Every real father’s desire is to reproduce himself in his son. The Father’s dream is to reproduce Himself in us.
You understand that the New Creation has received the nature and life of the Father.
We invite the Holy Spirit, (once our spirit is born again with the nature of our Father), to come into our body and make His home in us, because we need his power to walk with God, and we are baptized in the Holy Spirit with the ability to speak in tongues and build a house suitable for the Holy Spirit to live in.
Then we begin to feed our spirit with the Word, we begin to act on the word and practice the Word, and the Word begins to live through us.
The word living through us is Christ living through us.
The word is built or formed into us, first into our spirit, and then in every area of our soul which transforms it, and once our soul is transformed, we enter resurrection life which glorifies our body.
This is the very genius of Christianity, the ability of God to build Himself into us through the Word, so that in our daily walk we live like Jesus Christ and even get to do greater works than he did as we come TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE SON ON GOD, TO A PERFECT MAN, TO THE MEASURE OF THE STATURE OF THE FULLNESS OF CHRIST (Ephesians 4:13).
Here are a couple of definitions of the key words in Greek from this Scripture.
Knowledge “epignōsis”- It is more INTENSIVE than “gnṓsis” knowledge”, because it expresses a more “THOROUGH PARTICIPATION” in the acquiring of knowledge on the part of the learner (disciple).
In the NT, it often refers to knowledge which very powerfully influences the form of spiritual life, a knowledge that lays hold of the divine nature through personal encounter with the Lord.
Our obedience to the Living Word is a participation in the very nature of God.
Stature “hēlikia” to come to full–age spirituality. Adulthood, Spiritual maturity.
Perfect “teleios” to reach the goal, or purpose of God for sending us to this earth. Finished, that which has reached its end, or limit; complete, full, wanting in nothing.
When we reach this level described in Ephesians 4:13 we become a manifested male or female son of God on the earth.
Ephesians 5:1 Therefore, be imitators of God as dear children. 2 And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma.
Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children; and walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us. (Ephesians 5:1)
As children of love, we are to walk in love as Christ walked in love toward the world.
The Father so loved the world that He gave His Son.
Jesus so loved the world that He gave his life (soul) as a sin offering, and by so doing, could take the sin of the whole world on the Cross into his soul, and darkness came over the land so that no one could see what has happening on the cross for three and a half hours, until the Father said OK son the penalty of sin had been paid, justice has been served, and Jesus cried out with a loud voice “it is finished”! And then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit,
When a human being dies in the natural their spirit will leave their body and then their head with bow, but Jesus had control of his death, he bowed his head first and then gave up his spirit.
So, by Jesus literally being a sin offering, by taking the sin of the whole world into his soul, can you imagine the horror of that! That was worse than what happened to his body.
So, we must understand this legal transaction that happened on the cross. Jesus became sin, so that he could legally transfer all his divine attributes to us. This is the legal aspect of redemption.
The vital aspect of redemption is appropriating that divine provision.
And that is why Jesus poured out the Holy Spirit after he received his coronation as King of kings.
So, we must be baptized in the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit job is to take the divine provision of Jesus through the cross and minister it to us.
So, a walk with God is partnering with the Holy Spirit and then laying hold of eternal life (1 Timothy 6:12) we lay hold (seize, grab hold of, this requires a fixed focus) of a divine attribute of God to obtain it, possess it.
This is called appropriation. Then the Holy Spirit fills us with that divine attribute, and then as we walk in it, and we practice it, it becomes written on our heart. And this becomes the new nature we walk in. It becomes the essence of who we are. We become the embodiment of it.
Christianity is not trying to do better; it is another Spirit living through us.
Our spirit, which is the spirit of Christ, I taught on this before now, if you are reading my posts.
Our newborn spirit is one spirit with the Lord. ONE SPIRIT not two. Our Spirit is then filled with the Holy Spirit we so that we can walk in a divine attribute or fruit of the Spirit that we need for the situation that we find ourselves in.
So, it is no longer us who lives but Christ who lives through us. This is called being led by the Holy Spirit.
So, I now love people in the world the way Jesus loved them.
NOW REMEMBER THIS, God does not see what is wrong with us, but what is missing of himself in us. And now through the finished work of the Cross, he is able to give that part of himself to us, and we are transformed in that area of our life. But this is a process, this is a journey, that is why I call it a walk with God. We are following on to know the lord and what is at the end of the road?
Becoming the bride of Christ where we rule the kingdom of God with Jesus Christ, he is our husband and we are his wife.
