God’s Best Is For You

GOD’S BEST IS FOR YOU

By

Nita Johnson

Seattle

The Lord has some things on His mind. He wants to help you prepare spiritually for the things that are coming. This evening, the Lord gave me one vision after another. In one vision, I saw a stained glass window in the ceiling of Pastor Matthew’s Church. The colors of the glass were indigo and red. A beam of glory was coming down through the indigo-colored glass, making the glory look like a transparent indigo light shining down on the floor. I thought, “Hmm. I don’t remember Pastor Matt having an indigo window in his ceiling.” So I looked up at the ceiling, and, sure enough, the window was not there. So I knew for sure that I was having a vision.

I went back to prayer, and I had a second vision. In this vision, again, there was a stained glass window in the ceiling. The glass was completely indigo with a white cross in it – the cross of the Lord.

I went back to prayer, and I saw a third vision. Again, there was a stained glass window in the ceiling. The background was an indigo blue, and Jesus was etched into the stained glass. He was wearing His proverbial white robe, and He had sheep all around Him.

This is what the visions mean. God is bringing forth a glory. This is His promise to you. This glory is the glory of the knowledge of God. Indigo can represent two things: first, the priesthood. Secondly, it stands for God’s knowledge given to man. In this case, the indigo light represents the glory of the knowledge of God. The second vision of the stained glass white cross with a blue background means that God is getting ready to take His Church through some tests and trials. He wants you to remember that the light of His cross is there, ever guiding you. When He shows me the cross in black, I start praying against it immediately. But when He shows me the cross in white, it tells me that He has a purpose. God’s hand is in some way involved in this cross. It is something I want to submit to God in, and He will bring forth His glory through it. The third vision of Jesus, dressed in His white gown with His sheep all around Him, communicates that He wants you to bear the comfort of the Lord, knowing that as this test and trial comes upon the Church, Jesus is shepherding His sheep. He is not going to let you down. He is going to be there like the most valiant Shepherd—guiding, feeding, and protecting. He will be with you. So you are not going through this cross alone.

There are some things that He wants to give you to help you in your cross. Let’s begin with Romans 12, starting with verse 9.

Romans 12:9-11 Amp.  [Let your] love be sincere (a real thing); hate what is evil [loathe all ungodliness, turn in horror from wickedness], but hold fast to that which is good. Love one another with brotherly affection [as members of one family], giving precedence and showing honor to one another. Never lag in zeal and in earnest endeavor; be aglow and burning with the Spirit, serving the Lord.

Earlier this evening, when I was in prayer, I saw a vision of a heart burning with the fire of God. It did not look like an earthly fire; it looked like the flame of the glory dancing on the heart. I said, “Lord, what does this mean?” He quoted this Scripture in Romans 12:11: “Never lag in zeal and in earnest endeavor; be aglow and burning with the Spirit, serving the Lord.” When He gave me this passage, my heart immediately became filled with God’s compassion over the call of God. His desire is to bring His people close to Him. He wants to ignite the passion of the Spirit within your heart.

The Church has become too apathetic and too wrapped up in doing works in the flesh, without the Spirit of God. Sometimes, when a person wants to be seen and known as being very Christ-like, very generous, or very kind, but they have not been developed in the fruits of the Spirit—gentleness, goodness, brotherly kindness, and so on—they will play-act. They will pretend that they are loving, kind, and good, but when their activity is put to the test, or put to the press, then the opposite sour fruit comes out. When you question them, they lie because they do not want to be called to account for not behaving in the way they know they should behave. Have you ever met anyone like that? This activity destroys the capacity to be aglow with the Spirit.

People who walk in the way that I am talking about right now are people with a lot of pride. That is why they will not be corrected. Because they will not be corrected, and because the pride is so great, the Holy Spirit also cannot correct them. As a result, they lose the strength of His Spirit, the glory of His grace, and the power of His love to affect the very thing that they want to portray. The Bible says that correction is a way of life. (Prov 10:17) If you hate correction, then you can never know the place in God He wants to give you. People who love correction can go as deep in God as they want to go.

Years ago, the Lord said to me, “You will have union, Nita, and you will have it because you embrace My correction.” He did not say, “You will have it because you’re the greatest lover of mankind I’ve created on this earth.” He did not say I would have it because I have so much ingenuity, and I can figure out all kinds of ways to make it happen. He did not even say that it was because of my willingness to endure when He needs to take me through a trial. It was because I am willing to be corrected. So I want you to remember this: always be willing to be corrected.

