We must overcome rebellion and bitterness and all of these things that fight against God in our hearts. We have to overcome. He’s given us the weapons to do it. He said, I will give you whatever weapon you need as long as you are doing it to be regenerated so you are useful to Me and I can commission you to live forever through eternal salvation. I want to teach on the foundation of faith. It’s probably not what you think it is. We want to go back to the very first verse of Genesis 1 and look at some things that we know. God said that most of His people don’t understand and know the ways of God. I want to begin by looking at some of His ways. Genesis 1:1, In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. This is singular: the heaven and the earth. One of the things we need to remember is that in the beginning, God was. He doesn’t explain how He came about. God was. All things exist because of Him. Let’s just stop and think. If you were the only person and there was nobody else, how would you begin to create? First of all, you would want to create order. If it wasn’t orderly then everything would be chaos. So in the beginning God created order. Because He was the only one, He created order to obey Him. That’s who God is. God is the one that has created all things. To keep order, you don’t assign a thousand people to do something. He has created us to be one with the Father. Jesus came that we might know the Father. In the beginning, from the very beginning, He began to create everything to obey Him so there would be order. Not for everybody to just bow down to Him and slobber all over Him, but for the purpose of order. When rebellion came, there was disorder. Jesus said to the disciples, if you’re going to live by the sword you will die by the sword. But if you live by the Spirit, it’s a whole different matter because then it’s the Father that is a God of order. Paul writes about the order of God in Ephesians. All things have order: order in the church, order in His kingdom, so that everything is peaceful and quiet, and everybody knows the order. As you learn to know God, you know the order in which He does things, and when there is order then the power that God created everything will begin to fellowship with you. That’s faith. And if you don’t fellowship with the Creator and know His ways, you’ll always be confused about what’s going on. So the first thing we need in faith is to know that He has order in everything that He created and if you don’t know that order, it won’t listen to you. It was made to listen to God alone, because there wasn’t anybody else. So if there is order, the presence of God can come, and if we honor Him, the One that created all things, the things He created will honor us. If you want to be rebellious, if you want to do whatever you’re going to do, the laws of creation will not follow you. You will follow the laws of creation. There are some laws that you must follow. If you get on top of a three story house and jump, you’re liable to stub a toe or something. You know that so you don’t do it. If you stick your fingers in fire or boiling water, you know what’s going to happen so you don’t do that, because that is the way God created it to be. We are serving a God that demands order to be in His kingdom. So then because we see it everywhere, it’s not hard to have faith in God because when we have order in our lives for Him, we will begin to have the attributes of God because we were created in His image and likeness. Isn’t that a foundation? That’s where we have to start. To really have faith in God, when you know Him and He knows you, He said He will give you whatever you ask in His name. Well in His name is order, obedience, and all those attributes of God. When you say in Jesus’ name, you better understand that you are saying you’re going to obey and honor the laws of God, because they’re good for you. It brings you into a place where you can meditate and God can begin to speak to you and fellowship with you. That is praying without ceasing. You are in constant fellowship and obedience to God. I don’t have to keep praying for something I prayed for ten years ago because I’m still in the hope of receiving it and I believe it’s coming; I’m not interfering with it. If you look in the Bible you will find people that God did things to so they would not interfere with His plans. Leah had a hard life because Rachel tried to take her over. Leah finally got so upset she said, you’ve taken away my husband, you’ve taken everything I have and I’m tired of you. Rachel was barren because she was not in unity with God. Finally she had Dan and she said God has judged me and given me a child. Then she had three more children and the last one was Benjamin. Then what happened? She died in childbirth. She gave a name for Benjamin that Jacob refused to accept. He said his name will be Benjamin (son of my right hand) and not Benoni (child of my sorrow). Why was that the case? Because she was not in unity with the Creator of all things that work together for the good of them that love Him. After God gave Zechariah the promise of John the Baptist, He shut up his mouth so he could not speak against the promise. As soon as the child was born, he could speak again. That’s because God didn’t want him speaking rebellion toward what God said. So to stop it, He shut his mouth. For Rachel to not damage what God wanted for the four children He gave her, He took her home. She was gone. So the only influence she could have was with the first of them; as they grew, they grew up without her. God judged and