Representative Man

 As the representative Man, He ascended to the Father, carrying us into the divine presence, and there receives as us and for us the gift of the Holy Spirit. He has received the Spirit without measure; the gift is for those He represents.

Therefore being exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He poured out this which you now see and hear.  Acts 2:33

The making of the new covenant in the blood of the Lord Jesus that took place in time space history on Golgotha outside of Jerusalem 2000 years ago is made real in this moment in our lives and carried to its fullest potential by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit now brings into this present moment, into the lives of men and women, all that was achieved by Him out there in history. The new covenant is the covenant of the Spirit; and apart fro m Him vitally and dynamically with us today, the new covenant is only an impossible dream that we read of in the Scripture .

- Malcolm Smith

The New Creation

 We who are in the new creation live between the ages. A new age has begun in the midst of the death throes of the old age. At this time, the two ages exist side by side. We are partaking of everlasting life, the life of the age to come, while living alongside of the old creation that is in the process of passing away. We wait for the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus, who will consummate the new creation, and all those in it will be seen for who they really are, the sons and daughters of God. We will be delivered from the pain and sorrow of living in the world while not being of it.

Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God! Therefore the world does not know us, because it did not know Him. Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.   1 John 3:1,2

For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.  When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory. Colossians 3:3,4

We must begin to think in these terms. We are the people who have, in the resurrection of our representative, exited the old creation; we are in the new creation. All that belonged to that old creation of death through Adam is ended, and we are now living in the powers of the age to come. We are living in the power of the life of eternal heaven, the life of God Himself.

- Malcolm Smith

End of Death

 The resurrection of Jesus, the representative Man, signaled the end of the age of death and the beginning of the new humankind, the new creation that is no longer subject to death but shares the very life of God, everlasting life. The stone rolling away from the tomb announced the beginning of the eternal age that knows no end. 

Enoch and Elijah had cheated death, and numerous others had been resuscitated from the dead to die again later. But Jesus had freely entered into death, destroyed it, and risen out of it never to die again. In His resurrection, the reign of death was declared over and finished and every man and woman carried in Him out of its grasp. 

Henceforth, the race of Adam outside of Him would be termed the “old man(kind).” All who believe upon Him and are part of the new creation founded on the new covenant would be the new man(kind) who partake of eternal life, the life of eternity, the powers of the age to come, the life of God Himself. For such believers, the end of the world has come; in His resurrection, the new creation has dawned. 

The New Testament never speaks of believers dying; we “fall asleep in Jesus.” The pain of death is in those who live having lost for a short while their loved ones. For the believer, death is a “life-ing” into the presence of Jesus. Death has lost its sting and is the old servant to escort us to Jesus until his retirement at the resurrection at the Second Coming.

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?” 

John 11:25,26 For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain. ...to depart and be with Christ, which is far better.  Philippians 1:21,23

- Malcolm Smith

Crucifixtion

We must understand that Jesus did not die by crucifixion. The Roman centurion who had witnessed hundreds of crucifixions and knew the length of time needed for death to occur was astounded when he saw that He was dead by three in the afternoon. Pilate could not believe the report.

So when the centurion, who stood opposite Him, saw that He cried out like this and breathed His last, he said, “Truly this Man was the Son of God!” Pilate marveled that He was already dead; and summoning the centurion, he asked him if He had been dead for some time.  Mark 15:39,44

Jesus did not die at anyone’s hand. He deliberately chose to die, the willing sacrifice for sin, freely choosing to join us in our death. This is brought out in the phrase that is used to describe His death:

...And bowing His head, He gave up His spirit.   John 19:30

The phrase “gave up His spirit” means to dismiss or hand over something, which is not the word that is used to describe the act of dying.5 He did not die by the hands of the Jews or the Romans. Crucifixion did not kill Him. He had power over His life; and choosing to die, He dismissed His spirit.

Paul consistently uses this same phrase to describe the death of the Lord Jesus:

...who loved me and gave Himself for me. Galatians 2:20

...Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God.... Ephesians 5:2

...Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her. . . . Ephesians 5:25

- Malcolm Smith

It Is Finished

The cry before He died “It is finished!” (John 19:30) is not the last gasp of a defeated man. Matthew 27:50, Mark 15:37, and Luke 23:46 do not record what He said but join as one to say that He cried out with a loud voice, which was a miracle considering His sufferings and the crushing of the lungs caused by crucifixion. 

