New Creation Realities – Part 5

 

The Bible says,

“By grace have you been saved completely in past time (Ephesians 2:5)”

When were we saved?  2000 years ago, He took away the sins of the whole world, but now the whole world was saved positionally with Christ.  It was done in the past, but individually it never becomes a reality unless they receive that grace through faith.  Now if they do not put any faith in what He did, His grace won’t do them any good to save them. Grace is there to provide salvation when faith is appropriated. Grace is there to provide healing. Grace is there to provide prosperity.  Grace is there to provide security and protection and rescue and all the provisions of God’s Word when faith is appropriated to the promise.   When you believe in what God said and act in faith, that grace will see to it that your faith is linked up to what God has promised.  So you were saved where? In past time, but you were also saved by making a decision to appropriate what He did to your life.  Regardless of when we were saved, it was in time past and you got saved because you realized that 2000 years ago He did something about your identity.  So watch what happens.

“…With the present result that you are in a state of salvation…”

What state do you live in?  Now how many are sure you live in that state?  You mean you don’t live in two states at the same time?  Can you live in two states at the same time?  You can, but you can’t occupy them both at the same time, can you?  Well by the same token, you cannot occupy a state of salvation and a state of damnation, or a state of divine health and a state of sickness, or state of abundance and a state of poverty at the same time.  You just can’t do it.   You got to choose a state to live in and occupy.   The Bible says,

 “with the present result that you are in a state of salvation which persists through present time.”

We are in a state of salvation that persists.

“…and raised us up with Him in heavenly places in Christ Jesus (Eph 2:6)” 

We are not only in a state of salvation that persists, but He raised us up and caused us to sit with Him in heavenly places.  So listen – you are not only the righteousness of God in Christ, but your new identity is an identification with a state of salvation that persists and also it is a new creation reality that should supersede natural reality.

“you are seated  far above principalities, powers and might and dominion (Eph 1:21)” 

That means you can seek the things which are above (Col 3:1-2). You can set your affections on things which are above.  You can think along the lines with those things which are available to you.  Someone will say, “Why don’t I do it?”  Because you don’t operate once and once and for all.  You have to be constantly changing in the spirit of your mind in order to cause them to take place.  There has to be an anticipation and reception of divine change and growth in God in order for it to continue to flow.  You have to keep having an attitude in God saying, “Yes more Lord.”  Now He won’t give you more if you are not doing something with what He has already given you.  You see what happens to us is we take this information and we file it away. We want to learn so we say, “my God, look at all this information.” We are filing it away because one day we are going to put it to work, but that is not the way to do it.  You cannot file away information about change and transformation in God and one day say, “I’ll put all this to work” because it is change.  It is not immediate change.  It is constant change.

So

“He raised us up, caused us to sit in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”

Listen why…  (Wuest)

 “…In order that he might exhibit for His own glory in the ages that will pile themselves one upon another in continuous succession.  (Eph 2:7)” 

Now He is going to exhibit something in the ages to come, the King James version says, but the way the original language talks about it is that after all the ages have piled themselves one upon another.” He is talking about the future.  You were saved in the past but that salvation persists until now. Why? Because God is going to exhibit something for His own glory after the ages pile themselves on top of one another.   How many of you want to know what He is going to exhibit?

 “…the surpassing wealth of His grace in kindness to us in Christ Jesus.”

Now God can only exhibit the surpassing wisdom of His grace when He has a finished product. It is then, He will say, “Look what My grace has accomplished, a people who were helpless and hopeless and incapable of perceiving themselves in light of a new identity manage to receive not only a new identity, but a constant transformation that bought them from that dimension and that sphere of sin and despair to the place of Christ-likeness and cohabitation with God.  After the ages pile themselves on top of one another, your salvation will endure.  A trillion years from today, what God did in you in this life by the Word of God will still live as a testimony and never become old.  Your salvation will never become dreary. I mean ten million years from now, you will have the joy of the Lord living on the inside of you and still be marveling and thanking God for the grace that was appropriated to you from the hand of God.  He is going to exhibit something in you. Do you know what you are going to be?

You are going to be like a trophy and a pillar in the house of God.  You are going to walk around, but you won’t be special in the sense that you will be one of a kind, though you will be unique.  You will look around, but you won’t marvel at you, you will marvel at others.  The first shock will be when we all get to heaven. We are going to get shocked at who is there.  We are going to say, “How did you get here?” It is the grace of God.  You are going to walk around marveling and saying, “My God, look what the grace of God has done in you. It had to be the blood.” How many of you know that in some people, it had to be the blood?  And they feel the same way about you.  So that is going to be a powerful reality even after the ages have piled themselves atop of one another.

Now look at Ephesians 2:8,

“for by grace have you been saved in time past completely through faith,” 

How many of you believe you are saved completely?  How many of you know some people who show it more than others? Another words, some people are more kind, some more forgiving, some more loving. They have grown in their salvation. Now they are not more saved. You are never more saved then when you first got saved, but guess what! You are never less saved then when you first got saved.  That means you never have to lose the joy of your salvation. Somebody will say, “Why don’t I feel the way I felt when I got saved?” Because you don’t think about your salvation as much as you did when you first got saved.

