Wednesday 29 June 2011

The 4 I's by Sylvia Pearce



This is a reproduction of Sylvia's Explanatory talk, reported back on Brian Coatney's blog post here

The first IThe name of the first chart is “Cleansed Consciousness” (Hebrews 9:14). It is rightly named simply because we all must have our minds renewed to the truth (Romans 12:2), which will close all the gaps of separation and cleanse our blinded consciousness from a guilty, “What Is Wrong With Me?” sin-consciousness. .

The first “I” represents our lost condition, and the word “being” represents all lost people just being themselves. They are not trying to be sinners; they are just naturally being one. They don’t wake up every morning and say to their master, Satan, “How can I serve you?” Or, “What rules do I need to keep in order to be accepted by you, or stay in good standing with you?” Lost people don’t work hard at being lost, do they? No, they don’t work hard at all. They just “be” themselves and they naturally and spontaneously bear the fruits of unrighteousness.

Why do I put the word “Satan” over the first “I”? The created human, “little spirit” or “I” is created to contain and be indwelt by a deity Spirit. Through the Fall, the human race has been invaded by an Satanic spirit. This is a very strong statement, and one most people recoil at when put like that. However, the scriptures clearly say it in Ephesians 2:1-4. None of us walk according to our own will, our own life, or our own minds. No, we humans have always been enslaved to, or joined to, another. Romans 6:17 calls us “slaves of sin.” A slave doesn’t do his own separate living; he lives under the control of another.

The second I

Let us move on to the second stage. Suffering drives the hungry heart to Christ, the Savior. The Cross delivers us from the powers of darkness and transforms us into newly created beings. It all was finished at the Cross, but how then do I experience this power and transformation? And why don’t I automatically experience it?

Christians are always trying and striving to improve themselves. Instead of depending on the Spirit’s transforming power, we Christians try to improve ourselves by self-effort. If we understood what the Bible declares to be true, then there is no self to improve. You can’t improve a dead man. “For ye are dead, and “Christ who is our life” (Colossians 3:3-4).

Our minds have to be first cleansed from the pollution left over from the Fall. Deep in our consciousness, redeemed man still has the grave clothes from his former owner, Satan. We are like Lazarus coming forth out of the tomb, but after three days, I’m sure Lazarus’ grave clothes stunk. And as long as we are operating from these dead grave clothes, even today THEY STILL STINK.

Now notice that there is a “C” with a little “I” in it. Actually, the “new man” is Christ in union with our human spirits, and that is my new identity and new life. Yet, I’m functioning as if there is Christ in me, plus a great big “PERFORMING ME.” At the beginning, I might think, “He is somewhere in my back pocket to be pulled out when I am in trouble or I feel weak.”

That is a lie, and the root of the stench keeping us deluded to who we really are in Christ. In our unsaved days, we thought we were an independent self, operating by self-sufficiency; and even now as a Christian we still think the same way.

The problem is that we don’t know the answer to this question: WHAT IS MAN? If we did we would understand the human being is a helpless expression of someone else: a vessel, a branch, a temple, a wife, the body, and the slave.

Don’t we Christians wear bracelets saying: “W.W.J.D.”? “What would Jesus do?” This means to most of us that we should imitate Jesus and do good things like He did. Aren’t we trying to become like Jesus by our own self-effort? Isn’t our dependency centered in on our own flesh power, and not on the power and life of Christ in us?

These false interpretations concerning our humanity are the lie that Satan planted deep in our consciousness.

Doing good by self-effort is an expression of Satan and “dead works.” The big “I” after the plus on the chart is not who we are. The big “I” is Satan disguised as a good, sufficient me.

Personally I went through a second crises and experienced great defeat for a long time. I think that is healthy; otherwise, I would have gone right back to trying to live the Christian life by myself. I had to be completely finished with a “self-acting-self.” Sometimes we are in the death side of the Cross for a long time. God has to know that we will not jump back into independent-self sufficiency, so He leaves us in the, “NOT I, but Christ” stage, sometimes for a long time. The “Not I,” truth must be burned in our consciousness.

The third I

Christ is not a part of our lives, HE IS OUR LIFE (Col. 3:3-4). When I found myself in the no-self stage, I was so thankful not to have a self. All I knew was I didn’t have to live any longer. I hated my self anyway. Little did I know that I really hated Satan masquerading as a good me, and not my precious vessel-self anyway.

The real truth is that I am a resurrected new creation in Christ. The only way to possess what Christ has already provided for us is to take a leap of faith into the no-condemnation release of Romans 8. If you are still condemning yourself, then you falsely believe that you can produce your own righteousness. If we dare leap into no-condemnation then you believe that Christ is your righteousness and He must manifest His righteousness through your soul and body.

Rest entered my soul. Jesus is taking my place now in my daily living. What a release! I no longer live. It is Jesus going to the grocery store; it is Jesus raising my children; it is Jesus fighting my temptations. There was no me there to do anything but rest in Him. My responsibility is nothing more than, my response to His ability.

It is good practice to stand by faith instead of fretting and trying to become who we really already are. What irony! Now faith is the key. Nothing will happen, or be experienced until we function as faith people instead, of works people.

Take a leap into your new identity, the new you, and trust that Christ is your life. Happy is the man who doesn’t condemn himself anymore. Happy is the man who knows Satan’s voice of condemnation and doesn’t believe his lies anymore.

The fourth IWe are to the final stage of restoration. Usually, however, we are so glad to be in the resting stage that we don’t want anything else – but no, there is one more adjustment. We cannot be really happy until we can fully accept our human self as a right self, and our humanity as God’s asset. There was never anything wrong with the human self; our sense of wrongness came from the delusion of independent-self. With the lie exposed and the truth believed, we are safe to get our self back. My basic humanity (personality and intellect) doesn’t change, yet my Christ-driven-self sure looks and feels different from my Satan-driven-self.

My consciousness changes to Christ in the background and my human self in the foreground.” “I now go to the grocery, I go to the bank, I plan my day.” Is it an independent “I”? NO, it is really He expressing Himself by me. Yet, I am not all the time conscious of Him. Does that sound dangerous? To some, yes, but not to me. It is hard trying to be conscious of Christ all the time, and we are not meant to be. But, I’m doing my business, I’m living my life. Now, who is that “I”? It is the new redeemed human I, operating with the Operator at the helm.

The divine nature in us is other love, not self-centered love. Never again is the point of life “about me.” I am a driven person, driven to be for others. Now, we too, are trusted by God to be sons and friends of God. Am I talking about the “old DOOR MAT” mentality? No, Jesus said, “No man takes my life from me, but I lay it down of myself” (John 10:18). I don’t see Jesus taking anything off of anyone.

Someone asked me one time, “Sylvia, do you love yourself?” The answer to my friend’s question is really, “Yes” I do love myself, because I accept myself and then forget myself and just be. Blessed is the day when we don’t obsess about ourselves anymore.

What do I think about myself? Well, I think I can do anything. I believe I have the sufficiency to do all things. I have no fears; I have self-confidence; I think that I am wonderful. Is it just me being on an ego trip? No, it is Christ’s very own right-self consciousness. Am I saying that I never “feel” any of these feelings of weakness? No, I am still tempted at times to fear, to worry, to be jealous etc, but my temptations don’t rule me. Instead God uses them as attention getters in my life. Then I rightly use them as my opportunity for faith to see what God is doing through them.

What a transformation! Praise the Lord; we come back as super human other-love beings. This is truly the “Liberating Secret.”

Tuesday 28 June 2011

John MacLauchlan notes - A tale of a genuine church in Yeovil, Somerset

Introduction to the VISION of CHURCH
(The header means notes about John MacLaughlan by Chris Welch, not by John)
Over the last months I have become increasingly aware of the pains suffered and caused by the existing models of church and particularly how it has affected some of the most enlightened here on the net. Some have had to receive actual physical healing for some of the inner wounds. In the last Havant Conference during one of the sessions, Peter Stott saw some real arrows in my back, and as he pulled them out I wiped straight out onto the floor. One of the immediate effects ironically has been to speak my mind to him, and also as some have noticed,to address people on the net.
One of my Facebook friends was crushed and ousted out of his Anglican post in Oxfordshire and has been flat out in bed with a recurrence of ME for 3 years to this date.
In the eighties Graham Cooke and Peter Stott saw a lot of this going on, but felt particularly for prophetic people, and began to run encouragement weeks just for them in the UK, but also they set about making materials more readily available for pastors to help them understand the operation of the prophetic.Peter and Mariette are often used to bring clarity and greater understanding to leadership couples in one of the big Chicago churches.

In the last few days I really wanted to "hit" this area of hurt and flush it out to the surface. I wanted saints to face head on whether their love for their individualistic way of operation  was really Christ them....or just a temporary Christ "workaround" until they get some of their Ezekiel 8:10 scrawlings fixed on the inner walls of their Temple. One sister who many will recognise immediately has spent 4 decades being all but and including  being "beaten up" by the religious, by the misunderstanding saints, and neighbours in her area. She has stood for this third level message in her lentil patch all on her own, and scores of people have benefitted from the results of her intercession as she shares now on Facebook.

