Julie Brown

Today, we talk to Julie Brown and her book the Mantle of Purity. Available on Amazon. 


juliebrown.org.uk

Transcript

Nicola: Welcome to Coldwater Podcast. I’m Nicola Halton. We all know the importance of getting out there and doing a great work for Jesus. In this podcast we will learn more about the people who are involved in changing lives for good for God. I’d like to welcome Julie Brown to the Cold Water Podcast. Hello Julie. 

Julie: Oh Hello Nicola. 

Nicola: Hello, I’ve a few questions to ask but I’m going delve straight in with a big one and ask what does Jesus mean to you?

Julie: Oh Nicola gosh that’s a wonderful question to ask. Well Jesus is the absolute heart and centre of my life and I’ve known Jesus since I was 9 years old and been on a journey with Jesus all these years and all I can say is that as the years go by my relationship with Him just gets deeper and deeper and I learn how much I need Him. 

Nicola: Yes

Julie: and how I really, really don’t want to live my life without Him. You know the scriptures talk about these mysteries about finding ourselves hidden in Christ and that in Him we live and move and have our being and that’s my testimony Nicola..

Nicola: Yes

Julie: That Jesus has been so good to me to really start to bring me into a richer and deeper understanding of what those kind of scriptures really mean when we are living in Him and that in Him we live and move and have our being. So Jesus is everything to me. I loe Him Nicola.. I love Him.

Nicola: Yes, yes and you talk in your book about… I haven’t mentioned your book which is called the “Mantle of Purity” so I’ll mention that now. 

Julie: Yes

Nicola: So that we can understand and you talk about restoration… It’s towards the end of the book and I never really fully understood that until you mentioned it in your book and He wants to continuously restore us but restore the Earth as well. 

Julie: Yes

Nicola: That is His purpose for us and for the Earth so thank you. Your testimony is wonderful and you talk about your mum in your book briefly and your father so I feel as if they were fundamental in you getting to know Jesus but would you like to expand on that please if that’s ok. 

Julie: Oh that’s another wonderful question Nicola it is such a blessing that I do.. my father has gone on to be with Jesus but my mum is still alive but my parents played an absolutely essential part in my own journey of coming to know the Lord and yes they were saved as young people and I do share this testimony in my book. And I shared it because I do feel very much in my heart it matters very much that we honour our mum and dad and we thank the Lord for the people he has brought into our lives to bring us close to Jesus or to introduce Him to us and for some people listening that might not have been their mum or dad. We’ve got all kinds of experiences haven’t we but God is good and he will make sure one way or the other he introduces us to the things that we need. And so. I was blessed though, it is a good thing to have a Godly heritage and so mum and dad… Mum was saved first and dad thought he was saved.

Nicola: Right

Julie: He thought he had an idea of a relationship with God but it was a little bit in his head and as you know they came along to Hollybush Christian Fellowship in the late 60’s and that is where the Holy Spirit was being poured out in a powerful way. My mother was filled with the Spirit and my dad was born again in a wonderful, wonderful way and I was filled with the Spirit as well so I was just a youngster at that time. So Nicola, definitely being around my parents and being around a fellowship where the reality of the living God was a daily experience, these things impacted me hugely and set the course really for the rest of my life because I touched something through them and through going along to Church meetings myself that was so real and so powerful that I was never able to forget it. 

Nicola: Yes and I know that it’s not a coincidence that your mum was actually saved, a young girl in a council estate in Sunderland. 

Julie: Yes

Nicola: And how she had that openness to God, you know she encountered Him at Hollybush and moved on and on so you know those wonderful tangible ministries that go out and reach out and make huge differences not just for one person but for generations. 

Julie: When you think about it in that way yes. My mum was part of a big family and they were Catholics actually. Quite a big church actually they did have outreach into the estate and the Bethesda mission, that’s were my mum went on Ford estate and a marvellous work among the children there. My mum was powerfully and soundly born again at 15 years old. 

Nicola: That’s wonderful, absolutely wonderful. At the end of the book you talk of a mandate in Matthew 16:13-18 on how we can all get to know Jesus and the book is called the Mantle of Purity. How is this a call for every single one of us. 

Julie: because it’s a call for everybody to.. Jesus really is extending the invitation to all to know Him in a very powerful way because that’s the meaning of the cross.

