About Pastor Jason

I am a very happy person. :D

Doctor… who?

I walked down the corridor of my new job, following closely on the heals of that gentle man who encouraged me into this new employment. I had never been a doctor, but I was excited at this new prospect. I was comfortable with the job and my present company. My socked feet padded the floor softly as we walked. I listened intently as my mentor talked with his assistant. I glanced down and noticed that they were comfortable and shoeless as well.

It was time for me to get started, so I turned and ventured my way to my new office. I had to walk the entire length of the hall again to gain access to the stair at the other end. A nurse or administrator  stepped out in front of me a few people up and I watched her curious behavior. She seemed to be scanning the feet of every person around her, looking to see that they were fully shoed. Her behavior began to make me nervous as she took notes of who was properly shod and who wasn’t. I made certain to stay behind her as I didn’t not want to make her list.

Suddenly she turned  enough to notice my way too relaxed attire. Instantly she had me by the collar and dragged me to a desk to report my indiscretion. A young man in much too neat attire was sitting behind his desk and wanted to know what was the meaning of this sloppiness. The nurse reported that she had found me wandering the halls without proper footwear. I protested, “I only just started, I honestly had no knowledge of these regulations. I assure you it will not happen again.” Never-the-less, proper documentation must be made. So with little understanding to my innocent ignorance they decided that I deserved a proper reprimand. I pleaded with my captors, “This isn’t necessary, assure you it will never happen again.” No use, this kind of behavior will not be tolerated.

I retreated to my new office feeling harassed. Pulling out my shoes and slipping them on, I wondered how such people could possible be without an ounce of grace. ‘Why such extremes for so little a violation? And I was brand new; how was I to know.’ I stared at the card in my hand; all professional looking with its wax coating and tan color. My name spelled out, I was a violator of company policy.

My office mate entered and found his way to the desk opposite mine. Moments later a young lady poked her head in the door and asked if we could get her a towel. Apparently, our office was also host to the supply closet. My office mate disappeared into a room adjacent to ours and materialized a white towel.

I stared at my card, feeling both abused, wounded, and angry. To more people entered the office with a stack of similar cards, all for me. “You need to work on a few things,” they both chimed, a giggle and a smirk hidden in their voices. ‘I beginning to not like it here,’ I thought to myself. Several cards illustrated with pictures every spelling and syntax error in the contract I had just signed. Another card illustrated the paper jam I supposedly caused and the proper condition one should leave a copy machine. “But, I didn’t even do this,” I objected holding up the card. They ignored me, shrugged and left. The cards filled my hands, their waxy coating and my name in bold, shouting at me, “YOU ARE A FAILURE.” Tears filled my eyes, and I wanted to die, or at least crawl away and hide.

When I awoke this morning I thought to my self, that dream probably wasn’t from God. I meant to dismiss it, but as I continued to prepare for work, the Lord began to reveal it’s meaning. Such is the value of working for human acceptance. So fleeting, their love is often governed by how they feel that day. Many would just as soon kick you if it meant their promotion. Fortunately, I have found I only have to ask, and heavenly Father will tell me once again why He loves me and who I am.

We work to gain approval, trying to curb our wrongs. ‘I’ll just replace this habit with a good one, just give me some time I can fix that,’ we say to ourselves not realizing the difficulty and fear that keeps those habits locked in place. God’s plan of transformation is entirely different. He does not fix our little problems. He replaces our identity.

While watching the newest episode of ‘Burn Notice,’ the hero of the story tells us that when a spy goes deep under cover, he takes on a new identity. The difficulty is that after months of eating, sleeping, and breathing as this other person, will there be enough of the old person left to complete the mission. The enemies tactic is to anchor us to our old identity through fear. This way we never will fully let go of the old and live out God’s identity for us. If we could live as only God’s identity, long enough, that old dysfunctional man would slip into oblivion. Many people try to deal with this anchor themselves; striving and straining against a thick iron chain, and the anchor, those old fears never move.

