Father, we come before You, Lord, in the name of Jesus. Lord, we cry out to You for words to match the things that are on Your heart. By Your great mercy, Lord, may this not be a conveying of intellectual information, but a contact between our hearts and Your heart.
Lord, may we be able to hear from You, that we would be able to behold You in a fresh way. Lord, we pray that You would breathe on Your Word. We thank You that we can have confidence in Your Word to break through everything.
Lord, we look to You and commit this time to You. I pray that You would help me to stay on track. Pray that You would help us to stay alert, Lord, and hear the things that You have for us. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Let’s turn first to Luke 24, starting with verse 1. I’ve had a little bird asking me for the last few days what I would name what I have to share. I would call it “Knowing Christ in Resurrection.”
I know for some of us it helps to have an idea of where we’re heading, to kind of frame things up, because that’s where we’re heading.
But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came unto the tomb, bringing the spices which they had prepared.
And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb.
But when they entered in, they found not the body of the Lord Jesus.
And it came to pass, while they were perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel:
And as the women were terrified, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead?
He is not here, but is risen.—Luke 24:1-6
Then 1 Corinthians 15:22, just a short verse:
For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.
—1 Corinthians 15:22
And 2 Corinthians 5:16-17. We’re all very familiar with verse 17. Verse 16 has a very special meaning to me.
Wherefore we henceforth know no man after the flesh: even though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know Him so no more.
Wherefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature: the old things are passed away; behold, they are become new.—2 Corinthians 5:16-17
And then finally, Ephesians 1:13-14. I’ll read a couple of passages as we go on through our time of sharing, but I wanted to frame things up for you at the beginning.
In Whom ye also, having heard the word of the truth, the gospel of your salvation,—in Whom, having also believed, ye were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise,
Which is an earnest of our inheritance, unto the redemption of God’s own possession, unto the praise of His glory.—Ephesians 1:13-14
I want to talk this morning about what it means to know Christ in resurrection. And I want to be very, very practical, okay? I know that can sound like a real mystical, “knowing Christ in resurrection” kind of thing, but our Lord is intensely practical. Knowing Him in resurrection is intensely practical.
And, the Lord helping us this morning, I believe that we can lay a firmer hold—and just be held. I know the things the Lord has laid on my heart concerning this have been marvelously helpful to me, and I pray that through these feeble words, He will be able to convey them.
First off, there are different types of knowing about the Lord Jesus. From a very early age, we may have known a whole bunch about the Lord Jesus’ biography. We probably knew a whole lot about His doctrine—Christian doctrine, Christian teaching.
Being raised in a Judeo-Christian heritage, if not in a Christian family, we knew a lot about His biography. We may have known His claims and even claimed to believe a catechism or a set of doctrines crystallizing a teaching.
You know, the Apostles’ Creed says that He was crucified, dead, and buried, and on the third day arose from the dead and ascended into heaven. There are literally millions of people who recite this every week and could probably pass a polygraph test as to whether they believe it or not.
But there’s a knowing that the Lord has for us. There’s a knowing of Him that the Lord has for us. I’m not here to talk about where the dividing line of eternal salvation is in this pathway of knowing the Lord. The Lord is so gracious to us.
I know each one of us, in our own personal history, can look back on how right from the beginning the Lord started drawing us, how He brought people across our path, how He brought His Word before us, and how He started to reveal Himself to us.
I’m not here to talk about, “Well, you’re okay on this side of the line, and you’re not okay on that side of the line,” anything like that. I want to talk about knowing the Lord in resurrection.
What I’m stating is that when God the Father, by the Holy Spirit, revealed His Son to us, the nature of our relationship with this Man, Jesus Christ, changed fundamentally.
It became not a knowledge of information about Him. It became a relationship of being joined to Him, of sharing the common life with Him.
We still knew the same information about Him, but from that moment on, we knew Him in an entirely new dimension as well. And I’m telling you: once caught, no escape. Praise the Lord. It’s a door that can’t be shut. The Lord’s pursuing love doesn’t get turned off.
But God, being rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us,
Even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace have ye been saved),
And raised us up with Him, and made us to sit with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus:
That in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.—Ephesians 2:4-7
The second thing I want to touch on is this: the Lord’s resurrection was our resurrection.
