The Lord is teaching us how to walk on a new plane, and it will be a little while before we all get into it. It’s like learning to walk in the natural. Every new phase has that similarity. You move along well in the plane you’re on, and when you move into a new stage, it’s a little different.
It’s like learning to drive a car and then being set down in an airplane, in another sphere. You handle an airplane differently than a car, and you have many problems that you don’t have with a car. It’s an entirely different operation. We’re learning how to move into this realm of authority, and what seemed to be just a simple matter of submitting to the Lord, now becomes deadly serious.
It’s the foundation of everything, because it’s the realm in which we move—the realm of submission. If we don’t move in the realm of submission, we will not be able to move in the realm of authority.
Now we need to pray that the Lord will teach us the words by which we can teach the truths that He is showing us (I Corinthians 2:13). It has to be spiritually discerned, and the words themselves must be taught to us and must be spoken in the Spirit.
When we get into these mysteries of God, we can’t rely on anything that we’ve known in the past, as far as being able to really understand them. Yet when they are expressed, we realize that they are an extension of truths that He has already taught us. They are not a contradiction, but an extension of truth.
We’re going to believe for miracles today, but not the kind of miracles that come from a conscious concentration for faith. We’re going to believe for the miracles that come from a witness to our spirit of the authority to use His name. We’re going to try to bypass the struggle of the mind to believe, and move into our spirit’s awareness of His authority, so that we move in a perfect faith.
I’d like to see a new level of ministry, even this very day—something that could tear things loose that must be torn loose. I’d like to see real authority come, the authority that is based upon our total submission to the Lord.
O Master, help us. Anoint us, we pray, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Give us the words which the Spirit teaches, that we might come to understand what you’re trying to say to us. Let there not be a struggle or a groping in man’s wisdom, but let the Word come simply.
Lord, we are sons. We are moving into the days of authority and rule. We are coming into the oneness. We are submitting to the fires of the Lord. We just want to know how to walk in this level. Lord, let there be spiritual perception. Bless even the minds of the little children, and if their understanding is not developed, let the truths be imparted.
We identify ourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ in every experience He had. The basis of the gospel is the fact that He was wounded for our transgressions and chastised for our iniquities, and by His stripes we are healed. This is the basis of all of it.
So we identify ourselves vicariously with Him in His experiences and we say, “He wrought all of that on our behalf.” This is true on the level in which we have walked. Now the Lord has shown me that it is not so much our identifying ourselves with Him as it is an identical experience with Him. He didn’t say, “Identify yourselves with Me.” He said, “Suffer with Me; you are a partaker of My sufferings.” We do not identify ourselves with His righteousness; we are identical with His righteousness. It’s not identify; it’s identical.
The work of the cross is not just something that causes us to rejoice, “O hallelujah, we see He died for us. Praise the Lord for the cross.” 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. Not self crucifixion, but a reckoning ourselves dead unto sin.
By revelation I have felt that there is nothing greater than to be a partaker of the sufferings of Christ. Now when I read how Paul said he 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 reached in and suffered the same agonies that Christ did—maybe not to the same measure or extent, but it was an identical experience.
I don’t identify myself with the love of Jesus Christ; I have an identical love. The Word says we love Him because He first loved us. When He loved us, He didn’t 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. It may not be in the same quantity or to the same degree, but when we love, it’s the same love. It’s an identical love. It’s not human love; it’s 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’s not a little mystical experience of identification that we go through. 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 (we are walking with the Lord, 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 didn’t feel he had attained it yet, but he was pressing toward it.
In a very real sense, I think we experience some of this resurrection life first, that power to quicken us and make us alive. You who were dead in your trespasses and sins, you hath He made alive (Ephesians 2:1). But this idea of being conformable to His death, to come right into the same experience that He had and the fellowship of His sufferings, is the thing that I’m concerned about.
Romans 8 speaks about the manifestation of the sons of God, about moving up into this place of authority with Him. Let us read Romans 8:16–19. 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.
This is not speaking about an identification with His sufferings. It is talking about going through His sufferings with Him. It’s not that we identify ourselves with His rule; we’re going to rule with Him. We’ll suffer with Him and we’ll rule with Him.
In the work that Christ does in our life, there is absolutely no distinction between Him and us—in what He has been through, what He is, or what He’s going to be. This was the will of God, for whom the Father foreknew, He predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son (Romans 8:29). And 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’re crucified with Him. We are so identical with Him that He becomes the firstborn among many brethren. He is leading many sons to glory, and all of them will be conformed to what Christ has been, what He is, what He’s gone through, and to the authority that He inherits.
I doubt if this truth has ever been voiced before. I’ve read books on theology, I’ve studied it, but I’ve never heard this before. It’s something that impresses me. I’m not just identified with Christ; I’m identical with Him.
When Paul says in I Corinthians 12:12–14, that the Body is not one member but many, yet it is one Body, and so also is Christ, he is not speaking blasphemy.
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 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 don’t 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. There they are—a family that is immune to the disease. The children have not identified themselves with their father’s illness; they have partaken of it. They’ve experienced it. They’re 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, and they cannot sin for they are born of God, and His seed remaineth in them (I John 3:9). We will come to that sinless state, too. We do not attain it through our individual experiences, but because we have an identical participation in His experience. We partake in it. I believe to become the righteousness of God. I believe that everything God is, I am becoming, by virtue of what Christ is producing and experiencing within me.
If indeed we suffer with Him in order that we may also be glorified with Him. 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’re all 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.
When we hear prophecies about the manifestation of the Son, rather than the manifestation of the sons, we know it is Scriptural. When the sons of God come into the full glory of manifestation, it is identical to the manifestation of Jesus Christ and His glory. When we come into the Kingdom, it’s His Kingdom.
Paul kept talking about wanting to reach up into all of these things, to experience them. He said he had not really attained unto that resurrection from the dead, and that was true. It is also true that you do not have to wait for all of these experiences to be identically reproduced in perfection in you before you can move into the authority.
To the extent that you submit to those things being wrought in you, to that extent the beginning of authority starts to move in you also. We find that at a very early time, before the disciples had gone through very much and while they were still carnal, arguing over who would be the greatest, they were nevertheless commissioned, authority was laid upon them, and they went out to heal the sick, cast out devils, and do many wonderful things.
Christ’s experience that He wrought for us is operating in us. Let me give you another illustration. A man doesn’t 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. The Lord has shown me that we will frustrate people if we try to convince them that they are going to leapfrog right into all of this at once. It would also be a grievous error to tell them, “You can’t have it until the sweet-by-and-by.”
The Lord has given us words which speak of the things to come and has also given us a word to walk in right now. Not only has He given us a glorious heritage, but He has given us an earnest of it, a foretaste that we can have now.
I’m convinced that we can move much more rapidly if we continue, with all of our heart, 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 which we can walk in right now.
Suppose the Kingdom is seven years away. We wouldn’t be ready for the Kingdom seven years from now if we had had no exercise of authority to prepare us 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’re under my roof, you’re going to do exactly what I say, The day you leave my table, that’s the day you can make decisions for yourself.” That is a good way of making sure your child will probably be good for nothing.
On the other hand, if you train that child as the days go by, teaching him how to work and budget his money, how to take more and more responsibility, and let him make a few mistakes and stumble around, when the time finally comes for him to be independent, he will be a mature adult. You can slap him on the back and say, “Go to it, son.” You have confidence that he’s been properly trained and disciplined. These examples illustrate a principle which we can establish.