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.
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?
We spoke to the issue of BodyLife in our last GN. BodyLife is an organic reality flowing out of every believer. A new life has been created inside our body and joined to God’s own Spirit becoming our new identity.
Problem! We are so rooted in our fleshly body we end up walking in flesh while living in our new spirit/Spirit. God’s resurrection power is thereby unavailable except in putting to death sin in the body … Jesus already nailed it to His cross! We need to nail it to His cross also, using His resurrection power. Jesus paved the way for us to get it done.
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.
This verse is like our view of the Redwoods. There is much more than meets the eye. Sin cannot overwhelm neither can circumstances be so impossible that grace is not waiting on scene to do “so much more.” Grace is a personal relationship working inside-out as well as outside circumstances - in. It is about two persons in relationship! One person is you and the other person is too amazing to describe!
The other side of our grace relationship is God Himself. Not the image of God who is in our mind, nothing that small. It is The Eternal Reality of God Himself. The I AM Who creates out of nothing! This is the person on the other side of our personal relationship because we are in Jesus Christ. It is not only GOD, it is The Holy Spirit, it is The Lord Jesus Christ, it is the Triune Godhead Person! I know! How can it be? Yes, it is the God of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Moses and the God of Jesus. Our grace is from out of God, our personal God, who provides power for us to accomplish His will ... and so much more! This grace, the Grace of our Triune God, is “this grace in which we stand,” Romans 5:2. How glorious is our God!
In our last discussion we focused on the new creation each believer experiences when born from above in Jesus, God’s only begotten Son. It is righteousness, the risen life of Jesus, from the dead, gifted to us through our faith, by His grace. His LIFE, in resurrection power, is created in us. This powerful Life is what we need to release His life Inside Out. This is one degree of Glory!
Do we realize the glory of our Lord God has been created in us? The Lord, who is a Spirit, has placed His Shekinah glory within each believer but it is only a taste, it should whet our appetite.
Clearly, God’s glory is seen in physical light piercing the dense, living redwood fence reaching upward into God’s kingdom. Much more than this, His organic glory within each believer connects us with each other as we grow consuming grace. His eternal glory within us often escapes our attention. His glory becomes our glory as our oneness in Him and each other is manifested even in our own flesh, Romans 8:11.
Here is one mystery of Godliness unlocked for the believer who “has ears to hear.” Our soulish tendency is to rely upon self but the testimony of the Lord is sure making wise the simple, Ps. 19. When we “will” open the faith door into our mind and heart, we enter into God’s own sanctuary of counsel, Rev. 3:20. His Truth is light into our soul so we can discern His “good” and become wise, Heb. 5:14. This is where we need to spend personal time! His glory becomes ours since we are His.
Looking at the above picture, you are struck by the massive trees next to two small persons walking on a narrow trail bridge. If these two people are believers, they have within them something much greater than trees. In the shadow of giant redwoods, dwarfing the two small clay vessels, God created again with resurrection power, life in these two people. This is what is meant to be ‘’born again.’’
Paul tells us in Ephesians 4:24 our new self is created in the likeness or image of God in true righteousness and holiness. The word created here conveys the same meaning used in Genesis when God created man and breathed life into Him. This time, John tells us in John 1, we are born of God Himself. God’s amazing grace purchased us, so once again, we are His possession. The first time we were His by creation but this time we are His because He bought us and we gave our heart and life to Him. This time, we are lifted above terrestrial soil and made citizens in God’s eternal Kingdom. While serving on this clay ball, already sin cursed, these two believers walk in the light of resurrection power.
Our ministry trip was totally different than in October 2015. Diverse as they are, God’s grace is abundant in both. It isn’t geographic differences, our Lord provides according to the needs of His Body. Our God is working in both ministers as well as the ministry.