The phrase “It is finished” was used in at least two ways in the days of the New Testament. In Roman warfare, the general would be positioned on a high elevation so that he could watch the battle taking place below him. From where he stood he could see when the battle had been won, while a foot soldier in the thick of the battle would not know it. When he could see that the enemy had been routed, he would shout the same phrase Jesus cried—“It is finished”—and every foot soldier would know that the battle had been won.

But the phrase has also been found written across the bottom of statements of account in ancient Greece answering to our “paid in full.” Jesus emerged from the spiritual death He died as us and shouted through the smoke of battle that the battle had been won and the sin of man had been canceled, paid in full.

He had been through the hell of bearing our sins in His body on the cross and out of that darkness had cried, “My God, My God why have You forsaken Me?” but then it was accomplished and in full, conscious fellowship with His Father He said, “Father, ‘into Your hands I commit My spirit.’ Having said this, He breathed His last” (Luke 23:46).

- Malcolm Smith

Tenth of Ten Words Describing the Gospel of the Apostle Paul (Complete)

Speaker Don Keathley

Ninth of Ten Words Describing the Gospel of the Apostle Paul (Reign)

Speaker Don Keathley

Eighth of Ten Words Describing the Gospel of the Apostle Paul (New)

Speaker Don Keathley

Seventh of Ten Words Describing the Gospel of the Apostle Paul (Died)

Speaker Don Keathley

Sixth of Ten Words Describing the Gospel of the Apostle Paul (Righteous)

Speaker Don Keathley

Fifth of Ten Words Describing the Gospel of the Apostle Paul (Holy)

Speaker Don Keathley

Forth of Ten Words Describing the Gospel of the Apostle Paul (Acceptance)

Speaker Don Keathley

Third of Ten Words Describing the Gospel of the Apostle Paul (Union)

Speaker Don Keathley

Second of Ten Words Describing the Gospel of the Apostle Paul (Forgiveness)

Speaker Don Keathley

First of Ten Words Describing the Gospel of the Apostle Paul (Love)

Speaker Don Keathley

The Heart of Christ

 

He Has Chosen You

 Nyssa was adopted into her family. Her parents first laid eyes on her when she was eleven days old and knew her entire condition before they threw wide the doors of their home and invited her in.

Jim told me he was initially reticent to adopt a child with so many special needs. But the moment he first laid eyes on Nyssa, all that changed. “As soon as I had her in my arms,” he said, “she looked up at me and sighed. My heart just melted, and I knew I had to say ‘Yes.’”

She was chosen in the same way Father has chosen you. He was fully aware of all the brokenness he would love you through.

Her father reminded me that she couldn’t even crawl into her own father’s lap that morning. If her father hadn’t scooped down and picked her up, she would never have been there. I’m certain our plight is similar. Who of us can really claim to crawl into God’s lap by our own power? He is our only source, and there would be no intimacy if he did not make it happen.

Perhaps the most we do is just lift our arms to him in surrender and desire. But our place on his lap is all his doing.

You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed youso that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you.

John 15:16 (NIV)

- Wayne Jacobsen

Worship His Majesty

 “Majesty, worship his Majesty . . .” The familiar words rolled off my lips as I sat among a group of believers from all over the western United States who had gathered to share their experiences in relational church. It was Sunday morning and we were just beginning with a chance to sing songs of praise and thanksgiving to God. I felt unsettled.

Sitting next to me that morning was a three-and-a-half-year-old girl, cradled in the arms of her father, Jim. Nyssa struggles against the complications of Freeman-Sheldon syndrome, a genetic muscle disorder that has caused severe scoliosis (curvature of the spine) and disfigured fingers. She is fed through a tube in her stomach and the disorder renders her unable to talk, walk, or play like other children. In fact, she can only lay cuddled in her father’s arms, cooing and slobbering. The connection between her and her father and the love and adoration that beamed from his face as he whispered to her and jiggled her in his arms was mesmerizing.

