I looked up the word coronation. The meaning is the act or ceremony of crowing. This could be like a baby crowing, like entering into a new realm, reign or season. A baby coming out of the womb is no longer going to be living inside the mother. We are entering into something substantial, that we can hold our place in. This grace, anointing, substance that will be given to us, is like a crown. This is a new authority to live in a new place—a mobile authority.
If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. 2 Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. 3 For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory. Colossians 3:1-3
We look at this chosen out from the furnace of affliction, a duplicity process, where a dream turns into a nightmare. This is a journey that repeatedly causes us to respond affirmatively, by continuously yielding.
We who are going to continue the journey having more faith now than in the beginning. It will require the training and the discipline of learning to abide from the heavenly place. This is the learning to abide with Christ in heavenly places, to seek those things above.
Have you ever asked yourself…What are those things above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God? They are literally the substance and essence of all that heaven is. Heaven is the only place that will agree with you. You will never confess a scripture in the presence of God in the midst of His angels, where we will hear “What? Do you really think you can?” They will extol you, encourage you. They will egg you on and talk of even greater things.
The whole realm of heaven is expansive light. It is filled with joy and is solid peace. In heaven, there is no contending against the will of God. There is no challenging the will of God. There is just “Yes and Amen”. All is possible because of Jesus Christ and everyone knows it.
I would have lost heart, lost my place and ran out of gas, had those sovereign moments not happened. I started to live from a place of heaven, the seated place with Christ. Even now, many times I must choose to sit with Jesus today. My life is screaming for change but I choose to step out of my life at this moment (whatever it is) and I step back into the place that He has prepared for me. And, I will enter in with joy and engage in peace.
To this day, when I start my prayer, I begin by the blood of the Lamb. I acknowledge that the blood is my boldness, my righteousness, my restitution, my recompense, my restoration and my everything. I then go through the veil of His flesh.
The veil of the flesh of Jesus isn’t me saying, “Thank You so much”–it is the way. It is the path that gets longer and broader. It has more substance, every time I pass through.
I pass through His death. From scripture, I found essence of what His death meant. The substitution that He was delivered up because of my offense. He Who knew no sin became sin for me—the Just suffered for the unjust. I recognize that this was for me, and because of me, He was here.
I allow this to open the door to His death where He was buried. There He descended into hell and took upon Himself, and carried upon Himself, not just my sin but my punishment and suffered for me, and all that this meant, even what I don’t understand.
It is like recalibrating my emotions every day I enter into God because otherwise, I’m just an agitated crazed dog trying to solve my life, wanting to go to bed or go outside to relieve itself.
The difference between an animal who is held captive to its stuff to this life giving Spirit that I am being conformed into the image of. This is a life giving Spirit.
The resurrection was in the bowels of hell. It was there that He was born again. It was there that Jesus took the keys that Satan had of hell and death. It was there that He stripped Satan of all authority and made him a non-existent entity.
He still has a “roaring lion” reputation. He can still roar and cause me to shiver. I am not diminishing his capacity. He has the ability to move through senses, emotions and past histories. But, on the flip side, when I spend time talking about how cool it was that Jesus took the keys from Satan of hell and death. When I think about Him taking all the principalities and powers of all the ages and chaining them up and parading them around, when I think about Him going into the prison of souls and preaching deliverance, healing and salvation, and when I think about Him taking captivity captive and He had no intimidation or wasn’t frightened and He wasn’t overwhelmed in the place where He found Himself resurrected in. Until He was fully satisfied when He completed His mission there, rising up, ascending into heaven. I then think about Him taking His blood into the very tabernacle of God in heaven, and cleansing it so that our presence could be received and welcomed at all times. Then, Jesus sitting down at the Father and sending the Holy Spirit to go and accomplish what I did in all of those who come to believe. Give the gifts that are required for the maturity of the church. Pour it out and don’t ever stop pouring it out. I think of the fact that Jesus now sits in a High Priestly roll in intercession.
The bible says, in Hebrews 9 that today, He is in the presence of God for us.
24 For Christ has not entered the holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us; 25 not that He should offer Himself often, as the
high priest enters the Most Holy Place every year with blood of another Hebrews 9:24
The word “appears” here means, “He is on exhibition”
Whenever the Father looks at the Son, He sees us. When He sees us, He sees the Son. There is no separating us from the Son and the Son from us.
