Show the House to the House/Apprenticeship by the Holy Spirit part 1

 August 17, 2021

Apprenticeship in having one’s mind renewed by the Holy Spirit to think as our Father thinks and go His way will empower one to know the House is God’s Family. It includes all of His sons (neither male nor female because it is our spirits and souls, not our bodies that are saved)  in heaven and on the earth. It is Christ’s many-membered Body (numberless, according to the Revelation). Our Father continually, lovingly, refers to us as Zion. 

As Deacon and I have submitted to apprenticeship (I love this new analogy He has imparted) by the Spirit of God, the mind of Christ has radically changed us and our lives. 

We had come to experience regret at how it seemed we had wasted our whole lives wanting to please God only to find we had fallen into the trap of attributing traditions and doctrines of men to the thinking and ways of our Father. 

The Lord blessed me, recently, by imparting the knowledge that we had simply been apprenticed by the world and the religious understanding of who He is. While all that isn’t of Him and will be burned up as wood, hay and stubble, the Lord uses our knowledge learned in the world to bring contrast to the truth given us in Christ. We understand why people, even Sons of God, are ensnared in delusions. We lived in delusions and lies and practiced them almost all our lives. From this viewpoint, we have gained understanding of  how easy it is to be out of order with the truth. 

The Lord allowed us to be ensnared but He uses how we lived so we can see the difference.  His way is excellent and virtuous and the religious world simply is not concerned that our lives don’t reflect holiness and the glory of our Father. The Lord is!!

The new “apprenticeship” analogy helped me to know our lives ruled by deception wasn’t all wasted. As a child I began acting on what religious mankind had taught me and this way became my normal way of thinking and acting. When we believe something we act on it and we live in it.  Deacon and I were convinced we were obeying God because of what we had learned about God through religious mediums. 

What is true is that we grew up “obeying a form of religion that declared it taught truth by how men interpreted scriptures” and what they said was true. I believed it all pleased God. I participated in anything and everything I believed to be God’s way. Deacon and I became leaders teaching what we had been taught to be true. This happened over almost our whole lifetime. We know, now, we were pleased by how much we had grown and were able to participate in our religious education and help others. Our souls had been misdirected. 

I was deluded from age seven to 60 because I gave value to partial truth that is found in the doctrines and traditions  of men.  It was not all bad. Our Father never leaves us or forsakes us. His Presence was and is always real and He never leaves us once we ask Him to be our Savior.  He is in every person that is His wherever we are, whether it is in pews in what mankind calls church or in a bar. He’s in us when we’re mean and hateful and He’s with us when we’re trying to be kind. He is teaching us but we give credit to the institutions misrepresenting Christ’s Church. (The whole Body of Christ who have been called out of the world’s ways to live in truth)

Even in the midst of us not believing and supporting partial truth He was and is always with us. There’s no question that we are His and He’s going to care for us.  However, it is how well we know Him and listen to Him that will cause us to desire to submit to Him changing us. Much of what became twisted and received as truth that wasn’t actually, began in the Spirit with the conviction of truth.  

We are very immature in living in the mind of God and most of our leaders are immature, as well.  We perish for lack of knowledge and follow them, believing they are led by the Spirit. (Maybe) Maybe, it’s because they have a position in mankind’s religious ideas of church which we have accepted to be God's way. Mostly, I just thought they knew God better than me because they knew the Bible. I only saw them on Sundays or Wednesdays preaching. That’s what I was shown. We don’t even know what to look for without the Holy Spirit guiding us. I am grateful that the Lord did put God-fearing people in our lives that we saw Christ in. We need to not see people after the flesh. Look for

what we can see of Christ in them. The Lord has promised to complete His work in us.

During this current apprenticeship by the Holy Spirit we are finding Him very faithful to divide that which is of the soul and what is of the Spirit. He sifts and divides between the thoughts and purposes and intents of our hearts. It requires the Holy Spirit to do that. It was very hard to come to admit to ourselves the depth of our deception. I relate to the scripture that says there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. When one has their eyes opened to see, we had to acknowledge that not only did we believe lies we propagated the lies, ourselves, as truth. We taught for truth (instead of truth) doctrines of men. 

