“We don’t label people like we used to, with our handy pre-printed tags. We even tried doing this with Jesus, but He blew our definitions apart” 2 Cor 5:16 (The Word on the street translation)
Jesus blew our definitions apart … and still does.
Jesus simply did not fit the religious expectations … and still doesn’t.
He did not qualify for any of the official religious positions that were available … yet God highly exalted Him and gave Him a name above every other name. His background was a bit dodgy, too dodgy for some to associate with Him … yet before Abraham was, He is. His authority was questioned because He did not submit Himself under the ‘covering’ of any of the groups of His day … yet the Father acknowledged Him and that was all the recognition He needed. The religious structures of His day could not contain Him … and still He does not dwell in temples or organisations made by human hands.
If there was anyone who should have recognized who Jesus really was, it should have been those who dedicated their lives to the study of the prophetic scriptures … yet, being absorbed in interpreting the past and defining their future hope, they missed the present – the greatest event that occurred right in front of their eyes.
John 5:39 “You have your heads in your Bibles constantly because you think you’ll find eternal life there. But you miss the forest for the trees. These Scriptures are all about me!
How many precious believers are stuck in the same trap today – refining their doctrine; neutralized by a future expectation that contributes nothing to their present encounter with God.
When John wrote the letter we know as 1John, he does not muse on the days gone past, those awesome days when Christ was still in the flesh with them. No. He overflows with excitement about an experience that is present and available to all. He is the same one who wrote: “There are so many other things Jesus did. If they were all written down, each of them, one by one, I can’t imagine a world big enough to hold such a library of books.” (John 21:25) One would have imagined that he would have spend the rest of his life recording these words and deeds – I mean these are the words and deeds of God manifested in the flesh! Yet, he doesn’t! He discovers a greater message than just recording historic facts – introducing his audience into a living present encounter with I AM. (Not ‘I used to be’, or ‘I will be’). He discovered the God who blows our definitions, our doctrines and our structures apart.
We develop our handy pre-printed tags such as ‘Hindu’, ‘Budist’, ‘Catholic’, ‘Charismatic’ or how about ‘Calvinistic’ and ‘Universalist’. Some of our labels become even more personal: ‘I’m from the First Baptist Church on Lewis Road’ and they are from that new charismatic fellowship called(labelled) ‘New Covenant’ and those poor people over there can’t even afford their own building! They are meeting in a house!
I think it’s time that we blow these definitions apart! I think it’s time for us to see from His point of view.
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Great stuff!!
Eph 3:6 The mystery is that people who have never heard of God and those who have heard of him all their lives (what I’ve been calling outsiders and insiders) stand on the same ground before God. They get the same offer, same help, same promises in Christ Jesus. The Message is accessible and welcoming to everyone, across the board.
Eph 3:7 This is my life work: helping people understand and respond to this Message. It came as a sheer gift to me, a real surprise, God handling all the details.
Eph 3:8 When it came to presenting the Message to people who had no background in God’s way, I was the least qualified of any of the available Christians. God saw to it that I was equipped, but you can be sure that it had nothing to do with my natural abilities. And so here I am, preaching and writing about things that are way over my head, the inexhaustible riches and generosity of Christ.
Eph 3:9 My task is to bring out in the open and make plain what God, who created all this in the first place, has been doing in secret and behind the scenes all along.
M
Brother Andre… Greetings on this eve of Thanksgiving Day 2006. As you know already, sometimes a post on your blog requires more than a small comment. I know you get the long e-mails from certain folk that want to say more than an Amen.
I just read the post for today, about Jesus blowing our definitions apart. That is one of the greatest revelations a Christian can have. If you think about it, that was the only way we could come to the place that we can love everybody the same. When we can pull down the walls that separate us, we have a much easier chance of becoming one body.
I am still excited about your insight on Christ in us, and living in the New Man rather than the old nature we are taught to believe.
There will be many ideas thrown your way, and many other brothers and sisters with great enthusiasm about their ‘new way of thinking’, wondering why you can’t see things their way. In my search for the Kingdom and His Righteousness, I have been led to delve into many of these great misadventures, but mind you, just long enough to see that Jesus Christ was not the center of attraction, and then I would reset my course, looking straight ahead to Jesus, THE WAY, THE TRUTH AND THE LIGHT.
