Shabbat shalom kol beit Yisra'el and mishpachah. Here is Sweden autumn (fall) has arrived and when the sun hides itself the cold is immediately apparent. We've actually had a couple of lovely sunny days and we have soaked them up as best we know how. For soon winter will come, a winter the likes of which nobody alive has ever experienced. You have a little over six weeks to prepare for it. Prepare for it well.

The last and most important prepartion we need to make, before Yom Teruah (Day of Trumpets/Shouting) on 1 October this year, is ourselves. The world as we have known it is about to be shattered into millions of little pieces and only the presence of the Living Elohim (God) in your life is going to enable us to reconstruct meaningful and productive lives afterwards. Nothing will ever be the same again. In a short time you will look back on today and it will seem like a distant dream, even a utopia of sorts, and you will remember it as being even greener than it really was. But that is what happens when the world dramatically changes.

A footnote, as it were, to my remarks about 1 October. There are false prophets out there, in the same spirit as the late and discredited Harold Camping, who are saying the 'rapture' will occur at that time. Many false prophets ride on aspects of the true sayings of true prophets, bend them to fit into their own preconceived theologies and then claim them as their own. I guarantee there will be no rapture of believers to heaven on 1 October 2016. Rather, the rapturists will 'remain' and pass through the coming dress-rehearsal tribulation, as they will in the Great Tribulation. How many false rapture prophecies does the Body need to be convinced this is a false doctrine?

Back to preparedness. I grew up in a home with older parents than most of my contemporaries. Both my parents had been married before (my father was deserted and my mother was a war widow) so I arrived into the world when they were in their 40's. I was brought up on stories from the Second World War, of life how it had been before that great cataclysm. Indeed, my father was born before the First World War broke out, and my mother in the year Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was assassinated by a Serbian terrorist. My father could even recall as a boy watching a zeppelin on a bombing raid over south-east England toward the end of that Great War 'to end all wars'. I used to enjoy his stories as an aerodrome camoflage officer, especially the one of a dummy aerodrome he was in charge of building to fool the Germans. But they were not fooled and in good humour sent over some Heinkel He 111's and dropped wooden bombs on it for his and their amusement. Hillarious!

My parents' friends, being of approximately their own age group, added to the kalaidoscope of stories that held me spell-bound as they were recounted to me as a boy growing up in the Far East. Stories of the death railway in Burma (now Myanmar) where my godfather and uncle were prisoners, Malaya and Singapore under the Japanese occupation, Luftwaffe bombing raids over Coventry in England (when my mother was nearly killed by a bomb), stories of torpedoed merchantmen in the Mediterranean, and the father of one school friend who was a British spy in the Wehrmacht. I heard about life in the 1920's and 1930's, the deprivations of working class people, the slums, and the simplicity and challenges of life in general. Life was simpler, washing clothes was done by hand, and borax was the main all-purpose cleansing agent.

I was brought up by parents who had lived through the austerity of war and was taught to 'waste not, want not', to eat every last scrap of food, even to wiping the last drop of gravy off my plate with bread so that at the end of the meal you'd never know the plates had been eaten off. I learned to carefully save, not to spend beyond my means, never to borrow money or buy with credit, to be polite and show kindness to others. Their values were passed down to me and I have attempted to pass many of these on to my own children. We are going to need many of these attitudes of thrift and carefulness as the 'throw-away' culture disappears overnight. We'll again start repairing things instead of throwing them away and learn to be more grateful for the little things as life gets tougher. I realise you brethren from third world countries will be smiling as you hear or read this because you already know what real hardship is. Be patient with us - we have been spoiled for far too long and have much to learn from you. We have all got to learn how to survive on very little.

Ours is a spoiled and careless, a self-indulgent and violent, generation. I have no doubt many of you have been following the race rioting in Milwaukee provoked by the black equivalent of the KKK or BLM ('Black Lives Matter'). Some of you are probably living in cities were the achievements of the second half of the 20th century have all but been wiped out. Chicago is a gangster city again and crime syndicates are even employing snipers to kill policemen. Soon it will be a no-go area for law enforcement. We are already shocked by that though really this is nothing compared to what's coming.

