How You Are Known in Heaven

SESSION 1

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These are incredible days for us. It takes a long time to prepare a people. You cannot do it in a couple of years. All of us have been on a journey of preparation. Some of that journey involves suffering, betrayal, persecution, and hardship. Sometimes you have to be abased before you know how to abound. There is no substitute for that; you just have to go through it. We all have to go through places of brokenness where, honestly, once you quit whining, complaining, and moaning, which is the worship language of hell – once you quit that stuff, you realize that there is only one thing you can do and that is kneel down and kiss the hand that hurts. Sometimes you just have to bow down and kiss the Son. I think that many of us have bowed down a few times to kiss the Son. God sometimes purposely lets us experience little, because He wants to see what we will do with it.

There are two things that God is doing with us. One is, He is teaching us how to trust Him. It is really difficult to become Christ-like when everything is going well. You do not learn the beauty of it when things are going well because you are too busy enjoying it, and that is exactly the right thing to do. But when it is not going well, when it is hard, that is when God finds out things about us. That is where we learn to trust Him and when He learns to trust us. That is the second thing God is doing. He is bringing us to a place to where He can trust us.

He is bringing us to a place
where He can trust us.

We used to have a prayer in England – I am sure we still do – and we prayed it for years because it is a great prayer. The prayer is simply, “Lord, would You trust us enough with a move of God? Would you trust us enough to give us a move of God?”

We are in that place right now where, I believe, the Lord is redefining the Kingdom to us, and He is redefining who the Church is in the context of that Kingdom. As we are discovering what Church and Kingdom are all about, you cannot have these huge things like Church and Kingdom put in front of you without understanding something of the dream of God and the longing of God and the passion of God to see a people raised up in the earth who are going to be as passionate about Him as He is about us.

You have to go back to Genesis to see the dream of God and how after thousands of years, that dream is still in His heart that He would make a people in His own image – who see like He sees, who think like He thinks, who speak and talk in exactly the same way that He does, who walk in the manner that He would walk, who would do the things that He does and who, like Jesus, can become a visual aid in the earth.

Scripture says that the Spirit of God wanders to and fro throughout the earth looking for a people on whose behalf He can show Himself strong. He is looking for Kings and Priests, warriors and champions, and He is looking for them amongst the “whosoever” – people who have been deemed to be ordinary, people who have been rejected, people who are not deemed to be worthy, people unlooked or looked over – and it is out of that people that He is fashioning men and women of real significance. If we are going to be significant, we have to know who Jesus is in Himself. We have to know what He is like and we have to know what He is like for us. You cannot escape that. You have to know! You have to know, “Who is God for me?”

When you know who you are, then you know how you are supposed to live,
both within yourself and towards other people.

And you find it out on every single day in good times and bad times. Who is God for me when things are going wrong? Who is God for me when favor is being displayed? Who is God for me when I am in need?

Who is God for me when my passion for the people group He sent me to demands that I need more resources? Who is God for me on that day? How does God see me? How does He think about me? How does He talk to me? How does He like to be with me? We have to have answers for those questions because that is what the Bible calls experience. That is what the Bible calls knowledge – knowledge that leads you by experience into an encounter and into a place of trust. And everywhere in this glorious Book there is a revelation of who God is and what God is really, really like.

When Jesus asked the question in Matthew 16:13, “Who do people say that I am,” He was not fishing for a compliment. He was making a really crucial point about identity and knowledge.

The thing is, when you know who you are, then you know how you are supposed to live both within yourself and towards the people around you irrespective of their behavior towards you. I would go as far to say that people’s behavior towards you is utterly irrelevant. What matters is who you are and how you show up. When those people around you know your true identity, then they have to act accordingly towards you.

That is what we call fellowship. Fellowship is not just how we meet together around the Lord’s Table or in worship or prayer. Real fellowship is when you know the person standing next to you – you know who they are, you know their identity, and you live with them according to who they are because they are living with you according to how they see you in Jesus, and that is the unity we are looking for. That is the oneness of heart and mind and soul and voice. You see the people around you as God sees them, and you relate to them as He would.

So when Jesus asks the question, “Who do people say that I am?” He got back four distorted images. The disciples said, “Well, some people say you are John the Baptist,” which is a little disturbing because he had just been murdered a few months earlier. That is kind of freaky. Others said, “You are Elijah or Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” Some people saw Him as the carpenter’s son. Some as a Rabbi or a teacher. He wanted the disciples to understand His true identity because that revelation of Him would shape their relationship with Him.
What you think you know about God is the most important thought you are ever going to have.

