The Joy Of The Process

Oh the process. Oh the waiting. Having the eyes of our heart enlightened to what it is producing releases the sustaining grace on our hearts to endure for the future joy of what is set before us within the waiting and the forming. The joy is coming into more Christ like formation by the Holy Spirit. Why is our joy founded on becoming more like Jesus through the process of lifelong relationship? Because the fullness of life is only experienced in the fullness of His life. You are most joyful when you are most alive. Our joy will be measured by how aware we are of how dead to sin we actually are. All the effects of sin and the wrong thought patterns that came with it steal joy, because they rob us of focus on Jesus and shift the focus onto the buzz kill of self, and all we aren’t and can’t do outside of Him. A wise preacher once said, yes, we have received His love fully by faith in a moment, but it takes a lifetime of experiencing it to be transformed by it. Jesus came to redefine and restore what it meant to be truly and fully human apart from sin. He did not come to expose how wicked men were innately from the beginning, but how desperately wicked, joyless, and hopeless they were apart from being born again in receiving Him rightly. Man was created very good before the fall. He had an untainted, unmarred, full and perfect capacity to relate to God with no blockages or veils. Jesus came to restore Eden in our hearts and that He did effectively, once and for all time. I’m thankful He finished that job, it is a work He has done in giving us a regenerated, fully righteous spirit that cannot be improved upon in the one hundred percent all access it has to God in unceasing 24/7 availability, although our soul and our body surely need work. That is called the sanctification of our souls or the full salvation of our souls, and the future and full glorification of our bodies at the Resurrection.

But why does God value this whole process thing so much? We want it cheaply. We want to press a button and get exactly what we asked for, and not in any other package than what we asked. We ask for God to change us and then many times spurn the very package it comes in. haha. God is committed to your growth more than you are and it seems He is way wiser in administrating ways to bring that forth than you could set up. Better to just lean not on your own understanding on this one or something. haha.

You see it in the life of Jesus most clearly, living in obscurity in some tucked away village, seemingly unknown before men and what men deem great and admirable. He was forged in the fires of hidden-ness and non recognition, and He loved His Father perfectly for taking Him in and through this stage of His life. You don’t get the Jesus you see moving in power in the gospels before men, if you didn’t get the Jesus you didn’t see at all thirty years prior before His Father alone. We do not need a public ministry to validate who we are before God, nor is that God’s stamp of approval. We need a secret place ministry that will truly endure into eternity based on God knowing us intimately in that place, and out of that place our knowledge of Him increases. Remember, He will say to many who worked tons of cool, prophetic, and flashy stuff in front of men to depart from Him because He never knew them. He actually will call them workers of iniquity. This is terrifyingly convicting and it is the pure goodness of God to lead us here when we are losing the One Thing needed: loving Jesus Himself in His ways above His works. His works just display what He is like anyway. One of the greatest sins is to refuse to take the time to let Jesus wash our feet in Him getting to know us. A lot times He uses the process of letting our wrong choices play out, we want Him to just rescue us immediately, but He is rescuing us by leading us to the utter end of ourselves, so we see sin for what it really is in depth, and what it really does to our connection with God, and what it really cost Jesus to forever cut it off in us in His body on the tree. Don’t get religious by the word sin here, what I mean is the way it cuts us off from his love in false humility, when the gospel fully reveals all our lovesick Jesus wanted was to know us, even as He is fully known by His Father. We will have no share with Him if we are not willing to embrace this utter humility of allowing Him to do everything for us, even when we sit down at table in the kingdom of God He will be the one putting on the apron to serve us. We better just get use to the fact that Jesus is the greatest of all, because He is the servant and slave of all. That is what makes Him truly great. He could careless about having a platform and looking successful before men. He knows living in this way of lowliness in and before His Father will unlock before men their greatest need and highest joy: for them to decrease, that He might increase, within that process we shrink down to nothing outside of Him, so He truly can be everything within Himself for us. He is such a gentle leader that constantly prefers us in this process, and He will not go faster than you are willing to let Him serve you in this journey of embracing our need to truly be found hidden and abiding in Him alone.

