The Invitation

By Jerry Potter

You can win over your temptations!

If you want to walk in fullness and step into your purpose, you must stop pandering to your own lusts and cravings. Jerry Potter explains how to subdue them and renew your mind with the mind of Christ.

"If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." -Matthew 16:24, NIV  These words were an invitation, from Christ to His disciples, to surrender to God’s will for their lives, and enter a new dynamic relationship with Him. Each section of this book deals with Christ’s words, and how we should give up our self-will and receive the keys to the kingdom of God. The first section of the book uses the story of Elijah and Elisha to reveal the seven steps of self-denial. Their journey shows how God deals with our self-life. God’s purpose is to anoint us with His spirit to finish the ministry of Jesus on earth, just as Elisha finished the ministry of Elijah. The other section of the book uses the beatitudes as an example of what the Christian life is like when God enters our lives. He has given us a picture of a life blessed by the Holy Spirit in the beatitudes.

About the Author:

Rev. Jerry Potter has spoken and taught in seminaries and major churches around the world. He held a conference in Sweden for Lutheran pastors, and published a book in Sweden titled Upon This Rock. After becoming an ordained pastor, Jerry became the assistant pastor of Evangel Temple in Pensacola, Florida. He became pastor of Elberta Assembly of God in Elberta, Alabama, where Jerry felt his call into evangelism. He is now the pastor of New Life Fellowship in Columbus, Mississippi.

Format:
5.5” x 8.5”, Soft Cover
Trade Paper; 240 pages

• Language: English
• Publisher: Creation House
• Release date: Mar 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781629985299

Book preview

Part I:

Self-Denial

There is a story about a great sculptor who made a statue of Christ. When asked how he could achieve such magnificent results from just a piece of stone, he replied, It was simple. I just chipped away everything that didn’t look like Jesus. God uses a similar process in our lives. He calls the chipping away process self-denial. As we learn to apply the lessons of self-denial, we are going to make a spiritual quantum leap in our relationship with God.

As we set out to understand the concept of self-denial, allow me first to defend the need and purpose of doing so. In the beginning, God created man in His likeness and in His image. Man was first formed from the dust of the earth; then God breathed into him the spirit of life and man became a living soul. Man was a triune being. His natural body was given five sense gifts enabling him to function within earth’s environment. His soul was given for self-awareness and as a repository of knowledge. The soul was meant to store information, organize it, and respond to stimuli received from the five senses (such as heat, cold, hunger, thirst, danger, pleasure), while the spirit was given for his awareness of God and spiritual reality. Man functioned well in the garden while his tri-unity remained intact and his relationship with the Creator flourished. Then sin came through man’s trespass and he was driven from the garden, and the presence of God. God’s warning had gone unheeded and spiritual death was the result.

In God’s eyes, spiritual death occurs when our relationship with Him is broken. We can only receive life by returning to that relationship. The bitterness of the consequences of the fall was not apparent all at once but was discovered as time passed. Man began to age and pain became a part of everyday life. There are, of course, several different types of pain: physical, emotional, and spiritual. The solemn consequence of man’s sin was realized in the spiritual pain he suffered when he realized there was no place on earth that God could be found. At times there were theophanies (visible appearances of God) to men like Abraham, Jacob, and Joshua, but they were few and far between. Not until the tabernacle of Moses was built was there any place on earth that God would lend His presence.

One of the direct results of man’s sin came when, by default, his soul assumed leadership in his life. God had meant for man to be directed by his spirit, not his soul, but the soul usurped the place of the spirit. Much like an ear is good at its function, the soul was good in its function. But if someone is blind, the ear can never take the place of the eye. The ear cannot see the stars or behold a sunrise. The ear cannot discern east from west or know a red rose from a yellow one. Any person bereft of the gift of sight is handicapped from living life to its fullest. So it is with the soul. Man without spiritual guidance struggles through life with little or no knowledge of the existence of God and His kingdom. He makes every decision in life based only on the data furnished by the five senses. Since God cannot be known by the five senses, mankind has dismissed Him as a myth created by primitive man, and His Word is viewed as historical conjecture created by hysterical people. Making no allowances for God’s will or prevenient grace, we categorize many of the good things God does as blind luck or coincidence. Blind to the existence of God and His kingdom, we ignore and disregard as hoaxes any supernatural occurrences.

Paul writes in Romans 8:6: For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Paul is not talking about the future, but puts this concept in the present tense. The person who follows the impulses of the natural mind and nature (governed by the soul) will experience separation from God and torment. The person who submits to the leadership of God’s spirit will experience life and peace. Many Christians I know live defeated lives filled with agony simply because they refuse to obey God’s Spirit. What they need is self-denial, which, in reality, is a denial of any further obedience to the leadership of the soul. Self-denial opens the door to total surrender to God’s spirit and will. It disposes the soul and allows the spirit to assume leadership as God intended. Self-denial returns us to God’s original intention for our lives.

