We want to see our women come up to what every woman should be in this walk with God: zero, where they are not put down because they put themselves down and are slobs, and they are not trying to put themselves up by becoming extravagant and trying to overdress and everything. You have to get into the spirit of this thing—that beauty of spirit. It is not the outward adorning, but the meek and quiet spirit which in the sight of God is of great price.
And let not your adornment be external only—braiding the hair, and wearing gold jewelry, and putting on dresses; but let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the imperishable quality of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is precious in the sight of God. I Peter 3:3–4.
A woman should realize that she doesn’t have to look like she got her clothes out of the missionary barrel, but neither does she have to look like she is a fashion plate. Just learn to dress in some way that reflects your spirit and what you are, and bring it forth. This is the thing of the true woman that God is bringing, liberating the women so that they are not slaves to fashion. The women have had to turn away from that, and they have turned away so far that they have almost put themselves down.
You have to come into the realization that as a person you don’t have to say, “I’m wonderful”; but at the same time you have to stop saying, “I’m nothing.” You have to stop getting in the squirrel cage and trying to work something up. But you have to accept yourself as the most wonderful thing that ever happened in the world. When a wife believes that, she will find that her husband has believed it all the time. If she doesn’t believe it, then she doesn’t believe that he believes it. He can say it a thousand times, but that doesn’t do it until she believes it.
I prophesy this, and I create it as I speak it: You are going to find changes. You are going to stand tall, because one sign of your own put-down is that some of you slump. You are going to get over that put-down, and automatically you are going to start breathing freer and standing taller. And you are going to be willing to experiment.
All of us should be corrected. We should at least come to the place in our thinking where no matter how we look or what we are, we accept it. We stay zero, but basically we need to live above zero in our thinking, and not be conditioned or governed by the world’s plumb line of figure and appearance.
We don’t have to submit to as much as we think we have to. There is no reward for self-abasement. And neither is there any meritorious blessing from God if we won’t take suggestions and help from those who love us and want to create us. We submit to being created by one another.
This is really significant. It may sound like an unimportant thing we are doing; but it is totally significant, because the battle is in the physical body. The physical is the target, and we are not going to have an openness in our mind to think that we are a wreck or anything else. And we are not going to hate ourselves like we always have.
When we talk about the bondages that we have—we want to break into resurrection life; we want to do all of these things—but we have to stop our restricted thinking about ourselves too. It’s almost like we say, “Well, I believe for resurrection life, but what will the resurrected man wear this year? How does he deport himself? How does he project? What does he do?”
The physical is only going to be an expression of what we are in our spirit. That is what I am talking about. I am not trying to create some artificial thing that is phony. I am trying to say that each one of us has to be what we are. You have to be what you are.
Our covering has to complement and express our spirit. And so, if we can coordinate our spirit, soul, and body, it is going to be an amazing look.
The thing behind this is so real when we realize how long we have faced the negative of this. Well, that negative thing is all over with. Now you are going to act the part, and dress the part, and be what we create each other positively to be—not what somebody has put you down negatively to be. Really, a person’s identity to himself is no longer a personal thing; it is a product of a lot of people’s faith. And we submit to that.
It is part of “the Unwrapping,” creating one another.
And it’s going to be so much fun, because it is so much a part of being family. We did this on the level of our natural families. You always knew that your sister was the most beautiful person in the whole world, and your mom.
No matter what the women were, we saw the beauty in them because you knew them.
I think the most frustrating thing I have felt through the years has been to watch people’s thinking about themselves. I could prophesy over them and speak a Word over them, and they would try to accept it, but they didn’t accept it. Other people would follow on some ego trip or something else, which was another thing totally, and they would walk in a maze of frustration.
The most difficult thing in the world is for people to reconcile the Word of God about them to their own revelation of themselves. That has been our greatest problem. Here we have these Words from the Lord concerning what we are to be, and yet we have never come up to the full assurance and revelation of what that really means.
You were never intended to do that by yourself though.
But now, you see, we are going to make one another know one another. There is not going to be, in the physical, a false image of what we really are in the spiritual, because the spiritual is going to shine through.
We are laying a foundation for a whole way of thinking that people must have about themselves. But they will not generate it by themselves; they will generate it because someone else demands it by his faith. You see, faith is a strange thing. When I believe for you, I can’t create you unless I demand for you what I see in revelation over you. There is a demand. Before God we demand one another to be this fantastic thing.
