Posted: 07/13/2010 at 1:50pm | IP Logged

Living Kingdom Today

By Ron McGatlin

The destiny of the world is to become the kingdom of God.

The kingdom of God potential has come and dwells within the people of God.

The full potential of the destined kingdom of God is now seeded within the fertile soil of the hearts of those in whom Christ Jesus dwells.

The Spirit kingdom growing in the hearts of human beings governs and empowers the lives of God’s kingdom people.

Subsequently, the Spirit kingdom is manifest into the natural world as the life of Christ emanates from God’s people.

Human government opposes the government of God.

The first level of human government is the inner governing of our lives. Within each person there is governance for the individual’s life. Natural man is governed within by his unredeemed soul (mind, will, and emotions) led by a spirit or spirits other than the Spirit God. God’s kingdom people are governed by the Spirit of Christ flowing through their redeemed soul by the Holy Spirit of God.

The natural unredeemed human governance opposes the governance of God within human beings. Therefore, there is internal conflict for the rule of the lives of mankind. This conflict is ultimately the war to rule the world. Whoever or whatever rules in the hearts of mankind eventually rules in the world.

The governments of the world are led by spirits: either ungodly evil spirits or the SPIRIT OF GOD.

There is no such thing as a spiritless government. Secular humanistic government is a government of evil spirits working through unredeemed souls of human beings. To seek to build a government that is neutral to religious beliefs and tolerant of all religions is to deny that the spiritual realm exists and to govern in ignorance.

Again, we find religion in the forefront of the disastrous condition of the world. The mutant form of weak, man-focused “Christian” religion that denies the reality of Christ in the Spirit indwelling His people has abandoned the governments of this world to other spirits. The enemy of God rules in this world where God should be ruling. The Spirit of God in His temple on earth is to be establishing His kingdom first in the hearts of people and through their lives into families, tribes, and nations.

In recent decades a spark has reignited the fire of the Holy Spirit, releasing an avalanche of revelation of “Christ in you (His people) the hope of Glory”. The hope of glory is the kingdom of God reigning within people and eventually in the world bringing His heavenly order to Planet Earth.

The process of kingdom growth within the hearts of God’s people has begun. However, we see the kingdoms of this world not yet the kingdoms of our God. The current dilemma for kingdom people involves functioning in God’s kingdom order in a world not yet ruled by God’s kingdom order.

LIVING KINGDOM TODAY

Even the best secular humanistic governments cannot bring forth righteousness, peace, and joy. Every government that is not on the shoulder of Christ Jesus is destined to fail, and as governments fail people suffer (Isa 9:6-7).

How do God’s kingdom people live in a world of nations yet mostly ruled by men ignorant of the Spirit of God and led by cunning and often ruthless spirits driving their unredeemed souls?

The answer to this question will vary with each person according to calling and specific direction of the Spirit of God. There are many parts to the Body of Christ and the different parts will have different functions.

Some may be led to work on the deep spiritual issues by helping others come to Christ and be transformed. Some may be led of God to work in more surface areas such as the political arena seeking to restrain the evil and press toward less governmental restrictions and increased tolerance for God’s people. Kingdom people will be called to fulfill a multitude of spiritual and practical functions to supply continued life, strength, and growth to the people of God. One part must never condemn another part but connect joint-to-joint as God’s Spirit leads.

The primary requirement for living in a hostile government environment is to be personally intimately related to God in such a way that there is continuous communication in the Spirit. God can direct day-by-day and moment-by-moment by His Spirit within. All hindrances and distractions that can limit our ability to hear and obey the Spirit of God need to be eliminated or overcome.

Christ Jesus is the over-comer, the healer of hearts and the cleanser of souls. Encountering the work of the Cross of Christ and the reality of the resurrected life of Christ Jesus by the Holy Spirit is God’s provision for renewing and transforming the heart of human beings to intimately commune with God.

