Tag Archives: flesh

Two Realms

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TWO REALMS

“So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit to God. For when we were in the realm of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death. But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.” Romans 7:4-6.

Two realms – the natural, physical realm and the realm of the unseen – are operative in the universe. The physical realm is more real to us because we function in it in our everyday lives. But, with the harnessing of the energy waves in modern times, for example, microwaves, wireless, light etc., we have become much more aware of the unseen realm. It amazes me how, with a single touch on the screen of my android tablet, I can order a book from an internet company anywhere in the world and in a few minutes, via energy that I can neither see nor understand, the book appears on my device and I can begin reading!

It is not difficult for us to understand, then, that we can live in two realms spiritually. We have bodies that relate to and function in the world. We eat food from the ground, and our bodies convert it into energy which drives our systems. But we also function in an unseen dimension which is just as real. The world we live in is immersed in the presence of its Creator. The Bible says that He fills heaven and earth. He is fully involved in what happens on earth, and that includes us.

The very breath we breathe is His breath – life. When He removes our breath we die. We have no life apart from Him. If it were possible, scientists could put all the elements of a human body together but they cannot produce life because both physical life and spiritual life come from God.  That means, of course, that if life comes from Him then we are dependent on Him and accountable to Him whether we acknowledge it or not.

And so, He has the right to dictate the way our lives are to be lived. When we confirmed our forefather’s disobedience by our own, we suffered that same consequences as he did – alienation from God. But God did everything to put us back on track and to restore the connection between the seen and the unseen realms.

So, Paul says, we were cut off from the power of the sinful world to influence us when we died with Jesus. It is a fact. It’s real. It happened. God did it in the unseen realm when we turned to Him through Jesus. We died to our old lives and the power of sin to keep us enslaved. But the reality of it is activated by faith – that unseen power, like the unseen waves of energy that network our planet and our universe, has connected us to a new power – the power of God.

From what were we cut off? Paul said we were cut off from the power of the law. Why the law? Because the law has the mysterious power to arouse sin in us. We know how this works. Just tell a kid not to do something and he will do it! Before you told him not to, he didn’t even think about doing it but, the moment you said, “Don’t,” that’s when he wanted to! Take away the prohibition and the desire to do it goes as well. That’s how we were wired by the sin nature in us with which we were born “in Adam”.

But Jesus destroyed that perverse nature by His perfect obedience to all God’s “prohibitions”. He killed the desire, then they killed Him but He rose again and would never be subject to temptation again. Now, through faith, we are in Him, and have the potential to live as He did. On top of that, He took away the necessity to have rules and regulations, and replaced them all with one “rule” if you like – the law of love. Then, on top of that, just to make sure that we will follow that law, He gave us His Holy Spirit to produce love in our hearts…

…which makes it all about Him and not about us. Paul said, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” That means that Jesus in us by His Spirit makes it possible for us to reflect His character in the way we live. The old, rotten fruit of self-centredness and greed has been replaced by a new life of pleasing God by caring for others.

It’s the power of heaven breaking into the earthly realm and showing us what God is really like. It’s about having God’s will done on earth as it is in heaven. It’s about us being mirrors of Jesus.

Acknowledgement

THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

 

Come To The Table

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COME TO THE TABLE

“‘I AM the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven which anyone may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh which I will give for the life of the world.’

“The Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, ‘How can this man give us His flesh to eat?'” John 6:48-52 (NIV).

Jesus’ words sound bizarre, don’t they? What in the world is He talking about and how can He expect His hearers to believe what He is saying?

Once more a literal interpretation of His words leaves us with the idea that He is advocating cannibalism! But we know that He cannot possibly imply that, so what is He saying?

We have to turn again to the Hebrew way of thinking. Where the “western” Greek-orientated mind-set is to interpret His words literally, the ancient Hebrew mind would recognize something different in His meaning.

Middle-eastern people were very hospitable but they never ate with anyone with whom they had issues. To eat with someone meant much more than sitting down together and sharing a meal. They only ate a meal with someone with whom they were reconciled.

This practice arose from the origin of the ancient concept of a table. The Paleo-Hebrew word for a table – shulkan – was also the word for reconcile and lamb skin, depending on the sense in which it was used. The connection between these meanings was like this: where there was no table available, for example, when they left Egypt in haste and they had to eat the Passover meal in readiness to leave, the skin of the lamb that was eaten at the Passover was used as a “table”, a sort-of picnic blanket.

The members of the family had to eat a sacrificed lamb as a symbol that they had set aside their differences and were one with each other. They could not travel together on a long journey if they had issues. Hence a meal – shul – was eaten at the table – shulkan– as a symbol of reconciliation.

