The Releasing Answer by Norman Grubb

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Hymn Translation in English

 

The Releasing Answer by Norman P Grubb, writer of "Rees Howells Intercessor", and his final great book "Yes I am ".

Norman shares the answer to the problem experienced by so many Christians, who once saved find they are unable to live the Christian life. He describes this experience as a second crisis, meant to press us into recognizing that Another is here to live.

The effect of the inner and outer law on us is twofold. On our response hangs our eternal destiny. We can either respond by hypocrisy or honesty. As a fact, we all start by being hypocrites. That is, we pre­tend to ourselves and others that we keep the law reasonably well, enough to salve our consciences: We have enough religiion or a philosophy of some kind to cover our tracks, for a self must always have a foothold for its selfhood—right­cousness (rightness) of some sort. What we really do is to try to keep the eleventh commandment, to hide the truth from ourselves as from others—"Thou shalt not be found out!"

Honesty is when by some means or other (God has a thousand original ways), we are brought up sharp enough in our lives, suddenly or gradually, to be faced with the plain recognition that we are not what we should be. We are law breakers. The moment of truth is when in our freedom we admit that fact. That is honesty, and that is also a total self-hu­miliation. The supposed foundations to our selfhood have given way. 

We have enough religion or a philosophy of some kind to cover our tracks

That is why there is a cost in it. The false front  of our self-justifying religion or philosophy collapses.
But this admission of merely being a law-breaker in the sense of not living up to the standards of God's law is not sufficient by itself. The point is that it is the law of God, and, therefore, the law on which our being is founded, so that we are at variance with the Source, the Originator, and Upholder of our being. Therefore, we are at variance with life itself We are wrong, we are lost, we are in the dimension of what Jesus called "outer darkness."
Now when that is an admitted reality to me, I am conditioned for the truth. I have a need and I must have it met. I can no longer consciously continue at variance with the God of my being and under -His justifiable condemnation, with its necessary ultimate ending in "everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord." What then shall I do to make amends'? But that is exactly what I cannot do as a self-confessed law-breaker with the usual consequences of law-breaking
This is the moment, the first moment when He who is love, the ground of my being, can get over to me what love is
being,
and what He is, and what I am to be. Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, is the answcr. What He did for me and as me was what 1 could not do for myself .
we are in the dimension of what Jesus called "outer darkness."

This is the eternal love. Now in my total need I am conditioned simply to see with thankfulness that what I could not do to removing guilt, condemnation, ever-lasting separation, He did for me, and they are no more. Seeing is recognizing and receiving and release.

In my freedom of choice, which hardly was conscious choice, when my need was so desperate and the supply so complete, I suddenly realize that God is now my God and Father, and Jesus Christ
my Savior and Lord; and not only have I a conscious peace and release, but I have a love for Him. What I probably do not realize is that this is the beginning of my living the eternal quality of life for which I was originally created. The restoration to God of His stolen property has taken place. A revolutionary change has taken place. For the first time in my human history, I love someone else more than myself A new love, greater than my love for myself, has taken possession of me: love for God and Jesus.

I do not yet realize that this is not my human affections. I probably think this is my love for Him, but what has really happened is that in receiving Christ I have received into myself the One who is love, and what I regard as my love for Him is really the first expression of God's self-giving love in me, loving another more than myself, "The love of God (not love for God) shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit." This new love, greater than love for myself, has taken possession of me, causing me to start being an other-
lover: for I very soon find that if I have love for Jesus, I also have love for all men, for He and His world are identified. I find in myself, not only the love for Him, but also the desire that my friends, rny neighbors, and all men should share the secret of life that I have found and that they equally need, and that I should take my share in the ministry to mankind in all ways available to me.   

