This morning, I had a very disconcerting dream. In it, a beautiful young sister took personal offense at Brother Tim when he openly shared the need for a follower of Jesus Christ to learn to rid of the old tendencies or rather the temperament of our human soul. (In essence, the old soul can never be the driving force of one’s life. Leave to it, it would wreck our spiritual walk eventually and cause much damage to the very people we love. )
At that, she took it as a personal criticism and walked out of the fellowship in anger. The husband, without proper discernment, sided with her. It was a difficult thing to witness, especially when seeing so many beautiful hearts were deeply hurt by it and the confusion that it caused to the innocent children.
At that, the Lord urged me to head-on with this scheme of the devil by sharing a few thoughts. In hope, somehow, may He grace it, that it be useful to spare us of such troubles of our soul and our life.
The refusal to allow one’s self to be further “sanctified”, or to bring death to our soul (old self), can cause grave damage to our walk in God, thereby relationships with others. Paul spoke of the shipwrecking of one’s faith. It caused much pain in him and great damage to his ministry.
It is almost “comical” and is enlightening to witness that people of the world and many saints worked very hard to grow in “love” and tried their best to love others or gain other’s love, only to be dismayed at the results of such a noble effort. Reasons are many. A few can easily be identified. Yet like weeds in life, they are hard to rid of in the field of human heart, which is the condition of the day and the culture of man:
- Self-pity or self-justification is not love unto oneself. Everyone knows this as an obvious truth. But we do just that to ourselves, consciously or unconsciously knowing that such a love is not from God. It is, like it or not, from our old soul. And this old soul is, often than we like, informed and controlled by our adversary, the devil. No wonder Brother Oswald Chambers observed that ”self-pity is of the devil”.
- To love someone else before ourselves or as unto ourselves is hardly the product of our natural affections, as beautiful as they are. Quite the opposite, it can only be produced by a willing heart with an enlightened understanding of God’s will and ways for others and our “approved” roles from Him for them. That is His ”other-worldly” love in action and in practice through our living obedience, and sacrifice our old self unto it. Put to death (burn into ashes like a slaughtered sheep on the altar) of the ”natural” self, and be transformed or born (raise to life) anew into the spiritual self. Only spiritual death, with it the end of the power of the old soul, leads to spiritual life, with it the activation of the wisdom of the mind of Christ (the approved life of Sonship in God) and then love from the heart of God the Father.
- The Love of God is very conditional. If it is conditional to John the Baptist and the great prophets before him, to Peter, John, and Paul who had to learn the way of Sonship with strenuous devotion and “unconditional” obedience, we then have to be humble enough to know that we are very limited in the knowledge of this love, and are in great need to learn this love. (John 15)
- Continuing to refuse to properly yield to the dealing of God to old self is proof of the lack of love of God in us. It is deadly contagious like a virus to a culture of Godly love. (1 John) Even more dangerous is that it makes us at enmity with God, thereby an enemy to the very people God purposed and graced us to love, spiritually speaking of course. (Romans 5-6) We damage others by our un-learned way of love. Is this not the common experience of mankind? We don’t need a movie or a novel to dramatize it for us. It is near us if not with us.
What is the lesson then? Plain and simple, the soul is the altar and self-love the ark of the religion of self. From the beginning, the seed of this evil was sown, and its thorns and thistles are well alive in us and among us today.
To illustrate this, allow me to offer an example. When we say others just don’t ”understand” ME. That is very common as a way to vent out our frustration in dealing with unsavory relationships or situations.
But we need to be extremely aware not to assume that is the case. Make sure to prayerfully give it serious evaluation. What if our impression or conclusion is wrong? What if they understand and see us in ways we can’t see ourselves? What if they are the messenger of God to reveal our true problem or true condition in life? What if they hold the key or the grace to God’s solution for our life? What if we are so blurred, or blinded, or pridefully stubborn that we have lost the art to hear others clearly and heed other’s counsel gladly? What if I am a Philip and they the Lord Himself, who is opening a door for me to dwell in the house of God and I am refusing His invitation because they are just another man from my home town, a familiar figure in the circle of my life, a regular folk from someplace I know, north, south, west or East?
Maybe we never think it is possible for someone in my life or in my time who can live a life from above, which means he or she is truly sent from God? Maybe we ultimately think God just doesn’t do that anymore and Jesus is the only one He wants to sanctify and glorify?
Or maybe, as some erroneously and proudly presume that once we are “saved” we get it, all-as Brother Derek Prince like to tease his audiences-if you have it all, then show us the all? 🙂
Sanctification or divine discipline by Father God unto His spiritual offsprings is an inevitable process for a son of God, without which only two possibilities remain: either we are never saved in Christ, or when refusing to actualize our legal right of Sonship thru discipline from God or discipleship through His delegated leadership, we, like Esau, have foolishly chosen to forfeit our birthright in God. In sum, we can not be a son of God without the proper work of the faith of the life Sonship, matter not if we are good Christian of any stripe, or a Jew before Jesus or after him, an atheist from birth or by choice. Vain are the theorizations of man when facing the living God. Let us see it, in the eyes of Jesus and Paul, Esau was not a no-believer of God. On the contrary, exactly because he was, he was used by them as a perfect example to warn the Jews of their day who refused their message. Esau had all the privileges of God’s promise but carelessly and foolishly threw all away.
