Given Over
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| As believers, we are only effective in what we do to the extent that resurrection life is flowing through us |
We have seen how from the beginning, the true Gospel was never planned to be understood or communicated without the cross being at its center. Whenever this is changed, the ministry and message automatically loses its true power to transform lives.
When we begin to feel that somehow this theme is not that attractive or relevant in modern times, or that it needs to be substituted for something more appealing and entertaining, then our values have changed. Worldly solutions have become more important. There is real jeopardy here because 1 Corinthians 1:18, places all all into two categories based on their attitude to the cross – those who are perishing or those who are being saved.
Once a disciple surrenders to Christ, he or she becomes enlisted for resurrection life. God knows that in order for there to be a genuine resurrection, another thing has to happen first genuinely. So He begins a process of bringing everything in that person's life which hinders the flow of the life of Christ to the death of the cross. Our best example of this is Christ Himself. There are many situations which He underwent during His earthly life as a man which He could have been easily exempted from, but these were not changed by any divine intervention whatsoever. His trials did not begin when He started His ministry. He spent a considerable part of His life before this, earning a living in one of the most difficult conditions at the time. And as we have seen, He went through hardship, hunger, lack, rejection, sorrow, opposition, and finally betrayal and desertion. He was not divinely shielded from these situations.
His Heavenly Father had all the power to change these struggles and challenges in an instant and cause His Son to have the best life on earth. He could have made the life of His own Son as smooth and comfortable as possible in order for Him to fulfill His mission, but this did not happen. The challenges themselves had been allowed by the Father. When we read the account of His life, what we see is an escalation that continues to intensify till it reaches a climax at the scene of the cross, the worst of all tragedies. So how could a loving Father allow such things to happen to His Son of whom He stated He was well pleased? The scriptures affirm that God is love. However, it also states that as far as the heavens are above the earth, so are His ways higher than our ways and His thoughts above our thoughts. This again brings us back to the matter of identity and our interpretation of love, which as we saw in the previous sections, is not always accurate.
In the days of His flesh, Jesus was subject to the same weaknesses and tempted in every way just as we are. Contrary to what may be believed today, obedience was not something that came automatically in His life. The Bible shows us this was something that He learned. How did Jesus learn obedience to such a high level? It was not through miraculous or special divine favours from the Father.
Who, in the days of His flesh, when He had offered up prayers and supplications, with vehement cries and tears to Him who was able to save Him from death, and was heard because of His godly fear, though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered. (Hebrews 5:1-8)
The more He submitted Himself willingly to what that had been prepared for Him, the stronger His obedience grew, to the level that He was able to obey the Father even when situations became difficult. This is the way of the cross. Once we receive salvation we are given the power to become sons of God and the Father begins to lead us along the same path. He already knew us even before we were even conceived on earth and today He knows us more than we could ever know ourselves. So when we finally come to the point where we no longer want to be just nominal Christians but to be changed into true disciples, He knows exactly what to allow in our lives to bring about the undoing of the old nature and the release of the new. How we react to these situations determines whether we are going to grow in obedience or not.
This quickly became very personal when I stood before Him. One of the things He clearly showed me was the events and experiences of my own life since the time I was a child. In His light, I saw a very clear replay of every thought, every feeling and every action just as it had happened on earth. One of the things that stood out was that I had actually resisted Him though I thought I was following and serving Him as a Christian. By responding the way I did to the situations He had allowed to come into my life, I was actually working against the cross and thereby missing out on opportunities to become changed into His likeness.
Jesus did not select for Himself the type of cross He was going to bear. This was predetermined by the Father. Inasmuch as we may wish to do so, we cannot choose the type of cross we bear as disciples of Christ. Yet this is exactly what we try to do. We try to make things as easy as possible for ourselves on earth and in so doing, miss out on great opportunities to die and come into resurrection life. Just as it was in the case of Jesus, the choice on what type of cross we are to bear is made by the Father. No two believers can carry exactly the same cross. It will vary because though as believers, we may fellowship and share our lives in the same place, the condition of each of our hearts is different.
