The basis of the gospel is the fact that Christ was wounded for our transgressions and chastised for our iniquities, and by His stripes we are healed (Isaiah 53:5).
This is the basis of our faith. We identify ourselves vicariously with Him in His experiences; we are aware that He wrought all on our behalf. This is true on the level in which we have walked.
Now the Lord has revealed that our relationship to Him is not so much based on our identifying ourselves with Him as it is based on an identical experience with Him.
He did not ask us to identify ourselves with Him. He said, “Suffer with Me; you are a partaker of My sufferings.”
We do not merely identify ourselves with His righteousness; we are identical with His righteousness. It is not just an identifying experience; it is an identical experience.
The work of the cross is not just an event that causes you to rejoice that He died for you. Rather, you have an identical experience. You may not physically hang on a cross; but as far as the spiritual reality of it is concerned, you do go through an identical experience. You are made conformable to His death.
We die out to everything not like the Lord, by no longer yielding to the flesh, but walking in the Spirit.
What is the work of the cross? The cross is a trading platform. He was made sin that we might be made the righteousness of God. We trade our sorrows for his joy, our sicknesses for his health, our mind for his mind, our emotions for his emotions, our will for His will. The list goes on and on. Jesus did not only die for our sin, he died as us.
The work of the cross is appropriating the divine nature. When we become aware of reacting like a fallen son or daughter of Adam and eve we look to the Lord who He wants to become in us and we put that on. We put on all the divine attributes of God.
There is no greater privilege than to be a partaker of the sufferings of Christ. When I read how Paul had to fulfill in his body what remained of the sufferings of Christ for His Body’s sake (Colossians 1:24), it means much more to me than it ever has before.
Paul suffered the same agonies that Christ did—maybe not to the same measure or extent, but it was an identical experience.
We experience persecution, and being rejected by men. Everything Jesus suffered in his walk with the Father we suffer because we are following Him.
If our brother or sister sins we suffer with Christ in that we mourn for them, we intercede for them.
We do not merely identify ourselves with the love of Jesus Christ; we have an identical love. The Word says, We love him, because he first loved us. 1 John 4:19.
When He loved us, He did not send down a divine love to see us echo back a feeble human love. When we are born of God, we love Him with His own identical love. Our love may not be in the same quantity or to the same degree; but when we love God, it is with His love. It is an identical love. It is not human love; it is a divine love. When He loves us, we are given the capacity to love Him back with the same kind of love.
When we suffer, it is not a little mystical experience of identification. We reach into His sufferings. But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish in order that I may gain Christ, and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith, that I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings (as we walk with the Lord, we walk right into the fellowship of His sufferings), being conformed to His death; in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained it, or have already become perfect, but I press on in order that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus. Philippians 3:7–12. Paul admitted that he did not feel he had attained the resurrection yet, but he was pressing toward it.
In a very real sense, when we accept Christ, we experience some of His resurrection life, that power to quicken us and make us alive. “You hath he made alive, who were dead in your trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1). I am concerned about this idea of being conformable to His death, of coming right into the same experience that He had and into the fellowship of His sufferings.
Romans 8 speaks about the manifestation of the sons of God, about moving up into this place of authority with Him. The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow-heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him in order that we may also be glorified with Him. Romans 8:16, 17.
This Scripture is not speaking about identification with Christ’s sufferings. It is talking about going through His sufferings with Him. It is not that we identify ourselves with His rule; we are going to rule with Him. We will suffer with Him, and we will rule with Him.
In the work that Christ does in our lives, there is absolutely no distinction between Him and us—in what He has been through, what He is, or what He is going to be.
This is the will of God, for whom the Father foreknew, He predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son (Romans 8:29). That is not just some reasonable facsimile. We actually go through everything He went through. We experience everything with Him.
We suffer with Him. We are crucified with Him. We are so identical with Him that He becomes the first born among many brethren.
He is leading many sons to glory; and all of them will be conformed to what Christ has been, to what He is, to what He has gone through, and to the authority that He inherits.
We are not just identified with Christ; we are identical with Him.
When Paul said that the Body is not one member but many, yet it is one Body, and so also is Christ, he was not speaking blasphemy (1 Corinthians 12:12–14).
Christ intends to manifest Himself throughout eternity in a many-membered Body, made one in Christ. Christ will eternally be one, and all the members will be one with Him because they have experienced the identical dealings. Whatever He went through, He sees that they appropriate and go through an identical experience, though it may not be on the same scale or in the same measure.
Let me illustrate this principle of an identical experience with a hypothetical example. Suppose a man has a terrible illness and barely survives. After he recovers, the scientists and doctors may take some of his blood and make a serum with which they inoculate his children. The father watches anxiously as the children have the same symptoms that he had, though not as severe. They do not come nearly as close to utter destruction as he did, but they have a fever, and their bodies must fight the same germs. They experience the same disease, but in a much milder form, and they build up the same immunity that is in his body. The children have not identified themselves with their father’s illness; they have partaken of it. They have experienced it. They are identical with him.
