Cleanse Yourselves
By Daniel Yordy – July 4, 2010
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"Therefore, having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God." 2 Corinthians 7:1

"And everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure." 1 John 3:3

The life of the age to come is inside us right now. That life, at its core, is to know the Father without limit and then to turn and reveal the Father to all of creation as He really is.

God created us as humans to live in both heaven and earth at the same time. He gave us two bodies, a physical body through which we reveal God to the physical side of creation, and a spiritual body, our spirit, through which we reveal God to the spiritual side of creation - heaven. Not just the earth, but heaven also, all creation, will be set free in the glorious liberty of the sons of God. We are the image of God.

Part of our present experience of the life of the age to come is to learn to walk and function through our spirits. We already live in the Spirit, Paul says, let's walk in the Spirit as well. Walking "in the Spirit" is not trying to relate to something outside of or separate from ourselves, hearing some other "voice" and then trying to please that voice. No. Walking in the spirit is to learn to walk in a part of our own selves that we have not fully known.

Our spirit is united in a fused union with God's Spirit. When we walk in God, we walk in ourselves. When we walk in ourselves, we walk in God.

What, exactly, does it mean to be one who walks fully in all the fullness of the Spirit of God revealed in him?

I don't know. Although I can, through the Scriptures, point us towards that great purpose of God in us, I cannot describe to you what it really is, for I have not been there yet.

Rather, I speak what God speaks, I call those things that, to me, appear to be not - as though they already are. I do not judge myself by what I see or feel. To do so is to get it wrong. I can judge myself only by what God speaks - by what I am before Him right now and by what He is in me.

And so, my purpose in these letters is not to paint a glowing picture of something I am ignorant of. My purpose is to point forward to the path ahead, to study the map - that is, the written Word fused with the Spirit, the Spirit fused with the written Word - and to fix our eyes firmly on the full purpose of God as He reveals Himself in the earth.

How are we to get from here to there?

Some believe that we should simply continue in our lives as God has given us our lives and when God is ready to do whatever He plans to do, He'll just do it. If He happens to include us, that's His business, and if He happens not to include us, that's His choice as well.

There is a lot of truth in this view. We wait upon the Lord. It is ridiculous to imagine that you and I are going to "reveal God" to the world without God. Sometimes, we have a hard time taking the next breath.

But I have set my heart on all that God speaks in the Covenant I signed with Him and He with me. All of it. It's what I want. Some say that the Covenant is Spirit only, that the words on the page from Matthew 1 to Revelation 22 are not the Covenant. But the words on the page are a record of what God has already spoken. Should He not fulfill one word that He has already spoken, simply because He follows some "whim of the Spirit," He would cease to be faithful and true.

The Gospel is the Word spoken by God coming through the demonstration of the Spirit and power. That Word was written into the physical realm. As physical words, there is no life in them, they can only kill; but we take those words back off the page by the same Spirit through which they came, and they become life and power in us.

If I have to figure out the words on the page with my brain, I am lost. If I have to follow the wafting of the Spirit without reference to what God has already said, I am lost. I'm no good at figuring things out; I'm no good at following whims and hunches. But I love maps. I love to follow a road revealed on a map all the way through. You don't know how many times I have been stuck in a snow bank or ruts or mud puddles simply because the map said the road went through and I was determined to prove it. It's what God put in my heart. I am very good at digging a car out of snow banks. But no matter how many snow banks I have dug myself out of, if the map says that the road goes through, I want to know that it is true, I want to see that part of the country that I have not seen before.

The map is the written word fused with the Spirit and the Spirit fused with the written word. All of both, always all at the same time.

But here is the problem for those who take the map seriously. God doesn't make sense. He contradicts Himself so overwhelmingly; He says things that oppose each other without compromise. I wouldn't blame the church for splitting up into all kinds of opposing groups. The problem is the contradictions in the word. One group gets a revelation of something God says, so they follow it. Pretty soon they have to get rid of other things God says because they don't fit the revelation. Then, pretty soon, they are condemning those people who happened to get a revelation from the things God said that the first group had already cut out.

Everyone wants to cut something out of the New Testament. It's almost as if you can't be a Christian unless you learn how to cut verses out of what God says. I am just amazed at Christians who so easily poo-poo something God says in the New Testament and then consider themselves wise by doing so. There is a right dividing of the Word of God that is a function of the Spirit; and there is a knowing of those things that have been mis-translated and mis-construed. Yes. But most Christians seem to be complete libertines when it comes to whacking out verses they don't like.

We had a brother visiting in our home, a kind sweet man, full of tender love for God and others. Yet he spoke these words (He has never moved in any of the gifts of the Spirit), "I don't need the gifts since I have the Giver."

