The Reigning Ones Part 2

By Nita Johnson 

January 2009

 Following is a transcirption of the teachings in New Orleans.

In the previous part of this message, I shared with you how every day for two years I prayed this passage asking the Lord to allow me to have this. I knew that this passage spoke of the ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ our Messiah, yet deep in my heart I felt it was possible for one who loved Jesus to also  estimable governmental yoke . Therefore, I would pray daily, “Lord, if I’m praying amiss, please forgive me. But if I’m not, I want You to know that I desire  this and I feel like I want it so bad that my heart is going to break in two if I  cannot have it. I know this is about our Messiah and the ministry of Jesus Christ, so if I’m offending You, please forgive me, but if not, please allow me to have  it .”

So, having prayed this every day for two years, I was praying it again, when the Lord appeared to me and said, “Nita, come and stand beside Me.” As I did, a double yoke appeared on His shoulders and extended until it was set upon my shoulders and we were yoked together. As this process completed, everything inside of me – all my human passions – began to go down, and exit through my feet. All of my lower nature just left me, and everything going on inside the Lord Jesus Christ began to fill me. His wisdom and understanding, His spirit of counsel and might, His knowledge and reverential and obedient fear of the Lord, and the Spirit of the Lord began to fill me. I was transformed into another person, everything had changed. I no longer found myself worshipping the Lord Jesus Christ who was up in heaven while I was down here on earth desiring Him, craving Him, passionately chasing after Him. No, because now He was not just inside my heart and my spirit, but He had come to dwell in my soul, so I no longer thought about the Lord, rather He was thinking and feeling and knowing through me. His mind, heart and passions were now mine. I was totally  incognizant of to my own existence, being conscious only of the Lord who now filled my soul.

Then, He turned and looked at me and said, “Nita, what you are experiencing now is what you’ve been praying for the last two years. This is the answer to your prayer.” He said to me, “This is the government of the Kingdom, it is also called the yoke of the Kingdom.” He then explained to me what He meant when He was here on the earth and would cry out to the people, “All you who labor and are heavy laden, come unto Me and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly of heart.” He said, “Nita, it is true I was concerned about how Judaism had become a bondage to My people, rather than a means of relationship. However, I was not encouraging them to yield up the yoke of Judaism for My yoke. What I was doing was crying out to them to take My yoke in exchange for the yoke of the sinful nature which was keeping My people trapped away from Me, hindering them from being able to ascend into Me. I was crying out for all humanity to come and take My yoke in exchange for the yoke of the sinful nature and come to know Me, helping them to understand that I was meek and lowly of heart and they would find rest for their souls.”

So the Lord equating this passage from Matthew 11 with Isaiah 11:2-5: an exchange of life from the nature that loves sin to the nature that is clothed with Christ — His nature that has come to dwell within. Your life is no longer yours, it is no longer you; it is Him that is living in and through you. This is what He was asking the people of Israel to consider. It is amazing to me, the goodness of God and the secrets and mysteries that have been kept hidden all these years and now God is choosing at this time to begin to open these mysteries and secrets to help His church become more than she ever dreamed she could be. He desires to help the individual believer come to know and understand that life in Christ is far more than they ever dreamed it could be. Jesus longs to have us walk with the Father the way He did and to move in the government that He moved in, but there must first be a death in order to walk in this life of God. That’s why Paul taught about our co-crucifixion with Christ; it was an invitation to let die in ourselves that which must die.

When we inherited this nature of sin through the fall of Adam, it was not a gift, it was a horror. It was a horror of great darkness that overtook the human soul. Our soul was created to bear God and carry the glory of God; it was created in the image of Christ, but suddenly, as a result of the sin of one man, our soul  became filled with the horror of darkness. Our soul was not created for that, it shrivels under this unnatural condition of separation from God, and it creates dysfunctional people. It’s funny to me that we have the term in psychology, “dysfunctional people.” When you look at it from Heaven’s perspective, we are all dysfunctional until we are perfected in Christ. That is a reality; you cannot look at yourself as being attuned to life and functional when you’re lusting after everything the world has to offer and you are not lusting after God. There is something wrong with this picture.

He has created us to bear Himself, the glory of the Father. Our soul really doesn’t know how to bear the darkness that it carries, and so the more that the darkness rules and reigns in the heart, the more dysfunctional a person becomes. You see, the kingdom of darkness fractures the soul again and again until darkness owns every part of the heart and soul, but the day is coming that God is going to send forth a people in the body of Christ that have died to all of that. Those who have paid the price to let the world go and to become one with Christ, to bear the seven Spirits of God, who have become the government of God in the earth. There is a new way being born by the Spirit of God into the earth and it is going to be carried on the shoulders of a new Priesthood and this new Priesthood is going to make possible what has never been possible before. It is called the Melchizedek Priesthood.

