The Word (John 1:1) – Part Two

As we saw previously, there is an emphatic stamp when using “the” before a noun in Scripture.  Consider that Jesus is not “a son of God”, but “the son of God”.  There is a greater specificity when using “the”.  God did not rest on “a seventh day”, He rested on the seventh day”.  Much like the exegetical “law of first mention”, where the first time something is referenced in the Scripture is significant in setting the context by which every mention thereafter can be understood, we can learn a lot about the fine details of the Lord’s craftsmanship by the “filler” words in the Scriptures.

There are certain Scriptures that say things that if we take them for what they say, and realize the implications behind them, our current opinions on how things work would get violently confronted.  John 1:1 is one of the Scriptures which has implications to it that are honestly kind of daunting.  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  This verse first acknowledges that there was a beginning.  That makes sense to us because we think about everything as having a beginning and end, limits where one things starts and another thing ends.  Two objects cannot be in the same place at the same time.  Thirty years ago I did not exist.  Thirty months ago, my brother’s marriage didn’t exist.  Thirty minutes ago, this sentence didn’t exist.  All these things had a beginning.

However, the Word already existed in the beginning.  Let’s say, just for arguments sake, that the Word existed exactly at the beginning of the beginning.  The curious part about this comes when you look at the nature of words.  Words have one purpose, to communicate.  They come from someone and are intended for someone.  So the Word proceeded from a Source that existed prior to the beginning.  This means that the beginning was not really the beginning.  But then, how far back does it go?  The Source had to have a beginning, right?  If you let your mind try to go back and back and back, it can get a little freaky.  Realizing that God has been around for eternity past can trip a breaker in your head.  Think about the wisest person you know.  They are wise because they have either had more birthdays than you or because they have been through more wisdom-giving experiences than you.  It is no wonder, then, that when we read Proverbs 8 about the personification of wisdom it sounds like the description of Jesus.

Out of His nature of Divine Wisdom as the Word, the Communication of God, Jesus was already reaching out to us to tell us Who the Father is and who we are to Him.  He was crucified before the foundations of the World.  His mind was already made up before wood, nails and whips existed.  What do you do with Someone who is in no hurry because a millennium and a day feel the same to Him?  He doesn’t get bored, He doesn’t get surprised or anxious.  And what if this same Person took that eternal nature and stuffed it into us?  What changes when we be content in every circumstance because we have no limitation of time because we have become like God, having His nature and likeness?  I’ll tell you what changes, we become consciously eternal people that have a perspective that produces peace that doesn’t make sense.  We become unoffendable, immoveable, immortal, and confident beyond understanding.  Jesus said we are already clean by the Word He has spoken over us.  Maybe our greatest need is to hear that Word echo out of eternity and into our innermost being.

*Word of God, reverberate within us and shake everything in us that can be shaken so that we can find discover that which will remain and live from there.

The Promise of My Father (Luke 24:49) – Part Two

If the Father was willing to put His Name on the line by promising something, it is probably safe to say that whatever was promised will be fulfilled and that the fulfillment of that promise is worth being a part of.  The First Covenant with Israel was directed towards a specific people group, God’s chosen people – from whom the Messiah would come.  But the New Covenant was open to all people.  Jesus blasted the doors wide open for every son of Adam to become a son of the Last Adam, thus becoming part of the Last human race.  One benefit of the New Covenant is the Indwelling Spirit.  This is not really even a benefit of the New Covenant, it is the New Covenant.

Without the Indwelling Spirit, we are without a transformation agent and therefore can not live free of sin, free in power, empowered by love or superimposed over death.  It is Jesus’ Father who promised us the Spirit.  It is Jesus who made a way for the Spirit to unite with our spirit.  It is the Spirit who is the Seed that supernaturally re-incarnates us.  Before you stop reading because I just said that we are re-incarnated, think about it.  New Age understanding of re-incarnation is that we die and come back with the same spirit and soul, but as a different species.  This is exactly what the Spirit does for us.  We are baptized into His death and we are raised up with Him.  We are resurrected into a new race of men, a race that never existed prior to Jesus.