But love, the most important part of our new identity in Christ, has the power to pull up that anchor and disintegrate it. Except, that what most people are actually afraid of is intimacy. So I ask you, can you gather enough courage to let God show you His love? Can you sit long enough to let Him speak over and over again to that fear? If He speaks, you will know His love. A new identity would fix everything, it would fix you. But, you can’t hold onto your old fears. You need His voice.

The Snare

I was in the third grade when it first happened. The fact that I would remember this is pretty significant considering how much I forget. I sat in my chair and drew. I can still feel it at times, that warm tingle spreading down from the back of my head covering my senses with fuzzies. All I was doing was drawing a chimney in perspective for a Christmas picture. The other children hovered around me each trying to gain a peek. One young man in particular, the jock of the class, he was the instigator. I had found my niche. If I drew, they would like me.

I remember how in forth grade I gained a friend who was a bully by killing him with kindness. I’m not sure where the idea came from. He was mean, and I decided to be nice.

I six grade everything changed. I had grown up with friends. I played well, had fun, but six grade was the dark year that turned into three. Six grade was the year I learned how worthless I was. I remember several incidents. One was, that I was sitting on the ground, indian style, as every boy in my class threw raisins at me, taunting me, mocking me. What had I done to deserve this treatment? Nothing that I know of, even now. I had been held back in second grade, so my sister and I now attended classes together. I was only held back because I couldn’t sit still and, I’m not sure about this, but it may have been effecting my grades. My mother and the teacher both agreed that I need some extra time to learn to pay attention. At the beginning of the six grade year, my sister and I were tested for the gifted program. I remember how happy I was playing with my friends at the beginning of that year. When both of us scored high on our test, we were very excited, but we had to move to a new school. The name of the school was Webster, again, odd that I would remember. There was one class in this school for the gifted children; one class of twenty to thirty kids who had grown up together, who were very tight. I was the new kid. My sister being a girl assimilated quickly. The girls in the class were nicer, plus if you know Melanie, there is a lot to like. I on the other hand, I was outcast from day one.

I remember that at some point my desperation to ‘just be left alone’ brought me to a breaking point. I grab one kid, twisted his arm behind his back and announced to the entire class that I would break it, if they didn’t leave me alone. As children do, they thought that this crisis was real, that I really had the power to break his arm, that this was a real life and death situation. I’m not sure what I was thinking. When you take a hostage, you should at least plan to escape. I was running purely on desperation, I only wanted the pain to stop. That child was never in any real danger. I didn’t know how to break an arm, nor did I possess the strength do accomplish such a feat. What I really did was destroy any hope I might of had of finding a friend, and so secured two more years of rejection.

It is almost like, around the age of twelve or thirteen a switch is pulled in the minds of children, and they start to destroy each other in a game of King of the Hill. Apparently, I stink at that game. By the time I got to high school, I was a shell of a person. My family moved again and we started over in a new school, Niceville High. But, I had learned to hate everyone, including myself. I still might be in that state if it wasn’t for God’s speaking love and acceptance to me…

Here is the snare. In third grade I learned I could find love by doing. In six grade I learned that I didn’t deserve love. So, now the only love I would ever find was through performance. I wonder how many people are still stuck in junior high, looking, hoping for love.

The path to freedom awaits, it is as simple as trusting Jesus to wash all of that away, as He speaks a new identity over you. You can have a new life, as you learn to hear His love.

A guide to Supernatural Power

20110410-095823.jpg1. Salvation
2. Baptisms – water and Holy Spirit baptism
3. Learn to hear the voice of God clearly and consistently
4. Discover God’s love for you
5. Let God speak to any fears He reveals that has separate you from Him
6. Let Him show you your new identity
7. Prophetic Bible Study – Learn His thoughts and His ways
8. Learn to rest/live in His love and presence
9. Learn to release His love and presence
10. Practice, practice, practice faith
11. Ask the Holy Spirit to teach you everything, even from your failures

Not necessarily all in this order.