Nicola: Yes

Julie: As we know, you know His death and His resurrection, He was thinking of you and me when He went through the process and so it’s my experience Nicola. It’s my definite conviction that in these days we are being drawn into a reality of experience with Him that will sustain us on such a deep and a powerful level that we can draw from the richness of our personal walk with Him and it will keep us and sustain us and haven’t we all found in the past year, particularly here in the UK because I am sure that there will be people listening in other parts of the world but here in the UK we have had months and months and months of lockdown and no ability to gather together and that has… Christians and many other settings but I have felt through this that this is one of the things that the Lord is doing that He is bringing us as His people to a place where we don’t necessarily rely on corporate gatherings as we might have in the old season. He is drawing us to know Him and to walk with Him and have a richness of relationship with Him that is daily and very, very real. 

Nicola: Yes

Julie: And this is very much Nicola for each one of us and nobody is left out. So there is… I believe there is an invitation that is being extended by the Holy Spirit right across the body of Christ to come away. To come away with Jesus and enter into the richness of the relationship with Him that He is offering to us. 

Nicola: Amen. The next question is – you say that intimacy is the ultimate strategic weapon. So feel as if you have answered that in what you have just said. So thank you. 

Julie: Well partly maybe I did. But I know that when I wrote that passage in the book I was talking about you know the buffeting that can come and as believers many times we do have those challenges and difficulties that come our way but the deeper our relationship with Jesus is and the more hidden in Christ we are actually the more authority He has given us and this is what enables us. It’s our love for Him that keeps us close to Him. Its our relationship with Him that bring us deep into His presence and then we are seated.. we literally are seated with Him in heavenly places at the right hand of the father and we will rule from that place with an authority that is coming from God Himself. 

Nicola: Thank you, thank you. There is a lot of wonderful advice on marriage and proverbs 31. I found this really helpful being a mother and a wife. Yes. How do you become a proverbs 31 women? Or man!

Julie: Well I share in the book… the amazing realisation came to me the passage that you are on about the husband and the wife. This is an allegory! An allegory is just a story telling method where the people and the characters in the passage or the book are revealing a hidden and deeper meaning and so just scales fell away from my eyes Nicola and I realised that the proverbs 31 wife was the bride of Christ and therefore that the husband that we hear about in the passage, is speaking about the Heavenly bridegroom which is Jesus. 

Nicola: Yes

Julie: And so it’s a powerful passage Nicola because it gives us a very interesting insight into the marriage relationship between the bride and the groom. Obviously in the natural what I am seeing in a prophetic sense, our relationship to Jesus is the bridegroom and so the key as to how we start to walk in this way. I mean the proverbs 31 wife was so fruitful she.. as everybody automatically thinks about the incredible success she had on the home front but also in the marketplace but the key to her success, this is what the Spirit revealed to me. Now I am looking at this in terms of a prophetic passage our walk as the bride in line with Jesus as the bride groom is that she recognises Jesus as the head.

Nicola: yes

Julie: In Colossians 2:19 tells us that Jesus is the head and from Him is the source and from Him flows everything that we need for life and for prosperity and so the heart of this is union. We… so union with Christ. The proverbs 31 wife, she carried the heart of her husband and that has got ramifications for marriage in the natural and I wrote about that in the book but if we think about ourselves as the bride, Jesus as the bridegroom, therefore if we are carrying Jesus’s heart the entrustment of what is important to Him, we have surrendered to Him, we know he is the head and there is an alignment starts to take place where the supply line is there, there is blessing, there is resources coming from Him, but the entrustment in return, Jesus starts to entrust His heart to us in the depth of the union that this begins to facilitate for us is really powerful.  Because we are starting to carry the heart of Jesus Himself, we know what He cares about, we know what is important to Him. We know what will minister to Him. We know what He wants to do and so the mystery is that the bride of course is made up of men and women. 

Nicola: Yes

Julie: And so isn’t this the challenge, we ladies can easily think of ourselves as the bride of Christ but it’s a bit harder for the guys but nevertheless the bride of Christ does describe men and women and so men too, guys who are listening to this, how you begin to touch and taste what it means to walk as the proverbs 31 wife did and have this very fruitful existence and this very powerful relationship with Jesus. The key to it is the same thing, its alignment with him, its surrendering to Him, its acknowledging, Jesus is your head and its enjoying the relationship that you have and there is such a bond and such a connection between the two of you that Jesus starts to entrust His heart and so that is one of the keys Nicola, for me. That really starts to bring this passage alive in a very, very real way. 

Nicola: Thank you that was amazing. 

