Showing posts with label Yes I am. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Yes I am. Show all posts

Tuesday, 7 April 2015

Pricking the Bloated Independent Self



Before Yes I am by Norman Grubb and others of his books, prophets were kind of stuck nonplussed.

We kept getting ourselves into scrapes but didn't really understand why. Certainly to everyone else who relate in quite a detached slightly formal, or may be just pally way, prophets were a complete enigma and consequently got themselves labelled as socially unstable.  Particularly in jolly hockeysticks or should that be golfsticks ? England.

Yet some of us had already observed that not infrequently Jesus caused the same problems, but that gets brushed under the carpet....since He is after all the Son of God and presumably can be forgiven....being perfect and all!!!

I brought this kind of thing up again yesterday in a comment on John Castleman's Timeline.



John Castleman
Yesterday at 16:21 ·
The chapter in my book i'm currently working on is titled 'The Art of Overlooking' since as Proverbs 19:11 reads, ‘It’s to one’s glory to overlook an offense’.
And He mercifully gives us plenty to 'overlook' along the Way, lots of gory on the road to glory. It's a loooooooooooooooooooooooooong chapter.

Chris Welch: I would say this is a huge and current topic. Daniel Yordy won't even talk to me now.....And I don't know if you realise....spiritually we are virtually twins. So we'd better get this issue sorted. People people love talking about honouring each other. I would.guess this would be the chainmail permanently attached to Cindi Estep and Leonard Fredette. Prophets see straight through crap and see only the real person underneath and tell them so. At the moment the whole.Body of Christ right across the whole earth is ripped in two over this one. Do we do a Bill Johnson and honour each other? Or do we.obey St Paul and speak the truth in love? Which in his case involved naming names so that we are still.reading about Hymenaus 2000 years later?







Ephesians 4 twice talks about speaking the truth in love verse 15 we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head,

and verse 25 25 Therefore, laying aside falsehood, speak truth each one of you with his neighbor, for we are members of one another. 26 Be angry, and yet do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, 27 and do not give the devil [s]an opportunity.

And in the middle of the two is the foundation....namely that the old self is being corrupted in accordance with lusts of deceit so put on the new self which is in the likeness of God.

What Norman Grubb has defined is that the independent self is a complete delusion. It is hooked into lusts of deceit....It REALLY EXISTS,,,but it's NOT the independent thing we thought it was. It is actually being engaged with Satan's spirit. There is no "human nature". We are either God going on in our "human clay vessels" or we are Satan going on.

"And you [a]were dead [b]in your trespasses and sins, 2 in which you formerly walked according to the [c]course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.3 Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, [d]indulging the desires of the flesh and of the [e]mind, and were by nature children of wrath,even as the rest."


Prophets are people with a balloon pricker.
They see evry man nolonger after the flesh....they see the authentic person, created in God. Now if some kind of bloated form is blobbing around outside of their authentic person, a prophet finds it quite normal to prick the fake even if it causes ructions.

Prophets cannot live with the false. They have no time for it. It quite puts them out of joint. They relate to everyone in truth and they kind of expect everyone else to do the same....which ofcourse they don't.

Jesus addressed the rich man, after he had regaled Jesus with all his keeping of the commandments....OK then....sell all you have and give it to the poor.

Is Jesus saying to everyone, every day, to sell all they have? NOPE. But He picked up the independent self clinging on for dear life to material possessions as its own god and He was immediately offended in the Spirit by the man and his self righteousness....so He launched in.

We all have people around us who do the equivalent and if we choose to walk in the Way of God then the Holy Spirit majors on it.

The function of walking in the Light is to have any last vestiges of independent self exposed as we can see in Ephesians 4 above.

As soon as someone has "removed the log" in his own eye.....come to that crashing awareness at the end of Romans 7 that there is no independent self....that any independence was really Satan as him or her.... SURE....as a thirdleveller they are going to be used to remove iddybiddy specks from their brother's inner seeing. The BIG JOB has been done by Christ on the Cross, including us into His death. We are never called upon to remove LOGS.
We can teach the Cross....but it was Christ who did the removal.

People I am brushing up with do not believe this is anything we do at all. Well you only have to read the story of Joseph as Prime Minister of Egypt, and how the Holy Spirit had him behave with his brothers to bring about a change of "seeing" in them.

Hopefully this post will get you thinking about how Proactive the Body of Christ is in bringing each of us unto glory....not by works....but by the power of Christ's own life manifested amongst us.

Sunday, 29 June 2014

Well, I am impressed!!!



Well, I am impressed .
I have just come back from cleaning in the pub to find that yet again the Yes I am post by Norman Grubb is high in the readership Top Ten this week. At least one reason for the blog has been to promote this last book by Norman Grubb which can be read in instalments here, or bought as a book or on Kindle. Yet, even though this blog has now existed for 6 years next month, and has had nearly half a million hits, could i ever get Norman's book in my Top 10 list???? NOPE. And it always puzzled me.

Similarly right now, a propos of nothing....or maybe the Kindle announcement....I find people have naturally been pushing this post or set of posts up the top ten.
WHICH I SAY AGAIN really encourages me. This is part of what this very blog is here for!!!!!


The Yes I am series is here

Thursday, 27 February 2014

Yes I Am song and component scriptures

Appearing at the end of Norman Grubb's last full-length book, Yes, I Am, are the lyrics of a song proclaiming the amazing truth about who we are in Christ. It was set to the tune of the old campfire song, "If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands" and sung at gatherings where Norman's Total Truth was being shared. As the introduction to the song says, "No great poetry, not set to great music, but great truth." Here we quote the Bible verse referenced below each citation.


IF THE LORD SAYS I AM YES, I AM


If the Lord says I'm a Christian, yes, I am,
And the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch. (Acts 11:26)
If the Lord says I'm made new, yes, I am,
If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away: behold, all things have become new. (2 Cor. 5:17)
If the Lord says I'm one spirit with Himself,
But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him. (1 Cor. 6:17)
If the Lord says I am. YES, I Am.

