Transcription from our 7-30-10 service


From last week…

Truth emboldens you in love. The law breaks you down in the fear of retribution. Truth tempers your soul against sin. By truth you are purged and cleansed by love and mercy, by faithfulness to God and to man. By the fear of God you were purged from sin which is what God wants. Now listen to me, this is what God wants because He cannot encase Himself in a house filled with sin. He has to purge the sin in order for Him to come in and dwell. He’ll live in your spirit and He has sealed your soul; He lives in your heart and you have access to the ministry of the Spirit. But if you want Him to totally possess you, He must remove the nature of sin and He does it first of all by teaching you to hate sin. As He teaches you to hate sin, you allow Him to remove that propensity for sin, that love for sin out of your heart and indeed you begin to beg Him to do it, pleading with Him—and you would do anything to be free of it; whatever He has to take you through—that you begin to hate that sin the way He does and when you finally come to that place, He is able to remove it. Some sins are very easy for human beings to get free of. And for one person it might be easier to get rid of this sin, for another person it’s a different sin, but we all have these areas of sin that seem to be in us like concrete and you wonder, is there any way out? Is there really any way to be free of something you’re struggling against? Well, there isn’t, —except Christ—and you have to pray, and you have to fast, and you have to weep and you have to beg. I’m sorry but I am telling you the truth. I know what you have to do to get filled with God and it’s not a journey where you skip along the side walk and everything just seems to happen—it doesn’t work that way.

Jesus Christ appeared to me and said: The war against the sinful nature is the highest of all wars, the victory of which is the most noble of all victories. It is not easy to overcome yourself but when you keep putting truth in you; you keep subjecting your soul to truth and commanding your soul to submit to the truth it’s receiving and you keep loving it, choosing to love it instead of reject it because it’s hard, the day does come when you get liberty. He wants to give you that liberty. I’m telling you that He didn’t save you to let you waste away in this world, loving the world. If that’s all you want out of Christianity, then you don’t need to be saved. You can just love the world and go where the world goes when it’s all over.

He saved you to have heaven on earth and to live the abundant life of truth. He saved you to become one with truth; He saved you to allow your precious and sacred soul to be the house of truth. He looks at your soul and to Him it is sacred, it is precious and if you’ve allowed Him to do the kind of work in it He wants to do then He also sees it as holy. When He begins to see your soul as holy, He becomes very jealous, very jealous… you are now His. You’ve never met a jealous lover until you’ve met the lover of your soul. He bought you at a price; He poured out His blood in order to own you and when you have loved Him in return enough to let Him make your soul holy, there is a divine jealousy that comes.

See, what the Church is taught is that you get saved and it’s all there. It’s like this divine package gets plunked into your soul and you have the holiness and righteousness of God through Jesus Christ; it’s all there and yet you keep going on sinning and getting angry when you shouldn’t get angry, you keep getting jealous when you shouldn’t and throwing temper tantrums, murmuring and backbiting. You keep doing it, you keep complaining when you should be rejoicing. Don’t think its okay to complain during the hard times, because that is rebellion. You keep complaining when you should be rejoicing. Why? Because you’re not holy yet; you’re not righteous yet. You have this judicial act that has been performed so that He looks at you through the righteousness of His Son. The righteousness is imputed to you, credited to you. But His goal is to impart it to you—big difference! You’re holy in that you are now set aside unto God. But He has not imparted His holiness to you yet—no, not without much work to be done first. Why? Because your precious soul could not handle it. He must build you up; He must change the inside of you to bear the bliss of His holiness living there.

God is majesty; He is holy and He is a consuming fire; He is the light, light beyond anything you can comprehend. I’m sorry, but your soul is not capable of bearing all that. You’re not even capable of bearing the highest truths, let alone the very life of those truths living in your soul until God has built you up so that you can bear it. It takes time. Aren’t we thankful that He loves us and that He is so patient? He is so patient because He really does want to get us there. He is so patient, but He also knows that most of His Church—though He would give it to them—most of His church will not pay the price and will end up going to heaven without the highest and best. So why would He get angry with you? All He knows is compassion—compassion over the greatness of your loss. He feels compassion because you couldn’t align yourself with the truth and be healed. Though He would certainly give you the power—if you desired it enough—to bring your sinful nature to the cross and let the life of the cross have its way. That’s the beauty and generosity of God because the truth of how to get there is contained throughout His Word. It’s there for anyone to learn.

1 Corinthians 2: 9But, on the contrary, as the Scripture says, What eye has not seen and ear has not heard and has not entered into the heart of man, [all that] God has prepared (made and keeps ready) for those who love Him [who hold Him in affectionate reverence, promptly obeying Him and gratefully recognizing the benefits He has bestowed].

To be continued next week…

In His Amazing Love,
Nita Johnson