Subject: Skandalon!!

9/4/2008

DID YOU KNOW…… that the Cross, SKANDALON, is Father’s chosen means to change a mere mortal “created a little lower than the Angels” into a partaker of Heavenly LIFE and REALITY? Did you know that SKANDALON is the God-chosen creative way for those who are HIS to grow into Super-Natural beings after Conversion?

That all sounds okay and attractive theoretically…until we realize that SKANDALON is a TRAP for our flesh! SKANDALON “feels” like “a TRAP”!!! That is actually the Greek word that God has chosen.

Skandalon—when Father introduces it into our lives—is a practical TRAP Father puts before us, to go deeper into His Life and Love. It is NOT “theoretical”—but He will present it into our job decision or circumstance, or family or spouse situation, or life circumstance, or in what we are called to lay down, or do, or leave, or embrace……

SKANDALON is His chosen means to turn Pinocchio (wooden humans) into a Real boy (men and women LIVING in the Spirit of God, with “Rivers of ALIVE WATER GUSHING from them, watering the parched desert of humanity in a wicked and corrupt generation).

SKANDALON is a TRAP for our senses, emotions, and minds. He is, and presents to each of us in a form specific to us and our weaknesses and “strengths”……

SKANDALON! He presents skandalon into our lives to test and refine and metamorphosize us into finally and truly Spiritual men and women—

And our skandalon, due to faithfulness to the Truths of Jesus, will come into our lives in the form of……

an inescapable dilemma,

a riddle with no answers,

inexplicable injustice,

a room with no doors—that is closing in on us, shrinking in on us,

a “lose-lose” situation.

Ever felt any of that?

Apart from having eyes to see the Unseen, we will feel we are undone with no choices—but fatally painful choices of denying our very selves—if we are to be faithful to Jesus!

Will we embrace whatever form our Father brings SKANDALON into our lives, and respond with the CHARACTER OF JESUS?

There are, of course, unacceptable responses. Let’s not go the wrong way when Father opens His Ways to us. If we are to ever live in the Heavenlies, fruitful in super-natural ways, “with weapons of righteousness in the left hand and the right” we must CHOOSE not to respond to the pain, the skandalon, with……defensiveness, depression, retaliation, quitting, anger, apathy, prideful “pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps” flesh-energy, withdrawing from others, or self-justification.

Satan is ruined, and “made a public spectacle of, and humiliated” STILL and ALWAYS “on the CROSS.”

Skandalon. Can we embrace it when it comes, rather than react? A cross has no more plans, no more rights, no more fun, no more movements or ambitions or comforts. “Dead to the world, and the world to us.”

-m