We are not in a kingdom of doing…we are in a Kingdom of becoming and beholding. If we can learn to behold Him, we become what we behold. We are transformed from glory to glory by beholding the Glory of God in the face of Jesus.
There is something happening in the body of Jesus. We are aware of it, but still don’t know if we have permission yet to fully just give ourselves to this. The capacity of God to touch the earth will come as we come into this place. The Lord keeps telling me that as the body joins hearts, God is going to be revealed…right where we live. No one needs to change locations, marriages, jobs or anything. We are right where God wants us. We are in the sovereignly
placement of heaven, than we realize. God will pour out of His Spirit, not just upon flesh but through us and this is where lives are going to begin to be changed. The place where we are, where we work, the families we are in are all
designed by heaven. People won’t get saved because we finally get the courage to tell them that they need to be saved. They will be saved, because you and I will look, feel, and act differently. It will be a life that will begin to be felt—a spirit that begins to be shared—rivers that begin to be poured out that Jesus spoke of in John 7.
This doesn’t come through activity and works. It doesn’t come with the realization that if we don’t do something that God is going to back off and not do anything.
Since I experienced being called up in 2011, God radically changed my paradigm from earth to heaven and from outside to inside. This is something I didn’t know and something you don’t know. I was always in between both worlds. I could never become comfortable living from the inside out, or from heaven to earth. But now, it’s becoming so real. I look at the struggles of trying to change things, from the outside, and it’s such an occupier of time and a disappointer because you never gain anything going from outside in. But inside out!
I was in this place while walking among, maybe the most religious place on the earth—Jerusalem. As I walked, I sensed the intensity in everybody and everything, and I just went back into the Presence. Here I heard the Lord say, “I’m looking for friends. I want a house that I can rest in until I’m ready to do what I came to do. I’m more than able to accomplish what I came to accomplish. I’m looking for a place of rest.”
So as I would walk through the city and pray and listen to the Lord and meet with people and hear people’s stories. The more I did that, the Lord began to talk to me that everything begins from, and comes from, the throne of God. All life flows from the throne of God. When we struggle on the external, we are missing where the source of origin is.
Let’s look at Revelation 22. This is where we are all going to get to. This is the way it’s going to look at the end. And I have a feeling we can have it begin to look like this now.
Revelation 22:1-5
And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb. 2 In the middle of its street, and on either side of the river, was the tree of life, which bore twelve fruits, each tree yielding its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. 3 And there shall be no more curse, but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and His servants shall serve Him. 4 They shall see His face, and His name shall be on their foreheads. 5 There shall be no night there: They need no lamp nor light of the sun, for the Lord God gives them light. And they shall reign forever and ever.
This is our future. They shall reign for ever and ever. We are being trained and raised up to reign with Christ in a heavenly marriage. In fact, this throne room is inside the New Jerusalem. It’s in the enter of the New Jerusalem and here we see the end of the story of this consummate wife that has grown up in maturity.
In referencing Hebrews 4, it talks about the rest of God in which we are to enter. We enter in by faith. We enter in by being diligent, making it our goal to get there. As we do, we cease from our own works like God did from His. We recognize that God rested from all His works which included the death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and intercession of Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ was crucified or slain from the foundation of the world. He didn’t rest after six days, then say, “Oh no, Adam you sinned, I’ve got to get to work again.” All of this was set in motion at the foundation of the world and you were known in Christ before the foundation of the world. You were saved in Christ before the foundation of the world. You were called in Christ. You are no accident. No one is an accident. There is no such thing as an unplanned
pregnancy in heaven or an unwanted birth in heaven. Circumstances of life may cause that to be what it has felt, and you might even experience through the people that you were born through. But you were known in God before the foundation of the world and you were set on this planet. You are here intentionally. Amen.
When you know the Father’s love, it trumps all rejection, all fear, all hatred, all unwantedness. It swallows it up, because the Father knows and loves us.
So, when we enter into the rest, there are two things according to Hebrews 4 that you will come into and continue to encounter. One is the living word of God. This is the word of God in its totality, not just what has been spoken to you, but the logos, the whole word of God—Jesus Christ.
We continually encounter the word of God. And you’ll bring your logos, of your life, and they will become one. And that’s the yielding and submitting of our life back unto the Lord and His word and that encounter. Along with that, we
will come into the throne of grace, where we are encouraged. We are literally encouraged in the book of Hebrews to come boldly to the throne of grace – to enter in often – to continually come, to stand and exercise our place in Christ, before the Father, at His throne of grace.
