Spiritcode

PRESENCE PRAYER THE VEIL   What is the veil?  The veil represents the mindset of separation from God in the soul. Before Adam and Eve were tempted by the serpent to disobey God they lived in the presence of God and were not conscious of any separation between themselves and God within their souls. But after they disobeyed God and listened to darkness, their souls were plunged into a mindset of separation from Him.    Their once innocent and blameless souls became self-serving and willful, hiding in the shadows of shame and guilt from God. Devising strategies to cover up and blame others for their disobedience. This became the separated soul life of humanity from that time on. The veil The first time this veil is spoken of in the Bible is when Moses went into the presence of the Lord when he received the commandments on Mt Sinai. The Israelites were afraid to look at him or come near him because being in God’s presence caused his face to shine so brightly that he had to cover it with a veil.   Exodus 34:29 When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, with the two tablets of the testimony in his hand as he came down from the mountain, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. Aaron and all the people of Israel saw Moses, and the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to come near him… The temple also had a veil of separation which separated people from Gods presence. No one was allowed to go through that temple veil, except for the high priest once a year on the day of atonement - they would actually sturck dead if they did. Atonement was celebrated last Sunday and today the Feast of Tabernacles is celebrated sukkot (John 7:37 living water) Hebrews 9:7 into the second chamber (behind the veil) the high priest went alone once a year, with the blood of sacrifice, which he offered for himself and for the people’s sins committed in ignorance; the Holy Spirit indicating this, that the way into the Holiest of All was not yet a reality while the first tabernacle was still standing… 11. But Christ came as High Priest of the good things to come, with the greater and more perfect tabernacle not made with hands, that is, not of this creation. Not with the blood of goats and calves, but with His own blood He entered the Most Holy Place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption.  Paul called the Old Covenant of the Ten Commandments given through Moses the “ministry of death, carved in letters on stone” and he contrasts this with the New Covenant given through Christ, where the Commandments are written in our hearts through the Holy Spirit. When Jesus died for us on the cross, he went through the veil of separation for all of humanity, making the way for us to pass through the veil also and to live a life with the mindset of non-separation between us and God.  Matthew 27:50 And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. And behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split. This was an incredible physical representation orchestrated by God to show us this Old Covenant was over. The veil was physically torn. The whole earth shook. Just imagine that. Interestingly, that was the end of blood sacrifices for sin for Israel. The veil was torn e through his flesh and blood sacrifice on the cross for all of us, for eternity.  The Old Covenant’s glory was torn and replaced by a New Covenant- a glory that is eternal and internal—Christ in us, the hope of glory (Ephesians 3:4).  No one in the Old Covenant had an inner life of the Holy Spirit within them.. What is the Veil? The veil is the flesh. What is the flesh? The flesh is our self-made soul where we build an inner self life that is a very poor reflection of how our original spirit self was uniquely created by God to be like him as his child. But the self of the flesh puts the false ‘shadow of us’ on display. This ‘flesh’ becomes the veil of separation until we realise that we can have direct, unveiled face to face intimacy with God through the Spirit, transforming us from the inside out. He comes into our vulnerability and weakness and shines through with his strength.  The Bible says that Jesus came in the flesh (John 1:14) but he went through life with a totally innocent and blameless soul and with a totally unveiled face. His soul was tempted in all points such as we are, but he did not sin (Hebrews 4:15 hamartia – miss the mark). Jesus did not have to create his own shadow me-self in his soul- which is the flesh. There was no veil of a mindset of separation from his Father.  And when He died for us on the cross, Jesus went through the veil of separation for all of humanity, making the way for us to pass through the veil also and to live a life with the mindset of non-separation between us and God.  Hebrews 10:19 Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the veil, that is, through his flesh. The Bible says the whole world is under darkness – under the influence of evil 1 John 5:19 describing a world separated from God with a veil over their face that turns them inward towards their soul self instead of towards the face of God. Just like adam and eve did We can get pulled by our soul’s problems to turn inwards into our shadow life or we can get drawn by the Holy Spirit to turn to the Lord, just as the sunlight draws a sunflower to turn to the sun so that it can grow and get life Paul spoke about Israel in the Old Covenant compared to us in the New Covenant But their minds were blinded. For to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains between them and God’s glorious presence, because only through Christ is it taken away. Yes, to this day whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their hearts. But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory. (2Corinthians 3:18) The turning can be gradual, like walking up a hill carrying the burdens of our soul till we get to the top and enter the presence of God, the tabernacle, the holy place where God is, the room spoken about in Matthew 6:6 when you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly. That turning is actually our repentance – turning from self to God. And when you walk up that hill Jesus is helping you carry the burdens, and while you are in the room Jesus helps you give the burdens to the Father. When you come back down the hill the Father rewards you openly – that is, he will supernaturally show you in some outward way that he has heard you and that he has brought things together for good in such a coincidental way that you know it could only have been God that has done it. The Old Testament brought harsh judgement and condemnation. But it highlights that with Gods Glory behind a veil, they were always missing the mark by trying to put God on display in their own lives in their own strength rather than trusting Him and putting Him on display. That was to show us that we can't live without God With-in us. But even though we now live a life without the veil, we often act as if it is still there.  When people say repent from your sins, (repent meaning turning from and turning to) and sin meaning to miss the mark- all that is asking you to do is to turn from yourself towards God to help you with why you are missing the mark. That's all sin does, it stops you from living with Him and for Him. In the New Testament the Spirit brings life, forgiveness, mercy, transformation, and freedom (2 Cor. 3:6, 17). In Presence prayer we come to know God for who he is and what he says and what he does. We know we are loved and mercifully accepted for who we are as our new ‘God with us’ self. Our hearts desire becomes to please him. The veil of separation has been torn down by Jesus. The Father and Jesus and Holy Spirit have come to make their home in us and we delight to do our housecleaning like never before – to sparkle. When people come to the house of our heart, they can feel welcomed and blessed as God can now be on display and not just us. Paul unveils this wonderful mystery in Colossians. Col. 1:26 This mystery was kept secret for ages and generations past, but now it has been revealed to God’s people who desire to live with him and for him. For God wanted them to know that the riches and glory of Christ are for all of humanity (Gentiles). And this is the mystery - Christ lives in you, giving you assurance of sharing his glory (His life on display though you). Simply turning to God as Father Son and Holy Spirit in our minds and hearts as often as we can brings us closer to the reality of God’s life within us and makes way for his life to shine through us. We have this treasure in earthen vessels so let us treasure our treasure and the turning takes the veil of separation away and allows our own and other people’s lives to be enriched. The present moment is always the most significant time in history - living with God.                            Paul OSullivan – pauloss@me.com

PRESENCE PRAYER SOUL AND SPIRIT     The journey of our lives as human beings with a spirit and a soul involves the reordering of the psychikos or soulish self of separation back into alignment with our true spiritual self in Christ through the Spirit of God. We can become transformed from psychikos or soulish to pneumatikos or spiritual. Paul wrote about this to the church in Corinth.   And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. The natural (psychikos – soulish) person does not accept the things of the Spirit because they are `spiritually (pneumatikos) discerned. (1 Corinthians 2:13)   Adam and Eve started that journey by creating a limited human soul.   The first man Adam became (ginomai) a living soul (psychikos) the last Adam (Jesus) became a life-giving spirit (pneumatikos). But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural psychikos), and then the spiritual.  (1Corinthians 15:45)   God had created Adam’s body from the dust of the earth and then breathed his spirit into that body. Adam now had a created body and a created spirit but then the Bible says a really interesting thing - that ‘man became a living soul’. That word ‘became ‘in the Greek is ginomai, and it means to cause to come into being, to make or create. God did not form a ready-made soul in us, but he created the capacity for us to shape a soul as a personal entity that was to become the expression of who we are in our inner being. That’s becomes the face of us. Our soul expresses the mind and heart of our unique God created spirit through the journey of our life, embodied by a physical body.    Adam and Eve walked in the garden of Eden with God, and they created blameless or innocent souls. Innocence means to not be harmed or hurt – not feeling forsaken. But harm and hurt and forsakenness came into Adam and Eve’s lives through the lie of the serpent. Satan in the form of the serpent deceived them into believing that God had deprived them of the Divine wisdom that they could have if they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve then created souls that separated their true blameless selves from God’s presence. Harm and hurt came into their lives and they became harmful and hurtful people and turned their harmless souls into harmful souls by creating protective helper parts in their souls to avoid feeling forsaken again. These soulish parts created a mindset and a heart-set of separation between them and God. This process became the universal human journey of the soul throughout its life.   Our souls are the expression of our spiritual self but our souls have created an inferior version of OUR spiritual self because of the psychikos soul’s self-serving needs. It has created parts to it that helped us to get over the problems, to deal with rejection, to advance itself, to be able to establish a reputation, to feel a victim or to be successful. It has become the me-self version of what the God with us self was created to be – God with us – Emmanuel. When we were very young we made immature decisions in our souls to protect us from having to suffer from these early traumas again. Don’t condemn yourself for doing that as you had no option. You were there as a me-self person not knowing that God was there with you. and you didn't say ‘Lord come and help me here’. We tried to work out a way to work through these things - and we created strategies that ended up not having the wisdom to actually work. We created ‘helper parts’ in our souls. We may have gotten our own way but look what those helper parts have done to our relationships, self worth - our lives. This has resulted in our spirits becoming ‘orphaned’. Jesus said he would not leave us as orphans but that he would send us ‘Another Helper’ the Holy Spirit. (John 14:16-18)   The individual uniqueness of every person mirrors the fact that we have each been created with a unique spiritual DNA. That spiritual DNA is contained in the spiritual seed of life of the Word (the Logos) that has spoken our spiritual life into being in eternity. That seed word was destined to be expressed from our spirit into and through our soul and embodied by us as a whole person, spirit soul and body. The journey is about our soul being reordered, not deleted. James 1:21… receive with meekness the implanted word (logos seed), which is able to save your souls. But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural (genesis) face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does.   Genesis in the Greek means original. So our Genesis self is the original unique spiritual self, designed and created by God’s word (LOGOS) before the foundation of the world. (Ephesians 1:4). We discover in the mirror of the Word our true unique spiritual self then we walk away and forget that and get drawn back into expressing our psychikos soulish self again with all its unresolved helper parts.   That unique spirit is waiting to be expressed in a saved and healed soul, saved from what we have plunged our souls into because of a mindset of separation from God. That is why we are looking at presence prayer as a pathway of hope and faith and love back into what our souls could truly express as we draw near to God and ask for the Holy Spirit, our New Helpe,r to reveal to us what Jesus is saying to us and what our Father is doing for us. Jesus is that LOGOS, the seed of life that encompasses the true DNA of everything created, every instinctive response of every living thing designed and upheld by LOGOS (Hebrews 1:3) and his logos seed has been sown into our unique spirit to make us one in Spirit with the Father and Jesus and the Holy Spirit. (1Peter 1:23)   John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word (logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made The Greek logos was seen as the universal rational principle of creativity and design by philosophers like Heraclitus and the Stoics. and they revered this concept. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius saw logos as the intelligent omnipotent and omnipresent Divine force that structured and guided all of existence.  But for the Jews the WORD only meant Torah and their relationship to the Word was the fulfillment of the Law.   So John in his Gospel would have deeply offended and insulted the Greeks and the Romans by declaring that Jesus, a bearded Galilean, was the one and only LOGOS. And for the Jews calling him the Word (their Torah) claim meant that he was the fulfillment of the law. so they all despised Jesus. And today the world despises Jesus.  The Bible says that we have been born again, not of corruptible seed but incorruptible, through the word (Logos) of God which lives and abides forever (1Peter 1:23). This is not only Jesus as the logos seed of eternal life but also as the Word of God as Scripture. *     Today the world believes that the Word, both as Jesus and as Scripture doesn’t mean anything. There exists a cultural spirituality where the word Universe is used as if it was the source of creative design and blessing – The Universe be with you. Spiritual does not just mean mystical as opposed to material. Cultural spirituality can include reverencing created things and concepts and reading as many books or doing as many rituals possible to heal our souls. In the same way it also includes the religious and legalistic Christianity practiced today- and this mindset is soulish rather than spiritual. But for many people this kind of soulish spirituality has been a pathway to ultimately being drawn into true spirituality. True spirituality is the things of the Spirit of God in Christ (1Corinthians 2). This is the reality of the Creator God as the Father sending his Son Jesus into the world as human. In doing this God joined Divinity to humanity in one person, Jesus, whose death and resurrection and ascension led to the formation of a New Creation born of both human and Divine seed (logos). *Paul even put the church in Corinth in the category of cultural spirituality and his admonishment still applies to the church today.  We began today with the words of Paul to the Corinthians in (1 Corinthians 2:13).The natural (psychikos – soulish) person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually (pneumatikos) discerned.  Paul was addressing the people of the Corinthian church, not just worldly religious spirituality. Paul was dismayed at the lack of true spirituality amongst them. He said they were psychikos- soulish, not pneumatikos – spiritual. He admitted that they had all knowledge and were upfront in spiritual gifts(1 Corinthians 1:7) but he finally said to them  I, brethren, could not speak to you as to spiritual people but as to carnal (sarkikos –that is worse than psychikos!), as to babes in Christ. I fed you with milk and not with solid food; for until now you were not able to receive it, and even now you are still not able; for you are still carnal. For where there are envy, strife, and divisions among you, are you not carnal?     God has sent us the Holy Spirit through Jesus, the second Adam, for the healing and salvation of the soul in God’s presence. We can choose to become spiritual (pneumatikos ) people or remain soulish (psychikos) people. The simplest way to experience being transformed from soulish to spiritual is to give ourselves to the work of  the Holy Spirit in times of presence prayer to reveal to us Jesus as the Logos Word who speaks

  PRESENCE PRAYER AT HOME WITH GOD  We discussed last week that Jesus said in my Father’s house there are many mansions (mone – at home with God). I go to prepare a place for you. (John 14:2). There is a unique individual mone for every person ever born – no two people build the same house for God. And remember the mansions were not only prepared for Heaven but for here on earth as we become the dwelling (mone) for God here. Jesus said My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make our home (mansion – mone) with him. (John 14:23). The more we dwell with the Father and Jesus and the Holy Spirit – at home with God here on earth the more they unveil who they are to us, whether we are here on earth or in Heaven, because faith and hope and love are eternal and will remain from age to age for people to come to know and love God more and more. How do we travel that journey of living a life at home with God in all the difficulties and problems? Paul tells us that staying connected to God is the key. He said pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. (1 Thessalonians 5:16). Praying without ceasing would seem to be an impossible task but what is meant here is that we can maintain a mindset of connection with God at all times so that what we do and how we feel whether positively or negatively is a ‘God with us’ conversation. And the Holy Spirit is praying for us without ceasing! John 16:7  – Jesus said he would be sent into the world to convince everybody that they have missed the mark of being aligned with his purpose for their lives – that’s your next door neighbour as well as people going to church. - He is also wanting us all to know that he has overcome the power of darkness that they have been slaves to in their fears and anxieties.  The process of becoming still is a prayer that Paul teaches us in our sufferings and problems.  Romans 8:26 Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. Now He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called (those invited) to live according to His purpose.  Those who are the called according to is purpose are those who desire to live according to his purpose and to respond to that invitation. And we know that all things work together for good - in other words but I know  you do it Father the way you always do, and we only find out how great you are when you show us what you’ve done according to your Will - Because we dont see that but we dont know it at the time… this is our walk all the time growing in faith and promise.    to those who love God, to those who are the called (those invited) to live according to His purpose. As we learn to become actively connected and still with God, we can grow in the practice of being at peace, trusting that he is always working behind the scenes on our behalf. Job complained about his affliction and sufferings to God (Job 30:20) and God said he accepted Job’s prayer, but he rebuked Job’s friends. Job had come to know God in his suffering, but his friends only found judgement in their hearts for Job (Job 42:8).  I cry to you for help and you do not answer me; I stand, and you only look at me. You have turned cruel to me; with the might of your hand you persecute me. You lift me up on the wind; you make me ride on it, and you toss me about in the roar of the storm. For I know that you will bring me to deathand to the house appointed for all living. House- MANSIONS!  and God said he accepted Job, but he rebuked Job’s friends.  But God wasn’t angry with Job because he complained. God was pleased with him for simply having a conversation. Even through the most awful trials, and countless sufferings.    But God said to Job’s friend Eliphaz “My anger burns against you and against your two friends, for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has. (Job 42:7). Jesus also spoke to God in the midst of his suffering in the Garden of gethsemane and asked if the cu of suffering could be taken from  him, and was there another way but then said – nevertheless not my will but thine be done. As we learn to become actively connected and still with God, we can grow in the practice of being at peace, trusting that he is always working behind the scenes on our behalf, being still and knowing God As an act of faith and thanksgiving. So the Holy Spirit is also praying unceasingly FOR us! And we Maintain a connection/conversation whether it is positive and faithful or even when it is negative and perplexed. We learn t believe and say ‘God you re aways right but not so with me And being connected it brings the blessing of peace, or agreement with God.. Phil 4.6 do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Even when it doesn't feel like it. In times of trials we might say Lord, this is a bit beyond me… but I’m going to accept it. I know you're there with me. Why didn't I get that job, or why are my relationships struggling.  We don't get to see what God is doing in the here and now, but if we are open to receiving what God has to show us, we will be surprised by how things get reordered in an incredible way you could have never imagined. Have faith that God is always working behind the scenes in the supernatural, working all things together for good for those who respond to the invitation to be living in His purpose. That's what Paul meant by praying without ceasing. And that's God's will for you. People are always saying what is God's will!? It's as simple as that. Staying connected - that is praying without ceasing. Not letting your own stuff get in the way all the time. What you think you know better about or can do or understand better. Expect that He sees everything we need, and He wants to provide it for us as a father does. We can now stay connected in a presence prayer with God 1 Thessalonians 5:18 pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. This becomes the practice of Presence Prayer which we will be discussing furher as we go on. -you're in His Will. You have been found in him, you're praying without ceasing, and He refines your faith into constantly saying thank you no matter what is happening.  Paul OSullivan  - pauloss@me.com      

