15. Open the Gates

What are those gates? There are three of them, to be exact. And who opens the gates? Who is entrusted with this greatest of tasks, this greatest of responsibilities? Who gets the honor of being the one who opens the gates to allow the King of Glory to ride through and into every part of the earth?

 

We have viewed ourselves and Christ in ourselves completely backwards and inside out. Previous diagrams of spirit-soul-body put the inside of us on the outside, put the outside of us on the inside, made the largest part of ourselves the smallest and the smallest part of ourselves the largest. No wonder our Christian lives have been such a mess; our thinking has been all screwed up.

Let’s look at the previous model of how we saw ourselves and how we saw Christ in us.

According to the backwards way of seeing ourselves, the inner circle is our spirit. That spirit is tucked deep inside, somewhere in the inner parts of ourselves. Now we admitted that our spirit was made clean, that it was born again. But we placed two definite hearts inside that inner circle. We were convinced, not only that all Christians are double-minded, but that all Christian are double-hearted as well. Yes, we had to agree that Christ lives in our heart because God says He does, but we also believed that inside something we called “our human nature” was also a heart that is deceitful and desperately wicked.

An Incorrect Diagram of the Human

Spirit - the inner white circle - Christ.

And so Christ “lived” in a tiny little room deep inside ourselves somewhere, and that little part of us was redeemed, yes, and contained goodness and righteousness. But there were a whole lot of other things inside of our makeup we were convinced were certainly not Christ.

But that whole way of seeing ourselves and of seeing Christ in us, also required the invention of a third little guy. That third little guy is ourselves – the guy with the blue face, the me that always bobs around no matter how hard I try to die to me. You see, we were blue in the face because we were always running so fast back and forth between Christ and that evil guy called SELF. Back and forth between the red heart made clean by the blood and the black heart still wicked and deceitful. Up and down between a “spiritual” mind and the carnal mind.

And so the Christian life, in this inside-out way of seeing, just wore us out. There was certainly no rest for the blue-faced me, all the days of our lives. Christ in us was limited entirely to that one red heart. And it was up to us to bring every other part of our makeup into obedience and submission to Christ, something the blue-faced me, never knowing for sure if he was red or black or simply blue, could never succeed in doing.

All through the Old Testament, especially the Psalms, and in anointed songs we used to sing are the words “Open the gates, and the King of Glory shall come in.”

Open the Gates, and the King of Glory shall come in!

This is what we want, what all creation is groaning for; this is the only answer for any and all of the problems in this world – the entrance of the King of Glory. This is the revelation of Jesus Christ; this is the beginning of the age to come.

This word is not just something found in the pages of the Old Testament that’s nice to sing. This is a clarion call, a command, sent forth by the power and might of the Spirit of God, resounding from eternity to eternity. “Open the gates!” It is a word on par with, equal to, the word God spoke in the beginning, “Let there be light,” a command that birthed the universe and all things that exist — The Lord Jesus Christ issuing forth from the Father.

Open the Gates!

What are those gates? There are three of them, to be exact. And who opens the gates? Who is entrusted with this greatest of tasks, this greatest of responsibilities? Who gets the honor of being the one who opens the gates to allow the King of Glory to ride through and into every part of the earth?

Here is the backwardness turned around. My spirit is the largest part of me, literally and actually. My human spirit extends far beyond my physical body. I will not spend time discussing how far, except to say that since my human spirit is one spirit with the Holy Spirit, my human spirit literally fills and extends beyond the universe. That’s not our concern right now, however; our concern is to open the gates. This is the great privilege that you and I have been given by the Father.

Not only is my spirit the largest part of me, but my heart, which is the anchor and center of my spirit inside my being, is the portal, the front room, the vanguard of heaven. My heart, then, is much larger than my body, even though it is the center of me, of who and what I am.

The physical body and the earth is the smallest part of this equation. The King of Glory already fills heaven. He fills my spirit; He lives in my heart. I am not opening the gate to let Him into me. That happened when I was born again. The King of Glory is on the outside of the earth, looking in. He wants to enter out of heaven and into the realms of the physical, into the earth, into this planet. And I am not talking about present evangelism. I’m talking about the whole creation being set free into the glorious liberty of the sons of God. I’m talking about the unveiling of Jesus Christ.

In a vision, Annie Schissler shared that the elect ones must open the gates for the mighty moving of God to enter into the earth and reach all those who are precious to Jesus beneath the storm. She shared that this opening of the gates included two specific things: a cleansing and purification greater than anything known before, and a deeply increased personal intimacy with the Lord Jesus Christ.

Let me share that vision here.

