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Chapter 11

Improving Our Vision

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If the failed expansion of our vision for a life lived victoriously and beyond our wildest imaginations is a result of our inability to grasp how we could ever possess such victory, then I’m afraid we may simply be lacking an appreciation for the source of our strength.

Our eyesight is so poor.

If the Holy Spirit were to expose us to a Holy Discontent (see Hybels’ book by that name), the sad reality is it may die a quick death because we are so leashed to the shackles of our very tangible American Dream culture.

The fact is, it is hard to escape the American Dream of prosperity, comfort, self-satisfying work and well-earned recreation and rest.

But on the other hand, if a Holy Discontent were to become strong enough, and we are gifted by the Spirit to be sufficiently wrecked and ripped from our comfort zone, such can actually move us from the American Dream and into a dream of God’s choosing–for the times in which He has us living.

You say, “Greg, I understand there is more. But I am insufficient to conjure up such newness of vision because I am so limited.”

But you’re only partially right–you just have the tense of the verb all wrong. You were limited!

WAKE. UP. PEOPLE.

You have been given all you need to partake in Christ’s overwhelmingly powerful victory in your life! Have you not been born into a newness of life in Him?

Which of these statements is true of you?

a.       My God is not capable, or 

b.       I have not been born into newness

If you believe you are not capable of attaining to a newness of vision for the precious life God has given you to live on this planet, then one of the above statements is true of you. Or just maybe neither is true and you just need to educate yourself about what is true of you as God’s child! If so, this is why you are reading this book. It is for this purpose this book was written–to educate Christians about what is true of us as God’s children!

What does 2 Peter 1:3-4 mean if it is not pointing to the fact that you have what it takes within–not on your own, but through the power of the Spirit of the God living within you?

3 His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. 4 Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires. 

– 2 Peter 1:3-4

My goodness, read that again! This passage is FULL of victory! Which of these three truths of this scripture passage are you going to deny and claim to be a lie, if you dare?

1. We have everything we need for a godly life through His divine power! Is this one you want to refute with God?

Did the Holy Spirit blow it when communicating this one to Peter?

If we are completely surrendered to the power of the divine living inside us, we have access to everything we need for victorious living–it is his power doing the work, not yours brother and sister.

We MUST stop habitually picking up our old man in lieu of surrendering to our newness IN CHRIST!

2. Or maybe this truth from the second half of verse 2 makes you uncomfortable. …through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness!

Ok, so if you are lacking in knowledge, what’s up with that? Do you not know where to go for that knowledge?

BATHE in the “sharper than any two-edged sword” Word of the Living God, my friend! It is through a knowledge of HIM that we gain, then possess and finally claim ownership of this divine power.

If you want to strip God of glory and goodness, then remain ignorant of his Word–stay out of the scriptures which bring understanding. Or, a better recommendation is that you could engage your circumstances, relationships and the world around you in victory by gaining in wisdom and knowledge of the tool you carry around with you 24/7…the Spirit of the Living God!

3. Perhaps this is the part you want to leave behind, that through them (meaning his promises) you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.

There it is! Do you want to participate in the divine nature or do you want to live in the power of the dead man of flesh inherited after the nature of that which is dust–a nature of sin, death, darkness, and ignorance of that which is right?

The triune, personal, all powerful God has told you that YOU HAVE ESCAPED THE CORRUPTION OF THE WORLD! Why, oh why, continue wallowing in it when you don’t have to?

God says that the new nature within you has given you full rights to participation in the divine nature. You are to be free from the evil desires of the world. If our hearts are set in Him, our old desires no longer have victory over us.

If there is trouble here for you, it is possible there is a problem in your life with surrender. But why, oh why should we not surrender ALL OF WHAT WE CARRY AROUND that was born of an old, defeated, now dead man? Where’s the joy in that? Where’s the appeal in that?

There is tremendous freedom, joy and victory that can only come from a brokenhearted surrender of our lives into the Cross of Christ which has already done all the work!

Indeed, it is the Word of God which breaks the spell of counterfeit pleasures. Let me say it again, it is the Word which breaks the power of counterfeit pleasures.

And as we listen to the Spirit of God while in his Word, we can recognize how it is that we can be made new–prepared for a life lived dangerously with the presence of God.

What about Isaiah?

When, like Isaiah, we have a personal encounter with God, we are changed forever. The counterfeit pleasures of this world pale by comparison when God finds us willingly living palms up…positioning ourselves for God’s movement in our lives. What God did for Isaiah at the leading edge of his call, God can do for us.

Check out Isaiah’s commissioning experience in the first 8 verses of Chapter 6:

1 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2 Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. 3 And they were calling to one another:

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty;     the whole earth is full of his glory.”  

4 At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke. 5 “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.” 6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7 With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.” 8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”  

    – Isaiah 6:1-8

What a picture of redemptive change through God’s power and undoing in Isaiah’s life. His experience resulted in a newness of duty and call.

Isaiah didn’t have the benefit of the Holy Spirit entering him as do we today. His experience was, one could say, a pre-Christ substitute experience. Christ had not yet been situated at God’s right hand, so the Holy Spirit had not yet been made available to Isaiah “full-time” in the same way He is today.

But through this pre-Christ experience, Isaiah knew about and deeply sensed his guilt and sin. And he didn’t know how to be made right…just that he had been “undone.”

So God took care of that–the seraphim flying to him with a live coal–touching, purifying and redeeming him in one swift moment. And he was made new! Isaiah got it. He knew what it meant to have all things new, old things passing away. And a new mission consumed his life.

In the same way, we need to be undone. It is a prerequisite without which we cannot be fully effective in hearing and executing our spiritual call.

Our undoing can only happen through a personal revelation from God in our lives. And an informed theology of who we are as Christians can help set the stage. Our being undone can awaken the sense of who we are–and who God is relative to us. It can break us. Our being undone through an understanding of accurate theology can humble us. And it can give us newness of life, boldness and purpose.

