Do you ever feel like your walk with God is a constant struggle—like you’re caught on a relentless roller coaster of soaring highs and plunging lows? Many have prayed, asking God why encouragement seems to so quickly turn into discouragement.

One of the most frustrating stumbling blocks for a Christian is the teaching they got. They have been taught to build with promise rather than covenant. Victory claims are made because Satan makes these mental promises that are in line with a person’s aspirations, and when God restricts it and challenges it, they attribute that “blockage” to be the devil and begin to fight against God.

• What do you do when these untethered promises have run their course?

Believers are left feeling empty and lost and that’s not what God wants for you. The crash follows the hype because all these so-called victories start collapsing. God is pointing to the foundation that is built on sand.

The problem is, neglecting to place victory into the growth cycle that God created to oversee and nurture our fruit bearing and increase in Him. The way the gospel is preached in the false church body, faith in God is about getting high on victory statements and slogans which do not give substance to the soul and are not sustained by the Holy Spirit.

Your faith never has a chance to progress in this one-sided relationship with God that has been built by the imagination because it soon begins to crumble. When ministry leaders crash after these highs, they say, “It’s just human, we all have emotions,” and pass it off as that. But let’s go deeper.

Thankfully, in this new apostolic season God is revealing the truth behind this struggle that Satan has kept secret. Let’s move forward together as we cut through the myth that struggling against yourself is normal. We’ll see why the devil normalizes the struggle –he’s using the struggle to redirect and disarm your faith.

As God activates His real apostles as His key to unlock your understanding and undo the damage Satan’s ministers have caused, He also begins to build new meaning as He defines what struggling means to Him.

You will find that ministers who are still under Satan’s spell do not intentionally lie when they normalize the devil’s take on their struggles, but they have a hard time articulating the challenge to make sense of these up and down swings. So, they try to make it seem like a normal thing as they explain their own “post-victory plunges”, suggesting that misplaced expectations can play a role in this reoccurring affliction.

• The truth is, God has been impressing upon ministry leaders that they have, in fact, misplaced their expectations.

You will find that many have not prepared themselves for the consequences of having abandoned Jesus’ covenant knowledge, stewardship, tools, and provisions. God abundantly supplies for our growth cycles to be so much more than emotional highs and crashes. So, yes there have been many misplaced expectations in the false church body that God is now healing through the real apostolical character.

When a minister says that struggling is normal, he has normalized the condition, but can’t put into words what he is struggling against, so he suggests that choosing to let go of sin should be an essential part of the process—something worth serious consideration.

• But this is an example of misplaced expectation – that sin can be let go of.

Let’s find out more about how God defines sin by going to Apostle Eric vonAnderseck’s Terms Glossary under that heading:

The god of this world (Satan) influences those in his kingdom of darkness through a system of inspiration, which expresses iniquity. This system and kingdom is called “sin”, and the fruit of this system is called the “sins” of the flesh. Sin is a kingdom that operates independently of God because it untethers the conscience from God’s light and keeps the soul empty of any image of its Creator. Its victims struggle with this history and purpose.

What man does with iniquity to build for himself is called sin. Hence, a “sinner” is one who builds with the tools of iniquity in the kingdom of darkness. These fruits that are born in the soul because of sin is called iniquity…

We who are in Christ Jesus are no longer in that system or kingdom; we do not use the tools of Satan’s kingdom to express ourselves, but we do still carry the fruits of being in that system in the past. It is the fruits of that system (fruits of iniquity) that we are overcoming through the circumcision of Christ; it is the tools of that system we have abandoned; it is the philosophy of that system that truth is cleansing every day.

The misplaced expectation of so many is that we are empowered to “let go” of that system without first learning how to separate the kingdom of the flesh from the kingdom of God by getting equipped with Jesus’ covenant to start living that reality.

Believers cannot let go of Satan’s perspective when ministers continue to reinforce Satan’s hold as they present the different facets of our human nature as acceptable building material to develop a relationship with God.

• Misplaced expectations have profound consequences.

Knowing the weakness of man, Satan manipulates the moral code to present advice on love, forgiveness, trust, and confidence that seems appealing, but lacks the fullness of Christ. The soul remains empty—like clouds without rain, offering no true nourishment for the soul. That reality will hit you when God reveals that everything you were building for has turned to dust, and it’s not a place you want to be. (Jude 1:12)

Where there is no substance, there can be no confidence in God. Neglecting to work with the things that God uses to sustain our faith leads to that familiar crash after the high.

