Manifesting Presence of the Holy Spirit

Knowing Who You Are

I Jn 4:10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us…

Can you say without any doubt in your mind that you are saved and going to heaven? If the answer is yes, that is wonderful. For those who are in Christ, we must be certain of our hope for eternity. Certainly this is an all-important revealed understanding of who we are in Jesus Christ. This certain knowledge establishes our hope and which is the basis by which all other revelation is made able to flow.

However, this is the first and most basic understanding of our right standing with the Lord for our eternal future. It is the first step in knowing who we are in Christ. What about who we are here on earth? There is more that we need to know about our right standing that is so very important and that sustains us until we go home to heaven.

This next important question must be asked, “Do you believe that you are loved by the Father just as you are?” This is the harder question.

Because love is the very key to everything about our Lord, there is a battle that constantly is waged in our mind to get us to question the Father’s love for us on the personal level.

There is a voice in our minds that constantly tries to get us to focus on our failings and past failures. As we consider these accusations, if we can’t get over the facts of our errors, the next accusation becomes, “How can God love me in this way? He must be disappointed in me.” We then tend to filter all we spiritually hear thru the mill of these internal accusations. What results is a lower view of ourselves than what the Father’s view of us is. The end result is a ship that is floating adrift, dead in the water and ineffective in the here and now. We argue, “How can God use me when I am such a flawed person?”

There is a war going on within the mind to try to get us to disagree with what the Father thinks of us. We are way to cerebral about this relationship with our loving Father. Our minds are getting in the way of His revelation love that must not be mentally understood but spiritually experienced. Father God, yes your Father who is a perfect Dad, wants you, His son or daughter to know who you are in His loving eyes.

Every word that is spoken in the word of God about you is absolute truth. If you accepted Jesus in your heart from your heart, let there be no doubt that you are forever going to be in eternal glory with the Father. Never doubt the word of salvation? Cling to that hope with all your might? For that is the beginning of effectiveness in this life, your hope based upon your faith.

But as to love, you must know that you are truly loved in a way that cannot be explained with human words, nor understood with the logic of the mind. In fact even if one could use words to describe it, even if it is heard, the fullness of understanding is impossible of our own mental ability. What I am speaking of here is the absolute necessity for revelation knowledge. I can read a thing a thousand times, but until the Spirit of the Lord comes upon me to reveal the thing, I can never understand it to the fullest.

All revelation knowledge is spiritual and supernaturally imparted. It comes by way of an experience of outpouring. He invisibly comes to me and installs it into me. It is not of my own doing, nor is it of any particular intelligence of mine to comprehend. There is no understanding of the Kingdom unless God comes to me and makes it known to me.

Knowing the word of God is not knowing Him at all unless He completes it in the experience of Him.

The Bible reveals God, it does not contain Him. Without the power of God, the word is nothing but writing. God never violates His word, He just violates our understanding of the word. (Bill Johnson)

God is all about love, not condemnation. Not only does He want us to know this but He wants us to know it experientially. It really cannot be known unless we experience it. He really cannot be known unless we experience Him.

You are loved with a perfect love, an everlasting love. On earth there is no such thing as perfect love besides that which He pours out. Mankind can only begin to attain to such a kind of love. But in heaven, the air is made of it. The waters flow with it. The fires burn with it. His heart beats by it. In all these things, He loves you. And He wants you to know it! He wants you to know it not only in the written word but far more so by revelation. He wants you to know who you are in the here and now. He wants to come upon you so that you will be made known to His heart of love for you as a father would love his children. This is relationship that leads to intimacy.

He wants you to know that Christ’s sacrifice was absolute. His sacrifice was sufficient for any mistake you have ever made or will ever make. He wants you to know that your penalties are all taken care of. There is nothing left now but grace given love. The power of the law and of death is broken over you. There is now no condemnation for you who are in Christ.

He wants you to know that He loves you just as you are right now.

Look what the word of God says about you:

Ps 103:17-18 But from everlasting to everlasting the LORD’s love is with those who fear him, and his righteousness with their children’s children– with those who keep his covenant and remember to obey his precepts.

Gen 17:7 I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you.

Jer 31:3 The LORD appeared to us in the past, saying: “I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with loving-kindness.

John 3:16-18 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned…

John 15:9 As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.

John 15:13-14 Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command.

