This is our third GN in a trilogy. We began with a drill down of Galatians 2:20 where a constant contrast between death and life is depicted, I have been crucified nevertheless I live. Christ Jesus, who is delivered from death by death, is also experienced by the born again believer. Created in Jesus, a believer is a new person with a new identity. Our New Life is supernaturally birthed, literally, providing living roots within our risen Savior. Our distinctiveness is a resurrected Jesus within us, inside our container of flesh. This is so amazing it is difficult to grasp! It is a miracle … only by His grace! His power is released into our old crucified self. It sounds cultish to a person without a supernatural Spiritual birth. Yes, it is supernatural, and just as mystic as is creation all around us.
It is necessary to re-define what being birthed in Christ Jesus looks like. Our new self is Spiritual. We now have within us a will to choose and grasp the resurrection power of Jesus. Not only that, we have been transferred from the kingdom of “darkness” or sin, into God’s eternal kingdom of light, i.e., goodness, righteousness and truth, Col. 1:13, Eph. 5:9. Our last two GNs developed this in greater detail.
In this GN, we are looking at the release of Christ’s resurrection power into our soul’s habit of fleshly enchantment. We are Spiritually “joined” into God while living in our vessel of clay. Our task is to be holy as He is holy even while living in hostile flesh!
Just as Eve was tempted with corrupted truth, so we are drawn into compromising God’s word by distorting truth with our comfort, our biases and preferences. Our eyes need time to acquire God’s Spiritual light. Spiritual living is an entirely different life than temporal experiences. The habit of soul and body is deeply rooted in values of this temporal world. Being born again is not just a change of circumstances, it is the entrance into eternity. Our soul needs to absorb the Spiritual rules of living in faith.
We are accustomed to the darkness in natural living. The natural self is no longer who we are … and, it is no longer our source of life. It has been crucified, put to death on (in) the cross of Christ. We live in flesh out of habit and by our will of choice, even as our new Spiritual nature flows out from our resurrected Lord’s into our soul. We are babes learning Spiritually to see and hear. “He that hath ears, let him hear,” –Jesus.
We are created brand new on the inside, dealing with real unseen evil spirits on the outside actively engaged in the affairs of men. We become objects of spiritual attack because we are created in Christ with a Spiritual identity. Our crucified self fights with hostility against righteous truth because we are now joined into our resurrected Lord, 1Cor. 6:17. Our natural self poisons our human system of thought deceiving our own soul because we think we are still under the control of the flesh, we are not! Our fleshly soul is vulnerable and under attack. It is time to be grounded in truth and righteousness.
This third piece of our trilogy addresses these aggressive fleshly attacks. Before examining this, lets look contextually at our new birth within God’s grace and our participation in His purposes.
“According as he hath chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love.” Eph. 1:4.
God Himself chose us, in Christ Jesus, before the world was even formed. It was determined Jesus would come to earth in flesh, dying on the cross to provide salvation before time started ticking. We are participating in a divine plan, ordained before time, to make us holy and without blame before him in love. John tells us the dwelling place of God is with man and He will be our God, Rev. 21:3.
Our living context is within an ordained relationship with God. God’s divine provision is to grow and nurture us Spiritually from dirt containers into eternal holy beings set apart for divine purposes, 2Cor: 4:7cf.
God endowed us with a sovereign attribute of choice. We are created so we can chose from our own desires. We can weigh our options and overrule our instincts based on our own will to choose. God gifted us this right in creation limiting Himself by respecting our choices.
Thresholds for our wisdom come from measures of our choices, that is, our faith or lack of it. This itself speaks to us about who God is and His steadfast love toward us. Choice is at the center of love and God desires we choose to love Him. Our love relationship comes through an organic process of discipline and commitment, including both the will of our mind and the passion of our heart. God’s love allows our option to choose Him through faith.
God raised the bar on our creation by provisioning us to love with agape (αγαπε) Love. This is love at His level. Love enables us to walk in His truth, righteousness and goodness but it requires maturity on our part. Remember, He gave us the ability to choose but good choices require spiritual discernment which comes through death. Death is one of our choices and actually produces Spiritual life.