If the Lord says I'm a son. yes. I am.
Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called sons of God.' (I John 3:2)
If the Lord says I'm an heir. yes, I am,
It'sons, then heirs—heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ (Rom. 8:17)
If the Lord says I'm a citizen of His kingdom here and now, yes, I Am
Now you are no strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. (Eph. 2:19)
If the Lord says I am, YES, I Am.


If the Lord says I'm a vessel, yes, I am,
We have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us. (2 Cor. 4:7)
If the Lord says I'm a branch, yes, I am,
I am the vine you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him. bears much fruit: for without me you can do nothing. (John 15:5)
If the Lord says I'm a temple of His Holy Spirit in me,
Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit
who is in you. whom you have from God, and you are not your
own . (1 Cor. 6:19)
If the Lord says I am, YES, I Am.


If the Lord says I'm a saint, yes, I am,
Those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, with all
who in every place call on the name of Jesus Christ. (I Cor. 1:2) 
If the Lord says I'm elect, yes, I am,
I endure all things for the sake of the elect, that they also may obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory. (2 Tim. 2:10)
If the Lord says I'm a partaker of His divine nature,
Through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust (2 Pet 1:4)
If the Lord says I am, YES, I Am.



If the Lord says I'm a priest, yes, I am,
If the Lord says I'm a king, yes, I am,
And has made us kings and priests to His God and Father... (Rev. 1:6)
If the Lord says I am seated in the heavenly places in Christ,
And raised us up to sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. (Eph. 2:6)
If the Lord says I am, YES, I Am.



If the Lord says I am holy, yes, I am,
If the Lord says I am blameless, yes, I am,
Just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love... (Eph. 1:4)
If the Lord says I am unreprovable in His sight.
In the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreprovable in His sight. (Col 1:22)
If the Lord says I am, YES, I Am.



If the Lord says I'm complete, yes, I am,
You are complete in Him. (Col. 2:10)
If the Lord says I am perfect, yes, I am,
Let us therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded; (Phil. 3:15)
If the Lord says that I am as He is in this world,
Because as He is, so are we in this world. (1 Jn. 4:17)
If the Lord says I am, YES, I Am.



If the Lord says I am filled, yes, I am, -
Now ye are full, now ye are rich... (1 Cor. 4:8)
If the Lord says I am strong, yes, I am,
I have written you, young men, because you are strong... (I Jn. 2:14)
If the Lord says I am more than conqueror in this world.
In all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. (Rom. 8:37)
If the Lord says I am, YES, I Am.



If the Lord says I'm not I but He in me, yes, I am,
I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God... (Gal.2:20)
If the Lord says I'm the world's light, yes, I am,
You are the light of the world... (Matt. 5:14)
If the Lord says I'm a god to whom His word has come,
Is it not written in your law, I said, 'Ye are gods? He called them gods, unto whom the word of God came... (John 10:4-35)
If the Lord says I am, YES, I Am.

Monday, 19 August 2013

Yes I Am 52 - Yes He Is - I Am

Yes I Am by Norman Grubb
Chapter 52
YES, HE IS - I AM

I correspond with an Indian friend, Biva Tampoe of Madras, who read one of my books some years ago and wrote to inquire further about the life of union in Christ. Recently she sent me her only copy of a little book published by her father, the late Professor Coomarasamy Tampoe of Kavali College in Andhra Pradesh, who also taught in British universities. The book is called The Problem of Good. I was struck by the way he wrote of Jesus as a man who walks the same faith way as ourselves, and I am putting in my own words, at the close of this book of mine, what I found to be his stimulating outline of that faith which overcome the world, and by which, John says, we also overcame our world. I want to see how He walked, for John says we are to walk as He walked.

It is obvious from Luke’s saying that Jesus "grew in wisdom and stature" that, whatever the inherent knowledge He had as to who He was, He still had to advance into an enlarged understanding of that truth. Probably Mary told Him, when old enough, of His miraculous birth, confirming to Him that He was the Son of God.

But His means of discovering the purpose of His coming was from the Scriptures. We know that because, at twelve years of age, He spent three days fascinating the theologians of the temple, not by a display of any knowledge of His own, but by "hearing them and asking them questions" of a type which obviously amazed them. Then He returned to His carpenter’s bench for another eighteen years. His subsequent constant reference to the Scriptures shows that this study was His main occupation those years, and from those Scriptures He saw the revelation of the coming Messiah, the anointed One of God, to found the kingdom which would have no end.

Evidently most Jewish readers of the Scriptures, and maybe even some of the prophets themselves, understood this to be as king of an earthly kingdom which would have dominion over all nations, who would pour in their wealth to Him. But there were always the men who saw in the Spirit: like Abraham, who looked for "a heavenly city"; like Moses, who said circumcision was of the heart, not flesh; like Jeremiah, who saw that all men were to have the law written in their hearts; and like Isaiah, who, full of the glory of the coming Savior, wrote of His uniqueness in being born of a virgin, His royalty as "Everlasting Father" and "Prince of peace," and His outreach extending to the Gentiles and the ends of the earth... but also foretold His suffering and death as our sin-bearer. From the Psalms, so full of references to Him, Jesus saw the details of His coming crucifixion, His bodily resurrection, His ascension and eternal priesthood. To those two on the road to Emmaus, after His resurrection, He "expounded in all the Scriptures, beginning at Moses and all the prophets, the things concerning Himself." Soon after that, when with His disciples, He "opened their understanding that they might understand the Scriptures" and told them: "Thus it is written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day."

So plainly, while a carpenter at home, His eyes were fully opened to all the revelation in Scripture. But the point is that no man can live by outer information, not even by the account of His birth from his mother. We can only live by fixed inner consciousness; and so, even though Jesus was conceived of the Spirit, He had to be baptized in the Spirit to know and fulfill His life’s calling. He knew His cousin John was the prophesied "voice of one crying, ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord.’" He saw the multitudes following John and repenting of their sins; and that all John could give them was that outer assurance of remission of sins. John kept telling them that Another was coming whose shoe latchet he was not worthy to unloose, and that He would give them the inner baptism of the Spirit, for by that alone could they inwardly know their sins were forgiven.