Major areas to be cleansed and overcome that prevent intimately communing with God include things like renewing our minds, healing past wounds, forgiving everyone and everything, leaving past religious convictions and beliefs, abandoning cares of this life and deceitfulness of riches, yielding control of our life to Spirit God, deliverance from other spirits, and abandoning all other idols. All these things and more are provided in Christ Jesus and appropriated by a joint work of our willingness to lay down our lives before God and allowing Him to powerfully cleanse and transform our being to accommodate the very life of Christ abiding within. We are then connected directly to the throne of God as we abide in Him who is seated at the right hand of God. We are then ruling and reigning with Christ in this world bringing forth the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. This is living kingdom today.

Living in the kingdom of Christ today, we endure all things, overcome all things, and are at rest in all situations. Having sought and found this kingdom of God and His righteousness, all things are added to us. Righteousness, peace, and joy fill our hearts by His love (Mat 6:33-34) (Rom 14:17). Faith and believing effortlessly become full assurance and reality of practical experience.

God’s people throughout history have lived powerful lives in God in nations ruled by ungodly governments (Heb 11:32-40). Today, in this time of ungodly governments severely opposing the people of God, a people are being prepared. In this season of the day of the Lord manifesting in the forerunner remnant of maturing sons of God, apostolic leadership of Christ is coming forth to prepare a generation of kingdom people to govern as Christ in families, tribes, cities, nations, and the world. Thus, the kingdoms of this world shall be the kingdoms of our God.

Praise the LORD all you people! Give glory unto the KING who has come to dwell among His people! Glory and honor to His Majesty the Mighty One in whom all the fullness dwells! Worship the One whose kingdom never ends! Our God Reigns!

Hallelujah! Thank You Jesus! Amen!

Ron McGatlin

archive.openheaven.com
basileia@earthlink.net  

For more on the rule of God from heaven on earth through Christ in His people, we recommend the “Kingdom Growth Guides” and “Overcoming Life On A Small Planet” available by Free Download at OpenHeaven.com.

Posted: 07/17/2010 at 5:37am | IP Logged

The primary requirement for living in a hostile government environment is to be personally intimately related to God in such a way that there is continuous communication in the Spirit. God can direct day-by-day and moment-by-moment by His Spirit within. All hindrances and distractions that can limit our ability to hear and obey the Spirit of God need to be eliminated or overcome.

Christ Jesus is the over-comer, the healer of hearts and the cleanser of souls. Encountering the work of the Cross of Christ and the reality of the resurrected life of Christ Jesus by the Holy Spirit is God’s provision for renewing and transforming the heart of human beings to intimately commune with God.

Ron

Posted: 07/18/2010 at 2:41pm | IP Logged

Living in the kingdom of Christ today, we endure all things, overcome all things, and are at rest in all situations. Having sought and found this kingdom of God and His righteousness, all things are added to us. Righteousness, peace, and joy fill our hearts by His love (Mat 6:33-34) (Rom 14:17). Faith and believing effortlessly become full assurance and reality of practical experience.

Posted: 07/18/2010 at 6:18pm | IP Logged

yes and amen!

Posted: 07/20/2010 at 3:30pm | IP Logged

Michael and all reading this thread, I was taught through the church systems years ago that we could NOT experience the kingdom of God in this life. We had to wait to die and go to heaven to experience the victory and order of God. Or we had to be alive when Jesus bodily returned in the air to take us up to heaven while he burned up the planet and made us a new one and then we could come back to a new planet that would then be heaven on earth.

It was quite a shock and yet overwhelming peace when God began to reveal the truth about His kingdom reality. I was at a start-over point in my life in the mid 1980s when I began again in Matthew reading the New Testament. The words kingdom of God and gospel of the kingdom began to stand out to me. I realized I did not really know why that was so important to Jesus that He talked about it so much. So I asked God the question that has changed my life and the lives of thousands around the world and is continuing to change the church and the world through many other men and women. I asked God, what does that word kingdom mean and why did Jesus talk about it so much? You can read more about this in Kingdom Growth Guide (#004) and in Overcoming Life On A Small Planet Chapter 4.