These are men and women who walk in such high places in God that they are dead to sin and to the world, dead to flesh and to the devil; dead to it all and living in the Lord. They are alive in Christ and they manifest His virtues, nature and glory. The Lord once told me that they would be called, among other things, “The Crucified Ones.” This is because these people will be so crucified and walk in such humility in Him.

In the previous section of this article, I posed the question if anyone could imagine a life without pride. None whatsoever; your heart, soul and mind emptied of pride, fear, self-centeredness, self-consciousness; all the things that go with the sinful nature. Imagine, if you could just get rid of pride, how your life would change. You would no longer have to worry about the ‘me’ syndrome. Have you ever had to take antibiotics for that? Imagine this scene, “Yes, Doctor Jones, I woke up this morning to discover that I have the ‘me’ syndrome. Is there an antibiotic for that?” Can you comprehend life without pride and self-centeredness, where you think about no one else but the other person, what is good and best for them; kindness, goodness, gratefulness and faithfulness to God and your fellow man, regardless of whether they love Jesus or not.

Jesus certainly did not reserve His love only for those who loved Him. He loved all people. And I think it’s unique that the Bible says He trusted no man because He knew what we were about, and He still does. One of the reasons He did, was because He bore the seven Spirits of God. When a person bears the seven Spirits of God they can read the heart and mind of man. They know the hearts of men as the Spirit gives revelation. He not only gives them the capacity to know the heart and mind of God, but also of their fellow brothers and sisters.

Seven Spirits of God

I want to now briefly focus our attention to what the seven Spirits of God are all about. First, the Spirit of the Lord is Who recreates the believer into the image of Christ. There are two ways to receive this gift. One: the seven-fold Spirit is imparted to your heart. In this kind of impartation you aren’t controlled by Him; it is a gift that manifests itself at specific times according to the will of the Lord. Also, God has set up a new government over your life as a result of this impartation, but it is not at a level of full dominion. The second way the seven Spirits of God overtake the believer is through a possession, whereupon your lower nature with all its human passions is aborted. Then, Christ become all in all. He fills and clothes you. He becomes you, He owns you completely. Paul refers to both these things in his writings. It is the Spirit of the Lord is who recreates you into the image of Christ. When the Spirit of the Lord so dominates you that He owns you, He has changed you into another person. You are no longer thinking or seeing by worldly standards; your eyes see differently than the rest of the Church. They see differently than they did before you were recreated in Christ. Everything changes, because now His mind is your mind, His heart is your heart. He owns your soul, He animates your being. You have become a repository for the glory of God. It is an awesome place to live; you don’t walk with the same perceptions or the same conceptions and you’ve been changed into another person. As different as night is from day, is a Christian who has been possessed by the seven Spirits of God from one who has not.

When the seven Spirits of God own you, you are walking in two spheres at once, you rule and reign with Christ in the heavenly sphere and the earthly sphere, where your body is being animated by God to fulfill His will and do His work in the earth. These people are highly prized in the kingdom of God and by the Father. This is so for two reasons: first, they have left the world behind and therefore God affords them a greater protection, greater favors. He walks closer and reveals Himself in ways He will not reveal Himself to the average believer, because you have left all for His sake. Second: these people are no longer just living for Christ; instead, Christ now lives His life through them, so that they have become vessels of His glory.

Let me give you an illustration to help explain this. Let us say that you have a priceless vessel half-filled with something priceless such as the oil of myrrh and you guard it because the vessel and the oil inside are costly. However, you also have another vessel of even greater value, it is older and more highly esteemed and full of invaluable oil; the contents and vessel are almost irreplaceable if broken or lost. Well, that’s the way it is for a Christian who has paid the price to leave the world behind and to be filled with God. God puts stronger protection around them because they have more of the glory, more of what is needed to help the world and His Church. Also, because they have become so priceless to God, Satan hates them even more. He fears them all the more and he’s constantly contriving ways to get rid of them, so the Lord must protect them in different ways than someone who has not paid the high price to go deeper in God. Because of this, the Lord reveals Himself to them, and with the revelation comes the impartation of Himself.

We as Americans understand the concept “to know” as being something that you have appropriated intellectually. However, this is not the way Jewish people understand this same concept. When a Jewish Sage, for instance, says, “I know,” what he means is that the knowledge has become experiential and he has yielded himself to that knowledge to the point that that knowledge has been integrated into his life and ways. 

