A Little Word on Faith

Faith, like everything else, is not of ourselves.

Faith is the word of God welling up in the inward parts of our being.

It comes, not at our own whim, but at the precise point where it is necessary.

It comes in despair, when we cannot take another step.

It comes when death seems imminent, and it testifies of life, which cannot yet be seen.

It comes rising up as a Living Word, from beyond ourselves as if out of nowhere, and lifts us up on our feet.

When we don't know the way, when we can't see the path, when doubt seems the order of the day, every moment faith says, "This is the way, walk ye in it".... "Just take the next step"....

Faith is being billowed over by Him Who is invisible -- imperceptible, utterly Beyond -- and yet more familiar than our own skin.

Faith is being carried along in the midst of our doubt in the river that waters everything in abundance.

Regardless of how the deck looks stacked; regardless of the utter impossibility of a child being born to a dead womb; regardless of the fact that no lepers have ever been cleansed before, regardless of the fact that no one born blind has ever been made to see, faith continues to say that things we cannot see are real and true.

By faith, blind eyes see, lepers are cleansed; and children are born which could not have been born.

Faith is rest -- once the battle has been settled -- rest in God accomplishing what He said He would accomplish. Faith is saying to God, as did the mother of our Lord, "Be it unto me according to thy word." In saying that, Mary acknowledged that it was God Who would accomplish this great thing, the Christ being born of her. In the same way, we say to God, "Be it unto me according to thy word."

"Let Christ be born in me!" Not by my might, my intellect, my good looks, my dedication, my spirituality, not by anything of "me," but by thy Spirit!

Faith says it is so. What He has said He would do, He has done -- "I will dwell in them and walk in them, and be their God."

Though the world rages against it, though even our own psyche rebels and says it couldn't possibly be so, nevertheless faith rises up and says, "God Himself is the doer of all in me!"

Faith is the foretaste of the heavenly country. It is the actual substance of the things we see afar off and hope for. It is the solid conclusive evidence of Him Who is unseen, unheard, unknown by the world, but revealed in the depths of our spirits.

Therefore, as Paul said, let us lift up our weak knees, and hear the word of faith shouting deep in our hearts. And that word is this:
Looking not unto ourselves, but unto Him, we are confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ."

Jesus Christ Is Come In the Flesh - Chapter 7, Hearts of Flesh

Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God:
And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.

What gravity there is in these verses. Why would such importance be placed on confessing, "Jesus Christ is come in the flesh"? Because God taking the form of and manifesting Himself as man is the means whereby He accomplishes His plan to give birth to an eternal family of sons who express His love.

"How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them!"

Our human idea of thought is a sort of inner banter in the mind, but God's thoughts take form and become real. Our own thoughts about ourselves are often self-accusatory, but not so God’s! His thoughts (which are "real") are "precious" concerning us and "great is the sum of them." More than the number of the sand! For each of us! Can we imagine such a thing?

"Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them."

When God "thought" of me -- lo, I was created!

Of what was I created? Of His Word – "and He is before all things, and by Him all things consist".

Created and predestined before the foundation of the earth to walk in Him as His sons, we have been given the privileged gift of self-consciousness and will. "Will" is in the heart of God, because as a Free Person He has with intent fixed Himself in love, and therefore as created selves who reflect Him we have been given the serious, but ultimately joyous inheritance of Freedom, which implies will. Free out of the freedom of God to be who we desire and choose to be!

In the Gospel stories nearly everyone had divided loyalties except the Messiah. He stuck to the truth, which was that HE had come in the flesh. "This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears." The Day of the Lord has come -- I Am HE!!!! What chutzpah! What ego!

Yet they nailed Him to a Cross, because they would not believe that God had come in the flesh. They didn't really believe in God. They only believed in their "idea" of God, and that idea could never come in the flesh, because it was only their idea, and not the True God. They were stirred by their harsh taskmaster, the serpent from the beginning, the king of "me for me," who himself would not go in to the Kingdom, and desired to prevent others as well. They had to kill God coming in the flesh because He testified that their god (themselves and the serpent in them) was not true.

