THE NATURE OF GOD
To have an intimate relationship with God, we are going to have to know what He is like; I mean know what He is really, really like. Once we get a revelation of His nature, then we can experience Him in our life.
Religion has portrayed an image of God that is not correct, and it may have become part of our belief system, our everyday life.
When we get caught up in the presence of God, where he becomes more real than our surroundings, when we have a meeting with God where he communicates his heart to our heart and it brings tears of joy to our eyes, we experience his love for us in that moment.
But unless we learn how to live in that awareness of his presence, where we experience and feel his love for us, it will wear off and we come back down into self-consciousness where we feel God is disappointed in us if we behave badly.
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil has become part of our belief system. The image of God that’s been presented by religion is that when we do good, God is pleased, when we do badly he gets angry.
But that is not the true nature of who God is. God is love and he loves us the same on our best day as he does on our worst day. God loves us because that is who he is. God is love so everything that he is and does must be an expression of love. So we have to re-evaluate a lot of theological perceptions and doctrines which present God as something other than love.
When God reveals his nature to us through encounter, then some of the things that we believed about him are not going to line up with what we experience in his manifest presence. Are we going to believe what other people have told us about him, what we have learned in church about him or are we going to believe what God is showing us in an intimate relationship with him as we experience his presence?
A lot of the things we believe about God have not been through personal encounter, we just thought they were true. God never told us, other people told us or we read and assumed it was true. We have many assumptions in our life based on what we thought we knew.
We encounter God as he reveals himself to us. In that revelation we experience his divine nature. Then the Holy Spirit will confirm the revelation in the written word, but we have to look at the original Greek and Hebrew text, and the root of those words, because we lost the meaning through the English translations and our understanding of those words that have been taught to us by others.
We must hear the voice of God. We must hear the sound of heaven, the sound of his presence, where nothing else matters but the voice. It must drown out every other voice, all the cares, all the other desires. Everything else has to be brought down to a level, where the loudest thing that we hear is his voice saying- come up here. We must value him above our next breath. Deep is calling to deep, the sound of his waterfalls, and the voice of many waters.
As we learn how to engage deeper and deeper into the heart of God. Then he is enabled to unveil things that we couldn’t see and hear before. There are conversations going on in heaven about us. Father, son and Spirit are talking about us, because they have all these vast sum of their thoughts about us. They talk about their intentions for us, of who we are in heaven, our sonship.
All we need is but a glimpse of how God sees things, and it will change how we view people.
God lives outside of time, he is the- I am, he lives in the eternal now. He is connected to every single thought that every single person has every second. And his desire is to bring good out of every decision we make, not to punish us for making bad ones. Even the most stupid decisions we ever make, he does not want us to suffer, because he’s a loving father.
People make stupid decisions all the time and we get frustrated with the stupid decisions people make. They are making a stupid decision again. But all this begins to change when we begin to see how God sees them.
God sees all the multitude of infinite possibilities that exist for every person. For God they are all now. He sees the beginning from the end and he is able to embrace it all at once.
As God begins to reveal all the possibilities that exist for our life, our first reaction is which is the right one? We think there is only once choice and if we don’t get it right, we are going to get it wrong.
But in a walk with God all things are possible, there is nothing right or wrong there because we are united to him, we are walking with him. His heart and our heart will allow all these things to become right, and then we learn how to choose that reality, where our circumstances begin to become subject to us.
As we mature we learn how to choose that reality because we have the power to choose to be able to fulfill our destiny in multiple of ways.
We need to understand God’s nature, in order to relate to Him properly. When we understand who God really, really is, we are going to want to get to know Him, and enter into a friendship with Him where we become continually aware of Him.
God has such an amazing, amazing life planned for us that we could not possibly imagine the wonder of it, but as we get to know Him we will begin to experience it.
The amazing thing about God is that He is able to impart His life to us. To know the Lord is to be like Him because we begin to experience His nature in us.
To know the Lord intimately, we need to know who He wants to be for us. He has so designed us that we have been created to wholly depend upon His Spirit.
Jesus is the express image of God, and the Holy Spirit is dedicated to revealing that image to us. It is in the revelation of the Lord to us, where we see His Glory and in seeing that glory we are changed into that image. This is how all change comes, the opening of our spiritual eyes to behold the beauty of the Lord, and in that revelation we partake of that beauty, we partake of His nature. The way the Holy Spirit reveals Jesus to us is the way He changes our life.
As we become aware of the Holy Spirit in our life, we are going to be constantly amazed and excited as His wisdom and power, His nature flows into us. We will become a living testimony of what God is like.
The people in the world really do not know what God is like, to know what God is like is to pursue after him. Religion gives us a false image of God, to know the Lord is to be attracted to Him. In His presence is fullness of Joy, the losing of self-consciousness where we become conscious of Him, in oneness with him.
Because the human race has lost its identity, they do not know who they are, they become self-conscious. The word sin in the Greek is hamartia which means to be without a share in. It comes from the root Ha- which means not, and meros, a part, share of, or portion. Sin is not sharing in the image of God. The loss of our identity and inheritance in God
What religion is designed to do, to tell you that you are not right with God.
But the gospel of God is good news, the word gospel means a news so good, that the human mind cannot imagine it, it sounds too good to be true. But through the cross of Jesus Christ, God has reconciled the world to Himself. As in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive.
Jesus did not come into the world to condemn the world, but to give it eternal life; it is a free gift that transforms our life. The life of God alive inside us displaces in us all that is not like Him.
Eternal life is knowing the Lord Jesus Christ. It is the very same identical life that dwells in Him. The attractiveness of this kind of life causes everything not like it to lose its attraction. Jesus came to give us this life abundantly. A life so good, that we cannot possible contain it, He came to give us of His fullness, more than we could possibly be able to receive at one time.
Many people have a wrong view of God. They see Him in a number of ways, none of which properly reflect His nature.
It is in seeing the true nature of God that we are motivated to open our hearts towards Him. A wrong view of God causes us to miss out on partaking of His nature.
It’s important that we capture the image that God wants to transfer into our heart. What we think about God is the single most important thing in our spiritual Journey. Our image of God will influence every single part of our life and be reflected through us.
The way we perceive God influences the way we live our life. We’re shaped, emotionally and spiritually, by the image of God we carry in our hearts and minds. He loves us; He enjoys us, and is deeply personal with us. He is faithful to us even when we are not faithful to Him. His love and faithfulness is what wins our hearts to a deeper level in Him.