  AT HOME WITH GOD   I’ve had a lot of questions over the years of what I think Heaven would be like. I would like to have the answers, especially in the last little while. And I’m content to wait for God to show us in his time. But what I’m going to talk about today is something that has been on my heart for some time and I’ve felt a deeper understanding of what Jesus was teaching us about his hope and faith and love for our lives here on earth that will continue on in Heaven.  We know we will get a new supernatural body at the time of the Final Resurrection when Jesus comes back. But there is still a time in between - being with the Lord in Heaven before that Final Resurrection that I’m going to look at here, and it is clear that we will have a recognisable resurrected body just as Jesus had when he walked the earth for forty days after his resurrection. But other than that, we cannot be specific It has not yet been revealed what we shall be (1 John 3:2). I’m speaking today about being at home with God in our inner being whether we are on earth, or whether we are at home with him in Heaven. Jesus tried to explain to his disciples about how he was leaving them to go and be at home with his Father and he said he was going to prepare a home for them also. He used the word ‘mansion’ to describe that home (mone – abiding with, making a home. God being at home with us and us being at home with God. John 14:1 “Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you… that where I am, there you may be also. Jesus went on to say If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make our home (mansion – mone) with him. So I have two questions. How do we build that house so that we can be at home with God and he can be at home with him? And how do we live in that house? We will look first at how Paul tells us how to start to build the house. 1Corinthians 3:10 According to the grace of God which was given to me, as a wise master builder I have laid the foundation, and another builds on it. But let each one take heed how he builds on it. For no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on this foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each one’s work will become clear; for the Day will declare it, because it will be revealed by fire; and the fire will test each one’s work, of what sort it is. If anyone’s work which he has built on it endures, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire. The foundation is the work of Jesus Christ, the foundation stone that gave his life for us that we could become partakers of the Divine nature through the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit in us burns off the dead wood of dead works of wood and hay and stubble, such as ego and ambition and superficial superspiritual success. He transforms us into the likeness of Jesus. The likeness of Jesus is the silver and the gold. The silver represents his redeeming mercy and forgiveness, and the gold represents the nature of God. The fire represents the trials of faith spoken of by Peter. 1Peter 1: 7,9 For a little while, if need be, you have been grieved by various trials, that the genuineness of your faith, being much more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to praise, honor, and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ, or a little while, if need be, you have been grieved by various trials, that the genuineness of your faith, being much more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to praise, honor, and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ, whom having not seen you love. Though now you do not see Him, yet believing, you rejoice with unspeakable joy and full of glory, receiving the end of your faith—the salvation of your souls We will now look at how to live in the house by looking at some things we have mentioned that Jesus has said. Jesus said in my Father’s house there are many mansions (mone – at home with God). I go to prepare a place for you.(John 14:2). There is a unique individual mone for every person ever born – no two people build the same house for God.  Jesus said My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make our home (mansion – mone) with him. (John 14:23). The unique spiritual home (mone-mansion) that we build with God and for God becomes the dwelling place for The Father and Jesus and the Holy Spirit who each have a role to play for us and with us in the building and the purpose and meaning to be expressed in that house that is our home. The Father is the designer and provider of the style, the furniture the decoration, the colour and the variety and character of the house. That lovely House of yours that the Father designed with you will draw people to meet Jesus in your unique and special way.  Just as he designed every little detail of  his creation here on earth. With such intention, beauty, and creativity and with its own personal nature – just look around you.  Jesus is the word of truth and faith and love grace that creates the life and character of the conversation in the house. That becomes the expression of how we are in the world and in relationship with the people around us. When you work on building your HOUSE with good things, the right paint and furnishings and plan, burning off the deadwood of the ego and getting rid of as much junk as you can and making an inviting HOME with the Father, then Jesus, the WORD will speak through you naturally in His way, and You can trust in that and have Faith for it.  The Holy Spirit is the one who transforms every person who is welcomed into our house. This transformation starts with us and touches the minds and hearts of all who come in.  The Holy Spirit is the Translator and interpreter. You won’t have to try to get your point across, the Holy Spirit does that for you.  You won’t need to strive in your opinions to make people believe what you say, or to “Get it” because they will supernaturally hear and understand by the grace of God it. That is his job and he does it well. We get caught up in thinking its our job. That was always the way Christianity was meant to be. Jesus said once to his disciples You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me. But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life. (John 5:39). Jesus challenges the Church to hear those words and do them. Too often the Church seems to have had a better idea about knowing God – Just read about him and argue with one another about what the Bible says about him.    We have 36,000 Christian denominations making too much room for everyone telling his neighbour about God and perhaps not enough room to let God be at home in us and us at home in him. That way we would share about who we know around a family table instead of debate about what we know from behind a pulpit. It is not too late to start and my hunger for spiritual fellowship is to bring Him whom we are getting to know to a living table in a living room in a spiritual home that he is dwelling in and that he is helping us to build. We are offered the opportunity to build that home in which we can be at home with God.  Paul said I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course I have kept the faith. (2 Timothy 4:7)  But Paul also tells us that even though a course on earth may be finished, there is more to come in Heaven. He even tells us that he experienced being taken to the third Heaven to see Heavenly mysteries that he was not permitted to utter on the earth (2Corinthians 12:2).  He tells us that when all earthly things pass away faith and hope and love will continue to operate eternally. 1Corinthians 13:12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known. And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love. Only Jesus finished his eternal course completely on earth, but for everybody else there will be age to age learning of the unfolding of the revelation of the nature of God to us. We are offered our course to be lived at home with him on the earth and then he brings us to our home in Heaven where a greater dimension of building that home with him continues to unfold.  The more we dwell with the Father and Jesus and the Holy Spirit – at home with God here on earth the more they unveil who they are to us, whether we are here on earth or in Heaven, because faith and hope and love are eternal and will remain from age to age for people to come to know and love God more and more. This becomes our age-to-age eternal destiny. Paul OSullivan - pauloss@me.com.    

FAITH AND HOPE AND TINEKE Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is the substance (hypostasis – the abiding basic reality) of things (pragma – work and business of God) hoped for, the evidence of things not seen…. By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.  Faith is abiding in the supernatural work of God doing his will for us in the world of the unseen in the things we hope for - and the assurance of his perfect will coming to pass. In that faith we surrender our will for us to his will for us. Faith is completed in observing the event that comes to pass in God’s sovereign will. When we observe the event we give thanks, and we receive more understanding of who God is. But what we pray to happen may not happen in the way we had first hoped it would. Jesus said ‘If there be any other way, take this cup of suffering from me nevertheless not my will but thine be done’ Hope is the ongoing trust in the eventuality of God’s perfect will being accomplished in his way and in his time for our prayer. It sits in the middle of our desire and God’s will and his timing. Tineke and I lived in that hope. The Holy Spirit bears witness to our spirit when we receive his gift of faith and it bears witness to our spirit for our hope. We had a witness of hope. Hebrews 10:23 Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful. The bible speaks of the people of faith in Hebrews 11 who died with the testimony of faith without receiving the promise. The completion of faith is the event of a promise. the completion of hope is the eventuality of a promise. The promise is always the perfect will of God for which we give thanks. We just read that the first experience of faith that God offers to us is about his creation of the world through his word. By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God The word for ‘understand’ in that verse is noe?? which means to observe and comprehend and be assured of that event. Most people observe and are in awe of the order and beauty of the universe and they attribute that wonder to a theory called evolution, but some receive a revelation by faith and observe and are in awe of the order and beauty of the universe that has been uttered into existence by God’s Word.  I wont be speaking at the funeral of course so I’d like to share some things about Tneke and me now. The way I came to have that faith in God’s creation was a long and winding road. It started when I met Tineke when she was a university student working as an assistant in a pharmacy during the holidays, and the owner of the pharmacy asked me to come and do a locum for him so he could go skiing. It happened that I was also at the same university as her, having gone back to uni to study medicine and so we continued the relationship from that time on, and then I was introduced to her family and I became a semi-permanent fixture at her home. I also decided to forget about doing medicine – another future had walked into my life. Tineke’s mother Martha was a devoted Christian, and Martha was wary of this catholic university student who believed in evolution, which you had to do to pass the exams, and it was inconsequential to me at that time. But I remember the day years later, after I received a revelation of who Jesus was as my saviour and I read that verse about understanding that the worlds were framed by the word of God and it was a total and complete reality to me and I wondered what I had been thinking all my life. Martha and I got to love one another and lo and behold I ended up becoming her pastor at our church, Northern beaches Christian Centre. I was now living by faith – the faith that said that God was always working his will into our lives for our good in the world of the unseen. Then I realised that my faith was nothing but the abiding under the supernatural work of God for everything I could ever hope for in my life. That meant that I learned to live with the hope of the glory of God, as the Bible says, ‘we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. (Romans 5:2). The hope of the glory of God simply means living in the expectation of God being on display in our lives as we entrust everything to him to bring his will to pass in his way and in his time – that is a living hope, and that is what Tineke lived within over these last six months. But the next experience of faith that the Bible speaks about after creation is that of the faith of Abel – that is the faith I saw in Tineke’s life and that is what I would like to share with you. By faith Abel offered to God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, through which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts; and through it he being dead still speaks. (verse 4) The faith of Abel was that he wanted to please God and so he offered a more excellent sacrifice to God than his brother. His willingness to let his life be a sacrificial offering to God was what I saw in the mind and heart of Tineke’s soul as she sacrificially gave her life in lovingly serving God in serving her family and those outside her family that God had placed in her life to care for. And through that humble submission to God’s will, Tineke being dead still speaks - and there are others from amongst us here who have gone to be with the Lord, and I believe their faith still speaks. At one stage I thought I had faith for her healing because of other Scriptures that spoke about healing and for which I asked for confirmation - and circumstances came about that appeared to suggest confirmation, but what truly remained as a witness in my spirit was hope and not a promise of faith that I could proclaim. Tineke suffered the ravages ofa dreadful disease and it was predicted that the immunotherapy would weaken her to the extent that it would not be tolerable but she struggled with an astounding courage but then a rogue infection hit her which was not discovered in time and her body could not withstand it. We sat with her as she took her last breath listening to a most special spiritual song that she had told lucy she wanted for her funeral. I had not been aware of that. The word that Tineke and I lived within and had agreement on was the word of hope that we held onto without wavering. Our hope remained in our trust in the goodness of God to be revealed in his way and in his time – and we left that in his hands  Tineke, being dead still speaks. Tineke’s faith still speaks to me. It was over three years ago that I shared a vision that I had to bring understanding to people of the truth of the salvation of the soul receiving the goal of our faith, the salvation of the soul (1Peter 1:9). Tineke joined me in putting together of that vision of the healing and salvation of the soul and we shared in the Scriptures together and I attempted to put so many Scriptures together that came cascading upon each other and it became difficult for me to know where to start and how to end and what to put in the middle. Tineke called it a blueprint but she knew it had to be ordered and structured and presented in a way that could be received and understood.  Then one day Tineke read a verse from Habakkuk to me that The Lord had given her about our vision together for this. Habakkuk 2:2 Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it. For still the vision awaits its appointed time; it hastens to the end—it will not lie. If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay. Tineke helped me make the vision plain and to put the words in order and sequence so that people would understand it. It took about three years and I could not have done it without her and we were at the beginning of running it as a course so that people who heard it could run with it. Scott Kardash with his gift of knowledge of the word and his computer tech skills worked tirelessly with me to present it as a group discussion and I began to share it in Scott and Lisa’s home to her home group. Then Tineke became critically ill – and now she is gone. It is as if Tineke and I were driving a beautiful car together when all of a sudden the wheels of the car fell off and Tineke was no longer there. And that is where I am now, and I am asking God what to do. But then I remembered the Scriptures that God gave to Tineke… For still the vision awaits its appointed time; it hastens to the end—it will not lie. If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay. I don’t know how I am going to do that as I feel empty of all energy and motivation but I know the grace of God will become my sufficiency and if it seems slow I will wait for it for it will surely come, it will not delay. Tineke being dead still speaks from that Scripture and I believe she would also like me to put the wheels back on that car and get back on track. And that gives me faith that God will speak, and I will hear him. Paul Sullivan - pauloss@me.com  

GOD’S GRACE IN US   1Corinthians 15:10 But by the grace of God I am what I am  When Paul made that statement, he knew that what he had become through God’s grace was God’s doing, and not his doing. He also said it was not him doing the work of God, but it was the grace of Jesus working with him. That grace was God’s activity upon his soul that empowered him to respond to God in love and the surrender of his will and to know that Jesus was working through him every moment of his life. Generally Grace can be seen working in someone’s life when they are doing some good thing that they love to do and they make it look easy even if it is very difficult. In sporting terms if a tennis player saw Roger Federer playing tennis and compared themselves to Federer they would see tennis grace in action and wish they had that grace in their game. Jesus lived a Divine life full of grace and truth within his limited humanity and people saw God at work in him and through him. As a Pharisee Paul thought he was a top-class man of God before the grace of God took over his life.   Philippians 3:4 If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. But then he found grace; And I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers. But he who had set me apart before I was born, and who called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles (Galatians 1:14) God’s grace for Paul was waiting for him from before he was born. Before Paul found grace, he was part of the disorder and violence of a treacherous world in a dark time in history. Paul had seen himself as a religious man of great competence and great commitment to the cause of his Jewish tradition. He served God through his own ambition and strategies and he took great pride in his own achievements in persecuting Christians. Paul’s religion had not put God’s love or mercy in his heart or a humble and surrendered will towards the Father, or oneness in the Spirit with Jesus. For that he had to find grace in the eyes of the Lord through Jesus After he found grace, he became part of God’s answer of love and light that overcame the darkness of that world. Jesus had overcome the darkness through his death and resurrection, and now he was sending forth messengers of his grace. God is doing the same thing today!   There are multitudes of people who are committed to the cause of doing things for God that have a similar zeal and passion for success like Paul did but have yet to find the grace of God for whatever good thing God has planned for them. We might be inclined to think that Paul’s existence was of such significance and importance for what God called him to do, that the activity of God’s grace upon us could not be anything like God’s grace upon Paul. But we would be wrong to think that, as Paul wrote to Titus concerning the grace upon all of us through Jesus. For the grace of God that brings salvation has shone upon all mankind. And while that grace is there waiting to shine, it is also there waiting to be found. The finding of grace came upon people in the Old Testament who saw the saving power of God and gave themselves to be an expression of that. Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. God also told Moses that he had found grace in his sight, and that he knew him by name. And in the New Testament we are urged to find his grace in times of need.  Come boldly to the throne of grace that you may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (Hebrews 4:16) The finding and receiving of grace for us is through our faith, as we realise that we are not sufficient of ourselves to produce grace by ourselves, but we also realise that we have access to his grace in our insufficiency through faith. That grace releases his work upon us and through us. Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. (Romans 5:1-2) Grace is the loving activity of God upon a human soul, and when we know that we can access this grace through our faith we realize that it is the sufficiency for each one of us to do what God has called us to do – ‘called’ – kleo,  means invited- invited to love and serve and bless those people in our world. That grace upon us allows salvation to shine upon all those people that God places us amongst. Just like Paul we are what we are by the grace of God, and we do what we do by the grace of God – ‘set apart before we were born, and called by his grace, and pleased to reveal his Son in us’.  That was and still is the Lord’s doing, and I pray we will see many such miracles in these days in which we live.   Satan gave humanity a rule of destruction to live by – a deadly commandment  – that you hate one another as I have hated you, and we are living in times where there are many obeying that commandment of fear and hatred. But God’s love which casts out all fear is on the rise today through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ who has given us his new Commandment – that you love one another as I have loved you.  Paul tells us that it was God’s love that compelled his heart to serve him and to serve the people he was sent to. He writes Whatever we do, it is certainly not for our own gain but because Christ’s love compels us. (2Corinthians 5:14).  Paul’s soul was bursting with that powerful love and he could hardly contain himself when he said, May your roots go down deep into the soil of God’s marvelous love; and may you be able to feel and understand, as all God’s children should, how long, how wide, how deep, and how high his love really is; and to experience this love for yourselves, though it is so great that you will never see the end of it or fully know or understand it. And so at last you will be filled up with the fulness of God himself (Ephesians 3:17-19). Paul OSullivan  -  pauloss@me.com    