Just yesterday I was telling a friend of mine that the difficulty in being a New Creation is that I forget to act out of my new nature.  We don’t change physical form and almost nothing changes externally, the immediate change is internal and even deeper than the cellular level, so at first it is hard to live differently.  When I was in college a friend of mine used to say, “It is not hard to be a New Creation, it is hard to stop acting like an Old Creation.”  This is why it is important to be in community with people who are pursuing supernatural life, because in community we provoke each other even when we are not aware of it.  If you compare two runners that run about the same speed on a mile, individually they will run a good mile when they are trying to get a good time.  But if you put them next to each other and tell them to run a mile, even if you do not tell them to beat the other person or get a good time, they will run faster because they will both be trying to do a little better than the other.  Community is an incubator of excellence.

In Luke 24, Jesus told the disciples to wait for the Promise of His Father.  He told them to wait as a group for the Spirit to come upon them.  If He had told them to individually go back to their homes and wait and then come together to discuss it, it is very likely that most of them would get impatient and distracted.  But because there was 119 other people waiting for the same thing, though I’m sure it got awkward and some had doubts, those 120 people experienced something that changed the world.

It is interesting that Jesus called the Spirit the promise of the Father.  It is as though the Spirit was the ultimate result that the Father had intended for us.  He has promised may things, all of which He will do, but this was “the big one”.  It is one thing to be a president of the United States, it is something altogether different to be the President of the United States.  There is a present-tense nature to “the” that highlights the importance of  what “the” is pointing at.

*Jesus, give us a love for the Presence of the Promise that will stir up a hungry addiction to You that will not be quenched or satisfied by anything but Your fulfillment.  Amen.

The Promise of My Father (Luke 24:49)

Even when you know that someone is trustworthy, waiting for something is a trial.  The disciples had been with Jesus for as long as three years or so.  They had seen Him tell off the Pharisees, ruin funerals, open blind eyes, heal deaf ears, un-cripple people, tell intimate details of people’s lives that He could not have known – not to mention He came back from being dead.  As far as they were concerned, He was worth trusting.  Not only had He done all of these things, but He had done them with conviction, saying what He believed and felt convincingly.  So when He says that His Father has promised something, I’m sure they had great expectations.

He instructed them to go and wait in Jerusalem, the very place that had just been the epicenter of the controversy about Him, for power to wrap itself around them.  The interesting thing about how He gave these instructions was the timing cues.  He said “I am sending the Promise of My Father…” Then He goes on to tell them what to do in response to what He said He was doing at that moment.  This is yet another example of how Jesus was living in two places at once, which is also our inheritance to walk in.

Jesus, from His place with the Father in Heaven, was at the moment He was talking with His friends simultaneously sending the Promise of His Father upon them.  He says that they would be clothed with power from on high, indicating the location of the source of the Promise.  So if He was the Sender of the Promise, then He must be doing it from where it was coming from.  The power of knowing where you are changes your perspective and empowers your words.  We have been removed from the kingdom of darkness and transferred into the Kingdom of Light, seated in the heavenlies with Him.

The incredible reality of the life of one born from above is that we are here and there at the same time.  So when we pray, we are there with Him and we can release things from there, rather than begging Him to send it down to us from where He is.

Some think that the Holy Spirit just “isn’t for them” or that the gifts of the Spirit are not something that is for today.  Jesus identified the Spirit as that which the Father Himself had promised to send.  If the Father was willing to put His trustworthiness on the line for this, I would venture to say that it is a sure thing.  He wants us to have the Spirit and He wants us to trust Him that He will accomplish everything that He has promised.  And He is a good Father who gives good gifts, so there must be something that we really want, really need or both in the Gift of the Spirit that He has promised.  Let us eagerly desire the fulfillment of the Promise of the Father.

*Father, we trust Your goodness and we desire the filling of the promises You have made.  Jesus, thank You for sending Your Spirit from on high and for plucking us up into the very place that You sent Him from.  We love You.

Jesus the Nazarene, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word in the sight of God and all the people (Luke 24:19)

Whoever said it first, I don’t know, but some very insightful person once said that the Lord never asks a question to obtain information, but rather to provoke thought and reveal truth.

Obviously these two guys on the seven mile road to Emmaus had no idea Who they were talking to.  It seems that they have a divine blinder on their eyes to keep them from recognizing Jesus, much like Mary had when she met Jesus in the garden by His empty tomb.  With Mary, Jesus waited for her to pour out her heart and then He spoke directly to her and she recognized Him in His Voice.  With these men, they poured out their distress at hopes deferred, then He spoke to them so that they could feel Him and only allowed them to recognize Him when He gave them broken bread – a symbol of His body broken.

