Coming Out of Darkness
Excerpt from Part 1:
Can you understand that? God is responsible for that which He created. Aren’t you responsible for the children that you bring into this life? How much more so is God responsible! Yet religion tells us that because we are rebellious,because we are caught up in pornography, because we’re selling our bodies as prostitutes, God cannot help us. Well if He can’t, then He is not God. If it depends on what I can do or what I can’t do, then I am god, and He is not God!
Excerpt from Part 2:
All that has been written above can be summarized very simply: God truly does love humanity, and He does not expect you to choose the good over the evil, because He knows that you cannot. What you need is to discover the treasure of His life that is within, and to learn to live by that life. “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us” (2 Cor. 4:6-7).
Excerpt from Part 3: Author: J. Preston Eby
Because the average Christian today has been brought up with a certain “other” than Christ, he is totally unable to think except in terms of established orders, sects,denominations, credentials, creeds, assemblies, Church ceremonies, Church buildings, doctrines, meetings, communions, baptisms, programs, campaigns, crusades, choirs, pastors, rituals, ceremonies, vestments, offerings, conferences, Board meetings, committees, elections, Sunday schools,theological seminaries, fellowship halls, stained glass windows, platforms, special
members, numbers and a thousand other things. Take all these things away from them and they would be spiritually destitute, totally incapable of doing the work of the Lord. But after they have spent a whole lifetime of this feverish Church activity, how many people are there who have ever taken the time to wait on God long enough to hear Him speak and divulge His will to their seeking hearts?
I declare to you of a truth that any man or woman who will take the time to seek God and God alone, hungering and thirsting after God’s mind and God’s will, that man will find himself drifting away from all the aforementioned things, and from them on to the mind of Christ. And lest any think that we are being brash or heretical to even suggest a departure from those things listed above, I invite you to carefully examine that list to determine which one of them Jesus Christ had used or even needed in His wonderful sonship ministry. It is astonishing to realize that Jesus knew absolutely nothing of any of it, yet He more effectively ministered the life of God, the power of God, the glory of God and the Kingdom of God than any man who has graced this planet. And, I do not hesitate to add, strip all of these away from a son of God, and what he will have left is Christ, only Christ.
I tell you, God has men and women all over the earth with the message for the Church. Will you open to them? Because they are not religious, they will not condemn you, but they will minister life to you and cause you to grow up into Him. I am thankful that many of God’s people are willing to listen to a message that will set them free, because to be set free, it takes the Spirit and the light and the word of God to break loose our mindset from religious tradition. And I know that every one of us likes to think that we are not religious. Almost every pastor I know who has a church says, “My church is not religious.” Yet in every church I enter, without exception, I hear the sounds of bondage and religion.
Excerpt from Part 4:
Most Christians believe more in the power of the devil than in the power of God. By confessing and believing in the power of evil to prevail over you, you give it the power to do so. Whatever you believe in will work for you. You believe in your heart that the devil has power over you, you then confess it with your mouth, and it becomes yours by experience. It can be very difficult to believe God when your experience is totally different. However, if you will look away from your wrong experiences and begin to believe God, your experience will then line up with the Word. You can spend your whole life fighting the devil (as I did for many years), sometimes winning and sometimes losing, but never realizing that in actuality he has no power over you.
Excerpt from Part 5:
But if you have God, that is what matters. You might be a Lutheran. You might be a Catholic. You might be a Pentecostal, you might be anything. But if you have met the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, you’ll know it. And would I look at you, because you go to a Lutheran church, and say, “You don’t know God”? I wouldn’t dare! Yet that happens all the time. Let’s get to know one another by the spirit. Spend some time in my presence, and get to know my heart. You’ll hear me say things that you can’t agree with, and that’s okay, but if you get to know me, and you get to know my heart, you will love me and I will love you. The differences in our intellectual beliefs don’t matter.
Excerpt from Part 6:
You can take the Word of God and justify the most heinous, horrible crimes with it, and people have done so, thinking they have done God a service. But God is in the business of restoring humanity back to Himself. He has no thought of destroying, but of uplifting. Yes, there is judgment. Yes the fiery indignation and wrath of God is on the earth and is coming to the earth. But it is a righteous judgment! There is passage in the Old Testament where God says that when He brings judgment, He will take into account where a man was born (Ps. 87:4-6). What does that mean? It means He will take account of where you were born. Were you born in India where you had no knowledge of God? Or were you born in America where you’ve had nothing but religion, and you’ve rejected not God but that which religion has said He is? (I rejected Christianity 20 years ago, but I didn’t reject God, and I never would.)
