LIFE IN THE SPIRIT

Walkersville Christian Fellowship

Gary L. Cox – 10.05.03

 “Life in the Spirit – 3, A New Purpose.”

 I have a letter written.  It’s dated 90 A.D., but the heading is mine:

Dear Complaining Christian,

The easiest people to complain against are those with whom we are most closely acquainted with: our family!  (Physical and Spiritual)

Do not think that we have some great spiritual gift or insight because we can plainly see the faults of others.

That is not a spiritual gift.  Rather, it is the echo of the great dragon that will be cast out of heaven forever; that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, who deceives the whole world: he will be cast out into the earth, and his angels will be cast out with him.

Then salvation will have come, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of your brethren will have been cast down, who accused them before our God day and night.

And they will have overcome him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death.

Love, Jesus, The Lamb

Our steadfastness is the mark of the genuineness of our faith.  Are we always steadfast 100% of the time?  No, but when we are struggling with steadfastness, we’re struggling with the crux of the Gospel being lived out in our lives in a practical way.  The greatest weapon I’ve seen Satan use against us in our sense of steadfastness has been the accusations of those who are closest to us, the accusations about us, those accusations have a tremendous capacity to mess with our mind in the area of steadfastness because of one thing: they are true for the most part.   What Satan does through the process of accusation is he gets our focus off of the liberty we have in the Gospel and he gets us onto a performance oriented religion which has nothing to do with the Gospel and it has everything to do with his great work of morality.  

 I want the point to be made profoundly.  So what’s your problem?  Why are you fussing and fuming and continually complaining about the difficulties which you face from day to day?  The closest person at hand and the person we are usually first to blame is the one in authority over us, whether it be a parent, a boss.  If we are children of God, He has received us as sons and heirs of God and a joint-heir with Christ.  You will not understand anything with respects to the message unless you first understand this underlying principle that God has a wonderful, spiritual purpose for our lives that is not only available, but to His children He is actively bringing about the transfer of those blessings by His work in our lives as a Father.  Every matter that affects us in any way has been controlled and crafted for us by the great love of our Heavenly Father.  Here’s the great avenue that Satan gets in: we have a weak and/or sinful authority in our lives and their weakness and/or sinfulness or their legitimate obedience to the authority God gave them, one of those three things hits us and we, in a very narrow way, we look to the agent as the cause of our problem. We easily spend the majority of our energy protecting ourselves from false expressions of care, ministry, help, service, you name it.  What God has crafted is not crafted so our flesh may revel in success.  It has been crafted so that our spirit may revel in sonship and by the Spirit, abandon itself unto death.   

 In the Holy Spirit’s work towards us, the Holy Spirit brings us to the place of death.  The living Spirit brings a working death and the dying flesh brings an imitation life.  The whole premise of discipleship which Jesus set up is established through this simple premise of the Gospel that, “If any man would follow Me and be My disciple, he must take up his cross daily and follow Me.”  What is the cross?  The instrument of death in our lives.  We likely spend all of our time when we’re complaining lashing out at the instrument of death that God has designed us to be brought under.  We’re fighting God and we’re criticizing God when we criticize even the legitimate sins and failures of those who are over us.  It’s not about the power of man to do good that makes our lives happy, it is the power of God.  The power of God is always available for His purpose and the purpose of God is one thing, to bring us to death in ourselves, and that hurts.  God will reveal His power in us when His purpose is allowed to be made real and that purpose is that we die.  The power of God in us is to put us to death, not to salvage the little scraps of our life to make it look as good as it can as long as we live.

If God be for us, who can be against us? 

If God be for us, who can be against us?  That ought to be the most constant source of comfort to us as believers in our everyday life because whoever would shape evil against us, that evil will never reach us.  The only thing that will ever reach us is the good that God has in being for us.  The amazing thing is that God takes the evil crafted by wicked men or just the weakness of normal, everyday men, and He works them out for our good, for our benefit. Satan attacks us when we are under authority and he tells us, “If your authority continues to get his or hers way, you are going to be ruined.  It’s high time to step up to the plate and take control of the matter and do a little protection of your own self because if you don’t you are going to be eliminated.”  Do you know what the other danger is?  Being the authority, hearing those gripe about our poor execution of authority and say, “You know what?  Maybe you’re right, maybe I’m ruining people’s lives,” and all the sudden we start trying to cater to the complaints lodged against us instead of catering to a purification of our obedience to God no matter what the cost. 