The Wave of Pure Light

God showed me a new and extraordinary wave of heavenly pure light and life that He is accumulating to prepare the manifestation of the Great Harvest, that will develop underneath the storm of evil which is forming…

He showed me how this new wave operated: there were like gigantic arms that collected in an increasing scale countless multitudes of souls for Christ. In amazing operations of God, in great power and strength, thousands and millions were taken for Him.

However, there were differences between the levels and conditions of these souls that the wave of light had reaped regarding the elect ones who walked above the storm. The elect ones were obviously superior in development and light, but despite their inferior condition, the souls that gathered under the storm were more numerous and were equally precious to the Lord and He was especially interested in the harvest of these multitudes. With great joy and power He was intensively working to fulfill this.

The inferior condition of the new ones was detectable not by their appearance, but by their relationship with God. Those who walked above the storm had a very intimate relationship with Him, characterized by a great intensity, as if they were linked with the same fires and torrents of the divine nature.

When the new ones took abundant blessings from God, it was due to the fact that they rebounded from His chosen ones. The blessing of one had an impact as a blessing for another one…

The ones who were under the storm, though they received great provision of light and life that God shed, nonetheless they were allowed to be moved, shaken and buffeted. However, through this, it would be provided the way in which the Lord would mold, transform and develop them. On the contrary, those who were above the storm of darkness, that is, the elect ones could not be shaken as they were rooted and asserted in their relationship with Christ .

