No matter where Chelsea and I turned, we fought opposition and resistance. We could not abide in our usual places of comfort, so instead we stopped fighting The Deliverer and yielded to His call to the wild, uncharted desert, the place where most believers refuse to go, the narrow Way where sustenance comes only from the Bread which falls from Heaven and from waters which shoot forth from The Rock. Chelsea and I did not want to go where He was leading us, but we knew He had never failed us and we could trust Him no matter where He led us. He led us out of our churches, our jobs, our families and friends. He led us out to the place where we could hear Him and meet with Him. It was there that He revealed the joy found in keeping His Commandments. It wasn’t going to start with a long list, just Ten Instructions.
It was during this season that we began to come to know and love the rest that came from keeping the seventh day Sabbath as He said to do. One of The Ten Commandments that our doctrine of men inspired churches so quickly dismiss and instead obey the Universal Catholic doctrines of lawlessness, turned out to be one of the most powerful of them all.
We did our best with what we understood after simply reading His Word and seeking to obey it. So rather then wait around for someone else to tell us what to do, we obeyed Him and set apart one twenty four hour period on the seventh day to give to Him. As the sun set on Friday nights, we prayed as a family, often turning on worship music, and the three of us had our fellowship with The Father at home. Then we opened our Bibles and studied together. Chelsea – being raised in church her whole life – had never read through the entire Bible, so we started there. We began by reading it as a family and found blessings begin to flow. It was The Way of the called-out disciples of Yahweh and Yeshua for thousands of years, and it needed to be ours as well.
In all my life I have never felt the peace and the real presence of God come into a space like I do when we welcome The Father to be with us on Sabbath. The holy presence of The Creator would invade our home, and soon Chelsea and I would begin weeping and praying with words inexpressible. Although Naomi was often fussy and needing continual attention, she would suddenly grow still and completely content. Chelsea would dance with Naomi resting on her chest, tears freely flowing down her cheeks experiencing peace, safety, and relief. I could not contain myself and would fall on my face weeping uncontrollably, feeling the complete set-apartness of the Lord Our Righteousness in the presence of my own sin. It was as if I was a putrid decaying odor in a room, which had only ever been filled with the fragrance of a thousand orchids blooming out the purity of the heavenly kind.
I could not fathom why He would choose to be in our midst. Even as we felt the desperate wretchedness of our cursed flesh, we would be enveloped in a peace of forgiveness, love, and warmth. Our God is a consuming fire, and His presence was not cold, icy, and numbing, but it raised the temperature of the room in a moment and drove away our doubt and despair. He does not need to absorb energy when He comes to meet with us; instead, His presence fills our own with life itself. We soaked up His presence, longing for a thousand hours more but He lifted from us and left us with a rest no paid time off or vacation could provide. This and so much more was what was waiting for us every Sabbath.
How could this secret have been kept from us all our lives? Why would we not be partaking of this harvest waiting for each of us? We found the greatest of joys waiting when we surrendered to Him 24 hours of our lives, and when we showed our love for Him by obeying His Instructions. This shifted our focus from this world to His, from our wills being done to His being completed in us and through us.
Unlike the Jews of the House of Judah and the Lost Sheep of the House of Israel living during the first years after Messiah’s resurrection, I did not have an understanding of these truths and I’d not been taught how to walk in His ways. I did not yet know about Tzitzis, mixed fabrics or calendar debates, but I knew we could at least start by obeying the Ten Commandments. We started there and found our souls being satisfied and filled with the substance of things we’d always hoped for. It was finally a way our faith could find freedom in works done not out of obligation or legalistic despair but in love, excitement, and joy.
It was as if on The Sabbath The Father was closer to us, almost like The King would come down onto the battlefield and give out rest, insight, battle plans, and understanding needed for the week to come. There was no greater time for revelation on things once veiled and concealed. It was during this day we would pray and see prayers answered in miraculous ways, or read The Scriptures and see it come alive with insights, perspectives, and revelations once hidden from our sight. It was joy inexpressible and something my wife and I can’t imagine going a week without.
There is no better place to start to see for yourself what can happen when you obey His Instructions. Don’t panic and become legalistic, just start by opening His Word and following The Way Jesus lived from Genesis to His final Revelation. The first thing in all of creation that was ever set apart, ever called holy, was not a man, the seas, or even wondrous women. We are not the center of creation like we’ve been taught to believe. The first thing ever called holy was The Sabbath.
The Father encoded it into creation, into our literal DNA, so that day of rest would restore our body, spirit, and soul, bringing us lost sheep of The House of Israel closer to Him. It is the knitting together the torn and tattered threads of prodigals’ coverings into restored robes of righteousness which mark us as His beloved, set apart sons and daughters.
Walking The Way The Great Redeemer taught makes us set apart from this world to where we finally look like the image bearers of Yahweh we were made to be. Eating the Way He ate, celebrating the Way He celebrated His Father and resting the Way He rested were the foundations of our new way of living. These principles though are not ones experienced on “The Broad Way,” but instead, they are learned in The Wilderness.
We experienced the hard way that you cannot drag other proclaimed believers down this walk with you. As excited and passionate as Chelsea and I were about the blessings we were discovering in our new way of life, we experienced ambivalence and ignorance from those we tried to share this with.
