As a devout follower of Christ, it pains me to say that Christianity, as largely practiced in the Western world especially, that it has been reduced a little more than a "social construct," a weekly get together to feel good or even bad about ourselves. I believe that there are far too few Christians who have a genuine, longing to see more, be more, and do more in their spiritual walk with the Lord.

Christ's sacrifice the cross didn't just save us, it restored our relationship to God the Father, providing a path for our coming into divine kinship through Jesus Himself. (See Luke 10:22, John 8:19, and John 14:7.) This restoration is a way established in Heaven, not in rules and structures imagined or developed by men.

The fact is, religion is man's attempt to reach out to God and dictate the terms. Religion is a poor substitute for a divine relationship. And relationship is what God is really all about. 

The Father didn't send His Son to establish religion. Christ died, not just to redeem us, but to restore the relationship that we were created to have with the Lord from the beginning.

And then He sent the Holy Spirit to teach and empower us in our adoption and in our transformation. Fortunately, religion's inadequacy is not God's failure. Although it is our responsibility as believers to answer the Lord's call and to enter into relationship with Him, the Lord is instituting change in what we think we know, about the way we go about this.

And this change is not coming through traditional, denominational, or religious channels for the most part. It's happening, in most cases, outside of the institutions that we have come to accept. By His own hand, and by virtue of relationship, the Lord is raising up a people to reveal His goodness, radiate His glory, and advance His Kingdom in our world:

Spirit-led individuals who have unassuming, earnest, conscientious hearts; believers whose integrity and whose purpose go far beyond sitting in a church pew each week. 

People who are ordinary in our eyes are receiving, not just revelation, but also authority and grace directly imparted from God. It's amazing to see what the Lord is doing, but it's even more amazing to be a part of it.

There is far more to following Jesus, to the whole "God experience" than most of us have ever been taught by man. Getting saved - going to Heaven - that was never an end goal. It's not the finish line. It's not the reward for being good. Getting into Heaven isn't about balancing the scales of of what you've done, good and bad in order to get in. 

Salvation is the "starting block" of your relationship with God. It's the place you begin. It's an outright gift. All you have to do is accept it, but once you do, then the real changes begin. Too much of what we know, or what we think we know, is completely backwards by true Kingdom reckoning.

What I share on this podcast ruffles feathers and makes a lot of people uncomfortable, if not downright angry. And I'm sorry if I offend some, but I know that a lot more people who hear these words are going to be freed, going to be unbound from oppression, and they're gonna experience the power of Heaven in their lives in ways that they may have never thought was possible before.

For too long, the church as an institution, has settled for a form of godliness, but denied the power of God. (See 2nd Timothy 3:5) And while the Lord, to our way of thinking how He does things, we feel that He might be delayed for a time, He will not be denied.

Our Father in Heaven is releasing revelation to otherwise ordinary people to see his purposes fulfilled in the world. God is pouring out His Spirit on people all over the earth today. And it's happening now with increasing regularity: sons and daughters are prophesying, young men are seeing visions. Old men are dreaming dreams. (Acts 2: 17 - 19)

The key to this are individuals who are moving beyond mere religion into intimate relationship with God. And my goal is to help you further develop and cultivate your personal relationship with Jesus and God the Father through the Holy Spirit.

That's what we were designed and created for.

Now, if what I say challenges, stretches, pushes you out of your comfort zone, then that's a good thing. I'm praying to bring you into greater resonance with His purpose so that you can live and operate daily in the strength and in the empowering grace of the Lord.

I'll refer to scriptures that I'm sure you're familiar with, but in contexts that you may not have heard in church or in Bible class. And I may surprise you with some language and some concepts you're probably not used to hearing in a "religious" environment. Still, what I share with you is biblical, it's laid out word by word, line by line, precept by divine precept.

Not that I expect you to take any of it at face value. As you watch or listen to "The Ekklesian," I urge you to take every word before the Lord. Ask the Holy Spirit, whether or not these things are applicable to your life. I only ask that if you're ready for a Spirit led life of significance and of purpose, and you want to experience the manifest power of God, that you prayerfully and thoughtfully consider these things.

The bottom line is "The Ekklesian" is for individuals with a hunger and a thirst for more of God; those who want to experience a greater reality from the Kingdom of Heaven in their lives. And they want to do it today.

If you know that in your heart, there must be more to life than what you're currently living, if you're longing for that deeper thing that God has for you, then know that Christ wants to bring you directly into relationship and release His glory upon you. And you can be utterly fulfilled in your life and you can positively affect the lives of others by bringing His promise and provision to them.

All you need to do now is answer His call. He'll do the rest. He started this work in you. He will see it through to completion. So come and discover how getting intimate with God will change your life.