THE SALVATION OF THE SOUL AND THE SPIRITUAL STRUGGLE We’re finishing up Module One of our Salvation of the Soul series with this sixth and final session. We’ve explored how, in response to early experiences of forsakenness, a person can create a protective helper part in their soul. These strategies becomes embedded and trapped as immature attempts to protect us from harm, leading to more unnecessary suffering over a person’s life. We’ve learned that our spirit can discover and gently engage with these outdated parts, not as enemies, but as once-useful protectors doing their best. With spiritual authority and compassion, we can invite them to step aside and make room for our true Helper—the Holy Spirit—who reveals to us our God-designed self, united with Jesus and the Father. There is a graphic story of a spiritual struggle in Genesis 32 about Jacob who wrestles with God, where God appears to Jacob in the form of an angel. Jacob’s life had been one continuous struggle, creating many unhelpful helper parts in his soul, using his own wits and skills and devious ways to get what he believed was due to him. His twin brother Esau came out of the womb before him, but Jacob grabbed his heel to get there first and it went on from there because it was in Jacob’s spirit to want the blessing of God upon his life - that was his heart, and we discover later that it was not Esau’s heart. But Jacob had lied and cheated and achieved many successes and some failures by constantly putting his unhelpful helper parts to use. He got to the point in in his life after cheating his brother Esau and pretending to his blind father Isaac that he was his brother, to get the first born blessing and  manipulating his father-in-Law Laban that he knew there had to be change in his life that only God could achieve in him. He was about to meet up with Esau again after many years in a proposed meeting for reconciliation, and he was worried that Esau might even exact revenge upon him. He let his family go on ahead and stayed alone and in the night, he finds himself in a spiritual struggle with God in the form of an angel and wrestles with God. In Jacob's wrestle with God, he became both a loser and a winner in the same encounter, just as we do with God because we can't beat God, but we stay in the struggle because God’s blessing means more to us than any other blessing. And Jacob refused to let God go until God had blessed him. So in his willingness to have attitudes and behaviours overcome in his soul, he showed God that he was sincere in his spirit. And then God mercifully affirmed him in that by saying, ‘you have prevailed with God’. So, he didn't beat God, but God still declared him a spiritual winner. His spirit yielded to God and his soul surrendered its many unhelpful helpers, and he won God’s blessing. They had thought they knew better than God in their grasping for blessings rather than faithfully receiving them from God. That is what our helper parts do – until they get to know and faithfully trust God for his best for us. But we can say to our souls to hold fast to the confession of your hope without wavering for he who has promised is faithful. (Hebrews 10:23). And God was faithful to Jacob with his promise despite Jacob’s wayward ways. God changed not only his nature, but also changed his name from Jacob to Israel, which means prevailing with God. So our spiritual struggle with God is not against God, it's with God, and he says ‘we can walk together’. Israel also means prince. He received a new identity and a new place of authority in the purpose of God for his life. But he also received a permanent limp where his hip bone was damaged when the angel struck him and that finished the struggle, and this left Jacob with a new moment by moment awareness of his vulnerability. Now this is being a real person, and his unhelpful helper parts were no longer hidden, but they were no longer ruling his life if and when they were triggered. He now knew what to choose, and he knew how to choose, and he knew how to live in God's blessing, and that limp kept reminding him - you're vulnerable. He could glory in his spiritual struggles and infirmities, because when he was weak God was strong in him and with him.  Paul also tells us of his many spiritual struggles, and he encourages us in our spiritual struggles. He said when I am weak the power of Christ can rest upon me. (2Corinthians 12:9). Our spirit knows all the parts of us, and our struggles are like weighty burdens that our helper parts are carrying, and they often confuse our interpretations of situations, and they allow self-focussed emotional reactions and errors of judgment to occur – the missing of the mark – the sin which we later regret. The Bible speaks of these burdens and struggles in the book of Hebrews. ‘Lay aside the weights and the sin that so easily besets us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. (Hebrews 12:1)  This is what is meant by our besetting sin – the repetitive missing of the mark, driven by entrenched unhelpful helpers.  Jesus tells us to lay aside our burdens and come to Him for rest: Come to me, all you who labour and are heavy burdened (phortizo 5412 - to overburden with ceremony or spiritual anxiety – our spiritual struggle). Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Matthew 11:28).  His yoke is easy because he offers us grace to walk closely with him, bonded and supported. Instead of carrying the heavy weight of old soul helper parts struggles and confusion, we now take on a lighter burden – a lighter spiritual struggle - the challenge of trusting Jesus. But even that faith comes from Him; He is the author and finisher of our faith. He’s saying, “I’m doing the heavy lifting—believe in me.” Jesus lifts the pain and failure we carry and gives us rest. We are no longer bonded to unhelpful soul strategies -we are yoked with Him.  This becomes an intelligent and spiritual process of our human spirit, together with the Holy Spirit, having dialogue with those parts with curiosity, and having those parts indicate to us what they feel, what they think, and what do they think they have to do in order to keep our whole system in balance at the time. And we now become Unbonded from them and bonded to Jesus through the New Helper – the Holy Spirit who brings the truth of what's been going on and what will now go on in our faith walk with Jesus. God planned in eternity for the saving of our soul and to become transformed into a Life-giving Spirit, after his likeness, not just in his image. Jesus became that life giving spirit by becoming human when he was already a life-giving spirit in heaven. And we become a life-giving Spirit by becoming partakers of his Divine nature. He planned that before Adam even sinned. We could say that Jesus had already saved us before Adam even fell. The faith process of the transformative work of coming into the likeness of Jesus as a life-giving Spirit is outlined in Ephesians chapter four. Paul knew the experience of having the ‘Old Man’ – the nature of Adam within him while at the same time having the ‘New Man’ – the Spirit of the life of Christ Jesus within him. He explains to us the process of making the inner exchange from living as the old creation to living in the New Creation – from a mindset of separation to a mindset of togetherness. Put off your old man (the old self in the likeness of Adam), which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt (phtherio -wasteful and ruinous manner) through deceitful desires, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the New Man (the New self), created after the likeness of God in true righteousness (which means being aligned with God’s ways) and holiness (set apart for his destined  purpose for your life). (Ephesians 4:22),  Paul is inviting us into something wonderful. He says we can invite our old self to stand aside, our old helpers forming the soul of our human nature and trying to drive our life with these old attitudes and habits. And welcome home the new creation self that is created after the likeness of God, aligned with his heart and devoted to him.  God says, you aren't that old image with that deficient soul. You are in Christ, you are a new creation, and I want you to know who you are and I want you to live your new life as I created it to be lived. This is a determination of God and we no longer need to get in the way. Each part of our orphan spirit’s heart that has been wounded can now be healed. Every lie that we've wrongly believed about ourselves is now able to be corrected and brought into line with God's idea of who we truly are. Whatever other people's negative ideas have done to us to devalue our true worth are erased by faith. That life changing process becomes the way of life. It becomes the way of discipleship to Jesus who knew how to be still and know his Father’s ways and his guidance and direction. But for that to happen we need to embrace that same practice of being still and knowing God. The next module of the series is all about that. It is called the Practice of Presence Prayer.  When Christianity became Christendom in the 4th century the church became political and warlike and financially rich and powerful with a form of godliness but denying the power thereof (2Timothy 3:5). However there remained (and still does) a silver river of redemption, a river of life flowing through dedicated Godly men and women who gave themselves to contemplative practices and the Scriptures and pastoral care and teaching that were modelled by the early Church Fathers. This river has been flowing over all those hundreds of years, and I will be sharing the Scriptural foundations of that transformative way of receiving the salvation and healing of our souls and becoming a life-giving Spirit. Paul O’Sullivan – pauloss@me.com

SALVATION OF THE SOUL AND THE JOURNEY TO FREEDOM  I’m continuing in the six part overview of the course salvation of the Soul and the Life Giving Spirit – this is number five. It is designed to be presented in interactive small groups and that is happening – It is not just a Bible study. However, I am doing the overview as sermon podcasts so that I can make my Scriptural position of the salvation of the Soul clear for the sake of accountability. We spoke last week about how Adam and Eve had felt forsaken and had misread the nature of God – not thinking or believing that they were loved and not able to trust him for their lives. They created helper parts in their souls – covering up - and the blame game - the woman You gave me – even God was blamed! The human soul was now on its journey of creating countless self-protective and defensive and self-rescue strategies that would become activated in every person to be born in the earth. Those first unhelpful helper parts were created in the Garden of Eden because of a feeling of perceived forsakenness - but they were not forsaken – God does not forsake us. I will never leave you nor forsake you (Deuteronomy 31:6. Hebrews 13:5).  Even Jesus had to briefly go through the feeling of forsakenness in his soul for our sakes on the cross but in his spirit, he knew he was not forsaken. He never departed from God, even while feeling forsaken but instead, he turned to scripture, quoting Psalm 22, demonstrating a path towards hope and victory through faith amidst pain. And every person ever born goes through feelings of forsakenness, whether real or perceived because it may or may not be intentional. Forsakenness sums up the human emotional pain felt in such experiences as feeling abandoned, deprived, overlooked, rejected, mocked, physically mistreated, unjustly judged or criticised, and many other negative experiences. It brings about a deep sense of separation, vulnerability, and lack of connection.  In childhood, we don’t have the wisdom or insight to understand why hurtful things happen or are said to us so we come up with the best self-protective strategies we can to avoid that kind of pain in the future, and those things get locked into our souls as helper parts early on. The problem is, they don’t grow or mature with us. We think life will improve as we get older, but those old strategies stay stuck at the age they were formed. That’s why we’re looking into the healing of the soul because many of us carry this deep sense of spiritual forsakenness from childhood onwards, even if no one meant us harm. Just the perception of it is enough. These coping strategies, though immature, helped us survive. They became part of who we are—how we show up in relationships and how we see ourselves. But often, we don’t realize we’re just replaying old patterns. They feel automatic, like they have a life of their own. So we don’t engage with them as evil, because our spirit created them in a time of naivety, but we need them to stop driving our attitudes and behaviour, and remember, our human spirit knows them. So who can help us see what’s really going on? We’re not all psychologists—but God is and His Spirit knows our spirit, and He understands our wounds. That’s where healing begins. We also spoke last week about David talking to his soul in the Psalms and talking about his inner bodily and spiritual parts and how they affected one another. He said in Psalm 32:3 that when he kept all his anxieties and guilt inside, his bones grew old, and his body dried up and he felt emotional stress.  I have seen it to be the case that when a person’s determined helper part gets into reaction to something difficult, they also sense a bodily reaction that can be automatic and subconscious. It can be in the chest or the stomach or the throat or the head – or appear as exaggerated movements or overwhelming fatigue. That illustrates that just as our spirit knows what we have experienced in our soul, our body also holds this unique information as a sensation of some kind. A psychotherapist called Bessel Van Der Kolk has written a good book on this called ‘The Body keeps the Score’. He describes how our brain and neuronal system were created to be wired in this way to be physically ‘triggered’ by an inner distress. Each oe of us have our own individual triggers. I spoke to a fellow whom we will call Reg two or three years ago regarding his stress and anxiety after suffering a physical and emotional collapse at work where he had a panic attack and thought he was having a heart attack. (This is a blend of two people’s experiences with names and other details changed for anonymity) He was put into rehab for weeks and even though he could walk and exercise under supervision he had difficulty recovering mentally and emotionally - or spiritually, even though he was a strong Christian. I knew Reg and respected him as a very successful management consultant who had worked at instructing in management systems and health and safety and managed teams to reconstruct damaged areas after natural disasters. He said his nature seemed to have changed. He had become irritable at people and resented having to stay in rehab being told what to do next – when to shower, when to eat, what to eat, how far to walk. I said – That’s not like you at all – not the Reg I know.  He said – ‘Oh but it is, that difficult person is there’. He told me how he felt blocked spiritually and was fearful of having another panic attack and was often very confused.  I asked Reg if he felt physical stress anywhere in his body when the mental and emotional distress hit him. I’d suspected it might have been in the chest, but he said no it was in the throat where he would choke up and lose his voice. So I asked him how long he had been experiencing that choked up feeling. He said a long time. He sat in silence for a while and then he said ‘When I was ten years old at school I was told by the gym master ‘You will never be anything like your big brother – you’re disorganised and can’t be trusted with peoples safety. It was because I didn’t set the gym up properly that week. My older brother was a good gymnast and always set the gym up to perfection. The gym master said no more gym for you this term.  Reg felt humiliated and extremely hurt and misjudged. He said that when he tried to explain that it was because he had had to set up on his own because the other boy who should have been helping him hadn’t turned up. But his throat choked up and he couldn’t talk. He promised himself nothing like that would ever happen to him again and he would prove to the gym master and himself and everybody else that he was as good as his brother. He decided to take command of his future and learned to be prepared for any unforeseen event and be able to fix or manage any problem.  It was then I realised that Reg had created a controlling helper part in his soul at that point in his life. Reg found that not being in control of what he could and could not do at the rehab centre had brough all this back. His fear of failure had created a controlling manager helper that drove his life – his very successful life, but it robbed him of the peace of God when under pressure to have to solve every problem and foresee every disaster.  His spirit and his body had just shown him what his soul was up to, just as David spoke to his soul and asked God what was happening in his soul. David only had the Law to help him reorder his soul (Psalm 19), but Reg had the Holy Spirit, and with prayer I was able to encourage him to speak to his soul. Reg spoke to the little ten year Reggie who in his immaturity had devised the best strategy at the time of coping with the feeling of inadequacy and of being unjustly judged. Reg who had created that helper part at ten years of age then asked that unhelpful helper part to step aside after all that time and to allow the Holy Spirit, the true Helper to show Reg how to let Jesus take his burden of fear and panic of not being in control. Reg gave himself to that and God began to speak to him in many different ways and his life changed. His gift of wisdom and management remained but now it was in God’s hands and not his. That was not just repentance from sin – hamartia, it was repentance to life as in Acts 11:18 where the Apostles realised that God had not only granted the Gentiles repentance from sin but had granted them g ‘repentance to life (metanoia zoe). I want to give you some examples of Helper Parts: See which ones you recognise! * Inner critics: constantly reminding of inadequacies and the need to work harder. * Caretakers: shielding from harm. * Controlling managers: trying to organise tasks to avoid failure. * Performance helpers: impressing oneself and others. * Pushy helpers: driving us to work harder  * Blame game helpers: getting out of trouble. * Rescuers/escapers: avoiding the harsh reality of overwhelming burdens. These are more tenacious and addictive than other helper parts. * These are viewed as common categories, but the specifics of each person’s helper parts are unique because each individual has a unique spirit, with unique talents, gifts and characteristics and circumstances. The ultimate goal is for individuals to become ‘the real person’ that God created not just in his image, but now being transformed after his likeness, and able to embody that likeness in his world. And this aligns with God's desire for us to live in agreement and relational wholeness.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

