23. Designed by Accusation

Now we come to the main articulation we have been seeking, and that is, how is the soul of any believer in Jesus designed specifically by the accusation of the evil one. We are not concerned, in this discussion, with “original sin,” or with the false story of the unregenerate.  More than that, though we start with the “baby Christian” state, we want to move well beyond it.

In other words, in looking at the specifics of this horrific and unnecessary design of a Christian soul, I want to use myself as my source of study and within my years from around age 21 to around age 41. 

The soul has NO “life” of its own. It is not substance at all. The soul is a story of words that exists inside of the human spirit which is the faculty in us that provides self-awareness. The soul is appearance only. That does not mean unimportant; our souls are VERY important to God and to His expression, that’s why He made us to be living souls.

Here is the point: the soul can change very, very easily. – Be transformed by the renewing of your minds.

It’s not hard at all to change your mind. Changing your mind happens by the speaking of your voice. Nonetheless, the rule of the serpent’s words in Nicene theology blocks out the speaking of Christ and teaches every Christian to speak accusation only.

Now, we have used the term “a false self,” but we actually mean a “fake self.” We must never think that the “false self” is something. It is imagination only. To “get rid of” the fake self would be like “getting rid of Santa Claus.” Who, in their right mind, would give any thought or energy to “getting rid of” something that does not exist.

And so the “fake self” is nothing other than a vast series of thoughts that are not true. Yet those untrue thoughts, that is, facts and ideas held in the mind, are so extraordinary to the one who dreamed them up, that letting go of their fantasy world seems a bit much to them.

Few people can create fantasy worlds in their minds better than I can. I read Tolkien first at age 12, and I have been creating my own VAST fantasy worlds ever since. Yet at the same time, I was designing houses and leading crews of men in their construction. Never once have I ever confused my made-up dream worlds with practical reality.

It is only in recent years that it has dawned on me that the majority of people who do not fantasize like I do also are unable to separate their fantasy worlds from reality.

Speaking Christ your life is real, for you have always and only been found inside the Pro-Knowing of God. Imagining yourself to be your own source, your own substance, a “human nature” separate from God, is pure mind-games.

You don’t have to “get rid of” anything in putting on the Lord Jesus Christ. You simply speak Christ, and your thoughts come into alignment with what is already true inside of God.

It is for this reason that we say, over and over, that Christ must be all first before anything NOT Christ could ever vanish away. Not-Christ in a Christian is 100% the product of the human mental capacity of fantasizing. Yet what great worlds we have constructed in our day dreams!

God alone is and has always been our substance and our source. We are and have always been coming out of God, out of His thoughts concerning us, and from nowhere else.

Because the fake human imagination of being one’s own entity separate from God is such a vast construction, it would be a huge mistake to try to “deconstruct” such a fantasy. In order to understand how it works, then, we will “construct” the false self rather than “deconstruct” it.

In other words, let’s start with Christian E, the “person” to whom I wrote Knowing Jesus as He Is. This is a person who has ZERO knowledge of Christianity before the moment he is born again and thus, being born again, he is a clean slate in his thinking, ready to receive into his mind all of God’s thoughts concerning him.

EXCEPT – we move Christian E out of our present fellowship inside of Christ our life and into a Nicene Christian church. He sits there in the pew, eager and waiting to receive Christ Jesus written all through the pathways of his mind and heart.

The pastor stands behind the pulpit, says, “Open your Bibles,” and reads a passage, any passage at all will do the trick. Then he says (in one form or another, even implied without words), “What do these words teach us about the Christian life?”

In that very moment the mind of our new believer in Christ, Christian E, is teetering on the edge of the abyss by the implications of what he has just heard. But here is Christian E’s problem, he trusts the pastor, he trusts the pastor’s kind and thoughtful heart and the anointing of the Spirit that is evident upon him.

What else is he to do?

The Bible – this written form of the Lord Jesus Christ, meant to enter into Christian E through his faith, through “Let it be to me,” to become Jesus Himself alive in Christian E’s heart, fulfilling all that God means by what He says, that is, God’s thoughts becoming Christian E – this Bible is suddenly transformed, as by a magician’s wand, into a barrier of death standing in-between Christian E and a suddenly far-away God.

