What a privilege to participate in God’s righteous nature and while actually being absorbed in His grace, gaining a personal knowledge of Jesus Christ. This is what happens when we are born spiritually of God. God is a Spirit and His Holy Spirit reveals spiritual things of Christ to us after we become a child of God, not of the flesh or the will of man, but of God Himself. We become Spiritually alive when we are born of God.
This puts our life at a very high level. Our life embarks into a Spiritual strata which can be mystifying and difficult to grasp. Our new Spiritual eyes do not easily discern spiritual things. We become Spiritually aware but often it is easier to revert to a habit of personal comfort and natural living. The walk of faith is not for the faint. There is a battle here. It is not mystic, but real.
This is our third consecutive faith discussion. We are still in the parking lot of this great Faith Forest of redwoods. But even in the parking lot a whiff of the air draws us into the wonder of something far larger and profound than mere humanity. On foot, under 300 feet high redwoods, old enough to have been alive while Jesus walked the earth, is a provocative setting to consider faith. These massive trees suggest powerful purposes and the God of this forest is our living Redeemer soliciting our participating in what He is doing. And we say, “I’ll think about it. Can I get back to you?” Oh, the darkness of our small minds!
These gigantic living trees are of no consequence compared to the enormous eternal reality being offered. And to think it is available to us, created persons who seem satisfied to climb, merely, what God brought into existence. By faith, we have direct access to God Himself, not just to climb His trees. Tree climbing is tempting but there is “so much more,” (Romans 5) in the Forest of Faith. Walking into the Forest of Faith is to penetrate the nature of divine Love and grace.
We have already considered the power required to support God’s life in our vessels of clay. The power to sustain life is far greater than anything we can conjure. But ours is not common life, it is eternal life in temporal vessels! We are merely containers being asked to consider living a super-natural existence, a life at a higher level, enjoying the benefits of being eternal and … acquiring God’s absolute qualities of righteousness and holiness.
Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen - Jude 24-25.
We were created for this great purpose. This is who we were intended to be but we chose to try it our way. Ours is a love story. God took upon Himself the judgment for our sin so that He could redeem us, buy us back into what He desires for us. Faith is a gift, given so we can once again enter into a personal relationship with our Creator and participate with Him in a righteous project He is completing, with or without us!
We are called, in Christ, to be righteous in two levels. We are righteous by re-birth in Christ, our spirit being joined to His Spirit. And we are called to make His righteousness, in us, visible through our soul. We are to live in the Spirit and walk in the Spirit, Gal. 5:25. Faith is about living and walking in Spiritual power rather than the soul of self. The only way we can have the power to do what we are called to do is to be born Spiritually, learning as a babe to walk spiritually by faith.
We do not have the capacity to be who God intends without Spiritual re-birth. Being born of God, being a child of GOD, transports us to a new realm of reality. It is a pathway beginning simply by believing with an infant’s mind but willing to risk self at God’s expense. It leads us into the presence of the great “I AM.”
We have already seen the inter-relation between faith, grace and love. Our life in Christ is much greater than the sum of these qualities. As we have seen from 2Cor. 4:7, everything is from God and nothing from ourselves. Faith’s capacity comes from God and our response to His grace is our faith. A circular argument? Yes, the mystery of Christ in us.
Grace is God’s gift of Love. It is all tied into a unity that comes out of the “I AM.” This Love has a capital “L.” God’s spiritual things open our understanding to an eternal point of view and we begin to replace our “world view” with an eternal view. Why? Love!
This does get deep! A good way to approach our eternal Love relationship is through the lesson of prayer Jesus gave His disciples, Matt. 6:9-13.
“Pray then like this: (Jesus speaking)
“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come, your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
(paragraph #1)
Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
(paragraph #2)
We have separated the prayer into two paragraphs so we can see divisions Jesus provided. The first paragraph draws our attention to the Father and the second paragraph to our humanity.
In the first paragraph, our initial focus is on God Himself. This comes before we express the needs of our inadequacies. It is appropriate we enter His august presence in humility and reverence by coming before our Creator God in submission. It is He, the “I AM” with whom we are to talk. Acquiring access to a person of high authority requires a very special acknowledgement …… and we have it, before the “I AM” personally!!
Secondly, we approach Him with an acknowledged relationship. He is our Father! Not only our Father as one we go to in our need, Jesus is expressing God’s own roll of Father to us. His loving concern for our welfare is not as a ruler absent on Heaven’s business. He is our on-call protector and provider. His unswerving love to each one of us is a constant “sword and shield.” His faithful commitment to us guarantees our nurturing. He Loves us as a righteous child in His Son Jesus.
How does this relate to faith? It is critical to see ourselves intimately related to God as a Father to us as well as the Father of us. Like grace, faith too is a relationship. HE is not a political card we play when we need help. We, rather, are participating in Family Business, “hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” This is our acknowledgement to His purpose and will. Serving God’s purposes will consume grace, grace we have because we are in Christ. There is a stewardship for our grace expressed through faith.
