Greetings friend.
“Jesus Christ, [a] the faithful witness, [b] the firstborn from the dead, and [c] the ruler over the kings of the earth.” (Rev 1:5)
“Grace be with all those who love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity.” (Eph 6:24)
It was back in May that I wrote part three of the series Reminders About the Holy Spirit and the Life of Godliness. My intention was to quickly follow up with part four and conclude the collection of my thoughts on the many relevant themes. Instead, my study and meditation on the lead verse became a lengthy pursuit and an enjoyable journey of something I consider profound, deeply meaningful, and uniquely rewarding after my many years as a Christian. Studies related to the main verse grew my vision and understanding of Jesus Christ, the church, and God’s work. The way I view Christianity and the Christian life has gained a substantial amount of additional breadth and depth, and, perhaps more importantly, my affection for the triune God and God’s people seems to have taken on a different feel with new and more refined interest.
Throughout my Christian journey, I have on occasion taken months to study a particular biblical theme or issue; sometimes a full year. Concentrated studies do certainly have value, and yes, these will require your precious and limited time, but I believe them key for my spiritual growth. Perhaps you should sometime consider such a venture for your edification. My only recommendation is to be sure the topic of such devotion leads you deeper into God’s heart, away from self, sin, false doctrine, and the world. The primary verse for part four of Reminders About the Holy Spirit and the Life of Godliness is Revelation 22:17. I will introduce this verse below, but first I have additional related and relevant thoughts to share.
During these past many months, a sense of incompleteness characterized the journey alluded to above, thus making any attempt to begin writing my thoughts all the more difficult. I knew of no end to which my writing would aim; that was a mystery. Resources and understanding continued to come my way, and I followed what, in faith, I believed was the Spirit’s leading for me to grasp specific truths and be grasped—changed—by them. I now view these essential points as foundation items of Christianity and the Christian life, things that we all as Christians at best commonly reference with our lips but, I fear, for many of us are actually very far from governing our lives as individuals.
This disparity between what we present and what we are becomes clearer when one’s words and ways are experienced away from the Christian crowd and only before the few. Here one may find it easier to live only what one is deepest down on the inside and it actually becomes harder to put on a false or external self before the few. When before the few, one may assume that the few are more tolerable and accepting of a little self and corruption being manifest. The combined weight of their observing and discerning is less than the crowds, so, reason concludes, it can be tolerated. Whereas when before the crowd, religious formalism seems to necessitate or require one participate as a good member of the crowd and look the part for all present to see and hear. Activities which define the crowd move them along in such a way that individuals in the crowd may not even consider keen observing or discerning of another who is near them.
But, dear friend, God the Spirit sees one’s true self on the inside, and knows the workings at the inner crossroads where life’s ways are considered before manifestation. In addition, God’s Spirit knows not only an individual this way but also knows the collective spirit of the whole this way. For when individuals unite and become the crowd, there is a collectiveness which produces its own manifestation of the Christian crowd to the world crowd.
When a particular Christian is with a Christian crowd, one can will a persona which seems to easily take on or reflect the experiential manifestations of the Christian community immediately surrounding that individual. A person sort of fits in, but this fitting in is manufactured. Not real. The individual knows this artificiality is the case but isn’t honest about the difference he or she is aware of. Sometimes the individual sensing the difference may not know how to put words to their experience. Or, the issue behind the presented persona may be moral and the individual strives to avoid exposure, deciding instead to just live a false life before others as a cover. But, God’s Spirit is in there watching, seeing, and He knows. When away from the crowd, though, why would one bother to expend the energy required to be a fake? Living before only the very few, only these very few would ever encounter or properly discern one’s true heart and one’s ungodliness. Perhaps one’s immediate few reflect back what the one is him or herself, so there is no basis in the individuals who comprise the few that would even move them to be discerning about the one with godly discernment.
Someone can live content with being one’s unholy self and not fear the repercussions of the many finding out, if he or she avoids the crowd, limits exposure to the crowd, or remains quiet offering only minimal substantive conversation regarding their inner world on rare occasion. “Just enough” quiets most people, then they become distracted and shift away. The persona person is safe. Further, if this analysis is actually the case for any one Christian—all I have to do is look at my own history for evidence that at least one Christian struggles with actual godly living—then, perhaps it is even the wider experience of corporate Christianity; the Body of Christ, the Church at large. We will consider this by thinking about the Body of Christ in relation to the world.
