We ended 2017 in the Upper Room considering our Lord's discussion about Spiritual Fruit on personal branches.  Building on that theme, we are entering into 2018 discerning agape love.  Agape love is about grace and fruit, much fruit!

Do you realize the entire Bible, all 66 books, is a prologue of your life.  Each person is a consequence of divine creation and the primary object of the biblical story.  It started before the foundation of the world and it is about lambs!  Check out these two passages:

In His last major teaching, Jesus called His disciples to produce fruit. Clearly, our fruit is not ours at all, but the vinedresser Father’s who owns the vineyard and tends to our health. Our fruit is His fruit!

his verse introduces the closing scenes of Jesus with His disciples on earth. The first closing scene begins with the “last supper” where Jesus is lounging with the remaining eleven disciples around the table.  Another closing scene is in the garden where mortal Peter cuts an ear off of a soldier. Jesus restores the man’s ear and continues to submit to our redemption and the cross. “Jesus was delivered up for our transgression and raised up for our sanctification.”

This verse introduces the closing scenes of Jesus on earth with His disciples. It begins with the “last supper.” Jesus is sitting, in the painting, with His disciples before they had chairs. Actually, they lounged around the table, leaning into each other.  It is here Jesus speaks privately to Judas who leaves before the meal is finished.  After the meal,  Jesus washes the remaining disciple’s feet telling Peter he need not be washed again, only his feet!

The life of Jesus on earth is about finished.  His disciples have been traveling with him for three years. They have witnessed miracle after miracle, healings, curses,  they saw Lazarus raised from the dead and experienced Peter not walking on the water.  Even the fig tree obeyed his command. Now it was all coming to an end … or so they feared. 

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.

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,  grace is orders of magnitude greater but unseen. It is not so much what the Creator has done, gazing at the sun’s halo;  it is what the Creator is now doing in us! 

We can’t be who God has made us unless we will our hearts to love Him. This is how we begin to penetrate who we really are. In Christ Jesus, we are a new supernatural identity.  As we begin to understand how glorious and complete we have been created in Christ Jesus, only as we cultivate height and depth, the width and the power of God’s marvelous grace, are we able to taste the glory of our Spiritual reality and what is yet beyond prepared for us. 

Please pray as we look to God in expectation thru teaching and impacting our local communities. 

We begin our  8 week “BodyLife” class at the local Wesleyan Church in Cambridge, MD. this Sunday, April 8, 2017.  This part 1 of 2 uses the current GN content but will be reformatted into a “Leaf” format.  Each “L” in GN is a leaf on our grafted branch into Christ.  There will be 6 leaves presented in each 8 week session. This is a work in process. We will make changes after this first 8 weeks to fine tune what it should look like going forward.  We are looking forward to a reproducible format.