Breakthrough Comes by Revelation
Breakthrough comes by revelation. I learned that in a dialysis chair, at the end of everything I knew how to do. No doctor could help me. My husband could not help me. My pastor could not help me. No one could help me but Jesus, and I had to receive Him by revelation. Revelation power is what breaks a thing open, and it comes to the person who has taken the position of sitting and listening.
That position has to be built before the crisis arrives. Fifteen minutes a day in the Word will save a believer years of grief. The Bible is paramount because it keeps a person grounded and keeps them from becoming strange.
Breakthrough also requires faith, and people make faith far more difficult than it is. Every believer has already acted in faith. If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, then salvation follows (see Romans 10:9). That is faith, and it has already been done.
The next step is knowing what belongs to you. A believer who does not know what they inherited through Jesus’ death and resurrection will go through things that were never necessary. However, when you know your identity, that changes the playing field. To identify means to make identical, to treat as one and the same. Once we accept Jesus as our Lord, we inherit His identity and become identical to Him. We are one in the same. Everything He is and everything He has is identical in us.
Consider a bone marrow transplant. When it is successful, doctors have to explain that the patient’s DNA is no longer entirely their own, because it changes to match the donor. Every believer has received a transplant from Jesus. Saying yes to Him makes us one and the same.
A New Creation in Christ
God did in Christ what He intended to put in every person. Everything placed in Jesus was placed there for the purpose of going into a human life. A believer is not meant to approximate Jesus at a distance, but to carry Him.
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.
—2 Corinthians 5:17
Notice the word, “anyone.” This verse does not describe churchgoers who punch a card at Christmas and Easter. To become new means to become a new species. You are no longer anything you resembled before. The spirit is regenerated and reconnected to the Father.
The closest example of the process of regeneration is the caterpillar. Inside the cocoon, it completely breaks down into liquid, then reforms into a different creature. Similarly, when we receive salvation, we become a new creation in Christ and are transformed into a completely new kind of human being. Jesus was the prototype, the firstborn among many brethren (see Romans 8:29).
There is a difference worth understanding between the Gospels and Paul’s letters. The Gospels tell what happened to Christ and what men saw of Christ. Paul’s letters tell what happened in Christ and what God sees. Anyone who has never studied the phrases in Him, in whom, and in Christ should take a Bible and start underlining them, because each one describes what believers have received from God in salvation. He has made us righteous.
This identification is the foundation of faith itself. No struggling is required to make it happen, because God produced the grace to believe and receive. Receiving a promise is like opening a gift that turns out to be a picture and a receipt rather than the thing itself. Nothing tangible has arrived, yet the right response is gratitude, because the relationship is trustworthy. When God promises that He will do something, it is similar to the receipt showing that the gift is already on its way. We grow in our relationship with Him by trusting His Word the way we trust the receipt.
That is where praise stands against circumstances. I am not going to let my circumstances override what the Word of God says about me. Whatever a man sows, that he shall also reap, and God is not mocked (see Galatians 6:7). I refuse to insult the living God about what He has already said concerning me.
Paul called himself a man in Christ, and what is true of one man in Christ is true of any man in Christ. Some days I walk through my house saying out loud, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (see Galatians 2:20). This is a confession, and every believer should say it.
The past does not get a vote in this. Bad decisions do not make a person, and neither do the opinions of a mother, a father, or anyone else. Where sin abounded, grace abounded much more (see Romans 5:20). The old man was crucified with Him so that no believer would remain a slave to sin (see Romans 6:6). Anyone living under condemnation needs to shut that door and begin confessing righteousness in Jesus instead.
Knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more. Death no longer has dominion over Him. 10 For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. 11 Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
—Romans 6:9-11
Buried, Raised, and Seated Together
Believers practice identification in Christ in two ways. First, water baptism: a person is buried with Him, raised with Him, and brought into new life. The second is communion, where the bread and the cup represent His body and His blood.
And when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, “Take, eat; this is My body which is broken for you; do this in remembrance of Me.” 25 In the same manner He also took the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in My blood. This do, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me.” 26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death till He comes.
—1 Corinthians 11:24-26
Communion is done in remembrance of Him, and in doing this we proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes. To proclaim is to put a decree into operation by official declaration. It is the same word used at a wedding, when two are pronounced husband and wife.1 Every demon in hell hears that the two have become one. Every time a believer receives communion, a decree goes out: We belong to the body of Christ, and we remember all that He has given us through His death and resurrection.
That declaration has an audience. I was buried, raised up, and seated together with Him. Anything the enemy tries to place on a blood-bought believer after that is illegal. Sickness is illegal against a covenant right with Jesus, and it has no authority to stay.
But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) 6 and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
—Ephesians 2:4-6 KJV
Acts 19 shows what happens without a relationship with Jesus. The sons of Sceva came against demons in the name of the Jesus whom Paul preached, and the answer came back that Jesus was known and Paul was known, but they were not. Authority follows identity, and identity follows relationship.
