Crucified with Christ

Even though the Bible clearly states that we were crucified in Christ, the overt or tacit denial of the literality of this truth by most theologians is often explained away as “positional truth.” The bare bones of positional truth is much like an insurance policy. It teaches that we Christians must physically die before we can collect the benefits. The Bible does indeed speak of experiences that will be actualized only after we leave our earthsuits, but the language in such instances carries the future tense to indicate that this is the case. Our crucifixion in Christ is exactly the opposite. It is conveyed in past-tense verbs: “Knowing this, that our old [man] was crucified with Him”; “I have been crucified with Christ” (Romans 6:6; Galatians 2:20). It’s a done deal.

The Christian who treats this teaching as if it were not present-day reality is misinterpreting God’s word. The verbs don’t lie. And we’re not dealing with an insignificant issue, such as whether you will get to name your white horse in heaven (Revelation 19:14). We’re dealing with the key to experiencing an overcoming life. God had no plan for making something beautiful of your life— that do-it-yourself life inherited from Adam. God’s plan is to kill that life and re-create you with an overcoming, obedient life—Christ as life. Christ is more than Savior and Lord; He is our life: “Jesus said, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life’” (John 14:6). God did not change your life, He exchanged your life— your old life for Christ as life.

- Bill Gillham

What Adam and Eve Did

What Adam and Eve did, and the result of what they did, has been canceled, obliterated, and made null and void by the new Adam, Jesus (Colossians 2:13-14).

His wounds have healed our wounds. We have a new Adam, and just as the first Adam’s trespass led to condemnation, the new Adam’s obedience leads us to righteousness, life, and freedom.

Our physical birth identified us with the first Adam (birth determines identity, right?). It placed us in bondage, under the curse of God, and brought death—we were spiritual stillbirths. But our rebirth (spiritual, Romans 10:9), our union, with the second Adam, Jesus, has set us free!

Remember? Our whole history changed. We tasted death with Him when He was crucified (Galatians 2:20), and because of Him, all the bonds, debts, and curses that were once ours were erased. So you see, death truly does set us free! "For when we died with Christ, we were set free from the power of sin." (Romans 6:7).

- Anabel Gillham

Breaking Self Sufficiency

The time that we live here on this earth is the only opportunity we'll have to walk in trust and obedience to the Father. If He automatically erased the learning opportunities that we have (stemming from having to deal with our old, fleshly ways), we would have no chance to grow in the character and likeness of Jesus Christ. We must face these challenges in order to recognize the Lord Jesus' sufficiency in our lives.

Although there are many reasons that you could be experiencing frustration at every turn, perhaps the primary point that should be focused on is this: Your loving heavenly Father may be trying to break your self-sufficiency, strength, and independence so that you can adequately and willfully cry out to Him as your sufficiency. Unless the Father helps you to realize your insufficiency, you might never recognize His sufficiency. This is often a difficult lesson to learn.

Now that you have come to recognize your fleshly patterns, you should be looking for specific ways in which God is choreographing circumstances, challenging you to deal with these areas of fleshly disobedience. He could be doing this in a variety of ways, from something you have read in His Word to a specific circumstance that is causing your flesh stress and pointing you to Christ as the answer.

- Bill Gillham

Replace your Head Noise with your Heart Voice

Diminishing stress from our lives is always an inside job. We are in the process of learning how to put off our old nature and put on the new nature of Jesus.

The old nature is a product of our environment and upbringing, contact with a worldly system of values, and our learned behaviors. We take on board negative experiences and traumatic occasions and treat them as though they are the truth about us for all of time.

The old self, until it is replaced in our experience, carries some weight in our personality. It supplies the head-noise, the background tape that runs on a loop incessantly in our thinking. All stress is already on that tape. When situations arise that are difficult for us, the button gets pressed and the old messages about ourselves get played. Stress is the result.

The new nature is a product of Heaven, not of your doing.

It is the way that God thinks about us in Christ. He has nothing but appr4oval for us because that’s why He put us into Christ in the first place—so that we could always be accepted in the Beloved (Ephesians 1:6).

