What does this mean to you?

It’s early Monday morning February 1, 2010 and the Lord is speaking to me about our upcoming bible lesson to be taught at Greater Life Church in Renton on February 7th. We have covered, for the past few weeks, the subject Perception and The Believer, and we are to continue with Perception and the Believers Thoughts in the weeks to come. I’ve asked Jesus Christ to give me His perception on this topic and He is working. Since that time I have been going through some difficulties with my own thoughts and have found myself in a position where I am questioning my life.

How did I get here? As I look back the one thing that changed in my life is the amount of prayer, not the lack of prayer, but the amount. Why am I here Lord. Why suddenly I’m here? To learn about perception and the believers thoughts! He says. The secrets to the visions of Jesus Christ, the consistency and strength is found in the amount of praying that we do.

People who pray little, will, from time to time, experience bits and pieces of His glory. But when you pray always, Jesus Christ will show you things that the mind and literature cannot comprehend.

God is righteousness, there is no sin or evil in him and therefore He cannot tempt us with evil. Instead, as James affirmed, every man is tempted when he is drawn away of His own lusts and entices. My God, my God! the Holy Ghost is so needed.

One thing that I’ve discovered about Christ is that when you want to learn truth you get it by going through and battling your own perceptions and ideas. In our trials we must capture the perception of God and He will show you while you’re in the storm, what is real and what is an illusion. Truth doesn’t come through literature, it comes through the life giver, the Holy Ghost, the Christ, the Tree of Life.

When we are sick, our perceptions and experiences answers us. They speak to what we are feeling and tell us how we are to respond. Those ideas conflict with the Word of God and the accomplishments of the Cross of Christ. Sickness weakens us, affects the mind and thoughts and during these times we need the prayers of others to help us through.

What we feel when we are sickly, what we say to ourselves is an example of ideas and processes that Jesus Christ came to transform. With His strips we are healed, by His stripes we are… Sickness will contradict the ideas of God every time.

Having a renewed mind and to know truth, doesn’t come through comprehension, memorization of scripture or spending time studying. They will do little for us when we are sick. It’s what we know about God, what we have captured through our senses about Him, they will help us. Those are the experiences that we draw from, those are the experiences that will destroy the work of sin. If we do nothing to deal with those ideas, opinions and thoughts; we will doubt God and sin replaces righteousness.

He came to destroy the work of sin. Sin is embedded in our memories. Sin from our past formed our opinions, ideas, concepts and perceptions. This is what Paul meant when He says, Eph 2:3 we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh… Our memories tell us how to act, to respond in crisis and normal conditions. Our thoughts tell us what we are and what limitations we have. They tell us who God is and what he isn’t and what He is willing to do for us.

It is natural for us to turn to people, books, audio, DVD’s and CD’s to help us form our perceptions of truth. That’s how we are made. But God has changed all that, now that we are saved. Blessed is the man that walked not in the counsel of the ungodly… This is not the way of the Holy Ghost. It is our way. It is how we are taught to learn. We’ve done it that way since man sinned against God. Our thoughts will always stand in opposition to God.

God changes us in grace by moving us through things that oppose His will, such as our thoughts and perceptions. God destroys perceptions, ideas and opinions that we perceive to be truth by carrying us through new experiences in the Holy Ghost. Nothing of God can be learned by reasoning, but by faith.

Peter, when he walked on water, learned something about trust and the perception of God for a moment, but that was enough to destroy science and to shake our thoughts. Because we are not partakers of that experience, our thoughts immediately discount it, or to attempt to insert our ideas or opinions into the story.

But underneath something happened to Peter, that didn’t happen to those who watched and that’s what we forget.

The observers was not affected by Peters experience the same as Peter. He walked, they sat in the boat. Now image the other disciples preaching how to walk on water; what impact will the message have? It will sound like a fantasy, a story to tell a child at night. It’s meaningless in the mouth of an observer.