Yet we must place this FACT in our understanding of Christian E. Jesus DOES live in his heart, and God IS directing his steps inside of love. Yet against that reality, we must also remember that what is doesn’t really count for Christian E in the present moment. Life is not God, per se; life is knowing God.

The danger for Christian E is not any kind of “removal” from the God in whom he lives nor any “removal” of Jesus from his heart. The danger is a veil of nonsense threatening to come down over his knowing so that he might live for years inside a Christian hades that need not be.

Yet should Christian E possess a true heart, in spite of the preacher having turned the Bible into a barrier between him and Jesus, he will find over time that “figuring out” the Bible just doesn’t seem right, and so, instead, he will hide God’s words from Genesis to Revelation deep inside his heart, even though he cannot yet know what they might really mean.

Now, there is one huge difference between Christian E and Eve in the garden. Eve did not know sin or death or falling short. Those things did not exist. Accusation could not have meant anything to her for she was only pure and holy.

Christian E, however, has known the full measure of falling short. Yet the moment he asked Jesus into his heart, all of that was cleansed away. In that moment he was pure and holy, just like Eve – only – he did not know that in his mind. He knew it in his heart and spirit, but not in his mind, for no one had yet taught him what Christ means.

And so the psychology of the serpent’s layout of which phrases to use, in order to drive Christian E as far into the fantastical imaginings of a “Christian sinful nature” as he could, would vary from the layout in the garden. Nonetheless, all of the same elements will be present in order to enable Christian E to fantasize himself as being something other than Father revealed.

But what is the force driving Christian E into creating an imaginary “Christian world” in which to know himself? The force is not the pastor, rather it is the congregation of dear and kind Christian people all around him. – What will they think of me?

As I completed “Opposing the Ten,” I see now so clearly what sin is all about.

Let me refer to nothing except my own self, my remembrance of my own actions. Every single time I did or said or thought something that was wicked, one thing only was going on inside my perception. I did not like something in my circumstances, and so I used my own power in an attempt to alter my circumstances.

Is that not why the Christian husband says unkind things to his wife? Is that not why, as a senior in school, that I kicked that freshman where I should not have kicked him? Same thing. I perceive something in my circumstances I don’t like, and I seek to change it with my own power.

Except, I so often failed, thank God.

Yet here is what I find more and more (like in big-time right now). As I KNOW God as my source, all of God upwelling inside of me and becoming me through Christ my life, as I know Father as my ONLY source, AND as I know that He shares all things with me and that we together are turning every circumstance towards goodness – wow.

Things that used to bother me just don’t bother me anymore. And because things bother me less and less, I have less and less reason to do or to say what is wrong.

When I am no longer my own source, but Father is all that I am and shares all that I am with Himself, then I no longer have any need to sin.

In order, then, to bind Christian E to a life of sinful actions, the preacher must convince Christian E that he has a “sin nature” of his own, that he has a “LIFE” not Christ. The preacher, working together with the accuser, and both using Bible verses, have a real easy time accomplishing this task in Christian E’s soul.

You know, almost all sermons I have ever heard preached (and I have sat under a lot of preaching), contained as their primary purpose the drive to convince me that I have a sinful nature, that I have a life not Christ, to convince me that “I” am bound utterly to an “I” that does not measure up to Christ. And that I cannot know God until I make “I” get in line with “Christ.”

Preachers – what are you doing? Do you love sin and Satan so much that you cannot show these dear and precious saints that Christ alone is their life, that they have no source except the Father?

What is a Christian soul designed and shaped by accusation?

I want to look again at what I share of my own history in Chapter “14. Perseverance.” Indeed, it took God ten years to unravel all the innumerable story-lines of painful accusation and to heal them AND then another ten years to weave into my soul all the story-lines of Christ until now as I know my Father in a startling and immediate way.

And you know what, to my great astonishment, I see now that the moment this twenty-year work of God in transforming the thinking of my story began was at the very moment when I heard the words, whispered so quietly in the icy darkness of a far northern February, words I could hardly hear in my lowest hopelessness. – “Give My people hope.”