said, Okay, I’ll give you four children. He didn’t say it to her, but that’s what He gave. And at the end of the fourth child she was gone because He didn’t want her interfering with what He had for the foundation of all creation to have salvation through Israel. Our biggest enemy is ourselves. One of the disciples was called doubting Thomas. After Jesus rose from the dead, He said, Thomas, come over here. Stick your finger in My side and you can see that I have a hole there. But that hole doesn’t bother Me anymore because I’m not flesh and blood, I’m a spirit. He will probably carry that wound in His side all of eternity for you and me, to remind us of what He did for us. He was a perfect sacrifice because He was obedient. “Not My will, but Yours be done.” The Lord spoke to me not long ago and said, I’m going to ask you to do some things you may not want to do. I got before the Lord and gave up my agenda again in a whole new realm that I didn’t know existed. I said, Lord, whatever You want, I want. Do you know what happened? I’m a different person. I’m not the same man because I gave up thinkings that were rebellious toward what God wanted. Rebellion is not faith. Rebellion in God’s eyes is death. You will not operate eternally in His kingdom with your rebellion. It will not be done because everything in His kingdom is order. Did you ever read the story where a bunch of men went to Moses and said, Moses, you’re taking on too much. We’re priests too and we have a right. What happened? The ground opened up and swallowed them and they went down into the bottomless pit and never were again. Was God mean? No. He was just keeping order in His house. When you try to own a soul, what happens? Jesus said in the fourth church in Revelation that jezebel (who labors to own souls) and her children (those that follow her in her rebellion) will die because He will not have rebellion in His house. He kicked satan out. satan just knew he could take over but he didn’t understand that everything that God did was commanded by Him. In the beginning, God gave commission to Adam that all things are given into his hands and they will obey him. But when Adam and Eve rebelled against that and ate of the fruit, there was chaos from that point on. When the chaos got so great He was going to destroy everything, but He found Noah. In Genesis 6:1, And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. Noah started building the ark when he was five hundred years old, and the flood came when he was six hundred years old. But God said the earth was going to last 120 years the way it was. Noah only took 100 years to build the ark. Where did the other twenty years come in at? Well He just spoke to Himself or to Jesus and said I’m done with the human beings that are on the earth and I’m going to give them 120 years and they will all be dead. But it says that God saw Noah who loved Him and was following what God made him to be. He was pure in his generations. Are you pure in your generations? That’s what we, the seed of Abraham, have been laboring for: to be pure in our generations. The foundation of all salvation comes through Abraham, and Jesus came to make it to where we not only can have salvation but we can be brought back to the original state of authority upon the earth. All of the signs of healing and everything He did were to show that He was a human being too, but He had power over all flesh. Doesn’t that line up with what I’m saying? Jesus had power over all flesh (John 17). If that’s the case, if you have Jesus living in you, you should have no condemnation. It says that in Romans 8:1. After chapter 7 where Paul says I do the things I don’t want to do and everything is pulling me to do this, and I want to do it but I can’t. But when Jesus comes and lives in you, you have the power to remove rebellion from your life. And when that happens, faith begins to arise because you begin to see things happen that are supernatural to the dead people (meaning those that are walking around but God sees them as dead – let the dead bury the dead. You come and follow Me.). Back to Noah, twenty years went by after God said I’m going to wipe out this generation. satan was trying to fill the whole earth with fallen angels offspring that were rebellious so God would have nobody to obey Him. satan and the god of force right now are trying to eliminate the Christian that is faithful so there won’t be anyone that will walk in alignment with God to have power upon the earth to cause the wicked to be destroyed. What we’re doing is kissing the wicked thinking that somehow it’s going to work. It won’t. We know what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah and their homosexuality. He blew them sky high. When we were in Israel, we stopped at the Dead Sea. It wasn’t the Dead Sea originally. Sodom and Gomorrah were full of life, prosperous, and had lots of oil. They were sitting on oil. When they went to war, the kings ran away from their enemies and ran into oil pits. That’s how prosperous it was. After God saved them through Abraham, they didn’t change so God said, because you didn’t change I’m going to blow you sky high. They told me the Dead Sea is three and a half miles deep, twelve to fourteen miles wide, and forty some miles long. When that thing blew, Abraham was there looking at it. Do you think that put the fear of God in Abraham? I bet it did. So therefore, God gave the earth that Jesus created to Him to harvest people for Jesus His Son. He was a perfect sacrifice because He was obedient to His Father and He was made in the image and likeness