There is nothing in this world that can be more exciting than this.
I am an oracle of God, all you need is the ears to hear what I am saying and then act on it, DO IT! and then you can teach others how to walk with God.
So, we go from grace to grace, faith to faith, strength to strength, glory to glory until we come into the full stature of God.
So, we love others the way the Father and Jesus does and we do not allow our heart to grow bitter toward someone, no matter what the criticism or the persecution may be.
Whenever I am inclined to say, “Well, I am wasting my time on them,” I remember Paul and Silas at Philippi. They had been arrested. They had been whipped until their backs were a mass of bleeding flesh, then put into a dungeon with their hands and feet in stocks. In the midst of that agony, that physical distress, they prayed and sang praises unto God.
They so stirred heaven that the Father had to open the jail; and when the earthquake had so frightened the jailer that he cried out in agony of fear, Paul preached to him with that bleeding back, and the jailer found Jesus.
Then he washed the backs of both Paul and Silas, and a church was formed in the home of the jailer.
If Paul had any other spirit, other than the spirit of Christ, he could never have done it.
Jesus was the lord of Paul’s life, and Paul gave himself up to the dominion, or governance of love, the lordship of love.
The Father wants to reproduce Himself in us. And this is how he does it, he fills us with himself and then lives through us.
Now the Galation church turned to a different gospel than Paul preached but he did not give up on them.
They turned to legalism, which is called dead works because you are doing things all by yourself, you’re trying to do better, well I am going to quit this and quit that, and I am going to start doing this and start doing that.
YOU CANNOT LIFE THE CHRISTIAN LIFE it is impossible, ONLY CHRIST CAN LIVE THAT KIND OF LIFE through you.
This is the first lesson you are going to have to learn, you cannot do it yourself, believe me I have learned this the hard way.
But through Christ you can do all things.
Galatians 4:19 My little children, for whom I labor in birth again until Christ is formed in you.
The process of building Christ into a person may be very slow, but it makes Jesus’ men and women out of us.
But we can grow spiritually more faster than we do in the natural IF WE HEAR A LIVING WORD FROM GOD, if you study under my ministry you will grow spiritually faster than anyone you know, if you practice what I teach and soon will start preaching.
We are created in Christ Jesus. We are His creation; and until Christ is formed in us, the world cannot see anything but religion in us.
For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. (Philippians 2:13)
The Father is actually building His love, His righteousness, His strength, and His wisdom into our spirits.
Ask someone you know personally “Have I grown spiritually since you last saw me? Can you see any characteristics of spiritual growth in my life?”
We should be fearful, if a month or two go by and we haven’t grown in Christ and the knowledge of the Word.
But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. (2 Peter 3:18)
Grace “Cháris”, when received by faith, transforms a person and causes them to love with the love of God, rejoice with God’s joy and so on.
“Cháris” is initially the new birth of your spirit and then developing in the divine nature through the work of the Holy Spirit in and through us.
Grace means God is working in you to desire and to do. The Greek word means love gifts. It is God’s foremost desire to have his love nature of Jesus demonstrated in our daily walk.
It is only as we yield ourselves to the lordship of love, that God can ever build Himself into us.
It is not just knowledge of the Scriptures. But growth in the divine nature. You may have a vast knowledge of the word, but if that word is not vitally working in your life, it benefits you nothing. If you have not love, it profits you nothing.
It says the fruit of the Spirit is love, SINGULAR not plural, the rest of the list is just how that love works, the different characteristics of it.
It is the Word that is built into us and becomes a part of us that counts.
As you study the Pauline revelation, you become convinced that the ultimate goal of every one of those epistles is the building of the Jesus life in the individual.
YHVH’S plan for building Himself into us is amazing.
We must take Jesus’s place in the earth. We must learn to act in His stead. There must be the conscious training of our spirits to be His actual representatives. So that when people look at us, they see Jesus, we must become living epistles.
Colossians gives us an indication of the passion of the Father to make Himself known to us in such a real way that we can enter into all the riches of the fullness of His life that belongs to us.
Here is a prayer of the Spirit through the mouth of Paul:
Colossians 1:9 For this reason we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; 10 that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing Him, being fruitful in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.
The word knowledge in the Greek is “epignōsis”. It means full knowledge, complete knowledge, exact knowledge.
We should have this kind of knowledge, I call it “revelation knowledge”.
We have the Holy Spirit who inspired the Bible as our teacher.