Therefore this verdict: Esau I hate, but Jacob I love. Understandably so, would we be happy to continue in blissfulness and without remedy when a son rejects your goodwill, spurs your love and disregards your patient endurance and persistent counsel? Not so with our God. His is a jealous love. He deserves our change and He demands our change. Without a genuine and fruitful change in us according to the pattern life of Sonship, we are no sons to Him.
“They are not to ‘honor their father or mother’ with it. Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition. You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: “ ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.’ ”
Then the disciples came to him and asked, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this?”
He replied, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by the roots. Leave them; they are blind guides. If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.”
Matthew 15:6-9, 12-14 NIV
“Jesus replied, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. But about the resurrection of the dead—have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.”
Matthew 22:29-32 NIV
And even if we know and receive those God sent as such, but do we think they are to serve us as we see fit or proper or good? What if in the eyes of God we are those “his own” who somehow chose to reject the teachings of Jesus and persecuted him? If not in natural experience, but heart and spirit on the high horse of a un-sanctified soul? In my observation, the unwilling and unrepentant are always the first to cry wolf when spiritual leadership is exercised and the canal ways of man challenged. So what if we are rejecting God and are used by the devil to harm God’s people? Is there no check on us by such a leadership?
Do we truly aspire to be transformed from a fish to be a dove who can spot life in a deluged world, even more, from a dove to be an eagle, whose wings can spread up to carry his young to safety and freedom? God wants to do just that for us. And if we allow Him, He will do it.
Now in another light. What if when we think like a mere man, we act like a mere man and no child of God at all, this leaves God with no option but to treat us like a mere man. And if God Himself can’t have a better choice with us, what would we expect others to do? To understand us like God and treat us like Jesus? In what way?
What if He is doing just that and we don’t like it and, like a fish on a hook or a young horse under the rein, fight against his every move to draw us closer to Him? What if our daughter is the hook and our friend the rein, and our unrestrained life is doomed to end?
Now a better light. What if he is calling us to be a Peter or a Paul, or a Mary? What if he is not content that we learn to give up and He needs us to help others to give IT up? What if I am called to be more than a teacher of death to self, but as He eagerly desires for everyone, to be a teacher of life in Him? To feed His sheep?
“Very truly I tell you, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.”
John 21:18 NIV
And even if it is the case, blame not others for their inability to understand us, let us rather use the occasion as an opportunity to learn how to communicate in love and in wisdom. If God can refute a false prophet with the voice of a donkey, or humble a righteous king through the anger of a frenzied man who was so mad at him that he had to cast on him curses and dirt. Why would we assume that God has to speak to me in “my godly ways”? Do I really deserve His “gentle voice” as Elijah did? Do I really respect His revelation as Daniel and Paul did? Do I ”fear and tremble” at His words? And if I don’t, why should I expect God and others to understand and treat me ”fairly” and ”properly”? Am I not ”a sinner”? A rebel from birth? A vain-glory while holding unto the pride in an alienated self from God? An enemy to God thus a friend to the Devil?
Even I am unfairly misunderstood, unscrupulously mistreated, unjustly faired by others or in life in general. Granted this makes us sad if not upset at times. But at the end of the day, is the all-loving and all-knowing God a heaven away and an age afar? Is He not, even more, closer to the broken-hearted and the poor in spirit? Am I not more blessed than those with an easy life and unworried soul? Would a bliss on earth the highlight of my passion and the hope of glory, the joy of eternity but an echo of my cluttered and distanced soul? What is my vision and standard of life?
To love is to live. But how to love with God’s ways and God’s fruits?
To practice this way of love, we have to know what is this love and what are the ways of this love. Love is a verb, not a lofty notion, a poetic emotion or an intellectual elevation, and most importantly, not a relational commotion.
Yes, yes and amen. But how to start?
Well, firstly, this kind of love starts with us learning to love the new and true self in God as a son of God. Secondly, as God orders it, it is to be practiced and perfected by loving (devoted to serving) others as ”unto self”, not the old self with all its whims and appeals, but the new one, who follows the teaching of Jesus, making leaps and bounds on the journey across the valley of death unto the mountain top of the feast of final victory, the fellowship of pure love, the throne of absolute righteousness, the kingdom of everlasting peace, the life of glorious power, and an age of universal happiness. In the Father and in the Son, on earth as it is in heaven, now and eternity.
In essence, what does it take for us to be sanctified by God to become this church, the pure bride of Christ (partner of a covenant life)? By the washing of the Word of God. That is by genuine and undiluted ways of discipleship in the life of Sonship. There is no other way. It starts with teaching us how to truly die.
Now may the Lord bless us and keep us and make His face shine upon us, that we are rather not freely happy, but happily free, to enjoy the new life in Him by maturing from a babe to a full-statured man, in ”increasing measures”, the new self in us.
“But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, my immediate response was not to consult any human being.”
Galatians 1:15-16 NIV