The meek will inherit the earth and the humble the place Jesus has prepared for them. Be sure to occupy the place Jesus has prepared for us before the foundation of the world and not a place we have chosen for ourselves.

It is time to be spoken to by Jesus, enlightened by the Holy Spirit and controlled by the influence of heaven. For some this means renouncing the spirit of control and self –centeredness that paralyses our leadership and suffocates those in whom the Lord is wanting to reveal His glory. It’s a simple matter to turn to Jesus, repent and enter a new season of peace and fruitfulness that benefits Jesus ourselves and others.

See article by Mary Lindow: More here.

Keith Allen

While walking around the block with a friend for some exercise and a chat recently, I mentioned that in ministry, one comes across people who are easily misled. They find themselves unable to believe what informed people know to be true and they are likely to latch onto the latest conspiracy theory as if it is God’s truth.

Given their lack of discernment, and attraction to every breeze of doctrine, the enthusiasm with which they adopt the role of Watchmen and Guide to others is a worry. Naïve rather than wicked, these semi-blind guides are a danger to themselves and those who find themselves in their orbit. As some sage wrote in another place, ‘False prophets [and naïve would be leaders] are not necessarily bad people. They just have trouble distinguishing between their own ideas and God’s.’

Tozer notes that ‘Some Christians have a positive genius for getting confused.’ He also observed that it is the sincere Christian who eagerly desires more of God who can find herself in a quicksand of delusion and false teaching.

‘Strange as it may seem, the danger today is greater for the fervent Christian than for the lukewarm and the self-satisfied. The seeker after God’s best things is eager to hear anyone who offers a way by which he can obtain them. He longs for some new experience, some elevated view of truth, some operation of the Spirit that will raise him above the dead level of religious mediocrity he sees all around him, and for this reason he is ready to give a sympathetic ear to the new and the wonderful in religion, particularly if it is presented by someone with an attractive personality and a reputation for superior godliness.’

Unless we read scripture prayerfully and consistently we will be unable to discern who is speaking truth and who is speaking a perversion of it. If it was good enough for Jesus who lived in His Father and the fullness of the Holy Spirit to have been immersed in scripture it is good enough for you.

Paul wrote to Timothy, ‘and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus’ (2 Tim 3.15). The opposite to being wise about salvation is being foolish about the things of God.

The inability to distinguish between sound doctrine and a mere reputation for the same can come about because we happen to be of a naïve disposition – the kind of person who has a tendency to say anything and believe anything. As such we make good sales persons but not teachers of the word. When combined with a weak knowledge of the Bible and a lack of desire to read it in any depth we make problems for ourselves and those with whom we are associated.

We may pride ourselves that we are filled with the Spirit and that we hear from God. But the truth of any feeling, experience, vision or word we receive can only be validated by agreement with the scriptures. This is so because ecstatic experiences that come from God are indistinguishable from those that do not. This means that it is possible to mistakenly believe we have heard from God on some matter when we have actually heard from ourselves or from a demon posing as an angel of light. Thus Tozer writes,

‘The heart of man is like a musical instrument and may be played upon by the Holy Spirit, by an evil spirit or by the spirit of man himself. Religious emotions are very much the same, no matter who the player may be. Many enjoyable feelings may be aroused within the soul by low or even idolatrous worship.

So where does this leave you? Have you fortified your mind with Biblical discernment?

This highlights what can be a problem in churches today. Heart-felt praise and worship of Jesus abates our flesh and enables us to experience the reality of His Presence. Genuine praise and worship is a life – a life of intimacy with Jesus and careful attention to His voice.

‘Praise and worship’ in many churches can be stylized and formalized. Worse still it can actually be about us. Repeating ‘I love you more than life’ one hundred times may sound worshipful. Nevertheless it is about about us and what we aspire to do. It’s religious

‘Worship’ songs of this kind can lead us to an altered state that we mistake for the presence of God. What we assume is God is the presence of us. The presence of God is not us in a trance. Any ‘word’ that we assume is from God in such a state has doubtful veracity, since it looks spiritual but actually comes from the flesh.  Reliance on such ‘words’ has resulted in believers doing great damage to themselves and others to whom they are connected. The solution is not to cease our praise and worship but to ensure that our songs are about Jesus – and to ensure that we are grounded in the Bible.

If the kind of ‘worship’ we engage in decreases or annuls our desire to read the Bible and discover His heart in scripture, we would do well to consider the whether the practices we have taken for granted are of God or merely of ourselves.

‘Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world’ 1 John 4.1 NIV.