Unfortunately, today the emphasis is almost entirely on coming to the cross of Christ and casting our burdens there. Very little is mentioned concerning the individual cross each of us is called to bear and what that really means. However, the fact remains that I have responsibility over my own cross. Not anyone else's but my own. When I share about submitting to the breaking process, I don’t mean blindly accepting everything that happens in our lives as being the will of God. This is a form of passivity and leads to spiritual bondage. There were plenty of situations which Jesus did not accept but instead turned them around as He kept moving on to fulfill His purpose. Later, we'll cover more on the wisdom to tell the difference between the two.
Now in His presence, I could hear His voice and understood the truth in clearer way than I had ever done in my entire life. He showed me how my challenges in many areas of my life did not begin at that time. However, unlike Him, I had taken a different course and instead of humbly submitting myself to the breaking process ordained by the Father through these circumstances in order to bring my life to an end, I developed a habit of trying all I could to avoid them or their impact as much as possible. In this way, I wasn’t really learning anything of eternal value out of my trials. I was busy trying to save my own life rather than losing it for His sake.
He started to explain to me what true discipleship was all about. His words kept pouring over me with such life and power, I began to experience how divine revelation truly divides soul and spirit and it is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. In Genesis 15:10, we see how Abraham encountered with God and took animals, split them in halves and laid them down opposite each other. This is what the sword of the Spirit does in our lives. Many times, because of the pressures of living in a natural world, our vision may become blurry and we are unable to distinguish clearly between what is truly spiritual and what is carnal, between what truly comes from God and what arises from our own human nature and the nature of those around us. This leads us into making the wrong judgement and taking the wrong course of action in our lives. When His words come, this separation is clearly made once and for all.
One thing that has been clearly imprinted in me is that the words that Jesus speaks are not simply means of conveying a message. They have a life of their own. When He speaks, the divine power in the life of those words flows through you and cause you to come alive in such a way that you experience the truth like you have never experienced it before. Man was created to live by the words that God speaks (Matthew 4:4) and these are the words that separate the natural from the spiritual. This is what happened in Genesis when they made a separation between light and darkness.
The Lord has delivered me from many challenging situations in the course of my life. There were other challenges which remained. The nature of my struggle was such that I resisted these, because I did not want them at all. I realized my choices had been driven more by self-preservation than truly becoming like Him. Like many people, I reasoned that my walk with Him and my fulfilling His purpose would have been more effective if I did not have to go through so many inconveniences, setbacks and hindrances because then I would be more available for Him. The irony is that many of the things that I saw as setbacks, inconveniences and hindrances were in fact His purpose! They were part of the practical cross prepared for me as an individual. Yet here I was, doing all I could to evade them altogether. I mistakenly assumed that if only I rid myself from such difficulties as much as possible, spare myself the time and struggle of dealing with them, then I would have the space I needed to commit myself to Him and His calling for my life. As He spoke, I saw that though on a human level this line of thinking seemed reasonable, it was not the way of the cross.
It is alright for a believer to pour their heart before God and express how they feel when such trials come. God never rebukes anyone for doing this. The Bible is full of examples of cries of desperation all the way from the psalmists to Jeremiah, Paul and even Jesus Himself. Moreover, there are many situations He will deliver us from when we cry out to Him in faith. I have experienced many times when God supernaturally intervened in my own life and that of others and turned the impossible situations around. Wisdom is to know the difference between these and the ones that constitute the practical cross we are called to bear. For our sake, He will not change the principles of His Kingdom. We are deceived if as disciples, we expect Him to deliver us from the operation of the cross. False teachings concerning faith and the supernatural may lead us to believe that the victorious walk of the believer is a life of continuous miracles and blessings that steers clear of cross. Only the light of His truth can deliver us from all such deception.
