The Following Message Has Been Transcribed For
Clarity, Continuity Of Thought, And Punctuation By
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It is a beautiful anointing here, we do not want to lose it. We have a whole teaching on the anatomy of the breaking of the anointing. We have a whole tape on it, on what happens and how the anointing breaks, and that it is a warfare of this entire world that we live in. Wherever Christ appears, He is engaged in a warfare to find out which spirit will be manifesting.
In every group meeting, in every confrontation that you have with another individual, in every moment that you are alone, if Christ is in you, there is a warfare that is going on, and the result of that warfare will determine which spirit will be manifesting. That is it.
We have a whole tape on it, and we found out that it is not true that the Holy Spirit is a gentlemen, that He just goes away if you do not want to talk about him or if you do something that is not spiritual, but we found out that if the Holy Spirit is manifested, and he disappears and another spirit replaces him, that he has been killed by that militaristic ungodly spirit.
It is not a simple matter of the Holy Spirit withdrawing. Some how, another spirit has come into the meeting and killed the Christ which has been formed there.
We found out that the Lord looks at it...it says that a structure, a spiritual structure has been built, and that structure is the spirit that is manifesting. For example, for Christ to be manifesting in this meeting as He is now, there is a spiritual structure. You cannot see it with the naked eye, but there is a spiritual structure that exists.
Does anybody remember what that structure is? It is the Father, the Christ, and the man through whom they are manifesting. What happens frequently is that another spirit will rise, and what is the name of the enemy spirit? Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind. Satan manifesting through his carnal mind through the man, the Father, the Christ and the man, or Satan, the carnal mind and the man.
A meeting like this is a warfare. Any spiritual meeting is a warfare, and the person that God raises up to sit in the pulpit is frequently...not the person, but the Christ that hopefully is manifesting through the person who is running the meeting is frequently attacked. The more liberty there is in a meeting, the more often that Christ is attacked by the carnal minds of the people in the congregation who do not know what they are doing.
They are not doing anything wrong, they are not consciously deliberately doing anything wrong, but that is why the person up here is the teacher, and the people in the congregation are learning because, frequently, they do not understand this. Running a meeting like this, and every time the person that is in charge perceives a carnal mind rising up in, you know harmlessly, the person does not mean to be doing any harm, but when the person in charge perceives the carnal mind rising up in one or more of the believers, it is the head of the meeting's job to crush that carnal mind. Why?
Because why? What is going to happen if I do not crush that carnal mind now? Let me put it to you again. There is a structure here, it is filling the whole room. It is a spiritual structure, it is the Father and Christ, not only coming through me, it was coming through Xxxx, and everyone that was entering into that ministry. Christ was manifesting in all of us.
In the far corner of the room that you need spiritual eyes to see it, the carnal mind started to manifest Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind, and there had to be a man somewhere to let him manifest through them, not realizing what was happening, so it is the job of the person up here to say, "Hold it, I will not let you manifest."
If ever you are in a meeting, and there is an anointing there, and then the anointing is gone, do not let anyone tell you He left because Jesus is a gentlemen, and He went away because He did not want to... if He was there, and then He was gone, He was killed, He was killed.
There cannot be a vacuum in space. If you go into the ocean, and you take out a glass of water, the empty space fills right in. There is no vacuum there. There is no vacuum in our natural air. If I were to take a siphon and siphon off some air from our atmosphere, it would all fill in with air.
It is the same thing in the realm of the spirit. If one spirit goes away, it must be replaced by another spirit. There is no vacuum.
Somebody once said to me, "How did the Lord let Satan move into this world system?" There was a vacuum. The carnal mind killed Christ, there was a vacuum, and He rose right up and filled the void. If you are in Christ, you are involved in this warfare every day of your life, and God wants you to know it, because you do not hear this preached too commonly.
Brethren, we are in the last days. Going to church is not a game. You are in the war whether you want to be in it, or whether you do not want to be in it, you are in the war. If you do not have Christ, you are completely overcome, and you are a prisoner. If you have Christ, it is possible for you to be completely overcome and be a prisoner if you are not living out of Him.
Why would you not be living out of Him? Because no one ever told you this before. If you have Christ, you have two minds. You have a carnal mind, and you have the mind of
Christ. Lord willing you have it, and we need to be aware that every thought that arises in your mind is either one spirit or the other. It is either Christ or it is the carnal mind, and we have to rule by Christ. Before we can rule by Christ, we have to be able to recognize a carnal thought rising in our mind, because there is no such thing as an innocent carnal thought, there is no such thing.
What is the overriding characteristic of our carnal thoughts? Death, death, to be carnally-minded is death. I do not care how innocent it looks, this is hard for a lot of people to understand. I told you that I had a conversation with a local preacher recently, and he said to me, "You mean you believe that you could sin?" I said, "Yes, the Scripture says everything that is not of faith is sin." Every thought, no matter how simple, if I desire an ice cream cone it is sin. How could that be Sheila? Are you not ridiculous? No, I am not ridiculous, because every time you think a carnal thought, you have not thought the thought of Christ. It has to be one or the other.
In this hour, nobody is thinking a hundred percent of the time with Christ. We know that and, therefore, there is no condemnation, if you desire an ice cream cone, but the day is coming, and it is very soon that it will be possible, what we need to accomplish it will be available, what we need to accomplish what?
What we need to think only out of the mind of Christ will be available to us, and it is going to be a warfare to keep our thoughts only in Christ. Why? Because the carnal mind does not want to die. If you stop living out of the carnal mind, and you think only with Christ, that is the death of death. It is the death of your carnal mind. He is not going to lay down and let you walk all over him, and that is what you are going to be doing. The Scripture says, "The God of peace shall shortly bruise..." who? Anybody? Satan under your feet.
Every place Satan has had, give no place to the Devil, every place that Satan has in your mind no matter how innocent it is, it is a place where Christ is not. I repeat, there is no condemnation in this. In this hour, we all have two minds, and there are certain areas where we have to be carnal, if you have a carnal job. You are not thinking with Christ as you cook in the kitchen. I do not know about cooking, but depending on what your job is, God knows we are not thinking out of Christ every minute, but He wants us to be aware of this.
This teaching is going out because the hour is at hand when we are going to have this opportunity, and He is going to be wanting us to be waging war against every thought that is not of God. Does the not Scripture say to cast down every high imagination? He wants us practicing it so that we can recognize our carnal thoughts.
If you are at work, and you are dealing with carnal people, you know you have to be carnal, but let me give you an example that can apply to you at work. You know if Christ rises in you. Let us say the Lord is giving you an opportunity to minister to somebody at work, you feel the anointing rising up in you, and someone else comes in to the room, charges in and changes the subject. Has that ever happened to you? Has God ever given you an opportunity to minister and someone who either is present or comes charging in, changes the subject or something like that. Have you ever experienced that?
Yes, this is the warfare, and God wants us to know how to deal with it, because that person has been sent by Satan to kill the structure of Christ that is manifesting, and when Christ manifests, He manifests for a reason. He has something to say! He has something that He wants to accomplish, and the church is immature. We are growing up, but we are growing up from young childhood. We are growing up from seed, we are spiritual children growing up from infancy, and we have to start waging this warfare.
I have been preaching here for a long time, it is great casting out demons in a church, we do it here when the Lord lets us. I did it for years, you all know that, but the real warfare is in your every day life, and that is what we are in training for now. A church meeting like this is a school room, it is a controlled situation where you go over to the person, you lay hands on them, you say, "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus," and if, Lord willing, there is a demon that has been stirred up, he will come out, but that is not what it is like in real life.
In real life you are standing there, and this raging bull comes charging at you, this spiritual raging bull comes charging at you, and he is trying to stop you from doing what the Lord has just put in your heart to do. Because you are a nice polite person, and you are were brought up to have good manners, you withdraw, and you let the carnal-minded person take over the conversation.
That is what you do. Why? Because no one ever taught you to do otherwise, but we are in a war, and the Lord wants us to start practicing outside of this controlled school room. He wants us to recognize what is happening, He wants us to recognize that Christ is manifesting, He wants us to recognize that the carnal mind has risen up to destroy that manifestation, and He wants us to retaliate not against the person. This is spiritual warfare, we have to learn when to pray silently.
The first thing you do is rebuke it, but before you could rebuke it, you have to recognize that it is happening, and for you to start recognizing that it is happening, you have to ask for it. When you go before the Lord in prayer, if you can receive this word, tell Him that you want to enter into this warfare, that you do not want be an automatic loser every time the carnal mind rises up, that you want to start entering in to your mature manhood, and recognizing this warfare that is not in a controlled...it is very easy to see someone manifesting in a situation like this, but what do you do with someone who is manifesting that has not repented?
You know when someone manifests here, you have a repentant person that sits down and says, "Cast this demon out of me," but in your every day life you are dealing with a manifestation of a person that is not repentant, and the dealings with a demon coming out of someone who is not repentant is very different than the way you deal with it in a situation, in a school situation where the person says, "Yes, I am in agreement, cast this thing out of me."
It is a whole different technique. The person does not want your deliverance, they do not want you laying hands on them. Frequently, they do not even have a relationship with the Lord.
Sometimes they are believers, but the manifestation came upon them, and they are out of control. They are not repentant. The demon is fully manifested, and there is no repentance, you cannot cast that thing out. How do you deal...let me give you some basic principles of how you deal with a charging spiritual bull? Number one, you have to know that you do not have to be a nice girl or a nice boy and back down. You have to know that you are a soldier in Christ, and you do not take that off of anybody.
