Restoration Ministries International

• To mutually establish a biblically-based way of life free from slanted Bible interpretations and heresy, read:   

“General Rules of Biblical Interpretation.”

• To remain free of the bitter hatred of contemporary politics and have the heart of our Lord Jesus, read:   

“True Patriots Are Bible-based Constitutionalists.”

November 16, 2024

The Obedience-based Serve An All-Encompassing God

Dear Friends in Christ Jesus our Lord,

Please download our next Potpourri, King Saul & Samson: Examples of Being Outcome-based. Our God has provided numerous examples especially in the Older Testament which reveal how very different His ways are from ours. His Word also reveals the dire consequences of human presumption that often plagues the outcome-based. In this Potpourri we discuss two examples from the Hebrew Scriptures, King Saul and Samson, whose lives graphically reveal outcome-based presumption and its end results. The accounts of these two men also illustrate the reality that no one could write the script for how our God brings about His will on earth. His amazing greatness and sovereignty are important for you to take into your heart with awesome wonder so that you'll remain obedience-based out of loving gratefulness.

For decades we've encouraged followers of our Lord Jesus to live obedience-based rather than outcome-based. Based upon God's Word, we're convinced that living obedience-based by His grace out of loving trust is the only response that's acceptable to our heavenly Father. Look at it this way. The smaller your view is of our magnificent God Who created and maintains the entire universe, the more predisposed you are to being outcome-based. This means that you think you have control over your own life, and especially your future. Contrast that unbiblical humanist perspective with that of the obedience-based who understand in their spirit that our God is so all-encompassing in wisdom, power, and love that it's a privilege to submit to His will!

We want to offer you another anecdote from Corrie ten Boom which describes the heartfelt response of the obedience-based toward our Lord:

Once I asked a parachutist, "How did you feel when you jumped from an airplane with a parachute on your back for the first time?" He answered, "There was only one thought: 'It works! It works!" What does it mean to go through life with Jesus? I can answer from experience, "It works! It works!"

"In all these these things we win an overwhelming victory through Him Who has proved His love for us" (Romans 8:37, Phillips). Lord, what joy that we may tell other people that it works. Hallelujah!

Over the years through many different writings and video formats we've underscored and repeatedly emphasized the truth of living obedience-based and fully yielding to the Holy Spirit. Out of deep grateful love for our heavenly Father and our Lord Jesus we want your life to pursue the same path as ours in this regard: fulfilling our Father's will to His glory. His will works!

Mike & Sue

November 8, 2024

The Obedience-based Live As Citizens Of Heaven!

Dear Friends in Christ Jesus our Lord,

Please download our latest Potpourri, The Biblical Mandate Is Living Obedience-Based. In writing this Potpourri the Holy Spirit compelled us to "prosecute this truth" — in other words, to focus our emphasis on a specific point. As you'll discover in this article, living obedience-based is mandated throughout Scripture, beginning with Abel's obedience versus Cain's self-will. Christian history reveals that living this way as our Lord Jesus's first followers did has been watered down by the following:

1. 👎🏼anti-Semitic obsession with diverse creedal positions and specified religious practices; 

2. 👎🏼replacing authentic Spirit-guided fellowship in homes with spectator gatherings in large edifices which were adapted from paganism; 

3. 👎🏼spiritual passivity produced by the pansyism of academic-only instruction of the Bible.

But your just being aware that these deceits may be affecting your faith walk doesn't get you anywhere. It's what you do in seeking our Lord Jesus with all your heart that enables you to flee the religious delusion which these lies have created. Consider the heart intensity of Francis of Assisi’s prayer, and out of grateful love for your Lord Jesus make your own heart at least as determined as his in living obedience-based:

Make me an instrument of Thy peace;

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

Where there is doubt, faith;

Where there is despair, hope;

Where there is darkness, light;

And where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console; to be understood, as to understand; to be loved, as to love; for it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

It's this heartfelt intensity of grace-with-purpose that separates what our Father is restoring to His own today from almost everything else that's taking place in organized Christianity. A verse that has anchored our loving obedience in sharing the Hebraic foundations is this: “A voice of [two] calling: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way for the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God’” (Isaiah 40:3). As long as there remains widespread unrepentance in Christianity and the absence of communal righteousness in congregations, we will be voices having to speak from the wilderness. Our heavenly Father provides no place for us among the unrepentant who prefer their self-will to His will.

