The Revelation of God in the Cross

The cross cannot be understood apart from the resurrection, just as the resurrection can never be understood apart from the cross. They are two sides of the same coin.

If you consider the cross apart from the resurrection, then the crucified Christ becomes nothing more than one of the many thousands of people who were tortured and executed by the Romans.

If we do not keep the resurrection closely connected to the cross, it can easily become a triumphant explosion of supernatural power that not only lacks the enemy-loving, self-sacrificial character of the cross; it actually subverts it!

There is a strand in theology that implies that God merely used the humble, self-sacrificial approach reflected through Jesus’s life leading up to the cross because it was necessary to get Jesus crucified to atone for human sin. Once this was accomplished, this misguided line of thinking goes, God could return to using his superior brute force to get his will accomplished on earth and to defeat evil, which in this view, is what the resurrection signifies.

This line of thinking allowed theologians to assure Christian rulers, soldiers, and others that God didn’t intend all Christians to follow the enemy-loving, nonviolent example and teachings of Jesus. It was a line of thinking that was unfortunately very convenient whenever Christians felt the need to set Jesus’s teaching and example aside to torture heretics, massacre enemies, or take over countries.

Though it was never openly acknowledged, this perspective implies that Jesus’s humble, servant lifestyle, his instructions to love and bless enemies, and especially his self-sacrificial death conceal rather than reveal God’s true character! If we’re totally honest about it, it implies that God was only pretending when he assumed a humble posture in Christ. His true character is displayed when he acts more like a cosmic Caesar than the crucified Christ, accomplishing his plans and achieving his purposes by flexing his omnipotent muscle rather than by picking up the cross.

If we accept this line of thinking, it has the effect of making Jesus into a liar when he said, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9).

Against this view, I contend that the cross and resurrection must be considered as two sides of one event. The resurrection confirms not only that the Son of God was victorious over sin, death, and the powers of hell, it also confirms that the way the Son defeated evil is God’s way of defeating evil.

It confirms that Jesus’s humble, servant lifestyle, his instructions to love and bless enemies, and especially his self-sacrificial death reveal rather than conceal God’s true, eternal character. The humble character of Christ wasn’t something God adopted for utilitarian purposes, as though it were foreign to him. Christ rather displayed this character because this is “the exact representation of [God’s] being (Heb 1:3).

The power that raised Jesus from the dead and that is at work in all who have been raised with him (Eph 1:17-23) isn’t a power that contrasts with the cross; it’s the power that leads to the cross and that confirms the cross as God’s way of responding to evil, even as it confirms that the cross reflects the kind of God that the true God is.

—adapted from Benefit of the Doubt, pages 242-244 - Greg Boyd

What the Cross Tells us about God

Whether we’re talking about our relationship with God or with other people, the quality of the relationship can never go beyond the level of trust the relating parties have in each other’s character. We cannot be rightly related to God, therefore, except insofar as we embrace a trustworthy picture of him. To the extent that our mental picture of God is untrustworthy, we will not rely on him as our sole source of life.

Paul tells us that the gospel is “veiled … to those who are perishing” because “the god of this age has blinded” their minds so that they cannot see “the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Cor 3:14-15). Satan’s strategy is to attack our conception of God. The root of our alienation from God and our bondage to sin is our untrustworthy and unloving mental pictures of him. Those who are under Satan’s blinding oppression cannot receive the “light” that God wants to “shine in [their] hearts to give [them] the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ” (2 Cor 4:3-6).

Only when the Spirit frees us from the blinding oppression of the “god of this age” can our hearts and minds see the glorious beauty of the God revealed in Christ. And only when we with “unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory” can we be “transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory (2 Cor 3:17-18).

Jesus describes himself as “the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6). The Greek word for “truth” (aletheia) means something like “uncovered” or “not concealed.” The glorious character of God is fully unveiled in Christ on the cross. As John wrote, no one had “ever seen God” or really known God up to that time. But the Son, “who is himself God … has made him known” (John 1:18).

When Jesus fully unveiled the true character of the one true God on the cross, he “disarmed the power and authorities,” vanquished Satan and his minions (Col 2:14-15), and thereby set free all who would accept the truth.

On the cross, the light expelled the darkness, the truth vanquished all deception, and the beauty of the true image of God destroyed the ugliness of all false images. And so now, for all who will yield to the Spirit, as the veil over our minds is removed, we can see “God’s glory displayed in the face of Jesus” (2 Cor 4:6) and be set free to enter into the loving, trusting, and transforming relationship God has always wanted to have with his people.

The cross is first and foremost the full disclosure of the true character of God and his pledge to demonstrate this loving, self-sacrificial character in all his dealings with us. We are challenged to take him at his word and to reciprocate by cultivating this same character in our relationship with him and all others. We do this not by striving, but by simply gazing on the beauty revealed in the cross with our minds and hearts open to the Spirit.

—adapted from Benefit of the Doubt, pages 235-237  - Greg Boyd

Why Do Religious People……

Why do religious people believe without reservation that two naked fallible human beings in a Garden ate of the forbidden fruit...that resulted in ALL of humanity being made sinners?

Yet, Jesus..."The God Man"...comes to earth to save the people of the world, was crucified, died, and rose again...but the outcome of being reconciled to God does not apply to ALL people...and because I dare claim Jesus really was 100% successful in His mission to reconcile ALL people of the world to God through His finished work on the cross...some religionists call me an apostate and a heretic traveling the slippery slope that leads to the sinner torture chamber in the fires hell.

There is a big discrepancy in the religionists way of thinking...Most, if not ALL religionists believe in a universal outcome that includes ALL people because of the sin of a mere man named Adam; but when it comes to "The God Man"...Jesus...regarding His sacrifice and His ability to affect ALL people, most religionists believe in a conditional outcome that does not apply to ALL people? Are they so deceived by religion they don't realize they give more reliability and ability to a fallible man than they do to the infallible God Man...Isn't there something wrong with that kind of believing!

Believing Jesus died on the cross "for us" is good...but...believing Jesus died on the cross "AS US" as the scriptures do by declaring we were crucified with Him, rose with Him and are seated with Him in heavenly places...is whole different story! Jesus fully became man. But He was still God and everything He accomplished on the cross applied to ALL people! God forbid we believe Adam can truly cause ALL to become sinners...but...Jesus (God in the flesh) is incapable of causing ALL people to be reconciled to Himself and be counted as righteous! Paul said, Jesus is the second Adam: "So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to ALL men, even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to ALL men" as Romans 5:18 tells us.

HALLELUJAH WHAT A SAVIOR who would supply such AMAZING GRACE to ALL!

Be it far from people...religionists or otherwise...who claim to be believers and followers of Christ, to preach and teach that Adam's sin made ALL of the human race sinners...BUT...that God through the sacrifice Himself upon the cross did not reconcile ALL of the human race to Himself!

Such BLASPHEMY should not come from the mouths of BELIEVERS...let alone their heart

- Glenn Regular

Salvation

Salvation is similar to a coin in that it has two sides: "Christ in you" (heads), and you "in Christ" (tails). Every Christian knows the heads side (Jesus is in me), but to many believers the tails side (I am in Christ) remains a mystery, mere rows of black print on white paper. When some brothers from Grace Fellowship International showed me what it means to be "in Christ" in 1975 it launched me on a fresh, new walk with the Lord. I ultimately counted all of the "tails side" verses (in Christ, in Him, in Jesus Christ, in Christ Jesus, in whom, etc.) in the New Testament, which I then compared with the Christ-in-you-verses (heads). For every Christ-in-you verse, there are ten you-in-Christ verses! That's right. A ten-to-one ratio of you in Christ over Christ in you. If this realization impacts you like it did me, and you’ve embraced only the “heads” side of the coin, you’re already asking God to show you what you’re missing. God wishes all Christians understood and walked in the truth of being “in Christ.” That’s how we became saints!