Do you love Jesus? Act like Him, and do not make excuses when you fail. Be big enough and humble enough to say, “I did it; I was wrong.” The Lord will always honor you.

Romans 12:9 Amp.  [Let your] love be sincere (a real thing); hate what is evil.

By “hate what is evil,” he is not necessarily talking about something such as seeing on the news that someone was killed, and thinking, “I just hate this. It’s evil. America is becoming so evil.” He is not talking about that type of thing. When you read this Scripture in context, you come to understand that he is talking about hating the evil of the sinful nature. It is learning to hate what Christ hates and to love what He loves. When you love passionately with the purity of Christ, you hate the evil in you even more than you hate someone perpetrating evil on another. You hate it so much that you will do anything to have it cleansed from your soul. You are not going to be one who is given to arguing, constantly disputing, or choosing self instead of your brother, sister, wife, or husband. You are not going to be one who is given to petty jealousies. When situations come up where you are not treated the way you should be treated, you choose to humble yourself in the eyes of the Lord. You pray blessings upon the one whom you feel has mistreated you because that is righteousness.

To get angry, belligerent, offended, or jealous is evil. It is not just bad; the Bible calls these things evil. Some people are contentious. Some are competitive. Have you ever known friends like that? You cannot do anything without your friend competing with you. These things are not of God. They are not born of the Spirit, and they cripple your precious soul. God wants you to come to a place where you hate these things that keep you from being what He wants you to be.

The reason people yield to these evil things is because they really do not have God’s vision of the beauty and the preciousness of their holy soul. They do not understand that these things actually mar and cripple the soul, causing it to be unfruitful in the things of righteousness. They bruise and wound the soul, developing in it things that you will have to deal with later on and let God remove. It is similar to the barnacles that you sometimes see around huge rocks in the ocean. These works of the flesh are like barnacles to your soul. Left unattended, they will cripple you until your personality and character is not even your own anymore, let alone the personality and character of the Lord. Every time you choose the way of the soul and flesh, you do not understand what you are doing to your soul. When you choose not to love instead of learning love, you harden your heart. You cripple your heart, robbing it of its ability to produce ripe fruit. When you love the things of the lower life, hungering after and yielding to them, then you are hurting and wounding your soul. You are developing barnacles on your precious, holy soul until what God created in you no longer exists, and you have become something He never intended.

Why am I sharing this with you? It is because God is calling His people to never lag in zeal. All of these types of things stop, hinder, and prohibit the soul from walking in zeal. It takes grace to walk in the fiery zeal of the Lord and in earnest passion for Jesus. That grace—God’s own investment in your soul—is shut down by these barnacles of the soul life and of the flesh. Things such as refusing to forgive, or holding on to bitterness, destroy the nature of righteousness. You find yourself without grace, without virtue, and without Christian energy to be before God what He has called you to be.

Many years ago, I led a service where the Lord told me to teach on forgiveness. When I began, I noticed a woman in the front row. I promise you, her face was so twisted and so contorted with bitterness that I thought, “I wonder if God sent me here just for this one woman?” Some people can hold on to bitterness and you would never know, but this woman’s entire face was literally contorted because of the bitterness in her heart.

As I taught, God began to release such a beautiful anointing. His Spirit massaged her soul, again and again, until I saw her face begin to soften. The awful look on her face began to change. By the time I finished my message, she was in soft tears, but her face was lovely.

After the service, she came up to me, and she said, “I want you to know that my husband wronged me many years ago. I’ve never been able to forgive him. But God has healed me tonight, and I have forgiven him for what he did.” I knew she was telling the truth because you could see it in her face.

We wear these inner things on the exterior far more than we know. The appendages that Jesus and Paul told us to be free of will hinder, destroy, and inhibit the grace, the glory, and the love of Christ that it takes to walk in the zeal and the glow of the Spirit. When you do not attend to these appendages, allowing them to flourish on your soul, you begin to lose hope, faith, and trust in God. You even begin to see Him as a liar. It affects your hunger and your passion for Jesus. The only way to keep that passion strong is to keep yourself free of the sins of the flesh and the soul.

This is God’s highest ideal for you:

Ephesians 3:16-17 Amp.  May He grant you out of the rich treasury of His glory to be strengthened and reinforced with mighty power in the inner man by the [Holy] Spirit [Himself indwelling your innermost being and personality]. May Christ through your faith [actually] dwell (settle down, abide, make His permanent home) in your hearts! May you be rooted deep in love and founded securely on love.