So while we will deal with this in more detail later, it is my strong belief that when we become both academically and emotionally connected with an accurate theology of God, we, like Isaiah, will have such a “woe is me” experience–one uniquely crafted for us by the hand of the Spirit. We will know that we are ruined, that we are men and women of unclean lips.

And just as Isaiah was made clean and commissioned by the seraphim’s hot coals, our hot coal experience can begin with a real apprehension of the work done by our Lord Jesus through his shed blood, and victory gained us on the Cross.

But in what way might this benefit us? And how can Jesus’ triumph live itself out in our lives?

It is the objective of Part III in this book to help us gain this apprehension.

But before we go there, we have some cobblestone paths over which to travel together. I say cobblestone because the next two sections are not to be skimmed through at 70 mph with the cruise set. Instead, ask the Holy Spirit to help you personally reflect on the observations I am making about many of us who may have become a bit too attached to the American Christian life.

In these pages, I will propose what I believe is largely true about us as life-long, American Christians; our longings still find their roots in what this earth side life has to offer. And insomuch as this is the case, we settle for the crumbs falling from the banquet table that was intended for us–a feast of intimate, ever-deepening fellowship with our Redeemer.

Thus, the following lyric from the song Slumber, by NEEDTOBREATHE.

All these victims stand in line for...

Crumbs that fall from the table just enough to get by All the while your invitation Wake on up from your slumber baby, open up your eyes Wake on up from your slumber baby, open up your eyes

May what follows continue to lead us into wholeness, and may our satisfaction with the dry crumbs of Spirit-less living become a thing of the past. Oh that we would position ourselves to let the Spirit open our eyes. This positioning is the intended purpose of the next two sections. Are you ready for the cobblestone?

  PAUSE to PONDER

Carve out five minutes right now. The world will wait. If you are out of time, return here when you have it – before continuing on. Take a deep breath and quiet your mind and spirit. Ask God to speak to you through his Word. 

Read 2 Peter 1:3-4 out loud once each minute. Talk to God about a different facet of this passage each time.

Ask God to forgive you for ever believing you are impotent in this life as his child, or that you don’t have what it takes, in Christ, to live a victorious Christian life.

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Chapter 26

Spurring On Our Death

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Though certainly not a prerequisite, lest we put God in a box, it seems that the more deeply spiritual, operational incisions initiated by the Holy Spirit coincide with times when one has been veritably leashed (sometimes physically, whether through injury, searing crisis or otherwise) to such foreign practices as stillness, silence, and sincere meditation on the Truths of God and His Word.

For our part, we label these times as “interruptions to our productivity.” For the Spirit’s part, He labels them as opportunity.

Oh, Christian friend, it is in such times our loving and gracious God is giving us a painful pause intended to spur on our death. And more often than not, we hate every minute of it.

All we can do is think about what isn’t getting done. “Lord,” we say, “what duties should I be carrying out right now which I am incapable of doing because of this cursed stillness?” All the while, the week, month or quarter year of relative incapacitation ticks away, pregnant with God’s purpose for us, and…we miss it.

The One who gave his life to gain relationship with us is stilling us and calling our name–but we cannot hear him because we are too concerned with our self-importance. The ears of our heart and soul are stopped up with the temporal. And we fail the test.

I can nearly see all of heaven, from the angels pausing from their work to our great cloud of witnesses, holding their collective breath when we are stricken with such times of what we call “unproductive stillness”– and we fail to recognize that it was a time divinely ordered for our becoming into Christ.

Your time of involuntary stillness may not be as incapacitating as was Dr. Rich Edwards’, but if gifted with such, I pray the outcome will be comparable. In his book, Not a Fan, Kyle Idleman tells this man’s story. I’d like to recount it here.

On February 10th, 2006, I was in control of my life and I liked the direction things were going. I had a thriving chiropractic practice, two sons and a devoted wife. On February 11th, everything changed.

I was heading out to my hunting cabin where I planned to meet up with friends and hunt wild boar. As I drove along, I could see the effects from the severe drought we had been experiencing. Everything seemed to have dried up and died.

By the time I had reached the road heading to the cabin, it was dark. As I turned, I missed the road and ended up in five feet of thick brush. I tried to free my truck by putting it in forward, then reverse repeatedly. The friction from that somehow ignited the brush. Within seconds, the truck was a large torch.

I reached for the door handle to escape, but the electrical system burned out and I was locked inside. Seconds later, the window exploded. I don’t really know what happened after that. I have no idea how I got out of the truck. The next thing I remember is walking down the road to the cabin telling myself over and over, “Don’t stop. Keep going.”

When I reached the cabin, my friends thought I was wearing some kind of three-dimensional, leafy hunting outfit. But it wasn’t camouflage. It was shredded, charred skin.

A Medflight helicopter took me to a burn unit where I was told I wouldn’t have much of a face left, and I would probably lose my sight as well as the use of my hands. God put an absolute halt on my life.

I was so busy being successful, I was on such a fast track, that God was a part of my life, but he wasn’t the most important part. He was not on the throne of my heart or at the center of my universe. I was at the center.

I don’t believe God caused the fire, but I believe God allowed it because he wanted to get my attention. Like a parent who tries to get through to a child, God grabbed me by the shoulders, sat me down and said, “I want you to listen to me.”

That was the beginning of a spiritual awakening in my life. Over the next four years, the doctors amputated seven fingers. I couldn’t use what was left of my hands for even the simplest of tasks, but the doctors said there was nothing more they could do. That’s when my wife, Cindy, asked about the possibility of a hand transplant.

That began a time of waiting, testing and prayer. We spent countless hours reading the Bible and praying together. Finally, the day for my double hand transplant arrived. Twenty surgeons and three anesthesiologists took seventeen and a half hours to attach my new hands.

Many people have pointed out that it was a miracle I didn’t die in the fire that day. That’s true, but in a very real way, I did die in that fire. The man I was died that day, and God gave me a new life where I’m not in control but have turned the controls over to Him. I’m not in charge of my life anymore, but have submitted everything to Jesus.