- Bill Gillham

Victorious Life

The key to living the victorious Christian life is not a new spin on the old, old story; it’s normal Christianity. It’s as old as the New Testament. Experiencing normal Christianity through the week yields such a sweet, intimate, obedient relationship with God that we don’t attend the worship service to get recharged; we attend the services to discharge our worship and praise to the Lord because we are over flowing with love and gratitude (Psalm 23:5).

By letting Christ express His life through us on a moment-by-moment basis, we experience the overcoming, abundant life that Jesus spoke of (John 10:10). Many Christians have taken the independent do-it-yourself exit off God’s “freeway.” Cordless Christianity explains why many Christians experience unexciting or perhaps defeated lives. It explains everything from the so-called male mid-life crisis to depression, sheer boredom to anxiety attacks, passivity to hedonism, perfectionism to slovenliness, etc. These are all manifestations of living in the power of human flesh. Jesus Christ is the only One who ever lived the Christian life, and I have found that by letting Him express His life

through us, by faith, we experience the Christian life as God intends.

- Bill Gillham

The Dark Night of the Soul

There is something that happens during the wilderness experience that is almost indescribable to someone unless they are either in it, or have been through it. Many in the prophetic community have identified it as "The dark night of the soul" experience. It is a time where you may feel as though God has left you, and all of hell has come to have dinner and nachos with you. It can be a very dark and scary time that you wonder if you will survive at all, or go down to the depths of the netherworld in flames. The length of time this period lasts is completely dependent on the amount you either surrender to, or fight the process.

The dark night of the soul, is a time where all of the sudden everything seems to be going every way but yours, you get stripped of everything, and cut down to only survival rations. Everyone around you seems to be misunderstanding you, or bringing up every evil thing you ever did, and making you look, and feel pretty bad. It is a time when your choices end, and God allows every negative thing about you to be placed clearly into yours and everyone else’s view whether you like it or not. It can be a time where you may despair of life itself, and death starts looking pretty good. It is a time when your soul and all that is of "self" get puts to death, and boy does it hurt.

During this time, you may feel like Jonah stuck in the big fish with nothing to do except to contemplate your mistakes and powerlessness over your situation. You may feel like Joseph stuck deep inside Pharaohs dungeon, feeling very trapped and wrongly accused, and saying "Why God, why?" Or you may feel like David after his sin and failure with Bathsheba was exposed, and everyone knows about it, and is waiting for you with their rocks of judgment and condemnation to stone you dead. Like Job, you may have all kinds of people trying to tell you what you should do, or how and why you got yourself into your bad situation. But no matter what happens, there is someone who knows what is happening, and that someone is God.

God has only placed you in this position to heal, purify, and prepare you, so that you can be given much to help the many. He's not doing this to be mean or cruel as Satan has accused him of. He is only doing this so that when your time of blessing and empowerment comes, that it doesn't lead to yours, or other peoples harm or ruin. He does this to purify your motives for serving Him and for serving others. He does this, so that you will have genuine compassion for those who are struggling with their faults, character defects, and sin-habits, and so that you will no longer wrongfully or arrogantly judge them. He does this to show you that it is by His grace and His strength alone, that any good comes out of you, and not by your own greatness.

You will get through this dark, difficult time my friend, and the very areas you seem to be so denied in right now (finances, health, ministry, relationships...) will be the very areas that you will be super-blessed in later on. You will be free of your fear of man, and the need for everyone’s approval. Your faith will rest in God alone, and not on anything that ever happens or doesn't happen in your life. There will be an end to this scary time, and believe it or not, you may actually miss this time of death to your soul. You have asked God for His best, and this is the road to it. Be of courage dear fellow soldier, God will not abandon you and your dawn will eventually come.

Let Your Ishmael's Go Now

by Lonnie Mackley

GE 17:18 And Abraham said to God, "If only Ishmael might live under your blessing!"

   There are many of us at the end of our wilderness time that are still clinging to Ishmael's that were birthed in our lives and begging God to bless them when God wants and needs us to let those old things of the past go, and to get ready for the new Isaac's that He wants to bring into our lives. Some people are clinging to old ex-spouses, ex-ministries, estranged children, past careers, past friendships, past ministry partners, past failures, or getting rich quick. But many of these things may or may not even be God's will, and because they are an idol in our hearts they have kept us stuck and prevented us from fully going forward. We might think that we know what is best for us, but only God truly knows what is best for us.

GE 21:9 But Sarah saw that the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham was mocking, 10 and she said to Abraham, "Get rid of that slave woman and her son, for that slave woman's son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac."

   Abraham had to let Ishmael go because God cannot bless or mix our fleshly ideas of His blessing in with His actual fulfilled promises. If we had our way, the flesh and Spirit would always be fighting with each other and nothing would work out right. Ishmael might have tried to kill Isaac once they got older, and our flesh works would constantly be trying to kill the Spirit works that God births. It must have hurt Abraham terribly to send Ishmael away, but we have to be willing to get rid of the flesh altogether to finally bring peace and Spirit back into our lives. God sees the future of how things will go and at times He even gives us our way just to show that His way really was better. We must trust in God's choices for us.

GE 21:14 Early the next morning Abraham took some food and a skin of water and gave them to Hagar. He set them on her shoulders and then sent her off with the boy. She went on her way and wandered in the desert of Beersheba.

   You too may have to be willing to finally send your Ishmael away at least in your heart, and trust that whatever is of God will return. Love and strong desire can often blind us to the truth, so we must let go of our desires in order to find and embrace God's perfect will. Some of us may even find that our Ishmael turns out to be our Isaac one day, but we must place our expectations for those outcomes into God's hands for Him to decide. I can tell you truly that many of you are about to receive your Isaac blessings now, but you must let go of all of your Ishmael works first in order to get it. Your Isaac is coming now my friend, so be willing to finally let Ishmael go, and you will see that God really does know what is best for you.

HEB 11:11 By faith Abraham, even though he was past age--and Sarah herself was barren--was enabled to become a father because he considered him faithful who had made the promise. 

Keep Your Isaac on the Altar

by Lonnie Mackley

While praying I began to see a vision unfold in the Spirit-realm, and this is what I saw;

I saw what looked like the event where Abraham was going to sacrifice his son Isaac on the altar (Gen. Ch. 22), but even though it looked like the same scenario some things were a little different. The people I saw in this vision looked like modern people playing out this same story. When the man placed Isaac on the altar, he seemed extremely worried and kept pulling him back off of it and talking to God about it like he was wanting some kind of assurance that nothing would happen to his Isaac if he fully obeyed, but no such promise came. Then I saw this man put Isaac back on the altar again, but this time he tied himself with a rope to Isaac just in case if something did happen, he could pull him back off again. This went on for a while until finally God's voice spoke from above, "Keep your Isaac on the altar!" Then this man placed his Isaac on the altar, sat down, and finally just left him there. Then there seemed to be a resolve and peace that came over him once he did this. I was not shown the end of what happened, but I could sense that what God wanted and needed had finally taken place. After this, the Holy Spirit explained more about what I had seen.