The question is how do you do it without breaking our social rules, because you do have to live in society? You do not want to go punch somebody and get arrested. Spiritual warfare is not a physical warfare, you cannot be holding people down, you cannot be knocking them down, and you should not be verbally abusive in any way, so what do you do?
What is the warfare, what is the major thrust of this kind of a warfare? The major thrust of this kind of a warfare is a spiritual victory, and what that means is that the spirit that takes authority wins the battle.
It is two spirits butting heads like you see in Daniel. What is it the goat and the ram butting heads? It is a spiritual butting heads, and you must take authority over that spirit. If you exercise your authority in Christ, you have to win. You might not win the first time, but if you keep getting up there and trying, you have got to take the victory.
I know I have not made it clear what I am talking about. I am going to give you a couple of examples. No matter what they are saying to you, you have to rise up in a spirit, and you have to ask God to help you. I know you do not know how to do this. The first thing you say is, "Jesus help me." That is the first thing you say silently in your mind, "Jesus help me," then you rebuke the thing. This is silently, this might be an unsaved person, this is in your mind, you see it coming.
First, you have to learn how to recognize it. Second, you say, "Jesus help me." Third, you rebuke the thing, and then, Lord willing, a spirit of righteousness is going rise up in you that you will not be intimidated by this thing. I know I am not giving you exact specifics, but as you pray about it, and as God gives you the opportunity, you will see it coming forth in you.
You must stand against it in righteousness. If this spirit wants you to do something that is ungodly, you refuse to do it. You tell them that it is not right. If they are accusing you, you do not respond, you do not retaliate. You do not respond on their level, because their level is carnal. You have to come out of a position of authority that is higher than them.
It is the exact opposite of the warfare of casting out a demon in church, and you must take dominion over them. They cannot accomplish what they want with you. If you are ministering to somebody, and a charging bull comes in and tries to change the subject, at that point, you might have to speak something, after you say, "Jesus help me," and after you rebuke the thing, do not worry about being a good little girl or a good little boy.
Rise up in Christ and say, "Excuse me, but we were talking about something very important.
It is very important that you do not rise up in a carnal anger, or a carnal hostility, and I know that I am not giving you specifics because I cannot. All I am doing is giving you something to pray about. It has to happen to you. Christ in you has to arise to take dominion over that ungodly spirit, and the way God has shown me that He is doing this is that He is less likely to arise in you to wage this warfare if you do not ask Him to.
Sometimes in some people...God is not a respecter of persons, He is just more active in some people than other people. He will rise up automatically, but God is not raising up an army of robots. He is raising up an army of trained people that have knowledge and understanding and experience, so He wants you to ask.
We are no longer little babies in Christ, and that is okay when you are a little baby, but it is time to grow up. Paul said, when he was a child he acted like a child, but now he is a man, and God wants us to act like a man. When we were babies and there was danger coming, the Spirit of God rose up within us and just knocked out the enemy, but not when you are a grown up man, God wants you to see it coming, He wants you to rebuke it, He wants you to ask for wisdom and help, and when you do that, Lord willing, Christ in you, not an angry carnal mind, not a fearful carnal mind, not a hostile carnal mind, but Christ in you is going to rise up in righteousness.
If you pray about this, I know God will give you an experience. You probably will not really know what I am talking about until you experience it, but pray about it, He will give it to you, and He will rise up, and it will not be your carnal mind. It will be the authority of Christ, you will take the victory, and you will back that bull spirit off, and the ministry that Christ had for that person will come to pass.
Do you have any idea what I am talking about at all? The biggest drawback that Christians have today is that they really do not understand what is required of them, and there is a lot of teaching going around today that says you are supposed to be meek, and you are not supposed to open up your mouth. That is not a Scriptural meekness.
A Scriptural meekness is humble before the Spirit of Christ. Moses was the most meek man that ever lived, and Moses was a warrior. He went and confronted Pharaoah, how could he be meek? He was meek before the Spirit of God, he could recognize Christ. God is challenging us to humble ourselves before Christ wherever He is manifesting, and a lot of Christians are having this problem.
It is very easy to say, "That is the Lord," when someone is saying, "Thus saith the Lord," and goes on, thus saith the Lord. Oh yes, that is not all. There is even such a thing as a false prophecy, but that is an easy one. In this hour as we grow up, God wants us or is challenging us to recognize Christ in someone who is speaking in normal conversation.
If you cannot do it, ask Him to help you. Do not panic, do not get upset. When God goes to teach you something, the first thing that He does is have someone tell you about it. That is the way He works. He sends a man to talk about it, then you are supposed to pray about it, then He is supposed to witness it to you, and then He is supposed to be giving you experiences.
Brethren, God is raising up an army, and there is a whole country full of people that will not go to church. They will not go to church, or they cannot get to church, or they do not go to church. There is a whole country full of people that are going to church and are not hearing what God wants them to hear.
Then, there are some people that go to church and it is being preached in the pulpit what God wants them to hear, but they just cannot get the understanding, that what that man in the pulpit is saying is for them, and why would someone not be able to perceive what the man in the pulpit is saying is not for them?
Because they cannot perceive the sin in their own heart. If you cannot perceive that you have a particular sin, and the preacher is preaching about that sin, you say, "That is a nice message but it is not for me." God is raising up an army of believers to go out to people and to show them their sins, in Christ.
You cannot be showing it to them in condemnation, but sometimes people cannot see it, and they need a man to say the words in the meekness and humility of Christ. That is what God is doing in this hour. He is doing it to believers and He is doing it to non-believers.
I had that experience for about a year before I came to the Lord. He was drawing me, but I would have never told you that I was a Christian. Now that I look back on it He was drawing me. I was a waitress in those days, and a man came up to me in the diner, and he said something to me that I never forgot. This was sixteen years ago, I never forgot it. I do not know whether he was a Christian or not, but God sent him, because I needed to hear it.
We have a whole church world full of people that think that they really do not need any help, that all their direction is pointed outward to correct the other people, to save the masses that are out there. We have a lot of people in deliverance churches that do not get deliverance. They are just always praying for somebody else, and that is very nice, but this is the hour that Christ is intending to appear in His people. When He appears, sin cannot stand.
He is coming forth in sin-filled men, but as He comes forth the sin has got to go, and we have a whole church full of people that do not know what their sin is. God is sending us forth an army raised up to recognize Christ, to learn to distinguish between Christ and the carnal mind, first in themselves. You have to recognize your own carnal thoughts.
How do you expect to recognize a carnal thought or Christ in another person if you cannot tell when you are thinking a carnal thought? You cannot. If you think that your carnal thoughts are Christ, then you are going to think Christ in another person is a carnal thought. When they come to tell you the truth, you are going to think they have an evil motive for doing it, and if you think that they have an evil motive for doing it, then you are not going to believe what they say.
If you do not believe what they say, you are not going confess your sins. If you do not confess your sins, then you are not going to repent. If you do not repent, Christ is not going to come forth in you.
This is called the judgment of the church. It is called the White Throne Judgment, and it is already started. I do not know about you, but I want to be on the cutting edge of what God is doing. It is very exciting, but it is a warfare, because when you go and show people their sins, unless they are really mature in Christ, they attack you. Their carnal mind, the beast in them, rises up and attacks you.
There is a training that God is making available in this hour, and it does involve deliverance. I find that people that have had a lot of deliverance are usually...let me put it this way, God is calling a lot of people to this ministry that have had a lot of deliverance, because you cannot be attacking these people when they attack you. If you point out something to them, and they rise up and attack you, you cannot get into a carnal battle with them. How is God glorified in that? He is not, He is not!
If you are called to this ministry or if you desire this ministry, it is very glorious and it is a great challenge, because it is never the same thing. You never know when He is going to arise in you, you never know who He is going to send you to. It could be someone on the street, it could be someone at work, it could be someone in the church, and then the beast rises up in them. Did Paul not say, "I wrestle with beasts in Ephesus?" Did Paul not say that?
He did not mean regular beasts. He meant people beasts, he meant people who were manifesting their carnal mind. That is what he was talking about. Did anybody not know that? He was not wrestling with lions and tigers in Ephesus. Paul was going to people and speaking the word of the Lord to them, and when the Lord speaks, He always exposes sin. God exposes sin, and if the person is not trained, and if the person is not understanding this, they rise, the beast in them rises and attacks the minister in Christ and slanders him, and lies about him, and misjudges his motives, and speaks evil of him.
You have to know how to handle it, and you are not going to be able to handle it if you do not have some measure of deliverance.
You have to have enough control over your carnal mind to keep him tread under the feet of Christ in you, because I want to tell you something, when someone comes to you and provokes you, or says something about you that is unkind or cruel or untrue, what it does is stimulate your carnal mind. Does anybody not know that?
If you are manifesting Christ, and your carnal mind is tread under your feet for that moment that you are manifesting Christ, and someone comes along and says an unkind or an untrue or a provocative remark to you, what it does is, it gets in there under Christ, and it strengthens your carnal mind. It provokes your carnal mind, and when your carnal mind gets mad...your carnal mind has just been laying there, he has been saying, "Oh well, Christ is manifesting for five or ten minutes and what is the big deal?"
