Invading The Impossible

“Building a culture of grace”

Invading the Impossible Copyright © Rob Rufus ISBN: 978-988-19848-7-6 First published in 2009 by New Nature Publications. Revised and reprinted 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photocopying or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from both the copyright owner and publisher of this book. Unless otherwise indicated Scripture quotations are taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2010 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. Scripture quotations marked as (The Message) are from THE MESSAGE: The Bible in Contemporary Language © 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked as (NKJV) are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Printed in Hong Kong For more grace resources please visit: www.newnaturepublications.com

Endorsements I had the privilege of ministering with Rob Rufus at his church in Hong Kong and was very blessed by the authentic presence of the Lord. The atmosphere was filled with joy, victory, and freedom. With that kind of fruit, I heartily endorse the writing of such a timely book, Invading the Impossible. May your faith be ignited as you read, meditate, and act on the Word of God represented in this project. Patricia King Extreme Prophetic Ministries xpmedia.com

According to the apostle Paul, a full proclamation of the Gospel is one that is accompanied by powerful signs and wonders. Rob Rufus heartily agrees with this sentiment, and has persisted in this conviction for many years. Thanks Rob for not settling for a second-rate gospel. Chad Mansbridge Pastor at Bayside Church International Adelaide, Australia Author of He Qualifies You

I believe God has put this message in Rob’s mouth. He has an anointing to bring breakthrough and revelation through the gospel. Rob has been unwavering in his stand for the beautiful message of God’s grace. He bears both the scars and the humility of spirit that mark those who throughout the history of the church have stood for truth.

Invading the Impossible He is one of the foremost pioneers of the grace awakening that the Holy Spirit is stirring in the earth today. You will be blessed by his perspective in this book. Gregory Haswell Pastor at Northlands Church Atlanta, Geeorgia, USA www.northlandschurch.com

I love this book! The words within these pages will liberate you and encourage you to seek out “the more” in God. As you read Invading the Impossible, the revelatory realm will open up, and you will discover the veil of religious bondage being removed from your eyes, to truly encounter God in His glorious light. I have had the privileged opportunity to minister with Rob Rufus on several occasions, and every time I have sat under the tremendous anointing he carries, I have received an impartation of greater truth, freedom and the grace for an increased outpouring of the miraculous. This book carries the same impartation for your life. If you are ready to receive a deeper revelation about the liberating supernatural power of God, I would highly recommend this book to you! Joshua Mills Evangelist Best-selling Author of 31 Days To A Miracle Mindset Palm Springs, California Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada www.newwineinternational.org

Endorsements I find Rob’s preaching, teaching and ministry intensely inspirational. Invading the Impossible will put fresh fire in your faith, to take higher ground, and enter previously uncharted waters in your Christian walk. As you read, you will feel power working and find that faith in a good God and believing that good report, will effect every level of your life. This is who we are as the Bride, as sons. This book is another key for us to see, believe and become all we are, and nothing will ever be the same. We are being transformed, by seeing who we are and what we have, so watch out world, watch out Devil, the Bride awakens! Wayne Duncan Pastor Author of A Matter of Life and Death

Reading Invading the Impossible re-introduced me to the gospel truth about grace that has profoundly affected my life, marriage, leadership and ministry. Thank you, Rob, for holding the line on a message that is as powerful and controversial today as it was when St Paul preached it in the early church. Steve Wheeler Author of Highway to Grace Pastor, Highway Christian Community KwaZulu Natal, South Africa

In writing this book Rob Rufus stands like a modern day Paul of Tarsus, reminding the church that they started their Christian walk in grace and righteousness, and that’s what they need to come back

Invading the Impossible to. In my eyes, Invading the Impossible is a timely prophetic proclamation calling the church back to her roots in Christ. As a result of heeding that call, I see the Church once again invading the impossible because they know who they are in Christ; a Church that turns the world upside down bringing revelation, freedom and reformation. Thanks Rob, for sending that clarion call. Lyn Packer Co-leader, Extreme Prophetic New Zealand

Invading the Impossible is packed with awesome life changing revelation that releases true Kingdom authority for everyday living. Everyone should read and re-read this powerful book, a source of constant inspiration. Tony Ide Pastor at Freedom Life Church Perth, Australia

Contents Acknowledgements Dedication Enjoying

the

Benefits

I

Resurrection Power 11

of the

II

The Designer Original 43

III

The Revolution Has Begun

61

IV

Lifting Limitations 81

V

No Regrets! 101 Dealing

VI

Disappointment 109

with

VII

Authority to Invade 115

VIII

Invading by Reigning 129

IX

Let God Impress You 155

of Jesus

Acknowledgements To the wife of my youth, who has travelled with me courageously and consistently every day for 35 years! I am breathlessly, un-embarrassedly and hopelessly in love with you. To the people of City Church International Hong Kong. You are imbued with the attitude of this book and profoundly embody the message as living pages that are far more graphic and exciting to read than this book! I have watched with wide eyed wonder as you make the sacrifices to live Christ centered and invade the impossible. I have been filled with pride as you have faced disappointments and resisted the seduction of religious witchcraft and the allure of the modern church to the idolatry of self-centeredness. You have lived possessed by eternal purpose and living promises, rather than the convenience of the temporal. You are heroes and I hope people will read and appreciate you far more than this book. You are dear to me beyond what words can tell. Great is your reward in time and eternity. Thank you! I love you. To Isi de Gersigny, for her powerful and prophetic word to me, announcing from Heaven that I would begin to write many books. You are always inspiring. You serve Earth with Heaven’s promises. Thank you, Isi. To Cornel Marais, for the original editing of this book. Your theological insights that have helped me to make adjustments in the book have been of tremendous value.

Invading the Impossible To Jan Boshoff and Lisa Ackerman, for your most excellent fresh transformation of my book. Your work is exceptional, and you have taken Invading the Impossible to a much higher level. Thank you both. To my own son, Ryan. I am so very proud of you. It was your enthusiastic urging that inspired me to write this book. Thank you for publishing it through New Nature Publications.

Dedication To the Lord Jesus, who has captured my heart and made me a prisoner of His love, locked up forever in His kindness, liberated from addiction to human approval. Such emancipation from the fear of man opens up endless horizons of possibilities with the One who has made me a co-equal heir with Christ. Now I pursue the realization of a vision that burns almost unbearably inside my heart: To see the church walk in her full inheritance in the miraculous power of God, endlessly invading the impossible and transforming the culture of nations.

Invading the Impossible

I

Enjoying The Benefits of The Resurrection Power of Jesus I am so excited that you have chosen to read this book! This opening chapter is ready to inject you, directly into your spirit, with Godsanctioned supernatural steroids. It is full of heavenly stimulants and it will boost your faith to new and higher levels. Read it slowly, asking the Holy Spirit to help you to see into the realms of revelation regarding the awesome truths you are about to study. For any believer who is eager to invade the impossible, the resurrection of Jesus is far more than a historical fact. I have done a lot of research in regards to the resurrection of Jesus and during my studies I read a book by Frank Morison called Who Moved the Stone? He was a high ranking barrister in the United Kingdom, and he was against Christianity. He knew that Christianity was based on the resurrection, because if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, then Christianity is

Invading the Impossible just another religion. If you check the historical facts surrounding other religions, you will find Buddha’s tomb is occupied, Mohammad’s tomb is occupied, and every other guru’s grave is also either occupied, or they have been cremated. But Jesus Christ rose from the dead! That event gave us more than a memory and a historical sentimentality or philosophy. He is the Risen Lord. The One who was raised from the dead and whose grave is not occupied. That does not give us a religion, but a presence full of power! Frank Morison wrote his book in order to disprove Christianity, and argued his case much like a lawyer in a court of law: If Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead, it would mean that you and I are also still in our sins, and that Christianity is just another powerless religion of empty rituals and ceremonies. However. while he was investigating the available evidence surrounding the resurrection of Jesus Christ, he became so convinced that the evidence actually supported the Resurrection that he became a Christian while writing the book against Christianity! If we want to invade the impossible, then the Resurrection has to be more than just a historical fact or doctrine, it has to be a daily life experience! When the Resurrection is preached as more than just a historical fact, more than just a doctrine, but with revelation of how the power of the Resurrection relates to daily living, then you will see so much grace come upon the church. With that grace also increased power for the supernatural and for miracles to be manifested within the 12

Enjoying The Benefits of The Resurrection Power of Jesus church. This single event was the most amazing thing the world had ever experienced. Jesus Christ was raised from the dead! Many Evangelical Christians only preach the Resurrection as though it was a historical fact. I know it is a historical fact, but it is also so much more! I have stood in the empty tomb in Jerusalem. I heard a friend of mine preach a message at the empty tomb with a whole bunch of Jewish people around, listening to us. His opening lines made our mouths dry up with fear, because with a serious look on his face, he said, “Jesus Christ was a complete failure.” Everyone thought he was going to blaspheme! “Yes!” he said, “He is a complete failure when it comes to funerals. To have a successful funeral the corpse must stay dead! Jesus Christ ruined His own funeral by being raised from the dead! He is alive!” The Resurrection is more than a historical fact, it is a daily reality. If we do not have a daily encounter with the miraculous power of the Resurrection, then how can we deal with the troubles and demands of life? But if we get revelation about the true relevance of the Resurrection, then we can administer the power of the Resurrection. It is the power to change history, power to defeat evil, power to do the works of Jesus and greater. Power to invade the impossible! With great power the apostles continued to testify to the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all. - Acts 4:33

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Invading the Impossible And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you. - Romans 8:11

Through the preaching of the Resurrection, there is a power made available to us who believe that is equal to the power which raised Jesus Christ from the dead. You have the very same Holy Spirit of God living in you that lives in Jesus! The same Spirit who empowered Jesus to overcome the world as a man, the same Spirit that raised Him from dead. That same life giving Spirit lives in each and every person in the body of Christ. Now, if the Holy Spirit is power personified, how can we be content living powerless defeated lives? Some have seen the power in operation, yet many have never. Some even deny the Spirit by saying the power doesn’t exist. If every person on the planet went blind and could not see the sun rise, it would not affect the sunrise at all because the rising of the sun isn’t dependent on our small little world and our few limited experiences. The power of God that raised Jesus Christ from the dead is literally available on a daily basis, to everyone who believes. Those people who believe it will see it and experience it. If you don’t believe it, you won’t experience it. If you don’t experience it, you won’t invade the impossible. 14

Enjoying The Benefits of The Resurrection Power of Jesus

Daily Resurrection Life I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better.

18

I pray also

that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints,

19

and his

incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength,

20

which he exerted

in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms,

21

far above all rule

and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. - Ephesians 1:17-21

Now the question I want to ask is a practical one: How do I walk in this resurrection power? How do I have the life and power that raised Jesus from the dead giving life to my mortal body every day? I am not referring to the day when you and I are raised at the triumphant return of Christ, when we will have an immortal body, raised forever from the dead never to die again. I am talking about resurrection power giving life to our mortal, corruptible, decaying bodies right now. Through the Resurrection there is a power made available to us that can daily give life to our mortal bodies, renew our youth, our health, our minds, our moods and attitudes. 15

Invading the Impossible What is the access? How do you get into Resurrection Life? How do you experience it? It is through the revelation of righteousness: The revelation that God has made us righteous as a gift. We are His righteousness, all the time, irrespective of our behavior, since our righteousness before Almighty God is based on the behavior and obedience of Jesus Christ on our behalf. We are the righteousness of God in Christ! The motivation to serve and obey Him is not through condemnation, or fear, or rejection, or divine disapproval. My motivation for serving Him is that there is no condemnation and that I am the righteousness of God. The more your faith rises in the revelation that you are righteous, the more the power of the Resurrection will be made manifest in your physical body and through your life. People ask me why I keep preaching on the gift of righteousness, and I always tell them because the level of faith in the gift of righteousness is far too low in the Body of Christ. When faith in the gift of righteousness is too low in the Body of Christ, then the power of the Resurrection is too low in the Body of Christ. Resurrection power brings dead things back to life, it brings dead marriages back to life, it brings dead finances back to life, it brings dead heads back to life. The power of the Resurrection removes cancer and opens blind eyes. It brings people out of wheelchairs. I have seen those miracles with my own eyes! No one can tell me they don’t happen! I was there! I know what the key is: Faith that you have been made the righteousness of God in Christ, raises the potential for resurrection power in your life and through 16

Enjoying The Benefits of The Resurrection Power of Jesus your physical body. Now faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God and the more you hear: “You are the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus.” the more you will encounter Christ and the power of the Resurrection at a higher level. Do not settle for a low level! The day is coming when the hospitals will not be able to cater for the patients. Medical science will not be able to cope with the diseases and viruses coming on this planet. I thank God for medical science, and I thank God for hospitals, but the church needs to position itself with Resurrection power flowing through our bodies, so that in the midst of the plagues we can walk unaffected, raising the dead, healing the sick and emptying out the hospitals! Too many Christians are sitting on the planet wrapped up with access to doctors and medical science and all kinds of social security. They don’t understand the shaking with which God is going to shake the nations. The nations will be shaken, but in the midst of the shaking, there will also be the glory of God coming in the earth and covering the earth as the waters cover the sea. There are many people who are being positioned, and who know their God will do mighty exploits in the last days. Your troops will be willing on your day of battle. Arrayed in holy majesty, from the womb of the dawn you will receive the dew of your youth. - Psalm 110:3

17

Invading the Impossible There are going to be billions of people saved in the days ahead. China will be saved! Africa will be saved! Nations will be saved! There will be believers emptying hospitals, going into insane asylums and delivering their captives, because when you are walking in Resurrection power even your shadow will heal the sick. Some people are settling for a kind of Christianity that is merely cerebral, doctrinal and historical, and that is not going to do it. In the early 1900’s in South Africa, a man named John G. Lake raised the dead, healed cripples, started a revival and planted over 500 churches in 5 short years! When the bubonic plague hit South Africa, people were dying by the thousands. This disease was so contagious that if you touched the spittle or even just got near people who had it, you would contract it. They were burying people in mass graves. John G. Lake went into the quarantined areas to pray for the sick and the dying. He was arrested for breaking quarantine law and allegedly practicing medicine without a license. Medical scientists took some spittle from a dead man and placed it under a microscope. They could see the virus was alive and active. John G. Lake took that sample into his bare hands, an action that would surely have caused him to contract the plague, held it for a couple of seconds and then told the scientists to look through the microscope again. The plague had died in his hands. They asked him how he did it and he answered them with Romans 8:2, For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.

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Enjoying The Benefits of The Resurrection Power of Jesus He understood that the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead dwelt in him, that the Spirit makes alive and gives life to our mortal bodies. Now that should be the testimony of the church! But the trouble is only a few men and women have stepped into the benefits of the New Covenant. Just a few on the planet walking in New Covenant power, and they are upheld as special cases when the power they live with is actually the inheritance of every believer! We don’t want to be pew-warmers, we want to be people who live and walk in Resurrection Power! Paul was expressing his extreme frustration at legalistic religious people, calling them “dogs!” He was saying that the church needs to be safeguarded from law preachers, those who preach sin consciousness to the New Testament church, because it makes people lose faith in the Resurrection. If we don’t guard against them, we end up having moral people in the church who don’t raise the dead, who don’t see signs and wonders and who don’t lead others to Christ. They are morally good people but inside they are full of dead men’s bones, full of death, fear, insecurity and condemnation and they are powerless. The Gospel has been falsely preached as right living when actually the Gospel is right believing. Right believing will lead to right living. If I want to see the power of the Resurrection operating in my life I have to remind myself every day that, “I am the righteousness of God in Christ.” Even when I have messed up or made a mistake, instead of endlessly confessing my sin I need to get up and confess my righteousness, “I am the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus.” 19

Invading the Impossible When you do that, you will feel Resurrection power coming over your body, but if you allow condemnation and guilt as if you were still under the Old Covenant, then you will not experience the Resurrection life, for 2 Corinthians 3:7 declares the law is a ministry of death. The law kills, the law curses and the law makes you conscious of sin. Anyone who is living even a little bit under law hardly ever manifests Resurrection power to raise the dead. Now we are not called to raise everyone from the dead, and everyone we do raise will die again when their bodies get old. Only at the end of the age will every Christian be raised again with immortal bodies, never to die again. But in the meantime, we are instructed by Jesus, just like He instructed His disciples in Matthew 10:7, to go out and preach the Gospel and tell the people that the Kingdom of Heaven is touchable, tangible and within reach of our faith! He said to heal the sick, cast out demons, cleanse the lepers and raise the dead. Jesus expected His church to live and move in Resurrection power. The fact that most Christians have never seen a dead person raised, never seen a person get out of a wheelchair, never seen blind eyes opened is absolutely unbelievable! Something has gone horribly wrong! If the early church moved in these signs and wonders, and we don’t, something is wrong. We should be bothered by it! Why is there such a lack of power? Because we have allowed evil workers into our midst, and we did not safe-guard the church against those who bring the law and sin-consciousness. We have got to see the church released into the 20

Enjoying The Benefits of The Resurrection Power of Jesus revelation that we are the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus! ...not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ — the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. - Philippians 3:9-11

If you have a righteousness of your own, you will not move in Resurrection power. If you have a righteousness of your own that is of your holiness and your performance and your efforts, then every time you fail that standard of your righteousness, you will feel guilty, you will feel condemned, and you will be sin conscious. But if you get a revelation of the righteousness that is God’s gift to you, and which has nothing to do with your performance whatsoever, then you will have a revelation that will stop you from ever suffering guilt or condemnation again. Then you will come into a knowledge of God that is experiential, and you will move in the power of His Resurrection! Sharing in His sufferings and becoming like Him in His death is not morbid and sad, but it is one of the most powerful truths you will ever hear in your entire life! To share in His sufferings and become like Him in His death is to come into a whole new state of a consciousness of righteousness. It is not having a righteousness of our own but instead being the righteousness of God as a gift from God 21

Invading the Impossible which enables you to know Him and the power of His Resurrection!

Double Jeopardy ...that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. - 2 Corinthians 5:19-21

He was reconciling the world, not just reconciling the church. “God so loved the world.” Some Christians think that God only loves the church. Scripture says it clearly, God so loved the world. The church doesn’t seem to love the lost. They don’t care that the lost are going to hell as long as they are getting their needs met! They complain and whine while pastors are forced to become a kind of political diplomat, trying to keep everyone happy. Enough is enough! Let the prophets and apostles rise up and let the fire of God shake the church and awaken us to the hour that we are living in! There are multiple millions that are ready to get saved today if only the church would awake to righteousness! We don’t have to endlessly plead for revival, we are revival. We are revived! We don’t need more revival. Revive means to make alive that 22

Enjoying The Benefits of The Resurrection Power of Jesus which was formerly dead. You have been made alive in Christ! You are revived! God has already revived us, all we need to do is believe it and live revived. “Not counting men’s sins against them.” This is God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, and He says He is not counting our sins against us! Why is He not counting men’s sins against them? Because, in Christ, He was reconciling the entire world to Himself. He has committed to us the message of reconciliation. So what is the message believers are to give to the lost? That God has reconciled them to Himself in Christ, and He is not counting their sins against them! At that cross, Jesus Christ obliterated every single sin that every human being would have done from the beginning of time, to the end of time. Do you understand that God is not counting men’s sins against them and never will? How can that be? Because the law of double jeopardy says you cannot punish the same crime twice! He has already punished Jesus on behalf of the entire world. He is not counting the world’s sins against them, He counted them against Christ! Sadly, millions of people do go to hell even while God is not counting their sins against them! There is only one sin that Jesus couldn’t die for, only one. That is the sin of unbelief. At the consummation and the climax of the ages, only one sin is going to be judged, unbelief. He is not counting your sins against you! He loves you! He 23

Invading the Impossible has reconciled you already 2000 years ago. He is not going to do it one day in the future. He has already done it! But there is one sin that He has to count, because it is the only sin that locks you out of the wonderful benefit of the Gospel, and that is the sin of unbelief in Jesus Christ.

There is Only One Sin Under the New Covenant When he comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment. - John 16:8

It doesn’t say the Holy Spirit convicts the world of “sins.” He has no sins to convict the world of because they are not being counted against them! It says “sin.” The Holy Spirit will convict the world of sin. “Yes Rob, the Holy Spirit convicts people of their sin. Every time we sin He convicts us of the wrong we are doing.” Rubbish! Read the next verse: ...in regard to sin, because men do not believe in me; in regard to righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can see me no longer; and in regard to judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned. - John 16:9-11

Unbelief is the only sin the Holy Spirit convicts the world of. If you really think about it, Jesus told us in the previous chapter, John 15:19, that we are not of this world. That already disqualifies us from being 24

Enjoying The Benefits of The Resurrection Power of Jesus convicted of sin after being saved, since we are then called out of the world. Verse 10 says that we are convicted of righteousness because Jesus went to the Father. He went to the Father as our Mediator, our intercessor and advocate saying, “All their sins are no longer counted.” So the Holy Spirit will only convince you that you are the righteousness of God. That means He convicts you of your new blameless state before God. Verse 11 says that in regards to judgment, He will convict us of the fact that the Prince of this world, Satan, has been judged. Where? At the Cross! So the Holy Spirit is convicting the world of the sin of unbelief, and every time we don’t believe the message of grace, He convicts us that we are righteousness of God in Christ. Every time we don’t believe we are the righteousness of God, the Holy Spirit is saying, “Believe on Jesus, believe you are the righteousness of God. Jesus went to the Father. He is interceding for you. Don’t listen to the voice of the devil who is accusing you.” The Holy Spirit is not accusing you, the devil is accusing you! But the devil has been condemned at the Cross and has been judged, and the powers and principalities have been disarmed! Jesus is convicting us saying, “I have taken away the written code and the regulations that stood opposed to you. I cancelled them at the Cross, and you are my righteousness. Just believe me!” Joseph Goebbels said: 25

Invading the Impossible “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the state to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the state.”

