Now we will continue where we left off the last lesson. Remember Colossians 3:14-17 says,
“14But above all these things put on love, which is the bond of perfection. 15And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to which also you were called in one body, and be thankful. 16Let the Word of Christ, dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in Psalms and hymns, and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts, to the Lord. 17And whatsoever you do in word and deed do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.”
Now we have talked about putting on love and singing with grace in our heart. We talked about being beautified with salvation and now Romans 13:14 says, “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” We discussed this in length in the last lesson, but did you know that when you are put on the Lord Jesus Christ, you are wearing Jesus? And when people see you, they see Jesus in you, on you and through you. Now whether or not they know it is Him or not is irrelevant. How many of you that if the Lord Jesus came and started walking in this city today and dressed normal, that most people would not know it is Jesus? So don’t expect them to recognize the Jesus in you when they see you. They are not going to say, “Wow! I see Jesus in you.” No, they are going to say, “I can see something different about you” and that something is going to draw them to ask you about what it is they see. What you have done is – you have put on the Lord Jesus Christ and He is shining through you. You have chosen to identify with the Lord Jesus by walking out His Word in your life. So what happens? When people see you, they see Jesus. It’s important though that you remember that you and Jesus are not separate entities anymore. You have been made one with Him. Through His death, He has killed the old nature in you so that He can raise the new nature in you. Now when you put Him on, you are causing His life to live through you, and your life and His has now become energized by the victory of Calvary.
Romans 13:14 says, “Make no provision for the flesh.” Why is that? If the devil can get you to associate yourself with who you used to be, you will begin to operate under the curse of the fall and reap the benefits of that curse. The devil wants equal time in your life. He will try to convince you that it is “balance”. No! You cannot mix the Word of God and the report of the Lord with man’s report and come out with balance. If you do, you will come out with error. True accuracy is believing God. The issues of life do not come from God. God has got Himself it together? No, we are the problem, and He is going to straighten us out and so we “make no provision for the flesh” or the old nature. That is why the Bible tells us to “Give no place to the devil.” (Eph 4:27) I don’t know about you, but that tells me that there is something I must do to ensure the devil gets no foothold in my life? So what do I do when I am tempted to go back to my old way of doing things? I tell the devil with boldness, “No, that’s the old man. That is not me!” Now people will say, “Wait a minute! That is too you!” You answer, “No, it isn’t, that is the old man. That person is dead in Jesus!” What are you telling this person? You are saying, “Look, I have completely annihilated satan’s foothold any place in my life because I believe that Jesus through His death on the cross, killed the old nature I used to have.” That’s right! Through His sacrifice on the cross, Jesus annihilated the devil’s foothold over every area of the life of the every believer. That’s why the devil works overtime to try to convince you that you are not who God said you are because if you believe you are who God says you are, he has no place in you and no ability to influence your life.
John 14:30 says, “The devil comes and has nothing in me!” Why is this important to know? If you can say this with conviction, the devil is in trouble because He will have no place in you. He cannot touch you. That is why the Bible tells you to not give equal time to the flesh. Do not give the new man some time and the old man some time. Do not be to the many viewpoints of the world. Just be open to the Word of God only. GIVE NO PLACE TO THE DEVIL! GIVE NO PLACE TO THE FLESH! PUT ON THE LORD JESUS CHRIST! Do not get caught up the traditions of man and religion. Do not put walk one foot in the Word of God and the other in the world, and call it balance. Put on the Lord Jesus Christ and His extremely zealous, Godly Word-based conduct. You let Jesus live on the inside of you. Remember, do not let yourself see you and He as separate entities. You are both joined as one, therefore His victories are yours now through faith. Your failures in the past were already judged in Him on the cross. You are one in nature. Through His death, He has broken the old man in Him so that He could raise a new man in Him.
“So put on the Lord Jesus Christ in your mind, in your thought life, in your awareness, and in your meditations. Realize your identity is eternally linked in Him.”
Now when God created Adam, the Genesis 1:26-27 said,
“Then God said, “Let Us make man in our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”
Here the Bible calls mankind “man” and if you read closely, you will see that man is distinguished apart from the rest of creation. By doing so, the earth and the children of men are recognized as a breed, a species, all to itself. Now every species of living things has a certain way of acting and there are those who will tell try to convince us through so called science, which is nothing in the world but religion of evolution, that man evolved, but you can look at breeds such as the cat and dog, and see that there is nothing evolving. A cat is a cat and a dog is a dog. Two different species each acting like the species it belongs to. Well by the same token, a human belongs to the human family and will have common ground with those within the human family. So when God said mankind, He was talking about a species of creation that He made after His image and His likeness. When Jesus became a new man, He became the last Adam. Through Him, a new species, a new breed, a new race of men and women created in the image of holiness now live. This new breed godly men/women will bear the characteristics of the Head or the Procreator, Jesus, but it is enough to just know that fact. You have to be changed, but to be changed and owe nothing to the flesh, and give no place to the flesh, you have got to allow the new Procreator, Jesus, to change your mind and your confidence, and transform or lead you far away from the old man, so as to bring you closer to the new man you were intended to be.