This position above regarding the estate of the individual and corporate Christian experience related to “belief” and “life” is my personal conclusion. It is my own experience. And, I have to believe that I am not alone with this struggle between a recognition of what is godly and what I know to be the “inner me.” If it is common, why don’t we talk freely about our inner worlds where God does His deepest, hidden, and most transformationally profound work, which by divine design produces or yields the choicest and most vital open and available fruit for all to know God by and connect most directly with God’s grace, love, light, forgiveness and true life? Why do we willfully shield the world from direct exposure to the reality and impact of God here, at this most deep and most organic to life level? Likely, it is because the transformational work of God in this way at this level is alien even to us, and it is alien to us because we have been fooled by the evil one that true religion is external and shallow and the inner world is exempt from the eye and rule of God! We are led to believe the world’s mantra that only what is external and of appearance matters! Self hides in the deepest inner recesses of the human heart. The devil will marshal his demonic powers to spread any lie and darkness, and so blind the mind to prevent Christians from grasping the divine fact, that the inside, the heart, is where the most glorious work of God gets done.
Jesus talks about a cup being clean on the outside only, while the inside remains filthy, and apparently out of sight, so out of mind (Mk 7). The world tends to look only on the outside and passes judgment based on wants, needs or values associated with the observer’s wants or values. “Outside to outside” the world and those of the world bounce off one another believing they see and know what is right and good, judging others by what they think is the case, using themselves and how they wish to be judged as the reference point by which value judgments are determined. But God looks, sees and understands opposite to or different from how the world examines. God looks from the inside and through the inside outwardly. Certainly, God may and can witness, as an observer, Carl committing an act, as you or I may look out a window and watch someone help a neighbor. But God sees and understands the act as a result of the inner workings of heart and mind which led to or resulted in the act. More importantly, God sees and knows all those premeditated thoughts that end in imaginations and wants that never manifest to the world but remain hidden in the heart, where only the individual and God know their record. As God, He can only, it seems, go from what He knows intrinsically to Himself outwardly. He is clean, pure, sinless, and His motives and relations with all things are done from, by and toward what is according to His nature. The ungodly have none of that working in them. The Christian, I believe, has a substantial amount of mixed and conflicting passions, interests, and motives at work in their inner world, and manifest to the world is a blended presentation of that which is of God and that which is of self. This internal mix, influenced by both the internal and the external world, is a conflict zone. And, it is here that godly ways are chosen, and this good chosen can be brought forward to the world.
Then again, perhaps many of you have already traveled far down this portion of the road of faith where you not only know by acknowledgement to yourself all of what I described, but you have mastered self and the flesh and only godliness working its way out of you is what the world experiences through you. If true, you are well ahead of me, so to speak (in terms of awareness and life lived out of awareness), and I am only now being illumined to such distinctions or truths concerning one’s condition. I am only now following in your steps, unaware of your own story (because you never put words to it), and what I just described is simply “old turf” to you. If so, then I will see Christ in your life and be drawn to God because of your life. I will hear Christ in your words and be edified in the life of God that comes into the world from the outside, through people moved by God’s Spirit and defined by the Spirit of Christ. Perhaps, my friend, perhaps this is you, and I should learn from your mastery of ungodly passions. Perhaps I can only “experience” what you learned yourself of this reality by my involvement with your life, and I must actually “learn for myself by my own struggle with and before God Himself” the godly life you seem to exhibit. I cannot avoid actually learning what I need by simply adopting something I pluck from you (outside to outside), God must work with me Himself directly and take me through a process, so that I may come to a point like you where you and I live or evidence similar life qualities in our relations because God has instructed us both, and it is genuine from our hearts toward each other versus some artificially manufactured living shell we give to one another. So I look to you as an example of godliness to guide and encourage me. Being encouraged, I will seek God for victory over my inner war (unless I prefer the darkness). He will be my needed savior and teacher. Can you live your part for me and witness the reality of God working in and liberating your life from the world and from self, or do I walk (most often with difficulty) this road alone and you truly don’t have this inner dynamic loose in you? I only assume you do.
The sense of incompleteness I spoke of above kept me moving further and further into studying the Lord Jesus Christ as my end, and studying Him from view points which I had known about but not considered in much depth before or, in some cases, was not even aware of. December 2010, I committed to studying our Lord during all of 2011, and my journey has been nothing short of a blessing. As, perhaps you know, when one says “I am studying the Lord Jesus Christ,” one cannot merely study him as one studies a block of wood on a table. Jesus is a person, so one is drawn into a personal relationship when one learns of him. And, in such a relationship, He in turn studies the learner in His own way. He is a Shepherd. He is judge. He is all in all, and to sanctify one that He’s saved in preparation for being with His Father, Jesus Christ by the word and Spirit works in mysterious fashion to separate out and replace what is ungodly in someone’s life for that which is heavenly and according to godliness. He is Shepherd. He is Judge. He is our life and our sanctification.