This is eternal life which is eternal self-giving love begun in me. I have "come home," and begun to be the light and the love I was destined to be. What we call Christianity, therefore, is not be­lief in a doctrine, not membership in a church, not allegiance to a Bible or a Jesus of history, but a new love; for again we say, we live where we love, and this new love is for the first time in my human history the love of someone more than myself. and this is and means a new qual­ity of life of which the potential and im­plications arc way out of sight beyond space and time, just as an Amazon river starts by a trickle at its source, or a prairie fire begins with a spark.
However, this has not completed the exposure to us of our mistaken concepts of life, as though it is we living it. We are so used to this illusory outlook that, though we have now recognized and ad­mitted that we did not live our lives on God's standards, and in our lost condition needed and found a Savior, we now think that, as Christians, we can set to work and live on a new level. We will seek to keep the commandments, to love God and oth­ers, to maintain communion with Him by prayer and Bible reading, to conquer the habits that defeat us, our hates and fears and lusts and jealousies, to have God at the center of our domestic, business and social life, to attract others to our new­found faith.
Instead. what happens'? We begin to find this new life wearisome. We have not what it takes to live it, neither sufficient love for God and our neighbor, nor sustained interest in prayer or the Bible, nor victory over our weaknesses.
We even lose the consciousness of God's presence. We cannot handle our depressions, our failures, our relationship problems, the strains and stresses of modern life, the difficulties of even attempting to be honest and pure and not self-seeking in the jungle warfare of modern industrial, political, and even social and domestic life. To say that we approach a conformity to the absolute demands of loving God with all our heart and mind and our neighbor as ourselves, is ridiculous, and frankly we often do not want to. Maybe we had better give up. Maybe life was easier and more enjoyable without trying to be a Christian in a serious sense. We seem nearer to a breakdown and the need of psychiatric help than to the peace and rest and adequacy we thought the Christian life had for us.
Good; all these are excellent signs. In our former unredeemed life, we had to be so disturbed that we came to a final crack-up and admitted our failure before God, a total failure. Despair is the best word, for despair means that we are finished and there is nothing more we can do about it. We have to come there, having given up completely, before we can have eyes to see that when we could not climb up to Him, He had climbed down to us; what we could not do for ourselves, He had done for us.
Now, again we have to come to a second despair. Before, our recognition was that we had not done what we should have done in keeping God's law. This time, as redeemed Christians, we come to the discovery that we cannot do what
we should do. Before, we learned our guilt. This time, we learn our helplessness. Before we did not, now we cannot.
The apostle Paul has a profound and subtle explanation of this stage in our experience. He has already shown how the law (God is love) should have been naturally operative in us, so that we are love; but owing to our fall into self-centeredness, that same law then confronted us with its demands which self-love cannot fulfill, and thus at last led us to honest admission of our lawlessness.
"...we have to come to a
second despair. Before, our
recognition was that we had
not done what we should
have done in keeping God's
law. This time, as redeemed
Christians, we come to the
discovery that we cannot do
what we should do. Before,
we learned our guilt. This
time, we learn our helpless
ness. Before we did not, now
we cannot."
He goes on to show, mainly in his Romans and Galatians letters, that because we are still not yet free from an innate self-reliance, from the idea that somehow as new men in Christ we can do what we didn't do before, once again the law confronts us with its "You ought," "You must"; and in our illusory self-confidence we jump at the bait. "All right, we will," we say. "We'll do the best we can." And down we fall on our faces. We don't fulfill it, and usually we don't even want to fulfill it. We prefer to please ourselves.

Often the preachers from the pulpits are themselves to blame in their constant exhortations to us to get up and get doing what we can't, and don't honestly want to--for the simple reason that independent self, self-relying self, can only by its very nature be self-pleasing-self. So we come to an impasse. The law, according to Paul, is now completing its job on us. It forces us to face, first our guilt, but now our helplessness.
The Bible is full of illustrations of sincere men, earnestly dedicated lives, who went through the period of their disillusionment, when they had to discover that they could not be or do what they wanted to do. Outstanding are the disciples of Jesus, who were completely sincere in saying they would die for Him, but they ran when the heat was on, Peter to the point of denying Him with curses; and that was just where they learned this second and final lesson—their inability.
I learned it, to give a word of personal experience, when I was as dedicated as I knew how to be. I had responded to the call of God to take Christ to the Congo. That cost me nothing, because I could conceive of no higher honor than to introduce Africans to Him to whom I had had a personal introduction through an Englishman. When out there, my aim was single and concentration total on my calling. But I carried with me this illusory concept we are all born with that I was a servant of Christ and wanted to be the best I could be; and yet I was terribly conscious that I was not what I should be. Particularly, I had not the kind of love which would identify me with those to whom I had gone, or the faith that the things would happen I had come out to see, or the power to see them happen: and when I am dissatisfied with
my standards of ministry, I take it out on my wife by irritability, and my fellow-workers by criticism which must not admit that they have what I have not.
So, though active without, tramping the villages to speak of Jesus, up in the early morning for a couple of hours with God and the Scriptures, within I was unhappy. I began to think that I had been happier before I gave my life to Christ than after. I was bound by self-consciousness, inner strain, disturbed relationships.
I was passing through what I since learned is a stage we all have to pass through when we are miserable Christians and, as I did, think we were happier in the old life than in the new!
"...the only self-giving love in the universe is a Person, not a thing. Therefore, it is
not something He could share with me, but it is Himself, and He can't take parts of Himself and give to me. He can only be Himself."
 Sometimes it has been called "the dark night of the soul," "the wilderness experience," "the dry and thirsty land where no water is," with much more self-consciousness than God-consciousness, more self-concern than concern for the needs of those for whom I had come to Congo.
But, unknown to me, my real trouble lay in another direction. I had the illusory idea that I needed to become something better than I was: I must be a better representative of Jesus Christ, and so forth. I was looking for personal improvement and some further spiritual equipment which would set me on my feet. God and the Spirit were then to be my helpers.

I sought God and searched the Scriptures, as any earnest Christian would do. Surely there in the Bible the answer was to be found, for it talked of love and faith and power and freedom. But the answer I got was in very different terms. It was a confrontation, not this time with the law saying to me, "You ought," but with God turning my attention from myself to Himself by saying to me, "I am." The way it came to me was in that statement I have so often quoted, "God is love." But the emphasis was on the little word "is." It struck me that I had been seeking a God who would say to me, "I have and will give to you." But instead, He was merely saying, "I am," not "I have." It was as if He were saying to me, "You've got it wrong. You thought love was something I had and could therefore share with you. But love is not a thing at all. I am love."
Then I saw that the only self-giving love in the universe is a Person, not a thing. Therefore, it is not something He could share with me, but it is Himself and He can't take parts of Himself and give to me. He can only be Himself. It was my first sight of an exclusive God. the One Person in the universe, who gives nothing but is everything, and therefore, His only giving is to give Himself and just be Himself wherever He does give Himself.
How then do I have my needs supplied, if God has nothing to give me, but in each instance I find that He is (not has' the power, He is (not has) the life; until finally read that "Christ is (not has) all and in all"? That last phrase gave me my key. I saw that my mistake was the idea that He would give me things, and that I would thus become something.