of Him. But because He came to the earth and was birthed by flesh and blood, He was flesh and blood but yet His spirit was of the eternal God. So God saw Noah and He worked with him for twenty years to sanctify him. God took twenty years to find Noah and bring him to a place of removing him just like He did Jesus; removing him from the world to become totally obedient for 100 years of labor. Before Jesus died He told His disciples that He sanctified Himself from the world. He said, I am no longer in the world but I am preparing to die for you that you might have the regeneration process start in you that you will become what God created Adam and Eve to be in the very beginning. That is, to have dominion over all that He created. That’s what He’s laboring for us to come into. Isn’t that the foundation of faith? Can you see your faith being changed now? It has for me. If we are faithful to Him, He’ll be faithful to us. We don’t have to question, am I saved? No, Christ lives in me and because He lives in me, He’s changing my heart so that I’m not rebellious towards Him, but I love His ways. That’s what David said. David loved His ways and his faith was strong. When God would say, take it, he took it. I’ve been waiting for the salvation of God to completely fulfill the whole thing of God sending His spirit to break the power of rebellion upon the earth so there could be a full and complete separation. I believe that’s been happening since the year 2000 through our presidents and all of that that is established. In our government today we do not have unity, but the devil is trying to tear apart everything that God wants to put together. There is soon going to be a huge clash of the wicked being destroyed and God’s people finally walking in the peace of God. Then we’ll have the full quietness of the thousand year reign. There were times in the scripture that God said to take their spears and swords and beat them into plowshares because there’s peace. He’s taken war out of the earth, or rebellion, or covetousness. The Lord has been teaching us how to raise the standard. When the enemy comes in like a flood, raise the standard. What is the standard? Rebellion being removed and peace in God abounding. Then your faith will arise like the sun in the morning. Genesis 9:9, And I, behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you; He’s speaking to Noah after the flood is over and the earth is back to dry land. Noah’s children had the opportunity to walk in the presence of God forever. The blessing came upon Noah, then Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Cush came from Ham and Cush had Nimrod. Nimrod was a warrior against God. He was known for that. So within two generations from Noah, great wickedness came back on the earth. What did Cain do in the beginning? Because rebellion had come upon the earth, he allowed rebellion to come in. God spoke and said, you must overcome it. You. And we must overcome rebellion and bitterness and all of these things that fight against God in our hearts. We have to overcome. He’s given us the weapons to do it. He said, I will give you whatever weapon you need as long as you are doing it to be regenerated so you are useful to Me and I can commission you to live forever through eternal salvation. Does that sound like once saved always saved? Not even close. All the churches that believe they can just say a few words and that’s it, they are sending them to hell. Jesus said to the Jews, you go out and try to save people and you make them twice the sons of hell than they were before because now they think they’re saved, but they’re not. Sometime in the time of Noah, from the time the flood was over but before he died, there was a transition that took place and God began to call Abraham. When Noah died, Abraham was 58 years old. It’s not in the Bible but in some of the other books it says Abraham talked with Noah. Abraham’s father was in rebellion against God but God called Abraham and said, Leave your family, your country, and where you were born. He was to get away from them all because they would try to steal his promises in God if he stayed around them. So Abraham left when he was 75 years old. That’s why we for years have been in a place of isolation to get away from the generations of wickedness. If we don’t get rid of that, we will be of very little use in the kingdom of God because our generations were wicked. In the Amish faith they say, what was good enough for my generations is good enough for me. Well it isn’t for me. And I knew it when I was just a small child. I knew something was wrong, but I had no idea what it was. When I was in my late twenties, I sought to find out and that’s when the Lord came in and said can you trust Me to do the right thing? And instantly I said “I can.” And a new level of faith came in me and from that point on my faith has increased or I wouldn’t be here today. But it was God’s dealings with me that caused my faith to arise. And it’s the same for you. When you have a dealing with God, you’ll never forget it. It will stick to you until you physically die or God takes you to heaven. It’s a hard thing to be saved, according to Jesus. Christ came to break the power of satan but we have to break the power of deception. That’s our part. Jesus did His part. He broke the power of satan but you have to break the power of rebellion from you being deceived. The only way you can know where you’re at and who you are is in your relationship with God. God is not a mean God. It’s just that if He would let rebellion reign, everything would be total chaos. The sun may not come up again, the gravity of earth and the sun and everything may fall apart. 