There are two things that mark the life of Jesus, both in His personal earthly ministry and His corporate earthly ministry through the Church, He speaks prophetically through both His deeds and His words.  People believe for one of these two reasons, He does something and they change or His Word breaks through their circumstances and the Truth sets them free.  For Mary, it took a word from Him to clear the blindness, for the two on the road it took a prophetic act.  But in both cases Jesus left them without them getting to touch Him.  This is a divine strategy.  He will bring illumination, then our responsibility is to walk in the Light that He has provided.

As great as it is to be mighty in deed and word in the sight of people, it is better to be mighty in deed and word in the sight of all the people.  But how much greater it is to be mighty in deed and word in the sight of God?  Elijah saw himself as one who did all that he did before the Lord, identifying himself as such to Ahab.  Even more so, Jesus lived before His Father.  This may be why Jesus could say that He only did what He could see the Father doing, because His eyes were focused beyond the veil.

Yet Jesus said that we who simply believe will do even greater things than He did.  He is only in the earth changing and shifting things as much as we, His Body, are making ourselves available to be mighty in deed and word in the sight of all the people.  He has been raised from being dead by the very Spirit that now resides in us who have been born again.  It is our turn to do deeds that will slice through the blindness of the world.  It is in our job description to speak words that will illuminate the spirits of men and women who are destined and made to know God.

With the two men who walked with Jesus, as soon as they recognized Him, He vanished.  This, too, is to be our practice.  As soon as we have done what we intended to do in being the light of the world, we are to disappear so that we do not become the object of worship, but merely a bridge from Heaven to earth.  Our job is to become transparent with Him inside of us so that when we look in the mirror we are no longer visible but are carriers of His image.  This will so mark us that when someone encounters Him at our hands and they look to us they see Jesus alone.

As my friend said today, “The Holy Spirit is in the Jesus-cloning business.”

*Thank You for speaking Your cleansing Word over us and making us like You.

“Wings, Wind and Wine” – a poem with explanation

So I took Steve Witt to the airport yesterday morning.  Steve Witt is a pastor from Ohio that taught a week-long seminar at MorningStar University on finding your passions, living with them in mind and focusing your life on your personal aspirations in light of the Lord.  The very beginning of the week was a class where Steve Thompson, the director of the school, gave a teaching illustration using the movie “Dead Poets Society”.  That night we rented the movie and got stirred up for being poetic.  So since I was already up at 4:44am and was done being a chauffeur by 6am, I went to breakfast alone and wrote a poem.  This is the poem that I wrote:

The Center billows pump tirelessly
Endurance is their market and Egypt their competition
Though the ash-bird rises from where she was razed
Her cage does not open up for he was raised in shame
With holy sails up, patches and all
The Scarlet Thread holds strong
But the hides don’t rock the same tunes
And the strong drink never weakens
Ever stretching the limits of lovingkindness
Ever staggering are His friends
Ever sprinting are the intoxicated
While the sober play the wall of observation
Frowns for the sober, crowns for the drunk
“Tipsy kings,” the phoenix sings, “recover the hidden things.”

For those who do not think like I do and would like to understand this poem, I will explain it line-by-line.  Just a note, I’m not one who believes that art has as many interpretations as it has observers.  I know exactly what I meant when writing this, and though someone may find something else in it that strikes them, I did not mean that in my original intent.  So I guess it could mean that “for them”, but that is not what the poem means.  Anyhow, that is my personal rebellion against postmodern thinking.  On to the explanation.

Lines 1 and 2:
Steve Witt talks about the internal passions in our spirits from the Lord being the winds that blow the sails of the boat of our lives.  There are, however, other winds that blow.  Egypt is a symbol of the world in Scripture.  So the Center billows are the Source of our passions, the Lord, and the world is the competition.  He never stops blowing upon us from within us and His market, or His job is endurance – a job that the world cannot beat Him at.

Lines 3 and 4:
The ash-bird is a phoenix, a mythical bird that is a symbol of resurrection life and the spirit of a believer.  “Razed” in line 3 is not a typo, it means “from the place she died or was brought down”.  The phoenix will die and be burned up and then be resurrected from that same place.  But the cage is the skin that our resurrected spirits live in, our flesh.  And sometimes we don’t open up and let our spirits free because of shame that we grew up in.

Lines 5-7:
Our personalities are like the sails of the boat of our lives, according to Steve Witt (and I agree).  Though we have patches and things that the Lord has fixed in our personality, we are by nature “Holy”, not “holey” or “hole-filled”.  It is the Scarlet Thread of His Blood that holds our once tattered souls together.  However, the patches made of hide/skins/cloth do not always match the generation they are effecting.  Just like the wine and the wine skins must match in age and usage, so patches must be equally aged.  So the reference to “rock the same tunes” is an allusion to not listening to the same music just as my parents’ generation and my generation do not listen to the same music.