Now I saw that we humans do not exist to become something, but to contain Someone. This was a totally different concept and was the end of my great human illusion that I must be this or become that, centering my attention on what I am or ought to be, and equally depressing me with the recognition of my failing to be all this.
Now I saw that I am to cease to look for improvements in myself, or to center my attention around what I feel or don't feel, whether I am this or have that, why I fail in this or an defeated by that—the whole outlook on life which fixes my attention on myself and my reactions or my adequacies or inadequacies.
The most illuminating illustration I found in the Bible was the several times we are called vessels, because a vessel, a cup, a vase, a can, is strictly limited to one function only. It only exists to be a container. It can be nothing else: and here was this simple though humbling illustration of my relation as a human to God. I only exist to contain Him. A vessel does not become the liquid it holds; they are separate, unmixable entities: so I as a human do not become the power or love or wisdom of God; I merely contain Him who is all these, and everything. How clearly I saw that: we humans are not created to become something, but to contain Someone but that someone is the living God, and, therefore, the All.
This transferred my attention from worrying about myself as the vessel not being this, or being that. Leave myself alone. I am just the container. In place of this, I had it clearly that I was containing a totally exclusive Person who gives nothing, but is all; and I don't contain Him in a relationship in which He imparts various gifts and graces to me, but I am just a means by which He can be himself in a human container. This means that my main function in life changes from activity to receptivity. Activity centers round how I can be this or do that, around my human self. Receptivity is occupied with receiving or recognizing what I contain the only function as a vessel.
I saw how all life is in this same relationship to God. Vegetation exists by what it receives—sunlight and rain. What it receives it utilizes, but it must receive first, then activity is a by-product of receptivity. All science is application, not creation.

"I only exist to contain Him.
A vessel does not become
the liquid it holds; they are
separate, unmixable entities:
so I as a human do not be﷓
come the power or love or
wisdom of God; I merely
contain Him who is all
these, and everything."

Scientists discover what is, and then apply it. We humans have lost our way because we are blinded to the fact of being containers of God, and have substituted our self activity. We have to return to the roots: and it is not even really receptivity, but recognition, for having already received Him, we form the continuous habit of recognizing that we do contain Him. Life at its base becomes a repetition of recognition. What more amazing realization can there be than that we humans contain God?
This is why Jesus stated that rest is the evidence of a life in gear. He said to
us His followers, "Take my yoke upon you ... and you will find rest unto your souls; for my yoke is easy and my burden light." An obvious contradiction in terms. Life is activity—the yoke is pulling the plow: but how can a plow be easy to pull or a burden light to carry? The answer is the difference between activity from inadequacy which is strain, and activity from adequacy which is rest. If we are pulling the plow of our life's problems, relying on our own resources, that is strain, for we haven't got what it takes to meet them. If, in our pressures, we turn inwardly as containers to Him who is the all within, and boldly reckon on Him to handle things, then it is rest in the midst of the activities the habit of recognition.
For many years after his retirement as General Secretary of the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade, Norman Grubb traveled extensively sharing the truth of our union with Christ. He was the author of many books and pamphlets, a number of which are available through the Zerubbabel Book Ministry and now Amazon on Kindle. Norman P Grubb entered the Kingdom at 98 years of age.


The Yes I am series is here

Yes I Am 15 - The Final Stage of the Restoration

Yes I Am by Norman Grubb

Chapter 15
THE FINAL STAGE OF THE RESTORATION:
THE CRUCIFIED BODY

We now turn our attention to the area of our daily living. It has been wonderful to have the disturbing questions of our past and future settled, for, however the world may try to hide it, until we have that settled, it is true of all men that "through fear of death we are all our lifetime subject to bondage." However, we live not in the past or future, but in the present. Have we an answer for its immediate needs? Yes we have, we are boldly asserting, or we would not now be talking it over.

Paul puts it quite simply as he directs our attention from past to present needs. He asks the question, "Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?" In other words, what about our present condition? Let us get down to brass tacks about our daily lives. Have we a genuine one-hundred-percent life-level which matches the kind of statements scattered throughout the New Testament: "joy unspeakable and full of glory"; "peace that passeth understanding"; "having all sufficiency in all things that we may abound unto every good work"; "reigning in life"; "more than conquerors"; "out of our innermost being flow rivers of living water"; "perfect love"? Or is there only a hit-and-miss attempt at such standards, with more miss than hit? (And we all know there is more miss than hit.)

Paul does not shrink from a face-to-face tackling of such questions. He provides us with both a total answer and the basis for that answer. It is best given in his famous Romans 6-8 chapters, into which I personally have never tired of digging further and further until I have at last come up with what I believe is the right understanding and application of what he is saying. It has taken me a long time to be simple enough to let into my head and heart what Paul is really saying, and not what I might think he is saying. The very fact that he adds these chapters to his completed new-birth presentation in chapters 3-5 shows that he realized the matter of full, present "total living" in our new Christ-relationship needed some more thorough examination and explanation - a further turning of the key in the lock - to establish us solidly in Christ as the new person we are.

