Hey, I love the thoughts you told us Tuesday morning about tapping into the love of God and believing that Jesus WANTS to heal us!  I immediately thought about your translation of the story in Matthew 8:

2. And behold, a leper came and bowed before him, saying, “Sir, if you want to, you can make me clean.”
3. And Jesus stretched forth his hand and touched him, saying, “I do want to. Be clean!” And his leprosy was immediately cleansed.

I’ve always loved that story, especially the way you translated here because it relays the love of Jesus so well.

The feelings were so good, that afterwards, I was praying and talking to the Lord.  I started off by saying “Lord, help us get to where you are.”  And then, he started talking to me.  He said, “Don’t get accustomed to ‘bad things’ in your house.  Get accustomed to good things in your house.” And then….he paused, and sweetly said, “Like me. :).  If you have your mind on Me, there are no ‘bad things’ because I am good.”  That immediately turned my thoughts to “all things” and the message that “all things work together for good to those who love God.”  If we are living our everyday life with Jesus in the forefront, the good things override the “bad things” we deal with in this life.  It doesn’t mean we don’t go through things or have concerns, but his goodness carries us through.  There was a lot of love in that.  I spoke right back to him and said “That is good” 🙂  It was a sweet conversation….well, actually, he was talking, I was just listening.

Reminds me of this scripture: “It is our Father’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom.”  Because He WANTS to!

Sweet!

Amy B

Hi Pastor John,

The Spirit woke me up this morning.  This is what was said, “Don’t complain about anything that I have given to you.”

I sat on it a while today while I was reading in Kings/Chronicles during the time of the divided kingdom.  A few thoughts came to me about how important it is for each of us to be happy and live the truth that God has given to our hearts. 

There were two stories that stood out to me: 

• In Numbers 20, the Israelites grumbling about wanting to go back to Egypt because it had better resources (food, water, etc.). After all that God had done for them: all the miracles, the food, the water…they were complaining! They had forgotten where they had come from and didn’t believe God for where He was taking them. 
  • This generation hurt themselves by complaining. Because of their complaints, God cursed them and they were never allowed to see Canaan’s land. 
  • But also, they provoked Moses’ anger so much that he struck the rock for water instead of speaking to it asGod had   So, the beloved prophet of God could not enter into Canaan’s land, either.  
• In 2 Kings 5, the story about Naaman and Gehazi, Elisha’s servant. Naaman was a humble man with great power in Syria but still willing to receive counsel when he was hesitant to obey Elisha after Elisha told Naaman to wash in the Jorden River to heal his leprosy. 
  • When Gehazi went to Naaman and lied to him about Elisha wanting money for the sons of the prophets, he was effectively complaining about not having enough earthly wealth. 
  • Ultimately, Gehazi wasn’t happy with the life that God had given him with Elisha. Elisha!  A doubly blessed prophet of God who followed in Elijah’s footsteps and God had blessed him for it (with earthly and heavenly riches).
  • Because of this, Gehazihurt God and Elisha’s hearts. Elisha lost someone who was close to him and Gehazi (along with his lineage) was cursed with leprosy. 

So, the negative impact of complaining about what God has given us is always about more than only you and your circumstances.  If you’re complaining – either through deeds and/or in your heart – you’re hurting more than yourself.  You’re saying to God, “I’m not happy with the life you’ve given to me.”  The people around you can feel your discontentment, so why would they want to be like you?  You’re unhappy!  I don’t think I would have followed Jesus if he was constantly grumbling about why God had sent him down to earth to die for our sins!  And Jesus went through the worst of it for us; so, ask God to help you be content in the situations He has given you as opposed to complaining about what you want instead.  It makes me think of that verse from 1Timothy 6:6: “But godliness with contentment is an exceptional means of gain.”  The gain here is happiness, peace and joy in the holy Ghost!  The heavenly gains!  I don’t want to desire earthly silver and gold when I can support and encourage the Elishas of God’s kingdom instead.  We want our Christ contentment light to shine to support each other!

I don’t know how to end this email, exactly.  I knew what God was showing me about my own life and what to change, so I was thankful for that knowledge.  But, the bigger realization of this made me cry out to God to help me understand Him more and ask Him to please keep us humble to accept/see where God is in all situations.  Life can be tough sometimes; we really go through things in this life that hurt deeply and are confusing.  But, we can be happy and content in knowing that God has been and always will be God to us…and for us.

Wendy

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Hi John,

I was reading Deuteronomy this morning, and thought the same thing as Wendy.  It cost Israel greatly to grumble in the wilderness. I believe the old man (our flesh) seeks to have something to complain about.  Reminds me of what the Spirit has been talking to me about too (which I sang about recently):  “I’m fine, you’re fine, everything is fine.”  I want to be careful to put that into action. We have so much….. Thank you Wendy for the reminder.