Truth is the greatest enemy of the state; of the institutions of religious control that try and manipulate people through guilt and condemnation and so keep them bound up. “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free!” The church has heard so many lies about what the Gospel is that we don’t see Resurrection power in the church. God’s people are not convinced that they are the righteousness of God permanently and irreversibly, and that God is not counting their sins against them, at any time. This same Joseph Goebbels also said “Faith moves mountains, but knowledge moves them into the right place.” When you know the truth and when it sets you free, your mountains of guilt and condemnation get moved to where they belong, under your feet! Everything that goes along with condemnation and guilt also get put under your feet; sickness, disease, poverty, incompleteness, unrest and failure. When you know the truth, you become healed, whole, filled with peace and rest. You become more than a conqueror, through Christ who strengthens you, because God freely recreates you as His righteousness by grace through faith. 26

Enjoying The Benefits of The Resurrection Power of Jesus We can go into the world announcing to people that God is not counting their sins against them. More often than not, the response to our excited declaration is, “Well, I didn’t even know there were sins to be counted and I don’t think I’m so bad, I am actually a good person.” This is exactly what the Law of Moses was given for, to put some perspective on the difference between man’s measure of goodness and God’s. When you have introduced to them a bit of the Law of Moses to show them where they have fallen short, that they are in fact sinners, then you can say, “Okay, you can see the situation is worse than you thought, but you know what? God isn’t counting your sins against you!” They will ask “Am I going to go to Heaven then?” “Well, sadly no.” “What? How come you are going to Heaven because God is not counting your sins, but I cannot go, even though He isn’t counting mine either?” “Because I believe in Him.” As you say that, the power of the Holy Spirit will come on that unbeliever and convict them of the singular sin: Their unbelief in Jesus Christ. When that conviction comes, not only will He convince them of their unbelief in Jesus, but He will also convince them of how easy it is to believe on Jesus because He will empower them to believe! You have the third Person of the Trinity testifying that you are 27

Invading the Impossible righteous and you are in the place of righteousness, that God has condemned the devil, and God is not condemning you. You have the power of the Spirit of God when you speak to the unsaved and when you tell them they need to believe on Jesus. The Spirit will convince them of the truth that they need to believe on Jesus! Something in them will agree! Let’s preach the real Gospel!

It’s Logical Let me pose three simple questions to show once and for all that I am not making this stuff up! This is pure truth. All I am doing is quoting scripture to you in its right context. The answers to these questions might be the first steps you take in actually renewing your mind to the Word and to the truth of the Gospel. 2 Corinthians 5:21 told us He was made sin. 1. Was He made sin by doing sin? No, He lived a sinless life which means He never sinned. 2. How then did He get to be made sin? How was He declared sin? How did He get into a state of sin? He received from the Father the free gift of our sin. Sin was imputed, or given, to Him. 3. Once He received that free gift of our sin from the Father, did He have to beg the Father to bring wrath, judgment and curse on Him? No. The curse came in28

Enjoying The Benefits of The Resurrection Power of Jesus stantly and automatically and with fullness, without any reservation from Heaven, because all the sin of the entire world was now summed up and brought together in one man, Jesus Christ. He was made sin and in that state of sin He attracted judgment and curse. It attracted sickness, disease and poverty onto Jesus Christ. He did not have to pray for it or beg. God could now judge and vent His anger on one person. By fully punishing all sin for all time, all at once, all of mankind could be reconciled to Him. If those three questions made sense to you, answer me the following: 1. How did you become the righteousness of God? By doing righteous deeds? No, since Ephesians 2:4-9 clearly tell us this righteousness was given as a free gift, by grace through faith. 2. Do you have to do anything to keep that gift? Did Jesus have to sin a little bit more to keep the gift? Since Jesus didn’t have to sin after being made sin, you likewise don’t need to do righteous acts in order to stay justified in God’s eyes. 3. Since you are the righteousness of God, do you have to beg God to bring Resurrection power on you? Do you have to beg God to bless you, or heal you, or to provide for you, or to preserve and protect you? No! Jesus didn’t have to do anything to receive the curse and we don’t have 29

Invading the Impossible to do anything to receive the blessing either. That’s why Jesus said stop running after things the pagans run after! (Clothes, food and provision.) He said seek first the Kingdom and His righteousness, not your righteousness. The fact is, that God has imputed a gift of righteousness to you that He will never take away, because He is never going to count your sins against you. Do you know how glorious that is? Sadly, this wonderful truth has no effect on most Christians’ lives. They are the righteousness of God in God’s eyes, but in their own eyes, they are sinners because that is what they have been taught in church. Go read your Bible for yourself! It is right there in black and white. The Bible clearly teaches throughout the New Testament that, as a believer, God is not counting your sins against you, and that you are righteous in Christ Jesus through a free gift. However, if you live with a sin consciousness, then you are in disagreement with Heaven and you are insulting the gift of grace. You are instead agreeing with the devil and disagreeing with the Holy Spirit who is convicting you that you are the righteousness of God in Christ. Sin consciousness is choosing to agree with the accuser of the brethren, the devil, who accuses believers before God day and night. Why would you want to do that? Why would you think the Holy Spirit is doing the work of the devil by accusing and convicting you of sins? That is as close to blasphemy as you can get! If Jesus Christ, and the Father through Jesus Christ, imputed righteousness to you, but you choose to impute sin consciousness to yourself, then you will live a lifestyle of condemnation even though you are the righteousness of God! 30

Enjoying The Benefits of The Resurrection Power of Jesus Do you know what follows sin consciousness? Guilt and condemnation. 2 Corinthians 3:7 calls that the ministry of death, which was engraved in letters on stone. Guilt and condemnation are at the core of the ministry of death. If you desire to have death ministered to you, choose to live with sin consciousness. Choose to try and gain your own righteousness through your own works. If however, you want to stand under the ministry of life, then repent from the dead works of the law and believe on Jesus Christ. Believe in your heart that you are the righteousness of God in Christ and then declare it! “I am the righteousness of God in Christ! The same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead lives in me, and therefore the same resurrection power is available for me to invade and demolish the impossible in His Name! Impossible, prepare to be invaded with Resurrection power!” But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation. - Colossians 1:22

What is most sad to me is that the Christian population looks no different to the unsaved population. Do you know why? Because although they live in Christ with all the benefits that brings, they have been trained and conditioned by spirits of witchcraft to disagree with the Holy Spirit and to agree with the accuser, the devil. They push light away and embrace darkness. God imputed your 31

Invading the Impossible sin to Jesus and imputed Jesus’ righteousness to you, but if you impute your sin back to yourself, you are in direct disagreement with God. To be wholly morbid about your sin and beat yourself up with your sin, thinking that it will bring you closer to God, is a deception. In fact you are just disagreeing more and more with God, telling Him that Jesus’ sacrifice was insufficient and that your own righteousness will perfect God’s handiwork. I am astounded every time Christians reason like that. Blind is not a strong enough word to describe them! The power of the Resurrection is in knowing that you are the righteousness of God. I have seen unity movements and intercession movements and spiritual warfare movements bombard the heavenlies for decades in order to spark revival. Yet, when you go to those places you find no revival there. You do find many beaten up, hopeless Christians, consumed with thinking about devils and powers of darkness, and how big the enemy is. Let those with ears listen to the Good News! The devil was disarmed at the Cross and the powers and authorities with him! Your “big enemy” has been conquered and was made into a public spectacle. Listen to the Gospel which contains the power of soteria, of provision, protection, wholeness, health, peace and rest. The Gospel is a demonstration to those who believe they are the righteousness of God. Paul went into cities and preached this message without months of fasting, no territorial mapping, and no binding and loosing bombardments. He simply preached and demonstrated Resurrection power! The powers, which were disarmed by the Cross, were shaken and there was nothing they could do about it. 32

Enjoying The Benefits of The Resurrection Power of Jesus

Abraham Never Lived Under Law Abraham lived before the Law arrived to convict people of sin. The Law only came 430 years after Abraham and was given not to save anyone but to show everyone how much we need saving. So before the law arrived, God came to Abraham, an Iraqi pagan man who worshipped idols. Abraham was old, in his seventies, his wife Sarah was aged too. God met with a pagan man living in absolute sin and manifested Himself as “El Shaddai”, which means “I am the God who is enough.” He turned up to an idol worshipper and still, despite Abraham’s sin, said, “I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great and I will make you a blessing and you will be a blessing to all nations.” Abraham didn’t argue with God! He hadn’t been to church! I am serious. It would be better for some people if they had never been to church. I am talking about churches where the pastors are friendly and flattering, yet at the same time, political and controlling. They control people with manipulation and unholy agendas. It is seriously wrong. Abraham did not say, “God how can you bless me? I have done nothing righteous! How can you want to bless me with such abundant blessing? I have still got stuff in my life that is not sorted out! How can you want to bless me Lord, I have not done one obedient thing!” Abraham had not been programmed and conned by Christian religion to believe that he needed to perform to be blessed. Scripture says that he believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. Did you notice that God didn’t promise Abraham 33

Invading the Impossible righteousness, He promised him blessing? Abraham believed that this living God desired to bless him, Abraham’s faith declared, “I believe you are a good God and that you want to bless me despite the fact that I am a pagan!” Because he believed that God desired to bless, God credited that faith as righteousness. Today, throughout most the church, it is preached that the blessing is conditional on your performance. We see a few nice gifts operating here and there, but we don’t see the power that the apostles saw, we hardly see any signs and wonders. Never mind the dead raised, nations shaken and the lost being saved by the millions. It was not through law that Abraham and his offspring received the promise that he would be heir of the world, but through the righteousness that comes by faith.

14

For

if those who live by law are heirs, faith has no value and the promise is worthless,

15

because law brings wrath. And

where there is no law there is no transgression. 16 Therefore, the promise comes by faith, so that it may be by grace and may be guaranteed to all Abraham’s offspring. - Romans 4:13-16

We are the offspring of Abraham because we are in Christ. We are in Christ by faith. But if you want to live under law, then your faith will have no value and the promise of being an heir of the world, and all the other promises, are worthless. There are many Scriptures which say the Christian has died to the law and we are redeemed 34

Enjoying The Benefits of The Resurrection Power of Jesus from the law. We are not under the law. That means no wrath and no transgression. God is not counting our sins against us. We are the righteousness of God! We can approach God with boldness! When this message gets into people’s hearts, it makes them sin less and less. When I see a Christian who is sinning a lot, I don’t have any judgment towards them any more. I understand that they simply do not really believe that they are the righteousness of God. The more you believe in who you are in Christ, the more you start living according to that faith. But if you are being forced into holy behavior by threats of hell and disapproval from God or the church, then your holiness is merely pretense and is based on control and dark demons, demons of witchcraft that will lock you into formality and hypocrisy so you can sit in church as the frozen chosen. But those who walk in the Spirit and know they are the righteousness of God will get more and more victory over sin. When they do sin, they do not go into a sin conscious pity party. When someone lives by the revelation of the gift of righteousness and makes a mistake, they can be confident before the Father, since Jesus is still their advocate, and the Holy Spirit convicts them that they are still the righteousness of God in Christ. I am not preaching this message to give anyone license to sin. It is ridiculous to even think that. Believing that I am the righteousness in Christ Jesus also doesn’t mean I am a perfect man. Of course not, I have and still do make mistakes. What it does mean is that regardless of how good I think my performance is, I understand and believe that I am the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus! 35

Invading the Impossible

Be Secure We don’t need ministry to feel important or to do things to feel that we are worth something! We are righteous! We are important! We have identity! The more secure we become in our identity in our righteousness, the more effective we will minister! In this coming wave of the glory, God will use every Christian who deals with the control spirit and gets it off their life. Those who get equipped will be ready for this revolution! Those who do not open to the message of righteousness will not be ready for it! When you find yourself caught up in condemnation and guilt; irritable and angry; completely focused on your sin and on your need to be forgiven; beating yourself up for being such a terrible Christian; doing your best to be penitent and sorry; and you go before the Father in prayer, confessing all your sin again, I believe God would ask, “What are you doing? Why aren’t you in sackcloth and ashes?” Of course your reply would be, “No God, sackcloth and ashes are what they put on under the Old Covenant.” To which He would respond,“Exactly! You are acting like you are under the Old Covenant! You are acting like I am counting your sins against you! You are acting like I am beating you up and telling you how sinful you are! You are placing yourself under the Old Covenant and you are listening to the devil! I want to remind you that he has been defeated at the Cross and he has been disarmed and the laws and rules were taken away and I made you my righteousness! You are 36

Enjoying The Benefits of The Resurrection Power of Jesus not under law and there is no transgression and no wrath! Get over yourself and come sit on my lap, look into my face and see the pure love in my eyes for you! I am happy with you! I love you! Holy Spirit, convince him again that he is my righteousness!” When Abraham and Sarah believed that they were the righteousness of God without any works, their bodies began to rejuvenate and at 90 years old, they conceived a child. Sarah was so beautiful that the Pharaoh wanted to kill Abraham and take Sarah as his wife! Now, was the Pharaoh a perverted man, lusting after a 90 year old woman? Of course not! He could have any of the beautiful woman in Egypt. No, when resurrection power begins to operate in your life, when you believe you are the righteousness of God, something begins to change! Abraham had revelation of resurrection power. Did you know that anyone who comes into a revelation of righteousness automatically goes into the revelation that you can carry resurrection power? The Bible says in Hebrews 11:19, that Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead. In other words, Abraham reasoned that if his son Isaac was sacrificed, then God could raise him. Abraham knew that he was carrying divine resurrection power. Why? Because Abraham had a revelation of righteousness far greater than most Christians have. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, so that the blessing given to Abraham may come to the Gentiles by the promise of the Spirit. Sometimes, when you believe this message, your own heart can condemn you because it still hurts when you sin. We feel like we have once again failed. The devil wants you to believe 37

Invading the Impossible that. He is the accuser who accuses us night and day, but he was defeated at the Cross and has no authority to do what he is doing. If you know the truth, then he cannot confuse you because the truth sets you free. Any time you feel condemnation rise in your heart, remember John said, “But God is greater than our heart.” (1 John 3:20) You have to take responsibility for your heart. If you feel condemned, you have to remember the revelation and reassure your own heart, until you are convinced again that you are the righteousness of God because Jesus has gone to the Father.

Justification It shall be imputed to us who believe in Him who raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead,

25

who was delivered up

because of our offenses, and was raised because of our justification. - Romans 4:24-25 (NKJV)

Justification means to be given righteousness. When God justifies you, He declares you righteous. Jesus went into the grave with a body that was saturated with our sin, once Heaven was satisfied that the price had been paid, Jesus was raised from the dead with all sin paid for. That means all our sin, past, present and future, was totally obliterated and does not exist anywhere in the universe anymore. But if we continue to impute sin to ourselves, then it still exists in our own consciousness, and will have the same effect as if it was never dealt with on the Cross. Studies have shown that every cell in your body 38

Enjoying The Benefits of The Resurrection Power of Jesus communicates with each other, and when you believe something strongly enough, that conviction is carried over into every cell. If you believe God is imputing sin and condemning you, then every cell will say, “We have to give him what he deserves, burnout, chronic disease, chronic fatigue, exhaustion, sickness.” But when you believe you are the righteousness of God then every cell will say, “This guy believes he is the righteousness of God! Let’s be as he believes.” Then the Holy Spirit agrees and says, “Yes! Let’s give him soteria: youth, energy and power to make his mortal body alive!” Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, - Romans 8:1

Notice that this scripture refers to “now”, not one day when we get to Heaven. There is no condemnation now! The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace. - Romans 8:6

The mind of sinful man is death. In the Greek, this is referring to a mindset of the flesh. The Greek word for flesh here is “sarx”, and means “human effort”. The mindset of the flesh, of human effort, of legalism through law, is death. So if I had to paraphrase this, I would say that the mind of a man set on the flesh is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace. If your mind is controlled by the Spirit of revelation that testifies that you are the righteousness of 39

Invading the Impossible God in Christ, then you know the devil is judged and your mind is at peace, since there is no condemnation. But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness.

11

And if the

Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you. - Romans 8:10-11

Paul primarily discussed Adam’s sin in Romans 5. It is Adam’s sin that brought death to the whole human race. From the time Adam sinned, every human being was suffering the effects of sin from the moment they were born. You were aging the moment you arrived. Then, at some point, you were born again and your spirit became the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. Your spirit is no longer dead, but alive, and knows God and can hear God, but your body is still suffering the effects of Adam’s sin; fatigue, sickness and aging. Now, some people want to put off living in resurrection power until the Resurrection! Read the chapter in its context! The next verse reads: “As many as are led by the Spirit are the sons of God!” He is talking about living and moving in the Spirit and having a mind controlled by the Spirit that has got life and peace. He also is talking about a physical body filled with the same Spirit Jesus had and the life that will be given to your mortal body by the Spirit! The same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead lives in you be40

Enjoying The Benefits of The Resurrection Power of Jesus cause you have been made the righteousness of God in Christ by faith. The same Spirit, the same resurrection power, the same miracle working power and the same life giving power lives in you. That power will only be manifested in and through you based on whether or not you believe you are the righteousness of God in Christ. Don’t let your mind or heart be convinced that you are anything less than perfectly righteous, perfectly justified, and perfectly accepted as God’s own child. Don’t let the resurrection power be reduced to mere historical fact, but let it rise up in you and flow through you to change the course of human history as you invade the impossible, day after day after day! I trust you can sense God’s resurrection power stirring in you as your faith in the gift of righteousness grows. I believe it is! Well done in reading this chapter. You are now ready to find out how radical and powerful God’s original vision for His church is. As you read the next chapter, you will see the origins of the church before the tributaries of the toxic traditions of man polluted the original pure stream. You will also see the desire of God to restore the church to its original glory , and even greater, to the measure of all the fullness of the stature of Christ.

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Invading the Impossible

II

The Designer Original The Book of Acts Church Acts 2 describes the birthing of the church directly from the pure pedigree and undiluted grace DNA that had as its source the resurrected Jesus. I am committed to not allowing our church to be defined as a Charismatic, Pentecostal, Word of Faith, or any other flavor of church,but as a church based on God’s blueprint. Everything else is in danger of deviating from the original. If I want to find out what the state of a river should be, I do not look at it where it is about to flow into the sea. I go back to the origin, the source of that river, before pollutants and impurities were introduced. I have been up to the source of the Umgeni River, high in the mountains of South Africa. The water at the source is crystal clear. You can drink it, it

Invading the Impossible is like champagne. But if you drink that water 50 miles down from the source, you could die! In some areas the church has become toxic, dangerous for human relationships and spiritual growth. Down through the centuries many toxic tributaries of the traditions of man have been added to the church. Some people look at what the church is today, or a hundred, or even a thousand years ago, and think that is God’s full idea of the church. No, we have to go back to the source. The origin. Go back to Acts 2 to 5, and you will see a church full of the miraculous power of God. You will see people who met daily, and they all devoted themselves to the apostles’ doctrine, to fellowship, to prayer and the breaking of bread. There wasn’t a committed core and then a big periphery of people looking in and being casual about the Kingdom. It was a people united in heart and mind, loving each other and introducing a heavenly society in the earth. They were a prophetic sign and a wonder for an age to come called: “As it is in Heaven.” That is where we are going. We are, by the Holy Spirit, patiently sequencing through supernatural stages back to the original intent, dream and dynamic of God that produces the culture and climate of the Kingdom. This climate and culture will, despite our obvious flaws and failures, (as seen in the early church, too) release an atmosphere of glory that is so sacred and awe-inspiring that every believer moves in signs and wonders.

Your Attitude Will Determine Your Altitude When looking at the level of the manifestation of the Kingdom in 44

The Designer Original your life, your attitude will determine the level of Kingdom in your life. The right attitude will enable the highest possible level God created humans to live in, but the wrong attitude will limit you to a low level experience of the Kingdom. This is a revelational key that will elevate you to the highest level of authority and power. How many of you would like to know what that attitude is? Let me rather ask, how many of you are facing impossibilities that you are trying to invade, and right now they refuse to bow their knee to you? You might even feel like bowing your knee to them! There is an attitude that will eventually cause all impossibilities to bow to you. There is a posture that positions you with a pervading power for invading. It is the attitude of the most significant person that ever walked the earth, and it is this attitude that the Bible instructs us to have. You probably won’t want to have this attitude unless you see that this attitude will release to you the highest authority and power that Heaven can give. In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset (or attitude) as Christ Jesus:

6

Who, being in very

nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; 7 rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.

8

And being found in appearance as a

man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross! 9

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave

him the name that is above every name,

10

that at the name

of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth

45

Invading the Impossible and under the earth,

11

and every tongue acknowledge that

Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. - Philippians 2:5-11

God did not humiliate Him and God did not humble Him. He humbled Himself. The attitude to have that will get you exalted to the highest place is not to grasp after the highest place, but to make yourself nothing. You would think humility should be a fruit of the spirit, but it isn’t. Humility is an attitude of the heart with which you approach every situation in life. Christ humbled Himself. He didn’t grasp after exaltation.

Equality Jesus did not grasp after equality with God because He already had equality with God. He had God’s identity, authority, character and nature. Instead, He made Himself nothing and was found in the form of a man. He came to defeat a devil that had stolen delegated authority from Adam. Satan tried to grasp after equality with God in Heaven and God threw him out of Heaven. The Bible declares in Isaiah that Satan tried to grasp after equality and lost his authority in Heaven. In the earth he tried to get that authority back, and so he went to Adam and deceived him, in order to steal Adam’s authority. He succeeded by convincing Adam to exalt himself so he could be equal to God. The foolishness of this seduction was that God had 46

The Designer Original already made Adam in His image and likeness, so Adam did not need to grasp after it. Jesus did the opposite of what the devil did, He didn’t grasp after authority, but humbled Himself. When Jesus died on the Cross, He cancelled first Adam’s authority as well as the rules and regulations that were opposed to us, and thus disarmed the powers and authorities. When He came out from the grave, He said in Matthew 28 “All authority in Heaven and Earth has been given to Me, therefore you go...” He did not say that as God, but as man. How did that happen? He gave up His authority as God in Heaven and made Himself nothing. He came to Earth as a man, with all of His divinity restricted, in order to re-inherit for man all that was lost through Adam’s fall. As a man, He did everything on your behalf so that you can walk in an authority even greater than the authority He had before the Cross. I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. - John 14:12

We are walking in a re-inherited authority, created for man through the mediation of Jesus Christ!