I have to be honest. I've grown weary of people who have a negative relationship with Scripture. It leads to a negative attitude and an outlook regarding everything. And there are too many who are always looking at the faults in other people. They're sin-obsessed, constantly looking for evidence that God is not present, rather than looking for God's abiding presence within others, or declaring His promises over their lives... because God abides within them too, but sometimes that needs to be called out.

Grace, the empowering presence of grace, it helps us to understand how God's heart works and how to see how He sees. And that means whenever we come into contact with difficult people, we know and we recognize that we are a gift. We are a present to them to speak and declare God and His presence into their lives to be a blessing for them.

We are not here to guilt, to shame, to bully or somehow force people into Heaven or into the Kingdom. We're also not here to curse anyone. It amazes me that we don't seem to have learned anything from Christ response to the disciples in Luke 9, starting at verse 51. Look it up.

Grace empowers us to show and speak the love of God into people's lives and to declare His promises upon them. Out of the abundance of our hearts, our mouths speak into each other's lives. So, is what is coming out of your heart... grace? Is it love? If that's not what's coming out of your mouth, then what's in your heart?

I'm talking about what grace is and what it means for us and to us and consequently to the world around us. Grace is the very ground that we walk on. Grace is God for us and in us and who we are in Him. So, my prayer today for you is that as you watch this, the Holy Spirit begins to reveal the fullness of God's grace.

You know, throughout the Word are promises for all of the empty spaces of people's lives. And our job is to bring those promises to life by speaking to them and releasing God's love and releasing His promises into their hearts and into their lives and into their minds, that they might have an encounter with God that can turn those things into a reality for them.

We are here to express the love of Jesus. And Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life that sets people free. So, I pray today that each person watching this begin to have encounters with the Father based around the promises that He's given us, that we would know and would be able to show others through the Spirit of Revelation. And that we would partner with God to extend grace so that He can fill their empty hearts and restore what's missing in their lives. We want their lives to be filled Father, with Your fullness, Your grace and Your promises.

Just think, think about those things. And I pray that the grace of God extend in your life more that you begin to see it, because it's already there, but that you begin to see it so that you can extend it to others so that they can come to understand what God is really, really like. And the love that He really, really has.

Colossians 2:9 informs us that in Christ, all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form. And Ephesians 3:17-19 explains why it matters: "...So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith that you being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length, and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ, that surpasses knowledge that you may be filled with all the fullness of God."

That fullness of God doesn't include sin and God's not sin conscious. Christ dealt with sin once and for all at Calvary. God is, if anything, is "growth" conscious. He sees our empty places and He wants us to grow and mature into what is missing in us, into His fullness.

We have failed to understand that everything that was against us, against Him, against Him in us; all those things again were nailed to the cross. All of the empty spaces in our lives, every place that we have tried to fill with something outside of Him, He's given us Himself. Every aspect of God is a promise to fill a space.

So our true relationship with God is about fullness. It's about anointing. It's about abundance. It's about grace... and receiving the promises that can transform us and consequently change the world.

Too many of us are caught in a religious trap and we need a fresh revelation of Jesus. People know too much about how church works and far too little about how God works.

We need an epiphany regarding how God thinks about us; about you, how He sees you, what He wants for you. And the good that He is planning for you. See Jeremiah 29:11.

There isn't any part of us that God doesn't love because He is Love.

And that's why He's given us His empowering presence, His Grace. He understands our flesh. He knows our struggle. He knows what we're going through. He knows everything about us and He's empowered us to be like Him. He doesn't just tell us, but He empowers us to be like Him.

And that's why when He looks at you,, He doesn't see anything wrong with you. Everything that was wrong about you, that was wrong about me, all those things were nailed to the cross with Jesus. And Christ didn't just die for you or for me, He died as you and as me.

So, the Lord isn't focused on what's wrong with us, His attention is on what's missing in us. And that's what He is out to provide and complete in us and why He speaks to us so much about fullness.

God knows you. He looks at you from a place of completion, not from where you started or from where you are now. I like to remind people that God invented time and He exists outside of time. He holds it in His hands. When He looks at you, He's always seen you across the span of time. And so He not only sees you where you are now, He sees you in the future. And that's where God fixes His gaze on you, just as He did with Gideon, who the angel addressed as a "mighty man" long before Gideon fit that description.

It's how He looked at Moses before, Abraham, or Joseph, or Ruth, or Mary Magdalene, or any of the disciples, and basically any and every child of God. He sees us full and completed.

So, here's what you need to understand in your heart: He loved you in the past. He loved you first, before you loved Him. He loves who you are now. He loves who you are becoming and He knows far better than you do the process of growth that takes you from where you are, to where you will be.

And the important thing is, is He has patience for it. He loves you through that process.

There are a lot of bad definitions of God's grace out there. I think a lot of people, confuse it with mercy. They think that God's grace or that grace is God's willingness to overlook their failures and their shortcomings and love them despite their sin.

