Jesus' Work in You: Supernatural and Unique
A husband and wife were talking recently about our spirits. One of them felt as though our spirit was something we were born with that actually had a specific fingerprint or mark about it that would distinguish one spirit from another. The other thought that while we were born with a spirit, once we were born again our spirit was totally, completely and fully Jesus and only Jesus. There was nothing left of us —our spirit was actually Jesus alive in us. At that point in the conversation, they got stuck. : ) Somewhere in the middle was the answer, but they didn’t know where it was!
One of them thought that when a person stands before God, He has to see His Son and nothing of us. The other said, “Yes, but it has to be uniquely us, right?” They knew they were saying close to the same thing, but it was hard to come to the place where they could really understand each other. Neither could quite find the words to describe what they were trying to say. So I think it would be good from an educational standpoint to go into this subject—it really is important. How you view yourself makes a lot of difference in how you act. If you understand who you are and how God created you, it definitely springs you forward in your ability to commune with God and to function in this physical realm by a life that is not your own. The conversation between them began because of something they read that talked about the spirit:
“‘Be strengthened with might through his spirit into the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you may be rooted and grounded in love.’ The Christian life is not merely a matter of becoming a Christian and knowing we will go to heaven. These are okay, but they are short of the divine thought. God’s full thought when we open ourselves to Christ Jesus is that a new source will be established within us for our entire being. This new source is our regenerated human spirit in communion with the Holy Spirit (John 3:6). Having a change of source is the most central thing in our regeneration. The mind, emotion and will are no longer to take the lead to determine our living. The leading part of our being now becomes our regenerated spirit, where we are joined to the Lord. (1 Cor. 6:17). What naturally follows, the new birth of our spirit, is a progressive transfer of source in our daily life.”
This is really basic in a way and in another way is incredibly rich and exciting. I don’t think you could ever go deeply enough into all of this to cease to appreciate it and be excited about it. What I want you to see is that Paul said we have body, soul and spirit. Our body is the physical realm, that’s obvious; the soul encompasses your will, your personality, your mind and intellect—all the things that are visible. If someone fatally shot you and your body was lying on the ground, you are still physically there. The blood is still is in your veins. But suddenly, you are not “you” anymore because something fundamentally has changed about who you are. The point is, that there is an invisible part of you that exists. And that is true for any pagan as well. When an unbeliever dies, who they fundamentally are, changes, the minute their heart stops beating. The blood is not moving through their veins anymore; they are fundamentally a different person. You need to understand that there is truly, as Paul said, body, soul and spirit. The spiritual part of you was once dead because of Adam’s sin—because Adam died we all die. Because of things that happened in you through Adam, your spirit before the second birth was dead. Here are some fundamental scriptures about the nature of our beginning with God:
“Once you were dead, doomed forever because of your many sins. You used to live just like the rest of the world, full of sin, obeying satan, the mighty prince of the power of the air…We were born with an evil nature, and we were under God’s anger just like everyone else. But God is so rich in mercy and he loved us so very much, that even while we were dead because of our sins, he gave us life when he raised Christ Jesus from the dead. It is only by God’s special favor that you have been saved! For he raised us from the dead along with Christ, and we are seated with him in heavenly realms—all because we are one with Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:1-6).
Here is another very familiar passage, but I want you to let it sink in…
“Should we keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more kindness and forgiveness? Of course not! Since we have died to sin, how can we continue to live in it? Or have you forgotten that when we became Christians and were baptized to become one with Christ Jesus, we died with him? For we died and were buried with Christ by baptism. And just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, now we also may live new lives.
“Since we have been united with him in his death, we also will be raised as he was. Our old sinful selves were crucified with Christ so that sin might lose its power in our lives. We are no longer slaves to sin. For when we died with Christ we were set free from the power of sin. And since we died with Christ, we know we will also share in his new life. We are sure of this because Christ rose from the dead, and he will never die again. Death no longer has any power over him. He died once to defeat sin, and now he lives for the glory of God. So you should consider yourselves dead to sin and able to live for the glory of God through Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:1-11).