When we first got saved, Christianity was an ideal. I think it probably was true of you; I know it was true of me. I read the gospels and I thought, “Jesus is so exciting and wonderful. I want to follow Him. I just want to love on Him, and I want Him to love on me.” At this stage, Christianity is an ideal.

You may come to the place where you go beyond that, and say, “I want to act and be just like Him. I want to walk in union with Him.” You desire this, but your soul has not yet been refined to be able to do that. Christianity is still an ideal. You may have better ideas and a clearer understanding, but it is still a precious ideal and something that is not easily grasped. The life of a Christian has not yet become tangible. You do not yet have the grace, the close walk with Jesus, the prayer life, the Word life, and the transfiguration that is needed to take place inwardly. You might talk about it, even a lot, but it is not something that is tangible in your soul yet. It is head knowledge.

Many people teach about Christianity from the place of an ideal. Most Christians throughout the world walk in Christianity in this place of the ideal as well. But here, Paul gives us an invitation that is indescribable:

Ephesians 3:17 Amp.  May Christ through your faith [actually] dwell (settle down, abide, make His permanent home) in your hearts! May you be rooted deep in love and founded securely on love.

If you fear the days ahead, you are not rooted deep in love. You are not yet founded securely on love, and this is the case because you have not learned how to trust. You have not gone through the refining of the Holy Spirit that enables you to trust as a child of God should trust.

Ephesians 3:18 Amp.  That you may have the power and be strong to apprehend and grasp with all the saints [God’s devoted people, the experience of that love] what is the breadth and length and height and depth [of it].

If you have ever tasted the love of God flowing in a tangible way over your heart, it gives you hunger for more and more. There is more to Christianity, though, than the gentle outpouring of His Spirit of love and grace. There is a place in Christ where He sends His Spirit to strengthen your inner man so that you can contain the love of the Father for the Son. He has to strengthen. He has to cleanse and remove the wounds and bruises. He has to place a grace inside your heart that causes you, at any cost, to rid yourself of the lower life. You will go through anything to be free of the lower life so that you can walk in the higher life. He develops this love inside you as you seek to have that love, fasting, praying, and even pleading to have it. You must fight the battle for this grace. It is not something that comes naturally.

His nature, His character, and His ways are so utterly different than the nicest, most wonderful human being on the earth who does not know Christ. They have merely learned to walk in a great and noble way. But when Jesus does His work in your soul, He strengthens the walls and the foundations of your inner man so that you can bear to carry the love of God. It is a work He must do, but you must cooperate with Him. You must choose truth every time over the lie. You must choose humility every time over pride. You must seek to humble yourself and to glorify Christ rather than yourself. You must love to be corrected by Him, and by whomever He has put in your life as an authority figure. You must love it. If you do not, you will not change. Every person that endeavors to change must walk through the waters of correction.

Ephesians 3:19 Amp.  [That you may really come] to know [practically, through experience for yourselves] the love of Christ, which far surpasses mere knowledge [without experience]; that you may be filled [through all your being] unto all the fullness of God [may have the richest measure of the divine Presence; and become a body wholly filled and flooded with God Himself]!

My dear friends, you have never known Christianity until you have tasted this. Christ in you is a life so different than where the average Christian lives. It is as different as night and day when Christ comes to dwell in you. When He comes to dwell in you, your nature, your character, and your lower life dies. His nature and the sinful nature cannot co-exist. So your lower life dies. You come to a place where you are totally incognizant of your own reality. Jesus Himself abides and lives in you. You no longer love with human love, but He loves through you with divine love. You no longer seek humility, but His own humility keeps your spirit man safe, steadfast, and free from the offenses and stumblings of the lower nature. His faithfulness functions through you. It is no longer you in your own strength and energy trying to learn faithfulness.

Now you must learn these things. You must. For, if you do not, you will never become strong enough to bear the higher divine nature. So you must work toward the goal and fight the battles for these things. You must determine that you are not going to walk in the ways of your soul and in the ways of your flesh. When you bump up against these, look at what you are doing and stop. Just stop. Humble yourself, right then and there. Carry the grace of God into humility and change. Do it again and again, until it becomes second nature. As it becomes second nature, the Lord says to Himself, “Well done. That is exactly what I needed you to do. Now you’re strong enough to bear My character.” Then He will give it to you.

