6 Minutes
God is not playing with us today. The Potter is not experimenting with His clay. We are His real commendation, and we are a good tribute for His Son, Jesus Christ, in that God is for us as we are His truth declaring that he was sent of God. This is evidenced in our hearts that all may read. There is special revelation, revelation God gives to selected messengers, charging them to bring the message to others. The message may be presented orally or may be consigned to writing, as when John wrote authoritative letters to the messengers of the churches. God reveals Himself in the events of nature and history. We learn of Him from the changing seasons, from the power of nature, from the sun, moon, and stars. In one sense, all of God’s revelation is word-revelation, because it proceeds from God’s own speech, the bible. He enters our experience and speaks to us in human words. But it is in the Person of Jesus Christ where deepest divine revelation is made. He is God’s presence to us. And it is in him that we sculpt the word that others may see him and that their faith response is filled to the capacity to love the truth.
II Corinthians 3:2-4
Our hearts are like the ark of the covenant, containing the tables of the law and the gospel, written with the finger, that is, by the Spirit, of the living God. He has purpose in how He is sculpting us, and that should comfort us. He has a plan, and He knows what He is doing. When God puts us on the wheel of circumstance, He means to accomplish something. He has a purpose. Our sculpting the word brings scripture to life. We are to create a visual message not as a graven image, but as a living faith to shape a godly character in the people of God. Because we strive to endure, because we hold fast, because we live out that godly faith, God makes us the ultimate fulfillment of His promises. Those before us had the fulness of faith in that which we will do and be in the power that God bestows. But their faith was the shadow of what is to be. The final remnant of God will have the faith of Jesus and we will come to the fulness of the revelation that results from the atonement. This is the atonement that ends the sacrificial pattern. This is our true joining in this life, with the life of Christ. The worth of Jesus’ work will accompany our conscious at-one-ment with God, our inseparability from God. This is our overcoming that Jesus spoke of. It is our overcoming the belief of separation from God, yet being distinct and individual. We must overcome our “dusty”beginning. Remember the man who washed the clay and spittle off his eyes...remember the man whom God formed of the dust...remember the one born of water and the spirit. This is our overcoming all heredity which separated us from God. Baptism, or washing off the mud, and being born again is the revelation of our atonement. Through spiritual baptism, and regeneration, we put off material beliefs and false individuality. We can be at-one-mind with God without being the same thing as God. Here we find perfect peace. Here is what our life explains; that suffering is an error of sinful sense and truth destroys sin, and that eventually both sin and suffering will fall at the feet of everlasting love. And no power can withstand divine love. Nothing can separate us.
Romans 8:38, 39
Here, we denote a full, and strong, and affectionate persuasion, arising from the experience of the strength and sweetness of the divine love. And here we enumerate all those things which might be supposed likely to separate between God, Christ and us, and truth concludes that it could not be done. Not the terror of death or the hope of life. The good angels will not, and the bad angels cannot. The principalities are engaged friends, the powers are restrained enemies. The troubles that are now, nor the fear of troubles that we know are coming. Time shall not separate us, eternity shall not. Things present separate us from things to come, and things to come separate and cut us off from things present; but neither of these will cause us to withdraw from the love of Christ, whose preference for us is interwoven with both present things and things to come. No amount of prosperity, no depth of adversity and disgrace; nothing from heaven above; nothing on earth below. Not anything that can be named or thought of. Nothing but sin. We must overcome every heretical trait. God creating us in His image, His likeness did not make us “like” God. It gave us the connection to love that we be God- ing, the expression of love. We were/are to be practicing being more and more love-ing, and love-ing more and more purely. Being love-ing is doing God’s will, and we cannot help but to do love’s will because it is the only will. It is by the atonement, entered in by the covenant, that we are recipients of the fruit of the blood of Christ that deepens and increases our union. It is Christ, who is our awareness of our atonement with God, that will sustain us in times of trial, temptation, and persecution; to show us what faith has done in days that are past, and what it will do still in similar circumstances...and the sculpted Word made flesh, dwelling in us, full of grace and truth...this is that some better thing provided for us.
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