The Divine Imagination Part 5 -Lawson and Aaron Perdue

The Divine Imagination Part 5 -Lawson and Aaron Perdue

The Divine Imagination Part 5 from Pastors Lawson & Aaron Perdue. In this episode of Grace For Today, you need to learn how the blood of Jesus will cleanse your soul, and how without this understanding you will have difficulty receiving the promises of God.

The Divine Imagination Part 5 – Transcript

Friends, I’m so glad that you’re with us today. We’re gonna be talking about how the blood of Jesus Christ, the Spirit of God, and the Word of God cleanse your soul. And if you don’t have this cleansing that takes place in your soul, it’s gonna be really hard for you to move into and receive the promises that God has for you in this life. Stay tuned and blessings.

Friends, I’m so glad that you’re with us today. And we’ve been teaching on how the blood of Jesus Christ purges your conscience from dead works to make you servants of the living God. I wanna continue to talk about that cleansing today and how that works.

You know, on that word for cleansing, in the Greek, it’s katharizo, which it’s like where we get the word catharsis or to find healing through a release of emotion. But that word katharizo̱ in the New Testament, it’s usually used to talk about the cleansing of a leper. So God just showed me some pictures of Jesus cleansing these lepers. That’s how he wants to cleanse your soul, your conscience as well. God wants to bring complete healing to you in your spirit, soul, and body. You know, a lot of times, the Bible says that man looks on the outward appearance.

[Lawson] Right.

You know, and like when these lepers would be healed, it’d be a very outward thing. But God wants to also impact your soul, too, cleanse your soul.

And sometimes there has to be a change, right, in your soul, before you can have a change in the physical realm.

Mm-hmm, that’s true. So, you know, let’s just look at Luke 5 really quick. Go ahead and turn to Luke 5. We’ll start in verse 12. I need to get there myself. Do you wanna read that?

It came to pass when he, Jesus, was in a certain city, behold a man full of leprosy, who seeing Jesus fell on his face and besought him, saying, “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean.” And Jesus put forth his hand and touched him, saying, “I will; be clean.” And immediately the leprosy departed from the man. And Jesus charged him saying, “Tell no man, but go show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing according as Moses commanded for a testimony to them.” But so much more went the fame abroad of him, and great multitudes came together to hear and to be healed by him of their infirmities.

I just think this is really neat that we just see God’s will towards healing. And I believe this is healing for your physical body, but also healing for your soul. Maybe even in how your mentality, the strongholds you might have in your own soul. God is willing to heal. He is extremely gracious. You know, we’re a very strong faith-based ministry and, you know, usually we say that like those kind of, if it be thy will type prayers. They really aren’t that faith-based. But this leper, you know, comes to Jesus and says, “If it be thy will,” and we see that Jesus was very gracious to him. He still gets healed.

He says, “I will; be thou cleansed.” So faith begins where the will of God is known. And you can know the will of God, not only from the nature of God, from the promise of God, from what Jesus did in his death, burial, and resurrection, but also from the life of Jesus. And here’s a great example, you know, right here in Luke 5. They brought all these sick people to Jesus and Jesus healed them all. So those different areas, those four aspects we can understand, it is God’s will to heal.

It is God’s will to heal. And one neat thing, too, about this particular healing, this particular cleansing, it happened immediately. You know, I believe that God can cleanse your conscience, can cleanse your soul immediately. You know, we’ve talked about people who’ve had addictions to different things, you know, alcohol, nicotine, just where they went to rehab centers and couldn’t get set free, but they just were in the presence of God, the power of God, and immediately that aspect of their conscience, what was just immediately impacted.