It causes the heart to grieve when you know falsehoods have affected or influenced everyone we have been connected to. We taught others to look for Him and His way in places where people don’t have the power to love very well. That’s the thing that really exposes the people in the order of institutional churches. We’re too busy trying to get relief from our own troubles. Institutional Church services do yield a little relief. The songs and the messages are based in scripture truth. People are on their best behavior at church and we are strengthened and encouraged while we are there. 

The sincerity to please God is there. Yet, relief is elusive for many. We don’t know how to keep our enemy at bay and he has gained monumental strength over God’s immature sons. They come in looking to be fixed. 

Yet, the desire to surrender completely to our most excellent Lord and follow Him requires denying yourself, carrying the instrument of death (cross) to self around with you, daily  We have to stop sinning!  We must obey every word that proceeds from the mouth of our Father. Then we will be able to hear what the Holy Spirit wants to teach us. We keep trying to “cram” the scriptures like we’re going to have a test at college. The ways of the world are not God’s ways; yet, we use the world’s ways to try to learn all we can about Him. 

We learn who He is by how we interrelate with Him. You can’t know Him by reading the Bible. You can read how He has related to others throughout time and generations. You can learn about His ways but until we bow to His sovereignty and start listening to Him and obeying Him and keep listening to Him and keep obeying Him we are vulnerable to demonic activity which is lies, lies and more lies. As we learn to listen we become extremely aware that we hear Him. Listening is the most vital part of our relationship with Him. Praying is actually listening. We can intercede until He tells us what He wants us to pray.

He gets our attention through the scriptures. Only He can make His way plain. What keeps us from seeing and hearing is all the things we believe to be true that just aren’t. We have to be willing to give it all up to hear. Until we can hear, how can we obey?

We have been misled to “work” the Word. The first time I heard this phrase it grieved the Holy Spirit in me. The Word is the person of Christ. We cannot manipulate Christ. Mankind has apprenticed us to look up scriptures and pray them. The concept is we’re praying the Word of God so He’s not a liar so if you just believe the scriptures you’re voicing and don’t allow oneself to doubt that word will come into being. Lord, forgive us we pray.

We are grateful the Holy Spirit got our attention and turned us around before Christ came back. The hardest thing we are experiencing now is watching people we love continuing in delusions. We know the Book of Revelation has come into play on the earth. The prophecy is no longer prophecy but suffering seen all around us. It is all meant to bring mankind to repentance.  Only one hour of it will produce the actual wrath of God. By then our Father will have done everything He knows to do to get mankind to repent. 

He wants us to know Him. From the beginning of time He’s tried to reveal Himself. Sadly, mankind is so “of the earth” we follow our imaginations of what pleases Him rather than Him. 

It is not going to be easy as time progresses. It’s already not easy but some of us will leave the earth because of the conflict. We will die. We need to mature to the point that fear doesn’t control us when faced with death. We need to understand that precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of every Saint. 

Death is simply the time predetermined by our Father to end our service on earth because He has accomplish what He wants accomplished in the earth through us. To leave this body is to be present with our Lord and all who have finished their race on earth. To live is Christ. To die is gain for Sons.  So many of us are immature in knowing Him and are still controlled by fear of being separated from our bodies because we still have attachments (lusts, pleasures, desires) for what life on earth brings. We still live for the satisfaction of our flesh and immature cravings for pleasure.

Perfect love casts out fear. Knowing Christ and living in Him, by giving up those attachments brings us to know love. Love is being brought to the point that we aren’t afraid to die. 

How can we be perfected by an immature way of doing church and working the word? We cannot. The Holy Spirit and those gifts He gives us that He appoints (man cannot appoint them)  teach and direct us according to the Spirit until we are equipped to hear Him and obey Him for ourselves. They watch over our souls until we rule with truth over them.

