HOW TO BE SPIRIT AND LIFE
01/03/24 13:52
When Jesus spoke or ministered He ministered from oneness with His Father. This was not a special anointing. It was His life as son of man and Son of God, His daily union. The result was that Jesus always ministered spirit and life whether or not he was relaxing at a meal or speaking the beatitudes.
Jesus also had the Spirit without limit because He and His Father were one.
CROSS INHERITANCE
Since the cross we have been positioned in Jesus as Jesus was. We and Father are one. This is our everyday life and the power of our ministry. It is also the soil from which the anointing springs – union with God. The gifts of the spirit flowing from this union are reliable, sustainable and impervious to demonic pollution. The anointing and gifts operating in separation from the incarnation are not.
WHY REVIVAL FADES
The big miracle is our union with God.
Christian thinkers have pondered why spectacular revivals die out. It could be that the gifts, anointing and healing are not the substance of the Kingdom – Just pointers to it. Sure, they are signs but signs that we have been made one with God and that we should live from that position and not from an imagined separation spiced bu occasional manifestations. This illusion has been called ‘the great darkness.’
FACTS OF THE APOSTLES
Our union with God is a fact. Usually invisible, it is a state of being – of being one with God. Living in it brings a sense of peace and contentment that is grounded and real. This is the true peace of personal healing and spiritual growth into mature sonship.
NOT THE BASIC HEALING
The gifts alone do not render us healed or Godly. Some who live from the gifts alone are jitter-bugs because they have a fragmented spirit. Not fully one with God they are not one in themselves. Heaven may come erratically and sporadically to earth via the gifts of the spirit in such people. Others heal but are clearly not healed in their personal being. But heaven is alive and always with us when we live in the incarnation. We are living in the healing presence as Leanne Payne asserts. The Lord’s Table reminds us and celebrates this reality of normal Kingdom Life.
OPPOSED REALMS
Law and spirit are a contradiction in terms. The law belongs to the realm of separation from God and the Spirit is a life in union with God – achieved not by us but by God who has declared us righteous and woven Himself into our being in the person of Jesus Christ.
ONENESS IS REAL
God is alive in us in the form of Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit and Father. They are not contained in some religious compartment, not restricted to certain days of the week, not glued to your prayer chair and not chained to our parents’ religion. Christ is alive and in you.
BELIEVING IS SEEING
I know that Jesus is real because I see His effect in the lives of ordinary people. I see Him at work bringing hope, spirit and life to those for whom Christ is life rather than attempting to make religion their life. I know Jesus is real because I have experienced Him in my inner man. Jesus is not only among us. He is in us.
You are never to bad to experience the saving power of Jesus. Jesus entered the worst thing that humans have ever done – the murder of the Bringer of Life. But from that atrocity He released Himself to be the life of the world and the resurrection of your broken life.
REBORN FROM ADAM, MOSES AND RELIGION
The old and dead way is the old covenant and the law. The new and living way is Christ your life. The law has no power to make us one with God or to make a real difference to human lives.
REALITY IS CHRIST AND REALITY IS INCARNATION
The incarnation is the reality of Christ come in our flesh and from our flesh into families, society and the world as the new creation. St. Athanasius observes, “How is it that He makes the living to cease from their activities, the adulterer from his adultery, the murderer from murdering, the unjust from avarice, while the profane and godless man becomes religious?
If He did not rise, but is still dead, how is it that He routs and persecutes and overthrows the false gods, whom unbelievers think to be alive, and the evil spirits whom they worship?
For where Christ is named, idolatry is destroyed and the fraud of evil spirits is exposed; indeed, no such spirit can endure that Name, but takes to flight on sound of it. This is the work of One Who lives, not of one dead; and, more than that, it is the work of God.” (1)
Life in the Spirit is more than the gifts of the Spirit. It’s union with God that is ours now. We possess it by believing. We live it by agreeing with Christ that He has included us in His life.
(1) St. Athanasius. On the Incarnation - Enhanced Version (pp. 32-33). Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Kindle Edition.
