Michael Stein writes:

THE LIGHT

. . . "One evening late in July when I had retired, I had fallen into a sound sleep.

I suddenly felt a touch on my right hip, and the touch was a healing touch. It was full of peace, life, and well-being.

It was a gentle experience, and then the Lord spoke to me and called me by my name "Michael." When he spoke to me, he was calling me to Him.

I was pulled upward above my body and was turned over so that I could see my body laying below me in bed.

"What do you see, and how do you feel?," I was asked.

At first, I had great difficulty believing what I was looking at, but I was not distressed. In fact, I was undistressable.

What I was seeing and what I was feeling were perfect questions at the moment. I was experiencing my spirit without my body.

The real me was much different in spirit than who I was in my flesh. My spirit is the real Mike Stein.

What I was feeling allowed me to understand that when you are with God in the Spirit, all things are experienced in truth and in absolutes.

You cannot lie, and you don't want to. You cannot flatter God, and you are certainly not concerned about political correctness. With God your spirit has no desire for such absurd things.

At that moment, I was standing at the edge of a vast universe, which only God can fill, and His Words alone brought me to the very brink of it in an instant.

Asolutes can ONLY be imagined by human beings, because of the limited sensual nature of our flesh.

It is because of our fleshly nature that we are blind to spiritual truth.

When you are with God in the spirit all experiences are absolute. In spirit, when we decide something, we are compelled to experience an absolute, honest reality of truth and nothing else even makes any sense.

There, for the believer, honesty, integrity, love, and the noble aspects of human nature are perfected in His presence. They are made new, yet our individual personalities survive and their uniqueness is amplified in God's presence.

Intellect is heightened, but becomes submissive to virtue. Virtue means everything to God. When your spirit leaves your body to be with the Lord, true virtue not only survives, it is liberated, and in Christ it explodes into victory.

THE DARKNESS

I was then taken to the edge of a vast and dark emptiness. It was like an immense black hole, and I was pulled into it.

The darkness and fear of this place never ceased growing more intense. Hope was stripped away in an instant and fear became so real and intense that I could feel and see it squeezing my entire being tighter and tighter.

This experience is worse than dying 1,000 times. The life in me was so hated that the darkness literally raged against me to utterly destroy all that I cherished so dearly - everything that is both life and light.

Then a thin line of pure light penetrated the darkness from an immense, hopeless distance away, and struck me, and I heard a calm voice clearly say "Yield to Me."

In desperation, and with every ounce of what remained of my being I cried out, "I yield to the Lord."

Then off in a great distance, that seemed to be a universe away, I saw a great wall of pure bright light surging towards me at a tremendous speed. When it reached me it was like a giant tidal wave.

That light was the living word of God Himself, He came to rescue me with a fury that nothing in existence can resist. I was seeing Jesus in the act of my spiritual deliverance.

The darkness with all of its hate and fear could not withstand the light even though it held me firmly.

But give me up it did, and when the wall of light reached me, it passed right through every fiber of my being.

I was drenched in life that was indescribable and radiantly passionate. My spirit was carried along at an incredible speed and my spirit hit my body with a tremendous impact of pure life.

When the light faded, I was back in my body looking up.

God, His Word, His love, His light, and His Spirit in response to my faith-filled call to Him, set me free.

Scripture tells us clearly that the struggle between Darkness and Light is not just a metaphor of moral good versus evil. It is literally true, and our faith is mighty to the pulling down of spiritual strongholds that are real.

I believe in the Scripture that says, "those that call upon the Name of the Lord, shall be saved." And again, "if we have faith the size of a mustered seed and say to the mountain, move, it shall be done."

The darkness and the light were both absolutely real.

The darkness, in our life, will never give up. It is full of hate , deceit, and lies, and tries to destroy us all.

Yet if we set our gift of faith in motion, God will move heaven and earth with the breath of his word to gain the victory and enrich our spirit and our soul.

Jesus the man was the out-raying of the divine.

ABSOLUTE LOVE

This first experience was the one of faith, the second experience was the most profound, because it was one of love.

When God completed His work of faith in me, He came to me a second time late on a different night and touched me very gently on my back.

Even though I knew it was the Lord, I pulled away. He touched me a second time and called me 'Michael,' and I tried to convince myself that I was dreaming.

When He touched me the third time the power of His virtue was so strong that when I sat up, I thought my spirit had been pulled right out of my body.

I was surprised to find that I was still in my body. The room was pitch black, but the spirit of peace was so heavy on me that I moved to the edge of the bed, and put my feet on the floor.

I then rubbed each of my feet on the carpet to make sure that I could feel them. I savored this experience for quite a few moments.

When I was sufficiently convinced that I was not alone, I prayed out loud, "Lord I know that You are here," and He said to me in an audible voice, "Why do you love Me?"

The sound of His words cut through me and laid my seemingly empty heart bare before Him. I was completely unprepared to answer this question,

. . . up from my spirit the answer came, and I said, "I don't know who loves you Lord, but You know."

My words were not framed by my mind. The words were from my spirit and Jesus was speaking through me and for me.

It was then that God filled me with His love. It wasn't love fit for any man/sinner like me, but He poured it out like an ocean of pure water in such vast quantities of pulsing life, that it seemed almost wasteful to be loved this much.

The feeling of acceptance was so absolute, I could not describe it. He held my spirit close to Him, as if I were a lost son who had returned home to a Father that I never knew I had.

The quality of God's love permeates and floods our spirits with the very essence of what God is.

His greatest power is His love, and when we rend our hearts and not our garments, we lay our hearts bare, and his love can reach us anywhere and under any conditions.

This is the power that the very gates of Hell itself cannot prevail against. This is the love that motivates the redemption of a blind and hopeless humanity, framed in a man named Jesus the Messiah of Israel.

The price of my redemption alone was so extraordinarily great that to this day, I am still trying to comprehend it.

This story is not over. It was just the start of God's ongoing work of His absolute love. My hope is that His love may touch you too. His mercy is unfailing.

REFERENCES

Eph 3:9-10, "...and to bring to light what is the administration of the mystery which for ages has been hidden in God, who created all things; in order that

the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in heavenly places."

Joel 2:13 - Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the LORD your God,

for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity.

Hebrews 1:1-4 - In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways,

but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe.

The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.

After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.

John 1:1-5 - In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.

In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.