Prior to the point where the Father, by the Holy Spirit, revealed His Son to us, we were very much alive physically. We were very much alive soulishly. But because of sin, our spirits were dead to God. We were spiritually dead to Him.
Because we were made in the image of God, there were still traces of ways that the Lord could relate to us—things like our conscience. Whether our consciences were taught right or wrong, whether we understood things rightly or not, our whole idea of right and wrong was twisted.
But even having a concept of, “Yes, I should do this,” and, “No, I shouldn’t do that,” is a trace in our souls of the way that we were created in the image of God, in our spirit initially.
But when God, by the Holy Spirit, made us alive together with Christ, a part of us that had been dead previously came to life. Yeah, I know this is fundamental, fundamental stuff. I’m just laying some groundwork.
After we came to know Him, the historical facts about the Lord Jesus were still the same. The things He did and said were still the same, but the nature of our relationship had changed and has changed.
We are so prone to switch it back to an informational relationship, and it is not an informational relationship. It is a living relationship. I’m going to bring that to specific points as we go along, but I feel like that’s very important.
The enemy would love to get us on any other ground besides resurrection—whether it’s teaching, feelings, experience, where we’ve been and who we’ve heard, whose doctrine we have, or how well-formed and crystallized our doctrine is.
The enemy doesn’t care how good our doctrine is. If it’s off the ground of resurrection, it has no value. To move us off that ground of resurrection in our relationship with the Lord moves us out of direct contact with Christ and back into the old man, back into the life of the soul.
This can be tricky, because the Lord is not asking us to annihilate the soul, to treat the soul harshly, or to try by our minds to suppress the soul. That is the basis of asceticism. That is the basis of certain forms of Buddhism.
But He does mean for us to understand that we know Him by means of our resurrected spirit.
God is a Spirit: and they that worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.
—John 4:24
When we came to know Him, He placed His life in us, and it is by that life that we know Him. We are so prone—I am so prone—to switch it back to information about the Lord, relating to Him based on information about Him, looking at the Word for information about Him.
And I’m telling you what: that is a dry, dry place. Because the essence of our relationship with the Lord is the relationship.
And the witness is this, that God gave unto us eternal life, and this life is in His Son.
He that hath the Son hath the life; he that hath not the Son of God hath not the life.—1 John 5:11-12
Even though we may not always feel like we are alive in Christ—particularly at 5:30 in the morning when the alarm is off—oh no, definitely we don’t feel like we’re alive at all.
Or we may not always feel reconciled to God, or at times wonder how we could possibly even be saved, as yucky as what we see when we look in the mirror. The fact is that once we receive the gift of God, the life of His Son, we are in reality alive, redeemed, and reconciled.
The reason why I stress that is that our feelings fluctuate here and there. Our understanding, the way we feel about ourselves, fluctuates here and there. But the reality of that relationship does not fluctuate.
The Lord always relates to us on the basis of resurrection because He knows the facts. He is not swayed by feelings. He is not swayed by circumstances. He is not swayed by how we might feel at the time—whether we feel okay or not okay, whether we had a good day or a bad day.
When He relates to us, He relates to us from the ground of resurrection. Like Brother Stephen was sharing at the conference about the difference between a son and Peter: when the Lord speaks to us, He speaks to Peter because He knows that the old self was crucified with Christ.
Sometimes we look in the mirror and see all this stuff that has to be dealt with. The Lord knows it has been dealt with. He stands on the ground of fact and relates to us on the basis of our having been reconciled.
Tenses are so important in Scripture. It says that, having been reconciled, we have peace with God. It does not say, “Okay, if you can get yourself reconciled again, you’ll have peace with God.” It says, “Having been reconciled, we have peace with God.” The Lord relates to us on the ground of fact.
There might be an objection: “Isn’t that presumption?” There may be an objection: “Isn’t there presumption and pride on our part to relate to the Lord on that resurrection ground?”
You know, “I’m redeemed. Lord, I thank You that I’m okay with You,” and things like that, when we know the stuff that is still under construction and the nasty now-and-now.
The Bible says that God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble. That is true, but we need to understand what humility is. Humility means lowliness of mind concerning ourselves. It does not mean denying what God has plainly spoken as truth, okay?
It’s easy to get the two mixed up. It is easy to feel bad and almost come saying, “Lord, You need to save me again.” He says, “I have wiped out your transgressions as a thick cloud. Return to Me.” That is something that does not change.
