: Lesson 1 Well hello everyone! You ve made it to week one of your forty week transformation! We are going to be tackling the First Big Q, Who is God? during the next eight weeks, and I am so excited to be taking this journey with you! So, this first week we are going to be diving deeper into dealing with misconceptions that you may have about God. The title of our teaching this week is called Will the Real God Stand Up, and I m going to be talking with you this week about how our image of God is actually formed. I want to talk a little bit about perceptions and the filters that cause us to believe maybe some wrong things about God. I m going to talk about how your image of God was influenced as you grew up and through the experiences that you have. I want to even unpack the way that we judge things and the way that we experience supernatural experiences so that you will be more open-minded to actually meeting who God really is. And then lastly, I m going to talk a little bit about how sometimes the lack of sound supernatural Bible teaching can cause confusion and I ll unpack that a little bit more for you as we go along but I just know that in my own life, I mean, I was in my thirties before I actually experienced a miracle. And I don t know about you, but the Bible, when I read the Bible, is just full of miracles and crazy supernatural things. And so if that s not been a part of what you ve been taught or part of what you ve experienced in your relationship with God, well, no wonder you re confused, no wonder that there s been distortions. So I m going to unpack a little about that as well. So let s dive into the teaching. Now, the first thing I m going talk about is perception and how we may think of ourselves as objective but the reality is really no one is objective. I mean, think about even in just communication or in conversations, how, you know, you say one thing but the other person is like, I have no idea what you re meaning, or there s a misinterpretation, or you get in a conflict because what you re saying and what s being heard - the wires are getting crossed. Well that s the problem with perception. You know, perception is so individual and by definition it s really the way that our minds have been wired to take perceptions of things we re receiving from our physical senses - so from our eyes and from our ears and just the way that we re perceiving reality - and how that gets interpreted internally. And depending on a lot of different factors - I mean culture, where you grew up, the kinds of education that you ve had, all kinds of environmental factors, the kind of family that you grew up in - the bottom line is that all of these different things impact the way that you perceive, especially when it comes to spiritual matters or comes to forming an image of God. The other thing to recognize is that we have perceptional filters and filters are a part of everything in life. As a matter of fact, even just with your physical senses at any given time we are only perceiving just a fraction of the frequencies that are available to be perceived. Whether it s light waves or sound waves, there s a whole range of colors and a whole range of sounds that we are not able to pick up with our physical eyes and with our physical ears. We know this to be true, just think about dogs and how dogs and their sense of smell and their sense of hearing is so much more advanced, or we think of dolphins and their ability to perceive using sonar. The bottom line is that we have limited ability in our human nature to perceive all of reality. As we progress through the teachings we are going to actually begin to open up our perceivers so that we can get more in tune with the realm of the spirit which is the realm where God lives, the realm of the invisible, and the realm of the unseen. But filters, we just need to know that they exist. And they don t just exist in the physical realm as it relates to our Lesson 1: - Page 1
: Lesson 1 senses - our eyes and our ears and our touch and so forth - but they also exist in our minds. You know neural science, which hopefully by now you ve watched the introductory videos and you ve gotten a better handle on how spirituality and neural science and things like quantum physics, and some of the advances that science is making, is actually coming into alignment with spiritual beliefs. My point is that our brains also are wired with filters. These filters get installed through our life experiences. A simple example, and I know it s been one that I have had to work through in my own life, is depending on how you grew up, whether you had a single mom, or whether you came from a family of divorce, or whether you came from a very hyper-religious background, these experiences and environments that we grow up in create filters. One experience I can think of is when you work with people that have been through abuse maybe you ve had physical abuse or maybe there s been verbal abuse growing up many times our brains will actually associate a meaning with those experiences. You ll make a judgment, like, let s say that it was your dad that was abusive, you ll make a judgment that all men are abusive or all men cannot be trusted. And this happens all at a subconscious level and so, whether you re aware of it or not, these filters are impacting your perception. They re impacting. As a matter of fact, it s even been proven through quantum physics that they re actually drawing certain experiences to you and they reinforce what you re perceiving and what you re filtering and what you re believing. So it makes sense that people that believe in God would have experiences that back up what they believe. And people that don t believe in God would continue to have experiences that back up what they believe which is there is no God. Think about it like this; think about how our perception can be tricked: have you ever lost your keys and you re holding them in your hand? Or have you ever been looking for your glasses and they re on top of your head? I don t know about you, but I do things like this. The point is that our perception can be tricked. As a matter of fact, let s take my little cup of coffee right here. This is an old adage but is this glass half empty or is this glass half full? Now, believe it or not, being a positive person or being a negative person has somewhat been programmed into you based upon what you have been influenced by growing up, and that s just one example. I have several examples here that we re going to show you, too. Let s look at some of these. Have you ever heard of optical