Cross Eyed Relationship

What is relationship? It is the unfolding of shared life. It is the glorious exchange of receiving and giving, and then giving and receiving again, not to be approached in any other order. The best givers are first the most humble receivers.

True relationships function out of the place of being real and bare with one another. That is why they are called “real”ationships. God put us back in right relationship through Jesus so we could find out through becoming His home by the indwelling Holy Spirit, who He really is, and therefore who we really are. All of us is tied up in all of Him, we are in total union with Him by the Holy Spirit, engulfed by God of very God, absorbed into Him, and one spirit with Lord (I Cor. 6:17)! If we truly saw that, we would realize being rightly lost in Him means being truly found in the gospel.Help us in that Holy Spirit.

Relationships with people exist to peel back all the layers of who Jesus is mutually in us, and as us in the gospel, and for us in all His triumph. They look right at baggage, insecurity, hurt, and wounding and don’t overlook and bypass it, but gently and sometimes violently make peace with those hindrances to love by nailing them to the cross. Being a peacemaker is being a son of God. Relationships are all about calling one another into deeper, truth abiding, love filled sonship. True peace with God can only be experienced and realized on the inside by FAITH (Rom. 5:1). Being a peacemaker means calling people to believe what they cannot see, calling forth things that may not currently exist, as though they already did (Rom. 4:17). That is what Jesus has done for us in the gospel, before the world was even created, well before you were a thought on your parent’s minds (Rev. 13:8). Being a peace maker in relationship truly is the definition of loving people well. It is (an all out war in love on anything that stands in the way of more fully receiving the bloody death blows of Jesus, in the full destruction of the unbelief and confidence of the flesh, and the carnal mind not rooted in the Word. True relationships stand enduringly under the shade of the cross alone. True relationships have only one vision and sight: cross eyed vision and sight. In the New Covenant we are currently in, inaugurated by the sinless blood of Jesus, who took away all sin and the effects of sin, which includes having been fully cleansed from a guilty conscience, which means we no longer ever have to view our faults outside of the blood of Jesus, which means we are liberated to think of ourselves as literally created anew in Christ Jesus, which means we are to live no longer conscience of anything against us by the power of the Holy Spirit alone (I Cor. 4:3-4).

Selah, oh what joy, dressed in His righteousness alone, guiltless and blameless I now stand before His throne, all because of Jesus!

In the New Covenant we are currently in, it is as if Jesus Himself has put cross eyed glasses on us that should never be taken off in the way we do and approach relationship with God and people. This is loving people to the maximum in Jesus’ eyes. It is called fighting for everything He won and paid for at Calvary for us, solely for the sake of love. Remember there is no greater reality of love than the one that fully broke forth and was fully expressed and made manifest at the cross (John 15:13). Living outside of something that is not true of us there only serves to hinder the fullness of the experience of the freedom for which by faith He has ALREADY set us free in and for (Gal. 5:1). To be fully free means to be fully crucified with Christ. If we would but realize and then awaken to how this already happened for us when Jesus hung there on that tree, there would then be a constant reckoning of being dead to sin in us, and as a result we would be constantly experiencing what it means to be alive in God (Rom. 6). Seeing anything outside of what the blood of Jesus says and has done, and not calling people to make peace with that by reckoning it already dead at the cross is a cheap and easy way to not love well. Living under the cross in relationship with people will mean a bloody mess at times, but it is in the aftermath of that carnage that true life is birthed and experienced.

May The Holy Carnage Ensue,

Ben

Revival: It’s Not A Formula (II)

The “Yes Lord” is simply a wholehearted confession of agreement with who He is and what He is doing in us and in the region we are in. Jesus is the great Amen to God on our behalf (IICor. I; Rev. 3). The Father looked at the cross of Christ and said Amen to us in Jesus not by overlooking our sin, but by buying us back, by paying for us and acquitting us of all judgment and guilt 100% justly through the sinless sacrifice of His Son, all unto all He is and was there for us and all He accomplished there for us being magnified unto the glory, praise, and honor of His name alone.