   There are some of you right now at the end of your wilderness preparation time about to become empowered, but there have been a few things in your life that have been extremely important to you, almost like an idol, where instead of leaving these things in God's hands completely, you have been going back and forth in your flesh and trying to have your own will done regardless of what God might want. God wants you to place these things on His altar once and for all now, and to submit to whatever decision He makes concerning them. God knows how extremely important these things are to you, and that you feel like you cannot live without them, but He wants and needs you to just trust that He knows what's best for you. Right now God just needs you to seek His kingdom and His righteousness so that you can fully overcome and be ready for this harvest, not to be distracted and hindered by things that have the power to hold sway over your mind and heart. Once you fully obey God in this, the fight between your flesh and the Holy Spirit will end, and peace will finally come into this area of your life. So Trust God fully now and keep your Isaac on the altar.

PR 3:5 Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; 6 in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.

Hidden with Christ

By Ryan Shaw

Every human being is made up of three components, we are: spirit, soul and body. We are a spirit, who has a soul which lives in a body.

Generally we are very aware of the components of our souls and bodies. The body is the easiest to recognize as it is our physical selves. It is ruled by the five senses of touch, taste, sight, sound and smell.

Secondly, the soul is made up of our personality including our mind, emotions, will, thoughts, desires and longings. We daily experience the soul’s reality through often intense feelings.

Believers tend to think the soul primarily affects how a Christian lives. Instead, our spirit most defines who we are as human beings.

The spirit, however, is less detected within and much less understood then the other two components. It is the human spirit that communes with God as God Himself is Spirit.

In Colossians 3:3 Paul declares a seemingly strange statement – “For you died and your life is hidden in Christ in God.”

What does this expression mean? Didn’t Jesus come to give us life and yet Paul tells us that we’ve died. This understanding of a believer’s old ways having died is a common theme throughout Paul’s writings.

We have been made a new creation as believers in Christ. It does not matter how much sinful baggage we have in our lives and past. When we are born again a miracle takes place within our spirit.

The old things that once dominated our spirit are gone as condemnation, darkness, powerlessness and every hindrance keeping us out of relationship with God is done away with.

No longer rejected and condemned by God. We are now the beloved of God because of Jesus taking our place so that we could be made innocent before God.

A new spiritual nature is placed in our spirits. Understanding this enables living in spiritual victory against the onslaught of the evil one. We can overcome addictions, depressions and every other attack as a result of having been made new within our spirits through the Holy Spirit.

This is the idea Paul is communicating in stating that we have died. He is not talking about dying in relation to our bodies or souls but in relation to the sinful nature previously indwelled in our spirits.

Paul declares believers have died to deriving all sense of inner satisfaction, significance and value from the world and its ways. Instead knowing Jesus and walking in His prescribed ways for life and Godliness are to be our standard for obtaining significance.

Jesus declares us of matchless worth as His own prized possession. God has created the human spirit to find its significance and sense of value only in Himself.

Jesus’ righteousness has been transferred to us and our spirits are made alive and united with Christ in all things. We are considered dead to the characteristics of the old life.

Yet, we must cooperate daily with this truth, diligently embracing our being “dead” to these things. In doing so, we receive spiritual power to overcome temptation that comes our way. This is something we were unable to do before receiving the new life in Christ.

Many believers are not aware such enabling and overcoming power has been given to them through the new birth. They can identify with Jesus by having the sinful nature “crucified”.

We have been given the ability to live in every level of holiness God calls His children to. This comes through our daily applying His victory through receiving the spiritual nature only available in Christ Jesus.

The Difference between Costly Sacrifice and Needless Burnout

“I would rather wear out than rust out,” George Whitefield once said.

Many pastors today are doing exactly that: Almost half of US pastors and their wives say they have experienced depression or burnout to the extent that they needed to take a leave of absence from ministry (Today’s Pastors (2014), George Barna).

Yet many others in pastoral ministry remain quietly skeptical about the phenomenon of “pastor burnout.” Why not burn out for Jesus? After all, did not the Lord Jesus say something to that effect?

“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.” (Luke 9 v 23-24, ESV)

Surely the right response to this challenge from the Lord is to throw ourselves wholeheartedly into his service and the service of his gospel, and not to set limits to our self-giving.
I might have been tempted to think that too—that is, until I came close to the brink of burnout myself.

I had been working for eight busy years leading a Bible training course in central London. In September 2012 I returned from an intense ministry visit to Australia and Singapore to begin an eagerly anticipated sabbatical term. My wife, Carolyn, was looking forward to sharing those weeks with me. Instead, I hit the wall. My energy plummeted; my mood dipped sharply; my morale went through the floor. And I felt empty, used up, expended.

My colleagues at work rallied around generously to help me; but it cost them in time and energy—resources they could otherwise have poured into gospel work elsewhere. That’s the problem: we do not sacrifice alone. It may sound heroic, even romantic, to burn out for Jesus. The reality is that others are implicated in our crashes—a spouse, children, ministry colleagues, prayer partners and faithful friends.

There is a difference between godly sacrifice and needless burnout. After I first gave my first seminar on burnout at the Basics pastors’ conference, a fellow pastor wrote to me:

I put it into terms of fighting fire, as I’m a volunteer firefighter as well as being a pastor. Obviously you have to push yourself physically when fighting a fire. It’s a stretching experience that is uncomfortable and physically difficult. You have to know your limitations while making the sacrifices needed to get the tasks done that must be done.
It’s foolishness to ignore your limitations, try to be the hero, and cramp up, pass out, or have a heart attack while in a burning structure because you’re beyond the limits of what God has supplied you with the capability of doing. It’s a form of heroic suicide that is counterproductive because you’re now no longer effective in fighting fire and the resources that were dedicated to fighting the fire are now dedicated to saving you.

In a similar way, the aim of gospel work is not to be a lone hero, but to work with other gospel workers to spread the gospel of Jesus.

Living Sacrifices

My reason for writing Zeal without Burnout was to help us discern the difference between sacrifice and foolish heroism, and so to guard against needless burnout. Until God takes us home to be with Jesus, we are to offer ourselves as those who have a life to offer, rather than a burned-out wreck:

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. (Romans 12 v 1) 

A “living sacrifice” is a strange expression. It means a sacrifice that goes on and on being offered, so long as life lasts. When I am off work because of exhaustion, my body has little to offer; I may feel in pain but the sacrifice is barely alive. How much better to keep plodding on in Christian service if we can! Perhaps the expression “sustainable sacrifice” gets to the heart of the idea—the sort of self-giving living that God enables us to go on giving day after day.


We are called to sacrifice, and sometimes that sacrifice will damage or even destroy us in this life. However, the best kinds of ministry—whether in a paid or voluntary role—are, more often than not, long term and low key—a marathon, not a short, energetic sprint. So it is my prayer that Zeal without Burnout will help many of my brothers and sisters to maintain their zeal without knowing the bitterness of burnout.

The Risk of Love

The most basic and yet most profound teaching of the Bible is that “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8; 16). He is revealed to be a God who is triune—Father, Son and Holy Spirit (See Mt 3:16; 28:19, Jn 14:26; 15:26)—who’s very essence is an eternal, loving relationship. He created the world out of love and for the purpose of expanding his love.

God the Father desires that we dwell in Christ and Christ dwell in us, just as Christ dwells in the Father and he in Christ (John 17:21-26). The Father wants us to participate in and reflect the loving union that he has with Christ. The goal, in other words, is for the perfect triune love of God to be manifested to people, replicated in people and reflected back from people. This is why God created the world. The whole of creation is meant to express and embody the eternal triune love that God is. It exists to glorify God.