Gary

Good morning Pastor John,

Happy New Year!

I loved last Sunday’s meeting.  I was trying to get my mind to be still while walking my dog this morning.  As I was thinking, “I want my mind still so I can hear from the Holy Ghost,” a thought came to me:  “Why do you watch the same sermon over and over again?”  I thought, “It is because my memory is not what it used to be and I want to remember it.”  Then the thought came to me, “It is to get it into your heart.  Your heart is not that little thing in your chest; it is much bigger.”

There are chambers inside of chambers where people hide pain, sin, and many other things.  Good things as well.  It makes up who we are.  So, if it is in our heart, we do not have to remember it because it has become us.  Bad things we have hidden in our heart, even things we do not remember, influence our decisions.  When you find yourself asking, “Why did I do that?  I don’t want to act like that,” it is because there is something in your heart that is quietly influencing your actions, and maybe you do not know what it is.

So, God’s Spirit in me is having me fill all of those empty chambers that the bad was removed from and filling them with messages to love and live by.  And if I keep piling good things full of light in my heart there will be no place for the darkness and it will flee!  

I wanted to share this before I get lost in the day and forget.

Thank you so much for all the good food you feed us!

Mark W.

Morning Pastor John,

I have been watching the meeting over again today, and it touched me so much.

As I watched Johnny become overcome with feeling Jesus and being more than himself, I could feel the pull from heaven. I felt the verse:

“Deep calls to deep at the sound of Your waterspouts; all Your waves and billows have swept over me.” – Ps. 42:7

I listened to Jammie tell of Jesus laying stillness across her, and how when Jesus is there, you remember all he has done for you.  I listened to you tell of how, when Jesus gives you something and you digest it, it becomes you.  Truth upon truth, we are made more and more like Jesus.  Line upon line, truth upon truth.  That sings to my heart.

Recently, in a quiet moment with Jesus, I was pleading for Him to fix some things.  I was telling Jesus, “If only you would fix this, it would be better. I could be happy.”  As I listed the things I wanted Him to fix, the Spirit spoke to my heart and said, “Then what?”  

The interruption and the response startled me, but in a moment I understood what Jesus was saying to me: If I fix all those things, what will be the next thing that keeps you from being happy?  I want you to be happy in any condition.”

That word happy didn’t mean what I had always known happy to mean.  It meant steady.  It meant peace.  It meant satisfied.  It meant looking up.

I wish I had words to express what I felt inside. Jesus is not trying to fix the condition of the world around me — Jesus is fixing me.  Jesus is making me something other than myself. That stills my soul.

Beth D.

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That’s so good, Beth!  Walking in the Spirit of Christ, the conditions around us do not determine the conditions within us.  Learning that wonderful lesson is what it means to grow in Christ and become established.

Jesus did not suffer to fix the world; it will always be evil.  He suffered to fix us, and he will if we are willing.

Thank you for that wonderful testimony.

Pastor John

Hey Pastor John,

Today I was cleaning out and organizing my desk and ran across some notes I had taken when we we’re doing the Matthew study.  I know it’s long but it is so good.  It encouraged and blessed me today so I wanted to pass it on.

I feel very loved and overwhelmed with thankfulness!  He has been so, so good to us!

Michelle

Notes from Matthew study

• Nobody knew God.  Nobody knows God.  He chose you!  It’s by the spirit He is revealed.
• Jesus died for us!  What love!
• You are blessed!  You are happy!  To you it has been given! What is that worth to you?
• Stop carrying your gift around!  Open it up and play with it.  God wants you to know yourself in Christ.
• You have the key to open the doors of the rich chambers of God!
• The knowledge of God is in your gut; it’s not in your head.  It’s something that rises up out of your belly like a river flowing.  That’s the kingdom of God – that’s the knowledge of God.
• The knowledge of God is to feel the truth!  It senses what God wants and what He’s thinking!  You know the truth only when you feel it!
• If you feel it and it’s a part of your bones, who’s going to talk you out of being you?
• If we are in Christ, we have been made new creatures!  Old things are gone!
• Your past is harder for you to get over than it is for God to get over.  Get over your old self, that thing is dead!  You can be happy if you’re really you in Christ!
• You are not a product of that union anymore!
• God doesn’t want you to just have the Holy Ghost, he wants you to have it abundantly!  That is when he is saving you!
• Let’s humble ourselves and be blessed!  Give in and be happy!
• What we are reading is true!  God did something!  Know what God has done for you!
• God is alive!  He is doing things!
• The most precious thing in life is fellowship in the light!  It’s more precious than gold!
• God has thought about you!  He wrote your name in the Book of Life before the world began!  Then He made the world for you!
• We messed it up.  Then He sent His Son to fix us up, and one of these days, he’s going  to catch us up and get us all out of here together!
• That’s what we celebrate; that’s what we’re here for!
• If you’ve got the holy Ghost, you’ve got something to shout about!
• No matter what happens, compared to the holy Ghost and the promises of God, everything is “so what”!
• That promise gives you joy that’s beyond everything this world has to offer because it gives you a hope beyond what this world can offer, that hope is sure!

