A New Way Of Living

I have posted here before on both of my blogs wonderful and encouraging insights my friend Art has shared with me, this is but a continuation on a theme he is still working on.
I trust you will enjoy!

Rich

The Necessity of Suffering

“Glory” is a word that seems so amorphous and indescribable. In practical terms and for our purpose it actually means the inherent expression of a life. We can see the matter of glory as the inherent expression of a life by the metaphor of the seeded flower’s life in its full expression as a blossom. The flower’s life, derived from the life in its seed, is ultimately fully expressed in the flower’s full blossoming. Each flower contains seed needed for life to beget life, which is reproduced after “its own kind.” The blossom of the flower is the glory or expression of the life that is in the original flower seed. God the Father in Christ, as the original seed, is the original eternal spirit-life who begets eternal spirit-life in the believer – all believers share His one life.

For the flower’s seed to germinate, it must first suffer death to its outer shell. The life is then released out of that death, to grow to maturity. This is similar to the allegorical description of the life-process Jesus spoke of concerning the release and multiplication of His life. “Verily, verily, I (Jesus) say unto you, Except a corn (seed) of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24 ). Here Jesus is saying, by His death His life would become germinated, multiplying itself. The Father’s life-plan would bring “many sons to glory” (Heb 2:10) out of Jesus suffering and death. All the believers are the multiplication and enlargement of God’s family that comes by sharing the one life of the “seed, which is Christ” (Galatians 3:16, 1Peter 1:23). We now possess the Christ-seed within our spirit and we thereby have the potential of being the “glorious expression” of the Lord’s life. We contain His life in our spirit, so that His expression may flow through our souls as He wills. Only His life released brings forth the genuine fruit of God.

I have described “glory” in terms of the flower in order to explain the necessity of suffering in the believer’s life. The flower’s seed has a “shell” that must be broken to release the life within. Our shell, which is our independent soul-self, must be broken, in order to release the life of Christ from within our spirit. Thus we see that there is a great connection between suffering and glory (expression).

Suffering deals with our being deceived. With no suffering, there can be no knowledge by realization of who we are NOT. We are Not the gods of our own life. We are wayward souls, separated from God often living waywardly independent from God even after our salvation. Suffering exposes this truth to us. We are NOT adequate within ourselves to live the Christian life overcomingly, as evidenced by our lack of rest and peace.

We may think we can do what we need to do, but we are not really in control of anything. We learn this only by suffering the failure of self-rule and self-effort. To me, the greatest suffering is not necessarily physical, but rather the loss of control. God desires that we give up control to trust Him and His leading, moment by moment. Suffering situations and circumstances that are beyond our control brings us to the realization of that need and His desire.

Satan has inspired the illusion of control in all of us since the day he tempted Eve, saying if you eat of the forbidden tree of knowledge “you shall be as gods” (Gen 3:5). This illusion must be broken before we will turn our hearts to trust Christ in us as our life. Without suffering failure, we cannot come to the knowledge of who we really are – we are the dependent children of God, the Almighty Father who loves us and cares for us. He is fully sufficient to father us, and guide and protect us in love.

The Lord suffered for us, but we also will endure suffering. The cup of suffering (Mark 10:39) is crucial to our being able to realize the truth of our state, as it was for Paul when the Lord denied his three pleadings to remove the thorn Paul suffered in his flesh. The Lord told Paul “my grace is sufficient.” Christ Himself is the very grace of God and His life in us is sufficient for all that we will endure.

The cup we drink from in life is always at the hands of our loving Father. Jesus willingly took the cup of suffering at the hands of His Father, so that His glorious life might be multiplied to us and expressed in us. “…Jesus unto Peter… the cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?” John 18:11

Taking the cup revealed Jesus’ true state of utter yieldedness and dependence upon the Father. Paul admonished the Philippians Christians to have the same attitude or mindset of Jesus, who suffered obedience unto death of the cross (Philip 2:5-8). The Father now administers the cup of suffering to us, that we might let go of self-dependence in order to trust Christ in us as our life and innermost guide. Only then may we go from a “Christ in you THE HOPE of glory” to His actually being glorified or expressed in and through our lives?