And what was more, though John knew (presumably from his mother) the story of his own special birth and the miracle birth of his cousin Jesus, yet he still said he did not know Him as the Messiah until His baptism. Then he and Jesus - no one else - saw the Spirit coming on Jesus in the form of a dove, and heard the voice saying to Him, "Thou art My beloved Son in whom I am well pleased." It was not sufficient for John to know the outer story of his and Jesus’ births, any more than it was sufficient for Jesus to know it… or all that the Scripture said about the prophesied Messiah. But from the moment of the coming of the dove and the word from heaven affirming His consciousness of who He was, from then on He both knew and acted as the prophesied Christ.

Do we see the point? Man, being spirit, can only operate as who he is when he has the inner spirit-knowing imparted to him. For Jesus to know and declare that He, this carpenter’s son, is God’s own eternal Son and the world’s only hope and Savior - that is the commitment and persistence of faith. As Kierkegaard said, "That is walking on sixty-thousand fathoms of water."

What a commitment! He is to found an eternal kingdom to embrace the human race, a kingdom which has nothing to do with the founding of a kingdom of this world with its pomp and power and material display. His is to be a kingdom of the Spirit, not of this world, a kingdom whose major characteristic and activity is love - something unheard of all through the centuries and totally the opposite of all human blueprints for the occupant of David’s throne. And His calling is to walk it by faith - to be the author and firstborn of the new race! What an adventure of faith!

Therefore, who Jesus was had first to be fully confirmed and demonstrated by a total confrontation with the god of self-centeredness, the god of self-interested self, this prince of the world who had already deceived and made captive the whole human race. In those forty desperate days of confrontation, the temptation was marvelously subtle. (I know of no one who has defined it more fully than did Dostoevsky, in his Legend of the Grand Inquisitor in the The Brothers Karamazov, with the words put in the mouth of the atheist Ivan Karamazov.) It had nothing to do with fleshly enticements. It was altogether suited to the human person who was now affirming that He was the Son of God. "If you are such," Satan says to Him, "you are the ultimate human self… with ultimate powers. Now use them for the full purpose of being a real human self - to own and control and manipulate all the rest of the human family for your own personal benefit."

It is in this focus that we understand the three temptations. First, if Jesus had power to make bread out of stones, He was obviously able to provide for the physical needs of all men (as He later proved He could, in feeding the five thousand). Second, if Jesus were to jump from the pinnacle of the temple and descend in safety among the crowds below, He could quickly be acclaimed as their Messiah - not because of what kind of person He was, but by appealing to their idolatrous human desire for a "superman." And third, by accepting Satan’s shortcut to power, Jesus could have the kingdoms of this world to use for His own ends. Here is the history of all man’s dictatorships - the masses are for the benefit of the few. Here is total self-magnification and self-gratification.

This is what the devil offered and pressed on Jesus all those forty days. "You are the superman. You must be if you are the Son of God. Now have the whole race at your disposal and for your own benefit. They are like a flock of sheep or a herd of cattle. They need a leader, so you will be benefiting them as well. Here are your three ways of doing it: Feed their bellies. Be to them the leader who captures their imagination and adoration. And use them for your own ends." This constituted the ultimate form of self-deification, and what looked like the easiest and most pleasant way to achieve it.

But Jesus was His Father’s Son, and no usurper of His Father’s prerogatives for His own ends. And His Father is the Servant of His creation: self-giving, not self-getting. The Son, filled with the Spirit of the Father, was likewise. So He turned back Satan’s temptations - the same basic temptations as in the Garden of Eden - by quoting the outer word, "It is written," "It is written," "It is written," and equating His innermost fixed purpose with the will of His Father, whose nature is eternal, self-giving love.

So the Messiah, who by His anointing already had the inner confirmation of who He was, was now established as who He was by His rejection of this supreme temptation to be a self for self. It was His inner personal death and resurrection which now established Him in His freedom to later physically die and rise for a world. Not the world for Him but He for the world. This is precisely the way all we commissioned-ones have the revelation of our own inner union confirmed - through testings which fix us in it.

Then Jesus took the inaugural step - a public declaration at Nazareth that He was the promised One. He quoted from Isaiah regarding the prophetic nature of the coming Christ - not as an enthroned king, but a ministering servant: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me... to preach the gospel to the poor, and bring deliverance to the captives, brokenhearted, blind, and bound. And this is I. This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears." What a statement! What a shock to hear these words from the lips of a common carpenter!

From then on, as I read John’s Gospel, I find Jesus had only one answer to every challenge and every need: I am. I am. I am - the light, bread, water, good shepherd, way, truth, life, the Son of the Father. This is what strikes me in John’s Gospel: no profound theological explanations, but again and again I am, I am, I am. Yet when the secret is opened up to inquirers, "It is I, yet it is not I. I am nothing by Myself. I am saying and doing what the Father says and does in Me. It is He, not I; and yet it is I. I am, I am."

And He never wavered, never watered down that potent statement. No, no. It was even "Before Abraham was, I am." And all He was was love, love, love, ministered without respect of persons to all needs: yet love which ruthlessly exposed false love - the type of self-love He Himself had rejected in the temptation. So at a price that cost Him His life, while loving and never condemning anyone in need, particularly the sinners, He hated and exposed anything which masqueraded as an expression of His Father in the form of self-love or self-gain or self-glorification. Sinners He loved. Hypocrites He exposed; and above all, those who concealed their hypocrisy under the guise of representing God.

But what I am watching is not so much His words and actions, but His attitude toward Himself. He never compromised about Himself. He was who He was, the Father in the Son form, and all He came to be and do was to bring us lost humans back to that One - His Father, represented by Himself. He alone could do it - not doctrines, not forms of worship, not activities, but He - the Way, Truth, and Life.

And I am watching how we now, as "I ams," are steadfast and boldly uncompromising about ourselves as expressions of Himself. "If you see Me, you see the Father." Likewise, if you see us, you see Jesus. Never, from His baptism onward, did He say anything less than that. And then He came to the final leap of faith. He was the last Adam, the quickening Spirit. He was founding the eternal kingdom: not of this world, but a spirit family, all forms of Him. He was that Himself: the Spirit in His human, Jesus form. This meant - and He knew it from Scripture - that He must physically die, and that He would physically rise to found the new kingdom of the Spirit.

