The
Power of the Force
Chapter
One
A kingdom is ruled by a set of laws that govern its subjects in their relationships with each other. God's Kingdom works this way. It is based on eternal laws. I am not talking about the Law of Moses. I am talking about a set of principals that bring order out of chaos.
The
whole universe functions by law and everything is in harmony and every thing
functions exactly in the order that God gave it. The sun has to be at the exact
same distance from the earth everyday. If it comes any closer we would be too
hot and if it goes any further we would freeze to death.
There
are many kingdoms in the universe. There is the animal kingdom, the plant
kingdom, the kingdom of the sea, the kingdom of man, the kingdom of the air and
many others. All of these kingdoms have their own rules and order and function
by them. There is only one kingdom out of God's creation that is out of order
and that is the kingdom of man and this is mainly because of his mistaken
identity.
In
Genesis 1:20-25,
And God said,
Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and
fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God
created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters
brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after
his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be
fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply
in the earth. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
And God said,
Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle,
and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was
so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after
their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind:
and God saw that it was good.
We
can also see that a seed is faithful and obeys its creator's intention for it.
No matter what circumstance the seed goes through it will only produce after
it's own kind. It is faithful to the law of its kind. This is the way God's
children are called to be. Jesus said to the faithful servant in Matt.
25:22,
"His lord said unto him, Well done, good and
faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee
ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord." We need to be
faithful because God's Kingdom is established in spiritual laws that govern it.
Again, I am not talking about the Law of Moses. God's law for man is simple.
You cannot receive the image of God and have the sovereignty without
understanding that you have a choice in this matter. I am not talking about
free will but you were given a choice between either obeying or disobeying His
will. You have been given two choices. Obey Him and live or disobey Him and
die. God
gave man this freedom and assigned to it responsibility. What happened in the garden was that the
mind of man became unattached to the reality of his spirit. As a result he
became more enticed to live after the condition of his emotional life based on
his experiences in life and his thoughts about them. Paul said in Col.
1:21,
"And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies
in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled." God
gave man this freedom and assigned to it responsibility. It has always
been God's plan to find in man a place where He can express all that He is. He
created man in His own image as spirit and when He placed the man in the body
of flesh man became a living soul. The soul is composed of our mind, will and
emotion. It is the conduit through which our spirit manifests itself through
the flesh. If our soul becomes so attached to our flesh that it allows the
flesh to dictate to it, we become out of order with what God designed us to be
and our spirit is denied the control of our flesh. God
gave man this freedom and assigned to it responsibility. Our spirit has never been separated from God. Nowhere in
the bible are we ever told that our spirit must be saved or delivered. It is
our soul that must be delivered from our mistaken identity. There must be a
rebirth of the connection between our soul and our spirit. Paul said in Rom.
12:1, "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies
of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto
God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but
be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that
good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God."
He
also said in Phil. 2:12,
"Work out
your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you
both to will and to do of his good pleasure." God
without manifestation ceases to be God. He is God but is only God to Himself.
It's like, I can call myself a Bishop but if I have no ministers that are in
that relationship with me then I cannot express my ability to be a leader of
ministers. I am a Bishop in name only. I can call myself an apostle but if I
have never been sent by God then I am only a self appointed apostle. There is
no expression of who I am.
God
is love but without anyone to love He cannot manifest who He is. If we
understand that we were in God at the beginning before creation then we must
have reached such a high level in Him that we had to be made manifest. Our
spirit must have reached a climatic point in God that we had to be revealed.
There is no child born just because mom and pop wanted a child. Every child is
a gift of God and comes from him. In natural childbirth there are millions of
cells that have to make their way to a place where they can be united. This
union determines the expression of the child that is to be brought forth. Even
so it is true in spiritual birth. Your spirit in God had to reach such a climax
that it had no choice but to be revealed. Nothing can become manifest until it
reaches its high point. God
gave man this freedom and assigned to it responsibility. Everything in God's creation works by this law. When the
seed of a man comes into contact with the egg of a woman and cells begin to
multiply and divide, there then begins what we call a gestation process and in
due time a child reaches a point in its growth that it has to be manifest. Everything
that has life must reach a place in itself where it becomes so full of what it
is that it manifests into another dimension. Paul
said in Eph. 1:4,
"According
as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should
be holy and without blame before him in love:"
This
means that you wouldn't be here if you had not reach a place in God before the
foundation of the world that you could be chosen. For you to have been chosen
in Him before the foundation of the world means that there was a level of
achievement that brought us to a point where we had to be revealed. If
this same achieving spirit is not completely in domination over the individual
that is manifest, the soul takes over. When this happens the soul becomes a
reflection of what is happing in the flesh. The soul will base its conclusions
upon the five senses of the flesh and when this
happens, we will pervert the Gospel and search the scriptures to make it fit
our situation. We will attempt to make ourselves better by using laws that we
agree with and even by doing that we conclude that we are not good. If I were
to tell you that God is going to do something great for you, I am telling you
that there is not anything great going on for you now, or that you need
something greater to happen.