Now, let Peter tell the story. He’ll describe what he felt, saw, tasted, smelled, and heard with great authority. His testimony will have power behind it. He was first partakers and now Peter can share. Why? Because he walked on water!

Now, let’s look at this another way. The observers got something too. They were at the event. Although they didn’t experience the walking on the water experience as Peter did, they however, did see something that shook them. What they felt, saw, tasted, smelled and heard impact them differently individually, but they had a story that they could tell. Unlike our story by reading it. This is why God destroyed the wisdom of the wise. They turn to literature, information and use their perspectives to process or interpret what God says.

Think about this for a moment. We, unlike Peter, didn’t walk on water and also, we, unlike the other disciples, did not see Peter walk. We didn’t feel the wind blow, feel the ship rise and fall in the waves and watch as Peter walked toward Jesus. We are mere readers left to our own ideas, experiences and perceptions about Peter and the disciples experience. What do we have in our lives that can help us connect to Peter? Nothing! So why preach it. Why are we preaching anything that we have not experienced? We become liars when we do preach what we have not lived.

Many of the messages that I’ve heard preached by clergy have described Peters experience as a failure. They hear the words of Jesus and immediately their thoughts begin to fill in the gaps or missing information. I see it differently. He walked on water people! Even if it was for a few minutes. Peter got something out of that experience that could never be told by reading or observing. Peter is qualified. We are not!

God doesn’t call preachers and ask them to learn from literature or other men. He tried that in times of old. He prophecied that He would do it differently in these last days. That He will come on the inside and make His abode within us. That we will be His people and the sheep of His pasture.

What Peter experienced could never be taken from him. How he got there and was able to walk on water is something that cannot be learned from literature, memorization or hearing a story told by others. How it happened cannot be comprehended in our mind. Our thoughts cannot go there. Only people who have walked on water would be able to stand with Peter and tell the story accurately, descriptively and with power.

God understands that the greatest expressions and life changing ideas come through living them; our testimonies are not formed through reading, memorizing and all those things that the mind believes is important. I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and bring to nothing….

I am reminded that the original 12 along with the other brethren at Pentecost didn’t go to school to learn about God. God fill them with Himself as He promised, and changed them by taking control. That experience alone can only be told by the individuals whom Jesus Christ spoke through and the crowd who heard them says, that these are unlearned individuals, farmers, house wives, fishers… As observers, they relied on the collection of their past experiences and their senses to determine what was happening and how they should conclude.

If we remain observers of the Word of God, hearers of the Word of God and not partakers of the Holy Ghost. Then we do not qualify nor do we have the authority to speak on a given subject.

Denominations, preachers, laity and nonbelievers argue and fight over ideas and opinions

Our perceptions and thoughts play a key role, by design, in forming us into functional individuals. When a individual’s senses are destroyed, their learning in this world ends and as we grow older and our senses grown dim, we are less likely to interact with the world around us as we did when we were children. This is the concept that Paul shared with us about interacting with the World, our senses must be dim to this world in order for us to realize truth. Truth is not something borne in us. Truth doesn’t come from us, it comes to us. We grown in this world by learning. Our senses are the doorway, our experiences are our builders, carpenters and planners that collect and put these things together in our mind. Our experiences hold us together and gives us the abilities to respond to our environment. Remove the experiences and you remove the possibilities for a person to function. Remove the memories and experiences of how to sin and you remove the function to sin. That’s the job of the Holy Ghost. To make us do things differently, to think differently and to act differently.

What a child of God needs to understand is that we are caught between two worlds. The Kingdom of Heaven and the Kingdoms of this World. We interact with this world through our senses, we judge and respond to this world after we have processed what we have gathered about our surroundings.

We need to silence sin. Sin is silenced when we have, not read or memorized righteousness, but have become partakers. We enough of our past has been overshadowed by the Holy Ghost, then the possibilities of sinning against God grows dim. John said, if we have His seed in us, then we cannot sin, because there is no sin in Him.