The point here is that something fundamentally changed when you became a believer. No longer was it your body and your soul that ruled over you. No longer were you a slave to your flesh, your opinions, your will, and your selfish indulgence. No longer were you slaves to those things, because you were born a second time. God’s Spirit regenerated the spirit that was within you and now the living entity of your spirit ignited by the life of God Himself can take dominion over your body and soul. You died in your flesh, you died in your will and in your soul, and in your self-centered living. You died! You were crucified with Christ. Those things that once dominated you—the evil desires and passions that Paul talked about in Ephesians—have been nailed to the cross. The prince of the power of the air pressed your buttons and you responded whenever he wanted you to—those things that throbbed in your bones have been crucified and are dead and gone. The Life of God was breathed into you at regeneration, replacing that old, enslaved life. What is born of Spirit is spirit. We can now see the kingdom because we are born of the Spirit and water.
This rebirth ignited the life of God within you, which can now, with progression, dominate over the top of your will. Your soul, your passions, the pursuit of pleasure, your pride, the fury that is in you when someone questions you, the discomfort and your face turning different colors when you are embarrassed—they no longer have to dominate. The flesh had dominated in all those things because the sin nature was so strong—ignited by the prince of the power of the air, the evil spirit. Now God has placed His Life within you and caused that unique part of the universe that is your spirit to breathe and throb with new life.
“Once we, too, were foolish and disobedient. We were misled by others and became slaves to many wicked desires and evil pleasures. Our lives were full of evil and envy. We hated others, and they hated us” (Titus 3:3).
Again you see that same picture—we were foolish and disobedient. That was us. Something fundamentally changed, however. If you don’t understand that about yourself when you are born a second time, you will continue to mess around in a world that doesn’t have a right to own you anymore. There is something fundamentally changed in you. Once we were this, now no longer.
Not Cramming, but Communing
And it isn’t just a matter of willpower—this isn’t a change that happens in your soul. It’s not, “Okay, I’ve decided to live for God now. I didn’t live for God before, but now I’m going to read my Bible and listen to other Christians, and I’m going to try real hard to live for God now and I didn’t use to.” That is not the fundamental change that happens in those who have been born a second time by the Spirit. What has happened to those who have been born a second time by the Spirit is a revolutionary, miraculous process of God rebirthing us. He took a spirit that was dead and shriveled and breathed new life into it. Now it is alive inside of you and throbbing. Now your spirit has the ability, as it communes with God, as an organ, to receive the Life of God, to receive the voice of God, to receive the power of God, to receive the encouragement of God, to receive the instruction of God. This organ is now alive in you by His miraculous touch, by faith, by His grace—that not of yourselves, lest any man boast. It is the work of God and all the color of who you uniquely are. You have organs to receive and to give and to join and commune. You have a new organ called your spirit that is able to uniquely receive and join and commune with and receive the color of God.
And it’s not like cramming for a test by knowing a bunch of formulas! That’s all black and white, two-dimensional stuff… “I don’t get this. I don’t know what this means. I don’t understand it. I can look at it, and spit out a formula for it and try to apply it—but there’s something wrong with it.” The process of cramming and plugging numbers in doesn’t have the depth, and it doesn’t have the glory and fullness in the way something has when you really understand it—when that thing has become a part of you. You can “plug and chug,” as we called it in engineering school…just throw the numbers in the formula and chug out an answer. But what have you really gained by doing that? Nothing, because you’re not a bigger person for it. You simply got a better grade for it. And if there’s a little twist or change thrown in—something that doesn’t quite fit in the formula—you’re sunk! You didn’t really understand the guts of it, because it’s not a part of who you are. You don’t understand it. You can’t apply it in different situations.
That’s what happens when we don’t know God and we’re not living by the Spirit, communing with all the color and richness that is in the Godhead. You’re just dead all the time and always asking questions that are foolish. You know how to apply a “truth” in “this” situation but if it changes a little bit—if the formula is a little different—you’re totally lost. You’re always forgetting things that you should have remembered—“Yeah, I knew that.” You do bone-head stuff and then are tempted to be defensive and prideful about it. “I don’t think it ought to be this way anyway.” There’s all this stuff that you can’t see, you can’t hear, you can’t feel, and you can’t smell. So you live by this horizontal formula, by your own soul, your own flesh, your own intellect, what you think you understand, and what you think you have experienced in the past. You live by all that carnal junk, so no wonder you are lost! No wonder you are always failing in your willpower. I know for me that I’ve never been able to live by willpower and have as much willpower as the next person. I’ve not been able to muster enough strength out of myself to do very much good in any area of my life for very long.
