Identity and Relationships

We were created to dwell in the Presence of God and experience His love continually and even the higher plan was for us to be one with love (union).  Remember there were two trees in the center of the Garden of Eden next to each other.  God said do not eat from the tree of the Knowledge of good and evil but did command them to freely eat of the other trees, including the Tree of Life.  Love must always include a choice, even the freedom to make bad choices.  It is religion that would come and try to get us to only make good choices but this really is the good side of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  As you grow up in a loving relationship with God, your parents, and others you would form a healthy and life giving identity.  Adam and Eve were created first in the image of God (identity) and how relationships function is always connected to identity.  Adam and Eve eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil led them to believe that God was angry with them and holding their sin against them so they hid.  This same belief introduced fear into their relationship with one another, then avoidance, lying, and blame.

The Kingdom of God is consistent, united, and not fragmented like the kingdoms of the world.  Thus God continually connects identity and relationship throughout His Word.  For you to live in loving relationships is for you to receive revelation of who God is as love. Then to receive His extravagant love and for your relationships to be forever changed.  People so encountered Jesus that they were forever changed by His love and saw themselves completely different.  Mary Magdeline had been seen as a despicable woman, yet when Jesus stared into her eyes and she was overcome with the eyes of love she was changed.  Jesus even honored her worship of Him as she poured expensive perfume on His feet and wiped His feet with her hair.  He told these religious men who judged her that this story of what she had done would be told continuously and even held her up as a standard of worship.  She went from being despicable sinner woman to beloved daughter of God.

God's love for us is supposed to be manifest in our relationship with those in our lives.  As we receive His forgiveness for all of our sins, we forgive those who have sinned against us, and we then are transformed into a forgiving person (changing our relationships).  Of course, I am talking about us experiencing the identity that is already ours in Christ.  1 John 4:20 challenges us that we are deceiving ourselves if we say we love God and hate our brother.  Meaning that God's love for us leads us to respond to love for Him and then we love others.  Love gives.  Key to transforming our relationships is to receive Father's love and then give Father's love to others.

When you have problems in your relationships I can guarantee you or the person you are in relationship with is believing a lie (identity).  It is so common for us to believe lies about our identity that the fruit quickly shows up in relationship but we often miss the lie because we blame the other person, blame our self, avoid intimacy in the relationship, or make excuses.  Bringing the lies we believe to the Holy Spirit to receive truth will bring us into lasting freedom that will bring new life into our relationships as well.

In Father's Love,
Bret

The Peace of sonship

Holy Spirit spoke to me about peace from John 14:27 where Jesus tells the disciples He is leaving them His peace different than the world's peace.  It struck me that Jesus' peace came from heaven and is derived from His relationship with the Father through the Holy Spirit.  I once heard a pastor say that the atmosphere of heaven is peace.  When we think of peace in our day, we drift to ocean beaches on tropical islands or idyllic waterfalls which symbolize more of an escape.  Our thought is if I can be in a peaceful place with no trouble then I can have peace.  The peace that Jesus gives is altogether different because it is not dependent on the absence of trouble but the Presence of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and the Father.

It does depend on us being in a peaceful place but that is not escaping our current circumstances or our current location but dwelling in heaven.  It days gone by they would be familiar words over a person's grave site on their tomb, R.I.P. (Rest in Peace).  It was believed that finally peace would come when you exited this world.  God has given us a peace by seating us "in Christ" in heavenly places (Ephesians 2:6), so that we can progressively become more aware of heaven's reality over situations and people.  The Old Testament word for peace "Shalom" is pregnant with meaning.  Some of the meanings are completeness, soundness, welfare, health, prosperity, safety, and peace.

It seems in order for us to have peace God would have to take us out of this world with all it's brokenness, problems, wars, crime, sin, murder, etc.  He did better than that by having our old man crucified which was subject to all these forces and then raised us up united with Christ finally to sit with Him at the right hand of the Father.  In Romans 8:6 says, "...the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace..."  Meaning that as lean back into your inner man/woman of the spirit (your spirit and His Spirit) in you that it is normal for your spirit to experience life and peace.  Your old dead spirit had become polluted with being present to this world whereas your New spirit raised with Christ is always present to God.

Jesus had an unending peace because His peace was never broken since His fellowship with the Father through the Holy Spirit was continual.  This is what Father has purchased for you and I through Jesus Christ.  Now we who are "in Christ" have the door open for us to continually experience peace by being in fellowship with the Father and Son.  Heaven's perspective on the challenges and difficulties you face are much different than an earthly or orphan mindset.  The Holy Spirit will readily reveal Heaven's perspective over a situation but if we are looking somewhere else (mind set on the flesh is death) will miss His perspective.

In His Peace,
Bret

Living in the Spirit

I came to a revelation by the Holy Spirit as I was listening to a teaching on "The Mind of a Saint".  I realized I have believed the lie, that I will be a loved son when I arrive.  Arriving meant some standard in my soul that had been agreed with I thinking mainly "I feel like a son loved and secure, therefore I am a son."  So I would go along believing I was a son until I ran into something in my soul that felt alone, abandoned, not good enough, or etc then I went down into the orphan pit.

