The Real Thing Blossoms from Within

2007

Brett: That’s a helpful reminder. I was thinking this morning of a book I’ve read a number of times, called Christ the Sum of All Spiritual Things. The author talks about, “Is your life full of things or is it full of Christ?” Is your humility a “thing” detached from Christ, or is it Christ Himself? There’s a distinction, and the distinction is life. It’s kind of like what we were talking about, the Word of God being powerful and full of life, as opposed to being about principles and things. That’s still a tough one to say that I walk in very often. I know that’s God’s heart, and I know I’ve experienced that. But when you’re in the throes of trying to make a tough decision... I was thinking about some things with Maria’s health a couple of weeks ago, and it was tough to know what to do. There were principles involved, and we didn’t want to violate those, and different things coming up against it. But in the middle of the night one night when she was pretty messed up, that’s what I was looking for—life. I was looking for something that spoke of God’s heart and way. Sometimes there are mutually contradictory principles, you know, and just being able to say that this decision is full of the Life of Christ and not my decision...I wish I knew how to stay there more! But you’re saying it comes from a painful death in different areas, I guess. I was reading that book and thinking, just to live there! To live where the things you do and the things that are good in your character aren’t really “things that are good in your character,” they’re Christ. There’s something there…

Mark: Even all that can be a bunch of blabbering words. “Oh, doesn’t that sound good.” There’s a particular denomination where you can go and listen to them blabber that stuff and chant it, even, back and forth, back and forth. But they don’t live it. We were talking about this a little bit earlier today outside. The real thing in the New Covenant blossoms from within. It isn’t something external.

Humility, just used as an example: if you knew that humility was a very cherished quality in God’s sight, and you were convicted of your lack of humility. And so, you repented of your lack of humility and your pride, because God opposes the proud and gives grace to the humble. And so, I decided that pride is sin and that I need to repent, and humility is a good thing, and I need to really cherish that and really do everything I can to be a humble person. There’s nothing wrong with any of those goals. How can you do more than that? But the thing is, the old covenant says, “Know the Lord, Know the Lord, Know the Lord.” The New Covenant says that from the least to the greatest, they all know Him. The Spirit of God testifies with our spirit, “Abba.” It blossoms from within when it’s the real thing, and it usually comes from dying.

So, when you ever hear someone say, “I tried humility. I tried and tried, and it doesn’t work,” then you know for sure it was a “thing.” But if they’re so crushed by their own repeated failures, that without even knowing that they were doing it, tried to promote themselves, protect themselves, sustain themselves, be important to other people, and be looked up to by other people... I’m thinking of a situation a few years ago where it was just a desperate thing, almost like trying to breathe air, to be important to people, to mother people, and it took death. It was something in retrospect, she could look back and say, “God did this, because I was a slave to it. I was drunk on it. I could repent of it all day long. It stayed a ‘thing’ to me, and then I was frustrated because it wouldn’t go away. I tried to repent of it, and it wouldn’t go away. It was still there. I tried that as hard as I could.”

In the New Covenant, “In times past God spoke through the prophets, but now through the Son.” It flows, it blossoms from within. And now we look over our shoulder and say, “I’m not that man anymore. I understand my desperate need for God in this, but I sure can’t be proud of being humble because I know how fragile I am.” When we begin to really see ourselves for who we really are, humility then has become a trait that has manifested the Christ-life in us. “I am meek and lowly in heart.” It is manifested Christ-life. Now it’s Christ. But see, you can even say all the words about it: “It can’t be just a thing. It has to be Christ. He’s the sum of all spiritual things.” And I’ve just added one more thing! “I’m of Cephas. I’m of Christ. I’m the sum of all spiritual things, because everything is of Christ to me.” And now it’s one more thing added to humility and all this other stuff, and it’s just lingo. It’s just jabbering.

The real thing comes from death and can’t be acquired or credited to our deep desire for it. It almost happens in spite of us, almost never because of us. And then you roll over in bed one morning and say, “God, you changed me! I was just so addicted to this, that, or the other. It was just an animal. As much as I wanted to repent of it, and as deeply as I truly hated it, it was just interwoven in my DNA.”

The process of dying is very different than the process of conquering—though the desire to conquer is almost a prerequisite for dying. If you don’t care, and you think, “Oh, God will do that. God just has to do that. The Spirit has to change me”—if you’re not desperate for God’s heart and mind and will and word in your life—you’re not even a candidate for death, which means you’re not a candidate for life! There can be no true Life, only a counterfeit life, only the natural man life, apart from death. And death isn’t something we can orchestrate or have by being so committed. “One, two, three, die!” We would get the credit for that. “Lest any man boast,” God wants to take us through this whole process of things that are so far out of our control but require our passion and our acknowledgment of His Word, His ways, His truth, a deep hatred of all the things that comprise the anti-Christ life, and an acknowledgment that we are useless failures in the midst of our desire to please Him and be like Him. I mean, how did Lazarus die? How much time did he have really knowing, “One minute from now I will be dead”? How much preparation did he really have? How much commitment did he have to “I will be dead in one minute”? And how much true power did he have for being risen from the dead four days later? So, a prerequisite for death is a deep hatred of the anti-Christ life. If you don’t care enough to hate it and to be passionate about your hatred of it, then you’re not even a candidate to die, which means you’re not a candidate to truly live. On the other hand, there’s no way to get there from here! It’s one of those things on a map that can’t happen.

So, is Christ the sum of all spiritual things? Yeah! But as soon as you start talking about it, it’s easy to substitute for it with just more words about it. “I’m of Christ. I’m not of Cephas, I’m not of Apollos. I’m bigger than that. Christ is the sum of all spiritual...” Well, aren’t you religious? According to Paul, it was just more carnality to say that instead of the other things, which is an odd thing...but it can be just another thing.

I would start the song, “To God Be the Glory, Great Things He Has Done” if I trusted myself and all of you to know the words well enough! Maybe you do, but that’s the song that comes to mind in response to what we’ve just been talking about.