John 16:27 …the Father himself loves you because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God.

Gal 2:20 I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

1Thes 1:4 For we know, brothers loved by God, that he has chosen you…

I Jn 4:10-13 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.

I Jn 4:19 We love because he first loved us.

1 Pet 1:9 For you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

1Thes 5:5 You are all sons of the light and sons of the day. We do not belong to the night or to the darkness.

Eph 2:19 Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household…

Gal 5:18 But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under law.

Gal 4:7 So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir.

Gal 3:26 You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus…

1 Cor 12:27 Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.

If “we love because He first loved us”, then how can we love at all if we are not first revealed to His love for us? How then can we pour out this perfect love if He is not continually pouring it in to us first?

His love then is an experience that we must constantly be coming back to. As for me, I can never get enough of Him!

His love is a covenant promise to you that was secured the day you received Christ in your heart. He loved you even before you were in Him! He waited for you patiently because He foreknew you would love Him.

At every turn He was there for you. At every turn He will be there for you. He longs to pour out His Spirit upon you so that you would be fully revealed to His heart of love for you. He wants you to be certain and secure in the revelation knowledge of His love for you.

The Lord knows your needs. He knows you better than you know you. He knows we are a needy people. He made us to be needy! Like a baby needs the touch of coddling, Father God wants us to come into His breast and be coddled. Like a child needs hugs and kisses daily, He wants us to know that He wants to hug and kiss us with His Spirit.

He knows the things we struggle with in this world. He knows just what we need. His heart breaks when our heart breaks and rejoices when we are in joy. But when we sense the need to be touched He wants us to turn to Him and not the world. He wants us to know that we have the right to turn to Him. He wants us to desire to turn to Him.

He sees us as we are going to be and leads us towards that destiny in love. He does not see us in our failings because He sees us thru the veil of Jesus shed blood and sees us righteous and white as snow, even in our daily errors. He sees us already righteous, not being made righteous, though that is happening. He sees us not in sin any more because we who are in Christ have been made dead to sin. Now the only thing that remains is His mercy empowered by grace over us, which is completely sufficient.

So let’s go back to the first two questions that were asked in the beginning of this writing. We asked, “Are you certain of your salvation? We then asked, “Do you know that He loves you as you are?” Both these questions are asking the larger question, “Do you know who you are?” And so I ask you now to ask yourself this question, do you really know who you are? Do you really know of His love for you as you are? Do you really believe that He loves you unconditionally? And if you think that you know who you are, do you truly believe it?

I am convinced that a great majority of the Body of Christ does not know who they are in the light of the eyes of the Father. This was certainly my personal testimony until the day I experienced the Father’s love in His manifest Presence in 1997. In one minute of His Presence, I knew that I knew, He loves me! He really REALLY loves me! I was deeply healed of the stronghold mentality of un-loveliness in that first experience in His Presence!

Today, there is a very serious reason for this lack of understanding of who we are in Christ. The Holy Spirit is not manifesting in our churches. We are not experiencing the Father’s love in order to know of it. There are some churches who are receiving the Spirit again, such as the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship. And the numbers of these kinds of places of His revealed love are rapidly on the rise in this very hour, and which is great news. But still, they are truly few and far between. Even many who say they are moving in the Spirit are not.

John 14:16-20 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever– the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.

It takes the day of His coming for us to realize these truths. If the Holy Spirit is the Councilor who leads us into all truth, then how can we gain any truth without Him in the day of His coming?

Jesus said, “…on that day you will realize”, or said another way, “on the day that the Spirit is poured out in Pentecost, you will then understand the intimacy of my love and the Father’s heart. You will understand what it means that I am in you and you are in me. You will see what you otherwise could not see without the Holy Spirit’s revelation.” So then it is all about the experience.

How sad it is that church leaders would argue against experience! They don’t understand that they are literally closing the door in the face of those who would seek the Father’s love in the experience. They kill the church with such an argument. They fear the radical manifestations of His manifest Presence because they fear what they do not understand or have never seen. They fear that people are seeking the experience and not the love or seeking the experience but unwilling to do the work. They don’t understand that it is by the experience that one is able to see love or is able to do any good Kingdom work!

Oh how we must gain the experience of Him, and not as we think the experience should be.