Likewise, the children of the Heavenly Father can walk through all the plagues and pestilences with Jesus. They are children, like unto Him. They cannot sin for they are born of God, and His seed remaineth in them (1 John 3:9). We will come to that sinless state, too. We do not attain it through our individual experiences, but through an identical participation in Christ’s experience. We partake in it. We believe to become the righteousness of God. We believe that everything God is, we are becoming by virtue of what Christ is producing and experiencing within us.
If indeed we suffer with Him in order that we may also be glorified with Him. We notice the phrases: “with Him”—“suffering with Him,” “glorified with Him.” In bringing many sons to glory, He made the Captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings (Hebrews 2:10). We are coming into the same glory. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God. Romans 8:18, 19.
Paul spoke about wanting to reach up into all the experiences God has prepared for His people. Paul said he had not really attained unto the resurrection from the dead, and that was true (Philippians 3:10–12). But you do not have to wait for all these experiences to be identically and perfectly reproduced in you before you can move into God’s authority. To the extent that you submit to the sufferings of Christ being wrought in you, to that extent the beginning of authority starts to move in you also. At a very early time, before the disciples had gone through many testings and while they were still carnal, arguing over who would be the greatest, they were commissioned; authority was laid upon them; and they went out to heal the sick, cast out devils, and do many wonderful works (Luke 10).
Christ’s experience that He wrought for us is operating in us. Let me give another illustration. A man does not have to wait until he is twenty-one years of age to inherit the entire estate of his father. The will could stipulate that if the son can prove he is a true son and an heir, he can stand upon the document that his father issued and go before the court and have released to him whatever he has need of until the time when the entire inheritance will be given him. The same principle applies to those who are moving into sonship. We will frustrate people if we try to convince them that they will move into sonship all at once. It would also be a grievous error to tell them they cannot reach into this provision of God until the sweet by-and-by. We have never taught that. We speak of the things to come and also of the way to walk in them right now. Not only has God given us a glorious heritage, but He has given us an earnest of it, a foretaste that we can have now.
I am convinced that we can move much more rapidly if we continue, with all our hearts, to submit to the marvelous work of the cross being wrought in us—identifying ourselves completely in an identical experience with Christ and His sufferings, being willing to bear His reproach, and at the same time reaching out in the spirit to draw the provisions of that inheritance in which we can walk right now.
Suppose the Kingdom (set up on the earth) were only seven years away. You would not be ready for the Kingdom seven years from now if you had had no exercise of authority to prepare you for it. Visualize an individual who has not been prepared to handle money or to spend it wisely, who has had no stewardship or faithfulness built in his heart for it; then suppose that such an individual suddenly falls heir to a lot of money. It would be a disastrous situation.
Suppose you tell your child, “As long as you are under my roof, you are going to do exactly what I say. The day you leave my table, that is the day you can make decisions for yourself.” That is a good way of making sure your child will be good for nothing. On the other hand, if you train that child as he grows up, teaching him how to work and budget his money and how to take more and more responsibility, if you let him make a few mistakes and stumble a little on his own, then, when the time finally comes for him to be independent, he will be a mature adult. You can have confidence that he has been properly trained and disciplined.
The Lord is bringing many sons to glory, and He knows how to do that (Hebrews 2:10). He knows what kind of experiences are needed to make us mature. The time will come when we will walk in our full inheritance, but He has ordained that many of His provisions are to be our inheritance now. We struggle to reach into them.
The time will come that with a mass rebuke, demons by the thousands will go screaming into hell. That is good. But in the meantime, God lets us practice on a few demons that come against us, and we cast them into the abyss. We struggle with a stubborn one once in a while, as we learn how to submit ourselves to the Lord and we learn to resist the devil and have him flee from us (James 4:7). We are learning the delicate balance that exists between submission to God and the exercise of authority. The more we submit, the more we can resist. This is a fantastic balance that He is working within us.
The more we die, the more we are alive. The Apostle Paul said, So then death worketh in us, but life in you. 2 Corinthians 4:12. Two things are working at the same time. We are coming closer and closer to the identical experience of Christ; and as we are, we are moving more and more into complete authority.
What is our place right now? God … raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus. Ephesians 2:6. Theoretically, that position is ours. In some measure it is true, even of a new convert. But it will be very realistically true of the sons of the Kingdom. They will reign with Him. They will be seated with Him.
These are in accordance with the working of the strength of His might. What is?… that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe. What great power is God beaming toward us? What is He reaching out to give us? To those who believe, He is beaming the surpassing greatness of His power. These are in accordance with the working of the strength of His might which He brought about in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead, and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in the one to come. Ephesians 1:18–21. This is speaking of supreme, absolute authority, the same authority Christ spoke of when He said, … All authority hath been given unto me in heaven and on earth. Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations.… Matthew 28:18, 19.