“But Rob, this seems so far-fetched.” It’s more real than you may think! Don’t think about how far-fetched it seems. Think about invading the impossible, and making the impossible bow its knee through the authority you have inherited from God through Jesus! 47

Invading the Impossible It is critical that you get revelation of what you already have in Christ Jesus, or you will always be grasping for something you don’t realize you already have. Every revelation is an invitation to a divine encounter to empower you to do what has been revealed to you. Revelation is something that was hidden, but is now no longer hidden. As soon as you see it, you have access to the anointing to possess it. If the church can’t see it, they will have no access to the anointing to do it. The key to equipping is the releasing of revelation to open your heart and mind to see what is yours in Christ, because when you see it, you have access into the anointing to do it. This is a progressive thing that we are doing little by little, but there comes sudden acceleration! When Jesus did miracles on Earth, He did not do them to show us what God could do. He did them to show us what ordinary human beings could do through being rightly related to God. We have the gift of righteousness, so we are as righteous as Jesus is through a free gift. That is the Gospel! That means the power of God can operate in us the same way it did in Jesus, and we can also operate in the higher authority that Jesus received after the Cross! There will be a church that will walk on water, multiply fish and bread, and open deaf ears and blind eyes! Jesus did not go through the blood and the guts and the horror of the cross only to have cute Sunday morning services. He went through that so the church could carry a re-inherited authority as men. That is our inheritance. 48

The Designer Original

Illegitimate Authority How do you explain evil? Evil is the manifestation of illegitimate authority. Evil is when a lower authority seeks to make itself equal to a higher authority. Last Adam, Jesus, who had legitimate authority, gave it up and humbled Himself and re-inherited God’s authority so we could invade the impossible! So we could bring Heaven to Earth, not so we could go to Heaven when we die. Although that is part of what He accomplished, it wasn’t the main focus of His sacrifice. On Earth as it is in Heaven is not just healing, it is for every area of life. You need Heaven to be manifest on Earth for your mental health, your marriage, your finances, your assignment and mission on Earth. For this you have been ordained and authorised to do the works Jesus did. Where evil governs, there is disease, sickness and broken lives. The church is waiting to go to Heaven to get away from evil. That is not Kingdom thinking. The Kingdom is meant to bring Heaven to Earth! I hate evil, I am tired of evil! I am tired of children being raped and abused! I am tired of the abuse of women in India and the rest of the world! I am tired of the church saying I want a comfortable life and want to go to a happy Heaven! Jesus sent us as ambassadors of the highest government in the universe with the highest authority for a reason: To walk and do as He did, and do even greater things. We are not talking about the Earth getting worse and worse and worse and the church being so weak and pathetic that we will have to escape to Heaven one day. No, we are talking about the Earth get49

Invading the Impossible ting better and better, and the government of God’s peace breaking into the Earth, and evil being toppled, and God’s Kingdom invading this Earth and manifesting God’s glory on Earth! The Holy Spirit is not leading you to sit passively at the rapture bus stop waiting to be evacuated. He is inspiring you to invade as a king and a priest on the Earth. (Revelation 5:10) The Anti-Christ and the Beast are not going to invade the Earth and take it over. Read the Book of Revelation, the church does! The power of God takes over the Earth! When you have this as your world-view, and your life goal is to see it established, then you will understand why you need more than just a little anointing to survive a little life. Life is not about surviving. Death is the one who should be struggling to survive. Death, sickness and oppression should have the struggle of existing as we destroy it with the life we live, by establishing the freedom of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. We shouldn’t be fighting off death! Death should be fearfully trying to fight us off! Advancing a Kingdom is never about holding ground! It is about taking ground! You can only take ground in an offensive mobilization, not with a defensive hideout mentality that is being fed by the traditions of man.

Changing the Course of Human History When the Holy Spirit was released from the heavenly realm and came into the upper room, into 120 scared, whimpering men, He came upon them with power beyond measure and the course of history 50

The Designer Original was changed. Those 120 men turned the world upside down. When He comes, it is for the purpose of changing history. We need to go back to that original church and that original blueprint! The river started in purity and power but through the centuries, illegitimate, toxic tributaries were introduced. Those tributaries are man’s traditions. If you want to know what church should be, go back to the pure stream, go back to the original first release. That is the church that He birthed! That is what we are going back to! That is what we are meant to have!

The Fear of God The fear of God isn’t a particularly popular teaching because of the fear of man. Peter understood this. In Acts 5:1-10, there were two people who God killed. It wasn’t the devil, God killed them. People say it is because they told a lie to the Holy Spirit, which they did, but actually, what they were killed for was not lying to the Holy Spirit, although that is serious. Abraham lied, but God continued to bless him. Abraham lied to a human king. Ananias and Sapphira lied to a man under the authority of the Holy Spirit. God killed them because of an issue of self-righteousness, an issue of self-promotion. They sold a plot of land and they lied about the amount the land was sold for because they wanted it to appear that they had given everything. That is self-promotion, self-exaltation, trying to gain man’s approval. That is self-righteous and it grieves the Holy Spirit. There was such power in this church that the Father did not want the power diminished through grieving the Holy Spirit and so Ananias and Sapphira went 51

Invading the Impossible to Heaven. I am utterly convinced of that. They were not punished since Jesus was already punished in their place. They were removed because God had global influence intended for this church and they needed the authority and the power of the Spirit without measure to topple evil and get the government of God into the Earth.

True Revival Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.

12

The apostles performed many miraculous

signs and wonders among the people. And all the believers used to meet together in Solomon’s Colonnade.

13

No

one else dared join them, even though they were highly regarded by the people.

14

Nevertheless, more and more

men and women believed in the Lord and were added to their number.

15

As a result, people brought the sick into

the streets and laid them on beds and mats so that at least Peter’s shadow might fall on some of them as he passed by. 16

Crowds gathered also from the towns around Jerusalem,

bringing their sick and those tormented by evil spirits, and all of them were healed. - Acts 5:11-16

Being revived is to be what God intended the church to be under the leadership of the power of the Holy Spirit, before the traditions of men came in and spoiled it. Don’t look at the current state of the river - don’t look at our current state. Look at the origin of the river. 52

The Designer Original Look at how the church used to operate and return to that. That is true revival.

There are Four Characteristics of True Revival: 1. Great fear of God seizes the church. This is not about those in Christ who lose confidence in God’s irreversible kindness and grace. The fear of God is an awe of God, a recognition that He opposes the proud, the self-promoting and self-righteous. This is a fear that brings a heavenly wisdom into the church and delivers the church from earthly corrupt wisdom. It sets the church free from a false gospel of legalism. It brings humility and faith in grace alone. It pervades the church with the atmosphere of the powers of the age to come, where the realm of the glory is manifested with the cloud of His wonders and the smoke of His substance! In this fear, God Almighty possesses His church as His own! The fear of God is better than the fear of man. 2. People do not join the church casually like it was a club. They don’t join out of convenience but out of holy conviction that there is a God in Heaven concerned with man’s affairs. That they are in utter need of a Savior, a person, and not a theological concept. 3. More and more men and women believed and were added. Those being added were committed. Great crowds gathered around this church. They never stopped growing whilst they were governed 53

Invading the Impossible by the Holy Spirit. 4. All were healed. We normally only look to this when we look at revival, but we neglect to look at the basis from which this flows, establishing Kingdom government. It is the absolute will of God for every church on the planet right now to be like this original! We are to be more concerned about the things of God so that evil can be toppled. This should not drive us into shame and guilt but inspire us to act while there is still time and we have breath in our bodies. This is the only internal relevance of our existence. A career is only important as long as it serves this call. We are all preaching and prophesying with our lips and our lifestyles. Human beings affect the timings of God. Every moment His plan is delayed, more people die prematurely through disease, more children are abused, more die of famine, more women are abused. If the world had more churches like this Book of Acts church, then the world would come under the power and manifestation of God and things would be changed. Romans 8 makes it clear that every believer has the Spirit within them - but that doesn’t mean to say He is on you. There is a big difference between the Spirit being in you and on you. The Spirit in us refers to fruit; love, joy, peace, etc. The Spirit on us refers to power. Jesus had the Spirit in Him when He was born. But, at the age of 30, He looked up and saw the Spirit coming upon Him like a dove. From that moment He walked out and did miracles right away. Imagine you feel a presence come upon you in such a way that you physi54

The Designer Original cally feel it land on your shoulder, like the most beautiful dove. Your whole life now is captured by a consciousness of the presence you carry. Every move you make will be made with care, since you don’t want to frighten it away. The Spirit in you is wonderful, but there is no external demonstration of power. The Spirit on you is when the demonstrations of power begin. All Christians have the Spirit inside them. Very few have the power of the Lord upon them.

Dealing with Disappointment In 2008, I lost a dear friend to cancer. I had to deal with the disappointment of having lost a battle. What do you say to a woman who just lost her husband after she had been standing in faith for him to be healed? In these moments pastors are put under pressure to offer pious platitudes which more often than not contradict the Kingdom. Initially, I didn’t say anything, I just held her. Then I told her he is in the glory realm. I told her that this is not the will of God, that the day is coming when all will be healed. Jesus is perfect theology, and if you find any doctrine that contradicts something in Jesus, then it is not good theology. Jesus healed every single man or woman who came to Him. He never grieved the Spirit that had come on Him. She said, “Rob, I agree with that.” To say that the Lord took him would mean God is an evil God who steals a wife’s husband, a family’s father. I knew his death wasn’t God’s will, and that we had been commissioned as ambassadors of Heaven to establish God’s will on Earth. The problem of our inability didn’t have anything to do with Heaven, or a lack of power from the Holy Spirit. The problem was 55

Invading the Impossible with me. Even so, I cannot afford to let disappointment haunt me, or else every single time I have to go and face that same giant who defeated me, he will stand there defiantly laughing at me, mocking me. Mocking my God and the covenant He made, which enables us to defeat that giant. I also cannot form theology based on failure and disappointments. Jesus never failed. Jesus was never disappointed by not getting a healing. I am going to find out how to equip myself and an entire church to move in the power that doesn’t fail or disappoint. In times of disappointment there is a very real pressure to lower the Covenant down to the level of our experience, but it is of paramount importance that we continue to trust God to raise our experience up to the level of the Covenant promise.

Sign Here Please I don’t want to have any more experiences of looking at a child or a mother or father that has died because of an illegitimate invader. I refuse to tolerate ideologies of failure. What we tolerate will inevitably dominate us. In 1981, we saw incurable diseases being healed and demons being driven out. In that time God called me to sign a contract about signs and wonders with a commitment and a resolve to have no other option but to see an original Book of Acts church manifested again on Earth. He has been filling in the details of that 56

The Designer Original contract ever since. I signed the bottom of an empty page in 1981. I would stay committed no matter how many people left the church, sidelined me, or rejected me. At the end of 1981, God said He would lift the power off me for a few decades until I could learn to steward this power without letting it go to my head. We are talking about a power to raise the dead and open blind eyes and multiply fish. You don’t give that to an irresponsible generation. By 1985, I was terribly discouraged and I wanted to just be a Bible teacher and not pray for the sick anymore.

Diamonds for Pebbles God sent a wonderful prophet, Bill Hammond, to South Africa who encouraged me. He prophesied over Glenda and me saying, “Son, your love has come up into the heavens and you have signed the bottom line of commitment.” That prophet knew nothing about what I had just been through. Years later, Bill Johnson said something that convicted me absolutely and reinforced this perspective, “We carry in our hands little grey pebbles, and these pebbles symbolize and represent all our strivings to gain approval in man’s eyes. One day, as Christians, God speaks to us in such an un-dramatic quiet whisper and He says, ‘I want your grey pebbles.’ We are shocked and say ‘God! These pebbles represent my security, my identity!’ God just smiles and says, ‘I want them.’ As they leave our hands, He fills our hands with the most magnificent 57

Invading the Impossible and gorgeous diamonds. Though it is painful to give away the pebbles, the pain goes away when you see what they are replaced with.” When the time for decision comes, are we going to be a comfortable charismatic church that is man-centered, holding on for dear life to our pebbles, or are we going to be a Book of Acts church, giving all our pebbles to the Father? Some will leave. They don’t want to give up their pebbles. But when we give up our pebbles and God transforms us with power, demons leave people with shrieks. The devil has to leave when God comes! People see the devil leaving and say, “See, the devil is in this place. I am leaving this church.” The devil is in most churches worldwide and will stay there, uninhibited, every Sunday, as long as God isn’t there. The demons are very comfortable in church! But when God turns up, the demons aren’t comfortable anymore, and must leave. When the awesome power of God comes, people may fall or shake or rattle and roll because God is there! Some may laugh. You get uncontrollably happy! If it is a choice between grieving the Spirit or grieving religious people, I know whose presence I treasure! I have made my choice a long time ago. I’ve signed the contract! People who leave because of signs and wonders do so with an attitude of self-righteousness! They say, “That isn’t God.” God turns up and they call Him the devil. It is very serious to accuse the Holy Spirit of being the devil. I would rather grieve over people leaving than grieve the Spirit by making them feel comfortable with the absence of God. The destinies of communi58

The Designer Original ties, churches, governments and entire nations are hanging in the balance. It depends on human beings who have been invested with the authority of the One, who inherited all authority as man on our behalf, so that in Him we are empowered, to topple evil. The starting block for getting into the attitude to invade has three steps: 1. Be possessed by the promise. If you aren’t possessed by the promise, you will be possessed by what opposes the promise. 2. Take your pebbles, the sum of your strivings and compromising to gain the approval of man, and let God have them. 3. There is an empty contract form from Heaven, sign on the bottom line and let God fill in the details through the rest of your life. If you’re willing to take these three steps, congratulations! Heaven affirms and registers your faith. Now you are ready to be a partner with God in precipitating the revolution that is gathering momentum in the Earth today. I believe you will enjoy the next chapter.

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III

The Revolution Has Begun! Overthrowing the Spirit of Religious Control There is a comfort and love in the Father’s heart that dissolves any pressure, agony, disappointment or difficulty we are facing. He is inviting us into closer fellowship, deeper into His presence, saying, “I am not lavishing My love on you because you do everything perfectly, but because I love you out of my own perfect love. I am replacing those things that hinder you with tender desires that will reassure you and comfort you. I continually affirm my love towards you and draw you to me eternally.” When this comforting heart of the love of the Father comes to use, it becomes something so wonderful because we begin to see problems as blessings in disguise. We begin to see problems as prophetic promises pointing us and positioning us to a

Invading the Impossible higher platform of the blessings of God, and promising us increased power in our weaknesses. God doesn’t need your strength. He is infinitely strong. He needs your weakness so He can perfect His power in your weakness. God will not take the strong of the Earth, those who think they will be used by the supernatural because of their great education, or because of their race or because of their great talent or wealth. God says, “I do not want anyone to steal my glory, I don’t want anyone to say God is using that man because he is so well educated, so strong, so talented.” No, God takes the weak and the foolish things of this world that He may confound the arrogant of this world. Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds. - James 1:2

We do not count it joy when we face trials because we are masochists. A masochist is someone who loves pain. I hate pain! I think it’s weird to like pain! We don’t rejoice in the pain, because our Father never caused the pain! The Father isn’t into causing you pain. The Father gives you nothing but perfect gifts. Every good and perfect gift is from the Father coming down from the heavens. He does not change like shifting shadows. Sickness is not from the Father. Cancer and flu is not from the Father. Poverty is not from the Father. Pressure on marriages is not from the Father. Discouragement and depression are not from the Father. Those things are from the spirit of this age. This world in which we are living is not Heaven. We are 62

The Revolution Has Begun! citizens of Heaven, and we must draw our resources from the supernatural every day. You can’t wait two or three days and then have a quick time of prayer. There are many days that I feel like I want to die and just go home and be with Jesus. But I tell you that even the death desire is another revelation about how much I must depend on Jesus, because I love life more than death. God hasn’t called me to die. I have already died in Christ Jesus and I am now alive unto the Father, and the life I live, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me. I am not going to give the devil the credit to live a miserable life. I am going to live celebrating life every day, because I am a citizen of Heaven! Therefore I can delight in hardship and I can delight in trials! When I find myself murmuring and complaining, the loving Holy Spirit is so quick to say, “Rob, stop it! Don’t do that! If you complain and get into self-pity, you are speaking words of negative substance over your life. You are giving voice to the devil’s will, not mine.” Even when your mouth wants to say “I can’t take it anymore, I have had enough,” say, “I am the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus, and I am more than a conqueror through Christ who loves me! Greater is He that is in me, than he that is in the world! This problem, this pressure, is a prophecy pointing me towards and promoting me to a higher level of the blessing, promising me greater power in my weakness. So I will not complain, but I will praise and exalt Him, and He will make my enemies a footstool under my feet!” Pressure on your marriage is a prophetic promise that it is God’s desire to take your marriage to another level of blessing. Sickness in 63

Invading the Impossible your body is a prophetic promise that He wants to take you to a level not just of healing, but of a lifestyle of health. Pressure on your finances is a prophetic promise that He wants to take your finances to another level of blessing and prosperity in the blessings of God. As you agree with the promises of God, you make an alliance with light and Heaven comes down and agrees with your heart. When you say, “Yes!” to the promise, God has already said “Yes!” and it is transacted into your life in power. Everything in the created universe has a purpose, even the devil and the oppression that comes from him. His purpose is to be overcome, to be placed under your feet. His purpose is to be defeated to the glory of God. So help the devil in fulfilling his purpose by overcoming and invading impossibilities in the joy of the Lord. That is why I rejoice in trails and hardships, because whatever is seemingly difficult to attain, is a prophetic promise of what I have been destined to walk in. When I defeat the impossible, God gets the glory and I get the blessing. That is a win-win situation! “Lord, any agreement I made with darkness, any complaint, any murmuring, I now repent of it in Jesus’ name! I break that alliance with darkness! I didn’t want to make it but under pressure I said foolish things. I repent of it right now Father and there is no more agreement with darkness, only agreement with light!” When we invade the impossible it is a requirement to topple illegitimate governments. I am not talking only about illegitimate governments in Sudan or Zimbabwe. God will bring those governments down in the Earth before Jesus returns. Jesus will return to sum up all history in Himself at the consummation and the climax of the 64

The Revolution Has Begun! ages. The end of the age is not the end of the Earth but is the end of the reign of evil on the Earth, when the Kingdom of Heaven will have fully come. Please don’t hear me say that we will have the full Kingdom of Heaven on the Earth before Jesus comes back. I am not saying that. We will die, we will get old. Right now, we have aging bodies, when Jesus comes back, we will have resurrected, immortal bodies never subject to aging or death again. Our earth suits will be turned into heavenly suits so we can handle the undiluted glory of God’s beauty. God’s Kingdom is invading every aspect of evil governments within politics, economics, education, medicine, etc. because Jesus is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. The privilege of co-working and co-equal reigning with Jesus Christ is ours. Jesus came and took authority back from the devil, which had been stolen from first Adam, and gave us authority to reign and rule and trample illegitimate authority. When the church rises up in the power of the Kingdom, then illegitimate authorities will be shaken! But much of the church doesn’t tolerate true prophets and apostles. Instead, the church wants to stone them! Without apostles and prophets there is a diminishing of the mystery and miracles. The church relies on nice programmes that can grow them into thousands, but few are coming out of wheelchairs, deaf ears aren’t opening, blind eyes aren’t opening and yet those powerless churches are regarded as being successful. Churches like that have got nothing to do with the Book of Acts church that had the power of God with signs and wonders. We cannot settle for anything so far below normal! 65

Invading the Impossible For too long, Christians have been sitting at the rapture bus stop looking for an excuse to get out of this evil world, while God’s desire is for them to to invade the impossible and make a difference in politics, economics, healthcare, education and every area of life. He is not calling us to come to church just to have sermons. He is calling us to be the sons of God! The salt of the Earth! You are the light of the world! You are a city set on a hill! You are the children of God! You are the ambassadors of the highest government in the universe! You are the king-priests of God! You are citizens of Heaven! You are the sons and daughters of Almighty God! That’s what you are! When the Corinthian church went into all kinds of sin and perversion, Paul didn’t put them back under Law! He said, “Don’t you know you are light and citizens of Heaven, and that you are the righteousness of God?” He never condemned them, he never manipulated them. He told them who they were! You need to tell yourself who you are. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t declare over my life that which God has said about my life. “I am the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. Greater is He that is in me than he that is in the world. I can do everything through Christ! Lord I am up to this. Yes, there are giants in the land, but Lord I can surely take the land. I can do it!” When I say those words my re-born spirit rejoices and leaps within me and my emotions and my soul come into line with truth, as I make agreement with light and disagree with darkness. Even under the most pressure and when you have just done your worst sin, that is when you need to say, “I am the righteousness of God, I agree with 66

The Revolution Has Begun! who I am in Christ. I don’t agree with my faults or my condition. I agree with my position in Christ Jesus! That is my permanent position!” There will be a toppling of evil illegitimate governments in the years ahead. And increasingly, Jesus will shake the heavens and shake the Earth and we will see righteousness like a fragrance in the Earth. The child sex trade will stop and the abuse of children will stop. Broken homes will become places of glory, perfumed with love. Husbands and wives will love each other and speak gentle words of kindness to each other. Children will respect their parents and there will be order in the home, because the Kingdom of Heaven is breaking into the Earth. As the Kingdom breaks in, the governments of darkness are dismantled and they topple. But before we topple governments out there, first of all we have to topple governments of religious control over ourselves. Do you know that much of the church in the world today is not free? It looks free, it acts free, it has an appearance of godliness, it looks holy, but inside it is under a man-made controlling government of legalism and condemnation. Human flesh, human talent, human skills andhuman programmes are controlling the church with an illegitimate religious government. We will not topple evil out there until we topple evil over us and in the church. The main thing today, is that all traces of the control government that has come over our lives from our past, needs to be brought down in order for the government of His freedom, liberty, grace, peace, 67

Invading the Impossible love and joy to fill and reign over our lives. Will you give yourselves permission to access and enter in to that government of God, and let the government of darkness break off your life? If we are to invade the impossible and topple unrighteous government, then let the government of God be established over your life today and topple the controlling government of the fear of man and religious government of condemnation. Across the Earth, a division is forming between law teaching and grace teaching. God Himself is doing it. Some of those who still preach a mixture of law and grace will first try to be diplomatic and reasonable, but under the surface they will carry hatred and envy. They will seek to disguise this in a form of godliness and theological reasoning, but in these days God is going to expose the true state of their hearts. This is not a gentle reformation. This is a true revolution. Those that do not understand this will be utterly dismayed at how quickly this revolution is about to spread. In this revolution the Gospel of Grace, as revealed in the New Covenant, will spread like wildfire. There will be unhealthy extremes on the left and the right in reaction to this. There will be voices that attempt to gain advantage by appearing to be balanced diplomats calling for calm, but God will sweep these self-appointed voices of reason aside and silence them swiftly. Those with secure, pure hearts will steward this revolution, not panicking at the unhealthy extremes or trying to prematurely balance everything. For you see, it is not the message of grace that is causing the extremes or imbalance, but it is the result of an entrenched and deeply established legalism and man’s control being forced to the surface. This 68

The Revolution Has Begun! Grace Revolution will force the mask off every form and appearance of godliness that denies the power of the New Covenant. This gospel revolution is not to be blamed for the ugliness that will appear in some. It is simply forcing the true nature of legalism into the open and stripping it of all its disguises, so that even the naive and the deceived will see how truly hideous its face really is. The camouflage of legalism is being removed, so that it can no longer harass from hidden positions that have an appearance of godliness. In these days, those who fearlessly embrace grace and remain pure-hearted and faithful, enduring hardship and refusing to be polluted by bitterness during persecution, will be partners with the Holy Spirit in seeing entire nations birthed into revival. Romans 5 speaks about the suffering we endure. The context is not the suffering of sickness; the context is suffering for the message of grace. It says, “This suffering will produce character in you, and character will build hope in you.” I am suffering for preaching this message beyond what some realize. Your reputation will suffer too, and as you embrace the grace message you will stir up every legalistic demon to alienate you and cut you off. But God will draw you closer to Him, and the refreshing hope of the Gospel will fill you with wonder, and the glory of God will become more present in your life. I am amazed at how few Christians experience the manifest glory of God daily. I experience His glory every day and it is available to every believer! You have got to reject legalism, reject the fear of man, and topple the control government of religion, of the fear of man, of condem69