1 Corinthians 15:19, If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept. Jesus is the first fruit. That means that what He has completed on the earth, those that follow the Creator God, are a part of the fruit from the seed that Jesus planted on the cross and we will become like Him. I’ve heard people say that if you want to know how much you’re like God, just put your life up with what Christ did on the earth. If it resembles Him, the seed of Abraham is growing in you. Jesus died and became the first fruits of them that slept. Verse 21, For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. Jesus was a man and fully God. We are fully man and if Christ is in us, we are being created to be one of the fruit of the earth. Fruit is something that gives life to those that want what you have. When Adam and Eve sinned in the garden, God said, you will die. How do we die? We must die to the sins and wickedness and rebellion of the earth to be able to be transformed into a new creation. We don’t need the outer court anymore, we need to go to the cross and die where Jesus died for our sins so that we might be resurrected into a new life. That new life is being born again with the promise of eternal life. When Christ lives in you, you will never die. But if you just believe, even though you die, after the thousand years you will be a part of the second resurrection. But the first resurrection will be those that receive Christ in their life and go up to heaven. Verse 22, For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming. Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. Jesus’ job is to gather the church together and make them the most powerful army that has ever existed and there will never be one like it again because it won’t be needed. The end will come when Jesus has delivered up the kingdom to God, His Father and our Father. Why would He put down all rule, authority, and power? Because from that point on we will get all power and authority through the Father. Verse 25, For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. After Christ comes back and gives eternal life, I don’t know if it would be possible or not, for someone like us to get to heaven and have eternal life and become rebellious. But if we would, we would be put in the bottomless pit and live forever in that. It wouldn’t be a very healthy place to be. Verse 27, For he hath put all things under his feet. But when he saith, all things are put under him, it is manifest that he is excepted, which did put all things under him. And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all. That is one of the most comforting things for me. Jesus is going to labor with mankind on the earth to destroy all death by destroying rebellion, wickedness, and all the things that God never designed but gave you the choice to do. When that’s all done, Jesus said, we’re going to take all things that you have subdued, and put them at the Father’s feet and say, Father, we want You now to be in charge alone. We will do what You want and we will become like You because we’re obeying You in what You want done and we will have joy and total peace and quietness forever. That’s the kind of people that will go there; those willing to labor to bring death down and destroy it. Until we have done that, Christ is not going to come back. Jesus said only the Father knows when the time is. You can know the season it’s in, about when it’s coming, but only God the Father will know exactly when the trumpet shall sound. He’s going to come back and separate the chaff from the wheat. The angels will go out to the four corners of the earth and gather it in because the angels also know who are rebellious and who aren’t. Abraham was given the seed of promise of New Jerusalem where there will be peace forever. Anyone that does not walk in peace will not be there. I mentioned before about our guide in Israel who stood with us up on Dan where the golden calf was, who was in the Cohen family, which were the High Priests. I have never felt a heart like his heart. There were some people that had come from Jordan and saw the sights there and they were rude. Cohen was our leader and they were just doing what they wanted to. They weren’t honoring him and my boiling point was just about to blow. But he came up to me and said, Larry, it’s all right. And I felt his love. I don’t know what God has for him, but I’m telling you, I felt quietness and peace in that man that will never leave me. He took the cork and just pulled it off and the steam came out and I was quiet. So those that use the sword will die with the sword, but those that have Jesus in their heart will labor by the spirit that wants to please the living God. The power of peace is one of the greatest gifts that God has given mankind. Jesus prayed that we would have peace. The book of Hebrews talks about walking in peace and quietness before God. But He says it’s a different story with the wicked. He said, rise up and roar. There’s a roar that’s going to come out of Zion, which is out of the kings of the earth that are laboring for God. That’s where we need to be - learning to pray without ceasing. The enemy tries to discourage us, but he’s going to be destroyed. My heart is set to serve the living God for as long as there is breath within me. And if you do the same, He will diffuse your rebellion and you’ll walk in a realm that you didn’t know existed. Amen.
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