Return to the Father’S Heart: So the Earth Will Survive (Malachi 4:6)

CHAPTER 1

Soap Opera Lives Washed Clean by Jesus

Y ears ago a popular comedienne produced a funny spoof on a familiar soap opera she called, As the Stomach Turns. The topsy-turvy lives of soap opera characters can indeed turn your stomach. The problems you see are gut wrenching.

What is especially disheartening is that Satan has turned so many Christian lives and families into heartbreaking soap operas. God foreknew these attacks on His people in the last days, and He provided a solution, if we are willing to implement it.

Soap operas got their name from the soap companies that originally sponsored them. The term seems quite appropriate since soap opera lives need lots of cleaning up. The unholy dramas many believers experience need the blood of Jesus for the cleansing. The root causes also need to be discovered.

What has caused the hearts of children to be turned away from their parents, especially their fathers, in this end time? Why have families broken up? Why do God’s children today see their Father as distant or even cruel? Why have their hearts not turned to Him in love and trust so they could be a people prepared for their Bridegroom Jesus? Why are believers mocking God and turning off nonbelievers by the dramas and even scandals of their hypocritical lives? Why haven’t they known the emotional and even physical healing their Father has promised them?

Many of the visitors to our Freedom Blog are discovering the answers to those questions. In this book we will endeavor to bring answers, some of which have been partially presented in our previous books, available on the bookstore tab at www.freedomchurchofgod.com.

Our Father wants His people free, and we believe we are some of the ones who are called to be instruments of that freedom in these last days. The testimonies you have read and will read in this book confirm that this process of freedom has begun. Freeing truths that have been lost for centuries to the Christian world are being restored. Miracles are occurring. Lives are changing. Long-term hurts and pains are being healed.

Lives Changed, People Set Free

As our heads were swimming recently with the steady stream of praise reports that were filling our hearts with joy, a pastor who has followed the blog faithfully and seen great changes in himself and his congregation wrote and said that he thought that the blog should have as its title, Praise Jesus! The site of miracles! He went on to say that he was passing on the miraculous results of prayer to other pastors.

A man who had sustained a severe bite on his hand received revelation from others on site and he shared that he had gone to bed the night before, thanking his Heavenly Father for His spirit of forgiveness. Also, he thanked Him that by the stripes of Jesus his hand was healed. When he awake the next morning, his hand was fully healed.

The pastor mentioned above commented that he was astonished to see how well the bloggers to our site access God in finding the answers to many questions that would cause great apprehension in the church that he served in. He said that coming up with the answer for this man to be reunited with his father was something for which they had not yet found an answer.

A young lady presented her problem regarding her former boy friend who began to cut his initials on her back. She was quite angry with him. Because of the amount of blood, she was concerned that her soul was somehow tied to him. She had been experiencing anger-rage that was unusual. She had not had anything to do with him in nineteen months but she could feel his anger and his moodiness and it kept her from resting. She asked how she could get free from these attacks on her soul.

A man who prays with his wife about problems on our site responded to this young lady saying that having anyone carve anything upon your body makes you an offering to Satan and places labels on you as a sucker. Specifically carving initials is often done to transfer the penalty of one’s sins to another person. Because of the unforgiveness towards him, it allows not only a soul tie but also a soul attachment. In blaming him for the wrongs in her life, this young lady was triggering these ties and attachments. He counseled her to forgive him and even to stand in the gap as him, confessing his sins against her. Then he told her to stand out of the gap as herself and forgive him. Taking communion, the body and the blood of Jesus could then be taken to reject and remove the label, breaking off all effects of it, as well as rejecting being made an offering to Satan. He told her that their prayers were with her for the wisdom and the understanding to do all that was necessary to be set free from these attacks.

The same day she responded thanking him for this much needed advice. She followed the instructions of standing in the gap for him, confessing his sins, as well as thanking her heavenly Father that the stripes of Jesus had healed her. She was not only able to forgive him, but after a few minutes she could see that the scars on her back were no longer there…

The man who helped is one of our regular contributors to the blog. His answers are bathed in prayer. He shared a praise report with us saying that ordinarily he didn’t speak about his past, though there were some who knew that nine years ago his spinal cord had been severed. The great news was that only last week, he began to get feeling in his feet and toes. He said that he now had feeling in the lower half of his body. And today, he could wiggle his big toe just a bit. He invited all to celebrate that his healing is here and we all complied.