I began to address this whole area last week. because she will freely tell you, that she is now" at home" being beaten up and abused. She finds it utterly bizarre to be treated to too much attention. I said she knows how to be abased. She does abased with panache, but she doesn't do abounding really well. And if "as He is, so are we in this world " is true, then we will model His life. And through the course of a day, Jesus would typically abound, then other dangerous types, out to get Him, would cause Him to be abased. But abased all the time.....nope, not even Jesus was that.
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What is church and what's it for?
You know we could almost talk about marriage in the same breath, because the physical and emotional abuses that happen in marriage are practically the same excuses modern people are using for never having to make a marriage commitment. And these same inner and also physical hurts have seemed to result from church life. So, let's ditch church then.
No, let's not.

Churches in the Bible were established by broken men. They had been right through the Way,Truth,Life rigmarole. Paul had organised the murder of one of the most radiant saints Stephen. This goaded him all his life. He knew he had Stephen's blood on his hands. More than that, from Jesus first phrase...Saul Saul why do you persecute Me, he understood immediately that Christ INDWELT these Christians.
Peter and the disciples had been more direct. They had walked right out on Jesus Himself. And they knew it.And it broke them.
Churches today are not established by broken men. Or to put it another way, people call brokenness, being sorry for a supposed sinful past life. Now I'm not quibbling on the past life. I'm quibbling the fact that until you can go beyond sins to catch the sight of SIN, the principle of SIN indwelling and possessing you...and the whole truth "There is No Independent Self".....you don't really know the first thing about brokenness, so from the get go, your style of leadership will be plagued with what Charlie Peacock sang as "The BIG MAN'S HAT". Why. Because you don't walk as Christ indwelling you as you. (Here's the song again, this time a more sober rendering, the black vocalist in the first clip,Vince Ebo has committed suicide around a decade ago)
Unless the Lord Build the House Those that Labour Build it in Vain
Christ is the only one who can build His house. Christ in us as us. Having exposed that what we thought was us, was SIN in us, and that's precisely what Jesus came to deal with, finally and permanently on the Cross. And His final and permanent way of dealing with it was to include every person who ever lived or will live in that death, take our spirit centre down into death in His Body death. Then when the Spirit raised Him, we were raised with Him and in Him. At conversion the sin spirit was fully kicked out, and Jesus Himself came in permanently. This is the ONLY foundation of God's Church. This is fully demonstrated by the Two Goats picture in the Old Testament. Read it again here, it will set you free.
All the other churches teach the Blood sacrifice of Jesus, but leave your "delusional self" intact to roam free throughout the churches. So gradually you become aware in these other churches that people seem to be like half dead zombies walking around...neither alive nor dead in Christ...in some kind of dangerous twilight world where you are very likely to get hurt. And WILL DO. It will indeed be like those Zombie slasher console games.In fact maybe all Christians should be forced to play them to ready themselves for life in the Church of the UNDEAD.
What does Building the House mean?
Well I'm sorry it doesn't mean paying millions to shore up Schuller's Glass Cathedral.
There's only two types of building in the Spirit.
If the ecclesia is a short time-frame church like Acts, it means the transfer of Christ into individuals in impartation of anointed Word, encouragement, faith, that people know what the Cross did for them, and Christ Himself becomes fixed in their centre.
In a longer term ecclesia, the church will have a calling as a Body of believers. It will battle through the stages of Ephesians, which is really a church book, gaining more and more authority in the Spirit in its geographical region and beyond. This is difficult to put into words so I'll use the example of Los Rios in Quilmes Buenos Aires. I think it is fair to say that they do not understand the Third level. But remember, the Moravians probably didn't articulate it too well either even after 100 year prayer meeting. But there's theology, and there's the indefinable qualities of maturity that the Holy Spirit builds into a Body of believers over time, that even they probably cannot articulate. Los Rios was established under Jorge Pradas and Ed Miller as a church that pioneered doggedly following the Holy Spirit regardless in the way of praise, and abandonment in worship and adoration.Not many will hear them sing and not break down in tears at the sheer beauty of the Presence of the Lord. They were established during the truly awful inflation years of Peron. When you visit a Living Church of the Holy Spirit that has maintained its walk with God, you will notice this perfumed fragrance of love oozing through the church. Love born of the brokenness of time and years.Out of this maturity as a church, has come a church in every province of Argentina.They are still a pyramid operation, but as you read in my previous post about Eric Chambers, more than structure what matters is, has the leader or have the leaders got the the highway to Zion running straight through their heart? or is it a BIG MAN'S HAT?
What Can I expect in a New Church following the Spirit?
Trouble. Let's look at what little I know about John MacLaughlan Yeovil,Somerset. He was one of the group of leaders who used to lead the London housegroup meetings in the fledgling days of the Friends Meeting House, before the arrival of Ern Baxter. John was a prophet, and often wrote in a magazine called Fulness which was a very similar magazine to Restoration magazine.
A bunch surrounded him eagerly and a church formed in Yeovil.(early80s) I only know fragmentary bits from a tuning customer in Yeovil church. I get the impression that as they were following the Holy Spirit, God began His journey of breaking people down to shock them into discovering "there is no independent self". This is a harrowing journey, and really costly if several are on it together, as it was with the disciples in the 3 years with Jesus.
In the 80s everyone was so naive about the awfulness of the human condition, so as far as I can glean, two things happened. Unlike Moses in the wilderness, these guys lived and worked and fellowshipped around Yeovil. When problems happened with Moses it was much more difficult, because you couldn't easily go back to Egypt. For Yeovil people, it was easy, if things got tough, just leave and carry on living the way you always used to live in Yeovil. I think the shock of this and how difficult church life was, and really not understanding our human condition full-on, I think prophet John panicked, and became quite controlling, trying desperately to hold the Ark of the Presence which seemed about to topple off New House Church Cart(King David reference).....and I think there were many casualties.
A Better Model - BIBLE HOUSE or CASA BIBLICA
Sometimes when you want to push something the Spirit is saying through a church, you take a core group who model it, and like leaven it leavens the rest of the church.
Emsworth Harbour
The Key of David meetings(Havant Church) are Jesus only agenda meetings. They are a current example of a particular exploration that is being made into how you run meetings in the Spirit, but without it fragmenting into complete nebulousness that now seems to occur 200 years on in Quaker meetings. As people get more trained by the Holy Spirit in this, it has affected the main meetings too.
CASA BIBLICA was the model given by God for training young people and couples, again as a core group which later infiltrated the whole of the Argentinian churches.
Living in community, yet walking in the light of the Holy Spirit is the toughest of calls but the most amazing of places on earth. Unlike Yeovil,CASA BIBLICA/Bible House in Emsworth, part of my former church ,then provided a safe place to breakdown in. It is literally a house where you fall into the ground as a seed, to be remade by the Spirit.  Luckily,if there are 30 of you, as there were in Emsworth, only 5 or 6 may be going "through it" at any one time. And the best way to describe the "it" is to imagine a woman with an acute PMT day...only this is not one day...and it is men as well!
Morning and evening we would have various meetings and church members and leaders would lead Bible teaching. People would remain in the house as long as the Holy Spirit directed.  Generally the posher you were, like me, the longer it took for the facade to break. I was in Bible House 6 years.
I want to stress the importance of the meetings. Some were house meetings. Some for the whole church.The praise and worship in those days was so fabulous you could practically cut the Presence of the Lord in the room with a knife, and serve it to people the next day. Now in these meetings, you may begin in praise, but God would so direct the meeting to attend to the deep wounds and problem areas, particularly of those going through things that week. We are talking real surgery in the Spirit here. When I first arrived for example, one of the girls had been sexually abused by her Christian father, nowadays a prisonable offense. She used to cut herself and her hair, but over some months she was totally and radically repaired. Her face was radiant. Out of her victory came song after song after song that blew us all away. I'm afraid I can  bore you at book length with the" day is as a thousand years life" that was Bible House.
So this was better BUT
it was still only dealing with deep traumas, many deep sin patterns, generational patterns of sin and sickness.
It was still early days in the charismatic search after God. Still an almost total naivety about the human condition. I want to tell you something, when I arrived in Emsworth Ian McCulloch prayed this prayer over me : " Lord do a quick work in this young man."
 Well I believe this man of faith got his answer, but ofcourse it certainly didn't look it to him. I was 6 years in Bible House, but really the process had only just begun now the facade was broken. Four years after this they chucked me out anyway. But as you will have realised with this blog, God really did a quick work though it seemed He wasnt at the time. This is because He took me right down in those years to discovering things that at the time that former church knew nothing of. And this is what we preach now on day one when we speak to people. And people are coming into the Kingdom in such a battered way, with family infrastructure being so poor, people are now ready to hear there is no independent self right at the start. Your average Christian in Britain either doesnt know this, or takes 40 years as a Christian before it slightly dawns on them.

So to conclude this section. Both Daniel Yordy and I having lived in Spirit filled communities that pressed ardently into God  KNOW how the Spirit works with folk in practice. Ofcourse everyone is different. Ofcourse it's different lengths of time. Ofcourse what we were in was still too shallow in  Spirit definition. But the one thing we know that others dont seem to on here, is that the God who can teach us individually the revelation behind the third stage of growth, can certainly now operate WOMBLIKE through a church geared up for it. It isn't going to be sooooo different from what we've seen so far, just more radical. The problem with Yeovil was complete naivety leading to the breakup of what could have been a great church. The problem with Emsworth was slightly less naivety...but still too much, so actually, I think after my leaving the church, one of the leaders became so discouraged he pulled the whole plug on Argentina, and Casa Biblica, and reverted back to the safe "Bible Training " model of every seminary, where people  get wound up like clockwork , sent out on the field ready to breakdown completely there, not having a clue as to what the gospel really is, nor who they really are.
The Woman and the Man Child of Revelation 12
So this brings us to the Church as WOMB for the ManChild who is this Christ as me believer who fully understands church life...the Living Church...he has the blueprint on his insides.The Holy Ghost Growing Machine.