Then the last leap of faith: that this same Spirit, through His death and resurrection, would enter His followers, and they become what He was - they, common humans, become the anointed sons of God, as gods and forms of the God who is love. So He had to yield Himself up to death, and walk this way by the same faith as He had walked those three years as the I AM: believing that He would rise from the dead by the Spirit raising Him up, and that when He returned to His Father in the spirit kingdom this same Spirit would take possession of the world of humans… and these would form the kingdom of God.

And now, why do I enter in such detail with our Christ of history? Because we are "I ams" also. As He is, so are we in this world. It has meant watching Him grow from His outer understanding of Scripture and what He must have learned from His mother into a fixed consciousness that He is that One; His being established as who He is by Satan’s temptations; His three years of constant declaration, "I am, I am, I am He"; and right through to His time of death, when His final confirmation before Pilate of being God’s Son sent Him to the cross.

Now with our fixed inner consciousness, our inner baptism, we too know. But only by Scripture inwardly confirmed. That is all. And we are to be as uncompromising as He in saying who we are. That is why I named this book YES, I AM.

We know the reason so many hesitate to say it: It is because we haven’t got it clear that our human selves are nothing but containers. As long as we wrongly think there is something in our humanity to be changed, we hesitate to say "I am." But once it becomes clear to us that we have not changed, but that the false god is replaced by the living God, we see we are an exchanged "I am." I was Satan in my human form, now I am Christ in my human form. And as the boldness of Jesus’ positive "I am" left an indelible impression on His hearers, so it is with the boldness with which we say "I am the branch form of the Vine," "I am a body form of the Head," "I am the wife that bears the children of my heavenly Husband." Therefore all that He is is expressed by me - power, wisdom, love. His "I am" is my "I am."

And the hesitation of us Christians to affirm our "I am," and our tendency to self-depreciation, constantly weakens the total position which was His strength and impact, for it really means that we’re not sure that we really are nothing, and He everything, and now we are everything, precisely as it was between Him and His Father.

And as with Him, so with us. We now lay down our lives, knowing who we are, so that others may find out who they are. We can’t help it. The Intercessor has laid hold of us as we have moved on from Spirit-baptism to Spirit-intercession. That is our total occupation. We are this, and the Savior-Spirit in us causes us to walk in these saving ways. So we are bond-slaves of Jesus Christ. And I hope that the revelation which God has made plain to us by His Word and Spirit will bring many into that same inner confirmation which He has confirmed to us: that we are among those pressing on in our high calling as intercessors, of whom it is being said, as of The Intercessor, that "it pleased the Lord to bruise Him"; and that we say like Paul, "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus," with this one perfect outcome - "So death worketh in us, and life in you." What a life! Christ magnified in our bodies, whether by life or by death - from grace to grace, from faith to faith, from glory to glory.




  • Back to the Foreword or 1st post in the series

Wednesday, 17 July 2013

Yes I Am - Foreword

Yes I Am............on Kindle






Yes I Am

by Norman Percy Grubb
FOREWORD

It is over forty years since I was led, I believe by the Holy Spirit, to write the first of this series of books on the one reality which has absorbed me all these years: Paul’s mystery, now made manifest, of "Christ in you, the hope of glory."

The first book, The Law of Faith, was followed by The Liberating Secret, The Deep Things of God, The Spontaneous You, God Unlimited, and Who Am I? I have had many evidences that the inner truth I’ve sought to share has, by the revelation of the Holy Spirit, become that same reality in many.

Like a fiddle with one string, I still write about this reality, which I boldly call Total Truth. My "textbook," my authority, has always been solely the Bible, and still is - the Bible inwardly illuminated and made the sole key to life by the Holy Spirit; just as Jesus said, "The words I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life."

I call this book YES, I AM because I would not write it if it were not, by great grace, a personally experienced reality to me, even as it is to many others of you. For as Jesus said, "We speak what we do know and testify to what we have seen."

I sought in my earlier years, as a missionary in the Congo with C. T. Studd, the key to what I call Total Living - complete satisfaction, complete enabling - and the Holy Spirit turned that key in the lock for me in a crisis of faith which became, though often with stumbling steps, my inner knowing of this "mystery" word of Paul’s.

From that time the inner knowing has increased and stabilized through the years, until I could "teach others also" and was better able to define what Paul, Peter, James, and John explain in their letters. This has been the sole heartbeat of my books.

There is a joy unspeakable and full of glory, a peace that passeth understanding, and an all-sufficiency in all things by which we are able to abound unto every good work. Though we are always only the earthen vessels in which "the excellency of the power is of God, and not of us," there is a reigning in life by Christ, a bearing of the good fruit of the Spirit, an overcoming in all things. There is a self-release from bondage into liberty, an overflowing of the rivers of the Spirit, and a counting and experiencing of temptations and trials as "all joy" instead of miseries to be avoided or endured. Because all is centered in the one Reality, our Lord Jesus Christ - crucified, risen, ascended, who now lives His life in His body members - we experience life as adventure, zest, thrill, and gaiety at the heart of a desperate seriousness. Immersed in meeting the needs of others, travailing in birth until Christ is formed in them as in us, we are privileged to bear about in our bodies the dying of the Lord Jesus, so that "death works in us, but life in you."

If you have already read any of my other books, I would say to you that you will find here a repetition of the great foundational facts of our Total Truth, starting with God Himself. I could not build without a sure foundation. If you will go along with me, I am bold to say that God has now given me many new clarifications. These include some startling even to me, ranging from and including the fall of man, what man’s real nature is, and our two-fold redemption: not only through the blood, but also through the body of our Christ. Then, at last, a clarity has come to me on those vital Romans 6 to 8 chapters which I have dug into a thousand times, which I can therefore now more clearly share with others. Finally, I go right on to new clarifications of ourselves as the free men in Christ we’ve been redeemed to be. So we now can say, in accord with the title of this book, "Yes, I am" and we are learning to live positively in the perfect love that casts out fear instead of in the bondage of negative believing. We see where temptation becomes adventure. The endless problems and frustrations in life, including personality clashes, are seen to be the necessary negatives by which He, the Positive, can reveal Himself; and we enjoy the process with Him. We move right on to the simplicity and constant use of the "word of faith" in our prayer life, and to the highest of all, the life of intercession, in which we are given a privileged and effective place in meeting the world’s needs.

