...When we walk in darkness (ignorance) rather than light (revelation of Him) the only thing that determines the seasons in our lives or provides us a mile marker for where we are; are the tragic events produced by the darkness we continually abide in.

Without Him, our spirits and our souls are in the dark and alienated from the Kingdom of Light. The Word of His Kingdom is the lamp unto our feet that empowers us to walk as the righteous sons of God we truly are in power that expands His domain through our influence we have with our King. If we walk in the light, it causes us to experience His reign and glory. It cleanses us from all unrighteousness, every disastrous event, hurricane wave or bloody reef, even the memory of them!

You are not what you appear to be on the outside. If you have received Christ as Savior, your life is hidden in Christ in God. You are untouchable. Why are we allowing Satan with his filth, to touch royalty? No one ever approaches a king without an invitation and no one ever touches a king unless the king reaches out to touch them first! God reached down to us and we love Him because He first loved us! His reach was a reach of love and compassion. He restored us. He healed us. He filled us with Himself and clothed us in His righteousness and honor. Because we don’t see ourselves as the kings and sons God has made us, we ignorantly allow anyone to touch us and spoil our honor.

We have honor because we are honored and anointed by our King! Not because of anything we produce on our own. Our life flows from Him. Because we see ourselves as common and unclean, we forsake our rightful place of authority and abuse the grace of our Lord who set His love upon us, not because of what we do or don’t do, but because of whose we are! Who are you? Do you know? Do you think the occupation you fill is who you are? Too often we mistake “doing for who-ing” You are not your job, your marital status, your parental status, your economic status, your church status. You are who God says you are. Your identity is so intertwined with His, it is impossible to tell the two of you apart!

“Of twain so making one new man” the Word declares a new creature in Christ, a new species of man. What species? A species of man, spiritually alive unto God! All others who don’t know Him, are the walking dead. The Word declares; He who is joined to the Lord is One Spirit with Him. We are partakers of His divine nature. God is a spirit. Those who worship Him, do so in Spirit and Truth. It is time to stop believing we are something we are not. Do you really want to see the operation of Gods grace in your life? Then we have to stop lying against the truth. Of course, it takes more courage to believe God about whom He says you are in Him, than it is to just accept the lie day after day, believing you’re just a skank who isn’t worthy and just a sinner hoping to make heaven home someday. Our strength and courage is in the Lord.

THE RIGHTEOUS ARE AS BOLD AS A LION!

You need to get righteously indignant at the devil who craves to make you his little slave to kick around and abuse! You need to grow some guts and start looking like a fool to the world if you want to walk in your Papa’s inheritance. You are peculiar, so just accept it! God accepts you! If you are not agreeing with God, you are walking in pride and doing an act, ignorantly playing a role never written for you and believing all the press reports and reviews that the devil spins in your dark mind. Humility is nothing more than being real. It is being who you are without pretense or apology.

When we disagree with the Word of God concerning our relation to him and seek to establish our position as His sons based upon our doing good or not doing bad, we verify the scriptures that identify the fact we’ve been bewitched or conned. We simply don’t believe Him. We begin to toil and spin. Ultimately our actions and attitudes say; Christ’s work was not really sufficient enough to restore us to right relationship to God as his sons, as if we have to add something to His work. God gives grace to the humble and He resists the proud. The proud man says, “Surely God, I just can’t take your word for it! I mean, there’s something I can to do pitch in. I don’t feel I’m as bad as some other folks I know. I’m in church, I tithe, I pray, I visit the elderly, I read my bible, I fast, I don’t drink or smoke, I pay my taxes, I don’t steal, I,I,I,I,I,”

Have you ever been taken to lunch by a friend, and when it comes time for the check, you have a hard time letting the other person pay the whole thing? You know the check is on its way and while conversation is ongoing, you’re thinking with the other side of your brain how you’re going to grab the check first. Well if they pay it, you just can’t let that slide! So you say, “I’ll get the tip!” That’s how we do God! Likewise, how would you feel if you invited your best friend over for a nice home cooked dinner and when the fellowship of the evening was over, your friend pulled a fifty dollar bill out and said; “Here’s for the dinner, it was great, but I pay my way”

Like I explained earlier about visiting your mother, you would, like her be insulted, hurt and devastated! How do you think God feels when we treat Him that way? We’ve not only been invited to dinner but He has prepared a table for us in the midst of our enemies! Yet, we still do Him that way. Why? Feelings of low esteem grow from a continual sense of shame that drives the need in us to prove our worthiness because we don’t believe ourselves capable of being accepted and loved by God or anyone else without anything in return. The terms that determine whether, “we are” or “are not” loved and accepted have been engrained in us from childhood. It has everything to do with our performance or lack thereof, performance pertaining to obedience as a child, school performance, sports achievement, our looks, skinny or fat, our personality and quite everything that has to do with the carnal nature of our persons. We’ve been taught to perform and acceptance has been our reward for being good and pretty.

These determinations have nothing to do with who we are on the inside as far as God sees us.  This blindness to how He sees us in Him is the avenue of our bruising, because through natural senses and reasoning, man cannot see what God has hidden from him. It is spiritually discerned.

The Word declares in 1^st Corinthians 2: 7-8 But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory; Which none of the princes of this world new; for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

Had the knowledge of Christ’s real identity been known, Jesus never would have been bruised for our iniquities. It is a remarkable thing to comprehend how The Father could have given up His Son for us all, while hiding His real identity from His own people. Even more so, to realize how Christ in the flesh, who experienced the pain and suffering of being rejected and despised by His own brethren, could and would, still lay down His life freely. That type of selflessness is overwhelming to the carnal psyche.