The Church Carrying the Presence of God
People say I am Christ as me, why do I need church?
You need church not because you need church, as 2ndlevel pastors always used to say,
you need church because it is a God designed, God patented structure for carrying the Presence of God in a way that one individual cannot.
One reason scripture says where two or three are gathered in My Name, there am I in the midst of them, is because the love relationship between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit might be felt in your heart, but it needs more people to manifest this Triune relationship so that others can see it too. He loves turning up and transmitting this Triune relationship presence when 2,3 or a whole load more are there.
Psalm 133 says Behold how good it is when brethren dwell together in unity. The Lord COMMANDS the blessing there. (That's a post or two right there!)
Well dwell together is usually taken to mean a church meeting. Hmmm. Try thinking live together, or be always in and out of their houses. The fact is BIBLE HOUSE were much more than the sum of their worth.
People could get healed there. The group got noticed everywhere they went. They were a huge blessing to all of the rest of the church. It was a song factory. As people got touched, they sang!!!  The song How You Bless Our Lives comes from a Bible House holiday campfire in Devon. All the waves of spiritual truth people were learning filtered into the church. And ofcourse there was the obvious. Gardening power, driving power, removing power, DIY power. People learned to play instruments from each other, to cook , to make clothes , to run businesses together, to renovate buildings together, to run livestock together, to do proper barbecues the Argentine way with whole sheep and cows strung up.These side of things are well grounded territory for all previous communities : Quakers, Amish,Moravian. The huuuuge difference with the third level is now we know what the enemy is, we don't need to be nearly as stupid in closing out the world. Because ofcourse things were a lot more subtle than we thought. A similar distinction when Jesus said "It's not touching a Jimi Hendrix album before a meal that soils you, it's the stuff still rising from within you. For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks"
All the natural BODY images apply
The Body just knows where sickness is and how to bring healing
The Body works in unity and in balance, no part outweighing the other
The Body is geared to grow naturally and coordinatedly....looking at the church right now there are huge faith lumps in one corner out of all proportion to love lumps in the other corner
By supplying in the Spirit you become strong as well as the one supplied
The Body knows what it needs to eat
Spiritual Gifts Flow naturally in a living Body of Christ
 "Seeing God only", works in purely human living ways, but also with gifts.
Gifts have a lot more rounded feel with people you've laughed, cried ,exposed your lives with than in some purely "meet on Sunday or midweek approach". Based in this rounded context, when you do go out to unknown people the supernatural is sharper, but still rounded with love and caring, and not looking something like an extruded bolt on Frankenstein's neck.
Why the Body?- the unexpected
Because when we gather the totally unexpected frequently happens. Turns of events for people can change in an instant. Kairos moments happen a lot in the Body context. Things in jobs, callings,healings, families.....all these longstanding things can turn on a sixpence in the presence of God upon a gathered Body.
Never ever confuse the glory we have as believers inside and out pictured in the Holiest Place by the Mercy Seat of goldcovered acacia wood....never confuse that with the glory of God Himself which floats overhead. In this glory He communicates His Kairos actions and directions. The Now Word of God.
Why the Body- intercession
Living in the Body as it pushes people through in God gives real insight into intercession and breakthrough, and rythms and cycles, all of which become vital in the third level. living in the Body is simply the quickest course you are ever going to get on how to use your spiritual tools, the ones everyone has in Christ Jesus.
Speed
Because I have seen how fast Bible House works for people even in still quite a "young man" level of growth, I have absolutely no idea how fast a Body can grow that actually preaches the Truths of the Cross of Christ but coupled with sensitivity to the Spirit. Ephesians says the the Body is built by that which every member supplies....the supply being purely in the context of Christ as Us. As Bible House shows, the Body is geared up to bearing the Man child, this manifest grown up version of Christian, rooted and grounded in Christ. It does it naturally. We have no idea how fast Bodies all over the world can grow, but we know from Facebook how many are excited with what they are learning. One said she had learned more in 1 year on Facebook than in 20 years in a church. Facebook is terriffically well placed for teaching, sharing the Word,sharing prayer needs, but has terriffic drawbacks for all the other aspects of living together as a "city compacted together, set on a hill."
I do pray that this piece has healed your soul a bit in regard to church as originally on God's heart, compared to the vague mirage of church many have so far experienced.
To me, the very least of all [d]saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unfathomable riches of Christ, 9 and to [e]bring to light what is the administration of the mystery which for ages has been hidden in God who created all things; 10 so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places.
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Dave Berrey dberrey@live.co.uk

9:52 AM (16 minutes ago)
to me
Hi Chris, been looking over older blog posts and came across your comments concerning John Mac and Yeovil. I was in that church from the beginning to the end. It wasn’t a pleasant time at the end, with many pulling out of church involvement for many years after the event.
I was quite close to John and his family, even living with them for a time. I keep in touch with his widow who lives not too far from me. The issue which really undermined the church as well as John himself, was his views concerning the prophet and their role. He held the view that as he was God’s spokesman, if anyone disagreed with him they were wrong. I understand that this was the reason he dropped his relationships with the other national leaders. In other words he was always right. This was obviously wrong and a dangerous position to take. As you say these were naive days, we had no previous experience of the gifts operating in the church. If we had taken the time we would have discovered there had been other times when God had released truth, and times when men/women had become deceived in the same way as we had. So lack of wisdom and maturity were abounding.
I can now look back, and with time now appreciate the great things that John taught us. He had a passion for the mature church to emerge, to see the 5 fold gifts described in Ephesians to be established and much more. Many things the current prophetic movement takes for granted were pioneered by John and others in that season. There was a significantly greater desire and experience of the presence of God in those times, something I notice you have also commented upon. But, God is re establishing this, certainly in this country only in a small minority. The same was true then only a handful of folk were involved before the greater release of the wider move of the Holy Spirit, which later became the Charismatic movement(not sure if that was a good thing???).
Anyway thought this might fill in a few gaps for you
Dave
PS For the record, John’s surname was MacLauchlan

Can I Interest you in the Four Spiritual Laws ?

This post began life as a note on Facebook as "Any idiot can...." And caused quite a furore.
Below the post is a copy of my reply to the newly "homed" and back from hospital Rich Novek.(Weeeeelcome hoooome Rich) In it I explain some of the distinctive that Daniel Yordy and I feel in "seeing " not only the Third Level Message for individuals, but how it relates to a Melchizedek version of Mature Church. We're not claiming any special rights on this...it's just that Daniel and I were like spies in the previous generation, and got to taste and see some of the wacking great fruit in the Land. But unfortunately it wasn't quite the time.....so we've been dwelling in tents again....waiting....


"Can I Interest You in the Four Spiritual Laws?"

Any idiot can.....

by Chris Welch on Monday, 27 June 2011 at 12:18
  Any idiot can crash through evangelicalism,through pentecostalism and the charismatic, through a terrifying Romans 7 until they find Christ is their life inside them......the challenge is now: Can we so speak the Word like Jesus and Paul,in particular, and the rest of the apostles too, to raise up congregations in this Biblical norm. We've spent decades sharing one to one in hushed tones. But until the church is "seen" manifestly working things out to this depth,then this verse is still a fairytale : Eph 3:10 so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places. 
Verse  implication All streams of living water implicit in the Life of Christflowing through corporate expressions locally,nationally,internationally
NOT primarily for the purposes of evangelism, although this is the effect of binding the strong man,
BUT primarily hitting the targets untouched by all previous generations....who had as much right to do it as any, ever since Christ "stripped all principalities and powers and made a show of them openly".
And what are these targets? This is the Epesians 6 warfare, and the Psalm of Ascents pinnacle psalm 134 of standing by night in the Holy/Holiest place.
This is the stripping of all the Ezekiel 8:10 scrawlings on the walls of the Temple of God's creation....MAN.Of whom it is said in Revelation
They have become the dwelling place of God
God is now tabernacled amongst them.  