That’s what I want! The words sailed through my mind so quietly I almost missed them. I had to stop a minute and ask not only what I had heard, but where it had come from. Certainly, this wasn’t my thought. After a few moments of meditation, however, I recognized Father’s voice in it and suddenly it dawned on me why my heart had been so unsettled that morning.

We were exalting God, joining the great throng of angelic beings that surround the throne with praise and adoration to God. He was just wanting us to enjoy a moment in his lap, like that father and daughter; with an intimacy that no moment of adoration could rival.

Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

John 1:12–13 (NIV)

- Wayne Jacabsen

God Himself

 

The Representative Man (Part Four)

The instant a sinner is united to Christ, he or she becomes identified with Him in His representative forgiveness .

Forgiveness and all the blessings of covenant do not come to us merely through Christ but in Him. We do not receive them only because He earned them but by our being united together with Him and in Him, members of His body, made dynamically one with Him by the Spirit. 

He as our representative returns to the Father with His blood of the new covenant, and the Father declares to Him and to us, the ones He represents, that the slate has been wiped clean: “For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more” (Jeremiah 31:34). In Him, humanity for the first time is declared not guilty and free from punishment.

- Malcolm Smith

The Representative Man (Part Three)

 He is the Apostle from God to humankind, and the Priest carrying humankind to God. He is the ultimate Man. We must not think of Him simply as an individual man who lived in Israel. He was an individual, but as the Mediator of the covenant He must be thought of as Humankind. When Pilate brought Jesus, having been cruelly beaten and mocked and adorned with a crown of thorns and a purple robe, to the religious leaders and people of Jerusalem, he said, “Behold the Man.” He spoke in Latin, and the sentence would have been “Ecce Homo.”4 The Latin lacked the definite article and, literally translated, he said, “Behold Man.” He said more than he realized, for that brutalized One who stood before him was indeed more than a man, He was Humankind. Jesus is not just a man but the Man saying the yes of unqualified obedience to the Father, and at the same time He is God achieving all the terms and promises of the covenant.

Even as Adam was an individual but also literally contained humankind within him, so Jesus contains the New Creation in Himself; He is the New Man. He takes our place, re p re s e n t i n g us to God in covenant. He enters into and walks our history into the death where sin had put us, and in resurrection joins us to His history carrying us into union with the Father.

- Malcolm Smith

The Representative Man (Part Two)

 The Gospel is the announcement that God has provided this Man in a way that no one could dream of in one’s wildest imagination. Before time, everlasting love and infinite wisdom produced the plan. God the Father in His great love for us determined to send His Son who, without ceasing to be God, would take to Himself our humanity and become flesh. The Son in love for us agreed to come and as a true human live out our human life, face our hardships and temptations, and finally offer Himself to die as and for us. He would rise from the dead, having put away sin and achieved the reconciling of the world to God, and bring about the new covenant. The Holy Spirit agreed to come and make the covenant a reality in the lives of those who believe.

As our representative, He is the Mediator of the new covenant. The word in the Greek literally means “a go between,”1 one who goes between two parties to bring peace. He possesses the nature and attributes of God and so represents Him to humankind; He has taken the nature of humankind (without sin) and so fully knows the needs of each one of us and can represent us to God. This is the same word that Job used— his cry for one who could lay hands on God and man is answered in Jesus.

For there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus.    1 Timothy 2:5

- Malcolm Smith

The Representative Man (Part One)

God has a radical agenda of love! He reaches to every man and woman to reconcile us to Himself, to include us in the circle of His intimate friends, and to return each one of us to the reason for our creation. How does He achieve this goal of totally transforming the man or woman who is dead in sin? 

He achieves it with no help from us. He makes the new covenant: a unilateral covenant, originating solely with Him and freely offered to man as His gift; a covenant based on the oath of God, who swears by Himself because He can swear by none greater.

But a covenant is between two parties, and each party has its representative. How shall such a covenant take place when the human side of the covenant is sinful, unfaithful, and loving their darkness rather than the light of God? There is no one on earth to represent humankind. Job cried for such a one who could explain God to him and speak for him to God.

