Being led by the Spirit is one of the most talked about features of the Christian faith, but in many ways God’s original meaning has been lost and it’s become just another worn out cliché as a person struggles against sin barriers and personal issues. People want to be guided by the Holy Spirit without first being equipped to walk in the Spirit. And that’s the problem God is correcting in the church today.

So, what does it mean to be led by the Spirit and how do you know the Holy Spirit is leading you? There’s an easy answer to this question. Apostle Paul places the leading of the Holy Spirit within the new covenant stewardship of Jesus Christ because that’s how God equips you to walk in the Spirit, and that’s why God begins discipleship with the apostolic key. Let’s see how the Apostle Paul brings out this teaching point.

1 Corinthians 4:17
For this cause have I sent unto you Timotheus, who is my beloved son, and faithful in the Lord, who shall bring you into remembrance of my ways which be in Christ, as I teach every where in every church.

There’s a lot to unpack in this verse about how Jesus leads, guides, and teaches His church through His apostles. Our attention is brought squarely to the apostolic stewardship, as Apostle Paul says that all churches everywhere, all believers everywhere came into the faith through the same door of instruction.

When Apostle Paul says that believers should be in remembrance of “my ways” “as I teach” he was not talking about himself as a disciple of Jesus, but identifying Jesus in the calling he had received from God as an apostle. And this is something he restates over and over again in the beginning of his epistles – Paul an apostle of Jesus Christ.

– Not Paul the missionary.
– Not Paul the apologist.
– Not Paul the disciple.

Paul identifies his calling as an apostle and God wants that to resonate with you to re-educate you about discipleship.

Paul an apostle of Jesus Christ: one who holds the blueprint of truth that Jesus entrusted to His apostles to teach His church how to follow Him.

When Apostle Paul said that we should be in remembrance of his ways, he was not referring to his own private study of the scriptures, or his own independent ministry vision, but rather the way of the covenant, and so he points that out, saying, “my ways which be in Christ.”

In Christ means in covenant, or according to Jesus’ covenant. Are your ways in Christ? Are your ways according to Jesus’ new covenant? Those are the questions to be answered to determine if you are being led by the Holy Spirit.

Jesus Christ is the door to a new covenant God made with us for our redemption to be sealed in Him. In Him – in Jesus – is all the new knowledge and spiritual tools that the Holy Spirit now acts upon as God’s living witness.

God is correcting the idea that the Holy Spirit will lead and guide us through our personal issues rather than lead and guide us through the covenant of Jesus Christ to confirm God’s new work in the inner man. And so, Apostle Paul is obedient to God as he points to the role of the apostolic calling to teach God’s blueprint of truth, which is His game plan.

In the false church body, it is believed that disciples create disciples, but as we just saw in 1 Corinthians 4:17 that is not the pattern God set in Jesus for us to follow. That’s not God’s game plan.

All Christians are discipled into the faith in the same way, through apostles who are the ones doing the teaching. And that one foundation of truth they teach is transferred to the other callings of God’s government, and we all teach the same doctrine of Christ to the church and to the world. (Acts. 2:42; Eph. 3:4; 1 Cor. 3:10)

The foundation of truth must be set in the heart. It is impossible to walk in the Spirit until the new covenant terms and conditions that God initiated to take effect are sustained for increase. This understanding and new rhythm of the Spirit must be rooted firmly in your understanding.

In Romans chapter 8 Apostle Paul builds a contrast between the fleshly kingdom where we all found our footing before covenant and our new foundation and footing in the knowledge of Jesus’ covenant and how we now build with God as we draw from that.

Romans 8:5-6,14
⁵ For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit.
⁶ For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.
¹⁴ For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.

We see the contrast in verses 5 and 6. God’s expectation is to empower our faith with His spiritual tools for our reciprocation to Him. God’s expectation is that we would use His tools (the things of the Spirit, vs. 5) to reciprocate Christ.