You’re not even getting this yet. It is just soaking through the first layer. When you get this—really get it—you are going to be surprised how tremendously aggressive and strong your faith and your spirit is under the surface. It’s beautiful. We are not motivated by some ambition or arrogance or pride. We aren’t motivated by that. The work of the cross ended all of that for us; we are out of that.
We exist as a family. We don’t exist as individuals anymore. And that is all this is; this is family talk. Here is the father talking to his kids, the shepherd talking to his sheep. The simplicity of this complicated, intricate relationship in the family is just hitting us.
We are discovering how this family really works in the spirit. In this Word we are demolishing one of the biggest forms of unbelief we have had. If you want to talk about faith—we have all kinds of faith for these wonderful spiritual things, and we have total unbelief about ourselves. We are destroying a really significant area of unbelief that we have never touched before.
Isn’t that why the Lord approaches Gideon and calls him a mighty man of valor? (Judges 6:11–16.) But Gideon can’t see it, because he is still status-conscious. He is the least in the family, and his father’s family is the least in the tribe, and the tribe is the least of all the nation of Israel. What we have to do is get rid of the hindering attitudes that we have, these assumed limitations that we have of ourselves which we impose on God: “How can God fulfill His will through me?” That projects our limitation on God, and we say, “God has to be crippled because I’m nothing.” God is not crippled.
I think we get an impression about faith that God is going to take a worm and thresh a mountain, and we forget that the Scripture doesn’t say that He is threshing the mountain with a worm. He makes that worm a sharp threshing instrument having teeth and threshes the mountain. That is exactly what it says.
Fear not, thou worm Jacob … Behold, I will make thee a new sharp threshing instrument having teeth: thou shalt thresh the mountains, and beat them small, and shalt make the hills as chaff. Isaiah 41:14–15, KJV.
God says that He is going to take the weak things, the small things, the base things to confound the mighty; but that chapter still ends by saying that He has made us His righteousness (I Corinthians 1:26–31). That is all the difference. “I may be small, weak, despised, base; but I am the righteousness of God in the earth.”
It is unbelievable the way the Lord is making all of us come alive and be up-front; we will be bold about what we are. There is a humility and a meekness that has been worked in us, but it is a completely different personality that the Lord is creating which will almost be misunderstood. If you look at it, you can’t put your finger on it.
The book of Acts speaks about this. It talks about how people were filled with the Holy Spirit, and with boldness they spoke the Word of God (Acts 4:13, 31; 14:3). That word “boldness” is used at different times, and you realize that the disciples were just not that aggressive in themselves. Not long before that, they had been hiding in a room for fear that they would be crucified (John 20:19). They all forsook Him and fled (Matthew 26:56; Mark 14:50–52). They were not the mighty giants, but that boldness came after the Holy Spirit filled them.
What we are facing now is the fact that we are ministering the Spirit to one another. We are unwrapping one another, and we are going to be bold. That Holy Spirit will create a boldness in each other. And you will lose the anointing of the Holy Spirit, you will lose that edge, every time you back off from that boldness. Every time, you will lose it. You will wind up in depression. But you see, since it is not self-confidence, and it is not an ego trip, then what has to sustain it? The Holy Spirit and our faith. We believe; we are going to be what God says we are. We are going to take that anointing of the Spirit. And if we draw away from it, we will go right into a slump. Then we have to dig ourselves out again; somebody has to come along and minister to us. We are going to create one another to stand fast in one spirit (Philippians 1:27).
This is going to throw us into another whole level of oneness, because receiving this from one another is one area where we still draw back from one another. Because we have so much unbelief about ourselves, if somebody in the family says something positive to you about yourself, you still draw back from him. It’s the hardest thing to accept from someone else. And I think this is going to create a deeper level of oneness in the family.
I was thinking about one person who was demanding that I do this and that for him. And I couldn’t do it for him, because I was aware that he was looking for somebody to do something for his frustration. It can’t be that. It has to be a ministry of faith. I cannot calm your fears or your frustrations and accomplish the will of God, because all that does is bring you up to zero until the next crisis comes. What we are talking about here is something more than the alleviation of negative symptoms and aspects of our spirit. We are talking about the creation of it. We are not as bad off as we think. We are just restricted in what has been done, and we need it confirmed and strengthened. When the truth comes, it sets you free (John 8:32); and you realize that your only chains were that you didn’t know the truth. That makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? There has to be an awareness—we are going to help each other.