Invading the Impossible nation, of legalism and of the performance pressure to do things to earn man and God’s favor. You don’t have to do a thing to earn God’s favor. He loves you unconditionally right now. You are forgiven, you are cleansed, and you are in Christ. You are a new creation! Everything from the old system of religion has passed away. The Old Covenant has passed away, it is obsolete. God says in Hebrews 6 and 7 that the Old Covenant of law is a weak and useless covenant. God said that about His own covenant! And there are still people mixing that weak and useless condemning covenant, that kills people, with the New Covenant. This is a deadly, deceiving, confusing and crippling cocktail. God is exposing it and there is no middle ground. The Gospel is the New Covenant embraced 100% and the Old Covenant rejected 100%! There is nothing in between. Revolution causes disruption. I am amazed at how some Christians want a cute comfortable life. You even hear people say that, “If you walk in grace, it means you will never be divisive.” The truth is, that if you walk in grace, it will sometimes cause division by the way some people react. We don’t want to be divisive! We love the church, but wherever Paul went, division came, because Paul would not compromise the New Covenant and allow it to be tainted with a bit of Old Covenant. Paul even rebuked Peter for confusing the gentile Christians into thinking they were now under the Mosaic Law. Do you think everyone loved Jesus wherever He went? Actually, some plotted to kill Him because they hated Him. Why did they hate Him? Was He a sinner? No, they hated Him because He exposed their hypocrisy and their superficial form of godliness. The religious 70

The Revolution Has Begun! leaders had a government over Israel that was not the government of Abraham, Isaac or Jacob, but the government of the Pharisees and Sadducees. They were controlling the people, and Jesus told them, “Your religious systems are deceiving people into thinking that you have God’s government. You put burdens and pressures on people that they cannot carry, and you do not lift a finger to help them. But my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” How many scientific breakthroughs would there be in the world today, if scientists like Newton and others just accepted the opinion of the scientists of their day? Today, there are scientists who are saying that the popular theory of evolution completely lacks any supporting evidence and current evidence clearly supports creation. They are facing tremendous opposition from the majority of the scientific community. There are many medical breakthroughs that came when certain scientists stepped out of the crowd and started a revolution. Those scientists were moved with compassion for people and because of their commitment and eventual breakthroughs, they caused a revolution that benefitted millions of people on Earth. But how many are aware that those Nobel Prize winners had to walk through the corridors of loneliness for many years? They were misunderstood and cut off by the scientific community that scoffed at them, saying, “What a load of rubbish, we have always done it this way!” But then the breakthrough came that brought a cure! Suddenly those scientists were no longer mavericks, but geniuses. They were revolutionaries that had stepped out from the crowd. Too many 71

Invading the Impossible Christians today conform to the crowd and conform to the pattern of this world. God has not called us to be like that. It is not the time to try and balance things right now. To break the control and the entrenchment of legalism there has to be a revolution and fur will fly! It will be the silly sentimental ones who are seeking to take advantage, pretending they are ambassadors of peace, but actually with selfish ambitions and agendas, who will try and calm the extremes down. Jesus never calmed the extremes down because He came in to topple a government of religious evil that was over Israel! It is not the time to calm things down! It is the time for revolution! Godly revolution is birthed out of pure hearts and pure motives because we love the church and we love people. Revolution causes disruption because things that have been unchallenged are confronted. In order to have a revolution you have to be willing to overthrow the established government, one which has been seen as normal for too long. God is raising up revolutionaries and fighters and they will stir the sleeping masses to their rights and to their privileges. There are consequences which are horrible and ugly and the revolutionaries get the blame, but the people who could have made the change much earlier, before the discontent, are the ones who should get the blame. Jesus literally went into the temple cracking a whip and kicking over tables. Now that is revolutionary! Jesus should not have got the blame for speaking the amazing words of authority He spoke to the Pharisees. Paul should not have got the blame for the tough words he had to speak, but elements of the religious establishment wouldn’t change, desiring to keep the people in bondage. So God 72

The Revolution Has Begun! stirred up revolutionaries and they confronted things that had gone unchallenged for so long, and the government that had been accepted for so long. Christians live like sleeping, mesmerised and hypnotised sheep in the pews while the control of man and the hierarchies of man control them, hindering them from living in the glory and power of the God of miracles. Religious systems in the Earth are coming down. Babylon is coming down. You say, “Gee Rob, I’ve got enough problems in my life, I don’t need to read this stuff, too!” You should read it! You are a king-priest of God! Revolution is not dressing the old up as different. Revolution is not putting an overhead up and singing a few happy-clappy choruses and saying “Hallelujah we’re so free.” That’s not revolution! That is dressing the old up as the new with an appearance of freedom. Revolution brings radical, cultural transformation. The culture of the kingdom isn’t to cater to your preferences. It is to cater to the King’s preferences. It’s not a South African or an Aussie culture. It’s not a Chinese culture. It’s the culture of the Kingdom of Heaven, of the eternal age. It is God breaking in from the heavenlies to topple ungodly, illegitimate governments in the Earth that oppresses the people! There has been a form of religion, a form of godliness, that has been over the church for centuries. It is primarily controlled by programmes, focused on keeping the people happy for the wrong reasons. It is a false happiness. It is not the happiness and liberty of the Spirit of God. 73

Invading the Impossible There are three common characteristics of the control government that God is overthrowing in our day. The prophets in the church worldwide have had a hard time in the church in the last 10 years. Notice that it does not say in Ephesians that the church is built on the foundation of the pastor or the evangelist or the teacher. It says the church is built on the foundation of apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus as the cornerstone. Evangelists, pastors and teachers must build on the foundation of apostles and prophets. Some say “Oh, those are the prophets of the Old Testament and the apostles of the New Testament.” That is not true at all, not even vaguely. We are not building on dead prophets and dead apostles because Christ Jesus as the chief cornerstone is not a dead Christ. I don’t need a dead Christ to build on. I need a living, speaking, vital, vibrant Jesus speaking to me every day. True apostles and prophets are godly people who hear God audibly and move in miracles, signs and wonders. Don’t let anyone tell you they are an apostle unless they move in signs and wonders, understand the revelation of grace, and can build a church. Too many people call themselves apostles today. Don’t let anyone call themselves a prophet unless they can preach the Word of God with revelation and power that breaks the control spirit off the church! God doesn’t want to overthrow pastors, He wants pastors to lead the church! But pastors must come under the true liberating influence of apostles and prophets. 74

The Revolution Has Begun!

The Three Characteristics of Illegal Government 1. Supernatural manifestations of the power of God is seen as frightening or as distasteful, because it cannot be fully explained or understood. Religious government argues that God would not do anything that we don’t understand. “It must be the devil!” they say. They feel the supernatural would not make the people happy, but would make them unhappy and uncomfortable, so they dismiss the manifestations of the miraculous. God often does things we do not understand, and we know it is God simply by the beauty of His presence. If there is a miracle taking place and the beauty of His presence is there, then it is God even if we don’t understand. Laughing, falling, crying, demons coming out, the control government pushes that out because it doesn’t understand it. The grace revolution is awakening in the hearts of people a hunger for supernatural encounters with God’s glory and presence. There is such a hunger burning in people’s hearts, they are desperate for the presence of God. Wherever we go and advertise a, “Glory and Grace Conference” people are lining up because they are desperate to get into that presence! They are tired of just being under the principles of Bible information from the teacher. They want to encounter God! The control government is underestimating this to their own detriment. 75

Invading the Impossible 2. The control government is legalistic. Some openly teach that Christians are under the Law of Moses. Others are not that blatant, but nonetheless they insinuate that we get God to bless us by our performance or our holiness, (an Old Covenant truth) rather than Jesus’ performance on our behalf. (a New Covenant truth) They argue that obedience brings blessing and disobedience brings curse, manipulating believers by fear, (of punishment, curse, and losing right standing before God) to get them to perform according to perfect standards they don’t conform to themselves. In this way they control the church, never releasing the people into the confidence of the assurance of the New Covenant. Often, there is a call for a balance between grace and law, between Old and New. But truth, biblical truth, is not held in the tension or balance. Truth is held in upward layers of higher and higher reality. If you touched the leper under the Old Covenant you were declared unclean, if you touch the leper under the New Covenant, the leper is healed. Both realities are true, but one is simply a higher truth than the other. You cannot balance these truths, or you will neutralise them both. You cannot balance law and grace. One is a higher truth than the other. Watch out for the call for balance.

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The Revolution Has Begun! 3. The control government has hierarchies in place. It is so clear in the New Covenant that Jesus Christ has removed the distinction between priests and laity. So for some people to dress up with priestly clothes and call themselves priests, while other members are laymen, is totally ungodly. It is a violation and a blasphemy against the Cross. Jesus died on the Cross to birth a royal priesthood, a Christian church where every believer is a royal priest! The control government doesn’t want you to know that, because they want you to see them as the professionals who have the hotline to Heaven. According to them, you can’t really hear God properly. “You don’t need to read the Bible. We will read it for you.” Until recently one control government preached in Latin every week to masses who couldn’t even understand the language! Pentecostals and Charismatics have a worse government than the one I have just described. It is more dangerous because it is more subtle. You live in fear of the pastor because he is the big guy. He is up on a pedestal. He is the man. You don’t cross him. He is the guru and they make sure you know that. It may not always be immediately obvious but it will become abundantly clear when you cross one of their invisible lines. The Grace Revolution has freedom in place with strong, gifted leaders leading the church. A grace church has strong leaders who lead with boldness and the fear of God, they are taking people on a journey of pursuit of a God breathed vision! 77

Invading the Impossible Here’s the difference. In the control model of government, your primary role as a member is to serve the leaders. In the Grace Revolution, the primary role of a leader is to empower the people to know God, to hear God themselves, to dream for themselves, to have visions from Heaven for themselves and to respond to the Holy Spirit’s initiatives to lead them to invade the impossible. Do you know what they do to revolutionaries if they catch them? What did they do to Martin Luther and the martyrs who stood against religious governments down through the ages? Were they divisive people just out to cause trouble? No, they loved the masses that were on their way to hell. They stood and said, “This is not true, this is wrong, we have to change this.” They were not reformers. We have called them reformers but that is too tame a word. They were revolutionaries. Most of us could not stomach radical people. They were wild, and today we live in the benefits of their sacrifice and boldness. We cannot afford to let that momentum be lost! We cannot leave ministry to a professional priest, because if you do, then the powers of darkness will come at them and try and make them give in to become a controller. People must be prepared to rise up and topple this false government of religious control. It is about the Father’s love, liberty, healing love, and beauty coming into the Earth! Freedom in the church will be commonplace. We need to see that in our dreams, and keep it in our visions. Now we can speak in 78

The Revolution Has Begun! tongues freely, but less than 100 years ago, we would have been put to the stake. Today the war about speaking in tongues is mostly over, but there is revolution right now about law and grace, about freedom from religious government over the church and the people of God.

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IV

Lifting

the Limitations!

A Mirror Mentality vs. A Window View Breaking off control If we are to invade the impossible, then the power that enables us to do the impossible must first invade us. When the power to do the impossible invades us and we come to another level in the anointing, then you no longer struggle with things like you did before. There is a difference between a one-inch firecracker and a nuclear bomb. A cracker makes a bit of a bang and there is a little smoke. You can hurt an insect with a cracker but with a nuclear bomb you can have a much bigger impact! God wants to take us up to a higher level of power and anointing, so that things we couldn’t do before will be

Invading the Impossible easy. I have a sneaky suspicion that to Jesus, raising the dead, opening blind eyes or deaf ears, and causing the paralyzed to walk was not difficult. Did you ever see Him sweating? “Go your way - your faith has made you whole.” He just did miracle after miracle and there was no struggle involved. Why? Because He was operating in the highest level of power! This power is also available to us. We are going to come up to that level, but in order to do that, we need to overcome the control spirit. The control spirit is the greatest hindrance and causes the greatest restriction when carrying the mighty anointing of God. If you study revivals, you will find they happened when the church threw off, or toppled, the governments of control brought through religion, and moved into the freedom of God. After that, the power of God rushed in and whole communities got saved. Look for example at the Welsh Revival which happened in 1903. Wales was a very hardened religious community, very arrogant, proud and hypocritical. A young man called Evan Roberts began to cry out to God, “Lord, if the church will bend and bow then you will come and manifest Your power.” He sought the presence of God which finally came into manifestation in 1903. In just 2 or 3 years the glory of God literally filled Wales and hundreds of thousands were born again! Even hardened miners were born again. They had to retrain the donkeys they used in the mines, because the donkeys had learnt to obey the miners’ very coarse language. Now that these hardened sinners were getting saved their language had changed to wonderful words of praise. There were serious drinking problems in Wales, too. When revival happened, pubs 82

Lifting the Limitations! closed down! Soccer clubs closed down because the players lost interest in football and were going to church every night instead. They were praising God, people would fall and tremble under the power, repent and call out to God to save them. These are historical facts! It happened in the Azusa Street Revival and in North-Western India, where across an entire state, school children were saved by their thousands because God came and covered the whole area with His glory presence. Why? Because they broke the religious control. If you go to those places today, it is dead again because religion is back in control. It is dead because of an absence of the supernatural. A song they used to sing during the Welsh Revival went: “This old world around me sage, thinks I’m drunk and mad with rage. Drunk - doubtless yes. I am drunk and odd but drunk with the wine of God.”

In 1903, the Welsh Revival was singing about being drunk with the wine of God! In almost every revival, joy, laughter and happiness has broken out, because God broke in and man’s control was broken off. If you are under somebody’s religious control, even a husband, a wife or child’s control, a control that is manipulative and which intimidates your freedom for long enough, then you also become a controller without realizing it. If we want to walk in a greater level of the anointing, then we 83

Invading the Impossible have to ask the Father to remove all forms of control from our lives altogether. Breaking out of religious control won’t make you a rebel, it will actually make you more accountable and obedient to God, more in love with Jesus and in love with His church. It doesn’t make people divide and disintegrate, it brings them together and cultivates life, security and victory over sin. Best of all, it brings the glory and power of God!

Losing Hope This form of religious control occurs when we lose hope. The Bible says in Proverbs 29:18, that people who lack vision throw off restraint. Vision gives us hope. When the true gospel is preached with heaven’s vision instead of man’s vision, we receive hope. With the absence of hope we begin to grow careless. Never be afraid and don’t get paranoid about the control spirit. The control spirit tries to control you with fear. It wants to turn you into a controller, by making you believe you are free from control as long as you are in control. I have had people walk into my church for the first time and say; “Great church but you need to stop doing this and that.” They are trying to control everything around them, including our meetings! Those people don’t have any authority or credibility with me, yet they come with their superior attitude and try to manipulate me. Now someone can come to me with a question, suggestion or insight, and I will listen, and thank them for their advice and concern. This control spirit dominates either with a controlling 84

Lifting the Limitations! arrogance that imposes on you, making you feel forced and pressured to do something you are not comfortable with, or it can operate with flattery, telling you how wonderful you are. You think they are kind and loving, but before you know it, they have obligated you to do something for them. When you are comfortable with the freedom of the Holy Spirit in you, and you walk in the Spirit and you listen to the Spirit, you will discern the spirit of control as soon as they open their mouth! One of the fruit of the Spirit is self-control. People say that means, “I don’t shake, I don’t fall”. Read the context! You are under the anointing of a supernatural Spirit. Decent and orderly is what God decides is decent and orderly. Paul has just talked about the works of the flesh, drunkenness, gossip, slander, divisiveness, and so on. Those are works of the flesh, not shaking and laughing in the freedom of the glory of God. Those that live in the Spirit will not satisfy the lusts of the flesh, because one of the fruit of the Spirit is selfcontrol. In other words I don’t have to satisfy the desires of the flesh because I am in control of myself. But not me by my own power, instead, by the fruit of a supernatural person called the Holy Spirit. I don’t feel tempted when there is all sorts of sin going on. I have self-control because the awesome person of the Holy Spirit lives on the inside of me. But when it comes to the control spirit, we are not talking about self-control over sin. We are talking about people controlling other people. Husbands can sometimes control their wives just by meanness and an attitude of deprivation. Wives may control their husbands with a system of rewards or by withholding 85

Invading the Impossible rewards, including physical intimacy. If you are controlling people in any way, then you need to stop it. Leadership is about inspiring change, not manipulating behaviour. The control spirit ruins relationships, and the one relationship it is after is your relationship with your heavenly Father. If it can ruin the way you relate to God, then power starts disappearing out of your life. The biggest leverage man has to control the church is the law. Legalism manipulates people to behave by laying down rules and regulations which come with punishment if they are violated. When you relate to God by law, you will always be in a fading glory. However, when you are full of hope, it will be difficult for people to be able to control you. I am a prisoner of hope! I am a captive of hope! I have been handcuffed to hope! I have been arrested by hope! I believe in these days the Father has plans for the church that are so awesome! That gives me hope. When you are moving in the miraculous, people put you in demand! There are a number of equipping fathers nurturing and coaching a new generation, to move in the supernatural. I am thrilled with that hope! Someone who tries to stop me doing that cannot control me because I am a prisoner of hope. Once you lose hope, you surrender to the control spirit and you become a controller and you limit the power of God operating in your life. 86

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Humility Humility is your greatest weapon against the control spirit. If you live in humility, you can never come under the control spirit. Humility is the mighty weapon that will easily keep you free from the control spirit, but that humility must not be false humility. False humility comes from a fear of rejection which is a false submission. You are just humbling yourself out of fear of being rejected or disapproved of. Humility is a very powerful position of confidence and security before God that sets you free from the fear of man, because true humility comes from God’s wisdom. There is too much false humility in the church. “I don’t want to be successful. I don’t want to be blessed. I just want to be humble.” Rubbish! Jesus was successful and He was humble. Moses split the Red Sea with his rod and yet he was the most humble man on the Earth at that time. Humble people are bold and confident in the mighty power of God, and they cannot be manipulated by the controlling spirit. But where did they get their humility from? From the wisdom of God. If you do not have God’s wisdom, then you cannot be truly humble. You have just learned the lingo that sounds humble. But if you have God’s wisdom, then you have discernment about the control spirit and you can deal with it in true humility before God. Who is wise and understanding among you? Let him show it by his good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom.

14

But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish

ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the

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15

Such ‘wisdom’ does not come down from heaven

but is earthly, unspiritual, of the devil.

16

For where you

have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice.

17

But the wisdom that comes from

heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere.

18

Peacemakers who sow in peace raise a harvest

of righteousness. - James 3:13-18

“Who is wise and understanding among you ... by deeds done in humility that comes from wisdom ... selfish ambition in your hearts” - Not in your head but in your heart – “Do not boast about it ... Such wisdom does not come from heaven” - He is being sarcastic now by saying, “such wisdom.” “Oh, it’s just a bit of envy Rob. They need to be controlled.” Well, let’s see how innocent it is – “For where you have envy ... you have every evil practice.” I am so convinced that revival is going to manifest in every nation on the planet and that the shape of the church is going to change so completely over the next few years. It is going to accelerate so fast, but you will never see signs and wonders, through your life or in your life, unless you have it as a prophetic hope in your heart. Unless you see by the eyes of your heart, the prophetic hope of the miraculous, of God invading cities and winning millions at a time! Unless you see that in your heart, you will never see it with your real eyes. 88

Lifting the Limitations! This vision is given to those who are the prophetic people - who are prisoners of hope, captured and arrested by hope. When you throw off God’s ambition for you, and abandon God’s agendas and adopt your own agendas and your own ambitions, then you have, “selfish ambitions.” Anything that isn’t God’s ambition or God’s agenda for you is a selfish ambition, or a self-centered ambition. I meet people from time to time, who try to manipulate and control me by their religious ambitions. They arrive in the church with religious agendas, and they try to hi-jack me to their cause. Controllers like to get you so focused on one aspect of the Kingdom that you become unbalanced. God says preach the Kingdom! Don’t just take on marriage counselling, or healing, or kingdom economics. Embrace the Kingdom! Otherwise you get into selfish ambition, and aim to make your name great in the church through this cause you’ve got. Selfish ambitions are not the wisdom from above and are never humble in nature. In them there is no life or liberty or freedom. There is just pressure to conform and perform. If you allow selfish ambitions, then you allow the control spirit, and the power will decrease in the church. You can go to church after church today, and sadly you need a microscope to find the anointing because there is so much control. I have even tried to control God. “God, I have a plan for Hong Kong. I have a plan for Australia and a plan for Africa.” Then I try to get God to bless my plan and after a lot of tears and sweat and frustration, I find that my plan is not happening! So I say, “God! What are you doing?” He says, “It’s not my plan. Find my plan. It is already blessed. When you find my plan, it has got my resources 89

Invading the Impossible and my power behind it. Your plan only has you behind it!” If you step out of God’s plan then Heaven stops providing resources to you and stops empowering you. That is when you try to control people around you. You try and gain resources and power from them because you have lost the vision of God and have stepped into your own agenda and ambitions, that heaven isn’t backing. You see TV evangelists come on air and say, “If you don’t back us, we’re going off the air!” Let them go off the air! That is a control spirit! You need to go off the air if you have to beg for money. That is a good sign that you are into selfish ambitions. You can challenge and inspire people to give and appeal to their consciences to give, but if you have to say things like, “If you don’t give then we are going off the air!” then you are manipulating Christians. In our lifetime so far, we have given hundreds of thousands of dollars away for the purposes of the Kingdom. I am into generous giving. But I like to give to people who say, “We are going somewhere. God is blessing us. We are enjoying God.” Some use the pictures of starving children to manipulate and control your emotions. I could come out every week and show you pictures of starving children around the world and pump your emotions and get you to give every week. In Australia I would get letters across my desk all the time from organisations and fundraisers, asking whether they can come to the church and campaign. I always say, “No! No! No! You are not coming and manipulating my congregation. I spend all my time trying to teach my congregation how not to be manipulated and controlled but to be led by the Spirit of God!” The minute we give 90

Lifting the Limitations! up our selfish ambition, the Holy Spirit takes over and He can raise the dead, He can win the nations, He can do signs and wonders, His glory can cover this world! I know I have fallen prey to the control spirit when God has to tell me, “Son, you are trying to get me to do something that isn’t my plan, and isn’t in my timing, and isn’t my way or my agenda. I want you to do this…” I can’t help but repent with joy and before I know it, I find the power comes! The best thing to do if you’ve got control spirits over your life, when you are trying to control God or other people, is to just repent with joy. Say, “Oh Father, I harmonise my heart with Heaven. I realign my ambitions and agendas with you. I repent of the control spirit and repent of my agendas and of trying to force my way on people. I humble myself and take your agenda and your ambition.”