I said at the beginning that the last preparation that must be made, after all your provisions for collapse have been taken care of, if yourselves. Of course, it should have been the first and ongoing provision that you made because if you're not right with Yahweh when everything collapses, you're going to have a far roughter ride of it. I sometimes hear the excuse, 'Oh, well, my heart is right with Yahweh!' And that, of course, is a good thing. Giving your heart to Yah'shua (Jesus) is of vital importance. But it's not going to be nearly enough. We give our hearts to all kinds of people all the time. Yahweh doesn't just want your heart, my friend, He wants your whole life!

I hear a lot of tosh from people who claim they are "filled with the Spirit", people whose lives don't belong to Yahweh even though they have convinced themselves that they do. Their wordly living testfies against them. Oh, they're 'filled' alright, but not with the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit) but filled with other spirits, with a heafty dollop of themselves in the mix. There's a supernatural presence in them and they know it. They can feel it because it gives them 'highs' but it is not Yahweh's Ruach (Spirit). They are filled with deceiving spirits that assure them worldliness is OK, that complete and total consecration and obedience to Yahweh is not necessary. And they have the twisted theology of lawless teachers to back up their desires.

Yahweh wants our whole life, our whole being, our time, our interests, our passions, our very essence. As you have probably realised from this short description, that does not leave a whole lot left for 'self'. It is easy to be 'religious' but religiosity does not equate with spiritual life. Most religious people are spiritually dead. What they are doing is acting out being spiritually alive. It's a drama, a play, a theatre production of the soul, made easier when others are doing the same thing and everyone in the group can assure one another that they're on the right path. Religion, indeed, can become one of the greatest obstacles to a spiritual life.

Yah'shua (Jesus) does nothing by halves and neither do His true talmidim (disciples):

"I have come that they (the talmidim) may have life, and have it to the full" (John 10:10, NIV).

You might even say that Yah'shua (Jesus) operates a binary system when it comes to spirituality - it's either plus or minus, full or empty. He makes it clear that what interests Him is "the full", not the 'half full'. he wants everything from us and promises to give everything He has...which is infinitely more than we could ever give. That sounds like a pretty good deal to me. Whatever we give, He pays with interest by many orders of magnitude, whether in this life or the next.

It is so easy to blithely tell Yah'shua (Jesus) that we "give Him all" but do we seriously think through our declarations? Are we even aware that we are making a vow when we say such things that He expects us to keep? Yet again and again Scripture makes clear what the magnitude of our surrender is supposed to be and what is expected of us, required as we are to "take captive every thought to make it obedient to Messiah" (2 Cor.10:5, NIV). How ordered is your personal thought life? How clean is it? How Yahweh-honouring?

In the six weeks ahead there is much work to be done, much surrendering is required. Only then will we have any real hope of surviving and flourishing in the months and years ahead after Yom Teruah. In order to give your whole life to Yahweh, there are things in your life that need to be confessed, renounced and washed away by faith in the blood of Messiah. Until that is done, the Enemy will steal more and more of our lives because of the sin-induced barriers between us and Elohim (God) robbing us of our communion with Him.

The men must get their lives right first because they are the leaders of their homes so it's them I am addressing now. Just under a week ago, as I awoke I heard Yahweh say very clearly that the men should go into spiritual warfare and renounce the spirit of self-emasculation. This demonic spirit is strong in the world at the current time, strongly driving the ubiquitous feminism of the West, it purpose being to spiritually eviscerate men by destroying their gender identity and power thus preventing them from operating in their Yahweh-assigned gender rôle as leaders. This spirit is rendering them weak and impotent in the spiritual domain.

