Tag Archives: death of self

June 5, 2009 · 12:45 pm

A Simple, Sincere Prayer Away from “The Answer”

This world is in trouble. America is bankrupt. It is all teetering on the brink of destruction. Families and homes are being wrecked through unemployment, brought on by insidious, covert forces. And yet, all of us earth-dwellers are a whisper away from receiving real answers to our problems.

Humankind is one simple sincere prayer away from contacting The Answer, who is the Author of the Book of Life. One simple, sincere communique to the Great One. Just one prayer, one humble request based in true knowledge would yield a release from the stresses and fears plaguing us.

But which god? “For there are gods many.” We need to ask the one true God. But we are to “ask in faith–nothing wavering…Ask, believe, and you shall receive.” That is the scriptural Rx for answers. But the catch is that we cannot ask God for things for our self, “to consume it upon our on lusts (desires).” He doesn’t hear the prayers of the selfish or prideful.

The Renunciation of Self

First, then, there must be a renunciation of our own selfish desires, and then we are to ask the Father and petition Him with our “simple, sincere prayer.”

But man is so full of himself that one of two things happen as he stands so close to receiving The Answer to Life’s Problems. He either is consumed with his own ego (old self), or he would pray to another god or another concept of the true God, which cannot give him The Answer.

Only One Religion Gets Rid of the Old Self

Only true Christianity–not Churchianity, not the watered-down pablum of Christendom–provides a way for a person to get rid of the old selfish heart we are all born with. It is done at the cross, which is not taught anymore in denominational churches like it once was 100-200 years ago.

At the cross, we surrender up to God in revelation our old self, identifying its sinful ways with Christ, who took our sins upon Him and actually died as a lost man that day at Calvary. When He died, our old self died; when He was buried, our old life was buried; when the Spirit entered into Him and raised Him from the dead, we, too, were “raised to walk in a newness of life” by His faith now entered into our new heart.

Now It Is All About Him

And now, after this experience, we communicate with that God, who walked fully in the man Christ. We call on Him with a simple, sincere prayer, asking for more light that He may reveal to us how better we may serve Him, how better we may be of help to Him as He fashions His earth and the people in it.

We then in our simple, sincere prayer seek to help Him bring in His government into this old earth. His soon-coming kingdom–this is His plan and purpose, which is contained in His book, that He, the Author, has already written.

We, then, are a simple, sincere prayer away from touching the heart of the very Creator of this entire universe! He knows our “frame is dust.” He knows we are weak and have great needs that only He can fill. And He is only a simple, sincere whisper away from us. We need only to take that first step. Kenneth Wayne Hancock

“He Who Commits Sin Is a Slave to Sin”

Q: What Is Sin? A: The Transgression of the Law

“But Deliver Us From Evil”–From the Evil Within the Heart

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February 17, 2009 · 1:51 am

Victory Over Sin and Sinning, Confirms Andrew Murray

I’ve written about the cross experience–how putting our old ego, our old self on the cross and letting it die with Christ, puts an end to our old nature and its sinful ways. And then by His in-dwelling Spirit, through our belief in His resurrection, we “walk in a newness of life,” where the old life is “passed away” and His new life in us continues each day*.

Sometimes it helps to hear it from somebody else. Here is a quote from Andrew Murray, a 19th century Scottish minister:

“The question often arises how it is, with so much church-going, Bible-reading, and prayer, that the Christian fails to live the life of complete victory over sin and lacks the love and joy of the Lord. One of the most important answers, undoubtedly, is that he does not know what it is to die to himself and to the world. Yet without this, God’s love and holiness cannot have their dwelling-place in his heart. He has repented of some sins, but knows not what it is to turn, not only from sin, but from his old nature and self-will.

“Yet this is what the Lord Jesus taught. He said to the disciples that if any man would come after Him, he must hate and lose his own life. He taught them to take up the cross. That meant they were to consider their life as sinful and under sentence of death. They must give up themselves, their own will and power, and any goodness of their own. When their Lord had died on the cross, they would learn what it was to die to themselves and the world, and to live their life in the fullness of God.

