Sunday Report
This Old Testament passage carries New Testament doctrine! Did you notice how the top is like a choral refrain in heaven while the bottom is a response from earth? There is a relationship connection!
The eye of our living Lord is upon us who have His living hope in our hearts. Our hope is because we have received His love poured into us so that our faith may be renewed in hope since we have now been joined, His Spirit to our spirit, and redeemed.
God’s grace flows to us and in us. This is most amazing! Pondering our reality, what actually is going on in us is staggering!
More staggering than a predictable eclipse of the sun, orders of magnitude greater and unseen is… grace. It is not so much what the Creator has done, gazing at the sun’s halo; it is what the Creator is now doing! Have you seen the Son’s halo?
Our three “L”s form a nucleus of Spiritual identity. They speak to the essential Life of Jesus Christ, God’s Love shared in us and the Holy Spirit’s Light to guide our glorification in Jesus producing His fruit.
Redemption makes possible God’s love in our hearts. All we are and all we have is because God is love. We are his because He made us, we are His because He bought us and we are His because we responded to His grace giving ourselves back to him in faith He provides. Paul put it this way, everything from Him, nothing from us.
Our three “L”s form a nucleus of Spiritual identity. They speak to the essential Life of Jesus Christ, God’s Love shared in us and the Holy Spirit’s Light to guide our glorification in Jesus producing His fruit.
In our last discussion of Christ’s Life in us, we described our created center in the knowledge of Jesus, receiving supernatural resources to grow God’s grace. Love, Life and Light are all part of our singular wholeness in Christ but each contributes qualitatively to our culture of Jesus’ grace in us. We want to now turn to “Light” and see how God illumines our natural soul and uses His word of truth.
LIFE is the second thread in our BodyLife trilogy of “L”s. We are speaking, of course, of Jesus’ resurrected LIFE in us. This common term in the evangelical community has lost its cutting edge. The living Life of our resurrected Jesus is literal. Not a mystic concept or theological idea, Jesus dwells in believers, Colossians 1:27, 2Cor. 1:22, Romans 8:1cf.
This truth is absolute! Do we see Jesus in believers or do we hear them pleading for Jesus’ help? No wonder Christianity is viewed as mystic and off the wall! How would you answer this? Valid or not?
Faith is one of the most pivotal elements in the life of God’s people since it determines destiny and qualitative growth in our created existence of grace. We are Drilling Down faith.
When I was a boy, we drove our 1935 two-tone grey Plymouth through a redwood tree. They had a one way road through one of these behemoths in northern California. A few redwoods are still alive today “who” were just beginning life when Jesus was born. It is hard to imagine how massive these ancients become. I wonder how large we can grow our faith?
We took a look at this verse last time as an introduction to faith. It suggests by context both living and walking are different, living does not necessarily equate to walking. The scriptural record is clear, our faith links the resurrection power of Jesus to both living and walking. Faith not only establishes us in righteousness but also provides the power to bring Jesus into our very soul so that we can live and walk in the Spirit.
The question becomes, why do we want to move mountains and mulberry trees? Faith not only moves mountains, it does much more, it makes us righteousness. The task of making us righteous is greater than moving mountains and this is exactly what we are called to do. We have been given the power to be righteous by faith.
Jesus Christ is our creator. In order to create, you would have to exist before your creation. It is hard to think of existence before time but this is exactly the heritage of 2Corinthians 5:17 believers described in these great pages and prayers of the apostle in Ephesians.
We are in a journey from temporal creation into an eternal setting deeded those who live in God’s immortal love.
Lavished in us are riches of God’s grace whereby we participate in a plan uniting both heaven and earth, in the fullness of time, all things in Christ, Eph. 1:7cf. This doctrine and its application are travel tools to prepare us for God’s eternal glory.
Paul layers steps into the fullness of God from the posture of prayer. We examined rooted and grounded in the previous layer; its a similar couplet used in Paul’s letter to the Colossians, Col 2:7. But here, in Ephesians, its one deliberate layering of God’s requisites, including, knowing the love of Christ surpassing knowledge, the breadth and depths, having the strength to contain Christ, being rooted and grounded and now the dwelling residence of Christ by Faith within our hearts. Here, in this layer, to know the fullness of God as a personal experience faith is vital.
The dwelling presence of Jesus within our heart is accomplished by unlocking faith. But this unlocking is accomplished in strengthening with power through the Holy Spirit, Eph. 3:16. But for the moment we are looking through glasses of faith and will look at strengthening with power another time.