It is a known scientific fact that if a baby is left in a room without the experience of the love of the mother, that baby will die for lack of touch. So it is with our spirit, soul and body. If the Holy Spirit is not ministering to us with the experiential touch of the Father, we will be rendered spiritually lifeless for lack of love. We need this touch. We need the breath of God ministering His love over our being. We need the experience of Him! It’s like waters poured out in a dry and barren land. It’s like life being restored upon dead dry bones!

Not only do we need to feel His touch, but we need it again and again. I can testify to this fact personally. I have been to Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship many times as of this writing. Very simply, I can’t get enough of Him! Wherever the Spirit is showing up, it is there that I want to be!

But with each visitation to Toronto, I walked into the room with a lower understanding of my standing in the eyes of my Father. I did not know or even sense this degraded condition until I was revealed once again to the Father’s love in His manifest Presence.

How insidious is this flawed condition of the mind of man! We don’t know what we need! We think we do but we don’t know. But He knows!

Each experience of His Presence renews my mind. It links my mind with the mind of Christ so that He can download good Kingdom stuff into me. But unless we be filled with the Spirit again and again in the experience of His love, unless we are consistently flowing in the revelation knowledge of the Father by the Son thru the manifestation of the Holy Spirit, we will go dry in revelation knowledge. The result then becomes man made ways.

Just as the glow of the Presence diminished over time upon the face of Moses, so it is with revelation knowledge, it diminishes over time. This is what is meant by scripture that we be renewed of the mind day by day. It’s not by reading the word daily, though that is good. It is by pressing in to intimate relationship.

Whenever I had experienced the Father’s love in His Presence anew, I was once again renewed into the spiritual revelation knowledge of His love for me. I was reminded once again of who I am. Each fresh new visit with the Spirit re-revealed the Father’s heart of love for me. I needed that. I need that. We all need that! And we need it again and again and again. This is what Pentecost was all about. Oh how sad that the Spirit has been rejected in the church! How effective has been the plan of the enemy of God to bring about this sad bone-dry condition!

With each new visit into His Presence over the last many years I became renewed that He loves me. I became renewed that He was for me and not against me. I was renewed into His love.

2 Cor 4:16-18 Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

How do we not loose heart? We do not loose heart by going back in again and again to be daily renewed inwardly. And because our renewal is spiritual and not natural, we fix our eyes not on the ways of man for renewal but on what is unseen, that is the Holy Spirit. This is critical!

Titus 3:4-6 But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior…

We need Jesus revealed and the renewal of the Spirit. The fullness of the revelation of Christ requires the power of the Spirit to make Him known. One without the other is either religion or foolishness. The both together is our means to all truth.

In John 14-18 (in my opinion the four most important chapters in the Bible)… Before Jesus left the disciples on earth, He told them that He would not leave them as orphans, that He would appear to them again thru the Holy Spirit. He said to wait for the Spirit. And when the Spirit comes upon them, they would then go out and save the world. The Spirit had to appear to the men, women and children in the upper room before they could do anything. And so it must be today!

We need the radical experience of the Holy Spirit right in the middle of our church services today if we are ever going to do anything of God’s Kingdom worth. On the personal level, we need this reoccurring renewal experience in order to understand who we are in the Father’s eyes. It is in the knowing of who we are that sets our feet in motion. Without this revelation we become bogged down in condemnation and fear that stills our feet.

If this scripture in Titus is true, then the manifestation of inward renewal by the Spirit is a must for salvation. Though we know that this references the indwelling of the Spirit that marks us for salvation, we forget that we need the renewal day by day of the Spirit that manifests upon us for the equipping and revelation of the Saints unto effectiveness in the world. We need both. We need the one time “marking” of the Spirits that leads to salvation, which the church is very good at understanding. However, we need the ongoing experience of renewal thru the infilling of the Spirit upon us day by day to be effective before we go to Heaven. It is of this second work of the Spirit the church greatly misses, and of which we desperately need.

John 14:16-18 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever– the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.

The Holy Spirit with AND In…

The Spirit in us is for our eternal home and became available when the inner court curtain was ripped in two as Jesus carried our sins on the cross. Our spirits went from death to life and our hope was established on the day of our regeneration. But the Spirit upon us is for our equipping of truth, the renewing of our minds and our power anointing in the here and now and for the reaping of this harvest.