If you have not read any of these books before, please be patient if the first chapters seem rather detached from our own pressing life situations. We shall surely get there, if you will follow through.

I have been wonderfully helped in producing this book. I have a job in deciphering my own scribble, and so several who are linked with us in fellowship in Washington and Alexandria have sacrificed their time to type while I have dictated. For this and other vital help I especially wish to thank Dick and Laurie Hills, Dart Cox, Maggie O’Bannion, Nancy Robinette, Lannelle Campbell, Tony and Bette Ketcham, Kay Krattli, and Sylvia Audi; also my son Daniel, a Ph.D. Professor of English Literature, who gave my manuscript a thorough going-over. And my editor at CLC, Robert Delancy. How wonderful the love of God is when dear ones volunteer their labors for Him in our oneness in Christ. My thanks and love to all of them.

This book has its background in the sixty years since Pauline, my precious wife, and I married and went to the Congo together, to take our share in bringing the gospel to our brother Africans, with her father, C. T. Studd. I give some details of this in the book. Pauline, though now physically weak and unable to get about, lies in bed resting in the Lord. Where should I have been without her through these many years? She is now lovingly cared for by one of our Worldwide Evangelization Crusade family, Susie Wheeler, while my daughter Priscilla cares for me.

In the course of the book I often refer to my years with the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade founded by C. T. Studd, and the Christian Literature Crusade, born out of it, and my great joy all those years in taking my share in the outreach of the Crusades. More recently, the message God has given me to share in these pages has taken more public form in a magazine called Union Life, begun five years ago by Bill Volkman, a lawyer, to whom "Christ in you" became a living reality. Quite a company of us are now linked with its increasing circulation, with many evidences of the seal of the Spirit. Various ones of us share what God has made real to us as we receive invitations to homes, house groups, and churches, both here and abroad.

I am thankful to the Christian Literature Crusade, which in cooperation with the Lutterworth Press in Britain has published all the previous books, and now is producing this one.

Finally, as one who years back translated the New Testament from the King James Version, helped by the Greek, into a Congolese language, Bangala, I am used to the King James version and like its accuracy, so my quotations are basically from it. I will, however, capitalize the pronouns for Deity.

My greetings and love in Christ to all who read this. May the Lord refresh and illuminate us by His Word and Spirit.

Norman Grubb

Tuesday, 25 June 2013

What is next, Edie Chill asks me ?

While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become sons of light.” When Jesus said these things, he went away and hid himself from them."John 12:36 prompted by Daniel Yordy's letter this week The Seventh Trumpet.
While you have the light....Why ever not we ask, is it on a time delay? Is it like the Mission Impossible Series where the tape selfdestructs 10 seconds after it has been played? (see 4 m 50 seconds)

 Manna in the wilderness had its own self destruct mechanism if you tried to keep it for more than a day.
We're used to leftbrain books and manuals where if we don't read them one day we can pick them up the next. Many people treat the Bible like this. Patrick Bwayo calls this reading the Bible like the Old Covenant Bible. Jesus phrase to his own brothers in Jn 7:6  was "your time is always here."

In schools they teach comparative religion. Every religion is presented in leftbrain format which if we applied the same to the study of wine, would be like giving A level students the labels off say 100 different bottles, and telling them to write essays on that. You can't know anything about wine except by drinking it. You can't know anything about religion save by worshipping. And to be fair, they DO give students the opportunity to visit places of worship.

BUT CHRISTIANITY is not found in the intellectual study of Biblical words, and to be truthful, it isn't really found in most churches.   A lot of churches once had light, but now they contain the shadows of that light, the external forms cast by that light. Catholicism above all really is that, for around the fourth century the church that existed became systematised, and floods of people fled into the deserts to try and maintain what they once had, far away from the structured heirarchies. Anglicanism is really only a slightly warmed over Catholicism, with an understanding that, at least intellectually ,  salvation is by faith in the sacrifice of Christ, but apart from High Anglicanism which maintains the idea of Transubstantiation...that the Bread and wine change physically into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ when someone rings a bell, most of the more modern denominations broke away because they genuinely had received a bit more light.

You can actually track the historical progress in terms of the items listed in the Heavenly Tabernacle, of which Moses Tabernacle was a copy. Even Methodism is an early attempt to mimic the idea of making disciples, be it only in some kind of home study situation. Nevertheless the reproductive quality of this cell like structure was so powerful that  the Kabbalist Jews copied it when they began Communism.

In actuality though, different individuals and small groups were pressing into a relationship with the Living God, and God was granting more and more light into the running of His Kingdom.

But Light is different from intellectual knowledge.
It has the actual SEED of DIVINE LIFE in it.
You don't receive light in the intellectual part of your brain. It may percolate there. It may begin there as doctrine until the Holy Spirit illumine it as Light, but once it is in Light form it literally illumines all your ways. Nothing about you is hidden from it.   "In His Light we see light".

So YES in answer to the phrase in the introduction, LIGHT IS IN FACT on a time delay.
Unlike a doctrine, or fact, which is an outer form, LIGHT is dynamic. It is the LIVING portion  of Christ/ of Christ's bread that you need PRECISELY in the spot and time that you now find yourself, that will provide the programming, the grace enablement for you to get you in the direction of Christ manifesting the Incarnation of Himself through your Body and Soul, whereby great fruit will be produced by which others too may come to know the Lord.