This posture of intercession is constant agreement with everything that was begun in Christ and to be fulfilled in Christ. There isn’t even a blip on the radar from our behavior. We need to know this, because otherwise, we bait ourselves up. Religion will make us hate ourselves. There is one thing that we can tell when we have been in religion long enough; it is that we hate ourselves, loath ourselves, we are angry at ourselves and everyone else all the time. This is because it is works-based to achieve to become.
But this Presence behind the veil, where Christ who is our Forerunner has gone before us, where the hope abides, where the confession of hope is joined in the hope of our salvation. It is just one glorious, “We’ve got it! We’ve got it! It’s good! It’s wonderful! You’re wonderful! I love you! We are accepted!” We live from here. We have to live from here because meanwhile, the earth is going to be doing what earth does. And, we are going to be doing what God gave us to do which is going to become lights shining in dark places. Liberators, not because we come as powerhouses, but we come in a union that is no longer in dispute in the circumstances.
Undisputed:
- We are inseparable from the love of God.
- We are inseparable from God’s love.
- We are indivisible from Christ.
- We are indivisible.
- We cannot be removed from Christ.
- Christ cannot be removed from us.
- This union with God is forever.
It is forever and not based on works and not based on behavior. It has just entirely been given by what Jesus accomplished for us. The only problem for growth is that we become more aware of, and yielding to, that it is ours. But for me, I have to always return to God.
I know, in a small degree, why Jesus had to pray so much. He wasn’t praying so much to figure out what to do or where to go next – He carried the character, the essence, and the substance of God. He carried Father. This was not like a “new Father” that He was learning. Yes, He was Man becoming aware of faith and yielding to and accepting what was given to Him. But, He had to stay connected to heaven so that He could respond in a heavenly fashion in every situation. The earth would have pulled Him down like it pulls us down. It would have overwhelmed Him like it overwhelms us.
His coming into the heavenly realm was so that He could be continually recalibrated back to His original place, and His assignment for redemption. When He was on the mount of temptation, and finished the testing of the devil, it says then the angels came and ministered to Him. Without understanding all this meant, I fully believe that He went into a personal renewal. I think He probably had to have a time of just having God talk back to Him, telling Him how much He was loved and how He was in His place, and “You did well, You did good.” He just really needed to become re-filled, so that the baptism of the Spirit, that He had received (now that it had gone through forty days of testing), could come with a new authority as He entered into Nazareth. This was going to be His first public speaking. This was where He would get thrown out of the synagogue, with an attempt to be thrown over a cliff.
That was the ministry Jesus began. Why would it be different for us? But our minds are not ready for that so we tone ourselves way down and we get into kind of a –I don’t know what we get into—but it doesn’t carry us through the journey.
The Lord walked by you and threw you into ideas and thoughts and dreams and you said, “I’d like to do that. I want to be there. I want to follow Him there. I want to go. Yes. Yes! I see it!”
The problem about what we see is that we can’t do what we see. We cannot do what we see, nor can we do what we hear. We never were going to.
It is only when Christ appears that we will be like Him. We will see Him as He is. There will be a summation. There are moments where there will be calibrated steps, into demonstration of the Holy Spirit and power, that are not our own. We will be the first to say, “Why look at me?” But right now, even before that, we have unlimited access to God. We are forever loved and called accordingly. Because He has done so, everything that He needs to do with each of us, He will do. And, if He doesn’t need to do it, you get a vacation.
Our identity is no more wonderful because people love us than if they hate us. But, our disengagement from the flesh is very painful. Our association with life is based on how many friends we have, who likes us and where we are in the pecking order of any group of which we belong. We live there.
Then God says, “That’s wonderful. Live right there, because I will make sure it becomes hell.” And you’ll do anything you can to get out of it. He will tell you to “Go up to where I am.” You cannot come into the heavenly presence without an invitation, and you won’t come into the heavenly presence without some persecution.
It is said that in the last days of Israel, God will first send the fishermen to call Jews back to the land. He will then send the hunters.
So, first you will be lured in, “Come on, come on!” Then, if you don’t, you’re going to be chased out and in. Do you understand what’s happening? It is transference.
So turn with me to Luke 6.
When I came into the realm of heaven and began to, and still do, go and imbibe God
IMBIBE GOD
- Absorb
- Breathe
- Experience
- Enjoy
- Become by beholding
I learned that everything that I had been trying to do was never meant for me to “do” but to “become”.
Much of what I thought was my checklist of observance, was really the wonder of who He was. The first was the fruit of the Spirit. I never memorized the fruit of the Spirit. I tried to. I knew the gifts of the Spirit, because everybody wanted to do those. But the fruit of the Spirit was like a condemnation list to me because I was not loving and full of joy and peace. I didn’t long suffer, nor was I kind. I was not at all faithful, or good, or gentle or self-controlled. I tried to be but the more I tried to be, the less I felt I was.