I struggled to understand why He allowed me to go through certain challenges in my own personal life, which I knew He could easily have erased. These were situations involving people in my life who had caused much pain, places I had been misunderstood, mistreated or rejected and experiences that had left me ripped apart. There were battles that loomed before me which I sought to flee from simply because I could not see myself as being able to endure. He showed me the reason why He would not remove certain challenges in my life was because to do so would be to violate His own principle. To remove them from would have been to take away the only means by which I would have been able to follow Him. Discipleship is such that the cross is the only instrument through which one can stay close to the Master without falling away. The cross brings death to everything in us which hinders the flow of His life. Without the cross, it is still possible to follow many things on earth - the church, a Christian movement, a ministry, a doctrine, a gift, a spiritual community. However, it is not possible to follow Him.
So the more I resisted this process, the more I drifted away from Him, even though I remained a professing Christian and saw many wonderful things happen in my life by His grace. When this reality dawned on me, I was gripped with remorse and so badly wanted to go back to the beginning and start all over again. I realized I had missed untold opportunities which had been specifically allowed to bring my life to an end. In doing so, I still made many 'Christian' achievements that were commendable, but I effectively disqualified myself from following Him. As shocking as this was, I realized there was no way I could return and start again. I'm writing this so that you do not fall into the same foolishness and waste your time. Whatever good can be achieved in each second of our lives that passes is lost forever once that second is gone. The time we have been given is limited and precious beyond all telling.
When we examine the lives of Jesus and the apostles, they seem to be mortal tragedies as far as our human understanding order and decency is concerned. But were they really? The wisdom that men like Paul had was to distinguish between ordinary events in his daily life and the practical cross that had been appointed for him. If you have this wisdom, you will not waste your time and energy seeking to remove yourself from the battles that have been ordained for your own good. It is not the faith of Christ when we resist or struggle against the cross. Such ‘faith’ teachings actually promote unbelief, because if I truly believe in the Father, then I will entrust my life to Him to do as He will in such circumstances without struggling against His plan. Resisting His way in the context of the cross is not only an expression of unbelief, but also rebellion.
Think about it. By the standards of modern Christianity, a believer with a life of shipwrecks, desertions, numerous beatings and imprisonments, lack of sufficient food and clothing, who considers himself the scum of the earth and the chief of sinners would not really fit our definition of a man of faith and power. This is why many looked at Paul’s life and questioned his apostleship. Today, I think may well-meaning people would just shake their heads at his resume. The circumstances of his life appeared more to be those of someone who had not only been abandoned by God, but was also living under a curse. Yet hear him from his prison cell, encouraging us to rejoice always and give thanks in all situations as this is the will of God for us. The man had learnt the secret of knowing and embracing his cross when it showed up in his life. He did it in such a way that the life of Christ was able to flow through and impact continents. He submitted himself to the cross and learnt obedience such that he was entrusted with grace and much more than most have been entrusted with throughout the history of the church.
Though it may seem ironical, true rest, peace and freedom for a believer can only come by embracing the cross. Only those who have been through this process know true freedom on earth. To be conformed to His death means to experience as He did, following His example. How did Jesus die? By offering Himself up. He stated, ‘No man has the power to kill Me. I lay down My life of My own free will.’ He accepted and handed Himself over to the process. This is how He overcame. In John 19:31-32, the two men Jesus was crucified with were still conscious and since it was already late, the soldiers broke their legs in order to bring about a quicker end. When they came to Jesus, they found His state was different. He was not struggling to stay alive. He had already yielded His Spirit.
There is a lesson here. Resurrection life will not come about by resistance or struggle. We yield, knowing we have submitted ourselves to God and that He is now in control. We cease to make a habit out of striving. If we walk this manner, the scripture becomes true of us that His life is manifested through our mortal bodies. We are only effective as believers in what we do to the extent that resurrection life is flowing through us. And we are only truly alive to the degree that the cross has been allowed to do its work within us. The measure of our witness and impact in our generation is contingent upon how much this has become true of us personally. As we mature in this way, the Gospel of the Kingdom will come alive in us. We will not just know, read, sing or talk about it. We will live it and witness its life-changing impact on ourselves and others. Such is the way of the disciple.
