Shhhh, just in case anyone is overhearing our conversation Jesus; you know this could prove to be a highly combustible outcome for me if any of my colleagues ever caught wind of my actions.
I’m so nervous about my meeting you at this very late and ungodly hour, and yet at the same time my heart is beating not so much with the fears I have, but with something else that has drawn me here. Ever since I heard the voice, I haven’t been the same!
I know you are from God, no man could say and do what you have done without that being so, but, you have to give me something to work with, please. Some principles, precepts or concepts, otherwise I just don’t get it. You know the deal of my having to get back into my mother’s womb is no longer possible, she died a year and half ago, so this being ‘born again’ matter isn’t a viable option anymore is it?
What I see you offering us is a highbred version of Judaism and God knows we need to be revived from the staleness and lifelessness of our air-tight orthodoxy. So, if you could help me to try and fit what you have to offer and make it work within our religious system, I just know after the leaders within the high council get a taste for this new way, they’ll love it!
Nick, you are right, you don’t get it, this isn’t me offering who I am and turning it into another add-on, pin the Jesus onto the lifeless system and jump starting it, I’ve come that you might have life. I haven’t come to make your programs more effective and more attractable to those with a lingering bad taste in their mouths because of religion. Much more to the point, this new wine has to be put into new malleable, supple wine skins, otherwise it is merely trying to make life fit into the rigidness of your already fossilized programmes, the end being a horrible mess.
I woke up this morning with this story playing in my heart and boy does it ever sound like the Nicodemus’s of today, although born-again, trying to replicate what the Nick of old was fixated with trying to make work. “Brother, I, we, just love this grace message you have come to share with us, but, we need to have something more than being ‘wind-blown’ by His spirit, we need some principles, precepts, workable concepts to integrate this vibrant and living message of grace and fit it into our already existing fine church programs.
What we have offered to us in Christ is something so totally unfamiliar to us, our deep fetish of loving rules is an unseen undertow always there like gravity just waiting to pull us under, back into a more secure and knowable way of doing “church.!
Rich
We know that line from Sherlock Holmes as he once again effortlessly cuts through what seems to be utterly impossible to understand by any normal person to his side kick, Watson. Elementary!
In seeing but the basic principles of the doctrine of Christ, things redundantly played before our eyes like flash cards is it any wonder we have seen much ado about “churchianity” and very little to do with God visibly being seen in His church, us flesh and blood people?
Let’s look at what our brother Paul lays down as a divine challenge or as I like to say, “provoking us unto love and good works.’
“So come on, let's leave the preschool finger painting exercises on Christ and get on with the grand work of art. Grow up in Christ. The basic foundational truths are in place: turning your back on "salvation by self-help" and turning in trust toward God; baptismal instructions; laying on of hands; resurrection of the dead; eternal judgment. God helping us, we'll stay true to all that. But there's so much more. Let's get on with it!”
I had to laugh listening to the last pod cast “learning To Fly” from the God Journey where Wayne and Brad were engrossed in a conversation revolving around Amy (one of) Wayne and Sara’s grand children that Wayne was teaching to fly, using a very sophisticated soft ware flight simulator program.
As long as Wayne did everything for Amy she might have the flying principles and doctrine down pat, but in not being permitted to slowly take control of “the controls” she will not become air borne except possibly in her imagination.
As Wayne shared this story he slowly gave Amy much more latitude to venture out on her own, Wayne of course being right there with Amy on his lap prepared to augment any needed course adjustments, but as her inner confidence began to soar, she and Grandpa discovered that flying wasn’t just for the birds!
I am always attracted to anything pretty much dealing with flying as my earthly dad was a bush pilot, aircraft engineer and one who made flying look so elementary. I still remember in a flight I took with him that glorious day he relinquished the controls to me, and I was flying that plane.
For interest sake, I was eleven months old when I first flew with my dad…oh God how I miss him.
Our rehearsed theory, of conceptual principles of what it means to be air born, soaring in the heavens will at best keep us earth bound, without hearing and seeing modeled before us someone like Wayne toward Amy with a tenacious confidence in His life in us, to live out what they see as being so elementary.
Rich
High Flight
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sun ward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor even eagle flew—
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
In order for us to be a part of His order we will have to stop trying to convince God and ourselves that He has to bless what we think is to be blessed.