You know, I’ve seen this happen physically with healing. I’ve seen it happen in addictions. My dad had a very strong addiction to nicotine. And in 1978 when we began to go to Andrew Wommack’s meetings, and Andrew Wommack at that time, nobody knew who Andrew was. You know, Lamar, Colorado, he had six Bible studies in different cities around the area there from Monday night to Saturday night, and we began to go to a Bible study. And right after I began to go with my mother, I said, “Mom, you know, the Bible says if two or three of us will agree on anything that we touch as asking, it will be done by our Father, which is in heaven.” And so we were actually feeding the horses, you know, to try to motivate my dad, in the evening we were doing it so he would come to Bible study. It was on a Thursday night. So I joined hands with mom, I can take you to the exact place. it’s right by a power pole, by a coral west of my grandfather’s main house on the ranch where we weaned the colts and things. And we joined hands right there by that pole. We agreed in the name of Jesus that my dad would be delivered from nicotine. And that night, after Andrew Wommack taught, he began to minister in the Spirit. I was actually sitting in the kitchen area of my aunt’s house, Andrew Wommack was standing in the corner of the dining room, and my dad was sitting in the back of the living room, but you could see from the front of the kitchen to the back of the living room where my dad was. Andrew’s standing at this corner teaching. And Andrew said, “There’s someone here and you have a problem with nicotine addiction and self-condemnation. And if you’ll come up right now, God will deliver you.” And my dad said that I just glared at him. Well, I’d just prayed, you know, with my mom. We didn’t tell my dad anything about this, but my dad and Andrew didn’t know anything about my dad. He didn’t know that my dad had a problem with this. My dad got up and went forward, and Andrew prayed for him. And God immediately delivered my dad. And he told me after this, he said, “I didn’t even want to quit smoking, but God took that desire from me.” And he actually went out and had a burial for his pipes. And I said, “Where are they?” He said, “That’s for me to know and you not to know. I’ve been crucified with Christ.” He had a problem also with alcoholism.

Well, even your desires, that’s part of your soul as well, right, your desires.

God cleansed that immediately by a act of the Holy Spirit and the blood of Jesus. And you know, my dad, you know, he didn’t drink all the time, but a lot of times when he started drinking, he’d get drunk, because he had this legalistic teaching about alcohol. And so I think that was part of the root cause of it. Legalism can lead you into more sin. You know, the Bible says that the law is the strength of sin.

It’s a guilt type thing.

Yeah. And so anyway, my dad had me take a six pack of beer out and shoot them full of holes, use them for target practice. Man, I’ve never been so happy in my life to see my dad delivered from nicotine and alcohol. It was wonderful. But like you’re saying, it was God dealing with errors in his soul. And he said, “After Andrew prayed for me that night, I never wanted to smoke again.”

Yeah, and one statement you made, too, about how God heals people, sometimes the healing has to play take place first in their soul before and then healing takes place in their body as well. And when I was going to school in Pittsburgh, I had a good friend who really loved God, loved the Word, she spent a lot of time in the Bible. She was really, really hungry for the things of God. And I took her to a healing meeting. It was Billy Burke, a great healing evangelist, was holding a meeting in my church. My church, you know, helped put on these meetings. I actually played flute at a lot of his meetings. And he was having a meeting in downtown Pittsburgh at the First Presbyterian Church. They opened up the church to have his healing meetings. And they did, because when he was a boy, he was actually healed in that same church by Kathryn Kuhlman at one of her meetings. He had terminal brain cancer and she called him out. He was up in the balcony. She pointed at him and told him to come down and prayed over him. He fell out under the power of God and was healed of terminal brain cancer. So I took my friend to these meetings. I was telling her, I knew she was hungry for God, and I was trying to tell her about the baptism in the Holy Spirit and just how like you really needed that. And I showed her in Scripture, you know, gave her different teachings on it, and she just wasn’t willing to just take that step of faith and plunge into it and ask for the baptism of the Holy Spirit. But she went to these meetings and saw just the power of God on full display, people like receiving really amazing healings. After a meeting, I was taking her back to her dorm, and I just asked her, you know, “Do you want to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit?” And she said, “Yes, I’m ready.” And I just prayed a simple prayer that she’d receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and she just like started shaking, fell on the ground, rolling around, praying in tongues. You know, I’m a charismatic believer, so I’ve seen some wild things, but this was, I knew this wasn’t like a courtesy fall. She was really being hit by the power of God.

This is not your traditional Presbyterian experience.

Yeah.

She was Presbyterian.

Yeah, and just as this was going on, I knew that God was really hitting her, and I just said, “Hey, ask God for something.” And at the time, she was also a musician, a flute player, and she had just terrible physical ailments. She had really bad tendonitis in her arms because she used to practice nine hours a day and just destroyed the tendons in her arms. They were so inflamed, she’d have to go to the doctor and get steroid shots. And she couldn’t play at all because of all the pain, and she couldn’t even open a doorknob. She would struggle just to open a doorknob. But I was hoping that she’d ask God to heal her arms. But the first thing she asked God was, “God heal my heart.” And you know, your heart is part of your soul. And as she prayed that, it’s like, it looked like someone grabbed her hand and took it over to her heart. And her hand was shaking over her heart, and God healed her heart. Like before it was like she dealt with a lot of condemnation, a lot of shame. I know her family would sometimes coerce her, manipulate her with shame. Like, “If you don’t do this, don’t do what we want, you’re gonna be shamed.” And God just lifted all of that off of her. You know, a lot of people really struggle with shame, self-condemnation, like you said. But I could just tell, it was like something had just been lifted off of her. And then I just told her, “Hey, ask God to heal your hands, to heal your arms.” And she said, “God, heal my arms.” And as she did that, her arms just started shaking even more, and she was instantly healed. You know, her arms were instantly healed. She didn’t have to get any more steroid shots, go back to the doctor. She could play her instrument again. And it was just like an immediate thing. But God, you know, she asked God to heal her heart, heal her soul, and then healing also took place in her physical body, which was really profound, so.