Keith Allen

My 19 year old daughter often says ‘I like being me!’ We are all meant to enjoy being ourselves. We were created to live in a ‘flow’ rather than on a draft board of black and white. By living in God through Jesus we can live in life rather than in bits of life. Our days can either be whole or ‘bitty’ depending in whether our source of wholeness is Jesus or positions and perspectives.

Jesus didn’t go about attempting a balancing act getting His perspectives right. He didn’t live from them. He didn’t seek balance. He was balance. He didn’t live from view-points or mind-sets. He had more than the mind of His Father. He was His son – an extension of His Father’s being, yet profoundly Himself! He was the Son of His Father –the perfect model for the sons and daughters of men.

Jesus did a lot of healing, spoke words of life and liberated people from the power of Satan. He was healing. He did not stress out over issues like Christians can. He served His Father by being Himself and doing what He saw the Father doing. Jesus was life and lived in its’ flow. When Jesus is our life we live in that flow of balance and wholeness. But there’s more. We become who we are and can enjoy being ourselves.

‘To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.’ I learned this in science, which I was passably good at, until our teacher went on a one-term binge on mass and density. I lost interest after that. I do recall Archimedes. But focused more on his darting around the bath room in the nude shouting Eureka than on principle.

To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Yes, I did learn this in my junior years around the pneumatic trough. However age has revealed to me that as a result of the knowledge of good and evil, a lot of people think reactively. People adopt a reactionary stance to some abuse of a good thing that they have endured at the hand of … well … people like themselves.

We can live out of reaction and response but we are meant to live out of God.

One of my teachers, a young and patient man – a graduate, I believe of Bathurst teachers college, Australia, put a glass rod in his mouth after stirring hydrochloric acid in a beaker. This caused amusement and a satisfactory diversion to we year 9 scholars. He embarrassment him self, coughed and spluttered but suffered no harm other than to his ego.

Later in adult life as a teacher, one of my colleagues had a more challenging experience when he let a lump of sodium slip into a pneumatic trough of unsuspecting water. A hole was burned in the black board, the fire engine came and the men in yellow uniforms sucked up fowl odours with their extracting machine. Numerous students escaped out of windows. Startled parents collected their kids early. Again, no serious damage was done. The teacher retained his job but the principal retired a early.

If we followed the path pioneered by a certain variety of Christian, we might feel forced to ban pneumatic troughs, cease using beakers and exchange male science teachers for ladies. We could take refuge in any number of reactions. We could do all this, go home and spend the rest of our lives in bed wearing a crash helmet.

A knowledge of good and evil mind-set can cause us to live in reaction mode. Some one claims to have the gift of prophecy, has an affair and gives a few people whacky words that do not come to pass. So “we get a thing” against prophecy. Then spend the remainder of our lives deaf to God’s Voice. It’s curious that pastors through bad preaching, have deceived more people than have prophets, simply because there are more of them. But people keep listening to them and their influence has not been annulled.

The nature of a religious life in the knowledge of good and evil is like living on a draft board of black and white squares. We can step into and over these squares, dodging about like a person crossing a river by trying to jump on the most secure looking rocks. We can reject some things yet be caught in fashions and fads. Sure, we are meant to be discriminating but we are called to live out of God  – not even out of discernment.

The result is that people surf in on the waves and get washed out by the rip.

People can live in dichotomies calling one thing a plague and another thing a bounty, living jerky lives zigzagging between ‘positions.’ The truth is though, that things just are. They were all created good with the capacity to minister life. But when we live in things rather than in God the things rise up to tyrannize us and stain our lives with misery. This is why Christians can be so sour.

Since Jesus lived in His Father and not in the knowledge of good and evil – which means not in dichotomies, theses, antitheses, dictions and contradictions. He just was and He just did. Jesus is  ‘ I AM.’ As daughters and sons we have a place in Him – to be ourselves doing our Father’s business.

Jesus went about releasing life by being Himself. “I AM” can do that and so can His daughters and sons – if we are alive in God, have our epistemology rooted in God and not in the bisected, dissected, fragmented, mode of The Good versus Evil monger.

We need to live out of God and not out of our experiences, which means not living out of us. The only way to rid our selves of fractured, contentious, oppositional thinking, is to let Jesus be our life. Then we have the mind of Christ. But not because we have worked it all out, situated ourselves in correct perspectives or avoided the mistakes of others.