You see, in order for me to talk about what it means to be a Christian soul designed by accusation, I must go all the way back through that twenty-year passage out, to look again at the nonsense that riddled my soul with pain.

And in doing so, I see that I will find exactly what I need inside the books I wrote during the worst years of my life, my own version of the “one verse to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.” I pulled the smaller of those two books out when I wrote “Chapter 20, The Two Gospels” in my book The Two Gospels. That earlier book was titled, are you ready, “The Two Gospels!” Except, when I wrote that first booklet, I had the two gospels entirely turned around. Yet reading through and pulling from that earlier booklet was overwhelmingly painful, for even to use from its pages was to revisit the hell in which I once lived inside all my “Christian” theology.

In 2007 I sent out several copies of the rough draft of The Jesus Secret, asking for comments and editing. I sent one to a sister who had lived in the same Christian community where I had taught and written my earlier version of “The Two Gospels.” At first she marked The Jesus Secret with interest, but before long, she ended her comments with the statement “This (speaking Christ) is not going to work.” Then I received an email from her. She said that she wanted to read nothing else that I might write. She said that searching for and rooting out anti-Christ inside of her took all her effort; she had no time to waste on finding “Christ” inside of her.

This sister finds exactly what she seeks; except it’s all nonsense. When I told her that she did not need to believe the preachers, she was offended.

I want to discover the twisted thoughts of a Christian soul designed entirely by accusation by looking at my own formerly tortured Christian soul. You see, sermons preached do not remain sermons preached. Rather, they become the fabric of tormented souls, the design of anti-Christ.

Granted, I was a complete mess inside my own story of self when I first experienced Christian community. And so, all the way through, two things were happening to me through those 21 years. The primary thing was, very simply, that God was dealing with me, to teach me of His ways AND to defuse all of my arrogance and self-loathing. But along with that work of God with me, there was also the other, all the ideas of Nicene theology that also drove wedges of separation between me and Jesus in my imagination.

That first mighty blow of separation actually came through Watchman Nee’s The Spiritual Man, in which I discovered that awful “reality” (I thought at the time) that I was a “soulish” and “fleshy” believer. There is no question that God has to deflate our hot-air balloon of self-conceit. I have found, however, that my being real towards my two sons about their own humanity has worked life in complete contrast to the former applications of shame.

Bit by bit, through the word preached that I needed to “line up with Christ,” I became utterly ashamed of myself. The sense of “I am ashamed of myself” sat like a heavy weight in the bottom of my swamp, turning so many of my thoughts into self-cursing. At the same time, however, I was utterly self-confident in my natural work abilities. It was several years before my natural confidence began to shatter when I began to see just how badly I had treated other people.

Now, through these years I also experienced great and powerful spiritual deliverance that deepened my faith in God. Nonetheless, as I viewed “the elders” in their personal maturity and as I lived inside the realm of “what do ‘they’ think of me,” I just could not act like “Christ.” During my early years of marriage, I came to the full conviction that there was something terribly wrong with me.

I spent several horrific years trying to figure out what demonic strongholds from my past were the cause of my inability to “walk in the Spirit” or to “act like Christ.” I investigated the role of my parents in my life, trying to find my “problem” as coming from their failure as parents. – And I tell you what, I have seen this same evil-thinking working on other Christians; seeing one’s “problem” as coming from one’s parents dishonors both them and God. If there is one thing of which I should be ashamed, it is how I treated my parents. I searched through other “sources” of “my problem” as well. Maybe it was my relationship with my next-door neighbor, Henry Miller, a simple-minded man my mother’s age. Maybe it was all my fantasy dream worlds of being the king of the universe. I was hit with the horror, from time to time, that I might be “the coming anti-Christ.”

Now, the only difference between the teaching I was sitting under and most other churches is that the fellowship I was part of took all the nonsense of Nicene theology to its furthest and most intense conclusions, yet entirely within the true knowledge of redemption and the demonstration of the Holy Spirit and power. Love one another was certainly part of our thinking and our practice, though we had no expression of Father as love through us. But otherwise, the same results occur in the Baptist or the Catholic or any other “brand” of Nicene thinking.