When you are given one of these great revelations from others, and it doesn’t immediately strike you as a revelation in your own spirit, just quietly stash it on the shelf, consider it now and then, before you decide what to do with it. Most generally, it will get lost in the shuffle, or else it may appear later down the road with another label on it… or packaged a different way so you can use it.
Revelation knowledge is the greatest and most exciting thing, and when a NEW revelation comes from the Father, I get so overwhelmed that I can hardly contain myself. I used to go running out to find someone to share it with and then go into a state of shock when I could find no one that could see what I was seeing. So don’t let that shut you down… just, “Thank you Lord for the word. Yes I see it. Thank you for opening my eyes on this.”
I want to share with you the greatest of all revelations that came to me. This was back in the late sixties, and because it has been drilled into our thinking that it has been taught this way for generations and generations, we must stick with what the teachers teach, and the preachers preach.
When Peter received the revelation that Jesus was indeed the Son of The Living God… THE MESSIAH! Matthew 16-13. I saw this in the KJV, and eagerly I would search every other translation to see if by chance I could find one, JUST ONE, that got the same revelation as I, but to no avail. Even the new Message version goes along with the rest.
Jesus ask the group of disciples, “Who do men say that I am?” Peter said, “I say that you are the Christ, The Son of The Living God.” Then Jesus turned and said… “Blessed are you Peter, because this revelation of truth did not come from men, but from Our Father… And I also say that YOU ARE… Peter.” (The Christ, the body of Christ, He is the head of the Body, we are his body… we are one with him.) If Jesus would have only said it this way, “And Peter, I also say that you are.” Then we would not have had every hospital and church named St. Peter. Peter was no different or more chosen than you Andre, or me. It could have been any one of the twelve that answered him. Then upon saying that, Jesus went on to say, “Upon this truth, upon this revelation (rock) I will build my church, and the Gates of Hell will not prevail against it…(the church)… And because you have received this revelation of who we are, I will give to you the KEYS of the Kingdom of Heaven, and what so ever you bind on earth is bound in Heaven, and what so ever is loosed in earth (mortal) shall be loosed in heaven.” ( spirit)
But we see Peter, the humble fisherman, eager to do Gods will and quick to speak up, running around the last two centuries with a big ring of keys and even made gate keeper of heaven…. You know every one will have to get St Peters OK to enter heaven. It could have been John or Jude or Matthew, or any one of the other twelve just as well, but it was Peter that was made a little rock, and a keeper of the keys, and the subject of a million sermons, because he got the revelation. But they are so set on Peter and his keys, that they didn’t hear Jesus say, “And Peter, I also say that you are, just what you said that I was. We all are Christ. Later in the chapter Jesus warns them that they should tell no man that he (with a little ‘h’) is the Christ, because they don’t get it without the revelation is given to them from the Father.
This has been the greatest foundation for all my revelations. Now that I see this, I can see the rest of them better. It’s like the parable of the sower… Jesus sowed the seed, and some fell on good soil.
Have you been able to see it this way? I would be glad to hear your thoughts on it. I love the word so much, and when I get started… it is hard to get into another frame of mind.
Happy Thanksgiving, maybe not in the UK but in America this is a great holiday. Be blessed brother Andre. Love in Christ… Oscar R Warren
Hi Andre,
Greetings to you and your lovely wife and the bairns .I have been reading your writings lately and observing from the wings the responses of others. I find that sometimes to hear the Lord in the morass of words we need a sense of detachment and objectivity to hear or discern where the Lord is in it all. I just wanted to pick up on some random things that stand out for me and throw them into the mix. So anything i say will be me just thinking out loud rather than trying to say anything in a carefully thought out manner.
There was something in your dialogue with the brother called Albert who commented on one of your articles and the gracious response you gave that particularly caught my attention. It was the difference of emphasis you highlighted in knowing the Lord first hand by,as you put it, knowing Him by divine encounter. Also your recent article i.e. “blowing our definitions apart” just got me thinking about some things that are all connected in someway.
I,ll do my best in my own clumsy way to try to put into words something that for me is not easy to define because its born out of a struggle to explain an ancient lost experience which i believe is the birthright and destiny of every child of God. There is a yearning in the heart of the Lords (an innate biological yearning put there by God that is native to our species) that will “only” be satisfied with divine encounter with the Lord himself. For this i know even if i am, though not, the only one that believes it, that the Lords people deserve Him and are designed specifically for the purpose of encounter/intimacy with him.