This is something all Christians do. We have all these cute sayings, some we hear from others, some we make up ourselves. They sound clever and we feel wise when we say them.

But show me where God says these words or anything like them. "Since you have Me, you don't need anything that I would give you."

Here's what God says (and it's fine to paraphrase; we can say what God says in many different ways, for many different applications - that's how language works), "Whoever rejects the gift (My Son) I send, rejects Me." In eastern culture, when a man invites you into his home as a guest, he will always offer gifts, whether it be jewelry or garments or, best of all, to dine with him. To reject the gift of your host for any reason is the greatest of insults; it is to reject the host himself.

Here is my point (and it's not to condemn the brother who said those words, though they ring so hollow and sound so foreign to me). One vital way by which we cleanse and purify ourselves is to judge every "saying" that circulates in our minds or comes out of our mouth. I am so amazed at how many times I hear Christians saying things that God does not say, often things that oppose what God says.

We must stop speaking what God does not speak.

God says, "I would that you all spoke in tongues." I say, "I would that I spoke in tongues." Who cares what my brilliant philosophy can produce otherwise? In the end it is all emptiness.

In the spiritual realms, the words that we speak are force. They cause things to happen. All of our words. And thoughts are the same as words. The spirit of our mind is as powerful as the tongue.

When you or I say or think things that are contrary to what God says, we cut God out of our lives in that area. We limit God as far as we are concerned. We cannot prevent God from doing what He says, but we can keep ourselves out of it in the present age.

In fact, I am overwhelmed at how many ways Christians speak the words of Satan concerning this world - and imagine that what they speak is the Christian thing to do. Yet they are speaking Satanism. I will address that issue in my next letter, Do Not Love the World.

And so, in our passage from abiding in Christ to being all the revelation of the Father, there is a stretch of road which we must traverse. This stretch of road has two lanes, like all roads do, both, in this case, are going in the same direction - they are two sides of the same thing. One side is "cleanse yourself from all filthiness of flesh and spirit," the other side is "do not love the world." "Watch out; take heed; beware" is the most frequent command of the Spirit of God to us in the New Testament. "Do not be afraid" is the second. But every time we hear the words "watch out; take heed; beware," they always point to this stretch of road, "cleanse yourselves," and "do not love the world."

My heart breaks for my brethren who love the world and who speak what God does not speak. Yet, at this time, that continues to be every one of us.

There is no way that you or I will ever know all the fullness of God or the revelation of Jesus Christ or the glorious liberty of the sons of God until we first know all that God means when He says, "Cleanse yourselves from all filthiness of flesh and spirit," and "Do not love the world."

"Perfecting holiness in the fear of God."

I fear God. When He speaks, I tremble. Playing loose and fancy with His Word scares the tar out of me. Speaking what God does not speak, explaining why God does not mean what He says, these things just plain frighten me.

Yet I am very weak. I have no ability to "get it right." I have no confidence in myself or my own understanding. If I do not speak what God speaks - all of it, even that which contradicts itself - what do I have to say? What do I have to think? How could I possibly survive?

Yet to speak all that God speaks is to walk alone in this world. Very few seem to be interested.

What is holiness?

Holiness is union with God. Holiness is no separation. Holiness is God in me and me in God with no shadow of any thought of any other possibility.

I am already one spirit with God. To perfect holiness is to perfect my knowing of that union.

"Because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, or were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened." Romans 1:21

". . . You should no longer walk as the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their hearts." Ephesians 4: 17-18

We are going back up the road mankind rushed down as they ran away from God.

We were separated from God because we were blind, we could not see Him or His life in us. But God opens the eyes of our hearts and we see God. We blink in the light, not knowing what it is we are looking at. But as we walk with God, He causes us to know Him. As we know Him, we know that God is our life, we have no other life.

To be separate from God in any possible way is to set ourselves up as our own god. To know God in me and me in God is the only way to escape our own self-deification. Self putting self "to death" is the highest exaltation of self that there is. Abandoning all thought of any independent self is the gospel.

To perfect holiness in the fear of God is to perfect my knowledge of this union with God in heart and in understanding.

That brings us to "cleanse yourselves from all filthiness of flesh and spirit."

In my last letter I raised the question, "Is our born-again spirit incorruptible?" I do not know the answer to that question.

I do know that the same incorruptible seed that conceived the Lord Jesus inside of Mary came into me when I was conceived a second time. I know that no other created beings are conceived of an incorruptible seed. I know that what is conceived of God cannot sin.

But we also know that many who receive seed from God do not bring forth its life, not in this age. I do not know what part of us is incorruptible and I do not know exactly how that incorruptible part of us extends itself over every part of us. I do know this, God says, "This corruptible must put on incorruptibility, and this mortal must put on immortality." He says, "The body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of righteousness." He says, "The same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is right now giving that same life to your mortal body."

