OUR FOUNDATION GIFT IS UNION WITH GOD
If we have spent much of our lives as Believers in a community where the presence and gifts of the Spirit are not appreciated or instead feared, we will certainly be pleased to find that many if not all the gifts that were normal in the time of Jesus and the apostles are available today when we believe they are.
HANDS ON
I and my friends have been privileged to heal people in Jesus’ name, mainly in India and sometimes here in Australia. I am not special. The difference between myself and those who don't heal is that I believe, and they don't. I know that cessationism is misguided because I have seen many healings and talked to a woman in India who was raised from the dead.
But the theme of this post is less about the healing and the gifts and more about the mode of them. This mode is the new covenant and its oneness with God that belongs to all. Jesus had the Spirit without limit because He and Father were one. He was one substance with God and was God. Jesus was one substance with man and was a man. The Lord’s Table is not a rite. It’s to remind us that we are one substance with Christ who has gifted us life in oneness with God.
You are one substance with Christ and are a son/daughter of God. Your aliveness in God results from your oneness with God. Here healing grows in you because you are in communion with life itself.
PURPOSEFUL
Gifts of healing and gifts of the Spirit have a point to them. They are not an end in themselves but advertisements for the Greater Healing that is the healing of our relationship with God. Adam is undone and in Christ we are one with God.
The separation that came to us from Adam has been undone in the at-one-ment of the cross and the living union that is ours in the incarnation. If this basic wound is not healed, we are not whole even though we may have a healed limb or an eye.
FALSE PREMISE
A friend told me once that we earn intimacy with Jesus by good works. Earnest but wrong. We have union with God in the person of Christ. It’s the meaning of the atonement.
GIFT OF INTIMACY
Jesus cried out, ‘It is finished!’ What was finished? The separation from God that Adam began. The death and resurrection of Jesus undoes separation and begins our Easter Life.
We should live in our already owned union with God and not in some imagined separation in which we strive to attract the presence of God to ourselves through perfect morality, praise and worship or works designed to make us worthy of intimacy with Jesus. No. We have oneness with God. This is the starting point of a life of intimate friendship with Jesus. It’s the beginning of your new birth and growth into sonship.
NOT EARNING CHRIST
You need to live in the fact that your sin and sins cannot separate you from God. To live a life of victory over doubt, fear and self-doubt you need to live in the truth that nothing you can ever do can separate you from God.
‘No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord’ Rom 8.39 NLT.
IT IS FINISHED
So, the undoing of distance between ourselves and God is the foundational issue and this has been accomplished. Your life in Adam is dead and your life in Jesus Christ is alive and living in you. Because Christ is your life, you possess Jesus’ relationship with Father, the Spirit and Himself.
SO WHAT’S THE ROCK OF OUR BEING?
I’m leading up to the fact that the miracles and the gifts are not the core of our Kingdom life. Our achieved union with God is. This is the meaning of the Lord’s Table which promotes the truth that the Bread of Life becomes us.
Holy Spirit lives to bear witness to the Christ of this fact, this life and this Kingdom. If we are intent on staying with Adam and Moses back in the mindset of the law of sin and death - and it is a mindset because this era is over - Holy Spirit will not force us to believe and will actually retreat and wait for a more auspicious time.
Holy Spirit ministers to Christ and to your full life in Christ’s Kingdom.
Healing and the gifts along with assorted anointing are not the Kingdom of God when bolted on to old covenant, law based religion. They cannot be maintained and communities that attempt to live in this alone sink into inertia and fade into religious stasis or something like institutional maintenance. There’s a reason for this. The anointing and the gifts by themselves are not the Kingdom of God, not life in the Spirit and taken by themselves are a false gospel.
NOT THE FUNCTION
Holy Spirit barracks for a real Christ and a true Gospel.
“It is not the function of the Spirit, then, to bear witness to himself in his distinctive personal Being, but to bear witness to Christ and glorify him as Lord and Saviour, whereby God the Father also is glorified in the revelation of his divine Being in the Son. For the Spirit to glorify Christ is to radiate his Life as the incarnate Son with divine Light in such a way as to make his intrinsic Deity, the Glory of Yahweh, to shine forth, and thereby also to make the Face of the Father radiant in the Face of the Son. Thus through the Son and in the Spirit the divine Shekinah, the glory of God’s personal Presence, shines in gracious blessing and peace upon all who draw near to him in adoration and worship, and bears transformingly upon them.” (1)
Start Christ your life NOW.
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (p. 66). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
