Friday, March 16, 2012

Don't Tamper With the Mail (part II)

There is power in the good news of Christ.  This message alone can save all of mankind from the curse that he is under.  And what is that message?  CHRIST IN US! The hope of glory! (Col 1:27) Christ is the message; He is the Word that is preached! When a heart grabs hold of that message, it is literally grabbing hold of the living Christ and saying, DON’T GO!  You are what I need!  When we receive his word He is imparting His very being into us.  As believers, every time we read the Word of God, more of Christ’s actual being is made known to us, and what is revealed to us BELONGS to us!  That is what changes us.  We were NEVER meant to go to His Word and use it as a “guide” to “be a better Christian”.  If that is how we treat it, any book from the Library will do.  Does that seem harsh?  It is not adhering to the teachings that change us, it is SEEING and RECEIVING Christ right into our very being, and that is a spiritual transaction that only the Holy Spirit can enact.

Let’s look at Colossians 1:27 closely.  Have you always assumed the glory promised was not until you see heaven? Hope in the Greek is elpis (expectation of good) and glory in Greek is doxa (a condition or state, a good estimation or opinion of).  This verse literally says that because of the revelation of the mystery of Christ IN US we can have an expectation that God is going to be good toward us!  And because of His glory in us, we now have a good opinion of Him which grows, and we can be confident that He has a good opinion of us!  Isn’t that the crux of it?  In the fall, man lost the glory that he embodied so not only did his estimation of himself change, he also began to fear God because his estimation of who God was had changed as well.   Through Christ, we are reconciled back to that glory.  We see Him accurately and since we now embody God’s righteousness because of His Son, we see ourselves accurately, as we were always meant to be.  We are at peace. 


It seems simple, but this revelation alone can transform a heart in the blink of an eye.  If as believers we are waiting for the hope of this glory to appear in Heaven, we will never realize the joy and the victory that is ours NOW.   This really is the message that saves.  The “doing” part was DONE.  Hebrews 10:7 says …the volume of the book is written of ME! Christ!  It all points to HIM!  Because when we SEE Him we will be changed.  And before that verses 5 and 6 say He finds NO pleasure in our trying, He wants a body that He can LIVE IN!  That’s all!  We make this way harder than it has to be.  Once we see the truth of who He is, He only asks us to yield to Him so He can live through us to bring about all that He purposed for us.  We get to just stand back in awe and watch Him at work.  So instead of a life of “trying to live FOR Jesus” He lives His life in us and we rest in who He is. 
Do you feel butterflies in your stomach right now at the possibility that it really is this simple?  That is His Spirit inside you recognizing truth.  Grab onto it.  Don’t let that other voice inside you turn you back the way you came.  How has that worked for you?  How many Christians do you know living that lie?  Do they have joy?  Consistently?  Are they victorious? Consistently?  Someone’s speech can reveal in a second what they truly believe.  Do you know believers that it seems like they always have some crisis going on, or their speech is a litany of complaints, always criticizing others or themselves? 
Our only HOPE is Christ in us, not a better us.  This is what the message was before man tampered with the mail and tried to make the message better.  It was too simple for our flesh before.  Man had to get his sticky little fingers on it and make himself a project.  There is NO fixing this flesh, when we realize that and just let Christ live IN US, then we will really begin to live!  There is so much freedom in Him when you see that it’s really all Him, and He left nothing for us to do but trust in His goodness.  Please meditate on Hebrews 10 this week; do you see that He wants us to be guilt free in our conscience as well? He did a complete work in us and He completely completed it! Now we are complete in Him! 

No comments:

Post a Comment