Sons and Daughters of the Most High King!

I have not written for some time not from a lack of God’s teaching, but from an overabundance that has refused to even consolidate itself to the ten page ramblings that have become my norm.  The Lord truly has been ridiculously faithful as is His Nature.  More appropriately than, God has been reaffirming his faithfulness over and over again to the point that I can no longer deny it even with my actions.  Even today I know not exactly what I will write, but I do know that the Lord is good, and that is what is the essence of his teaching.  Our understanding of him and of his goodness is his chief desire.  We have an abundant God, we have been abundantly pardoned, and thus we, as God’s children, are to live abundant lives.  That is not to say we will be abundantly rich in monetary value, but you can surely rest assured that we are to be abundantly rich.  We shall be rich in joy, rich in love, rich in wisdom, and power, and promise, and grace.  The life of a saint is one of immense richness.  The life in the Spirit can not be matched, and both of these are truths that the church has lost, they are truths that I have not fully lived into.  We have an identity crisis my friends.  There are too many professing Christians, real heart Christians, who are walking around enslaved by the sin that Christ has freed them from.  The person who walks with Christ is no longer a sinner.  We are saints, and we will occasionally fall back to sinful habits.  However, those moments of sin are no longer our nature.  In Christ our nature is transformed, it is renewed.  Our nature is to be Christ-like, because Christ-likeness is what humanity was created to be.  This is not to say that we are to become gods.  That is the thought of the Buddha, and never a greater lie has been told.  However, the ways of Christ on Earth were not the ways of God, they were the ways of man, in right relationship to His Father. 

Hear as we begin this exploration Colossians 2:9-12, “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority.  In him you were also circumcised, in the putting off of the sinful nature, not with a circumcision done by the hands of men, but with the circumcision done by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism and raised with him through your faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.”

There are many crucial truths in these few verses.  First of all, I want to point out the nature of a Christian.  Right here in these verses is the exact definition of what it means to be “Born Again” in Christ.  Many people have become very accustomed to throwing such language around, but I fear that the church has misplaced where resurrection with Christ truly happens.  The answer comes in verse 12, where Paul says we are raised “through faith in the power of God.”  This is different than saying that new life comes through faith in God.  There are many people that believe in God, but belief in God does not bring new life, because it does not bring power with it.  The power of the Spirit is essential to the new life of the Christian, and there are too many of us who call ourselves Christians, without believing in the power of the Spirit.  Now by saying that I am not saying that salvation only lies within the Pentecostal or Charismatic churches where healings, tongues and prophesy are considered normal.  Though these are important manifestations of God’s power, and any life truly being imaged after Jesus Christ should not be too quick to dismiss these realities, the power of the Spirit goes far beyond that.  Essentially, the power of the Spirit is to change our identity.  Without that power, we will remain enslaved to sin and Satan, even after we meet Jesus Christ.  We must ask ourselves as we evaluate the actions that make up our life whether or not we are living as if we believe with our entire being the mighty power of our loving God.  Do you live like a person who has received in abundance the power and life of the Living God?

You see, the problem of sin against our salvation lies not in God, but in our own minds.  God has been willing and eager to save his people from themselves long before Jesus Christ.  There is a popular understanding of atonement that basically looks like Christ saving the world from an angry God.  This is not the case.  The Son and the Father are one in will, and make no qualms about it.  God is not our enemy, and all too often that is the portrayal.  He is our only ally.  We are our own enemies, and our understanding of ourselves.  The gift of salvation is something that lies on the banquet table ready for anyone to eat.  Listen to Colossians 1:21-23A, “Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior.  But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation – if you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope held out in the gospel.”  Notice where the status of enemies lies according to scripture.  We are not enemies in God’s eyes, but rather in our own.  God is not trying to change his own mind about whether we’re worthy to be saved.  He is trying to change ours, to let us know that his love truly is great enough to call us back home.  Thus, even when we say we believe in Jesus, but look at ourselves as dirty rotten sinners, we have not actually attained the salvation that has been offered us. 