And Then the Power Comes! When you lose hope you come under a control spirit and abandon God’s agenda and ambitions for your own selfish ambitions and agendas. Even though they may look religious, if they are not God’s agendas and ambitions, they are selfish ambitions. When you accept what is unacceptable you settle for a lie and that is when you allow that lie to defeat you, define you and describe your life. Lies are definitely not the landscape and geography of your future. We have legal access to walk in greater manifestations of the anointing until we come to the fullness of the measure of the stature of Christ. 91

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Call to Greatness God never called us to be average. I hate average! I puke on average! An average kiss is like kissing my sister. It is not the same as kissing my wife. When I kiss my wife Glenda, there is a buzz! We were never called to be mediocre. We were called to be great men and women of God! The Bible does not call us great because we’re perfect. The Bible reveals great men and women whose imperfections and failures are clearly recorded. I sometimes wonder if God, is not ashamed of things we do? David committed adultery and murder, and Jacob and Abraham lied No. God does not equate greatness with perfection. Men and women’s imperfections are clearly recorded in the Bible, but instead of disqualifying them, it revealed God’s greatness and perfection through them. Don’t measure your greatness by people’s response to you. Some people are so preoccupied with smallness that they cannot even see you are on a journey to greatness. All they see is your history. You have to hear God speak to you about greatness! I hope you have. If you haven’t, it is not because He hasn’t spoken, because He is speaking to every believer about greatness, and that includes you! God spoke to me in 1981 about greatness, but not every person around me heard Him speak. Some don’t believe He said it to me. Some people, like Joseph, the son of Isaac, told people about God’s dream for greatness. To have ambition for greatness in God is not selfish ambition but the calling of God! You heard God tell you to do great things, but the people around you probably never did. Like Joseph, you tell them about the great things and they want to throw 92

Lifting the Limitations! you into a pit. Some people don’t want you to become great, because that will embarrass and threaten them, so they will seek to seduce and intimidate you to abandon the expectation of greatness and conform, to just be ‘normal’. When faith leaps in your heart that God’s will for you is greatness, and that God made a covenant to commit to your greatness, then you begin to rise above the control spirit. God is delivering you and me from diminished dimensions. God is able to expand and enlarge the dimensions of Christ’s miracle ministry through you. No matter what your career is, no matter your vocation or calling of God, every Christian has been called by God to do the works that Jesus did, and greater. The church today has not yet operated the way that the church operated in the Book of Acts. We find it difficult to conceive that we can even do these things, but God has predestined us into this greatness by giving us all the resources we need in the Holy Spirit. Demons have no authority to dictate your position or level of God’s calling in your life. A small boy’s lunch offered to Jesus was not diminished, but multiplied thousands of times. So also with our lives offered to Him, no matter how insignificant we are, Jesus’ anointing on us displays His divine dimensions. God has not called you to look in a mirror but through a window. A mirror only shows you what you are now. Don’t limit yourselves to what you are now. The mirror should become a window that you can look through, to the power of what you are to become through God’s promises and His calling and His hope. It is the anointing that empowers you to see beyond the mirror. Lack of hope will dry you up, dwarf you, diminish you, decline you, deprive 93

Invading the Impossible you and dilute you, but the anointing will enhance you, elevate you, enlarge you and excite you.

Five Symptoms of a Mirror Mentality If you don’t look through a prophetic window of hope, but see what you are right now and find it discouraging, you will become vulnerable to a control spirit. Church pews around the Earth are filled with this mentality, and sadly there are more people enslaved to this mentality in the church than in the world. The control spirit has turned people who should have been great into small, little, diminished people with no hope. But we cannot bring the control governments all around us down until we have brought them down in our own minds. The following symptoms will help you recognize and get free from a mirror mentality in your own mind. 1. Prejudice We pre-judge everybody. If they are not like us, do not look like us, smell like us, or dress like us, we judge them. We think unity is uniformity. Rubbish! Unity is diversity! People under a control spirit expose themselves only to a smaller inner group of people that are just like them: Inflexible and who don’t think outside of the box. Around the world today there is no excuse for ignorance anymore. You know what worries me about movements and denominations? They feed only off themselves. It is spiritual incest. They are basically just clones of the religious control system they are under. Generally (but with 94

Lifting the Limitations! some wonderful exceptions) it is, sadly, easy to tell who is a Baptist and who is a Methodist and who is a Pentecostal. What is that? It is a control spirit operating through a religious sub-culture. Jesus kept the people guessing! “Who is this person? Does the Messiah drink wine? He just did! Who is this guy? He doesn’t wear religious clothes!” People should never be able to say; “You are a Charismatic, you are a Pentecostal, you are a Baptist.” No, they should say “Who the heck are you?!” because you are not living in a religious sub-culture, but in the dynamic dimensions of Kingdom culture. Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world. This world has a patterned idea of ‘church’ that Christians should most definitely not conform to. 2. Small Expectations and Narrow-Mindedness This is a condition that resists change for self-centred reasons. Some people want the church to stay small, so they can stay in their small circle and just be nice to each other! Yes, we can have relationship, but we can be thousands and still have relationship! The early church had thousands and yet they were relational and loved each other because they met in small groups. 3. Suspicious, Conservative, Nervous and Cautious I remember the first time I went into a church in 1977 after just being saved out of Hinduism. I didn’t want to get deceived again and I was very cautious. The first meeting I went into, everyone started singing in tongues and I said to Glenda, “We are out of here! These people 95

Invading the Impossible are weird!” But something in my heart said, “Wait, just discern the atmosphere.” I discerned it and I realised that God was there! Then I looked at one man and he had his face up in the air and I saw the way he was worshipping God and I thought, “That man is sincere, I am staying.” I watch people come into our meetings and I watch them as the power of the Spirit of God starts moving. They tense up, insecure and afraid. Why? They have been under a control spirit. Remember the first time you went into a ‘wild’ meeting! Isn’t it sad that we aren’t talking about non-Christians here? We are talking about people who have been Christians for years and yet are suspicious, nervous and cautious. It is a control spirit! 4. Easily Disappointed and Easily Offended Pharisees are easily offended! So when you are around a Pharisee, they will smile a lot, they will make you a cake and be nice to you but you can’t say anything that disagrees with them, because they will get offended. So what do Christians usually do? They say nothing that disagrees with them! What’s just happened? They have just been controlled and they allowed it to happen to themselves. You are reducing the effect of the supernatural on your life every time you allow someone to control you. 5. Short-sightedness They have very little focus on God’s purpose for their life. They live life short-sightedly. They make decisions based on how to get out of pressure now. So they bargain long-term success for short-term relief of pain. The decisions they make set them up for disqualification of 96

Lifting the Limitations! destiny. They want to get out of debt, so instead of trying to get out of debt by God’s economics, they use worldly principles to get out of debt, and so get into more and more and more debt. Then they will be making excuse after excuse blaming the devil for their increasing debt. Adam blamed it on the woman and Eve said it was the devil that made her do it. Always excuses! Here is the good news for those with a mirror mentality and under a control spirit. When Gideon was dwarfed, diminished and diluted because he defined himself by what he saw in the mirror and became afraid, he hid in a winepress. He was under a control spirit. He was dominated and he was intimidated. His destiny had diminished to hiding in a winepress because he was afraid of the Midianites. The angel of the Lord appeared to him in this dwarfed state and told him; “The Lord is with you mighty warrior!” The Lord was not looking in the mirror. The Lord was looking through the prophetic window! Gideon’s answer was typical of someone with a mirror mentality! “If the Lord is with us, where are the signs and the wonders?” Does this sound familiar? Hopelessness brings people under the control spirit. The angel said to Gideon; “Go in the strength you have and deliver Israel out of the Midianites’ hand.” Here, God calls Gideon to invade the impossible and throw off the Midianites’ control. He wanted to take this man, a diminished dwarf under the control spirit with a mirror mentality, and help him look through a prophetic window into greatness and bring great deliverance to a nation! How many Christians are sitting in a winepress? Gideon’s answer to that great call to invade 97

Invading the Impossible the impossible was “How can I ... my clan is the weakest!” Gideon was focused and locked into a control spirit by a mirror mentality. He was telling the truth about himself in his current condition. God came and smashed the mirror and opened the window to Gideon’s destiny. That is the trouble with the church. You have got people who know the Bible back to front and can quote the whole Bible, yet they have never had an encounter with a supernatural God or had heavenly voltage go through them. You cannot do the supernatural without divine encounters! God did not anoint Gideon according to what Gideon thought of himself, but according to what God thought of Gideon, a mighty man of courage. He anointed Gideon on the level of the prophetic window of his destiny, which was to deliver a whole nation. If you want to live small in a winepress, then you can keep looking at your mirror and the control spirit will limit you from living in the limitless anointing. Or you can let God come and smash your mirror and open the prophetic window and show you your destiny, so you can do the impossible! But where people are living under a control spirit, they do not even see the need for increased manifestations of power. God anointed you and me according to how He sees us, not according to how we see ourselves. If you look at the mirror of the law, you will only see a limiting picture of yourself. It will bring you under a control spirit. But if you look out of the window of grace, the control spirit will lift off you and you will be able to walk in the 98

Lifting the Limitations! anointing of power that you did not even know you already had, to do the impossible. Now that you have been convinced of the futility of a mirror mentality, and have been encouraged to let God smash it, you are ready to deal with the retarding, regressive mentality that restricts advancement and which seeks to perpetuate the pains of your past, into your future. Get ready to let God set you free from your regrets, and activate His agendas and assignments for your advancement. He is summoning you to new horizons without being anchored to the negative baggage of your past. I believe the next chapter is going to be very helpful.

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V

No Regrets! Regret is an absolutely useless emotion! There is nothing positive or helpful about regret at all. Regret torments the mind and chains the soul to the past. Have you ever tried to drive a car forwards while constantly looking backwards? Regret makes us relentlessly re-live our past, plagued with the useless question, “What if?” or the limiting lament, “If only!” What if I studied more, or spent more time with my family? If only that divorce didn’t happen? What if I took that other job opportunity or never had that affair? This kind of selfinterrogation only undermines your ability to see that God desires to take you into a future of liberating newness. You won’t even see the land that has been promised to you. You won’t have a passion or a desire to even try to invade and take what is yours through divine promise and destiny.

Invading the Impossible There are only two ways to deal with regret, and you cannot deal with it by going back into your past, because there is nothing you can do about your past. Your past is powerless unless you give it power by going back and re-visiting it. Instead, attack regret by going and doing something about your future! Now is the time to see the power of your future! The second way to deal with regret, is to get a bigger picture of who God is. God works all things together for good to those who love Him, and are called according to His purposes. God can turn a terrible divorce into an instrument for your good. God can use that, or anything else in your past, to make you a greater person than you have ever been before! So, by holding on to regret, you are just delaying, or putting off altogether, that transformation. In the economics of God’s redemptive kindness, when His grace fixes your wings which were broken in the past, those same wings will then be able to fly far higher than before they were broken! “What-if?” is a question we do not know the answer to! We aren’t here to answer all the “What if’s” either. We are here to do the will of the great King of Kings. We are going to be praised and rewarded by Him for our impact on this planet. We need good marriages and families. It is part of reflecting the Kingdom. But if that is our main objective or comprehension of the Kingdom, then we need an expansion of our consciousness! When Joshua led Israel to invade the Promised Land, God gave them promises to inherit. They were given the geographic dimensions of the land that God had already given to Abraham. They were given authority to clear the land of all foreigners and giants. We too have a Promised Land: To see cities shaken 102

No Regrets! with the glory of God! Before he died, Joshua said, “Everything God has promised me, He has given me...” Yet, there was still much of the Promised Land, Israel didn’t occupy at that time. Sadly, when the people stopped invading and started settling down, the signs and the wonders started diminishing. As soon as you put up the white flag and say, “I’ve had enough!” the signs and the wonders will stop and the presence of God will seem far away. Five hundred years after Joshua, David came and conquered the entire geographic area of the Promised Land. This is a staggering scenario. Think about it. The awesome agenda of God to invade the Promised Land was put on hold because of the absence of appropriate human partnerships of faith and fortitude. The Almighty God had to wait 500 years for a David to emerge, a man whom God honored by calling him a man after His own heart. God has been waiting for you! That is why you are reading this book! The day has come when more and more of God’s people, with hearts like David, are emerging. They refuse to settle for partial conquests and partial promises fulfilled, refuse to complain that the miracles aren’t happening as fast as they want. A people who will not go back to Egypt, and who will not settle for less than the fulfilment of God’s promises. Keep fighting! Keep advancing! The purpose of war is to occupy territory, so that the occupation becomes a platform for further advancement. If we are not advancing, we cannot keep what we’ve got! If you lose your fighting spirit, how will you guard and protect what you’ve got? We must learn to not only keep what we’ve got, but to always advance! This is normal Christianity! Everything else is a 103

Invading the Impossible pale shadow of the original. A number of years ago, God began to wean Glenda and me from everything we find our identity in, that is not Jesus. He told me that in every area where we find approval from man instead of Him, He will begin to establish our identity in Him and Him alone. I said, “But God, I am Rob Rufus - I know you! My identity and approval is in You alone!” He said, “We’ll see.” Sometimes we live with delusions about ourselves regarding the source of our sense of value and identity, and this delusion affects our destiny if we don’t allow God to deal with it. As pastors, for instance, we are sometimes deceived into thinking our identity is based on the recognition that comes from leading a great church. We have to be on our guard against the political spirit, which constantly seeks to seduce us with enticements and offers of positions and prestige, in exchange for prostituting our heavenly calling and commission to the subtle culture of coercion and control, that conforms us to the plans of man rather than the plans of God. This is a very real challenge that takes divine wisdom and humility to overcome. If you truly desire to invade the impossible and experience unprecedented miracles and fruitfulness, you will have to resist the political spirit! If you burn with a longing to continually respond to Christ’s constant invitations to ever expanding horizons of influence and impact, you will have to accurately diagnose, discern, and dismiss the political spirit. You will have to overcome the fear of being misunderstood. You will have to find grace through times of loneliness and pain. You will definitively need the comfort of His tender 104

No Regrets! presence to protect your heart from the poison of bitterness that will try and pollute you, strangle your dreams, and suffocate hope. In all these times, Jesus is gloriously and abundantly sufficient. Popularity is overrated, especially if its price is the loss of peace and the conscious awareness of divine endorsement! There is an addiction far more dangerous than crack, cocaine or heroin, and it is destroying people’s destinies more often than is realized. If you want to invade the impossible, then you must be set free from your need of man’s approval. In this process of weaning, I felt increasingly abandoned and sidelined, but God spoke audibly to my heart and said, “Son, man is not side-lining you. I am! It is me who is taking you out of the loop to re-position you for future inheritance and jurisdiction to influence nations.” Our Father wants everyone who has been going through a pruning and weaning process in the last few years, which has caused much perplexity and pain, to understand that it is God’s grace that has been sidelining you to position you for His purposes, free from political prisons. When this feels unbearable at times and you are tempted to think, “Slavery is better, let’s go back to Egypt. We can live without the signs and wonders. We just want peace!” I want to remind you that surrender is not peace! It’s bland sterility. A new wind of freedom is blowing in the Earth and we have to be weaned from our dependence for identity. Never, ever replace God! We must bless each other. We need partnerships and togetherness, but the Spirit of denominationalism will come in, when you believe you need those relationships for identity and approval more than you need God. In 105

Invading the Impossible the midst of all this, God again spoke to me saying, “Son, you are in the middle of the biggest pruning ever and yet you are producing much fruit. If you are producing fruit during pruning time, then how much more fruit will you produce during the coming harvest?” The prophetic helps you overcome your regrets, because it gives you vibrant vision that pulls you into your future, violently invading and forcefully advancing the Kingdom of God. The prophetic also enables you to live with an eternal perspective as your reference point, that helps you to overcome distractions like regret. Have we been conditioned to live a small life by the propaganda of past regrets? Do past failures have legal legitimacy to limit our strides into the future, confining us to the lame limp of the permanently wounded? I puke on that! It is a crime against Heaven to have that mentality! How can you say you have been gripped by grace and gripped by God, yet all you want is a nice little life? Imagine the adventures that God will give to those who just walk with Him! You can live with no pain and a little joy and yet have no purpose. Eternity is coming! The end of the age is coming! We are living with lost people all around us! How are we going to train people to disciple nations? You learn on the job, you learn while doing. I don’t believe God wants academic theorists. I believe God prefers experience over theoretical knowledge which has never been put into practice. Let’s expect and trust Him to open up unprecedented doors. Vision connects your purpose with reality and brings practical administration. 106

No Regrets! People are going to make eternal decisions and invest their lives according to God’s purposes. We make our decisions, and then our decisions make us. When you make your decisions according to God’s vision and purpose, you won’t be struggling with the regrets of the, “What if’s” You will only think “God’s glory, His plan, and His love to all mankind, through grace.” You won’t be asking, “What if?” Instead you will be saying, “Whatever you want Lord, I am not backing down.” Remember the three ways to attack regret: The first is to do something about your future. The second is a bigger understanding of God’s capacity to turn all things, even the bad things, for good to those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. Lastly, refuse to be a political prisoner, caged in by the need for man’s approval. Stand up in your eternal destiny in Christ, where discovery brings recovery, and where we wise up, and size up, in our divine assignment as the ambassadors of the highest government of the Universe, authorized by Heaven to violently advance the Kingdom, and to continuously invade the impossible! All of this big talk is not in any way trying to invoke delusions of grandeur or euphoric triumphalism, divorced from any kind of disappointments, even periods of despair. It is vital that we become very well equipped to understand the reality of how to effectively deal with disappointment. While regrets are something of the past, the fear of disappointment in our future is something that we have to be equipped to deal with, in order to courageously and sustainably step out in supernatural sequences, of ever increasing invasion. 107

Invading the Impossible

VI

Dealing

with

Disappointment

If you do not invade the impossible, the impossible will begin to invade you. The way in which you deal with disappointment will determine the degree to which you invade the impossible or whether the impossible invades you! I want to encourage you as you read this chapter, to trust the Holy Spirit to show you how God can turn disappointments into divine appointments. Bill Johnson says, “It is vital to feed on what God is doing more than what He isn’t doing.” What He is currently doing needs to be celebrated! Most Christians carry a consciousness of disappointment in their life, because most of us who have stepped out in the supernatural have had some setbacks and some disappointments. I look at the disciples, and see men of faith, who were overjoyed because demons were subject to them in the Name of Jesus. But one day they stepped out to pray for a boy with a demon and they couldn’t get the demon out. Jesus came and cast it

Invading the Impossible out, proving it was the will of God to get that demon out. Today, if we unsuccessfully try to get someone healed, we say it wasn’t the will of God to heal that person. The disciples were shocked and asked why they couldn’t cast that demon out? Why were they shocked? Because they had great success before, in casting out demons, but then they hit a disappointment. Jesus answered them, “This type only comes out by prayer and fasting.” He did not mean this type of demon only comes out by prayer and fasting. Every demon has lost authority, and must come out in the name of Jesus. There is no hierarchy of demon that can resist you because you haven’t fasted and prayed enough. If you believe that lie, every demon will tell you they are the kind that only comes out by prayer and fasting, and that you haven’t fasted enough. So you go off for a week praying and fasting and in that time the demon kills the person. Jesus meant this kind of unbelief comes out by prayer and fasting. He told them the reason they couldn’t cast the demon out was because of their unbelief. Most people with disappointments have prayed for someone who didn’t get healed, or who died, so they back off and develop a theology to accommodate the absence of miracle power in a Christian life. If you do not deal with disappointment effectively, then disappointment will effectively deal with you. It is our responsibility and our accountability before God, to monitor our hearts and make sure we do not tolerate disappointment and do not allow it to fashion our theology. It is to the degree that we effectively deal with disappointment, that we will effectively advance and invade the impossible, and force the impossible to bow its knee to Jesus. 110

Dealing with Disappointment What is the power of disappointment? Bill Johnson says, “It gives power to the things we don’t understand and robs us of the things we do understand. We begin to trade truth for lies.” I have heard the most diabolical lies told to me by Christians, who in their disappointment, have begun to find ways to explain why they don’t see the dead being raised, the blind eyes being opened, the deaf hearing, and the cripples walking. Nevertheless, Jesus, who is perfect theology, said we shall do greater works than the works that He did. (John 14:12) Jesus healed them all, the early church, in Acts 5, healed them all. “The same works” means we should be able to heal all, and still be able to go on and do greater works. In contending for greater works, it is vital that we deal with all our disappointments. There are well documented cases of the dead being raised in our day, and more and more of us are seeing, first hand, diverse miracles and signs and wonders increasing. When the peace that surpasses understanding comes on you, then the things you don’t understand no longer have power to rob you of the things you do understand. At the same time, God begins to open the eyes of your understanding and give you revelation, on how to invade the impossible. Those disciples failed and were disappointed, but when you look further on, you will find that they overcame their disappointment, and went on to raise the dead, saw cripples walking and deaf ears opened! The majority of Christians today do not operate in a supernatural ministry, because either they have been taught that the supernatural has passed away, or because they have tried and failed, and then allowed disappointment to discourage and distract 111

Invading the Impossible them from their destiny.