Most Christians find self-denial a difficult task, mostly because they don’t understand why God asks them to do it. They simply do not fathom or grasp the rewards of complete surrender.

Much the same as going on a diet, self-denial is a means to an end. When we buffet our bodies with dieting—denying ourselves the foods we want—we have in mind the goal of losing weight. Our motivation may simply be to look better in a swimsuit or it may be health related, perhaps to preempt the development of heart trouble, diabetes, or other obesity-related diseases. Diet pills, fad diets, and the latest fat-burning widgets advertised on television offer us substitutes for self-denial, but in the end they are at best temporal aids and at worst destructive to our health. Sadly, we see the same inane thinking applied to spiritual matters. Most who desire to be spiritual want shortcuts and quick fixes rather than the path that leads to the cross—the path of self-denial.

Self-denial is the only key that unlocks and opens the spiritual mind. We do not become spiritually-minded just because we study Scripture. If our exegesis of Scripture is processed by our carnal mind, we are going to experience carnal interpretations of the Word of God. The very cause of most of the erroneous doctrines of our day can be traced back to carnal interpretations of the Word of God. I am appalled at the number of pop culture doctrines of our day that teach people to seek the things of this world. Paul instructed us to seek those things which are above, where Christ [sits] on the right hand of God (Col. 3:1). If we seek those things which are above, every step of self-denial will open a new vista of revelation from God. When God reveals His Word to us truth is imparted and our minds are transformed. When our spiritual mind is fully developed, we will be able to experience the fullness of Christ’s invitation, and God will anoint us for His service.

Self-denial deals with the very core of our nature and our thinking. God must deal with the hideous consequences that accompanied man’s fall in the Garden of Eden. When Adam sinned by eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil he took into his being a sinful nature. Before the fall, man had an innocent nature and was placed in the garden to choose an eternal nature. There were only two natures he had to choose from: one was from God and the other was from Satan. Adam chose Satan’s nature, and passed it down to the entire human race. This nature is the source of all the sin in our lives today. We are not sinners because we sin; we sin because we are sinners. We are born with the same nature that Adam chose and it influences everything we do. It permeates our thoughts, defiles our actions, and projects strange imaginations onto everything we see.

Seeing ourselves through the eyes of the nature of sin is like going into a house of mirrors and never knowing which image is the real you. The only true mirror is God’s Word. Sin causes us to usurp the rightful place of God in our lives, placing ourselves at the center of our own universe. We judge everything that touches our lives as good or bad, based solely upon how it affects us. If we like it, it is good. If we don’t like it, it is bad. We have a very strong sense of right and wrong and often accuse God of being unfair if something disrupts our well-being and causes us pain. I know of people who are angry with God because their child died, or they lost a loved one to an untimely death. Still others blame God because their life is, in some measure, less than perfect. We have set ourselves up as God’s judge instead of realizing He is our judge. God looks at things from an eternal perspective. Something that we might judge to be evil in our temporal existence may, in fact, be working for our good in God’s eternal perspective. Are we going to trust our shortsighted natural vision or trust Him who sees the end of time as if it were today? In order for us to align ourselves with His eternal purpose we must have a new focal point: GOD. He must become the center of our lives, our thoughts, and our existence. Once we allow Him to become our center, we will be able to trust His purpose in everything He allows to touch our lives, even if we cannot fully understand it. Self-denial means we must abdicate our throne and return it to God as its rightful owner.

When Jesus calls men to self-denial, it is a call to deny the very heart and soul of our self-driven purposes in life and accept His will for us. If we respond, our entire being will be brought into a transition from carnal thinking to spiritual mindedness. God never asks us to do something that He is not willing to help us do. This transition will take us over a long and arduous journey in the spiritual realm, but will certainly be worth the trip.

God will confront us many times and in many ways on our spiritual journey, and each occurrence will involve the three-step process: the revelation of our loves and wills, the separation from and surrender of the self’s purposes, and the impartation of His life to fulfill His eternal purpose in our lives. God will reveal each step in His time as it must be taken, then a choice must be made between self-will and God’s will. When our natural impulses are denied and God’s will is chosen, He imparts life. Until we chose life, we manifest death. Death is that state of existence in which we are separated from God. I am not referring here to salvation. It is entirely possible to be saved and yet have a carnal mind. I am referring to the process God uses to release life from our spirit to flow through our outward being. In this way, God openly manifests Himself through us.

One of the major problems with religion today is related to the carnal interpretation of God’s Word. Carnal thinking always puts self first and we become the focus of our theology instead of God. Our modern or pop theology considers the Bible to be little more than a spiritual catalog we use to pick and choose what we want God to do for us. We are motivated to give to God for what we can get from God. We praise God because it will make us blessed. We see faith as the key to God’s storehouse, which we can use at our discretion to heap upon ourselves everything we want and think we deserve. The focus of this theology is completely anthropocentric (man-centered) and has diminished God to the role of servant. One would think by listening to media preachers and pastors of some churches that the greatest crowns in heaven are reserved for the most materially blessed Christians. The Scriptures teach us that this concept is a delusion, a departure from the truth. God measures our spiritual success not by what we gain, but by what we lose. In Philippians 3:8 Paul shares that for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus he suffered the loss of all things. In the carnal way of thinking we measure ourselves by what we gain, but in the kingdom of God our progress is measured by what we lose.