What you think about God is everything, and you have to work it out. If you do not know that vital stuff about God, you are always going to struggle when the heat is on. It is what you know about God that keeps you, that makes you stand, that makes you get up, that makes you walk. Our true identity is made up of who we are on earth and how we are known in Heaven.

I want to say this to you, “Every single one of you has an identity that Heaven knows and understands. You are known in Heaven. When you receive a prophetic word, what’s happening? God is saying, “This is how We see you. This is how We view you. This is what We believe that you are about.”

Inheritance Scriptures

If you receive scripture, where there are times that scripture seems to jump out of the Bible and wrap itself around your face, and you know, that you know, that you know, that God is communicating with you – how many have had that kind of experience? How many have had it more than twice? More than 4 times? You see, He has been messing with you for years.

Here is the thing though, as good evangelicals, what do we normally do with that? We think, “Well, God is speaking” so we turn it into a talk – message – for someone else. How many of us have done that? A scripture has really grabbed your heart and you have gotten a message out of it and given it away, but the message was not for anyone else, it was for you! And the Lord was saying to you, “This is how I see you.”

Challenge #1, before you go to bed this evening, write those scriptures down – however many there are. I have about 8 particular passages of scripture that God has specifically given to me. Here is His phrase for those scriptures, “These are your inheritance words. These words describe who you are, what you can have, and the promises that are present in those words belong to you. It is called the prophecy of scripture.”

God has sown words into your life where He is saying to you, “Everything in that passage now belongs to you. Every promise belongs to you. Every experience that you can read of belongs to you.” If there is someone’s name in that passage, you can have the same experience with God that they had.

It is important to Him that you realize who you are in His eyes.

One of my passages of scripture is Numbers 13 and 14. It is the story of Caleb coming back with a good report and God said about him, “He is a man of a different spirit.” The Lord has been talking to me about that for many years – “Graham, I have set you up. You are known in Heaven as a man of a different spirit and this is how to live up to it. This is what that means. It means that you flow against the tide. It means that you stand when everyone else has fallen. It means that you press in when others are running away. It means that you do not give up, and you do not quit. You watch your language and you watch your mindset, because you will see things in the day of trouble that you will not see at any other time. And when you see those things, you will understand that I am adding substance into your soul and into your spirit. I am making you a man after My own heart. I am making you a man of a different spirit.”

When God is giving you scriptures like that, He is being absolutely serious. This is how you are known in Heaven. When He gives you prophetic words, the same thing is happening. He is saying, “This is how you are known.” It is important to Him that you realize who you are in His eyes.

Every time you read in the Bible about favor in the Old Testament, the same phrase keeps cropping up again and again and again. “If I have found favor in Your eyes.” “Now that I have found favor in Your sight.” You have to know how God is looking at you so that when you are looking in the mirror, whether you are shaving or putting your makeup on, you know who you are looking at. You can talk to yourself, “This is who I am. This is what God is doing in me. This is what I stand for. This is how I am known in Heaven.”

We are made up of two things. One, how we are known in Heaven, and who we have become on earth in terms of our earthly experience. Our personality is made up of how we are known on earth, and it is the integrated organization of soul and body. It is the combination of physiological, intellectual, emotional, and physical attributes. We have been shaped by our upbringing, by our environment, by our training, by modeling into a learned behavior whether that behavior is positive or negative. We have been shaped by our environment and things in our culture, in our family line, and so on.

Our true identity is made up of 2 things:
- who we are on earth,
- and how we are known in Heaven.

We can have a negative side to our personality. We can have victim thinking. We can be cautious or pessimistic. We can be judgmental or prejudice, fearful or hesitant, only taking comfort in the familiar. We can have a fear of man, fear of being wrong, fear of looking stupid, fear of risking something. We can be prone to deception, always believing the worst, having a sense of unworthiness, and being entirely too self-conscious. Not that I think that anyone here is afflicted by any one of those things!

A lot of those things come to us through rejection, betrayal, humiliation, things spoken to us, things done to us and so on. Sometimes we can accumulate those things because we do not realize we can kill them and put them in the ground. So we accumulate them and believe them to be true about ourselves.

We have things that we believe are spiritual, a language about ourselves – oh, I am not really any good – I am not good – Jesus is everything. What a load of nonsense that is! I mean, He is everything, but so are you!

Jesus will never accept the glorifying of Him and the denigration of you in the same space.

Do you understand that? That is not a glorious thing to say. “Oh, I am no good, but He is everything.” There is no glory in that for Him because He knows that it is not true.

The Father put you into a place in Jesus where you have to know that your identity is bound up with His. Whatever He is, you are. If one of His Names is Wonderful, guess what? One of your names has to be wonderful, too!