Weapons to Deal With Disappointment There are two mighty weapons to deal with disappointment; joy and peace. They are the weapons of glory that dominate and crush disappointment. If you lose them, you will be dominated by disappointment. In Philippians 4:4, Paul tells us to, “Rejoice in the Lord always - again I say rejoice.” Re-anything means to do that thing again. If you have to do it again, it means you might have lost what you did the first time. If you lose your joy during the day, then you need to go back and rejoice. To rejoice means to gain back joy. “The joy of the Lord is my strength!” When you feel weak, disappointed or defeated, start rejoicing. Revitalize your strength in the joy of the Lord. “When you are weak, then He is strong.” Why is this? Because weak, defeated, crushed people have no strength to rely on for themselves, so they actually have no other alternative but to trust God. Jesus Christ is the Prince of Peace. Peace is a supernatural sign of the government of God. Where peace increases, the government of God likewise increases. Romans 16:20 says that the God of peace will crush Satan. If you read on, you will see that He will crush Satan, but under your feet! The God of peace crushes the small god of chaos under the feet of men who take up rest in the everlasting peace of His Kingdom. Peace and joy are not circumstantial. Happiness is circumstantial. Calmness is circumstantial. Joy and peace are inward states of being, not dependant on outside circumstance. Peace 112

Dealing with Disappointment is sleeping through a storm. If you stay in joy and peace, mountains of opposition will be leveled out. Mountains speak of opposition. When you go forth in peace and joy, mountains of opposition will break forth in song. Joy invades the impossible. Psalm 16 says in His presence there is fullness of joy. One of the fruits of the Spirit is joy. We know Jesus is joyful. The Bible says when we stand before Him at the end of our life, He will say; “Enter into the joy of the Lord.” Hebrews 1 says, Jesus is anointed with the oil of joy. Heaven is a place of ecstasy and happiness The Holy Spirit is referred to by Jesus as the New Wine, far more intoxicating than old wine. Laughter in the Holy Spirit is a holy weapon against disease, deception, sickness and discouragement. Paul asks the Galatians, who had been deceived by witchcraft and who were going back under legalism and condemnation, “What has happened to your joy?” Loss of joy is a sign that we have put aside the activity of the Holy Spirit’s power and anointing in our lives, and we have allowed a spirit of demonic witchcraft, a spirit of heaviness, to have influence over us. The oil of joy instead of mourning. The garment of praise instead of the spirit of heaviness. Joy is warfare against sickness and disease. Joy boosts your immune system! The Bible says “You shall go out with joy and be led forth with peace.” Joy smashes the gates of hell. “Rejoice in the Lord always.” The Bible says those who sow in tears shall reap in joy. “With joy draw waters from the well of salvation.” Babylon symbolizes the counterfeit of the Kingdom. Psalm 126:1-2 speaks of Israel coming out of Babylonian captivity and returning 113

Invading the Impossible to Zion, saying “Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy.” Now that you understand how to disempower disappointment, it is important that you become acutely aware of the awesome authority that you have inherited, in Christ, to invade the impossible. This investment of authorization, which is already in your new creation nature, will require all the faith that the previous chapters have prepared you for, to grasp by revelation the height that you have already been exalted to, in Christ. I dare you to read the next chapter through the divine lenses of grace, expecting this authority you already have to be activated supernaturally.

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VII

The Authority

to Invade

It is time we refuse to accept the unacceptable! What you tolerate will ultimately dominate you, your family, your children, and generations to come. How do we know what is unacceptable? In Romans 12:2, Paul writes; “Do not be conformed any longer to the pattern of this world.” Now the pattern of this world has its foundation in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. “But be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so you can prove what is the perfect acceptable will of God!” As your mind is transformed by revelations and through encountering the glory of God in power, you are able to prove what the acceptable and pleasing will of God is. What is the acceptable and pleasing will of God? As in Heaven, so also on Earth! How long will it take a person riddled with cancer, blindness, or pain to get healed, when they step into Heaven? What is unacceptable? Everything that contradicts what is in Heaven. Jesus healed all who

Invading the Impossible came to him! He refused to accept anything less than what he knew was true in Heaven. He said: “I have given you keys - what you bind on Earth is bound in Heaven, what you loose on Earth, is loosed in Heaven!” But because of disappointment, we have begun to accept the unacceptable. It is unacceptable that there is a child sex slave trade! It is unacceptable that hospital wards are filled to overflowing with sick people, and that even in modern countries, it looks like a war zone, with people dying on stretchers in the corridors! If the church today still represented Heaven, like the church we see in Acts 5, we would be gathering great crowds, and all would be healed, all would be delivered, all would be set free. Like toxic streams, legalism and the traditions of men have flowed into the pure stream that started in the book of Acts. We have nullified the Word of God’s power, we accept the unacceptable, and we allow disappointments to make us cynical and skeptical. Progressively, we lose our innocence and child-like, pure, simple faith in Jesus Christ. We are called to invade the impossible, and to make the impossible bow its knee to the church. I am talking primarily about signs, wonders and miracles, but it also includes toppling evil, and righting social injustice. When Jesus left Heaven and came to Earth, He came with none of His divinity in operation. He was as much a man as you and me. All of His divinity was restrained within His humanity, and He did nothing on this Earth as God, but did everything on this Earth as last Adam, as man! Bill Johnson says, “When Jesus did miracles, He was not trying to show us what God could do, but 116

The Authority to Invade He showed us what man could do, through being rightly related to God.” Jesus lived an ordinary Christian life, and set the norm for Christianity. Before He left this planet, He did not announce that the standard He had set would be the benchmark to strive towards. The very opposite is true. He said that His example was the starting point, not the goal! He said anyone who believes on Him, will do the same miracles, and also greater miracles. But what has the church done? They have let the things we don’t understand, rob us of the things we do understand. People say to me that it is not wise to tell Christians that they are already holy, that they are already righteous, that they are already perfect in God’s eyes, through grace. That they are 100% accepted in Christ, and that God doesn’t disapprove of them whatsoever, because they have obtained a righteousness apart from the law, apart from their performance, and apart from their obedience or disobedience. A righteousness entirely based on the obedience of the one man, Jesus Christ. A righteousness that is an unconditional, permanent standing that you have before God, every second, of every moment, of every hour, of every day. They say if you tell Christians this, it will make them arrogant and puffed up. The question I want to ask you, is whether Jesus, knowing that He was equal with God in nature, became arrogant? No, it gave Him the opposite attitude and He humbled Himself. Your knowing that God will never see your sins or hold anything against you, doesn’t make 117

Invading the Impossible you arrogant, it makes you so secure that you no longer grasp after righteousness through the law, but find rest in your identity, already having a righteousness that is equal to God’s righteousness. God’s righteousness is revealed in the gospel as a gift for you, knowing this doesn’t make you arrogant, but makes you want to weep with wonder and joy. My God finds no fault in me! He gave me His righteousness! The righteousness you and I have as Christians, is equal to God’s righteousness, because it is His righteousness! This awareness inspires you to reach out as a servant, and touch people with miracle working power to heal them, to restore them, and topple evil off their lives. Self-righteousness causes insecurity and an overbearing attitude that dominates others, and at best, patronizes people in a complete absence of the supernatural power of God. As this message goes out, week after week, month after month, one of the most wonderful effects we increasingly see, are people becoming less self-conscious and more other-conscious. They become empowered to reach out and touch other people’s lives with grace. Self-righteous people are insecure and live under condemnation or arrogance, always trying to prove themselves. But the righteousness of God brings security. Let me show you which attitude will bring you and me to the highest level of authority and power, that God wants every Christian to walk in. Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: 6

Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality

with God something to be grasped,

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7

but made himself

The Authority to Invade nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. - Philippians 2:5-7

What does “being made in human likeness” mean? It means being made just like us, so that we could be made just like Him! Do I mean just like Him in His humanity? No! Just like Him in His exaltation! Love has been perfected among us in this: That we may have boldness in the day of judgment; because as He is, so are we in this world. - 1 John 4:17 (NKJV)

Jesus identified with us at our worst, so that we could be identified with Him at His best. There is no limit to the height of exaltation that we have already been elevated to, because there was no depth of depravity and darkness that Jesus refused to descend to, on our behalf, on the cross. When He sat down at the right hand of God, exalted to the highest place, the Bible says we sat down with Him. (Ephesians 2) We start the Christian race at the finish line as winners already! Under the law, we are limited to our workmanship, but under grace we are the workmanship of God, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which He has prepared in advance for us to do. You may say, “But He was perfectly righteous all the time!” So are you, in Christ Jesus. You see, if you hesitate and say; “Well, I am not righteous all the time.” you are still living dominated by an Old Covenant mental119

Invading the Impossible ity. Under the Old Covenant, righteousness was demanded through keeping the law perfectly. One failure in any part of the law, would bring you instantly under curse, and the glory would fade. (James 2:10, Galatians 3:10) Under the New Covenant you are righteous in God’s eyes, all the time, because of a gift of righteousness. Therefore the glory never needs to fade. So, when you think of Jesus having an advantage because He never sinned and always walked righteously, you are still thinking with an Old Covenant mindset, because actually, God sees you as righteous all the time. It is difficult to convince Christians that Jesus was as much man, as if He were not God at all. If He had access to His divine attributes while on Earth, then why did He need to be baptized in the Holy Spirit, like we do? He did no miracles before the Holy Spirit came upon Him. The Holy Spirit didn’t come upon Him as God. The Holy Spirit doesn’t need to come on God! The Holy Spirit came on the man, Jesus Christ. That’s why you can do the works He did, because you are a man as He is. He humbled Himself and became obedient to death, even death on a Cross. Therefore, God exalted Him. God exalted Him to the highest place, and gave Him the name that is above every name. At the name of Jesus every knee in Heaven and on Earth and under the Earth will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. There are three vital questions I want you to consider: 1. Was Jesus exalted to the highest place as God or as man? 120

The Authority to Invade I can tell you right now from the authority of Scripture that He was not exalted to the highest place as God. You cannot exalt God to the highest place. It is blasphemy to think that. He is God, and is therefore, by definition, always in the highest place. He is the Creator of all things! He is the highest place! Jesus had occupied the highest place as God, but didn’t grasp after it. He gave up that equality with God, and was found in the appearance as a man and became a servant, obedient unto death on the Cross. Jesus was exalted to the highest place, as a Man. So in Heaven today, there is a Man living in the highest place, in Heaven and on Earth! The Bible says of the angel called Lucifer, that jealousy and pride were found within him. (Ezekiel 28) He said, “I will make myself like the Most High.” (Isaiah 14:14) and was cast out from Heaven. On Earth, he came to Adam and said, “You will be equal to God.” In other words, he deceived Adam into thinking he had to exalt himself. Remember the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? Adam did not take the good out of the fruit and eat only the evil! Goodness is as much part of the fall of man as evil. Goodness is man’s self-righteousness grasping after God’s righteousness, through the law. It is a deception of the devil that is still upheld in legalistic religions all over the Earth. Everyone who practices legalism does not understand that they are operating under satanic deception to try and seek self-righteousness through their own effort. Satan wanted Adam to do what he had done in Heaven. He wanted Adam to try and exalt himself, to be equal with God. Why did he 121

Invading the Impossible try and do that? Because he knew that Adam had a delegated authority from God, to have dominion on the Earth. What is a kingdom? It is the dominion of a king. So Adam, as a man, an ordinary man, had been given authority from the King of Kings, to have dominion on the Earth. Satan knew that if Adam fell for the deception, he would lose that delegated authority, just like Satan had lost it in Heaven. Satan knew he could then steal the delegated authority from Adam, and operate in that authority in the Earth. In 2 Corinthians 4:4, Satan is called the god of this world. (Please remember this is ‘god’, not ‘God’. He is not Almighty God.) Insurance companies call events like 9-11, drought, and other natural disasters, an act of God. They are right, but it’s not our God, it’s the god of this world. It’s Satan! Disasters aren’t from our God. Our God has given the church an authority to invade and topple evil. Satan stole Adam’s authority, so now God couldn’t just come to Earth and smash the devil out of the planet. Satan is operating in Adam’s original heaven-sent authority! That is why Jesus came as Last Adam, to reclaim man’s authority on Earth, as a man. How did Jesus do this? He did not grasp after equality with God like Satan, but did the opposite, and made Himself nothing. God comes in the appearance of a man, having His divinity completely restricted in His humanity, facing the devil only in the authority of Last Adam. So when the devil tempts Him, Jesus doesn’t dispute the devil’s claim to the kingdoms of the Earth. He doesn’t dispute that! He says, “I will worship God alone.” So Jesus operated in delegated authority as Last Adam, but Jesus never gave in to the devil’s tempta122

The Authority to Invade tion, and went to the Cross and died on the Cross. If you read Romans 5, you will see that it wasn’t your sin being forgiven on the Cross. It was Adam’s sin being cancelled! The Bible clearly says that, through the sin of one man, death reigned in all the human race. What was his sin? It was trying to be equal with God. So what was the power that amplified Adam’s sin, and gave Satan increased leverage to operate in the delegated authority he stole from first Adam? It was the Law! The Law was introduced to increase sin. (Romans 5:20) The Law of God was never introduced to control sin. On the contrary, sin increased when the Law was introduced. The Law was added to expose the condition of first Adam that had been transferred to all of mankind. That is the condition of trying to grasp after equality with God through the Law. (Self-righteousness, a result of eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.) The Law was added because of unbelief in the goodness and grace of God. Galatians 3:12 says the Law is not based on faith. Hebrews 11:6 says that without faith, it is impossible to please God. The power of sin increased when the Law came. Who wrote the Law? God wrote the Ten Commandments with His own hand. Who cancelled the Ten Commandments? God did, at the Cross. When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins,

14

having canceled the written code,

with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. - Colossians 2:13-14

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Invading the Impossible Now notice the connection between cancelling the Law in verse 14, and the disarming of evil powers and authorities in verse 15. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. - Colossians 2:15

Preaching the Law to the church is to re-arm a disarmed enemy. On the cross, God punished first Adam’s sin and cancelled the devil’s authority that he stole from first Adam. After Jesus said, “It is finished!” and rose from the dead, He said something He could never have said before the Cross. He said in Matthew 28, “all authority in Heaven and on Earth has been given to me.” If one person has all, then everyone else has zero! Now for the second question. 2. Was ALL authority given to Jesus as God or as a man? It was given to Him as Man! You cannot give all authority to God! He has all authority. As God, Jesus had all authority. As a man, and on behalf of mankind, He cancelled first Adam’s sin, disarming the principalities and powers. Preaching the Law, the written code, to the church, is re-arming principalities and powers. He rose from the dead and inherited all authority on Earth as a man! Then He was exalted to the highest place, so that at His name every knee in Heaven and Earth must bow. 3. Did He get exalted to the highest place for Himself or for you? 124

The Authority to Invade If He did it for Himself, then all there is for us to do, is to just worship Him. But if He did it for you, and you don’t seek to find out why, then you are responsible for the grossest ignorance on the planet! If Jesus went through all He went through as a man, to get back into Heaven, exalted to the highest place, with everything under His feet, for you, and you don’t know about it, then it might as well never have happened. People who get this revelation, that He did not do all this for Himself, but for us, will invade the impossible. There is a man sitting in the highest place alongside God on your behalf! You were co-crucified, co-buried, co-resurrected, co-ascended and now you are co-seated, as a co-equal heir, with Christ, an heir of God! (Romans 6, Romans 8, Ephesians 2) Never in the history of the planet has the devil ever been under the feet of a man. He has always been under the feet of God. In Heaven, he was under God. Then he came to Adam and got him under his feet almost immediately. He kept mankind in ignorance and under his feet, until a man called Jesus came. Jesus didn’t put the devil under His feet while He walked the Earth, but neither was the devil able to put Jesus under his feet. Right up to the Cross, the devil had never been under the feet of a man, rather, he had held man in a powerless state of guilt, surrendered to a lie. God had not been the source of problems in the Earth. No, the Earth was made for man. Man was supposed to govern the Earth under God, to rule the Earth. Satan has come in with principalities and rulers, and has used the corrupt philosophies, political and economic systems, to control whole nations and regions. Jesus said that the Kingdom of Heaven will come into Earth and 125

Invading the Impossible topple illegitimate authorities. But how can we do that, if human beings are under the feet of a devil? For a righteous government to come into this Earth, human beings must put the devil under their feet. None of us could, because we are human beings. But one human being came, and at the Cross, cancelled the illegitimate authority that had reigned for thousands of years, by cancelling the Law. Then, as a man, He was exalted to the highest place, for you. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better.

18

I pray also

that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints,

19

and his

incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength,

20

which he exerted

in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms,

21

far above all rule

and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.

22

And God placed all things under his feet and

appointed him to be head over everything for the church, 23

which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything

in every way. - Ephesians 1:17-23

He has been appointed the head of all things. What for? For His Father? For Himself? For the angels? No! For the church! A man has 126

The Authority to Invade been appointed with everything under His feet, for us! Principalities, rulers, darkness, cancer, blindness, poverty, broken families, everything was put under His feet, for you! When He says, “every knee must bow,” He is not just talking about your knees, but the knees of Satan, demons, death, sickness, pain and poverty. Their knees must bow to the name of Jesus, because all things have been put under His feet for you, so that you can walk into the impossible, and make all things bow! In Acts 3, Jesus has only been in Heaven for a few weeks since He taught His disciples about the Kingdom. He told them, “I am leaving, and I am going to the highest place, where everything will be put under My feet, for you. Now you go, knowing that everything is under My feet, and you watch, everything will bow to you.” In Acts 3, they are walking past the Gate Beautiful and they turn to the crippled man and fix their eyes on him; “Silver and gold we don’t have but what we do have, we give to you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk.” That man had been crippled since birth, but he got up, walking and leaping and praising God! Peter then addressed the crowd, saying, “Men of Israel, why does this surprise you? Why do you stare at us as if by our own power and holiness we have made this man walk?...It is by the name, and faith in the name of Jesus, that this man, who you see and know, has been made whole.” These boys understood something that the modern Christian hasn’t got a clue about. Not a clue! They understood that everything was under the feet of Jesus already! 127

Invading the Impossible Now, God waits in Heaven for His enemies to be made His footstool. Who makes His enemies His footstool? His church. Please don’t let the devil say this to you, “You cannot invade the impossible until you have everything under your feet first, those sins, those habits, those bad character flaws. Until you have those sorted and under your feet, don’t bother to try and invade my domain or the impossible.” Don’t bother talking to the devil too much. The Bible does not say you can invade the impossible when you have everything under your feet, it says you can effortlessly invade the impossible, because everything is already under Jesus’ glorious feet for you! Everything is under His feet! The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. - Romans 16:20

Whose feet is the God of peace going to use to crush Satan? His feet or your feet? Your feet! Because he is already under Jesus’ feet, and Jesus is a man, he can be under your feet, irrespective of your performance! This posture of peace, which an understanding of our position in Christ places our feet in, is so powerful and vitally important.

128

VIII

Invading

by

Reigning

Reigning refers to royalty. Kings and queens reign as royalty. Under the New Covenant, you and I are both royalty. We are kings and queens, and royalty reigns. We are invading through reigning! What does it mean to reign? I am not talking about reigning in the way some natural kings or queens of the Earth reign nowadays, because generally speaking, they are constitutional monarchs. They don’t have reigning authority! The Bible is full of examples of kings who reigned with absolute authority. That means they were not subject to anything, or anybody. They were sovereign! When they lifted their scepter, it was final. Under the Old Covenant if you went into the presence of a king with an unhappy expression on your face, you could be put to death. They wouldn’t have unhappy people in their presence! When you came into the king’s presence, you came in humility, and if the king pointed his scepter at you, you would be okay.

Invading the Impossible But if you didn’t get the scepter pointed at you, you would be taken out and executed. Now, we as royalty don’t do that to people, but we do reign in life, over principalities, powers, demons and issues. By enforcing our reign, we are invading the impossible! How do you begin reigning to invade the impossible? Simply by resting in the gift of God’s righteousness. How do you rest in the gift? By believing the fact that you are currently, right now, irreversibly, perfectly, the righteousness of God! The more your faith in the gift of His righteousness grows, the more you rest and the more you enter into rest. The more you enter into rest, the more you enter into reigning. And the more you reign, the further you invade the impossible. And the more you invade the impossible, the more the Lord glorifies Himself and the more exciting and fulfilling your life becomes. Entering rest means you no longer strive, you just rest. Rest in the government of peace, of total wholeness. It starts with you believing it and developing your faith in it. How does faith grow and develop? Does faith grow by someone laying their hands on you? Not at all. I wish it did. I would ask the greatest men and women of faith to put their hands on my head, and then I could walk in faith. No, faith is not received that way. Faith comes by hearing God speak, and faith grows stronger by seeing God move through you.