We are able to see and ‘be’ because we are deep-rooted in the wholeness of Jesus. Here we live in God and are able to multiply the good. Good and evil do not cease to exist because we live in God. But formed and built up in Him we are furnished with the discernment see what is of man and what is of God and live in an atmosphere of liberty and peace.

Keith Allen

To know Good’s heart is to know God’s love. To know that God is love is also to understand His anger. God’s anger, unlike ours is unsullied by rage and vindictiveness. But it is nevertheless real since it is the other side of His perfect love. Where human love can be polluted by sentimentality, selfishness and the desire to control. God’s love is pure.

If we have never experienced deep anger, it may be that we have never really known love.

As sons and daughters of God we have emotions that we inherit from our Father. Everything that came from the hand of the Father was good – including the potential for anger. If we don’t feel anger, maybe we don’t feel much at all. Maybe we don’t love much or  have never been truly loved. It’s what we do with emotions that determines whether our actions are good or evil. Do we abuse or harm people with our anger? Or do we allow our anger to motivate us to work towards the elimination of injustice and abuse? Do we harness our anger so that it propels us to multiply love?

A.W. Tozer writes, ‘There is a strong tendency among religious teachers these days to disassociate anger from the divine character and to defend God by explaining away the Scriptures that relate it to Him. This is understandable, but in the light of the full revelation of God it is inexcusable.’

It’s inexcusable also to claim that anger is illegitimate in human life – particularly when such denial is associated with passivity and the effete kind of piety that neuters our humanity; emasculates our person so that  we pretend that genuine Christianity is a bunch of people going about being   ‘nice’ to each other. In such a state we are incapable of taking a stand for truth and justice and thus we fail to love.

Then there’s the misguided attempt to get the abused and sinned against to deny their anger and attempt to extinguish it with premature forgiveness – as though the abused must stop feeling angry for the comfort of those at hand.

We cannot offer genuine forgiveness until we have let our heart be angry. Until we have acknowledged the pain and anger resulting from the assault of un-love on our heart, we cannot offer genuine forgiveness.

The cancer of society is not that we are hated. It’s the institutionalization of un-love.

God is love and God experiences anger. But the wrath of God does not mean that He goes about constantly mad at human beings. The wrath of God and the love of God are seen in the Person of Jesus. Jesus bears the penalty of our sins while revealing the love of God. Tozer writes, ‘God’s wrath is His utter intolerance of whatever degrades and destroys. He hates iniquity as a mother hates the diphtheria or polio that would destroy the life of her child.’

We do not realize how deeply enmeshed and accepting we are of un-love and un-life. We come into the world expecting to be loved and to live life to the full, but time causes us to lower the bar. We accommodate ourselves to the landscape of death and try to make religion out of it.

Jesus is saying to His people today, ‘I see you good works. But why are you so absorbed in healing soul and body when your being remains so crippled?’ There is no lasting peace when our being is in pieces.

‘They offer superficial treatments for my people’s mortal wound. They give assurances of peace when there is no peace’ Jer 8.11 NLT.

So let’s be rid of the notion that false doctrine with its slanders about the Father, the diminishing of Jesus, the debilitation of the power of the cross, the substitution of ‘endurance’ for the authority of God’s sons and the castration of the Holy Spirit do not matter. It does. (Of course the Holy Spirit does not suffer castration. We do.) All of this makes humans smaller and weaker even as it perpetuates our degradation in the name of god [sic]. Let’s be clear. You have no right to bind people in the Old Covenant in the name of  your denominational identity!

In the visions of Rick Joyner, Jesus is depicted on occasions as burning with anger, significantly, in the context where children of God are suffering spiritual abuse at the hand of those who claim to be nurturing the flock. Rick Joyner urges Christians to take account of  ‘the severity of Christ.’ This ‘severity’ arises because Jesus loves people so deeply that He is angered by the abuse perpetrated by Christians on themselves when they settle for anything less than Himself.

We can have a life in ‘christianity’ and be small and ineffectual or we can have Jesus as our life and exercise the authority that is His. Union with God in Jesus means that we are life-givers, liberty-multipliers and healers. You want to heal the planet? Be His woman. Be His man. Have Christ live in you. Embrace Him as your life!

Mostly Jesus goes about multiplying forgiveness, healing and joy. Occasionally we see Him angry. On the occasions when Jesus is angered in the New Testament the anger is directed at teachers of the law and religious leaders. I believe He was angry when He wrote poignantly in the sand. Jesus burned with anger at the presumption of those who condemned Him for healing on the Sabbath – not only because this was not loving but because they purveyed a perverse view of God.

