When Jesus Gets Our Only Yes
I started following this Blogger awhile back. As I read this post I was gripped by the content and it's relevance for the Body of Christ. It's a now word for us and so needed. You can find her at lovesickscribe.com Please welcome Dawn Hill to Grace for the Journey today...
There is a call going out for us. It is a call to know Him more. It is a call to give Him our “yes” and the devil our “no”. We were made for intimacy with Christ. If you have been around me long enough or read my posts, you have heard me say that. We cannot be the church, the bride without Him. We are to be His and His alone. I have been thinking on some things lately as I normally do, and as I was writing recently, the Holy Spirit led me to ponder on the difference between permission and consent. There are things I had never thought about until now. We must gain more understanding of the difference so that we give our “yes” and our “no” to the appropriate one.
I do not pretend to know everything about this, but one thing I can tell you is that permission and consent are not the same thing, and this can change how we relate to God and to the devil. It will skew our perception in our relationship with Abba Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. Permission is explained by Quora as being “handed down from an established authority to one who does not have the same position of authority” while consent is explained as “an agreement between two parties of equal authority, and the action only happens if both parties agree.” To understand this difference is to recognize our unity in Christ, giving our “yes” to Him and our “no” to the powers of darkness.
It boils down to intimate consent...This may blow your theology out of the water, but Jesus is not looking for your permission, He is looking for your consent. He is looking for my consent. When we come to know Him and to invite the Holy Spirit to tabernacle with us, we become His bride, and the bride gives consent to an equal party in authority. We are coheirs with Christ according to the Word of God. I am not saying that we are God. I am saying that He wants us to know Him and the power of His resurrection, and that comes through giving our “yes” so that this very thing happens through our agreement with His “yes” that was given two thousand years ago when He hung on the cross.
Intimacy requires consent, not permission. Intimacy with Christ, knowing Him beyond the shallows of religion only happens when we give our “yes” to Him, receiving His “yes” that was already given to us. There is a problem, however. Many times, we have given our consent to the enemy. How is that even possible? It all started in the garden. The garden keeps coming back to me, and it occurred to me one day that the enemy was not only after identity, but he was after intimacy, a knowing of man that was only reserved for God. God did not want Adam and Eve to know about evil or to know evil in a relational way.
The word know used in Genesis when referencing the creation of man and woman can be compared to the intimate knowing of a husband and a wife. Isn’t it interesting that Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and that the same word know used when God spoke of them knowing good and evil shares the same meaning as God knowing them? When the fall happened, it opened a portal to know darkness in an intimate way. Sin causes us to choose separation from God while uniting ourselves with another who wants to steal, kill and destroy us. Many give their consent to the devil because they have been intimate with darkness. Rather, they should revoke permission to the enemy’s camp as one does when they have authority over another. As the body of Christ, the bride of Christ, we have this authority over the enemy given to us by our faithful Bridegroom. Satan is to be under our feet!
Permission in its rightful place...In order for us to revoke permission to the enemy, we come into the understanding that we have authority over him. He is to get a “no” instead of a “yes”. If you know Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit abides in you, then you have authority over him and every demon from hell. Do not give him permission; revoke it. Put permission in its proper place, enforced against the enemy of God.
On the flip side, we sing and tell God that we give Him permission. I have been guilty of it myself, not realizing what I was saying. To give God permission is to place ourselves as an authority over God. This cannot be so. There is still much that we need to understand in relation to the Father because the relationship between the Father and the bride is not the same as the relationship between the Bridegroom and the bride. There is a unity while having a separate identity and authority.
What we must understand is this: the Father released permission to come into His glorious Kingdom through the atonement of His Son, Jesus Christ. We consent to a relationship with Jesus by confessing our sins, renouncing our relationship with evil and receiving the Holy Spirit. Jesus has seated us in heavenly places with Him according to Ephesians 2. We are hidden in Christ if we confess with our mouths and believe in our hearts that He is Lord. It can make your head spin just thinking about it and trying to rationalize it in your mind, but it is the truth.
As the body of Christ with Jesus as our Head, we must not give consent to the enemy and instead, we must revoke permission to operate in our lives and in this body, His locked garden. We have authority over the devil and the kingdom of darkness, not in our own power, but through the Blood and the Name of Jesus. We are able to call upon the Name of Jesus because as His bride, we have been given His Name and all that is His. We must sever any consensual ties to the enemy through sin and anything that is not of God and His nature. If intimacy is not given to the Lord, then it is given to another. Saints, I urge us to examine ourselves in this hour and to make sure that Jesus gets our only “yes”. The devil cannot and should not have our intimate consent. He should only receive our revoked permission.