Three days before this I was awakened to see a vision of a woman's face. Under each eye were two overlapping, downward-pointing traingles, one grey (overlapped) and one black.According to my understanding these are the spirits of Hecate and Lilith which between them, operating as they do in tandem, that are the chief cause of this emasculation. Men and women alike need to study the traits of these demons and deal with them in their lives. For families to operate in the Ruach (Spirit) effectively these two must be gone.

Yahweh wants your life, not just your heart. He wants you voluntarily submit yourself to Him so that He can remove the masks we wear of pride, perfectionism, jealousy, self-loathing, self-pity, frustration, and aggressivess, to name but a few of the most common issues that believers struggle with. Ask Yahweh to reveal the emet (truth) of your condition, ask to be cleansed by embracing the emet (truth), confessing guilt, and receiving the cleansing atonement of Messiah. Then he will remove the sin that is giving these demons legal rights to emasculate and eviscerate.

Once you have emptied yourself of these sins, relinquishing them, and have allowed Yah'shua (Jesus) to fill you up with Himself, confess:

"Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Messiah Yah'shua (Christ Jesus)" (Rom.8:1, NIV).

Many believers are sincerely asking to be filled with the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit) at this time, and this is a good thing. But they are puzzled as to why so often nothing is happening. The reason they are not being filled is because they are too full of themselves. And being so full of themselves, there was simply no room for the Ruach (Spirit)! Only when you have died to yourself - to self-will - can you actually be filled with His Ruach (Spirit)!

That's the key. That is the condition for entering the Sanctuary and specifically into the Holy of Holies. And to do this each day, and be there each day, you have to die to yourself EVERY DAY:

"I have been crucified with Messiah and I no longer live, but Messiah lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by emunah (faith) in the Son of Elohim (God), who loved me and gave Himself for me" (Gal.2:20, NIV).

You have to get rid of the OSAS or 'Once saved, always saved' mentality. Self-crucifixion is an attitude that must be maintained and daily renewed by refocussing on Yah'shua (Jesus) until it becomes habitual. Why? Because it is so easy to lose our Messiah-focus, it is so easy to drift into the flesh on account of the pull of its spiritual gravity. Each day we must acknowledge what has been done for us on the cross and abide in it. That is what is meant by working our your salvation day by day:

"Continue [daily] to work out your salvation with fear and trembling..." (Phil.2:12, NIV).

This attitude of maintained salvation which allows for spiritual filling (to the brim and overflowing - Ps.23:5) is, when you boil it down, what a truly consecrated life is. In effect, such dying to self means you are happy to physically die if Yahweh wants to bring you home:

"If we live, we live to the Master; and if we die, we die to the master. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Master" (Rom.14:8, NIV).

I'll be the first to admit this is scary. It scared Yah'shua (Jesus) as He wrestled in the Garden of Gethsemane, hoping He could circumvent death and atonement! It is a human thing to be want to cling onto life. But becoming an overcomer - for real - inevitably takes you to the point of being willing to make that Great Choice should Yahweh require it of you: the willingness to lay down your life.

One of the great readjustments that we have to make in order to come to the place of being willing to lay down our lives for Yahweh is to reverse fleshy priorities. If you ask most people what their priorities are it will usefully be something like this (particularly if it's a woman):

• 1. Children
• 2. Marriages
• 3. Jobs
• 4. Elohim (God)

The correct order ought to be:

• 1. Elohim (God)
• 2. Marriages
• 3. Children
• 4. Jobs

The Christian/Messianic faith is very simple: Yah'shua (Jesus) laid down His life and was resurrected so that you could be forgiven of sin, rise from the dead and have eternal chayim (life) with Him. All that he requires is that you be willing to lay down your life for Him in a similar way, either for consecrated service and in death when your time comes. The only way to be filled with the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit) is to have such a mind and heart, and only thus filled will you overcome and be triumphant in the tribulation which is on our doorsteps now. That is the message, plain and simple. May the grace of our Master Yah'shua the Messiah (Jesus Christ) and the fellowship of the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit) and the communion of the qadoshim (saints, set-apart ones) truly be yours, is my prayer in Yah'shua's (Jesus') Name. Amen.