A Wonderful Life with the Lord

I’ve still been considering my experience of the Lord and how to go on in the Christian life in a daily way because sometimes it gets a bit stale. I know that we can’t really experience the Lord without faith so that means we always need faith. I’m still on the word faith if you read the previous blogs; maybe I’ll have a different topic next week. I feel like last week’s blog was a bit theoretical regarding what faith is, but anyway, it’s good to have a proper understanding. But in experience, what about when I don’t feel like I have any faith? 

This verse in Galatians 5 topped the whole thing off for me. Verse 5 says “…neither circumcision avails anything nor uncircumcision, but faith avails, operating through love.” Doing an outward act like circumcision (or anything that we try really hard in), will not fulfil the requirement of the law on us and it also won’t bring us into experience the Lord. However faith will. But how do we get faith? I didn’t make this up; the bible says that faith operates through love. This is really cool. Christians love the Lord because of all that He has done for us; but more so, He Himself is everything that we need in any situation because He lives inside us as the Spirit. None of us deserve His mercy to search us out in our pitiful condition before we got saved. We also don’t deserve to experience the bountiful supply of grace that He is to us day after day whenever we open to Him. That’s why I love Jesus.

Sometimes I have experienced His supply through other people. I’m in a bible school at the moment. This past Saturday I made my mind up not to do whatever we were supposed to be doing because I was a bit fed up (ever feel like that?). But I knew that the Lord was able to get me out of my bad mood; so I just said “Lord, I need you to as my supply, there’s no way I can get through this day and so I’m not even going to try.” Then straight away out of the blue this guy I know well cheered me up with a timely word and I was able to go on with my day. I really think that was the Lord caring for me.

Okay, that’s a small example, but immediately I had an appreciation for the Lord for being with me and caring for me and I began to love Him more. What happens when you have love for the Lord? Faith begins to operate though that love. I loved the lord and I got faith. I was closer to the Lord and enjoyed my union in and with Him.

So I feel like to go on in the Christian life is to be full of love and faith. We get faith from people speaking to us about Christ or from reading the bible which is full of Christ; then from that we seem to appreciate Him because He’s so wonderful to us, so we end up loving Him more. Then faith operates through that love to keep us in a wonderful union with Christ where life is amazing because we are experiencing Him. Then because we are in Him and are loving Him, we go to others and bring them into faith and love as well – just like my friend did to me on Saturday.

Living by Faith = Experiencing Our Baptism Daily

Have you been baptized before? It might have been quite a while ago; but the bible shows that it can still be our experience today. Last week I wrote about how the Lord carries out His eternal purpose through faith and not according to the law. I’ve been really caught up in the word ‘faith’ recently. Paul uses it a lot and our experience of Christ totally hinges on it. So in Galatians 3:27 is key to start off with; it says that we have been baptized into Christ. Then Acts 19:3 also says that some were “baptized into”…we are actually baptized into another realm, Christ. Our baptism isn’t just an outward act. So both of these verses show that there is a union between us and the Lord, a oneness that we have after having been baptized into Him. We are much closer to Him than we were before. This union is organic in life as opposed to being something organised.

That’s about baptism, but let’s go back a few verses to look at faith; I found a helpful way to actually understand what faith is. For sure faith is our believing in Christ to receive Him. But there’s more, it’s something deeper. When we believed into Christ, we received the Spirit right? So now it’s not just objective believing, we’re now joined to Him. After believing it brought us into an organic union in life with Christ, we’re not separate from Him, we are in a union with Him that’ll be for eternity. So now with most verses that speak about faith, when you read them, go ahead and substitute the word “faith” with “organic union with Christ”. So 3:11 says “…have life and live by faith (the organic union with Christ)”, verse 23 “before faith (the organic union with Christ) came we were guarded under the law”, and verse 26 “you are all sons of God through faith (the organic union) in Christ Jesus.”

To have faith and to live by faith is to live in a daily organic union with Jesus Christ who is in you. Faith isn’t trying your best to believe that something will happen. To have faith is to experience Him within us as the most wonderful one in the universe who is more satisfying than anything else. Since we have believed into Him and have been baptized into Him, we are in an organic union with Him - He’s always with you and in you. So our believing and our being baptized are not once off events, our baptism may have been years ago, but we can live in the reality of it daily because we are organically joined to Him in life. This kind of living is Pauls thought in his writings, I feel like he wanted to help people live in this organic union that we have with Jesus everyday in a fresh way.

Should I Still Try To Keep The Law In The Old Testament?

I think this question is in many Christians’ thoughts; we have the full bible don’t we? So does that mean I should try to keep the law because I have the Old Testament too? Well before God gave the children of Israel the law when they were in the wilderness after having left Egypt, He had an eternal purpose with man; His purpose extended much wider and deeper than the giving of the law. His eternal purpose wasn’t just to give us the law for us to keep.