Revival 101

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A Step by Step Guide to Starting Spontaneous, Contagious, Lasting Revival

Many revivals have been started by men (and women) of extreme passion. Some were driven by the things that they saw in God. Smith Wigglesworth was driven by his faith and love of God after he fought for faith to prevent a loved one from dying. John G. Lake was driven by the presence of God that he carried after he had learned that he could live through the Spirit of God. Evan Roberts was driven by his relationship with God, having spent years encountering God.

Other revivalists are passionate men with charismatic type personalities. They are driven internally by a desire to see something, or to be something, or to matter; to make a difference. Regardless where the drive in a man comes from, it is a driven man that is usually the catalyst and sustainer of revival.

So how is revival started? Many have speculated that revival is a sovereign thing that God has determined and He simply brings the right people together. That maybe He is building something and requires sporadic revivals to establish His purposes. Well I don’t believe this idea is correct.

The Lord has been teaching me a lot about faith in recent days. Faith, at its core, is simply the conviction that a person is trustworthy. This conviction produces a high level of confidence in the person they trust. Confidence is another word for faith. This type of confidence in another is impossible to create without having multiple interactions with the person you trust. Additionally, faith is a substance that is produced in the spirit realm that is felt by the spiritually sensitive. Faith has a fragrance. Faith has the same language as God. Faith changes our image. We are anointed by faith. Faith is a sword in our mouth. Faith sees from God’s perspective. And finally, faith is produced naturally in those that experience God’s love and start to see God’s perspective.

Because faith has substance, is an anointing and has a fragrance; faith in the room is often what we are feeling when we sense the presence of God or the anointing. Obviously, we are feeling more then just faith, but faith is a big part of what we are experiencing. Every time God puts His anointing on something, it is because faith has been released. “He inhabits the praises of His people” -Psalms 22:3, “where two or more are gathered together in My name, there I am in the mist of them” -Mat.18:20, “whoever.. does not doubt in his heart, but believes… will have whatever he says.” -Mark 11:23. This concept that faith has substance (“now faith is the substance of things hoped for” -Heb. 11:1) explains why Jesus so often would remark on the level of faith He found in people following Him.

So how does revival start? The Lord told me many years ago that revival will start with one person who carries revival, one person who has become revival. Revival is actually easy to start, but is hard to maintain. Revival is often started in hundreds of churches each Sunday as the Spirit falls on the congregations in worship. But since it is hard to maintain, by the end of the meeting the Spirit of God has left and the people have focused on other things. Here’s what the Lord showed me:

Revival is produced and maintained when there is a corporate release of faith.

Here is the inherent difficulty, corporate experience requires unified focus, and maintenance requires continued releasing of faith. This is where a passionate leader becomes key. While it is possible for a body to be unified in a moment without leadership, it is near impossible for the unity to remain without the leader.

In the Brownsville revival, Pastor John Kilpatrick focused the church to pray for revival two years before the revival started. This prayer effort produced a longing and hope for coming revival. In 1995, when Steve Hill came, the church was primed and eager for any move of God that signaled that revival had started. Steve Hill was used to provide that signal and the congregation’s hope for revival shifted into faith and a mighty move of God began. Steve Hill and John Kilpatrick became the maintenance. Without their leadership, the revival would die. Thus, for the most part this powerful move of God remained in house with few transfers to other locations. Those transfers occurred as a result of leaders from those churches receiving a touch and becoming catalysts themselves.

So how do we sustain revival and make it transferable? Well the shift must be in what is the catalyst for revival.

A corporate understanding of the depth of God’s love for each individual is a better catalyst then passionate leadership.

When the Lord showed me that faith sees from God’s perspective, I asked Him what His perspective was. He said, “My perspective is, ‘Christ is Risen’. Read Romans Chapter eight.” Romans 8 talks about sonship, living by the Spirit, freedom from bondage and sin, bringing freedom to a bound creation, and God’s love. ‘Christ is Risen’ means that I am free, there is nothing that can hold me down, nor stop me. It means that God is for me and happy with me. It means that nothing can separate me from His love, nor stop me from experiencing it. It means that I can be a son to God, and God wants to father me.