However, the Good News of Jesus Christ and the gospel is not just about going to heaven…the Good New of Jesus is that the power of an indestructible life can live within us. Jesus Christ was manifest to destroy the works of the devil; not just to forgive sins, but to destroy the devil’s power over us. We are learning to live like Jesus lived. We are learning to live by the Spirit rather than by the law. We’re learning to live by the Spirit rather than by the flesh or by religion or by willpower, by our soul, or by our hormones. We’re learning to live by the Spirit. To hear God. To sense Him. To drink Him up. When God looks at us, isn’t it essential that He say, “This is My Son in whom I am well-pleased?” We are at a place in our lives where we are learning how to live by the Spirit. We are learning how to let this living thing inside of us commune with God and receive its strength and its nourishment and its guidance and its color and sight and sound from the Spirit of God seated with Christ in the heavenly realms. And THAT is in an altogether different dimension. You do understand that, right? “Seated with Christ” doesn’t mean you go up way high in a rocket ship. That means you live in the fifth dimension, where God is. That is His intention. Not in time and space as men perceive it, but in a dimension that is beyond where the physical body can go, because the spirit within you is not confined to time and space. It can live with Christ seated in heavenly realms. At peace, in heavenly realms. What you need to learn in order to go from one degree of glory to another to another with ever-increasing glory is to learn how to live by the Spirit. That His life, His wisdom, His knowledge, His personality, His strength can be manifest in us. Some of the small things that entails is putting to death the misdeeds of the body. That is only a small part of it—that’s not the end of the story. The big, exciting news, is not just that you don’t have to sin anymore. That is certainly true, but it is only a small part of what it means to live connected to the vine, abiding in Him, living nourished by Him, fed by Him, instructed day and night as you sleep, as you rise, as you walk along the way, instructed by the Spirit of God. That goes way beyond simply putting to death the misdeeds of the body (though that of course is also God’s intention).
“Once we, too, were foolish and disobedient. We were misled by others and became slaves to many wicked desires and evil pleasures. Our lives were full of evil and envy. We hated others, and they hated us.
“But then God our Savior showed us his kindness and love. He saved us, not because of the good things we did, but because of his mercy. He washed away our sins and gave us a new life through the Holy Spirit. He generously poured out the Spirit upon us because of what Jesus Christ our Savior did. He declared us not guilty because of his great kindness. And now we know that we will inherit eternal life. These things I have told you are all true. I want you to insist on them so that everyone who trusts in God will be careful to do good deeds all the time. These things are good and beneficial for everyone” (Titus 3:3-8).
What is it that we are supposed to insist on? We insist on a knowledge that God has regenerated us, He has washed us, cleansed us and planted His very Life in us. He has awakened our spirit and caused us to have the power to overcome evil in our lives. He has given the power to commune with God, to receive fresh Life from Him every day, manna from heaven on a daily basis, and to hear and feel and experience all that God is. And as Paul said, to “have the very mind of Christ”—to have the anointed life of God with ever-increasing glory living within us and manifesting itself through us. That is God’s intention. As it says in Hebrews, we are “made perfect and are being made holy.” It is a progressive thing. We are “becoming a habitation of God by the Spirit.” God is filling us more and more on an individual and corporate basis as we let go of the cares and worries of the world and the deceitfulness of riches. We are filled more and more as we are quick to submit to God, quick to confess our sin and apologize to Him, and as we are quick to humble ourselves and obey Him in the small things. The more we do those things, the more we make room in our hearts and spirits for Him to manifest Himself and commune with us. Our ability to freely commune with Him increases as we pull up the weeds in our life and make room for Him in our hearts.
In the meantime, the Good News is that “we are made perfect and are being made holy.” If we are uniquely spirited people, then one person’s spirit is totally different from another. Altogether these spirits are the Bride of Christ, an equal yoke for Jesus. But they are all individual pieces. Each one doesn’t have total giftedness or total insight and maturity, but the individual spirit that is within you is uniquely you. The book of Revelation says you will have your own unique name. The spirit that is within you is unique to the universe. And yet as you commune with the Godhead with a clean spirit, pure hands and a clean heart, you become more and more like Him in His image and His glory. You become more able to do what He uniquely created you to do, and more in communion with others who seek Him with a pure heart. Together then we become more and more like Him. In the meantime, we’re “made perfect.” We are clothed with Christ. He looks at us and because He sees the Blood of Jesus, He declares us not guilty. We put on Christ, and that gives us justification before God. But there is another issue called glorification or sanctification—the issue of becoming more like Him in deed, in practice in our lives, in our thoughts, and in our ability to commune with the Father. That is what is at stake for most of us.