He literally faced this pain in His emotions, body and soul. No man took His life. In the middle of all His pain, He willingly and gladly laid it down for us all. What a Love! It is the proof that displays The Father’s unwillingness to break or cast away a bruised reed even when sin is wounding it. Jesus was the first bruised reed. Listen as Isaiah describes the Messiah in chapter 53:  For He shall grow up before him as a tender plant, (a reed is a plant) and as a root out of the dry ground: he has no form or comeliness; and when we see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from Him; He was despised, and we esteemed Him not.

Surely He has borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But, He was wounded for our transgressions; He was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed.

All of us, like sheep, have gone astray, every one of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet He opened not His mouth: He was brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a lamb before her shearers is dumb, (silent) so He (likewise) did not open up His mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment; and who shall declare His generation? For He was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was He stricken. And He made His grave with the wicked, and with the rich in death; because He had done no violence, neither was any deceit in His mouth. and yet, It pleased the Lord to bruise Him.

Heb. 12: 2 declares; He endured the pain and death of the cross for the Joy that was set before Him despising the shame. In doing so, He set down at the right hand of the throne of God. The first part of this verse starts with, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.

He is the prototype we are all molded into

We must realize that we find our identity in Him.

Our real identities are hidden there.

Just as The Lord of glory had His identity hidden that led to His affliction for our redemption, we likewise are hidden so that we too may partake of His sufferings unto His glory and righteousness. If our real identities are hidden, how are the world and our brethren supposed to know who we really are? Jesus said in John 13: 34-35 A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men KNOW that ye are my disciples if ye have love, one to another.

There is a difference between love {FOR} one another, and love {TO} one another. {Love For}, implies your feelings of affection for another person, while that person may not be aware of your feelings for them. If you never acted out how you felt, they would never know unless you showed them.

{Love To}, implies your actions based upon the intentions to display and communicate your feelings of affection regardless of whether or not it is reciprocated. Our actions of love show or reveal our true identities, that we are His. Just as He loved us, we too will experience the bruising that comes from loving others who oppose us and themselves even to their own peril.

If we do not keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, as He did on the Father, for the joy that was set before Him, we will suffer as those who suffer the bruising of a misguided life. Our actions will become motivated by human acceptance rather than an expression of love as unto the Lord. Our attempt to love will become religious duty. Resentment and shame will seep its way into our emotions as we retaliate against the difficult people in our lives that seem unlovable. The constant whisper of guilt will say, “Look at you, you call yourself a Christian, you don’t love enough”. This is a sign that we are not anchored deeply enough in Christ’s love for ourselves.

If we don’t allow Him to wash us in His love and righteousness, we become unsure if we truly are His disciples. The root of shame begins to grow into a fig tree of shame.

It begins to take on leaves of shame that attracts those who are naked and bruised. Before you know it, there is a block party going on around the tree of shame and everyone has their fig leaves tied on while a Lo Debar town hall meeting is taking place. The point is this, if you are suffering shame or the results of a disastrous event in your life that’s robbing you of your confidence before God, He will not break you or extinguish you because you are not burning brightly. This is the time to run to Him, not from Him. His purpose is to establish you once again and to strengthen and equip you to fulfill your destiny. To make you ablaze! He was bruised so that He could heal you of yours. He hung naked on the cross, so that He could clothe you in His righteousness. He bore the wrath of God for our transgressions and iniquities so that we could experience God’s grace and acceptance for His obedience. He is the God of new days, new mercies, new hopes, new dreams, new desires, new promises, new lives, and new joy.

Let’s reconsider our attitudes and remind ourselves of God’s goodness in our lives. Satan would have us forget. Get alone somewhere and take some time to thank the Lord sincerely for what He has done in your life. Practice His presence. Believe me, Peace and joy in the Holy Ghost will come. The more you do it, the more you will be changed into the man and woman of God you were created to be. As I end this book, let me share a final anchor to your soul. It has been a word deeply planted within my spirit and the Lord has watered it continually as I have grown to trust Him and love Him for being my friend and King.

It is a promise; a declaration of the intents of His heart, a Reckoning on God’s part that He wishes us to settle with (as final) in our hearts. It has nothing to do with how we perform and everything to do with who we now are. As far as He is concerned, it is something that He will never change His mind about. It is His (Love To) us. In order for it to be beneficial to us, in order for it to become real and alive within our hearts, we will have to come to the place of Reckoning that God is serious about this, to Reckon that He is good “All the time” 24/7 and that His thoughts are only for our benefit and development as “Kings Kids”, prospering in the health of our souls. You are more than you know and God sees you as He sees Jesus! He speaks to us as the spirits of just me made perfect, already declared in the book of Hebrews.

This unchangeable, unfailing and steadfast anchor is Romans 11: 29 

For God’s gifts and His call are Irrevocable.

He never withdraws them when once they are given and he does not change his mind about those to whom He gives His grace (favor) or to whom He sends His call.

Has God given you salvation, the Holy Ghost, healing, a sound mind, a gift of teaching, prophesying, preaching, and singing? Has He called you to preach, teach, and evangelize, to reach the nations, to write a book, to sing a song, to start a ministry, a business, to seek political office? What ever it is, He has not changed His mind about it, nor about you! You are in His favor because Jesus is in His favor. You are in Him! You are kept by the mighty power of God. You are sealed in the Holy Spirit and un-pluck-able from the hand of the Lord. Run toward what he has called you to. You’re a driver, racing on the track of Life; Papa is waving the checkered flag just for you! He is calling you forward. He is calling you upward.

He bids you to finish in His power, what He has begun.