an answered question!

I have done a bit of study today in Hebrews and found an answer to some ideas/a question I have been pondering for the last few weeks.

I recently went to a conference where John Crowder [see www.thenewmystics.com ] was speaking. His message was one of major challenge for Christians to truly embrace what God has done for them in Jesus. As he spoke I felt as though I needed to become a Christian again - it was as if I was hearing the message for the first time. He said something along the lines of.."The cross is the crack in heaven, the crack that lets everything in heaven leak into earth [as if God can't help himself]." wow I liked it.

John was speaking from Psalm 24 [a favourite of mine] saying that if we are Christians and we have said yes to Jesus and have embraced the cross then we should enter into completely new life, new creation and utter freedom sin. We have full access to God, face to face, hand in hand contact with the Father - we CAN ascend the hill of the Lord [Psalm 24:3-4]. God doesn't do things half heartedly - its not his style to say sorry you have to wait for healing, you have to wait for deliverance, you have to wait to experience joy. However we as Christians do tend to find ourselves waiting for these things. Basically we have to be fully dead to ourselves [Gal 3:20 I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live...], we have to recognise that we are living in heaven now if we have embraced the cross [Ephesians 1:3 - every spiritual blessing is ours, its in heaven, and its present tense - blessed now, Bill Johnson says we have to broker what's in heaven on earth - Lord's Prayer] but we also have to believe all of this and have faith that this is true [Hebrews 11:1 faith is being sure and certain]. John Crowder was essentially saying we can have a perfect and sin free existence now if we fully embrace the cross in our lives now. We have to just open our hearts and let the king of glory fully enter [Psalm 24]. I heard this message and something of it resonated in me as true - I can see it in the Bible [some other time I will write about an interpretation on Romans 7] but I am just not there yet and trying to muster up faith for this isn't quite working - in fact it ends up as striving. But if the King of Glory fully enters our hearts surely the life I am living is menial compared to what Father has for me. Something is wrong somewhere. I find myself living and operating still out of my brokenness rather than from my salvation...but..

At Philadelphia we have been hearing teaching on Galatians and last night Paul Mac spoke on Gal 3 on adoption. To hear it visit www.stthomaschurch.org.uk. Paul shared that essentially when we are saved we are rescued and find ourselves standing on what we could call a platform titled justification. We are forgiven, we are right with God and we sense and taste something of what it means to be free from the effects of the Fall in our lives. However there is this yearning and knowledge that there must be more. We sometimes see others who have something we don't have - an access to the Father that we aren't experiencing, fruitfulness, a deep joy, an access of heaven for healing and the prophetic that we want but can seem to clutch. We could call this platform sanctification. We want to be sanctified, we want to walk more how Jesus walked but we try and try and don't seem to make it, the gap between the platforms is too large for us to make the jump. Paul M spoke and said that there is another platform in the middle that basically joins all the platforms to make one and this is called adoption.

Adoption in the Greek-Roman time was quite a different concept to our idea of adoption today. Adoption then was when a master did not have an heir and decided to adopt one of his slave's sons. That child would fully become that son of the master, he would have a new name and identity, it was legally binding and nothing could change it. The child would not be ridiculed for his previous identity - the culture believed that this child was literally NO LONGER the son of a slave.

This is what the Bible talks about when it says we are adopted children of God. We have access to a completely new identity where everything that belongs to God is literally ours. We are in covenant relationship with God and its through this that the access to sancitification and a lifestyle more like Jesus is available. We need to press in to know that we know that we know that we are adopted beloved children, instead of striving for sanctification with a slave mentality.

So Hebrews is where I have been reading today - every time I read Hebrews I encounter so much of God and his plan for humanity. In Hebrews 10:26- 31 it is one of those tricky passages that says we must live sinless etc. This seems to be in line with what John C was saying - that its possible. However I read on and as I got to chapter 12 it says "in your struggle against sin..." So the writer takes for granted that sin will still be a struggle. However I prefer to see this as a starting point. [We must also remember that we must NEVER come up with clever heresy to explain away the Bible because our lives don't look like what the Bible tells us our lives should look like]. All that John C was saying is accessible [we can technically occupy it] and belongs to us [we own it coz God has done it]. However we start our Christian journey being freed from Egypt and we are in the desert wandering around. This is where we struggle with sin and want to go back to Egypt...however if we embrace the process of adoption and the process of character development and fatherly discipline that God will do in us if we let him that Hebrews 12 talks about, we can increasingly reach the promised land [which is on earth] of sanctification. Moses and the law didn't get them to the promised land so we must break free from legalistic striving. It was Joshua and random acts of faith [like walking around a city] that enabled the people to occupy [their action] what they owned [God's action]. God give us revelation in our spirits of this adoption that has occurred.