By divine design, God set a standard for our faith that we cannot reciprocate to Him anything that is less than what He is. God uses apostolic stewardship to set the example, to ensure that the truth that is built in the heart is in fact Jesus’ essential elements.

The need to start our faith with Jesus’ essential elements (God’s building blocks) is vital for the divine exchange and process of regeneration to direct the flow of grace as we draw from Jesus rather than self. In this way, Jesus’ essential elements set the tone for our priesthood – how we exchange the grace of God with one another to build each other up in the faith.

Apostle Paul brings to light the necessary division between the kingdom of the flesh and the kingdom of God so that the two are not confused. We are walking after a different pattern, and so Apostle Paul says, “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.” (Romans 8:1)

Apostle Paul is saying that it is impossible for the natural man to reciprocate to God. This is an important point to take on. We cannot draw from ourselves to reciprocate to God. We cannot draw from our own nature, from our personal issues to reciprocate to God. These are not God’s building blocks.

We cannot walk in the flesh and expect to be led by the Spirit.

Everywhere we look at the landscape of the church, we see how ministers of the gospel skipped over God’s essential key that apostles teach believers how to walk in Jesus’ covenant. Its like they took an eraser to blot out what they did not want.

There is a domino effect to that bad leadership in that believers also skip over the foundation of truth and neglect God’s commandment that we are to be equipped with the spiritual things of Christ to serve Him and build with Him.

Skipping over the apostolic key has disastrous results: a shift takes place as believers are encouraged to approach God with their personal issues, hoping He would transform them into Christ-like character development. Instead of being led by the Spirit, the Holy Spirit is made to serve them, to keep them in line by convicting them of sin, which is a deadly mistake, which has deadly consequences.

In truth, God created a growth cycle that He modeled after Jesus where the Holy Spirit officiates over the development of the fruit of Christ in the inner man. The cost of neglecting God’s essential apostolic key means that believers are led to construct their own concepts about spiritual growth that are not connected to God.

We can see that truth in the false church body is dangerously self-referencing – it’s made to serve self, which is contrary to God. God designed truth to reference Jesus Christ and therefore He fit truth with Jesus’ 12 key elements and defined them according to Jesus’ covenant to build a path for us to walk with Him.

Believers who neglect the apostolic calling are trying to live the Christian life in a vacuum. They are taught to draw from their own nature to see how they might complete their struggle against sin. And this is why God is striking a blow against false discipleship.

Sin is not God’s platform.

Rather than have sin inform your faith, God designed righteousness to inform your faith. Righteousness is one of Jesus’s essential elements and God designed a divine synergy between the element righteousness and the elements rest, truth, and justification to complete your faith in Jesus.

The Christian life cannot be lived in a vacuum – without Jesus and His apostolic stewardship and without His covenant knowledge, His essential elements, and tools. Jesus will only mediate on our behalf according to the grounds of His covenant and that’s why our obedience is required to take on what God initiated to work in us His divine nature.

You may find yourself saying, “I hear a lot about apostles and Jesus’ new covenant, and the need to know the terms of contact God initiated, and the need to build with Jesus’ elements and the spiritual tools that He gifted the church, and the importance of the new priesthood we have in Jesus.

What does it all mean? I don’t know what ‘elements’ are and why they matter and why I should know anything about them. Can’t I just skip all of that and just lean on the Spirit to walk with God and grow spiritually?”

The answer is no. That is a stripped back version of the gospel where all the essential elements of Jesus’ covenant are either removed or repurposed to define the issues of life. That’s false discipleship.

A word of knowledge God ministered for this article is “pressing flesh”, and most people recognize what that is because of the political climate in which we live. Pressing (the) flesh is often said of politicians who want to send a message that they are in touch with the needs of the people.

Their in-person contact is supposed to inspire trust through contact to convey the all-important message that says, “I know the issues that matter to you the most, and I want you to know that they matter to me.”

We know that politicians famously promise one thing while they do another, so God uses the word of knowledge to bring something out into the open, to reveal how those who have assumed spiritual leadership in the church are doing the same thing.

