ABIDE IN HIM // WALK BY THE SPIRIT

I didn’t know what those statements really meant, and what people said when I asked, didn’t really make sense either. I wanted to REALLY GET IT. 

When I want to ‘really get it’, I have to be taught by the Spirit of God. 

So I ask Him, and He shows me in a way that I can actually understand. I was waiting on Him, meditating on these phrases (‘Walk by the Spirit’ & ‘Abide in Him’) and the portions of scripture that speak on them, when the Lord began to teach me.

He said ‘Think about it this way.. when you are trying to fall asleep, you might methodically go through the parts of your body, recognizing the tension and *releasing it*. Starting at your toes, recognize the tension and *release it*. Ankles, recognize the tension and release it. Calves, same. Knees, same, thighs, same… then before you know it you’re asleep!’ 😴 

🤗This automatically registered with my experience, I could see Holy Spirit’s work in me was exactly that. Systematically going through my entire being, helping me recognize tensions and leading me to release it to Christ’s Truth/Promises. ‘Overcoming.’ 💪 This is His work of healing us and making us whole!

But then I kinda got confused about it being about ‘going asleep’. Is that the goal? Fall asleep? ‘Help me understand THAT Lord.’ 

He gave me a visual. He started showing me a man that had swords stabbed into him, he had chains covering him, and he was not stoked at all. Every time there was the step of *releasing of tension*, Holy Spirit would take out a sword, or take off some weight.. *releasing* the man to be who he truly meant to be, in the Spirit of Christ!! Very stoked. 

So I saw and understood that as we follow Holy Spirit, He is systematically helping us heal and *release these tensions*, which frees us to *naturally* WALK by the Spirit! Just like sleep is a state of being, being IN HIM (‘Walking by the Spirit’ or ‘Abiding in Him’) is a state of being that we come into through our healing (releasing the tensions Holy Spirit brings to Light).

To further explain, it’s His Spirit in me that is being released as this process takes place. Always growing toward perfection. This is seen in Scripture in ‘being conformed into the image of Christ’, this is the victory and the Promised Land. This is walking in Oneness with your Father. This is ‘ABIDING’. The only command is to Love (all other ‘commands’ stem from loving God and loving others). 

 So to ABIDE and WALK BY THE SPIRIT – is to be *growing in surrender*, allowing His work to heal you and release your true, whole self that operates completely healed – *Christlike*. 

ABIDING and WALKING BY THE SPIRIT *ARE NOT* things we do by learning how. 

There is no pressure to figure it out, because it’s God’s job to teach you and give you the perfect situations to do the work. Every situation and circumstance in your life is giving you the chance to overcome by faith, dying to your own broken ways, and coming into alignment with His ways! 

So be brave and courageous! Learn your lessons and keep humbling yourself. What God is establishing in you, is the most valuable thing on this planet!! A man or woman, set free to be exactly who they were created to be, radiating God in action and speech. Wow. ⚡️👊 THATS powerful. 

That’s what God wants for each of us. Abundant Life!

You can’t do this process without the relationship.. you have to follow His Spirit. 😬If you can’t recognize Holy Spirit’s work in you like this, just ask for it! 🥳 Tell Him, “I will let You go there! Do what you need to do!”

“I will let You dig into my being and tear out the hooks that pull me away from You.” “I will face them bravely and release them to You” “I want to know You more!”

Done- expect to start learning and be led into challenging situations where there are two paths, the easy one and the hard one. Follow Him. 

Anyways! Done rambling

Love you guys 

💙JIK

There is no dissatisfaction in the Kingdom.  

 The Kingdom of Heaven is perfect, just like our Father. I believe that the Kingdom-reality is something that we are growing into. That through following the Lord, we are taking the ‘Promise Land’ that is flowing with milk and honey.  

This Kingdom of Truth is something we learn to live in. As we receive the Father’s Love and courageusly die to ourselves, we are transformed to operate more and more out of His Nature, and find ourselves governed by the principles and precepts of the Kingdom. It’s a lifelong journey that should inspire wonder in us at the possibilities of what the Lord has in store for us!

About a year ago the Lord spoke something to me that has since completely changed my life! It was a simple, easy to agree with statement, that had profound implecations. 

“There is no dissatisfaction in the Kingdom.”

I said ‘ok.’ That set me on an intense track for about a month where God started processing my entire being, showing me everywhere that I had dissatisfaction. He showed me that it was in my speech, it was in how I viewed the Body of Christ, it was my motivation to change myself, it was in my motivation to do ministry.. I kept seeing it everywhere! 

The next step was surrender it to God. He told me to replace all dissatisfaction with hope and confidence in the promises of God. He showed me that ‘confidence in the promises of God’ equals ‘confidence in WHO HE TRULY IS’.  If I had dissatisfaction, it was actually unbelief in Him!