These days my wife and I constantly pray to be used by God in any way he wants–to bring glory to himself. It may sound crazy, but I would rather have gone through all of this pain and suffering, and all of these challenges and have the relationship with Jesus that I have now, than continue down the path I was on before the accident without that relationship.[1]

May I ask you a question? 

Given the torrid pace of your life, how but through a time of your being dropped onto a bed of stillness can the voice of God be heard in your life? 

Likely, you are too busy to hear otherwise! How can He become your great Love if you’re incessantly consumed with the affairs of this world? How but through incapacitation might you recognize how broken and dead you really are in your overly confident flesh?

Oh, how God sits, waiting, His figurative hands folded patiently. He does not want what we can do firstly. He wants us. Broken. Humbled. Tender. Delivered from ourselves. In times of quiet and lengthy need, the odds of our looking longingly (and long enough) heavenward, significantly rise; it is in these times we stand the best chance of understanding the delivering value of a complete death to self, without which we are destined to a life of relatively powerless self-exertion.

Left to ourselves and without giving up, we are like those Habakkuk prophesied about in Habakkuk 1:11 where he spoke of the Babylonians as “that ruthless and impetuous people….guilty people, whose own strength is their God.” I don’t think this is meant to be our encouragement to live likewise–in our own strength.

No, our own strength, if we desire a vibrant walk with the Spirit of God, must be ruthlessly slayed.

I know this is a tremendously counter-cultural message, but it is the only way. 

When, after all, did we start finding it important to live sensitively and tolerantly in line with the cultural persuasions of the day? Certainly this is not the picture we see when studying Jesus’ life. Certainly this is not the picture we see when observing the lives of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the lives of Moses and Aaron, the life of Stephen, the life of the disciples, the life of Paul, and so on. Instead, those surrendered to God live in notable contrast to their culture’s modus operandi.

But while our need is for self-abandonment, positioning us for a life empowered by the Spirit of the Living God who aches to be unleashed within us, we seldom find the time for the prerequisites God often uses for such positioning–stillness, silence and sincere meditation on the Truths of God and His Word.

Such practices do not naturally coexist at the breakneck speed of our hectic lives. Like it or not, the busyness of America and much of the developed world thrills our adversary. 

While Satan knows he cannot have our souls, he is ecstatic about the unexamined pace of our lives. 

For it is this hurried (dare I say frenzied) pace at which many of us well-meaning Christians lead our lives that aids and abets such a low bar of spiritual expectation.

Yes, our adversary must keep us away from lives of contemplation by incessantly filling our eyes, ears, minds and hearts with things that, at worst, please temporally and relatively, and, at best, occupy our time with spiritually neutral substance. And while it would be difficult to point out what is wrong with our daily, weekly, monthly and, before we know it, yearly pursuits, it may be a better question to ask what is right with them.

And so as a result of the “busy and good” commotion of our lives, we seldom ponder the proposition that our Christian walks were intended to be so much more than fire insurance–a journey relegated to the enjoyment of good music which lifts our eyes heavenward while possessing a gracious heart of thanksgiving to God for saving us from hell.

Were there a thematic declaration of prognosis for our spiritually shallow and weak living to which I could point, it would lie in the content of the single-sentence paragraph you just blew past.

PAUSE to PONDER

How have you responded to painful experiences that have inhibited your busy and productive life?

Have you ever considered the possibility that there may be more to these ‘interruptions’ than meets the human eye?

If you are a Christian, and your omniscient and omnipotent God is love (I John 4:8), can you trust Him with your life? How about with the unexpected and painful circumstances that change your plans, even radically?

[1] Kyle Idleman, Not a Fan; Chapter 3

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Chapter 39

The Believer’s Access to God

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So – the Blood has satisfied God; it must satisfy us also.

Why do I say we must get to a point where the Blood must satisfy us also? It is because we have a conscience. And no amount of trying to feel the forgiveness of the Blood will sufficiently aid in clearing our conscience. No, it must come through an intellectual understanding of what it is that allows us unfettered access to God–free from a stricken conscience.

Now we already know how the blood satisfies God, but it also does its work for us–consciously. In Hebrews 10:19-22, we learn that we can draw near to God because our hearts have been sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience.

Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great priest [Jesus] over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water.

    – Hebrews 10:19-22

Isn’t that a beautiful and most magnificent word for us from God? Oh, I could just leap for joy when I read these truths from His Word! Having read them only cerebrally and having been thankful for them for some 30 years, I am now moved to my emotional core because these words mean something more to me today than I could ever have imagined–even just 5 years ago.

Coming to a personal, deeply subjective understanding of this myself through the illumination of the Spirit is one of the many deep joys that has become mine.

How about you?

Do you experientially know this full assurance of your heart having been sprinkled to cleanse you from a guilty conscience? Oh, that it would become yours as well.

And now when Satan wants to bring me under conviction for a wrong, I have the personal, strong grounds to remind him that it was all covered in one, historic act of crushing victory for us who have entrusted our very lives into the hands of Jesus, the Son of God! And my guilty conscience abates in the light of God‘s Truth.

But even that is only part of the story. Are you ready for this? Because it gets really good here!

Our access to God is completely unrestricted because of an even deeper, in this case, surgical procedure. (Let’s give ourselves a little preview of things to come in our study together for a moment.)

Let’s go to Jeremiah 17, verse 9.  

9 The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?   – Jeremiah 17:9

So, if our very heart, the core of our fleshly man, is sick and beyond cure, then the only solution would be a heart transplant, right? Well Ezekiel, in chapter 36, gives us a preview of a coming attraction! In verses 25-27 he prophecies about God’s plans for our heart transplant. Check this out!

I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.  And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. – Ezekiel 36:25-27

And so, what is Ezekiel doing? He’s giving them a preview of the New Covenant to come–to be set into motion and fulfilled through Jesus some 600 years later! And so again, what is the only solution to a heart that is incurably sick? A new one. Right? That first heart has to be killed off. It must DIE–and be replaced.