There has to be
a change in our thinking and this doesn't come about over night. We have the
word of God that gives us the opportunity to conform our thinking to it so we
can get back into the order that God has assigned to us. The word of God that
has gone forth out of His mouth searches for an individual that is in the right
order and alignment to that word so it can manifest itself through that
individual. The Word is looking for someone that He can manifest Himself
through. Jesus said in
John 6:63, "The Spirit gives life; the flesh
counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are
life. Yet there are some of you who do not believe." In
order to bring spiritual words into reality, it requires a vessel that is in
the right alignment and order to that word which will cause it to be manifest.
Religion has
caused us to alter the plan of God and has made it to be the plan of man. We
have changed the Gospel from the destiny and purpose of God and made it to fit
the condition of man. So our emphases is on getting people saved and keep them
from going to hell. If we were to do away with hell most of what religion has
taught us about being saved would be worthless. We
have perverted the Gospel and have caused it to be all about us. It has nothing
to do with purpose and destiny and all we are interested in is being able to go
to heaven when we die. We condemn people to hell and tell them about what
sinners they are. They will agree with us because they know that they are not
being moral. We tell them if they leave our church and get ran over by truck
that they are going to an everlasting hell. Our purpose is to get them saved
just in case they were to die suddenly.
We
had discussions about what if we had an evil thought and was killed before we
repented. Would we go to hell or to
heaven? Our thinking was centered on our own self-righteousness. We were taught
that we were just sinners saved by grace if only we could stop sinning. I often
thought that I needed to go forward at the invitation and get saved again and
then hire someone to shoot me so I would be sure I would go to heaven before I
sinned again. We
have written songs about how beautiful heaven must be and how we will walk on
streets of gold and live in mansions fit for a king. We have lived in a
futuristic, shall be, one of these days, mentality.
In
the last fifty years we have seen the moral corruption in our government and in
our communities and in what we see on TV and in our schools the lack of
discipline and we have reached a place in our generation where what we believe
has got to work. It seems as though the world has more answers regarding
spiritual things than we have. What we
have been taught is just not working and our young kids are looking else where
for answers. They are not interested in our feeble attempts to regulate God's
promises to the future. They want answers and they want them now.
We
cannot just preach to people the Kingdom message without it being available
today. People have got to see it working in reality. We can talk all we want to about give and it will be multiplied
to you 100 fold but they can see that it is not working. We can shout and
rejoice that we are Kings but we have no idea about how to rule in this world.
We don't live like Kings. We live like paupers. If we are kings and are to rule
and reign like Jesus then why are we not doing it? Most are just waiting for
the sweet by when Jesus will come and change us in a moment and then we will do
it. There has to be a
remembering of what God said in the beginning when He said, "Let us make man in our image and our likeness
and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air,
over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move
along the ground." "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and
subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over
every living creature that moves on the ground."
We have got to get back to
that which was lost. Jesus said in Luke 19:10, For
the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost."
When we began to rely on our
own ability to create what was right in our eyes, we lost the understanding of
what God decreed about us. We became so caught up in living according to what
we thought was the way to do things, that we forgot that He gave us the
authority to rule on this earth.
The world does not need
another sermon and does not need us to preach to them. What the world needs is
a revelation. Information alone is powerless without the revelation of what it
means and the experience of its message. Without the experience all you have is
knowledge. We have enough knowledge. We need to experience the manifestation of
that knowledge. Gen. 1:3-5 says, "And God
said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it
was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light
Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the
first day."
But did you know that it was
three days later that he created the sun and the moon and the stars? Rev. 21:23
says,
"And there shall be no
night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord
God gives them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever." There are many things this is talking about but I
want you to focus on the fact that when God said, "Let there be light!" His
words went forth at the speed of a little more than 186,000 miles per second.
John said in John 1:1-5, "In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The
same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without
him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the
light of men. And the light shines in darkness; and the darkness comprehended
it not." When Jesus said, "Let there
be Light," His words entered into a capsule of time. The Lord said in Isaiah
55:11, "So shall my
word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but
it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing
whereto I sent it."
Jesus told Abram, "A father
of many nations have I made you," and yet, it was some twenty-five years later
before Isaac was born. When the Lord speaks His word goes forth looking for a
vessel that is prepared to bring to pass that word. Again, Jesus said in John
6:63, "It
is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I
speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." The words
that the Lord speaks are both spirit and they are life. The word alone is just
knowledge until the spirit calls them to life. The spirit brings or gives life
or expression or manifestation to the word. We need for the spirit to bring
forth life to the words of God that we have knowledge of. Words are powerful
and can affect the people who hear them. This is why we must be careful how we
express ourselves to others. We have not been called to bring another message
to the body but to bring them into a new experience in God. Not an experience
from God but an experience with God. Experience is gained from the sum of the
things that we have lived. The Lord
uses all these experiences of life to bring us to a place of understanding what
He has spoken over our lives. If our actions based upon our understanding of
what God has purposed for our life are brought into alignment with what has
always been our destiny, as decreed by God, there will be a quickening by the Spirit
of God according to His purpose.