We have to do this for our children too. We are missing a great deal when there is so much negative ministered to the children. For every positive upgrade that they get in vision and ministry, they have nine other things to put them down. To start with, they are born into the world relatively helpless. From their sight, even when they begin to see and reason and communicate, they are very much a little people and helpless.
Believe to come into the place where you can take that little child and teach him by the time he is one year old that he is a giant. You can bless him. You can tell him that in his spirit he is a mighty giant. And he will grow, and learn, and function, and he will be blessed and helped a great deal, but he is going to be more than a conqueror (Romans 8:37, KJV). This is not the thinking of the world, is it?
The world would teach you that you don’t want to tell your child all the time that she is beautiful, because that would cause her to become vain.
But I do that. How many times have you seen a woman of God walk over to a little girl and say, “My, you’re really beautiful, aren’t you?” And she nods her head “yes.” She believes it. And she is. It creates something in them.
Vanity and arrogance are something totally apart from a confidence that you can put in a child that he can accept himself. We all accept ourselves as being handicapped persons. If some child is born without a leg or hands or so forth, they try to teach him to overcome his handicap. We have all heard about some of the amazing things some of these handicapped people can do. But the key is that they don’t believe they are handicapped. A handicap is a handicap only if you accept it as a handicap. In some way we have to overcome it all.
You said, “We accept the hit so much that we start thinking of ourselves as handicapped people, and then we have to overcome things.” It really wasn’t us to begin with, but we accept something that is not us, and then we set about to overcome it. It was never us to begin with; it was something Satan threw on us.
That’s it. Oh, the power of fear. But it’s all boiled down in one thing: God did not give us a spirit of fear (II Timothy 1:7). Everything boils right down so simply: God didn’t give it to me, so I am not going to have it. And we go on for the positive appropriation of faith.
We are so much into an emphasis on the physical body, and it seems to me that what the Lord is trying to do is get through to us an understanding of how to create the physical body which is through our spirit—we eliminate the soul, and our spirit controls our physical body. Now we are breaking it down; we are dissecting the situation to see how it works, because we must know His ways.
I want to put an end to another restriction. I have objected very much to little names or things that put people down. It is one thing to just kid around, but it is another thing to have something which locks a person into an image or restriction. It just can’t be. We are one another’s liberators. We set one another free in this.
MARILYN: We must watch this, as a family, in the Body, in the ministry. We have to watch to correct one another, because it won’t be corrected if we don’t do it for one another in love.
This is going to be everybody’s release, because this is the one area where we have never broken through the unbelief into faith.
The way this all unfolds for everybody is really going to be exciting. It is going to deal with every kind of relationship. Instead of people struggling to relate and be compatible, there is going to be the aggressive faith to create one another. That is really the thing.
It will be a fun thing. You see, I start creating you and you start creating me, and we go through it, so that it is no longer a struggle: “Well, I’ve got to be compatible; I’ve got to conform; I’ve got a big problem that I have to adjust to.” That ceases to be it, because you are not dwelling on the negative side. You are seeing the vision of faith, and you are literally projecting one another into that level. It is going to be good.
That is what we do. We always look at a person and project them into what you know they going to be. And it makes people be that.
The only thing we have to see is that we have to enter into it boldly and quickly. There is a time element involved.
We don’t have any choice. We are not given a choice to like ourselves; it’s done. We have to do it; we start there.
All this is just the endpoint of faith. It comes down to a basic, bottom-line level: “Who are you?” And you realize that you have never believed it; but now we believe it.
That’s right. You say, concerning your brother, “Who are you?” But you make more progress if you ask your brother, “Who am I?” Then your brother has to have the revelation over you. And when he says the same thing—“Who am I?”—it really means something. But he has to speak with a faith that is imparted to you.
We have the atmosphere where this works now. I know you said things like this years ago, but now the family atmosphere is where it will function.
Once these things were afar off. But now they are upon us. Once we had faith to believe that one day we would be it. Now we must have repentance in our heart because we are not.
We started seven days of intercession, not knowing what the Lord was going to bring. The Lord showed me that there is going to be a change in the depth of our spirits. The problem areas we still have are the issue in our ministry to you, John, because of what comes through in the spirit. We must create the atmosphere. It is another layer of the Lord creating Himself in us. And that is what will minister to you. And I brace myself, because you don’t wrestle with the Lord except you get a broken hip (Genesis 32:24–32). You don’t go after the Lord with any resistance. If you are really serious you will not resist His presence; you will go into it. And when you are there, you know that you are going to struggle, and that God is going to devastate you. He does every time. God is going to remake you. He is going to change you.