God's Means is God's Finished productJust as we send kids to school, not just to learn IQ facts, but to learn EQ facts. ie not just to learn head knowledge, but that they also learn as peer groups what growth is as an interpersonal group,and just as the peer group is not only the end product, but is itself the means for an acceleration of growth.So the Body of Christ is both the end product of God tabernacling with manBUT IS according to 1 Corinthians 12-14 (including the LOVE revelation)............THE MEANS  TO GET US THERE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE 

 God's Circuitboard
 Just as an electric circuitboard has to have no shortcircuits in order to work,in order for the Church to be the very place where God takes off his shoes and puts His feetup on the sofa, and opens the fridge for a fountain of cool,refreshing streams of Living Watercoming from His own very Presence...
Leadership have to have passed through the revelation stages of Romans, Colossians, Ephesians etc.
It has to be sweating out of their pores as LIFE, as a contagious LEAVEN which they infect others with just by being in their presence for more than two minutes. Proof( Norman Grubb, Watchman Nee, Evan Roberts all spent very little time all told in the presence of Jessie Penn Lewis....but the rest of their lives was spent working out what just happened.I myself but spent one evening with Richard Wurmbrand, and I think all told 3 hours with Basilea Schlink , and a few more hours with Ed Miller....and huge sections of my blog refer to them.
The gospel in today's church has short circuits in it
 The gospel in the Bible has the 100 megawatt 120 million volt power of grace shot right through from beginning to end.(Like a stick of rock lettering)Any works whatsoever are just physical hand gestures exuding out of a rock certain revelation and experience of Christfixing Himself in our innards as us. All the grace type portals that we have as Christians are the flimsy cardboard window frames by which God floods in with more of Himself.Bible reading,prayer, fellowship,praise, waiting on God, reading testimony books,conferences,taking bread and wine, baptism in water.....ALL these things, which in most churches are WORKS PILLARS   , like the 5 PILLARS of the Muslim faith  are very very very secondary to people being blitzed, zapped,virtually electrocutedwith the FINISHED WORK of Christ on the Cross, in as many aspects as us leaders can prise into headspace, heartspace , spirit space....and if there's possibility, legspace. Under Spirit anointing we publicly portray Christ crucified and all mankind as the co-crucified.Like Paul, we long to get into a place, to have a "gift of utterance", to " be able by some means to share a gift of faith" with a flock. It's nolonger a message. By the Spirit I heave out the spiritual concrete that has been written by the Spirit right across my heart and being, and layer it into other believers, like a bricklayer laying more mortar. But whereas he has to be careful in case mortar looks untidy, we can splash it all around in great huge dollops, the Father doesn't care, and somehow straightens it up so it looks neat later!!!!  

The Bible shortcircuit
  Because of the way the Fall locked us into our leftbrains in fear and shame, we crawl out of our darkened caves just far enough to be able to crane our neck over a Book which is written in a strange language called Ruach..the breathe or wind of God.
Now to our cavern accustomed eyes it appears at first to be in English, but decidedly odd for a cavern dweller, whose limited linear approach to life is:
how do I get food for today and retreat into my cavern to eat it and remain safe?

But unless we see that the Bible is God's record of how He gets and plans still yet to get HIS ONE LIFE in the Universe   squashed into His other main life form in the Universe that He constructed for the job....MANKIND, we really don't get what this RUACH book is a manual for.But with no other thought than caverns on our mind, it is very hard for the Bible not to become ONE BIG SHORT CIRCUIT .

 Now this doesn't mean that the Bible is a shortcircuit, any more than a dollar bill is meant for babies to chew and suck on.....but that's what babies do....and that's also what caverndwellers do with a Ruach  book.

Martha said to Jesus about her dead brother Lazarus. "I know he'll be raised on the last day." You see she'd read the Book. But Jesus was angry. Hey hold on a minute. "I am the resurrection and the Life". Evangelicals interpret this as Jesus the superman swooped down to earth and appears in her garden just in time to save the world....well raise Lazarus.But Philippians tells us Jesus laid ALL HIS GLORY aside. I suppose charismatics could argue that He was now anointed with the Spirit, so He had the power.  But it's more subtle than that. Jesus knew He had come as a normal man. He was the 2nd Adam.It would be as if Adam had had a friend called Lazarus. What Jesus the Man, who had laid all glory aside was saying was, the Father in me, the I am Life...is both Life and resurrection of Life. Which is a whole heap different from anything my Baptist pastor taught me. Then Jesus said to the religious scribes ....John 5:39"You search the Scriptures because you think they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me!"  Then in John 7 :16-17 “My teaching is not Mine, but His who sent Me. 17“If anyone is willing to do His will, he will know of the teaching, whether it is of God or whether I speak from Myself. Examine verse 17. If you were a theologian, what's verse 17 got to do with the price of eggs?A theologian's version would be  : when you've studied all the original texts and the surrounding Rabbi's commentaries, you shall know if what Jesus is saying is orthodox. 
Charismatic not liking the verse "Unless a seed, fall into the ground"

Bible  Clue
But this then is a clue to how scriptures DON'T shortcircuit.Our understanding, appreciation, and ability to work out the genuineness of any teaching has scarce nothing to do with the hours we spend reading scripture.
This is my life story.By 12 I had spent  12 times 52 times one hour in a Methodist church. I'd vaguely heard the gospel of forgiveness and asking Jesus into your life about twenty minutes of  624 hours.

I knew Bible stories.I was brought up with Bible notes  like Quest, but I was really unable to read more than a slender passage before falling to sleep, or just becoming bored.I became an atheist for a year, and entered into a very very deep depression. God heard the cry of my heart for something genuine, and used the persistent needling of my friend Rod Nixon in Amersham to get me into the Christian Centre, an outreach in new Amersham.

Over two monthly meetings I saw two Billy Graham films. I asked Jesus into my heart. Within no time , I was attending two studies on the book of Romans along with other young people. Six weeks later at 13, i was baptised in the Spirit. In the next few weeks I hungrily so devoured Watchman Nee's Normal Christian Life, that I'd printed and produced a potted version for all my schoolfriends. (Actually complete with rather limited artwork....come to think of it...how similar to my blog!!!)

A elderly methodist lady in her 80s who i gave Nee's book to read to said "I haven't a clue what this is all about, but it seems very good."
By the summer holidays I was reading all the epistles in blocks at one sitting, and I became aware of how little, even a renewed baptist pastor, who every week was leading people to conversion and the Baptism of the Spirit, how little his gospel sounded like the one in the letters. Then I tackled a minister of the then liiberal church of Scotland where we were staying on the Isle of Coll about all this and also the baptism in the Spirit.And ofcourse I added to my understanding and revelation of scripture, but really things plateaued for nearly twenty years until I began to understand the Third level of Growth.

This overnight, brings into focus lots of scriptures the charismatics never use like:
if the Light that is in you is darkness, then how great the darkness! Charismatics cannot use that one because it is impossible for them to get their head round the fact that now they have been filled with the Holy Spirit, how could they still be in darkness?
( This is a blogpost in itself)
So revelation of scripture has everything to do with internal YESES to God, and hardly anything at all to do with hours spent reading it.
The Bible is a shortcircuit only to those who have SHORTCIRCUITS     in their heart.
 Just as the Body of Christ can never be one, while each individual member isn't one him or herself, what we can transmit of the Word is limited by what Yeses we have said internally to God. So both unity, and understanding are tied up in this verse of David in Psalm 51: Unite my heart to fear Thy Name

Jack Fortenberry and Structural Shortcircuiting 
Two years ago before Jack came along I was an "internal" kind of guy. I wrote a disgruntled letter back to Jack after he had talked about  "Corinthian Elders", saying it was nothing more than rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic as it was going down. I said , "We have to get the Christ as us message out. Then automatically other things will fall in line."After all, this is what happened when huge numbers of us got baptised in the Spirit. The way the baptist Church was run for example, began to totally change. So, surely the same would apply with the third level message.

But then I read Corinthian Elders.I was poleaxed by the clarity with which Jack had seen something. Most Christian division today occurs because of our unbiblical church structures. We're lame wads  (Simpsons). We willingly plant a timebomb in all our church foyers and switch on the timer?How?By creating churches (and I use the human phrase advisedly, because God's version grows organically by revelation according to context) with a pyramid structure with a pastor at the top, we may as well call the fire brigade now and get them ready to pick the church building pieces after the bomb has decimated everything in sight.

What everybody in the whole world calls STRONG LEADERSHIP  from a leader has exactly the same logic to it as President Moi's last 10 years as President.When i was chatting to Daniel Arap Moi about the possibility of taking my camcorder footage of his schools back to England he gave me certain instructions. He overrode the headmaster of the school compound my parents and I were on and I became aware of his immense power.

Now both he and Jomo Kenyatta were convinced in their role as a strong father-figure shaping a nation that had newly found independence. And this with many tribes vying for total control.Now there may be some trace of truth to this, and to an African mindset used to village elders, and tribal kings, this paternal role may have been safe territory.

To the West however, Moi looked increasingly like Mugabe and so many other African leaders including ofcourse Idi Amin. Which was behind my blogpost, when does paternalism become patronistic dictatorship?

You see from the start, when the West look at an African nation, they then don't need to see or discuss anymore. Why? Because they see a pyramid.

Now for some reason no American looks at any of their churches and sees the same thing. They are all so suckered, in the same way as Africans, on the notion of "strong godly leadership". 

Church without the Glory  shortcircuit

Yup, but Mr African, Mr Englishman, Mr Guntotin,devil defyin' American, supposing God, the Eternal God in the heavens doesn't run His house that way, and cannot bring His glory.  Supposing the nearest a pyramid ever got to glorifying God was even then one man,
supposedly in charge,
face down on a cold stone floor
not exactly leading,
well not humanly
by the name of Evan Roberts in the Welsh revival.

Supposing we all dug out our scriptures again and noted that meetings are run
 by everyone having a "hatha"  (howbeit that everyone hath a gift ....be it a hymn or a song or a scripture 1 Corinthians 12-14)
by the overall simple premise that all church is , is getting Christ into folks innards properly that they too become mature and as quickly as possible father  the next bunch who go and do the same.