There is a sharing of the authority. And He put all things in subjection under His feet, and gave Him as head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fulness of Him who fills all in all. Ephesians 1:22, 23. You are to be a part of the fullness of Christ. You are to be one who expresses that authority. You are to be one of those who manifests the fullness of Him who fills all things. You are to be His Body. You are to be the channel, the instrument, by which this supreme, majestic authority flows. God is beaming that at you.
God has put you through difficult dealings. I am not giving you sympathy; I want you to honor God for it. Stop complaining and murmuring. That is more despicable in this age than when the Hebrew slaves murmured after coming out of Egypt.
Stupid slaves they were, murmuring and complaining, while being led out of slavery into the inheritance that had been promised them centuries before. Because they murmured and complained, they died in the wilderness. You will be just like them if you begin to murmur at the dealings of the Lord, at His chastenings and discipline.
Although He was a Son, He learned obedience from the things which He suffered. Hebrews 5:8. You also will learn obedience by the Lord putting you through His dealings. For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. Hebrews 12:6. Why? Because you are going to be a partaker of His sufferings. Everything that Christ went through, you go through. You will not necessarily experience it as He did, but the same identical experience will be worked in you, in one way or another. It is not an identification; it is a real experience.
Your doctrine may need to change. You are not only to mentally acknowledge that Christ is your Lord and Savior; you are to become His bondslave, literally, as you find everything beaten out of you that will not submit to God. It is not just a matter of voicing your belief in divine order; you must come under divine order.
If we believe and accept divine order, then we must accept the corresponding, progressive manifestation of authority. And He put all things in subjection under His feet, and gave Him as head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fulness of Him who fills all in all. Ephesians 1:22, 23. In verse 6 of the next chapter, we read: (He) … raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus. This means that we have been moved into that place of authority with Christ because we are to be His fullness in the earth.
There should be a corresponding balance between our identification with Christ—in His sufferings, in His dealings with us, in the identical experience being worked within us—and with the authority which is being manifested. The Lord is producing this balance in us now, for we will never be ready for the responsibility of ruling with Him unless we are progressively moving in now, step by step. Are we moving in as much authority as we are in the corresponding sufferings? Absolutely not. It would be difficult to figure out the ratio; but for what Christ has wrought in us, there is to be a far greater exercise of authority than we are experiencing at the present time.
Something in our minds is holding us back. We are not accepting the release into the authority of Christ that we really have. We are not accepting the promise that begins, “All authority in heaven and earth is Mine. You go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:18–20). We are still looking at that promise. We are impressed with Satan, and we should not be. All authority in heaven and earth is Christ’s. As long as Satan can convince us that he has some authority and he has a right to harass us, he will continue to do so. He is a liar and a usurper. But the day it begins to dawn upon us that we are out of his dominion, that we are the manifestation of authority from the Father, that the authority of Christ which is to be manifested in the earth rests upon us, that day we will successfully tackle many more things than we ever have before.
There is always a great lag in a church—between what we see is ours theoretically, according to the Word, and what our faith will dare to believe to walk in. The greater that lag, the greater the danger. When that lag is too great, we look at the promises of God as being unattainable, and we accept our limitation and our falling short as something that is necessary, something that must be. We almost become conditioned to think that we must sin a little, have a few bad habits, and be sick some of the time. We see the promise in the Word that by His stripes we were healed (1 Peter 2:24). There is perfect, present blessing for us in all things. We hold it as a theory, but we do not struggle to walk in the reality of it. We must stop talking “cream” while drinking “skim milk.” We must begin to live what we believe and thus eliminate the lag.
In a walk with God we will not be guilty of preaching the manifestation of the sons of God and not manifesting that sonship. We will not be guilty of saying we believe in His authority and then not exercising it. We can exercise it much more than we are. We can walk in more than we are walking in. It is this lag that bothers me. The prophetic revelation must not get ahead of the actual appropriation, or we are in danger; for then we are as those who claim to believe the Bible from cover to cover, but put off the promises into the Kingdom. Now is the Kingdom. Of all people, we will become the greatest hypocrites of all if we do not exercise ourselves in faith.
Some Christians think the Kingdom will come in the far distant future. We say it is now. If it is now, then let us begin to move in the Kingdom promises more than we have. We have gone through the sufferings. We have gone through God’s dealings. As we walk with God, He deals deeply with our hearts. Now it is time to start moving into the authority.
