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Isaiah 61 Ministries, 2010 | Recent Posts | Ezra1 | 7th Angel |

An article that raises some questions about raising boys.

Return of the Kings | Kings Fast Trak

Saturday, July 31, 2010

“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” Galatians 5.1 NIV. Many christians prefer their slavery to Christ’s freedom. Many more have successfully revised His freedom into their bondage –a bondage that gives them a certain status and the illusion that they are pleasing God. But this prison does not appear as the prison it is because it is their and identity and their life. They are embedded in it and it is embedded in them.

Some people exist to set the captives free. Others unite to maintain the prisons in which they and others find their identity, a career and comfort. Jeremiah describes this world as a wasteland. Jesus came to set people free and empower them as sons of God. He made this declaration through His prophet in Isaiah 61 and spoke this it out at His first public sermon, which is recorded in Luke 4.18. Specifically Jesus came to liberate people from every kind of bondage that is known to man. Jesus nailed to the cross is the sign of your freedom. But you living in the Spirit is the reality of both your freedom and victory over the world.

If you live in an old testament mentality you will be preoccupied with sin. But if you live in Jesus you will be advancing into the reality of being a son of God. The sons of God live in the Spirit of Sonship because through Jesus they are bound to the Father. Their imprisonment in Christ fills them with Christ’s life, holiness and authority to reign over circumstances and the Enemy.

Sons of God are ‘imprisoned’ in Jesus, which is the reason for their authority over their circumstances and the Enemy.

Jesus makes people free indeed. Not half free and half bound. He does not give ‘virtual freedom’ or ersatz freedom. He is not yes and no. He is “YES!” He does not tell you that ‘if we are saved by law He died for nothing’ and then contradict Himself by asserting that old testament laws are written on your heart as some claim He does in Hebrews. How could this be so when Hebrews is devoted to declaring that Judaism is dead and that life is found in Jesus. No. It is His Person who lives in your heart because your life is bound in Him. His freedom is real and it is potent as we live in Him and not in laws.

Jesus came in the power of the sovereign Lord to liberate people from deformed understanding, spiritual blindness, religious captivity and emotional paralysis. This is why He healed people and broke the power of demons in their lives. His healing of the body was a sign of what He was doing in the Spirit – delivering people from crippling guilt and healing their bodies. This was the outward manifestation of what He was doing for the whole person; the whole world. In Jesus freedom and light came into the world, but many preferred darkness rather than light. Why? Many resisted Him because their deeds were evil. Others because their mind-set and their lives were religious.

Some people live to set captives free. Like Jesus they are angered at the marketing of religion. Others live to shore up prison walls. Walls that give them a career. Walls that provide certainty. Compartments that make them feel secure. Spatio-temporal grids that provide a pauper’s identity – and a false sense of spirituality.

The more subtle are our religious bondages, the more extensive is their hold over the people these bondages own. The more pervasive are the bondages, the more viciously will demonic presences fight through religion and politics to maintain them. The most pervasive and inebriating climate of bondage comes from the religious and secular frameworks of the knowledge of good and evil. These world views promote themselves as political correctness, ‘godliness,’ and even the mind of Christ. But its source is the serpent in the tree who successfully binds, blinds and diminishes the sons of God.

If we don’t live in God through Jesus we live in a prison. If we don’t live in the Spirit we are living in the letter. If we live in the letter we are living in the knowledge of good and evil. If we are still living in the knowledge of good and evil, then for us, Christ died for nothing. If we are attempting to find our righteousness and wholeness in anything less than Jesus or in some addition to Him, we have created a prison. But our inheritance is to live as daughters and sons in the House of our Father.

Friday, July 30, 2010

We often hear it said that when we get Self off the throne and put God where Self was, we will have commenced the journey of putting our life back together. It’s true of course. Misguided effort and confusion occurs in the church when we use ministry as a means of doing our work in the name of God.

So what do we do in our name? When we die in Christ so that we are alive in Him, we are well placed to become who God intended us to be and do the things he envisaged we would do. This is why Paul wrote, “I die daily.” Wholeness and completeness occurs as God’s people assume their genuine identities and purposes in Jesus. We leave behind the Babylon of self-centered works and begin to grow the Kingdom of God’s Son.

Both the old and new testament promise a new name for those who persist in God. For we of the new testament age this means persisting and advancing into the Romans 8 life of living in Jesus by the Spirit. To live in the Spirit is the summit of being a son of God in our flesh. Not ‘flesh’ in the sense of carnality but flesh that is the temple of the Son of God. Christ in you and through you is the reality of His Kingdom come, His will being done on earth as it is in heaven. The fact is, you are the reality of His life from heaven on earth.

Considering what I wrote in the first paragraph, a life lived in Jesus is a paradox. Why? We were created to live out of our person, distinct but contributing to the whole. We were made to be a self – but not a self independent of the Father – a self that lived in Him as a daughter/son. We were made to be who we were by living in God. This may sound a contradiction but it is the truth. Sons are sons by living in the Father. Thus Jesus emphatically declared; ‘I and My Father are one.’

This is why the new man in Christ lives from his spirit, not from the things he thinks he should do. He lives from a ‘ real self’ that is hidden in Christ in God. The result is that he and she produce stuff that is Godly and alive, instead of living in ‘stuff’ attempting to produce God. Many of God’s people still live in ‘the stuff.’ Witness the continuing obsession with church and the feverish attempt to create it in new forms. If we could live in the Father by absorbing ourselves in Jesus, the church would be created because He would build it.

Leanne Payne got it right with the insight that the chief disaster of the fall and the ensuing dominion of the knowledge of good and evil, was that mankind came to live out of his projections of good and evil instead of living out of God. But the Father has provided a Way, whereby all of us may live in Him by the Spirit. To live in our carnal selves is to live fruitless and fractured. To live in our doings is to produce leafy trees without fruit for God’s Kingdom. But to live in Jesus is to be who we were born to be and to be engaged in the purposes in which the Father designed that we be absorbed. In Christ we are ourselves. We are alive and we are multiplying life. Living in Jesus it will be said of us, ‘There is life in you and that life is the light of others whom you touch. Out of you will flow rivers of life for the watering of families, cities and nations.’

‘May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world’ Gal 6.14 NIV.

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Richard Foster has written an excellent book entitled ‘The Celebration of Discipline.’ It unwraps the practices of meditation, fasting, prayer and solitude as disciplines that can enhance spiritual growth. Such devotional habits have value to the extent that they place our being in an optimal position to receive the reality of the union with God that is already ours in Jesus.

We need to practice the presence of Jesus with us and in us and around us. The focus is Jesus, not the disciplines. The default position of all of us is to become absorbed in the disciplines as an end in themselves. Jesus is the beginning, end and middle. We are drawn into God by Jesus, which is to say that we are drawn into God by God. God is His own mediator. The Holy Spirit places us in Jesus who has placed us in the Father. Any discipline that focuses our being in this reality is worthwhile. As long as we remember that Jesus is the essence of life – He is life in itself.