THE HEALING OF THE SOUL AND ITS HELPER PARTS Why does the soul need to be healed/saved soterion? We have discussed the fall of Adam and Eve and how the serpent convinced them that they could eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge and they would not die. He sowed the suspicion in them that God forbade them to eat of the tree because he did not want them to become like himself and come into his own likeness by knowing good and evil. The lie of the serpent was that God was withholding something from them that would make them become like God. In their naivety they believed that lie and disobeyed God perceiving that they had been forsaken by God, and they immediately felt separated from God and felt guilt and fear and shame.  They had created in their once blameless and innocent souls a mindset of separation and isolation from God. Their souls were filled with fear and guilt and shame for the first time. They acted out from this newfound ‘otherness’ and become defensive and self-protective. They covered the shame of their nakedness, and they felt exposed and vulnerable. Father God called out Adam’s disobedience and covering up - and Adam put the blame on Eve for offering him the fruit of the tree in the first place. When God called out Eve, she blamed the devil for beguiling her. Their separation mindset had ‘orphaned’ their spirit from God. The enormous cosmic consequence of feeling deprived and forsaken by God set in place a mindset of separation from God for all of humanity. Adam and Eve had just created in the soul of humanity two alien parts in their now damaged souls that had never existed before. The first new part was covering up their sin – and the word for sin used by Paul in Romans 5:10 for sin entering the world through Adam is harmartia and that word for sin appears 173 times in the Bible. It means missing the mark. They were the first of the rest of humanity to miss that mark, except for one man Jesus. They had misread the nature of their God – not thinking or believing that they were loved and not able to trust him for their lives. The second new part of their damaged souls was the blame game – the woman You gave me – even God was blamed!  The human soul was now on its journey of creating countless self-interested defensive and self-protective strategies that would become activated in every person to be born in the earth. The relationship between the human spirit and the soul became conflicted and disordered concerning what was right and wrong and good and evil - the conscience was damaged. And once the relationship between the human soul and God was damaged the relationships between the souls of people towards one another were also damaged. The once Godly responses of sacrificial love and trust and agreement became a burden and a struggle – it now became ‘what about me?’ Jesus was the only human being who did not create one self-protective or defensive or self-promoting part in his soul. Only he could remedy this disaster, so we have just seen the horrible dilemma for the souls of mankind for the rest of time, and we have just seen the magnificent answer for the salvation and healing of the soul of mankind. Jesus would one day become the saviour of the soul - from age to age for all of humanity. I will be calling these self-created soul parts like covering up and the blame game, and other dfence mechanisms ‘helper parts’. Today we will just identify some common helper parts and next time we will look at the process of their formation and identify more specific parts of our soul and see how they become ingrained and lead to us missing the mark of finding God’s will in many issues of our lives. We will find that these helper parts turn out to be what I will call ‘unhelpful’ helper parts. We all start forming these helper parts in our soul at an early age as we acquire and cultivate the separation mindset that darkness has engineered and weaponised in the soul of mankind. These unhelpful helper parts cause so much unnecessary suffering in our lives - and regretfully in the lives of those in our world that we care for. But just one more spoiler alert – some good news – great news - Jesus told his disciples at the last supper that he would not leave us as orphans but that he would send us ‘Another Helper’ - the Holy Spirit, who would lead us into all truth. He said that the holy Spirit would take the things that Jesus would be saying to us and reveal them to us.  (John 14:16-18). I will be using the terminology of parts in this course to describe how just as we have three major parts in our being, the spirit and the soul and the body, each of those three parts are also made up of parts. We have just discussed the helper parts of our soul, and we saw in the earlier teaching that our spirit is made of two parts, the mind and the heart (Hebrews 4:12) and we also observe that our body is made up of many many parts. The Bible was describing our parts thousands of years ago in the Old Testament, where David in the Psalms speaks of his outer and inner body parts as well as his inner spirit and soul parts. For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Psalm 139:13. David also knew God’s heart towards his spirit and soul. Behold, You desire truth in the inward parts, and in the hidden parts You will make me to know wisdom. (Psalm 51:6). We are actually all familiar with the concept of our differing inner parts that would appear to be in conflict with each other. For instance, our spirit and soul is made up of our mind and our heart and if we were deciding whether or not to purchase something like a car, we could find that our heart could be saying yes - that’s for me! But our mind could oppose that desire and say ‘What about paying the mortgage?’ We live with this subconscious polarity and find ourself saying ‘what part of me made me say (or do) that? When the mind and the heart of our spirit go through hurtful or harmful experiences at an early age our immature and often innocent spiritual self creates defence mechanisms and self-protective or self-advantage mechanisms to cope with the emotional or mental distress. Our immature self then sends an insufficient version of who our true spiritual self is (our genesis self’ – James 1:23) into our soul as a tangible part of our reality of who we are and how we behave. I would call that a shadow self that gets bonded in our soul and that shapes an untrue version of the spiritual self that God created us to be. Unfortunately, what we see in real life relationship is that peoples’ soul parts are responding and reacting to other peoples’ soul parts. But the next good news spoiler alert is that the Bible tells us that our spirit knows every distorted or disordered part of us that has been created in our soul, and even in our body through harm or trauma or mishap. For what man knows the things (ta – the parts that make up the whole -everything) of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? (1Corinthians 2:11).  The Bible also says in the Old Testament, The spirit of a man is the lamp of the LORD, searching all his innermost parts. (Proverbs 20:27). In this course we are going to find that the mind and heart of our uniquely and individually designed spirit made in the image of God hold the blueprint of the logos designed Word of God that created us for his designated will and purpose (genesis self). We do not have to lived trapped or stuck in a disordered soul but we can receive an understanding of who we really are and understand why and how we devised our unhelpful helper parts in the first place. The Holy Spirit is yearning to give us the understanding of what Jesus has to say about our orphaned spirit and how we can replace the unhelpful helper with the true Helper of the Holy Spirit. This becomes a journey into freedom.  At last we can begin to take responsibility for the soul we have formed and see it sanctified and set free. We can actually become participators in the salvation and healing of our souls with Jesus and the Holy Spirit and identify and replace the unhelpful helpers with the Divine Helper and begin to do the Father’s will for our lives. We can begin to live a life of purpose and meaning designed for us before the foundation of the world. To be continued.  Paul OSullivan – pauloss@me.com

THE SALVATION OF THE BODY AND SOUL AND SPIRIT  In these teachings I am attempting to lay down the Scriptural foundation and the way of putting into practice the course that is now available and which I have called ‘The Salvation of the Soul – and the Lifegiving Spirit’. As you will see on the Youtube and read in the course booklet, the course is based on the Scripture in 1 Peter 1:9 Reaching the goal of our faith the salvation/healing (soterion) of the soul, and another foundational Scripture is 1Corinthians 15:45 And so it is written, ‘The first man Adam became a living soul. The last Adam (Jesus) became a life-giving spirit’. The healing and salvation of the soul involves the interaction of our spirit and soul and body that are designed by God to work in harmony with one another and in alignment with God’s will and purpose for our lives (1Thessalonians 5:23). Ephesians 1:4-5 makes it clear that God’s pathway of our soul being saved takes us on to his predestination purpose for us, which is for our whole being to become the expression of his life-giving Spirit into our world around us. We have observed the difference between salvation in the Old Testament and the New Testament. In the Old Testament the choice was for Israel to obey the Law and Commandments and be protected from their enemies and materially blessed. In the New Testament the goal of our faith was salvation for the soul and the blessings were spiritual rather than material blessings (Ephesians 1:4).  Today I will be discussing the fact that each of these three parts of us, our spirit and our soul and our body goes through a different stage and mode of salvation. My headline summary would go like this; ‘Our spirit has been saved, our soul is being saved, and our body will be saved at the return of the Lord’. The Bible calls our physical body a mortal body (Romans 8:11). That means it is limited by earthly constraints and has been appointed to die (Hebrews 9:27). The Bible calls our body the temple of the Holy Spirit (1Corinthians 6) and as God’s vessels of his life we embody the inner workings of truth and faith into our world in the will of God (Romans 12:1). This is why Paul encourages us to keep our body in check - he says ‘I discipline my body and bring it into subjection’ (1Corinthians 9:27) The reason that the body is so temporary in this earthly life is because unlike our innermost being of soul and spirit it is subjected to all of the forces of this world. Our outer bodies receive information from the outer world through the five bodily senses of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. This sense information gets expressed in our soul The soul will respond positively or react negatively to our bodily experiences. David in the psalms commented on this interactive process of our body and soul and he gave glory to God that his body was so fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139.14).  Our physical bodies will be changed in an instant (saved) into a resurrected supernatural body ‘in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal (body) must put on immortality ‘(1Corinthians 15:52). Our earthly body exists for one age – a lifetime, whereas our sprit and our soul have an eternal quality that can progress from age to age and from glory to glory. (The word eternity in the Greek is ai??nios– age to age. In fact the word eternity was only first used in the English Bible by Tyndale in 1526 who translated aenios – age to age  into eternity . And he also translated the Old Testament Hebrew word olam as eternity instead of  ‘horizon to horizon’ (Ecclesiastes 3:11) So our body will be a new body one day. it would be interesting to know what we might look like. ‘Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. (1John 3:2)(1Corinthians 6:13-14). The supernatural resurrected body of Jesus when he walked the earth for forty days after his resurrection was recognizable. It will be similar with us, but we cannot be specific (it has not yet been revealed what we shall be). Will we look like we are about thirty years old? I have no revelation about this, just speculation. Jesus entered his ministry at around thirty years of age (Luke 3:23), The qualifying for Old Testament priestly ministry was thirty (Numbers 8:24). That was the age of maturity in the Bible. How old did Adam and Eve appear to be when first created? (it has not yet been revealed what we shall be). So the body will be saved but the Bible says that the soul is being saved (IE a work in progress). “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1Corinthians 1:18, 2 Corinthians 2:15). This describes the work of the salvation of the soul as an ongoing process of faith. It also shows that perishing (appollymi – wasting, being ruined, destroyed.) is also an ongoing process of wasting our time and our ongoing life instead of choosing to work with the Holy Spirit for the saving of our soul.  John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life ai??nios – age to age life).  Receiving eternal life does not mean just going to Heaven. It means receiving and believing in the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus living within us and through us and bringing about the salvation of our soul. By doing this we do not ‘perish’ (appolymi) which means to waste our life in not fulfilling God’s purpose and meaning for our ongoing age to age life.  Then beyond being saved is becoming a life-giving Spirit – and that ‘becoming’ includes our lives being a witness on the earth of the nature and reality of a living God in Heaven.  Nowhere does the Bible say that the goal of salvation is ‘going to Heaven’. The goal of salvation in both the Old and New Testament has never been stated as going to Heaven. The goal of our lives is actively being a witness on the earth of the nature of a living God in Heaven. Israel tried to do that by obeying the Law and they failed. When they chose to obey, they received outward blessings and victories over the enemy and were saved. When they disobeyed, they lost the battles and the land, and they ceased being saved. Our soul starts being saved by receiving faith in the Spirit of life of Christ Jesus and by working out that salvation on an ongoing daily basis (Philippians 2.12). Going to Heaven is going to heaven – there is an afterlife where every soul will be held accountable by a just and loving God – and onlyGod knows how that plays out. Let him surprise us.  So far, we’ve seen that our body will be saved in the future, and our soul is in the process of being saved. But as I said at the beginning our spirit was saved two thousand years ago - for everybody. It happened through Christ’s work on the cross at Calvary – 1Timothy 4:10 because we trust in the living God, who is the Savior of all men, especially of those who believe. The Bible calls this work of Jesus reconciliation (Greek – katalasso). But the Bible also uses the word reconciliation to mean something different in Matthew Ch 18 for the healing of offenses and disagreements between one another and that  Greek word dialasso. The word katalasso describes the supernatural work of the being of God entering into humanity and the being of humanity entering into Divinity. And Peter also writes about us ‘becoming partakers of the divine nature’ (2Peter 1:4) The Bible says that this work of reconciliation was sealed for humanity by receiving the Holy Spirit at Pentecost (Ephesians 1:5). So the work of the cross brings more than just forgiveness – it gives to every human being the opportunity to experience living as a New Creation in this life by faith through the grace of God in the power of the Spirit. God’s very being has now also become both human and Divine forever - through Jesus Christ. Why did God reconcile us to Himself?  Because His deepest desire was to unite us with Himself —to live His life within and through us, so we could live our lives within and for Him. It becomes the completion of his circle of love—the very reason He created us in the first place. God didn’t ask our permission. He went behind our backs and did it and he didn’t warn the devil either. He just went ahead and reconciled us to Himself, uniting His divine nature with our human nature through Christ’s death. This was God’s initiative—pure love in action.  Let’s look at a powerful passage from Paul, who understood reconciliation perhaps better than anyone. In 2 Corinthians 5:14, Paul writes: “The love of Christ compels us, because we believe this: One died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.” Christ died for us so we could live for Him by becoming a life-giving Spirit. Paul continues: “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their sins against them, and entrusting us with this message.”(2 Corinthians 5:18)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

THE SALVATION OF THE SOUL GODS IMAGE AND LIKENESS I am continuing today in the discussion of the salvation and healing of the soul. We have seen that God has created us to function as a spirit and a soul and a body – three parts that are to work in harmony together within each person, and in harmony with the will of God, so that we can fulfill the design and purpose for our lives. We saw that these three different parts of us interact with each another in a predictable and logical way.  The spirit is the life force of us as a human being, the individual and unique essence of who we are – no two human beings are created spiritually identical – not even identical twins. And each person’s unique spirit reflects a shadow of God’s nature - made in the image of God - So God created man in his own image, in the image(selem) of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27).  Our human spirit was created with two parts - the mind and the heart. The mind seeks understanding — what’s true or false, right or wrong — and through that process, we form a conscience. The heart, meanwhile, is where our desires, emotions, and beliefs live. What the mind accepts as truth, the heart embraces as faith. But here’s the dilemma - with so many different minds in the world, there are countless versions of what people believe to be true. And with those truths come just as many belief systems that people place their faith in. So, in practice, truth and faith have become relative values, shaped by the culture, religion, or philosophy that a person grows up in. (36,000 Christian denominations). When it comes to our inner spiritual life, the mindset and heart beliefs of our spirit are expressed in our soul, which becomes the expression of who we are and how we are seen in the world.  I'm just going to stop there because I just said something that I'd like to clarify. I said 36,000 denominations, and which one has the truth and how do we come to the unity of the faith? I'll tell you what it won't be – It won’t be by having exactly the same doctrine on every single verse in the Scripture - it won't be that, but you know what it will be?  It will fulfill Ephesians chapter 4 verse 13 that says ‘until we all come in the unity of the faith’ and there will be the one ‘yes ‘concerning the expression of Jesus as the one who is living through us and we will have a different flavour according to our gifts and our persuasions of certain things - that don’t have to cause arguments! It is more like saying  ‘that's an interesting perspective’ - but what will be unified is the life of Jesus being seen in his people in the unity of the Spirit because the Spirit is expressed through the soul as who we are. And we come into the unity of that expression as being the life of Jesus flowing like a river through us.  So therefore, the soul reflects the conscience and the belief systems and the soul must take responsibility for those choices.  I know that in the denomination I grew up in I had a conscience about not being allowed to eat meat on Friday, and my friends said I was stupid to have that belief - but I did that as unto the Lord because I thought that's what God wanted. And there are many things like that that people do to honour God, and the Bible says in Romans 14 ‘let each man be fully persuaded in his own mind’.  People do things to honour God and perhaps some only eat vegetables while others will eat meat - and others will see one day as being the only day of the Sabbath while others will see all days alike - let each one be persuaded in their own mind, says Paul (Romans 141-6). And it says, ‘but don't put somebody in jeopardy to their faith by demanding that they believe exactly as you’. You can do a thing but if they don't have faith for that it is nonetheless the Lord who sees where their heart is.  And Paul said to the people who are able to eat meat offered to idols ‘there's no such thing as an idol’ but he also said but don't flaunt that faith even it's real. So our soul takes responsibility for those choices of faith and love over legalism. Therefore the soul reflects the conscience and belief systems that we’ve developed ourselves, and so our soul must take responsibility for those choices. Let us go back to the beginning — to the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were tempted by darkness in the form of a serpent, and they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They were tempted to think and believe that what was ‘good’ meant what was only good for them and not what the absolute good of God was for them. That very choice of Adam and Eve introduced to all of humanity from then on a world of relative values. In other words what is good for me is all that counts. But absolute truth and faith come only from God, who gave us a free will to choose what we believe, and a conscience to guide us toward the good. The Bible tells the tragic story of how humanity, time and again, chose evil over good - and how that choice damaged the soul and brought harmful consequences to the whole person and to the whole world which was judged at the time of Noah’s flood. So God started over again with humanity but the dilemma remained; How could God remedy this confusion of the meaning of good and evil which causes such great damage to the soul?  What God did was to choose the nation of Israel out of all the nations in the earth to give them the best remedy available for the disabled conscience of humanity. He called a man named Abraham and told him that through him all families of the earth would be blessed. Abraham’s grandson Jacob took his family of 70 Hebrew people into Egypt because of a famine in all the land. They finally became 2 million slaves to Pharoah over a period of 400 years and became the nation of Israel and God had told Abraham he would take Israel back into the Promised Land of Canaan. God then miraculously delivered Israel from slavery to Pharoah through Moses to whom he gave the Law and the Commandments which reflected his relational nature of love and wisdom and goodness. Obedience to these Laws became the way of Salvation in the Old Testament for Israel and God also instructed them to make blood sacrifices for the forgiveness of their sins. These sacrifices prophetically foretold the final fulfillment in the one sacrifice of Jesus on the cross to forgive the sins of the world once and forever.  If Israel obeyed God’s commandments and offered sacrifices faithfully, He would bless them, provide for them, and give them victory over their enemies who followed false gods and lived in darkness. God had also promised them a land through their ancestor Abraham, and He would lead them into it as their Saviour. But this salvation was only partial—it depended on human nature flawed since Adam and Eve, trying to perfectly obey through sheer human willpower. And when they disobeyed, the blessings stopped, battles were lost, their land was taken, and their souls were weighed down by guilt, shame, and judgment. They had a strange choice – of being saved or not being saved. (And strangely enough we have the same choice of being saved or not being saved – we will discuss that shortly).  There is one Old Testament man, an anointed king called David, whose heart understood the beauty of God’s Law and Commandments that reflected God’s love and wisdom and goodness. Through his devotion to the spiritual truth of God’s Word he experienced the reordering of his soul and he ushers all of us into the understanding of the world of the soul. The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul; The testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple; The statutes of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart; The commandment of the LORD is pure, enlightening the eyes; Moreover by them Your servant is warned, and in keeping them there is great reward. (Psalm 19:7-11) But David was still a lesser separate being who depended upon a devoted but insufficient human nature. However, God had planned a better salvation in the New Testament that would allow humanity to partake of his Divine nature, and let us look at that promise of God – his big idea of sharing his very life with humanity at an appointed time through his Son Jesus. Genesis 1:26. Let us make man in our own image (selem- a shadow of Godness, as I quoted earlier –  all of humanity has this shadow of Godness ). However this verse goes on to say ‘according to our likeness’ (mut – which means an embodied being not just a shadow like selem). In other words, God had already planned from the beginning that there would be a way for humanity to embody the likeness of God.  And Jesus became the embodied being – in him dwelt the fulness of the Godhead bodily (Colossians 2:9). Jesus did this so that we could have his life and likeness dwell within us, and embody his Divinity. And Paul writes about this in 1Corinthians 15:45 the first man Adam became (ginomai – generated) a living soul - the last Adam (Jesus) became (eis – entered into) being a life-giving Spirit. We too enter into becoming a life-giving Spirit. God had to let humanity in the Old Testament try to save their own souls - just to prove to us that we cannot do it by existing only in the image or shadow of God, we had to come into his likeness and embody his life-giving Spirit.  Jesus brought his Divinity into humanity so that humanity could come into his Divinity. He sowed his life as a seed into the soil of the human heart by dying on the cross and rising from the dead and sending his Holy Spirit of Life for all flesh (all of us) at Pentecost. All flesh means the guy next door. It has been done – it is finished. But who is going to believe it and choose it and receive the ‘salvation of the soul’? As I said earlier Israel had a strange choice – of being saved or not being saved. And strangely enough we have the same choice of being saved or not being saved – we will discuss that shortly. To be continued. Paul OSullivan – pauloss@icloud.c