God had originally spoken to Abram and said he was to become a father of many nations, at the time he didn’t have even one son. So when push meets shove, he and his wife Sarah agreed (concocted a scheme) that by Abram having sex with Sarah’s concubine Hagar, that in fact this could very well be His order coming into play, ergo, a son.
Anyone who knows this story knows the devastation this brought into the world, but that is a distraction from where I intend to go.
Bottom line, long after the son, Ishmael was born, and long after Sarah and Abram reach the physical point of no return of being able to procreate, God once again comes with great, good news, lets listen in shall we. “I will bless her, and indeed I will give you a son by her then I will bless her, and she shall be a mother of nations; kings of peoples will come from her." Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said in his heart, "Will a child be born to a man one hundred years old? And will Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?" And Abraham said to God, "Oh that Ishmael might live before You!"
And later God also said; “Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age; Sarah was past childbearing. Sarah laughed to herself, saying, "After I have become old, shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?" And the LORD said to Abraham, "Why did Sarah laugh, saying, 'Shall I indeed bear a child, when I am so old?”
The son that was miraculously born from their union was called, Isaac, and the root meaning of this name is ‘laughter’!
Papa is doing the very same, long after we have experienced such shattered hopes of ever becoming fruitful He comes to those He has emptied and says, I will now fill you with the true knowledge of My Son in you, and you will come to see it is His life in you as you that the world is going to see. Once again birthed in our bareness or lifeless womb, we seem to be hearing peels of laughter, but what is so funny we ask ourselves? Just the living One asking us, “Is anything to difficult for Me to accomplish within you?”
The spirit of the Father is slowly getting our attention, “Turn away from all that you don’t see, your dead, lifeless womb, turn to Me, I will open your eyes to behold Me the fruitful one and as you allow me to make love real to and in your heart, prepare for a bountiful harvest, now and throughout eternity.” I am the True Vine, let me fill you to overflowing-laughter, it is my medicine to you.
Rich
In the process of everything that can be shaken being shaken, there is an inner release within the believer a realized maybe not fully yet, voice, and that voice being the voice of the Father of our spirit.
Can you say emancipation-freedom with me?!
The picture I choose for this entry spoke to me in a violent and powerful way. As you will notice the tape on the mouth of the young girl, gagging her from exercising her ability to speak freely, is a visible metaphor depicting where the church has been for a very long time! That is changing rapidly, not by might, nor by power, but by a revelation of the total unconditional loving acceptance of God the Father.
In a few blogs I peruse frequently, I am being blown away in seeing the head of the church (which is His body) the same head over us all Christ Jesus, doing exactly what he said he would do, “And I will build my church”.
We have all been seduced to one degree or another coming out from under the opiate drugged influence of the Matrix of religion and then set out to discover the “Holy Grail, a perfect expression of how to do ‘church’ or, whatever else is vital to our perceived understanding of what it truly means to be a Christian. Pursuing what we feel is a holy cause, isn’t it always, we are being lied to and even distracted further from trusting the Father of our spirit to open the closed, blinded eyes of our heart.
In coming to know the Word, you know, “n the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” yes that Word, the Scriptures have never been or looked the same to me.
Here in Ephesians 4:14-16 is laid out what I am seeing first hand. As the Truth Himself is making His heart known to his children, out of that inner explosion of love, realty they in turn are speaking forth the Truth in Love, ergo, is causing the growth of the body to come together being built up in and through love.
I will only sight two examples of His heart that I am seeing with regards to the Truth being spoken in love that is making, setting the captives free.
Over at “The Best Parts” Tracy is expressing a tangible view of the Father’s heart for His church.
Over at Amy’s blog “Walking in the Spirit” she as well is being given a voice to speak the truth in love to His body.
In being privy to what the Father is making known, often the picture from the Old Testament where God says to a prophet, “Son of man, can this valley of dead bones return to life,” the prophet replies, “Lord only you know.”
The Lord then said to prophesy to this lifeless heap and stage after stage what was once a lifeless pile of rubble became fully alive.
To my way of thinking this was a shadowy metaphor for what I am witnessing in this hour of the church, His body no longer being tossed too and fro by every wind of doctrine, cunningly devised by demonic persuasion to keep it mute.
Rich
Posts