It is a good discipline to read the Bible. All of it. Such a discipline would go some way to inoculating us against the naiveté that afflicts many of God’s people. It surprises me the extent to which intelligent people are swept along by flaky winds of doctrine that come from demagogues and self appointed authorities. One wonders what ‘nutter’ theory some people will adopt next. Familiarity with the sweep of Bible history and actual scripture verses would help protect against specious versions of end time events that graze like sacred cows in the pastures of the church – versions that label some as ‘chosen’ and others as disposable. Some are remarkably blasé about reading the Bible, but they fasten like limpets onto conspiracy theories that come from the pen of any Tom, Dick or Harry with a PhD.

It is good to know the Bible but it is better to know Jesus and the power of His resurrection in our present life. Disciplines have value but not as much values as living in His real presence. WHAT WE NEED IS A DISCIPLINES LIVING IN HIS PRESENCE. Some of us need to abandon the idol of DISCIPLINES.

Those who make much of disciplines are the weaker brother, not the stronger. Since Jesus gave His life, life itself has come to be a sacrament to those who live in Jesus the Person rather than in ‘christianity the religion.’ Jesus came to the world to release ‘God’ so that we can live in the world to release and multiply Jesus. Brother Lawrence got it right when he wrote, ‘O God of pots and pans.’ Christ in you releases His glory wherever you happen to be. We just need to be intentional about it and live more in God-consciousness than we do in self-consciousness.

In the power of the Spirit of Christ, His Presence transcends our being. By this I mean that His Presence in us is larger than our body. Not only is His Presence in us but there is an out-shining from us in the Spirit that far exceeds our presence in our body. His Presence is always with those who believe to bring life to any situation.

‘I also pray that you will understand the incredible greatness of God’s power for us who believe him. This is the same mighty power that raised Christ from the dead and seated him in the place of honor at God’s right hand in the heavenly realms. Now he is far above any ruler or authority or power or leader or anything else’ Eph 1.19-22 NLT.

‘That's why I work and struggle so hard, depending on Christ's mighty power that works within me’ Col 1.29 NLT.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

When I was in high school we used to do these comprehension exercises. You would read a story and answer the questions listed at the bottom designed to promote discussion and to assess how much you had understood what you had just read. Some would get ten out of ten. Others one, or possibly three.

How is your spiritual comprehension? You can improve it. There are christians about who are particularly dull in the things of God. They have a ‘faith’ that consists mainly of unbelief in God, and as a consequence a desperate reliance on the understandings of their head and the works of their hands. They deny the Spirit and uphold the flesh with great sincerity and at times self-righteousness. This outlook propels them in the direction of good works rather than ‘God-works.’ Unfortunately their works are devoid of supernatural life. Their tragedy is that have no more effect on the advance of the Kingdom of God than the efforts of any good minded atheist working from his humanitarian impulses.

If this is you I have good news. Simply repent. Seek Jesus’ face rather than your own and you will be done with bareness.

Such christians are not insincere but they are misguided. They have a mind-set that distorts their reality so much that they just don’t get it. Frequently attempting to become blind leaders of those who can see, they presume, from their position of un-teachability to be critical of those who live in the Spirit and from whom flow rivers of life that irrigate the Kingdom of God. They are continually motivated to get others to do what God would like to do through them – if they could flip over from attempting to use Christ’s name to build their own name.

Spiritual perception has little to do with intelligence and a lot to do with one’s position in relation to the scheme of things. Basically it’s this: Our spiritual perception will be poor if we imagine we are the centre of our universe and sharp if we are convinced that God is. The kind of people I’m describing are those who have never been able to recognize that God is God and that they are not. They what Watchman Nee calls carnal christians. They have not accepted that they exist for God and that He does not exist for them. Their ‘christianity’ is an unfortunate amalgam of god-talk and humanism, wrapped in an envelope of the knowledge of good and evil. Consequently they live in confusion even as they attempt to tell others what they should be doing and leave behind them a succession of failed fellowships without knowing why. It is such people that Jude called ‘clouds without rain.’

The Lord attempts to speak into the lives of such people through their friends and those who love them. But such words are often rebuffed with what would be arrogance if they did not come from ignorance and near total blindness. I Have heard words of life and light – living words of truth and revelation spoken to such people in love – words about the supremacy of Jesus and the power of the Spirit. But they have been thrust aside and told that what they were saying is ‘just words.’

Words of life appear to be ‘just words’ to those who live in performance and view the world through the cataract of the flesh rather than the lens of the Spirit. Their great need is to be born again so that they can see the door to the Kingdom of God. The Spirit is willing but the flesh is dull. As I said, there is a way to escape spiritual blindness. It’s called humility and a teachable spirit. The meek will inherit the Kingdom, but the proud will inherit confusion.

‘Jesus declared, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again’ John 3.3 NIV.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

In politics, decisions are made on the basis of placating factions and interests. On this basis the side that gets what is wants applauds the decision, while the side that loses describes the decision as a sell-out. There is seldom a win-win situation In Selfdom. Just winners and losers. A politician, if he or she is a good one, attempts to give each faction something. The problem is that there are usually more than two factions. Marginalized factions usually get nothing and the discrimination they endure is perpetuated.

Which brings us to the church. A carnal church or denomination is a political arena. Decisions are made on the basis of pleasing factions and maintaining leaders in power. Such leaders, to preserves themselves and their position, often sell themselves like Esau for a mess of pottage to avoid a political mess. Only some, like Jesus are willing to sacrifice themselves for the truth. These are in the tradition of Elijah. The former are in the tradition of Ahab who must have what belongs to others. Those who sell themselves lose their birthright, which is their inheritance in the Kingdom of God. But the meek and the poor not only see God. They inherit the earth, which is to say they become priests and kings in Christ’s Kingdom with authority to reign – frequently outside the church from which they have been flung or frozen out. Take heart from the fact that Jesus ministered outside the camp.

Priests and kings mediate the salvation and the reign of Jesus with authority and not as the scribes. This is to say they live in God, not in the knowledge of good and evil or in a political mind-set. They cannot minister in the context of a political church for one simple reason: Christ is not divided. Those who are His are one with Him and one with each other. Living in God and eating the fruit of the tree of life, they live in unity while multiplying diversity.

The sin of the man-centered church is not that it is immoral. Its sin is that it worships itself instead of Christ the King. The house of man has two manifestations. It may appear as a luxuriant green tree but without fruit that lasts or it may be discerned as the dead tree that it is. The present battle is taking place between the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. The kingdom of God and God’s House is separating itself from the house of religion and man-centered worship. There are those who talk ‘christianity’ but hate Jesus. There are those who enthuse about His Second Coming but resist His coming in the flesh of those around them.

God says come out of her my people and don’t participate in her plagues. You need to make a choice. Do you need to stop rationalizing that things will change if you persist enough and pray enough? Is the approval of man more precious to you than the approval of Jesus? Be careful that in trying to bring about change you are not changed yourself – dumbed down to the level of those you hope to revive. Two can only walk together when it is agreed that Jesus is Lord and man is not. The things of the Spirit of Christ are foolishness to those walking in the flesh of religion. Your life is not about pleasing people. It’s about pleasing God and living in His Son.

‘Those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever’ Daniel 12.3 NIV.

FURTHER READING: God’s order and government is as different to that which pertains in many churches and denominations as is night from day. Don’t delude yourself through insularity, passivism and sentimental religiosity that there is not a government of God that the Father wants to impart through Christ in and among His people.