Let’s think about this briefly in terms of the story of the Prodigal Son as told in Luke.  The son leaves his father, thinking that he can do better on his own terms, that life will be more enjoyable his own way.  He makes himself an enemy of his father, and his father’s will.  We see in this story not a father who sits angrily the whole time his son is gone, but one who waits for his son’s return.  It seems in fact, as the son eventually returns that the father may have been waiting all these years just for his lost son to come home.  There is no anger, and no place for shame.  Think about the conditions that the son comes home in.  He finally gets to the point that he must admit his guilt.  He feels himself to be completely unworthy of his father, and his home.  He has chosen to leave home on his own terms, and he rightly recognizes that his is the blame.  Thus, he sets himself in his own mind as unable to be welcomed back into his home as a son, but simply as a servant.  He settles in his heart for a lower position, but when he gets home he has a big surprise awaiting him.  His father will not allow him to take the place of a servant.  He gets no option.  He is the son of the father, and he can only live in the father’s house a son.  This does not seem fair perhaps, but that is the abundant, exuberant pardon of the loving father.  The father does not need time to sulk, he does not need anything to reinstate the son as his son.  In fact, he is exceptionally eager to do just that.  The son is not an enemy in the eyes of his father, but only in his own eyes.  He has settled for a lesser identity than the identity of “son” that the father has for Him, and the father will have his way here.  This my friends is what Jesus says the Kingdom is like, yet somehow we do not live like this is our situation.  (Let me clarify that I am not trying to ignore judgment here, or deny that God has wrath.  This is not a message of Universalism, nor is it a picture of some mamsy-pamsy weak God.  Rather, this is the true reality of our Father whose love runs so deep and so wide and so long that he refuses to restore us to anything less than perfect son/daughter-ship.)

It seems to me that there are three kinds of people in this world.  There are those like the son before he hit rock bottom, who really are perfectly content without the father, and are convinced that life is fine without him.  Then there are those who have recognized their need for a father, and thus admitted to some degree or another that they need a god.  These people turn back to return to the father, but they are convinced that they will have to settle for a lesser position in the house.  This is the problem with all religions besides Christianity:  there is nothing to span the gap of guilt within the human mind.  It is here that the cross becomes essential.  The cross is basically God’s means of saying, just as the father did in the story of the prodigal son, “I am here, I have been waiting, YES! I really love you this much!  YES!  I am this abundant of a father.”  The Bible tells us that we are “co-heirs with Christ”, that we are “holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation.”  Only through Christ and the freedom of the Holy Spirit are these promises available.  God has simply extended the free gift of having Him as a live-in.  He will reside in us, teaching us each day to, “Put on Jesus Christ.”  We are being transformed into the likeness of the Son, that is the perfect, sinless, blemish-free Lamb.  Christ will see that we become his brothers and sisters, and we too must see this as our goal. 

This is the knowledge and the full extent of the Good News: new identity.  We have been living as outsiders, peasants, rebels, slaves, and many of us have maintained those identities even after knowing Jesus.  God would have us know the greatness of his story though, and if we think ourselves humble by living for less than what God desires we are sadly mistaken.  One of Satan’s greatest weapons is convincing us of our pride.  I am a prideful person, and to pretend otherwise would be outrageous, but I am also a chosen and called Son of God whom God yearns to welcome back into his courts, and in whom God wants to show the world the riches of His power, and to pretend otherwise in this regard may be an even greater sin than not properly dealing with one’s pride.  You see, Satan loves to take our good attempts at humility and use them to restrain us into a life of less than the Father’s desire for life, and the reality is that anything less than what the Father calls life is actually death.  Thus, we are lulled into believing that we have gained life, and are humbly refusing to get carried away with our effort and role in the Kingdom, when in reality we are simply settling for another form of death.  Satan you sly dog!  He shall not have us that easy though, for we are sons and daughters of the Most High King, and your Royal Daddy will stop at nothing to remind you of who you are.  Praise God for his persistence in claiming us, in empowering us, and in setting us free to his will.