The Holy Spirit longs to fill us with the exact knowledge of the Father’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding.
It will be wisdom to use the knowledge of this revelation in our daily walk.
It will be wisdom to know how to appropriate the legal aspect of our redemption as well as all the provisions and promises in the Bible. “In Christ” they are all amen and amen.
It will be wisdom for us to know how to present the gospel in an attractive way.
We are to have “knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding,” a deeper insight into the very heart of the Father.
1 Corinthians 2: 9 But as it is written: “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, Nor have entered into the heart of man The things which God has prepared for those who love Him.”
These are being revealed to us today through the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit can search all things, yea, the deep things of God, and enable our spirits to know them
Most of these riches are found in the Pauline revelation.
In Ephesians 3:8, we catch a glimpse of where Paul said, “To me, who am less than the least of all the saints, this grace was given, that I should preach among the Gentiles THE UNSEARCHABLE RICHES of Christ”.
These unsearchable riches belong to us, but, like pearls, we must search for them, and when we search for them with all our heart the Holy Spirit reveals them to us.
1 Corinthians 2: 11 For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God.
Notice carefully the next first.
12 Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, THAT WE MIGHT KNOW the things that have been freely given to us by God.
We are learning to grasp this exact knowledge of God with the help of the Holy Spirit.
Colossians 1: 9 For this reason we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; 10 that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing Him, being fruitful in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.
Our walk with God is before the world.
We might say that it is a twofold walk. One phase of it is before the Father, and the other is before the world.
I am to walk worthy of the Lord before people so they will recognize this new life in me.
We need to allow Jesus to so live his life in us that people around us can feel his presence.
Philippians 1: 21 For to me, to live is Christ.
Jesus is saying to you in this verse , “I want to be magnified in you. I want to absorb your personality. I want to take possession of your dreams and ambitions. I want the first place in your life.”
You may be thinking, “I do not want the Lord to have control of me, for I will never be able to achieve the things I am so ambitious for”.
But Jesus loves us more than we love ourselves, He desires our success in life more than we do, and with the help of the Holy Spirit we can do anything that is in our heart to do.
The Holy Spirit is a genius, he can do anything, “You need some help with that, I can do it”.
You say but, “Lord, I do want to go on the streets and witness to people”, “You will send me down to the slums to help the poor people”.
But His wisdom will become so apparent to you. He will help you with those limits to your dedication, to those boundaries in your mind that say we’ll I will do this, but I won’t do that!
When you get into difficulties, He will lift you out of them.
He will first work in you to make you willing and then give you the power to do it and make an eternal difference.
He will change our ambitions for his own. He will swallow up your ambitions with His love, until for the first time you will really care about other people more than yourselves. He will take those natural talents and abilities of yours and sanctify them and use them for his glory
What you thought might be his will, you will find out it is not, when we delight in Him, he gives us the desires of our heart.
You will begin to live in such a way that people will see the Jesus in you in such a way, that they will be draw to hear what you have to say.
The Holy Spirit is not going to lead you to some person that the Father is not drawing to himself, he is not going to have you shove the gospel down someone’s throat.
Just like our heavenly Father feeds the birds of the air, he is going to lead you to those little birdies (people) with their beak’s open, saying feed me, feed me.
He is going to move upon you in such a way that people can see the Christ in you and feel the presence of God upon you. And when you speak, I will give you the words to say.
And when you lay hands on people, it will be me laying hands on people to heal the sick.
Do not lay hands on people’s heads, just put your hand on their shoulder, unless you are so full of the Holy Spirit that he leads you that way.
The head is the most vulnerable place for the transference of spirits, and if you got anything impure in your soul, you might transfer it to another.
You are not just running out there and doing things in yourself, you are a co-labor with the Holy Spirit.
God does not need anybody working for him, people have enough problems in their life, religious people only make their life more difficult.
You first must learn how to wait on the Lord (focused listening) where you can hear God’s voice. And then you can be a co-laborer with him.
The Holy Spirit gets to the root of the problem, or else all you will be doing will be in the flesh (that union of soul and body that acts independently of the lord) and you can remove all the leaves off of a fleshy tree, and it will grow a whole new set. Maybe, a different kind of leave but it is still flesh. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit.
First you must learn “who you are in Christ”, and then when you learn how to appropriate an aspect of the divine nature, then you can impart that aspect to another.
You see, it is this forming of Christ within us. That is the secret that is the genius of the new creation. “Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature [creation]” (2 Corinthians 5:17).