Finished and yet to be Realized

“So get rid of all uncleanness and the rampant outgrowth of wickedness, and in a humble (gentle, modest) spirit receive and welcome the Word which implanted and rooted [in your hearts] contains the power to save your souls.”

The residual affect of sin within our members is something that is stimulated through the impetus of the father of lies within our flesh, trying to keep our soul fear-bound. In harkening to his subversive taunting, our soul is temporarily cut of from the “implanted” (engrafted) Word of God that has the power to further release, actualizing within us, the saving, restoring work of God’s grace. Without the secure, true knowledge of Whose we are (totally accepted and unconditionally beloved sons of God), this diabolical, unnatural, inclination will divert His life being fully formed within us, within our soul!
I love the following quote and somehow believe it flows congruently with my thoughts: “In other words, the work of Christ is finished and yet to be realized. It is reflective of the “already, but not yet” tension of the Kingdom of God.”

It is of utmost urgency to have revealed to us our true point of reference, and it is this: “he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit.” In the miracle of being received by God the Father, birthing us, our previous state, being “by nature … children of wrath, sons of disobedience,” we were instantly translated from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God’s dear Son.

This implanted (engrafted) Word of God to which we have been joined is our only hope of outwardly becoming all that is contained from within our only source of life, Christ in us. Our salvation is for the purpose of saving all that we are, spirit, soul and body, being presented to the Lord, perfectly.
Our common adversary, Satan, fully knows his impotency in stopping us from responding to God’s initial offer of saving grace, but knows full well he can still wreak confusion within our life, within our soul, by using the residual lingering stain of fear to continue his purposed manipulation of keeping our souls alienated from God our Father.

I love how our brother James puts it: “But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.” It is important to understand that this wisdom that James speaks of is inseparable from the Father’s love!

He (our Father) relentlessly appeals to the inherent soul-alienation within the child of God: “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly."

Rich

Connecting the Dots

In our coming through the portal of grace into a new and living world, what lies ahead of us has never been seen or heard of before. It has not yet fully dawned on us what is ours. “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”.
Up to this point in being a human being we have only really known a two dimensional existence, all along thinking we’re actually alive.
In the re-birthing we received what was meant to be our “birth-right” that which even Adam and Eve did NOT have or ever experienced!

In a heart beat everything we knew changed and yet appeared to be the same. The finished work of the Father from before the world began as well as in space, time, and history was instantly ours, we became completely His sons and daughters. We were complete and yet this completeness had to be worked out in the area of our lives that was still totally unchanged, our soul.

The sinner from the beginning, Satan, the one who held us captive, we being dead in our sins and trespasses, instantly lost his death grip on us the moment we responded to this loving God and Father of grace. The Scriptures describe this as, “Being translated out from the kingdom of darkness into the marvelous kingdom of light, aka, the family of the Father.”

The kicker is, although completely set free in our spirit, our soul was now the targeted battle zone where, as the battle ensued, all of us will be tempted to believe the LIE that in fact nothing has changed in us at all.
We are now living in two realms at the same time, the spirit realm where we are seated in Christ at the right had of God, and yet we’re still here in space, time and our geographical locations. What’s with that?

Salvation is just another abstract concept seen, experienced apart from the God and Father our Salvation. The Father’s ultimate intention was never to free us from hell only to give us a front row seat in heaven, but in saving us to complete us, spirit, soul and body.
The spirit dimension of our make up was instantly made complete in the re-birthing, the body aspect is something that awaits each of us on the other side, and it is my opinion, from the beginning the body was always meant to be ‘disposable’. Now that leaves us with one last component of our being, our soul. This is where it gets very interesting!

The father of lies is very much alive and well within a component that was added to the original creation of man after the fall, called the ‘flesh’.
It is from this unseen, but very real vantage point he continues his hellish best to attempt at bringing and keeping us although gloriously re-born (saved) ruled by the dictates of our fleshly yet un-renewed soul, mind-will-and emotions.

I want to say here, that I am not trying to come across as someone who fully in any estimation entirely sees or knows about this subject matter, but what I do know is that what I am seeing and growing in IS the truth. The beauty of Him, Christ Jesus being the Truth, we each must discover through His grace alone at a personal and experiential level the truth for us.
Other wise, we will be deceived into becoming an outer display of an inner distortion, having only a form of Godliness, but without the substance, NO power.

To be continued…

Rich

Stay and Die, or Go and Live

Those were the words spoken into my heart that fateful day fourteen years ago. It’s too long of a story to put down here right now, suffice it to say I was a dead man walking, going through the motions of sitting once again in my old institutional ‘place of worship.’
This is after having my coat of many colours stripped away from me and left naked and hung out to dry, or was that to die?

Many, many months prior to this particular morning, I told God I did NOT want to ever make any more irrational knee jerk impulsive choices to jump into any more fires, and that I would stay firmly fixed here until he said differently.
Little did I know that, that Sunday morning was going to be what has been said so well in a movie I saw, “Everything you’ve known, is about to change.”

The Father’s offer to me was vividly laid out to me and with this visual presentation he says, “You can stay and die, or go and live.”I was reflection on that turning point in my life and this jumped out to me today.

The children of Israel had barely left behind their former land of bondage, living in Egypt under the cruel hand of Pharaoh Lord of Egypt, when Pharaoh has a change of heart and continues to peruse these liberated slaves he once owned.
It is in this setting that the Israelites begin to freak out and say; then they said to Moses, "Is it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? Why have you dealt with us in this way, bringing us out of Egypt?Is this not the word that we spoke to you in Egypt, saying, 'Leave us alone that we may serve the Egyptians'? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness."

As I was reflecting on this I sensed the Lord saying, ‘You’re darn right I did bring you out here in the wilderness to die.’
This could not be the Lord, in fact I remember Him asking me if I wanted to ‘stay and die,’ or ‘go and live,’ what’s with the dying part if I was going and not staying?
With this invasion of Life that happened in being reborn, it set into motion a whole new realm of struggles, and here is a comment from my friend Bill that speaks into this reality.

Rich

The Nature of the Struggle

In truth entering the Christian life is an entry into a series of struggles. The struggle that each child of God must confront is not what most Christians would imagine it to be. Our struggle is not with the physical world directly. We know this from Scripture: Ephesians 6:12. What most Christians would find surprising is that our struggle is not even primarily with Satan or demons. No, our most fundamental and long-standing struggles are with self.