Jesus taught and preached "Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand." He sent His disciples to preach the same message. Jesus became a life-giving Spirit (1 Cor 15:45) and returned in the Holy Spirit as promised (Mat 16:28) to indwell and empower His people to finish the work that He began while on earth. After returning at Pentecost He worked with and within His disciples redeeming the kingdoms of this world to the kingdom of our God. He then worked with the disciples proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and doing the same mighty works that He had done in His natural body (Mark 16:20). Only now He (the Spirit of Christ) was in His new body of many members reaching out in power to redeem the world in many places at one time. This is the true Body of Christ led by One Head, Christ Jesus through the Holy Spirit. This is what Jesus was talking about when He said He would build His church (ekklesia – called out ones).

After the first-century disciples had passed away men rose up speaking perverse things leading disciples away after themselves just as Paul had warned (Acts 20:29-31) . The church became infected with the rule of man and religious spirits. By the third century the rudiments of modern religious church systems had developed.  

The Holy Spirit was replaced by other spirits as the theologians took an intellectual approach to discerning the Bible and establishing many doctrines as foundations of the spiritually powerless but politically powerful church systems based on the tree of knowledge. The theologians unknowingly had the help of other spirits in developing their foundational doctrines just as the Pharisees had in the past. Jesus said the Pharisees were of their father the devil.

The devil hates the kingdom of God reality on earth now because it destroys his rule over the earth. He helped propagate the systematic doctrinal demise of the real gospel of the kingdom that Jesus and His first century disciples proclaimed and demonstrated in their lives. Doctrines were developed that postponed the victorious reality of kingdom on earth until sometime in the nebulous future. The devil does not really mind us believing in a kingdom some day in the future in heaven or even on earth. He wants all scripture about kingdom to be interpreted as in the past or the distant future but NOT today. His false kingdoms can continue as long as God’s people do not find out who they are in Christ Jesus and Christ in them ruling and reigning on earth.

I was even taught by a notable “Bible believing” religious system that the biblical miracles were not for today but for a transitional period of the past. I was told, now we have the completed Bible and no longer need those kinds of things. The world is not salvageable and must be dissolved by fire. (Yet, we quoted regularly that God so loved the world).  We were also led to believe that the Holy Spirit is not a trustworthy guide for today because people say God told them many weird and crazy things, we must adhere to the Bible word. Then they told us what it meant as they taught line upon line many things that I have had to lay down and allow God to teach me His truth.

Doctrines of demons and traditions of men have veiled the minds of the people and robbed them of the reality of the kingdom of God now on earth in the indwelling Spirit of Christ Jesus through the Holy Spirit.

The English Bible has been translated by men in the church system that was void of the power of the Holy Spirit and perverted with religious spirits. They had no view of the real kingdom of God and had to interpret the ancient writings from their original languages to fit into the doctrinal foundations that they believed were from God.

One common belief that had been perpetrated by all this in past was that all the earth was bad and man should despise it and partake of this world only barely enough to sustain life. Having money, eating good food, sex with a wife were all to be avoided as much as possible to be holy. The world and the things he had created were defiled and to be disdained in order to be holy. These and other twisted views planted by religious demon spirits affected the minds and traditions of the translators of our Bibles.

Please don’t stone me yet. This does not mean the whole Bible is useless. Quite the contrary the Bible word is very important and is used extensively by the Holy Spirit. However, it does mean that the revelation of the Spirit of God MUST be involved in getting through to understand what God is really saying in the written word. The Holy Spirit is the original author of the original written word and can interpret it completely accurately if we go back to original languages as much as is possible. The Holy Spirit can also help us to get through the maze of improperly translated parts of our bibles to the thought that was originally intended. The only way to know what the written word really means is by the Holy Spirit.

Now, I guess you can gather some stones as I share a few direct results of discerning the word of God by the Spirit of God and going back to the Bible before the English translations. If you have trouble accepting these things, please go to the reference material for revealed biblical teaching. Pray and ask the Holy Spirit to lead you into truth and give you clear discernment.