The fundamental Spiritual principle of life comes out of temporal death. Self (plus Satan) is the culprit separating us from God and it is this self God nailed to the cross. God put self to death and it is self we continue to put to death daily with Jesus’ resurrection power acquired in our new birth.
If we live spiritually, with fleshly habits, we will not learn love at this agape level. Spiritual growth requires consumption of God’s grace from one degree of glory to the next. Our measure of faith comes out of choosing to consume God’s grace. Faith is our response to God’s grace. In other words, faith uses God’s provision of grace to grow our Spiritual capacity. This is why grace becomes a relationship. While it all comes from God, with nothing from ourselves, we still have the will to receive and consume it. God allows us to enter into relationship through Jesus, God’s Son, so we can glorify and love Him.
If we are created in Christ Jesus, we are endowed by God to be whom He intends us to be, holy and without blame before him in love. The above verse, Eph. 1:4, is introduced to us with this prologue: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ. If we are in Christ, we are blessed to have God as our own heavenly Father guarding us and guiding us. This is His promise to us, Psalm 23. He has blessed us in Christ making us “bone of Christ’s bone.”
Eve was taken out of Adam picturing our relationship to Jesus Christ.
“This at last is bone of my bones
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called woman,
Because she was taken out of man” -Adam, Gen. 2:23.
We have been Spiritually created in Christ Jesus and Jesus is literally in us. We have been created “one” in Him just as Jesus and God are One, John 17:21cf. The essence of our new identity is Spiritual. God is Spirit and they who worship Him must worship in Spirit and truth, John 4:24. We have become Spiritually one with God through Christ’s death and resurrection.
Our task is to know God intimately. We are to know Him practically with reason but it is essential we know Him organically, in our heart, not just in our head. We must walk in knowledge of His person as well as His provisions to us as His heirs and children. We have to know and do. By doing we actually increase our knowing.
God teaches us our limitations and His limitless power by grace in love through our faith choices. We are intended to respond by participation in Him, operationally (doing) and in love (knowing). We have the blessing of His accomplishment on the cross and His resurrection power from the dead. We accomplish our task simply by choosing to let our Lord fulfill His accomplishment in us. We enlarge our Spiritual capacity by trusting our heavenly Father to do what He has ordained. Our hands and feet become His hands and feet.
Sounds simple! It’s not. The darkness within us is difficult to see. We are duped. We don’t know what we think we know. We so believe in self, it keeps us from trusting what God has done and is doing. We know about God in our mind but we don’t really know Him intimately. Learning what righteousness looks like requires exposure intently and frequently so we finally begin recognizing with discernment God’s righteous light from our own darkness. He may need to blind us to condition us to be spiritually discerning, so we hear with our spiritual ears and see with the eyes of our heart, Hebrews 5:14, Matt. 13:9cf, Eph. 1:18, 3:14cf.
We have been transferred from darkness to light but our soul lingers in the habit of its own darkness. Our creation in Christ is Spiritual (light) but our soul is entrenched in temporal and worldly values (darkness). We grow Spiritually as we crucify fleshly reason. Reason does not drive our Spiritual train, love does!
“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” Eph. 2:10.
God’s work of holiness in us is an extension of God’s grace to us. We are accepted in His beloved Son having become family, God’s family! God’s pure devoted love is focused on us, implanted in us so we can love as God loves. This is the work which He begun and continues to perform until we are complete in Him, Phil. 1:6. It is the work of making us holy even as He is holy, 1Peter 1:16.
God is making us worthy of Himself. This is the nature of agape love. Our commitment and sacrifice, by choice, opens the way for God to work. He perfects love by leading us through confrontation with both sin and holiness. Love exposes our will and makes us naked before our own self. This is where we need to be to respond in righteousness, truth and goodness. We are to reckon ourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus, Romans 6:11. Love has the ability to uncover and expose, not only who we are fleshly, but the heights and depths of our spiritual participation. We are not at risk in this process, but it can “feel” like we are since we can feel the holy fire of God’s purification when we choose to accept it.