It is not pride to say, “Lord, I thank You that no matter what I have ever done, no matter what I will ever do, You have laid hold of me and You are not going to let me go,” because that is to the praise of His glory.
The same Scriptures that state that there is none righteous, no, not one, also state in Romans 8:10 that if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is life because of righteousness.
But if the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwelleth in you, He that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall give life also to your mortal bodies through His Spirit that dwelleth in you.
—Romans 8:11
We can trust the life that He has placed in us. If He said it is so, we can believe it is so. That is not presumption; that is faith.
If He says it is so, we can believe it is so. We can stand against our feelings. We can stand against our circumstances. We can stand against how we feel about ourselves. If He says it, it is so; we can stand on it.
He has placed His life in us, and in this Book He describes that life. So much of the time, we take this Book and see it as a map of how maybe one day we can get to that life. It is not that at all. It is a description of the life that we have received.
We can know Him by that life, and we can live by that life. In the midst of the battle, we can be fainthearted and even try to let go of His hand, but He is not letting go of us.
If while I was still dead in sin Christ died for me, He is not going to give up. He is not giving up on me now.
Another characteristic of knowing Christ in resurrection is that it has a characteristic of nowness. Okay? It is right now.
It is not about what He showed me a long time ago. It is not, “Well, I’m going to know Christ one of these days.” It is about now—the point of the relationship. Like I said, the point of the relationship is the relationship.
There are shadows of this in the Old Testament and descriptions of it in the New Testament. Consider the manna in the wilderness. They tried to collect two days’ worth, save a little walking and stuff. But if they collected it for more than one day, except as the Lord directed for the Sabbath, it bred worms.
There is a parable in the New Testament where the Lord says, “To him who has, more shall be given; and from him who does not have, even what he has shall be taken away.”
It is not like you can say, “Okay, I went to this conference, and I got this great stuff about the Lord. It showed me how great the Lord is and how great His plan is for me, and I’m going to put it in my pocket here and everything will be cool. If I start feeling unspiritual, I’ll just take it back out of my pocket again and read about the thing that He gave me then.”
It does not work like that, because relationships are all about now.
Current application: conference. So many times I have come to the end of conference week wondering how I’m going to hold on to all the things that the Lord has shown me—all the ways He has opened the heavens and revealed Himself to me in a new way.
I reread the notes. I go down in my notebook, reread the notes, re-listen to the tapes, thinking, “Okay, this is it. I’m not letting go of this. It’s not going to happen like last year, where it’s gone by the first of August.” Holding on.
But just like the reading of Scripture, ministry under the anointing of the Holy Spirit is not essentially an intellectual transaction. It is contact between our born-again spirit and the Spirit of God.
It is a renewal and a reintroduction to the life that we received. But we do not reach perfection in this new life by retreating into a monastery and spending years crystallizing this thing into a set of doctrines, refining the doctrine until we have it all straight, and then maybe getting a whole bunch of us together that have it all straight. Frightening thought.
Paul says in 1 Timothy 1:5 that the goal of our instruction—in other words, where the whole thing is heading—is love from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith.
So the way that we keep what we have learned in conferences is not by crystallizing the teaching, but by turning our hearts toward the Lord, toward the life He has given us, toward the relationship—the now relationship.
Not the, “Oh, what the Lord was showing me two weeks ago in conference,” relationship, but the now relationship. It is a characteristic of the Spirit, the Spirit of His Son that He has placed in us. It is not a historical thing. I cannot stress that enough. It is a now thing. It is a relationship.
The way that we keep what we have learned is by turning our hearts toward the life He has given us, toward our relationship with Him, and toward our relationships with each other. It is intensely practical.
The way that the life the Lord has brought us into is refreshed—the way He renews our vision concerning that life—is intensely practical. We will get into that, Lord willing, as we continue.
As I mentioned, you cannot store it. You cannot store it up in notebooks. The more you give it away, the more you have. That means investing our time not just in accumulating doctrine, but in spending our time in each other’s lives.
We have this common life that we share. It is not only a life that we share with the Lord; it is a common life that we share with one another.
The enemy of our souls would have us see Christianity as a burdensome, complicated business, full of rules and regulations and things we need to do. But the truth is, as I mentioned, it is an ongoing relationship. It is as simple as an ongoing relationship.
