A Covenant Made part 2: Breaking Self
3/29/2012
There are a lot of pictures of baptism in the scriptures. One of them is to be “Clothed with Christ.” If you actually stop and ponder that, what that actually means, that’s a pretty powerful concept. Again, it goes way past forgiveness of sins, which is the washing of rebirth and regeneration. It is a good thing, but this goes past that. To rise to walk in newness of life isn’t just to be forgiven, but it’s to be clothed and filled and enlivened by. To represent Him, not out of duty, not out of commitment, but out of letting go of who we are.
That book by Watchman Nee, Release of the Spirit, I haven’t read it in 15 years, it was the first Christian book I ever read. That book talks about the fact that the process of living for Jesus and living in Jesus isn’t so much a matter of being committed to finding out all the right things to do, but it’s being broken so the Spirit of God can be released in us. It’s almost a passive thing rather than an active thing because if the miracle has taken place and Jesus does live inside, then breaking ourselves out of the way is actually the objective then day by day, rather than trying to acquire something.
The brokenness, if you can picture it like a pot being broken, not just being sad and forlorn and upset about our sin. That’s not really necessarily what broken in the biblical Christian sense means. It means getting yourself out of the way which might mean NOT whining, NOT complaining, NOT being forlorn because a lot of that stuff could just be self too--to draw attention to ourselves, to hide from our responsibilities. If I can feel enough pity then I can separate myself from other people so I don’t have to deal with Light. It’s just a whole bunch of excuses but, in truth, to be broken means that we get out of the way. We break the vessel so that the oil which is inside, from the moment of rebirth on, can pour out on its own, and Jesus can be who Jesus is!
It’s not something you have to figure out. Everyone born of the Spirit is like the wind. There’s something about letting Jesus decide what our day is going to be, what our words are going to be, what our decisions and priorities will be--there’s something about that that’s only really accomplished supernaturally by being broken and letting Jesus decide. As opposed to figuring out “What would Jesus do,” we’re being broken of any thoughts of self of any kind and allowing Jesus to be Jesus because He’s real. He’s alive. He’s a person. He has thoughts, opinions, and decisions. Those things are all desiring to be expressed through His vessels, the treasure in earthen vessels.
It’s not a commitment process or memorization or any such thing. It’s thinking so little about ourselves, that we allow Him to be who He is. And this miracle is being expressed by letting go, not by being determined. The cleansing, the washing, the forgiveness of sins comes naturally, “As we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive them, and the blood of Christ continually cleanses us from all sin.” It’s because it’s a posture that we put ourselves in that we belong to Him and we will be pure for Him. We will open ourselves up to Him. We won’t be afraid to talk to others because there’s no self left, there’s no image to present because we don’t need an image. We don’t need a reputation. We don’t need to be liked. We don’t need to be respected. We don’t need to be included or involved. We don’t need to be invited. We don’t need anything. We just need to be broken.
And in so doing He can use each of us as He pleases and melt us together as He certainly has chosen as one of His miracles to do as a Holy Nation, a royal priesthood, not just individuals. All of our oil kinda mixes together. There’s the synergy and the power of all the different gifts and all the different things He’s trying to accomplish, but it kinda gets messed up when we don’t get self out of the way, when we are not broken and contrite, when we don’t open ourselves up to let Him be Himself. Instead we are trying to conjure something up. Then that brokenness and the mixture of that anointing oil that flows out, that process gets interfered with and there’s chaos and other things that come out of that that are kind of unattractive. That’s religion. So, clothed with Christ and filled with the Spirit of Christ.