Think of it this way. We do not wash and iron clothing we are going to throw away. In the same way, as we will see shortly, the “flesh” is simply too bad to be cleansed; it must be crucified. The work of God within us must be something wholly new. And thus, Ezekiel says, “a new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you” (Ezekiel 36:26).

Yes! Do you see this? Are you following what we’re on the cusp of learning here, friend? Let it build within as we continue onward.

Alright then, first, back to where we were before our detour into a preview of coming attractions! The cleansing work of the blood….

The cleansing work of the blood is in relation to the conscience. Remember that portion of Hebrews 10 in verse 22 where Paul writes that our faith in Jesus’ shed blood has sprinkled our hearts to cleanse us from a guilty conscience? Well this is in recognition of something real–not something about which to turn a blind eye. It means there was, in fact, something negatively intervening between, causing a rift between, myself and God. As a result, I had an evil conscience whenever I sought to approach Him. And that evil conscience was constantly reminding me of the barrier that stood between myself and Him.

But now, through the operation of the precious Blood, something new has been effected before God which has removed that barrier, and God has made that fact known to me in his Word.

When that has been believed in and accepted, my conscience is at once cleared and my sense of guilt removed. I no longer have an evil conscience toward God! It is an absolutely miraculous, beyond explanation, supernatural exchange that takes place.

Just try to tell someone who has experienced this deep forgiveness first hand–this removal of a guilty conscience, that it is nothing more than a psychological crutch! Good luck with that.

And so today, after many years of living in the forgiveness of my Savior, I have found that in order to keep going on with God, I must only reckon upon the up-to-date value of the Blood, and remember it as my sufficiency–my only sufficiency, before Him. God keeps short accounts, and we are made nigh by the Blood every day, every hour, and every minute. It never loses its efficacy as our grounds for access if we will but lay hold upon it.

And as a very important reminder, I once again want to reiterate that it has never been, nor ever will be anything we do that can draw us near to God; we only enter into the presence of God by the blood.

Each time we recognize our sins and our tendency toward sin and that we have need of cleansing, we must come to God on the basis of the finished work of the Lord Jesus.

As I lie on my back at the onset of most days, I remind myself that I approach God through His merit alone, and never on the basis of my attainment; never, for example, on the grounds that I was extra kind or patient the previous day, or that I have already done something for the Lord that morning. No! I have to come by way of the Blood every time.

A clear conscience is never based upon our attainment; it can only be based on the work of the Lord Jesus in the shedding of his Blood. Therefore, our approach to God is always in boldness; and that boldness is ours through the Blood, and never through our personal attainment–at any level.

Think of this. Were you to meet God in person today, on what grounds would you dare approach this most Holy place of God’s very presence? Whatever may be your measure of attainment today or yesterday or the day before, as soon as you were to make that move into the presence of God, immediately you would have to take your stand upon the safe and only grounds of the shed Blood.

Whether you had a good day or a bad day, whether you have consciously sinned or not, your basis of approach is always the same–the Blood of Christ. God’s acceptance of that Blood is the ground upon which you may enter, and there is no other.

So, for the present, let us be satisfied with the Blood–that it is there and that it is enough. We may be weak, but looking at our weakness will never make us strong. No trying to feel badly and doing penance will help us to be even a little holier. There is no help there!

So, let us be bold in our approach because of the Blood. Our conscience is cleared because God has said the Blood has done all the work. It is finished!

Perhaps this would be a good point of transition for you before God as it has to do with the Blood’s sufficiency for you. Let this be the moment in time for the absolute clearing of your conscience for what

you have done, and will yet do into the future that has the potential to threaten the intimacy of your relationship with the Spirit of God within you:

LORD, I do not know fully what the value of the Blood is, but I know that the Blood has satisfied you; so the Blood is enough for me, and it is my only plea. I see now that whether I have really progressed, whether I have really attained to something or not, is not the point. Whenever I come before you from this day forward, I thank you that it will always be on the grounds of the precious Blood. Thank you.

And finally, at this point, your conscience is really clear before God. No conscience could ever be clear apart from the Blood. It is the Blood that gives us boldness. “No more conscience of sins”; these are the tremendous words of Hebrews 10:2. We are cleansed from every sin; and we may truly, with Paul, echo the words of David: “Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not reckon sin.” (Romans 4:8)

And so, the first step is one where the blood has the ability to aid us in the clearing of our conscience. But there is also a second step for us to lay hold of–one designed to give us victory over the powerful pull of the accuser of our flesh.

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Chapter 46

His Death and Resurrection – Representative and Inclusive

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The unique nature of our having died in Christ through the Cross stands in contrast to what we learned earlier about his shed Blood. For unlike the shedding of his Blood as sufficiency for the Father, in his death on the Cross he included you and me. The Lord Jesus, when he died on the Cross, shed his Blood, thus giving his sinless life to atone for our sin and to satisfy the righteousness and holiness of God. To do so was the prerogative of the Son of God alone. No man could have a share in that.

The Scripture has never told us that we shed our blood with Christ. In his atoning work before God, he acted alone; no other could have a part. But the Lord Jesus did not die only to shed his Blood; he also died that we might die. He died as our Representative. In his death he included you and me. 

Yes, the death of the Lord Jesus is inclusive.

Similarly, the resurrection of the Lord Jesus is, alike, also inclusive. And so there is yet one further, glorious implication of our being included in Christ we must bring to the forefront of our minds and hearts as well. 

It is in light of this Truth that the end of I Corinthians speaks both of Christ as “the last Adam” and, too, as “the second man.” Follow me here. Scripture does not refer to him as the second Adam, but as “the last Adam”; nor does it refer to him as the last Man, but as “the second man.” The distinction is to be noted, for it contains a truth of great value. 

As the last Adam, Christ is the sum total of humanity; as the second Man, he is the Head of a new race–one we joined the moment we placed our trust in him for our salvation. So we have here not just one, but two unions–the one relating to his death and the other to his resurrection.

In the first place, his union with our unredeemed race as “the last Adam” began historically at Bethlehem and ended at the cross and the tomb. In it he gathered up into himself all that was in Adam and took it to judgment and death. 