But that's not grace. That's mercy if anything else. Another poor definition I've heard for grace is that it's unmarried or deserved favor. And frankly, that definition is even worse. John 1:14 tells us that Jesus came from the Father full of grace and truth. And Luke 2:52 tells us that He grew in favor with both God and man.

So grace for us, isn't something that's unmerited because it was given to Christ and because He abides in us, we're made worthy.

What's the point? If we look back at John chapter one, verse 16, it informs us that for, "From his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace." Now, this is part of our going from strength to strength in that is mentioned in Psalms 84.

Grace is more than favor or a blessing. It is a divine empowerment. It is, I believe, the empowering presence of God that abides within you, that power that transforms you, grace is what enables you to become the man or woman that God sees when He looks at you.

You see God's perception of you is through the lens of Jesus. It's not according to what you've done, or according to your behavior. Grace is something that each of us desperately needs and depends on. You need to not just acknowledge, but you need to embrace the grace of God because grace also empowers you to believe and experience Christ's fullness.

God knows you. He looks at you from a place of completion, not from where you started or from where you are now. I like to remind people that God invented time and He exists outside of time and He holds it in His hands. But when He looks at you, He's always seen you across the span of time. And so He not only sees you where you are now, He sees you in the future. And that's where God fixes His gaze on you, just as He did with Gideon, who the angel addressed as a "mighty man of God," long before Gideon fit that description.

It's how He looked at Moses before, Abraham, or Joseph, or Ruth, or Mary Magdalene, or any of the disciples, and basically any and every child of God. He sees us full and completed.

So, here's what you need to understand in your heart: He loved you in the past. He loved you first, before you loved Him. He loves who you are now. He loves who you are becoming and He knows far better than you do the process of growth that takes you from where you are, to where you will be.

And the important thing is, is He has patience for it. He loves you through that process. There isn't any part of us that God doesn't love because He is love.

Christ was, is, and always will be God's provision for reconciling mankind and restoring our divine relationship on His terms, not mans.

Throughout church history, many things that well meaning men (and some not so well meaning) have insisted are God's will and God's intent were never what the Lord had in mind.

And the result is many organized religions have largely tried to reduce pleasing God to a way of thinking or acting, even dressing; to a set of rules or traditions to be kept or followed in order to curry His favor or earn some sort of divine brownie points. And those things miss the mark completely.

If you've become disenchanted with the church experience, or worse been hurt or wounded in the environment, unfortunately, you're not alone. The church is frequently at war with the very people that it should be extending mercy, love, and grace towards. Too many of its converts are confused, conflicted and afraid, and they do not know that the power to live in fullness instead of fear, to manifest God's glory instead of wallowing in guilt, is found in intimate relationship with God.

The life of a true follower of Christ is not about religion at all. It's about relationship: personal intimacy with God. It's about surrendering to the Holy Spirit and allowing God's Spirit to renew your heart and mind. That is what transforms a person.

For most of us, the relationship we have with God has become convoluted and obscured by men and organizations that have intentionally, or otherwise, sought to displace the role of the Spirit of Truth in our lives.

Getting to know the Lord shouldn't be as byzantine as it has become for so many. To set things straight, you may need to consciously "decouple" from the flawed foundation that your faith currently rest upon and uncomplicate your thinking by allowing the Lord to establish and renew your heart and mind on the firm foundation your faith was meant to be built on.

And that foundation is a relationship.

The Holy Spirit is calling out and seeking after individuals who have a desire and want to make a commitment to come into true relationship with the God of Heaven and who want to be transformed by the Holy Spirit. Now, these individuals are receiving revelations that are radically shifting how they think, how they live and what they think, it means to be a follower of Christ.

God's criteria is different than most of us believe. Your personal relationship with Him is at the core of your very existence. And it's not a relationship based on emotion or intellect. Although these things are part of it, they are in the natural. As Jesus related to the Samaritan woman at the well, in John 4:24, "God is spirit and His worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth."

It's simply not enough to relate to God out of the natural, out of our humanity, out of our flesh. We cannot become or be with the Lord has destined us to be, through our own efforts, no matter how much we strive. 

We are transformed through the Holy Spirit. As I said, previously, the status quo is being challenged by those with a heart to follow the direction and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. And renewal is being birthed directly in us because we are seeking after something that only God can impart. 

Have you sent something different, something new within yourself? Then tell Jesus today that you're ready to pursue intimacy with Him. Let Him know that you're thankful that He came so that you could get to know both Him and the Father as they truly are. Ask the Holy Spirit to transform you, to mold your heart and mind so that you can receive His love more fully and draw ever closer to Him. 

And as you cultivate a direct, personal, deep relationship with God, there are going to be a lot of things that will be different than you might expect. But it's time to get used to something different.