This person's remark gets in there, it touches it your carnal mind, and your carnal mind gets mad. He rises up and flips you over, Christ goes down underneath, and you have got a carnal mind manifestation, and that is the end of your ministry. You have to have enough of a measure of deliverance to know that this is not going to happen, and even if you feel the manifestation, that you are not going to act on it. You are going to stay in Christ.
It is all practice, it is training, and God wants to bring you into it. He is raising up an army in this hour, and He is raising up an army to judge His church.
The end of the judgment is, anybody know what the end of the judgment is? The appearance of Christ, the appearance of Christ! It is the judgment of your soul, it is the wounding of your carnal mind, and as your carnal mind dies, Christ will arise in you. We are talking about the fullness of the stature, the Lord Jesus Christ coming into your mind, we are talking about the mind of Christ permanently residing in your temple.
Right now, we have two minds, and we are unstable in all our ways. James says we are unstable in all our ways. We have a carnal mind and a Christ mind, and the only way that Christ mind is going to come to a point of preeminence will be through the wounding of our carnal mind. We have to resist him every time he rises up, and we have to resist him in others, but that resistance must be in Christ.
We cannot have Christians going out and getting into battles and saying that it is God, but then again on the other hand, sometimes we have Christ rising up to rebuke or to correct or to give a strong correction, and carnally-minded Christians cannot perceive it as Christ. They think it is the carnal mind in that person. There is a rumor going around the church that the Lord is always sweet and sugary, because of the Scripture that says, "God is love."
God is love but the question is, how does love act? Love is kind, love never hurts, they are quoting the Scriptures from one of the books of Corinthians, but love is also righteousness, love is also righteousness.
We find in Revelation 20 a picture of Christ Jesus riding on His horse with a sword in His hand, and He is true, and He is faithful. True and faithful to what? True and faithful to the nature of God and in righteousness, He doth make war, and who does He make war against? He makes war against the carnal minds of men.
We have to get all these Scriptures to start to jive. You get a carnal-minded person, and they say, "The Scripture contradicts itself," The Scripture does not contradict itself. There is always a connecting link. We have to find out why these two Scriptures seem to be contradicting themselves.
Usually, it is because one Scripture is speaking about one thing, and the other Scripture is speaking about something else. Love is kind, love never injures, that is true, but Christ also makes war against the carnal mind. When? When sin is manifesting either in your own carnal mind or in somebody else's carnal mind. God makes war against sin.
If the person is not sinning against you, you are to be kind and gentle, and forgiving in whatever other words are in those Scriptures, but when sin is manifesting, if someone is trying to dominate you, if someone is trying to take authority over you, if someone is trying to control you, you do not just sit down and not say anything. You are supposed to respond in righteousness.
All of this is a training. You have to learn how to do it, and the beginning of it is that you have to learn to discern between the carnal mind and Christ in your own mind. The next thing that you have to learn is to tell the difference between the carnal mind and Christ in someone else's mind. Then, you have to go through an education, through a training with God to know how He would want you to respond in every situation, and I recommend that you go very slowly.
I had many situations where I was wounded by people, and I did not respond because I did not know what was right, and when I did not know what was right, my choice was to let them have it, so they took the victory over me, because I was not sure what was right. Once I got a revelation, once God taught me what was right, what was the righteous response to this sin against me, I started to do it, and the righteousness of God could come forth, and it can sound very stern to a carnal ear.
We have to learn all of this, brethren. Why? Because Christ wants to appear in us, and it is not a rapture. We are not going to wake up one morning and have the mind of Christ. We are growing into Him, we are growing into Christ through many experiences.
The doctrine and the teaching are very important, very important If you are maturing in Christ. We know that the Scripture says that first Christ, the firstfruits, and then those who are His at His coming, and then the end. Each man is coming in his own order, so we know that everybody is not equally matured at the same time. You have to find out where you are, but if you one of the...if you are not a babe in Christ, if you are moving into some level of maturity, God is going to start giving you experiences, and He is going to let unpleasant things happen to you.
He is challenging you to go before Him and say, "This is the way I would have handled it in the world, but how did you want me to handle it in Christ? What is the victory in Christ? I pray all the time, "Lord how would you have dealt with that? How would you have dealt with that?"
Then another thing to watch out for is your own attitude. Are you on the defensive? Do you feel that you have to protect yourself against people, or do you feel that you are ministering to them? Do you look at someone who is saying something ungodly to you in a manner that would say, "Look at this poor person that their mind is so far gone, look at what they are saying to me? How can I help them? What can I do for them? What can I say that is going to help Christ to begin to appear in their mind? "
This is a question of maturity. As you grow in Christ, you realize that there is no reason to be afraid. As your maturity in Christ develops, you have the authority to say something to these people that is going to change their whole life, and it may be people that are not even saved.
You know we have a generation coming up in this country today that are being dragged up by their boot straps. They do not even have an upbringing, some of these kids. I walked out of my house one night, and there was this eleven year old boy trying to sell me magazines, and I told him, "No thank you." I was very polite to him, and he turned around and started giving me a high pressure sales pitch, eleven years old. I could not believe it. Obviously, somebody trained him, and it was very phony. I said to him, "Has your mother or father ever taught you to take no for an answer?" He looked at me with perfect honesty. He said, "No, they never taught me that." I said, "When somebody says no, you should accept their no.
I know I said it with kindness, I know I said it with love. I told him what was right, he was doing something ungodly.
It is not enough to say to somebody, "That is ungodly, you should not be doing that." You really have to explain to them what is ungodly and give them an alternative. You have to tell them what is right, because they do not know. God is showing me more and more everyday, if you get mad at people it does not do them any good, because they really do not know what they are doing wrong, and it is our job to tell them.
This kid just turned around, and he walked away. He will probably never forget what I said to him. He thought he was doing the right thing, some high pressure sales person that had rounded up these young kids to sell these magazines had told them, "Do not ever take no for an answer," and he did not even know that he had been taught something ungodly. That is witchcraft, you try to force yourself on somebody.
Basically that is what God is doing in this hour, if you are on the cutting edge of what God is doing, if you are want to be on the cutting edge, if you want to ask him if you can be on the cutting edge of what he is doing, the spearhead of the move of God in this hour is the White Throne Judgment, and it is taking place in our own hearts. When God is satisfied that we are honestly pursuing the judgment of our own carnal mind, He is going to send us out to others.
That is the latest thing that God is doing, that is the most mature thing that God is doing in this hour. If you are not called to it, then there is no condemnation in it. Everybody is not called to it. God has children of all different ages, but if you are hearing this message and you want to be a part of it, then tell God that you want to be a part of it.
There is a training involved, and a large part of that training is the doctrine of the hour that is coming forth. It is the Spirit of the word, it is the Spirit of the word. There is a letter of the word, and there is a Spirit of the word.
There is nothing wrong with studying the letter of the word. I thank God for the letter of the word, but if you want to go on, you have to start moving into the Spirit of the word. We know that Jesus spoke in parables and when He took His disciples, when He was alone with His disciples, He gave them the understanding of the parables, and that is what is coming forth in this hour. The deep understanding of the Scripture, and what is the deep understanding of the Scripture? It is the story of our humanity, what happened to us, how we were created, how the creation fell, and how the Lord intends to raise us from the dead.
This Spirit of the word does not mean that the letter of the word is not valid. I was speaking to someone the other night, and I told them this, and they said, "Oh, so you believe the Bible is not true?" I said, "Hold it, hold it!" Then people go away and tell other people that I say the Bible is not true. I never said any such thing.
The Bible is true, but it is also true on many different levels, and the letter of the Bible is a parable, it is a parable. God set it up so that a three year old child can understand that there is a Jesus, that there was a sin in the garden, that there was a fall, and that is wonderful, but when you have been with the Lord for fifteen years, if the Lord permits, it is the time to go on and study a little more deeply. The message sounds very different, because it is the study of the spiritual truth, and this creation is spiritual. It is not physical.
To find out what really happened, you have to start studying spiritual things. You have to start learning spiritual principles if you really want to understand what God did when He set up this creation, and if you really want to understand the truth of our existence. Jesus said to the Pharisees, "I will tell you the truth and the truth will set you free."
They did exactly what I was just talking about a few minutes ago. The beast in them rose up and called Him a bastard. They told Him He was illegitimate. He must have gotten them mad. What happened when He said to them, "I tell you the truth and the truth will set you free?" Their pride rose up, and said, "We know the truth, what are you talking about? We have the Scripture, we have Moses, what are you talking about?" What He was saying to them was, "Yes, you have the Scriptures, and you have Moses. You have the letter, but the truth is spiritual. It is not of the letter, and when I give you the truth, it is going to set you free." They cast Him out of their midst.
Jesus had a hassle with some Pharisitical beasts. That is the beast. The carnal mind rose up and did not like what He said, and why would the carnal mind not like this kind of teaching or this kind of talking? Because the end result of this kind of teaching is the death of your carnal mind. I am preaching the death of the carnal mind.
The carnal mind is destroyed on two levels. The first thing, the preaching of the Spirit of the word does is that it causes Christ to start to develop in you. It causes Christ to start to develop in you, and Christ enters into your heart as a mustard seed. Your carnal mind is fully developed when Christ enters in as a mustard seed.
Let me remind you that the carnal mind is a three-fold cord, at this time the carnal mind is a three-fold cord. What does that mean? The carnal mind is a spiritual entity, it has three parts to it. It has three parts to it, and they are all woven together. Where are the three parts somebody?
