The Thing is Not the Thing (part I)

I am part of a women’s small group that meets once a week to behold Christ in the Word.  I am sure if I began a sentence with “The thing”….. The rest of the women in the group could finish the sentence, “is not the thing.”  It is a concept that God dropped in me several years ago.  It means, nothing is what is seems at first blush, look deeper and see through the eyes of faith, not flesh.  It’s so simple, yet there is absolutely no way any of us can get there on our own.  That in fact is the beauty of it because for years I did try to get there on my own, and the very thing that prevented me from getting there was that I thought the “thing” was the thing.  Confused?  I pray that the Holy Spirit gives you crystal clear understanding of what I mean.

As I’ve said before, my MAIN goal in writing this blog is that believers experience the liberty that exists only in Christ, and the victory of an effortless rested walk.   In prior posts I have reminded you of the truth of who you became when you were born again.  You are not who you were, and most importantly your actions are no longer dictated by your flesh but by His Spirit which is dominant in you, and your flesh now submits to the will of the Spirit in you. (Once in a while you need to remind it to sit down and shut up and enjoy the ride).  The real you HAS BEEN reconciled to Christ; until you awaken to that truth you will behave as an estranged child.  So stop seeing yourself as a bad little boy or girl who is continuously disappointing your Father and needs constant discipline to be kept in line.  We were broken under the incredible weight of sin that saddled us and we WERE MADE FREE when we trusted in Christ to remove that saddle of sin.   The key to victory is an accurate perspective, and the key to an accurate perspective is, assuming your proper position.  Christ did not permeate us with His victorious risen Self so we could continue to see things from a limited fleshly point of view; He positioned us high above, WITH Him so we could see things accurately from His triumphant perspective.
 

Is your focus fleshly and inward?   If so you will discern every situation that enters your little life bubble carnally.  First you will focus on how your flesh is being affected…Why is this happening to me, what have I done to cause this, and what can I do to make it stop?  Many Christians look at “events” or “trials” or whatever you want to call them and immediately the goal is to figure out how to get through it, because they see the event as happening TO them.  What if your perspective was from a higher plane, looking down, instead of identifying WITH the event.  What if we stopped categorizing everything that came into our life as either good or bad?  What if we saw our life as a mission, everything as blessing and ourselves as, implacable!  IN CHRIST this is exactly the case!  James says consider it all joy when you encounter various EXPERIMENTS!   Yes! Peirasmos is the Greek word for experiment, or proving!  When a scientist tests a hypothesis, he is proving out for all to see what he already has confidence in.  God knows His promises are solid and will hold up under grueling examination.  As believers we should not fear living under a microscope so the world can examine our lives for evidence that God’s word WORKS!  But before you can convince anyone else, YOU have to have confidence in what you are selling!
 

Does His Word work for you?  His Word is Spirit and it is life, and so are you, since Christ came to live IN YOU.  But if you see yourself as flesh, and you see your problems as physical, and you see your life as here on this earth, Spiritual food will do you no good.  In order for you to see spiritually, you must stop seeing with your limited physical eyes.  Pluck the dang things out if you need to but stop living life on a short leash, bound by fear, and lying emotions.  (Ok don’t really pluck out your eyes; just yield them, along with all your members, to righteousness)  Aren’t you tired of this constant waffling?  Questioning God at every turn…Did God inflict me with this or am I being attacked by the devil?  Is God going to deliver me or does He want to teach me something?  Did I cause this by some “un-confessed” sin in my life?  Me, me, me, I, I, I,-- STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT!  For goodness sake get over yourself.  Christ wants to live through you, so let Him.  He delivers, because HE IS a deliverer, He heals, because HE IS a healer, He provides because HE IS a provider, He Loves, because HE IS LOVE!  He acts based on who HE is.  If His reaction toward us had ANY dependence on our actions HE WOULD BE CONTINUOUSLY DISAPPOINTED IN US!!  He sanctified us and set us apart, SO HE COULD BE HIMSELF TO US AND IN US!  Stop thinking it’s all about trying to pretty up your flesh; it’s all about magnifying His Son in spite of your flesh.  

