By
Nita Johnson
Transcript from July 2010 New Orleans Teaching
From last week…
But here we have today, God’s Bride, His Church, who again is not recognizing truth though it stands before us. How do we remedy this chronic problem? Can I be really tough with you for a minute? Where we quit pampering ourselves and we choose truth even when it is hard or when it hurts; even when it means that we are going to be required to endure for the sake of the truth we are given? When are we going to choose to be tough? I’ve heard that in the greatest marathons there are times when people die, even though they’ve done much preparation. They run because really deep, deep down inside they have a motivation to compete for the prize. They go through all of the rigors of preparation and running a marathon is not easy; it is hard. I used to run and it was wonderful, but you get past a certain point when you’re running when in your body you start feeling the exhaustion. You really have to go through the rigors to prepare for a long marathon and the Church needs to come to that same mentality, to go through the rigors of preparing for truth. It’s the mindset that says: I’m going to do whatever my soul needs, whatever my heart requires – I’m going to do it so that I may have truth, because truth is what is going to save me in the days ahead. Amen?
John 14: 6Jesus said to him, I am the Way and the Truth and the Life; no one comes to the Father except by (through) Me.
We think we love Jesus because He is love; but the more we get to know Him, the more we understand that we love Jesus because He is truth. We need His love; He is love and we need that, but, if He is not truth, we have nothing to stand on in difficult times. He said: I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except by and through me. He is love; He is goodness; He is mercy; He is kindness; He is justice; He is judgment; but all that He is, He is because He is truth. If Christ could lie—if it were possible for Him to deceive—and I know some of you might think how could I say such a thing?—but you know that our doubt and unbelief convicts our heart all the time that we doubt that He is truth. Somewhere deep inside we think He can and will deceive us. We know it because we don’t believe. We lack faith; we lack the stability of faith and we lack it because in our soul we wonder if He really is truth. If we knew that we knew that we knew that He could never deceive us, we would never doubt.
Christ is holy truth. There is no lie in Him; He cannot and will not—and again I say it—He cannot deceive us. It’s not possible for Him to lie or give us less than truth. We don’t always recognize truth, but He’s always speaking the truth and He’ll never speak to you less than truth. If Christ has spoken it, you can take it to your last breath. We may not understand how He’s going to bring it about, but He will bring it about, even if it is in the hereafter. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob learned that, along with many others along the way, there was something greater they had been promised, something that they wouldn’t see in their lifetime, but they would see in the next life. So sometimes promises are given to us and we don’t understand how those promises are going to be made manifest or even if they can be. But I promise you—if Christ spoke it, it is the truth, and it will be. He wasn’t saying: here I am – the way, and I’ll tell the truth while I’m alive. That is not what He is saying. He is saying: I am the way, I am the truth, I am truth, I am truth!
How can He do anything other than what He is? He only does what He is. I am the way, I am the truth, I am the life. I am the way unto the Father who is truth; He is the light of truth, the life and essence of it and I am the way into Him. I am truth because I came from my Father and I am. I am life. What is this life? It is the living truth. To be in Christ is to be in the way, is to be in truth, to be in the life of the Father. Listen to me; don’t just let it go into your head. Let it go into your heart and soul, let it reverberate through your spirit. If you are in Him you are in the way; you are in truth. You’ve been given a new matrix from which to live, from which to flow. You’re not what you were before—you’ve become a new creation. A new creature and there is now something inside of you that is hungering to be free of the darkness and a walk in the light. There is something inside of you that is hungering to be free of the deceptions of the world and walk in the truth of the kingdom. There is something inside of you that is trying to rise and override your soul; the passions of your soul and those of your flesh. There is something inside of you screaming for the light of truth because you have become one with truth. You didn’t know the truth before you knew Christ. You may have known that there is truth, whether you understood it or not. You may have wondered if Christ was the way of truth but you didn’t know the truth. I don’t care how many people stood in front of you and said, “Well, I’m telling the truth.” The media raised you lying to you every day. You live in a world governed by the spirit of deception and living under the veil of the lie, and this lie tells you that you need what is in the world to survive. It is a spiritual kingdom that thrives within the confines of this lie. The lie that tells you that you need something other than God to survive, and everybody believes it unless you’ve come into the place of union where your mind, heart and soul have become overtaken by the Spirit of the Lord.
If you haven’t arrived there, deep inside of you is the belief that you need something other than God to survive. You need cars, houses, food and friends. You need all these things and deep inside, you believe it, because that lie hovers over you. That lie is the very air you breathe. There's a veil put over your eyes that hinders you from seeing the truth if you’re not walking in union with Christ. The only way to get that veil broken is to leave the world and come into union with God. Jesus said, “I am the way, I am the truth.” You can choose to live in the world that is full of lies, full of deception, dishonoring truth every day, beguiling and blinding you, hindering your understanding and receptivity to truth. Or you can fight the forces in spiritual warfare and pave your way into the light of glorious truth. It’s up to you. Everyone is called to fight the good fight of faith, yet few fight it. When you enter into this place of reigning where you’re living in the truth now, wholly in the truth—you see all things differently, and you wonder how you could ever have been so blind to see things in such a perverted way. The world is like an insane asylum—can I be that honest? The world is insanity; the opposite of everything that is God and it is the opposite of everything that is truth; it is insanity.
I heard one man recently—Chuck Colson. He said, “This debt that America has gotten itself into—fourteen trillion dollars—I want to tell you the truth; I just want to state it plainly. I want you to know this is insanity. It is insanity for a nation to put itself fourteen trillion dollars in debt, and it is sin.” I chuckled and thought you might be the only person that has said that. Probably, there aren’t even many men of God saying that. Not only is it sin and insanity to be fourteen trillion dollars in debt, but it is sin and insanity to be a thousand dollars in debt if you’re an individual. The Bible says to owe no man anything but love.
This world is built on a shaky foundation, and God is calling you out of it. He’s calling you out of it to live in the Spirit, in the life of truth where you see everything through the eyes of God instead of through the eyes of the one who wants to deceive you. I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except by and through me. Then He said in verse 17, the Spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive (welcome, take to its heart) because it does not see Him or know and recognize Him, but you know and recognize Him for He lives with you constantly and will be in you.
It is this truth with which God wants to consume you. He wants your soul consumed with truth, the Spirit of truth where you are discerning the truth from a lie and good from evil; you are discerning the light from the darkness. He wants you owned by the truth. He wants your soul to radiate the light of His glorious truth.
In His Amazing Love,
Nita Johnson