If you just sit down and think where He has brought you from, what you used to be, where you are now, it won’t take long before you start getting excited about what God did, but if it is done once for all, you were completely saved in time past.  You are not going to get more saved.  You were saved by grace through faith with a result that your salvation persists through the present time.  How many are glad that it does?  How many want to grow in that? Although salvation is complete in you, change is conditional, isn’t it?  How many of you know people that live as baby Christians all their life? They die and go to heaven.  So you have a decision to make.   Some people live as struggling Christians.  They struggle with sin all their life, die and go to heaven.  You have a decision to make.  Some people live in a constant state of double-mindedness about everything being saved.  They die and go to heaven, but they live life without receiving anything from the Lord, but the Bible shows us that salvation is completely done. It persists through present time, but change is conditional.

We are going to change from glory to glory, and listen to this what Ephesians 2:9-10 says,

“⁸For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, ⁹not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. (NKJV)”

“and this {salvation} is not from you as a source; of God it is the gift, not from a source of works, in order that no one might boast, ¹⁰for we are His handiwork created in Christ Jesus with a view to good works which God prepared beforehand in order that within their sphere we may order our behavior” (Wuest)

Salvation is complete already.  You are just as saved as you will ever be in God. It persists until present time, but watch the key.  It says,

 “you are handiwork created in Christ Jesus with a view to good works which God prepared beforehand in order that within the sphere we may order our behavior.” 

What in the world does it mean? This is what it means… You did not offer salvation, so you cannot brag about salvation in the sense that you are boasting about it. You can brag about God providing it or about the salvation itself being provided by God, but you can’t say that anything you did helped it come about.  How many are glad for that?  But that gives you a security.  As long as your heart intends to serve God, then nothing you may fall into by mistake can undo the salvation God did. Now don’t misunderstand me, we do not believe in eternal security. We believe if someone wants to go to hell and they work hard at it, they will get there, but we do not believe that it is something that happens in a moment and a twinkling of an eye.  We believe you have to cross many barriers and safeguards that God placed there for your sake.  You have to be willing to walk away from what God has provided and go to the extreme in order to lose what God has given you in Christ.

This is what we are saying…  You did not earn it.  You did not provide it.  You did not do anything to make it happen but believe that it was finished and provided through Jesus.  Now that salvation persists until today. So it says, “You received it by grace through faith” and it says, “You are God’s handiwork.  You are God’s workmanship.”  Now you are His workmanship created (past tense) in Christ Jesus. What does that mean? That means that now you are the son of God, but it does not appear what you shall be (1 John 3:2).  Now although God knows exactly who you are because He has pre-created and predestined you in Christ, He has to bring what He knows about who you really are to you through the Word of God so that you can believe it and allow it to change you in the “Now” constantly to the image He has foreordained for you to be. So in other words, you are His workmanship created in Christ, so all you have to do is find out what Christ is like and attribute to your new self, in light of what He did, His likeness and His character. So that means if God created you in Christ, then Christ is God’s will for you.

“He predestined us to be conformed to the image of His dear Son. (Rom 8:29)” 

Now Jesus is the finished work and you are the work being worked upon now, but finished in Jesus before the foundations of the world (1 Peter 1:20).  When God looks at you, He says, “this is how you are, but then you look and say, “but that’s not how I am now”. God said, “but that is how you are before you ever became this way and after I am through with you, this is how you are going to be again because when I created Adam, I made him in My likeness and in My image and in his loins I created you perfect, righteous, and holy.  He was the first man, the head of a human race that was to resemble me and be like me, and he fell but I knew he was going to fall so I prepared a last Adam and in Him, I created you again with the same glory, I have put in you and the same identification I put in you when you were in the first Adam.  Then I sent the last Adam to undo what the first Adam did so that through an act of faith in what the last Adam did, you can take the new nature that is finished work in Christ and cause it to be changing, transforming work in you until the finished work becomes a reality in you and you see him like he is and you changed into His likeness.

That’s where you are headed and it doesn’t have to wait until after the rapture because the fun is gone then. It is celebration time then, but if it happens before the rapture, devils are going to face Jesus again in you. He will be living in you. His miracle working power lives in you. His mind lives in you.  His spirit lives in you. His fruit will live in you. Every part of Him will live in you and the world itself will face another Christ.  It will be Christ in you because when the body of Christ and it won’t be another Christ.  It will be Christ in you because when God said you are His handiwork, He said, “He created in Christ”.  You were foreknown.  You were predestined to conform to the image of his dear Son.  You are the body of Christ. Now it is a finished salvation persisting until now, but the transformation has to come by the renewing of your mind and as you constantly allow what God has already planned you to be and predestined you to be and list to this, He has created you in Christ to be before He ever came. Now when you allow that to come into your life, it changes you.

Now what happens when you change? Listen to what happens… You are changed to walk the sphere of good works, the same good works you were foreordained to walk in and you start walking in the sphere of good works and what happens is – the blind see and the deaf hear and the lost get saved and the down brother gets uplifted and you do not get offended, you forgive and people do not understand what it is. You say, “How can you walk like that?” Well I have embraced a new identity, therefore I can walk in a different sphere.  What kind of sphere is it?  It is the sphere of good works because I was foreordained to walk in them. Now how do you walk there?  By faith.  That means through unbelief and doubt and associating yourself with the old man, you walk in the sphere of bad works.  You can read the Bible and get nothing out of it because you are in another dimension. So God said, “You are a finished work in Christ, but you are a progressive work through Christ.” The Word of God is progressively changing you, redeeming you back to the foreknown image that God had for you.  Beloved, now we are the sons of God, but it does not yet appear what we shall be, but what little revelation we are constantly allowing to come into our life and we are receiving, that which we are receiving is bringing constant change and it is causing us to order our behavior in the sphere of good works because we are God’s handiwork.