He again hangs his answer round the final completion of the operations of Moses’ law on us. He explains how in our newfound sincerity, with a zeal to live consistently (as we should) on totally holy and righteous standards - walking as He walked, loving as He loved - we find ourselves in a struggle between flesh and spirit. We know the law and its commandments; we aspire and we strive; but we largely and disgustingly fail. What we should do, we don’t do; and what we hate, we do!

That, as Paul says, is because we have by no means yet been enlightened and experienced the "total exchange" which has taken place in our identification with Christ in His death and resurrection. First of all, we never had it clear about the totality of our former identification with that false deity who had stolen us as his dwelling place - that we were never anything but individual expressions of him, manifesting his nature, not our own. So our present confusion and ineffective living stems right back to that as its source. We have always felt at home with the idea that we are "self-running selves": that we ourselves are responsible for the good and evil in our lives.

Because we were blind to our condition, God in His grace first sent the law through Moses to expose our bondage and reveal to us the nature of the false deity expressing himself through us. In this first exposure, however, we saw no more than the sins we had committed - the breaking of outer laws - and by no means did we penetrate within ourselves to note the sin nature - Satan’s nature expressed by us. Therefore our first response to the greatness of grace shown in our Lord Jesus Christ was simply to recognize our outer sinfulness, to believe that our guilt and curse had been removed by His shed blood, and to rejoice that God would remember our sins against us no more, as guaranteed by His resurrection.

But what we did not know then (and were not within reach of understanding) was that this was no real salvation if it delivered us merely from the outer penalty of our sins but left us as "vessels of wrath" - still containers of the inner sin-person, that old serpent the devil, still reproducing his evil fruit by us. Complete salvation must rid us of producer as well as product, cause as well as effect, sin as well as sins.

This total salvation - the totality of Christ’s cross-redemption - is the deeper discovery which Paul himself didn’t see in its full implication until he lived three years in Arabia. This is what he speaks of in his Galatian letter as the gospel which "I neither received of man, nor was I taught it, but [I received it] by the revelation of Jesus Christ." That revelation was centered around not the blood but the physical body of Jesus on the cross. And what is the importance of that? It is because a living body is the dwelling place of the spirit, and therefore when a body dies, the spirit is no longer in it.

Therefore Paul (when writing to the Corinthians for whom he was an intercessor, and thus having insight into the full meaning of the Savior’s intercession for the world) opened up its total significance as no other did. "We are convinced," he in effect wrote in 2 Corinthians 5:14-21, "that when the Savior died on our behalf it was a body death, and this means that if He died for all, then we all died." And what did His body represent before God? Paul tells us in verse 21 that "God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us." Please note: sin is not sins. By His shed blood He "bore away our sins," but in His crucified body He "was made sin." This is fantastically deeper than "bearing our sins," wonderful though that was. "Made sin" is almost unthinkable; for sin is Satan’s label, just as we might say love is God’s. Satan is, as it were, Mr. Sin, the spirit of error. Where does the spirit of error live? In human bodies, ever since Adam and Eve partook of that forbidden fruit. So when Jesus in His body hung on the cross, "made sin," that body represented all the bodies of humanity, which are all containers of sin. Yes, He in His body on the cross was made the representative for all the bodies of the human race having Satan, sin’s originator, living within.

There that body died and was buried. When a body dies, the burial is to make it plain that no spirit remains in it. And so it is that Paul can so authoritatively state in Romans 6: "…in that He died, He died unto sin once" - not, in this context, died for our sins, but died unto sin. (That is why the blood is not mentioned by Paul after Romans chapter 5. From there onward the subject is His body death.) Christ’s burial was to signify in plainest terms that no spirit remained in it.

So now Paul just as boldly states that we believers, being buried with Him, are "dead to sin" - a truth way beyond being only cleansed from sins. We are no longer containers of sin (the same thought as being containers of Satan), and we are to state this truth and affirm it as completely as we state and affirm that we are justified from our sins. "The body of sin" is "done away with" (Rom. 6:6 NASV) meaning that our bodies are no longer sin’s dwelling place. And we are to reckon this as fact (Rom. 6:11).

Many of us commonly use "reckon" to imply uncertainty. If, with a book in his hand, someone says to you "I reckon I have a book in my hand," he is likely implying to you that though he believes it is a book, yet he is not absolutely sure. Were he sure, he would just say "I have a book." But in the Bible, reckoning means considering as actual. To reckon a thing to be so, to count on it as fact, is the first stage of faith that affirms. And "reckoning" will later become "realizing" - which is faith confirmed. But we must start with the reckoning!

But to consider myself dead to sin is no light thing, especially when I do not yet appear to experience it. We hesitate to declare "I am dead to sin," because we are thinking about how often sin still seems to turn up in us. But the issue is plain. Will we obey God’s Word? In this same chapter, Paul says that we have "obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered unto us." Have we, really? So let us "go to it" and be sure we boldly affirm and declare what His Word says we are. Let us not compromise (as many folks do - even teachers of the Bible) and seek to get around this by saying it is our "position" but not yet our "condition" - a lovely little evangelical wriggle. Let us rather obey, and declare what we are told to recognize, attend to, and say. Then let us go further, after our word of faith and obedience, and find out how this is a present fact in condition as well as position.