If we are ever going to know who we are in Jesus, we need the ongoing revelation of the Holy Spirit manifesting upon us, in our homes, in our churches, and on these dry bones.

Renewal is where it is at in the days ahead. It will be the signature of God’s End Time Church. It is the ongoing events of experiencing God unto the renewing of our minds and our hearts. In this we do not faint, but press on in the full knowledge of His loving heart that is for us and not against us.

But now there are so many who just don’t know who they are. So many are locked in legalism and religious ways of their yesterdays. Or, they see God as one who is just looking for a reason to strike with lightning at their failures save for Jesus who stands in the gap. Or maybe it is unhealed wounds from broken relationships or rejection from bad church experiences. For others it might be addictions and dependencies that beset them from the truth. Or it might be a fear of man or of failures. Or maybe a theology that this Holy Holy Holy God is untouchable by mere man, and that we should cower at His feet and await come what may.

All these things require experiential love of the Father to debunk these false notions. Father God is waiting for a church that will seek His face with a desire for intimacy. Not out of duty, not out of works, not out of misplaced fear but out of love and a thirst for more of Him. In this way, we will all be revealed to who we are. Then we will be able to bring others with us.

Father God and His Bridegroom Son want us to know that His love for us has nothing to do with what we can do for Him. His love for us is unconditional save for faith.

There are no works we can do, however good sounding or good intentioned that will gain us any more love from Him than what He already holds for us right now.

No amount of praise or worship, no amount of reading the word nor any amount of good works of any kind will cause the Father to love us any more than He does right now. Those things follow the revealed knowledge of His love!

I want to love Him when I know He loves me. I want to read His word when I know He is for me. I want to go out and do when I know He loves them like this as well!

We are fully loved already, even in our flaws. His is a perfect love, and He wants to express it to His Bride, the church, by way of His Holy Spirit. Will we agree and come into the inner court of His love, or will we remain locked in our yesterdays, in our fears, and without loves revelation?

There is a point of balance that exists in the revelation of my flawed state which lies somewhere between self condemnation to the left and His love for me to the right. The only way for me to reconcile this issue in my mind is to disengage the mind and then yoke it to the mind of Christ. By this we become revealed to His point of truth by the Holy Spirit. God’s definition of balance is not how man would think of balance. In the world, balance is compromise. But, His balance is always radical and usually opposed to our thinking. I tell you that you are far more to the right of this balance than you might think you are. Your are so loved! Therefore be filled with the Holy Spirit. Then go in again and again.

It’s time to know who we are. It’s time to sit at His feet and simply wait, just like those at Pentecost waited… wait until He comes with His love and His touch. We need Him to come! He wants to come. He is simply waiting for a people who will wait for Him. Will we give Him the time?

I am but a flawed imperfect man full of sin and error and the best I can hope for is to die to myself so that He can truly live in me. My death to self is what I seek. But the revelation knowledge of a love that is so wonderful, so strong and so complete, reveals to me that even in my flawed state, I am rendered guiltless and fully loved. I want to know this love that died for me so that I could walk in the gift of no condemnation. I want to know of His heart that beats just for me. I want to be drawn into His heart in the deep deep spiritual place of His wonderful Holy Presence in as often as He would draw me in.

I am so in love with Him because I now know that He first loved me.

I know who I am now. But I need to be reminded of it again and again. Enough is never enough for this lovesick warrior. How about you?

Here are some wonderful words of encouragement from a song by Bryan Adams:

Sound The Bugle

Sound the bugle now – play it just for me
As the seasons change – remember how I used to be
Now I can’t go on – I can’t even start
I’ve got nothing left – just an empty heart

I’m a soldier – wounded so I must give up the fight
There’s nothing more for me – lead me away…
Or leave me lying here

Sound the bugle now – tell them I don’t care
There’s not a road I know – that leads to anywhere
Without a light I fear that I will – stumble in the dark
Lay right down – decide not to go on

Then from on high – somewhere in the distance
There’s a voice that calls – remember who your are
If you lose yourself – your courage soon will follow
So be strong tonight – remember who you are

Ya you’re a soldier now – fighting in a battle
To be free once more…
Ya that’s worth fighting for

This is the word of the Lord in this hour and He stands at the ready to back it up with power! “Know who your are! Remember who you are! I love you just as you are. Because “I AM” you are!”

T. Scott Morton