SAFELY WITHIN THE CIRCLE

      Our anticipation of change often is underdeveloped therefore we can not appropriate what we are in the body of Christ, because of a limited expectation for growth. Is it due to our own lack of knowledge and vision? Who's fault is this? And how may we gain positive awareness that the changes taking place in us are in God's plan? I think most Christians who are serious about there spiritual growth will admit to being held back by many road blocks. Mostly those self inflicted. Really the result of our focus being on the apprehension of ourselves not in The Spirit but in the flesh. The presence of the old sin nature has been given the place of dominance. We have not lived in its death by the reckoning of the new nature and life which is in Christ. It was a wonder and a privilege to be made in the image of God, the greatness of our origin. Hence our unwillingness to depart from the personality of the first Adam.  He walked with God under his own volitional influence. We would still like that privileged. So we are reluctant, and often choose to see the coming days in our old Adam's natural mind and leave our spiritual one undeveloped. So really then our slow arrival to true spiritual maturity is no ones fault except our own! Relegated to the sidelines of The Fathers desire for His children, which is a oneness with His Son in His Son's life as a partaker of it by faith. Short of this maturity as our current experience how are we to then regard ourselves? What is the alternative?

      When I think back on some of the most important spiritual truths that came home to me in my struggle for deliverance from Adam; I viewed many of them with great trepidation. "Work out your own salvation in fear and trembling". First could it really be true that I am a living vessel for the expression of the Triune God Himself: "And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh [flesh, natural, Adam as unacceptable] hath He made us alive together [position, new life] with Him, Col. 2:13. Oh what a responsibility. How could I ever live up to that? But if the Word be true I am just that. "Your life is hidden with Christ in God" Col. 3:3; that is if your life is safe in the circle of His love. "For as many of you as have been baptized [filled with His Spirit] into Christ have put on Christ" Gal.3:27. Does this mean we must hold to a certain standard by our will, to live up to what He has done in us? Many have tried this way. All have failed. If that is true I also have been a great failure indeed. Just where in ourselves then do we gain the recognition of the heights of our position [life in The Son apprehended]?  Held firmly in Jesus Christ in heaven, as he lives His life through us. This is Spiritual reality. After all we are His body so we must be living out His life. Each one of us as individuals. "For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus " Eph. 2:10. What a surprise  it was to  learn that the very purpose for my entire existence is to be a conduit for The Father to express Himself to all of creation; "We are 'partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption which is in the world" 2 Pet. 1:4. How did he do that  for us? By "sending His Son in the likeness of human flesh" Me created in His Son. He became like me. For His exclusive sight and vision, His Love, His thought of what mankind is to Him. Seen in his love for His Son, and all of it applied to me. God's view of me in His son was transferred to me; at and in the Death of Jesus Christ and then I was given a new life in the Spirit at His Resurrection; "we all with unveiled face [in awareness of who we are] beholding as in a mirror [seeing Jesus in us] the glory of The Lord" 2 Cor. 3:18. I was made alive forever more by Spirit in His Resurrection. Because of the great super abundant capacity of His love He made us to appear in His view, in His Son. It seemed impossible that He would have that kind of unending love for me. If my behavior be the judge anyway. But my reassurance comes by the Word only; "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus" Phil.2:5. It is to my shame that my thoughts do not reflect what must surely be a holy mind, but none the less it is in me because He said so; " I have strength for all things in Christ who empowers me---I am ready for anything and equal to anything through Him who infuses inner strength into me" Phil. 4:13, Amp. But how can I get to anyplace remotely close to a lifestyle, thought life, or behavior that is Christ like? The reluctance of my first Adam is so often in the way.