God wants to heal you, spirit, soul, and body. And I believe when you’re born again, when you believe on Jesus, your spirit is already healed. I don’t believe your spirit can get any better than it already is. But if you don’t see a change in your soul, and in this series that you’ve been teaching from “The Divine Imagination,” we have been really talking about the area of the soul and having that renewed and transformed, and it’s a work of the Holy Spirit. It’s a work of the blood of Jesus. It’s also a work of the Word of God. And you know, really having a renovation take place in a soul, we call it the heart. You know, a lot of times in the Scripture, when people see the word heart, they think it’s talking about your spirit. I’ve studied this out and about 98% of the time, the word heart is used. If you read the context, it’s either talking about a combination of your spirit and your soul, your inward man, your inward being, or it’s talking about your soul. As a man thinks in his heart, so is he. That’s Proverbs 23:7. That’s talking about your soul. It’s your thinking elements, your mind, your will, and emotions. About 2% of the time, it’s used in reference only to your spirit. But about 98% of the time, either a combination of your spirit and your soul or your soul. And so we need to understand that we’re not only a spirit or a soul and a body, but we are a spirit, soul, and body. And our spirit is the place where God lives, and that’s changed immediately. But our soul needs renovated, praise God. And the Bible says that we can be transformed by the renewing of our mind. And if you study that word out, that’s in Romans 12:2 and it also says this in Ephesians 4:23, it says, “Be renewed in the spirit of your mind.” Or verse 20, it might be verse 24, but it says right before that, “Put off the old man, which is corrupt according to deceitfulness. Be renewed in the spirit of your mind.” And then the next verse says, “And put on the new man, which in the likeness of God, after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.” So your spirit is righteous and truly holy, but you gotta put on the new man. And when it says be renewed in the spirit of your mind, the word there for spirit, I think that’s Ephesians 4:24, is not talking about your spirit, it’s talking about your attitude. It’s talking about your soul, like school spirit. You gotta watch your attitude. And faith, for instance, we say is a major attitude, a spirit of faith. We have a major attitude of faith. And praise God, what happens when your soul is renewed, you get a major attitude change. And if you don’t change your attitude, you can’t change your altitude. And that’s a law in flying, right?

Yeah, and your attitude is part of your soul as well. We kind of talked about how the soul is your mind, your will, your emotions, but also your attitude. That’s part of your soul. And sometimes for you to receive healing in your physical body, you have to change your attitude. And one of my examples I gave, we can talk about it, is Naaman the leper.

Praise God.

You know, Naaman, he realized that, you know, there was someone in Israel that could heal him, and when this prophet spoke, he had a bad attitude. He didn’t want to-

Now your friend, I don’t know if you’ve said the rest of that story, but she not only got healed in her emotions, but then she got healed physically. And God healed her arms and she didn’t have that tendonitis and all these things. It was miraculous. And you know what? God is no respecter of persons. He’s a respecter of faith. But faith works in our spirit. We have the faith of God, but we have to let the Word of God work in the realm of our soul so we can see the results of our faith in our body.

Sometimes, one thing I wanna kinda mention too is sometimes there’s a type of teaching called, it’s the sovereignty of God teaching that just God controls everything. And if you’re suffering, it’s ’cause God wills it. And that really affects people’s soul as well. I had a friend in school, a really great musician. It was when I was going to Rice getting my doctorate. She was also a doctorate student, and she was dealing with tremendous physical problems from playing her instrument. And it was so bad that she thought she’d probably have to quit being a musician and find a new career. And, you know, she put a lot of time, a lot of money. Like she was getting her doctorate at a very high level. And she was a believer, but she was really under the sovereignty of God teaching. And she even told me like that, “Maybe God is doing this to try to, you know, teach me something to try to…” And I just asked if I could pray for her, and just I knew that she was so under that teaching, all the ministers she listened to were so, just hammered that home that God controls everything, and I just knew I wanted to be able to shift her way of thinking in that. So I just started praying that, “God, you know, you love this person. You care about them. You want them to succeed. You’ve given her this, you know, musical ability and she’s gonna use it for your glory, so we thank you for it.” As I just praying that, just praying about the love of God, and she just started crying, and I just prayed for her physical body that this pain would be gone, that she could, you know, practice, you know, grow as a musician. And she’s still playing it. She’s actually a professor in the School of Music at MIT.