Was Jesus inviting the people to be reconciled to God through His flesh? It sounds very much as though that was what He was getting at. There is certainly no hint that He was implying that, in some mystical way, the bread eaten and the wine drunk at the Last Supper literally became His body and blood. That would make Him the advocate of cannibalism which is unthinkable.

It also denies the clear teaching of Scripture that His death was a once-for-all, never-to be-repeated, all-sufficient sacrifice which reconciled us to the Father. To insist that, every time we participate in the memorial feast of “Communion” or the Lord’s Supper, we are re-sacrificing the Son of God and eating His actual flesh and drinking His actual blood is to turn it into a satanic ritual rather than a symbol of what He did on the cross for us.

“Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.'” John 6:53-55 (NIV).

When we read His words with the understanding that He was talking about reconciliation, not cannibalism, they make a whole lot of sense. To be reconciled to the Father through the sacrifice of His Son brings us back into union with the source of life. Physical death cannot separate us from Him because He has conquered death. Just as bread sustains and energizes our physical bodies, so also, as we “feed” on Him, our spirits are nourished, and our life in Him grows.

Jesus was not instituting a new, cannibalistic religion, but teaching God’s people that the sacrificial lamb they ate when they celebrated the Passover was only a picture of what He would do on the cross. His death would bring them back into fellowship with the Father and reconnect them with the source of life.

Do you have this life?

Journey To Wholeness

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JOURNEY TO WHOLENESS 

“Jesus answered, ‘Flesh give birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.'”  John 3: 5-8 (NIV).

That’s it! It’s a mystery — a secret finally revealed.

Every other religion has a set of beliefs and a set of rules to which its devotees subscribe. Their origin is in the mind of man and the outcome is the best or worst that man can produce. The only authority religion has is force applied from the outside or persuasion based on lies. It cannot produce life or change a human being’s basic nature.

But Jesus, the Son of God, was sent from the Father to remove the barrier between Himself and His human offspring and to return the Holy Spirit to those who believe in Him and receive Him to restore what He intended us to be from the beginning.

This interaction between God and human beings through the Holy Spirit is very different from even the best of what religion or philosophy offers. Self-help is useless because it cannot provide the energy to effect anything but frustration and disappointment, or self-satisfaction if you think you’ve arrived!

Jesus explained to Nicodemus that the best that flesh can do is reproduce itself. What is “flesh”? It’s the nature we were born with — self-centred, selfish and self-seeking. I am the centre of my universe and everything revolves around me and is about me and for me. This attitude is the antithesis of everything that God is. It blocks my fellowship with Him and my understanding of Him and His ways.

I am caught up and locked into a way of thinking and a way of living that shuts me out of His felt presence and keeps me a prisoner to a life of greed, selfishness and self-destruction, and doomed to face God’s justice as a firstborn son “in Adam”. ‘If you want to be free of that mind-set,’ said Jesus, ‘you need a power outside of yourself to release you and give you a new nature so that you can begin again.’

It takes something far greater that “Seven Easy Steps to a New Life”. You can change your ways for a few days, or even weeks, but you will inevitably slip back into who you really are because you still have your unchanged, inborn, selfish nature that holds you in a vice-grip.

It was God’s original intention for human beings to live in union with Him so that they would experience the love, joy and peace that are the essence of who He is. Adam lost that when he chose to go his own way, and dragged all his offspring into lives of misery and chaos. As long as the flesh rules, that can never change.

Nicodemus recognized that there was something so radically different about Jesus that he had to find out what it was. ‘It’s the Holy Spirit,’ Jesus told him. When the Holy Spirit is welcomed by handing the reins back to God, He becomes fused to our spirit, bringing God into the picture once again. The old nature is still there but it is overshadowed by a new disposition, the very nature of God.

Change happens, not self-help change that lasts for a little while, but real, radical change because God, by His Spirit, is now in residence. ‘It’s as mysterious as the wind,’ Jesus said. ‘You can’t see the Holy Spirit, but you can see what He does.’ He changes the heart, the attitude, the disposition and the outcome is evident by the way we think and the way we treat people.

It happened wherever people responded to Jesus. Zaccheus is a good example. From a self-seeking and greedy tax-collector he became an honest and generous believer who put his money where his mouth was — literally! Jesus response was, ‘Today salvation has come to this house. Zaccheus has begun his journey to wholeness.’

Now that’s real change! Have you started your journey?

Perfectly God!

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PERFECTLY GOD! 

“The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

“(John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, “This is the one I spoke about when I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because He was before me.'”)

“Out of His fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

“No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is Himself God and is the closest in relationship with the Father, has made Him known.” John 1:14-18 (NIV).

