Once he reveals to us this is how you are known in heaven, that is the way that He speaks to us from that point on. He will always talk to us from our identity. He does this always, it is who He is, it is what He is like.
Accountability is not calling people out on their stuff. It is calling people up to their real identity. Accountability says you don’t need to be doing that, this is who you are. Did you forget, you forgot, this is who you are. If we forget we need to be reminded.
We need to know all the prophecies over our friends. We have files on our friends because we are intentional. When we see them struggling, we go to the filing cabinet-this is who God says you are. We read out a part of the prophecy, I think that is what God is doing in you right now, so this is what He is saying. And this is your permission, and these are the resources. This is what a true friend does.
Speaking the truth in love is telling a person how God see’s them in the future, so that they can rise to it. You don’t need to be worried here because you have a provision there. No need to be anxious because you have this word. You have a promise.
Speaking the truth in love means we are going to say something about that person that sets them free from behavior that we don’t like.
We are all prophetic, it is seeing something. In prophecy if the first thing we get about somebody is a negative. When God shows us something negative about a person, at that moment He trusts their heart to us. We don’t speak out the negative. We do not prophesy the problem.
If we are getting a negative, that negative is not meant for that person, it is meant for us. God wants us to know what their struggle is. And then he wants to give us His heart for them. So, he is going to give us compassion. He is going to give us a tender heart, a sweet spirit. So, we can see their struggle with a heart of compassion and in the light of that what does the Lord want to say.
We do not prophesy the first thing, it is for us, it is a word of knowledge. We prophesy the second thing, what God wants to do about it.
If everything we get for a person begins with a negative, it means we have a spirit of breakthrough for that person. It means God is trusting us with their heart and their life, and we need to let that spirit of breakthrough come upon us, we need to let it rise up within us so that we can give them a word that might become their inheritance word.
Who do you say that I am, o my God, you are the Christ, the son of the living God and something shifted in the heavens over that group. And Jesus says you are not Simon anymore you are peter. And you have keys to bind and loose. You will interact with heaven, and the revelation that you perceive will be the bedrock of the church’s experience and hell is going to be defeated by it. In that interaction, peter gets a mandate that gives him elevated status, legal authority, and permission to overcome.
We must define our persona in the kingdom. Our prophecies and inheritance words contain clues about who we really are.
The question we must ask ourselves is this, if I am going to see this prophecy fulfilled, if I am going to come into the fullness of my inheritance, what kind of person do I need to become, in order to see this word fulfilled. That is the question.
All prophecy kick-starts a process. A series of steps that takes you from where you are now, to where you are supposed to be.
What kind of person do I need to become, and we must start seeing ourselves in that prophecy. These inheritance words and prophecies help us to wage war on our history, on our past and our present and how they guarantee our future.
STEP UP INTO YOUR TRUE SELF
This is the essence of discipleship and mentoring. When we mentor somebody, we want to know what God is saying about them. We write out all the prophecies the lord gives about them. And teach them how to start interacting with their prophecy. Because their identity is showing right there in those words.
All a mentor does is bring us into alignment with who God says we are. It is time to step up to our true self in the spirit. A time to start getting a grasp of who Jesus is for us and who we are in him.
When we say yes to the Lord, he will be committed even if we change our mind tomorrow. This is how it works, if we say yes, he never hears the subsequent no’s. He just needs one yes, even if it is half-hearted, he will take it.
If we have a prophecy or a scripture that we now realize that it is an inheritance word. And if we want to live in the fullness of it, if we want God to treat us as who we are in that word is real now, we need to understand that there is an acceleration that is going to come into our life.
When we say yes, there is a quickening spirit that is going to rise up within us and we will have a spirit of divine acceleration.
We can make five years growth in one year. It also means that we are going to have to run. It means we are going to have to learn like crazy. It means we are going to have to love the learning. We are going to joyfully wage war on every problem and difficulty until it comes into submission.
This is a happy thing; it is only difficult because we are resisting our own identity. The joyful thing about it is that we start interacting with problems and difficulties and difficult people according to our new nature, our new identity which we are putting on. It is a crash course at being brilliant.
It needs to be sure and settled in our hearts that we are going to be significant people in the kingdom. We want to grow up and taste who the lord really is in this life.
We stand up on the inside and tune in to the quickening spirit. Our relationship with God will speed up, it will quicken. The lord gives us an anointing for quick victories. For fast breakthroughs.
That which you think is longstanding as a problem is now going to fall to us in this next time frame. In this next year, major difficulties and hurdles in our life will begin to disappear and diminish. We will grow in size.
As our anointing grows as our relationship grows so does our capacity for enjoying every single thing in life. We will come to a place in this quickening, in this divine acceleration, where we will learn and love to see the joy and take the joy in everything. That we would recognize that joy is available in every single circumstance of life.
We will travel with everlasting joy on our head, in our heart, in our mouth, in the hands that we lay on people, and we will learn to live every day under the smile of God.