But if it is a fact that we are dead to sin, then it is also a fact that we are "alive unto God through our Lord Jesus Christ" (6:11b). As the spirit of error (Jesus "made sin" - 2 Cor. 5:21) went out of that representative body when Jesus died, so also the Spirit of truth entered in three days later - and therefore the Spirit has entered us through Christ’s bodily resurrection. We see the vastness of the implication of that because, for that reason, we who were called the "old man" because of the "old" spirit of sin in us, now are called the "new man" because of the "new" Spirit of the living God in us. The man, our human self, has not changed. But the old indwelling deity, of whom the man was but the expression, has been totally replaced by Another. And thus - with our whole self totally and solely at His disposal - we joyfully recognize our new Owner. Because of His new management within us, the old owner, Satan, has no control over us. He can shout at us from without, but he has no further place within. We have changed bosses! We are in the employment of a new Firm!

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LWWW1 - Desperate to Live Right - Page Prewitt

Life ~ The Who The What The Why 1


Introduction
Life is not as it appears and that being human beings expressing their own acts and deeds - it is the acts and deeds of one of the two known supernatural spirits, Christ or Satan, indwelling mankind and, as a result, using the human spirit to live and accomplish their deeds and desires through. Our life becomes the right life when through the cross of Christ the spirit of Satan is put out of us and we become joined to the spirit of Christ. This does not put us in a relationship with Christ, as so many believe, but in an eternal union with Him; as the Bible says, we become one with Him. The two become one, yet always mysteriously two: "he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him" (1 Cor. 6:17). As a result of this union reality, it is Christ who now lives His life through our human vessels (Gal. 2:20). As should be obvious, His purpose is to use us to reach the lost and dying world and bring them by his Spirit into their ordained eternal union with Him.
[Part 1] Desperate to Live Right
If you are someone who has been a born-again Christian for some time and you find that it has become discouragingly difficult for you to live a godly Christian life, this booklet has been written for you. I, too, have been in that place spiritually. I clearly knew God's requirements for living a godly Christian life; what's more, I wasn't fooled into thinking that I even came close to meeting those requirements. My heartache was that I desperately wanted to "live right," as I called it, and be the kind of person, both inside and out, that I knew God required me to be. Nonetheless, no matter how hard I tried to do this, I missed the mark almost all of the time.

 Life is not as it appears and that being human beings expressing their own acts and deeds - it is the acts and deeds of one of the two known supernatural spirits, Christ or Satan, indwelling mankind and, as a result, using the human spirit to live and accomplish their deeds and desires through.

When I would read Romans seven where Paul says, "I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do," I would think, "This is me. I am just like Paul. I, too, am a miserable failure. I am unable to do what I know is right, and I continually do what I know is wrong." I could and did wholeheartedly say along with Paul that this was certainly a wretched way of life. In view of the fact that the great and beloved Paul had experienced the same failures that I was experiencing, I came to the conclusion that maybe this was it, and the best any of us could hope to be or do this side of heaven.
This belief gave me no peace, however. My conscience and the Bible convicted me that my failure to obey God's commands and live up to His standards was sin, and in order to be a right person, I had to stop sinning and live a righteous life. But as I have already said, knowing this had me in a hopeless state because my best effort to "be an imitator of Christ" failed over and over. Along with all this dilemma and despair, I knew the Bible promised that God had a way of escape for all our temptations.
There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way of escape, that ye may be able to bear it (1 Cor.10:13).


[Part 2] We're the Container, Not the Contents
I came to see that Paul found the answer to his life that he described as being worse than death. At the end of Romans chapter seven and on into eight we see the light dawn for our brother Paul when he ecstatically bursts forth with the blessed truth that the Lord Jesus Christ is the answer to the bondage in which he (US, TOO) is held. In the great "glory" chapter eight, we are blessed to have recorded for us Paul's discourse where he expounds how he and those who are in Christ have been set free not to walk in sinful fallen flesh, but instead to walk in the Spirit of the risen Christ. I had no problem agreeing with Paul that Christ was the answer for my wretched state. My problem lay in the fact that I didn't know how to translate this truth into everyday living. In time I did find the answer I so desperately needed. Read on because I am writing this booklet in an effort to share with you the answer I had revealed to me. It came in the form of the message that I, along with many others (namely my mentor and teacher Norman Grubb, who first taught me these Bible-based truths) have come to know as the Total Truth.
The biblical foundation for this truth is that we humans are vessels or containers. The reason I say this is because the Bible calls us pots, branches, body members, slaves, and wives. The function of each of these examples is to contain or to be connected to something or someone. As such, we were created to contain a supernatural spirit as well as our own human spirit. It is the supernatural spirit (Satan, in those who are lost, and Christ, in those who are saved) that defines and rules us. With this understanding of our humanity, we comprehend that we do not have a nature of our own, but instead we express the nature of the one we contain. (Illustrations will come later to show the working out of this truth.)

....speaks of God (now) Come Home

Christianity is about Presence and Consciousness. Both are Agape Love since God oozes the stuff.

 Ask most people "outside" leftbrain locked Western civilization, and they know that who you "call on" will come to you. 

This principle is behind Shamanism,African Tribes rituals,Indian religions....but also Christianity...if you "call upon the Lord" He will "come" with salvation, and Presence.

But consciousness is God's real aim.

This is the tabernacle picture then of us, represented by the "Ark of the Covenant" with Law and Manna inside it. 

And with Presence over the top of it.
This is not afar off. 
This is the meaning of the torn veil.