When I saw immaturity in the Body, I used to allow dissatisfaction to motivate a new post or inspire a video idea. Now, I actually believe that God’s faithfulness will complete the work that He started and I don’t need to pick up any burden to do anything about it. It’s really not my responsibility, God is the TRUE Shepherd and He KNOWS how to shepherd HIS sheep. The victory is already accomplished and God ACTUALLY IS soverign. SO why did I ever carry a burden to fix or change anything??

After the month of allowing God to replace all my dissatisfaction with hope and confidence in His promises, I felt severely unmotivated. I had no reason to do anything anymore. If I am not allowed to be dissatisfied, then everything is at it should be, and in process just like myself..

I HAD FINALLY CEASED FROM MY OWN WORKS.
I HAD FINALLY ENTERED HIS REST.

but I still had desires to do things for the Lord!

I could imagine my Heavenly Father’s excited face as He says “GOOD! GO, Do it! So long it doesn’t come from a place of dissatisfaction or unbelief, you have freedom to do whatever you want to for my Glory!” 

The Lord began to minister to me the parable of the talants.  He showed me that the master didn’t micro manage the servants, they had full freedom to do what they thought was best with what He gave them. The only wicked thing to do was nothing! On top of that, it was clear to me that a harvest was promised as long as we risked using what we have been given!

This new mentality has effected me so deeply. Through this understanding, God has given me a new honor for literally everyone. I can see and honor the different parts of His Body this way, and even honor them and see God’s faithfulness in their respective maturity levels. God has people in every facet of life, being representatives and helping each other toward Him, and He has people in every maturity level too!

I no longer have any desire to argue or struggle to be understood, if someone can’t hear me, that’s ok! I can honor them and bless them where they are in their journey and trust that God will be faithful to them, just like He’s faithful to me!

I can go on and on, but I wont. I know there are a lot of people not ready to hear this.. but I believe there are a lot of people who have known it in their own ways all along. I hope this encourages those of you who have always believed God was big enough to worry about it Himself, and it wasn’t ever our job to fix the world. 

I’ll just keep loving people and talking to those who can hear me.

JIK

He knows how to open our mouths.  

Our Father’s Love is an infinite well that we will always be drawing from. What we can glimpse and experience for ourselves literally transforms us. I would say that receiving His Love carries a responsibility to share the same Love as a proper response.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that we are meant to Love in the same way we receive Love from our Father. This goes for all other perfect gifts that come down from the Father of Lights too! We are to be like our Father.

So let’s continue onward into how we relate with one another.

What I want to say is that we can trust God. – We must grow in trusting God for our own process and for other’s processes. There is no pressure on anyone to be further along than they are. No one. This is kind of scary right?  We love to judge ourselves and we love to judge others..

Why are we so trained by our earthly minds to do this?
Are we able to allow the Holy Spirit to teach us a new way?
I hope so.

Personally, the Lord showed me that unconditional Love is like treating everyone as if they are perfect.  As if they were Jesus Himself.  “As much as you have done to one of these, you have done to Me,” Jesus said.  Love covers over a multitude of sin. The Bible says that ‘we do not judge anyone according to the flesh anymore’.  What stands in the way of treating people this way? I’ll tell you, it’s our own fleshly minds.

The mind that sees others living in ways that might go against our personal convictions, speaking with words we wouldn’t, or getting tattoos we wouldn’t.. Our minds anchor us in a reality that fights against the Spirit’s ways of viewing and treating one another in Love. Our job is to die to our ways of thinking and accept the Way of Christ.

We want to operate by His Nature of Unconditional Love. *selah

I would even go as far as to say that as we follow the Lord into our spiritual healing and wholeness that was paid for on the Cross, we are being released into this exact nature! He is clearing the way of all the hinderances that blocked our vision and our ability to Love like He does.

Here is the tricky part.

What do we do when we see someone ‘in sin’? The temptation is to allow our minds to take control and judge them as ‘in sin’ and then convince ourselves that Love would tell them how God feels about their sin.  Unfortunately, this is usually not received in the way we hope, and we may conclude that God will just have to convince them we were right later on.. (humor intended)

Can you see how our mind’s judgement sabotaged the whole situation?

I would rather have an operating system of Unconditional Love, trusting that God’s love is what creates an environment conducive for transformation. If God wants me to say anything, there will be an open door to share my perspective, and that I don’t need to force a conversation. I don’t need to force a conversation, because Dad’s faithfulness is already at work in the situation and my mind’s assumptions only confuse things.

Could it be that God knows how to reach people better than we do?

I have a testimony:
I was young in my faith and full of zeal.  I had a part time job on a farm and the owner of the farm was old and going blind.  He was a good man and I felt the Lord’s heart for him.  I desperately wanted to talk with him about the Lord, but every time he came into the little shed where I was, there was never an opportunity.  I started kicking myself every time he left like I had failed God for not forcing a conversation.  I was taking it pretty hard on myself.