In the second place, our union with him as “the second man” begins in resurrection and ends in eternity–which is to say, it never ends – for, having done away with the first man in whom God’s purpose was frustrated, Jesus rose again as Head of a new race of men, in whom that purpose shall be fully realized! 

And, glory upon glory to God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit who all worked together to make our rebirth possible, we have already been born into this new race of men–the moment we believed and truly surrendered into Him! 

When, therefore, the Lord Jesus was crucified on the cross, he was crucified as the last Adam. All that was in the first Adam was gathered up and done away with in Him. We were included there! It is not our ability to emotionally relate to this fact that makes it so, but merely that it has been done. 

As the last Adam, he wiped out the old race; as the second Man, he brings in the new race. What’s more, it is in his resurrection that he stands forth as the second Man, and there, too, we are included. “For if we have become united with him by the likeness of his death, we shall be also by the likeness of his resurrection” (Romans 6:5). 

Oh, how I pray that the scriptures are coming to life for you! Is God trustworthy? Then what He tells us is true about us is also trustworthy. 

As ones who have trusted in Christ for our salvation, we have not only been firstly redeemed unto God through the Blood, but we have secondly died to sin through our having been put into Christ, a result of his work on the Cross! 

This is what gives us free passage into our newness of life, our having become a truly new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17) with a new heart (Ezekiel 36:26-27; 11:19-20) to serve God. 

This is an absolutely staggering and life-changing bit of news for us as believers in Jesus–if we but grasp it with the help of the Holy Spirit’s work in our life. 

To review then, when we trusted in Jesus Christ to forgive our sins, generating within us a newly formed, right standing with God the Father, we, at that moment, were asked to live in a new reality–namely, that of our historic death in Jesus Christ as the last Adam, and into the life we now live in him as the second Man. The Cross is thus the mighty act of God which traverses us from Adam to Christ. 

So, in light of all of this, take a moment to pause–take a deep breath. 

It is at this critical juncture that I need to ask you a very important question. 

Have you truly surrendered your will to the will of God in your life? If you are not positive, please do so today. 

There is no magic formula–only a genuine brokenness and receptivity to the truth of our access to God through his son Jesus Christ. If the weight of these truths we have been discussing has burdened your heart, give Jesus your life. Now. 

And if this is the case, it has come only because God, in his sovereign will, has given you the ability to come to him today with all of your baggage. He is ready to lift the weight from your shoulders. He is freedom. He is life. Give your life to Him–He is able to make something beautiful out of the mess we bring to Him. 

Time is marching on, and I believe the return of the Savior and Judge of the world is near. Please do not delay. Please let go. 

If, right now, you are wondering how to let go of your life, and how to let God put you into his Son for eternal life, let’s briefly look at what John says to us in I John 5:12–because John gives us our clear view of how we can know we have the life of God in us! 

12  Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. – I John 5:12 

In other words, you can know that you have eternal life if you have the Son of God. 

So the question you need to ask yourself, regardless of whether you have grown up in the church all of your life or have lived a thoroughly sinful, God-rejecting life is this; how do I have the Son of God in order to have a forgiven and eternal life? John again does us the favor of making this clear in the Gospel of John, Chapter 1 and verse 12. 

12  But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. – John 5:12 

Simply put, you must receive Jesus Christ to have the Son of God. 

What does receiving Jesus Christ look like? 

It is as simple as asking Jesus to come inside you, to indwell you, to live in you by his Spirit. By childlike faith, you invite him in. Jesus said in John 14:20, that He will be in you. Conversely, the apostle Paul writes in Romans 8:9,“Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.” This is why Paul appealed to the Corinthians to make sure that Jesus was in them, according to 2 Corinthians 13:5. 

So – have you asked Jesus to be your Savior? 

To have the Son and gain eternal life, you simply ask Jesus Christ to come into you. You do not attain forgiveness of your sins or gain eternal life with God by doing good things, going to church, being on an elder board at your church (Ephesians 2:9), calling yourself a Christian or even by confessing your sin(s) to a priest or pastor. These things would indicate that Jesus didn’t need to die on the cross for you, because you are saying that you believe you will gain heaven through some, even part, of what you do. 

So, again, my question to you is, have you asked Jesus to come into you?

If you have not, and if you want to be sure that if you were to die tonight you would wake up in heaven and in Jesus’ presence, pray right now and invite Jesus Christ to take up residence in you by his Spirit. But in doing so, please know it is not the exactness of the words that matters, but the condition of your heart before God that matters. So if these words mirror the desire of your heart today, just pray these words to God with me now–life is about to change for you forever! 

Father God, I believe you are there. I believe Jesus Christ is your son. I understand that Jesus Christ died on the cross for my sin. I recognize that when I ask you to forgive me for my sins, based on Christ’s sacrificial death for me, when I die my sins will not keep me out of heaven. Though I deserve eternal separation from you, you tell me in your word that by believing in the Son, I will receive eternal life. I receive this gift of grace because Jesus paid the penalty for my wrongdoing. Thank you. Spirit of Christ, come into me and take up residence in me. Live your life in me. 

When you sincerely pray like this, not only do you receive eternal life, you receive the Spirit of Christ to live in you. In addition, unique and personal things will start happening as you continue to seek to obey him in your new, reborn life as a child of God. 

Now because you are gaining a better, even personal, understanding of the powerful antidotes of the Blood and his Cross over the diseases of our sins and our sinful heredity, the honest truth is that we soon find ourselves longing for these truths to become ours by way of a subjective and personal experience.

This, God longs to do in us. But how? How can the intellectual properties of these truths actually become our experience? This is what we will endeavor to explore in the next section of chapters. 

[setfreeexcerpts]

Chapter 14

Waiting Expectantly

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Using the cognitive skills of my natural man, outside the compulsion of the Spirit’s guidance, I simply cannot decipher that which is temporal from that which He deems to be something.

Just yesterday, I came across a beautiful snapshot of this principle, found in the first three verses of Psalm 40.      