 At the moment it is starting to be a notion among believers, attended by God's freeing Word....But I'm telling you like a "cloud" the size of a man's hand, this "notion" will soon be a rainstorm to beat every single revival in history...since it speaks of permanent Union,God with His people, God come home.

The 2nd Seal and Conscience - Peter Stott 6th June 2010

Continuation from Mark Stibbe's Prophetic Talk given at last year's RiverCamp2009 on the second seal.
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2Timothy2:19

Nevertheless, God's solid foundation stands firm,

sealed with this inscription:

"The Lord knows those who are His," and,

"Everyone who confesses the name of the Lord must turn away from wickedness."

My notes in blue: The main gist so far in the worldwide Spirit-filled community is that we have been getting to know the Lord in a new,living, real way and now we move onto the 2nd seal which is a call to holiness. Both Peter and Mark Stibbe approach this subject with much fear and trembling, because of their own "legal" pasts. Holiness, true holiness , they are aware, is not the stultifying obedience to a set of rules and commandments, going back again to lawbook-living.



Before we go to Peter's message on conscience, can I point out that from a 3rdlevel point of view, the order of these two seals above are very key.



It's not us knowing the Lord. It is Him KNOWING(sexual union word) us. So you can forget the second seal until you have first laid a foundation as follows:



that the former 0wner /occupier , Satan, since Genesis 3:5 , has now been driven out. The Lord knowing us is a very deep phrase which describes the experiential process, the conscious process of LEARNING HIM as Our New INDWELLER. That we only ever were, and continue to be, spirit containers; before we were born again, containers for the Satan spirit,since we were born again, containers of Jesus.



As Christians, because of ignorance and our own limited understanding of scriptures,and also because just about all the main Christian teachers in the worldwide Body of Christ still teach "separation": Christ and a separate me, who is trying ,through godly pursuits, to better him/herself, we are unable it seems to read Romans, Colossians,Ephesians etc the way they were originally understood.



How do I know that? Well, as in tuning pianos, thankfully there is an inbuilt natural check and balance system. How do I know when first a note made up of three identical strings, then second the entire first octave of a piano are exactly in tune? Well, simple really (and this is a bit of an oversimplification you techie purists), there are NO BEATS. When there is dischord, the differences show up as unpleasant extra vibrations called beats. (Techie moment:If A440 beats per second is played against A441...you only hear the straggly one beat per second difference wowing between the 2 strings)



In the Body...you know when the teaching is right

People live free....yup...amazingly enough...that's OUTSIDE of meetings

secondly "these signs follow after those that believe."



So you can tell a 2nd level community of believers who are still "stuck " in the independent delusion:

1. All sorts of sin is still going on behind the scenes which creates peculiar B.O. when the saints gather together in meetings


2. There are only spasmodic signs following in a random hit or miss kind of way....usually after only gazillions of prayer or bursts of spiritual concentration...as Rob Rufus describes the early 80s for him.

Where "separation" is still implied in the teaching, you are not dismantling the false consciousness that was sown back in Genesis by the devil, whose genius was to come up with something sooooooo like the real thing, that even squinting very closely at our history, at all mankind's mistakes, we still were only ever putting on the devil's own specs....."If the (very)light that is within you is darkness....HOW GREAT is that darkness."

and it has taken all these millennia to trap what is going on, and continue what Jesus came for, to lay the axe to the root.
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Peter Stott : "The Second Seal and Conscience" from notes - ACWelch. June 6th Havant Main Sunday meeting.

The call to holiness is a call to come alive again. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. The component parts to our makeup have been seriously clogged up and damaged by sin, and the shame of sin.

Here are a list of some of our abilities and gifts that really only come into their own again when we have received Jesus into our lives, and we are walking closely with Him.

Memory - a powerful tool for recalling the ways God has blessed us and come through for us in the past.

Imagination and creativity - our drive to experiment with the new in every area of our life knows literally no bounds

Will - a curse when wayward, but a powerful driving force in God

Conscience - this is the subject of this talk.
Sin damages.Clogs up.Wrecks our self-image.Causes shame. Both when it's our fault and when it isn't. (The Bulger murder case didn't just affect those concerned, it brought a measure of shame to our nation. "Righteousness exalts a nation.")

Sin is unattractive in people. It dulls. Righteousness has an attractive radiance about it. A liveliness. A clean conscience gives strength, forcefulness, authority.

Innocence Lost - by Steve Taylor from 1987 Album ironically titled "I Predict 1990". The end makes me want to cry.

Ever hear the sound of a death row chorus?
ever see the look of a wolfman prowling the steps?
in this deep freeze bunker they store us
send away the priest, 'cause they're ain't nothing more to confess

She had the innocent eyes of a Renoir lady
clutched her black book like an angel nursing a child
"It's a quarter to midnight here, baby
if you're gonna stare, do it while I'm sleeping"

But her eyes, they shone of an innocent way...
in her eyes, we glimpsed of an innocent way...
and in the days that followed we were under a spell
why's the girl visiting a prison cell?

Innocence, innocence,
innocence lost
all souls want it back
some uncover the cost
innocence, innocence lost
break free, look at me
is your innocence lost?

He'd seen things that a man don't mention
sunk into his eyes was a weariness nothing could heal
"Don't tell me 'bout your cheap salvation
what's a man do when he don't feel nothing?"

But her eyes, they shone of an innocent way...