Imagine a comparison, if you will with  SatNav. Your satnav is programmed to find where you are now, then out of all the possible choices of road find the shortest or cheapest or quickest sequence of roads for you to arrive at your destination.  In the UK, Portsmouth goes via Guildford and Kingston to London. If you are in Southampton, which is west of Portsmouth, it is really annoying to be told that you have to go back to Portmouth to get to London, because YOU DON'T. The Satnav would then tell you to use another motorway, the M3 via Basingstoke.  Methodists have their way of doing things. Anglicans theirs. Baptists theirs. And it's all atrociously longwinded and vague and none of it is current light.

Current light says believe in Galations 2:20....non stop...in and out of Christian meetings and gatherings. At work. At leisure. At sport. The old idea of having endless meetings and endless teachings and endless prayer sessions and endless worship gatherings is now irrelevant IF YOU DON'T GRAB the current light

which is


Jesus Christ is YOUR LIFE lived as you....out of your very spirit through your soul, out via your body.
It is now:
As HE IS so are we in the world.
What is Jesus Christ doing in you now?
Or as Jesus put it describing His Father's life....I can only do what I see My Father doing.

Or as Rich Novek puts it ....we see ONLY GOD...ONLY NOW.
His is the ONLY LIFE in the Universe....what Caribbeans loosely call flow....as in "that's really flowing man".  or "That's really happening"....or "That's REAL man." Or "Keep it real".

Norman Grubb called it the Spontaneous YOU.  Which comes as a shock to British people, who ruled by a piece of them that was never given any status to rule...but only to be a servant or butler....namely the mind...they are known the world over to come across slightly stilted, because their minds are forever cutting in and processing what is essentially an ever running fountain called life.

SO DO WE ATTEND MEETINGS?

It's a bit like when Paul said others have come to spy out our freedom.

WE LIVE SPONTANOUSLY  and out from that everything flows.
Everything that we attempted before like worship, prayer, Bible teaching and learning, fellowshipping...
ALL THIS is now spontaneous, in or out of meetings.  As Norman Grubb said...I am Israel. or I am the Church.

By this he meant if we are practiced in believing on the Christ living our life...then as truly as He is the centre of all these spiritual activities, then He is that through us. People get just as offended when we say these things as they got with Jesus when He kept saying
One Greater than Solomon is here
One greater than Jonah is here
One greater than the Temple is here

Ofcourse the PROOF is in the believing...signs follow after.
If we are really living from the One Jesus Christ then it should flow with somebody else also living from the One Jesus Christ. Ofcourse it often doesn't quite....and we rub up against another person's wrong seeing or them against my wrong seeing....BUT HEY....this is nothing other than the normal mechanism of
a devious mechanism of God known more commonly as

LIVING IN A FAMILY or
LIVING WITH OTHER HUMAN BEINGS ON PLANET EARTH.

So NO...WHILE YOU HAVE THE LIGHT....while God gives you the LIMITED WINDOW of opportunity that He shines with His Lasar Light which, going right through the centre of your being, has the capacity to take you ALL the way from wherever you precisely are NOW all the way to ZION...HIS HOLY HILL....you have to believe it....believe ON IT....trust it...Let it become your main hunch....base certain things you would have done, but are now not doing on it....and base things that you WILL DO NOW, and wouldn't have done on it.

What if I'm wrong and it is only a hunch. My hunch, but nothing more?

Well you have to believe that God's Divine Sat Nav of His grace WILL LET YOU KNOW in no uncertain terms if you are barking up the complete wrong tree. AND HE DOES.

This is called training our senses according to righteousness. You also get to know when others are telling you wrong. Their words have a jarring empty effect. And ofcourse when you stop even quicker in your tracks instead of doing what they want you to, they get even angrier. Because you "look rebellious". But they ofcourse can't hear yet how weird their words sound in the Spirit.

You want some real example?
The gospels are full of them. Compulsions and pressures to do things that just aren't God going on.
Martha getting all frustrated because her sister wasn't doing a blind thing for "all these guests" in their house.
Jesus just talks straight at her and says..."Mary is fine...she is doing exactly what she's supposed to be doing."
See, God only gives a limited portion of light. He doesn't endlessly pour forth that same light. If Martha doesn't at some time quieten herself down enough to listen while Jesus is speaking that light, how will she ever get from where she is spiritually now, all the way to Zion? It will be an impossibility. She will have no substance to believe herself there...no conveyor belt of grace.
She will then get rattled with Mary as Mary apparently sales on past her in life, exhibiting graces of God and gifts of God, and experiencing fabulous moments in God.....and like Cain with Abel...she could begin to get very angry with her sister. But her sister has simply "bought the ticket" that is going to take her there. The ticket of hearing by faith or hearing with faith. Letting that Word enter her, for it says the "Entrance of your word gives Light".

Many have access to Word but they don't let it enter....so it never GIVES LIGHT. And without LIGHT you don't have direction...and without direction you never end up being drawn pulled and tugged...almost despite yourself...towards Zion.

This was part of the prompt behind this post.
The charismatic movement was the training ground of the Melchizedek Order. Learning to do what the Spirit said in His timing without any man pulling strings so that this Order would rise 24/7. The charismatic shell cracked around 30 years ago while the chicks have been hatching. Soon the movement will be nothing but Ichabod with strings pulled entirely by man.
Like · · Promote ·
  • Karen Murphy Mclain Now you're being"cynical" lol
  • Edie Chill What's next Chris?
  • Chris Welch I am being exact, and what is next is the third level church which is an incarnation of Gideon's 300.
  • Chris Welch The "I am being exact phrase" response to" Now you're being cynical", is said boldly because of my experience in 1981, when I (although not the pastor) somehow was handed the key from the last remaining member of the congregation in Emsworth which had been opened by Smith Wigglesworth about 50 years earlier. So I know firsthand what an empty Spirit shell looks like....old,sad and very grey and infirm.


    So What's Next?

Unbeknown to us who have been too close to the White Cliffs of Dover to notice they are in fact cliffs and not white fog, God has been rewriting the entire I am the God of Abraham , Isaac and Jacob package in corporate form, but this time on a mega scale the whole world over.


Abraham represents the evangelical anointing, the faith anointing. The receiving of salvation by faith
.