Monday, July 26, 2010

When man fell, our mode of being changed from living in God to living in our knowledge of God – but not only that. Our mode of being changed from living in God to living in our perceptions of God. Given that our perceptions of God influence our perceptions of good, our exit from life in the spirit left us with a diminished god, a shrunken self and a distorted knowledge of good and evil.

Initially our potential in God was infinite. It is again. Since Jesus has made ‘the two one’ we are joined to God and placed ‘in Him.’ He alone is our ‘limitation.’ Such a limitation ensures that we live in holiness and with unlimited potential to advance into the glory of the sons of God who live in the Spirit.

To live in anything other than the Spirit is to live as less than we are. This is so for those in rebellion against God and those who believe in God – yet choose to live out of the letter instead of in the Spirit.

Those who believe that Jesus is the means for us to achieve success in keeping the law sometimes say, ‘I have a right to believe as I choose.’ The fact is you don’t. You were bought at infinite price. You don’t belong to yourself. Taking the name of Christ you have an obligation to conform to His beliefs and not your own. Your obligation is to live in the Spirit in order to put to death not only the deeds of the body but the imaginations of a carnal mind-set.

We can expand in our being as sons of God if we live in God’s son. In Christ we have infinite potential. Eternal life is not only everlasting life. It is unlimited life – the unremitting development from glory to glory of the sons of God. Limited to living in God’s Son you have access to infinity.

Saturday, July 24, 2010

When Jesus allowed Himself to be bound, nailed and killed on the cross He released infinite possibility. The binding and death of God’s Son released unlimited creative power into God’s sons. It was the fullness of God extinguished on the cross that opened the door to the multiplication of extravagant creative potential in God’s daughters and sons. That’s if we live in God.

Since the cross and the establishment of Jesus at the right hand of authority and power we have a privilege – a privilege that to the carnal/religious mind is counter intuitive. This is the privilege of confining ourselves to God; of being so immersed, hidden and captured in God that the Spirit of Life is released through us without limit.

The carnal christian is impounded in law. The sons of God are captured in God’s Son. Where those who inhabit law begin with a bang and end in a whimper, those who live in Jesus are righteous, holy and whole. They are the progenitors of creative life and power in families, factories, laboratories, retail shops, hospitals and churches. Having renounced the self-centeredness of law-mongering they advance into the fullness of Jesus and His re-creative, life-multiplying power that regenerates the world. They say,

Whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ — the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection’ Phil 3.6-9 NIV.

The power of His resurrection is the power that overcomes every life-denying effect of the knowledge tree.

We now know the power of Christ’s resurrection because, in agreement with the word of God above, we have died to ourselves as law addicts and law mongers to live in the Spirit. Some people think this season is simply the Holy Spirit added to ‘what I have always believed.’ Happily it is not. Isaiah 61 and Luke 4.19 are declarations for all who are captured in the illusion that we ‘have the truth’ or a perspective (often called ‘my perspective on this’) that gives us a right to deny what Jesus has accomplished in favour of our views and our accomplishments. As the purchase of Jesus YOU DO NOT HAVE THAT RIGHT!

You will reach you potential as a son of God in Christ. Confined to Him, living in Him and with His life in you, you will grow into a potent and creative daughter or son of God. But live in law, even a skerrick of law, and you’ve got Buckley’s. Place yourself in a culture of law keeping or under a pastor who is a law monger and marketer of dog-eared religious mind-sets and you sentence yourself to limitation and the dumbing down of your infinite potential as a son of God. You have been redeemed to be a living sacrifice to God, not to man.

Jesus said that putting what we value before Him, be it people, mind-sets or identities, makes us unworthy of Him. The converse of this is that we can never achieve the potential of our true worth.

You have one Father. As a son you live in Him by living in His Son by the Spirit.

‘Do not call anyone on earth 'father,' for you have one Father, and he is in heaven’ Matt 23.9 NIV.

Bind yourself to Jesus. You have one master and one Lord who is the Son of God.

‘You are not to be called 'Rabbi,' for you have only one Master and you are all brothers’ Matt 23.8 NIV.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

In case we have not noticed, there is a distinct difference between the kingdoms of this world and the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God does not work from compromise or from ‘political fixes.’ Genuine men and women of God do not make deals to secure support from the factions of men. Such factions can be misguided, carnal and self-interested. The ‘mind of Christ’ is a function of revelation from God and not the ways of men. The ‘Mind of Christ’ outlook, known also as discernment comes from living in God’s Son by the Spirit. Those whose hearts are hidden in God through Christ are privy to light, clarity and certainty in the things of God. Not in everything but in the doctrine of the apostles. They have moved to a new perspective – a perspective where good is not a shadow of an evil, but a view point that comes from dwelling with He who lives in unapproachable light.

“Who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light” 1 Tim 6.16 NIV.

We have been created and then redeemed to live in God. As such we have been taken out of the darkness to live in the light. In the political sphere there are elements of truth and error on both sides of a debate. This is also the case in the man-centered church. But it is not so in things pertaining to the Kingdom of God – which is why Jesus and Paul spoke with such certainty. They were not arguing positions: Their hermeneutic was revelation. They released the truth of God because they did not live out of the knowledge of good and evil.

Satan was the first to distort what came from God. Using spin he posited the knowledge of good and evil as a higher realm of enlightenment and godliness. He introduced a political element to what had been the unequivocal truth of God: Eat the fruit and you will surely die. He attempted to create a faction (Eve) to which he then appealed, using a spin that was actually a lie. Using fear that produced mistrust, he created the first wedge. He used the issue of their identity as a ploy to create uncertainty and then divide them from the Father. Today he continues to specialize in gaining advantage through creating division. If he cannot create a divided mind in an individual he will go for creating division in a community.

Genuine apostolic ministry does not live to oblige factions or pander to denominational identities. It specializes in affirming our identity in God through Jesus. Genuine apostolic ministry speaks for God and promotes the identity of SONS: Now are we the sons of God!

The yin and yang of eastern religions is a graphic representation of the notion that ‘the over all good’ is maintained by a ‘balance’ of positive and negative kept in equilibrium. The theory of evolution utilizes the same ideas, which means that in this mind-set good and evil are relative terms. But in God, good is complete in itself. It is not the opposite of evil. Good simply is in then sense that God is. Which is why He says, I AM THAT I AM. My point is that a politically led church uses a mind-set that is fallen. We are called to have the mind of Christ by living in God.

In the church and elsewhere, peace may be maintained among factions by taking votes, juggling deals and pandering to the squeakiest wheel. But even of the parts are satisfied, the whole may remain deeply offensive to God. Mixture in the Bible is given names like Babylon, adultery, fornication and prostitution.

I once knew a pastor whose face would become ashen. His hands would shake while his eyes darted to and fro like a startled rabbit. He would stand on one foot and then the other. particularly when it seemed that I was about to state the truth with no regards to the (vested) interests or feelings of those who had divested themselves of the authority of God. I have experienced the distrust and the dislike of pastors and others who live to justify and maintain religious systems and their supporting strongholds of false doctrine. The religious spirit allies itself with the political spirit to blind, rob and paralyze God’s people, disguising itself as an angel of light. There are political leaders whose profession is to juggle the political interests of political people. They can manufacture a consensus but unfortunately they do not represent God.

