8. Saved inside of Lostness

In this article, I want to pick up where I left off in “Lost inside of Salvation.” That is, I want to build on the understanding of the bubble inside of which each one of us lives, a bubble filled with our story of words, protected within a wall that is fragile and that can be shattered.

What I want to explore, now, is how Christ through us brings the knowledge of Salvation into our brothers and sisters in Christ, fellow Christians, who, though one spirit and one flesh with the Lord, still continue in all the horrific thinking of lostness.

We see our own selves, inside of our bubbles, as one seamless story of Christ only. Any momentary confusion or lack makes no difference to us, for we call even that by Christ our life and rest our stories, as they are, as belonging only to Jesus.

In short, we have turned around. We are no longer looking for any salvation outside of ourselves, or any salvation “to come.” We already ARE the unfolding of God’s thoughts concerning us and have never been anything else.

Writing the Jesus Secret Version of Hebrews 9-13 changed my life. When I saw the original argument of the writer of Hebrews, that IN NO WAY included any return to some sort of “struggle against sin,” but rather presenting an extension, in every direction, of Hebrews 10:19-22, AND when I saw the deliberate and thus deceitful choices of the Calvinist translators to confuse the issue, to drag God’s precious people back down into the false self-hatred that was Adam’s rebellion – self-improvement by human performance, that is, “fixing” God’s stupid mistakes – something sealed itself inside of me.

That certainty of knowing, then, that permanently sealed my bubble inside of God, also caused me to see, as I never have before, the awful falseness of all Nicene thinking and theology. Sitting here, then, inside my bubble, seized into God and into His authority flowing out of me to love my brothers and sisters in Christ and to speak into them the knowledge of God, I know I am living inside a different universe than the endless thoughts rattling around in the minds of my brethren.

And that’s just it, the old creation exists inside of one place only, inside of people’s heads, inside the false thinking rolling around inside of the endless wrong thoughts of each one’s fantasy self-story. Their flesh is Christ; their spirit is Christ; their thoughts are nonsense.