 

 

The “More Lord” is a spiritually violent decree and petition of hunger! The kingdom is truly taken by spiritual violence, and the violent take it by force or hunger that is so desperate and willing to lay hold of Him in the same intensity and manner in which He has wholly laid hold of us (Matt. 11; Phil. 3). When the woman with the issue of blood had exhausted all human resources and ingenuity, she laid hold Jesus’ garment in faith as He walked by. Her hunger, which was birthed by the lack she had received outside of God (Matt. 5:3), laid hold of His garment and that kind of pure faith demanded that she be given what she pursued. It is not some formula of working ourselves into the presence of God to lay hold of something we want. We have to and must realize we are already in Christ as much as we could be; you didn’t just get 50% of Jesus when you came into Him, more importantly, He came into you, ALL of Him into you! The way to get more is to get in on the relational experience of what and who is already yours and in you. It is not gaining anything by works, but awakening to who He is through living and abiding encounter with how much He really has possessed us in our new birth in Him. Heaven was bankrupted of its most prized possession for heaven to fill you with its highest Treasure: Jesus, God Himself in you!

 

 

The “Thanks Lord” is simply a heartfelt declaration of praise and admiration unto His magnificence and goodness in who He is and what He does! It is a heart and spirit that is overflowing in gratitude and has finally reached the sum goal of all the three pillars: worship, worship, and worship. A massive percentage of prayer should simply be thanking God for who He is and who He is with us and in us through every season. That gets the eyes of self and onto His beauty and power.

 

 

I believe “Revival” that is lasting can hold up under these pillars! haha. No formulas or how to’s here, just heart realities expressed in weak words that a strong God is simply waiting to answer when we ask knowing we are children of a Father who always outdoes Himself in giving what is good, namely, the best gift He ever gave and could give, Jesus, God Himself to us and in us (Is. 30:18; James 4:2)!

 

 

What a great God we have in Jesus!

Ben

Revival: It’s Not A Formula (I)

Revival: we hear this word tossed around all the time in our modern church culture. It is nice language and left just in our language, spoken from our flashy platforms, its unplummeted depths of awakening and transformation will remain untouched in our experience, which really is everything in God. We can ascent mentally to many doctrines of truth found in the Bible, but an experience with God in the Word through the Holy Spirit hovering and breathing on the Word on the inside, forming and manifesting the life of Christ inside of us on the Word is what translates us into the living reality of the Word, where it becomes just as incarnate in us as it is in Jesus, the very substance and potency of all the Word made flesh, because the Word was actually brought to life in His incarnation. We have to start moving from speech to a real time anointing that has birthed the life and character of Christ in us in hiddenness, by hiddenness I mean living out of our positional identity of being hidden in Christ (Col. 3).

 

 

The Word of God indeed is the chariot on which God truly rides in on to translate us into the reality and experience of what is written, literally God turning logos, written word, into Rama, living word, written by the very fiery finger of God on tables of human hearts in indelible ink!

 

 

There is a little saying we developed recently while on a “revival” trek up the East coast of America in just a simple and real child-likeness before the Lord, knowing that He is an outlandishly good Father and within His very nature exists the highest substance of giving: eternal life Himself. The art of giving was born in Him, for it originated in Him and all true, enduring gifts flow out of Him to us and in us. We are the gift carriers of His presence, meant to be unwrapped and enjoyed by all He sends us to! He does not give flawed and messed up gifts that need work; He does all things perfectly well. Haha.