We have been piling up this living word and theory in our hearts. Now let us catch up with it and not hold it in our minds beyond reach. Let us not be like the dog chasing a wiener on a stick that is tied out in front of him. He runs and runs, but never catches up with it. By the grace of God, we will not always be chasing something we can never catch. We will always have a word to walk in, and we will always have more set before us, but we do not want God’s provisions stacked up as a mountain of goodies while we are actually possessing very little. We must walk in the word. In a walk with God, when we get a word, we must start to walk. When we come to the limits prescribed by our own thinking and we feel as if we can go no further, then we must start moving all the more.
We must bypass the subconscious acceptance of limitations, because they will never be valid again. There will never be a boundary line defining the limits of that in which we can walk. In the days before us, we will never know a solid, concrete limitation. We may feel we have come as far as we can; we may stumble and fall; but if we will get up and reach into God, we can keep right on going. There is no limit to what we can be. There is no limit to what we can do. We will not accept any limitation; we will move forward in the name of the Lord. In our thinking we cannot embrace all these glorious truths, only to praise God for them and rejoice in them. We must accept them to the extent that we, too, believe to walk on the water (Matthew 14:28–32). If we go down a few times, we will just get up and keep trying. There must be the exercise of our faith.
A baby is not making a mistake when he stumbles while he is learning to walk. If we do everything we can to be submissive to divine order, if we move forward with aggressive faith, doing the best we can, and then we fall flat on our faces, I do not think God counts that as a mistake. We are learning to walk. God will pick us up and dust us off and tell us to try again.
We will learn. When we make our first mistakes, we will not cry too long; we will simply get up and walk right on. We will succeed because we will be standing in Christ’s authority. There must be this positioning of ourselves with Christ. We are His expression in the earth. We are His Body. We are the fullness of Him who filleth all things (Ephesians 1:23). That is the reason we personally must experience everything He has experienced. The identical thing must be worked in us, and then we will walk in that identical glory and the same authority—all authority in heaven and earth. What we bind on earth will be bound in heaven. What we loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Whenever two of us agree, touching anything we ask, it will be done (Matthew 18:18, 19). These promises are in the Book, just waiting for someone to believe them.
Let us believe the Word and move in God’s provision. Let us appropriate our deliverances. Let us heal the sick and move into divine health. None of us know how to walk in the fullness of what God has provided. We are used to driving a car, but we do not know how to fly a plane. We will wait on the Lord, and we will mount up with wings as an eagle (Isaiah 40:31).
We must determine never to look back to anything in the past. We must say with Paul, “Forgetting those things which are behind” (Philippians 3:13). That is important. We must forget yesterday’s limitations. This is not yesterday. It will never again be yesterday. Today is the day, unique in the fact that the Lord brings it forth for us to walk in it with all the authority He is heaping upon us. Are we moving as much as we could? No. We can move in more. We should be moving in more.
Where do we start? We must ask the Lord to blot out of our minds the boundary lines, defining how far we can go. We need our minds renewed. They are standing in the way. We believe we can only jump so high, and we could jump higher if we believed we could. When athletes believed no one could run a mile in four minutes, no one did. But then one fellow came along who did not know it was impossible, and he did it. After people realized it could be done, many more did it, and even that record has been broken.
Have you accepted too many boundaries as to how much you can move in the Lord? It seems the miracles are always for someone else in the sweet by-and-by. Do you ever daydream about a day when you will be moving in the greater works? You have dreamed the dreams; you have seen the visions; now you must begin to move toward the fulfillment.
Before the days of Samuel, a prophet was called a seer. Samuel himself wrote, “He who is now called a prophet was aforetime called a seer” (1 Samuel 9:9). Before the prophet’s ministry was really established, men of God saw revelation of the future with a prophet’s vision. But there came the day when miracles began to happen; such was the case in the days of Elijah and Elisha. After that such men were no longer called seers, but prophets. A prophet does more than just see the vision; he speaks it into existence. He prophesies to dry bones, and a big army arises (Ezekiel 37:4–10). He is told by God, “Prophesy against Sidon. Prophesy against Egypt. Prophesy against Philistia.” The prophetic word brings them down, one after another.
Prophesy against Babylon. Come on—exercise your faith. Turn loose God’s people. Can you see them? There are thousands of them. You are ready to help them now. You can meet them. You are well-grounded in the Word. You can teach them and minister to them. Turn them loose. Stand and prophesy. Walk around Jericho’s walls, blow your horns, and yell. Those walls are coming down. Come on, make it happen. Make it happen! That is the way the Kingdom comes.
Even the Lord’s Prayer is in the imperative mood. We do not pray, “Oh please, Lord Jesus, let the Kingdom eventually come”; we say, “Thy Kingdom come.” We do not plead for bread. We say, “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:10, 11). It is all in the imperative mood. We must speak God’s word into being. We must take the position and authority that are ours in the Lord. We are not being sacrilegious or irreverent if we do. He provided it for us. In that way we honor Him. Without that kind of faith, we will never please God.