Transcript from July 2010 New Orleans Teaching

From last week…

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. 

John 16: 13But when He, the Spirit of Truth (the Truth-giving Spirit) comes, He will guide you into all the Truth (the whole, full Truth). For He will not speak His own message [on His own authority]; but He will tell whatever He hears [from the Father; He will give the message that has been given to Him], and He will announce and declare to you the things that are to come [that will happen in the future].

I can say to you that this world is darkness, and you will sit there in full agreement not even understanding what that darkness is. One time the Lord visited me. He stood on the threshold of heaven. From that vantage point, I looked up at Him, at which time He begins to speak. I do not know how to explain how Jesus does this. All I can say is that when He wants to get a message across to you, He will not necessarily use words, for He wants Himself to be the message; He will emanate that message from His whole being. At this particular time, as He stood at the threshold of heaven, He began to emanate His virtues, starting with mercy; He suddenly became holy mercy, and as He began emanating this holy mercy, I was encompassed by it. Then it dissipated and He began emanating His love; He is love. On and down through His virtues He moved. As He closed down one virtue, the next virtue would emanate. I could see and feel what love looked like. Love has a look; even mercy and faithfulness has a look when He wants it to have a look. You see and feel it. You experience.

After going through His virtues, He then closed all of that down, and He let me begin to feel the nature and the character of evil, and as evil began to rise and become pre-eminent in my consciousness, I could feel the spirit of murder. I could feel the spirit of hate. I was like walking down the streets of Harlem with gang wars all around me. I could feel the spirit of murder; I could feel the spirits of hate, jealousy and anger—the personification of these things all around me. I don’t know how else to say it except it was as though I was walking down the streets of Harlem, gang wars happening all around me. Passions of the flesh and soul seemed to be coming out of the very walls of the buildings, coming up from the very street and the sidewalk, coming down from the very heavens, surrounded by bitterness, unforgiveness, and jealousy; all of these horrible, dangerous, passions seemed to clothe me. I felt so afraid—I said, “Lord, please take this away; I don’t know why you’re showing me this.” I was so afraid! Suddenly, Jesus said, “Have you had enough?” I said, “What is it? What is it you’re trying to show me?” He said, “This is the spirit of the world.” I said, “Lord, please deliver me from this, this is frightening to me.”

And then He began to cause that to dissipate and again He began to emanate, one at a time, His virtues.

Drawn to the beauty of His virtues, I began to arise and go to Him. I lifted off my bed, up through the roof, to meet Him where He was. I was so compellingly drawn by the beauty of His virtues I could not help myself.

Now listen to me, God is calling you to truth. He is calling you to come out of the world. Satan makes the world look so good, doesn’t he? He makes it look so inviting; titillating your senses, titillating your passions, that you follow him. He shows you one thing, and you think, I’ve got to have that, and you think about it and think about it until finally you go down and buy it. He shows you another thing, and you start lusting after that. You are like a pinball in a pinball machine being shot back and forth, lusting after this and lusting after that, and it all looks so beautiful. I just have to have some of that cake. You think, I’ve never heard of rocky-road cake before. Just a little piece—I wonder where I could go to get it. You start hungering for something you’ve never tasted before. Maybe not rocky-road cake, maybe strawberry shortcake; you do not know what you’re hungering for, but you just have to have it. And after you have it, you may love it or hate it, but you are already onto wanting the next thing. Satan makes it all look so good, appealing, and may I say, right? He teaches you how to love this, and He teaches you how to hate this. He teaches you how to want this, and He teaches you how to despise this, and he works very hard at it. The spirit of the world is ever working to keep you in bondage to that darkness, and he succeeds.

But God is calling you to the light of truth. What is truth? The truth is that you are born of God. You are no longer a child of the devil. You are born of God, and your life is now springing from a new flow, a new fountain. That life is springing from the life of Jesus Christ Himself, and it’s not something you’re to visit occasionally – just come to church, feel the spirit and think: I want that life, I want what that life feels like. He doesn’t want you to visit it occasionally. Jesus wants you to come out of the deception that tells you that you have to have and live by the passions of your soul, flesh and mind. He wants you to come into the truth where you’re living by the passions of Jesus Christ; the passions of love, goodness, gentleness, kindness, joy, faith; the passions of a higher reality where you’re ruling and reigning over the one who wants to rule and reign over you. He wants you to live in the fountain of truth; He wants you to stand under the waterfall of glorious light where you're ever transformed, transfigured into the image of Christ. You were never called to live on the fence between deception and truth, dipping your toes here for a while, dipping your toes there for a while. By doing this you are constantly keeping your heart hard and indifferent to what Christ is. You don’t know or realize that. Every time you yield to the passions of your soul, yield to the passions of your flesh, you are hardening your heart and you by choice are making your heart indifferent to the life of Christ to which you’ve been called.

Is that where you want to live? Is that where you want to go? Jesus said that the Spirit of truth would come, and He would lead you into all truth. How long have you been saved? Five years? Ten years? Twenty years? Fifty years? And how deeply in the truth do you walk? I’m feeling the tears of the Lord Jesus Christ on my heart. How much of your time and your energies has been given to follow after the passions that to you are illegal? The passions of your soul—the passions of your flesh; how much of your energies in the last ten, twenty, thirty, forty years that you have been saved has been spent on the things that pull you away from truth, pull you away from Jesus? How much of you belongs to you instead of Him? I’m feeling the groaning of the spirit because it’s all too true. Satan dazzles, and we bite—he sets before us the dainty morsels, and we chew and desire more until the life of our spirit is brought down in utter subjection to the passions of our soul and we cannot make the ascent.

Don’t you know that there is life so high and so beautiful, so powerful that when you look at the lovely picture of Jesus Christ walking with His disciples among men—isn’t there something in that life that causes you to crave Him? Isn’t there something so extraordinarily beautiful that makes you want to follow Him? Doesn’t it provoke something in your heart that says if He were here today you would leave everything and follow Him? The Father designed the Gospels to give us a living picture of what it means to walk with God. The old covenant was written for us, pointing its finger at the coming Messiah, the coming holy one that would teach us how to walk with God. The new covenant rehearses, teaches, emphasizes, and describes what we saw in living color; tells us how to get there. And there, embodied in the Gospels, not only did He walk, but He spoke. He taught us and gave us the words that teach us how to get away from the world and to walk in God. Shake yourself awake. Paul said to fan the flame. You can’t just sit still and expect the Spirit to do it; you must fan the flame and shake yourself awake. The Bible said to shake of the dust, sleep, and slumber (Isaiah 52:2, Eph 5:14). You must do the shaking! You must command your soul to rise and embrace the truth, embrace the life, and embrace Christ. You must command your soul to be awakened, and you must do it now!

You can’t keep sleeping at the foot of truth and expect yourself to rise in the strength and the wholeness of the One who bought your soul. Neither can you sit still in slumber and expect Him to do it for you because He does not. You are the one who opens the doors of your heart to the Holy Spirit and says: Come in. I want You to shake everything that You can shake, Lord, because I want every compartment of this heart to belong to You!

You are the one that has to do it. He’s not going to come and barge in the door while you sleep at the foot of truth. Someone used to work for me; every time our team would go into prayer, this person would go to sleep. I would tell this person, if feel the desire to sleep, then get up and walk, but don’t sleep when you should be praying. If you have to go stand on the edge of the bathtub, then do it. Do whatever you have to do to keep yourself awake because today, sleeping is the most serious mistake you could ever make. It’s never been more necessary to wake up.

In His Amazing Love,
Nita Johnson