My brethren are entirely and utterly saved, no future “heaven” offers anything they do not possess fully right now. But they are saved inside of their own foolish and unnecessary lostness! (Please don’t make too much out of my two titles; I’m just enjoying the play of words.)

~~~

I am limiting myself in this letter entirely to my Christian brethren. I am not interested in fathoming the thinking of the unregenerate. They have one need – to receive Jesus as their personal Savior, to be born again – then they are my Christian brethren, and now I can know something about them.

This article, then, seeks to answer one question. How do we insert the knowledge of Salvation into the minds of our brethren whose minds are conditioned to reject most of what we want them to know?

And the light is made visible in the darkness and the darkness does not seize hold of it. – He comes to His own and His own do not receive Him (John 1:5 & 11).

But what, exactly, are we attempting to do? We are NOT bringing salvation to them; they already live only inside of Jesus.

Let’s review the last article, but from the view of “defining” our fellow Christians. (And we are thinking clinically as students in a classroom, in order to understand. We never extend this clinical thinking, however, into real interaction, but we hold each one in the highest of respect and in the deepest regard as the very face of Jesus, the expression of Father’s own Person.)

But, in fact, let’s target one, whether it be Brother A or Sister B. Brother A (or Sister B, whatever the case might be) lives entirely inside of Jesus and Jesus inside of them. Brother A lives in and possesses all that Salvation is and means, God filling him full, God flowing out from him, God sharing all things with him for the sake of others.

He just does not KNOW any of that, however.

Inside of his bubble, Brother A is a mixed-up mess of confused but repetitive, and thus very familiar-to-him thoughts, a story of self drawn from all sorts of different experiences over the course of his life. Whatever those thoughts might be, and from wherever they may have come, Brother A regards them as himself, as who he is, and will fiercely defend those thoughts, regardless of where they came from, as rock-solid “truth.”

In fact, this religious self-defense is entirely God’s design of him, though darkened by ignorance. God means for him to protect himself from others, including me. And that is the problem, for his God-given wall of self-protection meant to keep out Christian spiritual rapists, also works to keep out Christ.

This is exactly the problem Jesus faced. The Pharisees were God’s gift to the Jewish people. The Pharisees were their wall of protection against the assault of idolatry coming at them from every direction. Without the Pharisees, there would have be no Scripture-believing people left through whom Jesus could come and to whom He could speak.

Yet that same wall of safety, given by God for protection, also turned against the word Jesus was speaking into them, that it also might not enter.

 I have shared of my experience with God on an Oregon hillside in November of 1994, as I considered God’s precious people and the word in me that I knew was their life. I saw that God had given them a wall of protection, to protect them, even, from me. And I KNEW, in my covenant with God in that prayer hut, that before I could ever share Christ with His woman, I would have to be utterly pure.

Answering my heart’s cry, as I arose from my knees on that wooded slope, God walked with me into the worst years of my life. The FEAR of God I possess now is one of the greatest treasures God has ever given me.

To force seed into God’s woman that is not the seed of Jesus, there is no greater folly, no more in-your-face and mindless wickedness ever committed, than that. Yet Christian pretenders do it all the time, telling themselves how “righteous” they are. Let me be far away when they give their account.

I would comment more on the practice of spiritual rape. And I want to talk a bit more about that wall of protection around each individual believer. It is easy to shatter that wall; well, I shouldn’t say “easy,” but it can be done, and it happens so very often.

God never violates that wall. God never inserts His knowledge apart from each person’s joyous and willing permission.

Someone who argues back is in no danger of their wall being violated. Word, then, becomes argument against argument. No life can ever come from such lifeless words.

I can think of no better illustration of a Christian believer’s wall being violated than Eve. Her experience was identical to mine, but much better to use. Eve was not the “temptress”; she was the one being violated by both the serpent and Adam.

I am fully convinced, in the Spirit of the Lord, that no sin or death existed in creation prior to the agreement made between Adam and the serpent. The serpent was a holy angel of God, the highest and most beautiful, strongest and smartest of all beings created by God. Isaiah used the word “light-bearer,” which, in Latin is “lucifer” to speak of him. Ezekiel, in prophetic word, saw him as the anointed covering cherub.

The serpent was entirely OF GOD, placed there by God and anointed by God. Eve’s heart was only towards the Lord; there is no other possibility. No sin or separation existed before Adam’s teeth pierced the fruit of death. More than that, the “serpent” (and NO ONE knows or can know what the early Hebrew word translated “serpent” actually means) – the serpent was not an animal, but an angel, as all the realms of heaven were fully open and seen by Adam and Eve.

Adam and Eve absolutely should have been able to trust that cherub anointed by God. And so Eve did trust him as if from God; though Adam, when he turned to look moments later, pierced through the fog and understood.

Eve believed the angel in just the same way that most Christians believe their pastors even though their pastors are preaching the serpent’s words into them. – “You can be like Jesus, but only if you try. Here is God’s wonderful program of self-improvement by human performance, by pretending with all your might, if you surely wish to eat.”

And of the two, whose sin was greater? The serpent envied Eve, certainly, but Adam despised her.

The one time in my life, the forty-five minutes of assault that violated me and came very close to overthrowing me, was very similar. You see, I believed that this one was representative of that ministry of Christ to whom I had submitted myself without reservation. In essence, my wall was nearly shattered because I believed it was God on the other side of that battering ram.

I did not know that Father Himself was on the inside of me sharing the assault with me as against Himself and taking most of its pain.

You can shatter someone only after you have first gained their full and implicit trust.

In crime, it’s called the confidence game, or “con-man” for short. And a Christian gives his or her trust to a con-man only through believing they are giving it to God.

Yeah – let’s follow Paul’s advice and not be quick to be “Christian teachers.”

Most of the Christian leaders I have ever known have been, to one degree or another, con-men. They present themselves as a ministry of Christ but preach the serpent’s words. Some even use their place to bully dominance over God’s precious saints, as Adam did over Eve.

Here is the point. Violating someone’s God-given wall of protection is NEVER an option for us. Throwing words at people is an attempt to violate that wall. Most so-called “correction” is violating that wall as the serpent did, coming as the “emissary” of God, but speaking curse, the law of sin and death, into the target.

I knew when “correction” was from my Father, for it came to me in humility and kindness and inspired my heart to life. I also know that most of the “correction” given to me over the years just did not fit. My heart was submitted, desiring God, but how can life come from “fixing” so-called “sin?” How can life come from the hard forehead of anointed ignorance?