1   I waited patiently for the Lord;

     he turned to me and heard my cry.

2   He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire;

     he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.

 3    He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God.

     Many will see and fear the Lord and put their trust in him.

David’s experience could be ours were we to daily walk in the Spirit, increasingly dying to the flesh of our old man. In this passage, David’s experience begins with what? Patience. More specifically, patience for the Lord to move.

But we so refuse to wait because we believe we are called to move, MOVE, MOVE! And, thus, we do so…in our self-empowered, self-asserted, self-confidence. Like the bull in the proverbial china shop, we hammer through too much of life without staying our sledge.

As an aside, I wonder if David wrote this psalm sometime after his confrontation with Nabal. The circumstances surrounding the story revealed to us in I Samuel 25 seem to be fodder for a lesson God wanted to teach David along these lines; namely, that it is frequently not in our best interest to “strap on our sword” in order to be our own solution.

Not only did God teach David that He was sufficiently able to bring about a right solution without David’s taking every matter into his own hands (I Samuel 25:27-38), but he also both saved David from regret and brought blessing into his life in the person of his wife-to-be, Abagail, as part of the lesson. What a story…read it!  

Ok, back to Psalm 40. If we but wait on God, we won’t miss the blessing He may be anxious to deliver into our lives. Again, here’s the storyline:

I wait patiently.

You turn to me and hear.

You lift me out.

You firmly set my feet.

You put a song in my mouth.

Many see, fear and trust in you!

What part of this process is ours? Haha, yes! We merely WAIT - and it is GOD who does the work.

I so fear we really don’t believe He intends to live his life through us SUPERNATURALLY! We are so earth bound, so what-is-tangible bound that very few of us ever believe He intends to move supernaturally in and through us for his purposes.

We THINK we’re out of the way when we come to some conclusion and then ask the Lord to bless it…to put a stop to it if He so desires. But in doing so, we have too often moved first in our natural man–refusing to wait on what we haven’t experienced…God’s supernatural lead. This is the Father’s plan for us, that all glory, honor, credit and praise be his, not claimable by us in any fashion.

But we REFUSE to remain under his umbrella, coming out into storms of our own choosing–when all along he has placed the umbrella over us for protection; He intends that we wait…not until the skies clear and all obstacles are moved, but until the path is lighted–before our feet hit the ground.

So it comes to this: origin determines destination, and what was “of the flesh” originally will never be made spiritual by any amount of “improvement.”

That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and it will never be otherwise. Anything for which we are sufficient in ourselves is “nothing” in God’s estimate, and we have to accept his estimate and write it down as nothing. “The flesh profiteth nothing.” It is only what comes from above that will abide.

We cannot see this simply by being told it. God must teach us what is meant, by putting his finger on something he sees and saying: “This is natural; this has its origin in the old creation, and did not originate with Me; this cannot abide.” Until he does so, we may agree in principle, but we can never really see it. We may assent to, and even enjoy, this teaching that the flesh profiteth nothing, but until we set free the Spirit in our lives to do such operative work, we will never truly loathe ourselves.  

Oh that we would learn to see time as you do, Father.

We fear that this short life must be filled with doing…NOW. We must not, we think, allow ourselves to be accused of slothfulness.

But in doing so, we miss it. We miss your movement–because we move FIRST. Forgive us, Holy Spirit.

We DO desire to let you be Lord, but we feel we see what can be done to effect a given situation forward with our physical eyes and off we go, walking in our own solution–one that may, more often than we know, be lacking in patient, purposeful, watchful anticipation of what you have in store for us.

It is an alert awareness of your Spirit’s movement we need…and this not of ourselves. Please help us escape our eyesight, Lord Jesus!

Oh God, please be merciful to show us your hand, and strengthen our faith, that it would truly evolve into subjective confidence. We are a weak and pitiful people. Forgive us. DO keep us out of the way, that we may see and marvel in your greatness.

[setfreeexcerpts]

Chapter 45

The Divine Way of Deliverance

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God clearly intends that our consideration of Romans 5:12-21 should lead to our practical deliverance from sin. Paul makes this quite plain when he opens chapter 6 of his letter. In it, he questions whether we should continue in our sin, and his recoiling response is “God forbid!” He queries rhetorically how a holy God could ever be satisfied to have unholy, sin-fettered children (Romans 6:1-2). So, it is Paul’s assumptive conclusion at this point that God has surely therefore made adequate provision that we should be set free from sin’s dominion.

But here is our problem. We were born sinners; how then can we cut off our sinful heredity? Seeing that we were born in Adam, how can we get out of Adam?

Let me readily remind us that the Blood cannot take us out of Adam. There is only one way. Since we came in by birth, we must go out by death.

To do away with our sinfulness we must do away with our life. Bondage to sin came by birth; deliverance from sin comes by death–and it is just this way of escape that God has provided. Death, then, is the secret of emancipation.

So, read the essence of Romans 6:2 again and rejoice not only in what you have known all your life, but also in that which is hopefully now, through the progressive logic of the scriptures, bringing a new smile to your face!

     …How can we who died to sin still live in it?  – Romans 6:2b

We…YOU(!)…died to sin.

But how can we die? Some of us have tried very hard to get rid of this sinful life, but we have found it most tenacious. What is the way out? It is not by trying to kill ourselves, but by recognizing that God has already dealt with us in Christ. This is summed up for us in the apostle’s next statement: “All we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death” (Romans 6:3).

But if God has dealt with us “in Christ Jesus,” then we have as big a problem as before. How are we to “get into” Christ? Here again God comes to our help.

We have, in fact, no way of getting in; but, what is more important, we need not try to get in, for we are in. What we could not do for ourselves, God has done for us. He has put us into Christ.

Let me remind you of I Corinthians 1:30.[1] Nee says he thinks it is one of the best verses in the whole of the New Testament: “Ye are in Christ.” How? “Of Him (that is, ‘of God’) are ye in Christ.” Praise God!