There are some who still need to deal with justification and abandon their lives into His hands. But for many of us, the issue is, “How do we become more like Him? How do we get off dead center? How do we put away the stuff that we were in bondage to five years ago or longer?” A big, big part of that is understanding that this God who is rich in mercy has provided you with everything that pertains to life and godliness in Christ Jesus, by His Spirit. And if you will put to death the misdeeds of the body and commune with God in your spirit…if you will fix your eyes on Jesus, the author and the perfecter of faith… if you will call on the Name of the Lord, continually putting aside your flesh and driving yourself towards your Messiah to commune with Him, to worship Him, to love Him… then what you will find is that you are transformed with ever-increasing glory into His image. God Himself is making you more like Him. It’s not by your own effort or willpower, lest you boast…but by your communion with Him you are drawn up into Him and become more like Him as a result. It is extremely important that you have a solid, fundamental understanding of who it is that you are. And also that you understand how we get where we want to be—which is made in the image and likeness, the fruitfulness, the power, the wisdom and the glory of the God we were designed to commune with. You have to put your antennae up. You have to live by the Spirit rather than by your soul or your body.
Father, it is our deepest desire that we be able to commune with You and live fully in You. We don’t want to be strange or bizarre. Your Son Jesus was certainly not bizarre or strange, flighty or weird. He was very, very real and alive and fun to be with. The children loved Him. He was a kingly priest that was in communion with You and yet the humanity He expressed was very rich and alive. And it was perplexing, enlightening and encouraging to those around Him at the same time. Father, we ask for that—whatever it takes. Perfect understanding of these things isn’t the key. But abandonment to You and moving Your direction and turning our face fully towards Your Son in the light of God—those are the things that will give us a place to know You better, and that is our major goal in this life. Father, please help us to learn to commune with You, and to clarify our thinking. We know that it is by the renewing of our minds that we are transformed, so we want our thinking to be clear so that we can pursue You with a good and honest heart. We know You have been pursuing us and have expressed Yourself in the deepest of ways and have paid the highest of prices to be with us. We want to yield ourselves to You. Father, please raise up for Yourself everywhere a tribe of people that truly are in communion with You—people who know You on the inside. People who are not cramming for a test, or living religiously and superficially, but on the inside there is a twinkle in their eye that is looking deeply at You. You are instructing us and teaching us and building us from the inside because of our communion with You, because we love You. Father, make us like that. Open our eyes to these things that we are talking about. AMEN.
YES, Unique! But Learn to Listen….
When is personality not sin, it’s just a part of what makes us unique? Maybe I am very funny all the time. At what point should I ever settle that it is simply me and it’s fine, versus the point where I should say that this humor of mine has to be totally crushed and destroyed and transformed and changed? I know Jesus had a sense of humor, yet that may easily beset someone. A sense of humor may be a dominant factor in someone’s personality—when you think of a certain brother, you may think, “That brother is always so funny!” When you think of someone else, you may think, “That sister is always very serious.” Some people have traits that seem to dominate. Yet we are all becoming like Him… but we are individual? The sinful acts are obvious—they have to go. But at what point could you still distinguish us from each other? At what point should we be distressed over a characteristic of ourselves and seek God that it needs to be changed and transformed, and at what point do we settle for, “This is who I am and what I see in someone else—that’s not my particular gift”?
It’s a precious thing that we are, in fact, all uniquely different and always will be, and should that not be the case, we’ve probably made a grievous mistake. There really is supposed to be a tremendous amount of color and personality and distinction. And certainly there are many gifts. “The Spirit gives gifts as He will,” and He distributes as He will. His gifts and personality and all of these things are uniquely different, and for good reason. If it were true that we could, each of us on an individual basis take on the exact personality of Jesus, the exact gifts of Jesus, the exact everything—if that’s what it means to come into the full measure of the stature of Christ that we would have exactly the personality of Jesus, then it would make a number of scriptures untrue. For example, 1 Corinthians 12 says if you are “baptized by one Spirit into one body” then one of the results is that you will never, ever be able to say to others in the body of Christ “I have no need of you.” If you have it all together because you are sooo spiritual—your personality is just like Jesus and your spiritual life is complete in itself because you are so mature, then you could legitimately say, “I have no need of you,” couldn’t you? But that will never happen, because by design we are all like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Every piece is different in color and shape, and as the song goes, “None of us have it all together, but all together we have it all.” The point is that we do become more like Jesus in areas as it relates to sin. The fact is that when we are immature we don’t even know necessarily which areas relate to sin! That is part of communion with God. “Okay, I’m funny, I’m funny, but when do I shut up? Funny is okay, but do I know when to shut up? Do I know when to look into people’s eyes and see that… a) I’m wearing them out; b) My humor has turned into being at other people’s expense. It’s insulting, perhaps.”