PJ prays- “Save us from everything this world has to offer”

• Mercy rejoices against judgment
• Goodness is having a heart like God.
• The whole world is deceived by esteeming rightness above holiness.
• Everybody needs the holy Ghost and to be full of it.  That’s the only relief from rightness and wrongness.
• Jesus said to me, “Go ahead and try to make a mess I can’t fix!”
• Many of God’s children have been talked out of righteousness through logic and human reasoning.
• There is no amount of logic that is going to get you full of the holy Ghost.  You’re going to do the will of God; you’re going to repent and walk uprightly.
• And then God, against all human logic, is going to fill you up!
• Jesus only did what His Father said.  We want to do what our Father wants.  By the grace of God, just do what our Father wants us to do without regard of the judgments or the misunderstandings and the sympathy of our relatives – and the slander of our brothers and sisters.  Let’s just do what God wants done.
• The wisdom of God is foolishness to men.  The wisdom of men is foolishness to God.  Now whose wisdom do you want?
• Learning to walk after the spirit makes you a real child of God.
• It’s not having the holy Ghost that’s going to save any of us if we don’t follow it!  Following it is what gets us home!
• The cloud will take you home if you follow it!  God is our home!
• We have much to be thankful for!  Jesus has found us and claimed us!  Let’s stay in his fold!
• If you want to serve the Lord, you will pay a price.  There is a cost.
• “All who are willing to live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution.”
• Everybody who walks uprightly before God is going to suffer.

*It matters to God how you feel*

• Knowing that “the trying of your faith produces patience” teaches you to wait on God because He’s got a good idea.  He’s got a plan for your life.  “But let patience have its perfect work that you might be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.”
• Jesus is not the light of the world, we are!
• Love is the fulfillment of the law.
• Your can force people to be a Christian; you can be talked into it, bribed into it, manipulated into it and persuaded into it, but this is you and God!
• I can tell you about it, but I can’t touch your heart.  If Jesus touches your heart, THANK HIM!  If the Father chooses you to be forgiven, THANK HIM!
• Your will is not worth damnation.
• The fear of God is good, is clean, is precious!
• The holy Ghost is your ticket home.  Hold on to it!  Live by that ticket.  Have it in your hand when the train comes.  “I’ll be standing at the station with my ticket in my hand.”  The train is coming!  The ticket is real!  Don’t miss that train!
• God’s righteousness is internal and eternal; it’s communication, it’s fellowship, it’s a kinship with God’s feelings and thoughts.  It’s what the Spirit brings in.
• When you entered into a covenant with God you made a deal:
  What God agrees to do:

1. Forgive and blot out all of your sin so that it is though they never existed
2. He gives you a new past
3. The holy men in the scriptures are your family tree.
4. He engrafts you into His family.
5. He recreates you as wise and holy sons and daughters of God!  Brothers and sisters of Jesus!
6. He cares for you throughout this life and then forever.
7. He gives you a new past, a new future, and a new present.
8. He’s prepared a new earth for you so that you might live forever in perfect health and peace.

You agree to your part:

1. Be your new, clean, happy self!

• He gives you a whole new being and all you have to do is be!
• If you keep your part of the bargain and be your new, clean, happy self, you’ll live forever.
• If you know who you are, then you live without fear and condemnation by those who think you ought to be something else.
• We honor Jesus by NOT following in man’s footsteps.
• The Spirit is sincere; it came so we don’t have to act anymore.
• In this covenant ceremonies are not accepted; acting is not accepted.  He sent His Son down here to suffer and die to stop the act and give us the reality of it, and that is precious to Him.
• Get out of the act; get out of the symbol and get into life!  The Spirit is life!
• No ceremony is going to raise you from the dead!  It has no power!
• If you have the holy Ghost, you’ve got life with Christ and God.  That’s the big deal!  That’s the important thing.  It’s up to God if you have life or not, and if you’ve got life you’ve got something to be thankful for!
• We are a mystery to every person in the world who doesn’t have the mind of Christ.  But we’re not supposed to be mysteries to ourselves.
• We’re living under a new covenant!  We are supposed to understand what God has done for us!  We are supposed to know ourselves.
• The Son has been revealed to us; we’re supposed to know Him.  To know what He’s done for us!
• Growing up in Christ means growing in the knowledge of God, and that includes coming to understand yourself, your new self!
• Your soul is on the line!
• If anyone worships the Father only in spirit and truth, as Jesus said, he is condemned as a false worshipper.
• If anyone teaches Paul’s gospel, he is condemned as a heretic.
• If anyone is moved by the holy Ghost, he is scorned as being “under a spell”.
• If anyone does the will of God from the heart, he is condemned as an evildoer.
• If anyone truly confesses Christ, he is cast out and ostracized by Christians as unworthy of their company.
• We may have to suffer a little for Christ in this world, but we know what to do – just keep doing good!
• If you follow Jesus, somewhere along the way, he’s going to amaze and frighten you!  You just keep following him and somewhere down the road, you will start to see what he’s seeing and feel what he’s feeling, and then you will amaze and frighten somebody else!
• Jesus was happy!
• We can be filled with joy!  Persecution comes with the package.  “My father said, persecution is like a tail on a kite, it keeps you steady so you can go higher.”  We all need the tail on our kites.
• All that persecution can do is help us go higher in Jesus.
• Suffering comes with the package.  Don’t take the gift then hide it.  Confess it!
• Let’s go to Him!
• Suffering here is nothing compared to the glory that awaits us!