The Sovereign Work of God

Rest and conquer through the Sovereign work of God for even as we die, we will never be separated from His love.  What does the sovereignty of God practically mean to me as I live my life?  If God is sovereign, then there’s a telling duty upon me by reason of which I must respond.  And if God is sovereign then we must rest.  We must conquer through the work of that sovereign God in us.  Our duty and obligation is to come to a situation and find that purpose of God and rest in it and overcome by the blood of the lamb.  The work of God will always be the same in us, it’s a work of death, it’s a work of the cross always bringing us to death.  God works through broken vessels and we need to be broken.  Nobody wants to be broken. 

Predestination

Verse 29, “For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate [to be] conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.”  The simple meaning of the foreknowledge of God is: to know before.  God has foreknowledge. According to His knowledge ahead of time, He is working out something presently.  Those people that God foreknew have been predestinated to a very particular end.  The end is this: “He also predestinated to be conformed to the image of His Son.”  In advance God knew those who are His and in advance God knew all of the circumstances that would befall or fall into the path of those that are His.  In advance God predetermined that 100% of those people would work in conformity with His great purpose to make us His sons and daughters.  The predestination of God is the destiny of everything that happens to us; is predetermined so that if we are exercised by that matter which God brings our way, it will work in us a conforming to the very nature of the son of Christ.  We have been predestined to be conformed to the image of His dear Son.  That destiny happened before we were born, it happened before the foundation of the world to be honest.  God is after me being conformed to the image of His Son and so He is working out every single matter of my life so that nothing reaches my plate without the spiritual reality that God literally determined that it ought to reach my plate in order that I might better be conformed to the image of His dear Son.  That’s predestination based on the foreknowledge of God.  To all of us comes the same working of God so that His purpose might powerfully be worked into me by His love and by His grace. 

Answering the call

Verse 30, “Moreover whom He did predestinate, them He also called.”  The predestination was the image of His Son so that Christ could be the firstborn of many brothers.  That image is predestined on us so that the circumstances coming our way work in us that conforming to Christ.  Our calling and election is this: that God, foreknowing that we would be His in advance, before we were ever saved, all the circumstances of our childhood, the special things that came our way, the lousy things that came our way, all those things that work in us to begin that process of conforming us to Jesus Christ, and to those He predestinated He also called.  Now calling is a requirement that requires an answer.  Here we are, we are His people and in the greatness of His foreknowledge He said, “To bring out that image of My Son I’m going to let these things happen.”  So He predestines that these things happen to bring that conformity about.  The things come along and God’s expectation is that as soon as a matter approaches the threshold of our lives, God wants us to say, “Lord, You are calling me.  This is evidence of Your calling.  Here Lord I am.  Your servant hears.”  Every person that has been predestined has also been called and the call of God requires an answer.  That answer is the yielding of our spirit, the yielding of ourselves so that we might be made into His image just as He planned.  “Those He called, He also justified.”  No man can come to the Father except the Lord draw him.  So the calling of God goes out and the calling of God is certain. 

Justification is the declaration of our righteousness; it’s the putting on our account the very righteousness of Christ.  That calling of Christ follows that work by which God Himself justifies us and counts us righteous by his mercy. I am declared righteous based upon the call of God.  God has called me to Himself and in that calling He not only called me, He answered that call and made me righteous on behalf of Christ.  “And those He justified He also glorified.”  We will not know glorification until the Lord returns and then we will know glorification for we will see Him as He is and we will be just like Him. As the work of God unfolds, He is the one in charge.  Which is more important – that we can clearly explain how God does this work or that we can clearly recognize in our own lives that God is at work?  Having the right doctrine isn’t going to save us, yielding our lives to Christ will.  It is that yielding of ourselves that allows the sovereign purposes of God to be realized in our life. 