Eve, that is another name for our human spirit. Eve married Satan at the time that she received his suggestion. There was a union of the minds, Satan and Eve had spiritual adultery. Have you heard of spiritual adultery? There was a union of the minds, a joining and there was an offspring, which resulted from that union, the carnal mind, and all three are one.
This is the spiritual structure or the skeleton of the heart of fallen man, Satan, Eve, the carnal mind, the three are completely intertwined and inseparable. They are known as man's heart, or they are also known as the mind of man. I know in the Greek, mind and heart are two different words, but in the Hebrew they are really just one word.
The Greek breaks it down, and it means it is your center. When a human woman conceives a child, the first organ that appears is the heart, and the flesh and every other part of the body (I am too much into anatomy) starts forming around the heart. Our entire spiritual being revolves and is formed around the heart of man, the carnal mind. The carnal mind is a three-fold cord which is not easily broken.
What happened at the beginning of time was that we had a creation. God made a creation, He made it out of the dust, and He gave it a name and that name was Adam, the Living soul, Adam the Living soul. Let me remind you that at that time, the creation had no sex. He was to be, we call him "he" because God said unto the man, "You shall have dominion over the fishes in the sea, and over the animals in the rest of the creation." The man shall be a God, and the one that has dominion, and the one that has authority is male.
We say that Adam was a man, but in relationship to God, Adam was God's wife, Adam was God's wife! It was the Lord's intention to reproduce His nature inside of the man, and the way He intended to do it was to join Himself with that part of the creation which was spirit.
As we see Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind, and Eve, it was the Father's intention to join with Eve and produce which mind? The mind of Christ, the mind of Christ, the mind of Christ, but we had a tragedy somewhere at the beginning of time, and Satan got in there first and brought forth the carnal mind, and the event that resulted from this joining, from this union and this birth is called, anybody know? What happened?
The fall, the fall, the fall. We see at the beginning of time that the Father had a relationship with the creation. The Father is Spirit, and He joined with the spiritual aspect of the creation, which was Eve. She is the mother of all living. Right? He did not join with her, and there were no offspring, but the Scripture says that He took the man, and He set him upright in the Garden.
What that means is that the Father said to the creation, "He is going to have a relationship with you, and I am going to give you authority, I am not ready yet to join with you and bring forth Christ in a three-fold cord, but I am going to give you dominion over this creation."
The example that the Father gave me is approximately a ninth month or a one year old child, and I keep seeing this baby in pampers. You put them on their feet, and they can walk, but if they fall down they cannot get up. Remember that stage? That was the creation, He set that baby on its feet, and He said, "Walk," and the baby walked until one day the carnal mind knocked him down.
Christ at the beginning of time...a lot of people get all upset when I say Christ can get killed. We have an immature Christ, and we have a mature Christ. The mature Christ which is a three-fold cord, the Father and Eve and Christ coming through a man. That Christ, that mature Christ will never be killed.
That was what happened to the man, Jesus. The Father joined with the mind of the man, Jesus, and brought forth His Christ in a three-fold cord, and now He is our Lord and Savior in heaven.
At the beginning of time, the formation of Christ was a two-fold cord. God said, "I give you authority," but it was capable of falling apart, because it was only a two-fold cord. Do you have a question?
COMMENT: You said the baby fell when the carnal mind brought it down, but it sounds like the carnal mind always existed there.
PASTOR VITALE: Yes, I am trying not to get in too deep, because we have new people here. I am not going into the details, I have tapes and tapes on it, but the carnal mind did not always exist. I will clarify it, but I am not going to go into detail.
The first thing that God brought forth was the creation that was innocent. It was capable of sin but it had not yet sinned, and it was the Father who was in a relationship with the spiritual aspect of the creation which was Eve.
He set the creation on its feet, and He called it Christ, immature Christ, Christ in the form of a two-fold cord, a formation of Christ that needed to be developed through experience. What happened was that because this early creation was inexperienced when Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind, whispered in the ear of Eve, she joined with him and brought forth an offspring, the carnal mind, the three-fold carnal mind which was stronger than the Christ that had no experiences. That was that baby that was walking, and the carnal mind knocked him down. The Lord has not yet put us on our feet.
Praise God, getting back to how Christ can be killed. A lot of Christians get offended when I say that, but a lot of people get offended when I tell you the truth. The bottom line, brethren, is what we have in the church today is a Christ which is a two-old cord, it is a Christ which is a two-fold cord.
The Father has come to us in the form of the Holy Spirit, and He has developed a relationship with us. He has given us gifts, and we speak in tongues and we prophesy, but He has not brought forth the full birth of his son in us. We are very much in the same condition that the creation was at the beginning. We are a two-fold cord, and the Father is in the process of making our relationship with Him a three-fold cord.
What is going to make us a three-fold cord is His bringing forth His son in us. A lot of people get confused, because they think that the Holy Spirit and Christ is the same thing, and the Holy Spirit and Christ are not the same thing. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Father, He is the Spirit of the Father.
When He comes into our heart, He is seeking to join with Eve, which is a name for our human spirit, that part of us which is spirit. This flesh is not spirit, our soul is not spirit, our soul is dust. That part of us which is like God is our human spirit. and when the Holy Spirit enters into our heart, He seeks to find that which is like Himself, which is our human spirit, and He seeks to join with her, and when that joining is successful, and it is not successful in every believer, there is a child conceived.
Christ in you the hope of glory, and when that child is conceived, He is likened to a newly conceived fetus in a woman's body. He has to grow up, He has to grow up, and He grows up through having experiences in God and through being fed a spiritual diet. He needs the Spirit of the word to make Him grow.
Have you heard the Scripture that says, "You shall be saved in childbearing?" You shall be saved in childbearing. Brethren, you have to have the baby, you have to have the baby if you want your soul saved. You have to give birth to this baby, and you cannot give birth to this baby until you get pregnant. Everybody that has the Holy Spirit is not pregnant.
Every married couple that engages in sexual activity does not get pregnant, that is just the truth, I tell you the truth. If you want this, you have to ask the Lord for it. You have to tell Him that you heard his message, and that you want His son born in you, that you are no longer satisfied with a visit from His son, that you have heard this message, that there is a deeper experience beyond having a relationship with His son.
We are told in the Book of Romans, I think it is Romans 5, that when you receive the Holy Spirit, He reconciles you to God, He brings you into a relationship with God, but it is not until He joins with your human spirit and conceives Christ in you that you are justified by His blood, because Christ is the blood.
I am going to say it again. Your relationship with the Father reconciles you to Him, brings you into a relationship with Him, He gives you gifts like a man courting a woman, but He wants more than that. He wants to join with you and bring forth His son in you. It is the reproduction of the nature of God in you, it has to be reproduced in you.
Jesus died for you, all of these things are true. It is just like saying, "I have electric lights in this house, if I do not turn on the switch, I do not have any light." Jesus' work on the cross is complete, and what He did on the cross was to make a way for the nature of God to appear in you. Now it has to happen to you. It is being preached in most churches that it has already happened to you. It is not true, it has to happen to you now.
Some people have the Holy Spirit, that Holy Spirit has entered into their heart, and Christ is being formed in them, and they do not really understand what is happening. Other people have the Holy Spirit, and Christ has not been conceived in them. God is no respecter of persons, if it has not happened to you, ask Him for it.
Some people are more fertile than other people. God wants to appear in you more than you want Him to appear in you. He wants to appear. He is a Spirit that is locked up inside of the carnal minds of men. He wants to express Himself through this whole creation, and He has laid out a map, a plan of how He is going to do it, and He wants our cooperation.
He is not taking us over like some alien from outer space. He wants us to be willing and in agreement, so He has sent ambassadors. They are called evangelists, they are called preachers and teachers, and He is giving this message to the people saying, "I want you to want me as much as I want you. It is wonderful that you go to church and that you sing and you dance, but I have more for you, there is more for you, come up hither."
That is the message that is going out today that if you have the Holy Spirit, and you speak in tongues, that is great, but He wants to bring forth His son in you which will save you when this son is fully born in you. He is going to be fully born in you in this lifetime. Your body does not have to die for Him to be fully born in you.
The resurrection of the dead is...who died, who died? Christ died, the two-fold Christ died. The Christ that was a two-fold cord, He died when the carnal mind slew Him at the fall. The resurrection of the dead is the resurrection of your dead human spirit.
Let me tell you this. At the beginning of time, the immature Christ is likened to a skeleton. This is the skeleton that Ezekiel talks about in the valley of bones.
Brethren, down here in hell, this is the valley of the shadow of death, and it is also the valley of dead bones. The bones of Christ are buried under the earth of the carnal minds and the physical bodies of men, and one His bones is in each and every individual human being. It is different than it is in the natural.
When we see a human skeleton, all of the bones are stuck together but, down here in hell, each human being has one of Christ's bones buried in his heart. The Father is coming to raise that bone from the dead, and the way He is doing it is by joining His Holy Spirit to the dead human spirit in a man, and He will quicken it, He will give life to it. From the moment that human spirit is quickened, Christ starts to develop in you, and He needs food, and He needs food that is good for the Christ.
Brethren, this is a hard word, but there is a gospel and there is a ministry that is to the carnal Christian. It is good, and it is wonderful, because when you are carnal, you cannot receive the spiritual ministry. You need ministry to the carnal man who has received the message that Jesus died on the cross, but once you float around in church for a few years and that Holy Spirit quickens your human spirit, you start to need spiritual food, you start to need the message that is going to bring you into perfection.