They share meaningful connections to what believers feel the heart wants (to get closer to God, to get stronger in the faith, to know the will of God), but they build a path to that promise in the kingdom of the flesh where it will never be realized. This is not the leading of the Spirit.

Going back to Romans 8:5, Apostle Paul says, “For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit.”

God is correcting the habit of ministers to gain the trust of the people by preaching a fleshly gospel that is focused on their personal issues. To press (the) flesh is to use the things of a person’s day-to-day struggles, dreams, concerns, hopes and worries to build bridges to your message and vision. This is not regeneration.

So, God’s correction cannot be ignored. When decisions are made for Jesus in the absence of His covenant and apostolic stewardship, we see an emergence of the hokum discipleship that would define the rest of their Christian experience—in the absence of Christ. The pressed flesh gospel does not show the Christian life as it really is.

Pressing flesh simply makes disciples after yourself, but not disciples of Jesus.

The leading discipleship practice in the false church body is to scale back the covenant of Jesus. Christians are encouraged to take what they like and leave the rest, which says to God that Jesus’ covenant doesn’t matter to you.

This vague guidance that is camouflaged with the fleshly nature of man is the result of this personalized gospel that is empty of Christ. This era of spiritual abuse is thankfully over.

Such discipleship styles are frustrating to believers because they are not given a chance to work with the spiritual things that God set in place for them to succeed. We can’t co-labor with the Holy Spirit if we aren’t using the elements of the gospel, the spiritual tools, the apostolic stewardship and the priesthood that God placed in Jesus for our contact with Him.

The elements of the gospel, Jesus’ spiritual tools, our new priesthood, God’s apostolic stewardship… these are living things the Holy Spirit works with and empowers. They have to be in place before we can walk in them. If you’re not abiding in these things, it’s like living outside the house while desiring to benefit from what’s inside the house.

The Holy Spirit is God’s empowerment of His new covenant house and will only bear witness to Jesus’ knowledge and will only confirm His covenant stewardship and tools. Our sanctified exchange with God happens in the environment God created for us to commune with Him. It is in this environment that He will assist us and guide us on this new path to create Christ in us.

As God breaks up discipleship in the false church body, we also see the changing tides in prophecy. All true prophets confirm the same covenant path and house of Jesus Christ, and His apostolic stewardship. This testimony of Jesus that God builds in the heart by the anointing is the Spirit of prophecy. (Rev. 19:10)

It’s easy to say that all of these things that God put in Jesus for us to connect to Him are put in the hands of the Holy Spirit, but in fact God put them in the hands of Jesus’ apostles. When we look at the church today, we can see that the mystery of Christ remains a mystery when apostles are not teaching Jesus’ covenant.

God’s expectation to equip and disciple His saints begins with apostolic stewardship.

God made this known when Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to set the pattern for us to overcome ourselves, Satan, and the world. Jesus, the Son of God and Apostle of our faith was led by the Spirit into the challenge to become the only true and living scale by which we weigh our faith. (Lk. 4:1; Heb. 3:1)

Did you know: The first thing Satan challenged was Jesus’ stewardship. The devil said, “If you be the Son of God …” Satan pointed out what he thought Jesus must be struggling with (the contradiction of sinners against Himself) and then promised to be the power to bring sinners into subjection to Him. (Lk.4:6)

Satan quoted scripture to justify how he was leading Jesus into the will of God. But Jesus knew the plan of God to begin a new covenant through His blood and He chose to remain obedient to God and pointed out where the scriptures confirmed that. (Lk. 4:8)

This was not a battle of scripture against scripture, it was Satan’s move against stewardship to suggest to Jesus that God’s plan to initiate a new covenant was insufficient and that Jesus should access Satan’s counsel and power if He wanted to move forward to realize His dreams.

Satan suggested that Jesus needed to accept his counsel and he showed Jesus how to join scripture to His aspiration to allow His aspiration to become the voice of God for change. Of course, Jesus discerned and rejected Satan’s vision and his fallen wisdom.