To be quickened is to be made alive. Even in a state of death, God made us alive together with Christ and gave us the same identical life. Jesus said it plainly:
Most assuredly, I say to you, he who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life. 25 Most assuredly, I say to you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God; and those who hear will live. 26 For as the Father has life in Himself, so He has granted the Son to have life in Himself.
—John 5:24-26
The life mentioned in John 5:24-26 develops the spirit and increases the intellect. The Holy Spirit gives wisdom and will make a person smarter than they have any business being. Praying in the Spirit is part of receiving wisdom from Him, because the Spirit prays while the natural mind would only get in the way. After praying in the Spirit, I ask for the interpretation of what I prayed, and an answer that once took days now takes moments.
The Good Fight of Faith
Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life, to which you were also called and have confessed the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.
—1 Timothy 6:12
There is a fight involved in a breakthrough. The Bible instructs us to fight the good fight of faith. A believer does not stay down in the realm of reason and natural circumstance. The circumstance gets pulled up into faith, where a new creation operates on an entirely different level.
Offense and unforgiveness show up in that fight more often than people admit. In the beginning, it is only temptation, and it becomes sin once a weak moment turns into unforgiveness. Carrying unforgiveness is like standing in a bell tower and pulling the rope, and the ringing goes on and on because someone keeps pulling it.
Forgiveness is a faith act, and it is done with the mouth. The father of the sick child said that he believed and asked the Lord to help his unbelief (see Mark 9:24), and the same prayer works here. “Lord, I forgive, and I ask You to help me forgive, because I do not know how to do this yet.” That is letting go of the rope. The bell rings for a while afterward, and the farther a person walks from it, the quieter it becomes. I have made that decision and been healed instantly of things I was not even praying about.
On the other side of that fight, a person is finished with being a victim. Once a thing has been beaten, it can be beaten again, and eventually it stops knocking on the door. The same is true of finances. I will never forget the moment we beat poverty. It was a revelation and a marked difference in our lives, and we have said ever since that we will never be broke again.
Israel watched the Red Sea open and then stood in the wilderness asking whether God had brought them out there to die. It is possible to see a miracle and lose the thread of it. God is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think (see Ephesians 3:20), and a believer in sync with Him will end up saying, “Wow!”
Hold Fast to the Confession
During some of the most difficult points in my life, I learned to get into the Word of God and into a Jesus bubble where I needed to know Him. I was in dialysis for three and a half hours a day. The first forty-five minutes are an adrenaline surge because of what the machines do to a body, and I decided I was not going to let the enemy use those minutes for fight or flight. I used them to dig into the Word of God and find out who I was in Christ, because I was getting out of there.
When the adrenaline came down and I could no longer read, I put the Word of God in my ears and listened to it. I reached the point where I saw everything through the Word. I dreamed it, and I woke up seeing it. That is the washing of the water of the Word, renewing a mind until the truth moves past mental assent and drops into the heart, where it becomes revelation (see Ephesians 5:26).
The spirit is the real self. When I died and saw my body on the table, there was no fear in it at all. I looked at myself and thought, that is me. The distance between here and there is thin and immediate, and a person moves at the speed of thought. Feelings live in the soul—the mind, will, and emotions—and they will lie. The spirit is what was regenerated back to Jesus, and it has to be fed whether it feels like anything or not.
The spirit, which is built that way, meets the storm before the mind and the emotions ever arrive. That is why I could laugh when doctors told me I was going to die. I was not laughing at them. I was laughing at my circumstances, because I was fully persuaded that I was whole and well.
Never let a struggle become an identity. A person may struggle, but those struggles are still not who that person is. This is not denial about a real situation. It is a refusal to grant that situation the right to stay.
But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.
—Romans 8:11
The Spirit that took Jesus out of the lowest pit and raised Him to the highest place is the same Spirit that lives inside a believer. The kingdom of darkness works constantly to get a believer to deny their identity in Christ, but the enemy does not get to have it. When he comes with his suggestions and lies, your answer must be spoken out loud, “That is a lie.”
God has a long reputation for working with misfits. All through the Bible, He takes the eccentric and the overlooked and turns them into champions. We need to put on the new man (see Colossians 3:10). There is nothing to create, because it is finished and only has to be put on. The work of the Holy Spirit is to take everything that is in Christ and translate it into a life.
Revelation is where breakthrough lives, and it arrives all at once. Something changes on the inside of a believer, and from that moment forward that person begins to live victoriously. Scripture tells us to hold fast our confession, because we have a great High Priest who sympathizes with our weaknesses and invites us to come boldly to the throne of grace (see Hebrews 4:14-16). To “hold fast” means to fasten yourself, and a believer fastens by what comes out of the mouth.2
Read the Word until it starts talking back. Sometimes the confession has to get loud on the outside before it gets loud on the inside. Lord, open the eyes of our understanding. Give us a revelation of who we are in Christ, so that we no longer bow to anything that does not belong to us. As it says in 2 Corinthians 5:17, “old things have passed away, and behold, all things have become new.” He lives on the inside of me, and He lives on the inside of you.
For Jesus,
Heather Z
Notes:
- https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/proclaim
- https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hold%20fast
Click here to watch the full video.
