How can we be prepared for sonship? Preparation with help from tutors. Preparation through entering rest. Preparation through soul transformation at different levels. Deconstruction of the mind.
Any mindsets, doctrines, theology or beliefs that distort the nature of God as Father and the relationship we have with Him will limit our sonship and must be deconstructed and renewed. Mindsets, doctrines, theology or beliefs that are based in Old Covenant thinking create fear, duty, obligation through the law. Law-based mindsets often create barriers to intimacy because of the wrong sort of fear of God.
The Joshua Generation are forerunners of a restoration that will revolutionize our experience of the true nature of God as love by iconoclastically destroying the false images of God created by the religious systems we have been programmed by.
Deconstructing the mind will involve religious deprogramming that will challenge our theology and doctrines. Face to face encounters with the true nature of God will inevitably create cognitive dissonance. Discovering the true reality of who God is by experience will change us.
Son, the greatest scandal of the age is about to be exposed. Many will not believe it but the truth of who I am and therefore who you are as My sons will be revealed. The lies of religion will be exposed to the pure light of truth.
The great I AM is about to reveal Himself as the lover of your souls in what will amount to a whole new reality. When our minds begin to be deconstructed from the frameworks of thinking that have shaped them we will see that many things that we assumed and presumed are not true. As the religious pillars of our minds begin to be deconstructed this will inevitably change our perception of God Himself. As we experience the true reality of who God is – Father, Son and Spirit – false doctrines and theologies will be exposed as lies, distortions and misrepresentations when they are compared with Jesus the Truth.
Jesus is the exact representation of the Father, He said, “if you have seen Me, you have seen the Father.”
The first doctrine that God challenged in my process was Penal Substitutionary Atonement. When that lie was removed all the other associated doctrines started to collapse like a house of cards. It was a domino rally effect within my mind. Penal Substitutionary Atonement as a doctrine appeared in the 11th century, rooted in the Latin Augustinian false view of God (birthed in guilt, shame and condemnation) that distorts the image of a loving God into an angry punishing God who needs appeasing with our penance.
The doctrines of: appeasement of an angry God, punishment, Eternal Conscious Torment and “hell”, Separation and Exclusion, death being the end of choice, were exposed as deceptions.
The inerrancy and infallibility of our English Bible versions all began to be challenged.
2 Co 5:14-15 The love of Christ resonates within us and leaves us with only one conclusion: Jesus died mankind’s death; therefore, in God’s logic every individual simultaneously died. Now if all were included in his death they were equally included in his resurrection. – Mirror Bible.
Rom 5:18 The conclusion is clear: if one offence condemns the entire human race; then in principle, the righteousness of one vindicates the entire human race. – Mirror Bible.
Now, if all mankind was included in Christ’s death and resurrection and was vindicated, then how does one harmonize the above statements with the understanding of “eternal” torment?
All truth must be seen through the lens of love – the lens of Jesus. A wrong view of God’s nature and character can lead to many fearful misconceptions: “Bad things are happening! This must mean that God is angry with me, He is teaching me a lesson, He is withholding things from me to punish me…”
To be able to know God who is Father, Son and Spirit and know our identity in sonship we need an encounter that produces metanoia, a radical shift of thinking, so we begin to agree with God’s mind. That agreement enables a deeper relationship with the Truth to reveal true reality and the cycle continues.
Rom 2:4 Or do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and tolerance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance? – Metanoia.
Repentance is a change of mind, not being sorry for being caught out in sin. This is another word that has been hijacked by religion and twisted. The word “repentance” is a religiously fabricated. English word from the Latin word, penance, to give religion more mileage to control and fleece us through fear. The English word became re-penance linked to sorrow and self-flagellation which is not what the Greek word means at all!
We do not continually have to do penance to be forgiven because Jesus dealt with sin on the cross and made us righteous once and for all. The word, metanoia, comes from meta meaning together with, and nous, mind; thus, together with God’s mind. – Agreement and alignment.
This word suggests a radical mind shift; it is to realize and embrace God’s thoughts towards us and about us. To think like God thinks about us. Therefore, we need to know how God thinks and that can be a major problem if we don’t engage Him face to face.
It cannot be an intellectual exercise. If we have a distorted view of God and of how He thinks and acts we will have a distorted view of ourselves. Religion has created a distorted view of God and therefore we may think of ourselves wrongly as slaves and not sons. This creates a works mentality that tries to appease or please GOD by our actions or behavior. That view of God that has come from the DIY tree path makes us fear Him and hide from Him. The DIY path leads us to try to make amends, please, or appease God through our own DIY religious self-efforts that can never bring righteousness. We are already righteous because He made us righteous: we cannot earn it.