We have a lot of Christians walking around today with a quickened human spirit, and it is not growing particularly fast, mostly because they never heard this message, and they think that all that there is, is to go to church and talk in tongues and prophesy. There is nothing wrong with that, I am not against it.
What I am telling you is that there is more, there is more than going to church and singing and dancing and prophesying, and even casting out demons. There is more, there is more, and that is what is being preached in this ministry today, and God wants His son born in you, He wants His son fully born, and when Christ is fully born in you, He kills your what? He kills your carnal mind. Your mind becomes Christ, and you will become a member of the many-membered Christ.
Jesus of Nazareth was called Jesus, the Christ, because He had a human body just like we do, but His mind was completely 100% Christ. He was not back and forth like we are. The carnal mind that He inherited from Mary was completely overpowered and tread under by the Christ, not one thought ever got through.
He never acted on a carnal thought. Every thought that came out of His mind, every word that He said, and every deed that He did, came forth from the mind of Christ, and that made Him Jesus the Christ. In that day, 2,000 years ago, the man, Jesus, was the only member of the body of Christ, but in this hour, the Lord Jesus Christ is reproducing Himself, and He is imparting the nature of His Father to a many-membered company of which, hopefully, we are all members.
When the Christ mind is fully born in you and fully overpowers your carnal mind, you will be a member of the body of Christ. We are engaged in this very exciting procedure of the resurrection of the dead Christ, and this time when the Father raises Him from the dead, He will not be a two-fold cord. He will be a three-fold cord, and He will never die again.
The Scripture says, "Once Christ being raised from the dead, dieth no more," because when you have a manifestation of Christ that is resulting from a union, not a fellowship between the Father and our human spirit, but a union with Him that has produced an offspring, that Christ which is a three-fold cord is stronger than the carnal mind, which is also a threefold cord, but an inferior three-fold cord.
The carnal mind can only destroy Christ when Christ is an immature Christ that is a result of the fellowship with the Father and not a union, not an offspring producing union with the Father.
That is why we see many instances where Christ is manifested, and some carnal happening stirs up and the anointing goes. I have been in some churches where it never comes back for the rest of that service, it is gone. When it is a mature manifestation of Christ in that service, no matter what happens in that service, if the man in whom Christ is manifesting has a certain level of maturity, that anointing will come back. He will bring it back, He will defeat the carnal manifestation wherever it is manifesting.
If He can do it kindness, He will do it in kindness. If it is necessary, He will put it down with authority, but that carnal mind will not be able to knock out the manifestation of Christ if it is coming from a man in whom this three-fold Christ is manifesting.
No one today is in full stature, but there are varying degrees of maturity. This is what God is doing today, He is not fooling around. He wants to come forth, we are in the last days, we are in the last days.
These three words...just as God was telling me to cancel my message for tonight, I was just praying, are there any questions on this before I go on to something else? As I was just speaking to the Lord, and asking Him to confirm that He cancelled my message for tonight, Xxxx gave us these three words, and that confirmed it to me, prism, covenant, and rainbow.
God, as you all know, makes covenants with man. God is Spirit, God is Spirit, and a prism, does anybody not know what a prism is? It is a glass, it is a glass. I do not know if it is crystal, but it is a glass that has different facets and sides to it. When you pass light through it, when you pass white light through it, it breaks it down into the colors of the rainbow. It breaks down light.
We have God which is Spirit, and He is also light, and the prism, we can liken the prism to the living soul. God passes Himself through us. Is not the Spirit of God which is within us being passed out through us? The Spirit of God passes Himself, and what is soul? It is man. He passes Himself through man, and what He gets is a rainbow, a breakdown of the Spirit of God into a many-membered company.
The Father is now revealing Himself through a many-membered creation, and we are all unique, we are all unique, and He is not doing the same exact thing through anybody. The manifestation of Christ through a man is unique to that man, but right now everybody is going in their own direction. Every time I think about it, I have to laugh because only God could take care of this.
What a "rag tag" army we are. Everybody is doing what they want, going where they want to go, wearing what they want to wear, and God keeps showing me soldiers that are called into boot camp, you know that they are really green. If you have seen some movies, sometimes they make a joke out of it. They will say, "About face," and one soldier goes that way and the other one goes that way. They are all going in different directions.
Then, six months later, one of them faces completely backwards like this, and they are all mixed up and confused, and then about six months later when they get through with boot camp, they are all marching in perfect unison. God's army is a mess.
Most of His soldiers cannot hear His voice, and if they hear His voice, they decided it is not God because they do not like what He said to them. Some of them just choose not to obey, some of them decide it is not God, some of them cannot hear, some of them say, "Oh, I just forgot I left something on the stove and they go home."
Just like Jesus said in the Bible, "I have to bury my dead father, I have to get married, I have to prove my oxen," because people do not really understand what is happening. This army is one mess, but God is going to do it, because if He does not do it, it is not going to get done.
We know that Israel is the horse of the Lord, and we are being trained to be the horse upon which the Lord will ride. The Lord wants to ride us, and He wants us to be obedient to His command. Does anybody know what dressage is? Dressage is a technique, I guess that is what I could call it, of very well-trained horseback riders, where they direct their horse with the slightest movement of their knee. They do not flick the reins or anything like that. The horse is so well trained that at the slightest pressure from the knee, it knows what it is supposed to do.
That is what God is bringing us into. It seems impossible at the moment but He is God, and He is going to do it. Everybody is running in all different directions, scattering everywhere they want to go, but He is going have His way. However He is going to do it, He is going to have His way.
We see the Spirit of God which is light, and it has been expressed through a prism which is the living soul, He is being spread outward, and He is being broken down into many different expressions of Himself. God is the creative force of the universe.
All creativity originates with God. Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind, has no original creativity at all. I know there is a lot of teaching in the church that says any music or art that comes out of a fallen man, that it is demonic. I have a different opinion, you can believe that if you want to, but I have a different opinion.
I believe that everything, every good thing in this earth, everything that gives peace to the souls of men...I know I have heard a lot of people say classical music is demonic. Maybe some of it is, but some of it is exquisite. Most of Mozart and Beethoven is exquisite, and that came out of highly demonized men, because everything that is created, even in fallen man comes from God.
Remember, fallen man, that which gives animation, I cannot say life, because fallen man does not have life. We are death, but we do have an existence, that which animates us, that which gives us what we call life, is from the Son of God. There is no life in the dust. Even though we are in an existence of death, that which gives us whatever we have goes way back to when the Son of God mixed with the dust of the earth, and imparted His life to us.
All creativity goes back to God. Anything good that comes out of fallen man goes back to God. There is no good thing in the dust. Does the Scripture not say that? There is no good thing in man.
God wants to take all of your natural talents, He wants to take everything that is good that is within you, because that originates with Him, and He wants to invigorate it by touching all of your positive qualities with the life of His Holy Spirit and, if possible, wants to bring Christ forth in you.
He wants to lay hold of every good thing in you and express Himself through it, and enhance it, and make it all that it could be, and He wants to crush every ungodly thing in you, and wound it and put it in chains and tie it up, and He is going to have His way. It does not look too good now if you look at the carnal mind. It does not look too good now, but He is going to do it, and He is going to have this whole world, and every knee shall bow, and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.
All of these frightening Scriptures that you read about, that the eyes are going to burn out of their sockets, all of these terrible judgments are going to fall, all of this frightening stuff that scares a lot of people, it turns a lot of people against God, what all that is about is the judgments of God upon the carnal minds of men.
The carnal mind, the corporate carnal mind, is the beast. He is a murderer, he is a vicious wicked, wicked thing. He is a man, a spiritual man in many members, he is as wicked as you can get, and all of these judgments in the Bible are for him. What most people do not understand is that before God does that to him in you, He is going to impart Christ into you.
When He does all of these wicked things, when He burns the eyes out of your carnal mind and whatever else He says He is going to do in the prophets, usually, He will have already conceived Christ in you, so that when your beast dies from these judgments, Christ will be the life sustaining force of your person.
The living soul is an expression of the mind which is in it. God made a soul. When the mind in that soul is Christ, then the living soul is righteous and it is alive. When the mind in this living soul is death, or carnal, the living soul dies. We are dead because our mind is carnal.
The renewed man, the inner man, the new man, the renewing of the creation is a change of mind. That does not mean that your carnal mind is going to get a new lease on life. The renewing of your mind is #1, the conception of Christ your new mind, and #2, the wounding of your carnal mind, and #3, the death of your carnal mind, and the exaltation of Christ in you.
I am going to just go over the three stages of resurrection and then. I will take questions, and we will call it quits for tonight.
We read about the first resurrection in the Book of Revelation. For a long time, I said to the Lord, "Where is the rest of the resurrection?" I did not know what it meant, and then I read a newsletter where a preacher talked about a last resurrection. He said, "There is a first resurrection, and the last resurrection." I said, "That sounds okay," but I did not hear God telling it to me. I said, "It sounded okay," and then as some of you know, God brought forth the teaching here that we are being raised from the dead in three stages, and what the book of Revelation talks about as the first resurrection is really the first stage of the resurrection.
Most Christians believe the first resurrection is the first group of people to be raised from the dead, but I suggest to you that it is the first of three stages of resurrection that will occur in the individual, and we found it in at least two if not three Scriptures. We found it in Daniel 8, we found it in one of the Books of Corinthians, and we found it in the third place also.