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Invading by Reigning

Faith Comes So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. - Romans 10:17 (NKJV)

You can’t hear enough about the gift of righteousness, because the more you hear about it, the more your faith will increase! When faith in righteousness increases, peace and rest also increase, and the more they increase, the more reigning and ruling increases, resulting in you invading the impossible more and more. Faith comes by hearing, not from having heard! We are to live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

Reigning

in Life

For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. - Romans 5:17

How do you reign in life? Through having faith in the gift of righteousness. Here is the biggest contradiction to the brainwashing of the religious community in the world. The religious world says that if you want to reign and rule in life and have success in life, then you have to earn it by your performance, keeping laws and rules and reg131

Invading the Impossible ulations, by living holy and acting righteous all the time. The Bible contradicts that in the New Testament. The New Covenant says if you want to reign in life, it is not through what you do, but through what you receive. You receive the abundant provision of grace through the gift of righteousness. A gift is something you don’t pay for. Imagine someone gives you a gift, a week later they invite you to do something with them and you say, “No, I haven’t got time.” If they respond by saying, “But I was generous to you last week!” Then it was not a gift, it was a setup! It was a demonic ambush to manipulate you with guilt. Now that is why when we hear that God gives righteousness as a gift, we struggle to believe it, because we think He is like us humans, giving a gift that is not really free, which obligates us to do something for Him. But this is a gift from a God who is absolutely pure, holy and righteous and who would never manipulate you. He meant to give it as a gift, so when you receive this gift, you are not obligated to do anything for God. It is a gift of righteousness, and having righteousness means having right standing with God. Romans 5:21 says, “...so also grace might reign through righteousness.” It is faith in this gift of righteousness that floods our lives with grace. Having righteousness as a gift means that God looks at you in exactly the same way as He looks at Jesus, all the time, every second, of every moment, of every day. It is a free gift, and you reign in life through receiving this gift. Our faith rises to higher levels by hearing about this gift! Jesus Christ’s perfect faith before the Father 132

Invading by Reigning is what causes you to stand in righteousness before the Father. You don’t even need perfect faith! Your imperfect faith is represented by Jesus’ perfect faith before the Father, so that you are righteous all the time, even when your faith is very weak. But here’s the deal: The manifestations of the benefits here on Earth go up as your faith increases. In other words, in Heaven you are righteous all the time, but if your faith in His gift of righteousness is at a very low level you will walk around thinking, “Oh, I am so unworthy, I am so guilty, I am so condemned.” Meanwhile all Heaven is saying, “No, you are not! You are worthy! You are the righteousness of God!” If your faith is low, then you don’t walk in the reality and experience of that fact. We are positioned in Christ Jesus, in Heaven, in righteousness. The measure of how we experience and enjoy the benefits of that, is according to the level of faith that we are the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. So the reason why some people struggle to believe that they are the righteousness of God, is simply because their faith in that gift is low. Their faith is low because they hardly ever hear they are the righteousness of God in Christ. The more your faith grows that you are righteous, the more authority in your life, the more victory over sin, the more joy, and the more blessings you will have. What is the foundation for this? The basis of our righteousness was taken away from our performance, and put on the performance of someone who is always perfect. It is not based on your obedience, but the obedience of the one man, Jesus Christ. For all human beings, death reigned through Adam’s disobedience. Now we all reign in life through one man Jesus Christ 133

Invading the Impossible and His obedience. Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men. 19

For just as through the disobedience of the one man, the

many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man, the many will be made righteous. - Romans 5:18-19

The Gospel of Power I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. - Romans 1:16

This is a very powerful and interesting statement. There is a power of God for salvation for all who believe. That word salvation in the Greek text is the word ‘soteria’. It means wholeness, health, blessing, provision and protection. Some people think that salvation means only going to Heaven, but this scripture is not talking about Heaven at all. This word is a reference to temporal or earthly wholeness, wellness, blessing, strength, victory and provision! So Paul says he is not ashamed of the Gospel, for it is the power of God unto wholeness, health, protection, preservation, and cleansing, for all who believe! How do you come to believe? Faith comes by hearing, and hearing 134

Invading by Reigning by the word of God. But he says he is not ashamed of this gospel! Why would he say I am not ashamed? Today when you hear people say, “I am not ashamed of this gospel.” they do not mean the same thing that Paul meant. What they mean is that they are not ashamed to preach this gospel. They mean they are not ashamed to stand at the traffic lights, declaring that people are going to hell, but that Jesus Christ died for them. They might not be ashamed, but their relatives are, very much! That’s not at all what Paul was saying, they have missed the whole point of that scripture. Paul lived in a time that was dominated by Jewish legalistic thinking. The Old Covenant way of thinking by the Law of Moses. The very idea that someone could be righteous apart from their work, performance, or obedience, was a shameful thing. They would stone you and kill you if you said you were the righteousness of God apart from your obedience to the Law. Paul declares that he is not ashamed to say that the power that operates in believers for wholeness, health, well being, preservation and protection doesn’t depend on their own works, but it comes due to a righteousness that is God’s gift. That is how he reigns in life! Not through works, not through how well he performs religiously, or his obedience or holiness. It comes freely and only through a gift of righteousness. Many Christians and preachers are ashamed of this Gospel! They will not preach it fully. They will say, “Yes, you are righteous through this gift, but you have got to do a whole lot of things after you are 135

Invading the Impossible saved, to earn the blessing.” Why are they ashamed? Because they think if they do not preach at least a bit of the Law, then people will go out and do a whole lot of sinning. So they add a whole lot of Law, to try and prevent people from sinning. They do not realize that the more they preach this false gospel, the more sin will break out in the church, coupled with more defeat, more sickness and more disease. Every time you hear this message of grace and righteousness being preached in the Earth, red flags come up in the church world. This message is bringing liberty and deliverance to homosexuals, drug addicts, alcoholics, and all sinners alike, but the church sets up red flags against it. I would like to ask, why don’t the red flags come up when people preach a mixture of law and grace to those who are in Christ? Paul put up his red flags, vigorously warning in Galatians 5:1, that the law will enslave people, and in verse 4, declares the law will make Christ of no effect, and cause the Christian to fall from grace! Let us be very clear on this, it is not sin that causes Christians to fall from grace, but coming back under law! The reason red flags come up when pure grace is preached is because pastors have been deceived to believe that if they preach this great gospel without any shame, then they lose control over the people. They think that they need to be in control, instead of letting the Holy Spirit have control. They gain control over people through guilt, condemnation, performance and conformance pressure. They are afraid that people won’t follow them if they take the control off. That is what it’s all about. It is not so much about law and grace, as it is about who has control! The religious church world has had control 136

Invading by Reigning over people’s lives for so long, but this grace revelation is a revolution that God is initiating, not us! For centuries the Church has been preaching law and grace mixed together, resulting in churches full of sickness, defeated people, and passive people without passion! Grace shows us the way that salvation operates for health, for healing, for wholeness, for preservation, and for protection. What is the conduit of this power? What releases this power? Faith in the fact that a righteousness from God has been given to you as a free gift. No obligation! Just believe it, and you will see the outworking of it! You should see the hope that comes into people’s eyes when this gospel is preached. They say, “I didn’t know it was so good!” I believe that if most people heard the true Gospel for the first time, then most people would get saved on the spot! Most people just haven’t heard the Gospel even once, for centuries, they have only heard religion preached. For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.” - Romans 1:17

What is the faith the righteous will live by? The faith that they are the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. This context that Paul is speaking in, is the Gospel, the power of salvation and a righteousness from God, which is by faith from first to last. That is what your faith should be based on. You actually don’t need faith for healing, blessing, prosperity or wholeness. What you need to develop your 137

Invading the Impossible faith in, to higher and higher levels, is that you have a gift of righteousness, and therefore you are the righteousness of God. That releases the power for salvation to health, healing, protection, provision and wholeness. The church is teaching people to have faith for healing, faith for blessing, for prosperity, etc. You hear about, “Five Steps to Faith for Healing”, “Five Steps for Prosperity”, “Five Steps for Protection.” They are running out of steps! It is exhausting and it doesn’t even work! The righteous, those who have a gift of righteousness, live by faith! Faith that they are the righteousness of God! All over the world, people are getting this message, and lives are being changed. At the same time, there are people reacting to this message. That is encouraging, because if no one is reacting then we are not preaching the gospel that Paul preached! The gospel Paul preached caused religious people to hate him, beat him and put him in prison! Today, they just write negative emails about you. I heard this said about me once, “Rob is preaching a righteousness that gives you a right to go to Heaven, but he is not preaching the righteousness required for daily Christian living.” That sounds holy, but there is no distinction between the righteousness to get you to Heaven and the righteousness to get Heaven to you. There is only one righteousness which the New Testament talks about, the righteousness that is a gift, and which is by faith from first to last. Colossians 2:6 says, “...just as you have received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in Him.” There is not one distinct righteousness for salvation, and another practical righteousness for Christian living. The only distinction 138

Invading by Reigning between types of righteousness is between imputed righteousness, given freely by grace, and self-righteousness, obtained by religious effort. The gift of righteousness will lead to practical outworking and holy living, but it is the same gift of righteousness that gets you to Heaven. There is acceptance grace and empowering grace, and I have always taught that they are the same thing, but for clarity sake we separate them. If people teach that Christians live by two kinds of righteousness, then they are not preaching the Gospel! That is why they are not seeing the power of transformation in people’s lives. What they are preaching is self-righteousness. If you do not preach the gift of righteousness as the only righteousness the Christian has, then you are preaching self-righteousness mixed up with the gift of righteousness and that is very, very dangerous. The legalists in the Bible were also saying there is another kind of righteousness for sanctification, and Paul the apostle said they were wrong. Paul said there is only one kind of righteousness; the righteousness that saves you. If you add any kind of righteousness that is separate from that, like one that is for your sanctification, then you are not preaching the righteousness of God, you are preaching self-righteousness. People say, “Yes, you are saved by righteousness as a gift, but then you have to do things in practical righteousness.” No! If you do things in practical righteousness, to earn the blessing of God, then you have stepped into the danger zone of self-righteousness. 139

Invading the Impossible The church world is pursuing self-righteousness. The people are being taught that you have to do things to earn the blessing, you have to do things to get salvation, you have to do things to get healing, provision, protection. I could spend hours telling you the things they teach, and I could teach the things they teach well, because 10 years ago I was teaching them myself! Praise God for the revelation of grace!

The Stumbling Block If you can have faith in this righteousness, the power of soteria will operate in your life. As faith in this righteousness decreases, so will the power of soteria operating in your life. What then shall we say? That the Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have obtained it, a righteousness that is by faith; 31 but Israel, who pursued a law of righteousness, has not attained it.

32

Why not? Because they pursued it not

by faith but as if it were by works. They stumbled over the ‘stumbling stone.’

33

As it is written: “See, I lay in Zion a

stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.” - Romans 9:30-33

Now why do people stumble over this gift of righteousness, rather than developing faith in God’s righteousness? Because there is some140

Invading by Reigning thing arrogant in man that wants to establish its own righteousness. For I can testify about them that they are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge.

3

Since they did

not know the righteousness that comes from God and sought to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness. - Romans 10:2-3

Zeal for God is not enough, if it not based on knowledge. What is knowledge? That Christ is the end of the law for all who believe, that a righteousness from God has been given freely by faith.

Christ is the End of the Law Christ is the end of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes. - Romans 10:4

This righteousness is a gift. It is not because you do right, but because you are right. The Gospel is most often preached as right living. The Gospel is not right living. The Gospel is right believing and right being. If you believe right, then right living will be a result, but every time you see righteousness in the New Testament, it is never about right doing, but always about right being. It is right standing with God. It is a gift of right standing. Any time in the New Testament you see righteousness, never look at it through Old Testament lenses! It is not righteousness through your keeping of the Law. It is righ141

Invading the Impossible teousness, as a gift from God, by which you reign in life! It is right being, not right doing. Right being results in right doing! But it is not your doing that earns the blessing of soteria, it is the righteousness of God, revealed in the Gospel, that releases the power of soteria in your life. This righteousness will break the power of worry! We worry about everything, and when we finally manage to stop worrying, we worry because we are not worrying! You feel it is somehow irresponsible not to worry, and then on top of that, there are control freaks that let you know that you should not be so carefree. There was a symposium, in the city of Liverpool, where a professor wanted to establish the fact that people who had a lot of happiness had a disease. He said excessively happy people are not aware that they are being criticized, and so they don’t worry about people criticizing them, and it should be registered as a disease. But he said the problem is nobody will be coming forward to register their disease, because they are so happy, they don’t know they are ‘sick’!

Stop Worrying so Much Unbelievers are people that do not have a covenant of righteousness with God, and all they have to do to come into this covenant is to believe that, through the gift of righteousness, they are righteous in His eyes. You are only outside the covenant, and all the benefits associated with it, because you haven’t believed yet. When you believe, you are made the righteousness of God in Christ by this covenant. 142

Invading by Reigning If you are in this covenant, then worry will be the sign or the symptom that your faith in this righteousness is very low. Worry brings anxiety about your future, your children, your retirement, and having enough money. That is for the pagans to worry about, because they don’t have the power of soteria to bring provision and protection! This sounds so irresponsible, especially to people whose lives revolve around their future, and having a good retirement, and their children, and money. They worry and slave so long and hard, only to end up living maybe five years in retirement, before dying of the stress they went through to get there. We devote all of our savings and investments so that in our retirement we can live to be old and decrepit, spending all that money on hospital bills. Worry and anxiety are the symptoms of a lack of faith, of people who don’t understand that the power of provision, protection, health and wellness is in the Gospel. The righteous will live by increasing faith from first to last. When your faith in this Gospel goes down, then you revert back to a practical and logical planning of your life, and you become preoccupied and obsessed with gathering enough money to provide for yourself. But if people would spend all that worrying time listening to messages on righteousness instead, their faith in the righteousness of God would rise, producing the power of salvation in their lives to overcome the very things they are worrying. The higher your faith in righteousness rises, the higher the power of salvation manifests in your life. No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and

143

Invading the Impossible despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money. 25

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what

you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes?

26

Look at the birds of the

air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?

27

add a single hour to his life?

Who of you by worrying can

28

And why do you worry about

clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labour or spin.

29

Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in

all his splendour was dressed like one of these.

30

If that is

how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

31

So do not worry, saying,

‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’

32

For the pagans run after all these things, and

your heavenly Father knows that you need them. - Matthew 6:24-25

This is Jesus, telling people to not worry about their lives. My wife isn’t a worrier, normally Glenda is asleep while I am walking up and down, worrying about various churches and their dear leaders, over what we are going to do, and how we are going to help those people. But she’s asleep! She trusts God! Do not worry about what you will eat or drink or about your body, what you will wear. Jesus says that life is more important than food 144

Invading by Reigning and your body more important than clothes. You are more valuable to God than the animals, and if He looks after them, day in and day out, how much more will He not provide for you, too? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? So do not worry about what you will eat or drink or wear, for the pagans run after all these things and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. In verse 30, Jesus says people who worry are of little faith. Look at Jesus’ answer to the worry epidemic: But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. - Matthew 6:33

Our number one priority in life is not to develop enough faith to have money for clothes and housing and provision and protection. Our number one priority is to seek first His righteousness, to develop our faith in His righteousness, because when our faith grows in His righteousness, then all of the things that pagans are running after and having nervous breakdowns about, those things will start running after you. Provision, blessing, cars, homes. As your faith continues to grow, more things are added and as it grows again, even more! You become a magnet to blessings as your faith goes up and up. Faith in what? In seeking first the Kigdom and His righteousness. Not your righteousness but His righteousness which is revealed in the Gospel. We have got to seek the Kingdom first. What is the Kingdom? 145

Invading the Impossible For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. - Romans 14:17

Paul has just written, in Romans 1, that the power of salvation is through a revelation of the righteousness of God, that is by faith, from first to last. When he is writing these passages later about the Kingdom of God, that it is not food or drink but righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, he is talking about the gift of righteousness! That’s what the Kingdom is! The revelation that you are righteous! Through that revelation, joy and peace fill your life in the power of the Spirit. So seek that first, pursue that, spend time listening to that. Don’t listen to teaching that puts you down and teaches law, control, and religion. You are mad if you do that! Listen to righteousness, seek first righteousness, seek the gift of righteousness and build your faith on righteousness, then worry and anxiety will disappear, and all these things will be added to you!

The Good News Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. People ask me why I teach on righteousness so much. Surely, once we have got the information then that is enough? Information won’t help you. It is faith that helps you, and faith comes by hearing. Faith will increase when you hear this over and over again. 146

Invading by Reigning How many of you have committed sins that you wish you had never done? How many of you find that sin still haunts you? God can deal with honest people, but He can’t deal with people that don’t have integrity. He loves humble, honest, real people and here is the good news; God is never going to hold your sin against you! That will never be something of consequence that God will bring up. You will never hear God say, “I saw you do that! That’s why you are sick and I am not going to heal you. You will pay! That’s why you have a curse in your genealogy because you sinned and it will go down to your descendants!” This gift of righteousness declares that God will never count your sins against you. Never! You cannot be righteous and have sins counted against you at the same time. If God be for us, who can be against us? God doesn’t justify even while he is accusing. They are opposites. You cannot be the righteousness of God and have God counting your sins against you at the same time! I am not brilliant at philosophy, but there is a definite problem with logic there! If you believe in practical righteousness as distinct from salvation righteousness, then you have a contradiction. The righteousness from Christ is a fool-proof righteousness! It is a failure-proof righteousness, and a devil-proof righteousness, because it isn’t based on our obedience, but the obedience of the One Man. You are forever in the obedience of Jesus Christ and in the righteousness of God, and He is not counting your sins against you! At this point those red flags come up in the church: “Don’t preach that! They will all run out and sin!” Well, I have some bad news for 147

Invading the Impossible those guys: People are already sinning under your law and control preaching! This is the only hope for them to get victory over sin. When you begin to realize you are righteous, then you start to live according to that! But it is not when you live it out that it becomes true, it became true the moment you believed! Some people say, “Well that guy is so holy, that is why his prayers are more effective.” We are all affected by these lies! I have had people come up to me and say, “God hears you better when you pray.” I want to puke! All these years I have been preaching about righteousness, and they still don’t understand? I am the righteousness of God, and so are you! It’s called the good news! It is so good that few embrace it without reservation, and that is why people have to sit under the same teaching year, after year, after year. Eventually their faith seeks first the Kingdom and His righteousness, and all those things are added as the power of soteria is released in their life and through it, to others. ...that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. - 2 Corinthians 5:19

Do you know that God is not counting men’s sins against them? Do you know that your sins don’t send you to Hell? Let’s get logical. I am sick and tired of people that throw out their basic common logic in the church. If your sins send you to Hell, then the righteousness that you do in self-righteousness must send you to Heaven. You 148

Invading by Reigning know whose sin sends the world to hell? Adam’s. “Through the disobedience of one man, death reigned.” And through the obedience of the One Man, righteousness is given. So people’s sinning does not send them to Hell. Adam’s sin sends them to Hell. In the same way, people’s righteous acts don’t send them to Heaven, Jesus’ righteous acts sends us to Heaven. When you were in first Adam, all your righteous acts were like filthy rags, when you are in last Adam, despite all your mistakes, you are still seen as the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. - 2 Corinthians 5:21

I know I have asked these three questions before, but let’s look at them again. 1. Did Jesus sin in order to be made sin? No, obviously not. 2. How did Jesus become sin? He received the free gift of our sin. 3. When Jesus received the free gift of our sin, did He have to pray, or ask, for the wrath of God to come down? “God bring the curse of the law on me?” No, as soon as He was made sin, not through His sinning but through the free gift of our sin, then He immediately got the curse, and the judgment, and the wrath, and rejection. 149

Invading the Impossible Now apply the same questions to our righteousness. 1. Do you do righteous acts in order to be made righteous? No, it is by faith. If you teach people that you are righteous because you do righteous things, then technically, you should also teach that Jesus became sin because He sinned! These people that preach two kinds of righteousness; one a free gift of salvation, and another practical righteousness to get the blessings, should then teach that Jesus became sin because He committed sin. “No Rob! Blasphemy!” Well, it’s equally blasphemous against the Cross to preach that you are no longer righteous if you don’t do righteous things. How did you become righteous? By doing righteous things? No, by a gift of righteousness! Now, when you have this gift of righteousness, do you have to beg God to bless you? 2. Did God punish Jesus as if He had sinned? Yes! Did wrath come on Jesus as if He had sinned? Yes! Was He treated by God as if He was the world’s worst, most vile sinner? Yes! Did He suffer the consequences of sin? Yes! Did He suffer the curse of sin? Yes! Did He suffer the condemnation of sin? Yes! Had He sinned? No! Why then did wrath, judgment and condemnation come upon Him automatically, without Him asking for it? Because He was given the free gift of our sin. You and I in Christ have been given the gift of God’s righteousness. Go join the dots and you will never be the same again, and no control-freak will ever be able to talk you out of your inheritance in Christ Jesus! 150

Invading by Reigning 3. Are we the righteousness of God because we do righteous things? No! Does God treat us as if we are righteous all the time, even after we have sinned and messed up? Yes! Does God pour out all kinds of blessing, left, right and centre because we are righteous? Yes! Do we have to beg and ask Him to do it? No! What do we have to do? Raise our faith, seek first His righteousness and the revelation of His righteousness!

Convincing Convictions The Holy Spirit was sent into the world to convict people of the sin of not believing on Jesus. There is no other passage in the entire New Testament that says the Holy Spirit convicts us of sinning. He convicts of our sin of unbelief in Jesus Christ. To convict means “to convince.” When he comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment. - John 16:8

“There you go Rob! He is going to convict us of judgment because we are not righteous enough!” Read the next verse please. in regard to sin, because men do not believe in me;

10

in regard to righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can see me no longer;

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11

and in regard

Invading the Impossible to judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned. - John 16:9-11

The next verse says He will convict of sin, because they do not believe on Jesus, and righteousness, because He went to the Father. What did He go to the Father for? His blood was shed on the heavenly altar, and the Father started the New Covenant, and it broke out into the world on the Day of Pentecost. The New Covenant reveals a righteousness from God, that is by faith from first to last! So what does the Holy Spirit convict you of? That you are the righteousness of God in Christ! “Well what about the judgment?” The prince of the world stands judged. (John 14:30) That refers to the devil. Where was he judged? At the Cross. The rules and regulations that stood opposed to you, and which condemned you were cancelled at the Cross and taken away, and the powers and principalities were disarmed and trampled on at the Cross. The devil was judged at the Cross and stripped of all his weapons to condemn and judge a believer! The Holy Spirit convicts unbelievers of not believing on Jesus Christ. Then He continues to convict believers of righteousness, because Jesus Christ has gone to the Father, and He continues to convince us that the devil has been judged! What happens when you get into the presence of the almighty Holy Spirit? You are convinced that you are the righteousness of God. You are convinced that the accuser of the brethren has been defeated and disarmed! As a newborn believer, you do not need the Holy Spirit to convict you of sin. You have a new nature on the in152

Invading by Reigning side. You have been born again. You need the Holy Spirit to tell you that you are the righteousness of God, and the devil has been judged and the accuser of the brethren is thrown down, and has no power to condemn you anymore! How we have taken these verses out of their context! I have heard people teach in mass rallies that the Holy Spirit convinces us of sin and of righteousness and of judgment, and He is going to make you feel bad that you are not righteous enough, and you are going to be judged! The Holy Spirit never had to tell me I have sinned! Not once! The only sin He convicted me about was unbelief in Jesus. Now I believe on Jesus so that is a sin He can’t convict me of any longer. I have never felt the Holy Spirit convict me of sin. It is not the Holy Spirit convicting you of sin. Do you want to know who it is? The devil, that is why he is called “the accuser of the brethren.” You only believe it is the Holy Spirit because you don’t understand truth, and it is the truth you know that sets you free! Believe that, and you will never be miserable again! This Gospel makes you reign in life! Not reign after life! “Oh, one day I will go to heaven and reign.” Why do you need to reign there? There is no devil there! Reign in life in Christ Jesus! To teach anything else but the free gift of righteousness by faith is just human effort trying to get life skills! Christ’s righteousness brings the power of salvation on your life, and out of that wisdom, you get to move in things that are called life skills. People write a book about someone successful and copy every aspect of their lives, in an attempt to mimic their success. “In the morning he does this and then that and those are 153

Invading the Impossible the life skills we will copy.” No, don’t copy someone else’s life skills! Get the revelation of righteousness and the Spirit of God will add all these things, and lead you in your unique way, because it is not “one size fits all.” There are different contexts, different issues, different people, and you can’t preach life skills to the church! You need to preach the revelation of the Gospel to the church, when you do, the following will happen: 1. You will reign in life. 2. The power of soteria; health, wholeness, healing, protection, provision, will increase as your faith increases. 3. All the blessings the pagans are running after and having nervous breakdowns over, will start running after you, gathering momentum as your faith increases. 4. You become an heir of the world through the righteousness which is revealed apart from the Law. You become the seed of Abraham and have favor. You will have global influence.