Humans are to glorify God by expressing his love and authority as we rule the earth. God wants to be Lord over all creation, but because he is the triune God of love, he doesn’t want to do this unilaterally. Of course he could have created a world where we have to do his will, but it would have been a creation devoid of love. Instead, God wants to rule creation through coregents, free agents who through love apply his sovereign will to the earth. God therefore created us “in his image” that we might “have dominion” and “subdue” the earth (Gen 1:26-28).

In such a world, there is risk because love must be chosen. Unless people can choose not to love, they can’t genuinely choose to love. The possibility of the one is built into the possibility of the other. Love simply cannot be coerced or programmed into people.

A creation in which love is the goal must incorporate risk. Creation doesn’t have to have actual evil, but it must allow for the possibility of evil—if the possibility of genuine love is to exist.

This is why God commanded humans to have dominion over the world in the creation story. If we weren’t free to disobey God, a command would be unnecessary; we would do what God created us to do automatically. Because God wants his will carried out in love, he empowers humans to carry out his command freely. And this, of course, means we can refuse to carry out his command if we choose.

God gave Adam and Eve free will in the Garden. The purpose of this freedom was that they might choose to remain in loving union with God. But because it was a union of love, it had to be possible for Adam and Eve to reject it. Tragically, the first couple chose to disobey God, thereby bringing judgment on themselves and their descendants (Gen 3:1-19). This disobedience was not part of God’s original plan; it was a rejection of God’s plan. Yet the possibility of this rejection had to exist if God’s original plan was to be possible. His plan is for people to administrate his creation as they receive, replicate and reflect back God’s triune love.


—Adapted from Is God to Blame?, pages 62-65 - Greg Boyd

Why You Have Free Will

God’s decision to create a cosmos that was capable of love and that was, therefore, populated with free agents (see previous post) was also a decision to create and govern a world he could not unilaterally control. These are two aspects of the same decision. What it means for God to give agents some degree of morally responsible say-so over what comes to pass is that God’s say-so will not unilaterally determine all that comes to pass.

Of course, many have argued otherwise by saying that God determines the free choices of agents “in such a way” that these agents remain responsible for the evil they choose while God remains all-good in ordaining them to do these evil acts. Where is the coherent meaning in this? Language has meaning only insofar as it connects, at least analogically, with our experience. But I find nothing in my experience-—or any conceivable experience—-that sheds the least bit of light on what this mysterious “in such a way” might mean.

To illustrate, suppose that a scientist secretly implanted a neuron-controlling microchip in a person’s brain without that person knowing it. With this chip, the scientist could coerce this person to feel, think, speak, and behave however he wanted. Let’s say that this chip caused this person to murder someone. Can we conceive of any form of justice that would find the scientist to be innocent of the crime while holding the controlled subject responsible? Whoever or whatever rendered the murder certain to occur is morally responsible, whether by means of a microchip or a mysterious deterministic decree.

God limits the exercise of his power when he creates free agents. This is the view of open theism. To the extent that God gives an agent free will, he cannot meticulously control what that agent does. Yet the “cannot” in this statement is not a matter of insufficient power, for God remains all-powerful. It is simply a matter of definition. As stated in the previous post, just as God cannot create a round triangle or a married bachelor, so too he cannot meticulously control free agents.
If God revoked a person’s capacity to make a certain choice because he disapproved of it, then he clearly did not genuinely give him the capacity to choose between this or that. If he truly gave that person the freedom to go this way or that way, he must, by definition, allow them to go that way, even if he abhors it.

Does this mean that God can do nothing to prevent us from making choices that he abhors? Of course not. God can do a myriad of things to influence us in a different direction or to influence other people to help prevent, or at least minimize the evil someone intends. But the one thing God cannot do, by definition, is meticulously control or unilaterally revoke a free will once given. God has sufficient power to do anything he pleases, but the constraint free agency places on God is not about power; rather, it is about the metaphysical implications of the kind of world God decided to create.


—Adapted from Four Views on Divine Providence, pages 190-192  - Greg Boyd

Filling the Earth with His Glory

“But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 53:5-6).

Every sin that man has been or will be guilty of has been whipped clean...forgiven...by the finished work of of Jesus' death and resurrection. Jesus by His death on the Cross bore the sin of "ALL". Until we have a proper appreciation and understanding of God’s accomplishment through the finished work of Jesus, we can never be kingdom believers walking in the reality of His life in us. We must have more than just an superficial understanding of the plan of God for humanity.

Man’s problem was sin. God took care of sin through Jesus. Man's downfall post-cross is his preoccupation with "sin consciousness" rather than "God consciousness"! Sin is not a problem with God because He has dealt with it through Jesus...sin is a problem for man in that it robs him of "God consciousness", and gives him a feeling of being separated from God. If we were more God conscious we would experience living in the presence of God and in fellow-shipping with Him our "sin consciousness would be dead.

Romans 3:23 says that “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” The glory of God is to fill the temple of God and PEOPLE are His temple...nor buildings called churches. Man was created to be a vessel to contain the fullness of everything that God is. We were not created to be full of self, sin, lusts of the flesh or the pride of life that "sin consciousness" glorifies and magnifies. We were created to be the full expression of His glory and to manifest His kingdom in the earth to glorify God.

There are two sources of life available to us as people to draw out life from, the first Adam or the last Adam. The natural carnal man receives his source of life from the first Adam and lives being "sin conscious", even if he is a believer. The spiritual man receives his life from the second Adam...Jesus...and is "God conscious" manifesting the compassion, love and grace of God as the Community of the Redeemed to the Community of Humanity.

Love and Free Will

God could have easily created a world in which nothing evil could ever happen. But this world would not have been capable of love. God could have preprogrammed agents to say loving things and to act in loving ways. He could even have preprogrammed these automatons to believe they were choosing to love. But these preprogrammed agents would not genuinely be loving. Love can only be genuine if it’s freely chosen. Which means, unless a personal agent has the capacity to choose against love, they don’t really have the capacity to choose for it.

In fact, the concept of a “preprogrammed lover “ is completely meaningless, similar to (say) the concept of a “married bachelor” or a “round triangle.” The reason God can’t create these things is not that he lacks any power, but because a “married bachelor” and a “round triangle” are self-contradictory. They’re equivalent to nothingness, so it’s no limitation on God to say he can’t create them. So too, the reason God can’t create a “preprogrammed lover” is because the very idea of an agent who is capable of love but not capable of choosing against love is meaningless.

If God’s primary purpose in creation is raising up a people who are capable of receiving and reflecting his love and carrying out his will “on earth as it is in heaven,” these people will have to have the potential to choose against love. The price of the possibility of love is freedom, and with freedom comes the possibility of evil.

The Bible is emphatic on its teaching that humans possess free will and are capable of originating evil. Notice, for example, that in the very first chapter of the Bible God commands humans to be fruitful and exercise dominion over the animal kingdom and the earth. The fact that God must command us to carry out his will reveals that we are not forced to carry out his will. We can choose to obey God or not, as the subsequent narrative makes clear.

The same thing takes place in the next chapter when God commands Adam not to eat of the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” in the middle of the Garden. The fact that God had to command Adam to obey reveals that Adam wasn’t preprogrammed to carry out his will, as the subsequent narrative makes clear.

