What is God's Wrath?

This video clip with Steve McVey is so worth the time to watch, What is God's Wrath?

Rich

The Growth of the Church

Life Centers

Thank you Father that the building and establishing of your Church rests in the secure and certain hands of your Son, Jesus Christ.

Rich

We have already touched upon this, but let us repeat and re-emphasise that the growth of the Church is on the principle of life. We can never go about this world gathering people together, asking them to accept certain things which we say about Christ, and then forming them into churches. The Lord has not called upon us to form churches. That is not our business. Would to God men had recognised the fact. A very different situation would obtain today from what exists, if that had been recognised. It is the Lord Who expands His Church, Who governs its growth. What we have to do is to live in the place of His appointment in the power of His resurrection. If, in the midst of others, the Lord can get but two of His children, in whom His life is full and free, to live on the basis of that life, and not to seek to gather others to themselves or to get them to congregate together on the basis of their acceptance of certain truths or teaching, but simply to witness to what Christ means and is to them, then He has an open way. As witness is simply and livingly borne in this way, one and another will be provoked at length to say: I do wish I had what they have! And another will say: I covet that one's experience. It is just what I have been seeking for! Such as these will either come to inquire the way of salvation, or opportunity will be found to lead them to the Lord.

It is in this way that the Church grows. Its growth may be furthered at a street corner as you preach Christ and someone responds, and believing on Christ with the heart and confessing Him as Lord with the mouth, life is given by the Spirit, and that one becomes the Lord's. The Church is not increased by your going and taking a building and trying to get people to come to it, and to your meetings, and then forming them, by a church roll, into a local church. That is not the way. Growth is by life, and this, to begin with, may be by the entering into life of but one soul, and then after a long waiting time of another; or it may be more rapid. But the point is that it is increase because of life. That is the growth of the Church. For the growth of His Church, the Lord must have life channels, life centres. I believe that, given a life centre, sooner or later one of two things will happen, that it will be abundantly manifest that Christ is fully and finally rejected there, or else there will be an adding, a growth. There is tremendous power in life, and the life of the Lord either kills or quickens. It depends on the attitude taken toward it. He is a savour of life unto life, or of death unto death. Things can never remain neutral. What the Lord needs is life centres.

The irreducible minimum, and yet the adequate means, to begin with, is two; two who are one in His life, two in whom there is co-operation in that life. He sent them forth two by two. That is the nucleus of the Church. It is such as these that the enemy will endeavour to kill, to quench, or to separate, and thus to ruin them spiritually, so far as their value to the Lord is concerned for propagation. Remember that! The Lord's advantage is bound up with a fellowship of two in the one life.

We can see now why in the main issue it is so important that all the resources of the risen Lord should be tapped by us, should be lived upon, drawn upon, why these spiritual, secret, heavenly resources of His life, His fulness, should thus become the basis of our lives. Their purpose does not end with ourselves, nor is it something for ourselves, and if we turn them to that end we shall die. That provision is for the Lord's end, which is reproduction, the reproduction of His own risen life.

There Are None So Blind

Through a series of things, mostly movies, I have been so richly encouraged this week. My wife rented three movies, Doubt, August Rush, and Changeling. I also watched the TV movie, Defiance. All spoke to me to the depths of my being.

We have all adapted and adopted a false singularity because of being born sinners establishing an alternate identity, one rooted in lies, or as Morpheus said to Neo, "The Matrix (aka religion) is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth." (What truth)? " That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind."

Apart from direct revelation from God the Father there is at best an insidious entity disguised and operating as me and you - the person we think we actually are. Because of sin and shame that have almost totally assimilated us we exist or go through the motions of living people, much like dead men walking.

I love the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. He could have done the whole thing from the get-go but for some reason he invited humans into this miraculous event. First he told the people to remove the stone covering Lazarus' grave. After commanding Lazarus to come forth, he then instructed the people to loose him from his grave clothes.

Those of us who have similarly been raised from the dead are, in my opinion, much like Lazarus, walking around with the clothing that had formerly been our identity. Grave clothes are suited for the realm of the dead, not for the living. There have been so many tags and labels we have given ourselves, along with other people in our life, that have defined who we believe we truly are. It is my contention that the Father, working in the lives of my siblings throughout the earth, is using the very circumstances and situations we are finding ourselves in to remove our invisible grave clothes - which keeps us alienated from the truth of Whose we are!

Here is a quote from a book my wife just finished (which I hope likewise to read) The Elegance of the Hedgehog which spoke life to me: "They didn't recognize me," I say. I come to a halt in the middle of the sidewalk, completely flabbergasted. "They didn't recognize me," I repeat. He stops in turn, my hand still on his arm. "It is because they have never seen you," he says. "I would recognize you anywhere."

