Pergamum 24

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Have you ever noticed how Paul begins all His letters with this greeting and that it is the same greeting the Lord uses towards you every time you come together with Him? Have you ever heard Him say those words to you? If not, then hear His greeting to you this morning …

“Grace and peace to you from My Father and I.”

I certainly had an interesting and challenging conference last week. I love my thoughts and beliefs being challenged! Then I must get quiet, read the Scriptures for myself and come to my own conclusions as I process them with the Lord. But, for the most part I received a bunch of revelations that confirmed things the Holy Spirit was teaching me and others encouraged me to search even deeper into the wonderful mysteries and revelations of Jesus Christ.

One of the mysteries that I had asked the Lord to reveal to me were in relation to sexual immorality and why sexual sin is so serious. I knew it was not the sin itself, but the belief system sitting in the hearts of men. what I wanted to know was how these sins affected the heavenly realms. In the early hours one morning the Lord shared so much with me and it shocked me. I had never seen nor heard anything along those lines before. The wonder of it all was that the speakers at the conference did a “sex talk” and confirmed exactly what the Holy Spirit had revealed to me.

Let’s relook at Jesus’ admonition to His saints in Pergamum.

“Nevertheless, I have a few things against you. There are some among you who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelite’s to eat things that were sacrificed to idols and to commit sexual immorality.” Rev 2:14 (TPT)

Notice how Jesus addresses the issue being the TEACHING and not the actual sin. Here He is revealing that the sin happens in the thought arena, or the soul. The had accepted a teaching that was contrary to His teachings and the acceptance of these teachings caused them to follow the teachings of Balaam that ended up in their sinful behaviour.

In general, the church teaches against the sinful acts that the saints commit without ever addressing the demonic teachings that sit silently in the back of their minds, whispering their sinful teachings, leading them into temptation. We preach “the Law” of “thou shalt not sin!” without revealing why? And even worse than that they then come with the heinous doctrine that GOD IS PUNISHING mankind with all sort of catastrophes because of their outward sinful behaviour. 😡

The Lord asked me a question: “Yvonne, if I am not judging and holding mankind accountable for their sin, then who is?” The truth is that we hold ourselves and others accountable for their sin, the religious system holds us accountable and so does the world. But never God. He dealt with your sin once and for all through the sacrifice of His Son.

“For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And He died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for Him who died for them and was raised again. So, from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And He has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making His appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. 2 Cor 5:14-21 (NIV)

In dealing with sin of any kind the first question you need to ask is, “Who is doing the judging?” Jesus’ words to all of us are the same as they were to Mary, “Woman, where are your accusers?” “There is no one Lord.” “Neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more.”

Jesus in His gentle and beautiful forgiveness of Mary did not condemn her which gave her the power to go her way and to stop her sexual immorality. He has not changed. His grace always was, still is, and always will be the power He imparts to us so that we can stop our sinful behaviours.

Next, I will share what the Lord revealed to me concerning the unseen dangers of sexual immorality.

Grace to you …