Then the Lord said, “No, that’s who I am. That is the fruit of the Spirit, not the fruit of Steve”… or any person. Seriously, what are we thinking? Steve is loving? No, I’m not loving. Ask my kids. I’m me. I’m just me, a little boy trying to reconcile himself to God and hold that reconciliation in the midst of a harsh, wicked place called the earth, which is a difficult environment.
So, I started worshipping, ascribing to God. “You are love. You are joy, You are peace. This is who YOU are.” Now that I’m in the presence behind the veil, I would begin to ascribe unto Him His greatness, His glory. I would then feel it fall on me. It was like “This is weird. The more I give to You who You are, then the more You appear to me to be that.”
I then went to the word Love and took 1Corinthians 13, because we had gotten the word of the Lord over us that we were coming into a higher way, a better way, the love way, the more excellent way, beyond
any place.
So, I said, “You are Love. You suffer long. You are kind.”
What does long-suffering mean? It literally means to extend our spirit over time, or to hold an emotion past the point where the emotion can be held.
“You extend Yourself over us until we can come to our own place of joining You again. You speak over us. We begin a journey. We fail and You just keep that long suffering one more day.”
We are running around as Christians wanting judgment. We want this or that to be dealt with. But, God doesn’t want to do any of that. He wants to suffer long.
“Get out of My way! I want to suffer long!” He says.
We get up and say, “Oh God, I pray today, give me the chance to suffer long; and may I be kind.”
What is kindness? Kindness is being helpful. Love does not envy. “You don’t envy.” Well, obviously. “Why don’t You envy? Why do I envy?” I envy because I feel lack and I feel there is an insufficiency through my lack.
“You don’t envy because You’re complete. You absolutely are totally complete.”
So I said,
“You are complete. Love is complete.” Love does not need something in return. Love does not parade itself; is not puffed up.
“What does that mean?
You’re not going around saying, ‘Look at Me, look at Me!’ You don’t need anybody to look at You. You are just quiet and subtle.
Every day the sun rises because You order it to.
You ask no one to thank You for it, because You don’t need those kinds of accolades. This is because You are absolutely, inside of Yourself, complete and quiet.
You are not puffed up. You are not blowing thunder and trying to make us become frightened to serve You.
You are just absolutely confident!”
When I thought about that – You don’t parade Yourself because You are quiet and You don’t puff Yourself up because You are confident—all of a sudden I heard this scripture, …in quietness, in confidence will be your strength…
I thought, “Oh yeah, of course. All of this is through the association of union and the enjoyment of Him.”
This is why I can now say to every one of us, “Have you suffered long lately?”
To each of us I would say, “Is there anyone in your life you’re suffering with? Are you having to be kind to somebody? Well good news. You are in love. You are in love.”
If anyone says, ‘You’ve got to be in love.’ Well, I am in love. I’ll show you all the people I’m suffering with. That means I’m in love. Not brotherly affection that comes and goes as it will. That is friendship. Jesus calls us past that. The enlargement of love is unlimited.
Do you not behave rudely and you don’t seek your own? “Why don’t You behave rudely? Because, You are gentle, humble and lowly. That is who God is.
God doesn’t say, “Alright everybody, you be humble, because I’m the only big one.” No, He is, Himself, gentle.
He comes in on a donkey and overthrows the Chariots of Ephraim. “And You don’t seek Your own because You are gracious. You are giving. You are looking to give, not take.”
So, for me, and for the journey of completion continuing in the process, faithful means full of faith. Faith is continued, until the end, through the gift of patience. And, we have continued in the sound of hope. We are now at the completion and God is saying, “Yay!!”
God affirms the journey that we are on as something valuable to Him, even if others cannot see it. This is how God is. When we are in His presence, He entirely communicates to us through His Son, and for and in relationship to what He has spoken over us. I want to share something because I do think that it is an outcome of the Presence. Luke 6:27
“But I say to you who hear: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who spitefully use you. To him who strikes you on the one cheek, offer the other also. And from him who takes away your cloak, do not withhold your tunic either. Give to everyone who asks of you. And from him who takes away your goods do not ask them back. And just as you want men to do to you, you also do to them likewise. “But if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive back, what credit is that to you? For even sinners lend to sinners to receive as much back. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, hoping for nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High. For He is kind to the unthankful and evil. Therefore be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful. Luke 6:27-36
I recently revisited these words with the Lord. Twenty years ago, I saw this but not with the revelation. You see, everything is given to us by revelation. It is then to be experienced through the cross until it becomes transformation. It’s transformation isn’t to the achievement of the revelation, it is through the surrender to it. As, the cross is not an achievement, right? The cross is not an achievement, it is a death. You lose your ability to control the matter.