 

 

Knowing His character to continually outdo Himself in showing us honor as His perfectly restored image bearers and sons, by His perfectly honorable blood, by which He bought us back from the dark and evil enemy of our souls, redeeming us and purchasing us as His own prized possession above all the created order; because we uniquely and exclusively share the honor and extreme privileged position of looking exactly like God, and of actually being destined to reign with Him as His very own coheirs for all of eternity, both now and in fullness with Him, as the soon coming Day of the Lord approaches in history, from that overflow, with much joy, we coined our three pillars of revival, haha, “Yes Lord, More Lord, Thanks Lord”.

God’s Got You

Biggest lie in mission’s preparations in America: I need to spend at least 4-5 years raising support and making sure I have consistent finance to sustain myself in the region and people I’m called to.

 

Where is the utter abandon in faith in God through all this? In the name of good stewardship we sit around and plan what are the best churches we can go to and “network” at, to get a monthly financial commitment from, so we can make sure we are provided for in our time over seas. We make sure to cover every angle in case God is not able to prove Himself faithful. We wait around for confirming words, thinking surely they must trump the go word He not only spoke, but commanded, over 2,000 years ago before He ascended to His Father. If Jesus commands it you better believe instant obedience is necessary and what He is truly desiring in His people, which requires you to lean not on your own understanding! How liberating to think that I don’t have to understand or figure out all the time where the provision will come from, living by faith pleases God, and He can’t help Himself but to lavish upon you in that place of simple faith which manifests in simple, childlike obedience. God is actually so outrageously lavish and always overdoing everything He does in abundant giving, that it is a stumbling block to the religious, because God couldn’t be that good, no my friend, He actually is way better than you think or have made Him to be, especially in the area of taking care of His little kids who want to go take nations for Him!

 

Many times it is what we think we know about Him that hinders our next and greatest breakthrough. You can throw out anything that limits God and puts all the responsibility on you to fulfill it. Check this out: “The Lord will fulfill His purpose for me; Your steadfast love, O Lord, endures forever (Ps.138:8). Where is your ability to provide for yourself through self effort in that equation? Haha. God help us! He really said He would do it all if we would just by faith hear Him and believe. Get over yourself and get into Him. Faith comes by hearing, not by having heard. We need to hear Him for real in the present tense context of our relationship with Him. Many people are still living on a good word from years back, that creates a staleness on the fresh manna He is longing to pour out and manifest in us, the manna is Himself, if we would actually engage with His goodness.

 

I’ve decided all of life is so much funner and easier if I just take God at His Word, and actually believe that it is impossible for Him to tell a lie! Let Him conquer you with truth and break down all your piety and faithless defenses to His unlimited resources.

 

If He commanded it, there is outrageous grace tagged onto that command that will carry us through until the great end of His commission, when finally He restores all things and is crowned as rightful King over all the earth, when every heart and tongue confesses that He is Lord to the glory of His Father.

 

 

 

Until He Returns We Will Carry This Gospel Of The Kingdom To All Nations,

Ben

Pregnant with Hunger

Your fire can either be stoked or quenched. A holy fire can only grow by being fed and fanned with what is holy. That’s how we come alive more in who we already are as light in the Lord, and how we enter into greater degrees of glory in Christ. #fantheflameHolySpirit

 

 

The Apostle commands that we fan into flame the gift of God on the inside. Internal stewing will manifest in well seasoned, mature, Christ like power flowing unhinderedly outwardly. On the inside we literally are like this giant pot of stew. We are constantly adding to the flavor and “meat” of that stew by aware, active engagement and agreement with the Holy Spirit. How we participate with what the Holy Spirit is birthing in us, is by simply saying yes Lord, and more Lord! Haha. The simplicity of relationship and life in Christ is what releases transformational power. Simplicity is what keeps the gospel in its purest state of power. The power is in the simplicity of existing, moving, and having our being in Christ. This will produce this bubbling, rich, spiritual nutrition and health to everyone we are feeding around us. They will literally smell it coming off of us. This simmering is only developed in a personal relationship which involves an ongoing love based dialogue with the Holy Spirit. We initiate the conversation and He always responds to hunger in our initiation, because hunger is the true posture of humility. Hunger sets the rate and increase of your ongoing encounter. 

