If it's fire, it's got to look like fire, feel like fire, smell like fire or something.
A burning fire in my chest, wanting to love and caress.
Welcome to another Raising Home Fire Secret Place training session.
Those who dwell in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of
the Almighty.
Our prayer and our vision for this time is that you would be further equipped, that you
would be taken into a deeper experience of the secret place, into a deeper personal connection
with God, and that you would experience what it's like in a deeper way to come under the
overshadowing of God.
Bill Johnson says, whatever overshadows you will come out in your shadow.
The book of Daniel, Daniel writes this, he says, those that know their God shall do great
exploits.
And so our prayer is that you would grow in your knowledge, not just your knowledge about
God, but your intimate, personal, experiential knowledge of knowing God.
And so enjoy this session, God bless you.
Hey, this is Andy.
Right now today I'm talking about how God is safe and that how God accepts you right
where you are at, and that He's not afraid of the dirt of your life.
And each of us will have lies that we picked up as we were going through childhood and
coming out into our adulthood.
And many of those lies still stick around.
They come in the form of, I am not, and we think it's us, but it's a lie that's spoken
to us, whether it's, I am not good enough, I am not worthy, I am not prayed up enough,
I am not beautiful, smart enough, you name it.
There are so many I am nots available out there that are presented to us in our childhood
that simply hold us back.
But my point that I'm wanting to drive home into your heart for your secret place time
is that God is safe and that for every I am not, He is the I am.
And that not only that, that He will accept you right where you're at, meet you in your
I am not, and smash it to bring you deeper into who you really are.
And I love this quote that our glory is simply us becoming who we already are.
And so God is safe.
For me, in my world, I was born again the year 2001.
And then I'm going to talk about an encounter I had in the year 2008, right at the end of
it, and where I was radically shifted and I learned that God is safe.
But from 2001 through to 2008, I was on fire.
I knew Jesus, I knew the Holy Spirit, I love Jesus and I love the Holy Spirit, but I kept
the Father at a distance.
I didn't really get Him.
I didn't understand this person in the Trinity who's known as the Father.
And so He remained distant from me while I focused on Jesus and Holy Spirit.
And it wasn't until the 2008 encounter, when I began to meet the Father, that God became
a safer place for me.
So let me share that encounter with you and how it came about that I learned that God
is safe.
It was in the year 2008, I'd started BSSM, which is Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry.
I'm living in Redding, California.
It's the start of the year and I get a phone call at one o'clock in the morning.
And you know, when you get a phone call at one in the morning, just naturally, it's going
to be a, you're kind of freaking out a little bit because, man, that's a pretty urgent call.
And so I already had some natural fear.
I picked up my phone, my wife wakes up and I say, Hi, it's Andy.
And this voice says, Does it hurt?
And a really harsh, horrible sounding voice.
And I say, Hi, it's Andy.
The voice says, Does it hurt?
Like that.
And I'm like, Oh my goodness, it's Andy, I'm scratching my head, just waking up.
And the voice says, Does it hurt when you fall from heaven?
Does it hurt when you fall from heaven?
Repeats that a few times and then hangs up.
And the spirit of fear that was sponsoring that person in that phone call just came into
our room.
It's like the temperature dropped, but we'd been learning that as we draw near to God,
He draws near to us.
It's an amazing principle.
But so what I did was I just turned my affections to the Holy Spirit and said, I love you, Holy
Spirit.
And the Spirit of God began to fill the room and where the Spirit of the Lord is.
He is the Lord.
The Holy Spirit is the Lord.
and it drives out the fear.
I quoted this quote from the scriptures,
blessed are you when you're persecuted
for righteousness sake, for great is your reward in heaven.
And I fell asleep, but a blessing was coming to me
because of persecution.
And that night the blessing came in the form
of a prophetic dream that marked me.
It marked me from that point onwards.
And in the dream, a well-known global ministry
came up to me and said, Andy, I impart to you
intimacy with God with no agenda
and with no strings attached.
I woke up the next morning after that profound vivid dream
where God imparted something to me.
And I went to my prayer, I was praying three hours a day
at the time every morning in a hill outside I love space.
And I began to pray.
Now here's the problem.
From 2001 through 2008, I had spent so much
of my prayer life praying to get more anointing,
envisioning the visions of revival,
wanting to be the man of God that God had called me to be.
So all of my prayer was God, I'm asking for something
from you and I'm envisioning stuff,
I'm building stuff with you in prayer.
But this impartation was for intimacy with no agenda.
And with no strings attached.
And so I didn't know how to pray.
The Lord would actually stop me mid-prayer
and say, stop dreaming, son.
Who am I?
That question would interrupt my prayer
for a couple of weeks.
Stop dreaming, son.
Who am I?
And then here's the encounter that changed so much from me.
It's two weeks into relearning how to pray,
a voice comes to me.
It's a motherly voice, it's the voice of God
coming in a way that I wasn't familiar with
and said, Andy, I am your safe place.