Go down the list. Something can turn sour in various ways. Too much energy can be diverted into things that are not of Jesus. Color and life, sound, and beautiful things could be going on… but do you know when to leave someone’s house? One time I was at an older brother’s house for hours and hours. Electricity was there and power and life in the time together. Good stuff happened…and then I remember driving down the driveway saying, “We stayed ten minutes too long.” Sitting in the driveway with the window rolled down for 10 more minutes of further discussion was all it took. The life drained out of it. All that had happened over those many hours was powerful and real and some very solid things could have come out of it and probably some value did still come of it. But the point is, that ten extra minutes of not living by the Spirit—by being social and cordial, just staying a little too long and talking a little more for whatever reason, and the life drained out of it. Whatever the motives were to extend it, it wasn’t God, and the life drained out of it because I wasn’t listening enough to say, “Bye!”” We have to be willing to do that, whether it’s a telephone call, a visit, a discussion of some sort or whatever…just to say, “This has been good. Bye.” Click.
Learn how to respond to God’s Spirit, because if we don’t, we will mess something up. A communion with God is the solution to that problem. We can be who we are and enjoy the daylights out of that. And we can enjoy the daylights out of who other people are too—until the point when the communion with God has been diminished or tarnished—the Spirit has been quenched, to use Paul’s word. It’s a nice, roaring fire, and all of a sudden out of no where a cup of water gets thrown on it and now the fire is just spittin’ and throwing steam and the heat drops way down. We have not kept the Spirit’s fire fervent. We have quenched the Spirit’s fire. The moment comes when we’ve opened our mouth one time too many, or we’ve given one too many opinions, or we’ve talked about one too many political or sports things, or spent five minutes too long reading the newspaper—fill in the blank. When we get rid of sin and lack of communion with God, we are free then to be all that God wants us to be. Explore that and enjoy the daylights out of it! But when you tolerate five minutes too long in the sports section of the newspaper…when you begin to live by your flesh rather than by the Spirit, the first few minutes (in the Sports section) was not an offense to God, perhaps. The last few were—you just had to check the box score. You just wanted to check one more thing about this or that, and you wasted God’s time, and He was offended by that. You quenched the Spirit’s fire, and you pay a price for it on the inside.
Here’s another practical example. Let’s say you are being straightforward in raising a child. They got a little crazy and out of line, so you speak with them very firmly, “Look me in the eye. Stop. Right now.” And then you feel yourself go on and say a little bit too much with a little too much anger in your heart because you have been inconvenienced. You wanted to do this other thing and now you can’t because they have taken up your time and spoiled it for you. Your flesh comes in and now all of a sudden this thing that might have been good, consistent child-rearing, is not that. You crossed the line. There was flesh in it. Maybe no one else noticed, but in your spirit—if you are living by the Spirit —you knew that you went too far. Or perhaps it’s the other way around—“Mommy, mommy.” “Shhhh.” “Mommy, mommy, mommy.” “Shhhhh.” You feel something when you are not consistent, and when you don’t take the time because you are too busy doing your big important thing, to look a child in the eye and say, “Shhhh. No. One more time and I will help you. I’ll interrupt what I am doing, I promise. But not for the reason you want.” When you do that and you are in communion with God, you can feel the Life of God flow into and purify and cleanse and enlarge your spirit within. You can feel it.
If you are thinking like a believer—like someone who has been regenerated by the Holy Spirit, no longer dead but now alive in Christ—if you are in communion with God on that level and seated with Christ in heavenly realms, you can feel the things God approves of and you can feel the things He disapproves of. So then you’re totally free to have all the personality you want to have. There’s no limit. As long as you are living by the Spirit we are all free to be very distinctive and alive and colorful and all His personality can flow right out. That’s fine. But it’s the flesh that gets us into trouble and confuses the issue. There is just no automatic rule.