All this is happening because of Jesus, because of His blood, the true understanding of His Word, the use of His name rather than the anemic title Lord, the understanding of His nine covenants presently in force, and the understanding and keeping of His days of celebration and worship.

This is also happening because people are seeking the Father’s heart of love and especially of forgiveness. This book is a needed supplement to our book, God’s Fruit of Forgiveness. The explosion of interest in the blog has highlighted the need for a frank exploration into the nitty-gritty of forgiveness, into the stark reality of what Christians face today that they didn’t face fifty years ago.

We relate an amazing story involving this helpful blogger who we will call Dave, not his real name.

Dave Forgave

The man who helped the young lady is somewhat of a poster boy for the advertising of the good news of forgiveness and its explosive results. His story should encourage readers who have experienced their share of soap operatic ups and downs and struggles to forgive.

Dave and his wife came from broken homes and met and married as teens. Dave’s father had not forgiven his own father and was overflowing with the distasteful and dangerous symptoms of this syndrome. He was especially abusive to his son. Dave, now in his late twenties, went to his father’s home nine years ago to seek reconciliation with him.

As Dave was leaving the home, unable to achieve reconciliation, his father shot him in the back. Dave fell in a pool of blood, his spinal cord severed. Rather than calling an ambulance, Dave’s dad called the police to complain that this young man was trespassing on his property. When the policeman arrived, Dave told him to tell his father that he forgave him for shooting him and for everything he had done to him during his life.

My colleague and apostle Gerald Budzinski has gained a reputation among young people on Facebook who are referred to him by friends. They see him as a man with answers who hears from God on seemingly impossible questions. Gerald was impressed with Dave’s insight. He somehow managed to research his phone number and call him.

That is when Gerald learned of his amazing story and of his life now spent in a wheelchair. He asked this prayer warrior, What do you need? He replied simply: All I need is more of Jesus. That’s why I named one of my websites, www.robertsmoreofjesus.com.

This young man had found the secret to a successful life. It could be summed up in one phrase: Dave forgave. He learned that He could rely on His heavenly Father to give him the grace to forgive an abusive earthly father.

Dave is alive in Jesus, and even his body is coming alive in a miraculous healing.

The secret of the joy of forgiveness, and eventually reconciliation, is knowing, really knowing, the One who suffered and died for all of us, the One who said of his killers, Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.

Many of you who read these words say that you know this Jesus, who came to reveal the Father. It was the Father Himself who drew you to Jesus (John 6:44). And then Jesus chose you (John 15:16). The apostle Paul’s great goal was to get to know, to really know, Jesus (Phil. 3:10).

How about us believers? Do we really know Jesus, intimately? If we did, we wouldn’t be living soap opera lives filled with unforgiveness. Jesus wants us to grow up. He wants to see us mature to become like our Father Love (Mat. 5:48). But our refusal to forgive others, especially our earthly fathers, has been one of the main ways we have fallen short of the perfection of our Father.

Forgiveness has proven to be the hardest quality of our Father Love for believers to exemplify. The lack of forgiveness is the main problem in the church today.

This refusal to accept our Father’s grace of forgiveness has divided families, split mates, hurt children, and made Christian lives a messy soap opera that gets bad ratings from the viewing audience of non-believers. They say, They’re no different from us, only worse! And they want us to be part of that Jesus’ crowd? No way!

The World on Our Shoulders

What they don’t realize is that we’re their ticket to survival. The Great Tribulation is around the corner. It will be worse than any soap opera or even horror movie we have ever seen. God calls us the salt of the earth (Mat. 5:13). Salt preserves.

Jesus describes events far more catastrophic than the horror inhabitants of Jerusalem experienced in 70 A.D.: "For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not occurred since the beginning of the world until now, nor ever will. Unless those days had been cut short, no life would have been saved; but for the sake of the elect those days will be cut short" (Mat. 24:21-22).

But what if the elect don’t do their job? What if they don’t pray and live as lights to the world and as preservers of mankind?

In our books we have explained the importance of reading the whole Bible rather than relegated what men falsely call the Old Testament to the dustbin. After all, Jesus did say, at a time when only that Old Testament existed, that we were to live by every word of God (Mat. 4:4).