You do not need to wear your religious robes around me.
You can come before me simply as you are.
And that statement from the Lord,
who was the Father, totally transformed my heart.
And I actually began to meet,
like I remember I was sharing,
I only knew Jesus really and the Holy Spirit.
I didn't know the Father.
I began to meet the Father.
Everything changed for me.
When I began to meet the Father
and God became a safer place
and I began to learn that I don't need to be fasting
three days and on maybe the third day
I might experience this presence.
I don't need to do two praise songs
and then maybe then I could open up my heart
to his presence because I've praised enough.
I don't need to apologize myself into his presence
and repent myself into his presence.
But as the scriptures say in Hebrews chapter four,
I can come boldly before the throne of God's grace
and find access, find help in our time of need.
And so that was the marker moment for me
and my prayer is that you'd receive that.
I wanna talk a little bit more into that.
You see, each of us have these I am nots
that hold us back and that cause us to be afraid
to fully open up before the Lord
and to fully be ourselves as well.
I had an I am not.
I'll tell you the story of my I am not or one of them.
I have many I am nots.
I'm still on the journey of coming out
from the I am nots into the I ams.
But this one I am not the Lord revealed to me
a few years ago.
I came into a place of his presence
and I went into a vision and I went clearly back
to when I was an 11 year old child
on the concrete courts of my intermediate school,
North Cross Intermediate.
And I remember in the vision,
I was seeing myself looking out over this crowd
of people that I really considered were the in crowd,
the cool crowd.
And this voice then came to me and said,
Andy, it was subconscious.
It was the voice of an enemy,
but as an 11 year old child,
I had no grid for spiritual warfare.
And so I just thought it was myself, but it wasn't.
It was the devil.
And it said this, Andy, you are not cool enough
to fit into that group.
But if you are funny, I can, they will not reject you.
They will tolerate you.
So I was presented this, these two options
of either be rejected by the cool kids
or be tolerated by the cool kids.
And when an 11 year old child is presented
with those two options, you know, he's smart.
He's going to choose toleration.
And I was presented with these two options.
But, tolerated is a long way away from celebrated.
And I was presented with these two options.
And so, the I am not that came to me was, I am not celebrated.
And that was with me all my life.
And the way that the voice came to me was, if you are funny, in other words, if you perform,
if you say the right things and perform just right and make them laugh.
If you perform, then you'll be tolerated.
So I learnt this lie that if I could perform right, then I would be tolerated.
I projected that onto the Lord, that if I could perform religiously right, then the
Lord will tolerate me.
That is a million miles away from being celebrated.
But I'm here to tell you this, the Lord wants to celebrate you.
There's more to this story, but I wanted to let you know that that I am not celebrated
lie wrapped around my life and in the vision I went through flashback after flashback
after flashback, 11 years old, 12 years old, 16 year old, 21 year old, like imagine a 21
year old on his 21st birthday celebration with a lie that says, I'm not celebrated,
I'm only tolerated.
I couldn't even enjoy my own birthday celebrations.
This crippled me and held me back and it was projected onto the Lord.
I want to pause that story right there.
I'll come back to the encounter that I had where the Lord healed me.
But I want to talk about your I am nots and I want to talk about how the Lord is not afraid
of that.
And I want to by doing that and to get there, what I want to do is talk about how there
were two betrayals in two gardens.
The first betrayal in the first garden was when Adam betrayed God and he ate of the fruit
of the knowledge of good and evil.
And so in his betrayal of the Lord, Adam, in the sense of guilt and shame that he experienced
as he disobeyed God and experienced the fruit of the knowledge of the tree of good and evil,
he dipped his own lenses of how he perceived the world, himself and God into his own now
all of a sudden guilt ridden heart and then put those lenses back on and looked at God.
And he made some massive assumptions.
He thought he knew how God would respond because he felt so bad.
He knew he thought he needed punishment.
But there was a second betrayal in a second garden.
And that was the betrayal when Judas betrayed God in that garden and God as Jesus Christ.
Now we get to see in the second betrayal a sneak peek preview of what was really going
on when the humanity whom God loves betrayed God.
And it wasn't like what Adam thought where he was deserving of punishment, needing to
hide away, only needing to present the very good parts of himself before the Lord.
What we see in the second garden, in the second betrayal, is the response of God loud and
clear for all to see.
And it is this, forgive them father.
They do not know what they're doing.
In other words, with action speaking so much louder than words, I love you, humanity.
In the midst of your betrayal of me, in the midst of your worst moment when you handed
me over to be crucified, even then, even at your worst, I love you.
You see, God is not afraid of meeting you at your worst.
God loves you.
He's not afraid of the dirt of your life.
He's not afraid of the things that you think hold you back.
All these I am nots that we have that we think disqualify us from Him.
I just want to close this session with this thought for you from a parable of Jesus, famous
parable about the 99 sheep that stay behind and the one that gets lost and the response
of God.
Now that one that gets lost, we don't know how long it's lost for.