And so we are in these two practices, which I believe are to be matured. They are really not taught in the church. We teach people to work hard. We teach people to do this, don’t do that, touch this, and don’t touch that. And all of that is fine. It keeps us in some kind of pattern. But we deny, like the Pharisees. They would shut the doors into the kingdom and they wouldn’t let anyone else go in. They wouldn’t even go in themselves.
The way in is through the blood of Jesus. Once in, you encounter a living oracle, the Word of God that’s spoken. It’s heard by the voice of God. When you hear the voice of God, you are coming alive. He is calling forth the program, the DNA of your calling. He quickens it and you begin to arise and come alive. And we yield. We give place. We say, “Yes, I hear You, yes, yes, yes.”
At the same time, the throne of grace is where life proceeds, where this river of living water is going to flow.
Now, here’s an interesting thought: There is a heaven throne room like this that’s going to be the center of God and where God sits and we enter in. We can sit with Christ in the heavenly places.
But just the same, every one of us are known as the temple of God. The new birth caused us to become living temples. We don’t need a temple right now because we are “living temples”. So inside the temple, our flesh being the outer court, our soul being the inner court and our spirit being the holy of holies, there is a throne there too. And Jesus can be enthroned on the seat of my heart.
So, when I go into God, or encounter Him face to face, it can be inside of me and it can be inside of heaven. You follow that? We can become aware that we are inside of a sovereign, huge, God-centered place that is emanating life and you’re receiving life. Or we can become aware that there is a huge, God-centered King dwelling inside of us that’s emanating and releasing life.
In John 7, Jesus said that there is coming a day after resurrection that the Spirit of God will be poured and to those thirsty, those drinking. That to those believing it, there would be a river of God flowing out of them.
The river flows out of us as it does in Revelation 22. It flows from the place of God’s rule. And when it’s undisputed, we come into peace, and yieldedness, and assured of “Wow, Jesus lives in my heart by faith; I’m rooted and grounded in love. I may not be smart, but I am loved. I may not be able to do anything, but God has chosen me. I may not be able to hold my place for anything, but God holds me in everything.”
And we become God-centered, not self-centered, but God-centered. Not self-aware, but God-aware. Not in an arrogant way. This is because the more we become aware of God, we won’t be arrogant, because we will recognize “Whoa, You’re love is so beyond what ever I could have myself had.”
I heard the Lord about this throne room, and about its possibility. I’ve been practicing this since 1999, so this is not a new thing to me, but it is continually enlarging and I’m just amazed at the resource of God here. And it’s just a prayer away. We don’t have to go anywhere. We remember that Jesus said to the Samaritan, “The hour is coming when you will neither worship God at this mountain in Samaria or in Jerusalem.”
You can encounter God in your seat, in your daily life, in the situation that your life is stuck in, to the full extent of the heavens.
And so, here’s the deal. I’d like to just point you to consider this… in Revelation 1, we behold the resurrected Christ, the glorified Christ, the one Who is the High Priest of our confession, the Alpha, the Omega, the Beginning, the End, Who is, Who was, and Who is to come, Almighty. We behold this One Who holds the keys of hades and death, the One Whose eyes are like fire, Whose face is the countenance of the sun, Who has a voice that sounds like many waters and we behold Him.
In Revelation 4 and 5 we begin to behold Father, Creator, then we behold the Lamb Redeemer. And if we behold the Lamb Redeemer and allow that revelation of the Lamb Redeemer to begin to come upon us, the Lamb Redeemer then begins to reside from within us. It’s a simple truth that without the revelation, we cannot enter into what has been given to us.
Everything is by a revelation which literally just means to take the lid off. It was there all along, but we can’t find it by flesh and blood. We have to have the Spirit of God. Jesus said many times, “No man can know the Father unless the Son of Man wills to reveal Him. And no man can come to the Son unless the Father draws him.”
So we are a people wholly dependent upon God initiating and calling us forward. Yet at the same time, Jesus would say, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” Because we discover Him by seeing and hearing. When we see and hear and there is an understanding of something that was not knowledge to us, or to our intellect, or our ability, and we discover God and we turn to Him – the bible says that, then He heals us. We have an encounter. That’s why I don’t “read” the bible. I tell everybody, “Don’t let the bible condemn you and don’t read it to do it.” That will save you zillions of years of heart ache. It is not meant to condemn us because there is no one to condemn us because Christ was killed. He was buried. He was raised from the dead. Now He makes intercession. That’s Romans 8. And I cannot do it. I mean, yes you can not eat ham the rest of your life if that’s one of your commandments. But you will fail in some commandment and therefore you will fail in all commandments.