His anger was fierce against the marketers of religion in the temple, just as it is today towards those who use His name as a vehicle for career and self promotion. It’s disappointing, to say the least, when we find Christians who get angry when they are overcharged at the super-market, but look the other way when people use Jesus, the Holy Spirit or anything Christian, to build an empire for themselves.

Who would say to their child, ‘My daughter, you were born without a toe. The surgeons have fixed that. As yet you are lacking an arm. But that’s Ok. One is good.’ Many of God’s people subsist on only one lung. Severely incapacitated they gasp for the oxygen of life. But those who could know better retort. ‘That’s alright. We only believe in one lung in our denomination.’

We might often imagine the wrath of God to be reserved for criminals, drug dealers, pornographers and adulterers. And so it is. How often do we recognize that this anger also awaits those who bind people in Moses, Old Covenant captivity, the weakness of the flesh and the impotence of the children of the slave woman –  for the sake of a career in the church or to protect our idol of denominational identity?

‘The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness’ Romans 1.18 NIV.

‘He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored’ Mark 3.5 NIV.

‘When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled’ John 11.33 NIV.

‘To those who sold doves he said, ‘Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!’ John 2.16 NIV.

Keith Allen

A friend had a dream recently. The key part of it for the purposes of this post is that someone had mangled the sacrifice and that people we called to return to the genuine Sacrifice. It’s a riddle of the cross. Observe what follows.

I see before me a half-dead man. Decay has so taken hold on his body that he is scarcely mobile and partially blind. His name is Body of Death. He his head is manacled to Performance, Performance has him chained to the law, the law confines him to the Old Covenant and the OC binds him to the knowledge of good and evil. Dead Body lives in Adam. But his real place is in Jesus.

From time to time Body attempts to revive himself with a swig from a bottle of spiritual gifts. Now and again he is stirred by a new method of prayer ministry or the effort to establish a new form of church. Sometimes he will attempt to stand upright and stagger a few steps into an overseas mission venture before falling to the ground like a man with a debilitating disease. Body is meant to bear a sword but all he has is a spoon with which he attempts to feed himself.

Body of Death does not mean to be a clacking carcass in the valley of dead bones. But he remains so because he lives from a mindset that has perverted the cross and robbed it of its’ power. The death and resurrection of Jesus, has been substituted for his own sacrifice of works. What has resulted is a false christ and a false cross on which he crucifies himself in order to please Jesus.

Beware of a false sacrifice (you) and a false christ (a little Christ who is the page boy of the law) that binds people in the Old Covenant by making it the New. The New Testament really is a new and living way – Christ in you, Christ as you. Christ for you. Christ covering you. This is the deeper meaning of the Lord’s Table: Christ your life.

Make no mistake. We cannot live in resurrection life (Jesus) unless we are really dead in Adam. We are not a new man or woman in Christ if we are still living in the law. In Jesus we are sons. In performance we are a Body of Death.

‘By abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace’ Eph 2.14,15 NIV.

Body of Death is dead because he has not died with Christ and therefore cannot be resurrected with Him to be the One New Man. He is still in the Old Testament while living in the New, struggling to have Jesus help him keep the law. But Jesus lives in us to transform slaves into sons by the Spirit.

Sadly, for Body of Death, Christ died for nothing because he lives in the law and hopes Christ will help him do it. He has set aside the cross; set aside God’s grace, while he strives to achieve what God has already accomplished in Jesus for Him. As a result he is separated from himself, separated from God and separated from his fellows.

No. We have been delivered – delivered from the Body of death to live whole and holy in Jesus as the One New Man.

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!’ Gal 2.20,21 NIV.

‘Yet now he has reconciled you to himself through the death of Christ in his physical body. As a result, he has brought you into his own presence, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault’ Col 1.22 NIV.

Keith Allen

Well, here we are in the New year. Time to think in things new! On the first day of Narnia the talking beasts were gathered in front of Aslan to hear him enunciate the principles of the Kingdom. The beasts, it may be noted were the taking beasts – not the dumb beasts who live in slavery in our world. Here were beasts that had been given an intelligence and insight that placed them above the ordinary beast of the kind we usually think of when we say the words, ‘dumb beast.’ And it has to be said that there are humans of the world who have more in common with the dumb beasts who are slaves, than they do with the taking beasts of Narnia who can be quite astute; more so than some humans. It’s not generally known that the donkey who rebuked foolish Balaam was once of these talking beasts of Narnia, placed in our time and space to rebuke a stupid man with the mind of a donkey and the heart of a charlatan.