The Bible says, “Don’t think of yourself more highly than you ought to think.” (Romans 12:3). In other words, you have to have a high opinion of yourself, just do not go overboard! Here is the thing. Not one of us here in this room would ever go overboard because we are so conditioned against it.

That is something we have to break because we see it as a fail-safe and it is not. It is a detriment. It holds us back.

You have to be able to stand up and say, “Hey this is me. This is who I am in Jesus,” without any apologies, without any self-effacing language, or without any creepy humility. Real humility is that you know exactly what you are like without Jesus. The other side of humility is that you know exactly who you are in Him. Somewhere those two things absolutely cancel each other out and you are free.

We can have a positive side to our personality. We can be optimistic, trusting, and willing to try things. We can be challenged. We are risk takers. We are brave, honest, self-aware, and open. We are a mix of all those things on earth.

Making War on Negativity

Jesus came to take all our negative things to the Cross. That means that every negative thing, every negative word spoken against you, every negative experience you have had, every negative encounter with people – all of those things were taken to the Cross so that you might be set free of them. So that you would learn in your new persona in Jesus how to make war on every negative thing, because negativity is what is killing our society. It is killing relationships. It is killing families. It is killing businesses, killing churches. Inbuilt negativity that we have not come to terms with, and that we have not dealt with, but we have accumulated, and we have said, “This is me.”

The good news is, it is NOT you! You are dead to it. Turn to your neighbor and say, “You are dead to that negativity. Stay dead.”

One of the things we are doing – we came here this weekend to kill negativity stone dead and never to allow it any breathing space again. When we sing about, “I am changing my language,” that is one of the things we are doing. We are making war on every negative thought, every negative perception, and every negative word. We are refusing to accept negative things because if we really want on earth what Heaven is like, then you have to ask the question, “Is there any negativity in Heaven?

What we trust in the nature of God gives us power in the Kingdom.

About 17 ½ of you thought maybe there is not any negativity in Heaven, and the rest are not sure where I am going with this so you are hedging your bets.

Is there any frustration in Heaven? No one is standing in front of the Throne right now going, “When is this worship service going to be over? I have not had a cup of coffee in 100 years. Seriously? If that angel starts another tune, I am going to give him some fivefold ministry.” No one is doing that. No one is bored. No one is angry. There is no negativity. There is just glory, on earth as it is in Heaven.

Do you understand the thing that God is putting in front of us right now?

If you want to have Heaven on earth, this is what it looks like. This is what you cannot allow. You cannot allow negative perceptions, negative thinking, or negative language. You have to kill it. You have to kill it in yourself. Then you have to kill it graciously in other people.

If God wants us to know what He is like, the Bible says about Jesus that He is the image; He is the exact persona of the invisible God. We are being conformed to the image, the persona of His Son, so that Jesus will be the first born among many brethren. Jesus is the radiance of the Father’s Glory – the exact representation of His nature. In fact, Jesus, when asked the question, “Will

You show us the Father?” He said, “If you have seen Me, you have seen Him.”

God loves to make Himself known. In Exodus 34 He appears to Moses on the mountain. I will not go into the whole story because it is too long and you know it anyway. Moses is up on this mountain hiding between two rocks and God’s hand is covering him because, apparently, the Goodness of God is so powerful it could incinerate you in your earthly form.

The Lord is saying, “My Goodness is so incredibly powerful that I need to protect you from it, Moses, until I give you a new body later on and then you will be cool. You can stand right in front of the Throne and bathe in My Radiance and it will not blister your skin.”

All the words that God has given you have to be fulfilled in life.

While Moses is hiding, God walks out in front of him. It is the first time that God talks about Himself in scripture and He says this, “I am Compassionate. I am Gracious. I am s – l – o – w to anger. I am Merciful. I am Truthful. I am Faithful. I am Forgiving.” (Exodus 34:6-7) What is He doing? He is saying, “This is how I am known in Heaven.”

Jesus comes to His hometown church in Luke 4, and He has worshiped with these guys. All these guys know Him. He comes to the front of the synagogue and He picks up the scroll from the attendant and, technically you are supposed to carry on reading this week where you left off last week, but Jesus does not do that. The Bible says that He finds the place (Luke 4:17).

You can imagine, the attendant is holding the scroll and Jesus starts pulling it out to find the place He wants and the attendant is looking at Him like – You cannot do that! I am the attendant! – and Jesus finds the place in Isaiah 61 and He begins to read it out:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon ME, because He anointed ME to preach the Gospel to the poor; He sent ME to proclaim release to the captive and recovery of sight to the blind; to set free those who are oppressed; to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.