illusions for example? The first one you re going to be seeing is a picture of...well you tell me what it s a picture of. Are you seeing a picture of a young woman or are you seeing a picture of an old woman? Some people see both. But the point is, depending on how you are perceiving this picture, your mind can play tricks on you. So what is real? What is reality? The point is that we can t always just depend upon our physical senses to tell us the truth, or for even our own mind to present reality to us in a way that is sound and dependable. Alright let s check out another one. In the second picture there s two lines that you re seeing and arrows going in opposite directions. My question is, are these lines the same length? What do you think? Yes or no? Well, the truth is even though your eyes may not be able to perceive it or it s an optical illusion these lines are actually the exact same length. Now the third picture is also pretty interesting so I m going to ask you, what do you see? Do you see a vase? Or do you see two faces pointing towards each other? Now the question is, what did you see before I directed your perception? Another really interesting thing about perception and filters is that they actually can be influenced by so-called authority figures - meaning, folks that we consider to be an authority, whether it be a parent or whether it be a teacher or whether it be a spiritual person that we look up to. Many times just the fact that we perceive them to Lesson 1: - Page 2
: Lesson 1 be an authority figure impacts the impact of what they are teaching or saying or believing and how we receive that into our own minds. Okay, moving forward. This weird little elephant - my question to you is how many legs does this little guy have? I know, it s kind of trippy, but the point is our brains kind of go crazy when we try to bend or move beyond the limits of how our brains have been trained to perceive. And then, the very last one that I just want to drill this point into you with is this kind of checkerboard picture. And my question about that one is, are these lines all the same length? Are they also even parallel? I don t know about you, but my eyes kind of go cross-wise when I look at that picture. So these are just examples of how our eyes and our perception can be influenced or be wrong even. And so we can t necessarily trust our version of reality. Now why am I going into this? Because we are dealing with a topic that is not just an intellectual topic. When you start to ask, Hey, will the real God stand up, you want to start to unpack, How was my image of God formed in the first place? In my own life it was not formed very well. I could give you my life story and kind of explain to you by the time I was twenty why I was at a place where first of all, I had no relationship with God and, secondly, couldn t stand Christians. I mean literally had a hatred in my heart for people that were Jesus followers, and was not stepping foot in church. I don t care who you were, what you had to say, I was like, Erg! No! Now, I didn t just come to that conclusion by myself overnight. No there were things that happened, there were influencers, there were church experiences, there were family influences, there was a neighbor, there was teaching - all kinds of stuff that when you packed it all in together - the image that I had of God, if He did exist, well I sure didn t want anything to do with the guy. And the reality was it took over a decade of just really the Holy Spirit working in my life to undo all of that. And it was through a lot of tragedy and soul searching and really bad decisions and all kinds of things until I finally got to the place where I was like, You know what? I don t even know why I believe what I believe. I m not even sure that I made these decisions about God. And, you know what, I m not going to let fear rule me anymore! If there is a God then He s big enough to introduce Himself and I m just giving Him a clean slate. He can introduce Himself to me Himself. But let me tell you, there s a lot of people who go through their whole life and never reach that point. And they re missing out on, my goodness, more things than I have time in my little video here to tell you about! Amazing kindness. Amazing gentleness. Amazing encouragement. Miracles. The supernatural adventure of a lifetime! Power beyond your wildest imagination! Crazy good things in every category that you can think of! Because God is great. God is good. He is love. He s so amazing. But because of all these things - our perceptions, our filters, our beliefs because of all of these things, we really just are confused. Now there s something else I really want to talk to you about and this is going to be kind of a foundational component of everything that we re going to be moving forward in throughout the forty weeks. If we re going to transform anything - your image of God, your image of yourself, what you believe about your future - then you re going to have to get a little distrusting of your own internal paradigm and world view and where you are right now and what you believe is possible. In order to do that, you ve really got to dig a little deeper underneath the surface, because if you re like me then, It s great that you believe that, it s great that that works for you, but, I m not from Missouri, but I m kind of like, hey, show me. And so I m a person that needs to understand what I m actually buying Lesson 1: - Page 3
: Lesson 1 into, and of course, a lot of that is the way that I was programmed so badly in my early experiences and spirituality. So what I m talking about is the way that we form our judgments in the first place. You know, human beings are created so amazing, but at the same time we also were created in a way, I guess I should say, we function today in a way that we weren t originally created to function. Now to really understand this I want to go all the way back to Genesis - the very first place in the Bible where perception and judgment is talked about. No matter what you believe necessarily about the creation story today, that s not as important - I mean that s a great topic for one of our Q & A calls and some things that I can walk you through if you ve got questions about that - but today just keep an opened mind and just walk with me - face value - at what I m going to be sharing with you. Okay, we re going to go into Genesis, chapter three, and verse one. It says, The serpent [the enemy] was the shrewdest of all of the wild animals the Lord had made. And one day he asked the woman, Did God really