Our Lord used the Apostle Paul to put this still more clearly. Paul did not know Christ after the flesh, but through the Holy Spirit Christ was revealed in his heart, and he could testify: ‘I am crucified with Christ; I live no longer; Christ liveth in me.’ In more than one of his Epistles the truth is made clear that we are dead to sin, with Christ, and receive and experience the power of the new life through the continual working of God’s Spirit in us each day” ( http://www.spiritoffire.org/ebooks/the%20new%20life/nlife26.htm ).

Let it be established in the mouth of two or three witnesses. KWH

*{For more see https://immortalityroad.wordpress.com/category/death-of-self/ or click the “Category” link “Death of Self” in the right hand column}.

“Forgive Us Our Debts”–Love Is All We Owe

We owe mankind only one thing–love. In the “Lord’s Prayer,” Christ is teaching us that loving others is all that we should owe anyone. As the princes and princesses of the King, we are held to that high standard. Owe no man any thing, but to love one another (Romans 13:8).

God the King is Love, and we His children are born of His nature, which is love (I John 4:8, 16). Loving others, then, is how we pay our debts.

So when the Savior, in teaching us to pray, tells us to say, “And forgive us our debts,” He want us to mean this: Forgive us Father, for the times we didn’t love others the way You love them. And when Christ instructs us to say, “As we forgive our debtors,” He wants us to mean this: Father, grant us a forgiving heart to all who do not love us as You love us. He did tell us, “Forgive and it shall be forgiven you” (Luke 6:37).

To love one another–this is one of the “new commandments” Christ gave us. “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another” (John 13:34).

Loving one another is the sign that God resides in us. “If we love one another, God dwells in us, and His love is perfected in us, because He has given us of His Spirit” (I John 4:12). The caveat: we cannot love one another with the agape “love from above” if we do not have His Spirit within us. Human love will only stretch so far and then it snaps ugly on somebody.

Love is the fruit produced from the sap (Holy Spirit) within us, the branches. And we cannot be grafted in to the vine (Christ) until we go through the death, burial, and resurrection experience with Him {Read more on this in my book The Unveiling of the Sons of God at http://www.yahwehisthesavior.com/sonsintro.htm }. We must be “raised to walk in a newness of life” through faith in God’s promise to give us a new heart and a new spirit if we put to death our old sinful self on the cross with Christ (6:1-6). When we receive His Spirit into our hearts, then the love will start flowing down and through us to others (See post, “Love From Above, Down and Through” at https://immortalityroad.wordpress.com/2008/01/22/love-from-above-down-and-through/ ).

The “debts” spoken of in the “Lord’s Prayer” is much more than money or material things. It is spiritual love that we owe each other. We owe mankind a heart of love in gratitude to God for the love He showed us by providing the Sacrifice, the Lamb of God, and thereby giving us a way to escape sin and corruption. It is now about Him channeling Himself (Love) through us on out to others.

These things should be in mind when we pray to our Father, “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Kenneth Wayne Hancock

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July 9, 2008 · 10:02 pm

“Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread”–The Bread of God

We are to ask for the heavenly bread–not physical bread. Christ told us specifically to not ask for food. “Do not set your heart on what you will eat or drink; do not worry about it” (Luke 12:29, NIV).

Christ in the Lord’s Prayer tells us rather to ask the Father each day for the spiritual bread from heaven. But what is it exactly? Some churches believe that a round wafer is magically and mystically turned into the body of Christ, the bread from heaven. This practice is not found in the scriptures of truth.

Christ gives a treatise on the heavenly bread in John 6. The “true bread from heaven” was not manna which fell for the Israelites in the wilderness. They all died. But, My Father gives you the true bread from heaven (v. 32). The spiritual “bread of God is He which comes down from heaven, and gives life to the world” (v. 33).

Physical bread is the staff of a physical life that ends. But spiritual bread is the staff of the spiritual life that never ends. This bread feeds the new inner spiritual man; it is our sustenance.

Then Jesus (Yahshua) declares Himself to be that Heavenly Sustenance. “I am the bread of life: he that comes to me shall never hunger, and he that believes on me shall never thirst” (v. 34).

The key word here is “believes.” It is believing on Him–that is how we partake of His Spirit. You take into yourself what you believe. You become what you believe. You are what you eat. Believing Him and His word about who He is, and what He has done, and what He will do–this is what it’s all about. Belief. Belief is not a material thing. It is a special invisible, spiritual thing. To believe Him and what His name means is to eat of the spiritual bread from heaven.