In October we traveled daily out of Addis Ababa. This May 2016 trip was based in three geographical ministry regions. It was long and physical. But more than that, it was a faith trip through the “redwoods” of Ethiopia. Our Father continues to shape us into the image of His Son through varied communities within His Body. Love reigns! Our loving Lord is preparing His Church for a wedding. Our trip is one small token step in His Bride’s preparation of a forth coming eternal event.
Faith is one of the most pivotal elements in the life of God’s people since it determines the destiny of our created existence AND our qualitative growth in grace. We are drilling down faith.
January Grace Notes listed 12 commonly known faith verses. One of many omitted is the following:
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.” -Romans 1:16-17, (See also Habakkuk 2:4, Hebrews 10:38, Galatians 3:11).
As ye have, therefore, received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in Him, rooted and built up in Him, established in the faith, as ye have been taught, abounding with thanksgiving.
Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls for a sincere love of your brethren, fervently love one another from the heart, for you have been born again not of seed that is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and abiding word of God.
Faith is critical to our walk in the Lord at every level. We are expanding our faith discussions so that we can look a little deeper into the mechanics of this important subject. In the previous discussion our focus was on the state of our being “in Christ.” The reality of our life has changed from temporal resources to unseen eternal resources which now are ours “in Christ”. These eternal resources are defined in scripture itself and by our faith. We want to explore these resources and how to use them as a life style in Christ. If we walk by faith rather than sight, if we walk by what is unseen rather than what is tangible, we need a whole new set of guidelines. Before we do that however, let us review where we are and how we got here. Our faith is the reality of where we are.
I seem compelled to search out little hideaways in the redwoods on my pathway of faith for GN. I have making side trips into Revelation for several years but it tends to become more and more consuming. I started using some Revelation references in the current GN because faith includes who we are, where we are going and how we get there. It is truly a blessing to spend time on The Revelation of Jesus Christ! It is all about Him.
God grows faith through grace. Once we are born into His care, we become part of God’s grace culture. This unique system of living is sourced in God Himself. Every circumstance of our life reaches into His personal nerve center because we have been bought and brought back into God’s personal family becoming children of God. His loving response to His children, who are in Christ, is an ability gifted to each believer according to God’s purposes and our need. This is called grace.
Our faith is joined to grace and has divine purposes. We grow in Christ through our faith by His grace. Growing in Him is preparation, while in our flesh, for ruling with Him during His earthly millennium kingdom and then reigning with Him eternally.
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 has layered steps into the fullness of God from the posture of prayer. We have been looking at each step starting at the bottom, the fullness of God, and moving up, one step at a time, back to the top, leaving a staircase for our understanding into God’s love. Last time we looked at faith. It is our door allowing Christ to “dwell in our hearts” allowing us to experience the fullness of God.
Now we want to look more closely to what the apostle Paul means by dwelling in our hearts. The word he uses in the Greek is a compound word meaning House (οικοs) and down against (κατα). It is not uncommon in Greek to combine a preposition into a word in order to convey a nuance or emphasize a meaning. In this instant, the emphases is not just living in a house or dwelling in it but with the κατα formed into the front of the word, Paul emphasizes the full weight of God’s presence is meant to impact our soul-self. He is saying Christ may come against our heart so that we can know the full content of Jesus’ presence within our soul-self.
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.
Our faith is based upon our knowledge of the person of Jesus Christ and our relationship with Him as a person. A regenerated believer, one who has been born again, knows what it means to have new life. It is easy to identify by our experience of faith when Jesus Christ came into our life. But this new birth is an embryo of life in Christ. It begins a gestation period introducing us into grace accessible by faith. Being born again is receiving Jesus factually! We literally receive the resurrected life of the person, Jesus Christ. How is this possible? … Love! What has love to do with it? ☺
In human terms it is ridiculously absurd. This reality contradicts natural laws and our sense of what is possible. The colossal nature of what God has done is a measurement of how gargantuan our God of love is! The regenerate person has within “self” a witness and testimony of the saving power of Jesus Christ as well as God’s immense love which drives grace. Paul says it best in Romans 5, it is so “much more!”