Ephesians 3:20-21 Amp.  Now to Him Who, by (in consequence of) the [action of His] power that is at work within us, is able to [carry out His purpose and] do super-abundantly, far over and above all that we [dare] ask or think [infinitely beyond our highest prayers, desires, thoughts, hopes, or dreams]—To Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen (so be it).

His power and grace that works within us is a marvelous thing. I always stand in awe, marveling at what His power and His grace can effect in the human soul.

Years ago, I ministered at a Church, and one of the members of the Church was an old man. His son and his daughter-in-law were having such a hard time with him because he was an old coot. He was always grouchy, and he always had something negative to say. The son and the daughter-in-law thought, “How are we going to make it with this old man if he does not at least change a little? He is impossible to live with.” So they had been praying for some time for him.

Now, I did not know any of this. It was the first time I had ever ministered in this Church. But I pointed this man out by the Spirit of the Lord, and I said to him, “God is going to take you through an instantaneous transformation. Where you have been one way in the past, you are suddenly going to be totally changed and totally different. So much so, that some people will not even know you. In other ways, those who know you will come to love you like they’ve never loved you before because of this higher character that God is going to implant in your heart suddenly.”

Sometime later, I went back to that Church and I stayed in the home of the son and the daughter-in-law. They said excitedly, “We have to tell you what happened because it is the most incredible thing!” They told me how I had spoken that word to their father. That night, he went to bed, and when he got up the next morning, he was someone whom none of them knew. He was so kind and considerate. He was giving. He was not yelling and grouchy all the time. He was totally changed. I said, “What do you think happened?” They said, “We don’t know, but God visited his house that night!”

This is the kind of thing I think most Christians need. Most Christians need to touch Christ and feel the transformation that He makes possible. They need to come to a place where they are growing up out of their childhood, and where they want, long, and yearn to be a person of kindness, a person who loves truth, and a person who is humble. They need to come to desire to be a person who is willing to always be seen as a person of goodness, not for the sake of their pride, but because they have become so humble that goodness has become who they are. For this we must pray.

Trials are coming. They are going to come just as surely as summer eventually gives way to winter. Winter is coming for a season, and the purpose of the winter that God is going to allow to come to the body of Christ is to take you into the operating room. That was one of the visions I was given. He is taking you into the operating room so that He can refine and chisel you.

One time, a while back, I visited Israel. When I go there to pray, the Lord speaks to me in visions  and in dreams. He is always talking to me about Israel. When I open the Bible, it becomes a living letter. He does this only so that I know how to pray. One of those times, He came to me and said, “I want to take you someplace.” I said, “Okay, Lord.” He said, “Give me your hand.” So I rose up, gave Him my hand, and off we went.

We came to a room. He walked inside the room, and He put on a potter’s apron. I noticed that in front of where He stood was a potter’s wheel with potter’s clay on it. He did not say another word. He began to move the wheel, and He worked with the clay like a most skilled potter. I stood there, watching Him. I thought, “Why is He showing me this? Is He telling me that this is where we are going together?” I just did not know. He continued to work with the clay. His face was so content, so filled with hope and joy, as He molded and shaped the clay.

Finally, I said, “Lord, may I ask what You’re doing?” He replied, “Nita, I’m working with Israel.” He continued working with the clay. “I am the Potter; they are the clay. I am going to keep working with My people like this until they belong to Me.”

That is what He is going to do for the Church as well. The Potter is coming to His Church. To a lump of clay, being moved up and down, having its size changed constantly, is not a big deal. But to a human soul, it is uncomfortable; it may even feel painful. Remember, though, whose hands are on that clay. Remember whose hands are on your heart and soul to change you. He is taking us into the winter because He is going to take us into the operating room. When the work is done, we are going to be someone we did not know before. What He is doing, He is going to do for His glory. His glory is going to be here and working deeply all the while. We are not going to be without His manifest Presence. He is going to come in His glory.

So, my dear brothers and sisters, prepare. Take this teaching, and go over it again and again. I am talking to you not as a pastor, nor as a teacher, but as a prophet. The Lord has given this message for the betterment of your soul to teach you the way to walk with Jesus through difficult times. Your goal is to learn to walk in the love of Christ, to walk in the love of truth, and to be transformed into His image. His goal is to have you walk, not only transformed in His image, but to have you walking as close to Him as people are allowed to walk on this earth. That is His joy and goal. He will have a Church without spot or wrinkle when it is over.

In His Love,

Nita Johnson