When we begin to feel that somehow this theme is not that attractive or relevant in modern times, or that it needs to be substituted for something more appealing and entertaining, then our values have changed. Worldly solutions have become more important. There is real jeopardy here because 1 Corinthians 1:18, places all all into two categories based on their attitude to the cross – those who are perishing or those who are being saved.
Once a disciple surrenders to Christ, he or she becomes enlisted for resurrection life. God knows that in order for there to be a genuine resurrection, another thing has to happen first genuinely. So He begins a process of bringing everything in that person's life which hinders the flow of the life of Christ to the death of the cross. Our best example of this is Christ Himself. There are many situations which He underwent during His earthly life as a man which He could have been easily exempted from, but these were not changed by any divine intervention whatsoever. His trials did not begin when He started His ministry. He spent a considerable part of His life before this, earning a living in one of the most difficult conditions at the time. And as we have seen, He went through hardship, hunger, lack, rejection, sorrow, opposition, and finally betrayal and desertion. He was not divinely shielded from these situations.
His Heavenly Father had all the power to change these struggles and challenges in an instant and cause His Son to have the best life on earth. He could have made the life of His own Son as smooth and comfortable as possible in order for Him to fulfill His mission, but this did not happen. The challenges themselves had been allowed by the Father. When we read the account of His life, what we see is an escalation that continues to intensify till it reaches a climax at the scene of the cross, the worst of all tragedies. So how could a loving Father allow such things to happen to His Son of whom He stated He was well pleased? The scriptures affirm that God is love. However, it also states that as far as the heavens are above the earth, so are His ways higher than our ways and His thoughts above our thoughts. This again brings us back to the matter of identity and our interpretation of love, which as we saw in the previous sections, is not always accurate.
In the days of His flesh, Jesus was subject to the same weaknesses and tempted in every way just as we are. Contrary to what may be believed today, obedience was not something that came automatically in His life. The Bible shows us this was something that He learned. How did Jesus learn obedience to such a high level? It was not through miraculous or special divine favours from the Father.
Who, in the days of His flesh, when He had offered up prayers and supplications, with vehement cries and tears to Him who was able to save Him from death, and was heard because of His godly fear, though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered. (Hebrews 5:1-8)
The more He submitted Himself willingly to what that had been prepared for Him, the stronger His obedience grew, to the level that He was able to obey the Father even when situations became difficult. This is the way of the cross. Once we receive salvation we are given the power to become sons of God and the Father begins to lead us along the same path. He already knew us even before we were even conceived on earth and today He knows us more than we could ever know ourselves. So when we finally come to the point where we no longer want to be just nominal Christians but to be changed into true disciples, He knows exactly what to allow in our lives to bring about the undoing of the old nature and the release of the new. How we react to these situations determines whether we are going to grow in obedience or not.
This quickly became very personal when I stood before Him. One of the things He clearly showed me was the events and experiences of my own life since the time I was a child. In His light, I saw a very clear replay of every thought, every feeling and every action just as it had happened on earth. One of the things that stood out was that I had actually resisted Him though I thought I was following and serving Him as a Christian. By responding the way I did to the situations He had allowed to come into my life, I was actually working against the cross and thereby missing out on opportunities to become changed into His likeness.
Jesus did not select for Himself the type of cross He was going to bear. This was predetermined by the Father. Inasmuch as we may wish to do so, we cannot choose the type of cross we bear as disciples of Christ. Yet this is exactly what we try to do. We try to make things as easy as possible for ourselves on earth and in so doing, miss out on great opportunities to die and come into resurrection life. Just as it was in the case of Jesus, the choice on what type of cross we are to bear is made by the Father. No two believers can carry exactly the same cross. It will vary because though as believers, we may fellowship and share our lives in the same place, the condition of each of our hearts is different.