None of this shortcircuiting into reducing the gospel to a level of halfbreed zombies who stagger out onto town squares in half transformed states scaring witless the people out to do their shopping with curdled zombie cries of "Have you heard of the 4 spiritual laws?"
And you say they rejected you?
No more shortcircuiting of pastors taking their people through12 step programmes  so they learn more of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil
or Restoring the Foundations Courses to heal the soul of a Zombie, and wind him or her up enough to point them too at the village square.
Or do you like 
 cosy Christ as Us
churches of one ?

No...the short circuiting stops the minute the ministries ARE all LIVING letters.
They know inwardly they have died and are risen with Christ
It is really nolonger them that live But Christ
The life they now live in the flesh is Him.
They don't really have to do much in church, because as it was with Jorge Pradas or Ed Miller, just having them in a meeting, the Christ in them moved the meeting to incredible heights in the Spirit....and hey...sometimes Jorge or Ed got to talk as well....but only if the Holy Spirit had stopped all the other things He was doing simultaneously in the Body as it lay flat out gobsmacked in awe before the Living Presence of a holy God.
Anyone here on facebook up for this type of Church?
You know, the one that takes its name from Christ
it's agenda from Christ,It's speed of growth from Christ
It's functional form at any given moment from Christ
It's unique calling and identity from Christ
it's Way from Christ, who knows how to get a church all the way from zilcho Western humanism all the way through the chapters of Ephesians, where like the Moravians after a 100 years prayer meeting they so entered into their Ephesians 6 call just two of them alone were all ti took to completely zonk John Wesley,
who with Whitfield so turned England around we were about the ONLY NATION at the time that DIDN'T HAVE a bloody revolution...but these Moravians went all over the globe...to India, to Africa, to South America, to America, to Asia....Hmmmmm   anyone up for this? Or do you like  cosy Christ as Us churches of one ? END of Facebook post

------------------------------
Rich,
I'm sorry on a human scale it's so rough.But the Spirit by me is detonating the mirage of church that is in much of 3rd leveller's thinking, and like Lot, they are fleeing as fast as they can from, instead I and the Spirit by me,are saying, folks, that was always a lie....but so is running away fragmented as ones and twos into the desert. God is building a house that is not in the clouds, that really works, because our lives really work....not incidentally because they make sense outwardly to folk, but like Moses'bush and his own desert experience, we have learned to burn continually and not be burnt up....(this is the true Spirit definition of a life that works).
Daniel Yordy and I and somewhere out there are others, who have not only crashed into a 3rd level form of seeing and living, but as an early taskforce, have been part of an early Melchizedek form of church....founded out of nothing but Word, perpetuated (originally) by nothing but Word, with everyone literally living day in and day out cheek by jowl on that Word. His group were tasked with walking into all things under the Spirit revelation of the Three Feasts and how it worked corporately at life level.Our group were tasked with unearthing praise and worship in the late 70s and early 80s to the nth degree, which meant following the Holy Spirit right into some very deep places. People would come among us and literally fall prostrate on the floor as they came through the door. Daniel's group preached Word like you've never heard in your life...in fact Rich...you're actually about the nearest as well as Daniel that I've heard since. But they were pretty useless when it came to praise and worship...featuring a few 1940s accordian songs all beit anointed ones) and tongues singing, and our groups had only simple sounding Word. Actually to be fair it was mightily effective Word, but had nowhere near the density of Daniel's crowd.Sam Fife and the Move see Wikipedia
Although there was no clarity of third level seeing as there is now, the Spirit content of what was going on was so high, Daniel and I , though experiencing the rough end of both setups have the sense not to throw the Christ baby out with the bathwater....so we're carrying a lot of real world Body of Christ stuff around with us, which is just not on the net yet.

When strongholds are being hit, everyone thinks you are an enemy, but this is the power of the lies in Ezekiel 8:10, that people actually firmly believe that these scrawlings are them.
No, individualism is not them...for all the reasons I wrote yesterday. We have the Trinity in our heart, so like it or lump it...we've got a whole Chuch of them already to go inside us already. There's no way churches won't form round us...who will grow and churches form round them, who will grow and form churches round them....this is just what seed does....in fact it doesnt do much more than that....but try and prevent it...you'll have a job!!!
Thanks so much for your history there Rich and it's not your heart I am after...it's any loose scrawlings hanging around.
Love you bro.By the way I never helped save you to kill you.
Chris

Monday 27 June 2011

From "NT Wright" to "traipsers"

    • Rarely can I think of a man whose very existence seems to provoke controversy in the church. Nearly nobody I know has read him. I haven't yet. But I think NT Wright would find this all hilarious. How can someone's mere existence threaten so many?
      Part of an ongoing conversation with my Uni friend John Stevens
      John Stevens
      70s prophetic
      Hi Chris,

      Trouble with so much of the 70s dipping toes in Isaiah passages is not that the Lord wasn't doing a new thing, or that these scriptures were not fresh bread, renewing the new thing that had got grimy over centuries of neglect (much like when 'a' book was found  discovered tucked away in the temple) but the inability to articulate how the scriptures related to Israel and the church.

      I don't fully agree with where NT Wright ends up but do urge you to take a look at how he deals with the crucifixion in terms of Israel. (Just about remember writing to editors of Restoration that they'd got off track on Israel and couldn't they see the immense coincidence of the outpouring of the Spirit late 19th C and into 20th C with the re-establishment of Israel?) NT Wright is strong on God's faithfulness to the covenant. He refers to the New Covenant but also seems to suggest that the Old is subsumed into the New. I'd like him to be clearer on the New but he does get us to see 'personal salvation' in the context of God's overall eternal purpose for the created order.

      I'm aware I'm not being that clear but certainly a blast of NT Wright might give a different perspective on Reformation/Evangelical then Pentecostal/Charismatic then? history. Level 1, 2, 3.

      'The Challenge of Jesus' is a good place to start.

      Hope all's well.

      John
  • Chris Welch
    • I'm certain from your 3 assertions that you've got something here. That every mouth be stopped is an enormous phrase, that God is constructiing the whole of history round. The reason the Restoration (cf.magazine)people wouldn't listen to you, is because , in time , their mouths would be stopped too. When people don't "hear the Word" they go sailing past on the devil's juggernaut.....only to have to patiently retrace their steps later on.
  • John Stevens
    22 hours ago
    John Stevens
    • OK then I remember Wimber's reply to an interview question 'do you think the Vineyard movement will become a denomination?' 'probably' was his reply. He went on to look back at how all popular movements in the past inevitably create accountable leadership with love and grace at the start but due to growth end up with layers of structures and hey presto denomination. So I'm wondering where you are in terms of  replacing pastor-led church with what? I guess I'm used to the journey from democracy to eldership in a Baptist church. That was painful enough. Where now? Absolutely with you that apostles are servants and in losing authority to elders gain authority when given it by the congregations they serve. I like 2John as it exposes the breakdown in relationship between a poorly led congregation and a good apostle. That Paul was eventually welcomed in Corinth was nail biting stuff could so easily have gone the other way. Seems to me that it matters not what structure you think you have, all creak and crack as soon as there is a real issue in terms of relationship. It's only those who are willing to walk the risky road of love and truth, even if, like John who was sidelined by a church, have to continue in the kingdom off piste.
  • Chris Welch
    14 hours ago
    Chris Welch
    • I am looking again into the diagram I did with the youtube series Continuous revival....its blogposted as a brief History of Pslam 24 part 8. What I am looking at is BUTTON TWO in the diagram. This is where all the spiritual warfare is going on, and directly links with button 2 in the heavenlies. So, yes , when Paul almost lost his footing with the Corinthians it was because the Spirit in him had unearthed so many strongholds in one letter...and these strongholds are the Ezekiel 8:10 scrawlings that are not just simple bits of ink, the whole of hell seems attached when you threaten them. My friend Elaine has watched a church in Southampton splinter into smithereens as the "elders" dismissed a much beloved pastor, for as far as I can make out, next to nothing at all....apart from not being in their "control" enough, and he had brought ever so many to the Lord. This is closely related to the West End boys converted the other week.
      I
  • Chris Welch
    14 hours ago
    Chris Welch
    • In proper answer to what you wrote...I think Loose is the best thing to say. Elders/pastors who love and respect each other and know how to create an environment where the I AM shows up. This is also the pattern for the Key of David meetings, although the main meetings fluctuate greatly still here in Havant.
      Obviously 1972 was still Pyramid period in our renewed Baptist church, but pastor Eric Chambers had such an open heart. I have never known such a crowd of 3rd levellers traipse through the one church. Don Basham,Jean Darnall, Richard Wurmbrand,Graham Pulkingham and all the fledgling London team like Dave Mansell George Tarleton....we never had Maurice Smith, but it wouldn't have surprised me. An anonymous apostle that I can't remember from NZ. The Sisters of Mary Darmstadt (UK base)Loads of other early Word of faithers from the States. So I think that's it. Loose....and having the Psalm 84 phrase "In whose hearts are the highways to Zion." As you can see, it indelibly marked me with the ability to see beyond personalities, to appreciate anyone whosoever who has "stuff", and stuff worth sharing.
  • John Stevens
    10 hours ago
    John Stevens
    • A rich very rich set of traipsers. Thanks for your reply. John

Sunday 26 June 2011

Revelation or Reason? by Fred Pruitt

There is a great attempt to understand the scriptures in every way, and I am always amused when someone feels he’s got the real true understanding just because he can interpret Greek words and by the scholarship of others, having now found the true actual “definition” of the word, they by that know the real rock-bottom truth of the passage.