She said, "Beyond these bars there are things you can't see"
He spoke slowly
"Ain't no pardon for me"

Innocence, innocence,
innocence lost
all souls want it back
some uncover the cost
innocence, innocence lost
she said, "Look at me,
don't you, don't you lose your innocence
don't lose your innocence"
he said, "God's own angels couldn't give me hope
when you leave me hanging, just leave me enough rope"

But her eyes he glimpsed of an innocent way...

And on the eve of destruction they were shining the chair
outside vigils, inside men were sobbing
as she kissed his forehead when the morning had dawned
he said softly to her, "I'll see you beyond"

Peter continues:

The Apostle Paul in Acts 24:16 "I strive to have a pure conscience before God and men"

Conscience is your friend. It is a fabulous tool when healthy, because it discerns good from evil. It tells you ahead of time to get the heck out of there, before you get enmeshed.

So a healthy conscience is Pro-active not Retroactive as it has come to mean in a sinful world.

It says AHEAD of time....Keep away. It is like a sensitised sense of spiritual smell.

Conscience can be corrupted. It says in Titus 1:15 To the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are corrupted and do not believe, nothing is pure. In fact, both their minds and consciences are corrupted.

The Holy Spirit can tell us to stop doing things for a while in order that we get freed up from any false soul/spirit attachments. If we are not careful, these temporary arrangements enter into the lore of our Christian movement, as a dead work, shaping our consciences falsely . In the 30s Pentecostal women felt it was a leading NOT to be attached to makeup. This then entered the lore of the movement, as if it was a permanent law of righteousness.

1 Timothy 4:2 Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron.
If our consciences have been so badly calloused, we are unable to correctly assess things. We begin calling bad things good.

We can have a weakened conscience. A strong conscience is one that is connected to our will. Otherwise we assent intellectually to something, but as soon as we are strongly enticed, all our notions go to the wind.

Shame is the dregs of what remains after sin.

Paul says in Timothy " I thank God I serve Him from a pure conscience

2Tim 1:3 I thank God, whom I serve, as my forefathers did, with a clear conscience, as night and day I constantly remember you in my prayers.


I Timothy 1:5 "The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith." How much expression of love is needlessly forfeited through bad conscience clogging us up?

Third-level teaching is so good at getting to the heart of things enabling a truly clear conscience.

If you understand that all you are is a container, and that sin was ousted completely at the cross, and the New-Indweller who is Christ has now come in, you at last have a foundation that is Word and Spirit to combat

shame, inferiority feelings, self-loathing, general yukky feelings...

We have a foundation now to speak to the devil with.

I decide to believe what the Word says about me, until the feelings and thoughts tag along and fall into line with my new believing.

After a while we get better at recognising what is genuinely our conscience, and what are just bad feelings that are still according to the lies I believed about myself.

Peter continues: our baptism into Christ expressed in water baptism, cleanses our conscience.

This could never happen before in the Old Testament system of sacrifices of bulls and goats. But Jesus did a complete thing for us - see the next post The Two Deliverances at the Cross chapter 4 - Treasures of Darkness by Sylvia Pearce.

Peter Stott: How to Keep a good conscience

By the Blood, The Word, and the Spirit.

-By keeping short accounts and going to sleep with a clear conscience.

-By soaking, or exposing ourselves to good stuff. Just generally taking care of what we are feeding on.

A clear conscience is a joyful thing, and joy brings strength with it.

By lining up our conscience with the Word and the Spirit. "Thy Word is a light unto my feet"

The Result.....

A confidence without boasting. It's not a self-confidence in our own works...but a clear conscience in regard to our dealings with God and man.

And learning to use that inbuilt umpire of peace that we received when we were born again. Let the Peace of God rule or umpire in your heart.

To live among a people that just simply acknowledge their sin before the Living God and His Presence, that take His righteousness offered as a free gift, and then, living unclogged, free to love others, to rightly relate....to lose these heavy clouds of depression and cynicism, to do away the dependance on stimulants, anti depressants, because innocence has returned, a lightness of spirit, joy strength and confidence....instead of having to live in our current rather numb Western culture. End of talk

The Believer as a Container for God's Presence

The Key to Everything by Norman Grubb
The whole text is here, as notified by Merrill Thompson on Facebook

PART I
The Believer as a Container
for God’s Presence
When I was in the British army in World War I, God very plainly called me, though I'd planned another career, to join a little independent missionary group just starting in Africa. I wasn't there very long before I deeply felt my inadequacy.
It wasn't that I was lukewarm for Jesus Christ; it wasn't that I had turned away from Him to some other interest. I was a servant of His, and my whole interest was set on introducing my brother Africans to Him.
The inadequacy I felt in myself first of all was the need of love. I deeply felt, when I got among them, that I just didn't have that love which bridges the gap. With that went the need of faith — and with that the need of power. All of these were linked together.
Response to the Christian message in Central Africa, like the United States, appears to be quite large. But I soon found there was much more profession than possession. I began saying to
myself, Are we bringing the Africans anything really worthwhile? Are we just bringing a code of
ethics? Or a liturgy, or historic faith? Have we got something genuinely transforming to transmit to others?
Then I made the question personal, "Have I?"
As I asked these questions, I discovered that when your ministry is disturbed, it tends also to disturb your personal life. I found myself, as my wife well knew, irritable at home in a way I hadn't been irritable — and critical of others to cover my own failures.
As I doubted, asked questions, and searched the Bible for some kind of an answer to my
inadequacies, I found some amazing answers. Some of them have shaken me considerably. They have changed my whole viewpoint — and my experience.
I can't call them revelations, because they are based on the revelation, witnessed to by the Spirit.
To begin with, my attitude was that God should improve me.
Well, I'm a servant of Jesus Christ, I thought. I've been redeemed by His grace, I belong to Him. I must ask God to make me a better servant of Jesus Christ.
I thought He should channel in some love into my heart, some faith, some power, some holiness — and improve me.
I had to learn sharply that self-improvement is both a sin and an impossibility. It came as a considerable shock.
But though my idea of how God should answer my problem was completely wrong, my sense of inadequacy was good. It sent me to the Bible. And my first discovery came as I read one famous verse in the first letter of John: "God is love."
Suddenly the is stuck out. What dawned on me went something like this: It doesn't say God has love, but God is love. If some body has a thing, it isn't he himself. It's something just attached to him, as if you've got a coat on or something in your pocket. You just have it, and you can share it. But the Bible doesn't say God has love, but God is love.