Who we are is undefinable apart from a revelation of Whose we are, period. One follows the other; the order is not reversible. He recognizes the real me, the real you anywhere. When we catch a glimpse of Whose we are, the grave clothes of sin and shame are loosed and we are free to become, essentially, ourselves. All of creation is standing on tiptoe with baited breath longing to see the manifest sons of God being called forth.

Rich

The Allure Of Rules

Why wouldn’t hidden but subtly disguised rules be an alluring attraction to us when resident in our flesh undetected, lies the father of religion and lies, the same one disguising himself before Adam and Eve to take a bite out of his tasty alluring tidbit, to become like God, unless of course the wonder and beauty of this irresistible Christ in us is there, but not recognized. There must be some pretty strong magic altering our minds within these poor substitutes. Isn’t that some of the alarm and concern Paul voiced over some believers, “Will you put up with a little foolish aside from me? Please, just for a moment. The thing that has me so upset is that I care about you so much—this is the passion of God burning inside me! I promised your hand in marriage to Christ, presented you as a pure virgin to her husband. And now I'm afraid that exactly as the Snake seduced Eve with his smooth patter, you are being lured away from the simple purity of your love for Christ.”

There is no contest to this, Jesus has never and will never be in a pout over the hucksters peddling their make belief wares, in fact, he is allowing it all to happen, why, so that there is right in front of us an opportunity to see that we do have a free willed choice, life, or death!

Why do bad things happen to “good people,” so that we will have the privilege of actually having the ability to freely choose, death, or Him, in the face of some very nasty life altering circumstances and situations? The Father has no intentions of bringing down the visible exterior expressions of what we refer to as religion and its institutions, but if permitted, he will in fact set us free from the inside where all of this other crap is birthed from. Without there being presented us one of two ways to go, please, do not say we have made a choice.

No matter how alluring and attractive the outer showings of being ‘like God’ become, when He is detected in the life of one of His, there will be no need for any Jesus impersonation.

Rich

Don't You See Him Yet?

“For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.”

If he died for me, then what’s all this being given over to death all about? Perhaps there is a tad more to being identified with this One who was fully identified with us, any thoughts?

Rich

Who’s Fool Are You?

“We are [looked upon as] fools on account of Christ and for His sake, but you are [supposedly] so amazingly wise and prudent in Christ! We are weak, but you are [so very] strong! You are highly esteemed, but we are in disrepute and contempt!
(It seems to me that God has put us who bear his Message on stage in a theater in which no one wants to buy a ticket. We're something everyone stands around and stares at, like an accident in the street. We're the Messiah's misfits. You might be sure of yourselves, but we live in the midst of frailties and uncertainties. You might be well-thought-of by others, but we're mostly kicked around.)”

I love more and more how in growing in the true knowledge of God the Father’s total unconditional love for me; I don’t really mind being seen as a fool, His fool.
There is such a stigma that tries to embed itself into our identity in being duped into saying, doing stuff simply because of believing what someone else has said, and all the while sensing from the get-go something was not right about it.

This is all leading to something that spoke to me this morning in reading an article by Chip Brogdan, “DISCERNMENT: A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH.”

Here is an excerpt from the article. “As more and more voices try to get our attention we need to be able to distinguish between true, false, innocent, and dangerous. Christ-centered discernment recognizes and approves of those things that lead to Christ, while rejecting and refusing to be influenced by the things that distract from Him. And believe me, there are more things that distract than there are things that lead to Him.
Most people have great discernment but they don't trust it. They don't give themselves permission to say "no" to something that is wrong. They put aside their uneasiness and for the sake of "unity" and "keeping the peace" they permit things that should not be permitted.
Please consider this week's article in that light. Even the Question and Answer was carefully selected as yet another example of why trusting your own discernment is so important. Don't ever be led around by someone else's opinions when you can be led by the Spirit. The crowd is usually wrong."


You can read the whole article here.

Rich

Check Up

It's not that I haven't had stuff to share here on my blog of late, but it has been submerged beneath a relentless barrage of soul agony.
I've been here before and experienced His goodness in the land of death, I know that Life will always be available to the dead, not for the weak!

Test yourselves to make sure you are solid in the faith. Don't drift along taking everything for granted. Give yourselves regular checkups. You need firsthand evidence, not mere hearsay, that Jesus Christ is in you. Test it out. If you fail the test, do something about it. I hope the test won't show that we have failed. But if it comes to that, we'd rather the test showed our failure than yours. We're rooting for the truth to win out in you. We couldn't possibly do otherwise.

Rich