Do you see it is not left to us either to devise a way of entry, or to work it out? We need not plan how to get in. God has planned it; and he has not only planned it but he has also performed it. “Of Him are ye in Christ Jesus.” We are in; therefore, we need not try to get in. It is a divine act, and it is accomplished.

Now if this is true, certain things will follow. Just as we agreed our lives are bound up in the ones who came before us, so this is true of our new life being “in Christ.” When the Lord Jesus was on the Cross, all of us died–not individually, for we had not yet been born–but, being in him, we died in him. “One died for all, therefore all died” (2 Cor. 5:14). When he was crucified, all of us were crucified there with him.

Let me try to illustrate this remarkable concept that we, being in him, shared in his experience when he died, remembering that God himself has placed us in Christ.

A few years back, I created a training video for new school bus drivers. When someone orders one of my training DVDs on the internet from, say Ft. Collins, Colorado, I fill the order from home by inserting the disk into a large envelope and sealing it. Then, I do something with the envelope. I post mark it and, walking it out to the mailbox in front of my house, mail it to Ft. Collins, Colorado. I do not post mark the disk, but the disk has been put into the envelope.

So then, where is the disk? Can the envelope go to Colorado and the disk remain here in the mailbox in front of my house? No! Where the envelope goes the disk goes. If I were to drop the envelope in the trash, the disk would go there too. And were I to quickly take it out again, I would recover the disk also. Whatever experience the envelope goes through the DVD goes through with it, for it is still there in the envelope.

“Of him are ye in Christ Jesus.” The Lord God himself has put us in Christ, and in his dealing with Christ, God has dealt with the whole race. Our destiny is bound up with his. What he has gone through we have gone through, for to be “in Christ” is to have been identified with him in both his death and resurrection.

He was crucified: then what about us?

Must we ask God to crucify us? Never! When Christ was crucified we were crucified; and his crucifixion is past, therefore ours cannot be future.

I challenge you to find one text in the New Testament telling us that our crucifixion is in the future. All references to it are in the Greek aorist, which is the “once-for-all” tense, the “eternally past” tense (See Romans 6:6, Galatians 2:20, 5:24, 6:14).

No, God does not require us to crucify ourselves. We were crucified when Christ was crucified, for God put us there in Him. That we have died in Christ is not merely a doctrinal position; it is an eternal and indisputable fact!

  PAUSE to PONDER

·         As one who has asked Jesus to forgive your sins and come into your life, please take at least one day to dwell upon the following before continuing in this book: I have died in Christ. The real me has died in Christ–approximately 2000 years ago. My sin nature has been dealt a deadly blow, never to return.

·         Sincerely and intellectually take time to think about what this means for your life from this day forward. Then, ask the Holy Spirit to illuminate your conscience mind with its reality.  

·         Meditate on Romans 6:6, Galatians 2:20, 5:24 & 6:14.

 [1] If you do not have your Bible in front of you, opening to every one of these passages, you aren’t yet serious. Get serious and turn to I Corinthians now and join me!

[setfreeexcerpts]

Chapter 27

An Ownership Problem

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“Our problem today,” says Dr. Tony Evans, “is we have Christians who want God to get them to heaven, but who do not want Him to own them on earth.”[1]

God must have your permission to own your life. He already has a right to it because, as the Bible says in I Corinthians 6:19-20, if you belong to Jesus Christ, you are not your own–you were bought at a price…so honor God with your body. But while He has a right to you, He will not take by force that which refuses to be surrendered to Him. God works in our lives only in those places where we give him jurisdiction. 

The fact is, we have an amazing ability to keep God at bay in our lives.

In Revelation 3, Jesus is writing to the Church in Sardis a warning we should take seriously in our Christian culture today. He says He knows their deeds; they have a reputation of being alive but are really dead!

Do you think if the membership of the Church in Sardis had been polled, they would have agreed that they were a dead congregation? But they did so many good things! Perhaps they were at church every Sabbath, gave generously, were people of integrity in the community, walked the second mile, turned their stricken cheeks when wronged, kept their commitments, gave a few shekels to the beggar at the gate, and so on.

Jesus says he knew their deeds–so they must have looked pretty good to the world. They had a great reputation! But Jesus says even though they had a sterling reputation for being spiritually alive, really, they were dead!

What? How could this be? Weren’t they making much of God by the way they lived their lives?

Apparently, while having a relationship with God, they refused to be OWNED BY Him. Apparently giving out of their abundance, giving of their time, and doing a multitude of good things wasn’t making Christ look like the eternal treasure He demanded of them. Had they been completely given over to God, then God would not only have been their Jehovah, the one they recognized as God, but He would also have been their Adonai–their Master, their Owner…truly their Lord.

In 2 Timothy 3:5, the Bible warns us there will be terrible times in the last days when men will not love what is good. They will be lovers of their earthly surroundings and comforts, but not lovers of God–having a form of godliness but denying its power. These are indicators of an unsurrendered life.

And if Revelation 3:1-6 tells us anything, it reveals that even believers can carry around the nameplate yet deny its power. Therefore, know that if God does not OWN you, He is unlikely to powerfully intervene in the daily experiences of your life.

Our holy and just God will seldom be compelled to reveal Himself to you when you yourself are sabotaging the power of his Spirit in your life through patterns of willful disobedience, sinful habits, inattentiveness to his Word, selfish living, refusal to give up the reins of control on your family members, an imbalanced affection for material things or otherwise. 

Again, all barometers of an unsurrendered life.  As Tony Evans says in his message, Adonai–The Owner of All, “God doesn’t just want to be in your life, He wants to OWN your life.”

What Dr. Evans seems to be saying is that is it possible for us to merely carry around the nameplate of Christian. And because it is important for us to differentiate between a life purchased by God and a life owned or possessed by God, I want to linger on this for a bit. Do not confuse the two.

You say, “Greg, how could someone purchase something, and not possess or own it? Doesn’t the one who purchased the item become its rightful owner? It would create quite a stir were I to purchase a hammer at the hardware store only to find the store manager demanding that he maintain possession of my hammer for safe keeping. I purchased the hammer so it is mine! I cannot use what I have purchased unless it is in my possession!” you might say. And that is precisely the point.

