Hi Pastor John,

I want to write about our Job readings.  This reading of Job has been so good; really transformative.  Once, the story of Job seemed unreal, but I feel like we’ve dug deeper than ever and made the story of Job so deeply real.  Reading back on the Job notes, and reading what was said, I was struck by how very real Job felt.  Reading his words, I found myself imagining how he must have felt going through his ordeal.

Also, I love so very much when God began to speak to Job.  How terrifying it would have been, but also, I could see nothing but love and correction in what God said to Job.  Then to see Job’s humble response – “I have no understanding of things too wondrous for me.”  This has been one of my all-time favorite verses, but now I love it more because it’s more real.

Then I also think of Elihu.  I was cheering for him all along and was so happy to find he was a good guy!  I loved when he says, “I will fetch knowledge from afar and to my Maker will I ascribe righteousness.”  Oh, my soul loves this!  I love Elihu. I love that he looked to God’s righteousness and withheld any judgment when God had not spoken.

Finally, I think of Job’s three friends.  I’m reminded how when we started Job, you really made sure we knew they were not the bad guys.  And they’re not.  But I think I forgot that along the way, and I will have to work on that a bit in my heart. Job’s three friends really were doing the best of what they knew in that time period about righteousness – God was showing something new, but they were just not aware yet.

But then, when God finally spoke and told Job’s three friends to go to Job and Job would pray for them, and they made offerings and God accepted the offerings and prayers of Job for his friends – I loved that, too.  What love of God all around! And the love of Job for his friends, and they for him!  What a good story!  It makes me look at righteousness differently – it’s all the righteousness of GOD.

My only wish is that at the conclusion, God would have said something about Elihu.  I wish I knew what God’s words for Elihu would have been.

Thank you for the wonderful journey through Job!

Love,

Jenny

Pastor John,

I talked to Jacob this weekend about his progress at his new electrical school. During the conversation he ended up telling me about his very first year in the electrical training program, and the experience he had watching an apparently normal young man leave his wife/fiance, grow his hair out long, and start wearing dresses to class.

He said everyone there had to just act like it wasn’t happening. I was shocked as he told me this, and I felt mortified for him.

But I feel like the Lord taught me something important tonight, as I recalled the conversation:

When this world tries to force a young person to accept and normalize that awful behavior as it sits down beside them, they are not just demanding that the kids hold still and be quiet PHYSICALLY as it gets close to them. They are training the kids spiritually to hold still and not to resist when those spirits come knocking on their heart’s door. The kids are being conditioned not to resist an attack on their hearts. They are being taught to not push those spirits away and speak out.

That is so much more wicked than I had ever imagined.

You told us years ago we better teach our kids who they are, because if we don’t, the spirits of this age are going to. That poor young man in Jacob’s class lost his mind, and Jacob witnessed it. That was a good lesson from Jesus, for Jacob, to guard the hearts of all those God may put in his charge.

Jerry

Pastor John,

Yesterday I had the chance to watch the video of the Sunday morning meeting. It’s hard, if not impossible, to put into words what I felt as I was watching y’all dancing, shouting, being moved by the holy Ghost while the Bro Band was playing.

The words of Uncle Joe came to my mind (which, when I first read this Daily Thought, almost word for word echoed my thoughts at the time):

Peter said on Pentecost morning, “This is that.”  He said, “This is that which was shed forth; this is that which was poured out from heaven.”  This IS that.  If this, that we have received from God, is not that, then what is that, that Peter had, and what is this?  I want to know, where is “that” if this is not that?  If this is not that, then I wanna go where that is.  All my life, I’d been looking for it.  I’ve been to all these different churches, and I get invited every week to go somewhere.  But I’ve already been, and I found this, which is that.  And if this is not “that”, then I want to know what this is.  Peter said, “This is that which was shed forth” . . . Yes we’ve found it!

https://goingtojesus.com/gtj_thoughts.html?tname=rdt10-08

Zoli

PJ:

Thank you for your notes from your message Saturday night.  I don’t know when I have felt such a pull in my heart to want more of/from God.  And I know it’s there if we want it.  Reading your notes tonight, I just felt such a Presence of the Lord.  As he once told me, “it is not hard-seeking, but heart-seeking” that lets Jesus into the chambers of our hearts that need more of him.  Your message and notes meant so much to me tonight as I read them, that I just wanted to share some of the ones that really flooded me with feelings.  Reading some of them even made me weep knowing how much God is calling to us to know him and his righteousness, and to know who he has made us.  Thank you so much for being such a faithful servant for us and feeding us what God has given you.  There are so many more feelings in my heart tonight from this message, but I have tried to keep it as brief as I could right now. This message makes it clear that God has given us what we need to live beyond this world and man’s righteousness.   Sandy 

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Excerpts from your sobering and encouraging notes:

The unborn infant is formed in the mother, but after it is born, the mother must be formed in the child, her knowledge and her abilities. So, we are formed in the womb of the body of Christ, as Christ convicts us, encourages us, and nourishes us until we come to the hour of birth. And after the birth, Christ must be formed in us.

Any person who has received the Spirit of God is in a much better spiritual condition than John the Baptist because he is a new kind of creature, a creature that has a divine nature – God’s – in a fleshly body. And that divine nature is filled with a divine kind of righteousness.

When someone is born of God, God⁷ shares His divine nature, His Spirit, with that person. The holy Ghost is God’s free gift to you, given because He wants you to know Him and be blessed.

Before Jesus paid the price for mankind to have God’s nature, with its right thoughts and holy feelings, God put up with man’s ignorance of Him. But things changed with Jesus.