This is a reality in the Kingdom of Light, as well. To know God at the level that a perfected one knows God is quite different than, for instance, me standing here and telling you some facts about God. Theirs is no longer just an intellectual knowledge. They have integrated the knowledge of God to the point that they are one with it deep in their inner man. This is accomplished, in part, through divine impartation that comes with each new revelation. They have become vessels who carry deposits of God everywhere they go. To sit under the ministry of one of these awesome, humble and contrite men and women is to experience a greater fullness of the word and life of God then you can ever experience with someone who has not entered there. You cannot impart to the Church what you yourself don’t live or lead them to where you yourself have not entered. In short, It is not enough to know something; you must live it.

An angel of the Lord came to an old friend of mine, a prophet,  who was trying to teach many things that he himself was not living. He had read about these things and what he read, he was trying to teach, but he did not live, know, or understand it as one who lived these higher truths. As a result, the Angel of the Lord came to him and told him to stop. He said, “Quit teaching what you do not know and don’t live, you can’t give life through it unless you live what you’re teaching.” When those who walk in the higher truths teach and speak in the name of God, they are able to release the very life of God through the word they are teaching. It is a very powerful ministry to the Church and to the world, to any who have hearts to hear. That is why God must protect those who carry such fine oil. It will be through the ministry of those Reigning Ones that the Church will be brought into a place of walking with Christ without spot or wrinkle.

The enemy of the Church, knowing that there is a company of people coming to the Church that have the capacity of transforming it by the apostolic life that flows through them, will try to do whatever he can get away with to get rid of them. The last thing in the world he wants is something like that affecting the Church that he is trying to destroy. If he cannot get rid of them by doing away with them altogether, then the next best thing is to make the Church despise the yoke and instruction they bring. So, if he cannot succeed in removing them, he’ll work through the unpurified heart in the very Church that these have been sent to heal. In addition, he will work by tempting the flesh of the one who has not been conformed into Christ’s image, trying to provoke them to have problems with those who would teach them, so they would miss the truths or life they have to offer. If that does not work, the next best thing is just simply to cause the Church to despise the life and be unwilling to pay the price to enter into the deep things of God. The enemy is working from every angle, and it’s amazing how helpful the Church can be. Remember when Jesus stood up with His disciples and said, “Come, the evil one is coming and he has nothing in me.” That can also be said of these Reigning Ones. He has nothing in them because the very nature of sin has been crucified in them. The life of Christ not only dominates, but also motivates and animates the life of these believers. They have truly been made into the image of Christ.

Many years ago, while ministering in a Bible college, talking about calling the Church to holiness and speaking about some of the plans that God had for the Church, I suddenly had a vision. In this vision, I saw Jesus crucified. The devil was standing nearby, extremely excited that he had accomplished this. He thought he had just executed the most intelligent plan that any being could conceive of. There was the Son of God hanging on the cross – he had accomplished his goal. Suddenly, it dawned on him that he had made a mistake; he was losing his power; he was losing his own life, force and authority to sustain his kingdom. Then, he turned his head and instead of one, it looked as though there were thousands multiplied many times over moving across the earth, transforming everything they touched. He stood there and cried, “Oh! What have I done? I have destroyed my own kingdom!”

The reason there were multiplied thousands moving across the earth is because they had become those who are crucified with Christ. Those who walk in the same life that Christ walked in. Does the Bible not say that He was the first-born among many brethren? In other words, He is the first of many to follow – those who have paid the price to be utterly transformed into the likeness of Christ. We are called to be transformed into and walk at the level of true “sonship,” as the Bible refers to it (e.g. Rom 8, Gal 4). It isn’t talking about the Church in general, rather the promise of a generation of people who would look just like Jesus on the inside and out. I am not referring to human features. Jesus was a very humble, meek, kind, generous, good, considerate and powerful person, all characteristics of which will be true of these Reigning Ones. To look at them, you would find yourself saying, “Now that person has been with the Lord because they are just like Him.” They will be like Him in nature, character and deeds, and in power and authority. He said, “Greater things than I am doing will you do,” (John 14:12) and the Church has yet to come to that. The day is coming when those who have paid the price to bring the glory to the Church will bring these “greater things” also. Even children will be doing greater things than the Lord did, and since He said that it would happen, therefore it must come to pass before Jesus comes back for His people!

Now, I want to take some time to discuss the different aspects of the seven spirits of God:

Wisdom

James 3:13

Nita LaFond Johnson