Let’s say you were there in the first century. You saw the things Jesus laughed at, and you heard the jokes He made, or how often He made them, or the way He walked, or whether or not He wore a hat. If you could see all the stuff that He was and tried to copy it, the Father would squash you like a bug in your heart, because that’s not who He wants you to be! He wants you to be who you are, who He created you distinctly and uniquely to be if you live by the Spirit. Together we are a very personable and attractive bride for the groom, but what bride and groom have you ever seen that had exactly the same personality? Yuck! How unchallenging that would be!! : ) Everything your spouse likes you like. Bummer! The thing that Jesus wants in a bride has life and personality and color. Even if you could know what His exact personality was, that’s not your goal. Your goal is to be who God created you to be, but to live by the same Spirit that He lived by. That’s what we all help each other to do, and as we help each other to do that, we enjoy each other more. The loyalties deepen, the enjoyment deepens, the respect deepens. Someone else’s sense of humor will do just fine if I don’t have one. “When you’ve seen them, you’ve seen me.” I can enjoy someone else’s personality and their sense of humor as if it were my own. There is no more competition.
As we melt together in spirit with the Spirit of Christ, we also then melt together with the spirit of one another. There is a communion that happens—that’s what the Body of Christ is supposed to be! There may be plenty of true believers out there, but there ain’t much that Jesus would call “church” out there. Because most of what is out there has nothing whatsoever to do with communing in spirit together with the Godhead. Nothing to do with that. It is hearing information and then trying to live the “good Christian life” based on that information. But there is no communion with one other and the Godhead together… “baptized by one spirit into one body.” That’s what a church is supposed to be. If it ain’t that, it’s not a church. I can show you ten verses that would establish that, but suffice it to say for now—that’s what we’re shooting for. The pleasure we want to bring God is helping each other commune with Jesus…teaching each other in a hard time—“Hey, turn your face towards Jesus, okay? You will like what you see when you get there. You’re beginning to watch the storm rather than reaching out your hand for the One who is walking on the water. You’re missing the point.” So we lift each other’s hands, as Jonathan did with David, strengthening each other’s hands in God, lifting up our hands like Moses’ arms were lifted up and the glory of God descended on the battlefield. We lift each other’s arms up. When our eyes lose focus, we turn each other’s chins around to refix our eyes on Jesus, and as we do that, we all enjoy the many-faceted wisdom of God, to use Paul’s expression.
Our Father, we are very grateful that as we embark on this journey and enjoy the magnitude of this glorious quest that You have put in front of us and empowered us to walk in, we are also very grateful that the Blood of Jesus has washed us and given us a place to stand before You unashamed in the meantime. We have all sinned in many ways; it is beyond question that we have blown it a thousand times, but it is our heart’s desire first of all to say “thank you” for washing us with the precious Blood of the Son. There is power in the Blood. We are grateful for the Blood that has flowed for our sake. Though it hurts us to know that it cost You so much, it also gives us the freedom to not be ashamed and to go forward. We are also grateful that the Spirit of God that Jesus lived by that raised Him from the dead is now powerfully at work within those who believe. We are excited about the journey and grateful that You have given us a place to stand in the meantime by Jesus’ Blood, made perfect and being made useful, holy and glorious before You.
We Must Have Both
In the walking out of these things and in learning to be led by the Spirit, and putting to death the misdeeds of the body…on the one hand I see how clearly I need the body of Christ. I need real people with names and faces and specific situations helping me and me helping them. I need people in my life to be able to walk this out. The gates of hell will prevail unless there is that connectedness in relationship. On the other hand I have also seen that I can’t count on anyone to do it for me. It is my responsibility to make right choices. There will not be someone constantly tapping me on my shoulder, “Know the Lord, Know the Lord, do this, turn from that.” It’s not going to be that way. I need people, and there is no way I am going to make it without people who help me continue to sustain my faith and walk in a way that is pleasing to God. But on the other hand, there is that thing inside of me that no matter what anyone else says or does, or whether they are there or aren’t there, it comes down to the place where it is just me and God. It is between me and Him when it comes to the choices I need to make. How do I walk in a way that is right before God where I am totally and utterly dependent on everyone, which I know I am and I have to be and I want to be? That’s God’s way, for sure. But on the other hand, the place where it is my own decisions before God—my destiny is in my hands in a sense because of the choices I make. Others aren’t going to do it for me. It’s me. I have to make choices to follow God and do what is right. I can’t blame my mistakes on anyone else; I can’t take credit for things of myself. I don’t want to go overboard one way or the other on either one of those things. “Well, it’s the body of Christ…” or be independent.
