Where We See the Vision of God

Revelations 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 shew thee things which must be hereafter.

Where We See the Vision of God

Most of us expect that God is supposed to meet with us on our terms, in our earthly mentality and thinking. We are always wanting more of God, so we invite him into our box, into our preconceived and formed religious thinking and mindset. Remember when, in Acts 10, Peter was on the roof top praying and God showed Him a vision of a great sheet knit on four corners, let down from heaven. It was full of unclean animals, wild beast, creeping things and fowls of the air. A voice came to him and said, “Rise Peter, kill and eat.” Remember Peter three times refused and objected because these were unclean. Peter said, “Not so Lord, for I have never eaten anything uncommon or unclean.” God was challenging Peter’s religious thinking and his doctrinal box. This didn’t fit in Peter’s theology at all. There comes a time when God takes the type and shadow and makes it a reality. There was a whole lot of this going on when Christ came as the fulfillment of so many types and shadows of the Old Testament. This is the reason that Judaism doesn’t fit comfortably in the mold of Christianity. The former was based upon types and shadows and the latter is based upon the fulfillment of those types and shadows in Christ. God’s Word does not change, but the times and the seasons of it do. We don’t reap our harvest in the winter, it isn’t the season. In God there are seasons and Jesus taught us to recognize the seasons spiritually. If our eyes are only fixed on this former season and our minds are narrowed to only walk in what have known, we may miss the season for which we were created and purposed.
In our passage in Revelations, God didn’t come down to John’s level of thinking and reasoning, He showed him an open door in heaven and said, “Come up here and I will show you the things which must come hereafter.” If we, in our generation, have come to this time of hereafter, then it is important that our spiritual eyes, ears and mind are open to the things that God is doing and speaking in this hour. They may well go against the grain of our former way of thinking as they did for Peter. We are quickly approaching the fulfillment of many of the things that the Word has spoken to us, but we have not comprehended them because the hour was not yet. I believe we are already standing in a new season of God and it is imperative for all of us to really be open for God to show us and bring us into a new dimension in our faith and in our lives. We are standing in a new day when the things spoken of as hereafter are now becoming present tense. Be ready for change, not in fearful way, but in a faith-filled way. Keep your eyes and your faith upon Him that when He moves, you move with Him, even if it is not the way it has always been. God is calling us up through that open door in heaven to come up and see the things He is about to do upon the earth. Even as God was showing Peter that He was about to bring the Gentiles into the kingdom of God, He is bringing us into a new season in Him. You will hear the word from God’s anointed and it will sound strange to you, but listen with your spiritual man, then move in obedience to what the Lord will be prompting you to do. This will not make sense now, but it will as the Spirit of God unfolds it.

Blessings,
#kent

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Defining Love

1 John 4:8
He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

Defining Love

How do we define love? 1 John 4:16 says, “…God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.” We know that, in and of ourselves, our love is limited and conditional, but in Christ it knows no such boundaries, ‘for while we yet sinners, Christ died for us.’ The secret to loving as God has commanded us too is in the abiding in Him. That abiding love is not static, it is dynamic in its expression toward all that surrounds it. The eyes of that love are always looking to the real needs in each individual that it encounters. Outwardly men say that they need a lot of things that aren’t really even relevant to the deeper need of their heart. They might not even understand what there need is, but God does. As we walk in the love of God, we become the expression of God by the Spirit at work in and through us. We want to ask God to help us see each individual, from those in our own family to those who are strangers, through His eyes and His heart. Operating and living out of the love of God is in seeing your life as a ministry and service to those around you. Love is an open door of giving. It is often returned with ungratefulness and abuse, but it stays open because it is the avenue of God’s love to our fellow man. When we suffer reproach, abuse and ungratefulness from others then we are, in a sense, filling up the sufferings of Christ. We are experiencing and feeling what He felt. We understand the sadness and heartache for those who reject Him, while at the same time we share in the joy of those who embrace Him.
We have become a very self-contained society wanting our own space and our own things. God blesses us to be a blessing. Abiding in the love of God will often take us out of our comfort zone, as it requires that we often lay down our wants and desires so that we might meet the needs in others. For us to intimately know God we must truly respond to the love of God and become the expression of His love to others. If we are a closed channel, then we have effectively cut off the life to God to someone who needs it. God says, “that is not my love. My love extends it’s arms open to all who will receive Christ and come into Me.”
Do we really know God? For us to really know Him means that we have to be the expression of that same love wherewith He has loved and gave His life for us. Are we willing to give our life for others?
Ask God to give you the eyes to see the world and the individuals around you through His eyes and His love. Then ask Him to help you to respond accordingly. The world is starving for genuine love. You are that love because God abides in you.