How can our minds be renewed?
Memorizing Bible verses and confessing them, trying to believe them? No. We are renewed from within by relationship, not from the outside by works. We are renewed as we relate to God who is Father, Son and Spirit in us and in Him.
My journey to renewal of my mind began with God using the legislation that I had produced to deconstruct my mind of the veils that covered it Iconoclastic – attacking cherished beliefs or institutions, long-held traditions, breaking or destroying images, especially those set up for religious veneration, breaking with convention or tradition; A series of conversations over a few weeks opened the door to the possibility, actually the reality, that I had many more assumptions and presumptions about God, the Bible, theology and doctrine than I thought and they were all veils and filters for my mind.
During the process the Father encouraged and supported me. Don’t allow what you think you know to influence your decisions; I just want you to trust Me I am trying to teach you to trust Me even when you don’t understand, which will be often C. S. Lewis writes, “God must continually work as the iconoclast. Every idea of Him we form He must in mercy shatter. The most blessed result of prayer would be to rise thinking, ‘But I never knew before. I never dreamed …’” So, the process of my deconstruction and renewal began in earnest.
It is impossible to see God as He is when our minds are confused with our own distorted ideas about Him. Every breaking of mental strongholds makes way for a resurrection of fresh revelation. This is not an easy process as there is a lot of eating humble pie to do.
I had a number of encounters with God that created cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the mental stress (discomfort) experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values, when performing an action that contradicts those beliefs, ideas, and values; or when confronted with new information that contradicts existing …
The encounters I had walking with God actually challenged what I believed about Him. What I thought I knew about God was challenged by my own experiences with Him. This put a stress on my brain that felt like a restrictive band. James Torrance puts it this way, “More important than our experience of Christ is the Christ of our experience.” In your highest modes of enjoying Him, He is still more real than the experience itself.
Language is insufficient to communicate His incommunicable nature. It must be experienced by encounters. Andre Rabe writes: Jesus comes to make you an atheist to the god of your own making. He comes to bring an end to your way of subjecting God to your own understanding I have concluded that I actually agree with Dawkins and other well-known new atheists in that I do not believe in that religious GOD either. John Crowder said It is only at the place where our ideas and our faith are completely devastated that we have an opportunity to meet the God who transcends all our ideas about Him.
This is why so many church fathers and mystics have said something similar to this: To experience God is to experience the complete and utter failure of your own intellect. Jesus was Himself a deconstructionist. He constantly challenged the prevailing religious paradigms of His day. Jesus often said, “You have heard it said (rabbinical tradition) but I say to you.” He completely challenged their thinking. He turned religion on its head, and everything became about love not DIY dead works, duty and obligation.
In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis wrote, “There are three images in my mind which I must continually forsake and replace by better ones: the false image of God, the false image of my neighbors, and the false image of myself.” Are we ready to let God renew and transform our thinking? C. S. Lewis called God the Great Iconoclast. God will not be confined to our limited, static perceptions of Him. We cannot keep an infinite God in a box made by the finite capacities of our understanding: all it will do is limit ourselves. God does not dwell in manmade temples, theological constructs or ideologies. God dwells in our spirits and in our hearts.
Prov 3:5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean or rely on your own understanding. 6 In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight. 7 Do not be wise in your own eyes;
We need a transformation, a revolutionary change of mind. We need the veils of our understanding exploded and stripped away. It is only our relationship with the Living Word, the ultimate source of revelation, Jesus the Truth and the Spirit of Truth who searches the deep things of God and makes them known to us. Don’t let your current understanding keep you in bondage to the imitations of your past experience. Everything we receive must come through personal encounters with God. Our encounters will never contradict the Bible but will definitely challenge our own interpretations of what we think it says, that might seem like a contradiction. Our encounters may not be directly found in the Bible and will definitely challenge the religious belief systems that limit what the Bible actually says by reducing it to a set of manmade rules or doctrines. Insanity is where we keep doing the same things but expect different results. It is to live trapped in our own limitations. Slaves follow the crowd; sons forge a new path. Slaves settle for what they have got but sons pioneer taking new ground. Our old mindsets, thinking patterns, religious worldviews will keep us in old, trusted ways of behavior and will limit our ability to engage in the heavenly spiritual realities that are being unveiled in our day.
