DON’T PICK THE LIE—PICK TRUTH

Nita Johnson

New Orleans Revival Services

Ephesians 4:21 Amp.  Assuming that you have really heard Him and been taught by Him, as [all] Truth is in Jesus [embodied and personified in Him].

All truth is in Jesus. I think one of the things that the Church lacks and needs the most is truth. We need truth as personified in Christ. He is truth, isn’t He? All truth is in Him. He is the very essence of truth itself. He is more than true. Jesus is truth.

Look at our politicians and bankers. Look at anything the world has to offer, and they will tell you whatever they want you to hear. They act ignorant in the things of which they are most respectfully guilty. They act surprised when their plans come to pass, and they have destroyed the very nation that has made them wealthy. For example, one of the latest things is regarding Bin Laden. This is just a supposition, and I suppose we will never be able to prove it, but I do not believe that Bin Laden was just recently taken into hand. But yet, our politicians and anyone connected with the whole vein of the thing will lead you to believe that a surprise has happened. I know personally that there were several occasions where our military came face to face with Bin Laden. They were told not to touch him because he was useful. He really is not our problem, is he? But all these deceptions are presented as truth. They fully expect you to believe whatever it is that they say. You have the lie, which is toted and applauded as truth, and you have truth of which they war against as though it is the lie.

All truth is in Christ. Do you believe that? Are you sure? Then why are you looking in the world for your life? Because although part of you believes it, part of you does not; that is the part that God is after. It is wisdom to believe that Christ is all you need.

Ephesians 4:12-13 Amp.  His intention was the perfecting and the full equipping of the saints (His consecrated people), [that they should do] the work of ministering toward building up Christ’s body (the church), [That it might develop] until we all attain oneness in the faith and in the comprehension of the [full and accurate] knowledge of the Son of God, that [we might arrive] at really mature manhood (the completeness of personality which is nothing less than the standard height of Christ’s own perfection), the measure of the stature of the fullness of the Christ and the completeness found in Him.

He is all we need. We do not need Jesus plus, or Jesus at the end of it. We do not need Jesus coming alongside while we are busy with this and that. Do you really believe that? Do not take lightly the Word of God. Instead, let it sink in where it has the force and the power to transform your soul. It is not easy, is it? We hear, perceive, think, and then we take it superficially. We do not work like we should to force it into those deep places. The Bible says that God desires truth—where? He wants truth way down deep.

There are thoughts and realities shifting around in our soul all the time. It is like going out into the arctic ocean where there are icebergs. Out there on a ship, you may see a huge iceberg travel by you that is flowing with the current. You can see it actually riding along on the current. Then, sometime later, you see a tiny iceberg moving in the opposite direction. You wonder, How can that be? It is because the little iceberg is really a gigantic iceberg below the surface, being driven by the undercurrent. The undercurrent is flowing in the opposite direction as the surface current. We have many currents in our soul; these many currents direct these icebergs, if you will. The icebergs represent strongholds, perceptions, and thought processes inside of us.

I remember a very, very dear man and pastor. He would do anything for you. He was just a very dear pastor. One day, I was praying for Him, and the Lord showed me his face. I asked, “What do You want to say to me about him, Lord?” He said to me, “He loves the world as much as he loves Me.” I said, “How can that be?” The Lord said no more. So I prayed and prayed for him.

Then it was time for me to talk to him. So I shared with him what the Lord showed me. And I said, “You know, it isn’t that I was sensing great sin. It wasn’t like that. It was like you just like to do things that the world affords. You like to do them as much as you like the Lord and as much as spending time with the Lord. But it has caused your heart to become double-minded, and God wants to help you with that.” He started crying. He said, “It is so true!” Then he began to share with me things such as, “I know I should be in my office studying the Word and preparing for Sunday’s sermon, but I love to go out with the kids and play basketball.” Or, “I know I should be studying, but I love to take my wife to a movie. I just love these things. I mean,” he said, “You know, the world is so great. It is so much fun. But you are right. It is affecting my life in God. I want God; I want Him so bad, but I cannot sit still. I just want to go and do everything there is to do. I have such a zest for life.” But see the Lord was saying, “There’s a problem here. It’s created a double-mindedness in your heart.”

Now today, many people in the Church would say, “I don’t consider that double-mindedness. I think you are preaching a little too tight on holiness and separation.” Maybe I am. It all depends on what you want in God. It all depends upon where you want to find your rest when the world crises arrives.  If you want the world to be your stability, you are on sinking sand. If you want God to be your stability, then in 99.9% of us that means a lot of character change that can only come in relation to Jesus.