It’s a truth that many who think themselves most in charge, most in control of their lives; who think of themselves the most deserving on account of their expertise in practical affairs, are at 0ne and the same time the most enslaved and the most ignorant of their bondage. They live from themselves and to themselves, laboring to raise a family, buy a house, purchase a car or two or more, then a swimming pool and an investment property and as well as this, labouring to educate their children so that they can step onto the same treadmill that has been their life.

There is nothing wrong with these things in themselves. They are fine in themselves. Some of them are necessities for living in the world. It’s not the doing of them that’s the problem. It’s the living in them that shrivels our being, boosts our ego and leaves us slaves of the earth rather than sons of God and representatives of the Kingdom of Heaven.

It’s those who have a hunger for God that change the world and inherit the earth – not those who absorb themselves in the pedestrian. Live from the pedestrian and you will produce pedestrian. Live in God and pedestrian things will vibrate with the life of God.

There are good, practical people who exclaim, ‘There are things to be done,’ and so there are. But we are not meant to live out of  ‘The Things To Be Done.’ Our privilege is to live in God and live out of His life into the world. The result of this arrangement is that the things to be done are the things God means us to do as a result of our nature and calling. More importantly the things we do are filled with His life – filled with the Spirit of Life actually. Such deeds having been birthed in Life Itself produce more life, since they are self-multiplying and innately fertile.

Living out of ‘Things to be done’ has a cause, which is the original curse that resulted from Adam’s choice to cast his lot with living in and from himself in his own version of what is right and what is wrong, rather than living in God and intuitively living the good, the peaceful and the creative.

Living out of ourselves is living in Adam. We do it because we believe Satan’s lie that Father cannot be trusted – cannot be trusted to draw us into who we really are; cannot be trusted to love us enough to fill our deep need for love and acceptance; cannot be trusted to reveal our true worth and situate us in our true place in society. In short we choose not to believe that Father cannot be trusted to burnish us as His daughters and sons, so by the sweat of our brow, we labour to do all this ourselves. Thus rather than living as sons we live as slaves. The meek labour in quiet perseverance in God. Others labour in desperation, slowly killing their heart spiritually and physically. The proud make so bold as to make a virtue of their slavery. Some are relieved to encounter the real Jesus who lifts these burdens. Others rise up to kill the givers of life.

The poor in spirit, not only get to see God. They get to know Him as He is. As a result they come to know themselves.

On the first day of Narnia the talking beasts were gathered in front of Aslan to hear him enunciate the principles of the Kingdom. Aslan spoke, ‘I give you yourselves, I give you forever this land of Narnia. I give you the stars and I give you myself.’

Through the cross and the Spirit poured out we have been given ourselves. Open your heart and receive the gift of WHO YOU ARE.We were made to live in God, which is to say, created to live from the Father’s being in the Spirit of life. Adam broke the union. Jesus rejoined us to God, made us one with ourselves and our fellow humans and most importantly, made a new and living way by which we can be ourselves. This ‘way’ is not a method, it’s not keys, formulae or things we have to do. It’s Jesus. The only ‘doing’ part in the deal is for us to believe – to live in the Son of God instead of living in ourselves.

Sadly there are Believers who strive by obedience to live in the intimacy with Jesus that is already theirs and which can never be taken away. Those who live in Jesus will increasingly obey. Those who seek intimacy through obedience will pretend, despise themselves and bind others in their own captivity.

The curious thing is that by denying self to live in God, we are enveloped in the Spirit of His Son. We become who we are. We begin to live as who were made to be and  delight ourselves in doing the tasks we are called to accomplish, rather than the tasks others would lay on us, or more specifically the talks with which we burden ourselves in order to earn respect, love or both.

The efforts of the slave to earn love are a barrier between Jesus and ourselves, obstructing the flow of intimacy, love and assurance that we crave in order to find love and be ourselves. As we live in Christ we become more fully ourselves, more poignantly the priest-kings the Kingdom God calls us to be. The fact that God has already given Himself to us, means that we are already bought, already His possession, already able to be ourselves and build the Kingdom of God.

Keith Allen

The angels sang, ‘Peace on earth, good will towards men..’ Yet it was not long before Herod sought His life and ‘God’s representatives’ began to plot to murder the one who was their life. There is much about life that is deeply offensive to the carnal mind.

I knew a man, a likeable person of conservative bent who is the type of person whose careful religiosity ensured promotion to the roll of church elder in the churchliest of churches. ‘We must be so careful .. so careful..’ was his refrain. “So careful” was brother Curtin that he, along with others have succeeded in keeping the Kingdom of God out of his church to this very day. No matter, apparently that Jesus declared that the Kingdom of God is ushered in by the forceful.