You can’t know who Jesus is without the First Testament, or The First Words of Jesus, who is called the Word in John 1:1-18. And you can’t fully understand the verse we have just read without Malachi 4:6.

Unless the hearts of the children are turned to their fathers and the hearts of God’s children to their Father Love and to His spirit of forgiveness, Jesus will have no choice but to destroy every living thing on earth before He returns to make it fit once again for life to exist on it.

However small, a group must exist in these last days that is working for this reconciliation. Jesus is looking for a bride, His church, who is willing to obey Him, willing to keep His laws of love (John 14:15), His days, and His ways that are epitomized by the spirit of forgiveness.

Many fathers today, even Christian fathers, aren’t showing love to their wives or their children because they haven’t forgiven their own dads. Yet Jesus set us the example, loving His bride the church by giving of Himself for us, so that He might sanctify her [His bride, the church], having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word (Eph. 5:26).

Jesus cleanses our sordid past by His blood that He shed for us, and as we take the overlooked and neglected elements of communion we assure that our past is indeed washed away and that we have eternal life (John 6:53-54).

We thus assure that He lives in us. He is the personification of the grace or indwelling empowerment to obey His laws of love. When we bathe in the Word by reading it aloud, meditating on it, and practicing it, we are being cleansed and prepared as a bride for Jesus.

It’s time. It’s high time we got cleaned up. Many on our blog come to us with questions betraying topsy-turvy lives filled with problems, many of those problems resulting from unforgiveness, and many of them are experiencing a cleansing and a newness they haven’t experienced before.

They are learning new things they have never heard in their churches, many of which have discarded them like useless rubbish because of their problems.

We welcome all of you who are in need of help, forgiveness, and reconciliation with God and man. We extend an invitation to really get to know and love Jesus, in His own words in Matthew 11:28-30: Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden [with soap opera lives more dramatically sad than they should be for believers, or perhaps even worse if you are not yet a believer], and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and YOU WILL FIND REST FOR YOUR SOULS [your heart and emotions, your mind, and your will]. For My yoke is easy and My burden light.

Knowing Love

Before we get into the fascinating nitty-gritty of solving complex problems, we need to understand the basics of knowing God. He is Love (1 John 4:8). He wants all mankind to know Jesus and His salvation and live forever in the Family of Love that He heads.

Jesus gives a surprising definition of eternal life in John 17:3. He says it’s knowing the Father and knowing Him. That’s His purpose for us.

But oops! Lucifer and Adam used their free will God gave them, since He doesn’t want robots, to rebel against Him. God is all knowing, of course, so He knew that His plan of love would require a delay before all mankind could come to Him.

Since you are reading this, you are in all likelihood one of the few He has drawn to Jesus in this age (John 6:44). The Father draws you to His Son Jesus, who died so that all your sins would be erased from the Father’s memory. Then it is Jesus who chooses you because He knows you can resist Satan’s onslaught in this age in which he is god of this world (2 Cor. 4:4).

You can then respond to His call (John 15:16), and begin to allow Him to bring about the fruits of the Father’s love in your life, including the all-important grace of forgiveness. This gift enables you to forgive your physical father and mother, as well as all those who have hurt you in your life.

How important is it to know your Father Love? It is probably the most important knowledge you can possess in these last days.

In His last hours, Jesus summed up the most important thing in life: This is eternal life, that they know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent (John 17:3). Eternal life is only available to those who truly know God, who is Love. And the degree in which we enter into the abundant life Jesus brought (John 10:10) is dependent upon how well we know Jesus.

Some who performed miracles in Jesus’ name will hear these words: I never knew you… (Mat. 7:23). Others, who were at one point part of the virgin Bride of Jesus, will hear the words, I do not know you (Mat. 25:12). It is obvious that Jesus knows us who responded to His call and walk in His ways of love, knowing and loving him as demonstrated by our obedience (John 14:50). But some He ceases to know because they stopped following Him, and others He never knew.

How about you? Will Jesus say those words to you?

It’s important to understand the process by which we come to know God. The Father draws you to Jesus, who is the Mediator between God the Father and mankind Jesus shed His blood for all who ever walked or will walk on the face of this earth. While many Christians believe that God the Father was the God spoken of in the Hebrew Scriptures, that’s not what Jesus said.