Truthfully, in the midst of being in an orphan pit feeling ashamed and rejected I was as much a son as I will ever be.  The only way for us to rise above the tyranny of the soul is to rise up in our spirit through the Holy Spirit's thoughts and revelations.  The Holy Spirit who is the Spirit of Truth and the Spirit of Adoption can guide us into experiencing the reality of our New Nature as sons and daughters of God.  Newness of life (Kainos) means that everything is fresh and new for us as children of God.  Our spirits always think from the place of Kainos life seeing new possibilities and perspectives in each situation or circumstance we encounter.  Yet there is also the choice to choose the old life's (orphan) perspective, thinking, or language which results in us sowing to the flesh and reaping death.

We have been placed "in Christ" which means all our perspectives, thinking, and language can come from being in First Love (between the Father and Son).  We have been given the "Mind of Christ", this does require choice (agreement/submission) where we receive the fresh thoughts, perspectives, and thinking of Jesus by the Spirit.  We receive these fresh insights and perspectives as we lean back into the inner man of our spirit a place of rest and peace.  When we put pressure on our soul, instead of rest and peace, we will tend to default to the negative.

Our soul is made up of the mind, will, and emotions.  This is the dimension of our person designed to relate to other people.  God created us first as a spirit, as a spiritual being we were designed to live from our relationship with God over every other relationship.  God breathed life into us, God is spiritual being that breathed into us spiritual life.  The soul is a great servant but a terrible Master.  When the soul is the Master I look for love, life, and my needs met through the people around me and the natural world (addictions, food, and worldly pleasures).

When we connect with the Holy Spirit's perspectives, thinking, and language we experience the dimension of the Spirit which transcends the physical world and the soulical realm.  The soul is not evil or bad but it must be subject to the Holy Spirit through our spirit.  Then through the soul life can be released through the soul and body.

In the Spirit,
Bret

His Fullness Poured into Our Love Deficits

I have been continually rocked by the revelation that Father placed us into Jesus that we could experience the affection between the Father and Son.  We share in their Brilliance, kindness, fellowship, and love in a constant dance of intimacy and delight.  You have been saved into this amazing relationship.  Yes it is a position but so much more, a fullness of life that will blow away our past experience of life.  I believe the Apostle John could exclaim "God is Love" because he had tasted of this divine reality of intimacy, got lost in the love of God, and therefore could declare that God is love.

Since we have been put in Christ there is no limit to the love that Father can pour out on us who are "in Christ" because it was our old nature connected to being "in Adam" that was the limitation.  Now I understand why in Ephesians 3:19 says, "and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God."  God has birthed us as New Creation sons and daughters to be filled with His nature of Love, Light, and Truth.

Seeing God's incredible fullness of life and love in the Spirit, gives us the freedom to be honest about our love deficits.  Each of us were created to be valued, loved, have security, and purpose.  Yet in this world we all have experienced times where our deepest needs for love were not met and some for long periods of time.  When love needs go unmet for a long time, strongholds of rejection (feeling unloved and unwanted) form in our hearts.  These strongholds will have a life of their own producing thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that we are disconnected from the love we crave.

If we receive the invitation of the Holy Spirit to fullness of life and love, then we can begin to open up these areas of deficit to see His love break into our hearts.  Romans 5:5 says, " and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us."  This needs to be more than a nice thought or statement, it must become our experienced reality.  The Love of God must be experienced in addition to being believed.

Receiving His Fullness,
Bret

Love Overcomes Rejection

In a world where people are trying to get ahead, be noticed, be better than others, and compete with everyone else for significance rejection is common.  On an orphan planet where there is often striving to meet our own needs for love and acceptance, rejection even finds it's way into our homes and families.  If we received rejection, and all of us have received some, as we grew up then we will give what we have received.

The good news in Jesus Christ is that we have received and are receiving a love so powerful that it overcomes all rejection.  If your identity is not found in love then often it is found in rejection and wounding.  The Holy Spirit has revealed that for me at the very young age of 6 an orphan heart was birthed in the midst of my dad's suicide and a core part of this identity to formed around being rejected, unloved, and alone.  In Dr. Caroline Leaf's book, "The Gift In You", she talks about how thoughts form structures in the mind that actually take up mental real estate.  She goes onto say that these structures look like trees in our brain and the worst of them can have thorns on them and even a dark cloud over them.  She states that love actually melts these toxic trees and then begins to form new trees.

The love of the Father is the answer for an orphan planet and for all rejection.  Rejection says that at the core there is a reason that a person is unacceptable or inferior and thus the punishment is to reject them.  Rejection is so common to our culture that getting cut from the team, not being chosen for the play, or getting a low grade with the scorn that comes with it are all common experiences for most of us in our life.  In fact, without the ability to reject others our culture would be lost in how to get things done.  It is in the midst of this backdrop that Jesus is sent to bring the spirit of adoption to make us sons and daughter, beginning a revolution of love and acceptance.

In Malachi 4:5 & 6 the prophet tells of the way in which Jesus will come, "Behold, I am going to send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the LORD.  He will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, so that I will not come and smite the land with a curse.”  This same passage is quoted in the New Testament in Luke about John the Baptist who is the forerunner for Jesus who is coming in the same spirit.  God is about restoring relationship, bringing love and healing to those broken relationships and to those who have been rejected.

Accepted in the Beloved,
Bret