I Could Never Love!
Love, therefore, must not be a thing I can have. Love is exclusively a Person. God is love. Therefore, there is no other pure, self-giving love in the universe beyond Him Himself. Love is exclusively a characteristic of one Person only — and that's not Norman Grubb.
That was a deflation for me. I had thought I could have love imparted to me, channeled into me, and I'd be more loving. But I suddenly found God saying, "You'll never have one iota of love. I am love, and that's the end of it."
Love is a Person; one Person only loving — and that's not I, and that's not you. God is love and, therefore, love is God loving.
That set a new trend of thought going. I began to relate this to my other need of power. And I suddenly found a verse in the first chapter of I Corinthians where it says that Christ is the power of God. Not Christ has the power, but He is the power.
Once again, I had thought power was something which was given to me, and I'd be a powerful servant of Jesus Christ. I suddenly found that power, also, is a Person. And that person is not I but is exclusively Christ, Who is God; it doesn't matter whether you call Him Father, Son or Holy Spirit.
Then I came to the one thing every Christian claims to have. Every believing Christian accepts the fact that he has eternal life. He takes it that he has a life which will go on forever in Heaven. ("The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.")
But I suddenly found that eternal life is not something I can ever have — for Jesus did not say, "I have the life to give you" — but, "I am the life."
Once again I had found that something I had thought I had — eternal life — is one person only, and that's not I. Jesus Christ is that "eternal life."
But where did I fit into all this?
Finally I came to a statement which gathered all together and finished off my investigations by its absoluteness. The verse was Colossians 3:11, where it says of believers in Christ that "Christ is all and in all."
Christ is all, not Christ has all.
And if Christ is all, what's left for me? Not much by my mathematicsl
I had thought I was somebody, and something or could get something. I found God had taken the lot. Christ is all.
Then I got the link. Christ is all and in all.
Then I saw for the first time that the only reason for the existence of the entire creation is to contain the Creator! Not to be something, but to contain Someone.
So there dawned a very important truth. We humans naturally regard the human self as
important. But we've got the wrong ideas of the reason of the existence of the self.
An immense distortion has come into the very warp and woof of humanity. It's the distortion of the ego — of the self. Though we feel self to be important, all of this showed me that self is extremely unimportant.
There is only one Self in the universe who is really important. I would almost say there is only one Self.
Why? Because there's only one Person in the universe who ever said, "I Am."
God said that was His name thousands of years ago when Moses asked what he should say when people would ask, "What is the name of your God?" (Exodus 3:13, 14).
We are told that at the end of the history of the universe it is God Who will be all in all. God all in all! Then what's left? It's terrific.

Why We Exist
There is only one Person, and the human creation is brought into a living relation ship with this One, so that He can manifest Himself in His perfection of life and love through us.
The whole creation exists because Spirit must have a body in which to manifest Himself. As the Scriptures say, "The whole earth is full of His glory." They say that Christ ascended "that He might fill all things."
If He fills all things, all things are containers of Him. Here is both the height and the dangerous depth in humanity.
The height is simply this: the rest of creation can contain manifestations of God; we can contain God as a Person. A person cannot manifest himself as a person through anything else than a person. You can't fellowship with a dog or a stone. You can enjoy the marvels of the atom or of a precious stone, but you can't fellowship with it. But I can fellowship with you because we are of the same makeup.
God can manifest His marvels and His beauty through the flowers and trees. We can view them through the microscope and telescope, and marvel—but we do not say, "That's God."
The greatest marvel, the greatest height of personality, is when we can look at a human being and say, "God is there."
The depth, the dangers, of humanity are that personality means freedom. Intelligent choice is the essence of personality.
Therefore, God appeared to be on the horns of a dilemma when He created people. (Of course, He wasn't, for He knows His own business in the end.) But it appeared so because the people He created could turn around and say, "Thank you very much, I don't want You to live in me."
That's exactly what happened.
We make self our god, not God. We just naturally run our own lives. And that's our whole trouble.
There isn't a single problem in humanity except our self-reactions: not one.
The Devil is no trouble. He was dealt with 2,000 years ago.
Your neighbor is not your trouble.
Circumstances are not your trouble.
The only trouble is your reaction.
Distorted self, self out of gear, is our problem.
Once we know how to handle the human self and put it back where it belongs, we've found the key to life.
That's what we're going to examine.