Those things really aren’t contradictory. It’s not an either/or situation. They are meant to complement each other. In other words, we have to take things very seriously, personally. Many times, the key choices we need to make are choices we make when no one is around. They are choices we make when we are by ourselves with a child—who knows what the choices might be, but we have to take things seriously and personally. I think the way that we can help each other a lot is to recognize that we’re incomplete and we don’t see everything. The only way any admonishment or encouragement really works, is because the person really does know the Lord and you are pointing them to Christ. You’re helping them to see something. You’re not trying to be their conscious for them. If a person doesn’t see it for themselves on the inside, it never works anyway. We have to take things very seriously, and if we don’t, we can’t grow. If we don’t sow generously we won’t grow. If we won’t weed we won’t grow. There is definitely a personal responsibility. There will come a day when we will stand personally accountable before God for what we have done while we are in this body. That is meant for us as individuals and we need to take advantage of each other’s help. We recognize that we are personally responsible, but we are also very, very needy at the same time.
Anybody over the age of twenty-one could live somewhere else if they wanted to. That’s just the way it is. Why are you here? You made a choice to be here for some reason or another. My assumption is that you made a choice to live here, and to raise your families here because there was food supply. From the time the pilgrims were going through the wilderness to this day, when you see wayfarers they tend to throw their tents by the oasis. They find a stream, a little green patch—that’s where they choose to live for a time until they go on to some other green patch. Truth is, people have always, in the physical realm, decided to be where there is life. They go where their needs will be supplied, and they would be foolish not to. God designed this thing called church so that there would be daily food available. It’s just a given—“Admonish one another every single day as long as it is called Today so that none are hardened and deceived by sin.” “See to it brothers, that none of you has a sinful and unbelieving heart.” There is a process together of feeding one another, in season and out of season. There’s a process of being eyes and ears to help each other see where there is food and to see the weeds that are choking our spiritual life. The process of, “I will build my church that the gates of hell cannot prevail against” was this thing that God invented where the gifts can work together. The eyes and ears and arms and legs of the body work together to provide a constant access to food and the labor necessary to pull the weeds and to not be tripped up, deceived and hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.
Jesus did a wonderful thing in inventing His church where we commune together with one another and with God. But here’s the catch: If you don’t press it into your own personal heart, you’ve benefited nothing. It doesn’t have anything to do with how much food is available. It has to do with whether or not you eat it and digest it and it becomes part of you. These things work together—plenty of food and digesting it personally. Neither by itself is very effective. We were not created to be individual Christians out there in a sea of humanity living our own good Christian life and visiting a couple of Christians or hopping on the telephone once a week and saying, “Hi” and telling some type and shadow or cool idea, but our life is never being opened up—we never get inside of each other’s hearts. “The kingdom is neither here nor there, it’s within you.” We have to get inside of each other in order to experience the kingdom.
The same is true in the spiritual realm as it is in the natural realm—to have food and protection all around you but to not eat the food is just foolish! You will die, even if the food is available. When someone says something to me that is important spiritually, I really think about it. I turn my face towards God, and I ask Him about it. I ask Him to make it real to me and to apply it to my life. We can cram for the test, and fool ourselves into thinking we have a good score because we obeyed all the right rules, or we can really get in and grapple with the material. We can get into it and digest it and make it a part of us. We can go into our prayer closet, as Jesus said, get alone with the Father and talk to Him about these things. Ask Him to expand, ask Him to bring further opportunities for learning, new situations or circumstances or teaching or admonishment or failures or victories that can help fill this thing out. “Help me to understand—let’s go on a field trip, God. Let’s go into the laboratory. I don’t want to just study the material out of a book—take me there! Show me. Be my Master Teacher. Use all the experiences around me, in the church and in my circumstances to make this very much a part of me so I’m not just pluggin’ and chuggin’, filling in the formula, doing the right thing and hoping everyone is happy with me. Make it so it really is a part of who I am. Make it so I can see it and feel it. And when the formula changes and the experience is different than anything I’ve seen before, I still pass the test because I can see and feel what is real. I comprehend the depth of what it is and so I can apply it in a hundred situations that no one has ever seen or read about before, because it is part of who I am.”
