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Articles 2021-2023
God is other than us. He is the Creator; we are the created. He is the Builder; we are His house. He is our Master; we are His servants. He is our Father; we are His children. We will never be God; He alone is the mighty, majestic One who fills everything everywhere with His presence. I once saw a poster that made this statement: “Two foundation stones for human enlightenment – 1. There is a God – 2. You are not Him.” Wise words indeed.
But with the above truth clearly established in our hearts, we must at the same time recognize that there is a relationship where the Scriptures speak of us and our Lord in terms of a functionally single entity. I am referring to Heaven’s Messiah. When Jesus was on earth, He was the Messiah, God’s anointed one sent to Israel for the sake of the whole earth. But since His ascension, the New Testament reveals that the Messiah is now corporate. While our Head is in heaven, God has called the body of Messiah/Christ to make His mind known on earth. Another way to say this is that God intends for Israel to see her Messiah revealed on earth from heaven before Jesus returns. God intends to make His Son known corporately before her eyes and even the eyes of the whole world through the power and presence of His Holy Spirit.
The Church must become in practical expression an integrated people functioning with one heart and expressing one mind. Here is Heaven’s emerging miracle. We cannot organize it into existence. But we must recognize God’s strategy, prophesy it in the face of all the religious mixture within Christianity, and then submit to His work of bringing it to pass. Is He up to the task? Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever (Ephesians 3:20 - 21).
Notice Jesus’ personal instruction to His disciples.
But when the Helper comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify of Me.
(John 15:26 NKJV)
The implications of Jesus’ words for us as individuals is that the Holy Spirit will make Him known in our hearts. He will glorify and then draw us to worship our Lord Jesus. But there is more. He also intends to testify of Jesus as the One who can integrate His people and reveal Himself as their one head in heaven who is cohesive in His thoughts and plans for the earth. Here (at least in part) is the apostolic vision.
Notice Paul’s words to the church at Corinth.
Now I plead with you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment.
(1Corinthians 1:10 NKJV)
The one mind in which they were to be joined together was not Paul’s but Christ’s. It was His judgment and purpose they were to cohesively reveal. The apostle was pleading for a miracle at Corinth.
As He neared His arrest, Jesus informed the eleven disciples that they were about to enter an experience of grief. They would see Him undergo great injustice and suffering. But their grief would turn to joy. It would be like a woman in labor who forgets her pain when she sees her newborn.
Whenever a woman is in labor she has pain, because her hour has come; but when she gives birth to the child, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy that a child (Greek, ANTHROPOS – a human being) has been born into the world.
When you congratulate a couple over the birth of their child, you celebrate that it is a boy or that it is a girl – not because it is a human being! What else would everyone expect, a canary?
What was Jesus saying? He was specifically referring to her reproducing after her own kind. Calvary would bring great pain both to Himself as well as to His followers. But their grief would turn to joy because His death and resurrection would be the beginning of the reproduction on earth after His own kind. Not that His followers would become deity (reread the first paragraph of this article). Foundational to Christian theology is not that men become God but that God became a man. And as such, He became the firstborn of many brethren.
But again, there is more. There had to come forth not only individuals being conformed to His likeness, but that they would be integrated into a corporate expression of His mind and of His judgment. And Paul exhorted the believers in Corinth to humble themselves, stop exalting Christian leaders like himself and Apollos, and recognize that the only one who could cause the growth of Heaven’s corporate miracle at Corinth was God Himself (1Corinthians 3:6 - 7).
Obviously, people would be involved with the Lord in realizing Heaven’s miracle. But the apostles had laid the proper foundation for it to occur – even Christ Himself (1Corinthians 3:10 - 11).
Apostles are not to lay the foundation of mere doctrine about Jesus; they are to bear His presence and His word in such a way that everything built corporately depends not on them as leaders but on His active presence and work among His people. And only as the believers seek Him diligently can they then move corporately according to the active ongoing revelation of Christ among them. Elders are to oversee this process of Jesus’ headship being revealed by the Holy Spirit in and through His corporate body.
Christian unity is not organizational; it is miraculous. And Jesus repeatedly asked for this specific miracle to come to pass.
Father, keep through Your name those whom You have given Me, that they may be one as We are.
(John 17:11 NKJV)
Jesus prayed that His disciples would experience the same oneness among themselves that He did with the Father. Such integration would not be something they could produce; it would have to be authored from heaven. That is why Jesus prayed for it. Their individual increasing cohesion with God would result in increasing oneness with one another. And it would ultimately come to pass because the Father would keep them (Greek, TEREO – to guard by fixing His eyes upon them). Today, in order to implement His purpose, God is still watching over His people to fulfill the prayer of His Son for us.
I do not ask on behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in Me through their word; that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me.
Notice that the unity Jesus asked for would be realized in full view of the world; it would come to pass prior to His return from heaven. Notice also that He was praying for us today – all who would come to faith because the early disciples faithfully walked with Him and even in some cases wrote Holy Scripture.
Jesus’ description of Heaven’s unity was that it would be realized among believers through His indwelling presence. They would be filled with the holy presence of God just as He had dwelt in the Father and the Father had lived His life in and through His Son. The oneness harmonizing heaven and earth that was demonstrated perfectly in Jesus’ relationship with His Father two thousand years ago in Israel was to now come to pass unto a measured full stature (Ephesians 4:13) in clear practical terms in every nation. Only God could produce such a wonder.
The glory of God is simply the God of glory revealing Himself as He really is, not as we or others think He should be. Here is what distressed Israel so much. Their perspective of God did not line up with God as He really is. And Jesus would not accommodate Himself to their expectations. Instead, He perfectly revealed the Father and then told them that they were blessed if they did not stumble over Him. Though there was nothing in Jesus that obscured the Father, the same cannot be said of His Church today. Oh, for an increase of the revelation of God among us and also the commensurate decrease of human wisdom, strength, and ambition.
I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected (Greek, TELEIOO – to advance or mature to final completeness) in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me.
The only way that the world will ever come to know that God sent His Son will be when the Church matures/advances to full stature in oneness – a process underway since Acts Chapter Two. And this amazing miracle will be the sign that God has loved His people even as He loved Jesus. Keep coming Lord in the power of Your Holy Spirit and bring to pass among us the cry of Your heart for us. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Donald Rumble – February 2022
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