Wow.

Doing just tremendously well in her career. And I just knew that I couldn’t change her whole theology, so I just started praying that, you know, just ministering to her soul about how much God loved her and you know, that he’s the one who gave her this gift, and it wasn’t to take it away.

Amen. And you know, a lot of you, you’re not gonna be able to fulfill God’s highest purposes and dreams for your life unless you have a change in the area of your soul and allow God to heal you. So we’re gonna be back after just a very short break, so stay tuned. We’ve got some great things to continue talking about this realm of cleansing of the soul. Blessings. Friends, I wanna share with you about our special product that we’re offering. I’m teaching and with my son Aaron, also with Jesse Duplantis on a couple of different things. Number one, “Insights Into faith.” Jesse Duplantis made a statement years ago in my churches he was ministering, and I just haven’t been able to let go of it. He said, “Most of the time, in the realm of faith, I made a decision and God backed it.” We’re gonna talk about that. We’re also talking about this, my son, Aaron’s, one of his newest series, “The Divine Imagination,” tremendous, tremendous revelation that I believe will help you move into the plans and the purposes of God. And also my series, “The Power of a Positive Imagination,” one of my most requested series. You want to get this product. If you can’t call in and get it physically, you can watch it online for free, or you can pay a small fee and download this information on our website at CharisChristianCenter.com. Friends, I’m glad you’re still with us, and praise God, I have really enjoyed the teaching, Aaron. I know when people get ahold of this teaching that it will really help them. And if you know friends that could really benefit from this teaching, I know some people out there that are watching this do, you can tell them they can go to our website, CharisChristianCenter.com, and at the first of the week, we put up all the programs for that week online. And you can download literally hundreds of hours, or you can watch or listen to hundreds of hours of our teaching absolutely free on our website at CharisChristianCenter.com. So utilize that. Tell your friends about this broadcast.

So we’ve been talk about “The Divine Imagination” and also just how the blood of Jesus purges your conscience. You know, that purging that occurs in your conscience, that occurs in your soul, you know, it needs to be a continual thing. You know, you are to be transformed by the renewing of your mind. That renewal, it needs to be a continual thing. Even to be purged away from a sin consciousness, you have to remind yourself, it’s a continual thing. Even Paul, when he’s writing to the Galatians, you know, like they learned about grace, they learned about what God had done for them, but they slipped back into that sin consciousness, that law performance-based consciousness. The cleansing that happens in your soul, it needs to be a continual type thing.

Well, and it’s like, you know what? We’re in the world, but we’re not of the world. But just because you’re in the world, the world keeps working on the area of your soul. You’re a physical body, you’re in the world. And you know, I know my spirit’s born again. I know in a lot of areas I’ve really renewed my mind. In fact, there’s people that used to look at me one way and say things that they… They say these are spiritual leaders, they say the complete opposite about me. And it’s because I’ve had a change in my consciousness. And it’s a work of the blood, it’s a work of the spirit, it’s a work of the Word. And it’s like I’m a completely different person. This is, you know, way since I’ve been born again. But it’s because I’ve allowed the Word and the Spirit and the blood of Jesus, the Spirit of God, the Word of God, and the blood of Jesus to continually work. The world still works on you, so you gotta keep working in this realm of your soul.

Yeah, I like what Paul writes in Ephesians 5:26. It says that he might sanctify and cleanse her, speaking about the church.

Right.

He’s praying that Jesus might sanctify and cleanse the church, cleanse her with the washing of water by the Word. So to me that says this cleansing that happens, you know, really in our hearts and our souls and how we think and how we live our life, that occurs through the washing of water by the Word. You know, you don’t just wash your body once a year.

You keep washing it.

You wash, you know, hopefully every day.