Which reminds me of a quote from Bill Johnson that appeared on Facebook recently. It highlights all that is self-righteous and limp about a life in religion.

‘If Jesus would have preached the average sermon preached in our pulpits this last week He never would have been crucified.’ This is to say that there is little in much of the discourse that rises above the kingdoms of men.

Jesus did not set out to annoy or insult people. Yet His life was so different to a life in religion that He continually confronted the status quo by being Himself.

There’s a vision in which the Lord pictures society as a large prison with high walls and very insecure guards. Some of these guards are secular figures speaking out their versions of popular unbelief. Others are church leaders – pastors to be specific – who bind people in religion. It’s notable that in this vision it is not this kind of person who bursts through barriers to lead people into the authority of the Kingdom of heaven. It is ordinary people who have been authorized and empowered by Jesus personally to speak life.

There’s another vision described by the same author. Here the people of the world, including many of God’s people, are groping about, almost blind and half paralyzed in the darkness of a huge tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They have gorged on its’ stinking fruit and as a result are stumbling and sloshing about erratically under its branches. Unsurprisingly these people have no discernment  or divine authority to be victorious in the world. They are another version of the captives in the prison.

It’s significant that when Jesus announced that He had come to set the captives free He was speaking to the religious in general and God’s people in particular.

The prison and the tree of confusion represent the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. To live in religion is to live from this tree and eat its fruit. We are eating this fruit if we are attempting to live from the law, the letter, Christian performance orientation, an ethical philosophy, a belief system, Bible principles, good works, missionary work, churchianity and Christianity. Common Christianity is a Christianized version of the knowledge of good and evil where people attempt to be like God by living THEIR LIFE.

A perceptive teacher put it well in a recent video: Sow Bible study and you will reap Bible study. Actually he is not against Bible study and perceives its Kingdom meaning better than many because he reads His Bible through the lens of Jesus. What he means is ‘Plant religion and you will reap religion. Sow Jesus and you will reap sons and daughters of God.’ We must plant Jesus to reap the Kingdom of God. Succinctly he has described the difference between a life in God and a life in he knowledge of good and evil.

A Christianized version of the knowledge of good and evil is a ploy of Satan to rob the sons of God of their ability to love and exercise their authority and power over circumstance and the Enemy. It infatuates us with our status making us believe we are Godly while concealing the fact that we are spiritual cripples.

Several years ago the Lord showed me in a dream the real nature of much of the church. It was captured in a dungeon. The people were drastically crippled and in many cases scarcely recognizable as human. They were presided over by Mr Berlesconi. They worked in a factory and were absorbed with the machinery. There were pastors present who were proud of this industrial activity.

Dungeon means prison and bondage. It means lives untouched by the sovereignty of Jesus and the message of the Isaiah 61 and Luke 4.18. The crippled nature of the people represents their deformity as slaves and their failure to live in their inheritance as sons and daughters of God. Their obsession with machines represents bondage to the letter and ignorance of the life that is theirs in the Spirit. The factory represents the Christian industry and the inability to be living as sons in the Kingdom of God in this regime

The one who presides over all this, Mr Berlesconi is a significant figure indeed, given his character, past position as a political leader and co-responsibility for the dire financial circumstances of Italy. He is one of a class of politicians who maintained themselves in power by leading the people to live in a false reality – a life beyond their means by accumulating debt. In this he is not unlike Christian leaders who have made a career for themselves by leading the people to live in religion and the knowledge of good and evil instead of in Christ. Eventually the tower begins to collapse.

As a media magnate Mr Berlesconi represents the ability of the Christian industry and its politicians to shape and control Christian opinion for political purposes and personal gain. The current predicament of Europe and the world financial system is a picture of what the Lord in mercy will allow to happen to the church that is not His, but represents itself and its interests while essentially living in adultery.

When Jesus is our life we multiply the gift of resurrection. When Jesus is our light we shine light into the darkness and people begin to see. When we are love because Jesus lives in us, we are able to sustain the reproach and persecution that comes to us as a result of taking up our cross and following Jesus with grace. May your life in Jesus empower you to sow life into dead situations this Christmas and in 2012.

We are going into recess until approximately January 16. May you all have a happy and blessed holiday season.

Keith, Elizabeth and Meredith Allen.