The Lord has a way of thinking about us that builds us up, empowers us to grow, and causes us to be constantly renewed in the Spirit. We need never lose heart because our outer man (old self ) is being killed off,  when our inner man (our true self in Jesus) is being renewed day by day (2 Corinthians 4:16).

Each day, in Christ, we are practicing the joyful discipline of being renewed in the spirit of our mind (Ephesians 4:23). That means we are enabling our thinking to come from a source that is full of love for us and wants to see become more of who Jesus is for us.

The new man hears a heart voice, not old head-noise.

We have put on a new self which is renewed in a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created him (Colossians 3:10). The true knowledge is that our head-noise belongs to the old man, crucified in Christ, and our new inner voice is made in the image of Jesus. We can only ever be fully transformed by the renewing of our mind (Romans 12:2).

- Graham Cooke

Smouldering...

A thin cloud of smoke was hovering over a certain spot on the opposite side of the little Swiss valley. Day after day it had been hanging there, without increasing or diminishing. At last I asked what it was. "Oh, it is a tree," they answered. "A wood-cutter lit his fire under it a week ago to cook his dinner, and it has been smouldering ever since." "But it will spread, will it not?" "No, there is no flame, so it cannot spread," was the answer.

It was damp with mists around it and with the sap within it, so it smouldered on and nothing happened. When we left a few days later, it was still smouldering. "There is no flame, so it cannot spread." The words have often rung in my ears ever since.

May God send them on to ring in other ears too! For if the hearts in England, where God's Fire smoulders now were lit up into a flame, the glow would be felt around this poor, dark, cold world before long. It is such a cold, dark world to the God who "so loved" it, that nothing but love will meet His longing! The false religious systems at their best are frozen still with formalism and slavish fears. They are chilled through and through with meaningless ceremonies and silly superstitions, and a dull morality with no power to make it workable...

Oh, the hugeness of the need - what can touch it? These days of ours are slipping between our fingers as it were, and their chances will soon be over forever. The months that we still have to live, even the youngest of us - how fast they go by! What does Christ feel about the priceless months that pass, like with our Swiss tree, where nothing happens around the spot where we stand? Nothing happens - is it so? There is no flame so it cannot spread. Oh, the smouldering lives and their possibilities! More sorrowful in one way than the unlit souls around; for of all the sad words of the tongue or pen, the saddest are these - "it might have been."

First - It is not a question of doing more, but of being more. If that Swiss tree had given itself for just a few more moments to the fire that was kindled in it, the outward results would have been very different. A flame must spread, but the tree would not let itself go. The strong sap within it fought out the battle; the tree held itself carefully back, and it saved its life. The autumn storms were coming on, and I daresay that the tree is safe and stands to this day.

The autumn storms are coming on the world too, and the chances of spreading a fire round us are dwindling day by day. If we will save our lives for ourselves, save our money to spend on our own pleasures, save our time for our own interests and pursuits, save our homes from the sorrow of a parting - well, if we will, we must. But remember, "He that saves his life shall lose it" and all that saving will be proven to be as a deadly loss when Christ comes.

Let us give ourselves away to Him for His world - away, away down to the deepest depths of our being, money, time, influence - and home if He call us to it - all as fuel to His fire. But let us give Him our heart of hearts first. "They... first gave their own selves to the Lord and unto us by the will of God": that was God's order in the beginning, and it still is. Where will the influence of those who give themselves away finally end? Who can say - like a flame once aroused it may sweep on and on.

May I tell you a bit of personal history? It is just the case in point. Years ago I was busy in London work. All were prospering with God's blessing, and I had no thought but to spend my life there. The whole missionary subject seemed to me rather dull and was altogether beyond the horizon.

But I had two friends with whom I was often thrown together with at work, and they both had taken to heart the needs of a dark world. I do not remember that they ever said anything personally to me about it, but one could sense it right through them. They were all aglow and after a bit, though I took no more personal interest in the matter, I began to feel that they had a fellowship with Jesus that I knew nothing about. I did love Him, and I did not like to be out in the cold over it, so I began to pray - "Lord give me the fellowship with Thee about the nations  that Thou hast given to those two."