Julie: You have also mentioned the queen of heaven. And I’ve never come across this before but it’s definitely there its Jeremiah 44-15-20 and actually I had my eyes opened a lot to this, because I have been squeezed financially, I’ve felt pressure, I’ve felt that tension and I also know that there is a pressure that can come in. So I would like you to talk about the queen of heaven for a little bit and explain that to people and what that is about thank you. 

Julie: Yes, I came to an understand of this major major Spirit on my journey and first I want to point out that Jesus never brought me into this understanding at an earlier time in my life. It was at a point where… so he initiated the understanding is what I am trying to say. 

Nicola: Yes, yes

Julie: I first and foremost believe we shouldn’t go looking for information about matters like these unless the Spirit is the one to press the green light so to speak. 

Nicola: Yes, yes

Julie: So, and yes I have been in many years of intercessory experience, I have been involved in an awful lot of deep prayer things through the last 20 years and so I have heard of the queen of heaven. I knew a little bit about the manifestation of that spirit because I have spent quite a lot of time in Argentina. Ministering there with harvest evangelism. So I knew that this spirit existed but it was only until more recent times that I came into a deeper and a more personal understand and so just briefly what I learned was that this is a major ranking spirit that is mentioned in the bible and in the bible times people would align with the queen of heaven a lot. But one of the main reasons why they did it was to ensure that they would have financial success. 

Nicola: Yes

Julie: SO that is where you can see error and idolatry where people were falling into and they were putting there trust in another source. I’ll jump through the steps really quickly but as the Lord began to speak to me about the queen of heaven, first and foremost he brought a spirit filled Catholic priest across my path who started to teach on this subject. And he shared something that I just witnessed with it and he talked about how this spirit, is a spirit that will attack the apostolic ministry. Now apostles and prophets lay the foundation with Jesus as the corner stone, they play a very important role and so he talked about how this spirit is very very much assigned to try to undermine an apostles ministry. An apostle if he can’t lay the foundations out of the things that God has given him to do, then this weakens the church. It weakens the body of Christ immensely. 

Nicola: Yes

Julie: SO he spoke about this spirit. What this spirit will try to do is to kill the Christian work and if that is not achievable to create a counterfeit of it. And as he was sharing one of the things that immediately spoke to me Nicola. I am coming to a point here that ties the whole thing together. He talks about this counterfeit and having registered… so apostolic ministry.. we see the denominations, we see these churches being founded, we see the work of God going forth. Well and that’s the kingdom of God, he mentioned this counterfeit and one of the first things that came to me as a suddenly realised, I thought oh my goodness, freemasonry is a counterfeit, it’s a counterfeit apostolic work. It’s a hidden kingdom that exists in the market place and for many many years even going into hundreds of years, this hidden kingdom has sought to dominate the market place and the queen of heaven, this is what the Lord showed me is one of the ruling spirits over it. 

Nicola: Right

Julie: So this is how we as believers, we are going about our daily business, we are in the high street doing our shopping and many times they can be an oppression that we will feel or even an experience. We are not masons ourselves we don’t believe in those things but what I am saying that is because of the agreement and because of the existence of free masonry that still goes on today and the covenants with high ranking powers like these that they have aligned themselves up with another source and that has become very deeply entrenched and of course the people have become deceived. So this understanding is very powerful to me because knowing that this is one manifestation of how apostolic work.. so churches can be attacked, a false apostolic music can get into the market place where we should be, where the Body of Christ should be.

Nicola: Yes

Julie: or trying to. I also realised that marriage is an apostolic union, now for some people listening they’ll be thinking, “what on earth are you talking about Julie.” But an apostle gets blueprints from Heaven you know, and I don’t mean that to sound mystical or funny but pastors leaders get into prayer, if God shows them so married couples, “this is what I want you to do for me.” And they take that revelation and they begin to build it so I saw that husbands and wives, do the same thing, in the power of their union they release into the Earth realm a child, and that child existed in heaven first. The words, from the foundation of the Earth I knew you and so I saw that marriage is an apostolic union and that a man and a wife have tremendous ability in their union because they become one and this is a prophetic picture of Jesus with His bride. There is such treasure here for us, that just bringing forth children is just one thing that a married couple can do. Married couples can get hold of blueprints from heaven from God in their union and start to establish, establish their home, establish their business, establish their ministry together and that is being attacked. That is why marriage between a man and a women is under attack the way that it is. It is very much a Spiritual battle. 