Christmas celebrates the time when God’s Gift came into the world to love the world and restore to it love and hope. Whereas the Enemy robs mankind, the Father gives gifts to those who receive Him.

‘That is why the Scriptures say, “When he ascended to the heights, he led a crowd of captives and gave gifts to his people’ Ephesians 4.8 NLT.

People receive the most life and the greatest wholeness when Jesus is pursued for Himself. When the glory of Jesus is unveiled simply for who He is, people are set free and ennobled. With Christ incarnate in them by the Spirit they develop as whole persons as sons and daughters of God. In union with Jesus alone people are the Bride of Christ. Now they birth people and projects that are bursting with the life of God.

Only Jesus is life in Himself. Nothing else. No one else.  The multiplication of Jesus for Himself produces the Kingdom of God. Sons of God in the authority of Christ release life into individuals, families, businesses, churches, towns and cities. The new creation is the life of Jesus burgeoning in science, commerce, business, education and medicine. The new creation is the whole earth being filled with Christ’s glory. As Christ-gifted people we would accomplish more for God if we were more focused on releasing heaven on earth than going to heaven.

It is necessary to multiply Jesus for Himself because anything else is pollution. Paul called the ‘everything else’ waste, garbage, dung. The Kingdom of Jesus Christ is the life of the Spirit manifest in the earth. It is God’s will being done on earth through those whose life is Christ.

There is unlimited power in Jesus. He is resurrection and life and hence the undoing of all that is tired and dead. Jesus is Christmas fun and abundance multiplied in the world.  The gifts of the Spirit are for the Kingdom of God and not for the kingdoms of men. Jesus is not a package. He is a Person. Signs, wonders, life all spring from His side. From His Face emits vision and discernment. From His hands comes love, healing and fruitfulness in abundance. His feet bring peace and reconciliation. His back produces perseverance and joy. His being and person in us multiplies resurrection and life. How’s that for a sack of excellent Christmas gifts?

When people learn of the gifts of the Spirit and the greater life called life in the Spirit they are learning of Christ and not new and novel abstractions and methods. Let no one attempt to use the Spirit-filled life to build their own careers and empires. The Holy Spirit is not a church growth strategy. The power of God is not to enhance the influence of man. Don’t make the mistake of thinking to rob God’s house to build your own. The Holy Spirit is not another church growth method or an arm of the Christian Industry.

A sure way to cause the anger of Christ to burn against us is to market religion and become a modern version of the temple money changer. Jesus didn’t live for Himself. Neither do His disciples. They live for Jesus. His power lives in them and will not be counterfeited by the flesh. Plant Jesus and you will harvest sons of God. Use Jesus to plant anything of self and you will plant weeds. Have a merry Christ-mass and multiply His Presence in you!

‘Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me’ John 6.57 NIV.

Keith Allen

Jesus’ water walk was not a stunt. It was an exhibition of what a son of God does. For those who live in the Son and not in themselves, all things are under their feet.

Life in the Spirit can be scary. Compared to life in the letter and the law such a life is to walk on water. Often we might fall in and like Peter, be pummeled by the waves. Yet Jesus is always there to pick us up, stand us on our feet and urge us enthusiastically to try again. The Father gave us His Son to walk in the Spirit. Man in his perverted wisdom substituted the church. We can try again and advance in the art (heart) of living in the Spirit. Or we can return to the law and bury our inheritance in the ground.

To reject our life in the Spirit is to turn our back on the excellence of being that is ours in Jesus. As the Spirit writes through Paul, ‘But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you’ Romans 8.10, 11 NIV. We need to cease applying this to the resurrection alone and begin living this reality every day!

Sure we may feel secure in the company of the religious. We might master those things that it would be possible to master even if Jesus did not exist. But this is to leave ourselves small people equipped with very small swords. There’s a comic scene in The Voyage of The Dawn Treader where a bunch of dwarves use big words and lots of bluff;  bluff and big talk which includes standing on top of their partners to make themselves look taller. It doesn’t work and they are exposed as duffers – an apt image of life in the letter and the flesh where eventually our actions both fail to impress us or intimidate the Enemy.

In Jesus, filled with the Spirit of Sonship, we can live, move and have our being in Christ while bearing swords of incredible sweep and power. Or we can take our identity in religion and denomination. We can wax smug about ourselves and our beliefs while shouting and brandishing a butter knife.

Life in the letter may appear sound, secure and religious. But it can never produces those levels of authority and power that guarantee victory over the Enemy and His works. Life in the letter can seem ‘godly’ but it should be seen for what it is: Life in you, life in Adam, life in man. It does not afford any power to keep the law, unless we make the circumference of the law so small that even a robot could keep it. The tragedy is that we take our places among the lawless and those who oppose Jesus.