 THE SALVATION AND HEALING OF THE SOUL  Just as God is a Trinity – as Father and Son and Holy Spirit so we as human beings have three parts – a spirit, a soul and a body, and these three parts of us interact together. The Bible says that God desires for our whole spirit and soul and body be presented blameless at the coming of the Lord. (1Thessalonians 5:23). Through the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives these three parts of us were designed to work in harmony with one another to achieve what the Apostle Peter calls the goal of our faith – the salvation/healing (soterion) of the soul (psyche) (1Peter 1:9) The word soul as it is used in modern day language seems to have vague and different meanings for many people. Scientists say that it has no real existence that can be scientifically measured as an entity, and many people simply see the soul as our inner emotional and feeling life – That’s why we have the term ‘soul music’. Plato the Greek philosopher believed that the soul was motivational and appetitive and expressed different inner desires.  But thousands of years before Plato the Bible was very clear about the soul as being the expression of our spiritual life. The word soul Is used three hundred and fifty times in the Old Testament including many mentions by David in the Psalms, which help us to understand the spiritual meaning of the soul. And the soul is mentioned over one hundred times in the New Testament. Our soul is actually the manifestation of who we really are as the expression of our inner self at any one time in our life. So what is Peter saying when he says that the goal of our faith is the salvation of our soul? And to answer that question we have to go back and look at how our soul came into being. The startling reality is that God didn’t create our human soul as a fully working independent part of our being, as he did when he created our human spirit and our human body. We find that Genesis 2.7 says the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man ‘became’ a living soul (nephesh). That word ‘became’ a living soul intrigued me. It implied a process of something coming into being rather than a conclusive creative act of God. But I could find nothing in the Hebrew word ‘became’ to suggest what the process was. It was only when I discovered the Scripture of Paul in 1Corinthians15:45 that I understood how we become the living soul that we become. The Scripture says The first man Adam became (ginomai) a living soul and the Last Adam (Jesus) became a Life Giving Spirit. That word ginomai means to generate, to bring into being, to cause to be. And this has even more startling implications.  That means that we are forming or creating our own self – the self that people see, the self that we think we are and whom others think we are. And that means that we are accountable for who we become - in what we think and what we believe and how we behave. And it is our soul that gets judged on the last day- what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and to suffer the loss of his soul’ Mark 8.36. That is why the goal of our faith is the salvation/healing of our soul. That is why the Bible in the New Testament says that we are ‘being saved’ (2Corinthians 2:15) It is a process of transformation and sanctification. Sanctification means more than just a status of personal piety – it means being set apart for a life of purpose and meaning according to the design and will of God. So how does this process of ‘becoming’ operate? We saw in the opening Scripture that our whole spirit and soul and body are to function in harmony together in the will of God for our lives. God created the first man Adam from the dust (adama) of the earth and then he breathed the spirit of human life into him. These two created parts of humanity receive information that gets expressed in our souls. Our body with its five outer senses and other functional parts send material information to the soul which is then expressed by the soul in some form of response of either pain or pleasure or any other reaction. The spirit, which is made up of the mind and the heart sends inner spiritual information to the soul through the mind and the heart. The mind of the spirit sends truth or untruth to our soul and the soul responds to that information. The mind and heart of a child may be imprinted with helpful or unhelpful ideas and ideologies or be impacted by helpful or harmful emotional treatment. What the mind receives the heart believes and so the heart sends a belief system to the soul that a person will align themselves to for better or for worse. And so the journey of the soul begins as it receives multitudes of packages of information from both our outer and inner world into our souls to be processed into our becoming who we appear to be. This is a remarkably complex process but not altogether complicated, because God has designed our unique individual human spirit and body from before the foundation of the world. God had said ‘Let us make man in our own image’ (Genesis 1:26. That word ‘image’ is selem in the Hebrew and it means a shadow – so that everyone from Adam and Eve has been created with this shadow of ‘Godness’ about them with different and unique talents and abilities and personalities. Each person was also created with potential gifts of the Holy Spirit which would come into operation according to their faith in Jesus. Their faith in Jesus and the understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit in their lives after the Holy Spirit was given at Pentecost empowers a person to release the supernatural power of God’s love and goodness into their world around them. So how does this soul of ours get saved, and what happened to it for there to be a need for it to be saved in the first place? To understand that we must go back to the beginning where God created Adam and Eve and see what happened to the soul of man through the assault of satanic darkness upon their human spirit – their innocent but naive hearts and minds.  This sum of all darkness appeared to them in the form of a serpent in the beautiful Paradise of the Garden of Eden. God had created Adam and Eve in His own image and they lived together with him as their Heavenly Father, walking and talking together in their paradise. They had been created with an innocent and blameless spirit and a perfect physical body and had begun to ‘become’ a blameless living soul – and it seemed that nothing could be better than this. Their minds were filled only with God’s truth of who he was and who they were, and their hearts trusted and believed in him for all of their blessing and provision. There was an obvious point of difference between themselves and God, in that they were created beings – of a lower order than God who was Uncreated being like no other being. God was perfect in all his ways as Father and Son and Holy Spirit and humanity was less than perfect, of a lower order of being. But for a time of blameless innocence they would have felt ‘at one’ with God, just as a baby child feels with its mother and in a place of satisfied agreement that all their needs were being met, and not yet recognizing themselves as separate with a sense of separation. But in each person’s life that point of differentiation occurs as a necessary matter of reality, when one ‘I will crosses another ‘I will’ And this awakening of differentiation for Adam and Eve was brutal as the serpent exploited their innocence and naivety and crushed their innocent spirits. He himself fully understood this point of differentiation and knew himself as a lesser created spiritual being as God - and he hated it. That is the evil sin of covetousness. Then Satan, this dark spirit being who had realised that point of difference - of being of a lower spiritual order than God, in his deception and pride coveted the status of being as God. He wanted to be in God’s very likeness. How deeply did his covetousness fill him with resentment and hatred for these puny human beings about whom he heard with                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             outrage in his heart the words of God saying about them ‘let us make man in our own image… AND here I would like to complete that verse which adds ‘in our own LIKENESS’ (not just ‘selem’ – image -but ‘mut’ - likeness – a three-dimensional substantial God-like being. To this statement about humanity coming into the likeness of God Satan said ‘No it would not happen, for this is what he coveted with all his heart. In Isaiah Ch 14 Isaiah speaks about the will of Lucifer as the five ‘I wills’ of Satan. How you are fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How you are cut down to the ground, You who weakened the nations! For you have said in your heart: I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God; I will also sit on the mount of the congregation on the farthest sides of the north; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds,  I will be like the Most High.’ Yet you shall be brought down to Sheol, To the lowest depths of the Pit. (Isaiah 14:12) It would be Jesus as the One who was set for a time yet to come in God’s plan for humanity to fulfill those five ‘I wills’ in the will of the Father. Jesus would come in the three-dimensional substantiated likeness of God as God and man and sow the promises of those five I wills for his beloved humanity.  Jesus would turn those five ‘I wills’ of the selfish Satan into the five humble I wills

THE REVERSAL OF THE WORLD AT PENTECOST Acts 1:8 you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth. Jesus is making a prophecy here about the cosmic reversal of human history, culture, morality and spirituality. He is saying that from this time forth a new era of spiritual activity would begin in the earth whereby every human being who believed in the death and resurrection of Jesus as the risen Christ could live as a New species of being – a new Creation. They would become conscious of the Spirit of the life of Jesus being joined to their natural human spirit – a reversal of natural human existence to Divine spiritual existence.  He was also reversing the witness of himself as God in the earth. Israel was once that witness. Israel had been the living proof on earth that there was a God in the heavens – God doing miracles of provision for them and giving them the Promised land of Canaan. And for Israel to be that living proof they had to obey his commandments and perform his sacred sacrificial offerings. But now there was a new witness - a new living proof on the earth that there was a living God in the Heavens. This was to be the lives of sacred power in those who believed in the resurrected Christ that displayed and glorified the nature of a loving forgiving God in the Heavens. Jesus was also prophesying the reversal of spiritual power in the Heavens that would give believers in Jesus the fulness of spiritual power over the principalities and powers and demonic forces in the nations of the earth and in their own personal lives.  Pentecost was also a direct reversal of the Tower of Babel. Spiritual corruption had occurred at Babel where the earth was divided into seventy nations (named in Genesis 10), because of their rebellion to God. The language of their one native tongue was divided into various unintelligible languages so that they could not communicate and understand each other. The miraculous ability of the disciples at Pentecost to speak in different tongues (languages) allowed Jews from every nation to hear the gospel in their own tongue, overcoming the chaotic dividing of languages that occurred at Babel. Even the word ‘divided’ in the phrase regarding the "divided tongues of fire" over the heads of the disciples is the same word diamaridzo that describes the division of nations in Deuteronomy 32:8. At Pentecost a new language of the Holy Spirit united humanity unto Christ through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit – We will now read the account of the Day of Pentecost from the Book of Acts.  Acts 2:2-12 When the Day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. Then there appeared to them divided tongues, as of fire, and one sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. The Crowd’s Response And there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men, from every nation under heaven. And when this sound occurred, the multitude came together, and were confused, because everyone heard them speak in his own language. Then they were all amazed and marveled, saying to one another, “Look, are not all these who speak Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each in our own language in which we were born? Parthians and Medes and Elamites, those dwelling in Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya adjoining Cyrene, visitors from Rome, both Jews and converts, Cretans and Arabs—we hear them speaking in our own tongues the wonderful works of God.” So they were all amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “Whatever could this mean?” Others mocking said, “They are full of new wine.” But Peter, standing up with the eleven, raised his voice and said to them, “Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and heed my words. For these are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day. But this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel: (Joel 2:28–32) ‘And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, That I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh; I will pour out My Spirit in those days on My young men and on My young women; And they shall prophesy, and the young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.  That entire section of Joel’s prophecy has come to pass for all of humanity and is now actively being taken hold of by faith in those who believe in the ‘baptism of the Holy Spirit’. This happens when a believer acknowledges that they are empowered by the Holy Spirit of God to be led into all the truth that Jesus has spoken in his Word and is now speaking today into our lives and we are spiritually empowered to fulfil God’s will and the requirements of the Commandments  In Jewish tradition Pentecost (Shavuot) is also celebrated as the anniversary of the giving of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai. This perspective emphasizes the ongoing significance of the law and its continuation in the covenant with God.  Pentecost is the fulfillment of the promise of a "new covenant" where God would write his law on the hearts of his people. This contrasts with the giving of the law on stone as the Old Covenant.  In both events God gave His Torah (Law) to His People and in both cases He sealed the covenant that He had made with them. At Sinai He gave the Law written on tablets of stone. At Pentecost, He gave the Law written on tablets of the Heart. Then comes another part of Joel’s prophecy that has not yet happened historically – but it is seen in the Book of Revelation as part of one of the seven seals which Jesus opens.  The prophecy finishes by describing the cry in the hearts of people in those last harrowing days - urging them to call upon the name of Jesus and become saved. ‘And it shall come to pass that whoever calls on the name of the LORD Shall be saved.’ And that will bring an outpouring of God’s grace upon those people who finally realise and yield to the awesome power of the Lord of Lords, Jesus Christ. (Revelation 6:12) There is also a further implication to the word ‘divided’ in the phrase the "divided tongues as of fire" on the heads of the disciples in the upper room as the same word diamaridzo in describing the dividing of the nations in Deuteronomy 32. It is that those 70 nations whose tongues were divided at Babel and whose names are listed in Genesis 10, went out to occupy different territories in the earth.  The miracle of speaking in tongues at Pentecost for all the people of the different nations to understand the Gospel message at Pentecost signifies God's intention to reclaim those nations he had previously disinherited due to their rebellion and idolatry at Babel.  And now the deliberate scattering of these new believers back out to their home nations after Pentecost acted as seeds of the Gospel of the Kingdom being planted among all those nations. Starting in Jerusalem, it extended to Judea, Samaria (representing the apostate northern kingdom of Israel), and even to places with Jewish presence like Ethiopia. The Gospel also reached Philistine cities which were areas outside the original Kingdom of Solomon's control, and Damascus, a location linked to Abraham's early history and Paul’s early history. All this explains the presence of believers wherever Paul later travelled with the New Covenant message. God was reclaiming the territory of the whole earth from the powers of darkness and rebellion into his New Covenant promise for humanity. This became the reversal and reclamation of geographic and spiritual territory of Pentecost. But the reversal and reclamation of territory begins at the personal territory of our own heart – that is the soil of the new territory that God is reclaiming in the earth in these days in which we live. Taking back the spiritual territory of our own minds and hearts by faith through the indwelling Holy Spirit brings about a maturing of our will into accepting God’s will in all of our circumstances and gives us a new spiritual authority. We rest in a new understanding of the sovereignty of God in our lives as we see both the outward visible reality and the inner unseen reality with clarity and discernment. We realise that no adverse or unexpected circumstances can stop God’s purpose from working in us and through us. We can navigate life’s sufferings of worldly trials and spiritual conflicts with peace and thanksgiving and hope. (1 Thessalonians 5:16–18).  We can say along with Paul – I AM WHAT I AM by the grace of God, as a vessel of his Divine will. This is what Jesus meant when he spoke about us receiving the power of the Holy Spirit to be witnesses to Me – our lives as living proof of a living God in Heaven. This the reversal of our new I AM identity at Pentecost. It is no longer about an I AM in reaction to life’s troubles – but an I AM that is co-labouring with God to bless others as we are we are being blessed, and see them redeemed as we have been redeemed, and witness a world being reordered and restored through the power of the Holy Spirit. AMEN. I want to just mention the thought of the reversal of our I Am again. The Holy Spirit convinces our I Am to no longer be content to let us think I am alone and isolated - thinking you’re alone IS not good enough, not for anybody I know including myself.  What is great is that you can be yourself with God - you can be yourself getting to know the ocean of mercy that God allows for you to be yourself as a work in progress - and know his continual forgiveness and encouragement. God is delighted that you're even paying any attention to the fact that you are sharing yourself with him. You might say to him - Is that what you are all about Lord?