You see, you may have purchased an item, thereby being the item’s rightful owner, but until that item is actually delivered into your hands, you cannot use it, eat it, or take it home with you. Until the item you purchased is actually in your hands for use, merely being its rightful owner won’t do you any good, will it?

In the very same way, as Christians, while we have been purchased by God, on our part having accepted the purchase price paid by Jesus, I am afraid much of the time we fail to deliver that which He now owns into his hands–namely, our life.

Again, were I to sell my motorcycle on eBay to a man in Georgia, having received full payment, the motorcycle would be his–not figuratively, but literally. It would be his. In due time, the title would be delivered to his house and he would be its outright owner. I would, in no way, be able to lay claim to that which no longer belongs to me.

But if the motorcycle is still sitting in my garage, it is not useful to the one who purchased, and duly owns, what used to be my motorcycle. Only upon delivering it into the hands of the new owner can it be of actual use to him. Only then can the new owner use it to run to the store for a gallon of milk, take his son for a ride, or change its oil.

Our relationship with God can be much the same. It may be true that He purchased us, but if we merely sign ourselves over to Him on the signature line, drawing eternity in his presence as the only ramification of his purchase while refusing to deliver ourselves to him for use, we have only completed half of the intended transaction God purposed for our life. A completed transaction could have led to a normal Christian life as God planned it to be lived post-Christ!

What does God have in you and me? I pray He has something more than ones saved as by fire. Are you living your Christian life on the periphery of his powerful infilling because you have constructed a life in your own strength? Do you know with absolute confidence that such a life will withstand the Refiner’s Fire?

Do you remember Billy Graham’s thoughts I quoted earlier?

If that is not your desire [having the Lord Jesus Christ come into your life and reform, conform and transform you into an obedient follower], you have every reason to question whether or not you have been saved.

How sad it will be for such a man, having missed out on what a life built up by what the Spirit could have wrought. How much better it would be to live fully released into the Spirit’s unreserved ownership of that which He purchased and already owns.

If I’m not completely given over to Him, then I cannot call him Lord–only Savior. Do you see the difference? It is important that you do! While He may own my life by right, not until I deliver it unconditionally into His hands will I begin to grasp the freedom and newness of life He has intended I be delivered to–through new life in Christ.

So the question begs to be directly addressed. Have you delivered the motorcycle of your life to God? Or have you sold yourself to Him to solve only the eternal destiny question, negotiating the full delivery of your life for a player to be named later?

Are you waiting for Him to forcefully take from you that which He has purchased? Don’t count on his doing so. That is not His style.

Well what about delivering more than half way–say to Chattanooga, Tennessee? That would show pretty good intentions! How about that? Good enough? No. He wants us to electively deliver ourselves “all the way to Georgia.”

Now don’t get me wrong here. If you have trusted in Jesus as the all-sufficient One to remove from you the damnation your sin-laden soul deserves, He does own your life. Were God to find your expired, half-delivered body alongside a street in Chattanooga, soul ID number researched, God would rightfully have you delivered into his presence in heaven. You do, after all, belong to Him. There would be no other claim on your life but from your new owner.

Therefore, God may own your soul because He purchased it in agreement with your own free will–no one held a gun to your head when you gave up technical ownership of your life. But as I said to begin with, there is a radical difference between something being purchased by someone and that purchased item being given into the buyer’s possession for unreserved use as its owner. What a pity to lose out on the Life He desires for us–if only we would but trust into His ownership.

So now back to where we started this. We want God to be everything but owner.

Adonai means you don’t own.

The Bible says you came into this world naked and you’re going to leave this world naked–because you own nothing. Everything is on loan. You are a borrower. So God expects you to recognize Him as Adonai.

There’s only one response you give to Adonai, and that is surrender. It is surrender of your will to His will, your way to His way, yourself to Himself. And God will wait–until you give up ownership.

And the only way to truly give up ownership is for God to gift us with a revelation of how wretched we are. The Holy Spirit has to do a work in us so that we can see how necessary is our death–a death as close to literal as we can get without deceasing our physical bodies.

I think this is what NEEDTOBREATHE had in mind when they wrote the lyric to the song, Keep Your Eyes Open, that rings true this way; “Your chains will never fall until YOU do.” And only then can we begin to experience the greatest of all ironies. Death produces Life.

How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.

– I Corinthians 15:36

 Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.

– John 12:24

 So to be the Lord of our life, God must put us into a place where we hold onto nothing for ourselves. THEN, Life in Him can begin. Fight this if you like, but know that in doing so you will be demonstrating your refusal to release into the hands you claim to trust.

Sadly, while death to self is what we need, we might not find it because we may have an ownership problem.

Until our love affair and deep fellowship with Christ becomes to us a greater treasure than our selfish and controlling nature, we will never experience the death of our old Adam. Said another way, until we fear quenching the Holy Spirit's abiding fellowship and power in our lives more than we love our flesh, we will never experience Life as Christ intended in our new man.

This being the case, we may now be getting to the bottom line; if you do not long for the indwelling fellowship of the Spirit in a way that eclipses the compulsions of the flesh, it is likely you have not yet experienced a depth of fellowship with God that casts out the proclivity to live within the confining walls of your willful and disobedient self-preservation.

And why might this be (let’s see if you’re getting this yet)?

It may be that there is still an ownership problem in your life. Cutting right to the chase, you love your sinful self-reliance more than you love your God.  

 PAUSE to PONDER

Is it really possible for you, a mere mortal, to quench or resist the Holy Spirit, and thus God’s movement in your life (Acts 7:51, I Thessalonians 5:19, Ephesians 4:30)?

STOP! Take sixty seconds right now and ask the following question of yourself: Who…or what owns me (think practically)?

Had you scheduled coffee with Jesus in order to get his take about you in response to the above question, what would He say?  

[1] Adonai–The Owner of All, a sermon message by Tony Evans from his radio broadcast, The Alternative (Aired on or around April 15, 2013)