The political outlook can produce religion. But it never multiplies the kingdom of God. The Holy Spirit is of God and for God. He speaks to those who live in God’s Son and they speak for Him. Those who are joined to God’s Son and deeply rooted in the Father live with God and speak for Him. But those who follow the political spirit -

‘They are like shameless shepherds who care only for themselves. They are like clouds blowing over the land without giving any rain. They are like trees in autumn that are doubly dead, for they bear no fruit and have been pulled up by the roots’ Jude 1.12 NLT.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Jesus is the Father’s Exemplar of life in the Spirit. As the Son of God and son of man He is the paragon of life as a son. And as such He is the means whereby men and women advance into the glories of living as sons. The Father sent His Son to re-join His Family to Himself. His mysterious plan was to re-ignite sonship by the Spirit of Sonship infused into His sons. This is why Jesus urged us to EAT HIM.

The law and the Jewish religious system was made to lead us to Christ. The Hebrew religious economy was but a shadow of the real: The real being God’s Son Jesus. The real being our re-admission to a life lived in God as sons of God. The real being the sons of God reigning in wholeness and holiness in the new creation as the Kingdom of God.

There are things we need to understand if we are to live in the glory of our salvation and multiply Jesus’ Kingdom. The old testament leads to the new, not the new to the old. The law leads to Christ, not Christ to the law. But many of God’s people have turned this on its head, stood Jesus on His head and made Him into a method of living Moses, morality and ‘christian lore.’ At the best such christians never advance. At the worst their inner lives and relationships collapse and there is this colossal disjunction between their use of spiritual gifts and disjointed and broken lives. We have been redeemed to live as sons of God in the Spirit of God’s Son.

Jesus loves us more than life. Jesus did not live out of the realm of good and evil that Adam and Eve had chosen. He lived in love. He lived in His Father. Had He lived in the inferior realm He would have left man to himself to reap his just deserts. But since He lived in God and was God He loved His people more than life and gave His life to draw His people into their life in God by the Spirit of God. Thus Jesus became the life-giving Spirit reigning beside the Father to replicate Himself in His Sons.

Monday, July 19, 2010

Those who carry the authority of God are sons of the promise. Functioning in gifts of the Spirit is not automatically an evidence that we are authorised by Christ and functioning in His authority. ‘Government’ in the Kingdom of God is sourced in sonship, and sonship is a property of life in the Spirit.

“Christ Jesus is the government. Elders are His gifted servant leaders. Gifts are the tools He provides.

God is the authority. God is SPIRIT and [He] need not delegate authority to another for He is the authority within His gifted servant leaders.

Elders who bring forth the kingdom of God are those who have ceased from trying to govern God’s kingdom on earth. They are those who no longer live. Where they once lived, Christ now lives (Gal 2:20). They are not only gifted, but they are the character and nature of Christ as the Spirit fills their human spirit, soul, and body with the life and attributes of Christ.

Elders may be gifted as apostles, prophets, evangelist, shepherds, teachers, or any combination of these spiritual gifts or others. Elders are more than representatives of Christ; they are carriers of the life of Christ. The potential is for them to function in any realm or way that Christ Jesus functions.

Every believer in whom Christ dwells by the Holy Spirit is to become a carrier of the life of Christ and thereby demonstrate the character and nature of Christ. Elders are those believers who are further down the spiritual road of becoming the character and nature of Christ than the younger believers (not necessarily chronologically). In the natural an elder person is one who is more mature. Also in the spiritual realm an elder is one who is more spiritually mature. The elder leads the younger less spiritually mature believers to become fully connected into Christ by the Spirit and become as Christ is in the world.

Christ governs by the Holy Spirit. Christ is the only head of His Body. Elders, through seasons of the experience of abiding in Christ and Christ in them, are prepared to lead the younger or less mature into maturity of truly abiding in Christ and Christ in them by the Holy Spirit.

Gifts do not govern.

Gifts are tools and do not govern any more than a hammer governs what and when it will strike. The one who holds the hammer determines how and when it will be used and supplies the power or strength to work the hammer. Tools do not rule. Christ rules.”

Complete article here.

Ron McGatlin, Courtesy OPEN HEAVEN.

Saturday, July 17, 2010

The hub of God’s Kingdom is Jesus. The means of His Kingship through us is the Holy Spirit. The description of our life in God is Romans chapter eight: Here is the essence of what the Father has accomplished in Jesus for His Sons.

‘If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you’ Romans 8.11 NASB.

This scripture is not only about heaven. It is the antidote to the death sentence over those who eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Life, light, holiness and wholeness comes to the individual and to the body of Christ through the Spirit of Sonship (adoption). Live in anything less than the Spirit of Christ and our doings are fraught with mortality. For mortality read frailty, cross-purposes decay, and worse – subjection to the world and the devil.

But supernatural, Spirit-Life in our being is ours only if we are dead to the law and the strivings of the self-life, self-culture and self-justification through works of the flesh. We are dead to our self-life to the extent that we are alive in Christ. To be crucified with Christ and alive by the Spirit is to be our true self, rather than our false self under the old Adam. We have an identity and authority in Jesus that surpasses all lesser identities. To be dead to ‘performance’ and alive in Christ’s peace is to be the daughter or son you were redeemed to be. ‘Life in the Spirit’ is God’s mysterious plan to replicate the life of His Son in you, in the church and the Kingdom of His Son.

‘My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not treat the grace of God as meaningless. For if keeping the law could make us right with God, then there was no need for Christ to die’ Gal 3.20,21 NLT.

Friday, July 16, 2010

Epistemology asks the question, ‘How do we know what we know?’ Epistemology is about the kind of glasses we look through to know things and to make sense of what we see. There are two foundational mind-sets that we can use to view the world. One is to examine it through a life in God. The others is to attempt to decipher things using the knowledge of good and evil. Of the two perspectives the latter is the most common.

The epistemological framework of the university is the knowledge of good and evil. It is also the epistemological mind-set of most, probably all, theological colleges and seminaries. This is the framework used to ‘know’ by all who live outside what Paul calls, ‘life in the Spirit,’ which is to say it is the perspective under which all who are not sons of God labour. “Sons” Paul asserts, live in the Spirit. Clearly much disadvantage flows from being sons of the slave woman instead of the free woman.

The epistemological frame work of the Kingdom of God is not an intellectual position. It is a spiritual one. It is the place lost by Adam when he moved from God to living in himself in constructs and abstractions. A “God” mind-set is a life lived in God. But this is not in God as an intellectual position. It is to have one’s ‘being’ in God – something that occurs spiritually, not intellectually.

‘For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God’ Col 3.3 NIV.

We have been redeemed to live in God. This is a life lived in God’s Son Jesus by the Spirit. It is only from within a Jesus lived life that the knowledge of good and evil mind-set can be transcended so that we can interpret things in the wisdom-light of God. This is why the life of God’s Kingdom is spiritually discerned. Not intellectually discerned. The mind does come into it, but only by way of the heart and the spirit, which is to say, only because our ‘being’ is merged in God.

In this mode it is not only truth we live in and send forth. We impart, life and multiply life. But only if He and we are one. Unless we eat Him exists in Him and through Him, we have no life in ourselves.