Consider the verse Revelation 1:5 above. If you spent some days reflecting on just that verse for your spiritual nourishment from the Bread of Life, would you be filled? Would you recognize the three phases, the progression of Christ’s ministry represented by those parts, and that Jesus is now the ruler over the kings of the earth as he was when John was given this revelation? Would you see that perhaps this three fold outline is actually a structure for the Book of the Revelation itself? Would the bible’s declaring that Jesus Christ rules over all earthly rulers be a truth that you are overwhelmed by and which transforms your thinking and your passions about your relationship to earthly kings and powers, such that your trust and rest in Christ’s rule and not man’s? What would such fact do to you on the inside and what would people then experience from you outwardly? Would they know Christ as ruler because you live with him as ruler yourself? Looking back on the study path I traveled, it appears to me that I have been moving through a very personal stream of study related to the person of Christ Jesus, and the work of God in and through Christ Jesus, and that while the study involved my relation to scriptural truths and interpretations of these truths, the person of God and God in Christ was always the aim. As I studied and knew God more intimately, He made me more aware of His ongoing work in me. This being so, the fruit of my labors was not simply the gaining of more information but that of an increased affection and intimacy with God, greater honor and submission in mind and heart due Him, and greater awe and wonder at the vastness of His work and ways in all creation and history.
At this time, the notion to continue pressing into the subjects identified above has gone. The learning assignment of mind and heart for now has reached its end with respect to content and concerning a reorienting of my heart more toward God and away from self and the world. I seem to stand on a distant shoreline prepared and able to walk forward carrying the newness of what I believe God has shown me through my own life into the lands of my future, always moving ever more toward being fully in God’s presence and understanding that I am always now before Him, and that what I do with the illumination of divine truths is something He continually looks at. Friend, do you have such a vision for your life? Do you see yourself at the start of each day as newly resurrected from the dead, alive with Christ with a new heavenly life making your way through all things with Christ by faith and the Spirit toward the Father? Is this not your hope, your Christian and gospel end? If not, then what is your Christianity? When you arise, does the flesh arise with you and Christ stay in the grave? If you have any doubt, ask others! The fact that I still sin and continually wrestle with sin does not falsify the work of God in my life. I, and likely you, would say that such wrestling validates it. As does my forgiving the sins of others and contending against sin in the world.
I perceive from my studies these last many months a sense of wholeness regarding a very full package of thought, but what I offer in this fourth part of the series is really just an indication of where those thoughts have gone: descriptive sign posts. Trying to produce a full report of what I have learned, and my expanded vision of the Christian life and journey will likely never be written; as I hope your report of your intimate life with God is also so full that you could never detail it all to any person. More importantly, I hope that I actually live more of what I’ve come to understand than what I ever pen for another to read, whether I ever write on it again or not. For while words are too easily spoken, and we can too easily exalt self in what we seem to know (at least I tend to), a life of divine truth lived out leaves a greater impact and imprint on another’s life in a way words alone cannot. Conveying or revealing the life of Christ in and through our lives in relation to another person provides something more tangible than words alone.
The bible is comprised of words, but we do not relate to mere words. God in Christ is always present. This we must remember, as well as that we live as with and before him. Think of how it is with you. Life puts forward the divine reality expressed in acts that can only be explained by a cause from outside the self and the world because the nature of such life acts, or ways, are contrary to self and the world. The world recognizes, as do those of the world, its own. You and I, as Christians, must live and give the contrast, so that the world will encounter the divine reality, know that Jesus Christ “is” and that he “is Lord of all”—NOW!—that the Father sent and loved him, and that love conquers sin, death and evil and brings redemption, life and light!
Beloved, if you live as the world, the world will only see its self reflection in you, which is self-validation for the world that it is ok and may continue on its merry and worldly way (and, I fear, dear Christian, you will experience its reflection in you and you will consider yourself absolutely fine; as if you belong here! Take and consider the opposite of Paul’s position stated in Galatians 6:14). The world needs to encounter the glory of God in and through you and me, and it should receive such from us because that is truly what is, or ought to be, most alive in us—unless you and I are living by, for and to the flesh. Then, what is against God is most alive, or active, in us, and the world likes us, or at least smiles at us yet never hears us when we might happen to speak a godly word or sentence. Certainly the world will never encourage us to pursue godliness! Fleshly rule should not be our witness or testimony. God forbid! Pray for me!