He closed the book and He gave it back to the attendant, who is looking daggers at Him thinking, “It is going to take me ages to put this all back together.” Then Jesus sits down, everyone is looking at Him, and He says these words, “Today these words are fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:21)

What is Jesus saying? This is how I am known in Heaven and these are My inheritance words.

This is one of my inheritance words. He had 300, but He is allowed so many because He is the Savior, right?

Today these words are fulfilled in your hearing.

All the words that God has given you have to be fulfilled in life. That means that we are partnering with those words as a part of our story changing, as a part of our journey, of being upgraded.

Later on, He is talking to the disciples about the Holy Spirit and in John 16 He says, “Guys, it is better for you if I go away.” All the disciples are looking at Him going, “No it is not! Seriously? No, it is not! Jesus, You are not wrong about much, but You are actually wrong about that.” Jesus said, “No, it is better for you if I go away because if I go away, He can come.”

Then He starts talking about the Holy Spirit.

He is your Helper in everything. He will convict the world systems of sin so you do not need to do that because it is His job, right? He convinces people of the need for Righteousness. He will judge the ruler of this world and He will lead us by experience into all truth. He will disclose to you what is to come –

See, you are supposed to have a prophetic relationship with God because He wants to show you what is coming up next in your own life and circumstances.

He will glorify Jesus to us and in us and He will take everything that will belong to Jesus and reveal them to us. (John 16:7-15)

What is Jesus saying? This is how the Holy Spirit is known in Heaven and this is how you need to know Him here on earth. You need to let Him do all of those things in your life because that is His job description.

God is big on revealing Himself and saying, “This is how We are known in Heaven. This is how you need to know Us on earth.” What is He saying here? “If this is good enough for Us, it is good enough for you.”

All the prophecies, all the scriptures that God has given to you are revelations of how God sees you, thinks about you, and wants to talk to you about those things.

So, it is just a regular Tuesday in Luke 1 and Zacharias gets a visit from Gabriel, and Gabriel has come to talk to Zacharias about his son, John, who is not even born yet. He is still in his mother’s womb.

Gabriel says this about John:

He will be great in the sight of God. He will drink no wine or liquor. He will be filled with the Holy Spirit while in his mother’s womb. He will turn many of the sons of Israel back to the Lord. He will go as a forerunner before Him in the spirit and power of Elijah. He will turn the hearts of the fathers back to the children and the disobedient to the attitude of the righteous to make a people ready for the Lord.

What is he saying? That is how John is known in Heaven. The child is not even born yet! But this is how he is known in Heaven.

How you are known in Heaven is what you confess about yourself here on earth. So John’s confession about himself was, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Make ready the way of the Lord. Make His path straight.’”

What was John doing? He was speaking out his own prophetic word. He is speaking out his identity. This is who I am, this is what I am here for, this is what God has charged me with, this is who I am. This is how I am known in Heaven. This is my place here on earth.

When you embrace your identity fully, you know how to stand
in every situation.

You have to know it, Beloved. You have to know it. You have to know it. You have to know it. You have to know it. Not just about it, you have to know it by experience. You have to stand in that place.

I remember the first time I ever confessed that I was a prophet. It was back in the 70’s. I had this call of prophetic ministry and office on my life and one of my mentors who I wanted to kill – many, many times – because he used to say to me, “Graham, God may wink at things, but the brethren – me – won’t let you get away with anything.” And he never did. He loved me ferociously and he is one of the reasons why I am still around after 40 years.

He said to me one day, “When are you going to confess that you are a prophet?” I said, “I am not ready yet! I am not ready yet!” He said, “By your standards then, you will never be ready.”

Resources Are Tied to Your Identity

Here is the thing, you are never ready for the call of God, but at some point, if you do not stand up and confess it – if you are not willing to take yourself seriously, then the Lord is going to withhold stuff until you do. All of your resources are tied into your confession. Your resources are tied into your identity and your identity has to be confessed. When you confess your identity, then the resources attached to it can actually begin to come.

It does not matter how other people perceive you. It matters how you perceive yourself.

When you get a prophetic word and you read it through and you pray about it, you believe it is the word of the Lord, at some point you have to stand before God and say, “Father……” and read out the prophetic word and say, “I accept this prophetic word into my life and I accept all the resources that come with it and I will partner with the Holy Spirit, and I will step into this place deliberately. I will start to think of myself in this way. I will start to see myself in this way. I will start to speak in this way. I will start to walk in this way. I will start to act like that man because that is who You are making me into. So, I am going to partner with my identity with the Holy Spirit so that together I am going to be made in the image of God in exactly the way that You said.”

It is a deliberate, verbal response.

“I choose to step into this. I give You permission to remind me about this.” And you have to tell your friends.