This is it. Basically, the first stage of the resurrection is the quickening of your human spirit, I have been talking about it all night, and the full birth of the Christ child in you, as we find in Revelation chapter 12. The manchild is born, and the full birth of the manchild bruises the carnal mind underfoot, bruises the carnal mind underfoot.
As those of us who are going through this processing realize, it is a whole long procedure getting to the point that the manchild is born in you, getting to the first stage of the resurrection has been going on for years, but when it happens that will be the first stage of the resurrection. It is the resurrection of Christ in the individual.
Let me remind you that when Christ in born, just like our natural example, in the natural example the fetus is in an amniotic sack. Christ when He is being developed in us is in a spiritual amniotic sack. What is that, a spiritual amniotic sack, does anybody remember? It is the carnal mind.
When the Holy Spirit enters into your heart, do you remember I preached earlier that the heart of fallen man is the carnal mind, the Holy Spirit enters into your heart, and Christ starts to form inside of the carnal mind just like a human fetus forms inside of the, I do not know what the amniotic sack is before it becomes an amniotic sack, but the Holy Spirit enters into your heart which is your carnal mind, quickens your human spirit, and Christ starts to grow within your carnal mind.
That carnal mind gets stretched outward as Christ gets bigger, it gets stretched outward. We find in the Book of Revelations that this condition is described as a grape, that the fruit of the grape is Christ (We did a whole study on this), and the grape skin which is going to be bruised and cut, and which is thrown away in the making of wine, that, that grape skin, that sack that is holding the flesh in, was originally the carnal mind before the fruit starting growing and pressing it outward.
The second stage of the resurrection, we find is that the Christ which is underneath the carnal mind, we find Him piercing through that carnal mind. It is called the circumcision without hands. Have you heard about the circumcision without hands? There is a spiritual circumcision, brethren. God knows how hard it is to understand spiritual things, so we have a natural example of everything.
Everybody here knows what a male a circumcision is. Christ, brethren, is your spiritual maleness, and when He comes forth, He has a foreskin over Him. It is the carnal mind, and that foreskin has to be cut away. Only in human men, the foreskin is cut away by another person from the outside, but in spiritual matters, it is Christ Himself who is cutting Himself free from His carnal mind that is covering Him.
This is a big mystery. We found it in the account of Jesus in the Garden. We looked up every word in the Greek, and the Lord revealed to us that this was the spiritual circumcision. This is the one of the three stages of resurrection that you really have to pray about. It is not that obvious, the first one we know is obvious because the man, Jesus of Nazareth, walked in full stature. The third stage, we know is obvious. We know the man, Jesus, was glorified, he went from being a man in a human body with full dominion over the world to being a glorified Spirit.
Can anyone not see the evolution there, that He became a greater manifestation than when He was in a human body. Do you have a problem with that? Okay.
This is the only difficulty, so you have to pray about it, and it is between you and God. This is what the Lord has shown us. We found out when we looked up every word of that account in the Garden where the church preaches that Christ was begging God to not let Him go on the cross, I want to declare to you that, that is blasphemy.
It is a blasphemy to say that the Son of God had weakness in Him. He had no weakness in Him, no weakness in His mind, His flesh was vulnerable. He was the Son of God, but because His mind was so strong, because He was the Son of God, He said, "No man could kill this flesh unless I say it is okay." The strength was in His mind.
To say that He agonized, because He did not want to go on the cross, that He begged the Father that He would not have to go on, that He asked the Father if there was any way to get out of it, I suggest to you that, that is a blasphemy, and that this translation was a translation that was brought forth by the King James translators who did the best that they could but who really just could not make any sense out of that passage.
When we looked up every word in the Greek, this is what the Father revealed. That the carnal mind is a porous surface, porous meaning that moisture can pass through it as in a sponge. If you put water on the top of the sponge, eventually it will seep down and appear on the bottom of the sponge. The carnal mind is a porous surface.
Christ is typified by what? Anybody remember? What is the life of Christ typified by? Blood, it is typified by blood, the blood of the grapes, the fruit of the grape. When the man, Jesus, was on His knees in the Garden, and it says that He was praying in a great agony, He was saying to the Father, "Father do I have your permission to circumcise this carnal mind, am I strong enough to do it?" The Father said, "Go," and He agonized in His mind, because it was a mental exercise.
It was not physical, and as He exerted, and I do not even know how He did it to tell you the truth, but it was mental exertion of power, and as He did this, He started to pierce through this carnal mind, and the Scripture says that the way that He pierced through it was that His life, which is typified by blood which is liquid, started to appear on the surface of the carnal mind as great drops of blood.
Remember that word from that Scripture, "And He sweat as it were great drops of blood." We looked up every word in the Greek, and this is what it is saying, that the blood of His life pierced through the porous carnal mind, and appeared on the surface as great drops of the blood of his life.
He went from the inside to the outside, and when blood appears on the surface of your skin, what happens to it? It causes a scab to form, it clots, and it causes a scab to form, and what happened was that Christ went to the outside, and He forced the carnal mind to the inside, and He clotted over the carnal mind.
In our studies here over the last year, we have found out that the wound that the creation received in the fall, that the wound is the carnal mind, and when Christ scabs over the carnal mind, it is the healing of that wound. Brethren, if you are a carnal man, you have a spiritual wound that has separated you from God, and the second stage of the resurrection is the Spirit of Christ clotting over...it is the Spirit of Christ or the mind of Christ clotting over the wound which is separating you from God, and after a wound clots over that which is underneath heals, that which is underneath heals.
We see in the second stage of resurrection, Jesus on top of the carnal mind and the manifestation of it. That most obvious manifestation of this change in the spiritual condition of the man, Jesus, is that He received aggressive power. When He walked the earth, He healed, and He delivered, and He was harmless as a dove. The only aggressive thing that He did was He turned over the tables in the temple.
I really do not have any revelation on that, but He did not harm any man, He did not kill anybody, He did not physically hurt anybody, but as soon as His condition changed, when the soldiers came looking for Him, all He said was "I am He," and they fell backwards.
Just the words that came out of His mouth had so much more power after He received the spiritual circumcision that He just said His name, and the men fell down. The third stage of the resurrection has another name, and it is called the slaying of the enmity in our flesh. Our flesh is the what? The carnal mind, it is the slaying of the carnal mind. I should not have erased that.
We have the carnal mind in the middle, and Christ is out here, and the third stage...the carnal mind is still alive, He is completely caged in like a wild animal, and powerless. He cannot cause the man, Jesus, to sin, no matter how much he screams and yells and whispers and whatever he does, but he is alive.
The third stage of the resurrection, Christ now in a dominate position on top of him, kills him. The voices stop. We know that Jesus could hear Satan's voice. How do we know? The temptation, absolutely, we know that Jesus in full stature could hear the voice of Satan tempting him, so we can expect to hear the voice of Satan until the third stage of resurrection. We are going to hear his voice, and God is saying, "Do not do it, recognize his voice and disobey it. Rebel against the carnal mind, do not do it."
Satan spoke through Peter also. Not only does Satan speak to you and say, "Now hear this, this is God speaking, I want you to do such and such a thing." Even more serious than that, he will send you to God's man to say something to him that will turn him away from God's instruction. That is a very good point.
Our second witness to that is the prophet who was sent to Jeroboam, and God said, "Go and make the pronouncement to Jeroboam, and come right back, do not stop anywhere," and the other prophet came to him and said, "I am a prophet of God," and he died. He obeyed the other prophet. Why? Because he did not have enough confidence that he had heard from God.
I want to tell you, brethren, this is a very good lesson, because everyone that is moving in Christ comes up against this. You hear a voice in your head, you get an impression, and then God goes away, and you have to stand on what He told you, when there is nothing that you could see, nothing that you could touch, nothing that you could feel. I have all kinds of trouble remembering what He said. I look at the circumstances, I listen to what other people will say to me, and I say, "Did God really say that?" Does that sound familiar?
"Who said that? Did God really say that?" That is what the Serpent said to Eve in the Garden, and that is what my carnal mind is saying to me, "Did God really tell me that?" Sometimes I really cannot remember what He said, I have to go look it up, and sometimes when I look it up, things look so different, circumstances look so different that it is easier to say, "God did not say that," than it is to say, "God said it."
Jesus' own disciple tried to turn Him away from God's will, by what? What, does anyone know what that message was called? There is a name for it. It is called suggestion, it is called suggestion, it is called suggestion. He said to Him, "Now master, God could not possibly want you to do that." He put a doubt in His mind.
Is that not what Satan did in the Garden? He put a doubt in His mind, it is called suggestion. A subliminal thought is a suggestion, and Peter was responsible for letting that carnal thought come out of his mouth, but Jesus was very strong in full stature, and He said, "Get thee behind me Satan." What does that mean? "Get down under Christ," that is what it meant.
The man who makes the suggestion is responsible for making the suggestion, and then the person that hears the suggestion is responsible for overcoming it. God is dealing with everybody, and we are all responsible for everything we do and everything we say.
COMMENT: You were giving new meaning about being responsible for every word that comes out of your mouth, you really give a new meaning to that tonight.
PASTOR VITALE: Amen, amen, praise God. It is better to be chastened knowing that we did it so that we can make a correction than to just go through life doing it and not knowing we are doing it. Amen? Can you say amen to that? I can say amen to that.