In that context, let's explore what God means when He says, "Cleanse yourselves."

Let us suppose that our spirit is constructed in a similar way to our body. That is, our physical body has many organs and limbs, yet it is all one body. Each of these organs and limbs has a separate function. Oftentimes one organ or limb looks drastically different from another and does a drastically different sort of thing. Yet all of it is one body.

Let us suppose that our spirit is similar, that is, that our spirit also has many members, each with a different appearance and function, yet all of it is one spirit.

Now, let's take that supposition into the weird and cryptic language of the Bible that gives part of our person to our liver, to our kidneys, to the physical organ called the heart, that says such things as "God fills our hearts with food." (The book of Acts)

Let us then suppose that our spirit, which is larger than all the rest of our being, and which contains inside itself our entire body and our entire soul, is connected to and reverberates with all the rest of our makeup, with each and every part.

James says that the body without the spirit is dead, that is, the life force and energy that the physical body enjoys comes entirely from its immediate and vibrant interaction with our spirit. When the spirit departs, all the electro-magnetic frequency, all the vibrancy of the body ceases.

So let's start with the body. In the last 100 years, mankind has plunged head-long into an incredible experiment without thought. We take chemicals that are made by man, that did not exist in nature and were not available to anyone before the present time, and we ingest those chemicals into our physical bodies in every possible way. We transfuse chemicals straight into our blood, we eat them, we breathe them, we cover our skin with them, we inject them with needles, we pump our babies full of them.

The majority of Americans are addicted to drugs, either legal or illegal. The Biblical word for drugs is "pharmaceutika" which is translated "sorcery."

Is it possible that injecting a pharmaceutical drug into one's body could dampen the spirit of that person so they are less able to see God?

We know that the industrial chemical, sodium fluoride, which is dumped into people's drinking water, affects the mind and heart to submit to visible authority without caring about personal integrity. We suspect that the immunization of children is one of the most devastating experiments ever to affect man physically upon this earth. We know that the radioactive bombing conducted by America against the Iraqi and Afghani people is causing a horror of mutated DNA and mutated infants among millions of people unmatched anywhere in history.

Americans are celebrating their so-called "freedom" today; I am too grief stricken for the weeping mothers of Fallujah, who are as dear to me as the Lord Jesus, to join with their delusions.

What level does the predominance of the chemical and pharmaceutical industries in our world today turn the hearts and minds of men towards the final blasphemy against God?

We know that microwaves can be directed against the minds of men to cause them to make immoral decisions. In today's world, to what extent must we literally be sealed in our minds as Christians have never known?

These are questions that we cannot answer definitively, but they are questions that we must hold nonetheless.

Let's move on to the heart. My heart is good because Christ lives in my heart. Yet the heart of man runs very deep and encompasses so much of life. Our mind thinks out of what is stored in the heart. Our mouth speaks out of what is found there.

To what extent do past experiences, past pain, past shock, past unforgiveness, past manipulation and control coming from other people, sit in the heart as a negative "program," a negative energy, a negative spirit, silent, hidden, waiting for that one moment when it leaps to the surface and causes our eyes to see what is not God and not real and our mouth to speak things that are not true?

I believe in inner healing, because it has been a large part of my walk with God. He has wounded, and then He has healed. And He has done this in me over and over again. It is His way.

I have been deeply wounded in my life, as I'm sure you have. I have been hit by things that were hard and confusing. I did not always react well. I have known bitterness and despair. I have lived in a number of different places; God brought peace to my heart over the years to every one of those places, except one. I lived the longest length of time in a particular Christian community in Canada, called Blueberry. It was there that I gave the strength of my adult years, it was there where I experienced God in His people like I have not known before or since, it was there that God brought me out of my shell into an ability to relate with other people, it was there that I married my precious wife and saw the birth of my first two children, and it was from there that I have carried an endless pain that would not heal.

I love the people that I knew there so very deeply; those from Blueberry who read this letter, I am so glad I remain joined with you in some way.

God has brought healing to me over and over through deeper and deeper truth and greater understanding of His love and His grace. But that pain would not go away. Great comfort would come to me, great understanding, but a few days later, there was the pain, in a memory from Blueberry, undiminished. (I am simply being honest here.) There is no question that that pain affected my life. When I visited family back in move community in recent years, all the wrong ways of thinking assailed my mind and heart. I had to throw off over and over the accusing voices that came through that which was so familiar. "Submit, brother, you're in rebellion." I had to throw off the bonds, the spirit and thinking that came through past relationships.