In this covenant, God is pleased –– and well pleased –– only when His children live as righteously as they can with His nature instead of their own.

God lives from the heart, not by a set of rules. It is His nature to think right thoughts and to do good things. And the entire reason God sent His Son to earth was to make the way for us to live that way, not being against rules; they are needed in this world, but being above rules, being ruled by the love and peace of God. That holy nature is in the Spirit, and Jesus paid the price for us to have it.

If we have been born of God and received His holy nature, we are in a far better spiritual state than Job, Abraham, or John the Baptist ever were. – if you want it. You can neglect that gift and retain your carnal mind. But if you do, you will never find out how much better a place you are in than anyone who lived before the Son came, like Job.

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Whew!  We are so blessed!

Sandy

Hi, Pastor John (and Darren).

After Darren sang the above-referenced song in today’s meeting, I shared with him that the song holds a special place in my heart as it truly convicted me early in my walk with Christ. I realized this morning that it played an integral part in my baptism with the Holy Ghost! 

I knew Darren wouldn’t remember the email I sent to him in early 2018. Even I didn’t remember the specifics. So I went to my old email and pulled it up. The email is copied below. 

When I looked at the date of the email it was Feb 15, 2018 – only four days before I was baptized with the Holy Ghost with the sound of the spirit!! Praise God!!! I love my life in Him and am so grateful to be part of the body of Christ!!!

Hi, Darren.

Brad Crooker introduced me to your music and I have thoroughly enjoyed listening to your CDs repeatedly as I commute to and from work.

Saturday’s meeting at Pastor John’s (Brad and I were streaming the meeting) was the first time I saw you minister in song and it brought immense joy to my heart as soon as I heard your beautiful guitar playing and deep voice. I am quite the fan :)!

Then the lyrics of your first song took me to a place I needed to go in order to be closer to Jesus! Your lyric “What you’re living for is what you’re giving into. This will be your end” touched my heart. I wasn’t sure why at first but I knew I had to sit with those words and let Jesus speak to my heart as to what they meant to me.

It was on Sunday that the message became clear… I have been living for my worldly identity and I continually give into it and giving into it doesn’t give me anything but pain and heartache. What I want to be living for and giving into is Jesus – His words, His thoughts, His joy! What I need to surrender to him is this worldly identity I have been so wrapped up in for the last 55 years!

“The world has nothing that you want. The world has nothing that you need. I will give you everything if everything you give to me.” Clearly what I was feeling and clearly my challenge is to heed your words and truly give Him my everything – the only thing I have known, the only way I have lived in this world my worldly identity – to Him.

So… I then went to your lyric “I don’t ask that much of you. You don’t ask enough of me” and I got down on my knees and prayed to God to take away all the meaning I have derived from who I identify as in this world and let me be who I am… a child of Christ! I will continue to pray this prayer and listen to this song!

Thank you a million times over for your songs and the one you sang on Saturday in particular. I am truly changed because of your ministry!

Much love and respect,

Allison

What a wonderful paragraph! I have been reading in the Suffering and the Saints book.*  And I have been thinking about the hearts of Daniel and other young men in the Bible who were captured by Nebuchadnezzar and made eunuchs.  I was telling Jesus how amazing I think it is that they were not full of bitterness.  It must have been so hard to go through all of that.  Those were real hearts and real young men who went through that.

Then I read this paragraph (below), and I feel like Jesus is reading this story to me!  

It really is wonderful that this is available for some heart that needs it.  Who knows who God will give it to one day.  This world is going to go through some very hard times.

Beth D.

* Going to Jesus.com – Suffering and the Saints

John,

I want to share a dream I had a few nights ago.

In my dream, I was at some sort of business standing at a counter about chest high. Opposite of me was a woman that I assume was an employee.  I do not know what type of business it was, or what I was doing there.

The woman asked me for identification.  I immediately pulled my wallet from my back pocket, took out my drivers license and set it on the counter.  The woman looked down at it, then looked at me and shook her head, “no”.

I then started to take other documents from my wallet, spreading them out on the counter, one by one, which included my insurance card, my hunting and fishing license, credit cards, and even my library card.  Every time I set a document on the counter in an attempt to identify myself, the woman shook her head, “no”. 

I emptied my wallet of every possible document that could possibly identify who I was. Afterwards, I thought to myself, I have given her everything but my birth certificate and passport. 

Then I awoke.

I had various thoughts about the dream throughout the day.  Here are a few:

– My real identity cannot be found with any document that I carry in my wallet.

– The woman would not be satisfied with anything tangible.

– The spirit is the witness.  The spirit in me testifies to who I am.

– Jesus said that a tree is known by its fruit. 

– I believe this dream was an invitation for me (and perhaps others) to step up and allow the spirit to manifest itself through me by my testimony, and by living in that place beyond my own righteousness, as you have been pointing out from our Job readings.

Two nicely dressed Christian men came to my door today to talk about how necessary it is to read “the word of God”, the Bible. When they asked me if I believe that the Bible is the word of God, I told them no, but I do believe that it is the recorded word of God. I think that through them off.

That simple comment opened the door for me to talk about the holy Ghost, the new birth and the living word of God. One of them told me more than once that what I was saying was worth consideration, and even asked if they could come back another day.

I also gave them my testimony which is my true identification.

When they left, I felt grateful for the opportunity to talk to these two, well intended men about the living word of God. 

Tom 

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Sounds like my message last night.

That is a good dream, Tom!  Our real identity is hidden from the world, as of now, because God has His children hidden in Jesus.  As Paul said, “Your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

Pastor John