Human free will is manifested in the fact that, throughout Scripture, God gives us choices and calls on us to choose the way he knows is best. To give just a few illustrations, notice the way God talks to the Israelites when finalizing his covenant with them at Mount Sinai. He says:

See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in his ways…then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed…I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live…(Duet 30:15-19).

God gives the Israelites a choice to either choose life (which means choosing to love and obey him) or to choose death (which means rejecting him). God obviously hopes they’ll choose life, but it is ultimately up to them to decide. In a world that is centered on love, even God can’t be guaranteed to always get what he wants.

Another clear example of the Lord placing choices before people, calling on them to choose to follow him, is found in Ezekial 18.

If a man is righteous and does what is lawful and right….he shall surely live, says the Lord GOD….The person who sins shall die….But if the wicked turn away from all their sins…they shall surely live; they shall not die.

Having laid out the choices before us, God discloses his own feelings about the matter when he asks:

Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, says the Lord GOD, and not rather that they should turn from their ways and live?… Cast away from you all the transgressions that you have committed against me, and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! Why will you die, O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord GOD. Turn, then, and live. (Ezek. 18:5,9, 20, 23, 31-32).

The Lord makes it emphatically clear that he doesn’t want anyone to perish. He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. He rather wants everyone to embrace the life he offers them. But because love must be freely chosen, he cannot simply decree that he will get what he wants. He pleads with people to turn to him, but he will not coerce them.

- Greg Boyd

Ignore Your Plan

But My people did not listen to My voice, and Israel did not obey Me. So I gave them over to the stubbornness of their heart, to walk in their own devices.--Psalm 81:11, 12

Sometimes I start a discipleship session with a question, “So what is your plan?” People generally are not sitting around waiting for advice on what to do. Before they ever step through my office door, they have decided exactly what course they are going to follow and are merely seeking counsel that agrees with their decision. Many times I talk to a husband or wife who has already decided that the way to fix their marital problem is to split up. Others decide the best way to correct their situation is to run, and some others believe that if the people around them would change, the predicament would then resolve itself.

Our plan is not His plan, and experience will confirm that assessment. Our plans are often devised out of frustration, anger, disappointment, and hopelessness; and since they are anti-Sermon-on-the-Mount/Life-on-the-Mount, they include no love, no Spirit, no Christ, no brokenness, no laying down of our lives. The solution is not to correct our plan to make it something we can more comfortably live with; that would still only be our plan in different clothing. As Corrie Ten Boom said, “Just because there is a mouse in the cookie jar, that does not make it a cookie.” Often we are in a state of so much emotional disruption that we just cannot think “spiritually.” We are too consumed with the morbid satisfaction that comes from contemplating how we will get even with someone or make him pay for something he did or said. So we must have a plan for destroying the plan that will destroy us. 

Here is just such a plan: When entertaining any scheme that is anti-Christ, simply pray before falling off to sleep each night, “Father, please do not give me over to the stubbornness of my heart; do not let me walk in my own devices.” Pray even when you cannot yet really mean it.God hears even idle words. He will hear, and He will answer!

How about this…”a plan for destroying the plan that will destroy us.”  Abandoning our plans to God and asking Him to not allow us to be given over to the stubbornness of our heart & not letting us walk in our own devices.  Well, amen.

Why is this an issue in the first place?  Well, look at ALL the ways Michael describes the lives of too many Christians making “anti-Christ” decisions.  WHEN will life as a Christian have none of the sad testimony so mentioned???

And, then why do Christians make a plan that “is not His plan”?  Oh, wow!  God tells us WHY in the 81st Psalm quoted at first of Michael’s writing: “But My people did not listen to My voice, and Israel did not obey Me.  So I gave them over to the stubbornness of their heart, to walk in their own devices.”  This life that is in essence behind our making anti-Christ plans is the result of our stubborn heart!

With a “stubborn heart” against God, man can look forward to a life like Michael describes and “schemes that are anti-Christ.”  SO…we MUST USE the plan Michael gives us: “pray before falling off to sleep each night, ‘Father, please do not give me over to the stubbornness of my heart, do not let me walk in my own devices.’ “

Holiness of God

Once we are anchored in the realization that God isn’t a Judge sitting in a courtroom assessing guilt and passing sentence on humanity but instead that He is our Heavenly Daddy in a living room who invites us to enjoy sitting on His lap, we are moving to a place where we can begin to understand His true character. When asked to identify the most preeminent characteristic of God, many people would say that God is holy. While it is true that God is holy, the meaning of that statement isn’t what some people think.

            Some believe the holiness of God is a sort of divine cleanliness that is so sterile that the very presence of sin causes Him to recoil from us because, after all, who among us hasn’t sinned at times? That idea is as far from what it means to say that God is holy as one can get. God doesn’t pull back from sin’s presence. To the contrary, in the incarnation He has proven His passion to rush toward people trapped in sin so that He can take it away from us and set us free to live the life He created us to enjoy. Jesus stepped into a world filled with sin and then spent His whole ministry seeking out those who were still deeply mired in it so that He could free them from it.

            The holiness of God speaks to the fact that He is “in a class of His own.” The word means “to be set apart.” In other words, God isn’t like us. His thoughts are not our thoughts and His ways are not our ways. (See Isaiah 55:8.) God once said, “You thought that I was just like you” (Psalm 50:21) but the point is He isn’t. We have projected our darkened perception about who He is onto Him based on the way we have felt about ourselves and others, and the result has been catastrophic. We have ended up believing in a god whose greatest obsession is that we do the right thing by avoiding sin, but that is not what God is about at the core of His being. As we learned in the last chapter, our Triune God is about relationships not rules. He is infinitely more interested in people than He is in their performance.

            Starting from the place where we understand that He is relational, we are better able to grasp why God is so interested in relationship. The reason is simple: God is love. This anchoring truth of the love of God is the catalyst for everything. We could have as easily begun this book by discussing God as Love and then have shown how He is relational as a result of that love. I began with the Trinity because the relational aspect of His identity is the first thing revealed in Scripture, in Genesis 1:1. 

- Steve McVey

Living Inside the Circle Of Love

 

            Your place in the Circle of Life and Love is as secure as the place of Jesus because you are in Him. The only way you could be expelled is if the Father and the Holy Spirit decide to evict Jesus. This very explanation is absurd to the point of stupidity because our God is one indivisible essence expressed in three Persons. There can be no separation between the three, or God would cease to exist. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit have brought you into an irrevocable union with Himself through your adoption in Jesus Christ. One could easier remove all the salt from all the oceans of the world than we can be removed from the union we share with the Trinity. We could make all the stars across the night sky turn black before we could cause our God to turn back on His decision to eternally love us.

            The doctrine of the Trinity is a necessary anchor in life because, when we see that relationship, we see our place of origin. We see our home. We see that we are included and that we always have been.

            This recognition of reality doesn’t just affect the way we see ourselves in relationship to God. It transforms the way we see others, too. Unless you believe that the God who is pure love by His very essence willfully chose to exclude some people and reject others, it becomes very apparent that we all stand on equal ground when it comes to His disposition toward us. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son,” the Bible assures us.

            This relationship between Deity and humanity doesn’t suggest that everybody is a Christian, but it does prove that there is nothing left for God to do for us. He has already done it all. Through Jesus He has drawn us into Himself, and the only thing left for us to do is to say, “Thank you!” The Judge of the Cosmos has judged you to be a precious treasure to Him. He doesn’t see you for what you’ve done but as the person He created you to be. He sees you for who you truly are—His beloved child! He has taken away the sin that held mankind in slavery and brought us safely home. (See John 1:29, 1 John 3:5, 1 Peter 2:24.)