For reference in the rest of this writing KGG means Kingdom Growth Guides and OCL means Overcoming Life On A Small Planet. TSM means The Seventh Millennium.

The references will be to teachings that consider the written word from previous language writings before our English translations as well as the current bible translations and come by revelation of the Holy Spirit who authored the original written word recorded in our bibles.

Many of the things traditional church doctrine has put off to some future time are now. KGG (#005)

Jesus taught much more about living kingdom life now than a future time or even going to heaven. KGG (#006)

Jesus told the disciples that He was going away for awhile and coming back to them. KGG (#008) OCL Ch 8

Jesus returned to earth to his disciples in the upper room at Pentecost while still seated bodily at the right hand of God. KGG (#008)

God is sending fire to the earth to burn up evil NOT to burn up the planet. KGG (#037), TSM Ch 7

God loves the world and it is to be made new just as redeemed man is a new creation. Jesus came to save the world and must save mankind to save (renew, heal and deliver) the groaning creation. KGG (#037), TSM Ch 7

God said he would destroy the world with the flood. He did not destroy the planet but sent the floods to destroy evil and cleanse the planet. KGG (#037), TSM Ch 7

He did not destroy the earth when He sent fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah. Again He cleansed the earth of evil. KGG (#037), TSM Ch 7

New Jerusalem is a spiritual city, the Bride of Christ. It is a lifestyle of living in pure holiness with God. It is the ruling city of the spiritual kingdom of God ruling on earth. It is now coming down from heaven being formed on earth. New Jerusalem relates to the tree of life. KGG (#037), OCL Ch 7

Babylon is the unholy spiritual harlot city ruling the kingdom of darkness on the earth. Babylon relates to the tree of knowledge of good and evil. KGG (#020), OCL Ch 18

The love, power and wisdom of God to overcome evil in this world is in Christ Jesus dwelling in His humble, purified, holy people by the Holy Spirit of God. KGG (#039), TSM Ch 9, TSM Ch 12

Christ Jesus is establishing His kingdom on earth in His people, His purified remnant Bride. As his holy people come out of religious deception and into living by the Spirit and walking in the Spirit, the day of the Lord cleansing judgments are coming forth on the earth to again destroy evil. He must have a holy people in place before sending the cleansing fire to dissolve completely all the evil works of the devil including false teachers and men of perdition. KGG (#040), TSM Ch 4, 7, 8

The kingdom is NOT EVEN about eschatology it is about the works of Christ Jesus today in His people establishing the New Jerusalem lifestyle, the true church ekklesia of the first born coming together with holy angels and the spirits of just men made perfect. KGG (#044), TSM 13

There are eternal kingdom principles of truth revealed in how to live kingdom of God New Jerusalem life now being revealed in this day mostly from the practical kingdom instruction in godly wisdom taught by Christ Jesus. Wisdom, power and understanding to do business, marriage and all areas of life on earth as it is in heaven. These things are only seen by those who have eyes to see and ears to hear the marvelous workings of God and his heavenly kingdom on earth. KGG (#001), KGG (#024,#025, #026, #027, #028, #029, #030) – OCL Ch. 1, 24 - 29

The nearest thing to rapture in the real kingdom is the glorious joyous beautiful completely satisfying life on earth now and throughout eternity dwelling with almighty God. KGG (#025), OCL 25

When Christ Jesus bodily returns it will be to rule and reign with a perfected pure and holy Bride. Not to snatch us away and burn the planet. KGG (#025)

OK – You may all hate me now and start throwing. However, I can assure you that if anyone will truly seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and lay down his or her religion God will open your eyes and ears to see and hear clearly the things written here and much more from the Bible word by the Spirit of God in real time experience with the living God.