We must not conclude that all we need to do to become spiritual is to give away our possessions; that will only make us broke. But if one measures self-worth by material worth, God may ask that one’s possessions be sacrificed. If self-worth is measured by the size of the church one pastors, God may allow the church to stay small. If the measure is related to our natural beauty or physical prowess, God may allow them to fail. We cannot trust in ourselves. Rather, we must deny ourselves. God may allow complete or partial failure so that we may learn to put the kingdom of God first in our lives.

Let me illustrate. Many years ago I sought the Lord about deliverance from a shortcoming in my life. As I prayed about it, God spoke to my heart: It is not your weakness that bothers me; it is your strength. He then instructed me to make a list of the things that were stalwart in my character. I made the list and forgot about it for a while. In the next few months God allowed me to face several hard things in my life—mostly without His grace. One day I looked back at my list and found that I had failed miserably. I had violated every entry on my list. They were not major violations, but violations nevertheless. In complete brokenness I lay prostrate on my living room floor weeping. As I confessed to God my utter failure at trying to be spiritual, God spoke to me: Welcome to the kingdom. I sat up in amazement and asked God to repeat what He had just said to me. He responded, Welcome to the kingdom, and continued, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom. God had allowed me to fail because I was trusting in my own strength. Now that I was broken in spirit, I knew I would only be victorious through God’s power, not my own. God must be the main focus of our thinking. All things must be scrutinized based on their effects on God’s will and kingdom.

In our course of study I may refer at times to God speaking to me. God does still speak to His people regardless of what you may have heard to the contrary. He does not speak to my ears, but to my heart. I do not hear voices, but when He does speak I know it to be as real as if it were orally spoken. Every time I hear His voice my heart leaps within me like a babe leaps in its mother’s womb. The greater my self-denial has become, the more easily I have recognized His voice. Often He speaks to me by impartation, meaning that suddenly into my spirit will flow a wealth of information. It may be pertaining to someone’s personal needs or it may simply give me knowledge of a situation. I hear no voice, yet suddenly I know all these things, and, I might add, they are always true. Thousands of people I know can testify to that fact.

The story of Elisha and Elijah found in 1 and 2 Kings will be the basis of illustrating how to implement self-denial. The richness of the story of these Old Testament prophets will bless you in your search to be closer to God. In it, we will see seven ways through which God reveals and exposes our self-centered loves and wills.

Self-denial is accomplished as we offer our self-based loves on God’s altars. In the next few chapters we are going to see the seven altars upon which all of our self-based loves must be sacrificed. Each altar deals with a separate type or degree of those loves. Each love is like a tree and may have many branches (many tangents, combinations, and variations.) God’s method of choice has always been to deal with us little by little, so He usually deals with each love in particular, rather than all of them at once. At the first altar, the altar of precedence, we will learn that there are certain justifiable loves that we have such as the love of family and friends that must be prioritized. We may have these loves, yet God’s will and kingdom must take first precedent in our lives. All of these altars reveal that there is nothing we can love in this world that will hinder or diminish our relationship with God.

1

The Altar of Precedence

Offering the Love of Our Family and Possessions

Atrue visitation from God heightens your spiritual awareness and etches into your memory almost every single detail of that experience. Years later you will still be able to recall with tremendous accuracy the things you both felt and saw while God’s touch was upon your life. I would like to relate to you two such experiences that changed the course of my life forever. The first occurrence happened when I was about five years old living in the small hamlet of St. Johns, Michigan. My mother had just tucked me in, turned out the light, and closed the door to my small bedroom adjacent to hers. As I lay there waiting to go to sleep, I saw a light and it seemed to be getting brighter and brighter. Soon the light was brighter than a hundred suns, and I saw a man in the midst of the light and He spoke to me. The angel of the Lord told me that he had placed His hand upon my life, and that I would come to know Him in a great way when I was older. The light disappeared almost as quickly as it had come, but I was aware of the lingering presence of God. This experience was always in the back of my mind during my childhood years and my adolescence. During those years, I had an insatiable desire to know God. My parents moved several times during this period of my life, and each time we moved we would find a new church to attend. I would always be the first to go forward and join the church. I was baptized five times before my twenty-first birthday. After the Lord met me and I became truly saved, in 1960, my desire to know God was the strongest desire in my life. I knew in my heart that there was more to knowing God than just being a church member. The anointing of the presence of God seemed to beckon me like a moth to a flame. I fasted, prayed, studied my Bible, and was in church at every