~~~

Let’s move on, now, to the story of self rolling around inside of Brother A’s mind and heart. What we are after is an understanding of how God and us together insert the true thoughts of Christ in such a way that our brother and sister receives those words as from Jesus and with joy.

And that is entirely what I am trying to do with Knowing Jesus as He Is.

First, let’s establish this absolute. One thing only prevents Brother A or Sister B from being right now all the fullness of Christ revealed in all that such a thing could possibly be. That one thing is that Brother A does not think so, in fact, he thinks not of such a thing.

But let’s look at reality. Brother A lives encased in a Salvation of utter goodness. He is connected in all ways as one person with the Father through Jesus. He is filled with Jesus, with all the good things of Christ; indeed, he is filled full and overflowing with all of God. Rivers of Spirit are always flowing out of him. Everything Brother A is inside of Father’s thoughts is coming to him continuously through the all-speaking of Jesus. And everything found inside of Brother A, as he is, belongs only to God.

There is nothing else. There is no darkness, no evil, nothing contrary to salvation.

Except one thing. Brother A doesn’t think so.

Instead, Brother A’s thoughts are filled with all kinds of things that are simply not true.

The framework of Brother A’s thinking is Nicene theology. The underlying whisper is the serpent’s words in the garden. His image of God is of a superior arrogance. The shadow of his thoughts is constant self-cursing, always falling short. And the drive is self-exaltation, though by “Christian” definitions, that is the superior “Christ.”

None of these things has any substance or reality. Rather, they are nothing more than Brother A’s nonsensical imagination.

Now, why can’t God just show Brother A the real truth? If He were to do such a thing, then Brother A would fight Him tooth and nail. And if God forced the truth upon Brother A, it would shatter his psyche. That’s why God never thinks about doing such a thing.

This is really crazy, because Brother A loves Jesus with all his heart; he is filled with the Holy Spirit and believes in the revelation of Jesus Christ through His Church.

Jesus’ parable of the tares is so very useful to us in many ways.

The good wheat of Christ is planted all through Brother A’s thinking. The nonsense of the evil one is planted all through Brother A’s thinking. And these two sets of plants have sent their roots down deep into every crevice of Brother A’s self-story. In fact, in every tiny place you might poke, you will find the tiny root hairs of Christ woven tightly together with the tiny root hairs of anti-Christ. And we are defining “anti-Christ,” here, not as any kind of substance, but only as foolish and meaningless thoughts.

And there is a further problem. Just as the thoughts of Christ are rooted deeply in Scripture in Brother A’s argument, so also are the roots of the false thoughts. And if you jerk out one set of roots, you WILL be jerking out the other.

That happens even with some who read what I share. They embrace some part of what I teach as truth, in contradiction to what they had always believed “the Bible says.” But then they go on to throw out other things “the Bible says,” not understanding the distinction of Christ.

I never throw out anything that God actually says; rather, I seek to know what He says, and then to draw every word into its place inside of the knowledge of my union with Christ.

You see, Brother A is a Bible man. All of his thoughts that are contrary to Christ come out from Scripture or out from what has been preached into him since he was a boy. More than that, every Bible verse we use, he also uses. And every Bible verse he uses we also use. The difference is entirely where he and we place each one of those verses.

The structure Brother A uses is a framework of knowledge based on holding firmly to the “right ideas,” an organization of thinking that we have come to call Nicene Christianity morphed into Calvinism. That framework of thinking places everything God says in the Bible into a rational arrangement together. What that arrangement or framework or structure actually is, I have never figured out. It all just seems to go together so convincingly.

I do know, however, the rule over how every verse in the Bible is to be placed. And this knowledge is so very important to us. Whenever God says, “You are,” that is to be instantaneously interpreted as “You should be, even though we see clearly that you are not.” Genesis 3:5 rules absolutely and without challenge in Brother A’s mind. I am convinced that knowing this one thing is a critical tool in changing Brother A or Sister B’s thinking.