Mike & Sue

November 2, 2024

Belonging to our Lord Jesus is to give up being you-in-charge

Dear Friends in Christ Jesus our Lord,

Please download our next Potpourri, Answered Prayer Is A Divine Interactive Experience. In this article we discuss the interactive experience of praying to our heavenly Father, receiving His answer and praising Him as we testify to others what He has done. Why is this so important? When most Christians pray, they're focused primarily on the answer they desire to their prayer and not on WHO they're praying to. They fail to see their prayer as the first step in bringing our Father glory and praise as His children in Christ, and having testimonies to His greatness and wonderful love. Prayer is just one way in which Father's children can have an interactive experience with Him through the bountiful privilege of coming before Him in the name of our Lord Jesus.

Originating with the preeminence of your Father and Lord Jesus in your life, your spiritual journey should be one of divine interaction which you can experience through the indwelling Holy Spirit. As we see in the Scriptures, some of the ways this divine interaction occurs are through the prayers of the repentant resulting in Father answering according to His will and them testifying to His glory; or in receiving guidance and empowerment by the Holy Spirit and then telling others how He worked in and through and around you; and even through divinely orchestrated encounters and interventions that you testify to others about so that Jesus is lifted up before them in His love and power. 

When you testify to divine interaction, you take our Father, our Lord Jesus and the Holy Spirit out of the pages of the Bible so They become real for others. Your listeners can either join you in praise, or perhaps find that they're being drawn to pursue this God Who is indeed revealing Himself as real. This divine interactive experience is the way our spiritual forerunners in the Newer Testament lived out their love-grounded obedient trust. Read about their lives in God's Word and discover that in belonging to our Lord Jesus, you are offered an interactive experience as they were, which provides you with praise and testimonies of divine reality. 

💥Your praise of our Father may include honoring, thanking, celebrating, rejoicing, and testifying to others about what He has done as you've come before Him in the name of Jesus as His own. Our heavenly Father is worthy of all these ways of praise and more, so it’s important that you don’t neglect your gratefulness to Him. Do you recall the 10 lepers whom our Lord Jesus healed (Luke 17:11-19)? Sadly, only one came back and thanked Him. Please don't ever let yourself be ungrateful even when your life is at its lowest ebb. Our Father never changes and nothing that's going on around you is beyond His scope of intervention. When you see yourself being awash with multiple needs which only He can answer, turn to Him in trust that He sees the Spirit of Christ in you and will set into motion His answers according to His will, His timing and His purpose. And as you come before Him with a hopeful and waiting heart of trust, it's vital that you view your prayer needs as the initial step of an interactive experience with your Father that leads to ongoing gratitude, praise and testifying.

After Christianity succumbed to being no more than religious rituals and creedal positions infused by anti-Semitic theology, few today expect to experience divine interaction. They may pray, but it's more of a half-hearted hope than an expectation that He is setting things into motion. When the two of us share our divine interactions with Christians, we appear to them that we're living extraordinary lives. But from our perspective, we're only living as our Lord's first followers lived, alert to staying repentant and gratefully coming before Father with all our needs and the needs of those we bring before Him. The wonderful interaction that is orchestrated through our prayers and our Father's answers according to His will results in our praise and the testimonies we share to His glory. 

And at the same time, we learn the essential character qualities of patience and perseverance, knowing that however He answers will be for His purposes to be accomplished. Wanting to lovingly serve our Lord Jesus and bring our Father glory also undergirds our motives when we receive the Spirit's guidance and empowerment, or the many encounters and interventions which He makes possible for us as His redemptive ambassadors.

We aren't special by any means! Rather, we're just a couple who were discipled to die-to-ourselves many years ago and have found our Father time and again faithfully picking us up as we've stumbled along the way. We are encouraging you too to die-to-yourself out of love for our Lord Jesus and to experience the divine interaction we've been privileged to participate in for so long through the Holy Spirit. You'll find, as we did, that the religious systems of Christianity leave you hungry and thirsty because they are too far removed from divine interaction. We've often wondered if the people who choose to remain in the passivity of religious complacency are there because they refuse to die-to-themselves and experience our Lord Jesus living through them. How scarce it is to encounter those who live actively as our Lord's redemptive ambassadors!