Out of the blue, the owner’s son came in; a man at least double my age.  He walked up to me and we started talking.  He asked me about my tattoos and I didn’t hesitate one second to start talking about the Lord and all the ways He rescued me from the darkness.  We walked out of the shed into the rainy overcast field, deep in conversation. I remember I hadn’t used the name ‘Jesus’ outrightly but I got to the point of my story where I say “Jesus Is King, You represent Me now” and right when I did, the clouds parted and a beam of light slapped us both on the face with bright warm light. The man looks over at me and says, “I’ve been mad at the Lord for a very long time, ignoring Him. Then something like this happens and I know He still loves me and is reaching out to me.”

I went back into my little shed praising the Lord, amazed at His confirmation of my testimony and then the Lord spoke clearly to me. He said, “Son, I know how to make you speak.”  He wiped away all the guilt my mind had gathered for not talking to the old man, and taught me that He would use me when He wanted to.  I learned that the pressure to perform was something I put on myself, it didn’t come from Him.

It’s about trusting God to open our mouths.  It’s about trusting God to create opportunities.  Our responsibility is to LOVE like the Father, and when it’s time to speak or correct, God will open that door and it will be the right moment.

I’m not saying that there is no right time to correct, admonish and warn.. I’m just saying that we should strive to have an operating system of the Father’s Love and then trust that when those other programs need to be used, it wont be our minds that turn them on.. it’ll be the Holy Spirit in step with God’s sovereign timing.

Walk with Unconditional Love
Trusting God’s Plan for All
Bold with Truth when it’s Time

JIK

You must be born again to enter.  

My hope today is to shine a light on the nature of God. The truth that ‘Death is Glory’ is portrayed throughtout the scriptures and I want to draw it out and put it in focus. I believe it is paramount to understand this truth as we move forward into what God has for us as the corporate Body of Christ.

Let’s start with Abraham.

Abraham is a picture of our faith. He helps us understand what faith looks like and the lessons we learn from reading about his life, tend to be be about how to have faith.  An invisible God called Abraham to leave all that he had known to follow Him into the unknown.  This is a picture of literally everyone’s faith.  We must leave all that we’ve known in order to follow God into the establishing of the promises.  When God calls us, we dont know exactly what to expect.  We find ourselves in Abraham’s story and are already seeing this principle of ‘Death is Glory’.

It is a ‘death’ to leave all that you know.  This death that Abraham partakes in of his old life, initiates a new adventure of faith. You could call it a new life. There must be a death of the old, to initiate the new. There must be death to see glory.

You must be born again to enter the Kingdom of God.

To be born again, we must answer the call to leave our old lives and all that we’ve known, in order to follow God into the mysterious new life He promises us.  This new life is in the Kingdom of God, where He is the ruler and His reality takes hold of you.  This is where the abundant life that Jesus promised is!  It is a state of being, where the Kingdom reality has full authority to inform your experience on Earth.  The Bible says that we participate in the Divine nature of God through believing the precious promises of God. We die to our controlling nature and learn to submit to the nature of Christ which leads to the Life God wants for you.

Let’s look at Jesus!

Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life that leads to oneness with the Father. It would be smart to ask ourselves, “if Jesus is ‘the way’, what does that mean?”  When I boil down Jesus’ life into a ‘WAY’ what I see is that He laid down His life for the good of all mankind.  He exemplidfied Love.  Self-sacrificing, unconditional Love.

Jesus was another picture of ‘Death is Glory’.  He submitted to the Father so fully that He followed Him all the way to the cross and literally died for our sins.  Jesus was the PERFECT picture of this WAY.  This ‘death to self’, for the good of others IS THE WAY of Truth that leads to Life.

Let’s take scripture.

If you lose your life, you will find it.
I must become less, so He can become more.
If you have died with Christ, then you will be raised with Christ.
To the degree that we partake in the sufferings of Christ, we see will understand His Resurrection Power.
You must be born again to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

You must receive the Kingdom as a child.  A child knows nothing, but learns everything from it’s parents.  In the same way, we receive His Kingdom by letting go of everything we THINK we know, and allow the Lord to teach us everything anew. This ‘letting go of everything’ is the death that is required in Biblical faith.

Let’s take this Biblical principle a little further.  I would propose that EVERY promise we carry, every thing that we hope to receive from Heaven MUST first include a death.

Going back to Abraham, the carrier of the promise. He was promised that nations would come from him through his only son, Isaac.  When God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, He was purifying Abrahams heart.  What could threaten to become an idol easier than something you have been promised from Heaven?  We must have no other gods before Him, and in order to keep Abraham’s heart in fellowship with the Father, there had to be this test.  This test was a death to the promise.  Abraham had to die to the hope of the promise and place that hope securely onto the Father, who was able to keep His promise.

Will we follow God to the crossroads?

Will we choose to trust Him and face the death that is required?

Will we see the glory of God?

Its up to you, but my heart right now is encourage you to jump!  GO, and dont look back!  It will be humbling to forget all you know.  It will be scary to leave everything you have built up for yourself this far in life.  But the Kingdom of God is like a treasure buried in a field, once you find it you go and sell everything you have to buy that field.

He is SO SO SOOOO worth it and pray to see you on this Way!

JIK