"And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God."

Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men -- what can this mean? It is God dwelling in man as the final consummation of creation. It is the purpose of all His "thoughts" toward us,　 "Great is the sum of them" -- "His tabernacle is with men."

This is not the tabernacle of the Sinai desert, where everything is hidden, apart and unavailable. No, this tabernacle is God dwelling full-bore with men. God "knowing" (mixing with) man, God manifesting His Eternal Word, His Eternal Son, by means of His created, adopted sons -- Mankind. This is God Himself being the hidden self in Man, redeemed man, THE "Man from heaven," in the many "men from heaven."

Paul calls Jesus, "the Second Man, the Lord from heaven." The "Second Man" is eternal "Man," and Jesus is the Lord and King of a new race of eternal "men," who in Him are also the "Second Man," and therefore all corporately the "Lord from heaven." We were all Adam. We are now all the Second Man, the Lord from heaven: Christ.

But that could not happen had not "Jesus Christ come in the flesh."

For us, "this day this scripture is fulfilled in your ears," means that Jesus Christ has come now in MY flesh.

The saying today is "outside the box." Saying Christ has now, right now, come in MY flesh, breaks that box to pieces. There is no box to be out of. This is the most ultimate boldness there can be, coupled with the greatest possibility of failure. And that failure is backed up by lots of evidence of bones broken and shattered on the rocks all around this mountain. But this is faith that pulls out all the stops and bets the whole farm and everybody that works on it on Red 23 (God) and then lets the roulette table turn, hoping against hope and against all odds and all histories, that the ball will come to a stop in Red 23. The Pharisees (outside you and inside you) will say that is blasphemy, that God cannot come in flesh, and certainly not in YOUR flesh. "You’re crazy and monumentally presumptuous to think Red 23 will come up." Anybody could point out a million reasons why it could not possibly be and why you’re such a fool to think it.

But He does come in flesh, and every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God. Jesus Christ has come in the flesh so that we may say, "Yes, I have found myself to be in Him, and therefore my flesh, my humanity, is the Carrier of the Divine. He has come, emptied Himself of His divinity, and donned the likeness of my individual humanity, so that my life in this world is the Treasure of Him walking around being my human me. My little individual human existence IS Jesus Christ come in the flesh!"

There is no Christ except He has come in the flesh. Unless He is the Son of Man (as well as the Son of God) He has no meaning to us creatures of flesh.

What else can "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me, and the life I now live in the flesh," mean, but that Christ has now come in my flesh?

And this means now. There is nothing to hold us back from saying God is manifest in MY flesh now. There are no deeper understandings we need, no levels to attain, no need to wait til we get a new body to be who we are, or even a need to get "more sanctified" or "closer to God." Today is the day. Right now. God is manifest in MY flesh right now. Spirit, soul and body. IN this particular earthen vessel He shines as a Treasure to those with eyes that see and ears that hear.

Now, today, is this scripture fulfilled in your ears:

"The spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD."

It is fulfilled today in you and me.

HE has done it.
"This is the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes."

Already Are -- Chapter 8, Hearts of Flesh

When we say we are "complete and perfect in Christ," we are not meaning that there is no spiritual "growth" or changes brought into our outer living by the Spirit of Christ who lives in us.

Of course God continues to change and mold us as every day passes. The scripture says, "But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord."

The completion I refer to, the "Already are-ness," is He Himself. In Him, I am. But I don't find myself by looking for myself (or for change or "growth" in myself), but by losing myself and finding Him. Then in finding and seeing only Him, I am changed into the same image from glory to glory, plateau to plateau, height to height, peak to peak, by the Spirit of the Lord.

And by simple faith we declare, "O Lord, you have become One with me so that my self is YOU being yourself," and we are thus privileged to see our hidden life in Him in the obscurity of faith going out into the world as a river of living water.