There are people who work in institutions of learning who live, move and have their being in Jesus, the Son of God. When speaking in things pertaining to God’s Kingdom, they speak with authority and their words are alive with God’s life-giving Presence. When they speak their words are at once more human and more Godly than those who live in the letter (the knowledge of good and evil) because they have become channels of the Word of God rather than mouth pieces of god-words. Paul declares this succinctly when He says the Kingdom of God is not talk but power!

Those who release the Living Word, live out of the Presence of God in Jesus. Whether or not they are aware of what they are doing, they are releasing rivers of God’s life because they live in the Spirit of God. They multiply power not talk. They are channels of the Presence of God who is in their words and gestures. Whenever they speak they release the fresh Presence of the Son of Man with the spiritual aroma of fresh bread.

Words of life will flow from anyone who lives in God’s Son. Your heart needs to be with Him, not your head. If His life is your life and your life His, expect to release life-giving words in your everyday conversation and teaching.

Eugene Peterson of Regent College in Vancouver, BC, Canada, does this in his writing. You will find this in his meditations on David. Peterson is a man who has the same heart-hunger for the Lord that David had. Consequently his writing evokes all that is deeply human and Godly. His major work, ‘The Message’ is not a translation of the Bible but a paraphrase. Nevertheless it highlights and multiplies the life of God because it is not primarily an intellectual work but a work of the Spirit of Christ in him. I’ll say it again. IT IS CHRIST IN HIM THAT RELEASES LIFE THROUGH HIM.

There are of course more people than this gentleman whose work is sourced in the Spirit rather than in the letter, and they are growing in number as individuals and whole churches come to realize that the wisdom, life and light of God comes from a heart and spirit bathed in God and His revelations - not from the intellectual draft board of the knowledge of good and evil. Did you know that you can be correct in what you say, yet be speaking from the knowledge of good and evil instead of the Spirit of God? Our task is not to be right and not wrong. Our task is to live in God’s Son and multiply His living words of life!

As the Lord Himself pointed out in the vision entitled The Torch and The Sword, the life of God comes from His presence with us and in us. The light of comes from the sword of truth as we speak out words of life and light. Our life lived in God’s life dispels darkness and death because we are living and acting from a position that is life in itself.

‘The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us’ 1 John 1.2 NIV.

‘In him was life, and that life was the light of men’ John 1.4 NIV.

When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life’ John 8.12 NIV.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

The Spirit of Sonship is the Spirit of the sovereign Lord in you. If we attempt to use Christ to do what we think we should do, we will always be less that what we could have been had we simply settled for union with Him. Trust in the oneness that is yours and the sonship that invades your life by the Spirit will make you more than you could possibly imagine.

“I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one” John 17.22 (NIV).

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

I have written before on Kevin Rudd’s demise. I believe many events have a prophetic significance – a meaning in the Spirit that is not immediately apparent in terms of the natural constructs. The prophetic significance in Mr Rudd’s fall has to be its suddenness.

This is not to say that others did not know that something was badly amiss or that Christians and non-Christians were not dismayed by his bad language and misuse of people. His workaholic ways did not bode well. Particularly as his response to mistakes was to work harder even though he was already working most of the day and night.

One moment Kevin Rudd was there. The next moment the man who was prime minister is simply himself and suddenly, someone else has moved into his office. There’s something instructive in remarks by ex foreign minister Alexander Downer in The Spectator. He writes,

“All politicians are at the very least a trifle vain. They like to be the centre of attention, to be in the media, to be ‘consulted’. There is barely an exception. All of them think they are a bit better than they really are. Nearly all of them are ambitious, many furiously so … What MPs didn’t like about Rudd, the backbencher, and Rudd, the shadow minister, was his conceit and vanity.”

Who is there among us, to whom at least some of the things in this paragraph do not apply?!

There are many likeable things about Kevin Rudd. But could this be a warning to those of us who are vain as well as those of us in leadership who are political. As the last week has shown, politics is about power, self interest and the preservation of control. It’s also about ego and the quest to make self-interest look like service. ‘Conceit and vanity’ can wear religious clothes. It need not come as a shock or be seen as ‘nasty’ that christian leaders can aspire to leadership for political reasons. ‘Self-promotion’ in some people is as invisible to them as it is an offence to others – particularly when it is done in the name of Jesus.

Recently a friend of mine who has been getting some personal mentoring from God had the Lord say this to her. ‘Pray for a humble heart every day.’

Maybe the Rudd demise is a sign. If it is, it can be viewed with relief by the Godly and as a warning to those who use Christ’s name to promote their own. The reward of Christ can come suddenly. It can come as a judgment and a discipline because it comes to promote redemption.

‘Suddenly, your debtors will take action. They will turn on you and take all you have, while you stand trembling and helpless’ Habakkuk 2.7 NLT.

Tuesday, July13, 2010

The attention span of much of the media is so small that the process of policy making fails to be captured. Consequently what are often termed ‘back flips’ are no more than the inability to observe policy development over time. Much of this is the result of attempting to be first with the latest.

Journalists, media commentators and pollies are forever going on about ‘back-flips.’ To discover that some public figure has done a ‘back-flip’ appears to be seen as discovering a major flaw. It’s a bone that is tossed into the air by the dogs of situation ethics and shaken with vigour.

Sure, consistency is a good thing, but not of you are wrong. Do these pundits really expect that proponents of flawed policies should adhere to them irrespective of the evidence to the contrary? I would rather be accused of ‘doing a back-flip’ than being stupid.

Saul of Tarsus back-flipped into Paul the apostle. A better description might be ‘front-flipped’ seeing he flipped from a proponent of law to an apostle of life in the Spirit of God’s Son. Significantly the Lord made him blind so that from this point on he would be able to see. Even though life in the Spirit imparts a righteousness that far surpasses any righteousness that comes from man, life in the Spirit is foolishness to those who remain within the constructs of the knowledge of good and evil. But we have been delivered from this body of death.

Many hated Paul because they said that he had abandoned Moses for Jesus. Of course he had. He had flipped into a life in God’s Son. You can’t live in both of you want to live in the Spirit. Only in the Spirit can we be ‘sons’ living in a “Life” that is not ours as if it is our life. Jesus is not only the righteousness of God in you. He is the sonship of God in God’s sons.

‘Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is’ 1 John 3.2 KJV .

Monday, July 12, 2010

Over a year ago I saw a picture. I believe it was from God. Two Christian leaders were jumping up and down on a dead horse. They hoped to revive a nag that is stiff with rigor mortis.

There are leaders to day who are attempting to resurrect a dead horse and leaders who assume that they have the right to ride the people like they would ride a donkey. Many today are still locked into the habit of attempting to use the church to build the church or the church to build their career. But self interest can only multiply self-interest. An abstraction can only reproduce an abstraction. The letter can only multiply the letter and man can only multiply man. Only Jesus is life and has life in Himself. Christ will build His church, but church as an object will never build the Kingdom of God’s Son.

For God’s sake can we stop obsessing about the church?!