The first thing is that we need to stand firm on resurrection ground.
We need to understand what the Lord has already done for us and be vigilant not to allow our minds and feelings to put us back on the death side of the equation—to see ourselves as being in a position where we need God to come and do something new to cause us to have life and to be in relationship with Him.
Because the Lord says that he who has the Son has life, and it does not matter whether you feel particularly spiritual today, okay? What the enemy would love to do is get us to go back and go through the whole thing over again: “Lord, I’m sure I must be lost because I feel like such a bad person today.”
There are denominations that have said, “Okay, well, it must not have taken the first time. Let’s get you back to that again. Oh, you fell off the wagon again. Okay, let’s get you baptized again.”
But, like I said, it is a matter of the Lord laying hold of us and holding on to us. Thoughts, teachings, and songs that talk about how God is over there and I am over here, and somehow I have to find a way to get from here to there, are toxic to our relationship with the Lord.
The Lord is with us. He dwells in us. We dwell in Him. We have new life in Him.
The second thing is Bible reading. Knowing Christ in resurrection means that our time spent in the Word is more than learning information about the Lord, about the historical Christ. As we look into His Word, we meet Him. He is the Word of God. We meet with Him personally.
Our souls may not realize it at the time, but we are face-to-face with Him, and He is disclosing Himself to us. It is really important to understand that we are spirit, have a soul, and live in a body, okay? We are essentially spirit. We relate to God in the spirit.
When we spend time in the Word, the Lord ministers to and encourages us in the spirit. Our soul may not be particularly into it at all, because unless it fits into formulas, boxes, equations, theories, doctrines, and all that kind of stuff, our minds are kind of like, “Eh.”
But our souls will appreciate it later, when the life flows from our spirit into our souls. As a brother has said in the past, quoting Mary:
My soul doth magnify the Lord,
And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.—Luke 1:46-47
It is the overflow of that life in your spirit that flows over into your soul, okay? One of the ways that life is built up and encouraged is as we spend time in the Word before the Lord.
Not, “Okay, let me see how I can doctrinize this thing and outline it as doctrine.” There is a place for rightly dividing the Word of truth. There is a place for understanding the way the Lord would have us walk in the assembly. But there is a meeting with the Lord in His Word.
Another aspect is prayer. Knowing Christ in resurrection means that prayers are not a religious exercise, but a dialogue in an ongoing relationship.
If we lose sight of the nowness of our relationship with the Lord, prayer becomes a heavy thing that we do out of penance because we did not do it more before. Okay, that is not fun.
He is present with us now. He is not far away, and it is not long-distance.
Look at it from the Lord’s side. Imagine if you knew someone and found out that the only reason they ever talked to you was because they knew they would feel guilty if they did not. That is sad. That would really hurt your heart.
The Lord relates to us in life. He loves us, and He calls us into simplicity of relationship with Him.
Another facet that I want to touch on is the matter of our gathering together. We are members of His body. When we gather together, the Living One is in us and among us. He is in our midst.
This sounds real mystical and stuff, but I want to break it down into specific practical points.
First, as a matter of remembering the Lord’s death and His resurrection: He told us to remember His death, but we need to make sure that we remember it from the life side, okay?
It is possible to approach it from a morbid perspective and to miss carrying it over into the resurrection. Because we have received life, we are not attending a funeral. We are attending a resurrection.
He died for us once for all, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God.
He is alive today. We are alive with Him in a way that we have never been before.
Another matter is worship. We need to be very careful, because there are songs where we ask the Lord to do something that He has already done. That puts us on very dangerous ground, okay?
Once again, it addresses the Lord from the death side. It is like, “Oh Lord, come and save us again.” We can stand on the ground of resurrection: “Lord, we thank You that You have brought us into relationship with Yourself, that You have brought us across Jordan. You have given us resurrection life.”
It may feel good to our souls. That is another one of the dangers. “Oh Lord, I’m such a jerk. I’m so terrible.” After we finish that self-flagellation, we feel a little better about ourselves.
But that reinforces an understanding of our relationship with the Lord that is not supported by Scripture. The Lord relates to us based on resurrection. He knows what He has accomplished. He knows that the work is done. That is why He can relate to us on that basis.
That is why He can say, “Fear not.” That is why He can say, “I have redeemed you. I have called you by name. I have graven you on My hand.”