The third stage of the resurrection is the death of the carnal mind, and we are told (I really have to look it up, I cannot ever get it straight whether it is Ephesians or Colossians) that of the twain He made one new man. The word "twain" means "two." Of what two? Of the two minds, of the carnal mind and of the Christ mind. He joined them through what?
Through crucifixion, and He made one new man, through the death of the carnal mind. So long as the carnal mind is alive, we are two men. Even if Christ is totally dominating that carnal mind, we are still two men. It is not until the death of the carnal mind that we become a new man, a cell in the body of Christ.
Of course, we see the physical appearance changes to one of a glorified man who has the ability to take many forms in the third stage of the resurrection. The first and the second stage of the resurrection finds that man in a very human looking body. I am sure Jesus walked down the street, and carnal men had no idea who He was. He looked just like a human being.
Of course, after He was glorified He took forms that looked very human also, but He took many forms. Let me put it to you another way, in the first and second stage of the resurrection, He was Jesus of Nazareth, He was no other man, He was Jesus of Nazareth, but in the third stage of the resurrection, He could appear like anyone that He wanted to.
He was something out of a science fiction movie in the third stage of resurrection, He could do anything. He had the ability to transmute matter, He could take the matter of His own body and make it change, and I am sure that if He could do it with His own body, He could transmute any form of matter on the earth if He wanted to, except that Jesus did not do anything frivolously. He only did what glorified the Father. I do not know if there would be any reason for that.
COMMENT: Would you say that when He comes forth in us as Christ that He is transmuting matter?
PASTOR VITALE: I do not think so. We went into this on a recent tape, I think it is part one of the Christ series as a matter of fact. I do not believe so. I believe to transmute matter, you would have to take this chair, for example, and turn it into a guitar. When a baby is born, for example, it is using what you have. It is taking the flesh of a man and the flesh of a woman in the form of an egg and a sperm and bringing forth more flesh. It is flesh bringing forth flesh.
In the case of the mind of Christ, it is a mind coming through where a mind already was. It is a mind replacing a mind. Do you understand? To transmute matter is to make it into something that it never was before. It is a fine difference. I cannot show you that in the Scripture, but that is my opinion right now, that it requires a much higher level of spiritual authority to take a form of a different man to be a man one minute and be a different man the next minute. It is not the same thing as bringing forth a child who is going to look like that for the rest of his life. Do you understand what I am saying?
Yes, so we see the man, Jesus, evolving. You know there really is an evolution. It is not from monkey to man, but it is an evolution of man, and we see the man, Jesus, evolving into a greater and greater degree of spiritual maturity. We did mention on a recent tape that when Jesus was mocked by someone when He was hanging on the cross, they said, "Come down, take yourself off the cross."
There is not a doubt in my mind that Jesus could have done it, and that He could have restored His body, but only as Jesus the Christ. His authority was limited by His ability to raise Jesus the Christ from the dead. If He did it, He would have still been Jesus the Christ. Only the Father had the superior authority to raise the whole man from the dead into a glorified form. I do not believe Jesus the Christ, the Son, had the power to raise Himself up into a glorified man, to the next level of spirituality.
The Father had to do that, and I know that Jesus could have raised Himself back to where He was. How do I know? He did it for Lazarus, and we looked up every word in that account in Lazarus, and we found out that Jesus not only raised Lazarus' body from the dead, but when Lazarus was raised from the dead, and that is why the Scripture says that many came to see Lazarus.
Jesus raised many from the dead, and no one came to see them. What did they come to see Lazarus for? Because He was in full stature. He not only raised him from the dead, He also raised Christ from the dead in him, so many came to see him. We know Jesus had that authority, but He did not have the authority to glorify.
In the condition He is in now, where He is one with the Father, He can do anything that the Father can do, because He is one with the Father. Any questions? Yes.
COMMENT: You gave a new definition to me anyhow of the term anti-Christ. I knew anti-Christ meant instead of Christ, but I never saw it as, I do not know how you said it exactly about the many-membered body?
PASTOR VITALE: Many-membered body of anti-Christ, yes. Anti-Christ, the carnal mind, they are the same person. We find in the Scripture that when God changes the name...God will have many names for one entity, that the name is indicating a particular function of that entity. The carnal mind is Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind, appearing as the mind of a man. Anti-Christ is the function of the carnal mind which replaces Christ. It is the carnal mind in its function of replacing Christ.
Brethren, if this creation did not have a mind, we could not exist without a mind. We would cease to be. Anti-Christ is the carnal mind in his function of being in the place of Christ, and he is a man. The carnal mind, anti-Christ is a man, he is a spiritual man, he is a many- membered man, and he is desperately wicked.
We look around at ourselves sitting at a meeting like this, and we say, "How could man be desperately wicked, because we are reasonably civilized people, and we have come out of many generations of people who have been influenced by the law of God and by the Christian Bible, and our hearts are still desperately wicked?" Do not misunderstand me, but we call ourselves civilized, and our lives do not appear to be that bad, but you never know what you are going to do when the pressure gets on you.
That is why the Scripture says, "Why are you shocked that the fiery trial is coming upon you?" Because God will test you, He will let pressure come upon you, He will let all kinds of trials come upon you for what reason? Because He is cruel and vicious? No, He wants to see what you are made out of. By your reactions to this stress, the Father will know whether your mind is Christ or your mind is carnal.
Have you ever read in the Scripture about all that measuring with the reeds and the two... What do you think they are measuring for? They are measuring to see if your reaction is Christ or your reaction is carnal, and what does God do to you if your reaction is carnal? Does He whip you with nine tails? No, He will put you through difficulties which are specifically designed to wound your carnal mind and increase Christ in you.
COMMENT: I think of what Jesus said, He knew what was in the hearts of men.
PASTOR VITALE: God help us, God help us from the hearts of men, God keep us from the hearts of men. You know, a lot of people hear this kind of teaching, and they just walk away, because some people have pretty good lives, they have had decent lives. Their parents have loved them, and their families have loved them, and they have reasonably good marriages, and they say, "What kind of teaching is that?"
Brethren, let me tell you something. The wickedness in the hearts of men does not come out until Christ starts appearing in you. Let me qualify that. There is always some wickedness in the world. We know we had monsters like Hitler, we know that there are some people who are murderers and criminals, and they wind up in jail.
I am talking about the average man in the street who has worked all of his life to support his family doing the best he can to love his wife. He is just an average Joe, how can I tell you that his heart is desperately wicked? I can tell you that because when that man comes up against another man in whom the mind of Christ is manifesting, he is going to be experiencing such wickedness that if he is a decent man he is going to be horrified at what is in his own heart.
This is what the Scripture teaches, and I can tell you from personal experience that it is true. When Christ starts appearing in you, the average Joe guy in the street that never hurt anybody in his life is going to rise up and think, and feel, and possibly say things to you that will shock him out of his mind, that it came out of him, because the wickedness in the hearts of man is a reaction to Christ.
I am talking about the average Joe citizen now, who is a socially acceptable citizen, never broke a law except to throw a cigarette in the street or something like that, maybe he cheats on his income tax, but he does not hurt anybody. He does not brawl, he does not murder, he has raised his children, he has worked all of his life, and he thinks he is pretty good, and God sends someone into his life whose mind, at least part of the time, is Christ, and all of a sudden, this man is going crazy at what is manifesting in his mind.
He does not know what has happened to him, he cannot understand it, he is horrified, he tries to deny it, he will run away from the person, he will overcompensate, depending on the man. One man will run away, break the relationship, another man will offer the person gifts or try to help them because they are trying to cover over what is in their heart. They cannot believe what is manifesting in them.
Brethren, if you have a carnal mind, when you come into relationship with someone who is manifesting Christ, get ready. Do not let yourself be condemned, do not let yourself be condemned. It is just like saying, you got a little puppy and it piddled on the floor. What else did you expect it to do? If your baby goes in its diaper, what else did you expect it to do? If you are a Pharisee you have a problem. If you are a Pharisee, and you think there is nothing wrong with you, and that your heart is not desperately wicked, you are going to really be in trouble.
What do you do when this wickedness manifests in you? You have to know how to deal with it, brethren, because I am telling you right now that if you whitewash it over, you are going to die, spiritually you are going to die. You have to know how to deal with it, because the day is coming that God is sending Christ to you, and if you are a Pharisee, you are going to stumble over Him. Who knows what you do? Anybody know what you do?
How do you deal with it when you see wickedness manifesting in your heart, and you are in total disagreement with it, but you know that it is there.
Go before the Lord, confess it, do not deny it, it is the worse thing you could do is to deny it. Get before the Lord, confess that it is true, repent, confess that it is true and that it is wrong, and repent, and ask God to help you, and He will give you strength in Christ, and when you overcome that thing it is going to be the death of that thing.
You might really have a wrestling match with it, but when you refuse to let that thought be revealed through you, when you refuse to act on it, when you refuse to speak it, when you go to that person, and refuse to let it be revealed through you, but deliberately and willfully manifest Christ, do the exact opposite of what is in your heart.
If that person needs something or...I am just thinking of a wild example, If that person needs something, and you have it within your means to give it to them, and something is raging in your heart that is wicked and evil towards them, give it to them. I give it to them. I will say, "Take anything that you want."