Human Consent

Without revelation from our loving Father regarding the design of our human vessel, body soul and spirit, that being the origin describing the first Adam, later to have that order reversed according to Paul describing the second Adam Christ Jesus, spirit, soul and body, there is in my opinion great distress throughout the body of Christ. Be that as it may, and even though it has profound significance to what I want to share here, I know his spirit will make known to each of us what is needed.

Eve, as in Adam and especially Eve from the Garden, have taken a bad rap and although she was the one deceived, there were two of them making that same choice, to try and be like God. Through the woman and man, consenting to this treasonous act, sin brought death to us all.
The other day I stumbled upon something so glorious I just had to share it here. Isn’t it just luscious when our eyes are opened to see something so full of wonder that it causes our hearts to skip a beat?

I began to look at the whole thing of our originally being created in His image and likeness, one facet of that being; we can above all of his creation, choose freely what we will.
As the first woman freely chose to be like God cutting humanity off from Life, plummeting us all into an alienated state of being, along comes another woman by the name of Mary, when presented with heavenly facts, realities that defied human reasoning, of her own free will consented to likewise partake of a succulent meal offered to her.

The fruit eaten by the first woman caused us to be alienated from the life of God, but as this young woman likewise freely choose to imbibe of the very words of God delivered to her by the angel Gabriel; the source of eternal and everlasting life was coming into the world through, of all things, a “woman”!

One expression of the word ‘consent’ is as follows, ‘asking permission’, also, ‘harmony’, wow, God asking our permission, specifically Mary’s, and then seeing how through her free will volitional choice, God through his son Jesus was going to establish a harmony that would totally eclipse the spectacular beauty of even the Garden.

“Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, it has not yet fully entered into the heart of man, the things God has prepared for those He loves!”

Rich

Have You Ever Seen

Have you been to a grocery or department store or perhaps a Mickey D’s and seen some kid just going berserk, wailing, possibly screaming, throwing themselves down on the floor and other colorful antics? Isn’t it an almost a knee jerk reaction of wanting to go over there and straighten this messy situation up, not just dealing with the kid but the parent/s as well? The thing is, we’re not responsible it’s not our child.

To my way of thinking this sure paints a picture of God’s kids acting up, perhaps into stuff that is at best questionable and a busy body thinks it’s their job to deal with His kid/s, cause if God was really on the ball He would have done something about this mess sooner than later.
Really, isn’t this all about the lack of trust in God’s ability to grow His sons up without the aid of some self-appointed spiritual deputy? Can you smell the stink of rules and regulations or is that just me?

Our journey began in a re-birthing, it always has been and is about Life, it has nothing to do legal wrangling, and the institutional religious organizations will always struggle with this. So much of religious teaching revolves around the salvation message being basically a “get out of hell card free” the focus not having anything to do with Love or Life, but all about escape~wow!

In reality salvation is principally about an exchange or renewal of life and only secondarily about eternal reward. This misplaced emphasis on salvation’s purpose leads many Christian’s to miss the benefits of living a renewed life in this world. Many born again believers are robbed of their blessings of new life in the present time by the mistaken teachings of church organizations that emphasize rebirth in terms of the next life and reconciliation with God in terms of effort which traps them in needless worry about their salvation.
This salvation-by-grace-life thing is a forever proposition, as a result of our salvation coming through God’s working as opposed to our own, there can be NO possibility of our efforts mattering in our salvation status.

What religion and its teachers do not want you to realize is that our empowerment comes from the life of God operating in us and our salvation comes as a result of this life alone!
If any who read this want to read some great thoughts shared here on Life, my good friend Bill Landon has a few of them he shares in his book, The Life That is Real Life, as well as, My Father and Your father, both are obtainable at iUniverse.com.

Rich