Once we are equipped to obey, we become able to show people around us in the world our Father just as Jesus did when He was in His earthly body.  Fear is all around us right now. The Holy Spirit is directing us when we listen. We have to stop reading to learn and listen to learn. Then read. What you read will back up what He says. 

Of course, our Father has been putting up with mankind going their own way since the beginning of time. He is and will continue to beckon us to truth. There are many still being brought out of deception and into His Illumination. (light). As we come into illumination of truth He comforts us. We can comfort with the same comfort we have received. 

In our past lives, our delusions became so much a part of us that that when someone challenged us with truth, we were confused by it.  We couldn’t see we were deceived. We would dismiss their words because they didn’t match what we were taught and believed and practiced. All the activities and the way the people were dedicated to their religious mindsets revealed how much they loved God to us. If the Holy Spirit wanted us to be led a different way He would inform the leaders, wouldn’t He? I would try to comfort myself with the thoughts that they listened to the Holy Spirit and He would inform them before He would inform me. I tried to convince myself I was the one who was off in my thinking but the Lord keeps drawing us to live in truth no matter how much we go to church or read our Bibles and pray in the Spirit. I know because it happened to me. 

No one spent any more time searching and memorizing the scriptures than I did. These were my actual thoughts but our Father was relentless about getting my attention. It’s confusing when you don’t want to believe so much of what you’ve trusted to be true are lies or don’t contain the full truth. I simply did not “want” to believe that all the people I served with, including us, were not following God but religious ideas about God. 

When I was exposed to differences in how the portion of the Family of God I was assembled to was living versus what I was reading in the scriptures I would push back my disturbance and question myself rather than those around me and the way we were going. We are not to judge, right? We don’t judge people but we sure better judge whether we are following Christ. 

Although, I listened to and heard the Holy Spirit I questioned anything He said that didn’t line up with my religious training. But then, one day, the Lord told me I thought I was rich but I was poor blind and naked. I needed a salve for my eyes. 

He gave me the salve but the delusions didn’t fall away all at once. He just had my eyes opened to more and more that brought more and more questions. I brought this up at times to those I believed to be mature in our religious world. Sometimes, it offended them because I was asking questions. Most of the time they didn’t have any answers. Eventually, we heard the Lord tell us to come out of what we had been apprenticed in. 

That’s when we stopped being apprenticed by the world and religious leaders and the Holy Spirit started apprenticing us. We hear the voice of our Father. We have to let Him lead us even when it hurts people’s feelings and makes us uncomfortable. We have to follow Him when no one else hears what He is saying to us. We have discovered very real  suffering that comes from not going the way that is popular. You actually lose any popularity you had when you were going their way. The Lord has to be enough. He has become enough. 

We didn’t recognize what was happening when He first had us break away from supporting anything but truth. Looking back we understand it now. Our Father is leading all His Sons to live in truth. When we live in truth the seven-fold characteristics of the Holy Spirit live in us. These are the same characteristics that rested on Jesus. They are fear of the Lord, knowledge, power, counsel, understanding, wisdom and Lordship. He is wooing and guiding us to search for the truth. We had been listening to too many voices that were leading us away from listening to the Holy Spirit. He is the Spirit of Truth. We started asking the Holy Spirit for answers and stopped assuming we knew them. ( although we thought we did)  We had to learn to bow to His sovereignty and listen and obey Him. 

We were serving as leaders. Sadly, our leadership had come as a result of religious apprenticeship. He had to teach us to lead differently. We had to learn to only say what the Father is saying and do what the Father is doing. The Holy Spirit is the one who apprentices us to know what He is saying and doing.

As we have learned to discipline ourselves to be still and listen for the direction of the Holy Spirit, Himself, the things we learned on the path we took in religious teachings began to show up in stark contrast to the truth. That began six years ago and every day brings more and more revelations of truth