This is what I say to God, just do not let me guilty of this sin, just do not let me be guilty of this sin, because I know that yielding to sin is going to destroy my walk with God. you want it, take it.
If I am jealous of something, if I perceive envy in my heart, I am having trouble thinking of examples, I will do anything I can... first of all, you have to get before God, you have to confess it, you have to repent. You have by to by communing with God recognize what the counteraction of it would be, what God would do in that circumstance, and do it. Be kind to them, give it to them, help them, which is the exact opposite of what the beast is screaming in your head, sin against them, sin against them, hate them, be envious of them, blaspheme, gossip, talk about them.
Do the exact opposite, ask God what Christ would do in this circumstance and force yourself to do it, repenting all the way, and I do not know, everyone is different. I do not know how long it will take, but you will find that, that sin will die. Every time it rises up towards somebody else, if you do that, eventually it will die, and one day you will find yourself in a similar situation and much to your amazement, you will not have that wickedness manifesting in your heart.
This is called Armageddon. It is the battle of the two minds.
Which mind will be expressed through you? Are you going to obey Satan who is whispering, or are you Christ in the wilderness being tempted. The Scripture never said, you would not hear His voice, and the Scripture never said that you will not be tempted. On the contrary, it says that you will. Are you going to obey God, or are you going to obey Satan? Do not tell me that you have not heard an audible voice from God, because in most instances you know what is right. You do not have to hear an audible voice from God.
Remember the story of Balaam, "I will ask God if I can curse Israel." What do you mean you will ask God if you can curse Israel, you do not know you cannot curse Israel? I will ask God if it is all right to sleep with that guy, because I am really in love with him. I heard a voice, "He said it is okay."
I am making a joke out of it, but you know this happens in the church, it happens right? You know someone that, that happened to right? Yes, two people that it happened to. God said it was okay, he is going to be my husband. I am telling you the truth.
This is what Armageddon is. It is the battle of the minds, you hear a voice telling you, "Do it, it is wonderful." He is sitting in the temple of God in your brain, calling himself God, and you said, "It is the only voice that I heard, so it must be God."
God speaks through many voices. The first place you look is this book called the Bible, and you know what you can do and what you cannot do. Frequently, God is not speaking because He knows that in your heart you really know what is right.
If we are going to beat this thing, if we are going to take this victory and be raised from the dead, we really have to know how God works, and I want to tell you, God's voice can be very quiet. It is not silent. If He makes a judgment that you should know, I do not make the judgment, but God makes the judgment, in a particular circumstance that you have had enough lessons and enough experiences that you should know that such and such is wrong, when you get down on your knees, and you fast for five weeks and you pray and cry on your knees and you hear silence, no voice, and then you say, "Oh, God must be saying yes."
I want to tell you something, brethren, I have been preaching this for a long time here. Silence does not mean "yes." It is more likely that it means "no." It does not mean yes. Yes means yes, yes means yes. Silence means you should know the answer to that, either you should know that in your own heart, or I sent a prophet to you to tell you the answer, and you would not receive my word through a man. Why? Because you have pride, it means something like that, it does not mean yes, very important!
My famous testimony that I almost got thrown out of this place where I live, because God gave me instructions through a man, and my pride said, "God did not tell me," I almost got thrown out on the street. You have to know how He works. You have to understand that sometimes He talks directly to you, but sometimes He does not. Sometimes, He speaks through a prophet, sometimes He speaks through your minister, sometimes He speaks through your employer.
I want to tell you something, sometimes He speaks through your parents. Do you know my father, the Lord has told me things through my unsaved father? It depends on what the situation is. God will frequently speak through an authority. Sometimes He comes to you first, and if you do not hear Him, He goes to a human authority. Sometimes He comes through a human authority first, it depends on the situation.
It depends on whether it is your children, whether it is a family matter, but God has spoken to me through my unsaved father in family matters, I tell you the truth, and I looked at him and I knew it was God, and I got a revelation, ever since I almost wound up on the street, I got a revelation.
I am listening to every word everybody says, and I am praying about whether it is God or not, because I want to hear every word that He says to me, because I am not fooling anymore. If He talks to me, I want to hear it. It is no fun missing God and suffering the consequences. I have better things to do in my life than that, and He has been very merciful to me.
I am still human, so sometimes He talks to me through other people, or He talks to me directly, and I do not hear Him. He has been very merciful to me. He will come and tell me again, and He will come and tell me a third time, but He knows that I am really trying to obey Him. If the reason that you are not obeying is because you are rebellion or you have pride, He is going to let you reap what you sow. Anymore questions, anyone else?
COMMENT: I was just wondering about Judas. I knew that Jesus knew that Judas was going to betray Him, but was Christ being formed in him?
PASTOR VITALE: Christ was not being formed in Judas, because it is not possible to have Christ formed in you, or it was not possible to have Christ formed in you until after the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ, but I do believe that Judas had an immature or an imputed manifestation of the mind of Christ, which is greater than we have in the church today.
Judas had a manifestation of the mind of Christ which was present on natural Israel, which was greater than the anointing today, and I have this on another tape. I know what I just said is offensive to some people, but I believe that and I believe that the Scripture bears it out. I do talk about it on other tapes.
There was an immature manifestation of the mind of Christ in Judas, and the Scripture says, "And Satan entered into his heart." I believe that what happened was that Satan in the form of the carnal mind rose up and tread Christ underfoot, and God allowed it.
I want to tell you something. I do not believe for a second, that God would choose someone whose heart was right to do that. If someone has to be a vessel of dishonor, and we know that there are vessels of dishonor, that God will raise one up to send against His anointed, because that is the way that it has to be.
Jesus said, "I did not lose any that you gave me except the one, so that the Scripture should be fulfilled." God permitted that, He will find someone who has a potential for that wickedness in their heart, and He will let it manifest.
If you do not have a potential for that wickedness in your heart, God would not force you to do evil. This is a very fine point, I want to take a few minutes on it. God will not raise up a man and put it in your heart to do evil, God does not do that. When God has made a judgment that a certain evil has to come to pass, and He looks for somebody to be the human vessel that is going to do it, what He will do is He will go...let us say it is a man of God, and the Lord says, "I am trying you in such and such a way and such and such an evil has to come upon you."
He will go around to all of the acquaintances of this man of God, and He will look at everybody's heart, and He is sure to find someone that is envious of this man of God, and that is the person that He will arrange a certain set of circumstances, knowing that, that envy will manifest, and the Lord lets it happen.
I am going to say it again, it is really important. God is the most misunderstood person in the world. Even His own preachers misunderstand Him. God does not take evil and put it in your heart because He wants to test somebody. He only uses the evil that is already there, and there has to be something in your heart that God sees that knows that you would be in agreement with this if God took His hand off of you and left you to your own devices, that you would not resist this.
We all have sin, I have sin. I have been envious, I experience envy, I experience pride, I experience everything that everyone experiences, but to the best of my ability as soon as I see it, I am all over it, killing it, crushing it, attacking it, crying out to God that I should not hurt anybody with it, but He knows that there is a man somewhere, that if left to their own devices, they would not fight this warfare, that they really are so envious of this person, that if they thought nobody was looking, they would let that thought through, and that is the one that He goes to. He does not put evil in your heart. Does anybody not understand what I am talking about?
This is very important because if you do not understand it, you are in danger of indicting God for wickedness. That is a very serious crime. It is the crime of pride to say that in any situation, God did evil. God is righteous, brethren, I do not care what happens to that person, I do not care if it is a little baby that died, or a new mother that died, I do not want to hear any of your sob stories.
My God is righteous, and if something terrible happened, it is because of sin on that family line, and I exhort you to be very careful to not be seduced by this sin of pride where you will blame God, and why will you blame God? Because you want to say, "I did not deserve this." That is what Job did, be careful.
COMMENT: Did Judas' spirit return to the Father, and all else was consumed by the fire of God?
PASTOR VITALE: Yes, the spirit went back to the Father. The personality and the body is temporary until we are baked in the oven. I was watching JFK last night, and a couple of people got shot. I think I mentioned to you earlier, when I am not always in the same place spiritually, but the higher up I am, the more bizarre everything looks to me. It does not look normal to me, and I saw this person get shot, and his ears got blown off or something, and , all I could see was these people on the TV, and they were clay dolls to me. I saw human beings as clay, as breakable clay dolls. We are breakable because we are not permanent yet. Can you see that? We can get an arm shot off or we can be damaged, or we can get killed, because we are not permanent yet. Our only reality is our spirit.
Our personalities and our bodies are temporary until that last generation when the mind of Christ is fully born in us, and the presence of that mind gives permanency to our soul and our physical body.
I do not think Christ was being formed in the disciples, because the provision for Christ to be formed in us did not come to pass until after the crucifixion and the resurrection. The disciples had an imputed anointing, yes, so it was not Christ. It was an imputed anointing, it was the immature two-fold cord anointing, but let me say this, it was not the anointing that is in the church today. In my opinion, it was the anointing which was on Israel which was a much stronger imputed anointing than the one we have today.
COMMENT: I was having such problems with the imputed and imparted anointing, so finally I asked the Lord to just put in my head, just input, and then it becomes a part, so I could remember.
PASTOR VITALE: That is good. The Lord has told me to start saying, "the immature, and the mature anointing," because that imputed and imparted anointing gets very confusing. I am going to try to say, "the immature Christ or the immature anointing, and the mature anointing." I think that would make it easier. Anybody else? Praise God.
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