It was not many weeks before it began to come - a strange, yearning love over those who were "in the land of the shadow of death" - a feeling that Jesus could speak to me about them, and that I could speak to Him - that a great barrier between Him and me had been broken right down and swept away. I had no thought of leaving England then or even at first of trying to stir others at home, but soon God made my way out into the darkness before eighteen months were over, and through eternity I shall thank Him for the silent flame in the hearts of those two friends, and what it did for me. Neither of them has ever had her path opened into foreign work, but the light of day is coming when He will show what they have done in kindling other souls.

- by Lilias Trotter

The Call to Suffer

Paul tells us that in all our relations, we are to “have the same attitude of mind Christ Jesus had” (Phil 2:5). Though he was “in very nature God,” he didn’t cling to this status. Rather, for our sake he set aside his divine prerogatives, took on the nature of a servant and “humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross” (Phil 2:6-8).

Along similar lines, Peter encourages us to be willing to suffer injustice out of “reverent fear of God,” for “it is commendable if you bear up under the pain of unjust suffering because you are conscious of God (1 Pet 2:18-19). He then adds, “To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps” (vs. 21). When people “hurled their insults at him,” Peter continues, “he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats.” Instead, Peter says, “he entrusted himself to him who judges justly (vs. 23).

This is the example, Peter says, we are to follow, and it precludes picking up the sword even though one might be justified, by normal worldly standards, for doing so.

Paul teaches the same thing when he tells Christians to never “repay anyone evil for evil” (Rom 12:17) and to never “take revenge … but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written, ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord” Rom 12:18). Knowing that God alone has the right to pass judgment on people, and remaining confident that God will do this in his own time and by his own means, kingdom people are commanded and empowered to refrain from ever executing judgment on their own.

This doesn’t mean it’s appropriate for kingdom people to enjoy ruminating about the future judgment of their enemies. Such an attitude reflects hostility in the heart that has no place in the life of a kingdom person. Our attitude toward our enemies is rather to be that of Jesus who with his last dying breath prayed that his Father would forgive his persecutors (Lk 23:34).

Paul and Peter are simply pointing out that kingdom people are to be confident that, if an enemy needs to be punished, God will do it in due time. We are to relinquish all judgment to God and self-sacrificially love those who treat our loved ones or us unjustly.

Peter returns to the example of Christ in the next chapter of his epistle when he encourages people who are facing persecution to “revere Christ as Lord” in “their hearts” by responding to their persecutors with “gentleness and respect.” Following the example of Christ who “suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring [them] to God (1 Pet 3:15), followers of Jesus are to maintain a gentle, loving attitude so that “those who speak maliciously against [their] good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander” (vs 16).

If ever one would be justified in using violence to protect oneself, it’s when they’re being persecuted for doing good. Yet followers of Jesus are to do what Jesus did in these circumstances. We’re to choose to suffer on behalf of the persecutor instead of retaliating.

The example of Jesus’ willingness to suffer rather than violently resist enemies is not just relevant to people facing possible martyrdom. Instead, it is to characterize our entire life. “Whoever claims to live in him must live as Jesus did (1 Jn 2:6). As “Jesus laid down his life for us,” John wrote, “we ought to lay down our lives for one another (1 Jn 3:16). There may be times when we are called to do this literally, but this loving, sacrificial attitude is supposed to permeate every aspect of our life.

Hence, as stated in the video yesterday, the justice of the kingdom is manifest when we reflect this sacrificial character of God – Greg Boyd

Treasures

One by one He took them from me,

All the things I valued most.

Until I was empty-handed;

Every glittering toy was lost.

Then I walked earth's highway grieving,

In my rags and poverty;

'Til I heard His voice inviting:

Lift your empty hands to me.

So I held my hands toward Heaven,

And He filled them with a store

Of His own transcendent riches,

'Til they could contain no more.

Then at last I comprehended

With my stupid mind and dull,

That God could not pour out His riches

Into hands already full.

Song by William Cowper