Blessings,
#kent

Knowing the Father is the Expression of Jesus

John 14:6-7 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”

Knowing the Father is the Expression of Jesus

This is a passage of scripture that is familiar to many of us. As the Father droped it into my spirit this morning I sensed that He was showing me that God the Father is Spirit. We so often don’t fully understand Him or comprehend His ways, but He has never revealed Himself more clearly than He did through the life of Jesus. Jesus is not only the way, the truth and the life; He is the open door to look into Father’s heart. When we observe and study the life of Jesus we see and understand that He was the open conduit of the Father’s heart and love for us. Jesus was the Father’s human expression to touch and communicate with us on the level of our understanding and comprehension. I’ll never forget an illustration I heard many years ago that related it like this. There was once a man looking through his window and observing the birds on a bitter cold, wintry, snowy day. The birds were gathered on his patio foraging through the snow for some morsel to eat. The man’s heart was moved with compassion and he thought if only I could invite them into my warm home and then feed them and warm them till the storm is past. He knew that if he tried to present himself as he was and opened the door he would only frighten the birds and they would fly away because they wouldn’t understand his heart. He thought, if only there were a way that I could become a bird and communicate to them my love and concern for them, then perhaps they wouldn’t fear me and would be able receive all that I want to provide for them. This is what the Father did through Jesus Christ, this God-man, who revealed the Father’s heart, love and intent for us. He made us to know that the Father’s heart is not condemnation and judgement, even though that is what we now live under outside of Christ because of our sin and separation from Father. We know that it is just and what we deserve in the light of His holiness, but Father’s heart is love and reconciliation back into a relationship with Him that He first had with Adam before the fall. What we have recognized in Jesus is the heart of the Father for each one of us and for His creation. What Jesus further reveals to us in John 17:20- 23 is His plan and desire was, not just for His disciples to be one with Him, but for us to be one with Father who would hear and believe their message, even as He is one with the Father. “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: 23I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” What Father is wanting to express through us is what He expressed through Jesus, His heart of love and reconciliation. How can we truly know and understand the Father? By How we know and express Jesus. As He was the expression of God the Father in the earth, so He has called His believers to be also. Jesus completes His prayer in John 17:25-26 by saying, “Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. 26I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.” What Jesus exemplified as one man that Father sent into the earth to reveal Himself through His Son, He now desires to do in a many membered body that functions as one man in Christ Jesus. Jesus, who is no longer the body, but the head of the body bringing us together in the unity of the Holy Spirit that has been given us that we might be corporately and individually the expressions of His love and truth. Jesus completed His course upon the earth. He gave Himself for us and for all of mankind to be the pure and holy lamb that sacrificed His life for our sins. Now He sits at the right Hand of the throne of God, ever making intercession for us that we, by His Spirit and life in us, might continue to be the expression of the way, the truth and the life. We know the Father, because we have first come to know Jesus. The more we know Him, the more we know the Father and the more we know the Father the more we can become the expression of the Father through His Spirit and life that dwells in us. To know Jesus is to know the Father, for they are one, even as we are being made one in them.