Don’t you love John’s positive declaration? No beating about the bush! In the most magnificent poetic language he could think of, he declared, no kidding, that Jesus is God! He didn’t even tell us how it happened. It happened — God, in the person of His Son, came to us — a man, yet so much more than a man, the God man, God in human flesh.

God the Father clothed His living Word, the Son, in a human body and sent Him to earth to live among His people in order to show them, through the life of a flesh-and-blood person, exactly what He is like because, ever since He met Moses at the burning bush in Arabia and called His people into covenant with Him at Mount Sinai, they just didn’t get it.

They wanted a god they could see and touch, so they made their own and worshipped what they had created out of their own imagination. And the gods they made were pretty awful!

And so God said, ‘If you want a god you can see, I’ll send you one — just like me — so that you can get a feel of the real thing!’ And when He came, they were so out of touch with the real God that they didn’t recognise Him. They were so used to their distorted, out-of-shape God who was a stickler for keeping impossible and unrealistic laws, and was thirsty for blood and punished people who sinned that they were uncomfortable with the One He came to reveal. He was too nice, too kind and too full of mercy — so they killed Him!

How can you be comfortable with someone who is full of grace and truth when you are full of laws and rituals and sacrifices and being so “holy” that you despise everyone who isn’t, especially despicable people like tax collectors and prostitutes? But, in spite of all that, He just kept on being kind to everyone and telling them the truth whether they believed it or not.

Moses…Jesus…the Law…grace and truth? Are they really opposites? How can they be when the instructions given at Mount Sinai on the best way to live, came from God. It’s just that the people didn’t really understand what it was all about. They were introduced to a life that would show all the nations around them what their God was really like based on the fact that there was a Lamb, already slain from before the foundation of the world, who had taken away their sin and healed the breach between them and their God.

The lambs they had to slaughter were just a reminder to them that all was well between them and God and that they were free to love one another…and the people who were not part of them because God loved them. They were spiritual babies and needed a daily reminder of God’s mercy, but they thought that their God wanted blood — a blood-thirsty God. They didn’t realise that the shedding of blood was for their benefit so that they would know they were forgiven.

When Jesus came, He showed them the real God, a God who wanted mercy, not sacrifice; a God who wanted them to be kind to one another, not judge and criticise one another for doing something good on the Sabbath or reaping a little bit of grain to eat when they were hungry. He showed them a God who forgave and didn’t hold grudges and most of all, a God who was real, through and through, and didn’t pretend to be one thing and do something else.

Jesus is qualified to show us the Father because He has always been with the Father and has the same nature as the Father. He is a “chip off the old block” as the saying goes. He is a perfect mirror image of the Father. When we look at Him, we see the Father because He is like God and He is God.

That’s what John wanted us to know. We can trust the Father because we can see Him in everything that Jesus said and everything He did.

Martha, You Are Troubled…

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MARTHA, YOU ARE TROUBLED

“As they continued their travel, Jesus entered a village. A woman named Martha welcomed Him and made Him feel quite at home.” Luke 10: 38-42

This much-preached-about little interlude is an eye-opener to the character, gifts and attitudes of these two sisters and the way they expressed their worship of Jesus. Martha appears to be the older sister and also the “boss” in the home. At this stage, Lazarus doesn’t feature at all.

Jesus seems to have treated this home in Bethany as a haven. It was close to Jerusalem and its occupants were open to Him and His message. He loved them and they loved Him. He often spent time with them, opening the truths of the kingdom to their willing hearts.

Both sisters were worshippers but they expressed their worship differently, according to their personalities. Mary loved to be with Jesus, sitting in His presence among the disciples regardless of protocol, ignoring the taboos of her culture. Jesus welcomed her and valued her closeness to Him.

Martha expressed her worship by serving Jesus and His disciples. She was the practical one, preparing a meal for the Master and His disciples. Both sisters were worshipping Jesus in the way they expressed their worship best.

The trouble arose when Martha expected Mary to be like her. Her worship was tainted with fleshly irritation with her sister for not serving Jesus her way. She had forgotten that true worship is doing whatever you do as unto the Lord, giving thanks to the Father in the name of the Lord Jesus. That makes the whole of life an expression of worship if it is done to Him and for Him.

Jesus’ rebuke was not about what Martha was doing but about how and why she was doing it. Was Jesus telling Martha that Mary’s worship was better than hers? I don’t think so. If He was, then He would be encouraging rivalry between the sisters.

What had Mary chosen that was better than Martha’s choice? Was it not to focus on Jesus and not be troubled by her sister’s choices and actions? Had Martha chosen to work in the kitchen with the same joyous abandon as Mary’s inactivity with Jesus, her worship would have been a positive experience for her and a true act of worship acceptable to the Master.