“And because of him you are in Christ Jesus,
who became to us wisdom from God, ...”
There are two scriptural descriptions for the modes in which our life in Christ operates. One is grace and the other is faith. Grace is God’s ministry of love to us and faith is our response to God’s love. It is God’s power, however, providing context for love-grace and faith.
Last week we looked at discernment as our response to God’s provision of wisdom. God’s wisdom is contained within His measure of grace. Discernment is a skill set we have responding to God’s grace. In other words, discernment is God’s grace upon grace as we acquire God’s wisdom in faith.
Faith is “willing” our soul into action. Notice, discernment is a skill set we acquire through action we take. “Our powers of discernment have been trained by constant practice” is the way the writer to the Hebrews put it in 5:14. Our “will” is key in responding to God’s grace. Some default to mind’s reason and let “facts” rule our behavior. Others default to feelings or our heart’s desire to prejudice what we do. Our soul follows what we ”will” it to do. Either way, it is our responsibility.
To grow grace we need to grow faith. We need to “know” spiritual things in order to respond with our mind and experience spiritual things in our heart. Growing faith is “willing” our soul to do God’s truth while expecting God’s promises to be executed in our experienced. We rob our heart of hope when we neglect God’s promises. Heart knowledge is experiencing God’s promises, which we tend to neglect. Discerning interacts to both God’s grace and our faith integrating both mind and heart.
In Christ we are called according to His purposes. We “will” ourselves into a condition so we can participate in God’s fullness, which is ours in Christ Jesus. It is up to us to “will” our soul to be holy as He is holy, this is our calling (1 Peter 1:15ff) and who we already are in Christ.
Remember, it is Jesus who is knocking on our heart’s door in Revelation 3:20, asking to be allowed entrance into our personal community of heart and mind to share His holiness. He is speaking to His church in Laodicea who is “neither cold nor hot” because they are not exersing their “will” according to their calling. “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches (Revelation 3:22).”
In the tabernacle there was the outer court for the priests where the laver and brazen altar were located. It was openly exposed being lit by the sun. The Holy Place was enclosed and lit only by the seven golden candlesticks. The Holy of Holies was enclosed further behind the thick veil and lit by the Shekinah Glory of God resting above the Ark of the Covenant between the outstretched wings of the Cherubim. This was the sole source of light where God dwelled.
In the outer court you understood what you saw. Your eyes and senses provided natural knowledge through experience. It was knowledge through reason and observation.
In the Holy Place your knowledge was the product of faith. Knowledge requires knowledge derived from scripture and a heart open to its meaning. It is both reason and love. We accept God’s declarations in His word as truth, such as the attributes of God and His story of love. If we love Him, all things work together for good (Romans 8:28).
In the Holy of Holies our knowledge comes from God alone. It illumines our whole soul with God’s peace assuring us His sovereign will rules. Knowledge here is not because we observe, reason or process information, but affirming our spiritual consciousness in a way our words can’t shape. It is God’s love communing with our soul.
God’s knowledge transcends the gravity of our universe and frees us from temporal restraints. It seems mystic to mortal minds but it is the eternal reality of God who is a Spirit. God manifests Himself to us through His Spirit who is our Shekinah in union with our spirit.
This is a purer reality than man has capacity to dream. A person created new in Christ becomes a spiritual person who has yet to learn what a spiritual life actually looks like. The picture of the tabernacle is a flannel graph of our spiritual life. Peter puts it like this:
“As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ (1 Peter 2:5).”
As 2Corinthians 5:17 Christians, we have become the temple of the living God (2Corinthians 6:16b). We are the living sanctuary of our living God; the Shekinah Glory of God is resident within us. It is God Himself who has made us holy. Listen to Paul explain it to the Corinthians:
“Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple (1 Corinthians 3:16-17).”
Under the new covenant, in Christ, we are priests and our body is our temple or our “tabernacle.” Christ is the high Priest who has offered for us an eternal sacrifice removing the veil of separation so we have access to the Holy of Holies, which is Christ in us and we in Him. Sin has been dealt with through Jesus our savior. He will come again but not deal with sin “but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him (Hebrews 9:28b).”
While we are waiting for our Lord, we have a task to do! We have to bring our soul and body into sync with who we are in Christ. It is a lifetime journey to trek through the tabernacle within our self and enter the Holy of Holies but this is our calling, to be Holy as He is Holy.
We are now of God in Christ but our body and soul are still rooted in the ways of self, the world and satanic influences.
When we are created new in Christ as a 2 Corinthians 5:17 person, we become spiritual people who are still living in temporal houses. We are still wearing the habit of mortal flesh and the ways of man is our habit. But now we are created new and have the resurrected life of Jesus. We have become one with Christ so that we are now spiritually equipped to handle the sin in our fleshly soul. In Christ we can put to death that which is contrary to God’s righteous holiness. We can bring His Holiness into our soul’s experience.
We have to start in the outer court; we have already been made priests (“a holy priesthood”). We have to test ourselves against what we believe so that we can actually be who we are in Christ. We learn more about ourselves and God as we make our way into the Holy of Holies. It is how we become who we are through knowledge, faith and revelation, all of grace through Him who loves us.
Our position in Christ, as we discussed last week, gives us the capacity to change our polluted soul’s condition to match who we are in Christ as described in Ephesians 1. We are given the holy privilege to sacrifice our self for the sake of Christ as Christ sacrificed Himself for us. Yes, there is a cost. It is the cost of love! The root of our salvation is love. The root of our relationship in Christ is love. The root of our temporal life is love. Love is the fundamental function that drives life whether temporal or spiritual. It is love that unites us from a temporal creation to spiritual eternality.
Love permeates our position and reality regardless of where we are in Christ. Love is not the caboose of our spiritual train, as someone recently described it to me; love is the engineer driving the train. As we move through our personal tabernacle from the outer court into the Holy of Holies, we become more and more aware of both the Father’s love and knowledge of His Son Jesus. The resurrected Christ becomes more and more our source of life as we learn to drink from Him and partake of Him in our person experiences.
Discernment is the product of this process. It is not a mechanical object we can acquire by our own effort. It is the sum total of God love-grace to us together with our gift of faith enabling us to walk in His Spirit.