For myself, I saw. Because of the prophetic sound, I could see it. Because of the move of the Spirit, I saw that this indeed was how God was going to take over the world. This was Jesus’ mandate. This was His manifesto. This was His strategy of overcoming evil and displacing hell. He was going to send us as living sacrifices into darkness so that the Light might shine by the way we responded in the darkness we were in.
The more hate that was sent, the more love we would release.
The more cursing that ensued, the more blessing we would give.
The more abuse we experienced, the more we prayed for the one who abused us.
I saw this. I had so many revelations that I literally experienced it and welcomed the idea. Cammy had a vision that was similar. Her vision was that we would become so aware of the love of God, that God could drop us in the center of hell and hell would not redefine who we were.
I was so enthused on it that in 1997 recognizing this whole idea of yielding and forgiving, asking for grace, blessing for cursing, that I called together all of our staff, all of the church, all of the departments, all of the leaders, who were wonderful people. The mindset was a community church mindset of life and grace. I said, “I want to ask all of you now to forgive me for anything I’ve ever done to you. I want to ask you to
forgive and I want to ask us to bless one another. I want us to release one another and liberate the past and…Let’s go forward in this new spirit.”
This was the worst thing. Don’t do this! In fact, don’t go home and do what I’m teaching you tonight. You don’t need to go do it. Doing it only sows the seed so far deep, that you never get out. Just let it happen. I did it. We had this big tarp like you place in the park for a picnic…about a hundred pieces of aluminum you put them together and the big tarp goes on top. I put it out and I said, “We’re going to build this without plans and we’re going to yield to one another and give place to it. We will call it Isaiah 4, 6 and 7 which is …after the spirit of judgment and burning has passed we’ve got to place the tabernacle over the glory.
I can’t believe we did that. We have to experience every part of the bible. If it’s your promise, you get the whole promise, not just the delivering promise. You go the bondage promise to the delivering.
What it did – because it was flesh trying to do the word of God – is it invited people to awaken offense that God was not ready to resolve. All of a sudden we had a group of people that were just kind of “What? You offended me? Let me see…… yeah, you did! And now that I think about it, you’re going to come and ask me to forgive you for something that is so deep?!” It just started erupting. Discontent. Malcontent. And it didn’t get any better. I thought, “Let’s bless all the witches’ covens that are cursing us today.” This was just naive. You can’t be stupider than I was. I take the bible. I hear it, I see it, I go to do it. “I’m going to bless all those who curse me!” I got eaten up. I had no grid.
You don’t bless those who curse you so that they will turn around and say, “I want to bless you too.” They won’t bless you too. They won’t bless you too. You don’t go do good to those who are doing evil to you, so that they will turn around and say, “Let me do good to you.” They are not going to do good to you. You are an instrument of heaven to represent God. God will choose to do whatever He does with it. But for the most part, it’s the means of overcoming evil with good, in that you disengage ramping the evil continually up. But, don’t go looking for it.
So, I was reading the book again of Divine Love knowing that we were in this Love calling. The Lord had been speaking to us about being chosen. I know this chosen idea was not that we were going to suddenly one day show everyone that we are the right people. We have the nice cars and the nice houses. This would be same old, same old.
So where is this taking us? “Where have You taken us?”
One of the things that Julien of Norwich had written, in her showings she received in the 1500s, was the ability to bring people into the presence of God in intercession with you and the simplicity of the way prayer was, was because all you ever ask for anyone is the same you are asking God for you.
There is no prayer for your enemies that is different from the prayer you have for you. In other words, there is no capacity to departmentalize things in heaven. Heaven loves everybody the same. Heaven is for everybody the same. As soon as you try to get heaven to be against a group, you are out of heaven’s heart. God is not for us or against us.
If He shows up with a sword and you say, “Are You with us or against us?” He says, “Neither. I’m for Me. I’m the only one that’s worthy to be for. I’m for Me. I’m here for My purpose, My intention, My kingdom and all are invited in.”