Nicola: Thank you. You have explained it brilliantly. You talk about the treasure and how we have got to hang onto the treasure. I hope it picked it up because the internet connection might not have picked some of that up. But I think we got the whole gist there was a few words dotted about there. You have encapsulated it and you are right you don’t go looking for this stuff. We have all felt that feeling when we have been in shops and we have come out empty and we are thinking hang on a minute so…. It’s, it’s we have tread places and we didn’t feel quite right so that is what I wanted to ask here what if you have sinned. What do you do if you have sinned? And you are dealing with issues. I think we all in ourselves know but I want you to help us move forward with that Julie because you know, your book really does bring you on closed to following the Lord and I wanted to tie this up beautifully and I am not feeling like I am but you have done a really good job of chatting and talking to us about things but yeah, I just want to finalised on what if we have sinned. What if we have let God down and what if we haven’t gone into that relationship deeper with that humility. What do we do? 

Julie: Well you know, we are forgiven Nicola. And that our relationship with Jesus isn’t really about.. for me its not about us trying to adhere to rules as such. Now yes we do fall short at times. We do make mistakes and the wonderful thing is though that Jesus… what many times we find hard to accept but it is true that you know he loves us unconditionally and I believe in many ways our life’s journey in God while we are here in this Earth realm is about continually coming back to that place where… in simplicity like a child and being able to accept that we are loved and there is nothing we can actually do to earn His love. So there is no standard that we can set. It is not possible so in all our mess and all our mistakes, that is the point that he chooses us and it is so hard for us to believe but it is true. I want to add something to this by saying that at the core of my book I wrote about an encounter I had with Jesus face to face, where he placed on me this mantle of purity and it was a tremendously powerful experience because although it was very brief, the power of it was immense and I knew what Jesus was doing. He was putting His purity into me and I felt it, and I tasted a level of freedom that was extraordinary. It was just incredible. Any tiny grip, and I’ll use this an example of mistakes that I have made, and we are all exposed to stuff these days even in that arena of life that we don’t necessarily want to be, bombarded left and right. But I felt that as Jesus gave me freely, he literally gave me something freely from Himself, he put that purity on my life and I felt the power of it and I felt a level of freedom that was profound. I was just totally set free and you know the word talks about the importance of the enemy not being able to find anything in us. You know the enemy couldn’t find anything in Jesus to hang on Him, to get at Him. And so little by little we are being transformed and little by little, you know we might fall down and fail but Jesus helps us we get back on our feet. And so there is less and less that the enemy is able to do and that is the hope that we have and so we have a relationship with Him. It’s a journey, we go deeper and deeper with Him and so if we keep falling down at the same point, there is victory that we can have and this experience that I had, yes it was personal Nicola. This purity came into my life. I experienced what it actually means, what the beauty of holiness is. Holiness isn’t a straight jacket. It’s the absolute opposite, you are so free that nothing can get hold of you and there is power in it Nicola. And so Jesus doing that for me, he was showing me that this is what he wants to do for His people and that is just one area of life. It was just in an area of purity and so in closing that is what I would say this morning is what ever you are struggling with, what every things that are going on in your heart or your life that you might be ashamed of, that is a secret, that you just can’t get free of. You know Jesus is the answer. I didn’t have to come bowing and scraping into Jesus that day. I didn’t have to rend my garments. I wasn’t even aware Nicola that I needed this gift from Him. He knows what we need. And I just want to finish with that this morning by saying that Jesus is our answer and in Him is everything that we need so no matter what you might feel your sin is, or even your problem or even a small thing you might not think is that important, it is in the relationship with Him that he exchanges what we have to offer which is just a small fish or two with what He has to offer and who He is. So this relationship with Jesus, Nicola, it’s not a long distance thing, it’s not founded in just reading the word and praying. There is a depth of relationship that we are being called into by the Spirit of God where the essence of who Jesus is in himself is our gift. It’s our treasure. It’s our inheritance. This is what he died for that we could have. 

Nicola: Amen thank you. You have just done that beautifully. Thank you so much,. 

Julie: Wonderful. 

Nicola: Well I don’t want to spoil the perfect interview so I’m going to say goodbye now Julie. Thank you so much. 

Julie: Thank you so much Nicola for the wonderful privilege of sharing with you and God bless you Nicola in all you are doing and the encouragement you are releasing to all of us through these podcasts. We really appreciate it. 

Nicola: Thank you so much. 

Julie: God bless you

Nicola: God bless you bye. Thank you for listening to the Coldwater Podcast. Please remember to subscribe and join next week.