Excerpt from Part 7:
Christians are the most bigoted group of people on the earth today. Christians get upset with me when they hear me talk about God being the Father of all and redeeming all and being able to save someone who does not know about Jesus. Even those who claim to know Jesus fight among themselves. Even within their own denominations they argue over doctrinal differences. The Baptists are divided over baptism. The Lutherans are divided amongst themselves. The Pentecostals are divided. These religions are all divided because of man’s carnal interpretation of the Bible. Anyone who sees the oneness of Christ and the Church could never be a part of that HARLOT system. Revelation 17:3 says that she is “full of names of blasphemy”. We should not call ourselves anything. Not Baptist, Catholic, Pentecostal or anything else. Paul told the Corinthians, “And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ. I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able. For ye are yet carnal: for whereas there is among you envying, and strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men? For while one saith, I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos; are ye not carnal?” (1 Cor. 3:1-4).How could the Word be more plain? Jesus Himself said in Matthew 12:25, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” The Institutional Church could never be a testimony to God because of the division among her. We must drop all bigotry and division. God is our Father and we are one family. You may be a Catholic or Pentecostal, but regardless of your affiliation, you are my brother and I love you and will minister to you.
Excerpt from Part 8:
When God had summarily arrested this man,Saul of Tarshish, He did not send him to the Bible School at Jerusalem with its noted teachers and preachers. They undoubtedly had the credentials. They had been eyewitnesses to things others would never know unless they told them. They had personally been with Jesus for more than three years. They heard more fall from His very lips than most men of that day ever hoped to hear in their lives. They had been designated by the Lord Himself to help lay the foundations of the Church! What a wonderful opportunity for this young man, Saul of Tarshish! A year or two under this sort of ministry and he could be trusted to be sent (of Man) any place with the gospel of the kingdom.
But God did not send His man, who was to become the apostle of apostles, to Jerusalem for instruction and training for ministry. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9). God turns this young man toward the desert’s school of obscurity and isolation and a crash course in intimacy with God. There is something infinitely better than merely knowing the Bible. It is knowing the Bible’s Author.
“But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen; immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood: neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me; but I went into Arabia, and returned again unto Damascus. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days. But other of the apostles saw I none, save James the Lord’s brother.”
This is why the apostle Paul could say he was a minister, not of the letter, but of the Spirit. He ministered by the Spirit, not from a book of prewritten sermons or learned Bible knowledge. He was ministering as a precious stone in God’s Kingdom. He had the transforming power of the Spirit of God in his life. To minister by intellectually learned knowledge is to build with wood, hay and stubble. When God comes to bring judgment, wood, hay and stubble will be burned up. The fire does not consume the gold, silver and precious stones.
Do you know what He asks of you? He simply asks, “Will you come unto Me?” He doesn’t say come and work, come and teach Sunday school, or go to Africa. He just says, “Come unto Me and I will not put you to work but I will rest you. Religion will work you, but I give my servants rest. When you come to Me you can learn to just rest and sit in My presence and get to know me. And I will reveal to you the inner depths of your being, your spirit, where you will find that I dwell. Then from our communion and fellowship you will begin to be like I am.” That is all He asks for. Your time given to sit in His presence and learn of Him will cause the oil of His spirit to flow from your spirit into your vessel.
Excerpt from Part 9:
Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matt. 5:3). To be poor in spirit means that you understand your carnal nature, the goodness as well as the evil. You realize that you are so poor in being able to please God with your human living. When you look at the life that Jesus lived as an example to His followers, you hear Him teach the principles of the Kingdom in Matthew 5, 6, & 7, and sense a stirring and a longing to walk as He walked, but you know it is impossible with your human nature. Within you is a desire, a deep longing hunger to be as He taught, but you realize the hopelessness and the utter inability for you as a human to walk as God on the earth. You have that desire to be conformed in every way to His nature within you, but you feel so empty and unable to fulfill all the righteous requirements of the law. That is when you begin to discover that to worship God is not a matter of your intellect, not a matter of your good performance.
Some of us can be very good, but our goodness cannot enter into the presence of God. One of the best examples of that is Cain and Able. Cain from his natural abilities and talents tilled the ground, and I am sure that he produced some of the best crops that could be yielded. I’m sure that he brought the very best that his human hands could produce to offer to God, but God rejected his offering. For years I wondered why Cain’s offering was not acceptable. It was because he tried to come to God based on his capability to please God through his natural ability and goodness.
Able just brought an offering to God and his offering was accepted. He did not do any work with his hands. Able realized he could offer nothing to God from himself. He knew he could not come to God with his natural ability and character. He understood that the offering was based on the coming Messiah, one who would come to be an offering for his sin. We cannot with our natural life be obedient and walk in all the precepts of the Law. It is wonderful that you have that desire. Anyone who has been regenerated has the Spirit of God within them and will have the heart-cry to be like He is. But unless you understand that it is impossible for a human to be godly, until you really understand that, you will always be a failure, because you will always be trying to make your carnal nature better, rather than letting it die.
Many people tell me that although they have never heard some of these things, they have the inner witness that they are true. Others say that God has spoken this to them but they were not sure they were hearing right. I can promise you that these words will germinate in your life. If you don’t like this message, I feel sorry for you, because the seed has been planted. God seals people in blindness until the appropriate time. We don’t like to hear that, but the Word says that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Pharaoh couldn’t have let the children of Israel go if he had wanted to. It is very plain in the Scriptures. God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, in order that His glory might be revealed to the Israelites. So do you think that God is going to judge Pharaoh harshly for what He caused him to do? How would you have liked to have been Judas? Think about it.