We see a disturbing pattern: Satan attempted to lead Jesus by the scriptures he selected that he thought pointed out Jesus’ struggle. Satan used scripture to lead and guide Jesus’ perception.

The same thing is happening today. Satan created another system to lead believers to follow scripture in an effort to carve out a faith for themselves that speaks to them in the voice to their struggle and personal issues that circle around what they know naturally.

The false church body struggles against their fallen nature and that struggle has become the foundation of their faith and voice of conviction they think is the Holy Spirit. In other words, their area of struggle is their starting point to reason with God. Their transparency is iniquity, and when the role of the Holy Spirit is assigned to lead in this struggle, your faith is sadly assigned there too and faith crisis is the result.

What we learn is that when your faith is trapped in the false religious system, it’s impossible to describe your faith apart from your struggle. But in covenant, faith is described by all the things God placed in Jesus for us to reciprocate to Him. Do you see the difference?

Always remember: Even though two kingdoms are present, that of the flesh and that of the Spirit, a divine work is taking place in us, and we reflect on the divine work in our priesthood, and our sins and iniquities are no longer brought to mind. God is not teaching us to press flesh.

God is setting the captive free. You can be confident that the Holy Spirit is not leading you into the struggle. That’s the fleshly priesthood of this world.

– The struggle of life is NOT the basis of fellowship (exchange).
– The nature of man is NOT the basis of fellowship (exchange).
– The needs of the flesh are NOT the basis of fellowship (exchange).
– The history of the natural man is NOT the basis of fellowship (exchange).

God lifts up His voice through His apostolic stewards of grace to counter Satan’s voice. So then, God set the pattern of stewardship in Jesus.

How does God lead? He leads through His apostles.

Apostles guide believers through the daily experience of regeneration as you progress with the tokens of Christ. This is something Apostle Eric vonAnderseck continues to focus on as he leads the church back to Jesus’ covenant. You can’t just read the Bible and expect this mystery to unfold for you. You have to be taught.

We see how God first announced to the world that Jesus, His Son is His steward. He will lead us and give us a new covenant in His blood that will house our faith in His righteousness where our faith will never fail to please God. Let’s read that scripture now.

Matthew 3:17
And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

God leads by stewardship. God established His voice in Jesus and then extended His voice to His apostles and His apostles gave the word that they received from God to the people. (Jn. 17:8, 17-20)

Moses is another example of God leading by stewardship. Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt and into the promised land. (Ex. 3:6-10)

Apostle Eric vonAnderseck describes the links of our faith according to God’s divine design in Jesus Christ, saying: “Think of discipleship training as links in the chain of our faith that tethers us to God. The first 3 links are government (apostolic governance), truth (the foundation knowledge), and Spirit (the seal, power, and confirming, living witness).

As long as the chain of our faith is kept intact, it serves God’s purpose: your faith is strong and you know God as He knows you. But when any of these links are removed, the chain is broken and spiritual growth and transformation is broken off from God.”

– Do you feel at times that your confidence in God is shaken, that you don’t know what direction to turn, you’ve prayed and prayed and still you find yourself caught in the undercurrent of depression and sadness, unable to live the Christian life as God planned?

– Do you find yourself wondering what purpose you have in God’s kingdom? What is God’s plan for you? Where do you belong in His community of believers? Where do you fit in?

These questions come up when the links of Christian discipleship have been broken. So, let’s review the links of Christian discipleship again. These links will change what you think about discipleship training.

First Link: Apostolic government

God’s first discipleship link is His apostolic stewardship which is His spiritual government here on earth and includes all 5 callings, but begins with the apostles teaching the faith of Jesus Christ. Just as the Holy Spirit does not act independent of God, neither do His apostles.

When people are unschooled in the apostolic calling, they ask, “What is the burden of the calling? What do apostles do?” And the page is left blank because there has been no training in the church about how God originally designed apostles to function.

