Dear Friend,
My foot is me. I am not my foot. But my blood, my energy, flows through my foot. My mind tells my foot where and when to go. My foot does not even consider itself to be an entity separate from my whole. If my foot were chopped off, I could go on but my foot could not.
I see the oneness of our relationship to God somewhat like this. I am a part of God. (Or at least I am meant to be.) His energy, life force flows through me, I should go where and when He directs as if I were His hand or foot.
“Feel the force, Luke.” It is not magic; it is the energy of God in His creation. Magic technically is the corruption of God’s force to work man’s will (or Satan’s) and place our desires on the throne that belongs to the mind of God. God’s Spirit is always subject to God’s mind. The goal is to have the Mind of God supreme in our being. As we are subject to His mind, we accept His power flowing through us and become an extension of Him.
Yes, sin blocks this. Sin is separation from God. Sin is the opposite of God’s mind in us. And if it were not for Jesus removing the sin from us, we would have no ability to be one with God. It is very important that we realize the sanctification that we have through Christ. Christ came to set us free from sin so that the mind of God could flow through us.
Read John 14-17 carefully. I call it Jesus’ last great cram course. It was after the Last Supper on the way to the Garden of Gethsemane. It takes about 15 minutes to walk from where they ate, to the Garden. It takes about 15 minutes to read these chapters out loud as if you were teaching them. They were Jesus’ last few minutes before He would be taken. He had these last minutes to get His point across. They are my favorite scriptures of all. This is from John 14 “
Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. Whoever has my commands and obeys them; he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him.”
If A=B and B=C then A=C. Remember geometry? The first time that I read and understood John 14, it was because of geometry.
If Christ is in the Father (and the Father is in Christ) and if Christ is in me and I am in Christ, then I am in the Father and He is in me.
If Christ could say, “I am one with the Father.” Then I can say, “I am one with the Father.” What about sin? That was taken care of on the cross. This is the reason that Jesus was willing to be crucified, because it took care of my sin on the cross, so that I could be one with Him and the Father. If I look at my sin, and consider my sin, then my sin is in my mind, not God’s will. If I put my sin to death on the cross and look at God’s goodness and mercy, then I am open to receiving God’s will in my mind.
“Whoever has my commands and obeys them” is not talking of the Ten Commandments here. This is about the mind of Christ dwelling in you. Look at Acts 5, the story of Ananias and Sapphira. How did Peter know that Ananias was lying? And why did he say, “You have not lied to men but to God.” The mind of God was in Peter and the church. Being human they made mistakes too, and had to be corrected. Yet they did not consider their sins as reason to not have the mind of God, but continued to be the “body of Christ.”
This understanding of who we are meant to be in God is what God is trying to say to His people today. There have been times when many people understood and times when only a few people understood. But God wants to make His church alive again.
He wants us to grasp that we are DEAD to sin as we died with Christ, and alive to Him as we were RAISED with Christ. We are an extension of the body of Christ. God’s energy (his Spirit) flows through us, and if we will yield to the Mind of the Father, we will be like Christ.
We must be willing to hear and obey. We must be aware that our sins are gone. We are sinless. Not because we no longer sin but because they have been put to death and can no longer harm us. We must not look at our sins, our depression, our fear, etc. We must let love flow through us until the Mind of the Father permeates our very being.
I do not know if I have made myself clearer or more confusing to you. Christ went off alone to pray so that He could know the mind of the Father more clearly. He lived in a human body as we do. He had to listen to hear. We have been set free from sin; we must live free from it. Knowing the mind of God must be our primary objective. A foot cannot go its own way. The signal must be clear and true. My son Paul has spinal cord injury. The signal is not clear and true. The foot often kicks on its own. It cannot support his weight. But it is still connected enough to receive energy enough to live and grow. The signal gets through better now than it did 6 years ago. This is the kind of foot the church in America has been.
This is not what God wants. He wants to be a part of us and us a part of Him.
May the Mind of the Father, the Heart of the Son, and Power of the Holy Spirit, be in us, everyone.
Rebecca