He told me that these sons, that would give way to this new wave, must be extremely purified. This purification is of fundamental importance, not only for themselves, but also for these new ones that will be gathered. This high, complete purification of the elect ones is equivalent to the opening of the doors inside them that will rebound in a force of great life and light to those thousands that are still in darkness.

~~~

The Lord has shown me exactly how the opening of the gates is both intense purification and increased personal intimacy at the same time.

Let us anchor ourselves into the One who alone keeps us true and with God.

Jesus. — He that is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him.

My spirit is one spirit with the Holy Spirit. The union of my spirit and the Holy Spirit is called “Christ.” But there is a huge difference between the Christ of God and the “christ” that is the new age spirit of Satan. God is always personal. Satan denies personality and comes as an impersonal “force.” That is one reason I refuse to write “Satan” with a small letter. A capital letter in English grammar denotes personality, the name of some one. Satan wants to be known as an impersonal force. He is not; he is a person who will bow his knee to the Lord Jesus.

Jesus is God present personally in the human realms. I am not filled with a “force” called “christ.” I am filled with the Lord Jesus Christ. A Person.

But the nature of the Spirit of God and of the personality of the Lord Jesus Christ means this. He that is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him, one person with Him, one heart with Him. He that is joined to the Lord is one will with Him, one mind with Him, one set of emotions with Him. He that is joined to the Lord is one body with Him.

For we are His body, His flesh and His bones. Ephesians 5

I read recently a rebuttal of the claims of Christianity. The writer said, “If two people say ‘I am Jesus,’ we know one of them is lying.”

The world and the spirit in this world demand that Jesus, the Messiah of God, the One sent into the world, be one individual person, quantifiable, and therefore excludable. God wants Jesus to be many. Jesus said, “If I enter into the “earth,” into the humanity of the body of Christ, becoming them, then I will come alive in them as many, many more of Myself.” (John 12)

Jesus is a Person, my elder Brother, my Savior, my Friend, the One upon whose breast I lean my head.

I am a person, conscious of myself as a living being, with a mind, a will, and emotions, and with a heart stretched and filled with hope, forged in affliction, in beauty, and in love.

Jesus and I are one person together. We walk together in sweet communion with no distinction of separation between Him and me. It is by this anchor alone that you and I walk forward boldly into the mind-blowing stuff God is releasing into this earth without being afraid of going off the deep end. We already have.

My spirit, Christ in me, is the largest part of my being. My spirit fills and pervades every other part of me. My spirit fills and pervades my will, my mind, my emotions, and my body. The vibrancy and frequency of my spirit, joined as one with the Holy Spirit, reverberates through all of my makeup.

But there is a barrier, a door, a gate, three to be exact, placed by God into me as the entrance of the King of Glory into the physical body and into the earth.

The first gate is my will. The second gate is my mind. And the third gate is my emotions. The first target of the entrance of the King of Glory through these gates IS the healing of my physical body.

But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you. Romans 8:11

We do not distinguish between His Spirit and our human spirit; they are one spirit.

But just as we had the view of ourselves all mixed up, inside out, and backwards, so was our understanding of the opening of these three gates.

Of these three gates, the largest and most important GATE, through which the King of Glory issues forth into all the realms of earth and of this world, is the mind. And I, me, Daniel Yordy, I have complete and total control of my own mind at all times. In God’s order, there is never one moment nor any way in which another force separate from me ever takes control of my mind. If that happens in someone, it is demonic; it is not Christ. Yet my mind is Christ’s mind.

My mind is the central gate, and I, me, my mind is the only keeper of that gate, the only one who must by willful and deliberate practice, open that GATE of heaven for the King of Glory to ride triumphantly through. God will have it no other way; God will never, ever violate me or remove from me the power He has given exclusively and only to me, the gatekeeper of the House of God, the gatekeeper of heaven invading earth.

But first is the opening of the will. And this has been so very, very backward in Christian teaching. Here is why.

The garden of Gethsemane was at the end of Jesus’ work and ministry in this earth. It was at the end of the career of a manifest Son of God revealing the Father in the work the Father sent Him to do. The prayer of Jesus in John 17 comes BEFORE Gethsemane. Jesus said, “I have finished the work You gave Me to do,” BEFORE He prayed, “Not My will, but Thine be done.”

Jesus is the pattern. But some have taken this final work of a mature Son of God and placed it entirely upon babes in Christ. That practice is wrong. Yes, in the pattern of Jesus revealed again in our lives as sons of God, there is a fulfillment of Gethsemane once again upon the earth in the second witness of Christ found inside of Revelation Chapter 11. I see what that is (dimly) and how it will work in our experience. I share more on that in my book, The Covenant, a book you need to read and know.

But the opening of our will to allow the King of Glory to come through into our minds, into our emotions, into our physical body, and through us into all the earth, is something quite different. Let me explain.

We had a dog a few years ago. This dog, Jack, was skittish and fearful. I got it for my son, but it proved to be a poor choice. We kept it in the back yard, but we had to confine it. We put up a wire with a pulley to which he was attached. Jack could run back and forth, which he did, barking and whining, pulling against the chain all the time, wearing a muddy track in the yard. This went on for months until we were beside ourselves. When Jack was off the chain, though, he always wanted to come into the house. Finally, we gave up. We removed him from the chain and brought him into the house. He made a mess, yes, but the most amazing thing happened. Jack was transformed in a moment. The chain made him rebel. Freedom brought him peace, and he lay quietly for hours on end, content to be in the presence of his master.

Those who understand natural freedom and prosperity and how they work in the earth say this: “Freedom is the mother of order, not its daughter.” This statement is in full agreement with the word of God, but not with Christianity. Christianity wants to claim that the only way we can know freedom in this world is first to impose order. Then, when everyone is in order, we will know true freedom.

That argument is false. It is Satan’s way of control. Freedom, setting someone completely free to do good or evil as they wish, is the only thing that will birth order into the universe. However, to the religious mind, that idea is heresy. How can order come out of freedom? But man on this earth has proven over and over that the more order is imposed, the more chaos results. The more people are made free to do whatever they want to do, as in the early years of America, the more orderly society became and the more prosperity everyone enjoyed.

The increase of externally imposed “order” in America today in the guise of “security” can result only in an ever increasing loss of prosperity and freedom and an ever increasing chaos, thus requiring more “order.”