So we are not only going to find out who we are in Him, we are going to put that knowledge to work. As we do, we will begin to see the result of what we believe. See the problem is many of us fall into a trap. As we are studying and learning faith, we try to put faith to work in the natural by seeing if it will produce a tangible something outside of us, and in so doing, we miss God. Then we will say, “It doesn’t work. I tried to believe God for a car and it didn’t happen.” That is kind of backwards isn’t it? You should first believe God for a change in your spirit and a change in your mind because faith is there to primarily make you a different person. Now when you get that revelation of that different person and you find out that he is already blessed, everything in the natural realm will comply with that. Faith begins with change, a change that takes us out of the old and takes us into the new. So a man’s life does not measured by the abundance of the things he possesses. Faith is measured by who the man has become. Now once he has become and is becoming what God has made him to be, he will have possessions. He will have victory and success in life, but it will not be because God did something for him, it will be because God did something in Him. That means that in order for God to create in you a change that produces faith, you have to hear the Word. You have to explore the Word. You have to meditate on and draw strength out of the Word itself.
Now let’s turn to John 1:12-13. It reads,
“12But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: 13who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”
The Bible tells us how the Word became flesh (John 1:14). The invisible, nontangible, spiritual Word of God became a physical, tangible, flesh, bone and blood person. The Word, Himself, became incarnated and became human. When you saw Him, He was thinking, but it was the Word. He was living, but it was the Word. He was speaking, but it was the living Word. When He sat down, it was the Word sitting with you. When He walked around, it was the Word walking around with you. That Word took not only a human form, not only a human identity, but that Word through an act of faith took your old identity in Him, and when He broke His body, He literally was breaking the natural manifestation in the earth realm that God had pre-ordained to be your substitute in order to deliver you from eternal hell.
The Bible says He took the bread and broke it, saying, “This is my body which is broken for you. Take, Eat …” (1 Corinthians 11:24-30) So it is not enough to know the Bible, you got to eat the Bible. How many of you said, “No thank you! I ate about a month ago. I know how that tastes.” No one right! Yet people come to church all the time and they sit there and say, “I don’t hear anything new. I ate that before.” Isn’t that interesting because it is not what you know. Are you eating the thing because when you eat, life flows in you? You feel good. How many of you know you get grouchy when you are hungry? Then somebody says, “What is wrong with you? Did you eat today?” You see the Bible is not just something you know, it is something you continue to partake of because it does not matter how many times you have eaten that Word before, if you are hungry, it will taste each time you hear it. As a matter of fact, partaking of the Word is God’s way to allow His power to continue to flow in you. Now when you are partaking of that Word, what is it doing? It is giving you new life that can only reach you and benefit you if you can relate to it. That means you have to have something in common between you and the Word of God, otherwise it is irrelevant to you. The Bible said, “If we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship (koinonia) or communion with one another, that is, we have things in common. (1 John 1:7) What do you think you have in common with Jesus?
Let me tell you some things.
• You are human. He became human.
• You used to be a sinner. He was made sin for you although He didn’t know any (2 Cor 5:21)
• You are tempted. He was tempted in all points like you are yet without sin. (Heb 4:12)
• You were worthy of death. He died for you
• You should have went to hell. He went down to hell for you.
As you can see, you have a lot in common with Jesus. As you walk in the light the Word becomes relevant to you. What does that mean? It means you have something in common with the Word. The Word connects to you in a personal way. Have you ever sat with people and they said, “No, I don’t eat that! Do you have anything else?” What are they doing? They are refusing to eat. They are refusing to be partakers of the meal because they have nothing in common it. What is the meal spiritually speaking? It is the Word. Now that is a bad place to be for when the Lord begins to talk to you about something, if you cannot partake of it or relate to it, it will not benefit you.
Have you ever heard someone say, “But I know that already, preach to me something I haven’t heard. I heard that before”? I hear it all the time, but what you must realize is the Word doesn’t do you any good if you just know it, you have to have something in common with it. Now let me tell you how common ground comes. You see somebody that failed God in the Bible will and you say, “If it was not for the grace of salvation, I would be there.” You see somebody please God in the Bible and you say, “That’s me through the power of the Holy Ghost.” You see Jesus winning and overcoming and you say, “Through Him I have that same authority.” You are finding common ground. Do you know what you are doing? You are eating or partaking of the Word. What does that do? It allows the life of the Word to become your life. How? You are assimilating that thing.