We can hold our hands together and go through the gates of hell unified in love and peace and strength with the weapons of righteousness in our left hand and our right. We can tear down the gates of hell, casting down the enemies of God, trampling them underfoot, and treading out the winepress of the wrath of God Almighty together on our horses because we have communion with God and understand the depths. We have a mind and a communion with God and with one another that permits that. It’s not an either/or thing. Somehow I have more opportunities, living here, than I would have if I was living by myself. I get fed every day in a hundred ways by accident. Totally by accident I get fed in ways that I just wouldn’t if I was doing a “church thing” somewhere, attending something or not even doing that because I am too spiritual so I just sit in my living room by myself. I need people inside of me. I need the kind of dynamic environment that allows me to see things—the testing, the windows into my soul, the windows into my spirit in the various circumstances of life. I really need that. I still have to go into my closet with the Father and say, “Show me. Expand on this. Apply this. Push this into me. Help me to see it. Let me see who You are, Jesus. Show me things in Your Word, and in my experiences, whether it is a car wreck or an illness or a promotion on the job or a firing from a job, show me. Make this a part of me.” So, I certainly must deal with God myself in order to commune with Him and expand and grow—for the tent pegs of my spirit to be enlarged to receive and exude Christ Jesus. But I also absolutely need people too—we have to have both.
You can have experiences all by yourself out there that are genuine, but you will also be hardened and deceived, if the Scriptures are true. If you do not have the opportunities to be admonished daily, you can be hardened and deceived. The other downfall is if you do have those opportunities to have the daily admonishing, but you treat it like you’re cramming for a test—“Okay, Okay, I’ll do that. Sure, okay, that’s the right thing.” Or maybe your pride wells up and you say, “Well, I think that’s just your opinion.” If we deal with it on some foolish, superficial level, we will never know God. It means nothing if we make it just a new form of religion that is just as empty, powerless, vain and misleading as burning candles and incense and wearing fancy dresses and easter bonnets. It’s a meaningless form if we are not really laying our lives down before God and communing with Him about it, pushing it in. The two things work together—you need both. Both are really critical to the fastest possible growth in the very short vapor lifetimes that we have been granted.
Be careful when you come home after being at someone’s house for dinner, or when you come home from work—be careful how you think and act. Let’s say you make a couple of remarks about this situation or that, or this person or that, and then go to bed. Or you come home from work and have an opinion and feel a certain way about something and you just go on with your day. If that’s how you live, then you will grow up to be a bitter, snide, know-it-all with no real life inside of you. It’s really essential that we turn our face towards Jesus and really work these things out with Him and talk about them with one another in a spirit of grace, not in a superficial “I know this” and “This person said that?” Blah blah. That is nonsense. There has to be the Spirit of Christ and communion with Him in the whole process. If there is no secret closet, then it’s hard to imagine that you will get much past being a know-it-all. Hard to imagine. You have to have a place where it is just you and Him and you are very serious about being humbled by Him and taught by Him with whatever experiences or relationships He chooses to bring your way.
Let’s say you’re a French horn player practicing on a desert island and you pick your way through the music. You sort of play it, and it sounds good enough to you after a while. But since there’s no one else to hear, you trick yourself into thinking you know how to play this song, but you really don’t! It would be far better if you could be in the midst of many other musicians and have a lot of input and correction. They could say to you, “Let me play that for you. Stop for a second and let me play this and see if it doesn’t sound closer to palatable.”
That is the individual level, but there is a symphony that lights up God’s heart that we can’t play alone on a desert island! We can play a small role in the symphony, but there is something that transcends our individual growth as a French horn player. We can play our heart out, but we can’t be a symphony all by ourselves. We don’t have the capacity in our one instrument or our gift. Even if we are multi-gifted or can play three or four instruments, you can’t run to them quickly enough and exchange them fast enough to play a symphony! Something bigger than any individual player in it is that God longs to hear the symphony. He definitely appreciates the individual playing his trumpet with a clean heart and pure hands, but He longs to hear the whole thing meshed together, and we can’t do that on our own.
By the same token, how good would the symphony sound if the musicians never paid the price individually to become skilled at the instrument? Think of professional musicians, the best in the world. When they all come together, what does that sound like? The music that people who have paid the price personally as individuals, are able to generate when they get together, is of a whole different order than people who like to hang out and play at the same time. God’s waiting for His symphony…Let’s play it.
3/4/1998