Isaac represents the Quaker/Pentecostal/ charismatic relationship with the Holy Spirit, His gifts, 
power , and the experience of Baptism in the Holy Spirit. Opening wells of salvation.

Jacob begins as something like the Word of Faith movement, bedding himself into believing for wealth success and supply.

But in 1972 God addressed His people as a generation and called them to seek His face (Psalm 24)
to raise up a highway of holiness  in the desert

to raise up the former devastations and restore the breach
to build signposts whereby others would follow
that He really was doing a new thing...BUT WOULD WE NOW PERCEIVE IT?
ofcourse we assumed He meant along the same lines as the Quakers Pentecostal and charismatic call to rediscover the power and gifts of the Spirit. He didn't mean this at all. That had been done. When He said NEW....He meant NEW.

In 1973 we were speaking the Word of faith over our towns and cities which were filled with old denominational churches that there would be new Spirit churches. We had no idea how to even achieve this, but we knew that was what the Spirit had spoken to us together with a rudimentary vision of His Church.  Within 3 years God had raised up ministries like Ern Baxter and unbeknown to me Sam Fife and other apostolic gifts to begin birthing this end time church. By the eighties through to the early years of this new millennium God had manifested this reproduction of His Church in towns and cities all round the earth.

By the mid eighties I was absolutely sure we were still missing something. I had also been blessed by brushing up against people of real stature like Pastor Wurmbrand,Mother Basilea Schlink, Ed Miller, Sam Fife,Jorge Pradas.
I was also receiving specific Spirit Words about my life through people that didn't know me at all.

Now for 5 years I have not felt to share any of these apart from with close friends, but today I feel to put this main one on my blog so that some of you can understand a bit more about why I do things the way I do.

Stephen Herzig is to this day a prophet who moves among the churches. He emerged out of the Abundant Life churches (in particular Maidstone Abundant Life Church UK where he and his wife Anita were pastors) established by Bob Weiner and Tony Fitzgerald, and these in turn had emerged out of YWAMMers who had begun to settle in towns and cities, marry and have families.
Just the other month I met someone from Haverford West Church who had equally had his life overturned by a Word coming through Steve. You should know that this Word had great authority about it, not least for two factors.
1. It was delivered at the START of  his preaching...he literally prophesied COLD before he began to even preach.
2.He didn't know me from Adam. I wasn't a leader. I was simply one of the many Bible House youth.

You should also know that after I had copied it by hand from the tape of the meeting, my then leadership instructed me to tear it up and throw it away, which I didn't do, because I knew it was God's voice to me.



14-9-86   Prophecy Through Stephen Herzig for Chris Welch
 

Before I start I have a word that I want to give to Chris, that I had laid on my heart while we were praying before the meeting began and I wanted it to be taped for him to be able to weigh it really and just have it ther so he can go over it in good time, so this is it, brother!

I really felt Chris from God that a time of preparation was ending in your life and that you'd walked with the protection and encouragement of men to stand by your side and stir you on and affirm the gifts God had placed in your life  (How accurate this was for in Emsworth they nurtured my prophetic gifting, my songleading and worshipping gifts,they had eagerly embraced many of my Spirit given songs and sung them in conferences and taken them abroad, they had let me write evangelistc drama and let me direct productions by my self and others like Jimmy and Carol Owen's Antshillvania, I'd been allowed to be part of the team spearheading the new Paris Church which had ended so disastrously).....but the time is now coming for you to take a step forward to lead in the things that are within your heart - to step forward into leadership in the things of God and I believe it will mean quite a significant change for you (and your family??? I wasn't married yet????) 

I believe it will mean quite a significant change possibly of location in your life ( well ...two minutes across Chichester harbour probably hardly counts...but when you sense things in the prophetic you feel things like a chill or a jolt and then you have to interpret them...and unless God gives you that specifically...you can faff around a bit....what in fact happened was greater than any geographical change....like a true Song of Solomon 5 moment everything I then was, all my friends, the entire church, my whole infrastructure, my name, and with it my music, my reputation, my gifting was torn away by the leadership at Emsworth, I was left surviving on my skills as a self employed piano tuner living on my own for another 10 years having lived practically all my Christian life in one form of community or another....until 1998 when I married Christine.....so yes....in the Spirit he was dead on - bullseye), here's the because.....

"because God wants to release you into a fresh field of ministry and authority and anointing in Him. For all the ingredients are within your life and He has been working to place each stone in place. He has been working in your heart to equip you with every single tool that is necessary for the future anointing and ministry which he has placed within the recesses of your spirit.

And He is saying the time is now to step forward to make preparation for that and NOT to allow yourself to be tied to anyone's ministry        (that didn't go down well in our apostolic pyramid)

BUT TO SEE THAT A GREATER CALL IS UPON YOUR LIFE THAN TO BE EVER SERVING SOMEONE ELSE'S VISION AND SOMEONE ELSE'S CALL.

For I am raising up people who will follow you and I have found and made a place for you to step forward with great confidence and with great boldness so that my Word can go forth.  (Hmmmph...well that was 1986....the blog didn't start until 2008 !!!! LOL so you can imagine I thought long and hard about that sentence!!!!)

And the music and the ministry and the anointing which I have placed in your life will explode forth, says the Lord and many will touch and be blessed....and a wide funnel - I see right at this point and it's like you've been living in the neck for some time but there'll be an explosion of ministry coming forth from your heart which will take you to many places and many situations which before you have not dreamed of sharing in or being in - and they've been kind of glimpses in your heart, but you've never really thought that they could possibly be for you - because you've seen other people walking out and taking it, but you've never really thought that God had it in His heart for you-
but says the Lord, my child, you have been faithful to My Word, you have served and honoured and lifted up others and I am now taking your life and lifting up you before others that they might serve and might release the gifts within your life says the Lord.   (Again the leadership did not like that sentence at all!!!)


My purpose here is not to go over ground that I have covered in this blog, but to share briefly that I had another direct encounter with the Lord in the Christmas of 1987 halfway up a mountain in Wales where in one sentence the Lord asked simply...forget (My relationship with all) the others, (that simply doesn't concern you,) DO YOU WANT ME?