Let me ask you something. How many of you lie awake at night worrying how you are going to digest the food you ate in order to cause it to give your body strength? No! Your job is to just eat the thing. As a matter of fact, you do not even give it a second thought. We walk around as if it is normal. Now the Word of God is like that. Your spirit man will detect the good news and go out after it. Listen, the rational mind will talk him out of that – It will say, “Don’t eat that! Make sure…” But your spirit man will know the good news. You spirit man will go after it. Your job is to just eat the Word. Once you eat the Word, it is the job of the Holy Ghost to cause that Word to live and give strength to portions of your being causing the new man to live and to be strong. As you begin to eat the Word, you are partaking of revelation knowledge through the power of the Spirit because of the common ground and things with which Jesus has made available to you. So what happens is – what is His, becomes yours. His nature is given to you. How are we given this nature? The Bible tells us that His divine power has given to us exceeding great and precious promises that through these we become a partaker or an associate with God and His divine nature. (2 Pet 1:4) Now how come many people know the promises, but don’t have the divine nature? It is not enough to know it the promises, you got to eat it. You have to anchor your faith to these promises.
Now it is a sad day when food sits before you and you refuse to eat. I tell you, you can be starving to death and roll around in plates full of food and still die of starvation. You know how it feels. You know how it smells and yet you die anyway. Don’t roll in it, eat it! There are people who have perfected the art of just analytically evaluating the Word of God and not allowing it to feed their spirit. If the Word is irrelevant to you, if you haven’t identified that it is food, if you don’t know you are hungry, then you are not going to eat and go about with little change in your life. You have got to recognize two things –
1) Recognize your hunger
2) Recognize food and begin to assimilate it or eat it, that you might receive the strength you
need from it.
Now the Word became flesh for a reason. He became flesh so that He could provide the food of heaven so that our spirit can continue to live and to be strong.
Let’s look at Elijah, the prophet, during the time he was running away from Jezebel because she said, “I’m going to kill you.” He sits down under the Juniper tree. He had been anointed. He had outran a chariot for over twenty miles, but when the anointing lifted, all of a sudden his life was in danger. He said, “God kill me”. Suddenly, an angel shows up and makes him some food and feeds him. The Bible said, “He was able to walk in the strength of that for many days.” That is what the Bible is saying, “Get around the Word of God and get heavenly food in your spirit so that your spirit man can once again relate to who he is”. Now you can be an athlete who has never been defeated, but if you haven’t eaten for a month, guess what happens? It doesn’t matter who you are. By the same token, it doesn’t matter if you have a new nature, you have to feed that new nature. You have to let that new nature live on a new heavenly diet. You have to let that Word go on the inside of you and fill you. Some people say, “I just don’t have that time to spend to study in the Bible”. Jesus is coming soon. You are going to live by what you eat.
The Word of God is food. It is life to those who find it (Prov 4:20). It is health to all their flesh (Pro 4:21-22). You got to feed the spirit man so that the spirit man can live. Do you know what happens in him? He rises up and he becomes strong. The Word helps your spirit man live out his identity. So in light of that, the Bibles said, “As many as received Him, to them gave the power”. The Word “power” here is the word “Exousia”. This is not like dunamis, a power that generates himself like the one He gave us on the day of Pentacost. This is a different word for “power”. It means a sense of ability. He gave them the ability, privilege, force, capacity, competency, a freedom, a mastery, a delegated influence, a jurisdiction, a liberty, a power, a right and a strength to become sons of God. Now that Word “become” is the word “ginomai” in the Greek. It means “came into being”. Webster’s Dictionary said, “To grow up to be” or “change” or “develop into by growth.
Are you sincere about changing into or developing? If you, then it is not enough to know how to change, you have to make a decision to diligently pursue that change. Now watch what he said, “To as many as received, to them gave He an ability, a delegated authority, a competence, a privilege, a force to be able to grow up to be and become a son of God.” He said, “that delegated authority secures and ensures your ability to become a son of God” and yet there are still people living their life as a child spiritually. As a result, they die as a child, and go to heaven saying, “How come you didn’t do this Lord?” And God will say, “Listen, I gave you the job, the job description, the privilege, the delegated authority to grow up and become a son.” That means you won’t be able to blame God for not raising the dead through you. You are not going to be able to blame Him for not healing the sick through you. You are not going to be able to blame Him for not prospering your life or causing it to radiate with the glory of Calvary. The only blame is going to be on you for not putting to work the “Exousia” or power given to you. If however, you do, then something will happen. Whether you know it or not, you are working hard to remain where you are.
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