All the commandment does, is it awakens the sin in us. So we will learn that.
But now, what about “beholding”. To keep the scripture is to value it. Wow…Imagine that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. What a kind and strong thing He did. What did it mean for Him to give His only begotten Son? He became sin for us, who knew no sin. He was delivered up because of our offenses. What would that mean?” THAT is the beholding. That’s the valuing. That’s what it means to keep My commandments. Search
it out for yourself.
The word ‘keep’ in the New Testament does not have anything to do about “do.” It has to do about “guard.” Guard the word. Keep the word. Don’t lose sight of the word. Don’t lose the sweetness of it. Do you understand? And when kept, in John 14, two things happen. We become a habitation for God in the spirit and we enter into the habitation God prepared for us in heaven. We begin to live in a place that we really haven’t earned and can’t keep. We have just been given it by faith.
Righteousness is imputed by faith. Everything brings pleasure to Father by faith, because we’re holding something that the world doesn’t value, yet we keep valuing it. And then the more tribulation or testing that comes against us, the more we keep saying, “No, my life doesn’t seem to look like what I saw, but what I saw is still more real than what I’m experiencing. I believe God. I hold my confession of hope. I’ll keep it alive.”
When we are in the presence of God in that throne room, Hebrews 10 tells us, very clearly, that what He wants to – after we’ve recalibrated ourselves back to truth – is to then bring our confession of hope back to Him as an offering, as an agreement to stand in agreement with the intercession of Jesus.
So, in this keeping the word, beholding the word, we become the word. What you behold you will become. And if you can behold the glory of God, you will be transformed into the same glory… from glory to glory.
2 Corinthians 3:18. So, this throne room experience.
In Revelation alone, there are multiple throne room experiences, moments in eternity, a snapshot of a moment that is a perpetual moment in eternity. This is not something that already happened, therefore will not happen or has not yet still to happen. It both is and was and is to come.
Therefore I want to suggest that we can enter into the experience in the throne room that John experienced, that he wrote down about. And by experiencing it – because the bible was meant to be experienced, not to be done – when it is experienced then we start carrying something that isn’t coming out of the mind, and it isn’t being sustained by the will. It might begin with a choice and there may be understanding about what’s happening, but it isn’t sustained by either understanding or will. It’s sustained by the truth that you have stepped into. It is God sustained. The throne room goes on every day, whether we want to agree with it or not. Jesus will not deny Himself if you and I get in a funk. He stays in agreement with what He accomplished. Father is in agreement with what He’s done and angels are in agreement with what has been accomplished. They are in agreement with what was said. If your life went left and my life went right; yours went up; mine went down – it does not matter. All that is required is to believe.
What He desires in believing is that we hold the things that we have seen and we just carry them. And maybe, like Abraham, we get to a point in life that we have proven one thing, for what we heard: We can’t do it. We can’t bring forth a child. And Sarah’s womb is never going to come alive. And we are just never going to pull it off. We finally come to that, and then God says, “Now let’s do it.”
Well, this gives you freedom, because you think, “Well, fine. And if I fall back into bad habits or if I go into a fear factor that I have not dealt with any better than I dealt with the first time when I went to Egypt, who cares?
God said. Let God perform. God promised. Let God perform. You see, that might sound like, “Oh gosh, we’re not taking any responsibility.” No, we are really taking the greatest responsibility of saying, “Wow, this was initiated by heaven. It’s going to have to be fulfilled by heaven. I’m not the one that couples with it and makes it work. I yield. I receive. I surrender. I give place.”
So,follow me on this. By the time we get to Chapter 5 of Revelation, we behold a Redeemer. And we begin to be called into a destiny of priests and kings and to reign on earth.
This Redeemer, Who unlocks the scrolls and moves history forward begins to become the focal point. From that point, every time we go to the throne, it says “to He who sits on the throne and the Lamb.” And the Lamb brought us into a place we could never have come and history would never continue forward – Redemption! A world we have not yet tasted. We want creation. God says, “Let’s go into Redemption.”