Nonetheless, it is always a mistake to “pull out a tare.” Rather, we plant Christ as He is, while gently clarifying the tare, and thus allowing our brother and sister to connect with Jesus in such a way that the false just quietly vanishes away.

Let me try to zero in on what I am trying to get at.

Brother A’s spirit is Christ, and his flesh is Christ. His thoughts, on the other hand, are a mixed-up mess of Christ and anti-Christ. And the confusion of his thoughts is ruled by the desire of his heart. More than that, his God-given sense of protection, of self-preservation, will fight against any penetration of things he does not already think.

I have observed this in my own life, that God has always employed psychological trickery on me, always entirely in kindness, but nonetheless, yes, God has certainly tricked me over and over so that I would, bit by bit, allow Christ to become my thoughts and not anti-Christ. God is a Master Psychologist, and He uses every trick in His book to bring about our acceptance of His thoughts.

Let me share an Annie vision.

CHANNELS AND PRESSURES
Throughout the whole day, I had been perturbed by thoughts of falling into the error of letting His presence become commonplace to me, and of my becoming professional and entering into some kind of routine in my seeking for God. More than anything else, I didn't want to lose the sense of the freshness of His presence. As I entered into prayer, the troublesome thoughts quickly fled as He said, "Trust Me to take you in the paths that I have marked out for you, and do not meddle in My affairs or try to tell Me the way I must take you. Don't be perturbed as to how I am to take you; it is sufficient for you to trust in Me. I shall take you where and as I will."

Entering the Cloud, I saw great Channels filled with life and intelligence, which channeled things into God himself. These tremendous attractions drew me irresistibly into themselves, entering into me as it were, and becoming identified with me. At the same time, I entered into them and became completely identified with them. I seemed to be possessed by them and, at the same time, I possessed them. This relationship resulted in a total union and oneness.

After this, the Channels conducted me to yet another place which seemed like great pressure chambers filled with tremendous tensions. These powerful and intelligent Pressures were also filled with life. The Channels and the Pressures operated together to fulfill a specific mission: to bring the soul on into God. When the Channels had finished their specific work, they brought the soul to the Pressures which, in turn, conducted the soul into the very center of a chamber similar to the place where diamonds are pressured out from a black carbon existence. *

In spite of the awesome powers that the Channels and Pressures exerted, there was absolutely no violence of any kind in the process. Nothing in the work of either of the two was in any way destructive, harmful or negative; to the contrary, the result of their workings was both good and positive. The work of both the Channels and the Pressures was unwaveringly constant and did not diminish nor cease until it had brought the soul on into God.

~~~

Then here is my comment on the side. * Although I have known this dual process all my years of walking with God, it seems to have increased in precision, frequency, and glory the last while. God reveals something wonderful (Channels), then you enter a time of difficulty (Pressures), then a wonderful new knowing of God comes through that difficulty (Channels). One important thing from this vision and through all of them is to see and know that these visions do not show us just “symbols,” but actual Spirit-substance that operates all around us all the time.

Then, I must add this. Ed Miller’s choice of the word “soul” comes out from the thinking that the soul is a thing in itself, that is, that the soul has a “life” of its own. Instead, I would see it as God changing our thoughts. Our soul is already fully inside of God and God inside of us. It is our thoughts that God must change, bit by bit, through this continuous psychological process that Annie saw as “Channels and Pressures” and which I have known well all my Christian life.

~~~

And so we come to the main purpose of this article. And that is, how do we win our brothers and sisters in Christ into the knowledge of all of Christ fulfilled inside of them right now? How do we show them they are saved inside of their nonsensical lostness?

Any shadow of arrogance must not exist inside of us. This is the full fruit of Christ being all that we are.
“I love you, Brother A” is arrogance.

We know love, not because we love Brother A, but because we KNOW that Brother A loves us with a love beyond what we could know. We approach Brother A in the humility of knowing just how much Brother A loves me.

You will never have a word of Christ for Brother A until you KNOW, in all humility, that Brother A loves you with all the love of God.