We don't know where it goes, but I want you to imagine with me, it goes down into the
valleys away.
It begins to feel lonely.
It realizes it's separated out.
It's no longer part of the family.
It's no longer in a place of belonging.
It's walking through the swamps.
It's covered in the filth and the mess and the I am nots of its own lostness.
But that shepherd, that
picture of God
comes and searches out, leaves the 99 to look for that one lost sheep.
And then when he finds it, the picture is that the shepherd picks up
the sheep and puts it on his shoulders.
Now who knows where that sheep has been and all the dirt and all the mess of that sheep. And on his pure robes,
the robes of God,
he is not afraid for the dirt of the lostness of that sheep to dirty him.
He comes right into the world of your lostness, your dirt, your
I am nots, and meets you right where you are at and brings you home.
Can you imagine the look on the face of that shepherd when he saw that lost sheep in its
brokenness and he was able to put it on his shoulders and bring it home.
That's the look that God has for you. In Ephesians 1 and 6, in the New King James Version,
it says, we are accepted in the Beloved. When it says that we're accepted, that you are accepted in the Beloved,
it doesn't just mean the righteous and holy parts of you that you're proud of before the Lord.
It means all of you. He sees you,
all of you, and loves you. And he not only invites you into his presence,
he wants you in his presence, and he'll meet you just like he met that sheep,
just like he met the world on the cross of Calvary, right where we are at,
coming into your world. He is your Father as you are.
And so let him into all of you because he is your safe place.
What about this baptism of fire thing? What does that mean?
Because like, if it's fire, it's gotta look like fire, feel like fire, smell like fire, or something.
Hey, welcome to the activation part of this teaching.
We're so excited to turn this from just theory and mindset shifting into
something practical in your life. And so here we go. I want you to find a
quiet place where you can just be alone.
I want you to have a pen and a paper, and here's what I'm gonna be asking of you. Now remember,
intimacy is into me you see, and God is not afraid of your I am NOTs.
We in religion think that we need to hide them from him and get it sorted out before we can come to his presence,
but we know that that is a waste of time. He meets us right where we are at.
So here's what I'm boldly asking you to do. With the Spirit of the Lord,
together with him,
in a journal with a pen, I just want you to prayerfully think,
Hey, Holy Spirit,
what are my I am NOTs that I hear most often?
Now some of these I am NOTs, they're so subtle. They're on a subconscious level.
They hold us back so much, but the Spirit of God I'm believing is going to highlight those
I am NOTs. Is it I am NOT worthy? Is it I am NOT a spiritual person? Is it I am NOT good enough for God?
What is your I am NOT? I want you to think about three, write down at least three I am NOTs and
take time with the Spirit on that. And then as you're writing those down,
and as you've written them down, I want you to, with the Holy Spirit, think about how much of my life
has this affected me?
All right, so you've done that. You've got your I am NOTs. You've spent some time processing with Holy Spirit.
How much has this I am NOT affected me?
You know, and sometimes what that does and what's that done for me is it's brought up grief of the loss of
destiny that that's had on my own life. But hey,
everything is redeemable and
God is the God who comes and just connects with us and walks us through all these things.
He will turn these things to good. I'm telling you now. Now,
here's the next thing. For every I am NOT,
God is I am. For Abraham, he was I am your provider.
For the people of Israel, he was I am your deliverer.
For you, he has an I am NOT that directly
counteracts,
sorry, he has an I am that directly counteracts the lie of the I am NOT. So
But I want you to spend time with God and just say,
Lord, here's my I am not, I let you in on that,
but God, you are the I am.
What I am, what of your nature comes
to bring truth to that lie?
And I want you to spend time meditating with the Lord
on the truth of who he is and what he says to that I am not.
All right, here's the final activation,
and then after this, I'm going to set you
some homework for the week.
But here's what I want you to do,
is the I am nots that are on your page,
the Lord has spoken to you about who he is, and therefore,
who you are, and broken those lies and revealed truth.
So I want you to right now cross out the I am nots
that you have written down, and then boldly,
and with joy and with the Holy Spirit,
write the declaration of who he is and who you are.
You could just choose to write who you are.
Instead of I am not, you can write I am.
For me, instead of I am not celebrated,
I would write down, I am celebrated.
I am celebrated by God, and I can be celebrated by others.
And so I want you to spend some time just crossing that out,
the lies, and declaring by writing it out boldly
the truth of who you are.
And here's your really simple homework, guys.
It's not going to be hard, is I want
you to, every morning of this week,
as part of your secret place time,
declare those I ams out over yourself.
Maybe you might just want to put your hand on your heart,
and you might want to declare, Jesus,
you said that I am celebrated.
Father, I am celebrated.
I just want you to declare it to the point
that you can begin to feel it penetrating into your heart.
You might need to say, I refuse the lie of the I am not,
and I embrace the truth of the I am,
and allow your heart to be open to the reality.
And don't stop declaring it until you
can feel that it's beginning to penetrate into your heart.
That's right.