What foolishness! Do they not see it is only the mind of man trying to nail down spiritual realities from the perspective of human reason, i.e., the “idea”‘ that we find the whole enchilada when we know the correct definitions of the words? Somehow that is seen and put forth as “truth”?

But if that is so, no need then for the Holy Spirit. Revelation has ceased, many claim, and no wonder they think it, for it has ceased for them. Otherwise, they could not make the statement. So they are speaking truly out of the depths of their own hearts when they say, “There is no more revelation. Now we’ve got the ‘book,’ and we are responsible to ‘It.’”

So we figure out what it means based solely on human reason, on an initial foundation of the Death, Burial and Resurrection of Jesus, which reason thinks it can grab and hold on to and systematize. In so doing they choke out the True Vine as their initial “true” revelation of the True Jesus, and leaving the True Vine they have choked almost to death, they build a house of straw and empty words which “have the form of godliness, but deny the power thereof.”

Thus we have Ichabod. And of course that false tree has become so big it embraces the entire world.

No worries, though! All that the Lamb said will happen IS happening and will continue to happen in the what is to come.

Saturday 25 June 2011

The church is for man, not man for the church

So let's just get this straight. Christians are not for the pastor. Pastors are simply there for teaching the straightforward truths of Andre Rabe's book "Imagine". The gospel is to get human beings fully functioning as themselves...you know...as God always intended long, long before the Fall appeared to interrupt things.
People are not there in church to listen to endless sermons about the same thing.
People are not there to sustain a pastor with their tithe so he is happy.
People are not there to be endlessly patronised, so they feel good about themselves humanly, so fully bolstered they can go back into the week set up for another fall, to be able to crawl to church the next weekend to have their back patted again. (Well actually....clearly people do go for that reason, or what else would sustain a man financially providing the same repeated behaviour for decades on end? Clearly , in order for the synergy to work, that IS what people want. But you'll find no authentic basis for it.)
In Africa the pastor's role is not to fill the role previously occupied by the village elder, a semi-god like person who was there to sort out all your major problems, so you never had to fully grow up yourself, and face the world as a man is supposed to.
Jesus never said I will build my church on Pastor Kwami Smith, so when he pulls the strings, you all move your limbs.
He never said through Paul, "and the Body, fitly joined together,by everything Pastor Kwami Smith supplies on the overhead, while passing round the offering plate for his super duper house with 5 bathrooms."
No, honestly, Jesus, nor Paul , never said or wrote that. I know that has come as a shock to Africans.
Jesus never said I will build my church on my apostle and prophet. And the apostle shall pull all the strings, and all pastors shall do what he says. Yup. He never said that. That's for England.Apostles is always plural Terry Virgo.
Also for England, Jesus never said I will build my church to straddle all the geographical locations of England, subdivided neatly between bishops, who pull all the strings of the little vicars in all the parishes.
Are you sure Chris?
Well, maybe I've just got the wrong Bible, but I've checked about 12 on the internet, and I haven't found it yet.
I've also checked the letters, and they all seem to start and finish, and have middle bits with the word grace in.And, from the context, it didn't seem to be a thanksgiving prayer at meal times. It seemed to be about a spiritual power imparted by true teachers and ministers, that when they passed through a place, they only seemed to teach for a few hours, and then.....how weird is this? the power of the grace force coming out of their insides seemed to empower the believers so much, the ministries just left. And when they returned they never preached the same message twice. How extraordinary is that?
I know the early church had a lot to learn to be as clever and dead as we are...but that's just how it is.
Now here's another weird thing. Let's take a walk through Ephesians.
Ephesians chapters one and two seemed to be the starting point. All English pastors regard this as a lesson for the more spiritual. But Ephesians 1 , 2 and 3seems to be what people learned first, and because of this strange power these early ministries had called grace, that's all they really needed to know to empower them to live. And chapters 4 and 5 were all about working out this grace power with a few practical instructions, not so much laws, in the following  areas of Church, (or living within a LIVE Body ), earthly families and work environments. The Body living was interesting because this didn't just seem to be between 10 and 12 on Sundays. Clearly the early church got that wrong, as they were showed the error of their ways when they crystallised into the Catholic church by about 400. And people were able to show Christians the right and proper way not to be so keen.
Then, now this is absolutely freaky: having worked out this strange grace power message...well actually more than a message, more a force really, which made church, family and work environments work....in other words they became overcomers right where they were......they seemed to think they now had enough authority to extend their territories and their prayer focus in spiritual warfare. Now , not one of them refers to spiritual warfare conferences, or special seminary studies, or exams, or special forms of clothing....but it's a funny thing, by the end of the first century, what began as a bunch of followers of the Way, had congregations of believers in certainly every major city and most towns in the lands bounding the Northern side of the Mediterranean. Most probably fluke.

Surely modernday pastors could teach these people a thing or two about living from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the 7 steps of this and the 10 steps of that? I mean how would believers know how to live? You cannot really rely on an unseen force of grace acting in the life of a believer? This is really no way to run a mega denomination which will only expect a few people to convert every decade or so, and begin teaching others how they can live from rules in the same way  like good honest churchgoers.

Ofcourse, the very thing I'm pretending to be incredulous about like my fellow left-brain countrymen in England IS THE VERY way GOD moves in and through His genuine church. Grace imparted. Grace left to work itself through in all areas of life. Then Ephesians implies in Chapter 6 you have spiritual grace empowering to go into action yourself, and the Body you've worked things through with, in order to expand into other regions. You get your authority in Jerusalem, you expand your grace authority in Samaria, and by now you are on a roll to take over the ends of the Earth and bring the nations, as Paul writes, INTO THE OBEDIENCE OF FAITH.

Pastors, bless'em are all working backwards. They are struggling over their own gospel, because they never heard it in the first place through a grace empowered servant. They are left in the delusion that "the Overcoming Life" must be a set of rules then, carefully studied and examined in seminary. Full of all these facts they then deluge this putrid LAW filth onto a bunch of willing listeners until they too are as bewitched as the pastors. The people never grow, but get increasingly bound up. The pastors get madder. They go 200 miles to make a convert twice the son of hell that they are. Then they send their flock to conferences to get them gee'd up with the revelation someone should have taught them in the first place. The congregation are then turfed out onto Waterlooville High Street to do a healing crusade, but inwardly and outwardly they are all miserable, because they know their Johnny is on drugs, their daughter is pregnant and her boyfriend has left her, and they are trying to strum a few chords and tell everyone that Jesus is marvellous.

Anyone sense a gulf between the Ephesians letter and present day churches?

first appeared as a Facebook note by Chris Welch

Thursday 23 June 2011

No Independent Self by Norman Grubb

All of us are grateful to Nancy Gilmore for making this original copy available



No Independent Self


by Norman Grubb



The basis of our total truth, which we are taking to the whole church in the whole world, is that the human self has no nature of its own. It is the expressor of a deity nature, whether the nature of the false deity, the spirit of error, or the true Deity, the Spirit of Truth (1 John 4:6). Because we have all become accustomed to speaking of ourselves as having a human nature, it may make it clearer if we speak of the self never being an independent self. It has never been a self-operating self, and thus never operating by expressing a nature of its own.



There is no independent, self-operating self in the universe, except the One who calls Himself the I AM (Exodus 3:14), and says, "I am God and there is none else . . . There is no God else beside Me" (Isaiah 45:21,22).



But the Independent One has a limitation to His independence, for it is said of Him that He cannot lie (Titus 1:2). In other words His eternal self-independence is a fixed choice between two alternatives (these alternatives are explained in the following paragraphs on the law of opposites). Therefore, when we say that we created selves have no independent self, but express His eternal Deity Self, we are also saying that we express God's fixed nature, which has eternally discarded the possibility of expressing the liar, self for self nature. We are fixed as He ( 1 John 3:9).





THE LAW OF OPPOSITES



The fundamental law of the universe is that there are pairs of opposites, and that nothing operates except by the one swallowing up the other (2 Cor.5:4), the one using the other as its means of manifestation -- thus light-dark, heat-cold, sweet-bitter, hard-soft, yes-no, the positive-negative of electricity, and the proton-electron of the atom: or taken into our own reality as selves, self-loving or self-giving self: self for self or self for others.



This is why it says of God Himself that He cannot lie. In other words, He is dead to being a self for self (a liar) and is unalterably fixed as being the Self for others. The eternal fact is that He has never been a loner, but brought His own Son into Being. Thus He is the eternal other lover (John 5:20; 3:35). (See Alan Parker pamphlet on "The Cross in the Heart of God").



Thus created selves can only know themselves and function by being confronted by the choice of opposites. This was true also among those whom we speak of as heavenly beings. Lucifer was the chief one close to the throne of God (IS. 14:12-14; Ezekiel 28:12-15). He was created to be the manifestor of the Creator's fixed nature of other-love, (Lucifer means Light-bearer). But he chose in his freedom to be the expressor of the opposite, alternative nature of self-for self to which God had died. He brought into manifestation the hidden fire-nature rather than the light-nature of God (Hebrews 12:29: 1 John 1:5). He imagines himself to be in independent self (Is. 14:13, 14), but is deceived as to who he really is. Jesus called him the expression of negative light (Matt. 5:23). There was war in heaven and Lucifer was cast out (Rev. 12:7-9).