In Europe, they tried an experiment recently. They removed all traffic signs and lights from a small town. There were now no laws governing traffic, none. What happened? Accidents decreased sharply, the traffic flowed much more orderly than it had before, and people began to acquire a deeper appreciation for the other person than they had once shown.

Law always inserts itself between people. When law is imposed, relationships go through the law before reaching the other person. When freedom is released, people relate to one another as people. The argument that freedom only releases “the beast,” is not true. The Beast released in history has always come through those nations that practiced the strongest and most forceful “ORDER.”

The chaos we see growing in America comes entirely through the increase in laws. The more things that are made illegal, the more crimes must be committed. Paul said that the knowledge of sin comes through the law; without law, we would not know sin. Freedom comes through Christ and through the presence of His Spirit, completely separate from outwardly imposed law.

Let’s bring this discussion back into the will of a believer in Jesus Christ. I was taught and believed that my will was not, in itself, submitted to God’s will. I was taught that I had to “learn” to obey, that God spoke, I heard, and then I was to do what God told me to do. If I refused, then I was in rebellion against God.

Now, I myself came to the place that I rejected instantly any thought that could be “God” telling me to do something. My gut always told me that to “obey” something that “came” to me was a violation of my person. My theology said the opposite. I learned to live in an unnatural contradiction – not a good idea. I truly believed that to “obey” something outside myself was an immoral violation of the intergrity of my own person. But I also believed that to “disobey” was to be “in rebellion” against God. You can see the conflict in which I lived.

I was taught that I needed to seek God’s will all the time, because God’s will was something quite foreign to my own will, that they were two different and opposing things. I was taught that I needed to continually seek “confirmation” to determine if I was continuing to do “God’s will” instead of my own will. I was taught that my will was always at odds with God’s will, that my will, if it asserted itself, would always chose a way that was not God’s way, that my will, by its very nature, was always opposed to “God’s will,” that my will was at war with God’s will.

I was taught that I needed to die to my will, die to doing what “I” wanted to do, that I always needed to do something other than what I wanted to do. I was taught that obeying my superiors was the stand-in for “God’s will,” since they represented God’s spiritual authority in my life. I was taught that a “strong-willed” person (such as I was charged as being) was always walking in resistance to God, that I always needed to have a “submissive” will if I ever wanted to know Christ or to move in any kind of spiritual authority in the body of Christ.

All this was fine for me, from age twenty to age thirty-three, as a single man. But then I married. I now had the responsibility of a wife and a son. And something shifted inside of me. I had fully embraced “submitting to the elders.” That was how I lived. But now that I bore a responsibility before God for others who were dear to me, I found that “submitting to the elders” was a continual denial of my God-given place – as if it was not important.

I will not go through the agonizing experiences that locked me into a deep and all-pervasive sense of powerlessness, of rightful power denied without hope, that sat its dark shadow upon my soul. That dark shadow of powerlessness worked its way into every cell of my physical body over a period of some years.

I became sick.

For twenty years I have labored under that sickness, that weariness of body and heart. All of His ways concerning me are perfect. God made me weak. But He did not make me weak for any other reason than to bring me to the knowledge of His power and His glory released through me. And for that I give Him thanks for every dark and lonely place I have ever known.

I am now an enemy of that false teaching concerning the will of the believer and that teaching’s dark and vicious repudiation of the gospel and salvation of Jesus Christ, the thing that whines “Dead men have no rights.”

Let’s root ourselves in something specific God says.

Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure. Philippians 2:12-13

When Paul says, “For it is God who,” he is making it clear that what God does comes first before anything we do. What we do comes only out of what God Himself does. And what God does is that He creates His will inside of our will and even the doing of His will in our will is of Him.

Now to the beginning and the essence of the gospel.

Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Romans 5:1-2

Peace with God is the very first thing that comes into the life of the new believer who is first justified by faith. I am not at war with God. My will is not opposed to God’s will, and God’s will is not opposed to my will. War is something that can be conducted only in the will. There is complete peace between my will and God’s will. I, me, Daniel Yordy, I am at peace with God.

That is basic gospel truth.

The opening of the first gate is the acknowledgment, the acceptance, that the cross of Christ is enough for me. It is finished. The opening of the first gate is the revelation that Christ is my life, the acceptance of Paul’s words, “I am crucified with Christ. But I’m still alive, only, it’s not me, it’s Christ.” The opening of the first gate is the acceptance, the surrender, the yielding, that I am not a self separate from Christ, that I, joined to the Lord, am one spirit and one person with Him.

It is those believers who see themselves as separate in any way from the Lord Jesus, who believe that they have a will that is contrary to God’s will, and that they must force their own will into submission and obedience to God’s will, it is those believers who remain at war with God and in rebellion against the Lord Jesus Christ.

But when I surrendered to the certain conviction that Jesus and I are one spirit and one person, that I am in Him and He is in me, all struggle vanished. All contention between “my will” and “God’s will” just disappeared. I know that I can do whatever I want. I know that all things are lawful for me. And I also know that I love Him; I know that the only place I want to be is to rest quietly at His side, with my head leaned against His breast, just like Jack!

I do not seek God’s will for my life; my life IS God’s will. Inside of that certainty, I follow the peace of God, knowing that He directs my steps. And I never, ever worry about whether I am doing “my will” versus God’s will. I am always doing both. If I do what I want to do, I am doing God’s will. If I do God’s will, I’m doing what I want to do.

I am one spirit, I am one person with Him.

Over the years, I have often “surrendered” my will to God’s will. Those places and times were deep and penetrating. God never concerns Himself with our limited understanding of Him and His ways, but He always comes to us in tenderness and great kindness, no matter where we walk. But I have never known a deeper or sweeter surrender than to stop trying to call myself a “self ” separate from God.

The prophet Joel said that multitudes of people are thrust into the valley of decision. He said that the day of the Lord is near the valley of decision. He was not talking about me.

My decision was made long years ago; I can take you to the very moment and the very place. It was a most unlikely place, a toilet stall in a Greyhound bus station in Prince George, British Columbia. I was twenty one years old. The fear and presence of God came upon me, and I went into the stall so that other people would not see me tremble.

God said, “Will you surrender yourself as a son to me?”

I answered, “Yes, Lord.”

God sealed me in that moment into that decision and has never paid attention to anything else I’ve said since.

I follow Jesus. The GATE of my will stands wide open.