So, by the time you get to chapter 7, there is a people of God living in the presence of God before the throne of God. They are white-robed. They have palm branches. They serve God day and night. God, Himself dwells with
them. The Lamb becomes their Shepherd. He feeds them. He leads them to fountains of living water. These people are undergoing the ultimate inner healing experience because Daddy is wiping the tears off of their eyes.
I was in Thailand in May and the Lord said to me, “You will live here now, Steve. This is where I want you to live from.” So I’ve got a little bit of an advantage because I’ve been returning there and saying, “Okay, well why does this have to be some time in the future? Why is that exclusive to this group of people only? Who said this truth in scripture cannot be experienced today?”
Because I had enough of a witness of an incredibly strong experience in the spirit, so I said, “Okay, let’s go.” And I want to tell you that there are fountains of living water in heaven and we are going to get led to them.
Why do you need them if you’re dead? Revelation 11 kicks into an intentionality of heaven taking over the earth. The kingdoms of this earth have now become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ. There begins to be a movement on earth where all things are beginning to be pulled back under. I think we’re close to that. I think we’re in the beginning stages of that. It could go another hundred years, but I definitely think we are in the time where Christ is beginning to say, “I will rule and set the course of humanity. I’m going to begin to come into the kingdoms and I’m going to bring judgment where I need to, and I’m going to bring deliverance where I need to. And there we go into these wonderful experiences of the church rising up, coming into heaven, holding her place in the second heaven and beginning to see the reign of God begin to rule.
By the time we go to Revelation 15, we have a new heavenly experience where the saints are. These are overcomers. These are tested ones, who have gone through, overcoming the beast, the name of the beast, the image of the beast, the number of his name and they are standing on a glassy sea mingled with fire. They sing the song of Moses and the song of the Lamb. So they’re people who have come out into a great deliverance.
Again, why does that have to happen on a linear, chronological line? If this was seen by John almost 2,000 years ago, why can it not be seen by me? Or you? Anything that we encounter in the spirit, in the word, in truth – because Jesus said, “My words are spirit and truth”. When we encounter Him in spirit and truth, we will “become” if we behold it. And we begin to say, “Okay, I’m going to behold that.”
So by the time we’re in chapter 17, we are now in the marriage supper of the Lamb. The Bride has gotten herself ready. There is a glory hallelujah. Babylon has been judged for her fornication and drawing the servants of God in. There’s something of a celebration and the sound of breakthrough.
Now we go to 20, 21, 22, it’s just massive movement. Heavenly kingdom, a new throne and then by the time we’re in Revelation 22, this thing is completely unaltered. Here, freedom and worship, we never move from His presence.
Now what I want to say is that that is your destination. If you get up in the morning and say, “I’d like to meet God in His throne room”, then we’re starting with the end instead of starting wherever we are in our troubles. We can close our eyes, with the blood of the Lamb, we can be given the boldness to go anywhere and through the veil of His flesh. We can walk right in to the throne room of grace and there we are beholding the glorious King. And we can experience Him in those expressions of Himself and multiple others.
The fruit of the Spirit is a glorious partaking of the love of God. God is love.
Coming into an experience of God is nothing that I’m going to do; it’s just something that we are going to step into, that God already gave you the right to step in and enjoy. But because our Western thinking keeps us in a linear path, and it’s a works-based faith, we often never enjoy what has already been given to us. The more we enjoy it, then that thing’s going to show up at work. That demonstration of God is going to begin to show up in your neighborhood. That experience of God is going to show up at Thanksgiving. Think about that. That would be a move of God to show up at Thanksgiving. Right? Because that’s where we are in the most locked in relationships that there are – they’re the ones we’ve known forever. The move of God, the presence of God, the goodness of God, the joy of God. These are tangible substance. They’re not things you have to do, because you can’t do them. You can’t love. We can only love if we’ve been loved. And that love lasts until the next challenge and then I’ve got to be loved all over again. Let’s step into the love of God.
Upcoming Events
Sunday, November 23, 9am: Brian Rogers will share on “Experiencing Rest by Grace”. Understanding how to walk in rest when work is all around us.
Sunday 10:20am: Nations Prayer – Reigning with Christ on earth as priests and kings to our God – Releasing the Kingdom to the Nations.
Sunday 11am: I will be sharing on “Standing Before the Throne of Grace—Obtaining Mercy and Finding Grace”. What happens here? How do we receive and what can we expect from our High Priest, Jesus?
Wednesday, November 26, 7pm: We invite you to come to: A Night of Giving God Thanks for His Faithfulness-with testimony, song, and rejoicing.