Unfortunately, today the emphasis is almost entirely on coming to the cross of Christ and casting our burdens there. Very little is mentioned concerning the individual cross each of us is called to bear and what that really means. However, the fact remains that I have responsibility over my own cross. Not anyone else's but my own. When I share about submitting to the breaking process, I don’t mean blindly accepting everything that happens in our lives as being the will of God. This is a form of passivity and leads to spiritual bondage. There were plenty of situations which Jesus did not accept but instead turned them around as He kept moving on to fulfill His purpose. Later, we'll cover more on the wisdom to tell the difference between the two.
Now in His presence, I could hear His voice and understood the truth in clearer way than I had ever done in my entire life. He showed me how my challenges in many areas of my life did not begin at that time. However, unlike Him, I had taken a different course and instead of humbly submitting myself to the breaking process ordained by the Father through these circumstances in order to bring my life to an end, I developed a habit of trying all I could to avoid them or their impact as much as possible. In this way, I wasn’t really learning anything of eternal value out of my trials. I was busy trying to save my own life rather than losing it for His sake.
He started to explain to me what true discipleship was all about. His words kept pouring over me with such life and power, I began to experience how divine revelation truly divides soul and spirit and it is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. In Genesis 15:10, we see how Abraham encountered with God and took animals, split them in halves and laid them down opposite each other. This is what the sword of the Spirit does in our lives. Many times, because of the pressures of living in a natural world, our vision may become blurry and we are unable to distinguish clearly between what is truly spiritual and what is carnal, between what truly comes from God and what arises from our own human nature and the nature of those around us. This leads us into making the wrong judgement and taking the wrong course of action in our lives. When His words come, this separation is clearly made once and for all.
One thing that has been clearly imprinted in me is that the words that Jesus speaks are not simply means of conveying a message. They have a life of their own. When He speaks, the divine power in the life of those words flows through you and cause you to come alive in such a way that you experience the truth like you have never experienced it before. Man was created to live by the words that God speaks (Matthew 4:4) and these are the words that separate the natural from the spiritual. This is what happened in Genesis when they made a separation between light and darkness.
The Lord has delivered me from many challenging situations in the course of my life. There were other challenges which remained. The nature of my struggle was such that I resisted these, because I did not want them at all. I realized my choices had been driven more by self-preservation than truly becoming like Him. Like many people, I reasoned that my walk with Him and my fulfilling His purpose would have been more effective if I did not have to go through so many inconveniences, setbacks and hindrances because then I would be more available for Him. The irony is that many of the things that I saw as setbacks, inconveniences and hindrances were in fact His purpose! They were part of the practical cross prepared for me as an individual. Yet here I was, doing all I could to evade them altogether. I mistakenly assumed that if only I rid myself from such difficulties as much as possible, spare myself the time and struggle of dealing with them, then I would have the space I needed to commit myself to Him and His calling for my life. As He spoke, I saw that though on a human level this line of thinking seemed reasonable, it was not the way of the cross.
It is alright for a believer to pour their heart before God and express how they feel when such trials come. God never rebukes anyone for doing this. The Bible is full of examples of cries of desperation all the way from the psalmists to Jeremiah, Paul and even Jesus Himself. Moreover, there are many situations He will deliver us from when we cry out to Him in faith. I have experienced many times when God supernaturally intervened in my own life and that of others and turned the impossible situations around. Wisdom is to know the difference between these and the ones that constitute the practical cross we are called to bear. For our sake, He will not change the principles of His Kingdom. We are deceived if as disciples, we expect Him to deliver us from the operation of the cross. False teachings concerning faith and the supernatural may lead us to believe that the victorious walk of the believer is a life of continuous miracles and blessings that steers clear of cross. Only the light of His truth can deliver us from all such deception.