I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions, and, as a cloud, thy sins: return unto Me; for I have redeemed thee.
Sing, O ye heavens, for the Lord hath done it; shout, ye lower parts of the earth; break forth into singing, ye mountains, O forest, and every tree therein: for the Lord hath redeemed Jacob, and will glorify Himself in Israel.—Isaiah 44:22-23
This is incredibly radical. Our relationship with Him and with each other is in an entirely new dimension from anything else on earth.
I know this is a poor illustration—I cannot think of another way to describe it. It is like our relationships prior to that point were all horizontal, okay? The Lord has brought us into vertical relationships. I know that is a bad illustration, but if you have another one, let me know afterwards.
He has brought us into this relationship that is in the life that we share with one another. He has brought us into a location that we are going to talk about in just a few minutes—believe me, just a few minutes.
He has brought us into a type of relationship with one another that we can never have with the world. He has brought us into a new value system.
Our relationships with one another are to be understood in the same way that we know the Lord according to resurrection. We are gradually being repaired—okay, I know I am borrowing a word—but we are being reparented.
I know that in my personal life, the Lord has done a tremendous amount of repairing, showing me Who He is, showing me how He sees me, and all that kind of stuff. We are being reparented to know ourselves according to the real us.
Some may shudder at the thought of the real us, but we need to remember the resurrection ground that we are on.
As we read at the beginning, 2 Corinthians 5:17 says:
Wherefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature: the old things are passed away; behold, they are become new.
—2 Corinthians 5:17
We share a common life with Him that is like Him. The enemy comes with accusation and condemnation, and to our peril, we agree with him.
True, we sinned. But equally true is that we died with Him and have been raised with Him. I know you have heard this illustration over and over again, but like Lazarus, he was very much alive when he came out of the tomb. There were still grave clothes to be removed, but it was not a question of whether he was alive. He was very much alive.
In the same way, the Bible says that we are to recognize no man according to the flesh—not ourselves, not our brothers and sisters.
We need to know one another according to Christ, because that is reality—according to the new life that we have received in Christ.
Some of us are better at hiding our grave clothes than others. Some of us can make things look a little better than other people can.
All of us—our souls—are in the process of being saved. Our spirits are saved; our souls are in the process of being saved. We need to be gentle with one another and relate to one another according to the spirit, according to the new creation.
We have a new life dwelling within us, and we can believe what God says about that life in each other.
So what? Now that we have received this new life, how do we spend our time? What is it all about? Where do we go from here? How does the rubber meet the road? Where do we go from here with this?
We have been raised. We have been raised from the dead, introduced to a dimension of life that we have been speaking about. We still have jobs and families to provide for, but we live in the midst of the world by a different life than the world.
The Scriptures describe the nature of the life we have received. Jesus said in His high-priestly prayer:
They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.
—John 17:16
I want to read a fairly lengthy passage that I think illustrates how extremely practical the application of this is. It is Luke 12, if you would like to follow along.
Listen: the Lord here speaks about the characteristics of life lived in resurrection, here in the now-and-now, as we walk through our time here on the earth.
And one out of the multitude said unto Him, Teacher, bid my brother divide the inheritance with me.
But He said unto him, Man, who made Me a judge or a divider over you?
And He said unto them, Take heed, and keep yourselves from all covetousness: for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.—Luke 12:13-15
I think it is incredibly important that we listen to this by the Spirit: not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions.
The land of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully:
And he reasoned within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have not where to bestow my fruits?
And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my grain and my goods.
And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, be merry.
But God said unto him, Thou foolish one, this night is thy soul required of thee; and the things which thou hast prepared, whose shall they be?
So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.—Luke 12:16-21
Therefore I say unto you, Be not anxious for your life, what ye shall eat; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.
For the life is more than the food, and the body than the raiment.
Consider the ravens, that they sow not, neither reap; which have no store-chamber nor barn; and God feedeth them: of how much more value are ye than the birds!
And which of you by being anxious can add a cubit unto the measure of his life?
If then ye are not able to do even that which is least, why are ye anxious concerning the rest?—Luke 12:22-26
Consider the lilies, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin; yet I say unto you, Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
But if God doth so clothe the grass in the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven; how much more shall He clothe you, O ye of little faith?
And seek not ye what ye shall eat, and what ye shall drink, neither be ye of doubtful mind.