say you must not eat the fruit of any of the trees in the Garden? And the woman replied, Of course we can eat of the fruit of the trees in the Garden. It s only the fruit from the tree in the middle of the Garden that we are not allowed to eat. You must not eat it or touch it. Cause if you do you will die. Now I m going to stop here for a second because the truth of the matter is Eve was already perceiving and judging in a way that was not reality because if you go back into Genesis in chapter two, God didn t say don t touch it. He just said, if you eat of it you ll die. It was just very simple, but she s already exaggerating, she s already making up a story, if you will, about her experience. My point is that whenever we go through experiences in life, there is what actually happened - the facts of the situation - and then there s the story and the judgments that we make up about what happened. Now we know this to be true in court cases in courts of law. I mean you get a witness on the stand - eye witness accounts - are they really reliable? There s been a lot of question around that. Why? Because of human perception. And so here Eve is, she s doing that, she s adding to the story. And so here s what the serpent says, You won t die. God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it. And you will be like God, knowing good and evil. Now, there s a lot we could talk about in this, and we ll be unpacking this more in the coming weeks, but the point is that the enemy was not only lying to her, he was actually using a twist of something that was true already. It says here that, you ll be like God, knowing good and evil. The truth was Eve was already like God. He was trying to get her to buy in to the fact that she lacked something, he was questioning God s character, maybe he s withholding something from you Eve, there s a lot going on here. Then he starts to tell her that the knowledge of good and evil is something that Eve was designed to have. And the truth is that the knowledge of good and evil is judgment. It s human beings deciding what is good, what is bad, what is acceptable, what s unacceptable, what s in style, what s not in style - all of these judgments apart from the wisdom of God. And the point is that Eve couldn t perceive in her humanity what the consequences were of her own choices because she lacked such a limited view of reality. So she was convinced, she ends up - we know the Lesson 1: - Page 4
: Lesson 1 story - she eats the fruit, but here s what I find very interesting: it says in verse seven, At the moment that her and Adam ate their eyes were opened, they felt shame at their nakedness and they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves. And it says, When the cool evening breezes were blowing the man and his wife heard the Lord walking in the garden and they hid themselves from the Lord. And the Lord called to them, Where are you? My point is that after they took unto themselves this knowledge of judgment their perception completely changed. They went from being totally naked and not ashamed about it, totally unaware of their own nakedness, they weren t self-conscious. Their self-image wasn t negative. They were just totally like a little child just running through the house naked. They just didn t have an awareness that there was shame in nakedness. Then they hid themselves from the presence of God. So their perception of God totally changed. He went from someone apparently they were normally walking in the Garden in the cool of the day with, to someone who they were supposed to hide from, they were afraid of. Fear became the fault perception, the default way that they were filtering reality. Now this is where the problem started but Emerge is about correcting this. The next forty weeks we are going to be unpacking more about why we can t let our own tendency to judge become the way that we form what we believe. We re going to look at a new way of experiencing reality, a new way of experiencing truth. We re going to question why we believe what we believe, and, is it true? So, the next step is I want you to take some time to get into the Digging Deeper exercises for this week. Like I said in the intro videos, this school is not about just listening to a talking head. This school is about digging deeper into your own life, into your own heart, into the own truth that has become real for you - and bringing this to the surface so that you can actually make some conscious decisions about what you want to do with your life, who you are going to be as a person and what you re going to stand for and whether or not this god-thing is really as good as Schlyce is saying it is. So as you go through these exercises, the first one is going to be about creating a journal. The second one is going to be about going through your background and identifying some of the influencers, going through a forgiveness prayer to forgive those that may have influenced you wrongly in your spiritual journey. We re also going to start to unpack some of the filters - some of the perceptional things - that you may need to let go of, and identify some beliefs that maybe it s time to just set them down and be a little more open-minded about your relationship with God. And then finally, we re going to ask you to start your journal with an introduction letter to God. Now I know some of you have been walking with the Lord for years so I m not trying to insult you with this. What I guess I m trying to ask you to do is start with a clean slate like I did. And I want you to form this letter from the very depths of your heart. In humility say, I think I know You or maybe, I ve never met You but I really want to know You. The real You. The one that You present, the one that You have decided who You are. And I m going to let go of my preconceived ideas and start our foundation and start our relationship fresh. I know it s going to be a huge step forward in your relationship with God and also in a new level of perception. Lesson 1: - Page 5
: Lesson 1 I am going to be walking you through, in the Awakening Meditation time, through an exercise that is really going to open up your ability to perceive the supernatural realm, to be able to perceive God and to be able to begin to receive His love in a way that you ve never experienced before. I m so excited! I m going to be praying for you, the team is going to be praying for you, and we know that there s going to be a transformation in your relationship with God this week. So I just believe in you and I know you can do it. So go for it! Lesson 1: - Page 5