  BONDED TO GOD’S JOY We have discussed being bonded to God’s love in our mind and in our heart, and last week I shared about being bonded to his peace in times of adversity.  God also bonds us to his joy - not just the joy of having everything going right but getting his joy of overcoming things going wrong. We get God’s own joy that he feels when he sees fear and dread and darkness being overcome in our lives. This is God’s shout of triumph that resonates in our spirit and our soul as we triumph over these things by his grace. This is the point where there is an inner turnaround and new joyful motivation is found to continue conquering and to conquer and reinforcing our motivation to take on new challenges. Knowing God’s love draws us to him, knowing his peace settles us in agreement with him, but knowing God’s joy takes us beyond being drawn to his love and settled in his peace. Knowing God’s joy makes us move forward confidently in his strength as part of his victory over evil in the world. We were not created to cope with these pressures in our own strength, so the only complete answer is the spiritual joy of God. As David said the joy of the Lord is my strength. Zechariah prophesies of the last days in chapter nine about God blowing the trumpet for battle and being seen over his people. In chapter ten Zecharia says And he will make them as His majestic horse in the battle. (Zechariah 10:3). A powerful picture of this majestic battle horse is seen in the book of Job Chapter 39:19. Have you given the horse strength? Have you clothed his neck with thunder? Can you frighten him like a locust? His majestic snorting strikes terror. He paws in the valley, and rejoices in his strength; He gallops into the clash of arms. He mocks at fear and is not frightened; Nor does he turn back from the sword. The quiver rattles against him, The glittering spear and javelin. He devours the distance with fierceness and rage; Nor does he come to a halt because the trumpet has sounded.  At the blast of the trumpet he says, ‘Aha!’ and he smells the battle from afar, hearing the thunder of captains and shouting. We see the same picture of the joy and enthusiasm of the end time Church as Jesus begins riding on a white horse, conquering and to conquer in the book of Revelation Chapter 6. The background to that is that after the Messenger who speaks to John in Revelation Chapter 3 has given John the letters to the seven churches in that region, he makes this prophetic statement in the next chapter. Revelation 4:1 After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come up hither, and I will show you things which must be hereafter. That means that everything that is spoken to John from that point on (90 AD) is prophetic for the future of the world in the purposes of God. In Chapter 5 these future events are revealed as the seven seals that only Jesus is worthy to open and as each seal is opened it continues to come to its fullest expression of worldwide, not just local, end time events until Jesus returns and the New Heavens and new earth come into being.  The first four seals are referred to as ‘The four horsemen of the apocalypse’. And these four horsemen speak of present and future worldwide events That first horseman is on a white horse, which speaks of the worldwide Reformation in 1517 of the Church being reformed from dead works into faith and from doing penance into finding repentance at the time of the reformation.  Reading on in Revelation… Revelations 6:2 And I looked, and behold, a white horse. He who sat on it had a bow; and a crown was given to him, and he went out conquering and to conquer. This is seen as a symbol of God’s joyful and enthusiastic strength in the battle of his people over the forces of evil. We see Jeus here wearing the crown of authority as head over his Church and with a bow in his hand. Judah, you are my bow! Ephraim, you are my arrow! Both of you will be my sword, like the sword of a mighty soldier brandished against my enemies. (Zechariah 9:13). His bow sends us out as his warriors and from the time this battle horse started riding it will continue until is seen as that same white horse at the return of Jesus coming with his saints.  Revelation 19.11 Now I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse. And He who sat on him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness He judges and makes war. His eyes were like a flame of fire, and on His head were many crowns. He had a name written that no one knew except Himself. He was clothed with a robe dipped in blood, and His name is called The Word of God. And the armies in heaven, clothed in fine linen, white and clean, followed Him on white horses.  King David was a man of battle and had to learn the lesson that it was only by trusting in the Lord who was mighty in battle that he would defeat his enemies. That is why David said The joy of the Lord is my strength. David prayed desperately to God about how his enemies had surrounded him - For I am desolate and afflicted. Bring me out of my distresses! Consider my enemies, for they are many. God hears his prayer and then David says Therefore I will offer shouts of joy in His tabernacle; I will sing, yes, I will sing praises to the LORD and now my head shall be lifted up above my enemies all around me; Psalm. 27 This joy became an active principle of strength for David, and it can become an active principle for our lives also. We can reverse the flow of our life from our helplessness to our faith in God’s overcoming strength. It was not God’s original plan for us to be on the defensive when it comes to overcoming darkness, but to be on the attack.  (2 Cor. 10:4, Eph. 6:12). Constant defensive behaviours cause people to become emotionally fatigued and depressed and robbed of their joy. Even our body has a part to play in this reversal.  When we get emotionally fatigued and depressed and in a downward spiral a hormone called cortisol floods our system causing more stress. But there is another hormone that counters that called dopamine – the joy and enthusiasm hormone which the brain produces and which motivates enthusiasm and achievement - and its even packaged expensively as a recreational drug in the street marketplace. It was once thought that dopamine was produced in the brain because of the motivation for achievement of a goal. It has now been found that it actually gets released not for a goal to be achieved but for a challenge to be met and overcome. It puts us on our front foot to stir ourselves into action and to overcome difficulties and challenges. So even our body helps our spirit and our soul when we enthusiastically praise God as the Captain of the host. It is what causes the battle horse to sniff the battle and say ‘aha’. We can be transformed from people who avoid life's pressures to those who rejoice and overcome life’s challenges by faith in his strength and not in our own strength. And the Bible says that Jesus will sing and will rejoice over us with joy (Zephania 3)- that is his reaction when he sees us wanting to join with him in what he is doing, sharing his joy and exuberance, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross and despised the shame (Hebrews 12) The scriptural theme of joy as a source of strength is echoed throughout the Bible, as seen in the life of King David and all through the New Testament. It is God's joy in us that empowers us to face life's battles with unwavering faith, and when we embrace this divine joy, we harness a powerful force that enables us to rise above our struggles and serve others with a heart full of encouragement and compassion. Paul, in his letters to the Corinthians and Ephesians, underscores the importance of spiritual warfare and the need to be proactive rather than reactive in our battle against darkness. He reminds us that our spiritual weapons are mighty through God for pulling down spiritual strongholds that darkness tries to establish in our minds (2 Cor. 10:4). And he encourages us to stand against the strategies of the devil (Eph. 6:12). In essence, by trusting in God's joy and strength, we can transform our lives from a state of helplessness to one of victorious faith, always ready to meet challenges head-on and overcome them for the glory of God. This profound truth is a testament to the fact that when we are filled with God's joy, we are equipped to fulfill our divine purpose and extend His love to the world. Jesus is teaching us here that God’s joy in us is the greatest inspiration to serve and to care for others. God sets this joy before us and knows that when we accept it we get his strength and his endurance to take on the most difficult and challenging tasks.       

  BONDED TO GODS PEACE  We spoke last week about being bonded to God’s love and we concluded that knowing we are loved by God and believing we are loved by God is the most deep and profound spiritual thing we can do. It was the starting point of what to know as the ultimate truth of who God is and his goodness toward us and the power of God is seen in his ongoing creative acts of love for us - and when we believe in God’s love we receive God’s peace and God’s joy. Today we are discussing God’s peace and the same principle is involved as with being bonded to his love, which is that what we know as truth with our mind we will believe with faith in our heart.  Isaiah 26:3 You will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you (focussed on you) because he trusts in you  Let us look at what peace means. In the original Greek the word is Eirene from the word eiro which literally means to be joined as one, and in spiritual terms that means being of one spirit with another person. This is what God wants with us, one spirit with him and one spirit with one another, and that means being of the one mind of truth and the one heart of faith as another person.  Jesus said ‘My peace I give to you, not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. (John 14:7). There is God’s peace and the worlds’ peace – and they are two very different things. Worldly peace is not really peace. The quest for worldly peace becomes the quest for worldly power. It comes from confidence in our own power base of influence or wealth without feeling threatened about losing it – and that can be a very unstable reality. A nation can feel peace if they have enough of a financial trading and military power base to overcome another nation in a war, but that is also a very unstable reality, depending on what military alliances they form and how much they trust in them.  God himself has perfect peace and certainly has no fear or anxiety about being threatened by any other power.  The Bible says that his spiritual peace and oneness is demonstrated in the Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit by the perfect spiritual agreement they enjoy with one another in all things. (1John 5:6-7). Jesus wants us to have that peace of spiritual agreement with God. Jesus does not give us the worldly peace of worldly power, but he gives us his peace, the spiritual power of his love and provision for our lives - and he tells us that his peace overcomes the fear and anxiety in our lives. That means that we come to agreement with God concerning his overall love and goodness to us even in the times when difficult times come upon us, we will receive his peace. Can we agree that God still loves us and is at work for our overall good to us when difficulties happen? If we say to God that we can no longer agree that he is good or that loves us because of the difficulty we are going through, we may forfeit the peace he wants us to receive from him. I think we all get tempted to think this at those times – why have you forsaken me? But God has said I will never leave you nor forsake you (Hebrews 13:5) We live with the constant challenge of discerning the difference between the peace of the world and the peace of God. If we are anxious about financial lack and difficulty, we learn to not look for the temporary peace of the world that comes through street-smart strategies. We pray to God for our needs to be met and we agree that God still loves us and is at work for our overall good to us when in difficult times. But money does not start falling from Heaven - God gives us wisdom concerning employment opportunities or diligence regarding investment or superannuation or plans for applying for a pension or whatever else is in his order for our lives. God doesn’t solve the worldly problems we get fixated on – He meets needs.  There is no word for problem in the Bible but the word need (chrea- lack) is found 52 times in the New Testament. A problem is simply an unmet need, and our human nature tends to allow needs to turn into problems, so we have to reverse that and allow problems to turn into needs – and then we bring the needs to God – and that is prayer. (Philippians 4:6).  Living with needs can be managed in a Godly way that brings hope and trust in God, which often means waiting patiently for God’s timing in things – faith and patience. God looks after our needs, but we attend to our problems by asking him to meet our need for wisdom or faith or we might humbly look for good advice from someone we trust. The closest word to problem that is mentioned in the bible was used when Paul said he was perplexed – he didn’t understand why things were not working out the way he wanted them to at the time. But at the same time, he never lost hope.  2 Corinthians 4:8 But we have this treasure in jars of clay (God’s inner unlimited power in our limited human bodies), to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, (under pressure from all sides) but not crushed; We are perplexed (apore?? - no answer to the problem), but not driven to despair. We are cast down but not forsaken – people put him down and circumstances appeared to overwhelm him but he was not forsaken by God.    Paul could have pushed back against the pressure with worldly power, and he could have anxiously analysed the perplexity, and he could have complained about being put down by others. But this is Paul’s testimony of turning outer pressure and turmoil into inner peace. Paul learned the lesson of turning what looked like a problem into a need. He shared his need with God and became anchored in God’s power and love and goodness and that gave him God’s peace. He let the quest for the power and peace of the world die so that Gods inner power could come alive in him. He goes on to say so death is at work in us, but life is at work in you… For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.  Paul was describing what spiritual ministry was all about – death in him and life in others. Paul knew that God was strengthening his inner life while his outer life appeared to be more helpless than ever. He never lost hope because he knew that God had allowed that difficulty to happen and that God knew what he was doing, and he trusted God to bring about his good and perfect will for his life ad for those he was serving. We too will find that learning to live in perplexity but not in despair becomes a doorway into the peace of God. I can have faith and hope that even though I feel helpless he is the helper. Being in agreement with God about who he is and what he does establishes my peace.  When Isaiah prophesied You will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is focussed on you he goes on to make this amazing prophetic promise about Jesus establishing his peace within us. LORD, You will establish peace for us, for you have indeed done all our works for us. His death and resurrection accomplished everything for the needs of mankind. That means – Jesus, you will give us perfect peace for you have died to the power and the peace of the world so that we can live in the peace and the power of God – your peace – your power. Jesus is our bond of agreement with the Father and the Holy Spirit and we can learn to live in that peace, day by day. Amen.    

  BONDED TO GODS LOVE As we read the many stories from the gospels, we find that there is one gospel writer, the apostle John, who stands out as the one who was bonded to the love of Jesus from the very beginning. His writings emphasize the love of God more than any other Biblical writings. John wrote the last five books of the Bible, which included his gospel and then his three epistles and then the Book of Revelation.  In his own gospel he even refers to himself as ‘the disciple that Jesus loved’. He was not being proud in saying this - it was simply a revelation of the love of God through Jesus for all of humanity, and so he qualified for that. And in John’s gospel in the story of the last supper when Jesus said that one of them would betray him all the disciples looked at Jesus and said one after another ’Is it I Lord?’ But John was not feeling self-conscious or guilty as perhaps the others did and so he simply said ‘Who is it Lord?’ I’m reading today from the first epistle of John which is totally about the love of God that bonds us to God and to one another. 1John 3:1. Think about how wonderful is the love that has been lavished upon us by the Father, calling us his very own sons and daughters. But realize that the world does not understand us for who we really are, because it does not understand Jesus for who he really is. 2. So, we are now true sons and daughters of God my beloved, and it is not quite clear to us as to what we shall ultimately be like. All we can know is that when he returns we will be like he is, because we will see him for who he really is. 3. And all those who keep this hope and expectation alive will purify the state of their hearts and minds, just as Jesus did. 7. My dear children don't be deceived by anybody about this; whoever is living a life that shows that they are in harmony with Jesus, is living in the same harmony with the Father as Jesus is. 9. Whoever knows that they are part of God’s very life, as his child, will not oppose God outright, because he is born of the same seed, and the essence of God’s life is his life. So he cannot live in hostile contradiction to him because he is part of him. 10. This is how you are going to be able see the difference between those who really are bonded to God as their Father, and those who are still bonded to darkness, in the same way. Whoever doesn’t live a truthful and upright life or doesn’t show love and care and kindness towards others is not bonded with God. 11. And God has been saying to us from the beginning that we must love one another. John knew how to avoid being bonded to darkness by not letting his mind and heart live in past regrets, or fear of the future, or hopelessness, or resentment, or hostility to others. John knew how to remain bonded to God in his lovingkindness, his expectation of God’s goodness and the power of his might, living in peace and joy and the love of others. I believe that John would have begun each day by thinking about the love that God had for him, and that his last thoughts at night would have been about the love that God had for him. He knew this was the essence of God’s nature and so he wrote ‘We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in his love. God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them’. And He would have known and understood completely that God had always been the same – unchanging in his love. What does God want back from us? He wants the circle of his love to come from us back round to him.  Doesn’t he want obedience?  Yes – but that same apostle John who wrote about God’s love for us said that if we love God, we will keep his commandments – and that doesn’t just mean the Ten Commandments, it means that when we know what he wants us to do we will do it. He said that both in his gospel and in his epistles. Loving God is our will power – rejecting God’s love is our won’t power, so completing the circle of God’s love back to him comes first and everything else comes after that.  So how do we love a God that we cannot see?  That is the work of the Holy Spirit that has been given to us by God and who sheds and spreads God’s love into our hearts so that we will believe it and feel it - it all starts with God. But before we can believe in God’s love for us we need to know it is true  and we can know it as a truth because the word of God tells us that – as we have seen in every line of what has been said today.  Knowing you are loved by God and believing you are loved by God is the most deep and profound spiritual thing you can do because our spirit is made up of our mind that knows and our heart that believes. What we know as truth with our mind we will believe with faith in our heart.  Our body even has a part to play in this because even our brain has been created to help us complete that circle of love back to God that causes us to know and believe his love for us and to do the things that show we love him back. We were created with a left brain and a right brain and those two parts work together so that we can make balanced decisions in our life. Our left brain is in charge of organizing and ordering and giving our thoughts structure but our right brain is more spontaneous and random and creative and colourful. It is jumping into what we want to do rather than calculating what we ought to do. That means that the left brain has to reorder the chaos of the right brain and when that balance anchors our soul, we can do very creative and inspiring things with enthusiasm and faith but it’s based on love and truth and order. That is why it is good to sit quietly and gratefully acknowledge God’s presence with us and focus our minds on his powerful work on our behalf in the world of the unseen. That is what faith is – believing that God is at work in our lives for our good. Paul wrote to us about being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ (Philippians 1:6).   Paul went on to say that It is God working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him.(Philippians 2:13). And in the next chapter Paul says that God is able to subdue all thning to himself. It couldn’t be any clearer than that. But if we don’t focus on that and think it and believe it, we are letting the right brain chaos run our lives.  That process is a picture of what happened in the very beginning of the creation of the universe in Genesis Chapter one. The Bible says that there was darkness on the face of the deep (the Abyss) and that it was without form and void (chaos). The Spirit of God hovered above that disorder and the word of truth – the logos of God, spoke and said ‘let there be light’. And then the mighty creative work of God was put into action. That act of creation was an act of God’s love for us, and that creative love in action is what happens when we sit and contemplate the love of God and give it back to him with a thank you. That is when we become creatively changed into the new creation of his likeness and we can do the creative loving of others. This is what waiting on God and contemplation is all about - nothing more nothing less – it is not a waste of time – it is not passive – it is actively embodying God’s love into the world around us. Let us wait on God and contemplate on actively embodying God’s love to us and into the world around us. Waiting on God is not a waste of time – it is not passive – it is active - and doing this takes practice - in consciously sitting in the presence of God and knowing that he is doing the mysterious work. Driving a car takes practice and you dont have to understand how an internal combustion engine works – it’s a bit mysterious to me. But I know I have to turn the ignition on, put the car into gear and then drive from A to B – and that last part takes the most practice – but we learn and get our P plates and our licence. We become part of the car and it becomes part of us – which is like being one with God who is directing our lives in faith. The Bible says that if we get off track we will hear a voice behind us saying ‘this is the way walk ye in it’ (Isaiah x.x). In a car we look at Google maps and hear it say ‘turn right at the next round about then drive 500 Metres then turn left. And if we get that wrong it keeps talking and tells us to go to the next roundabout and come back to the first roundabout  and start from there ‘This is the way - drive ye in it’. That takes faith in  our google maps program. Practice sitting with God and he will direct your path and grow your faith and renew your mind - and truth and love will run your life, not chaos and uncertainty.