So I said, “Okay, okay, I will say it!” I waited until I was doing a conference 700 miles away and I stood up in this conference and I said, “I just want you all to know that I am a prophet in this nation.” And everyone is looking at me and said, “Is he weird?” Some people are looking at you going, “Bighead!”

Anyway, I do the meeting and I get back to my hotel room. I walk in the door and the phone is ringing. It is my mentor. I pick up the phone and he says, “That does not count!” I said, “What does not count?” He said, “You blabbed it 700 miles away. That does not count!” I said, “Who told you?” He said, “Who do you think?” I said, “Come on dude that is cheating!” He said, “I need all the help I can get with a little reprobate like you; now do it in the right place.” And he hangs up the phone on me.

So, I did it in my home town church. I stood up and said, “I just want you all to know that I believe God has called me to be a prophet, and a prophet is what I intend to be.” And there was silence. And then somebody snickered. Then a few people laughed and a few people got up and walked out. All my friends said to me, “What on earth are you doing? That was the most idiotic thing I have ever seen you do and I have seen you pull some lunatic stuff.”

Then you realize that not everyone is going to be happy about who you are. You have to be it anyway. You have to be faithful to it.

Then it seemed like for every other event for the next couple of years, I had to confess that I was a prophet until pretty much everybody in the whole corner of England had heard this thing. “Do you hear what Cooke is saying about himself? He is a prophet now apparently.”

It does not matter how other people perceive you. It matters how you perceive yourself. Only you can live your life. Guys, you have to live it. We are not too old and we are not too young. We are just the right age for something brilliant to happen.

In that identity, in that persona, we are invested with three things:

Legal authority over the enemy
Permission to overcome every obstacle
Elevated status in Christ

We are invested with three things - Legal authority over the enemy. Your identity gives you authority in the Spirit world. That is why you need to confess it, and experience it, and encounter it, and live it. Your identity gives you permission to overcome every obstacle against you, and it gives you elevated status in Christ. You need to learn to act from a place above your circumstances, not a place below. Your identity gives you elevated status in your circumstances. Think of it this way, if you are in Christ, so are all your circumstances. Right? But you have to prove that. If you are in Christ, so are

ALL your circumstances. Prove it! Prove it in your circumstances. I am in Christ; my circumstances have to fall to me.

I will put it another way. All of Heaven is attracted to Jesus in you. Come on. This is what it means to be a GameChanger. You know who you are in Jesus, and you know, that you know, that you know, that all of Heaven is attracted to Jesus in you.

You are a magnet for favor. You are a magnet for blessing. You are a magnet for power because all of Heaven is attracted to Christ in you. Christ in you, the expectation of Glory. We have to prove it. GameChangers prove it. Warriors prove it. Champions prove it. That is what experience is.

In our persona we are given 3 things:
- Legal authority over the enemy
- Permission to overcome every obstacle
- Elevated status in Christ

GameChangers prove it. Warriors prove it. Champions prove it. That is what experience is.

Experience is something that we know because we have proved it and it is in our life. It is not a thought. It is not a concept. It is a proven part of our identity. I KNOW this is true.

When God shows up in our life and calls us to a specific task, He is introducing us to our persona as He defines it.

That gives us an elevated status on earth. David becomes King because he got a prophetic word from Samuel and he proved it against Goliath. Goliath is speaking to him the language of intimidation.

Language is important in the Spirit.

If you do not know who you are, you will be intimidated by somebody else’s language. When you know who you are, and when you are intimately acquainted with who you are, then your intimacy with God in your identity and your language become the most intimidating thing about you.

Goliath says to David, “I am going to feed your body to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field.” David says, “Oh? Is that right? I see your intimidation and I raise you 500. I am going to feed your body AND all your friends to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field.”

And David runs towards him. David runs towards him, because David knows one thing that Goliath does not know. David has a prophecy from Samuel that he is going to be King one day. “I am not King today, that means I cannot die, so it sucks to be you right now.”

So he ran at Goliath like he was running through an open door into his destiny because Goliath was a doorway into a higher and better place. He knew that nothing could prevent him from inheriting because he had a word from the Lord. Prophecy comes in useful. That is where you quote your identity. You quote it to the giant in front of you. You quote it to the problem that is present. You quote who you are. “This is who I am.”

David becomes King. Abraham becomes the father of many nations even though he is faced with barrenness in his wife. He just wants one son and God is saying, “I will make you the father of many nations.” And Abraham is thinking, “That is sweet. That is cool. I just want one. Just give me one and we will talk about the rest later.” And the Lord is saying, “No. You accept this or you cannot get this.”

God always works from the whole to the particular.