We'd like to share the thoughts of Corrie ten Boom on this matter from her writing, Losing Self for Jesus' Sake:

If you lose yourself for Jesus' sake, you cannot hold out on anything. No "excepts" are accepted! 

'"I said, 'Let me walk in the fields.' He said, 'No, walk in the town.' I said, 'There are no flowers there.' He said, 'No flowers, but a crown."' (George MacDonald)

"For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." (Matthew 6:21, KJV)

Lord Jesus, forgive my "excepts". I surrender anew and now totally. My mind and body may say I cannot, but with the help of the Holy Spirit, I can. God's resources are not limited to our natural abilities. We cannot use the excuse that we are not qualified. Remember the parable of the talents. "I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing" (John 15:5). Thank You, Lord, for the unlimited power with which You are at work in us who believe." 

"But I do it all things because of the gospel, in order that I may become a partaker of it with you" (1Corinthians 9:23, literal).

We'd like to close this email by recalling for you phone calls from two of Christ's redemptive ambassadors which we received many years ago while we were caring for Mike's mother until she went Home to her Lord. The first call was from a man in Texas who wanted to let us know how he was using our workbook Demolishing Strongholds. He told us that he regularly rents a conference room in a local motel for a Saturday and then advertises in the local newspaper a 'deliverance' workshop aimed specifically at unbelievers. (In his advertisement he included from our workbook some specific adverse symptoms which demonic strongholds produce in people.) The people who attended these workshops were helped to demolish their demonic strongholds in the Name of our Lord Jesus. Many, when they were free of demonic agitation and influence, sought to be born again. He then followed up with these newly reborn individuals to disciple them, and gathered them together in a Hebraic-based house church of communal righteousness. (We discuss the importance of communal righteousness and answered prayer in this Potpourri. Read it for yourself and discuss it with those close to you in Christ to see how you can help one another deepen this aspect of your walk in Jesus.)

The second phone call was from a Latino pastor from the Bronx, NY. He was eager to obtain copies of our book, Pastoring By Elders, since his congregation of about a hundred had swiftly grown to over two thousand. When Mike asked him how this had happened, the pastor told him that it was because he was using our Demolishing Strongholds workbook so the people in his flock could be free from demons and their influence in their lives. He went on to say that when the people in his congregation were free, they responded the way many in their culture are known for: telling others about the good thing they found! Those who became free by the authority and power of Lord Jesus went to their families, friends, co-workers, and neighbors, and helped them become free of the demons through the authority of Jesus. This led to many conversions and resulted in him pastoring over two thousand— far more followers of Jesus than he'd ever discipled! He knew he needed help, so he was looking for more copies of Pastoring By Elders to learn how he and other reliable older men could most effectively shepherd the people.

We share these two anecdotes with you not as an advertisement for our books (which are available free on our website), but for a far greater reason: To encourage you that Christians with a heart to live as redemptive ambassadors can accomplish much to bring glory to our Father and to lift up Jesus as Lord. Consider this biblical reality as we often do: 

If you have the Spirit of our Lord Jesus dwelling within you, then since Jesus died with a burden for the lost sinner and rose victoriously to make the Way for them, wouldn't His Spirit prompt those He indwells — you — to be a redemptive ambassador to lost sinners? It's painfully hard for us to picture someone in whom dwells the Spirit of our Lord not fulfilling His command in Matthew 28:18-20 out of grateful and obedient love.

Our daily prayer for you as you follow Jesus as your Lord and Savior is this: •that your life would glorify our Father as by grace you fulfill His purposes,• that you live under the rule of our Lord Jesus in loving and obedient trust, •that you yield to and are guided by His Spirit, •that you live repentantly so that you are fully available for how He would use you, and •that the aroma of our Lord Jesus emanates from you and His Light shines through you. It's up to you to make our prayer real for yourself!

Mike & Sue