A CHILDS FAITH ENTERS THE KINGDOM  I’ve been talking lately about principalities and powers of darkness and the angelic rebellions in the heavens that Jesus overcame for us on the cross. But aligned with that there is the wonderful ministry of the angels who obediently serve God the Father by serving us as his children. God delights to see his children protected and cared for at as early an age as possible. The Bible says that God has assigned angels to help them on this journey of\ the inner life of their souls, as Jesus said to his disciples, Matthew 18:10 “Take heed that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that in heaven their angels always see the face of My Father who is in heaven. I don’t yet fully understand how that works but I think a lot happens that we don’t realise is happening.  Our heavenly Father never ceases to see us as his children, but we may cease to honour and know him as our Father. Growing older is not always growing wiser and the reality of having to become mature and independent is a hugely significant responsibility. Fortunately, God allows us to go through our foolishness and our failures and to relearn and to get back on track, and Jesus had to admonish his disciples on one occasion about having to do some of this relearning. It occurred at the same time that he told his disciples to never despise the little children whom they regarded as a nuisance. The little children were playfully enjoying being around Jesus, but the disciples said that they were getting in the way of them getting the most out the serious things Jesus was teaching them. He then taught them the most important and serious thing that they needed to know and relearn – that they had to become like little children. At that time some parents in the crowd had brought their children to Jesus for him to bless them Matthew 19:13 Then little children were brought to Him that He might lay His hands on them and pray, but the disciples rebuked them. But Jesus said, “Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for their simplicity and joy and trust express the kingdom of heaven.” And He laid His hands on them... Luke adds deeper meaning to this story and quotes Jesus saying ‘Assuredly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will by no means enter into it.” (Luke 18:15).  I want to speak today about a child’s faith that was immortalised in Scripture – the child’s name was Isaac. God had told Abraham and his wife Sarah, who was well past childbearing age that they were going to have a child, and that through that child Abraham would bring blessing upon all the families in the earth (Genesis 18:10). That finally came to pass miraculously, and they were greatly blessed. But then God told Abraham to sacrifice this promised child Isaac on an altar at a place called Mount Moriah. The Bible says that Abraham obeyed God and that his faith was accounted to him as righteous. That means that his faith put the desires of his heart in alignment with the desire of God’s heart. We are encouraged to learn from the faith of Abraham, who walked up the hill with his son Isaac to offer him to the lord as a blood sacrifice. But something needs to be said about the extraordinary faith and obedience that was shown by the child Isaac who walked up the hill to be sacrificed. As they walked up the hill in the story in Genesis Isaac says to his father ‘look there is the wood and here is the fire but where is the lamb for sacrifice. And Abraham said, “My son, God will provide for Himself the lamb for a burnt offering.” So the two of them went together. Then they came to the place of which God had told him. And Abraham built an altar there and placed the wood in order; and he bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar, upon the wood. And Abraham stretched out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. Isaac with a ‘Yes Dad’ in his heart prepared to become that sacrifice on the altar under the knife saying,  Then an angel enters the picture and calls Abraham to put the knife away – that reflects the words of Jesus about angels always seeing the face of the Father for his children.  And the story goes on in Genesis to say ‘Then Abraham lifted his eyes and looked, and there behind him was a ram caught in some bushes by its horns. So Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up for a burnt offering instead of his son. And Abraham called the name of the place The-LORD-Will-Provide’ (Jehovah Jireh - Genesis 22). Isaac as a child had just as much faith and hope in that resurrection as Abraham, and Jesus knew and undertsood that same child-like faith and trust for himself. Isaac as the son of Abraham obeyed his father and Jesus as the Son of God obeyed his Heavenly Father. Jesus understood what Isaac felt when he himself was on the cross committing himself as a sacrifice to his Father for our sakes as his brothers and sisters and knowing he would be resurrected.  The Bible says about Abraham’s faith for Isaac that Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death"(Hebrews 11:19). This means that Abraham's faith in God's power to bring Isaac back, even if he were to die, was strong enough to fulfill God's promise of blessing all the families of the earth through his son Isaac. This was the first evidence of resurrection life put into action in the Bible. This was not only extraordinary faith and obedience – it was an extraordinary hope - Abraham, hoping against hope believed, so that he became the father of many nations (Romans 4:17). Abraham faith and Isaac faith is all about the resurrection faith of trusting Father God through the difficulties of life with a ‘hoping against hope’ that our ‘Yes Dad’ in all things brings God’s good will and Heavenly life on earth for our lives. There would have been no resurrection life faith for Abraham to pass on to us if he had not been willing to offer his son Isaac to God on Mount Moriah. And there would have been no resurrection life faith for Isaac to experience if he had not trusted his father, Abraham. There would have been no resurrection life from the dead for Jesus to give to us if he had not offered his life to his Father for our sakes on the cross. And Jesus wanted his disciples to understand what he meant when he said that unless they received the Kingdom of God with that trusting childlike faith, they would not fully enter into the Kingdom in the power of his resurrection. That resurrection only be experienced by us through his death on the cross. Jesus had told them earlier that he was going to be killed and be raised on the third day. The disciples of Jesus did not want him to die on a cross and Peter was speaking for all of them when he admonished Jesus at that time, saying  ‘No Jesus, that is not going to happen to you’, and Jesus said ‘get behind me Satan, you don’t understand the things of God, only the things of man’. Even though the sacrifices of Abraham and Isaac and Jesus were momentous acts of faith and hope Jesus wanted the disciples to know that no matter what the scale of sacrifice was, their ‘yes Dad’ to God’s will in times of difficulty would always supernaturally bring God’s will in Heaven upon the earth. ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven’ is not just a noble phrase from the Lord’s prayer, it is a true statement of faith and hope from a child of God who expects to see the most difficult of situations turn into an expression of God being glorified, or on display, in their everyday lives. Jesus wants us to experience a life of full spiritual satisfaction as a child of God by seeing ourselves as his brother or sister and being cared for by a loving Father in Heaven. There is a life of childlike faith in most children that trusts that mum and dad are sorting out all of the important things in life for them and fixing everything that gets broken and life works out better when you do what you are told, and life goes on and you presume that you are going to live forever, and most of that thinking changes when we become adults. When we look at a cross, we see a vertical beam crossed by a Horizontal beam. The vertical beam is the will of God coming from heaven down into the earth, and the horizontal beam is the will of humanity that crosses the will of God. Where the point of crossing occurs is where our will obeys God’s will – that is the place of our ‘yes Dad’. And that point is where the heart of Jesus would have been located when he hung on that cross. That sacrificial act of obedience took his Divinity and humanity into his resurrection glory in Heaven and it included all of us. When we believe in what he has done for us and receive the Spirit of his resurrected life into our hearts we begin to share not only that crossing point of sacrificial obedience with his heart, but we share the resurrection life that lifts us above the earthbound tyranny of the ways of this world.  Jesus knew what he was talking about to the disciples when he spoke about becoming as little children in order to enter the kingdom life of God here in the earth. An obedient child of God who has a ‘yes Dad’ to God in their heart will hear their Heavenly Father saying to them. ‘For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the LORD, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. And you will seek Me and find Me, and when you search for Me with all your heart. I will be found by you, says the LORD’, (Jeremiah 29.11) Amen  

THE SEVENTY NATIONS AND GLOBAL SPIRITUAL WARFARE We are continuing the account of the second phase of the ministry of Jesus, after he said that he was setting his face toward Jerusalem. (Luke 9). Jesus was heading toward the final victory over human sin and corruption by his death on the cross, so he sent seventy disciples to go before him and bring a foretaste of the blessing of the Kingdom of God in his name.  Luke 10:1 towns and villages he planned to visit later. The Lord now chose seventy other disciples and sent them on ahead in pairs to all the  The number seventy is significant in this story of the ministry of Jesus.  Firsly, it represents the principle of delegation of governmental authority, as also seen in the command to Moses to delegate authority to seventy elders to help him in counselling the people of Israel in the wilderness. And the Jewish Sanhedrin was the delegated authority of the ruling council in New Testament times, consisting of 70 elders, following the precedent set in the Old Testament. In this story of the seventy disciples Jesus was not only heading towards Jerusalem to overcome human sin and corruption on the cross but was also heading toward overcoming all the rebellious principalities and powers of darkness that had corrupted the world throughout the ages.  There were three major acts of spiritual rebellion to be overturned by Jesus when he came to establish his Kingdom. The first act of spiritual rebellion was by Satan, the angelic prince power who appeared as the serpent that tempted Adam and Eve to disobey God. The second  spiritual rebellion was by angelic powers just before the flood of Noah in Genesis Chapter 6. And the angels who did not keep their proper domain, but left their own abode, He has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day Jude 1:6) The third spiritual rebellion was at the tower of Babel, soon after the flood, where the entire world was divided by God into seventy nations. The people had built a tower that they said would exalt them to Heaven. God divided their languages and sent them out into all the world. Read Genesis Chapter 10 where these seventy nations are named. They all came under the influence of spiritual principalities and powers of idolatry. Many of those nations throughout history had rulers who saw themselves as gods, such as Egypt, and Rome (Caesar is Lord). Canaan and Tarshish (Spain) are mentioned. And in Daniel the prince power of Persia and the prince power of Greece, and Babylon.  Soon after the tower of Babel God called Abram out of one of those nations, from a place called Ur of the Chaldees (the nation of Babylon), to establish the Holy Nation of Israel.  The nation of Israel was ruled by the one true God, and Israel went into battle against many of those scattered nations who opposed their entry into the promised land. Israel finally took the physical territory of the land, but they did not necessarily overcome the idolatry and spiritual darkness that remained in those regions. But Jesus was to come out of and through Israel, and overcome all principalities and powers in the heavens and on the earth.  Jesus was giving these seventy disciples the authority to speak in his name and to confront the territorial powers of darkness that had held power over those Gentile and Jewish places for many generations since the tower of Babel. Reading on in the story…  These were his instructions to them:  Luke 10:2 “Plead with the Lord of the harvest to send out more laborers to help you, for the harvest is so plentiful and the workers so few. Go now, and remember that I am sending you out as lambs among wolves. Don’t take any money with you, or a beggar’s bag, or even an extra pair of shoes. And don’t waste time along the way. This was a disciplined strategic mission. “Whenever you enter a home, give it your blessing. If it is worthy of the blessing, the blessing will stand; if not, the blessing will return to you. “When you enter a village, don’t shift around from home to home, but stay in one place, eating and drinking without question whatever is set before you. And don’t hesitate to accept hospitality, for the workman is worthy of his wages! “If a town welcomes you, follow these two rules: (1) Eat whatever is set before you. (2) Heal the sick; and as you heal them, say, ‘The Kingdom of God is very near.’ “But if a town refuses you, go out into its streets and say, ‘We wipe the dust of your town from our feet as a public announcement of your doom. Never forget how close you were to the Kingdom of God!’ Even wicked Sodom will be better off than such a city on the Judgment Day. This demonstrates the strategic confrontation against the ancient spiritual rebellion that still pervaded the territory.  What horrors await you - cities of Chorazin and Bethsaida! For if the miracles I did for you had been done in the cities of Tyre and Sidon, their people would have sat in deep repentance long ago, clothed in sackcloth and throwing ashes on their heads to show their remorse. Yes, Tyre and Sidon will receive less punishment on the Judgment Day than you. And you people of Capernaum, what shall I say about you? Will you be exalted to heaven? (This echoes the Tower of babel language) No, you shall be brought down to Sheol” Then he said to the disciples, “Those who welcome you are welcoming me. And those who reject you are rejecting me. And those who reject me are rejecting God who sent me.” When the seventy disciples returned, they joyfully reported to him, “Even the demons obey us when we use your name. ”Yes,” he told them, “I saw Satan falling from heaven as a flash of lightning! And I have given you authority over all the power of the Enemy, and to walk  among serpents and scorpions and to crush them (symbolic of evil spirits – Revelation 9:10). Nothing shall injure you! However, the important thing is not that demons obey you, but that your names are registered as citizens of heaven.” Then he was filled with the joy of the Holy Spirit and said, “I praise you, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for hiding these things from the worldly wise and for revealing them to those who are as trusting as little children.  So the sending out of the seventy disciples was a turning point in the final overcoming of the Kingdom of God that was to be accomplished for us at calvary - a complete victory over evil spirits. When Jesus said he had overcome the world he was not just talking about human corruption, but about the corruption of the world by the rebellion of dark and demonic angelic forces throughout the ages. And Paul tells us that Jesus has overcome all principalities and powers of darkness – Colossians 2:15 He has disarmed principalities and powers, and has made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them... Paul also tells us that we are seated in our Heavenly position with Jesus far above all principalities and powers. (Ephesians 2:6).  We are living in days when there is much spiritual activity, both of the Holy Spirit and of the powers of darkness that seek to blind peoples’ minds from the light and truth of God. There are Principalities and powers of darkness influencing leadership in the cultures of all the nations of the world at the moment. And there are nations where those powers will not prevail because those who believe in Jesus and his Kingdom choose to live in obedience to God and his Word – and God is fighting for them. On a personal level our offensive weaponry in our direct encounters with the power of darkness is our faith that God is in command of our lives and is fighting for us. We don’t shout at the devil – we have Jesus speaking to us and through us – the one who has overcome darkness for us. Deuteronomy 3:22 You shall not fear them, for it is the LORD your God who fights for you.  Our defensive weaponry in our direct encounters with the powers of darkness is the saving and protecting power of God through faith in the abiding presence of God the Holy Spirit. Paul tells us to stand against the powers of darkness by ‘putting on the full armour of God’  Ephesians 6:13 Therefore take up the whole armour of God, that you may be able to withstand in the times of evil, and having done all, to stand firm.  We are equipped to overcome personal attacks of darkness upon us that are designed to weaken our trust in God and to get us into emotional conflict with others and into internal conflict within ourselves. 14. So stand firm in this way, with a belt that is buckled with truth… The buckled belt speaks of alertness and readiness to move forward with the truth that defines who we are and where we stand with God. We are confident that we are OF him and FOR him and that he is FOR us. …and having the breastplate of an obedient surrendered heart. This is the alignment of our heart with his heart and surrendered to his will for our lives. Our heart’s desires are then safe from the deceitful enticements of darkness.  15. And have shoes on that allow you to walk the talk of the wonderful message of a shared life with Jesus.  We are literally walking in his shoes, standing where he stands and going where he goes. This prevents the enemy from getting us off track with his diversionary tactics. 16. Hold up the shield of faith with complete trust in God. That will stop any flaming missile that the devil hurls at you. The devil will manufacture the missiles of deceit and malice and aim them at us then fire them through the aggrieved heart of somebody else straight at our heart, where our deepest and most vulnerable feelings reside. Our faith that God knows our heart deflects those missiles and we can trust him to defend us. 17. Wear the crash-helmet of safety that protects your mind from darkness and deception and cut through the lying darkness with your spiritual sword, which is the Word of God. Our mind is the prime target in spiritual warfare, so we focus and affirm ourselves through his Word and then speak that int