The words Jesus spoke from the Cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” if you can hear this, were words for humanity. The debt has been paid. We really have good news. We have been told that the gospel is good news, but we haven’t heard the gospel of good news. We have heard a gospel of performance. Performance based Christianity.
Excerpt from Part 10:
Question: So when I do something I know is not like Him, then I simply need to acknowledge, “Father, I see, that was Adam. Thank you that you are reigning now, you are ruling in my heart.”
Answer: Absolutely. You have got it. It is not you. Oh, if Christians could hear that message. Paul says it so plainly; it’s not you, it’s that sin principle that is still operating in Adam. Romans 7:14 For we know that the law is spiritual – but I am unspiritual, sold into slavery to sin. 15 For I don’t understand what I am doing. For I do not do what I want – instead, I do what I hate. 16 But if I do what I don’t want, I agree that the law is good. 17 But now it is no longer me doing it, but sin that lives in me. 18 For I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh. For I want to do the good, but I cannot do it. 19 For I do not do the good I want, but I do the very evil I do not want! 20 Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer me doing it but sin that lives in me. 21 So, I find the law that when I want to do good, evil is present with me. 22 For I delight in the law of God in my inner being. 23 But I see a different law in my members waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that is in my members. 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. You are that new creation. God said to me, “You are perfect, but Adam is not.” As Paul said, “I delight in the inner man.” That inner man is perfect, in heart and attitude. You have to hear these things in the Spirit. Your mind cannot grasp this, it is spiritually revealed. A lot of people hear reconciliation in their mind and they just go have a good time, but we can’t withhold truth just because someone is not going to comprehend it. God wants the truth revealed, and He will deal with those people anyway. Their fires of tribulation will probably be hotter than yours, but He is going to deal with them. We have so many Scriptures, such as, “He works all things after the counsel of His own will” (Eph. 1:11).
Question: When you start talking about ultimate reconciliation, you immediately get back, “You are just giving people a license to sin.” How can you respond to this?
Answer: I had a lady who had this reaction in one of our meetings about three months ago. She heard the message of reconciliation and she asked me all of the typical questions like, “Well, why would we even preach the gospel then, and what about all of these people who hear this and then just want to go live their life any way they want? You would be responsible for them going to hell.” But what she did was pick up the Coming Out of Darkness books and some other writings that we had, and she called me just last week, in tears, and she was so thankful for this revelation that God had given her on reconciliation. So, God has to do it. God has to open the eyes.
They say you are giving people a license to sin. People don’t need a license—they are already doing it. No one had to give me a license for Adam to sin. He was well able to do it, he didn’t need a license. What we need is to give people peace and rest, and you do that by letting them know that it is O.K. Wherever you are today, it is O.K. God knew, when He called you, what you would be doing even today. He knows the end from the beginning, and He is the author and the finisher of your faith, so you need to rest, knowing that God is sufficient to deal with your carnal nature, but if you focus on it, it takes much longer to be transformed. You can’t focus on the negative, you have to focus on God and His Word. We read verses like “All things work together for good to those who love God,” and then something happens, and we think that is the one thing that doesn’t work together for good.
Excerpt from Part 11:
A lot of people ask me, “What are you?” I’m not a Baptist. I’m not a Catholic. I’m not a Lutheran or Pentecostal, and I’m definitely not a Christian, according to their understanding of what a Christian is. I am simply a member of the Body of Christ. I know that’s confusing to a lot of people, but I don’t want to be associated with a false image of what God is. Don’t tell me about the love of God and then display to me what I see in religion. Don’t tell me that God teaches, “Love your enemies, do good to them who despitefully use you. Bless them who curse you,” and then tell me that He is going to leave endless numbers of people in agony for eternity in hell. I don’t know that kind of a God. I know a God who reaches down into the very depths of my despair. I know a Father who loves me so deeply that I can turn my back on Him—and I’ve done it. I
can look at Him and say, “Enough, I can’t take it any more! I can’t take the pressures! I can’t take the rejection! I can’t take it!” and I can turn and walk away and He just says, “Gary, it’s too late. I’m looking for an inheritance. And, to be honest with you Gary, it really doesn’t matter how you feel. I have an investment in you. I have placed the very seed of My Life within you.” “Listen to this My people, I have placed the very seed of My Life within you. Everything that I AM, everything that you desire in your heart of hearts, everything that you could possibly imagine that I can do through you, is in the Seed of Life that I AM—hidden deep within the consciousness of who you are.
“Can I forsake Myself? Can I forsake that of Myself that I have placed within you? Think not that I have come to destroy you. Oh yes, I have come to destroy that false concept of yourself. I’ve come to destroy that Adamic nature—that false sense of a self life that causes you to feel separated from my presence. That was destroyed at Calvary. Some of the sweetest words in the universe are that death produces life. That which dies brings forth life. There is a very hard shell around the seed of My Life that’s within you. That hard shell is simply the Adamic life. Oh, I speak to the seed. Can you not hear? Can you not sit in the quiet and listen and hear Me speak to you?”
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