I will end this rather disjointed discussion with some thoughts from 2 Corinthians 10:3-5, where Paul writes, “Though we are of this world we do not wage war as the world does.  The weapons we fight with are not of this world.  On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.  We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”  The reason the weapons we fight with are not of this world is that the war we fight is also not of this world.  When Jesus was being arrested Peter thought his sword would have a part to play in the battle, but the fight Jesus was going to win was not a fight that could be entered into on Earthly terms.  In the same way, we must be aware of the cosmic battle that is going on for this world.  We are at war my friends, and the enemy wants nothing more than to slow up God’s soldiers with an identity crisis.  We live in a world that Satan has claimed as a Stronghold, any and every heart that has not been set free by the power of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit is strongly claimed by the Enemy.  We, as Princes and Princesses of the Most High King are called and commanded to enter into battle to reclaim those lost Brothers and Sisters to the Royal Family.  The first difference between this fight and Earthly fights is that our enemy is not of this world, and we must not confuse these things.  It is our nature to make enemies of other people, but we must not be like the older brother in the story of the Prodigal Son who forgets to acknowledge and celebrate his brother’s identity as family.  Atheists are not the foes of Christians, Muslims are not the foes of Christians, Jesus-less Christians by name are not the foes of Christians.  They are simply our enemies and God’s enemies in their own minds, but we must see them too in the light of the Cross of Christ.  This is by no means me saying that we should be content with our siblings being lost, but rather that we must remember that the enemy is the one they are enslaved to, not their own soul.  Satan would like nothing more than to remain hidden in the background while we fight in the flesh against those whom God would have us claim as our brothers.  Secondly, and most importantly in this battle, we must demolish the arguments and pretenses within ourselves that Satan will set up against our Knowledge of God.  The Knowledge of God is our knowledge of our new identity of freedom and power in Christ.  As we have discussed before Satan has crippled many Christians by setting up in their minds arguments and pretenses against this knowledge.  It is for this reason that Paul tells us in Ephesians that we are given the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.  We must do battle in our own minds!  This is the initial battle ground, and we must hold it for God.  It is easy to read Paul’s words about demolishing arguments and pretenses and start thinking about those people elsewhere who are arguing against the faith.  We must not forget those things either, but Paul is quick to remind us where the most detrimental arguments come from, from within.  We were formerly captive to our sinful ways of thinking, but now the roles have we reversed.  How beautiful this gift of God is!  Before our sinful patterns of thought were the jailer and we the imprisoned, but through the power of the Holy Spirit God now gives us the keys and tells us to take captive those very thoughts that once contained us.  Claim your identity in Christ as the jailer of your sinful ways, and the empowered prince or princess of our Holy God and King.

Then, with that identity firm and with the shield of faith firmly in place against any lies of the evil one march into this world reminding our Brothers and Sisters of their rightful identity.  Do not think that this battle is simply one that need be fought outside of the church either.  I believe that much of the American church is more enslaved to their fallen identity than even the most hardened Atheists.  Remember that Satan cannot create anything of his own, he can only manipulate that which already exists.  It is for this reason that pride is often though of as the most common and the worst sin.  It is because our nature as created by God wants the best for ourselves.  The reality is that God gave us the best, and we were to rightfully and hungrily desire that best in God.  However, Satan tricked us by convincing us that there was something better just beyond the best God had given us, some luscious treat he was holding back from us.  Sadly though there was and is a trapdoor that first step beyond the best of God, and it plummets us from royalty to pauperhood in an instant.  Thus, Satan trapped us in our longing for that best that God wishes for us to have, to a pattern of constantly striving and hitting the trapdoor again and again and again.  The danger is that many people have come to Christ, seen the best and then been taught the problem is with their longing for the best, their pride.  Thus they break the cycle of striving and hitting the trapdoor, but they rather than seizing and claiming the gift of best that God is holding out, settle for a humble, dreary existence in the pits of this world.  Claim your identity as an alien and stranger in this world.  Let us lead a revolution in which the whole church claims their full identity, and let us watch the Holy Spirit demolish every stronghold of the enemy and usher in the Kingdom of the Living God!