My spiritual journey… so far

In this post Im completely skipping the emotional journey and healing etc and just giving the highlights of my spiritual journey as a Christian in recent years.

This is an overview of my journey from the time when I came to the clear conclusion that Jesus Christ IS the Way, the Truth and the Life… and my journey after that.

The Holy Spirit has been writing this post in me for several weeks. Today it has been put on paper. I can find more or less 8 stages in my recent spiritual walk

1. Discovery of Paul’s epistles
2. Would I walk by faith or by sight?
3. Discovery of the new covenant
4. The discovery… of myself… in Him
5. AFTER the cross
6. The finished work of Jesus Christ
7. The Kingdom HAS come here on Earth
8. And beyond…

So let’s dive in…

1. Discovery of Paul’s epistles

One day the Holy Spirit once said to me “if you could talk to anyone in history – except for Jesus Christ – who would it be. After a bit of thinking I answered “Paul, because he has the best overview of history and the future”. And within a moment I realised THATS why God had Paul write all those books, letter and epistles… to record what he had learned.

I literally finished my coffee and rushed home to begin reading what he had written, because God had used Paul to write it for hungry people just like me!

2. Would I walk by faith or by sight?

Then some time later, I remember one specific day, I was under intense spiritual opposition and God said to me to sit in a chair, I did, and He said to turn to Col 2:14-15…

¹⁴ having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.

¹⁵ And having disarmed the powers and authorities,

he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. – Col 2:14-15

and He flat out said to me… is this true or not?

Now bear in mind… that verse says HE DID IT… past tense… and if I looked at my life and nightly terror I was going through, it didnt seem to be true… but there it was in scripture.

Would I believe something that wasnt true? Or was it true but Im not believing so Im not seeing? God was clear “is that true? yes or no?”

The powers and principalities DID NOT seem disarmed at that time in my life. Anything but!

Would I walk by sight or by faith?

I knew if I denied what Jesus Christ did for me on His cross then I would be in FAR WORSE trouble than I was. So I said “yes its true”. I accepted His sacrifice for me. I put on the new and I discarded the old. I began the process of renewing my mind… be renewed in YOUR mind.

3. Discovery of the new covenant

As I believe, I received. Now many years later the battle is almost – but not yet – won. But I just keep putting on what Jesus Christ did for me, and I keep learning to overcome – and we keep winning over time.

What Paul wrote was nothing like what I had been taught in church. That discovery made me annoyed, but it wasn’t surprising. Paul knew the secrets to God’s power, but the church is largely clueless… and WORSE… it is unashamed of it’s cluelessness.

Over time in my countless hours of studies I noticed…

• that Paul (and the NT in general) mention the word “faith” over 200 times, whereas the OT only uses it twice
• that Paul speaks about everything as past tense, completed, done whereas all the prophets spoke about the Messiah coming in future to do those things.

I made a note of all the recurring themes I discovered in Jesus Christ’s teachings which I could find in Paul’s teachings and also which were in the OT.

The test and the confirmation.

I felt waaaay out there. I didnt know anyone else who thought even remotely like this.

So I took these verses and what it seemed to be saying and showed them to Darryl… the most influential man in my life at that time… and he didnt like it. I showed it to a messianic man in the congregation and he called it heresy.

Uh-oh. But I could see these things clearly in scripture. It was undeniable. I checked, rechecked and double checked. It was there. That’s what it says. Would I believe?

Then I showed it to Roma… one of the two most influential women in my life at that time… and she said “oh this is wonderful new covenant theology!”  I said “what is the new covenant?” and she said “google it”.

Shortly after that I discovered Jeremiah and then I understood the last supper and Jesus Christ Himself, His blood and body, WAS the new covenant.

What I had researched in scripture was gloriously confirmed by even more important scripture.

I can tell you that when I abandoned ANY effort to make myself righteous and I decided to depend wholly and entirely on Jesus Christ’s all sufficient sacrifice to make me righteous (NO MATTER what addiction I had raging at the time) the battle in my life increased greatly.

The enemy knew I would get free if I held onto Jesus Christ in this new way… so the battle became even more intense. Darryl once had a word for me and it was “your life has been a war zone” and it was true. But now that I had found the exit, the Door, the Way, the Truth, the Life… the war increased in intensity.

4. The discovery… of myself… in Him

At that time I read only two translations of the bible… Amplified and NLT.

In the NLT every time I read Jesus’ words I kept noticing Him saying these words in scripture over and over… I in you, you in me, I in them… and eventually it was all I could see – particularly in the NLT. I underlined it wherever I saw it and then I counted how many times I found it… a lot!

I began to make videos of the scriptures that I found and you can view them on my YouTube. This is the original one.

I hid in Him by faith and the raging war over my soul seemed to be unable to touch me any more. I would lie there and declare the truth of scripture and the war would be raging outside but not touching me.

I had found the Ps 91 wings, the shelter, the secret place – it was and is being IN Jesus Christ.

Psalm 91 – shelter you under His wings

5. AFTER the cross

But God had more in store for me. He didnt only want me to survive, He wanted me to learn to be an overcomer.

One day He told me to go get an A2 size white cardboard and get some different colour marker pens. I went, got them and came back. I sat down. He said to write all that I know as a timeline up to the cross.

Then when I had written down the things I had learned, He said to me “turn the cardboard over and write what you know about AFTER the cross” and I literally knew nothing. He had made a new point… that I knew nothing about what happened after the cross.