When we discover God’s personal love for us individually and experience it regularly, we start to live from faith rather then toward it. We are being transformed into love, rather then trying to learn how to love. We take on God’s way of thinking, God’s way of talking, God’s way of loving, God’s way of living. We start to look like Christ, not because we try to live better, but because we hear God say, “I love you,” “I’m proud of you,” “I want you.” We start to live from the reality of God loving us at all times. Such people will not need a leader to remind them to focus on God, or believe on God, or remember to pray. These people will cause others to desire God without preaching. When you get a group of such people together, you will have revival, because each person has become revival itself. Now a leader’s job is only to provide vision or direction, rather then maintenance.

So what are the steps to have lasting revival?

  1. Individuals learn to hear God everyday for themselves.

  2. Individuals experience God’s love.

  3. Individuals learn to walk/stay in that love.

  4. Individuals become passionate with God.

  5. A corporate understanding of sonship and God’s immeasurable love is gained.

  6. The corporate body begins to release faith towards a common vision.

  7. Revival

As you can see this process is longer then the normal process of a charismatic leader showing up to a church that is longing for revival. But the result is spontaneous, contagious and long lasting. The body that learns to experience God individually will produce converts that know God. This church will know what it means to walk in the new covenant.

Hebrews 8

11 “No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.

12 For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”

Isaiah 54

13 All your children shall be taught by the Lord, And great shall be the peace of your children.

14 In righteousness you shall be established;You shall be far from oppression, for you shall not fear;And from terror, for it shall not come near you.

15 Indeed they shall surely assemble, but not because of Me. Whoever assembles against you shall fall for your sake.

The fullness of salvation

Every time we sin, the blood of Jesus pays the price to remove it. There is nothing that God requires of us except that we come to Him and confess it, 1 John 1:9.

The death of Christ crucifies the sin nature for us. This is often not received because we believe that we are still a failure and that it is impossible to ever measure up to God’s standards. We need to come to Him and let Him show us that sin is separated from us now and is not a part of our identity, Romans 7:17.

The resurrection of Christ gives us access to the devine nature of God. Most Christian’s don’t access this because they believe that they are still stuck with the old nature. But once God has shown us that we are not sinners saved by grace (rather we are now saints who still have the potential to give into temptation), then we can come to God without fear of rejection.

All whom My Father gives (entrusts) to Me will come to Me;
and the one who comes to Me I will most certainly not cast out [I will never, no
never, reject one of them who comes to Me].
(John 6:37 AMP)

So how do we access the resurrection?
This new life is poured out by the Spirit and is gained when we spend time with God, specifically when we hear Him speak to us. The Lord told me that every time we hear Him speak to us, He rubs more of His devine nature on us.

Sanctify them [purify, consecrate, separate them for
Yourself, make them holy] by the Truth; Your Word is Truth.
(John 17:17 AMP)

And I give myself as a holy sacrifice for them so they can be made holy by your truth. (John 17:19 NLT)

The only way to deal with the flesh is through a life style of listening to God. The Holy Spirit is the teacher who will leads and guides us into all truth, even holiness, sonship, and the love of God.

If, when we were at our worst, we were put on friendly terms with God by the sacrificial death of his Son, now that we’re at our best, just think of how our lives will expand and deepen by means of his resurrection life! (Romans 5:10 MSG)

Destroying Sin’s Hold

The Lord showed me several years ago that the root of all sin was actually a fear that we all carry. Many people have listed this root as pride or selfishness, but the Lord told me that the problem was much deeper.

Here’s some background.
When I was twenty years old, I was without a job for three months leaving me much free time. I was also attending a new church and I had opportunity to share my thoughts and opinions every Sunday morning during Sunday School. I, in pride, wanted to impress the others in my class, so I started using my free time during the week to go over the next weeks Scriptures. I would simply read the Scriptures and write down all of my thoughts. We were reading from 1st John which allowed the Lord to use that study time to infect my thoughts with His own, about love and living in Him.