We only see Him, All in all, and in seeing Him, we are ourselves in fullness.

And all this is accomplished by the Spirit of the Lord, and not by us. We don't touch it. We don’t try to make it happen. This is something we cannot make happen in any way by any efforts of our own. It is a gift of God.

The growth I've found is not what I expected it to be a long time ago. I really thought I would become a more loving person, more holy, more fervent, more caring, more more more more -- than I thought I was.

But since having found that "I" would never, ever, be able to produce the "self-improvements" I thought I needed, life has shifted inwardly from the stress of always striving to "become something one day" (but sadly never arriving), into a settled, continuous "I live yet not I but Christ lives" consciousness, which is subterranean to my moment-to-moment living and conscious thinking, and yet able to burst up into the present moment (forefront of my mind) at any time.

Now in that continuous "I live yet not I" life that is almost unconscious, I find myself just going around doing my daily business, whatever it is, and in doing my daily business, every moment is Christ, and that's the substance of my faith which is my real life that is within me.

We see indeed by revelation that all things consist of the Christ, the Word of God. Scripture testifies to this over and over and we find it true in the depths of our being. And since there is no past or future in God, and since He is the God of the Living, then He is the God of the Present. Therefore in the Present He exists in all His fullness, and in the Present By Him ALL THINGS consist, and in the Present Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father, and is also the Lamb in the midst of the Throne and the Bright and Morning Star. Also in the present moment, we sit in the midst of the throne with Him, to reign with Him, and by His gift to join with Him in being the vessel of the Father's life in the world we live in.

This is a continuous thing. This is the "already are-ness" we join when we come to who we are.

Yes, absolutely we are changed from day to day and from image to image. But what does Paul say? He says, "from glory to glory." He does not say from "worse" to "better," or from "lesser" to "more," or from "less perfect" to "more perfect." Paul says that we grow from one "glory" to another "glory" --　and that's all it is – it’s all glory!

As we go from one consciousness to another, from one understanding to another, it is all Christ in His perfection every step of the journey, every moment! Every moment!

So the gist of it is not to see our growth as some sort of self-improvement, or getting better or holier, more loving, or even as becoming "closer" to God, but as Christ being as He means to be in us in the present moment. If we believe He lives in us to will and to do of His good pleasure, then what other confession could we make?

We look into the mirror and what do we see? Paul says we see Christ when we look into a mirror. But when we look into a mirror we see ourselves. So then it is Christ in His own completion in ourselves in the here and now. We see what appears to be us in the mirror, but Paul says what we see is Christ. It is Christ reflecting Himself in us NOW.

As we always say, "TODAY is the day of salvation. Today, if you will hear his voice..."

Our job isn't to look at ourselves, to rate our progress, to consider our status, but simply to look "unto Him" continuously by faith as the Real Self Who is hidden in ourselves, and in the simplest of childlike faith we say, "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep." And He does. "For I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day."

Isn't that it, though? Which of us can know the way? There are a billion voices out there, all shouting something different, all purporting to be The Truth, and what certainty do we have over any other that the way we have found is THE way?

"O God, you're the ONLY ONE who knows! And You keep us in Your bosom, as the apple of Your eye, and promise to lead us and guide us and to receive us into glory!"

Shout hallelujah! We are back on the mercy train, the grace train, the only train in town!

And thank God our God is the Father of mercies. "Blessed is the man unto whom the LORD imputeth not iniquity."

So of course, yes, we change, but how we change is like the Spirit, "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit."

And also --

Mark 4:
26　And he said, So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground;
27　And should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how.
28　For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.

O praise God. It is the Divine Nature in us, which grows up, of its own accord, in fullness.

We rejoice in today. Tomorrow will take care of the things of itself.

[DY: There is so much in this series by Fred that is so wonderful. I have included just a bit here, please visit his site to read the rest.]

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