I struggled to understand why He allowed me to go through certain challenges in my own personal life, which I knew He could easily have erased. These were situations involving people in my life who had caused much pain, places I had been misunderstood, mistreated or rejected and experiences that had left me ripped apart. There were battles that loomed before me which I sought to flee from simply because I could not see myself as being able to endure. He showed me the reason why He would not remove certain challenges in my life was because to do so would be to violate His own principle. To remove them from would have been to take away the only means by which I would have been able to follow Him. Discipleship is such that the cross is the only instrument through which one can stay close to the Master without falling away. The cross brings death to everything in us which hinders the flow of His life. Without the cross, it is still possible to follow many things on earth - the church, a Christian movement, a ministry, a doctrine, a gift, a spiritual community. However, it is not possible to follow Him.
So the more I resisted this process, the more I drifted away from Him, even though I remained a professing Christian and saw many wonderful things happen in my life by His grace. When this reality dawned on me, I was gripped with remorse and so badly wanted to go back to the beginning and start all over again. I realized I had missed untold opportunities which had been specifically allowed to bring my life to an end. In doing so, I still made many 'Christian' achievements that were commendable, but I effectively disqualified myself from following Him. As shocking as this was, I realized there was no way I could return and start again. I'm writing this so that you do not fall into the same foolishness and waste your time. Whatever good can be achieved in each second of our lives that passes is lost forever once that second is gone. The time we have been given is limited and precious beyond all telling.
When we examine the lives of Jesus and the apostles, they seem to be mortal tragedies as far as our human understanding order and decency is concerned. But were they really? The wisdom that men like Paul had was to distinguish between ordinary events in his daily life and the practical cross that had been appointed for him. If you have this wisdom, you will not waste your time and energy seeking to remove yourself from the battles that have been ordained for your own good. It is not the faith of Christ when we resist or struggle against the cross. Such ‘faith’ teachings actually promote unbelief, because if I truly believe in the Father, then I will entrust my life to Him to do as He will in such circumstances without struggling against His plan. Resisting His way in the context of the cross is not only an expression of unbelief, but also rebellion.
Think about it. By the standards of modern Christianity, a believer with a life of shipwrecks, desertions, numerous beatings and imprisonments, lack of sufficient food and clothing, who considers himself the scum of the earth and the chief of sinners would not really fit our definition of a man of faith and power. This is why many looked at Paul’s life and questioned his apostleship. Today, I think may well-meaning people would just shake their heads at his resume. The circumstances of his life appeared more to be those of someone who had not only been abandoned by God, but was also living under a curse. Yet hear him from his prison cell, encouraging us to rejoice always and give thanks in all situations as this is the will of God for us. The man had learnt the secret of knowing and embracing his cross when it showed up in his life. He did it in such a way that the life of Christ was able to flow through and impact continents. He submitted himself to the cross and learnt obedience such that he was entrusted with grace and much more than most have been entrusted with throughout the history of the church.
Though it may seem ironical, true rest, peace and freedom for a believer can only come by embracing the cross. Only those who have been through this process know true freedom on earth. To be conformed to His death means to experience as He did, following His example. How did Jesus die? By offering Himself up. He stated, ‘No man has the power to kill Me. I lay down My life of My own free will.’ He accepted and handed Himself over to the process. This is how He overcame. In John 19:31-32, the two men Jesus was crucified with were still conscious and since it was already late, the soldiers broke their legs in order to bring about a quicker end. When they came to Jesus, they found His state was different. He was not struggling to stay alive. He had already yielded His Spirit.
There is a lesson here. Resurrection life will not come about by resistance or struggle. We yield, knowing we have submitted ourselves to God and that He is now in control. We cease to make a habit out of striving. If we walk this manner, the scripture becomes true of us that His life is manifested through our mortal bodies. We are only effective as believers in what we do to the extent that resurrection life is flowing through us. And we are only truly alive to the degree that the cross has been allowed to do its work within us. The measure of our witness and impact in our generation is contingent upon how much this has become true of us personally. As we mature in this way, the Gospel of the Kingdom will come alive in us. We will not just know, read, sing or talk about it. We will live it and witness its life-changing impact on ourselves and others. Such is the way of the disciple.