By 1988 the Spirit had formulated this phrase in me. There is another LEVEL.Christianity has another whole level to it that the Church worldwide know nothing of. Later in   the year I had received the phrase the THIRD LEVEL. None of you can know what it felt like to read Chapter 31 of Norman Grubb's final book "Yes I am" which as clear as anything is titled : ON NOW TO THE THIRD LEVEL....here is a sample paragraph:

"Paul's Roman letter we all recognize as his fully developed, detailed, and authoritative statement of what he calls "my gospel." In this letter the three states are plain enough:

  • chapters 3 to 5 - justification (little children); 

  • 6 to 8 - unification (young men);

  • 9 to 15 - cooperation, co-saviorhood (fathers)." Norman Grubb



So , feeling totally validated by something that I had heard myself direct, even though to all appearances my life, (just as that of Daniel Yordy ,Rich Novek,Annalize Mouton and so many others that have walked this way)appeared such a disaster, I made the 1989 Introduction to the Third Level message tape in faith that one day it would get listened to. I even had it specially copied by ICC Eastbourne, but I could tell, even though it was a commercial order, they were profoundly embarrassed by it. 

I also made two other moves as a Word of faith that God was bringing in the Third level into His worldwide church. 

One was a Double CD Concept album which actually is a fulfilment of the Word given in Friends Meeting House Fountain Trust meeting in 1972....to set up signposts for others to follow. "Early Harvest" Double CD is like a series of "piles of stones" to mark the different Spirit foundations that God puts into the life of a believer. Watchman Nee had done a very similar work in his teaching series that were later published in book form. Norman Grubb produced what is really the capstone in his series of books culminating in "Yes I am", what he calls the Total Truth message. 

Finally, I regathered all my Exeter University accomodation hall friends who met as a group 1987-88  into a self catering house in Emsworth in 1990 and presented these new found truths, though most were unable to follow any of it. One of those number, eight years later became my wife. Renting Europe's premier self catering house and finding the money to record all the CD including the later tracks in Chichester cathedral and River Studios London were a real test of God's supply, and  also of Him organising the means each step of the way....I mean how do you set about this stuff singlehanded....I'd been used to doing everything together with other Body members....where the shared load meant things happened really quickly. 

Up until 2008, that had been my main Word of faith, that God would bring forth the third level within His worldwide church...BUT and here was my uniqueness... NOT excluding any of the enormous wealth of revealed knowledge of the last 40 years concerning Holy Spirit power, 
namely including the Vision of the Church, the Vision of Praise and Worship and learning the protocols of the Melchizedek order as a New Covenant priesthood. In thisI  felt totally isolated from Norman's actual organisation, Zerubbabel. 

It was as though Norman had got the individual message, the mssage of how God gets his man, like Jacob at Peniel, but was wheeling the message out on a new cart, rather than the Spirit raised up means of local bodies of Christ, within the vision of the Church itself. 

Meanwhile in 1990 I was so disgusted by the House of Lords ruling against UCB radio which had been broadcasting the length and breadth of UK for the first time with a radio frequency that had been donated by the newly liberated Moscow, that as a result the Spirit completely arrested me on this for the next few years. 

I held some local meetings and even set up a small video lending library, but as a now solitary cavedweller!!!! The whole thing seemed futile....until the fruit of the intercession became apparent, but in an extremely odd way as neither party knew what on earth was happening.

 God brought Rory and Wendy Alec of God TV virtually direct from South Africa to my doorstep ( well via a few weeks in South Bromley church)....but ofcourse they were totally unknown and neither I nor they at that point knew why they had been specifically brought to the UK....but they had been brought in response to Christians' cry that God would break through in the media here. 

But,as for me, now having learned more about the Masonic and Luciferian subterfuges that the Illuminati get up to, I now wonder if the TV evangelists were targeted...
either to discover their weakpoints, 
or that they had already sold out to the control of the Illuminati...
or that prostitutes were paid to bring down Swaggart and  Bakker, and already poised in London were the relevant masons to put in place the draconean measures to prevent the UCB Radio from operating, or any others bold enough to try. However at no point has anything appeared to be "set up" and the men appeared to have been caught themselves.

God subverted this whole plan by as usual doing something immeasurably greater in inventing a whole new medium...international sattellite staions which weren't regulated in the same way as UK terrestial media. The new DAB medium was coming in at the same time as the world wide web. 

2008 saw a number of Christian bloggers beginning to appear, as well as a whole tide of men suddenly getting the subterranean urge to join the hitherto female domain of social networking or Facebook and then Twitter. In 2012 I went into hospital for an operation having tossed too many pianos around for 30 years. I gathered some friends together to cover me in prayer...except that 18 months on we are still chatting , praying, laughing, supporting one another in what couldbe said to be a prototype thirdlevel church. We are international. We talk and share round the clock from vastly different time zones. Many of us have come through the same type of things, some haven't been down the same road...but God has used entirely different means to get to the same result....the seeing of Christ as our only life and expressing Himself through us His Vine branches as described so well in John 15. 

 From the time of the Stephen Herzig prophecy which is but one of about 5 similar ones given to me personally I have seen no ministry with as wide a vision as I have personally....until I met Daniel Yordy. Daniel has filled in a lot of the fuzziness for me in my breadth, and in particular in the last 24 months. Rich Novek, I submit to because I see in Him an extremely practical outworking of the Christ as me message, whereas there is something a bit pernickety and Asbergers about Daniel and myself. Rich is just a whole lot better with people. And without people...guess what...there is no church...and no persons by which Christ can express His Life. 

So Edie, in that long reply I hope you can see that long before all of us knew anything, God has been weaving something manystranded, multinational, and very varied together to be able to start powerfully conveying this third room of the House to the rest of the Church. So at present the global Christian scene are currently looking at a small cloud the size of a man's hand, but we all know that it is destined to be a large large stormcloud of blessing yes, but with powerful authority to fit the bill that we have so long prayed for....namely IT IS THE ANSWER TO 2000 years of praying THY KINGDOM COME.