And this is the problem. Because we knew and treasured and held to the truths of Christ planted all through our thinking, we then embraced all the false thinking of the tares with the same fervor. And the two kinds of thinking get so tightly woven together that it is nearly impossible to ever draw them apart.

I can say with all certainty today that I am a miracle of God.

And I am not the source of anything precious I now know, but only Father. “I” was the source only of shame and ruin in my former self-story.

Let me quote from my letter “20. The Two Gospels,” which I wrote in 2014 regarding my earlier booklet written during the worst years of my life which I also had titled “The Two Gospels.” In this quote, I am quoting from my earlier writing and then seeking to understand what on earth was my problem.

~~~

There is almost nothing in this booklet to refute. Yet it brought me into utter despair. Let me quote one bit.

– Eternal life is a gift from God. We neither earn it, nor deserve it. God gives it to us freely out of His great love for us.

What is eternal life? Your answer governs how you view your walk with God.

What is eternal life? John 17:3 “And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.”

Eternal life is knowing God.

Eternal life is not knowing about God. It is more even than knowing Him really well. “That they may know You” is an intimate marriage union with God enabling us to bear His life. Eternal life is coming into union with Him who is eternal, whereby He plants His life in us and enables us to bring forth out of our beings that very same life.

Can we walk in union with God here in the earth? Certainly. –

I rest my case. Yet as I typed these words now onto this page, the dark hopelessness appeared to me in one little phrase. Can you find it? You see, I started my rendition of the “true gospel” back then with Galatians 2:20 as the only doorway into salvation. Can you believe that?

Did you find the hinge in the above quote from “The Two Gospels” by Daniel Yordy © 1998, the sling shot that casts all this wondrous truth coming through my mind and fingers back then into darkness and despair? And if I could take you back to those dark months of December, January, February, 1998 when and where I finalized what I had written in 1996 so that you could see me in that setting, you would likely go quiet. You would understand and be astonished.

Here are the awful words: – “Coming into union with Him.”

~~~

You see how it is that I was writing then the very thing I am writing now. EXCEPT for one thing. All this revelation was something “I” had to implement; I did not know Jesus, the all-speaking of God, fulfilling what He is through His full and present union with me.

The Veil that blocks IS always the first words of the serpent, the words that break utterly between the Person of Jesus and the word God speaks. Then, working out from that savage break, the serpent implants the word, “You can enter into union with Christ – if you try.”

Here is the one thought, then, that drives all the design and fabrication of the Christian soul by accusation. –

“I am not, but I should be.”

And here is our answer.

“I am, and Father and I together make all things good.”

A universe and a soul of death versus a universe and a soul of life.

No human could ever come into union with Christ. It is Jesus who comes into union with us, who makes all that we are part of Himself.

Now, here is the most important thing to know about all the tangled web of Christ-roots all woven together with all the vast array of self-accusation. – And that is, it’s all so very simple.

You see, the brother who preached that we “should be” like Jesus, if he had instead, after reading the verse on our union with Christ, repeated over and over again for twenty-five minutes these words, “You are not, but you should be,” he would have been clear about everything he was conveying to that congregation. And indeed, the vast majority of all sermons I have ever heard preached was one form or another, using one Bible verse or another, of saying this one thing, over and over, “You are not, but you should be.”

There is no reason whatsoever why you would need to go through the “years” of transformation that the Lord led me through in His path to life for me. We need to “figure out” absolutely NOTHING about our own false story.

Changing your mind is the easiest thing for you to do. To change your life, all you need to do is to be silent forever about “I am not, but I should be” and to speak every declaration of “I am, and Father I together make all things good.” I am fully confident that the transformation of your thinking will happen quite rapidly.

And so, if you were to read through my earlier work, you would see, to your amazement, much of the same revelation of Jesus Christ that I now teach. But all of it was cast into and by the mind that says, over and over, “I am not, but I should be.” “I am not” drives Jesus far away in our imagination, closing off His good speaking to our knowledge, and “I should be” creates every ratline of fake self-thinking formed in the meaningless “absence of Jesus.

It is so good for us to know that the serpent’s deceit is as simple as the gospel, and that the simplicity of the gospel is all that is needed to eliminate all that nonsense from our souls and to set creation free.