You see my brother when it comes to divine encounter I’m not talking about this experience in the context of present day practices or knowing it with-in the context of the modern mind set we hold that so easily labels and categorizes this experience. You see my brother i would trade in all the positional truth in the theological world gathered in a life times study for 2 minutes of divine encounter basking in His presence. A brother whom i know who has grown up in a deep experience of knowing the Lord with-in the matrix and natural habitat of organic church life once told me a story which i will relate to you. He was studying at a highly reputed theological seminary in America and once asked his professor this question ” how did the early Christians know they had an indwelling Lord living inside of them”. The professors’ reply was that they would have only known this by the witness of the spirit of God.
The early churched was birthed by divine encounter and hundreds of years before they ever wrote anything down they knew the actual experience of divine encounter and knew what it meant to fellowship with an indwelling Lord outside of time and space in dimensions unseen that was their dominant daily reality. When i speak of living in invisible realms i don’t mean the charismatic experience of miracles ,ect.
This experience i allude to here ( of fellowshipping with an indwelling Lord) which is the normal Christian life really pre-dates the early church. The Christian life really has its origin with-in the fellowship of the Godhead .This is what we were called to, this is our birthright and destiny .We have been brought into the fellowship of love between the Father and Son. We are the 4th member of the Godhead his divine counterpart his Bride designed for intimacy and companionship with Him.
What Christ experienced with the Father before time is the only model and proper definition of the christian life, nothing else is the christian life. When Christ came to this earth that relationship/experience of living by the life of the Father did not change. He lived by the life of his indwelling Father and passed this same experience onto us. John says just like us your fellowship is with the Father and the Son no different. Father i pray that they maybe one “just as ” you and i are one, the same experience. There is something about sharing in the divine nature of Christ that gives us the ability to behold divinity and fellowship ( which is more than the common notion of prayer) the mutual exchange of divine love and life. Somehow i am convinced that experience is really only known and found with-in the corporate experience of the ecclessia.The testimony of Christ expressed in fullness through a many membered body is fullness anything less is limitation.
I remember when i was down visiting you Andre you made a statement something like “if Paul’s Churches were meant to last they would still be around todayâ€. Well my brother i believe they are still around today but they are rare and there has always been little pockets of them all the way down through history. The visible corporate expression of Christ with-in a geographical locality is the place of divine encounter where we learn Christ together there is more i could say on this alas i don’t think its a popular message or one that many will sign up for history has born this out. The modern mindset places individual ministry above Her this was not the mindset of the early church many speak of their calling few speak of her place in the heart of God. The part is never greater than the whole .God never restricts our ministry to the confines of the local church but i strongly believe its His place of preparation and for those who wish to know Christ in a deep way. If you think im missing the mark here brother then pray me but Christ and his church is where my heart lies its a pipe dream that has never died in me despite my many disappointments in the pursuit of what i believe are ultimate issues central to the Lords heart. There i said it .Finito. Andre i bless you and your dear family as your follow your heart in the Lord…….For-ever one Him ……Roddy
What an encouraging letter – thank you my brother. You are constantly on our hearts and minds, inspiring gratitude to our Lord for such precious friends.
I absolutely agree with you that the fellowship that is available between brothers have not been appropriated to the extent that it could be. There are such dimensions of unity, of oneness in spirit and mind … we have simply scratched the surface.
For me the most important part is that we do not neglect – fail to appreciate – our fellowship with one-another, because we are looking for a bit bigger fellowship than just two or three gathered together. If two or three is good enough for Jesus to call a gathering – it is good enough for us! – what do you think?
You’ve touched on so many beautiful truths – our fellowship being an extension of the enjoyment between the Trinity. The fellowships that Paul started – we are in agreement – what survived is the heart and truth of these fellowships – not the nametag or organisation. In other words it was the God-part that survived not the man-made part.
Lotsa love at home.
One of the hardest things for me, an ex-deacon, ex-Baptist,(oops, there the labels are again)is dropping labels. 50+ years of labeling people is hard to overcome. Spirit of Truth, show me the real picture of your loved ones. Help me overcome my human tendency to label people for we are the same in the beloved. Thank you Andre for those uplifting words.
Hi Don,
Religious labels are probably the worst because they suggest that God has placed these levels and labels in place! Yet, to see from His point of view does not reduce anyone, but elevates everyone.
Thanks for the note.
Andre