A new community appears in the same way that a new person appears. How does a new human being appear? A new human being is born. John, Annabel and Craig come to be persons in the world because the union of their parents has imparted themselves to their children. How did God’s church appear on earth? Jesus was conceived in Mary. Born of a woman and God the Holy Spirit, Jesus imparted Himself by the Spirit to those who believed in Him. He still does.

Man’s church is an abstraction, but the church God builds through His Son is His Presence multiplied in His people.

How to we live in reality instead of in constructs? With reference to God, we as His people occupy the female gender, which is why, although we are sons of God, we are also the Bride of Christ. The Bride consorts with the Groom. Together they reproduce the Kingdom of God.

There is a prostitute who unites with other lovers. This Bride of Christ alone is the true church. The triune God has united in purpose so that Christ can be fully formed and reproduced in His people. The extent to which we as individuals are one with Jesus; the degree to which our union with Him is not adulterated by relationships to things other than Christ, or formed by people who think they know what is best for us, is the extent to which we really are His bride and really are married to Him. Note that His church is not the product of a union of the letter with the letter or the multiplication of new formulations in the letter. It is the manifestation of His Son in people by the Spirit.

Most specifically the church is the manifestation of Jesus in people. People and leaders set apart by Jesus that are as yet, largely not recognized by what is called the institutional church or those absorbed in their self-importance. They are not recognized by the paler shadows that seem impelled to attempt to project new iterations of the past into the present and future. As Wolfgang Simson correctly observes, few of the representatives of the passing paradigm are capable of birthing the new.

When Jesus declares that it is He who builds His church He is saying that it is He who draws people to Himself into intimate union. It is He who reproduces Himself through His people. It is He who appoints leaders who live in Him but not in the templates and assumptions of the letter and of the past – leaders who are so captive to Jesus that they think, plan and do ‘without limitation,’ in the Spirit. Pregnant with Jesus, His Bride produces new sons and daughters, new leaders, new communities of faith and families of believers intimate with God. This new creation really is new and daring. Here is new creation leadership. Here are people that change the world and advance God’s Kingdom. Their power comes from pressing deeper into union with God and hearing His voice rather than being infatuated or intimidated by those who assume that God has appointed them to think for others. There are apostles appointed by Jesus and apostles who have appointed themselves. God’s current and future leaders will live in the discernment to know the difference.

I hope you can see that it is not an abstraction called ‘church‘ that is the church. It is not a discourse ‘in the letter’ about ‘organic.’ It is people joined by the Spirit to Jesus and each other with ignited lives that are His church. Here are new creation men and women formed from Him that are the church that He is building. This church formed from Him and reproduced by Him is the church that is both bride and sons. This is the church that routs the Enemy and His works and expands the Kingdom of God.

The extent to which the Son of God has reproduced Himself in His people by the Spirit is the extent to which we are His church. Our completeness as His church is the result of us being formed by Christ and of having Christ formed in us. This is Christ building His church. The church is ‘born of a woman’ to the extent that it is the fruit of His Bride living in spirit and in truth.

Let’s change the metaphor and put it another way. Jesus is the rock cut out without human hands. He is the rock that strikes the image of humanism, religion, politics and militarism. He is the Rock that strikes down elitism, cronyism and self-interest wherever it appears. Jesus is the rock that annihilates this image and the rock that becomes a mountain that fills the entire earth with its glory. Jesus is the Rock that came from the parent Rock. He is the rock that joins all who will believe to the Rock from which we were hewn. He is the Rock that creates the living stones of His House; the Rock who breathes life, strength, love and authority into the stones who are the sons of God; living stones who glow with the Presence of God. You are Peter, John, Annabel and Christopher. When you stand on The Rock that is Jesus you are alive. He will build the church through you.

Saturday, July 10, 2010

You can speak words of life. But we need to be clear on this. Life does not come from information. It flows out of living words. Words, speech, discourse that is entirely information based has no life in it. What sustains us as humans is not information. It is life. This is why we need to live in God, rather than attempt to live in information about God. To attempt to live on the latter is to be the seed that has fallen on the pathway. There is no soil in which it can take root and grow.

An entertaining and informative talk does not release life. To speak words of life we must live in the Spirit of life, being filled and overflowing with the life-giving Spirit of Christ.

Life does not come from information because life does not come from the letter. Read ‘the letter’ as all those formulations of godliness by which christians attempt to live. Paul is definite. The letter kills. The letter is an expression of the knowledge of good and evil. The vision entitled The Torch and the Sword reveals that those who live under this tree and eat its fruit suffer from blindness, paralysis and powerlessness in regard to the Enemy. Since the cross you have the ability to live in God. You have been placed in Him by the accomplishments of His Son. Live from Him instead of living from you!

Jesus does not reign so that you can live in the letter. He lives so that you can live in Him.

Living in Jesus you have the torch of His Presence – a torch that reveals good and highlights evil. But you do not live in these. You live in God and speak the living words of God’s Presence in you. Why? Living and grounded in Him; rooted in Him, the words of God are spoken by you – the sword of the Spirit. The torch and the sword are both manifestations of a life lived in God. They are both manifestations of God – His Presence and His living, powerful word. The torch is the manifest presence in you, around you and among you. The sword is the living word of the Spirit that comes from your lips because God is in you and you are in God – by the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Friday, July 9, 2010

Goodness is not a list or criteria. Goodness is a Person. This is the Door to our life in God.

It’s amazing how people can talk passionately about the Jesus-lived-in-life; how they can talk about the Spirit-efficacy of the bread and wine - the Person of Jesus entering our being by the Spirit – and then in another compartment of their lives enlarge on all the things they have to do to avail themselves of God’s salvation, righteousness and life. Anyone would think that when Jesus died on the cross He died for bits of us rather than all of us.

Jesus lives to make us one new man. Not two or more.

Christ in you is the reality of glory – the glory of sons of God being restored to their holiness, wholeness and authority as members of His House. Life comes from life. Person comes from Person. Sonship comes from God’s Son. You get to be a son of God by having God’s Son live in you – a transformation that occurs by at the hand of the Holy Spirit, which is why it is called life in the Spirit.

The Holy Spirit added to an old testament outlook produces a torn life. There are times of jubilation juxtaposed with chaos and fragmentation. We experience God working through us, yet live a life in which humpty-dumpty never gets put together. Jesus did not come to empower the letter or any kind of spirituality through regulation. He came as The Way. He describes the attempt to live by the Spirit in the old testament mode as follows.

‘No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse’ Mark 2.21 NIV.

Many christians live torn lives. Why? Because death is overcome by life. Not by rules, regulations, methods and box ticking. Our new life is a life embodied in Jesus, who lives in us. He lives in you not by your self-absorbed attempts to keep life-smothering rules. Or by you doing little christian quick steps and rituals. You can talk ‘christian talk’ as much as you like, but the more of it you live in the “deader” you are. The Way might be narrow and missed by the hoard but it is your only hope of peace and fulfillment.

“He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life” 1 John 5.12 NIV.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

The only thing wrong with the House Church Movement is the people in it. Sound a bit rude? Well, let me explain. We can minister Jesus to each other in House Churches. That’s if it’s about Jesus and not about a new form of church. The best thing a lot of us can learn from our first dip in the pools (and puddles) of house church is that we all need Jesus a lot more than we need a change of venue.

The question is, ‘Do you live in God or are you attempting to get God to live in what you are trying to make?’