Many years ago, when I used to sell real estate, I managed a very large real estate office. I would train our sales people. We wanted our office to be ethical, recognized for quality work. We did not allow anything slipshod or fly by night. So I would tell them, “If you want to be a very, very high quality agent, then find someone who is very successful in the real estate business. Look for someone who is ethical, and who you would like to be like. Spend as much time with them as you can. Mimic them; get to know their ways. Find out what they do, how they do it, and then do it.”

So when I came to the Lord, I thought, That is an excellent wisdom. I think I will do that with Him. If I want to be like Him, I think the best thing I can do is spend as much time with Him as I can. I will get to know Him, how He thinks, and the way He feels. I will learn His ways, His thoughts, His heart, and His passions. I will just get to know Him, and I will spend as much time with Him as I possibly can. In that way, I will get to know Him quickly and very well. Well, you do not get to know God quickly. So if you ever think like that, you are already on the wrong path. If you are pressing hard into Him, everything you think you know about Him changes nearly every year. After all, where does truth end? You learn line upon line. You do not get to know Him quickly, but you can come to know Him wonderfully.

I love to investigate; my brain just works that way. I love being nosy about God. Years ago, a prophet came and began to prophesy to me. He said, “I can see a vision. I see you taking apart this clock. You’re investigating everything inside it thoroughly so that you can completely understand it. You’re so inquisitive.” He paused, and said, “But the Lord is telling me that this clock is God! You want to know everything you can possibly know about Him.” I responded, “It is true! I am guilty as charged. It is true. I want to know everything I can know about the One who gave His life for me.” Paul said, “And the wonders of Your person.” (Phil 3:10) I used to tell the Lord, “I want the whole panorama. I want to know every face You have. I want to know every part of the heart that is You. I want to know everything about You. I want to know the parts that are scary, and I want to know the parts that seem wonderful.” I just want to know Him. He is complete.

I remember Him coming to me one time. I was praying fervently and passionately, crying out, “Lord, I want to know You. I want to know You like Paul knew You. I want to know You the way Jesus knew You. Lord, I want to know You!” I was just crying out, weeping, and full of passion. Suddenly, He appeared to me. He stood in front of me. As I beheld Him and looked into His eyes, I saw that He was utterly complete. I needed nothing outside of Him. Absolutely nothing. What words in our vernacular can express the infinite completeness of an infinite God? I do not know how to describe to you what I saw. As I looked into His eyes, I saw that He was absolutely, utterly, and thoroughly complete. We think we need so many things in this world; the world keeps telling us we need them. If we do not have this, we need to get it. If we do not have that, life is just not complete without it. It goes on and on and on, doesn’t it? But I am telling you the truth—we do not need any of it. He is complete, and He is our completeness.

He is complete truth. What did He say to us? He said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” (John 14:6) Without truth in the middle of way and life, neither can work. We cannot know the way without truth. We cannot become life without truth. Truth has to fit in there. He could not have said, “Well, I am the way and the life” because He would have left out the most important part. The truth is Jesus is the Son of God, but do you know that? You say, “Yes, of course I do. Don’t be ridiculous. Don’t be silly. Teach me something I don’t know.” Have you experienced it? Has He come to you and allowed that reality to enter into your soul, encompassing your soul so that you have manifestly experienced the son of God? Have you experienced what it means that He is the Son of God? If you have not, you do not really know it. You know it intellectually, the way the world has taught you to know things, but you do not know it the way God teaches us to know things.

God’s presence comes upon me and when that particular aspect of Himself comes upon me, I cannot bear to look at the words in the Bible. Let me tell you why. When that presence is here, every word—even words like in, whom, and because—becomes so full of His life that it becomes unbearable, and my soul has a very difficult time staying in my body. It wants to go up into the Lord. The life of His Word has so much power that it wants to cut asunder between soul and spirit, freeing the soul to know the life of the Spirit. When that happens, I am not sure how to proceed or what else to do. Sometimes I do not proceed because I cannot. His Word is so filled with life and power. It is so living that even the least “I Paul” becomes too much for my soul to bear when filled with the life of God.

When Jesus said, “I am truth,” we look at it, and we think, Yeah. Okay. Truth is what the Bible is, and that is what He is. He is truth. That is good. I think I will memorize that Scripture. Then someone says, “Do you know that Jesus is truth?” We answer, “Boy, do I ever. Let me tell you the Scripture.” But that is man’s way; that is the world’s way. I want to tell you something. You were recreated to hear truth God’s way. Before the recreation—before you became a child of God and were given the power to know, understand, and comprehend truth—you had to know and understand it through the intellect. But when you were impregnated with the Spirit of life, something happened inside of you which enables you to know truth God’s way.