He would later say that His body is the “bread of God” and encouraged us to eat it. “Eat” here is to spiritually believe what transpired with His body–the death, burial, and resurrection. He was saying that His flesh, His actual physical body was going to be presented as the one sacrifice that would purge our sins. Believing this in truth is eating (taking in) this spiritual, true bread from heaven.

“I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh which I will give for the life of the world” (v. 51). Here we see him giving His physical body so that we could have immortality.

He was teaching us to pray–not for ourselves with things for ourselves, food, material things. No. We are to ask for more of His Spirit, more faith, more belief of what He has done for us. We should recall and thank Him for allowing our old nature to die with Him on the cross, to be buried with Him, and to be “raised to walk in a newness of life” with Him (Romans 6:3-7).

The words, Give us this day our daily bread, contain a profound lesson in our learning to pray. Kenneth Wayne Hancock

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April 17, 2008 · 3:24 pm

Baptism: Empty Ritual or Symbol of “Death of Self”?

“Why were you baptized?” a survey taker asks, cornering us with his microphone and camera. Most of us would have to say, “Because they told me I should do it.”

Question 2: “What does baptism mean exactly?” Here most of us would scratch our heads and say, “Well, I’m not sure. The minister and congregation were very supportive, and I feel that it was the right thing to do.”

But the right thing for us to do is to “dig deep and build our house on the rock,” as Christ admonished us to do. We dig deep by digging into the letter that He has left us, the scriptures of truth.

Baptism is an outward symbolic action of an inward, spiritual, and transformational happening. The meaning of baptism is laid out in Romans 6:3-11. “Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into His death” (v. 3). We are immersed into His death.

Water baptism is a symbol of us identifying our old self dying with Christ, being buried with Christ, and being raised up with Christ. It is where we identify our old sinful self with the Lamb of God, our sin sacrifice. “He was made to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.”

When He died, my old self died. When He was buried, my old evil nature was buried. When He was raised from the dead, I was raised from the dead! Hey, this is not just my testimony; it is all of His children’s testimony.

And baptism in water is a symbol showing the world and God how we are regenerated.

How is this transformation done? By faith, which is having assurance of its reality before we actually see it with our own eyes. We have to reckon it so through God’s power. “Reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God” (v. 11). God has already reckoned the death of our old self and our resurrection with Him. Why shouldn’t we reckon it so?

Baptism is a symbol of our transformation into being right with Him. We are now free from sin. “For he that is dead is freed from sin. We are now the children of the light, having escaped darkness.

God’s sons and daughters, His princes and princesses, shall see through the empty rituals of Churchianity. They will shine forth as lights “in the midst of a wicked and perverse nation.” Their clarity of vision will help them sift through the barren sands of man’s traditions to ultimately find the “one pearl of great price.” Kenneth Wayne Hancock

{If this has been helpful, make a comment and/or pass it on to someone you care about. I would love to hear from you. You can read more about this in Yah Is Savior: The Road to Immortality, Ch. 28. Click the Blogroll “Yahweh Is the Savior” link to your right]

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March 4, 2008 · 12:57 am

God’s Desire: To Reproduce Himself–in Us

In the last post we saw that the Creator has a will that will prevail. His will is His desire or His wish for His creation, humankind. Humans are strongwilled; most desire things for number one. And their number one usually is not God, although it should be. If we have any other desire for what is to happen in our bodies, other than what He wants, we struggle against His wishes. This is where frustration comes from.

What is his desire for us His crown of creation? He has magnificent plans to actually reproduce Himself in us! Nothing less. Let me repeat this important point. According to the prophets and apostles who wrote the scriptures of truth, what God wants is that He magnify Himself in a “body of many sons” and daughters. All the other religious catch-words that we have heard like “salvation,” “faith,” “hope”–these are facets of the diamond, but reproducing Himself in His people–this is the precious gemstone of truth as to what God is doing.