It suddenly occurred to me that all of the sins I had consciously fought with most of my life had vanished.

By the end of this three month period, it suddenly occurred to me that all of the sins I had consciously fought with most of my life had vanished. I was clean in conscience and behavior. The sin left in me was that of pride, though I was unaware of it. Once I saw the pride issue I hit a downward spiral, slipping back into every sin that I had found freedom from and came under condemnation. The Lord was dealing with me about the pride so that I would come even closer to Him, not slip away. When we start to reside in His presence, day in and day out, God will bring to the surface all unresolved issues that would steal us from His love. But, shame and love are contrary to each other, so instead of yielding to that love, I accepted shame from the enemy. This is the power that sin has, it brings us back under shame, reminding us continually that we are failures. But God’s love and grace is much greater then the bondage of shame. We must learn to stay in His love even when we find ourselves falling short again. In this way we will find that the power of shame is broken. I ended up stayed in this state of failure for close to ten more years, when I finally decided to try this experiment again.

This experience of freedom, plus my study of 1st John, led me to a deep revelation, intimacy with God will break the power of sin. Yet, at the time I was still unsure how. In fact the Lord told me during those few months, “Everything comes from relationship.” This phrase locked me into a pursuit to understand what it truly meant.

When I restarted the experiment to see if time with the Lord would cure sin, I had already developed a strong ability to hear God through the still small voice. I had only just begun to listen during the first experience, but now I knew I could hear Him and I knew how. The first thing I had to deal with now was the shame of having fallen into pride so many years before. This shame had manifested all these years in an irrational fear that one day God would cast me aside, so now I was afraid to approach Him on intimate issues. He dealt with this issue of shame by taking me to two separate Scriptures, one in the Old Testament and one in the new, where two distinct stories were unfolding with eerily similar plots. Both involved a miracle by a man of God, followed by a second miracle that produced a response of, “Leave me, I’m a sinner.” Seeing these two stories side by side, I knew definitively that I was hearing God, so I asked, ”What are you trying to show me?” His response immediately moved me to overwhelming emotion and tears, followed by an hour of intense worship and thankfulness. He told me, “I was chasing them, and I’m chasing you.”

Remember that I started this teaching by saying that the root of all sin is a fear. It was a couple of years after that powerful encounter that I was preparing a message about the possibility of living without any sin that He spoke this to me. The fear that we all carry that drives us to sin is a fear that we are not valued or important. Let me illustrate this idea. Research, even by secular psychologists, has revealed that the most proud persons deal with the greatest levels of insecurity. This insecurity drives them to extreme levels of self promotion. But we can clearly see that pride is always just a mask to cover up these feelings of insecurity or fear that we are not significant. The same is true of selfishness. A man only needs to be selfish because he feels that no one else will show him love. It is now easy to see that under these two issues is the real root, the fear of not being valued. 1 John says that perfect love cast out all fear.

“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear: because fear has to do with punishment. He that fears is not made perfect in love.” 1 John 4:18 NKJ

As you can see, experiencing the love of God cast out the fear that drives sin, thus delivering us from sin itself. Look at this verse.

“Anyone who continues to live in Him will not sin. But anyone who keeps on sinning does not know Him or understand who He is.” 1 John 3:6 NLT

This verse is not actually talking about our salvation, but the depth of our personal interaction. Jesus died, not to just get us to heaven but, to get heavens realities into us. The main point of this purchase of our souls is to get us to the place where it is now easy for us to know Him. Paul talks about Jesus’ ministry of reconciliation. He says that the Spirit we received causes us to cry out for our Daddy God.

But my problem is that I am never satisfied with partial answers. You might be wondering how this is partial. When we come to Him, His love drives away the fear that causes sin; simple right. But there is still the issue of why we don’t want to come to Him. See, I have preached this for years but few have been able to respond in faith. So what is it that keeps us from believing His love or coming to experience it or even hearing His voice?