‘Outwardly you look like righteous people, but inwardly your hearts are filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness’ Matt 23.28 NIV.

The grace of Jesus is a marvelous thing. Not only does it annul our sin. It fills us with a state of being and an un-polluted righteousness that is not ours. It is this state of being; a state of being a son of God that enables us to love ourselves, our wives, family, those we mix with and fellow believers. We are infused with the love that is God in us. This love, which is not our own, is a supernatural love that is the essence of God and is infused into us by the Spirit of Christ alive in our being.

‘And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him’ John 4.16 NIV.

So don’t give up. Don’t make do with a place of false security. Don’t substitute items of law and disciplined performance for the greater discipline of living in Christ who is the righteousness of God in you. Don’t substitute things like Bible study for a hunger for His manifest presence because you made a mistake or you have seen others stuff-up in some way. Don’t let your refusal to abandon the law prevent you from living the glory of a life abandoned to Jesus.

Determine to take your place in Christ’s being. Allow yourself to be drawn relentlessly into His Spirit by the Spirit. Know that nothing in all creation can separate you from the love of God. Live in the reality that there is no condemnation for those who live in Christ Jesus – and be drawn into the infinite life that belongs to the sons and daughters of God. Your skill in walking on water will increase and you will crush demons under your feet.

Keith Allen

I’ve discussed praise and worship with some friends recently. We were looking at it from the perspective that praise and worship is not always what it seems. Sure, the praise and worship of Jesus is an excellent thing and a righteous activity when done in the Spirit of God towards Jesus. As the glory of Jesus is uncovered so we as His children are unveiled into our true identity and purpose.

But praise and worship in its’ ‘institutionalized form’ is not always the praise and worship of Jesus. When the songs are about us they produce a trance like absorption in ourselves. Following this kind of self-indulgence people can say really ditsy things and think they are in the anointing. Such a ‘daze’ dulls our comprehension of the Word, limits our attention span and sets us up for deception.

This is an important issue because the Lord is transforming us from merely being the church to being His body in spirit and in truth – all of which means forsaking the forms of living in ourselves (religion) to living in Jesus by the Spirit. Our purpose is to become the Kingdom of God’s sons and daughters.

To sing, ‘I love you more than life’ 300 times may sound commendable, but the fact is, it is about us. ‘Us in a trance’ is not the Presence of God. It is the presence of us in a religious atmosphere. Our immersion in self gives rise to utterances that are not life-giving or worse. We may hear the utterances of a religious spirit. Such a spirit may be clever enough not to voice outright heresy. But it will speak through people to bind them in mind-sets that limit the power of Jesus in those that hear them.

In order to know that we have heard clearly from God, we need to know that we heard God and not ourselves; that we heard Jesus’ word to us and not some expression of our personal sentiment or desire. We need to be assured that we are hearing from the Spirit of Christ because we have been worshiping Jesus and not extolling our own good intentions.

‘Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare’ Isa 55.2 NIV.

We need to ask ourselves, how many in Pentecostal/charismatic circles have thought they ‘heard’ a word from God following an ‘us centered’ episode, when it was really a word from their own soul?

How many of us can distinguish what is coming from the Spirit of Christ and what is merely the effervescence of our own soul? How many know God’s word well enough to distinguish truth from religion? I believe in hearing God’s voice and that we can learn to do so accurately. Yet people in large numbers from certain circles crash and burn on the basis of decisions they have made. Decisions sometimes made in reliance on shonky words of knowledge and prophecy.

Confusion, turmoil and just plain Babylon occur in the earth because people worship the thing rather than the creator. In the church we have believers attaching themselves to church, to the Bible, to works of service, to communion, to community and to praise and worship. In this season Jesus is weaning us off ‘things.’ He wants us to draw life from Him.

‘For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself’ John 5.26 NIV.

In polite circles we might call these ‘things’ distractions. But where the success or failure of the Kingdom of God is concerned they come under the heading of idols. The religious spirit; the spirit of anti-Christ is adept at using the things of Christ to diminish our completeness in Christ. Be vigilant and don’t allow yourself to be consumed by the deceptions of the roaring lion who seeks to devour the naïve and religious. For heaven’s sake choose songs about Jesus and not songs about our good intentions.

Make Christ your life. Eat Him. Live in Him and let out the roar of the Lion of the tribe of Judah who lives in you!

Keith Allen