For all these things do the nations of the world seek after: but your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things.
Yet seek ye His kingdom, and these things shall be added unto you.—Luke 12:27-31
Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.
Sell that ye have, and give alms; make for yourselves purses which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief draweth near, neither moth destroyeth.
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.—Luke 12:32-34
So the nature of this life that we have received has everything to do with our relationship with one another. It is practically expressed in our life together.
It is practically expressed in priorities. It is practically expressed in what we spend our time on—how we spend this time that we have here.
When God made us alive together with Christ, we were called into two things: a building work and a battle.
And the builders, every one had his sword girded by his side, and so builded.
—Nehemiah 4:18
As one of our brothers touched on during the conference, I found it really interesting that a couple of verses later it says, “When the trumpet sounds, come together and fight for your brethren.” It does not say, “When the trumpet sounds, come together and fight with your brethren.”
God has called us to be built together as living stones into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. We have been given the privilege of building something that is forever.
That is what the passage we read from Luke speaks of. God has given us the privilege of participating in something that is forever. So we have a choice as to where we are going to invest our lives.
Being built together with one another, once again, sounds very mystical, but it has very practical implications. It is a process to build something eternal. Okay, here is a practical application: you have got to be there.
What that means is that a large part of being built together is just showing up. I am not talking about exalting a meeting or exalting a time that you have to be somewhere.
What it means is that as we spend time with one another, as we fellowship with one another, as we share in this common life that we have received, this building goes on.
But you cannot send somebody as your ambassador, okay? You cannot have some priest go and do it for you.
The Lord does the building work. I am willing to stand corrected here, okay? But it seems to me that it is very similar to what I was talking about in spending time in the Word. It is a matter of us being willing to read it, and the Lord meets us in the Spirit.
In the same way, if we are willing to be there, then the Lord will build us together. But we have got to keep other stuff from getting in the way, because there will be a hundred other priorities that come and say, “Oh, you need to do this. You need to do that. I’m sure there are enough brothers there anyway.”
But if we are willing to be together, the Lord will build us together. It is not always easy, because, speaking for yours truly, some of us have really sharp edges that need to be worked on. But the Lord is gracious, and you guys have not thrown me out yet.
It is a process. It builds something eternal. You have got to be there.
You have to be willing to trust the common life that we share, okay? When we were first married, we made an agreement right from the beginning that the word divorce would never come up.
Because once you even use it in an argument, you are heading on the wrong path. The same thing is true in our lives together. There is no such thing as divorce. We have been brought together in one body.
Things can get hot and heavy. Each one of us has things that we are dealing with. Each one of us has buttons—hot spots, things that can put us over the edge. Some of us are more vocal. Some of us run away and just get bitter.
But we have got to stay committed. It is not commitment to some organization. It is not commitment to some 501©(3) group. It is commitment to the common life that we share.
It is commitment to your brothers and sisters. It is commitment not to give up.
And finally, you have to be willing to step out of the boat. One of the really cool things is that when the Lord calls you to step out of the boat, you can know two things.
First, the life in Him—His life that is in you—can do it. The other thing you can know is that some really cool stuff is getting ready to happen.
Because you are stepping out of your comfort zone. You are stepping out of what is familiar. You are stepping out of things that you have been able to trust in the past, and the Lord is going to have to do some stuff. And He is always faithful to do that.
New life, new location—not just ideas and teaching, but life. That is part of our birthright that can never be taken away from us.
Just as the angel said to the women who came to the tomb seeking Jesus after His crucifixion:
Why seek ye the living among the dead?
He is not here, but is risen.—Luke 24:5-6
Father, we thank You for this time together. Lord, we thank You for this common life that we share. Lord, to each one of us, You have given life.
I am reminded of that passage that says, “The God of glory appeared unto our father Abraham.” Lord, we thank You that each of us has a spiritual history that begins with that.
It begins with You revealing Yourself to us, revealing Your Son to us, calling us to Yourself, and calling us into this new life.
Lord, we do not want to be theologians, Lord, or people who have it all straight in our heads, and that is all.
Father, we want to walk practically in this relationship that You have called us to with Yourself, and this relationship that You have called us to with one another.
Lord, thank You for the resurrection life that we share with You, Lord—the life of Your Son—and for this resurrection life that we share with one another.
Thank You, Lord. In Jesus’ name, amen.