Greetings;
Today is the last day of the year! I hope you had a great Christmas and you are ready for a new year and a new season of experiencing God’s life! Pastor Jonathan chanllanged us yesterday to hear a single word from God for 2019. Receive the word, believe the word, and become the word! What word does God say you will be in 2019? What I thought was a year of “testing”, God saw as a year of hope. I am ready to become a word of faith to my world!.
God loved the world so much that He sent His only begotten Son to make a way for us to be reconciled to God with a spirit-to-Spirit connection from within. Christ within us is the hope of glory. That hope is not merely a hope of going to heaven when we die, but the hope of heaven’s influence in our lives while we journey through this life upon the earth. The real issue of redemption is a redemption of Adam and Eve. The original mandate was to be fruitful, multiply, fill, subdue, and have dominion. A man and a woman in the likeness and image of God is the means by which the mandate is fulfilled. God is neither man or woman, but the masculine and feminine nature of humanity reveals who He is in His likeness and image. A relationship of men and women has the ability to produce life in a generational way. The way of relationship in the kingdom of heaven cannot just be something that gives each one us love. It has to produce life that is a testimony of inheritance and destiny. Anything that God put in the earth of humanity that produces life is a testimony of spirit, soul, and body. The human spirit, soul, and body has to be able to expand life in the dimensions of spirit, soul, and the natural. I believe that for this reason, the identity of a man and woman in marriage is huge.
In the original creation Eve was deceived and then Adam ate the fruit with Eve and the result was man sinned. The issue was a disconnection from God’s likeness and image in the form of mankind, male and female. This was not just a one-time action. It was a disconnection from God for a perpetual and continual disconnection from God in the form of what was meant to be the family of God in the earth. In the process of the fall of mankind, Eve was deceived and then Adam sinned. When Adam sinned, Eve sinned, because they were one flesh. It started with a deception on the part of Eve. The serpent said; Did God really say?
The apostle Paul was concerned that believers in the church could be deceived, even as Eve was deceived. Eve was taking things that God had said and thinking that maybe that is not what He really said. When Jesus came to redeem humanity, He came as eternal Adam and He was looking to restore eternal Eve, which is the body of Christ made of men and women. The body of Christ consists of people who have Christ in their hearts and who live for the purpose of the inheritance of Christ in their world. Their purpose is not just to go to heaven when they die, but to bring heavenly things into the earth. Our Adam, Jesus, never ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Our headship, our Adam, cannot be deceived. We are going to go to heaven when we die if we are joined to Him, but what about our journey here upon the earth? It is possible for us to be deceived. Our Adam will cover us with His love, but will our deception affect our ability to be the life-birthing womb of God in the earth? Paul wrote to the church of Corinth that if they received a different Jesus, or a different good news (a different gospel), or a different spirit, they may well have to put up with it.
2 Corinthians 11: 3 But I fear, lest somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. 4 For if he who comes preaches another Jesus whom we have not preached, or if you receive a different spirit which you have not received, or a different gospel which you have not accepted—you may well put up with it!
It is possible to be a Christian and accept things that are the ways of the world and live in this life with something less than what we were supposed to live with and for? To understand this, we have to understand the words. The word Jesus means, God saves. He is our salvation in every situation. He is the food we need, the air we breath, the forgiveness we need, the healing we need, the eternal life we need, the resurrection from the dead we need and any other thing that we depend upon for life in this world. Jesus is our salvation in every situation. No one will likely makes a plan and says, I think I will try a different Jesus. It is called deception. If I embrace something from my past, something worldly, and I say I cannot be changed, I am embracing that worldly way as my salvation. My life becomes something that is bound to the past or to the world around me. My confession becomes, this is what I am, this is the only thing I want, this is my way to salvation, and this thing becomes a different Jesus in my life. If you tell me I have to change, I hear what you say to me as bad news. Not changing is good news to me. With this type of thinking there is a spirit, a different spirit than the life-transforming Spirit of God. I still have the Holy Spirit, but I have accepted another spirit to influence my soul in a way that binds my soul from hearing God’s Spirit to my spirit from within.
Christ is one with us in our spirits, but other spirits don’t attach to our spirits. They attach to our souls. When we choose to believe another spirit, we become double minded. We have God’s way in us and then we have other things as well. I believe that homosexuality can be like that. You can still go to heaven when you die. The blessing of God can be upon you as an I love you blessing, like the I love you as a little child. You are loved, but you are not participating in the full inheritance that God has for you as a son or daughter of God.
As a leader, I believe I have a responsibly to receive all people as little children, but I also have a responsibility to help them grow in understanding and maturity to overcome things they need to overcome. As a father I have the responsibly to inspire my children to become fathers and mothers. I have the responsibility of helping them come to maturity so they too can live for the sake of others.
I have not really answered the full dimensions of the questions of homosexuality, but I am challenging all of us to be loved and to overcome. We must love all people the same. We do not condone the things that produce death, nor do we seek to kill those who are already bound in some form of death in their lives. We do not condemn people who are deceived, but we do live to help them find freedom from their deception. We seek ways to help them grow in a relationship with God. Any form of law will not change them, it will only kill them. Only grace can change them. Christ inside of them is the only hope of glory. This is not just a hope to go to heaven when they die, but a hope to see that what cannot change today will change in the generations of their future.
Blessings,
Ted J. Hanson