We learned that many are not ready to receive this understanding and it is not our responsibility how people respond to truth. But we are responsible for how we go about introducing truth to others. If they choose not to join us on this path, we must still be able to maintain the fruits of The Set-Apart Spirit in how we treat others who do not agree with us. After all, each of us is responsible for walking The Way of our Messiah, and often this means that we will have to leave the ones we once loved to have a higher love and intimacy with our Creator instead. (Matt. 10)
Eating foods He told us to eat and observing The Sabbath is where we started. We did not know what it meant to follow The Loving Instructions of God, His Torah, fully, or what the Hebrew Roots or Messianic Movement was all about. We knew there were likely to be pitfalls, false sheep, and deceptions among many of the things some people in those movements were saying, but we also knew there was so much freedom and blessing in learning His Word and beginning to obey His Instructions. Because of this, we spent countless hours starting to test and examine the things we’d been raised to believe were true. I had to undo much of the lies I’d been raised to believe but so too did Chelsea.
Growing up all her life in mainstream corporate Christianity, Chelsea wrestled for so long with breaking out of the traditions she’d been raised to believe were good or what God wanted. The more she examined and studied the source of these practices and traditions, the more she learned how they were rooted in Egyptian and Babylonian paganism and were utterly at odds with the way God told us to worship Him. (Exodus 32, Leviticus 23, John 14:15) The most noticeable of these corrupt and deceitful traditions of men is The Sabbath and holidays.
Even a cursory basic testing to the doctrine of Sun Day worship will reveal it is based in the Egyptian and Babylonian mystery religions. The pagan origins and further endorsements came not from Yahweh but by the leaders of the same Roman Empire, which murdered Jesus and built a universal religion to seductively swallow up puritans and pagans alike.
Dedicated Sun Day worship came well before the formalization of this doctrine into “Catholic Law” with Constantine, The Council of Laodicea, and later again at The Council of Trent. This is because Sun Day was reserved as a day of worship to Tammuz or “the cross bearing Mithra” the so-called sun of god. It will reveal the origins are firmly rooted in disobedience and deception those two markers of The Dragon’s forked tongue and not The Word who became flesh. Even today worshiping on Sunday is an open marker of a church who has submitted itself to The Catholic Church.
Though The Protestants may have protested many heresy’s of Universal theology, they failed to protest enough. In many ways they chose not to actually guard The Body from all doctrines of disobedience. They did not choose to follow and obey The Messiah they claim as Lord. Martin Luther along with other key leaders of The Protestant’s infancy refused to obey The Scriptures on this doctrine. Instead they vehemently demanded people obey the doctrines of Catholicism and worship on the day the orgiastic, pedophilic pope Leo X, a Chosen One from The Medici Bloodline, said to worship rather than the day Yahweh set-apart.
By the same means our Universal Catholic and Christian churches had only ever taught us to celebrate the holidays of Easter (Ishtar) with the female fertility goddess’s rabbits and eggs, or to worship the birth of the sun god Ra/Nimrod on Christmas, convincing the sheep these were all about Jesus. (Jeremiah, Ezekiel, James, Ephesians) Even though most pastors when pressed as to the origins of these holidays admit that they are wholly rooted in Babylonian and Egyptian worship to other gods, they still justify their practice to Christians and adherence to them for all. Doing this robs The Body of Messiah of the blessings that come from worshiping God not the way we want to but rather in The Way He instructed us to. Instead, this earns us the ability to live our lives under a curse. Read the book of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua and Judges to understand just how The Father feels about us worshiping Him in ways He specifically forbids. If you are truly hungry to learn about our Redeemer, Psalm 119 is a quicker overview of understanding His Way.
Our priests and pastors never told us how to celebrate Yahweh’s Feast Days which are our way of practicing the prophetic fulfillment of Jesus’s first coming in The Spring Feasts like the exact day Jesus was impaled on the cursed tree during Passover and resurrected fulfilling the Feast of First Fruits. Keeping The Fall Feasts will help prepare us for His Second Coming. For the blessed fulfillment of the Great Days of Tribulation which will draw to a close and the final trumpet will blow, and then we will be resurrected and made to reign with our King forever after He throws the final Enemy Death into his place of eternal judgment. The Feasts are furthermore used as timepieces in judgment as well as blessing. For a more indepth, historical understanding of this I highly recommend Chad Schafer’s preeminant book, “The World in The Bondage of Egypt…Under the Triumphal Arch of Titus”
Learning about The Sabbath, eating the food He told us to, and celebrating The Feasts of Yahweh are a great place to start for all those who are trying to follow Jesus and walk The Way He walked. To learn how to be set apart and holy takes time. The beautiful thing is that this is what our lives are supposed to be about. They are supposed to be about us learning His ways, learning how to love Him and serve Him and fight for Him. There is so much to be learned when you begin to study these topics, and it can be overwhelming at first, but be patient with the process. There are so many things to learn but trust that The Father will help you learn what is most important first. Like the council in Acts 15, there are some fundamentals that need to be adhered to first, then as you study The Prophets, The Writings, and The Instructions of Yahweh, you will mature in your walk and apply more and more of His Ways to your own life. This process is nothing less than what it really should be when we claim to be born again, to be birthed into a new Way of living.
The truth is that there were changes of identity occurring every day of my life: changes from a murderer to merciful, from a son of Belial to a son of The Living God. Some of those changes came quickly, but others did not. There is only One who can change a leopard’s spots or can make a wolf into a lamb. He alone could change the fabric of my being and with it change my future. The work He was doing in our wounded hearts was writing hope upon the canvas of despair. Without His Holy Hand pressing the Word to the fabric of our hearts we could never have known the pen would be mightier than the sword.