GOD'S PURPOSES TO BE FULFILLED BY HIS FAMILY OF SONS



God utilizes the choice between alternatives in us to fulfill His eternal plan "to the praise of His glory" (Eph. 1:3-14). He is bringing into being a vast family of sons in His image, whose created selves (with no independence of their own) express His fixed other-love nature. They will manage the universe with His Son (Heb. 1:2; Rom. 8:17) by ministering to it in His eternal other-love, and thus serving and liberating it to fulfill itself in the love of one to the other (Is. 11:1-9; Rom. 8:19-21), so that the whole universe will be one eternal song of praise, worship, harmony, mutual love and delight (1 Cor. 15:24-28).



This then necessitated that we who are created in His image be confronted by the reality of the opposites in ourselves and choose to express the deity nature of self-for-others or self-for-self. Therefore, the firs created couple had to be confronted with the symbol of the two trees in the Garden. They were at first unconscious expressors of God's other-love nature. Adam was in harmony with all creatures and could give each its proper name (Gen. 2:20): they knew no opposite to other-love in union with the Father.



In order to become conscious operating selves, and not merely continue like spontaneous infants, God used Lucifer, the wrathful expressor (Rev. 12:12) of that opposite fire-nature, to entice and deceive Eve. She responded to Satan's (the serpent) lies about God and began to express his self-for-self nature in herself by taking the fruit which God had forbidden. Adam consciously chose to identify with Eve's self-for-self nature disobedience (1 Tim. 2:14).



Thus they became conscious of the opposites through the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The good is self which expresses God and other-love; the evil is a self which expresses Satan and self-loving love. They became expressors of their Satan-father's self-for-self nature, Satan's "seed" (Gen. 3:14; 1 Jn. 3:8-10: Jn. 8:44). In their expression of him (Eph. 2:1-3, they became tricked into the false concept of seeing themselves as independent selves, even as their false father Satan was deceived into thinking he is an independent self. (In reality he expresses that negative fire-nature in God which, rightly used in God became the source of the light-nature of other-love).



So we transmit what we are or think we are. Therefore, it was God's purpose that Satan, the serpent, should transmit his deceived concept of his independence into us his seed. As a result we fallen humans think we are independent selves. But in reality we are merely expressors of Satan's self-for-self nature. Note the word "deceiveth" in that plainest word in Scripture concerning his lying effects on us (Rev. 12:9). And thus by this deceitful means we destined sons of the Father could once for all experience the bitterness of this lie and discard it through the Last Adam, Jesus Christ.



THE SECRET AND ESSENTIAL VALUE OF THE LAW OF GOD THROUGH MOSES



From this follows God's gracious dealings with fallen humanity through the law given by Moses (Jn.1:17). Paul has been the great expositor of its necessary purpose. Actually the law, as outer manifestor of God's true nature, is inherent in every person. The law exposes eternal truth as well as our inability to perform it in our false union with Satan. Romans 1:8-21 makes that plain and traces our total declension from it in the rest of the chapter. But here and there is a response in an honest heart, as in Romans 2:18-21, and the instance of Joseph in Genesis 39:9. And all nations have had their laws of right and wrong. But in the blindness of our deceived selves, we have not recognized our self-for-self nature as sin against God and its eternal consequences. This is the "ignorance" of Acts 17:23, Ephesians 4:18, and even of Paul in 1 Timothy 1:13. Thus only the outer pronouncement of God's law is known to be sin (Rom. 5:13).



So when God began His eternal purpose of restoring the human family to its true being, He first give His great call to Abraham to be the human father of the family of faith who would believe in the Living God, the "Possessor of heaven on earth." There had always been the thin line, like a nylon thread of believers and knowers, in this Satan-captured world, from Abel, Seth, Enoch, Noah, and Shem, to Abraham. But it was just a thread. Now it was to become a great nation of believers in the true God in that idol-infested world. In the "fullness of time" He would Himself come in the flesh to be our marvelous Saviour.



In due course the first little family became a great population in Egypt and then became a nation through Moses in its own promised land . It was Moses who gave them and us, in plain words inscribed in stone, the true characteristics of God's holy nature (which in our later days we are to know as law all fulfilled in love). Yet in His fullness of mercy, He combined the law and its judgments (which we would inevitably break because it was given to us to expose the inevitability of our breaking it as slaves to the sin deity) with constant means of restoration and access to Him by blood sacrifices and various fellowship offerings of the Tabernacle and Temple. By these means, indeed, there were always those (many more than we might think -- 2 Kings 19:18) who had a living relationship with God For the Lamb had been slain from the foundation of the world, and there was a spiritual Christ before the historic Christ (Heb. 11:26; 1 Cor. 9:3,4: Jn. 8:56, 58).



So in the blindness of our fallen hearts, the law was God's merciful means of revealing sin as sin. Then, in that fullness of time, the True Lamb of God came to make the one complete and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the world. By His death and resurrection there is justification from the condemnation and eternal consequence of our sins condition. This is for all who move in by inner faith reception and outer word confession of Him in His finished work of atonement. Beyond that the Spirit gives inner witness of the replacement of the Spirit of Truth for that false spirit of error. This is the radical revelation to those who cannot stop short of our total inheritance.





We have come now to the law's final revelation, which the vast majority of the redeemed remain ignorant of. It is for those who hunger and thirst after righteousness until they are filled (Matt 5:6). What is revealed is the root of sin: the Satanic deceit of thinking we are independent selves, who by ourselves can resist all Satan's assaults of self for self. This is especially under line for us by Paul in Romans 7. We know we have now become new creations in Christ and experience in our redeemed selves the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22, 23). But at the same time, we are being constantly knocked off our steady walk in the Spirit by the assaults of all kinds of temptations. They drag us back toward sin-responses such as fear, hate, lust, pride, etc.



Because we are still under the delusion of being independent selves, we respond to those temptations which the law says we should not respond to. We therefore say we don't want to respond, and we make resolutions that we won't (Paul's Romans 7 statement "when I would do good"). But then we are hopelessly caught. We struggle and seek to resist the pulls, but there they are. We feel guilty for having such pulls -- which we call flesh -- and experience inward guilt and often outward response. We blame those responses on a supposed flesh-nature which binds and drives us, so that we see ourselves as what Paul said in Romans 7:14: "carnal, sold under sin." So we remain with our struggles and inner condemnations as being such flesh people. When we have actually sinned, we repeatedly return to 1 John 9 and thankfully accept the forgiveness and cleansing, though with the hopeless recognition that we shall very soon go through the same repeated syndrome of struggle, condemnation by the law, and renewed cleansing.



But at last some of us come to a place of desperation. Only those who become desperate can find the releasing secret. Paul himself went this way. In Romans 6 he leads us through the deeper meaning of identification with Christ, by which we reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive unto God. But while we reckon that in Romans 6, it just doesn't work out in the life of Romans 7! Yet Paul then goes on to leave Romans 7 forever behind (except for occasional foolish visits) and live in the reality of Romans 8, where there is no further condemnation, there is freedom. The fixed law of the Spirit of life forever replaces the former fixed law of sin and Satan control.



Paul's great discovery was that the human self is basically neutral as for as the kind of nature it expresses. He says in Romans 7:18 that no good thing resides in our humanity (flesh). But then he says that neither does any bad thing, though he had mistakenly and so deceivingly thought it did. No!

- - if any good in him is expressed by the Spirit bearing His fruit through him, merely as a branch; so also, any bad is not in humanity, our flesh, but is equally the fruit of the bad spirit through us as a branch. He actually said that in Romans 6:20-22. Which fruit were we formerly producing? Fruit is not a branch product, but a vine product. It depends on which vine our human selves are the branches of! So if the good is the Spirit of good expressed by me, the bad is the spirit of bad - - what Paul called "sin that dwelleth in me" in Romans 7:17. This is now replaced by Christ dwelling in us (Romans 8:10).



So, at the point of desperation, Paul found a solution to his misery. He was not able to combat temptations under the pointing finger of the law's "you ought to." The solution was the radical revelation that he never was an independent self combating temptation and challenged by the law. He came to see his created self (as are all selves) as the mere container and then expresser of the Eternal Self. We are all created to contain and express the eternal self. But we have to learn that nothing functions except by swallowing up its opposite. We learn the operation of God's opposite by yielding our human selves to the Satan occupant, resulting in "sin that dwelleth in me." We are tricked into believing that we run ourselves (as he thinks he runs himself) and that we ourselves are the sin person doing the sins. But we are branches, not vines.



God sent the law through Moses to challenge us to be doers if we think we can! Down at last we fall. We are of course unable to be self-operating selves; because there is no such things. Initially we saw our sins removed by grace. We did not yet see that they were Satan's sins by us and not ours (Jn 8:44). But then comes the final discovery that the sin-doer was never we, but he in us as us. The law caught us out as if we were independent selves. Then came the condemnation fro the law and the struggling to rid ourselves of the sin-power holding us. But at last we see! There never was anything wrong with our branch humanity made in His image. So therefore, we take no condemnation as if we were the culprit. It was he, "Mr. Sin", pulling at us and often knocking us over.



