What do we find in the living Christ?
PRELUDE
Earth, as it now stands in untruth, is a spiritually lifeless environment. If one follows the ways of the vast majority living here, their life will be lead to a final destination of eternal death. Earth’s spiritual lifelessness stems from our being involved in the various deceptions, orchestrated by the Adversary, that are in opposition with the original purposes that our Creator intended for us. Therefore, Earth with its many illusions of the truth, has become a full-time place for the cause of deceiving us to unknowingly lose our lives to the wiles of darkness.
While on Earth a transformation occurs in us, mostly because we are taking on the posture of our surroundings, and we become “moving” lifeless beings stirring around in its habitat. This man-made transformation is not designed to take us into the everlasting, but instead into “self-destruction”. Being such, we can also think of Earth as it is, of not only being an environment of gradual physical death, but of being able to cause other deteriorating ways to occur in us as well.
We come to learn that life apart from He who created us is not really life at all. We have seen the concept of this many times when the author of a series of novels dies. His physical death generally signals the end of the series. The physical death of a steward, whom God had given the blessing of a special ministry, usually signals the end of that particular ministry as well. The seed is gone, therefore so are the unique roots and actions of that seed; never to rise up again in the purity of their works. Others may try to continue it or emulate it, but it can usually be attested that it is not the same as before.
Each and every one of us existing on Earth is carrying forth a “ministry” in our daily lives, whether we understand it or not. Your ministry comes in one of two forms, a resurrection–light or a death–darkness. A resurrection ministry, which requires life changes, ushers forth an inner light while a death ministry brings on the deepening of outer darkness. While moving about in everyday life doing the things we deem are necessary, we are speaking to the masses around us about what we are and who we stand for. Each ministry is subject to the woes and lures that Earth generously offers and these enticing traps make death’s path appear to be much more lucrative and advantageous because of the apparent rising amount of crowds who are in acceptance of its dark practices.
The negative actions that are brought forth from the surface of ourselves are proofs that the Adversary’s mission is bound up in this world that he has postured as a society. This so called society, in all its facets, is the climate of the workings of dark forces roaming around each of us with a goal to bring us down to an eternal dark destination. We witness this daily in the senseless attacks we bring on each other from meanness, cheating and lying to verbal and physical assaults.
In the Adversary’s worldly set-up, we exhaustively strive daily to stay afloat, to nourish ourselves, to survive, no matter what that social class of survival is. We all believe that we have the same challenge before us in order to exist and we think to quit or slumber from our efforts is to begin to slip down. This idea finds the un-resurrected person constantly in the uncomfortable position of having to choose between greed, self, evil and wickedness.
There is by creation, a knowing inside of us that tells us that a resurrected attitude is much more appealing than one of death. Therefore, we attempt to attain its appearance by our own strength without paying the price that it costs. The ideas we use for the efforts we make to mimic this inner resurrected change, originate from the methods that were formulated by the core of self and they will eventually fall void.
Most of these attempts are rooted in our not wanting to accept our true dependency on the one who created us. We instead want to be “independent” as our society has taught us to yearn for throughout the years so that we can believe that we are in control. Under society’s acceptable independent cover ups for our self-driven motives, we can secretly pursue our independence for our own “self’s sake” rather than for others as well. A death environment always courts the faulty idea that everyone can be “master” through some form of independence and without revelation of this untruth, many will continue to attempt this useless feat whether openly or discreetly.
All matters under this society’s government, regardless of shape, size, format or color, reach to the same unfavorable lifeless point. We do not go upward through time of participating in its offerings, but instead we go down–way down, under. To have stood for a lifetime of facing the constant battle required to exist here so that we can be counted present in this society, with its ever insatiable demands, is difficult enough, and then to die un-resurrected makes all our activities have been in utter, utter, vain.
Some are so regretfully fooled, to participate with the majority here, under the possible hope of a few words of kindness said amongst peers at life’s end or by works for an impressive recession of vehicles to view a tombstone of unique material; and yet merely a few months later, all is forgotten both on and below the Earth’s surface.
Can we really define this as having lived, impressions made to other mimicking, powerless people around us? The more the merrier society says.
And to those who managed to have really stood the tallest while here in this lifeless trap, who think they are powerfully taking on matters totally into their own hands, for example, by funding the construction of various monuments of extreme elevations scattered throughout, their fall is even far greater. They then sanction their rights for feeling privileged by gracing these monuments with their signature names, which only prolongs the sentence whether in their presence or in their absence. They feel pridefully worthy by our orderly applause and “ahhs” at their monetary works while they are still walking around in the inevitable trap.