            Our Triune God embraced us in eternity past. Later, like a fatal disease, sin broke out on planet earth but the Antidote to Sin had already cured the cancer in eternity. Its application in time took place at Golgotha, and ever since then we can all rest in absolute peace because, as Jesus said, “It is finished.” The Father was “in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19) when “through the eternal Spirit (He) offered Himself” (Hebrews 9:14). There is the gospel message of the Trinity at work to save us from the certain death that sin brings. Through the joint effort of the Father, Son and Spirit, the cancer of sin has gone into remission. Now we simply need to believe it and experience it! (See Acts 2:38, Acts 10:43, Luke 24:47.)

            The finished work of the cross makes it possible for us to look at every human being as a precious object of God’s affection. If Jesus loves the world, and He does, and if our Triune God proved His love at the cross, and He did, then that reality will change the way we relate to people—to all people. If nobody is excluded by Pure Love, the implications of how that affects our lifestyles are staggering.

- Steve McVey

Rejecting the Courtroom Deity

 

            Ask the average person to tell you what is most important in the day-to-day relationship they have to God and few will say that “to enjoy Him” is the “chief end” of their lives. Reveling in the love of God probably won’t make most people’s list of how to glorify Him. You’ll more likely get an answer that has to do with obeying Him or serving Him or something else works-related. When we frame our relationship to God in terms of what we do, we will inevitably come to the place where we ask ourselves, “How well am I doing?” The very question then becomes a bridge that we can easily cross, leading us to a skewed understanding of who He is and why we have a relationship to Him.

            When our focus is more oriented toward our behavior than it is toward Him, imagining Him judging our actions to see how well we’re doing becomes inescapable. It is at this very point that we move away from seeing our Father as primarily relational and begin to see him as the god who is judicial. He becomes (in our minds) the Judge who watches what we do, scrutinizing our actions to make sure that they are up to par. When we take that step, it may seem like a small shift but in reality we have just moved away from grace and into legalism.

            Doesn't God care what we do? Do our actions not matter to Him? Of course He cares about our behavior, and actions do matter. The question is why do they matter? Certainly, it’s not because God is the morality monitor of the cosmos whose job it is to make sure that we’re all behaving like we are supposed to. No, behavior matters because actions have consequences. Our God loves us and doesn’t want to see us make choices that lead us to harm. He doesn’t want to see us hurt ourselves, and that is the reason He cares about our actions. He loves us and His relationship to us motivates Him to guide us in how we behave lest we bring harm to ourselves.

            God didn’t tell Adam not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to be selfish and hold out on something Adam might enjoy. He forbade the first couple to eat from the tree because they would die if they ate from it! God loved them and didn’t want to see them suffer the consequences of disobeying Him by eating its fruit.

            The Trinity is a culture of loving acceptance and you are loved and accepted regardless of how you behave. His heart is linked to ours through love, not laws of performance. However, our Triune God desires for you to avoid bringing harm to yourself by ignoring what He has instructed about how to live. If we choose to disobey, we will suffer the consequences, but even then He will walk through the pain with us. He will comfort and guide us as we move through the injury we have brought upon ourselves. He won’t be saying, “I told you so” or “This is what you get for not listening to me.” Instead, He will sweep you up into His arms and say, “Let me carry you. Just trust me. I’ll carry you through this.” That is what a relational God does!

            Reject the idea of a judicial god who judges your life while looking for an infraction of the rules. That is not who He is. He is interested in redemption and restoration, not retribution. Christ Jesus is not a courtroom judge. He came to deliver us from sin’s penalty, not to impose it on us. Don’t confuse your relational God who revealed Himself in Jesus for a judicial god who is more interested in rules than relationships.

            A relational God would do everything necessary to show Adam that he was still loved and accepted after he sinned in the Garden of Eden. He would come to Adam, in pursuit of him, even though he had sinned. He would promise him that sin would not get the last word over humanity.

            He would cover him with the skin of an animal like a man gives a beautiful diamond engagement ring to the one he pledges to make his own forever. He would put him out of the Garden to protect him from himself, lest he eat from the Tree of Life and, in so doing, damn and doom himself to a place beyond redemption by becoming eternally trapped in his fallen estate. He would go with Adam when he left the Garden of Eden and would be with him all his life, loving him until He led him safely home.

            A judicial god would have made Adam seek Him; He’d wait for him to beg for forgiveness. He would be angry and punitive. He would make Adam prove his sorrow about having sinned by changing his ways and gradually regaining that god’s acceptance and favor.

            Do you see the difference between the relational God revealed in the Trinity and the judicial god manufactured in the murky minds of the misinformed? It’s one thing to say we believe that God is relational but what we believe becomes clear when we apply our understanding to our own lives and the lives of others.

            A relational God wouldn’t keep score or, to quote another who understood God better than most of us: He would be “patient and kind. He does not envy, does not boast, and is not proud. He does not dishonor others, is not self-seeking; He is not easily angered and He keeps no record of wrongs. He does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. He always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” (See 1 Corinthians 13.)

            A judicial god would have rejected Abraham when, because of fear, he had his wife go into Pharaoh’s tent to sleep with him. The relational God didn’t shame him but only reaffirmed the covenant He had sworn to him earlier.

            A judicial god would have had the prodigal son’s father lecture him. The relational God had him laugh with joy over the son and throw a party in his honor. A judicial god would have had the father leave the self-righteous older brother in the outer darkness alone while everybody else partied. The relational God had his dad go out into the outer darkness with him, refusing to leave him there alone.

            A judicial god would have told a parable where the vineyard owner paid people what they deserved for working in his field. The relational God told the story in a way that the owner lavished generosity on everybody, regardless of how long they had worked.

            Do you get the picture? Example after example from Scripture could be cited to illustrate the fact that it’s all about relationship to God. The Trinity is the matrix for the family system that our God desired for all humanity. His eternal intention was to include us in the Circle of Love and Life that has eternally existed among the Godhead.

            Before the first tick of the clock He had already embraced us and cuddled us in the center of the circle of the Father, Son and Spirit. Paul wrote, “Even before He made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in His eyes” (Ephesians 1:4, NLT). When did this happen? “Before He made the world,” the Bible says. Where were you when He chose you? “In Christ,” the Scripture clearly affirms.

            The inside story the gospel tells is that you were in before you knew it. The game is rigged. Before sin stained the garment of humanity, the Eternal Eradicator had already cleansed the stain by “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8, King James Version). Sin was a big issue in time, but in the eternal realm nobody experienced the slightest nervousness about it because there was the Lamb, having drawn the consequence of sin into Himself before it even became a problem in time. We might say that we were all born with a credit—a big credit. Our sin was already forgiven before we even got here to commit the first one. It was that important to God. Nothing was going to keep us from living in His loving embrace. He saw to that.

            If you want your relationship to your Heavenly Father to be one that causes you to experience the abundant life that He created you to know, renounce the lie that He relates to you as a courtroom judge and begin to renew your mind to the fact that He relates to you as your Abba, the word Jesus used that denotes the kind of childlike relationship that a baby has to its daddy.

- Steve McVey

Our God Is a Relational God

 

            While it’s true that mere mortals can’t understand everything about an Eternal God, there are many things that we can know of His nature. All that can be known of God is the result of His self-disclosure to us. In other words, we know what He has chosen to tell us and to show us. No more and no less. We don’t figure this out on our own. The good news is that God has chosen to reveal Himself to us in ways that are life-altering when we grasp them.