I left an institutional church a few years ago because there was a continual emphasis on community but no real interest in communing with Jesus. Sure, Jesus name is mentioned. He’s often discussed and analyzed. But basically it was about us and not about Him. I know a house church where there’s a tussle between those who think church is about their needs and those who believe it’s about Jesus’ need to be worshiped. Until we put Jesus where He belongs, none of us will belong.

I first heard of ‘community church’ around 1979. Most churches wrote it on their notice boards out the front to be gazed on with a certain lack of awe by the public. Few ever attained it. Not in any depth. Willow Creek admitted a few years ago that as busy as their people were, few of them had developed a deep relationship with Jesus. Could it be that there are as many running about today doing house church and alienated from Jesus as there were doing Willow Creek a few years back? Sad, particularly if it’s the same frantic souls doing it today as were doing it back then. How long will it take for us to get that it’s about Christ and not about the ‘inanity.’

No intimacy with Jesus, no intimacy with people. You’d think it was obvious but apparently it isn’t. Tides of self-seeking christians sweep in from institutional churches, full of debris, into house churches. But ahoy there fellow christians. Nothing changes until we begin to seek Jesus with all our hearts and then hand over all our hearts. Didn’t He say, ‘My people, give me your hearts?’

I’m a person who enjoys people and solitude. It helps me contemplate and write. Recently I went to India with a group of people where the Lord was pleased to minister through us with healing power. I remember thinking to myself on the way out to a village where the Lord healed a large number of people through our efforts. ‘House church leaders can bleat about community continually. But they never seem enjoy it. Here am I. I don’t even try to achieve it and community comes to me.’ There a lot of fulfillment to be had amongst the God hungry and those He supernaturally empowers.

I experience community in different parts of Australia with people who are hungry for Jesus – people who seek Him, who seek to live in Him and for Him; who eat Him and live from His sustenance. Those who eat the Living Bread get to have living colleagues, capable of imparting life to dead people – if they are teachable.

There is an instant empathy with such people and these kinds of people recognize each other in a crowd. But so do those who are of the ‘christian industry.’ Those driven to use Jesus’ Name to advance their own name. The question is, what kind of ‘community’ do you represent?

Being a living sacrifice is not dull or boring. It is often challenging and uncomfortable but it is always satisfying. And you get to be fruitful without even trying because God is at work in you and you have given up the wearying task of trying to get God and others to do what you think He and others should be doing to meet your expectations.

Wayne Jacobsen makes some interesting observations about house churches, which I’ve extracted from a piece he has written entitled, “Why House Church Isn’t the Answer.”

Having seen the weaknesses and failures of many religious structures, [people] have turned towards house church as the answer for authentic church life. Unfortunately, they are likely to be just as disappointed there. [Why? Because fulfillment is found in Jesus and not in buildings structures or new commandments such as ‘You shall do community in a house.’]

It is easy to convince people that house church just might be the answer to all they have desired to experience in body life, that is, until they get involved in one. It quickly becomes evident that meeting in a home isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be. What do we do about the people who only want to use the group for their own needs? [You really don’t have to get to know people in the institutional church. Here, many who are more interested in hiding from God than in knowing Him can brush past each other. In a house where some people are looking for ‘belonging’ but not necessarily for intimacy with God, the problem is impossible to conceal. Hopefully where our lack is exposed we may be more likely to repent].

If people aren't discovering the substance of what it means to live as the church, changing the mechanics will only provide a platform for people to commandeer the group in their thirst for leadership or pull it down by trying to make their needs or passions the focus of the group. [House church can be a place of healing and empowerment in the presence of Jesus. It can also be a place where those who were not able to hold sway in a larger setting use the opportunity to commandeer people to their desires and pet notions. Those who do no live in the Spirit of Jesus will attempt to subvert Jesus and others to their fleshly agendas.]

Any time we begin with our needs as the focus, instead of God's purpose, we will end up disappointed by the results.

If we begin to build our sense of church based on those self-needs, we will only end up frustrated with a cheap counterfeit of the real church God has created us to embrace. If we are looking to relate to the church because we need acceptance, or security, or a place to demonstrate our gifts, or people to love us in a certain way or someone to tell me how I should live in Christ, we're already headed in the wrong direction. [Jesus and a desire for Him will produce community and fruitfulness, but community as an abstraction or ‘little god’ cannot produce Jesus or ‘God fruit.’]

Most never realize that the life of the church is not built on our self-needs, but on God's purpose in his people. Changing the venue from a building to a home doesn't solve this problem. If we're going to seek to find church life by having our needs accommodated by others, we will find moments of fulfillment mingled with long, dry periods of discontent and frustration.

Experiencing the joy of authentic fellowship begins when we realize that all our dependence must be centered on Jesus himself. We don't share fellowship because we need to. We don't do it to get our needs met. True fellowship can only be known where our dependence upon Christ spills out in our love for others. Knowing the joy and .freedom of his life, we can't help but share it with others.

True life is only found in Jesus. There is life in no other--not even a correct arrangement of Christians in houses or buildings. That's what Paul meant when he called Jesus the Head of the Church, declaring that it was God's purpose for him to "have first place in everything." Our needs are not the focus of body life. His presence living among us is [the priority and focus of everything we are and do].

People who are learning to live deeply in a relationship with Jesus will find the sheer joy of sharing life with others who are doing the same [community]. They can cross paths for a moment, or walk together for years, without having to manipulate or control each other.[They are the John 17 people]. Because those people will realize that Jesus is the only one in control after all.[ John 17 tells us that those who are one with God – intertwined with God - are one with each other. The love such people experience is a witness to the unbelieving world.]

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

When you give a talk, sermon, lecture or address of any kind to God’s people, what is it actually that you are giving them? To live out of information is to live out of the knowledge of good and evil. To live in God’s Son is to reign over knowledge and live in discernment. We can all study up on a topic, do some research, look up some Bible references, consult a commentary or two – and then put it all together ready for delivery. But when you deliver it, what is it you are actually delivering: Information or life.

The medium we use is speech, words, phrases, analogies, a metaphor or parable and personal experiences. What comes out of our mouths will be sourced either in ‘the letter’ or in the spirit of life. The words of our mouth will be determined by the man we live in – the old Adam or the man who is one – the man who lives from his position in God rather than his position in dualities.

What we deliver depends to some extent on the anointing. I say to some extent because the anointing can only effect what it has to work with. The anointing can give ‘information’ added penetration. The Spirit, by grace, can take a talk given in the letter and turn it into revelation in the heart of anyone who is journeying towards God. The Spirit can take a phrase uttered by an unbeliever and use it to open a door to life in one hungry for God. But all of this is something like picking up specs of gold from a mullock heap at the top of a goldmine. The Lord can use a Cyrus or a pharaoh but He would prefer to use one who lives in His Son; a person who is rooted in The Spirit – a person who multiplies the Kingdom of God.

God’s messengers can release the Son’s life – if they are living in God’s Son. If they live in the Spirit and not in ‘the letter,’ which unfortunately is a highly regarded branch of the knowledge of good and evil. The anointing empowering a message sourced in the Spirit is infinitely more powerful than a message sourced in the knowledge of good and evil. The latter my produce some fruit, by the grace of God. But it is very small raisins in comparison to the abundance of a message that is grounded in the vineyard of God’s Son, delivered in the Spirit and filled with the life of God. We can situate ourselves in the mullock heap or mine the gold.