If one should decide to seriously take on a life of promoting a legacy, he immediately poses as participating in a spiritually bankrupt, purposeless production. Certainly we are moved by the lives they boast to have touched through their calculated orchestrations of what they deem to be generosities, in addition to their motivated appeasements, all coming from their outer man. However, we must ask ourselves, “What sort of legacy are they really leaving behind?” In reality, they have only brought the recipients into an even lower state of where they are standing themselves, for the real root of their actions are always, yes always, coated with the idea of maintaining mastership!
A MINISTRY CARRIED OUT IN A DEATH ENVIRONMENT, BUT LIVING IN LIFE AS YOU GO ABOUT . . .
Mankind’s actions stemming from the inner portion of himself, the resurrected man, is ministry on the side of the higher destination–eternity; a vast contrast to the dark, lower one with a destiny of death awaiting.
The resurrected Christ lives because we are alive and we are alive because He lives in us! He is living because we are choosing, by our own wills, to take on His likeness. We know that outside of Him is us, of which has already been proven that we, on our own, are only capable of producing, in the end, what is in our very seed root – sin.
The ministry operating in a resurrected life will bear the fruit of Christ’s accomplished purposes in them, with that light coming through even in the severe darkness of this earthly environment. We know by evidence of seeing change coming out of us, that our hearts have been altered from what we once were by His Spirit living in us, He is living! We know that it is a fact that this is only possible in the power of God’s manifested resurrection; bounded in His honor of His son’s work on the cross, for we have seen and see the results of our own efforts being attempted without him.
But a resurrected life has a price – it costs; just as it did for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and there is no escaping this absolute truth! You have to give up something, you have to let go of things while here, you have to pay for it! Perhaps that is where the confusion lies, bringing many to choose what they have come to consider the lesser path of pain, death.
There are so many things in our societies that continue to come, go and then re–enter in a new and so called “improved” version, but strip it down and it is simply the same dead end place. Jesus’ life producing option given to us, by the cross, has power over any and all societies, as we have seen through our lives, as well as the lives of others. We have seen the bright light shining through anyway and anyhow in the midst of any and all dark things.
If we are one to have truly received Him, our personal way that we know Christ is alive is by the different experiences going on in our very inner selves. It is not what we have manufactured, but what we have allowed to process in us through Him, and so it flows out of us naturally like living water despite ourselves, yes even when many times we want to do something otherwise.
The Old Testament is overflowing with numerous details of who man is when he is without the Spirit of Christ within. These stories have revealed the impossibility of overcoming the strong holds of self alone; that which lures us to remain in darkness until it is too late. Mercy and grace are wonderful words!
The things experienced from the practice of existence in a death place, proves to us that there is a battle going on of two opposite forces at work within us by nature. However, we are producing things of His likeness by His resurrection power despite being in the trenches of darkness. So when people around us gravitate towards us because of those rays of light making their way out from within us by His power, they and we cannot help but know that He is living!
We should be the magnified proof to the world of His life. We were designed to be just that – an ongoing extension of Him. He has given us the ability to overcome as He did by passing over that Old Testament type soul and process ourselves through Him – a re-birth, so as to look and be like He is. He has allowed for His fresh, living Spirit to directly manifest itself within us, giving us the power to wake up – to see, to bring true life by the resurrecting of the very Spirit that gave us breathe at our earthly birth; and with that breathe, we were given the right to choose to live for eons and eons in His presence. Praise the Lord!
Let us not confuse the cruel actions of the completely blinded man; the man who has allowed himself to be taken to a very, very, very distant place in self. He might attempt to overturn the rays, even unto what seems to have taken an earthly life pre-maturely away from here; but even in such an allowed purpose as that, that sacrifice may have been just the touch that was needed to secure yet another lost soul for the Lord, giving it eternity with Him. Yes again, a living Christ in action!
When we surrender our wills so that the power of Christ’s resurrection comes forth within the earth through our lives, we show the world that He is living! His cross work and resurrection was carried forth out of love in this exact same death environment that we live in now, and with that we must say is ultra-power! As we accomplish a re-birth by His power, we set apart that which is His life from this society. We see for ourselves that our lower “self” thinking has truly risen through His love, putting us in a position to share in the honor and glory given to Him by our Heavenly Father.
In the living Christ, you find within yourself His life; a life which graciously forgives instead of crying out for vengeance. You find a God kind of love, peace and joy. Where have you seen this awesome form of existence at least a few times in your life? I hope in the presence of your very own presence. Jesus Christ lives!
TP
In His Word: Hebrews 12:22-24