FORTY DAYS ON EARTH After Jesus had descended into Paradise and hades he took the keys of hell and death and re-inhabited his entombed body. He then sealed the offering of his shed blood on Calvary to his Father in Heaven for the purification of the sins of the whole earth. He returned to the earth that same day in a resurrected body that could never ever die again. This resurrected body was without the constraints of a limited physical body, but it could be seen and recognized as a natural body. After that, He appeared in another form (heteros morphe – an altered form or nature) (Mark 16:9) Jesus returned to the earth in Jerusalem where he heard that the temple priests had fabricated a story that his body had been stolen by the disciples and that they had overcome the temple guards and raided the tomb. He set off walking from Jerusalem in the direction of Galilee, where he had said he would meet with his disciples. He saw two men walking together in serious discussion and he greeted them and joined them as they walked, but Holy Spirit had supernaturally veiled their eyes from recognizing him (Luke 24:13). They were taken aback that this stranger seemed to know nothing of what had happened in Jerusalem over the last few days. They explained patiently to this stranger the things about Jesus, that he did miracles and that he was a great prophet and how their chief priests and rulers delivered him to be condemned to death and crucified. They said to Jesus they were hoping that it was Jesus who was going to redeem Israel as he had said that he would rise on the third day, and today was the third day. As they walked the 12 K journey to Emmaus Jesus quoted to them passage after passage from the writings of the prophets, beginning with the book of Genesis and going right on through the Scriptures, explaining what the passages meant and what they said about himself, and  something happened in their hearts as they listened to him. They appealed to him to stay with them as they finally arrived at Emmaus, even though he had told them he was going further, so Jesus accepted their offer to at least stay and have a meal with them. During the meal Jesus took some bread, and prayed a blessing over it, and as he broke the bread their eyes were opened and immediately, they recognized who he was and at that very moment Jesus vanished from their sight. This could well be called the firstfruits communion service - a prophetic illustration of how our times of fellowship and communion in remembrance of Jesus open up to us a deeper revelation of who Jesus is as we sit in the presence of God in the unity of the Holy Spirit. After Jesus had disappeared the two men decided to go back into Jerusalem and find the disciples who were in hiding, afraid of what was going to happen to them because of the rumors that were going about that they had stolen Jesus’ body. They found them and were whisked inside and the doors were locked behind them. They told them of their journey with Jesus on the road to Emmaus, and their miraculous meal with him where he had suddenly vanished. While they were still talking Jesus appeared in their midst while the doors remained locked. The disciples panicked, and thought they were seeing a ghost, but Jesus explained to them that he was not a ghost because a ghost didn’t have bones and flesh, and he asked them to touch his hands and his feet and to see for themselves.    Jesus stretched forth his hands and his peace hit their hearts. He breathed his Spirit upon them and they received the impartation of his peace. They immediately felt at one with Jesus and with each other. But this was just a mere foretaste of what was to come, as it would only be after his final ascension and being seated at the right hand of Father that Holy Spirit would be sent to dwell within them. On the day of Pentecost Holy Spirit would be sent from Father and from himself upon all humanity.  He asked them if he could have something to eat, so James brought back some steamed fish and some honeycomb and Jesus accepted it and ate it. Jesus noticed that Thomas was not amongst them and he told them he would see them in a few days at Galilee, and he vanished once more. The disciples all gathered at Galilee eight days later and Jesus again miraculously appeared to them and this time Thomas was present. He knew that Thomas had not believed that he had risen, even though the other disciples had said that they had seen him. Jesus held out his hands towards Thomas and told him to have faith and believe and to touch his hands and his side where he had been pierced. Thomas did this and said, ‘My Lord and my God’. Jesus acknowledged that in seeing and touching he now believed. He went on to tell Thomas that there would be many who will believe without even seeing him and that they would be greatly blessed for that kind of faith.  Jesus appeared to them again one morning after seven of them had been out fishing all night and had caught nothing. He stood on the shore and watched them fishing but they didn't realize that it was him. They had taken two boats out, one larger boat, rigged for catching and one auxiliary boat, which helped with baiting and with the haul.  Jesus shouted out to the fishermen from the shore asking them if they had yet caught anything and they said no they hadn’t. Then Jesus told them to throw out the net on the right-hand side of the boat, and they would get plenty of fish, and when they did they couldn’t draw in the net because of the weight of the fish. Then John called out to Peter ‘That is the Lord’, and at that, Peter put on a robe and jumped into the water and swam ashore. The rest of the disciples stayed in the boat and pulled the loaded net close to the shore. They looked over to where Jesus was, sitting with Peter and they saw that a fire was kindled and fish were frying over it, and there was bread. Jesus told them to bring some of the fish they had just caught, so Peter went and helped them drag the net ashore and bring some fish. There were 153 large fish and yet the net hadn’t torn. Jesus then invited them to come and have some breakfast and Jesus went around serving them the bread and fish. That was the third time Jesus had appeared to them since his return from the dead. After they had all enjoyed breakfast together Jesus called Peter aside. He knew there were things that had to be said between them. Peter’s soul was in a turmoil of regrets, shame and guilt. Time and again he had asked himself why he didn’t stand up for Jesus instead of disowning him three times when he was asked if he knew him. He had remembered when the rooster crowed that Jesus had predicted that he would deny him three times. What was Jesus going to say to him now – would Jesus disown him, even rebuke him three times? But Jesus asked Peter three times, in three different ways whether or not Peter loved him. The first time Jesus used the word phileo which means brotherly love and Peter said yes of course he did, and Jesus said to him feed my lambs. Jesus asked him a second time, using the same word, phileo and Peter said emphatically Yes lord – you know I do! And Jesus again said to him feed my lambs The third time Jesus asked Peter if he loved him he used the word agape which means a sacrificial love, higher than any other kind of love. Peter said Yes Lord, and he meant it with all his heart. And this time Jesus said to Peter feed my sheep. And so Peter humbly gave himself up to the ownership of God’s love. As a true representation of a flawed humanity owned by God’s love, Peter was mercifully forgiven and accepted. It was also this moment that owned him, not his past, or his uncertain future.  This would also continue to be his greatest gift to God, the gift of his each moment to God. As Peter would go on in life, he would have faced his many imperfections, and he may well have learned to return to that special moment on the seashore, where he could surrender to the ownership of God’s love and shed his fears, growing in faith and being transformed into God’s nature. The bible says that Jesus met with over five hundred people over those forty days, and in the book of Acts it describes the final time that he met with his disciples when they asked him if this was now the time for him to free Israel from Rome and restore his people as a mighty nation, and again Jesus realized that they still did not understand the nature of his Kingdom, but that they would soon learn. He told them that only his Father had set these times, and they were not for them to know. He also told them that they would testify about his death and resurrection with great power. He instructed them not to leave Jerusalem and that they would be baptized with the Holy Spirit in just a few days and receive the promise of the Father.  Suddenly a dazzling light shone within a billowing white cloud above them. Jesus turned to them all and raised his hands in blessing. He did not need to say goodbye. As he began to rise slowly heavenwards he was enveloped in the cloud, and as they stood together looking into the cloud that had taken him they saw the shining figures of the now familiar two men in white standing to one side who told them that the same cloud that they saw taking Jesus into eternity would also bring him back one day to that same place - in total glory and triumph, and The Plan of Salvation will have been fulfilled. And so, they waited just as he had instructed them, and after ten days the Holy Spirit fell upon them on the day of Pentecost. Jesus had told them he would join their lives to his risen life and they would become one in Spirit with him. The Holy Spirit would take Father’s love, and his own words, and place them in the hearts of men and women, as a deep consciousness of his indwelling and abiding life.  The Holy Spirit had accompanied Jesus every moment of his life on earth. He had joined himself to the human spirit of Jesus and had felt every feeling that Jesus h

RESURRECTION AND AGE TO AGE LIFE As Jesus was dying on the cross he said ‘Father into your hands I commit my Spirit’ The Bible says that he then descended - in his Spirit - on a mission of great purpose. Below him was a place called Paradise, and next to Paradise was a place called Hades. Jesus had spoken about these places when he told the story in Luke 16 of the rich man and Lazarus, the beggar. The rich man who lived sumptuously in arrogant self-indulgence all of his life ended up in Hades and Lazarus who lived the life of a humble beggar at the gate of the rich man’s house ended up in Paradise, with Abraham.  Jesus had now descended to these places. Paradise was where there were millions of souls who had been waiting for him from the beginning of time. These had lived their lives on earth in hope, many of them guided by the Commandments through Moses, but many simply by a good conscience. They were locked away from eternity till Jesus would now come to get them. Jesus would also visit Hades the prison of lost hope. The bible says that Jesus then preached to all those prisoners of time the message of the Gospel, the plan of the Father to send Jesus into the world to set people free from the captivity of sin and to bring his New Creation life to humanity (1Peter 3:19). Jesus would have sat with Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, and many others in Paradise as well as his newfound friend that hung next to him on the cross and to whom he said, ‘Today you will be with me in Paradise’! He spoke to with them and he rested with them. He was to wait there until the end of the third day when he would ascend into Heaven and set the captives free. (Ephesians 4:8) from the captivity of time, as they had waited till heaven came to get them. Jesus also declared the message of the Gospel to those in Hades who had resisted God and refused to listen to him, including those who were destroyed in the flood of Noah.  1Peter 3:18 He died once for the sins of all sinners although he himself was innocent of any sin at any time, that he might bring us safely home to God. But though his body died, his spirit lived on, and it was in the spirit that he visited the spirits in prison and preached to them-- spirits of those who, long before in the days of Noah, had refused to listen to God, though he waited patiently for them while Noah was building the ark.  The Book of Revelation also tells us that Jesus was given the keys of ‘Hell and death’ at this time, and with the key of freedom he was able to unlock those prisoners of the past  and take them into an age to age existence to await an eternal destiny. Revelation1:17,18 Fear not; I am the first and the last: -- I am he that lives and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and I have the keys of hell and of death. On the third day when Jesus turned the key of freedom in the prison gate a tremor hit the universe. Power from Father and Holy Spirit in heaven was released into and through Jesus to overcome death and the grave. His resurrection changed the nature of every atom of matter in existence. God had joined himself to his own creation in the person of Jesus Christ and now humanity could become a ‘New Creation Being’, joined in the Spirit with Jesus (2Corinthians 5:14).  The time had now come for them all to leave, and Jesus led some on a triumphant upward journey, to their new home, his home in Heaven, while others to a place reserved to await an age to come. A company of them was escorted by hosts of angels, ascending ever upwards until they first reached the earth, (Psalm 68:18, Ephesians 4:8, Psalm 24)), and there they stopped for a brief period of time, because there were things for Jesus to do there. The first thing that he had to do was to go to his tomb where his earthly body lay in its shroud. The Archangels Michael and Gabriel went ahead of Jesus to the tomb and found the guards there that the temple priests had appointed to stand watch at the tomb. As the angels alighted the ground shook and the massive stone rolled away as a huge burst of lightning hit the place sending the guards reeling headlong to the ground. They leapt up in fright and bolted. Jesus entered his tomb and united himself again to the wounded shell of his body, leaving the shroud lying separated from the headpiece which had been folded away neatly (John 20:7).  Michael and Gabriel waited inside the tomb while Jesus walked bodily from that temporary resting place, out into the garden. He walked about and would have recalled vividly the events that had so recently taken place nearby, and his time of kneeling in an agony of prayer when he accepted his cup of unbearable suffering.  At that same time some women had prepared oils and spices according to the custom, to anoint the body of Jesus. On their way to the tomb, they were discussing the problem of how to move the huge stone that covered the entrance. When they arrived, they were astonished to see that it had been moved and the guards were nowhere to be seen. They peered inside the tomb and were met by the majestic appearance of Michael and Gabriel, sitting in the place where Jesus had been laying. ‘Are you looking for Jesus?’ Gabriel said. ‘He has come back to life as he said he would. Go and tell the disciples that he will be coming to see them, and that they are to wait for him in Galilee.’ The women ran to tell the disciples but one of them dropped behind and walked slowly through the garden, still confused and weeping. She almost collided with Jesus who was also walking in the garden, and she apologized, not recognizing him, thinking he was the gardener. This was Mary Magdalene. And he called her by her name and said, ‘It’s alright Mary, it is me.’ She ran towards him, but he held up his hand and said to her, “Do not hold me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; go to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’. Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord,’ and she shared the things that he had said to her.’ (John 20.17) And now Jesus had to fulfill the offering of his blood to his Father in Heaven. The blood of animal sacrifice had been offered for the sins of the people by the High priest of Israel in the holy place of the temple for the last fifteen hundred years for the nation of Israel (Leviticus 16, Hebrews 9) but Jesus had just marked the end of blood sacrifice for sin for all time by sprinkling his innocent blood on the ground at Golgotha for the forgiveness of the sins of the whole earth. Hebrews 9:11 But Jesus came as High Priest of this better system that we now have. He went into that greater, perfect tabernacle in heaven, not made by men nor part of this world, and once for all took blood into that inner room, the Holy of Holies, and sprinkled it on the mercy seat; but it was not the blood of goats and calves. No, he took his own blood, and with it he, by himself, made sure of our eternal salvation.  A strange phenomenon then occurred in Jerusalem. Hundreds of souls who had just accompanied Jesus from below and who had recently died were making the briefest of appearances to their loved ones. And when the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom the earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened. Many bodies of the saints who had died were raised up and came out of the tombs after his resurrection, and they went into the holy city and appeared to many. (Matthew 27:52) After the very brief visit to their astounded friends and relatives on earth in their new recognizable forms, they then had to regroup with Jesus and resume their journey to Heaven (Imagine the strange reality of this spiritual world). The magnificent procession began to ascend from their graves to the sky in glorious splendour with its escort of glorious angels. As their ascension took them closer and closer to the throne room a mighty voice could be heard proclaiming his majestic entrance. Psalm 24:7-10 Lift up your heads, O gates! And be lifted up, O ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in. Who is this King of glory? The LORD, strong and mighty, the LORD, mighty in battle! At this command the heavenly music began. The sounds of pipes and trumpets, the voices of hundreds of harmonies, and a beautiful range of stringed instruments created a majestic symphony. Jesus had come home, and the Bible trumpets his victorious homecoming.  Hebrews 1:3 He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he sustains everything in the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.  This was the moment - purification for the sin of all mankind had been made and now everything in the Universe was integrated into his glorified New Creation Being of power. Ephesians 1:19-21. how powerful is that divine energy that comes from God to us when we simply believe that he is the creator and generator of this supernatural power which exploded into reality when he raised Jesus from the dead and took him into heaven to sit next to him at his right hand. 21. This heavenly place and position took Jesus as God and man above any other force or realm of authority that can be named, whether on earth or in the heavens…and he has become the centre of all consequence and meaning in the universe. All the angels and all those who had come with Jesus on the upward journey beheld their king in his place of honour and joined in the magnificent celebration. His time in heaven for these celebrations was momentary, as he had left the tomb just before dawn and had to return to earth that same day, still bearing the marks of the cruel wreath of the crown of thorns from his flogging from the guards of King Herod, and the wounds to his hands and feet and side from the cross.  The reason that Jesus had to return to the earth on that same Resurrection Sunday is that on the Su