This isn’t our last probe into being “filled with the fullness of God.” But we must start “drilling up” to the love of Christ surpassing knowledge (Eph. 3:14-19). The way Paul puts it, love is a condition for being filled with the fullness of God. But first, we want to be realistic about what Paul means by “filled with all the fullness of God”. We won’t leave our discussion with all the answers but perhaps we can measure its meaning within our understanding. As we journey in faith, God is ever increasing our capacity to receive more grace (Romans 5). So, since we are not removed from God’s spiritually organic activity, “being filled with all the fullness of God,” we focus our soul’s attention in other directions as God maintains His work within us. Let us not forget, it is God working within us, to will and do according to His good pleasure (Philippians 2:13). His faithful work in us continues while our mind is otherwise engaged (Philippians 1:6). This is pictured for us in 1Kings 17ff as we probe this remarkable man Elijah.
After about two years alone with the birds, the brook and God, Elijah is now ready to be strengthened in his faith and tempered for Ahab at Zarepath. First, the widow who did not have the resources to do what Elijah required. Exhausted of resources, the widow submits to God through Elijah and proves God’s faithfulness. Second, bringing back to life what God had already promised to sustain. God seals Elijah by putting divine power into Elijah’s hand for use restoring life into the widow’s son. God affirms Elijah showing His power to others through him and allowing Elijah to experience God’s reality in God’s service of love and judgment.
Our life in Christ operates in two scriptural modes. One is grace, the other is faith. Grace is God’s love to us and faith is our response. It is God’s power making them effective.
We launched our In Christ discussion from a verse platform written by Paul to the saints in Corinth,1Corinthians 1:30:
And because of him (God) you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness, sanctification and redemption,
We observed these “carnal Christians” are in Christ Jesus. This relationship in Christ Jesus brings a wisdom defined as righteousness, sanctification and redemption. We identified these “wisdoms” being associated with the work of the Father, the Holy Spirit and Jesus the Son, operating in our life. Spiritual wisdom is God’s grace cultivated by our faith. Grace is a spiritual capacity but faith is our soul’s ability to receive and apply it.
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 and grace. It is God’s power, however, providing context for love-grace and faith.
Last week we looked at discernment-wisdom as our response to God’s provision of love-grace. The same principal of love-grace and faith apply as we switch our focus to righteousness. Love and grace are constant companions for believers in Christ. No one can snatch us out of the Father’s hand (John 10-29). Love and grace are fundamental to our relationship in Christ and the fullness of our faith. Our faith effects (not affects) knowledge, wisdom, behavior and hope including the smile on our face.
Grace and faith are context shepherding our focus on righteousness. Because of God we are in Christ who became our righteousness. We alluded last week to the relationship between justification and righteousness.
Our union in Christ is much more than an association with Jesus. We may consider our spiritual relationship “in” him a bit distant since His work on the cross was such a long time ago. The courtroom scene often illustrating our “position” in Christ conveys our legal standing without connecting us on a personal level in His life.
The translators of the Greek New Testament sometimes interpret the Greek preposition εν (in) with our English preposition “by”, as in the case of 2 Timothy 2:1 which we quoted last week:
2 Timothy 2:1 You then, my child, be strengthened by (εν) the grace that is in (εν) Christ Jesus,
Another example we use, because of its importance, is Romans 5:9 and 10; “we shall be saved by his life.” Paul is writing we are being saved “in” His life. This simple preposition fundamentally changes the way we see who we are “in Christ.”
The Lord’s prayer in John 14 also coveys a spiritual relationship more hands on than legal: “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” In this same passage Jesus says: “In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (John 14:20ff).
Peter tells us the angels in heaven look at us in wonder because we have a salvation completed in Christ Jesus Himself (1 Peter 1:12). In fact, as we read the first chapter of 1Peter, we cannot turn away without being awe struck by God’s grace, which we possess in Christ Jesus. We are the benefactors of God’s love in such an astounding way, a way we actually distort trying shape it and size it into our inadequate capacity to understand.
Understanding the mystery of being in Christ, and becoming an effective minister in our “niche” capacities, is one of our challenges. Paul tells us through his letter to the Ephesians, “speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into Him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love” (Ephesians 4:15-16).
The three New Testament passages used for teaching spiritual gifts for believers are 1 Corinthians 12, Romans 12 and Ephesians 4. The first two are more “list” focused and the Ephesians passage, which I prefer, is more “function” focused.
While it is important to express our “niche” capacities in spiritual ministry, our primary focus is to grow up into Christ who is the head of His body. Maturity in Christ gives us a far better yield of our fruit we bear and enables us to grow in faith.