"He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”

Ron

Posted: 07/21/2010 at 8:02am | IP Logged

Michael, I changed the word position to revelation in your reply. I sincerely hope this more accurately says what you intended. Position sounds like a theological thing and "my position" sounds like a theological understanding. Theology has many positions God has only one. I am not trying to be picky or contentious here at all. My heart aches for you as I read your reference to "my position". I have long ago done away with my theology and eschatology I now know nothing beyond what God has poured into this empty clay vessel and commissioned me to freely give to all whom He sends and gives ears to hear. I do not speak of that which He has not given. I know only the kingdom of God now in this life as pure revelation from God. I believe a lot of things are probably true regarding the end time events etc. But I do not know them by choice because God has not revealed them or personally confirmed them by His Spirit to me.

I have one primary purpose in life - one commission from God - that is the gospel of the kingdom - the kingdom of God now in this life - the kingdom that is now, always was and forever shall be - the eternal now kingdom of God. I will not speak beyond my sphere assigned by our Lord. One of the great religious traps of our enemy is to get people focused on what is to come and how all the end-time things will work or how glorious it will be someday and miss the purpose and reality of their lives now. Our assignment for bringing Christ and His kingdom into the world is not for later. Our assignment on earth is for the time we are alive on earth. Someone said, only one life will soon be past. Only what is done for Christ will last.  I would tweak that a bit and say that only what Christ has done through us will last. Yes, the results of our lifetime goes on and has eternal impact. But our time is now and is short.

Love, the pure love of God is the greatest and most foundational aspect of the kingdom of God. The experience of intimate connection with the love pouring into us by God is the fountain of life and the great all consuming cleansing work of God. Sharing that love with others is the outpouring of God to save and change the world. Sharing that love with others who are also intimately connected to God's love is the most heavenly experience on earth. It is the love of God that establishes and holds together His kingdom life now in this life and forever. Without love there is no kingdom - no righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. All the world is to be ordered by the pure holy love of God. God will have a pure and holy people who will return His love to Him, who will live and walk in His Spirit.

Keep on pursuing love. It never fails
and His kingdom never ends.

Ron McGatlin

Posted: 07/21/2010 at 8:18am | IP Logged

Sondra Warren wrote: One of my favorite teachers, Wade Taylor says, that Jesus will not come physically until he comes fully in us, his body. If Jesus is a priest of this order with an endless life, should we not expect this is as well at some point ON EARTH? Sondra

Yes, Sondra. Christ in us now has made us all to be kings and priest. Christ is being formed in His Body on earth now. Yes, we, in Christ, now have endless life - etermal life now in this life and forever with Him.

Ron

Posted: 07/21/2010 at 8:21am | IP Logged

Thank you Gail for your reply from the heart.

Much love and blessings,

Ron

Posted: 07/21/2010 at 11:07am | IP Logged

Hi Ron,

Thank you for sharing your wisdom. As one who is further in their journey and shares openly from their rich experiences, I certainly appreciate your candor. If I may share from my journey, we have the "eternal now." When Jesus told the Pharisees "Before Abraham was, I Am!", He wasn't speaking in temporal terms - He was speaking in eternal terms; that's why they didn't "get it". That's why so many struggle now - they continually think and speak in temporal terms. It doesn't work, especially when speaking of the eternal Kingdom of God. When Jesus spoke of the "future" - He was speaking in eternal terms. He has made us eternal spirit beings, put us in a clay suit so we can carry the "present moment" - presence - as well as His eternal Presence and manifest His eternal Kingdom here and now. He hasn't given us the past - it is no more; He hasn't given us the future - although we have a promise of it - because it is not yet; He has given us Himself - His Presence - to find our fulfillment and purpose in the present - His Presence in presence. We live in an "Eternal Now." (With thanks to Paul Tillich) Thank you, Holy Spirit. May we experience fully your Presence in presence.

In His Great Love,

Ken         John 14:20

Posted: 07/22/2010 at 7:44am | IP Logged

Amen, Ken. The great eternal now kingdom. The words of wisdom you bring are very helpful and enlightening. Life flowed through them into me. Our natural minds have no capacity to undrstand the eternal now kingdom reality of God. Indeed, only those who live by the Spirit and walk in the Spirit experience God's eternal kingdom now in this life.

Thanks for posting this precious word.

Ron