Additionally, as you and I acknowledge without debate, it is God who grants us any and all understanding of His word. Spiritual truths are spiritually discerned. 1 Corinthians 2:9ff establishes this fact. Our own experience, like those of others we know, confirms that any Christian’s understanding of the bible changes over time. Thus, I keep open to further review all that I share below and in subsequent letters. Our understanding of God’s scripture is a work in progress. We are people living a pathway of divine relationship whereby as we go on we are conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. To the degree that we as individuals continue to behold and love our Lord, so will we continually be transformed into His image. This is God’s work and desire, and it seems natural that at some point it should be or become every Christians too. I wonder, if one does not love the Lord Jesus Christ sincerely (Eph 6:24), does that person love Him at all? Sincere love verses what other type of love? What love would that be? And, if one does not love Him sincerely, or at all, then one will not pursue Him. He is not worth our time and effort. We pursue what we love (what we want or desire or value).
Observation seems to say that many do not love Jesus Christ. Many a Christian appears soiled by what is earthly. Their testimony by word and deed should appear more Christ-like and heavenly, but often the only testimony given is natural and worldly. These wonder why after so many years as a Christian they appear to themselves (and others who may in silence observe them) fleshly, shallow, even dead, not much different in substance of a life hid with Christ in God than shortly after conversion (if even that!). They are not far along that road of Christian maturity and godliness. In short, the reason for their dreadful condition is Self. They remain as god to themselves and they live trying to be lord over others, having missed something specific of the divine message to them along the way; which would have liberated them into God’s relationship with them as their God, and having secured the reality of intimacy with God whereby He would truly rule as God in their lives instead of self’s tormenting rule. What a miserable condition to truly be a Christian and yet not live from, by and for that divine reality. You and I acknowledge all this, and we know that as we pursue Christ and God the Father, and thankfully receive what is revealed to us from His word, it is His delight to increase the fullness and depth of relationship with Him based on His word and involving our prayer, meditation and godly conversations. Through all this the body grows from the divine nourishment one member gives to another by word, life and the Spirit. There is a reason for my commenting on all these parts up till now. This background will connect with how we will look at Revelation 22:17. I trust that the relevance will become clear as we move into the text.
The primary verse for part four is Revelation 22:17, “And the Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let him who hears say, “Come!” And let him who thirsts come. Whoever desires, let him take the water of life freely.” The verse, after positioning our Savior earlier in the chapter, contains four parts, and throughout this discourse I will refer to them in the following way:
And the Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” (4a)
And let him who hears say, “Come!” (4b)
And let him who thirsts come. (4c)
Whoever desires, let him take the water of life freely. (4d)
From this verse, I focus on 4a: “And the Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” I am fascinated by this passage, especially “the desire” it reveals. Yet, after all studies and speculation, we must eventually ask ourselves, dear friend, what is contained therein for me and for you? To begin, we might ask if we acknowledge now the presence of such desire in our lives for the Lord Jesus Christ, or we might need to acknowledge that we seldom or never call out for him. Do our lives give evidence that we desire to be with Jesus Christ or have him be with us? Additionally, if we do now call for Him, or if we will in the not to distant future, what is the nature of this call, a call that is shared with God’s Spirit? This we must learn and understand well, so that our call unites us with the reality the passage reveals. We want to step into this truth and reality. We do not want to simply ask amiss, and we dare not try to mechanically fit a call on to our lives as something false and outwardly manufactured or displayed. We must be certain Who it is we ask for, and we must understand and desire (accepting the full implications of) our call being answered. Do we honestly believe that we are ready to stand in the full presence of God? Is this the implication of this call?
Some may understand that this call does not stem from something we as “the callers” would ask for ourselves, but that the call is solely an invitation for others to hear and come to what is offered to them through us. Reading 4b-d seems to allow for the interpretation of invitation, but, if it is such an invitation, who is the Inviter? (Can we learn from Matthew 11:28?) What condition would you and I, and the bride in total, need to be in so that such a Spirit led call would actually go out from us? What of this? Perhaps there is both (1) the expressed desire for the Caller by the Spirit-bride for themselves, as well as (2) the expressed desire of the Caller as an invitation to be with Him but apparently through the Spirit-bride for others. We will explore this, and much more than just these few thoughts or questions.
As you may have gathered from this brief introduction to the fourth and final part of my series on the Holy Spirit and Godliness, the details which stem from studying Revelation 22:17 are extensive. Future letters will be many, and they will be written over much time. I will try to write again soon. Until then, convince yourself from the Scriptures that Jesus Christ is now Lord of all, pursue the Lord Jesus Christ, and understand what this means for your life (inwardly and outwardly) and others through you.
God’s best.
Carl
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