 

 

Lord make me the hungriest man for You alive! Faith that is born out of hunger demands an increase from heaven. He ALWAYS opposes the proud, in a way that honors them, but does not answer what they ask for, because it is not in the right posture that will actually make them more like Jesus, but He gives MORE grace or constant, increasing measures of grace to the humble to enter into more experiential revelation and experience of Him and His home. Grace exists to make you more like Jesus. Grace is always unto transformation. The things we have longed for to become a reality in God in the realm of His revelation and Kingdom, deep down in our spirits, when finally ready in the consummation of the germination process, begin to travel up in the fullness of the time of the birth, and grace is our companion or midwife that brings it forth and nurtures it into the full expression of the heart of God, readying it and priming it for continual and full release at all times. The grace of God is our great teacher in Christ to guide us along into new experiential territories in unexplored dimensions of His power. Secondly, grace also exists in Christ to EMPOWER us to walk in the full substance of heavenly, Kingdom realities as the Holy Spirit births new and deeper things in us and in our experience with Christ in heavenly places, from the place of being just as resurrected as He is, our life being presently hidden in His life at the right hand of the Majesty on high (Col.3). 

 

 

What a joyous relief to stop living as if I were still alive in the world (Col.2)! The death of Christ has afforded us full access to our heavenly country where our citizenship is forever secure and written in heaven. A name that is written in heaven, in the realm that is high above the earth, has all authority over anything in an inferior realm that would come against what Christ has instituted in His and our death,burial,resurrection, and ascension! The normal living condition of a believer is having all things under their feet by the blood of the Lamb. It is living in this realization and increasing awareness that comes by faith that allows us to live in the continual and constant state of always being led by Jesus in triumphal procession over every enemy! Haha! He won, and freely and fully invited me into all the spoils and inheritance of His victory. 

 

 

Pride wants to bring something to the table. Humility that releases greater grace sees that the table is already fully set and that I’ve been seated at the Head of it, inside the Head Himself, fully joined to Him. Humility manifested in simple agreement, feasts on His accomplished life on our behalf, fully imputed into our account, and because of that victorious diet, we always can overcome!

Found and Known

Note on the title: (The Word you are searching for has Found and Known you; on that basis does our  relationship in Christ exist, not on the basis of you having Found and Known Him).

 

 

How about instead of seeking for another good “word” from somebody, you actually go into secret with the Word living and abiding in your inner man, and in the place of beholding with unveiled face, you become that Word. As the Word begins to take deep root and become flesh in you, your experience will shift from constantly seeking good words and the security of other’s affirmation, to having the true Word already found and alive inside of you. You will shift from seeking as an orphan, to having been found as a son, by the Word Himself knowing you, which is never based on you knowing the Word, but upon Him knowing you.  #Gal.4:9 #ICor.8:3 #Matt.7:23

 

 

Everyone is looking for a “word” from God. Christ is the final and eternal Word of the Father on your behalf, for His glory, and for your highest joy, which is fully and completely knit to His glory in all things. Look no further. His perfect life and death is the Word that continually prevails over you and ultimately and fully defines you. Your efforts are meaningless outside of Him. You would cease to be breathing if He was not upholding you by His Word currently. All our vain pursuits would cease to exist if we began to realize that the only reason we are breathing is FOR Him and BY Him, to encounter Him in His glory and to be transformed into His likeness, in order to make Him known in bearing His fruit to the world through love, proving we are His disciples, and in this way bringing Him much glory (John15).

 

 

Your Word has already appeared in flesh and now lives on the inside of you to forever direct you into the ever expansive unfolding of that Word being made incarnate in you, just as it is in Him.