Blessings,

#kent

Come up Hither

Come Up Hither

Revelations 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 shew thee things which must be hereafter.

There is a door being opened in heaven for those that are earnestly pressing into the Lord’s presence. It is a door of revelation and understanding. A door and entrance that is leading us into the third dimension of His Presence, before His throne. It is a place, the likeness of which we have never seen or experienced before. It is place of lightning and thunder, a place so awesome that we are as dead men in the presence of the Lord. As I read this passage, I ask the Lord, “can I enter that door? Dare I ask to have privilege of experiencing such an awesome thing?” Immediately I thought who am I to ask such a thing? What am I to God that He should look upon me with such favor and privilege? There is such sin and unworthiness in my life that I should even aspire to enter such as dimension of heaven in this life. But what makes me any more worthy after I pass from this life? Why is it only then I could taste heaven, but not now? Isn’t the same thing that gives me confidence of heaven after I die at work in me in this life? It is all by the precious blood of Jesus. He alone is my righteousness and right standing with God. Yes, why isn’t it possible to taste of heaven, to look into the mysteries of the Most High, and to taste of the age to come? Our mind set has always been earth now, heaven later. Is that the mind of God? Doesn’t Paul say in Ephesians 2:4-7, “But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) And hath raised [us] up together, and made [us] sit together in heavenly [places] in Christ Jesus: That in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in [his] kindness toward us through Christ Jesus.” God is telling us even now we are raised up and seated in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. While the fullness of all that this entails may not be fully realized till future times, we do ourselves grave injustice to think that God doesn’t want us to exercise our faith to lay hold of an increasing depth and revelation of who He is and what He wants for us in this hour. All through the history of the Word of God, God has been ever revealing Himself in a greater and greater way. How does He want to reveal Himself today? Are we content with the former things, the present religious system that has become more Hollywood and entertainment than worship that brings us to His presence? The true worshippers aren’t waiting for someone to lead them in hymn 157 or listen to an inspiring special or even sing contemporary songs about Jesus. The true worshippers are pressing in, in Spirit and Truth. They are chasing after the heart of God. They are burning and hungering after His highest and holiest for them today. They are not content just to be among the throes of Christendom and churchgoers they want to “come up hither.” They are hearing a trumpet call from heaven that is calling them up higher to experience a greater depth in God than they ever have before. They are singing the song of the Lamb even now as they enter the heavenlies of their spirit man and come before His throne to worship Him who is forever worthy of all praise and glory. Their spirit man is crying, “Holy, Holy, HOLY!” They are passionate in their pursuit of His presence. They are intent upon tasting, even now of the ages to come and the glory that shall be revealed.

When Jesus fed the multitudes, didn’t He first tell the disciples to feed them? Luke 9:13 says, “But he said unto them, Give ye them to eat. And they said, We have no more but five loaves and two fishes; except we should go and buy meat for all this people.” Jesus was trying to teach them the principle of not looking at what they don’t have, but acting upon the little that they do have. We will never have the sufficiency in and of ourselves, but if we will act upon the little that we do have, heaven will become our sufficiency. ‘Then Jesus took the five loaves and two fishes looked up to heaven and blessed them.’ Our eyes have to be fixed on heaven, upon our Lord, for He is the sufficiency and supply for every need. The disciples were the key link between heaven and earth. They were the distributors of the miracles of Christ. Our lives have to be in that chain of distribution where we become the dispensers of God’s miraculous grace in whatever form He chooses to manifest it. Do we want to be one of the one’s in the crowd looking for a free meal or do we want to be the instruments through which God feeds the multitudes? God has so much more for us, but He is looking for the hungry ones, the ones willing to pay the price to pursue Him and run after Him. They are the ones who will not be distracted by the cares of life and the vanity of this world. Their eye is single and it is set upon the Lord. With all that is within them they will “come up hither” and pursue Him through the open door of heaven.

Blessings,
kent