The pain from my memories of Blueberry is gone. A few months ago, I walked up to a shelf of books at Barnes & Nobles. On the bottom shelf was a book with a picture of a ten-year-old boy with his eyes screwed tightly shut called "Look Me in the Eye." The book called to me to read it. All my life the thought of looking someone in the eye was a horror that I could not do.

I learned that I am an Asperger's personality, that is, that I have the neurological disability of Asperger's that is part of the autism spectrum, that this is what I have lived my whole life inside of, that I operate by a completely different set of functions than the normal person operates by. Reading that book opened up, once again, all the pain of Blueberry - specific instances of confusion and despair.

The pain is gone.

Just a few weeks ago, I noticed another book on Asperger's Syndrome at the library and took it home. I opened it somewhere in the middle and started reading. Immediately the words on the page took me right back to a painful incident at Blueberry, one that I had never understood, one that brought confusion and unhealed pain into my heart. My face was stricken with tears; I understood perfectly how Asperger's explained the whole thing. And the pain is gone - forever.

An incident, a relationship with another person, that held still a long tentacle of control upon my heart, unknown and unseen by me, was broken. I can love, now, the person involved, with no shadow of any separation from God.

What am I saying? I am saying that our mind and our heart must be re-programmed to think and to see as God thinks and sees. That is what it means to be cleansed in this context. We were cleansed by the cross of Jesus; we are continually cleansed of sin by the blood as we walk in the light. But every negative energy, every dulled frequency, every past hurt, every forgotten bitterness, every thing that hinders the full knowledge of God in our minds and in our hearts, we want God to remove so that we look out from Him and see all things by His eyes and by His heart alone.

So let's look carefully at every word that we speak, every phrase, every saying, and every reference we make to life, to this world, to other people, to God, and to His ways, and judge those words by what God Himself actually says in the New Covenant of Grace.

For every word God speaks, the serpent speaks another. More times than one can count, when Christians speak what sounds good and "Christian" to them, they are not speaking what God speaks, they are speaking what the serpent speaks in contradiction to God. The words of the serpent fill what is known as Christianity, especially American Christianity. They come alongside everything that God speaks. Christians speak something that comes out of God, then something that comes out of Satan, then something that comes out of God, back and forth, back and forth, and they do not even know what they are doing. I have listened to dear and Spirit-filled saints speak a word straight out of the throne of God and then, in the next breath, speak something so blasphemously Satanic that I am left gasping in horror. Yet in their minds they imagined that both words were "Christian."

James is floored by the question. "Can a spring bring forth both bitter waters and sweet both at the same time?" He thinks that it cannot be so.

I have no desire to try to prove him wrong.

Let us look carefully at all things that we speak and all things that we think. Let us remove any thought and any clever saying that is not what God Himself speaks.

What is filthiness of spirit?

Satan was well able to place his own thoughts and feelings into the mind and heart of Jesus even after Jesus had received the Spirit without measure and was sent forth as a manifest Son of God. Yet Jesus knew the difference between the words of His Father that were inside of Him against the words of the serpent that came from the outside in. Jesus spoke with His mouth the words of the Father, thus removing from His heart and mind the words of the serpent.

The idea that demon spirits cannot insert their thoughts and feelings into a Christian from the outside in does not agree with anything God says in the Bible. Whenever they do so, their intention is to cause us to believe things that are not true. That is their only power, yet the power of illusion is incredibly powerful. Precious Christian brethren suffer all kinds of oppression that comes only out of the suggested illusion of demons.

Just because a thought registers in my mind or a feeling presses against my heart does not mean that is just little old me thinking my own thoughts and feeling my own feelings. Everything I am Jesus carries inside Himself and everything I find inside myself, I place directly into Him. Whenever I place a demonic thought or a demonic feeling into the Lord Jesus Christ, I am astonished at how quickly it hightails it out of there and peace and joy and love floods back into the momentary cavity it had carved.

Satan is a master psychologist and he uses everything he knows about how we tick to keep us happy with closed eyes and blind heart so that we are content with tootling along in this world not seeing out from God in all things and without grappling with God's intention to prove Himself through us in this world.

But God is a far greater psychologist, and He takes every trick of the enemy, and turns it back on him, all the while teaching us of His ways. This is the arena God formed to place us in. This is how God creates sons that reveal His very heart to all creation.

Sin is whatever separates us from God. The whole world is reconciled to God by the blood and cross of Jesus. There is nothing that separates us from Him, we in Him and He in us, except the blindness of our own minds and hearts. Whatever is not of faith is sin. Faith believes that what God says is actually and really true against everything the natural eye sees and the natural feelings feel.

We believe God when we speak what God speaks and when we stop speaking and stop thinking that which speaks contrary to what God says.

Let's speak and think only what God speaks. The pure in heart see God.

Blessings, Daniel Yordy