Once this concept comes alive in you, you will not live from mountaintop to mountaintop; circumstances will not dictate how things are going.  This is what Jesus meant when He said to find your life you must lose it.  Not so you could carry around a cross every day and suffer till He returns, what good is your suffering to Him?  Can it redeem ONE person?  He meant exchange that lie of a life you are living and live LIFE inhabited by the one who INVENTED LIFE!  Next post we will see what this kind of life looks like! 

To Be or Not to Be

In my last couple of posts I purposed to create an excitement in you regarding the liberty we have in Christ and the truth that; God intended for us all to live as liberated beings!  It is and will always be the knowing of the truth that makes us free. (John 8:32) This word  know  is ginosko which is to know, perceive, understand, and to become known, it is used as an idiom in the Greek for sexual intercourse, and is derived from the same word as ginomai, meaning to become.  So if we amplify the text in its context we see that it is the inward knowing of God’s truth that causes us to be in such communion with Christ (who alone is truth) that we are transformed into His image, truth.   The word free is eleutheroo, which means to set at liberty, one that is no longer under restraint, as if setting free from slavery.  And vs 36 literally translated says if the Son sets you at liberty then you are in fact free, there is an expectation that we exist in that freedom!    

So the obvious question is free from what?  Many of us would say free from religious rule keeping.   I would agree that in setting us free from the law of sin and death, the focus is no longer on improving our behavior in order to gain favor with God, and that God’s focus is His Son, who perfectly behaved and met every demand of the prior covenant so we could live free from the demands of it.   But I would contend that we are not fully experiencing freedom FROM because OUR focus is still on behavior.  God indwelt us with Christ not to make our flesh behave better but to free us from our flesh.  While many of us realize that we cannot behave better by trying harder, we still think that behaving better is the end game.   Many Christians live and die having never realized the power and purpose that is available by walking in the Spirit, which simply means refusing to walk preoccupied by the flesh. 

The bible is full of the promise of fruit to those who walk by faith in agreement with the Spirit, but many see these passages as discouraging stumbling blocks that signal they are nowhere near ready to move into God’s purpose for them.  Many assume (because we still see our flesh as something that needs dealt with) that God cannot possibly accomplish His will through us till we are free from these nasty little habits and behaviors.   Having hearts that are sincere toward God many beg and plead for God to “make me more like Christ!”  When all the while we ARE completely consumed in and by the living Christ, having BEEN given all things necessary for the task at hand.  II Peter 1:3&4 tells us that having called us, God fully supplied us through the epignosis (correct and accurate knowledge) of Christ, the purpose being that we would become partakers of HIS DIVINE NATURE, having escaped (past-tense) the hindrances of the old nature!  And this word for become in vs 4 is ginomai, which is not a gradual process of *becoming*, but signifies a change of condition, you WERE that and now you ARE this! The truth that HAS transformed us into the Righteousness of God dwells on the inside of us.  We behold it constantly before us; we have no choice but to be transformed. (2Cor 3:17 & 18)  All of 2 Corinthians 3 is telling us that the glory that comes from obedience to rules is temporary, it will not produce life. 

IN A NUTSHELL>> We are blinded to the transforming nature of Christ and a veil comes over our hearts when we behold His Word and discern imperatives to strive toward rather than the Spirit of the Lord which alone has the power to change us from Glory to Glory.   The power in the grace of God to transform will be of no effect to you if you discern demand instead of supply.(Gal 5:4)  The volume of The Book points to Christ, in whom every demand IS ALREADY MET.

You have become meet for the task you were preordained to perform and all that is necessary is your yielding to the truth of WHO YOU ARE!  Does it make any sense that God would predestine us to be conformed to the image of His will and preordain works to be done by us and not equip us for the task?  Why would He leave that to chance?  Is He a God of loose ends?  The completed work of Christ is just that, completed!  Rest in who He HAS MADE you, trust the truth of His Word.   Preoccupation with the flesh is carnality, no matter how you slice it. 

You are not your flesh, you no longer reside in your flesh you reside in the Spirit, there is work to be done, you have been equipped to do it, you now serve righteousness, simply yield to it!