For He is not a man, as I am, that I may answer Him, and that we should go to court together. Nor is there any mediator between us, who may lay his hand on us both. Job 9:32,33

For such a covenant to take place, we need a human being to represent every man and woman to God. We need a second man to restart the human race, another Adam who can set right what the first Adam brought to destruction and then take humankind to the intimacy with God that he had been created to enjoy. We need one who can represent us to God saying the yes to Him that the first Adam failed to say, and in that yes lead us all to the destiny for which we were created. 

- Malcolm Smith

Brothers and Sisters

 

Fear or Shame Won't Help

 In the early days of my journey, fear and shame were constant if unwelcome companions. I was constantly afraid I wasn’t doing enough for God to like me, and I was ashamed of my sinful desires. My shortcomings and failures were always before me since he commanded us to be as holy as he was.

However, that was not the relationship God had in mind for me, and it is not the relationship that would help know him or experience all he had for me.

Jesus didn’t seem to live with his Father that way, and he was perfect. He called his Father “our Father,” so that we could share in that relationship as well, and through it be transformed. So, instead of focusing his followers on their failures, he invited them to focus on his joy. He told them everything, “so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.”

No one I knew in my young days lived that way. To us, God was a demanding deity, and we lived every day under threats, obligations, and a constant demand for perfect performance. Jesus pointed us down a different road because those who live like that cannot experience his fullness, and they won’t effectively share his love in the world.

Fear and shame will not produce the work of God in us. Jesus showed us his Father was not a terrifying presence in the world, but the most endearing. Love is the coin of his realm, not fear and shame.

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus . . .

Romans 8:1

- Wayne Jacobsen

Wayne Jacobsen writes...........

 Why Follow After God?

“Would you follow God if there was no hell?”

Someone asked me that a few years ago, and my immediate reaction was, “Of course I would.”

If he had asked me that when I was younger, I doubt I would have answered with such certainty. Back then, my relationship with God was more confused. We would have said God was loving, but only for those who did everything he wanted. But whoever did that?

His holiness was his most terrifying feature, and the best reason I was given to follow him was my fear of the consequences if I didn’t. Threatened with eternity in flames was all the motivation I needed to do everything I thought required to stay in his good graces. More than anything, I wanted God to like me, protect me, and bless me.

Looking back now, I realize I was not in an endearing relationship with my Creator as a beloved son. I was caught in the Stockholm syndrome with God; like the victim of a kidnapping, I sought to ingratiate myself to the one I feared, confusing that with love.

For the past twenty-five years, however, I’ve come to rely on his love. It has made all the difference. God never wanted our indentured servitude but to share his life with his grateful children.

For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption, through which we cry, “Abba, Father!”

Romans 8:15 (NASRE)

Death is the great interrupter

Some food for thought............

Death is the great interrupter because, far more often than not, it strikes when it’s least expected. When death comes it invariably interrupts plans, dreams, projects, goals. One author observes how very sad, how very pathetic it is, when a man dies suddenly and we go into his home or his place of business “and see the unfinished things he has left—a letter half written, a book half read, a picture begun but not completed. Life is full of mere fragments,” he observes. “Mere beginnings of things.”

Who is HE Really

 Scripture paints two seemingly contradictory portraits of God. As the holy God, he is shown to be unapproachable in his purity, willing to mete out unspeakable torment on his Son, and ready to consign the unrepentant to eternal agony in hell. He is also portrayed as a tender Father, so loving that the most wayward sinner could run to his side in absolute safety and find forgiveness and mercy.

If you cannot resolve these images into a coherent view of God, you will end up playing the he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not game. Like the schizophrenic child of an abusive father, you’ll never be certain which God you’ll meet on a given day—the one who wants to scoop you up in his arms with laughter, or the one who ignores or punishes you for reasons you don’t understand.

Here is why so few believers ever discover the depths of friendship God has offered to them. They see God’s holiness as a contradiction to his tenderness. Unable to reconcile the two, fear wins out, and intimacy with him is forfeit. Vacillating between loving him and fearing him will keep you from ever learning to trust him.

You cannot love what you fear, and you will not fear what you love.

For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship.

Romans 8:15 (NIV)

Faith

 

Prayer