There are living words of the kind spoken by Jesus and those who live in the Spirit and there are well intentioned, dead words spoken by those who deal in information and speak in the spirit of Greece. We need to know that what we say is not powerful because it is right but because it is the fruit of the tree of life. Our teaching can only be powerful and life-giving when it is given in God by the Spirit through us.

The letter is a more refined version of the flesh. Living in the Spirit rather than in the letter you will impart information and life. Living words, sourced in the Spirit of life and spoken by new creation men and women, have the power to convict, reveal and impart the life of God. But the other kind takes up half an hour of people’s time and worse. It causes them to go away with the illusion that they received something worthwhile.

Words sourced in the letter can puff up, but they fill no one with the life and the light of God.

‘The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life’ John 6.63 NIV.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

The point of the Father’s plan and Jesus’ accomplishment is found inRomans chapter eight where Paul sketches the glory of life in the Spirit. Later he declares that those who live in the Spirit of God are the sons of God. We are invited to live in the reality of this inheritance and not bury it in the ground.

In John chapter seventeen Jesus’ intercession reveals His purpose in coming among us. It is to achieve for us union with God and communion with each other. Paul in, Romans eight, reveals that the summit of what the Father and His Son have accomplished for us is to live in the Spirit. Miss what God is saying in Romans eight and we miss the summum bonum of what Jesus came to achieve: The holiness, wholeness, authority and power of the sons of God. Who wants to wade in the shallows of sonship when we have been called to surf in the ocean of God? Concentrate on sin alone and we have missed the point of the cross – which was to restore the sons of God to the glory of God by having Christ live in them.

For many of us who have been schooled, acculturated and marinated in religion, a life lived in the spirit is difficult to come to grips with. This is because religion, including ‘christian religion’ is to do with our attempt at knowing what pleases God and what revolts Him. Then attempting to do what pleases Him so that He will do what pleases us. (A religious as opposed to a truly spiritual life is always a life focused on us). Seen in this light it’s a way of manipulating God. What did I write? ‘Manipulating God.’ Mmm … reminds me of someone who promised that if you master the knowledge of good and evil you will be as gods. Aha. You’d have to be god to manipulate God, would you not? Is that a furphy or not?’ Our first parents were already sons of God. By believing Satan they were robbed by religion.

But we have been redeemed to live in God by the Spirit of God. The Spirit of sonship is not only our comfort and security in the Father. Alive in the Spirit of sonship we are alive in the authority of sons. Let’s be clear. Only sons of God reign over the devil and circumstances.

Should we be living in religion with a religious mind-set it will be difficult to understand what Paul means by life in the Spirit because what many understand as ‘spiritual’ is not really spiritual at all. It is religious. It is an exercise in the knowledge of good and evil. This will be so even if we have made progress with God and advanced in several areas in our journey. As indicated above, ‘religion’ is a means of doing or not doing and believing or not believing. This is to say that for many who have been schooled in this mind-set, spirituality is all about the things you do and the beliefs you understand and hold in your head. It’s a mental and physical thing. This pseudo spirituality is about the efforts of the body and the mind.

In this state, it will be difficult for us to understand what God through Paul means by life in the Spirit or a spiritual life for one key reason: We are not living a spiritual life!

In the scripture that follows, Paul is not taking about demonstrably wicked people. He is however talking about religious people who are locked into religion and its limited vision of life, spirituality and the Kingdom of God. ‘The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned’ 1 Cor 2.14 NIV.

Life in the Spirit is not a matter of the head and understanding. It is a matter of the heart – a heart that says to Jesus, ‘You are my life and I live totally in you.’ Such a heart will become subject to the wisdom and revelation that comes from the Spirit of God – the revelation that opens eyes that don’t see and ears that cannot hear. By such revelation, we know that we know that we know, that we are the sons of God living by the Spirit of God.

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

There’s a bunch of dwarves in C.S. Lewis’s Last Battle. They are in a prison but they refuse to eat. They in there with our heroes and the guard brings them in some slops to eat in buckets. But an amazing thing happens. As soon as our heroes put the revolting food to their lips something happens. The slops turn into a banquet! They eat, are refreshed and their strength and morale return. Not so the dwarves. They refuse to eat. They claim that what’s in the bucket is still slops, not there at all or alternatively the ‘banquet’ is a master trick on the part of their enemies to further deceive them. The dwarves remain dwarves. They insist on being less than they are. The heroes go on to realize their potential as .. well … heroes. They become larger than they could have ever imagined.

‘You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows’ Ps 23.5 NIV.

This episode is capable of a number of applications. It could be taken to mean salvation. It could be an image of righteousness by faith or then again life in the Spirit. It is the latter form of existence I wish to explore today. The life of those who live in the authority of Christ: The life of Sons who live as sons, the life of those who live in the completeness of Christ’s achievements – in the Spirit.

Thousands of God’s people have been redeemed. They are going to heaven. But they don’t live as sons. They live as dwarves. They live as if the law of sin and death and the law of the Spirit of life are one and the same. Since the first advent of Jesus little has changed for them. They still live in law and attempt to use Jesus to do it. They know that they are saved by grace. But grace as they define it is meant to cover their falling short of law. They have yet to receive the larger grace; the greater grace that was intended. They have not received as their life, a life that is not theirs. I mean the life given by the Father and the Son and given to you. The life that is Christ in you: Jesus.

The law was given to lead us to Christ. The law was not given to lead us to Christ, then to the Spirit and so back to the law. There is nothing devious about life in the Spirit of Christ. In Him there is no shadow or turning. We are rooted in God. There’s no double talk. It is not yes and no. It is YES! All things are ‘yes’ in Christ. The new testament is not, ‘Yes! Yes!, your life is hidden in Christ, oops. Hang on, no it’s not. No! No! That’s too good to be true, Christ helps us keep the law..’ Bollocks. Christ makes us one with Himself. Christ draws you into the Father. Christ lives to transform you into a son. Live in anything less than Jesus and you will always be less than you could have been. Live in Jesus and you will live in life without limits and with authority.

The law was given to lead us to Christ. Period. In Christ is the fullness of God. There is no more. NOTHING IS ABOVE CHRIST. If the role of Jesus was to enable us to do good things, to meet various criteria, to enable us to say ‘look at these things I have done’ – then there is something superior to Christ and He died for nothing. Jesus is not the means of criterion referencing. He is the means of joining you to the Father and transforming you into a Son. ‘Now are we the sons of God.’

Live in a dwarf mentality and we will pervert even Galatians 2.20 into a means of living in laws. We will distort the entire new testament into the old. Dwarves exhibit dwarf thinking and dwarf resentment filling them with dwarf reproach. No. I am dead to the old Adam, dead to my way of living in the knowledge of good and evil. Because of this I am alive. I am alive in the Spirit because Christ is my life. The command of God is to live in His Son. The testimony of Jesus is that He is our life.

Last month's blog here.

‘There is one body and one Spirit one Lord, one faith, one baptism one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all’ Eph. 4.4-6 (NIV )