Merry Christmas John,

I wanted to thank the Lord for our Christmas Eve celebration of “God’s Mystery” – His Son, that we enjoyed last night.  The reading was wonderful and the music and feelings too.  We are so blessed to understand what we do understand, and to have these feelings that go with it.  And I wanted to share about Song and I getting to take home Brother Coy and Theresa last night.

A week or so ago, Brother Thomas called me on the phone.  He was feeling “alive” in the Spirit, and our simple conversation picked me up that afternoon.  When I hung up the phone that day, the feeling of my heart was, “Jesus, let me bless that man somehow: he really made my day sweet.”   That’s what we can do for one another when the Spirit is in it.  

Anyway, several days pass, and I’m on the airplane coming home, and I saw his signal text asking for help in taking Brother Coy home from last night’s meeting.  When I called him the next day to ask if anyone responded, he said that nobody had yet, so there was my opportunity to give Brother Thomas a rest.   I told him we’d take Brother Coy home for him, which we did. 

Needless to say, the trip with Coy was a blessing to US!  He told us a lot of history and information that we did not know about Brother Frank, and Preacher Clark, and Sister Leatha’s family, and of course, about the holy Ghost. They showed us where saints lived, and were buried…. a real history lesson of our family.  We got home at midnight but it was worth EVERY moment to my heart.  I went to help a brother, but a brother blessed ME.  When we dropped them off and it was quiet in the car, Song turned to me and said something like, “What a wonderful people they are – so simple and real”…. then she paused and said, “It would be a wonderful opportunity for young people to do this, and go with Coy to or from the meetings once in a while…. they would be blessed.”    I had to agree with her, that it would be a blessing, on occasion, for young OR old to spend time with Coy like we got to last night.  He will certainly leave you with Christmas “cheer”!! 

Beyond all that, we really got a taste of what Brother Thomas does for our family here, by offering to take Coy to and from the meetings – He drives at least three hours each time (getting him to the meeting, 3 hours, and then coming home, 3 hours – per meeting.)  We get a wonderful blessing by knowing brother Coy – I’m so thankful that Coy feels the same about us, like he said.  

Jesus answered my prayer last night.  I knew it was Him.  And he did lots of other things through brothers and sisters last night to bless me – too much to talk about in an email, things that left me  both crying and thankful.  I love us, because He first loved us.  We are truly hidden.  Who could possibly understand the amount of love we get to share?  What a wonderful Christmas Eve.

Merry Christmas,

Gary

Merry Christmas, John!

The reading was so wonderful, last night!  After the reading, I had a Christmas song in my heart.  If I got the chance, I was going to request it.  I took the Christmas song book, turned it to the song, and placed the book face-down in the chair next to me.  Well, the reading, Bro Coy, Amy and Vince’s testimony, and Bro Tom’s . . .whew, really blessed us.  God is so good to all of us!  Well, the song that you sang, Oh Come All Ye Faithful, was the very song I had in my heart. I took the songbook just before you sang it and showed Judy the song where I had previously picked out.  I love it when even the small things add up and show us we are in tune to the Spirit.  Nothing too small or too big to Jesus!

“Oh Come Let Us Adore Him”,

Billy

Pastor John,

Sunday morning, while you were preaching, the words from Paul came to my mind, where he said something like, we have been seated in heavenly places. That’s what it felt like sitting there with everyone listening to you, that something otherwordly was happening, something not human. It was a very special meeting. Very thankful that I could be there and for the whole week.

Zoli

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Hi Zoli.

The feeling I had during my sermon on Sunday reminded me of the feeling I had during a sermon on August 23rd, 1981. I had not felt that exact feeling since then, over 44 years ago. It was a feeling to our vision being readjusted to see what is really true, clearing the air of the pretty but deadly fog of this wicked world.  It was a holy correction from the heart of God and the mind of Christ, and I am thankful for it.

Pastor John