Recently I was praying about this issue and I asked Him to help me understand what the sin nature is talked about in Romans chapter 7. He told me that the sin nature is independence. This makes sense to me since earlier this year He had told me that the law is our attempt to be like God, without God’s help. So as you can see God was pointing to the divide between us and God as the real problem. Remember that Christ came to reconcile us to God. In fact every place where God defines the new covenant that He was establishing through His Son, He mentions that one of the purposes of the cross is to enable us to know Him (see Hebrews 8). The Lord had even told me many years ago, “It isn’t sin that causes separation, rather it is separation that causes sin.” Now, I realize that sin causes us to separate from God, but God was revealing that He doesn’t stop loving us or knocking on our hearts when we sin. Jesus, God in man form, didn’t cringe to be around sin, even though He was holy. You may be thinking about God’s turning away His face from Jesus while He was on the cross. Many ministers have preached that it was because of God’s holiness that He looked away. But, Hebrews 2:17 says that Jesus had to become like us in everything, including the pain of shame and the feeling of being separated from God. What the Lord was showing me about separation was that when we sin, we don’t have to feel condemnation or shame, but instead we can immediately turn to Him and find that He still loves us.

Here is what He told me this week. All of these things: (the fear of not being valued; our sin nature is independence; living under the law is our attempt to be like God, but without God’s help), all these are held in place and enforced by the reality and awareness that we have fallen short of the glory of God, we are flawed, and we seem to continue in this flawed state even after salvation. This subconscious awareness produces a flight response, a desire to hide, or a desire to cover our flawed-ness, our nakedness. We are actually experiencing a shame for our human condition. This is not the same type of shame one experiences after being humiliated, or even defiled by another. This shame is different, it is at the very root of who we are, continually suggesting that we deserve to be rejected, we deserve to be dismissed. It is a direct result of the sin nature and is also the bondage that keeps the sin nature in place. It is a defilement that seems to exist at the very core of who we are.

In Genesis 3, we discover that immediately after eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve become aware of their nakedness and were ashamed. They were not ashamed of there sin, but rather of who they were. The word shame actually means, “to cover.” And this is the very first response to the sin nature awakening in them. “I need to cover this up, lest I be rejected for it.” In Exodus 19, we find the Israelites having a similar response. They are offered a priesthood, but they turn it down for fear that God would kill them. Then in Exodus 34, when Moses returns from the mountain they ask him to put a veil over the glory of God shining from his face. A similar veil ends up covering the Ark of the Covenant and the glory of God that was resting there. This veil was also covering the mercy seat of God. Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 3 that this veil is still there, now covering the hearts of people, blinding them to the reality of God’s love for them.

This veil is shame. In verse 16 Paul tells us that God takes this veil of shame away when we come to Him. His love removes the feelings of unworthiness, of failure, of still feeling like a worthless sinner. His love draws us in and says, “It is alright, I still want you”. Turning to Jesus removes the veil. While we gaze upon Him the veil fades away as we see our value to Him, our acceptance by Him and His passionate unending love for us. Fear has no power against that vision.

When dealing with this myself, I asked the Lord about my feelings of condemnation and shame. He had me repeat many times, “My flesh does not want You, but You want me.” This one sentence confessed my shame, but it also demonstrates the depth of His unquenchable desire for me. It dealt with the shame, but without letting me hide, it drove me into His embrace. When I realized that underneath every impulse and uncontrollable drive to sin was this feeling of shame (not shame for the sins, but shame for my humanness, my fallibility), I then gained the power to despise the real problem. I now can come to Christ even if I feel ashamed, knowing the feelings of shame are a lie, and God won’t reject me, but rather, He will love me past the shame. So, I actively pursue God, especially when I feel worthless or like a failure.

My flesh does not want You, but You want me.

God wants you. Are you going to let a lie about your value, stop you from experiencing a love that will forever fulfill you? Or are you going to despise the shame for the joy set before you? Are you brave enough to come? Or, will you let these feelings continue to control your life?

I leave you with Ephesians 3:

“I pray that from his glorious, unlimited resources he will empower you with inner strength through his Spirit. Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong. And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God.” Ephesians 3:16-19 NLT