We need to rest in our circumstances and conquer through the sovereign work of God.  That’s the call upon our life.  The sovereignty of God means nothing and it’s useless doctrine unless it translates into one spiritual reality and that’s this: that we learn to rest in the fact that we can have no enemies.  God has a plan for our life; a wonderful plan and we need to yield to His purpose.  And when we yield to His purpose we say, “Here I am Lord, your servant is ready to go, your servant heareth.”  Not one thing that is coming against us is going to harm us according to the plan or the devices of those who send it our way.  It will all be taken and used by God for our good.  Every difficulty and every trial is an opportunity for the purpose of God to be worked in us and where His purpose is there also is His power.  All definition of power is wrapped up in understanding the resurrection from the dead.  We can never know the power of God until we know the death to the flesh, that magnification of power, the resurrection power brings.  The power of God is always on the other side of death.  Hebrews 12 says that He chastises every son He receives and we need to take that touch and say, “Oh Father, there You are, You are present, You are alive, You are coming at me with Your wonderful plan.  Lord help me yield to that.”  We will find the power of God and the faith to walk through a difficulty will yield to us the power of God, not only in getting through the difficulty but moreover, in understanding that once we’re through we have life.  We will not experience the power of God if we have not experienced the death of the cross in the circumstance that God in His foreknowledge predetermined that we, who are called and justified, should be nurtured by in that confirmation need to be conformed to the image of Christ.   

Verse 33, “Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect?  It is God that justifieth.”  If we are God’s own, every legitimate wrong has been covered by the blood of Christ and we are now justified.  The practical affect is that we stop seeing human agents as self-driven and we rather see human agents as divinely-driven.  This forces us to recognize that the purpose of God is the only place where the power of God is unleashed and we need to overcome by the blood of the lamb.  As we yield to the craft of the hand of God, we begin to rest in all His work and we no longer pick up the answer to the accuser. 

Conquerors through death

Verse 35, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?”  We understand from verses 33 and 34 that Christ sitting at the right hand of God is making intercession for us and even as we talk, at this very hour, Christ is interceding for our particular case right now.  And it is that intercession of Christ on our behalf that is the magnificence of the place, the practical working place, of His sovereign grace working in our lives because we move, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” and he goes through this list.  If you look at the list it’s a list of death.  Everything in that list is something that brings death in our lives in some form.  I have the capacity in trusting Christ and His work of righteousness to be immune from the condemnation that Satan brings my way.  There’s where the working of spiritual life through death works in me because every form of persecution is an attempt to get us to admit that we’re wrong. 

Verse 36, “As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.  Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us.”  The work of discipleship in our life is the constant placement of ourselves under the loving care of God who continually puts us in the place of death again and again.  It is in that continual placement of our lives at the place of death that we begin to give evidence and give proof that we ourselves are conquerors because the threat of death doesn’t move us, yea, we will die.  We will die because we are trusting in something, in someone that’s larger than life.  No one can keep us from the purpose of God.  Our lack of faith in it is what causes so much upheaval in our lives.  We don’t recognize that if God is for us who can be against us.  The only thing that will happen by the intended evil is that God makes us more like His Son. 

Abandonment to His purposes

We need to abandon ourselves to the spiritual purpose that God has provided for us out of His love.  We need to yield to the sovereign will of God by His work through the Holy Spirit.  Romans 8:26 says that Christ is seated at the right hand of God and continues to make intercession for us and it says that the Holy Spirit likewise helps our infirmities because we don’t know how we ought to pray and the Holy Spirit makes intercession.  That spiritual reality is to lead us to abandonment.  When I yield to God’s purposes then He accomplishes those purposes by His power.  And many, many, times His power will be manifested and there will be that snatching from the jaws of the lion at the last minute which is salvation.  The greater conformity is that we’re going to be made into the image of Christ.

We ought to be aware of just how little we practically walk in the truth that God is sovereign.  We’re His and therefore we have been placed in a category of predestination and He has determined beforehand what would reach us because He knows full well that only those things that reach us will be the precise tools needed to get us to yield our grasp on this life which is really death.  And in giving up that grasp, we invite death and we find rather life. 

When we are in a circumstance remember that we have a God and look to Him and remember God knows us inside and out, and before the foundation of the world He predetermined that this trial would meet us at this hour and press death into us so that we might find the power of God as He unfolds His purpose in our life to be conformed to the image of God.