Second Link: Truth

God’s second discipleship link is the foundation of truth. The Lord lays a very precise framework of knowledge in the heart of every believer by apostolic instruction and then daily visits with His power to confirm what He has built, to engage with us, to create His nature in us.

As God transforms you by His divine hand, He daily provides you with gifts for your own stewardship of His grace. All of Jesus’ 12 essential elements come into play because they are the DNA of His nature that the Holy Spirit uses to create His nature in you.

Third Link: Holy Spirit

God’s third discipleship link is the Holy Spirit. God seals your faith with a token of Himself when engrafting Himself into you. This baptism of the Holy Spirit with the sign (token) of tongues is the first tool of sanctification. As God separates you from the world unto Himself, He begins the work of remodeling your soul. What God initiates in Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit sustains with gifts for us to build with Him.

So now, having seen God’s links, what is the first link that God fastens in your faith? What is the first link God establishes in our discipleship training? It is the apostolic stewardship that now includes many apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers that are all skilled to teach the same covenant of our Lord.

Jesus’ apostles are living today and they construct the foundation of truth in the heart, and that’s what it’s all about. Nothing of Jesus is missing from your faith and nothing of man is added. Following this divine pattern a building takes place in you and through you and this is how you know you are being led by the Spirit.

Because God begins discipleship training with the apostolic calling, we should take a look at that page from His playbook. I want to take a quote from the EVA Terms Glossary to see how Apostle Eric vonAnderseck builds on that.

Apostle Eric not only contrasts true apostles to false apostles, but also brings out where the Jesus Movement stopped short of God’s glory. Those are the teaching points I want to focus on. Apostle Eric says,

“True apostles teach the one blueprint of truth, which is Jesus’ doctrine and His record. The doctrine of Christ includes all the terms of Jesus’ new covenant by which God creates in us the likeness of His Son.

False apostles teach the many truth(s) of their own moral code, which they join to a scripture to hold out as a promise of life to believers, but the scripture is untethered from God when it is made to serve man. False apostles teach from the instincts of their own nature the things they believe God wants to do for you. As man’s nature is diverse, so also is their teaching made of many truths, not Jesus’ one truth.

There are many that claim to have redefined truth during the Charismatic Movement otherwise known as the Jesus Movement of the 1960s and 70s, but they could only define truth according to what they were progressing in.

God was breaking up the ice of denominationalism.

It’s true: God was breaking up the ice of denominationalism to begin to free people to the covenant, but leaders emerged who only saw the miracles of God’s compassion and the sign of the seal, as God baptized people in the Holy Spirit with the evidence of tongues. Ambitious leaders developed a language to describe this work that they wanted to progress in.

They assessed the Charismatic Movement as the final move of God before Jesus returns, but they never directed the people into covenant, and that had a devastating consequence: believers could not flow into the fulness of Christ.

Ministers who were born of that system redefined truth.

It’s true: Ministers who were born of that system redefined truth to be relative to self, not absolute to God. They also defined prophecy and the prophet’s calling according to what they wanted to progress in.

They saw that God spoke to people, and they developed language to describe their gut feelings, impressions, and spiritual intuition they thought was the voice of God. They could not filter their faith, nor direct the people into the priesthood, so believers could not progress with the true grace of God to hear His voice.

The Jesus Movement ultimately developed into a monstrous log jam.

It’s true: The Jesus Movement ultimately developed into a monstrous log jam and now God is breaking up the log jam. He raised up sanctified apostles to whom He redefined the Christian experience by restoring the original foundation of truth to progress in the fulness of Christ. The church is now going through Transitional Knowledge Training.”

You can read more about Transitional Knowledge Training in our IDCCST online Course, designed by Apostle Eric to restore the church to Jesus’ covenant to reflect how God had meant the Christian life to be lived. Give Jesus another chance to rebuild your faith today.

IDCCST stands for God’s Intelligent Design for Christ-Centered Spiritual Transformation. A new series of classes have begun with Apostle Paul Odendaal. Registration on our website is free and all the online classes and online materials are free.