If you are going to accept your identity, you have to accept the whole. Abraham had to accept that ‘I am going to be the father of many nations.’ Then God works from that place into the particular so that he starts out and he gets his first son.

You have to accept the whole of who you are to be a GameChanger.

You have to study yourself. You have to study your words. You have to think about them. You have to start seeing yourself the way God sees you. You have to take time out. You need to go buy a journal. You need to write those passages down. You need to write them out. If you have enough passages of scripture, you might need to buy a journal for every one, because you need to study to show yourself approved. You need to study so that you know who you really are. You need to write those things out. You cannot be backward about this. You have to do it as a matter of absolute urgency. Whatever else you think is important, you have to attach some importance to this, because if you do not, you will let it slip like you have always let it slip. Then you will be dreaming about being a GameChanger while somebody else is actually fulfilling it.

Your persona is not just about what you do for God, it’s about how you live before Him.

There comes a time when a dream has to become a reality in terms with your partnership with God.

You are here because we believe that you are GameChangers. We believe that you can take initiative. We believe that you are wanting to respond to the fullness of what God wants to be for you and we believe that everybody in this room – there is no ordinary person in this room, but there might be a whole ton of extraordinary people – who are going to do something majestic in the earth because you are discovering who you are.

That is why you are here! You are not here by accident. You are here by design because God wants you to know that this is how you are known on earth. Now Beloved, you have some work to do. You have to study Jesus, but you have to study what He says about you. You have to take it on board.

Moses becomes a Deliver. Joseph becomes a Prime Minister. Deborah becomes a Prophetess. Esther becomes Queen. Mary becomes the mother of Emmanuel. This is how you are known on earth. Many of them had dreams, angelic visitations, specific words given to them by God that said, “This is how you are known in Heaven.”

I have gotten words about being a warrior so the whole Caleb thing is really important to me. Caleb loved Majesty. He was a catalyst. He was a GameChanger himself. He created an environment for people to really start following after the Lord.

Part of my identity is prophetic. I love thinking about present/future. I love the prophetic gift. I love the mindset of a Prophet.

I am a teacher. I love favor. I love fullness. I love the Spirit of Wisdom and Revelation.

I am a builder. I love to build. There are loads of people out there who can bless, but I am a builder. I need to build something. I need to have relationships where I can build.

So you understand how the words over my own life have shaped my life and my destiny and shaped who I am and how I think about myself. So I do not do meetings, I take assignments. I do not go to places to bless; I go to places to build. That means I want to stay with it until something is built.

You have to confess and declare your identity.

It shapes who you are. It shapes how you see yourself. It shapes who you want to be. It shapes how you show up in places.

For an identity upgrade to be established, three things have to happen. They have to happen by design, and they have to happen by cooperation, and partnership.

Perception Must Change

The first thing is, your perception must change. Not just that you see yourself as God sees you, but you own it. You envision yourself – you envision yourself being that person.

When David got prophesied over by Samuel that he was going to be King and his dad threw him outside the house and said, “Get back up that hill and look after the sheep,” it was a different David that went up the hill than the one that came down.

David goes up the hill and he is thinking, “What does it mean to be King?” He is thinking about, “What will this do for my life?” He is thinking about the bigness of it – living in palaces, everybody in the country bowing to him. He is thinking a whole bunch of things, but he has started to think about, “What does it mean for me to be King?”

When he goes to deliver sandwiches at the battlefield against the Philistines and he sees Goliath giving this challenge and nobody responding, he gets indignant. Why? Because he is thinking, “If somebody does not do something, I am going to lose a kingdom before I have even had a chance to get a hold of it.” And when no one does anything, he steps into his identity. Right there, right then. He is 17 years old. He steps into that identity.

“What will be done for the man who kills this giant?” In the end, it is only him. He goes out there and suddenly, he is catapulted into this whole national prominence. People are singing songs about him. “Saul has killed his thousands, but David, his tens of thousands!” And he is off on the journey.

Your perception of yourself must change.

Thinking Must Change

Your thinking about yourself must lead you to developing a whole new mindset.

All of us have a mindset. It is either going to be negative, or positive, or a mixture. Your mindset needs to kill off every negative thing. You have to kill off all those memories that you have because they are no longer relevant for you. You cannot be walking around with yesterday’s baggage. You need to be walking around with tomorrow’s luggage.

Baggage is what other people say about you, or what they may still be saying about you – “Oh well, she is always like this.” You need to change that mindset about yourself.

With God, He gives you the luggage that fits with who you are becoming as you walk from the present into the future.

