The World Within 

We cannot change the culture around us without first changing the culture within us. 

Knowing that God loves us intellectually, and experiencing His love for us are two different things. Kingdom life, flows directly from knowing God personally. Salvation is at its core is about the restoration of relationship. It is in coming to know Him that we come to know who we are, what our purpose in life is, and how to walk it out. Fundamental to us becoming the people he has called us to be is to experiencing and grasping the reality of spiritual adoption. It’s this reality that redeems us from living from our previous identity of being orphans living on an orphan planet.

No matter what you say you believe about God, the gospel, you and I will reproduce around us what we really believe on the inside. You can say one thing, but what people experience around us is what we really think and believe on the inside. The fullness of the Spirit is measured in terms of overflow, not what you contain but what you release. Our internal world will eventually come out. The ‘juice’ that flows within us, will flow between us. Transformation of a community begins with the internal change that leads to Kingdom overflow.

The intimacy we enjoy or don’t access will be manifest in what is reproduced around us. Anxiety and fear are evidence that we have an inferior and faulty view of the Father. Likewise an emphasis upon being a self-made person is evidence of a broken relationship. Orphans live perpetually in competition, believing from experience that resources, opportunity, promotion, are limited. Which pits us against one another, struggling to grab the little we believe is available.

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. But until we believe we are free, until our internal world is shifted we won’t live free. We can say we believe that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus has set us free from Satan, sin and death and at the same time live bound by many forms of legalism, fear, religiosity, which is form without power.

Jesus hasn’t just come to show us the theory of being free but has come to actually set us free and make us free, freedom in reality. We can sing the songs, know the verses, but He wants us to be free in practice. From the heart free. Freedom from walking around with mindsets and a lack of experience of our true freedom found in our true identity (Romans 8 we received son-ship) Must access the benefit of the name we are known by, saints, sons, adopted, beloved, priest, royal, special,  (1 Peter2:9,12) etc. 

There is great humility in believing what God says about you.

Freedom of sonship isn’t something we did, earn or produce but something we received (Rom 8).  We are on a journey of ‘cashing’ in on the rewards and the benefits of our adoption. Shifted from internally living as a slave, believing that opportunities are limited, and becoming fully convinced that He loves us, He is good and that His resources are unlimited.The gospel is goodnews about His goodness that unleashes us into who we were always meant to be.