      The answer to this very real and common dilemma for the Christian, who is needfully humbled enough, and is willing to accept his present controlling flesh weakness is: We can not carry the burden of the kind of effort it takes to be Christ like in our Adam personality, or in a normal human effort. This would merely be a performance; which is not of Spirit and therefore cannot please God. The life of Christ carried out, can only be done by Spirit. That is how God has accomplished it all for us in His Son, entirely in the Spirit realm. So should our Christian life be any different? We are safely within the circle of His providence, if truly born again. We must approach any godly character we may gain or be aware of as a gift which we found only by faith in the accomplishment of Jesus Christ for us!  He holds our position before God. We can never look back at ourselves only death will be available in that view. So then are we really to think of ourselves; that perhaps we "ourselves" could possibly ripen enough to become over-comers? "Not that we are sufficient [because of the old personality] of ourselves to think anything as of ourselves, but our sufficiency is of God" 2Cor. 3:5. After all it was Jesus Himself who overcame the world for us and all was in Spirit, except His death which He had to suffer for us, for judicial reasons. But we are left still here. Surrounded by our own sin nature. Dealing daily with the first Adam nature. But here is where the salvation we so desperately seek is found available. He is in heaven, in a no sin environment and has taken us there by manifesting our identity; which He has assumed for us at the Right hand of The Father; "And has raised us up together, [positional] and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus" Eph. 2:6. So any overcoming we may feel or take note of is on account of Jesus only and so can only be applied to ourselves by faith in His work alone! This is the position The Father has placed us in. He accomplished that in a body just like ours for all practical purposes while on this earth. Which according to The Father was  necessary. As He The Son had to, just like we must, use His faith to insure obedience to the Father, nothing else would suffice, no other way would satisfy The Fathers Holiness! All other ways are of the flesh. Oh yes He became aware of His power, which He carried in Him on this earth life, but He did not use it to save Himself. He trusted completely in the Father. His was a pure Spiritual exercise. It was not His intuition that carried him through; but faith in the fact of the Fathers Words! Should we do any less? He had feelings of pain hardship even rejection. He was fearful and disillusioned. Abandoned by His friends at the last moments of His life. He died just as we were to, forsaken of God. In the greatest of human suffering, for that which we deserved. He in a fully human way faced the certainty of eternal death, but overcame by His own personal Spiritual faith in the promise of the new covenant written in His Blood, that The Father would Resurrect Him.. His act was counted as His own choice, that of a man by the Fathers plan. Counted and then inclusively applied to us for judicial purposes. Now giving us the option of having faith in a new life He has showed us. And all of it accomplished by a Man. Therefore mankind was made able to receive forgiveness. Pronounced redeemed; man was made "not guilty", he became justified! Not only that, man became capable of a entire new existence, one of Spirit; "For the law of the Spirit of life [seeing the true truth] in Christ Jesus made me free from the law[ manifested in our human flesh existence] of sin and death" Rom. 8:2. Jesus had our mind within Him, but He overcame it [the human mind] by faith.  Because He was always one in Spirit with the Father, by faith. We must assume that position to be delivered, by faith. Where we would have and still will always fail in the natural non-spiritual, to grasp Christ Jesus as life, that is if we continue to live in the natural and not The Spirit. The Father simply cannot except anything of our flesh!! We must see our old life as killed on the Cross, dead and gone. In that Spirit, which is faith formed, is found the same oneness with God as Jesus has, which we have now been made capable of living in. This is the occupation of our mortal bodies with immortality; with all glory going to Jesus! Which He then gave right back to us as a brother, entered our being, and provided His life as alternate to ours, as only a brother would or could. It's our choice. I choose to believe, that Faith in biblical fact is Spirit derived and Spirit retained, as life. A repentance from my former self as a child of Adam siting in my sin nature.

      This process which The Father went through in His Son brought about our reconciliation; to be brought back to a place of favor, fully accepted. Most Christians know of atonement; this old testament word means to be sheltered by The Blood. In the Church age this would be the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for us, we are atoned by this act. Yes this is very true, we are sheltered by His Blood: but why stop there as many have? To do so is to rests in the comfort offered by man made religion, or subject ourselves to the vanity and pride of works and at the end we will find only ourselves. A grave disappointment awaits!

      Reconciliation brings a new light, we were brought back to a right standing. This new nature we received is not one of the flesh. He did not die to make us better or even capable of being ideal conformed Christians in a earthly way. If we simply remain in our flesh, enjoying His atonement, we are like a piano being played, perhaps sounding good but never the less merely a product of manipulation; that of the flesh. We may be  born again in Spirit, which is true of all Christians; but not spiritual. In a spiritual life Jesus Christ is our Constant thought. He is the object of life and we are subject to that life by a spiritual awareness that all we are or ever will be is sanctified in Him. We engage in complete trust of His guidance in all things. The world and things of the world hold no priority in our life. And His Word is our absolute guide. The life of the old nature has been eliminated by His death. We do not any longer need to live there! Yes I know friends we all have a ways to go and always will, but we must enter the circle to find the way.

      Reconciliation is based upon the fact that the man [Adam] who dishonored God is removed from The Fathers sight. But a New Adam [Jesus Christ] stepped forward to honor The Father, bearing the judgement of death, which was due the old man. Then He was raised from among the dead to the Fathers right hand in glory in a representative status, as us. This reconciliation is shown in His Word. "For the love of Christ constrains us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then all were dead: and that He died for all, that they which live [us] should henceforth not live unto themselves, but unto Him which died for them, and rose again. From now on we know no man after the flesh; yes we have know Christ after the flesh, but now we no longer know Him in that way. Therefore if any man be in Christ he is a new creation [reconciled to God by becoming like Christ in spirit] old things have passed away; behold all things are new" 2 Cor.  5:14-17. My friends you could not live up to the Word of God in any way shape or form if you only recognized your natural nature. You must come to be dominated by The Spirit, the new creation of faith, otherwise you are remaining at rest as one atoned for: but not reconciled to God in your own understanding by a spiritual knowledge or awareness of your new creation in Spirit. What a loss indeed and the principal shortcoming of most believers. Whereas; who you are as a Christian is in fact formed in Jesus Christ, who is Spirit. He has become our life in God's reckoning. We must embrace this truth as our life here and now. This is the only existence you will ever know that could be called life, all other is only death: He will be our life. Count on it! Enter it by positional faith and identity in what The Father has accomplished in The Son. There is no other way to life. Most Christians bear out their entire lives in there original condition. Choosing to remain under the confines of the old Adam mind; they have volunteered unnecessarily to abide outside of the circle.

       By succumbing to the change which has taken place by The Son in us by faith we will come to know: There is not even a glimmer of recognition by The Father, of the man of offense, us as natural Adam. The second Man, The New Adam, who took our place on the Cross is the only object of mankind before The Father. Those of us who believe in Jesus Christ as Saviour must now come to know by this great sacrifice the Fathers love is fully toward us. There is not a vestige of the former man to observe in The Fathers sight. As we enter into this positional joy, being reconciled to God we must come to realize we are seen as Christ and only Christ before the Father. In that we are joint-heir's with Christ. Like The Son we have also become a son or daughter with equal standing and the same love with which The Father honors His own Son with. We are partakers of His unsurpassed love, by being safely within the circle of His Grace.