Greetings,
Yesterday I was at Everyone’s church in Mt. Vernon, Washington. We had a great time together and we renewed our focus on God’s presence, God’s counsel, God’s life through us to others, and God’s desires given to us. This is our focus for 2017. God’s grace is working in our lives and we are the people of God. We are His family and good things are being worked out in our lives.
God takes what the enemy intended for evil in our lives and He turns it for good. I don’t believe that He is not in control of every detail; I believe that He is in charge of every detail. He is not a distant God who does not want a relationship with human beings. He has not just simply sovereignly determine the future. He has determined the future with an intimate relationship with a wonderful family. In this process of grace, the internal realities of God kingdom have to manifest. So, we face pressure, but we persevere. We are moving beyond the place of internal Passover to internal Pentecost. We are moving to ultimately know internal Tabernacles. God is our God, we are God’s people, and we live together with Him in all things.
God wants us to know in our hearts that church is not a place we go, it is something we are. We don’t just go there for training or Sunday service. We are the church! We are each part of the Provers 31 woman. We know who our Husband is. We are dealing in the real-estate of the earth on behalf of our family name. We carry the family name; the family character, nature, way, power, and authority. We are the church. We are each sons and daughters. We are overcomers. We are facing pressure and we are finding grace to cheerfully endure. We are cheerfully enduring and the testimony of Christ within us is transforming our hearts and our minds. The power of God in us is stronger than the pressure that is against us and what is manifesting is character from within. That character is the family of God character. Wow! That is not like us! It is a gift. It is not a discipline of the flesh; it is a transformation of the flesh. Wow! We are becoming loving! We are becoming merciful! It is a transformation in our hearts and minds by the power of God’s grace. We used to want to kill them, but now life within us is killing what wants to kill! We are changing from within! We are finding grace. We are persevering and character is manifesting and then we see hope. It is something inside of us. It is manifesting!
1 Peter 1:13 Therefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and rest your hope fully upon the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ;
In this verse, Peter is talking to believers; human beings who have discovered that God loves them. They are not better than other human beings, they have just discovered God’s love. This verse implies that the loins are in the mind. It implies that our future is in our thinking. The world does not gird up the loins of their mind. The world doesn’t have their loins in their mind, they have their mind in their loins. In other words, their future is in the desires of their flesh. They can even have a good intention and a good heart, but they do not put their hope in what God can do in them. They see their future as dependent upon their own human abilities. Their future is determined by what they think, they can do, or what they want to do. God knows that there is a better way. He knows that each of us are good at doing what we want to and not so good at what we are told to do. This is why He wants to put His life-giving desires within our hearts and minds. Those with religious thinking seek to impose rules upon themselves and upon others to bind their desires in some way. Law makes slaves out of all of us even though it is filled with good ideas and good commands. It turns us into slaves. It causes our view of God to change. Law alone causes us to think that God is a Master. It causes us to think that God needs things from us. He needs us to love Him. He needs us to worship Him. He needs us to act right. He needs us to obey. God does not need any of those things from us. When we do those things, it doesn’t change who He is and when we don’t do those things it still doesn’t change who He is. When we obey Him, He doesn’t love us more and when we disobey Him, He doesn’t love us less. I know this is true, because when we were sinners He died for us. When everyone was as bad as they could be, He didn’t love us less. It was not upon the cross that He loved us. It was before the cross that He loved us, therefore He was willing to embrace the cross because He loved us. Sin never created a problem for God towards us, it created a problem from us towards Him. Sin prevented us from seeing God for who He is and thus we could never come to Him and become who we were meant to be. We were unholy because we lived separate from Him. Living with Him would transform our lives to become holy as He is. Sin prevented us from seeing who we really are. On our best day we perceived that we were servants and God is a Master, but He never saw us as servants and Himself as a Master. He saw us as children and for this He sent His Son to redeem us from our fallen state of thinking. Our future is only found through Christ in us and Christ in us will empower the thinking of our hearts and minds to be that of children of a Father who loves us. This is the environment of grace and it creates an atmosphere of life for who we are meant to be. It is not about what we can do for Him. It is about who we are in Him.
Blessings,
Ted J. Hanson