The consequences of rejecting Jesus’ covenant loom like a shadow over the faith of believers who lack the covenant knowledge necessary for their faith to reflect His fullness through the simple spiritual labor God has assigned to us. These areas of neglect directly contribute to the emotional roller coaster that defines the Christian experience of those living outside Jesus’ covenant house.

Another weighty consequence of neglecting God’s provision in Jesus is that repentance remains unsealed. When God calls the conscience forth to give an account of where it has been building, it testifies to the absence of Christ’s life. In that moment, a struggle arises as one attempts to weigh their experience on the wrong scale, leaving them disconnected from the true foundation of faith and discouraged.

God describes this unfortunate consequence and gives it a name. It is simply a defiled conscience. No one wants that. In contrast, when we are established in a covenant relationship with God, God talks about a purged conscience and He contrasts the two realities. We see this contrast in Apostle Paul’s instruction below. (Heb. 10:2)

Titus 1:15
Unto the pure all things are pure: but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure; but even their mind and conscience is defiled.

Hebrews 9:14
How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?

The covenant that Jesus purchased with His blood is called His fulness because it contains all the realities of God’s kingdom and informs our faith about how He works in us and through us to leave substance in our soul for our confident building with Him.

Skipping these basic realities, ministry leaders have found it impossible to separate the kingdom of the flesh from God’s kingdom of the Spirit. Not realizing what the flesh is made up of, what it consists of, they cannot see the role each feature of the flesh plays and how Satan uses them to challenge our faith.

Did you know: The closer you get to your own truths, the further away you get from God’s one truth in Jesus.

Most Christians have received a thorough training in how to align scripture to their expectation to release some kind of closure, but the remnant church is receiving new training on how to align their faith to Jesus’ covenant foundation to co-labor with the Holy Spirit to stay in rhythm with God’s plan for the increase of their soul.

Apostle Eric vonAnderseck unfolds many of these important watershed teaching moments in his upcoming lesson “Apostles Restore the Lost Foundation” as he finishes his lesson series on the Second 8th Week in God’s restoration timeline.

The apostolic harbinger places the contrast God makes between the defiled conscience and the purged conscience. This is a pivotal point in learning that profoundly shifts understanding.

Let’s take a sneak peek at this section where Apostle Eric addresses these common misconceptions:

When we are in covenant with God according to Christ, we are enabled to answer God according to the tokens of His resurrection because we’re progressing with the grace of God. Our repentance is sealed in the tools of Christ, meaning that His tools require no repentance.

Jesus’ blood touched His tools to sanctify them for us, and when we use them, we touch Him and He touches us, meaning that we receive of Him. It’s that simple.

1 Peter 3:21
The like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us (not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the ANSWER of a good conscience toward God,) by the resurrection of Jesus Christ:

What happens when God calls the conscience forth to answer Him? Christians who are caught up on the No! No! Yes! Yes! gospel continue to be confused about their struggles. They’re struggling because they can’t answer God –they continue to answer the transgression.

Many ministers play the “what if” card: what if God is inviting you into something greater? But the invitation to covenant is never made. In other words, Christ and His covenant is not present to represent you, so when God calls the conscience forth for accountability, death is still present.

The questions about surrender deepen as a person goes to the scriptures to get God’s perspective rather than go to His Word, Jesus Christ to draw from His covenant.

Surrender is a carefully crafted word we looked at earlier. The minister who is working with Satan’s gospel normalizes the struggle of a defiled conscience that is unable to answer God. He digs deeper into failed deliverance tactics and asks if you have surrendered everything to God.

However, the question that God asks is this: have you yielded your will to my covenant knowledge, stewardship and tokens, and have you accepted my new priesthood for your contact and growth with me? Everything else is just carefully crafted word salad.

Why is God so focused on Jesus’ covenant, refusing everything that ministers offer in His place? Simply because it is God who gives us His increase by the fruit of His work in us. God continues to provide us tokens that represent Him and identify us as His children.

We labor with the tokens of His name to be accepted of Him and express our hope in the priesthood of Jesus Christ. The fire of the anointing preserves this knowledge, sanctifies this knowledge and gives hope to the exchange of this knowledge. Substance is born within the soul because the conscience has been purified by the Spirit.

But when Christians are abandoned outside of Jesus’ covenant house, their mind is constantly trying to resolve the conflict of the conscience to find closure in reversals. We can see why God has a controversy with Satan’s ministers.

That’s the end of that quote. There is tremendous liberty in the instruction we receive from God’s sanctified apostles. Does God desire for us to wrestle with a defiled conscience? Absolutely not.

Though this struggle has been normalized within the false church body, God is actively shaking His church free from its grip, correcting these misconceptions through His healing hand.