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IX

Let God Impress You You cannot impress God. I realized this one night when I had a visitation from God while I was on my rooftop. His opening words to me were, “Son, I long for my people to stop trying to impress me. I long for the day when my people will allow me to impress them.” That night on my rooftop God urged me, “Please Rob, tell my people to stop trying to impress me with human effort and holiness and obedience. Let me impress them. I know this is going to be a shock to you, but I was not impressed with man’s science when they went to the moon. No big deal. I created the moon and the moon is such a small little thing in a small little solar system. I created vast galaxies that are expanding at the speed of light. Man might be impressed with that, but I am not. Neither am I impressed with man’s ceremonies and rituals. I am not impressed with man’s efforts to be righteous before me. I long for the day when my church will be impressed with

Invading the Impossible the gift of righteousness that I have given them, and would actually believe it whole-heartedly and unreservedly! If my people will stop trying to impress me and relax, and let me impress them, then I will show you demonstrations of miraculous power and manifestations that you couldn’t even imagine right now. You can’t impress me with your strength! I don’t need your strength or your determination. What I want from you is your weakness. I want your humility and your childlikeness. I want you to be impressed with what I can do. Some of my people are working so hard to impress me by the way they try to not sin and do good. Then they even ask me if I am impressed. They are working so hard to impress me with their own righteousness, when I am already impressed with my son’s righteousness that I gave to them. But they are not impressed with my son’s righteousness and somehow think that it is not good enough. They worry and are anxious that the perfect righteousness of Jesus might be inadequate, so they attempt to impress me, by adding their own righteousness.”

Older Brother Syndrome The older brother, in the parable of the prodigal son, was so busy trying to impress the father with his hard work and all he was doing for the father. It is very clear that he didn’t even know who his father was. It is my conviction that many Christians today are so zealous to impress God that they miss meeting Him. He comes into a room and He manifests His presence and they are not sure whether it is God or whether it is the devil. They know about God, they have heard 156

Let God Impress You about Him and can quote Bible verses that describe God. They know about Him but have never met Him. They haven’t heard His voice and don’t know Him. That is appalling! The primary purpose of the New Covenant was that every believer would know God personally and experientially. Yet, I meet multitudes of Christians who don’t know God. The older brother did not know his father. Think of the words Jesus used to tell this parable. They are shocking, even to me who has been studying the gift of righteousness and living in it for years. It still shocks me that Jesus uses such a parable to reveal to the church how legalistic, controlling and self-righteous they are. He was talking about Israel, but I am telling you He was talking about the modern church too. He said the younger son squandered the inheritance of the Father. Now think about that - what does it mean when a son squanders the inheritance of the Father? He took it prematurely and spent it on prostitutes and wild living and ended up in a pigsty! A Jew in a pigsty! Finally he comes to his senses and goes home, and when he goes home his father runs to him, kisses him and puts a robe, a ring, and sandals on him, and slaughters a fattened calf to celebrate his return. Now, you would have thought that if the older brother knew his father, he would have been overjoyed at this, but the older brother was angry and he said, “All these years I have been working hard for you and you have never even given me a goat, but this brother of mine who spent the money on the prostitutes, you give him a fatted calf and a party!” Does that sound like someone who knows his Father? He lived in the father’s household and didn’t have a clue what his 157

Invading the Impossible father was like. That is a commentary on the tragedy of the modern church. There are millions of churchgoers who know all about God and are working hard to impress God, but have never let the Father impress them. They are missing party after party, divine encounter after divine encounter, supernatural manifestation after supernatural manifestation, because they are working so hard to impress God. They say to God, “Let me just show you how strong I am, how determined I am, how righteous I am.” While God is saying, “No, let me show you how awesome I am. Let me show you how glorious I am. I am the husband, church! You are the bride!” This is a husband thing! Husbands like to flex their muscles and demonstrate and show off how good they are! It is something weird and strange when a bride wants to show off how powerful she is to her husband. He sits in the corner all cowardly and afraid of how powerful his wife is, and how hairy his wife’s legs are, and how big her biceps are! Something is seriously wrong with that picture! The Bride of Christ is trying to show off to the Bridegroom and say, “Look at us, be impressed!” But He is saying, “Stop trying to impress me! My role as husband is to impress you, but I cannot show my glory, or manifest my power, or perfume your life with my presence, or let the aroma of my glory manifest daily in your life, while you are busy trying to impress me.” We say, “Lord, if I can just be a bit more holy and if I can just have a bit more victory over this area of sin and just get triumph in this area then I am sure that I will be more attractive to you.” That is a big deception! The Father tells us, “You are dressed in the beautiful 158

Let God Impress You garments of salvation. You have my son’s salvation, you have got my son’s righteousness and I see you that way. Your sins and your shortcomings are removed and are not even in consideration. They are not just covered up, they are gone forever!” The Old Covenant covered up sin and hid it. The New Covenant obliterates sin and it doesn’t exist in the Father’s perception of you. He said, “You are unbearably attractive to me. I can’t wait to show you amazing things. I want to impress you! Please stop trying to impress me by working so hard for me.” When we get captured by this, we will hate sin more and we will want to obey God more, not because of religious reasons, but as a result, a by-product, of this revelation of His love. It is unavoidable, it just starts happening! Your zeal for God will be based on pure motives, not fear. When this revelation comes alive in the church world, we are going to see the most magnificent manifestations of signs and wonders and miracles. Let’s just allow God to impress us and see what happens.

While

He Cannot Impress Us We Are Trying to Impress Him

Have you ever been with people at the dining room table who are playing the control game? It is one-upmanship. Someone tells a story, and then somebody else tells one to better that. While you are talking, you can see that they can’t wait for you to shut up so they can tell 159

Invading the Impossible a better story that is even more impressive. Or you see soldiers comparing war wounds and the next minute they are all half naked trying to outdo one another. In the church world, people do the same thing. “You think you are impressive God, have you seen my righteousness?” That is self-righteousness. When we compare ourselves to others based on our right doing, and then depend on that as the basis of our relationship with God, He says, “Yes, and your efforts are like filthy rags compared to the gift of righteousness from my son. He is beautiful, and the garments of salvation that you are wearing, my bride, my church, my child, they are so beautiful! Be secure in the garments and rest in them, and let me impress you with what I have got! Stop working so hard!” Now when a man works, his wages are not credited to him as a gift, but as an obligation. 5 However, to the man who does not work but trusts God who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited as righteousness.

6

David says the same thing

when he speaks of the blessedness of the man to whom God credits righteousness apart from works:

7

“Blessed are they

whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. 8

Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will never count

against him.” - Romans 4:4-8

I really like to ask people whether they have a revelation that the Lord will never, ever, ever, ever count any of their sins against them. Most Christians I know live like religious bookkeepers, who think God is constantly counting their sins against them. So they try to 160

Let God Impress You balance their sin out with righteous living. It is appalling to hear Christians say, “I got sick, but I deserved it, because I did wrong. I am in this situation because I did wrong. I sinned, so God is punishing me.” That is Old Covenant, and yet it is shocking how prevalent it is in the church. I want to categorically say, that I am against sin. I don’t want sin in my life. But the truth is that I haven’t met one Christian who doesn’t sin. So let’s just stop pretending! If you are the righteousness of God, and God is never counting your sins against you, it means your sin can’t open the door to the devil. But if you live under the Old Covenant, then your sin does open the door to the devil. That’s why the devil is deceiving so many Christians into an Old Covenant mentality, so that when they do sin, they live under condemnation and guilt, which opens the door because of their fear of the devil. But when you are in the revelation of righteousness that God will never count your sins against you, then you are blessed coming in and blessed going out and blessed all the time! God never puts sickness on people. The devil tries to put sickness on us when we sin, to try and get us to believe the lie that God is punishing us for that sin. In the New Covenant, your sin can never open the door to the devil. All the devil’s attacks on your life are totally illegitimate. That’s why Jesus calls him a thief. Thieves don’t have the right to steal! If your sin could give him a right, he would no longer be a thief. No matter how much you just sinned, resist the devil knowing that you are the righteousness of God. 161

Invading the Impossible

Be Safeguarded Finally, my brothers, rejoice in the Lord! It is no trouble for me to write the same things to you again, and it is a safeguard for you.

2

Watch out for those dogs, those men

who do evil, those mutilators of the flesh. - Philippians 3:1-2

Why did Paul say what he is writing is a “safeguard”? What does the church need to be safeguarded from? He goes on and speaks about evil men. When the church hears about “evil men” we think about pornography, stealing, lying, and getting drunk. Well, we certainly don’t want to encourage those activities, but in this context Paul is not saying that the church needs to be safeguarded from those things. He is going to define what evil men are. They are mutilators of the flesh, which refers to circumcision, people who bring the church back under the Law. People who demand that New Covenant people should live under Old Covenant regulations. Paul calls that evil, or of the devil. Evil men and women in the church are those who try to control the church and impress the church with their righteousness. In fact, they try to give out the idea that according to legalistic righteousness, they are faultless. They look down on everyone else with faults and failures, and they pretend that the only way God is going to love you, and the only way God will reveal Himself to you, is if you line up and do everything right. Paul says that is a deadly dangerous thing and the church needs to be safeguarded from that evil. We are so naive. We don’t see that ma162

Let God Impress You nipulation, religious legalism and control as the evil that the church needs to be protected from. Much of the church is backslidden, even though they may attend church, they are lukewarm, have no passion for God, don’t know God, don’t hear His voice, and don’t experience His presence. All because they have not been safeguarded or protected from this evil that is too prevalent in the church of Jesus Christ. Paul calls any kind of ritual, any kind of demand to be more righteous, anything based on your ability and performance, evil because, in essence, that is saying that the righteousness of Jesus isn’t enough. You must be holy and perform religiously to relate to God. For it is we who are the circumcision, we who worship by the Spirit of God, who glory in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh—

4

though I myself have reasons

for such confidence. If anyone else thinks he has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more:

5

circumcised

on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee;

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as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for

legalistic righteousness, faultless. 7 But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. - Philippians 3:3-6

Paul doesn’t say we have been circumcised, he says we are the circumcision. You are the circumcision. You have been born again and your heart has been circumcised. You, as the new creation, are the circumcision. You are the righteousness of God. You are the testament and witness that He is a good God. “We who worship by the 163

Invading the Impossible Spirit of God, who glory in Jesus Christ, who put no confidence in the flesh.” Confidence in the flesh is confidence in our ability, our performance, and our self-righteousness as the basis of our relationship with God. “though I myself have reasons for such confidence. If anyone else has such reasons for confidence in the flesh, I have more. Circumcised on the eighth day - of the people of Israel, the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews. In regards to the law - a Pharisee. As for zeal - persecuting the church - as for legalistic righteousness - faultless.” Paul says that even though he was legalistically faultless, that he could have based his relationship with God on his ability and performance, he didn’t. He counted it all as a loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ

9

and be found in him, not having a

righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ — the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. 10 I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection... - Philippians 3:8-10

The Greek word used for “rubbish” is faeces and actually means excrement, or dung. What did Paul call “rubbish”? Think about this for a while. Does the modern church call what Paul called “rubbish”? We are too polite, we are too nice, we are too politically correct. Religion is dung. Laws and regulations are dung. The Old Covenant 164

Let God Impress You is dung. The church has been brainwashed by generations of legalistic Pharisees who didn’t allow safeguarding of the church. Millions of Christians have backslidden and have no passion for God because they are under this control spirit of guilt and manipulation. Faultless, legalistic righteousness is dung! It is evil and it is very, very dangerous. Why do more and more people stop going to church in the Western world? Because it is full of people who walk around displaying to everyone their moralistic, faultless, self-righteousness. From my experience in travelling to many, many nations, I have seen that there are many good, nice, moral people in the church. But I promise you, many of those good moral people live with a lot of guilt and a lot of condemnation, because they have not recognized God’s righteousness, which takes away condemnation. They are trying to get rid of condemnation by becoming faultless with legalistic righteousness. Paul calls that dung, and the people who profess it dogs. Calling somebody a dog in that day and culture meant you regarded them as a male prostitute, it was really offensive language! (Deuteronomy 23:18) The trouble is that we don’t discern who they are, because they are nice people who smile a lot, but they actually intimidate people and give the impression that they are under the blessing, and have the blessing because they are so moral and up-standing. But they don’t know God! They don’t hear His voice! They don’t know the power of His resurrection! That is evil, vile, and dangerous! The church is pointing its finger at pockets of evil in society with legalistic selfrighteousness, trying to impress God with how holy they are, not 165

Invading the Impossible realizing that to God that smells like dung! He hates the smell of self-righteousness! Open the doors to the prodigals! Let the unsaved come in! Come in, and be washed! Come and have that stench of the Pharisees’ self-righteous dung cleaned off you by the loving grace of the Father! Receive the free gift of righteousness with joy! Only believe! The sophisticated theology of today says we must balance this message of grace with law. That is older brother nonsense! Evil! Don’t be nice with that kind of stuff! I am not helping controllers. The controllers are getting increasingly angry because we are setting the controlled free. I know you think I am exaggerating but Glenda and I face the spirit of witchcraft often, not just from what is happening in Hong Kong, but from what is happening around the world. Nations are being touched by this message going out through our website. Thousands of believers who have been under control are coming out. This is not a commentary on the message, it is a commentary on the context of control. They have lived under control for so many years and when they first break out, some do overreact and I understand why! Give them time to establish the revelation of righteousness and they will become the biggest tithe givers and the biggest servants and the most zealous, sacrificial servers for God. They only need to be broken out of control! I want you to read Philippians 3:1-8 again, but read it in the Message translation. Eugene Peterson’s translation brings it out beautifully in modern English. And that’s about it, friends. Be glad in God! I don’t mind repeating what I have written in earlier letters, and I hope

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Let God Impress You you don’t mind hearing it again. Better safe than sorry — so here goes.

2

Steer clear of the barking dogs, those religious

busybodies, all bark and no bite. All they’re interested in is appearances — knife-happy circumcisers, I call them. 3

The real believers are the ones the Spirit of God leads

to work away at this ministry, filling the air with Christ’s praise as we do it. We couldn’t carry this off by our own efforts, and we know it —

4

even though we can list what

many might think are impressive credentials. You know my pedigree:

5

a legitimate birth, circumcised on the eighth

day; an Israelite from the elite tribe of Benjamin; a strict and devout adherent to God’s law;

6

a fiery defender of

the purity of my religion, even to the point of persecuting Christians; a meticulous observer of everything set down in God’s law Book.

7

The very credentials these people are

waving around as something special, I’m tearing up and throwing out with the trash — along with everything else I used to take credit for. And why? Because of Christ.

8

Yes,

all the things I once thought were so important are gone from my life. Compared to the high privilege of knowing Christ Jesus as my Master, firsthand, everything I once thought I had going for me is insignificant — dog dung. I’ve dumped it all in the trash so that I could embrace Christ

9

and be embraced by him. I didn’t want some petty, inferior brand of righteousness that comes from keeping a list of rules when I could get the robust kind that comes from trusting Christ — God’s righteousness.

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10

I gave up all that

Invading the Impossible inferior stuff so I could know Christ personally, experience his resurrection power... - Philippians 3:1-8 (The Message)

“I gave up all that inferior stuff so I could know Christ personally, experiencing His resurrection power.” Paul says he gave up all that stuff and sees it as dung and rubbish in order that he may know Christ and the power of His resurrection in his daily life. Paul links knowing Christ and the power of His resurrection to two things. Firstly, considering legalistic self-righteousness as dung. You have got to see that! When the devil says, “You sinned, God doesn’t like you and now He is going to punish you.” You have got say, “That is a whole load of dung, devil! To the dung-heap with you, devil! I reject that rubbish, I don’t accept that rubbish! I am the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus!” Not only that, but to actually see it as evil, as a danger, as something the church needs to be safeguarded from. Secondly, have simple faith in the gift of righteousness apart from the Law.

Knowing God You do not teach people under the New Covenant to know God. You should not have to teach people how to know God or have “Knowing God” seminars. That is Old Covenant methodologies and mindsets. It is an inferior covenant. The modern church is full of academic, cerebral knowledge about God, but they don’t know Him. They don’t hear His voice or encounter Him at all on a regular basis. They end up running from conference to conference and meeting to 168

Let God Impress You meeting, to get to a service where someone who knows God, walks in the anointing and who can release power can give them a brief exposure to the presence of God. And they are still unsure if it was God or not! That’s weird! People run after a supernatural God but get upset when He does something supernatural. The whole Bible is full of people falling down under the presence of God! We have people in the church who are afraid of falling down under the presence of God because they don’t know God. The controllers teach that the supernatural it is very evil and the church needs to be safeguarded from it. No, the church needs to be safeguarded from them and their evil dung deceptions. This is how the modern church does it, “We are going to have a seminar on knowing God. We are going to teach you how to know God. The three easy steps to knowing God.” That is all only moralizing behavior. Then people start to think that they have to be intelligent to know God. They think they have to go to seminary to know God. They think they have to study and have a diploma to know God. No, you don’t! That is Old Covenant! Adam knew God before there ever was a Bible. Paul and the early church didn’t have the Bible you have. Adam walked with the glory of God in the cool of the evening. God visited Adam. God visited Peter on a rooftop and he fell into a trance. He saw Heaven opened! Revelation of God is normal for a New Covenant believer who is not trying to impress God, but who believes in the gift of righteousness. They are impressed with Him and His gift and not their own faultless legalistic righteousness. When you get the revelation that you are forgiven forever and 169

Invading the Impossible God will never hold your sins against you, that He has given you the gift of righteousness, then you automatically have encounters with God. You will get to know God and encounter Him on rooftops, or on the bus, or on the train, or while you are washing dishes. God will come to you and speak to you. No one will have to teach you to hear Him or experience Him! As soon as people get up and hold seminars on knowing God, then you know that they are Old Covenant in their mentality and they don’t know the New Covenant. But the ministry Jesus has received is as superior to theirs as the covenant of which he is mediator is superior to the old one, and it is founded on better promises.

7

For if there

had been nothing wrong with that first covenant, no place would have been sought for another. - Hebrews 8:6-7

What Jesus is saying, is that this Old Covenant is finished, obsolete, redundant, it has passed away! God doesn’t operate through the Old Covenant at all! That was only ever brought into being to show man how they cannot impress Him with their own effort! Now the New Covenant isn’t about us impressing God, it is God saying “Let me impress you!” the writer of Hebrews goes on to show the inferiority of the Old Covenant, how they didn’t know Him and were trying to keep the Law and were under condemnation and bondage, just like many Christians today! When we get to verse 11, he tells us what the priority, the main reason for the New Covenant is. That you and I know God! That is why Paul says, “I want a righteousness that is apart from the law and that is by faith, that I may know Christ and 170

Let God Impress You the power of His resurrection.” No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, ‘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.’

13

By calling this covenant ‘new,’ he has made the

first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and aging will soon disappear. - Hebrews 8:11-13

The moment you get a revelation and believe and are impressed with the gift of righteousness, you will experience and encounter the living God as a Father and a friend. As someone who loves you and wants to walk with you. He will start showing you things that are powerful which will impress you, and you will give up trying to impress Him! “Father, I am so impressed with the gift of righteousness, by what you did at the Cross!” And God will say, “Keep being impressed because I have more! I am going to impress you, son, by getting you to raise the dead! I am going to impress you by using you to open blind eyes! I am going to impress you by getting you to see the supernatural and see people get delivered from demons! You will get redemptive revenge on the pressure demons have given you! Let Me impress you! You believe in My righteousness and you see what is evil and rubbish and what you need to be safeguarded from!” 171

Invading the Impossible This gift of righteousness is so important, its alternative is evil, something we need to be protected from! When Paul says that according to legalistic righteousness he was faultless, that those were his credentials, he was referring to before he got saved. If you read the last part of Romans 7, you will see Paul describing his life before he came to Christ, when he was under the Law. It is a very different picture from the legalistic perfection that he boasted of, because in the synagogue he appeared faultless! Romans 7 describes what he felt like before he came to Christ. When you read it, he talks about delighting in the law in his heart, but that he did the things he didn’t want to do. He talks about being under condemnation and confusion and guilt! Today, you also have many moral good people that don’t do ‘bad’ things. They might be moral, but they are filled with guilt and condemnation if they are under the useless Old Covenant! They can’t worship God because they are trying to impress God, instead of being impressed with Him! It is dangerous to live under condemnation! It is evil and wrong to live under condemnation! The New Covenant is a superior covenant and you do not need to be taught to know God. When you get this, and someone says to you, “We are going to a knowing God seminar.” You can say, “Say hello to Moses for me. I am not coming. I am walking with God. I know God. Once you know He will never count your sins against you, that this is a better covenant based on better promises with a superior mediator, so will you.” 172

Let God Impress You What is the main thing of the New Covenant that the writer announces in verse 11? “No longer will a man teach his neighbor or his brother saying, know the Lord.” Under the Old Covenant they had to be taught how to know God, but under the New Covenant: “No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or his brother, saying ‘know the Lord’ because they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest, for I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” So as soon as a believer has a revelation of righteousness as a gift, from that moment, that believer starts getting closer to the Lord. They start experiencing God, enjoying God, and fellowshipping with God. From the least to the greatest, all will know God. I look at the modern church that says we are New Testament believers and find that the majority of Christians do not know God. They know about Him because they live under Old Covenant condemnation, but once you know the revelation of righteousness you will know Christ and the power of His resurrection! What is the power of His resurrection? When Jesus rose from the grave, He carried up from that grave a consciousness of certainty, of conquest over the devil’s oppression and condemnation. He carried up a consciousness of righteousness that He had achieved for us at the Cross. When He turned to His apostles and breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” He imparted that consciousness of righteousness into them. So, when the Spirit of God breaths unto the modern church like He did to the first century church, a consciousness of righteousness is imparted. 173

Invading the Impossible We know that we are no longer conscious of our failure, of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we are conscious of the Tree of Life. We are righteous conscious in Christ Jesus. So it is written: ‘The first man Adam became a living being’; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit. - 1 Corinthians 15:45

God breathed into Adam’s nostrils and the Bible says Adam became a living soul, but last Adam, Jesus Christ, is a life-giving Spirit. So God breathed into first Adam’s nostrils and he became a living soul, but he died when he ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Last Adam didn’t get breathed into, He breathed out of Himself as a life giving soul. After His resurrection, He breathed into His disciples a consciousness of, “I know in whom I have believed and I am persuaded that Jesus is alive and real.” He breathed into them a consciousness of conquest, “I am not a victim to the devil, I am in authority over the devil, I trample devils under my feet and I am not afraid of the future or of man. I have a consciousness of conquest, of righteousness. I don’t live with condemnation. It doesn’t entertain me, it is evil and to be condemned. I am in the consciousness of righteousness!” When the church walks in that revelation and is impressed with God’s righteousness, then God says, “I will show you a whole lot more to be impressed with.” You will be impressed and forever captivated by the One who is altogether beautiful. The One who sees you as His beloved, His 174

Let God Impress You crown, His reward, His delight, His joy, His friend, His treasure, His righteousness. I cannot describe to you how pleased I am that you have read this book. I feel I have journeyed all the way through its pages with you. My prayer is that when you put this book down, you will continue to allow the Holy Spirit to freely love you, for Jesus to impress you, and the Father to reveal sonship to you, so that invading the impossible and partnering with God becomes as normal as breathing. Lots of love, Rob Rufus

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