We can say that God’s original purpose in His dealing with man was in faith; this is seen with Abraham before the law was given. Abraham is the father of faith just as Galatians 3 says “Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.” Before God gave the law, He had a desire that He would dwell with man, that’s why He created man in His image in Gen 1:26, eventually so that we could receive Him. After their exodus out of Egypt, the children of Israel were happy that they were God’s people yet they never knew how sinful their condition was throughout all their years in Egypt. They never knew that God was righteous and holy, and so their own sinful condition hadn’t been fully exposed before God. This is the reason that God gave them the law; it was to expose them of their shortage in themselves so that they would realize their need for a savior, and it was to show them who He was – the kind of laws we give show us what kind of person we are.

Now let’s zoom in to their life under the law in the wilderness. Once Moses had set up the tabernacle with them having the law governing them, then whenever anyone sinned, they were condemned by the law, sometimes even unto death. So their option was to either pay the price of that condemnation, or to offer up a sacrifice at the tabernacle. So they would always offer up sacrifices for their sins with the goal of entering into the tabernacle because in there they would meet the presence of God and wouldn’t be able to sin. So God worked according to the law but through the tabernacle. Both were needed.

Now in the book of Galatians it shows that the law was a child conductor unto Christ. The law was meant to expose us so that we would need an offering; but now Christ has offered Himself once for all so that we don’t need any sacrifices anymore, but only need to believe into Him and receive his shed blood for us; this conducts us to Christ. Today, we still get exposed at our sinful condition, it doesn’t mean that the law isn’t there anymore, but we just don’t try to keep it by ourselves. When we get exposed, we need to take Christ as our offering by applying His effective blood to us, and then we can enter into Him as the real tabernacle (John 1:14). The point is to get into him. When we are in Him then we are in a oneness in life, this is an organic union with Him – this is what He desires, for us to be one with Him and Him one with us; a life with Him. This is a life of faith and not the law.

So when we fail, the goal isn’t that we be perfect and victorious by ourselves, it’s that we would turn to Christ and enter into Him. So how do we live if we don’t try to keep the law? We live by faith. Living by faith is by seeing what He does for us and who He is to us. He’s our savior, life and everything we need. This fills us with such appreciation for Him and He therefore becomes our faith. We can’t conjure up faith; He is the source of our faith. We can get faith by opening up the bible with an open and prayerful heart to enjoy who the Lord is in the word. So we live by faith which is our organic union with the Lord, not by trying to keep laws. We don’t try to do anything, we just get into Christ, this is the experience of faith. He began with faith before the law and is still operating His purpose today in faith.

Small Groups: The Way for a Healthy Christian Life.

How many people did the Lord spend most of His time with in His ministry? Mostly it was His twelve disciples and often he would be with just three of them – Peter, James and John.

The God of the universe becomes a man and kind of has one shot at carrying out His commission properly. After His death He had only really gained twelve people, or eleven if you want to be specific. Surely Jesus had a way of working in order to capture people for His Kingdom and to be able to disciple them – He did it in and with small groups of people.

Once He had “captured” that small number solidly, He was able to add people to them as revealed in the book of Acts 2:46-47. There they met in homes daily and the Lord added to them probably because they were able to disciple them due to the small intimate setting in a home and because attention could be paid to each person there.

A principle in psychology can be borrowed for the Body of Christ, this is that we shouldn’t “bottle things up” but be able to speak to others so that we can let matters or problems go and others can help us. In Christian small groups of between let’s say three to eight people, we are able to open up matters and then get real divine help through their prayers for us as well as knowing that others are bearing us in what we are dealing with. There’s a mutual trust, mutual intimacy, joint pursuit of Christ and mutual “building up of the Body of Christ” that takes place that can’t happen the same way in big settings with lots of people. We even get the chance to care for others besides just ourselves.

What this results in is a healthy human and spiritual life which is not alone or individualistic. The Lord can surely be testified through such a group of people in their living as well as add other believers to them so that His Body can grow.

The New Jerusalem – Something Personal

I was in Qatar a year ago and I saw this big oyster with a pearl and as I was going through my pictures the other day something clicked within me as I saw it; I was reminded of Revelation 21:21 which says “And the twelve gates were twelve pearls, each one of the gates was, respectively, of one pearl.” This is part of the description of the New Jerusalem which so many people say is heaven as a physical city, with physical pearl gates. Well let’s just consider the pearls in the city gates for a moment. If the gates were physical pearls then they would be about 8 to 10 feet tall for people to walk through; that’s taller than Tim Duncan. Now the pearl in the picture is huge right; now imagine it being 8 to 10 feet tall – how big would the oyster be? To me it’s just not logical or correct to say that the gates are physical pearls. Another reason why I can say this is because the first verse of Revelation which describes the content of the rest of the book, says that the contents are just signs with spiritual significance, not actual things. So what’s the pearl a sign of? Just as a pearl is produced by an oyster being wounded by sand, we could say that Christ was cut on the cross and His life flowed out to us so that we could be born again so that we could be “precious pearls” for His expression. We are the pearls, we are the New Jerusalem.