 

 

God speaks in these last days only through the channel of His dazzling Son, who is the exact imprint and perfect image of the invisible God. He has narrowed done forever the channels through which He speaks in these last days to only ever be through His Son! Jesus is God incarnate. He alone makes known all the truth about who God is. The Word has found a home inside of you, it is the place God has always desired to become flesh in and dwell in. You are His desired resting place. You are the channel in which He speaks and moves in the earth currently.

 

 

Stop searching outside of Christ and get lost in the unlimited treasures of the very mystic secret of God revealed only in Christ. This is our sole glory: to search Him out, and in His kindness His plan all along was for us to always find Him! He is not far off; He is as close as the living River that is flowing in your inner man at this moment, drowning all your efforts to find Him on your own and ushering you into the depths of the ocean of His effortless grace that causes us to see and live in the increasing knowledge of Him. The River called Himself inside of you is flowing into the endless ocean of encounter that opens up in God perfectly revealed in Christ. The search is only meant to produce awe and thankfulness in us as we find out really that all God is and all we are is actually only and forever tied up in the person of Christ. All the mysteries of God are tied up in the one, actual revealed mystery of God: Christ Himself, in whom are hidden ALL the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, flowing from His love and His great desire to forever connect His creatures to His glory and nature for His name’s sake, based upon His ability to do so.

 

 

Selah

The Key to Answered Prayer

Abiding in Christ and having His words alive and abiding in you, means you ask anything you wish and it will be done for you. The Father is actually glorified and put on display as reigning supreme by answering your wishes. It is impossible to wish outside of the will of God with His words living and abiding in you. This is the key to answered prayer and the reason why many prayers go unanswered! It is the active reality of His words abiding in us that takes us into a fulfilled prayer life in the grace of God. #John 15:7-8

He is the Giver: Part II

People who are full of God overflow with God. Anointing can never be contained, it was meant to be released, because it is like a raging wildfire and a rushing river in nature, it manifests by flowing out to others not remaining in for ourselves.

 

 

The amazing thing is we always get more then what we give, that is the difference between the kingdom of heaven’s mindset and men’s worldly wisdom, that says, the more you keep and store up what you get the more interest will build in your account. The way interest and increase builds in the kingdom is through releasing and giving what we have (Luke6:38).

 

 

I am in no way advocating a prosperity gospel that gives only to get in the area of money. We find joy in becoming like Jesus and expressing His heart and desire to give by simply giving of ourselves, and our money also!

 

 

I believe that the whole foundation of the kingdom rests upon the economy of God called the ministry of receiving and giving.

 

 

In heaven, the giving of worship never ceases unto God and His slain and risen Lamb. On earth, God and His Son receive all worship given to them by His saints and in that exchange we are given the gift of being transformed from glory to glory into the likeness of Jesus by the Spirit of the Lord. He gives us the greatest gift of becoming who we behold and admire. Us becoming like Jesus makes God look so worthy and glorious!

 

 

The Holy Spirit is the great gift and promise of the Father that actually makes our living condition, both positionally in heaven, and currently on the earth, work more to His maximum glory and to our maximum advantage and supreme benefit then if Jesus were presently still on the earth in all the glory of His first coming (II Cor.3; Eph.2:6; John16:4)! Jesus said it was to our advantage that He go and the gift of the person of the Holy Spirit come, to make us just like Himself, in taking all the things of the Father and making them authentically and personally ours (John16).

 

 

There is nothing that makes God look more glorious then a man or a woman who through 80-90 some years never quit loving God, but actually increased in Christlikeness and love for God. That journey of the free gift of the Holy Spirit constantly manifesting and making us more like Jesus is the strongest testimony to the true power and desire of Jesus, that is far greater then worldly sin and the devil! Our life, and the testimony of His gifts fully maturing in us through His ability, will scream of His faithfulness and glory to sustain us blameless unto the end! It makes Him look glorious by putting us into the place of sole dependency on Him. He gets all the glory and we get all the joy from Him getting it, because He did it all and does it all as we simply as children respond in full agreement in our life to our gracious and good Father.