Your luggage is your inheritance words and your prophecies. You cannot be walking around with yesterday’s stuff still bothering you today in the present. It is like going on holiday to Florida and you get there in the Florida Keys, brilliant hotel. You have a room overlooking the beach. It is beautiful. It is sunny. The sea is a wonderful clear blue. The beach is pristine white. You open your suitcase which has been packed by your worst enemy, and it is full of arctic polar wear! That is baggage! Baggage! Your bags have been packed by someone who does not like you.

God gives you luggage. With God, He gives you the luggage that fits with who you are becoming

Language Must Change

The third thing that has to change about you is that you need a new language. It has to be learned and it has to be employed. You have to use it on yourself. That means you have to stop agreeing with the devil. You have to stop agreeing with negative people when they talk about you. You have to stop apologizing for things that you are not, and you need to get hold of who you really are and say, “Well, I am not there yet, but this is what I am moving towards. This is what I am becoming. This is how God sees me. This is how I am going to think about myself. It is how I am going to speak about myself. It is how I am going to talk about myself. When I pray, I am going to pray from this position of having elevated status in Christ. I am going to pray with God, not towards Him. I am going to pray in conjunction with my promises.”

When Jesus asked a question, He first asked the question, “Who do people say that I am?” He got back four distorted images. Then He said, “Who do YOU say that I am?” He was looking to see if they got it about Him.

If people do not see our true identity, it is really hard for us to walk with them.

Simon suddenly gets it. He has an epiphany and he stands up in typically Simon fashion and he blurts it out, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God!” Jesus grins at him because what has Peter just done? He has spoken out His identity. This is how You are known in Heaven. “You are the Christ! You are the Son of the Living God!” And Jesus comes straight back at him and says, “Yes and you are no longer Simon, you are Peter!”

Something shifted in the Heavens over that group and in that moment, Simon’s own persona, his own identity, is revealed to him by Jesus. “You are Peter! And you will have keys to bind and loose. You will interact with Heaven. The revelation that you will receive is going to be the bedrock of the church’s experience and all of hell will be defeated by it.” And that is a mandate!

You can see the three things there.

Elevated status
Legal authority
Permission to overcome

There it is. All the other disciples are going, “I wish I had said it first! I knew He was the Christ, but Simon beat me to it.”

We are here because this is the start of a process for us. We are defining what is positive about us.

You also have to write down what is negative about you because those are all the things you have to defeat.

Let me say this as plainly as I can, Beloved:

You must kill negativity stone dead in yourself!

In your perception.
In your mindset.
In your language.

Being a GameChanger means you are learning how to step into your truest identity. You understand who you are. You understand who the people around you are – their identity, and you are helping, supporting and developing them, and they are with you.

In our Lighthouses, in our regions, we need to be supporting each other. We need to be helping each other. There has to be people in your region – your regional leader needs to know who you are and you have to make it known. That is why we are going to give you assignments – homework.

For an identity to be established, 3 things must happen by design:
- Your perception of yourself MUST change.
- You must develop new thinking that leads you to a better mindset.
- You have to learn a new language, and you have to practice that language
all the time.

It is going to be great.

We want every region to change. Why? Because we now have in it a number of GameChangers, warriors, champions – people who are exploring their own identity. When you start to get it, you can start to give it away to other people. You can start to say to other people, “Hey! THIS is who you are. This is how you are known in Heaven. This is how God sees you. This is how we see you.”

We need to create in Aglow that kind of language, that kind of mindset.

So here you are, you are the first of millions in Aglow. You are the very first of millions of people in Aglow who are going to get this message, who are going to receive this opportunity. We invited you here so we could put some weight on you, which means you are not going to live as a sponge anymore, but you are going to be a living stone in what we represent. We brought you here so that you could start the process. You could be the first born, if you like, of a whole new generation of Aglow, people who are living in a particular way, thinking in a particular way, and speaking in a particular way.

YOU ARE THE FIRST!

What does that mean for us? It means we are trusting you to come up higher. We are trusting you that you are going to be a self-starter – that you are going to get on with it, that you are going to make it a priority in your life to explore who you are, to discover what God is saying about you, and to make it known, and then to step into that place.

If we are changing – and we are changing – we are changing Aglow from a Para church organization to an apostolic network in the earth. We need warriors, champions, and GameChangers, to step into that place of ownership and say, “We are going to take every one of our 17 million and get them an upgrade, and then we are going to start in on the rest of the world.”

We are learning how to step
up into all that God has got
for us and all that God
wants to be for us.

We are creating an environment here in our regions where you guys can get together and start talking. However, if you are going to do it, you are going to have to have some intentionality. This cannot just be a set of notes that you take home and put in a drawer with all the other notes. We will be following up – it is not a threat, it is a promise. We will be following up. Why? Because we are sowing seeds of greatness and we are asking God to water them quickly. We need this thing we are building to grow and we need it to grow fast, and there is a quickening Spirit on you. That is why you are here, because we believe you can move quickly.