Now the New Jerusalem becomes not a physical city but something personal; it’s made up by persons who have been redeemed by God and born anew with the divine life and who now express God in their living because they’re one with Him.

To add to this, let’s just take a quick tour of the New Testament looking at God working with people. Jesus (as a person) was God’s tabernacle among men in John 1:14. After His death He produced the Church which as we know is not a physical building, it’s the members of His body – us. Then the kingdom of God in Rom 14:17 is also referring to people in the Church, not a physical kingdom with buildings. The next item lined up in the progression in the bible is the New Jerusalem. After God has spent all this time, effort and focus with people, why would He want a physical city so badly, as His greatest work? He could click His fingers to get that if He wanted – what God wants is people, you and me. But not just us by ourselves, He wants to have Christ in us, and Him lived out of us.

What Are God’s Thoughts?

One may say that it’s too bold to attempt to say what God’s thoughts are; I mean it’s God we’re talking about, how could anyone actually know. Shouldn’t we have the humility to not even try to ask that question? Many I’ve met would feel this way. In any case, how are we going to answer this? We could go the philosophical route which would take centuries of attempts as it has, or we could look at the bible.

Psalm 72 shows a condition of sinful people whom the Lord will water to recover them at His second coming. These people aren’t like that directly because they are bad people, but they’re sinful because they are thirsty in their living. Everyone on earth is actually thirsty for meaning, but we just try to quench it with different things, and most of us end up dry. This psalm shows that the Lord will return to water people and “drop like rain” upon them, not to judge them with a rod as many think He will.

In the book of Genesis He doesn’t care much for our conduct or behaviour, but for our eating, that’s why He put man infront of the tree of life. That’s right, from the beginning he wasn’t looking for us to ‘do good’, or ’be the best person we could be’ as many would say today. He wanted us to receive Him into us. His thought process was of us receiving and Him giving.

Now we hit the important verse. Isaiah 55: 8 says “My thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not My ways”. Well what are His thoughts then? Go back to verse 1: “everyone who thirsts come to the waters”. The context in Chapter 55 is that we would come to God to drink from Him in a way of receiving Him as our life supply and
enjoyment. So His thoughts in verse 8 are that we would drink Him.

Okay, but that’s just the old testament, what about the new? Then lets read John 7:37, Jesus said: “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink.  The bible is really consistent. But drinking sounds rather simple for it to be God’s thoughts. Yes, but how many people actually receive the Lord in this way?

So if we (our heart) were to drink the Lord, what does that even mean? The bible describes our heart as being earth for seeds to grow in. Earth needs water to grow things. So our heart needs to be the good earth for Him to water us. But we need to prepare and open our heart for Him to water us.

God’s thoughts toward us are not that we would try to be someone or do something for Him out of ourselves – for most of us, those are “our thoughts” of being a Christian. His thoughts are that we would just open up and drink Him, let Him water our heart. His thoughts are that He would find some who would let Him supply them with Himself instead
of trying to do something for Him. In this way our “soul will be like a watered garden” (Jer 31:12).

Peace. Love. Faith. Grace – Our Experience Today

If you read my previous blog about raising up our children for the Church life, I wrote a bit about the Church as the bride of Christ. The last two verses of Ephesians touch this topic again. It really impressed me at how we as members of the Church need to be towards the Lord to fulfill His purpose in our daily life. We can talk about us being the Church in theory, but what is that like in our experience? Well these verses show what our experience in the Church can be.

Verses 23-24 say: “Peace to the brothers and love with faith from God our Father…grace be with all those who love our Lord”.

We all want and need to have a condition of peace in our heart. We get peace from our loving relationship towards the Lord. But this love is “from God”, it doesn’t originate from us. Love is from God to us; He always loves us and is always loving us. Love here in this verse is accompanied with faith. Then our faith is from us towards God as a response to His love. This is our experience right? That’s why we have faith; through Him loving us first. So in the Church we need to continue loving the Lord with our faith toward Him, and according to the word and our experience we’ll then receive more grace. Receiving grace is for the Church. Our receiving grace is just our enjoying of Christ as our portion which makes our life with the Lord and the ‘church life’ such a joy to us.

After reading Ephesians the response in me is that I just want to be part of His bride (chapter 5) in reality, not just theory, and also His corporate warrior (chapter 6) against His enemy. But this all takes place in the Church which is day to day in our lives.

So I guess with all that said and in view of these last few verses I mentioned above, we always need a soft and open heart to the Lord to receive His love, have faith increase in us towards Him as a result, to be kept in a condition of peace, and get more grace – enjoy Him more. Having love will keep us in peace and will issue in us receiving more grace. This is all in the Church and for the Church, for one another so we can fulfill God’s purpose as His Church today. I love the Lord and I love the Church life.