Are we prepared to embrace and spread the revolution? Doctrines and beliefs that were once deemed so foundational are often really just the skewed projections of our own fearful, fallen assumptions about God.
God is about to explode the DIY myths that we have made that actually obscure who He really is from our view.
What is God like? Where do we get our views about God from? Is anything other than a personal encounter with Him reliable?
All the Bible stories about encounters with God that were subjective but are now taken as objective! Doubt raises a question and when doubt appears it can be because we have outgrown our incomplete idea and imperfect knowledge about God.
God says, “you learned all this and now look at Me – I’m bigger than all that you think!” You cannot be satisfied by the picture you have painted for yourself of Me because it is as small and limited as your own intelligence and education compared to the infinite limitlessness of I AM. Be open and pose the questions that your doubts raise; do not be afraid, I will not be insulted by your questions because they are just about your notions about Me. There are so many answers to be discovered that will stretch and expand your reality.
Some people’s views about God may just be the indoctrination of their childhood; that means their beliefs are just an accident of birth. Life experiences can also create an image of God. People project their anger and make a hard hearted or angry God. For some, God is just a projection of their own image. God is then just like us but a bigger and nicer version of us. Toxic and false images of God are poisonous to the soul. Distorted images of God cause us to become like the God we worship. We become agents of that image like ISIS, inquisitors or the crusaders etc. God becomes a harsh tyrant king, a punishing judge, an abusive stepparent. God becomes the ‘mighty smiter’ God’s holiness opposing His love. ‘God is love’ is now almost heretical because of a warped theological image of the angry God. For some God is like a deadbeat dad who doesn’t care for His family. For others, like an absent father who is unsupportive and uncaring. Some feel like God abandoned them because He wasn’t there when they needed Him or when they were abused or beaten. For some people, God is a legalist that if don’t please or appease then you had better watch out. For some, God is harsh, angry, to be feared. The demanding God who wants them to trust Him with blind faith. For some, God is a sovereign who controls everything fatalistically. For some people, their God is like a Fairy Godmother in the sky or a Genie in a lamp that if you rub it the right way you get your 3 wishes. Some people only call on God when they want something from Him or need help.
God is actually revealed and manifested and incarnated in Jesus as love. God is love therefore love is God’s very essence. If you could boil everything about God down to just one thing that one thing is love. Love is action, caring, merciful, redeeming, reconciling and restoring. God is love and His mercy endures forever. Every attribute of God is only a different facet of the one essence: love. What do we mean by love? Love is not all about what we can get, the playboy selfish sexual love that is only our DIY perversion of love. God is love: therefore look at Jesus, the express image of God, and you see love with skin on. Love is defined and focused in Jesus, who is God incarnate 3 persons sharing one essence: love that was manifested and revealed in Jesus. God is spirit and was invisible but now Jesus is the express image of God and that is what He looks like – Col 1:15. All the fullness of who God is was embodied in Jesus. God’s entire essence and all the facets of the Father, Son and Spirit are revealed in Jesus. There is no true God who is not like Jesus no OT God or NT God. Jesus is not just one face of a two-faced God. Heb 1:3 Jesus perfectly mirrored God and is stamped with God’s own nature. Jesus is the only perfect and complete theology, not only one side of the story. Jesus is the only way to know the Father. Jesus loves all people including those on the margins, those who have been rejected, tax collectors and sinners. Jesus challenges the religious abusers and spiritual bullies of the disadvantaged. We need to encounter love if we are to truly know who God is.
All my encounters deepened my relationship and revealed God as love. Those encounters revealed how high, wide, broad, deep and inescapable love is.
I see angels with light wands marking us out with laser guided love bombs. God wants to explode those love bombs over you, penetrating your mind, your heart your whole being with His love for you, revealing your true identity as loved sons.
Live loved, love living and live loving. Strip everything away till all I have is You. Undo the veils till all I see is You. I will pursue You, I will pursue Your presence, I will pursue You, I will pursue Your presence.
Angels are marking you out for love. Invite Him to release those love bombs over you. Let those love bombs explode over you. Love explodes in your heart and mind, be cocooned in love. Jesus reveals His love for you. The Father reveals His love for you. The Spirit explodes His love in you. The love of God touches your minds. Encounter love that will explode any wrong image of Him and remove the veils that obscure and distort Him. Love explodes your limited reality.