I am working on an autobiography, partly because I want to place Christ into every memory of my life and thus into every nuance of my present thoughts. And it has just dawned on me that the only godly approach to sharing about all the other people throughout my life’s experience is to know, in my remembrance, just how much each one of them loved me.

Buddy Cobb, who has just recently passed on, loved me with a love beyond what I can know. Buddy Cobb laid down his life for me. Buddy Cobb thought more highly of me than he did of himself.

Do you see how that changes everything? As a preacher, Buddy Cobb taught hyper hyper-Calvinism, the gospel of the serpent, more convincingly than anyone else I have ever known. As a brother in Christ, the love of God was always poured out from his heart.

You see, I was quite concerned that in giving an honest account of the difficulties I went through with other people over the years, that I would cast some in a negative light. Now, I no longer have that concern. Regardless of any outward words or actions, each one was filled with Christ and with the love of God out-poured towards me.

No truth of Christ is planted or has ever been planted by arrogance. All arrogance has ever planted in the heart of another is even more confusion of anti-Christ, especially if they “believe” you. It is rape of the worst kind.

I made a sign that I stapled to the shelf just above my computer screen that says, “Place My Readers into Love.” But there is only one way in which I can actually do that, and that is by ever reminding myself about just how much you love me with all the outpoured love of God.

I have never known the removal of that shadow which opposes Christ from me more than the stated acknowledgement of that love poured for me from each individual and named believer in Jesus. In fact, the beginning of my own deliverance happened when I inadvertently wrote the words “My dad loved me” in a college assignment around age 30.

Our ability to plant Christ into the acknowledgement of our brothers and sisters’ thinking begins by placing ourselves beneath of each one in stated and grateful acknowledgment of just how much “you” love “me.” Only then do we ourselves actually know the truth.

Next, we must understand our own framework of thinking, and where and how each word God speaks actually fits. We do not counteract verse against verse, however, for such argument puts us right back into the tree of knowledge. Rather, as we know where each verse fits, we are better able to speak that word as Jesus Himself into Brother A or Sister B’s heart.

And our structure, or organizational pattern, into which every verse of the Bible finds its place is the structure used by every writer of the New Testament, and that is the Tabernacle of Moses in the wilderness. – “See that you make all things according to the pattern shown you in the mountain.”

Only when we use God’s expressed pattern of thinking do the verses of the Bible fit and become life to us.

But then, our final key, more important than God’s pattern of thinking, is the definition of “WORD.” You see, of truth, the greatest power of the serpent’s nonsense is the definition he gave to the Word God speaks.

Here is our definition of Word in its shortest essence. – Jesus lives in your heart through faith. Everything else we might know about the Words God speaks is either found inside of “Jesus lives in your heart” or comes out from “Jesus lives in your heart.”

Nonetheless, to counteract the serpent’s nonsense, we need a slightly larger understanding of God’s definition of Word. Because, you see, that is entirely what the two trees in the garden were all about. The two trees are two ways of thinking, two minds, two different definitions of the word God speaks.

The serpent defined “Word” out from the tree of knowing right and wrong as being “hold the right ideas in your mind and then implement those ideas into your life.”

Of truth, you will find that as the entire definition held by R.C. Sproul in his book, Knowing Scripture. He gives no other definition of “word” except the serpent’s.

But we define Word as the Lord Jesus Christ, entering as every Word God speaks into our hearts through our faith and there in Person fulfilling all that God means by what He says in all the fabric of our lives.

The only response to the serpent’s definition of word is, “All that the Lord say, I will do.” The only response to God’s definition of Word is, “Let it be to me according to Your word.” The difference is life and death.

Yet it all boils down to this. We must show Brother A and Sister B God Himself.
And here is God Himself.
  Little acts of kindness and gentle words of encouragement.
Four simple things, then, that will plant Christ thinking as the only story they know into the minds of our brothers and sisters.

1. Submit to each one in gratefulness for the Love of God outpoured from them to you.

2. Know yourself where every Word God speaks fits into its place inside the pattern that is Christ.

3. Show your brother and sister that every Word is Jesus alive in their hearts.

4. Show Father to each one by little acts of kindness and gentle words of encouragement.

And thus we have God’s program for evangelizing the Church, for showing them their Salvation against a lostness that does not exist.