            The very first thing the Bible reveals about Him is that He exists as a triune being. He is the Three-In-One God. When Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning, God,” we are immediately notified of the trinitarian nature of God. The word God is the Hebrew word, Elohiym. The word is plural, denoting the fact that He doesn’t abide alone. There is a plurality in His very essence. The first time He is mentioned in Scripture, the thing God chose to show us about Himself was His triune nature. Don’t underestimate the importance of this.

            Although the word trinity wasn’t used until Tertullian coined the term in the late second century, the concept is taught in the Bible from the very first verse. The reason for discussing this doctrinal tenet first is because the Trinity is the exact expression of the very essence of God. If we miss or even marginalize the triune nature of God, it will be impossible to rightly and clearly articulate anything else that we may say about Him. How can we be correct in any aspect of understanding Him if we come from a completely wrong starting assumption?

            Some have grappled with why this emphasis on the Trinity is so important to the Christian faith. One answer is that the Trinity makes clear the most important aspect of God that can be known about Him: God is relational. He does not and cannot exist apart from relationship. Don’t quickly read past this paragraph without internalizing its meaning and importance. God is relational. He is more concerned about sharing His life with others than anything else. This may be the most important thing you will ever believe about God.

            Why did Jesus come into this world? He answered, “I have come so that they might have life and have it to the fullest” (John 10:10, emphasis added). The incarnation of Jesus Christ is first and foremost about God coming to us to share His life with us. When Adam was created in the Garden of Eden, He “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7). God gave life to Adam for a reason. He wanted to include humanity in the Circle of Love that had always existed among the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

            Read the Genesis narrative and you will find that God didn’t create Adam and Eve, give them their assignments and then head back to heaven with the knowledge that His work was done. Our loving Creator made us to joyfully share His life with us. He isn’t interested in separation from those He created and loves. In fact, He has refused to allow separation. He made us to live in union with Him and to find our very lives in Him. More than anything else, God wants us to know and enjoy Him. The 17th century church reaffirmed this in the Westminster Confession saying, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.” It isn’t without importance that glorifying God and enjoying Him are linked in this commonly accepted confessional statement.

            You may wonder why I am putting forward this emphasis on the relational aspect of God’s nature. “Of course God is relational,” you may think. “Don’t we all know that?”

            The answer to that question is yes and no. Yes, we understand at an intellectual level that God is interested in having a relationship with each of us. On the other hand, no, most of us don’t really understand the implications of the relational aspect of His nature.

- Steve McVey

It's gonna rain; sell your umbrella!

Sometimes we unconsciously protect ourselves from an outpouring of God. We demonstrate caution when we should be wholehearted.

We look from the sidelines instead of jumping into the action. We are passive in our worship rather than engaged.

We must never be prudent about the Holy Spirit. There is no discretion when it comes to God. Everything in Him is "Yes! and amen in Christ," towards us.

We need the same response back to Him. When we have a promise of latter rain, former rain; any rain immediately get rid of everything that would prevent you from soaking in His Presence.

Get rid of all inappropriate mindsets and attitudes. It's called humbling yourself. Put yourself in a place to receive. Believe simply; expect hugely.

- Graham Cooke

Radical renewal or business as usual?

When push comes to shove, most of us stay the same. We are in love with the idea of change but not the practice of it.

We love to respond to God in meetings. We want impartation. We love the promises and the prophecies of God. All of these impart an anointing to partner with God in all the developments of life.

All of life in the Spirit either comes to us or is established in us by process. If we have an impartation to enter a new place in Christ, then the process that comes is designed to establish that reality. If the Father uses process to cause us to enter a new place in Christ, then an impartation will come to empower us to abide.

Either way, process is a part of the process! It is a series of steps designed to move us from one reality to another and enable us to complete the journey.

Most impartations are lost somewhere between the altar and the street. We want new, but we think old. We settle back into life as normal, business as usual, both as individuals and as a corporate body.

I have seen numerous churches receive quite amazing prophetic words, but leadership does not enter the process of adjustment so that they can encounter the Lord in the way that He is requiring.

Life in the Spirit is always about the process of becoming more in Jesus. We must partner with God in the process of our transformation.

Love the promises of God. Love the process that enables you to see them fulfilled.

- Graham Cooke

Your Identity

Your identity is who you are regardless of circumstances.

If you come home from work one evening to find your home and all your possessions have been burned to the ground and your wife and children safe but crying what would you do first?

Probably a dozen things would come to your mind. One of the first aspects of your identity to reassert itself would be The Provider. You would call up the Father in you, hug your wife, cuddle your

children and get them to a safe place.

You would make sure they were fed, had a place to sleep, and an environment that would provide safety and security.

Every situation, good or bad, makes a withdrawal on our identity.

We demonstrate our Christ-likeness or our carnality. There is no one else to blame for this since we are in charge of who waned are how we show up.

It is not what other people say or do to us that defines our life it is our response. Jesus is the same towards us yesterday, today and forever. His love for us is unchanging. He certainly does not love us

according to our performance, maturity or immaturity.

Whether we do well or badly, He is consistent in His heart toward us. He has a series of internal values that allow Him to be consistent.

- Graham Cooke

The Trojan Horse in the Church

The default state of life in the world is negativity. When we live with the reality of our outer selves, rather than the reality of our inner selves, we refuse to allow ourselves access to positivity as a mindset.4 We take disappointment, hurt and rejection to be the base level of our expectations in life, and adjust our outlook accordingly.

And the worst thing is that this negative mindset is contagious!

It affects how we express ourselves, and positive people surrounding us are weakened by our negativity. How could they not be? The response to their encouragement is contempt? We become the negative experience that disillusions our peers, and so the infection spreads. We become a Trojan Horse in the midst of the city under siege, spilling a horde of enemy troops out to invade and conquer the people holding out.

Understand, there’s no judgement involved in this. Rather, there’s overwhelming empathy, because the attitude is pervasive. It’s everywhere. You’ll hear it explained time and again: “It’s perfectly natural. It’s just the world we live in.”

Well, no. We don’t live in the world. We are supernatural creatures.

That’s the blessing of the Kingdom. We have a new way to be. A new pattern to trace our lives after.

“For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ…” 2 Corinthians 10:4-5

Nowhere in Scripture is the world’s way of dragging us down to negative, disempowering thinking more evident than in the story of the people of Israel and their years in the wilderness.

For over four centuries, the children of God had lived subjugated by the nation of Egypt, enduring forced labor, unfair and punitive laws enacted specifically to afflict and limit them as a people, and finally—the ultimate in draconian legislation against a race—the ruling that all male children would be put to death.

These were the circumstances into which Moses was born. When God sent a grown Moses to deliver the children of Israel from their Egyptian bondage, the people that were brought out of servitude were not the same as the people who had entered it. The experience had changed them as a race, made them fearful and incapable of trust.

God recognized this in them, even as He expected their faithfulness to Him, because God doesn’t ask anything of us that we cannot deliver.2 His compassion for His fallen people was immense, as it always is. He saw the negativity and the passivity that scarred their lives and revealed Himself in ways that in any other time in history would have been utterly astonishing.

The burning bush to prophesy their deliverance.

Terrible plagues to torment their captors.

The division of the Red Sea to aid their escape, pillars of smoke and fire to guide them to the land promised to them.

Food fell from the sky to feed the hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, and water sprang from rocks to quench their thirst.