It is up to us to get into the flow of the Creator’s desire and wish. To do this, we must relinquish our meager little desires, putting our old spiritual nature on the cross and die with Christ (Romans 6:6). We must spiritually sacrifice our selfish desires and take on His desire, which is to use us as His temple, His dwelling place on this earth. Then we must bury our old self with Christ in the grave, identifying our sinful core with the sin sacrifice that He made for us. And then, by believing that He was literally raised bodily from the dead after three days and three nights in the tomb, we, too, “can walk in a newness of life.” He arose; we arose. This is first step in becoming a new creature in Christ.

We, then, “as newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word” so that we can grow up into Him until “Christ be formed in you” and I. Wow! In His eyes we are already there. He sees us as His sons and daughters, His princes and princesses, His future kings and queens in His soon-coming kingdom. That is a big wish, a big desire, a big will, a big heart.

God’s not messing around. He is calling out a body of sons and daughters that will lead the way for the rest of humankind. And “whosoever will may come.”

What can we do to be of service to Him and His wishes? First, we need to surrender to Him and His will, desire, wish. And in due time He will grow up in us, and He will speak through us as He did in the prophets of old. His Spirit will flow down and in and through us out to others, and He will multiply Himself by “bringing many sons unto glory.”

We just need to get with His program. If we are on the same page as He, then we can ask what we will, and He will grant it. Why? Why wouldn’t He answer the prayer of one of His children who is asking for more of His Spirit so that His wishes can be carried out.

It’s all in the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done, in earth, as it is in heaven.” That’s one prayer that will be answered. It’s going to be done. We need to search it out and do it.

Throwing the Baby Out with the Bath Water

Upon coming to the stark realization that we have been duped and deceived–especially in the deeper matters of the heart–we tend to throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water. How could I have been such a fool? we ask ourselves, and then we turn our back on the offending entity.

Burned by a woman, a man can become bitter and cynical towards women in general, looking at the entire gender as if they all were like the one that hurt him. Of course, it can work both ways.

The same scenario can happen in a religious sense. It happened to me. I was raised by a mother who took me to church and taught me Bible verses. Mom and Dad took us to church. But the things spoken by the preacher–those things of hope, love, and joy in God–these things were not happening in my home life. Dad and Mom could not get along. The fussing and fighting led to a divorce.

The brunt of all this came crashing down on me at 11 years of age. “Uh, son. Your mother is leaving today with your sister. We are going to leave it up to you. Which one of us do you want to live with?

“What?” I stood there in shock. Just yesterday, my name was in the newspaper on top of the standings, the Little League Baseball’s leading hitter–the batting champ! Known and loved by all. And now my Mom is moving out and I’ve got to choose which one to be loyal to basically. I mean, this is 1958, for crying out loud. It’s supposed to be like a Leave it to Beaver type family.

So I looked at Mom, standing there clutching my 8 year old sister, and I looked at Dad, standing there resolute, firm-jawed, justified in his ossified stand, and not wanting Dad to be alone, I chose to stay with Dad.

And that was the last time I went to a church house for several years. Ten years later at 21, right after I got back from Vietnam, I started in earnest my quest for the truth–about God, about world affairs, about everything–but I did not go back to the denominational churches. I turned first to the major Eastern religions. But I did not find in them what I knew was true even then, in that the old self had to die. The old nature that we are born with was selfish and it needed to go. But nowhere in the Eastern religions is this problem directly addressed.

I began to drift into nihilism’s abyss of nothingness, and had the sickening thought that the truth was this: that there was no absolute truth.

And it was then when I was 24, that I was invited to a Christian meeting in a home. And the man teaching from the Bible quoted Romans 6:6. “Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with Christ…” And I stopped him right there and asked, “Is it talking about getting rid of the old self–about the old ego dying?”

And he said, yes, that it has already died on the cross with Christ along with all its sins and sinning nature. And if you believe in Christ’s resurrection in you, you can be raised to walk in a newness of life.

And I went, Wow! This is life changing. This is what I’ve been searching for. And that very day started a 14 year missionary period in my life.

I see now that for those ten years I had turned my back on Christianity and the Bible, blaming God for my misery. I had thrown out the baby (Christ) with the bathwater (my pain). But God is merciful and loving and forgiving, and He led me back to Him. Kenneth Wayne Hancock

{If you want to read more on the “cross experience” and other things, check out my website where I have my two books posted in their entirety. That website is YahwehIstheSavior.com My books can be ordered at amazon.com}

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