You know, when I was a kid, you know, we’d wash with a rag and stuff once a day, but then we took a bath like once a week. Well, thank God we take a bath a lot more than once a week now, you know, or when my mom was a kid. It was a different time. They had to draw up water. They didn’t have running water. They had to heat water on the stove and pour it in the tub, and they had 10 kids in my mom’s family, and they’d all take a bath on the same day. Boy, if you were the last one, it was a dirty-

There’s too many believers that maybe just wash themselves with the Word maybe once a year. Maybe they just open their Bible once a year or just go to church once a year, hear the Word preached once a year. You know, this needs to be a continual thing.

Right. We need to be continually cleansed by the Word of God.

Amen, and you kind of shared one of my Scriptures I wanted to share, too, which was from Romans 12:1-2, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, wholly acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world.” The world is gonna constantly try to shift you into their mold.

Oh, they are. You can see right now in the political arena, there is such a-

Yeah, even a lot of strong believers get shifted into that mold.

Oh, it’s terrible.

It’s very tragic.

It’s hard to think they’re even born again.

Be transformed by the renewing of your mind that you may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God. So that renewing of your mind, that is a continual type thing. You don’t just, you know, do it one time and then just think your mind is gonna stay right. You know, it’s a continual thing. You need to spend time in God’s Word continually and let his Word shape how you think, let his Word shape what you desire, let his Word shape, you know, your outlook on life. Don’t let the world shape that.

No, it is terrible. And the world, I mean, it’s tragic the way the world thinks. But we don’t have to think that way, act that way, talk that way, or go that way. And we can have a completely different result than the world when we continually feed on the Word of God, continually allow the blood of Jesus to cleanse our consciousness from performance-based thinking to grace-based thinking, and continually allow the Spirit of God to have his way in our life. Amen, there’s three elements of sanctification, and it’s the Word of God, the blood of Jesus, and the Spirit of God. And we need all three of those. And you know, the Bible, Jesus actually prayed for his disciples in John 17 and he prayed for himself, his disciples, then he prayed for those who’d believe on him through their word. And when he prayed for us who would believe on him through his Word, he said, “I pray that you wouldn’t take them out of the world, but you would keep them from the evil.” And he said, “Sanctify them, set them apart through thy Word. Thy Word is truth.” And you know what? We have to come to a place where, you know what, the Word of God is true. I don’t care what anybody says. And boy, when you get to that place, you’re gonna be in a new place really to move into the things of God and walk in the things that God has for you.

That’s awesome. I just wanna pray for people right now before we close. We have a minute here. I wanna pray over people.

Go ahead.

Just pray over over you in your soul realm and your heart. So I thank you, God, right now that the blood of Jesus, it purges our conscious, it purges our hearts, Lord. So I just thank you that for people right now who’ve just experienced a lot of difficulty recently in life, maybe early in life, Lord, have dealt with trauma, Lord, I just thank you right now that the blood of Jesus is just touching every fiber of their soul, every fiber of their mind, Lord. I thank you that the blood of Jesus is healing them at a deep heart level right now, Lord. So I thank you that you’re lifting off shame, you are lifting off guilt, you are lifting off just these strongholds that the enemy has just put on these people, Lord. And I just thank you that they’re finding complete freedom in their souls right now, complete freedom in their conscience, complete freedom even in their emotions, Lord, right now. So I just thank you, Lord, that he who the Son sets free is free indeed.

When Aaron was praying, God spoke to me. There are some of you watching this broadcast and you have shame associated with something that someone else did. It does not belong to you and do not accept it. If you need personal prayer, give us a call today. We’d love to hear from you. Blessings.

[Barbara] Did you know that you can stay connected with us?

[Lawson] We have a church app. You can get it for your phone. You can get our most recent videos, audio, stay connected with the church. All of it’s absolutely free of charge. Stay connected with the different things that are happening in different departments. We’d love to have you get our new church app. Blessings.

[Narrator] Imagination is a very powerful force that works on the inside of everyone. The thoughts of your imagination create the framework of your life. Get the Imagination Package, which includes “Insights Into Faith” with Jesse Duplantis, “Divine Imagination,” and “Power of a Positive Imagination” CD series, all for $49 when you call 719-418-4000 or visit CharisChristianCenter.com. Thanks for watching “Grace for Today.” This broadcast has been made possible by our faithful partners. If you would like to become a partner, need prayer, or have a question, please call us at 719-418-4000. Or to partner online, go to CharisChristianCenter.com/Give. You can write us at P.O. Box 63733, Colorado Springs, Colorado 80962. See you next time on “Grace for Today.”