Our divine context is Christ in us and us in Christ, both! It is a process of testing our limits and its effect measures our faith. The degree we permit, by our choice, His work to continue within our soul is the degree we consume His grace. The more grace we consume the broader becomes our dimension of God’s eternal person within us. Our dimensions of love expand beyond our human limits into the eternal reality of our new creation in Christ, Romans 8:28cf.
Remember, it is still a choice, even after we are born again. It is a constant, continual choice. As long as we wear flesh, we are in a state of choosing, testing limits of our growing faith as we consume God’s grace through the participation of our soul.
The temporal attacks on our Spiritual identity is an opportunity to consume God’s work of grace. It exposes weaknesses providing an opportunity to rest in God’s strength while in flesh. Our weakness actually becomes our strength, 2Cor. 12:10.
When we are born of God, spiritually, we become citizens of Heaven. Our earthly journey becomes spiritual training preparing us for eternal life in glorified bodies. We will reign with Christ in His earthly kingdom which is fast approaching. Our finite tenure here on earth exposes us to circumstances qualifying us for greater Spiritual capacities. Suffering, for example, gives us a special knowledge of God as we experience special mercies into His nature on a personal level. We are learning the limitlessness of God and the finiteness of our humanity. To the one who conquers Jesus will make a pillar in the Temple of God, Rev. 3:12cf.
The Holy Spirit is God’s fire purifying, burning out the impurities of our temporal residue by the blood of Jesus’ sacrifice. These spiritual lessons are being learned in battlefield conditions. Spiritual forces of evil are in heavenly places. We are living under authorities opposing our Father God and His absolute person. These are times for us to worship, learn and serve.
Fire is a symbol of God working on behalf of man throughout scripture. In order for an offering to be consumed, a fire was required. Not only did it destroy meat or grain, it also sent upward a fragrance evidence of a transaction taken place. The smoke was a message. It is a witness of Jesus’ work on the cross purifying souls, 2Cor. 2:15-16.
God’s work of grace is a transaction requiring our appropriation so we can be whom God intends for us to be. God used an alter and fire to illustrate an innocent lamb slain, consumed by fire and the sweet fragrance went upward evidencing our commitment and dedication. We are putting flesh to death when we are consuming grace.
Today we are under a new covenant. We are the Body of Christ. The fire on a physical alter burning a spotless lamb is now residing within our own spirit/Spirit (our spirit joined with His Spirit). Now the fire burns within us because we have the truth of His Word, which is Jesus (the logos) Himself, and we have God’s Spirit revealing Christ’s truth to our finite minds. In addition to this, we have each other, co-members in His Body. We are to minister to each other and provide additional flames to the fire we have within.
Have you observed the fire in your fire place? You cannot sustain the fire without having more than one log. You can make it work with two logs but at least three is best. The heat from one log laying next to another shares its heat to keep it burning hot. You have to stoke the fire by turning the logs so they can share more intense heat from their burn areas with each other.
We need each other to share our gifts in ministry. God reveals Himself through personal needs which witness to our brothers and sisters in the Lord. The smoke rising from our sacrifices are more effective when logs burn together.
Our participation is a result of both a death and purification. Death is required in order to produce God’s resurrection life through Jesus Christ. “For the death he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus,” Romans 6:10-11.
God’s provision also provides purification as we combat the constant attack of the world, the flesh and the devil. God uses these attacks as boot camp experiences training us with discernment and wisdom. These become effective tools in righteousness, truth and goodness. The evil context in life conditions us revealing both God and self.
We are salted with fire, Mark 9:49. Salt was a very precious commodity in our early history. It was the means to keep something fresh enough to use. It prolonged the life of food and substances servicing our needs. We are salted with the means to become holy as God is holy while still living in this flesh.
There is fire in our ministry to each other. It reveals God’s truth by testing and by reproof. God’s fire in us comes from both internal and external sources. God’s uses His Word through the Holy Spirit within us and we need to be “grounded” in it. He uses relationships and circumstances revealing Himself in our life. We are rooted in His love and we need to root Him in ours. We cannot neglect Him or His word.
To be filled with all the fullness of God we need to be rooted and grounded in love, Ephesians 3:14cf.