This is why the first will be last and the last will be first and many are called but few are chosen. It is like the balls rolling on those Roulette tables. You really don’t know where this thing is going to land. And just about the time that you think it’s your number, it’s going to be your enemy’s number of grace and favor and blessing. You are just supposed to say, “I’m so thankful.”
I was taking a walk about two weeks ago and this started to come back to me. I said, “Lord, no. I can handle the fruit of the Spirit. I can even handle the love description, but Lord, I can’t handle this. No. You told me to love my enemies and You knew what was going to happen. I can’t love my enemies. I don’t have the capacity to love. They just kept being my enemies. I can’t bless those who curse me. They didn’t turn around and bless me back. I lost my defense and I lost my place. That’s not me, that’s You. How can You tell me to be You? I’m not You! You are the only one that can really do that.”
Suddenly, I thought, “Aha, that’s exactly what is happening. Your nature becoming my nature, not by choice and willful power but by surrender and discovery and failure.
Ok, I’ll do it because You said, but within the grace You give. I will not try to do this, but I will surrender to this.” The sound of authority started to grow.
If you do good to the unthankful and the evil, expecting nothing in return, you really are dismantling hell’s ability to shut you down.
Seriously. How much do we do to get something? Most everything we do is calculated to try to obtain the next result we are looking for. And in the kingdom, it is just so anti-Christ. Everything is about “I don’t need anything back in return. I want to give away. And, if I’m poor at the other end that is just fine.”
When Job went through the journey he went through, that hell brought him through, the disengagement from where he was, was first he got in a whirlwind where God took him out of the smallness of his mind. The turning point of captivity was when he prayed for his friends – the ones who had cursed him and spoke evil of him and put him in his prison and closed the door and chucked the key. He prayed for them.
God heard the prayer and accepted the prayer. Then God turned his captivity and gave him double of everything. This was not a Job achievement, this was a Job yielding.
So, we say, “My life went through these experiences. Through the faith promises, my dream turned into a nightmare, but God will come and turn it back into the dream He called it to be and resurrection life will be there. But if resurrection life will be there, what will show up out of that resurrection life? And I believe what’s happening is that we’re starting to become like sons and daughters of the Most High God. We are kind to the unthankful and the evil. We bless those who curse without looking for the curse to turn around. And again, you can’t “do” this. This is an impossibility and yet it is the only logical course that we’re headed toward. …A supernatural awareness of God to the level that it is all that we need. We have no need, so we can give away. We’re not trying to achieve, so we can lose. We can lend because we don’t have to keep. We can bless because we don’t have to have it come to us. We can pour out because that’s what we want to hope to be – a drink offering, because all that is required has been given and all that’s been given is all that I need. So whatever. And we live this “whatever” thing. I’m telling God, “I do not like this. This is totally unfair. You can’t expect me to love my enemy. All I can do is continually be subjected to my enemies. I don’t get delivered out of it. You want me to just keep loving them? You want me to be kind to the unthankful? They don’t learn to be thankful, they just take advantage of it. You’re just asking me to yield, yield, yield. I can’t do that. That is You not me. You are full of that, I’m not.”
I felt like God said, “What an intelligent discussion we are finally having. I can’t believe you finally figured that out. How does it feel now?” I said, “Well, it doesn’t really feel that good. But I know what I’m supposed to do. I’m not going to do it in the naivety of another form of control, another form of change, another form of moving things.
The first thing you begin to find in the simple practice of observing God in this setting is that it disconnects you from the tensions you are getting into and the stresses that are on you and the resolution you are needing to have happen. It really disengages you from the earth factor and activates you in heaven’s factor because heaven is saying, “This is how we are.”
Upcoming Events
Saturday, May 23, 2014, 6:00 – 9:00 pm: You are invited to an extravagant evening of Messianic music and dancing! Jonathan Settel and Lev Shelo with Corry Bell in Concert.
Sunday May 24, 2015, 9:00 am: Gino will share, “Don’t Call It a Comeback” Living in the quietness of a promise fulfilled.
Sunday 10:20 am: Nations Prayer join us as Psalm 2 Exodus 15 and Revelation 15 are pray out in these thirty minutes of prayer for the nations.
Sunday 11 am: I will be sharing, “All He Asks is that We Follow Him”. The first command Peter heard from Jesus was also the last command he heard from Jesus. That’s all He ever asks of us, not do for him, nor accomplish for him, but to follow Him. It’s that simple – it’s that possible.
Monday, May 25, 2015, 11am: Please join us for our annual Memorial Day Picnic. Click here to watch the promotional video.
Grace and shalom,
Steve Dittmar