The Father gave his people everything possible to assist them in restoring their faith, their belief in themselves, their belief in their future with Him, their agency and power in the world.

But it wasn’t enough for them. Negativity and a subjugated mindset remained deep within them. Free of their Egyptian overlords, when adversity struck they would begin to doubt the wisdom of abandoning their lives there. At least in Egypt, they had had roofs over their heads and would not be in danger of wholesale slaughter in hostile territory.

Finally, God could not allow the situation to continue. The generation that had left Egypt would not trust in Him to deliver them as promised, no matter how extraordinary the miracles that surrounded them. He decreed that the next generation would take the land promised to them, and so the people of Israel walked the wilderness for forty years until that broken generation was no more.

When we feel trapped or powerless in our lives, beset by terrible circumstances, the common refrain is the prayer for deliverance from those circumstances, for a miracle to occur. And miracles do occur, of course. We, as Christians, see them in everyday life. All life is a miracle! But miracles don’t provide us with faith to survive the world.

We must elevate our thinking to positivity first or, just as with the Israelites fleeing Egypt, no amount of astounding works of God will convince us.

We in the Kingdom are in a cold war against negativity that stems from the world. Negativity finds a way in, it sours and poisons and breaks us down.4 And then it makes us into its creatures: Trojan Horses in the midst of the city, spreading the process of penetration, demoralization and subversion further.

Negativity isn’t our inheritance in the Kingdom. Our attitude and the way that you cope with adversity tells people everything about our true spiritual conditions.19

And just because we are under siege doesn’t mean we’re about to fall, or let the enemies surrounding us through the gates.

The best defense is attack and the greatest response to the pervasive negativity that the world can throw at us is an unwavering renewal of purpose.

- Graham Cooke

Stop Being so Unchildish

There’s nothing quite like the beaming joy of a child. Uncomplicated, innocent, unburdened by cynicism or fear.

It’s pretty different from the “beaming” joy of an adult. Way too often, we’re hobbled by the trappings of adulthood. We’re bound to the process of becoming what we call “mature.” And by “mature,” we usually just mean lowering our own expectations.2

If you really think about it, it’s difficult to take the concept of worldly maturity entirely seriously.

There’s very little about life in the world that we would understand as “mature.” Our world confuses pessimism for realism, cynicism for perception and negativity for truth.12

The world of our old self doesn’t sell itself very well as a sophisticated and seasoned environment to grow up in. However, the worldly concept of maturity suggests that childhood should be a state of protected grace, and that without that protection, it falls victim to a fallen society around it. When the world itself touches on childhood–when innocence is corrupted by experience–there is a corresponding loss of vitality and an increase in the negativity of oppression and fear.

It’s the open hand versus the closed fist.

That, in a nutshell, is the way the world views growing up. Maturity is something to be sought after, but it’s also something that’s poisoned, corrupted and decaying. Childhood is precious and to be treasured and protected, but it’s also something to be escaped as soon as possible.

We’re convinced that we shouldn’t encourage children to mature beyond their years, but rather urge them to appreciate their youth while they can. And yet, we constantly belittle them, condescend to them and patronize them.

But here’s the rub: We’re all children in the Kingdom.

We’re all newborn and learning. We never stop growing in the Spirit, because everything that the Spirit is working towards in us boils down to one simple objective: to make us more like Jesus. And one of the fundamental aspects to our experience with Him has to be a childlike view of exactly where we are in Him.

We’re invited to cultivate a feeling of blank, delirious astonishment at the fullness of Christ in us! We need the wow factor that only a child can properly express—that gleeful rejoicing in something so unspeakably cool that it makes us want to bounce up and down with excitement.8

The world loves to place ideas and people in neat, nicely manageable boxes. That’s why we get terms like youth and maturity, child and adult, innocence and experience. In the Kingdom, we’re not nearly so insecure that we feel the need to compartmentalize and rationalize life into convenient, bite-size chunks.

It’s perfectly possible to be a grown-up, with responsibilities and dependents, and still retain a childlike sensibility.

The Holy Spirit knows the difference between “childlike” and “childish.”

Given that attitude, it’s not surprising that we’re the best advertisements for the Good News. How can we not be, when the rhythm of our lives is captivated by Jesus? In Him, we’ve reclaimed childhood for adults and rehabilitated maturity for the child in all of us. We’re walking commercials for the capacity of Christ to renew and restore the world.2

God allows and even engineers situations designed to establish further astonishment in our lives, to restore the childlike simplicity we need to move in His Kingdom.

There’s no fear in us, no insecurity. We’re given more love than we could ever need, and there’s more still to come as our capacity to feel and express love grows.

Smile along with us. It’s all going to end in laughter: the delighted chuckle of a child, amazed at how wonderful life can be.

- Graham Cooke

Obstacles Make Dreams Bigger

We are governed by the passion of God for us. We are His Beloved, learning to be fully loved by Him. His passion gives us identity. We are warriors, over comers and more than conquerors. The nature of God within our inner man of the Spirit causes us to rise up and occupy a place of anointing, power and wisdom. We are in Christ learning to become like him, and as we pursue the Lord, our vision begins to unfold and we set out on our journey. On this road we shall meet blessings, giftings, opportunities, presence, anointing, power and authority to name but a few!

However, we will also have tribulation, opposition, warfare, persecution and various kinds of obstacles.

Believe it or not, all of these things are good for us. Every one of these situations is designed to enable us to grow up in all things in Jesus. Each one is important and must become the subject of a dialogue with the Father. It’s in our loving, prayerful conversations with God that we learn wisdom. In our relationship with God we discover how He perceives, thinks and likes to do things.

The language He uses towards us is the baseline for our own proclamation. At some point along the road, we will hit an obstacle.

An obstacle is designed to slow us down and make us think.

Left to our own devices, we will simply keep going in the same direction. A barrier is really causing us to pause and take stock. And there are questions that need to be asked of the Holy Spirit. Namely…

What is this barrier for?

It has a job to do for us and—quite possibly—things to be released to us. We must make sure that we receive what the Father wants us to appropriate.

Sometimes an obstacle is placed in front of us by God for the purpose of upgrading our vision and experiencing our dream at a higher level.15

We can only stay on this level for so long. If our identity has not grown we must revisit our growth opportunities on this particular plane of spirituality. If we have learned something on this level but have not practiced it into a continuous experience that transforms our lifestyle, we must repeat the lesson. All we have acquired is head knowledge without a strategic life exchange in Christ.

Some obstacles appear in front of us because the Lord wants to raise our sights and develop a larger vision. The obstruction is bigger than our current experience of God. We are initially made small by it, but we are not reduced. The obstacle can only be here by permission of God, so it has to help us become what He is seeing about us.

To get above any problem, we must see it from a different height.6

We need the viewpoint from where God is standing—not from where we are obstructed. We are learning to ask great questions in our fellowship with the Holy Spirit.

A particular favorite question of mine is the famous: “what do You want to be for me now?” It allows us to explore God’s heart towards us.

What if the obstacle is present to teach us elevation? Our vision needs to go to a higher level and we must see ourselves as someone about to grow into a larger place of relationship with the Lord.

An obstruction can feel like it is challenging our dream but it’s really disputing our identity.7

This obstacle is for our good! Therefore, we must seek God’s perspective. We see more clearly when we are giving thanks. We envision more powerfully when we know that God feels challenged on our behalf.

Our dream must be made bigger. The obstacle is part of the enlargement process.

- Graham Cooke