We are all going to prove that we are ready. You are here because we believe you are ready. We believe this is your time. We believe that God gives us golden moments like this. It does not matter how old you are or how young you are. That is irrelevant. What matters is the quality of your response. What matters is that you understand the determination of the Holy Spirit towards you. What matters is that you know that He will not quit – that He is going to press in on you and teach you how to press in on Him.

What matters is that He is going to take you on a journey and He is going to change your story. That is what matters.

What we are learning this weekend is how to stand up and be counted – how to become men and women of a different spirit. We are learning how to be changed into another man and another woman. We are learning how to step up into all that God has got for us and all that God wants to be for us.

How you are known in Heaven is the starting place. You have to know how you are perceived, how you are thought of, and how God speaks about you and to you. And we need to embrace it like a thirsty man would embrace a glass of water, how a starving man would embrace food. You need to embrace it fully and completely.

Are you ready for this? Let us stand up and prepare ourselves.

Father, I thank You. I thank You that we are here for such a time as this when all the intentionality of Heaven is being brought to bear inside this auditorium. Lord, I ask right now that every heart will be touched by Your desire, by Your determination, by Your passion for us, by Your purpose, and by Your intentionality. That every heart and mind will be touched – that we will all be standing here, thinking to ourselves, OMG, this is it. This is it – that which I have been praying for, that which I have been wanting, that which I have been thinking about – it is here! Prophetic words spoken over me – this is that which was spoken!

And even those of us who came here and are now thinking, “Shoot, I did not think it would be like this. Do I really belong here?” The answer is, “YES! Yes you do.” Yes you do because you are part of this great enterprise, and your role in it is just about to increase. God is expanding who you are. He is enlarging who you are and not one of us in the next couple of years is going to be the same as we are right now.

We have to accept that there is a burden of change upon us from the Lord, right here, right now. You are here by design. You are here by intentionality, and you are going to leave greatly intentioned. You are going to leave with the design in your heart. I WILL participate. I WILL partner with God. I WILL step into that place.

It starts, Beloved, by you studying those words – those prophecies and those scriptures. Write them down. Talk about them to the Lord. I want a spirit of wisdom and revelation so that I can know EVERYTHING about how I am known in Heaven.

Love the Learning

The Lord is going to splurge on you. He is not going to spoon feed you this thing; He is going to pick up the whole pan and dump it on your head. He is going to splurge on you because He works from the whole to the particular. He is going to dump everything on you by design and by delight. He is going to overwhelm your heart. He is going to overwhelm your thinking. And when your thinking gets to a point where you think, “I cannot think anymore,” then you need to ask the Lord, “Enlarge my thinking. I want the mind of Christ. I want some extra capacity in my head so that I can receive the whole of what you are saying about me, because I need to be touched by the majesty of it. I need to be touched by the enormity of it. I need to wrap it around me as a cloak. I need to understand the fullness of it so that I can begin to experience the first pieces of it.”

When God wants to teach you fullness, He does not do it in installments, He does it fully. He completely overwhelms you so that you feel like you are drowning in favor, and He shows you what it could be like. And then He brings it all back to the thing in front of you and says, “Now, let’s put it to work here.”

That is what GameChangers do. You take from the whole and bring it to the particular and we start the process.

Father, I pray for a spirit of wisdom and revelation. I pray for dreams – vivid outrageous dreams that go on – not just all night, but night after night. I pray for visions. I pray that scripture would come and wrap itself around our heads – that You would give us a spirit of wisdom and revelation to understand the whole of how you see us so that we may understand the enormity of what You want to be for us – the Majesty, the Sovereignty, the Supremacy, that we could understand the power of the one with the One. Saturate our hearts in Jesus’ name. Overwhelm our hearts and our minds and cause us, Lord, to begin to rewrite our story in our journal and to partner with the Holy Spirit so that we may start the process of understanding how You see us, how You think about us, how You connect with us, how You speak. Everything about us can change. I ask Lord, for a divine acceleration to be upon us so that we can move as fast as You want to move.

More than anything, I pray for a delight, for a joy. This will not be a trial to us. It will not be a huge burden to us. We will feel the weight of it, but we will feel the weight of Your passion and Your delight in us also, that we will wake up to Your joy over each one of us. This is what Jesus died for, that we could see ourselves thus.

I ask, Lord, overwhelm our hearts for Jesus’ sake, for our sake, for Aglow’s sake, and for our missions sake in the earth.

Amen