Now theologians may love the Word. They go to school, year after year, until someday they get their Doctorate degree. I have a very good friend; he does not mind me telling on him. He is a Doctor of Theology, and very intelligent, but there is something that degree can do to you that is not necessarily the best. So one day, he decided to make himself breakfast. He pulled the eggs out of the refrigerator. He had a carton of eggs sitting on the counter, and he realized that one of the eggs was broken. There were about eight eggs left in the carton. One of them was broken, and he thought, I’m not going to let that egg go to waste. So this Doctor of Theology picked up the carton of eggs and turned it upside down in the hopes of emptying the broken egg so as to not lose any of it. In the process, he lost the other seven as they crashed on the floor. He caught only one between his knees. He told me this story, and even though he has a great sense of humor, he was not laughing. He said, “What is wrong with my noggin? Why didn’t I know that wouldn’t work?” His wife was standing there watching. She said, “What do you think you’re doing? What did all of that education accomplish?”

God has given us an intellect to reason with, but they spend years studying the Bible. They may know two thousand, even five thousand Scriptures. I know one pastor that knows ten thousand. But if you have never experienced the life of God in the Word, all you have is head knowledge. You have not, even for even a moment, become identified with truth. You cannot really know truth until you experience it through the life of God.

Years ago, I was in prayer with my dear friend and, at that time, my secretary. She and her husband had moved up north. This experience occurred when she came down to California to do some special work with me. She was at my home, and we were getting up in the middle of the night, praying together. It was about two or three o’clock in the morning. Suddenly, the Lord came to me. He said, “I am going to take you up, and I am now going to teach you the name Yahveh.” Immediately, I was gone. She told me that at that moment, the entire room filled with the holiness of God so powerfully that she went to the floor. The terror of the Lord gripped her. When I left, she said, “I knew you were gone.” I was taken up, and I experienced the name Yahveh. You say, “Well, what did you experience?” The Bible tells us what the name Yahveh means. He explains it right here in Exodus.

Exodus 34:5-6 Amp.  And the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there and proclaimed the name of the Lord. And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The Lord! The Lord! A God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abundant in loving-kindness and truth

Merciful is the first meaning, or attribute, for Yahveh. Gracious is the second attribute. Slow to anger is the third attribute. Abundant in loving-kindness is the fourth attribute, and truth is the fifth. This is what the name Yahveh means. I was taken up into God, and I found myself hovering there in the middle of nowhere except God. I could see the Lord standing off in the distance. He began to proclaim the name Yahveh to me, just as it reads there. As He proclaimed each attribute of the name Yahveh, it would leave His belly. That attribute would come rolling out down a predetermined path toward me, and when it came to me, it would enter into me. It felt like my whole being would explode under the power of that name—under the power of His mercy, under the power of truth, under the power of long-suffering, under the power of loving-kindness, and under the power of graciousness. I do not know how long it was, but it seemed to take a long time for each attribute to settle in so that my spirit and soul could adjust to the power of the living Word that had just been placed within me.

When the whole thing was finished, I was on my face. I could not take anymore. The Lord spoke to me, “This is the experience that I gave to My servant Moses. This is how I taught Him about Myself on the top of the mountain.” If you are content to have head knowledge, He will let you stay content with that. If you are not content, but your heart is desiring and passionate for more, wanting to know God as Paul or Moses or the Lord Jesus Christ knew Him, you can provoke Him into that kind of relationship. He will allow you to do that. He has made that decision to allow you to incite Him in this tender grace. But it will never happen if you keep loving the world. You cannot have both the world and God in your heart. Why? Because, there is not enough room. God is big; He takes up a lot of space. Furthermore, if God fills half of your heart, just by virtue of the fact that He has that much of you means that you are coming to the place that you cannot tolerate the things of the world. You do not want them in you. You do not want the love of those things in you. You do not want your soul filled with the things that are warring against the Spirit. Paul tells us that the Spirit is ever warring against the flesh, and the flesh is ever warring against the Spirit.  This war never ends until the Spirit is at rest because He owns you completely. You just get to a point where you are tired of the war, and you are hungry for truth.

The world tells you what to think, but what it tells you is a lie. Well-meaning Christians sit watching TV, and they are gulping down all of that deception every day. They are feeding their heart full of the lie. The world is not going to tell you the truth. It cannot tell you the truth because it does not know the truth. They will not even tell you a truism if they can possibly lie to you and get what they want. Not all are like that. Some really do care, and they really are out there fighting for what they believe is right. But even the world is finding out that the things that they have been believing is a dangerous, dangerous lie to embrace as truth.

Jesus Christ is the Son of the living God. Jesus Christ is Lord. Jesus Christ is the Word made man. Jesus Christ is the living Word. Jesus Christ is the eternal Word. Jesus Christ is the revelation of the Father. Now if we just stop there, and you spend the rest of your life learning those few realities, it will take the rest of your life and much of eternity. So how do we have time for the world?

In His love,

Nita Johnson