His will includes judgment of sin. It includes not only Judgment that Jesus took for us but also the judgment to take place upon the earth and upon those who do not accept His provision of grace. Even here we are included participants in our Father’s business. Revelation 8 suggests this earth’s judgment is precipitated by the prayers of saints as their incense of prayers are filled with God’s fire and thrown down to the earth in the trumpet judgments, Rev. 8:3-5. We are participants of God’s purposes not only now, during our earthly sanctification, but we are also participants of God’s much larger plan and purpose. This eternal view is part of our faith discussion.
A Spiritual family mindset is contrary to our carnal habit of doing things for our own self interest. The mindset of submission to our Father conditions our heart and mind for faith. We need to be in the Spirit, minding the things from the Spirit in order to begin seeing things of the Spirit. Faith bridges the gap between ourselves and God. It makes our Spiritual reality more vital so what is unseen becomes visible to both us and those seeing and experiencing Christ in us!
Jesus gave us this prayer to re-direct our soul’s natural tendency toward temporal things and to focus, rather, on the Spiritual rigors of life in Christ. We constantly need to make quantum shifts to Spiritual realities so that we train our mind and heart in these eternal values rather than allowing natural things to erode our spiritual lessons and experiences. Faith gives life to our spiritual/Spiritual relationship opening flood gates of grace. Faith is doing but faith is also opening our heart to grace.
We separate spiritual things into component parts to give our mind a dimension to grasp. But in doing so, we neglect the greater issue which is God’s love. We tend to demean God’s love as something whimsical even when we know it is not. Eternal substance easily escapes our temporal minds so we miss Spiritual lessons. All the things that define God for our mortal minds are summed up in “God is Love.” Love is the engine driving the eternal train not the caboose bringing up the rear.
Our mind’s carnal orientation betrays us. Love with a capital “L” is not only beautiful, it is much stronger and much more durable then the mind we idolize and are given to manage. Carnal love is a particle of something with a divine quality faith will lead us into.
This leads us to the second half of this prayer where we find a continuity of submission reaching deeply into our own personal needs. I learned this prayer as a child and thought it was about giving thanks for physical meals, “Give us this day our daily bread.” This is how our carnal mind continues translating spiritual content. Not only is the whole subject spiritual but Jesus Himself is our bread and life, John 6:35ff.
Our personal prayer may reveal to us our own motive and may give us cause for change. Prayer reveals the root desire of our heart, whether it is in grace or personal satisfaction. Here our answers lay, in the desires of our heart! And here lays also the cathartic possibility for us to follow Jesus’ example by walking in His resurrection power by faith, looking to Jesus the author and perfecter of our faith (Hebrews 12:2).
The second paragraph flows seamlessly from the first. Our loving Father is attentively responsive to the eternal and spiritual needs of His children, us! Just as Jesus is not talking about the food we eat for breakfast, neither is He talking about how much we owe on our visa card, “… forgive us our debts.”
Jesus uses this model prayer on two separate occasions. It was common for people to have their teachers compose a prayer for them. In Luke Jesus uses slightly different words enabling us to better define His meaning. Jesus uses a word for sin rather than debtors in Matthew. Clearly His intent is the debt of sin we have to God for which we are forgiven.
The integrity of righteousness from God through mankind back to God comes into view. We are forgiven our debt of sin and made righteous so that we can also share Christ’s righteousness with others. Grace comes from God, flowing into the believer and returning back to God through the believer’s faith. We experienced God’s forgiveness, His imputed righteousness for our sinning soul in addition to being made partakers of His divine nature through the union of His Spirit with ours. We are made righteous in Him even while wearing our flesh of sin.
We have a similar lesson in the next phrase where the purity of heart is at issue. What God has begun within us by regeneration, new Spiritual birth, He will continue to perform, Phil. 1:6, until the day of our completion. The child He loves, He will discipline and direct into the righteousness of Christ. Sometimes this is done by passive temptations and sometimes God creates circumstances requiring changes in our thinking so that we can respond in faith. This is what we are dealing with in the phrase, “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil (the evil one).” This is the operation of His grace in us.
This second paragraph context is in perfect harmony with the first paragraph. You can see this in what Jesus said in verse 6. When you pray go into your own closet and pray dealing privately with these Spiritual matters with your Father One on one.
These are matters going beyond our comprehension let alone our ability to manage within humanities’ framework. We are dealing with mammoth redwoods and about all we can do is climb them. But God is the creator of both the redwoods and eternal life. He has put within our vessels of clay the grace for our faith so that His resurrection power is within our grasp. Mountains and redwoods have faith in common.
Faith is about experiencing the reality of the redwoods in our daily life and learning to enjoy them by letting God’s resurrection life express its own power within us. We are to allow God’s plan and purposes to be expressed in and through our life. God is as real as the redwoods and His enormous purpose will include us if we learn to live and walk in His Forest of Faith.