I started seeing how the Lord was going to do something in all of us. He brought devastation; He crucified the soul level; He ended our bonds. He brought us into oneness when He did it; but it hurt at first. Now we are going to go into another phase of the Lord’s dealings. The Word that you are bringing will show us what we have to do. Everybody is going to get into it. This is not just a little thing. We must change. Past ruts, conditionings, any lack of submission in our hearts to the Lord and to the Word are going to be dealt with; there is going to be another whole phase of dealings that go to the depths of it.
This will be a dealing, because people can love what you are saying, but can they come up and out and maintain this? You said that we must be aggressive in this, and stay in it with faith. And if we shrink back, we are going back to lukewarnmess. We cannot maintain the anointing without being aggressive. All these things that you have said are requiring that we come aggressively out, and stay out, and be what we have to be. That is a death.
I want us to take as much as we can get from the Lord that He knows can deliver us, and do it fast. We’ve got to run; we have to get through this. And I think that we can yield ourselves to what the Lord is going to make us come into now and change ourselves—as fast as we can. This is going to be the beginning of a great release that we have been interceding for.
I don’t know how to relate this together, but while we were just talking, the Lord was speaking of these two areas of judgment that are coming. I am wondering if the family and judgment aren’t closely related for this reason: The father is bringing forth the family, and the wolves are trying to pick off the family. My motivation in speaking judgment would be to protect the family, or the little lambs that are being picked off. But the sons come up, and their motivation for speaking judgment is to protect their father. It is becoming very much a family affair. We are not only going to create one another, but we are going to protect one another. And just to speak our oneness in faith is going to bring a backlash of judgment on everyone who has stood against that oneness and every relationship within it. You see, that oneness is the judgment on Satan.
The relationship ministers. You can take it in the direction of judgment too. No wonder the relationship was fought.
How many times have I said, “The Kingdom of God is relationships.” You have heard that a lot of times. But every time one of these truths comes, you see how true it is. In that oneness will be the greatest creative force loosed in the universe since God first said, “Let there be.” The creation of the world and the universe is not as great as what God is doing right now in the oneness of the Kingdom. But it is starting small (Zechariah 4:10). God always starts with an atom. Everything we have been talking about is just a basic, foundational level for turning loose the whole creativity of God in the earth. It is that simple. It is so practical.
We have to lose the negativity about our physical life and our material life, and we have to integrate it back into the beauty of expression of our spirit. Because of our physical, we put ourselves down in such a position that we don’t loose the faith that we really have in our spirits. We have to turn that faith loose.
Our life may be up to ninety percent a spiritual thing, but just that ten percent of what you are physically causes you to get to the place where you don’t care and you go around without any feeling. You don’t have to be way up there on an ego trip, but you cannot be down below on a negative trip. It affects your faith. You have to come to the place where you do not have a negativity about yourself.
There doesn’t have to be the arrogance and preening and so forth that we have known; but there has to be something where you accept yourself as a total person—basically spiritual, but the soul and the physical come into it, because it is in those levels that your spirit expresses itself. When you shake hands with a person, is that spiritual? Yes, but it is a little bit physical. When you bless somebody and lay hands on him it is spiritual, but it is also physical.
Something has to come out of what we are in right now as a family, that instead of the old human, Adamic pride, there is an acceptance of ourselves for what God has made us. You cannot put yourself down. It doesn’t make any difference how big or little you are; you cannot put yourself down. You see, what you are in your spirit comes through to the physical and other people accept it, but do you accept it for yourself? You have to accept yourself in it.
But you can’t without other people’s help. It’s “the Unwrapping.”
Others come back and almost rebuke you because you are negative about yourself. But we can’t be negative about ourselves. We have to accept what we are as a creativity of God in action. It doesn’t leave any margin, no little five percent where you can afford to put yourself down any longer. That is the answer. In the negative side, those of the world go for pride, self-confidence, the power of speaking positive about yourself, and all of that. And it is true that on a mental, soulish level they attain something in it. But nothing that you do on that soul level as the initiator of it is permanent enough that it cannot be shaken. You will waver in it. You will get to the place where something adverse happens to you and you slump right back into a rejection. The soul never loses its fear of failure, and the true spirit never loses its awareness of victory.