I learned many new things…

• I am seated with Him in Heavenly places
• Death has no hold on Him… nor on me
• He made all things new
• He poured out the Holy Spirit ON ALL flesh (not just on believers)
• He has set sin aside and abolished it
• He has annulled death

and so much more. You can read the list of scriptures that I began to build up.

Over time I began to build up a mental picture of the journey.

Around this time I had many intimate visions of Him in me, and me in Him.

I went through terrible times of trial and I learned to take spiritual refuge in Him by faith. In other words I learned to declare the truth and then I would receive it shortly after that. Although some things only changed slowly, others changed quickly.

I began to see these verses in scripture: By tribulations, violence, struggle, wrestling… we enter the Kingdom of God and my journey made more sense. Getting into the Kingdom of God… not just being saved… was going to take effort… and the main effort is to believe, to have faith.

6. The finished work of Jesus Christ

As I discovered the full story of His perfect walk, His sacrifice, His resurrection and the results of all of that I began to see His words “it is finished” as truth. I began to understand why Jesus Christ said clearly and plainly that those years were THE  END OF THE AGE.

Here are two scriptures that could change the world as we know it IF we just believed it…

The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work. – 1 John 3:8

so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death–that is, the devil – Heb 2:14

I began to understand the mental shift that Paul had made, which we need to make, to see these things as finished, complete, done, over.

Most importantly I began to understand our role in this mystical drama… our role is to have faith, to receive by faith. It is finished and simply waiting to be received.

The confirmation.

Once again I felt waaaay out there. I didnt know anyone else who thought even remotely like this. Until one day I was invited to hear a visiting healer talk. I usually pay no attention whatsoever to these people because they always seem to sell something they dont themselves have. The speaker was Curry Blake.

I was gob smacked. Yes people came in sick and they left sick. And it upset me no end to see that. But what I heard Curry teach was what I had been discovering. And there it all was, written down, researched and being taught like it was old news.

And it was old news! Curry was teaching what John G. Lake had been teaching in the early 1900s!!!

Then in 2014 I went to a Terraforming conference and I discovered that there are several hundred people going to places and regions and declaring God’s words there and changing the spiritual atmosphere. I chatted to the two founders that God is using in that movement and asked them when this revelation came to them and they answered in 2006. That is the same year I received more or less the same revelation… and blogged it here… although the revelations I have received since are beyond what they are teaching… because the next revelation that I received is “The Kingdom HAS come here on Earth”.

But regardless… once again I thought I was pioneering all alone and then I found hundreds of people doing the same thing. PRAISE GOD!!!

7. The Kingdom HAS come here on Earth

Emboldened I continued to do my best to search the scriptures and to always apply one golden rule which had served me well in the past 10+ years or so… to only trust something new that I have found IF

1. I can see it promised by the OT (future tense)
2. I can see Paul confirming it has happened (past tense)
3. I can see Jesus Christ saying that He will do it shortly, or if He was speaking after His resurrection that He has done it

So I trudged on, and I began to read more and more into the original Hebrew and Greek to find the tenses and the underlying meanings. It boggled my mind how terribly inaccurate most of our translations are. It seems the translators are heavily influenced by what they believe, rather than by what the scripture actually says!!

For example in the Lords Prayer Jesus teaches us to say “Thy kingdom come G2064.”

Throughout my whole life I’ve heard people pray that in this way “Your Kingdom come… at some time… in the future… dear Lord please don’t let it take too long to come!” But that word “come G2064″ is not in the future tense. Its not even in the present tense. Its past tense… meaning… when you say these words of the prayer you are declaring that it HAS arrived.

I realised that we have been gypped. Its no wonder our churches are devoid of power but full of knowledge and teaching… we dont know what Jesus Christ has done on the cross!

And so much more… when Jesus Christ said that He will give us the KEYS to the Kingdom of God… or the Kingdom of Heaven… loosing it here on Earth, He actually DID give us those keys in the very next breath.

¹⁹ I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven;

and whatever you bind (declare to be improper and unlawful) on earth must be what is already bound in heaven;

and whatever you loose (declare lawful) on earthmust be what is already loosed in heaven. – Matt 16:21

Why oh why are we not loosing the Kingdom of Heaven in our churches? Why arent we teaching congregants to loose the Kingdom of Heaven in our homes? We are like the pharisees… we refuse to go in AND we wont let anyone else go in EITHER!

The confirmation.

But once again I felt all alone with this understanding… I didnt know anyone else who was teaching this. By now I was feeling ok with discovering things in scripture, if I was careful to follow my golden rule.

And indeed not only had Jesus Christ said that the Kingdom HAD come in His Lord’s Prayer, but in fact He said in the last supper that it will come when He drinks from the fruit of the vine (which He did on the cross) and whats more, the Kingdom actually manifested on Earth in Mark 9.

And then I bumped into teaching by Bill Johnson (for example this one) and he took what I thought I had pioneered and showed me that many other people were already there and had fleshed the teaching out a lot. I just scooped it all up and  enjoyed it.

8. And beyond…

And yes there is a beyond and God is showing it to me. I may pioneer again cutting and slicing through the thick bushes, beating a path heroically… and then after a time break through to an open bit of land and find a bunch of people camping and having picnics there for 100 years!

Thats what it repeatedly feels like to me… I dig into scripture and find these things, declare them, believe them, get tested and go through sifting over them… and then suddenly find a bunch of people already know this stuff and have been teaching it for a while. Hehehe.

I hope this has helped you in your journey in some way. God bless you!