This brings us to Paul's Calvary revelation that Jesus on the cross was we on that cross, for He came to be our representative. Because sin was indwelling and expressing itself by us, He died on Calvary as us, His holy body as ours. He was thus "made sin" (2 Cor 5:21), made the sin expresser we were. In his death, the Spirit of error left that body. Sin as us left. In the tomb His own resurrecting Spirit came into His body and raised it. He comes into our bodies also as we receive Him by faith. So Paul saw the truth about our human selves. The created human self, created "very good" in God's image, had never had anything wrong with, except that it participated in physical mortality. Now it manifests the nature of the Spirit of truth and responds to His drives. It is dead in Christ to manifesting the nature of the spirit of error and responding to his drives. Therefore, we have also become "dead to the law," because the law only had an apparent claim on us while we were living in the deceit of thinking we were independent selves running our own lives. So now there remains nothing for this outer law of God to point demanding or accusing fingers at. We are "dead to the law", because there is no longer such a thing as an independent self to which the law can address itself.



Free At Last



So now at last are clear. We are free because we know ourselves as nothing but the expresser, vessel, branch, temple, body member, and slave of the Deity self, his Spirit joined to our spirits. And we have moved in by the recognition of faith, as in Romans 8:2 and Gal 2:20, to being right self-conscious selves, conscious of ourselves being Himself in expression. We act freely as ourselves because He has of His own choice by grace joined, fused, and identified Himself with us as ourselves. We are "driven" people, driven by His self-for-others deity nature. And we live freely in His keeping in our soul-body reactions as much as in our spirit (1 Thess 5:23).





So then, what about those continual pulls that we still have to that old opposite -- those invasions of fear, hate, worry, lust, self-seeking and weakness? Now we are alive to Satan's subtlest assaults on us. The subtle trick occurs when we feel those constant pulls on us and we go back to the old habits of thinking we ought not to respond to them. Bang! We have been caught out in the old habit of thinking we are independent, and thus need to respond to an "ought to" or an "ought not". This is the subtle trick. Those pulls make us think we are independent human selves again, and the moment we think that, back comes the law saying, "No, you ought not to." And we are caught right up into false condemnation. That "ought not" only reaches us because we have slipped back into thinking we should be watching ourselves, running our own lives, and combating the wrong pulls. This is where Satan has his laugh on us. There we are, inwardly condemned as if we ought not to fear, hate, anger, lust, or to want or react to these negative desires. And there we are struggling and condemned, or maybe following through to some actual sin.



Why? Here comes Satan's final subtle trick. We are tricked in to thinking that having those pulls is sin: whereas, the real sin is the unbelief of thinking we are again independent selves who should not have these pulls. But the independent self is really Satan-self again having his hold on us, and we then again "carnal sold under sin". That means we are back again under the law with its "thou shalt not". But we are bound and unable to keep that law because our false sense of independent self, to which the law addresses itself, is really Satan as us with his temporary control of us.



Paul puts the essence of Romans 6,7 and 8 into three verses to the Galatians -- Galatians 5:16-18. "Walk in the Spirit," he writes, "and you will not fulfill the lust of the flesh." We are Spirit people, but still in our flesh-humanity, and thus open to all Satan's pull on us in our soul-body emotions and appetites. So now what happens? We become conscious of flesh pulls, for, says Paul, "the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh, and these are contrary the one to the other." These contrary pulls make us conscious of the antagonistic opposites, "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We are Spirit people bearing Spirit fruit and loving to be so, but we now also feel the pulls and desires of the flesh -- Satan's agency in this Satan-filled world for attracting us back to his self-for-self ways.



This consciousness of the flesh-Spirit antagonisms is the danger spot. Satan thereby seeks to drag us back to that separation through the fall, in which we again think we are independent selves instead of Spirit-united selves. This independent self outlook is really the touch of the old Satan-union on us. It also means that we immediately put ourselves back under the law again. And with what consequence? We are bound by that Satan-self in our separation and cannot respond to the law or Spirit, and so Paul says, "Ye cannot do the things that ye would." Thus we are under the condemnation of the law and experience guilt that we cannot fulfill it. Being in the lie of independent self temporarily puts us back under Satan's control. Therefore, we cannot do the things that we would. Properly caught, properly bound and condemned!



But now Paul says, "If ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law." In other words, if we are temporarily in unbelief, which has resurrected the lies of the independent self, we then suddenly remind ourselves of who we really are -- Spirit bound and Spirit led, our self expressing Himself. We then say, "Wait a minute. Of course I am not an independent self feeling these pulls of Satan. That is his lie. No, I am a Christ-self." I do not deny or fight the reality of my flesh pulls (and those are precisely what my Elder Brother equally, continually had according to Heb. 4:15).



I accept and recognize the reality of these flesh pulls, but I am dead to them in Christ ("always, bearing about in my body the dying of the Lord Jesus" as in 2 Cor. 4:10). They can shout at me by temptation, but have no hold or right to me (Roman. 8:12). I am alive unto God, a Spirit person, and led by the Spirit. The only law on me is what I now instinctively fulfill, the "law of the Spirit" by which I spontaneously do the things of the Spirit. Through Christ the Spirit has replaced that old "law of sin and death" by which I spontaneously did the things of the flesh. So I go free -- back to who I really always was.



This is Paul's definition of daily freedom under daily flesh-assaults or pressures. It is what James tol d us to be very thankful for -- good constant practice in the application of our faith walk. We admit those lying pulls back to unbelief, but now we are spontaneously faith-conscious of walking as Christ as us. Therefore, we "stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free" (Gal. 5:1). By admitting Satan's right to pull at us through the flesh, we are also free to affirm our right to our faith-consciousness of being Christ as us. Thus we express Christ's nature of love, joy, and praising. We swallow up the negative pulls, or rather use those very pulls to express His pulls: love replacing hate, faith fear, rest strain, strength weakness, self-giving for self-gratifying, and so on.



We Will Repeat About This Independent Self


Because of its importance, and because it is the main reason for this whole "walking in the Spirit" sharing, I will address again what we do in meeting the assaults of the flesh. The answer is that we do not fight temptation, nor take condemnation for it. The very opposite. We recognize that the real temptation is to make me think I am the independent self that I am not. Then I am again "under the law", yet cannot fulfill it, because independent self is really Satan as me (Matt 16:23). It is the sin of unbelief. What then do I do? I quickly recognize that the problem is not my having flesh-temptation, but rather my temporarily forgetting (2Pet 1:9) that I am n longer and independent self. Who I am is simply and sole an express of Christ in His nature..



Therefore, as quickly as I can, I accept the fact of being tempted, for we live in a totally tempting world. Accepting that, I don't deny or resist the temptation. No, I resist the tempter (James 4:7) by saying, "That's not I you are pulling: That's only my outer soul emotions and body appetites, which of course are open to all that can reach me from your outer world" -- 1 Cor 2:12). But I am not a bunch of outer responses, I am Christ as me. He is the real Self expressed by my human container self." As I do that, I am in fact doing what Paul said in 2 Cor 4:10: inwardly recognizing my place of death in his death to those old pulls of Satan on my human self. In place of these temptations, I am seeing myself in my true self-relationship of Christ in me as me. As I do that, the consciousness of myself as a Christ-expresser swallows up the negative consciousness of Satan and his pulls on me. Satan flees (Ja 4:7). I resist him by replacing false belief in him by true belief in who I really am -- Christ as me. Light swallows up dark. We don't fight the dark; we replace it by turning on the light.



Our danger, then, is not the fact that temptation pulls us. We shall always have plenty of that on all levels. The danger is that it tricks us back into thinking we are the selves who must respond to these pulls. But now we know that trick of Satan. We accept the pulls as normal and right on our humanity. But then we say, "That's not my real me. Those are only pulls on my outer clothing of soul-body. My 'me' is Christ as me, and the light is on and the darkness swallowed up." And if we are tempted to think, "But yes, we are constantly assaulted by the same things," then we then equally say, " And yes, that gives me continual practice in recognizing again and again who I am -- Christ as me!"



And Now That More Than Conqueror Reality



Now we are "more than conquerors" (Rom 8:37), because we are freed from having to fight our own battles and watch out for our human responses. We are "fathers," not just "young men" (1Jn 2:12-14). We are co-laborers, co-saviors (1 Cor 9:22), and intercessors. We now move out to meet the needs of others. We are more than just personal conquerors; we can lead others into conquest. We are the privileged ones to be "Knowers" by the Spirit of what is to us the total truth; That formerly we were Satan-I, but now through Calvary Christ-I, with no illusory independent self in between. This is such liberating light and the meaning of life in fullness that we have an unending drive of the Spirit to bring this "mystery hidden from ages and generations and now made manifest: (Col 1:26) to all God's people. We are taking our share in this worldwide, church-wide commission. We know it includes also our share in the offense of the cross where the sword of the Spirit pierces too deep and disrupts established convictions. But we also have the glory of seeing an increasing number in whom the light is lit in clarity. And we know our calling, as with Paul, is "to open my mouth boldly to make known the mystery of the gospel," and to "speak boldly as I ought to speak" (Eph 6:19, 20). And by God's enabling, this we will do.