Take your Bible and read a few verses that make this truth plain: John 1:18; 5:37; 6:46; 14:7; 17:25-26. Jesus came to reveal the Father, and He said that He was the only way to the Father (John 14:6). Mohammed and Buddha are not the way. Only Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Where the vast majority of Christians are confused is that they think those who don’t know Jesus today, because they’re not called in this age, are condemned to some fiery hell forever. That is not reflective of a God and Father who calls Himself Love, nor is it the Bible teaching. Almost seven hundred Bible verses point to a time when all who don’t come to know Jesus in this age will be resurrected and offered an opportunity to know Him after His thousand-year reign on earth (Rev. 20:5a).

Cruel Tyrant, or Father Love?

If you think your Father God, who is Love, would condemn someone forever simply because He hadn’t chosen to draw them to Jesus in this age, you don’t know that Father Love. It’s time you threw in the trash can the false conception of a cruel and distant Father who loved to smite people in the Old Testament and condemns innocent people willy-nilly to burn in hell forever. You may also think that, perhaps like your earthly father, He is just looking for ways to get you.

That’s a picture of Satan, not our Father Love. If you swallow that lie, it’s time to spit it out and lay it down to Jesus. Satan wants to cleverly portray Father God as the one who comes to kill, steal, and destroy rather than give His children the abundant life (John 10:10).

Are you getting the picture? Do you begin to see how Satan has deceived the whole world (Rev. 12:9), alas, even the Christian world? Do you begin to grasp how important it is for God’s children to return to their true Father Love? For indeed, how can we return to our Father if we don’t know who He is? Satan wants us to see our Father as the cruel scoundrel that he, the devil, is. He even wants you see yourself as a dirty, rotten scoundrel of a sinner who is unworthy of the Father’s love.

But that’s not who you are if you have accepted Jesus as your Savior and Divine Master. If you have Jesus living in you, that means that the real you, your spirit man, has been washed perfectly clean by Jesus’ blood. Your past has been washed away along with all your sins so that you can come boldly before the throne of your Father (Heb. 4:16) and get to know Him.

The doctrines of the Christian world are full of falseness. Our Father Love has gotten bad press in the pulpits of churchianity. If we persist in that falseness, our hearts can’t return to our Father in heaven, or even to our earthly fathers.

Our bloggers who began to recognize their unforgiveness to their physical fathers let out a common cry: We need Jesus! The man we call Dave, who forgave his father for shooting him in the back when he came back for a hug, said, I need more of Jesus. We all do.

We need Jesus, because in knowing Him we get to know our Father.

Does your heart yearn to truly know Jesus? Is your heart feeling a tug from the Holy Spirit to get to know your Father Love and turn to Him in these last days?

You’ve come to the right place, to a place where God is restoring lost truths, truths whose light chases away the darkness of falseness that has swallowed up the world (Isa. 25:7)—truths that will set your heart free to embrace the unconditional love of the Father.

Are you ready for Love? Are you ready to allow the light of God’s truth to shine on the darkness of your life? Perhaps you have a life and a family that has been ravaged by Satan’s sad soap operas. It’s not too late to receive God’s love and change your life.

Isaiah tells us to seek the Eternal while He may be found (55:6). Some of our troubled bloggers have found hope and freedom, a hope God offers to you: For you will go out with joy and be led forth with peace; The mountains and the hills will break forth into shouts of joy before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands. Instead of the thorn bush [symbolic of demons] the cypress will come up, And instead of the nettle the myrtle will come up… (Isa. 55:12-13).

Your Father hasn’t come to abuse you like your earthly father may have done. His plans for you are for welfare and not for calamity and to give you a future and a hope (Jer. 29:11). Yes, as we approach the most calamitous times in the history of civilization, these can be the most exciting times for you and your family. Nothing is more exciting than getting to know Love, loving and obeying a Father who is eagerly waiting in these last days to wrap you in His arms of protective love.

God promises to those who love and seek Jesus in these last days that not a hair of your head will perish (Luke 21:18). That means you don’t have to allow your head to be cut off by ISIS. The precursors to the Islamic Antichrist plan to do their scandalous deeds, faithful to the words of their Koran, to believers in the West. But you don’t have to be their victims if you know Jesus, who He is and who you are in Him.

Even if you don’t qualify for the first rapture, the one to heaven, God promises that He will protect you if you