Line 8:
The “strong drink” is the new wine that requires a new wine skin.  It only gets more potent with time.

Lines 9-11:
The new wine is the Lord.  He told Israel that He is the one who “exercises lovingkindness” in Jeremiah 9.  When I lift weights, my goal is to stretch the limits of my muscles, when the Lord exercises lovingkindness, He is stretching its limits to show how far it will go.  In this same passage in Jeremiah, the Lord says that no one is to boast except in two things, that they know and understand Him.  It is those who are in true friendship with the Lord that are many times found “drunk in the Spirit” as Paul exhorted the Ephesian church to be.  They continue in their intoxicated state as they know Him more and more.  But they are not like worldly drunks, who stagger and get no where, they sprint after the Lord and His upward call on their lives.

Lines 12 and 13:
The most offended people at Jesus were not the ones who were morally in opposition to Him, but those who were religiously minded.  The Pharisees hated Jesus unto killing Him.  Today, we still have and are pharisees when we see what the Lord is doing and rather than jump in and enjoy, we sit back and watch.  Jesus said that the Kingdom does not come through observation, but this is what we religious people do, we “righteously judge” what is happening from an outside perspective, never getting our feet wet.  But in reality we are being help back by that same spirit the pharisees had from entering into the Joy of the Lord.  The reward of religion is a frown on your face, the reward of those who jump in with what the Spirit is doing is a crown on their heads.

Line 14:
Proverbs 25:2 says that it is the glory of kings to search out what the Lord has hidden for them in His glory.  It is the phoenix, a symbol of a resurrection spirit, who sings her song that those who walk in the Spirit (the “tipsy kings”) are truly walking in royal authority and will recover the things hidden for them by the Lord from ages past.  And they will enjoy those revelations for all eternity.

Love is the Answer

Recently I have been seeing the power of Love.

When someone is being harsh, the best way to disarm them is to not react out of offense but respond out of love.  When we react to something, we are defensive and it is this reactionary stance that gets us in trouble.  Bad theology is birthed in reactions to extreme situations.  But responding to a situation is steady, slow to anger, patient, un-offended and more rational.  This is not to say that love is not direct or sharp.

God is not like other gods, He is happy.  He is undisturbed.  He is Love.  He’s doing alright.  And He most certainly is not “pissed off” (pardon my language if you don’t like that term).  God loved the WORLD so much that He sent Jesus to destroy the effects of sin, how much more must He love those who are His children?  It would be easy for us to find two-thousand and nine things that the Lord must be upset about with the church in 2009 and write a book called “2,009 Reason God Might Hate the Church in 2009″.

But that is not our job.  Rebuking the Church, convicting people of sin and fault-finding are not in our job description.  It says in John 16 that it is the HELPER who has it in His job description to convict of sin…and wait, He only convicts the world of that.  The Lord, the One who has absolutely every right to rebuke anyone He wants, does not rebuke us.  Rather, He loves us.  And when He actually did rebuke the 7 churches of Revelation 2, He did it differently for each church.  We cannot fall into the religous pride trap that would have us rebuking the whole Church for one thing.  The two churches in Revelation 2 who were farthest apart were only 120 miles from each other, if these two churches could not be put under a blanket Word from the Lord, than neither can the Church in America – much less the Global Church.

Love is not being harsh when everyone else is applauding unrighteousness.

Love is not exposing someone when they mess up, knowing that people may blame you for their actions.

Love keeps waiting when it was “too long” about three hours ago.

Love speaks a soft word to comfort the shamed and a loud one to confront the shaming.

Love doesn’t need its actions to be requited in order to accomplish what it intended with those actions.

Love talks about how great “they” are, while still being aware of its own contribution to the accomplishment.

Love uses “I”, “me” and “my” much less than “you” and “your”.

Love acts like you would expect love to act like.

Love can take hits, be unoffended and break you down without offending you.

I’m growing in Love.

New Covenant version of “Turning to the Lord”

In the Old Covenant, the people of God could walk in favor with God and man based on promises that the Lord made through His prophets (example: Deuteronomy 30:9-10).  The problem for the subscribers of the Old Covenant was and is that the favor is linked to behavior.  But that is the problem for everyone, isn’t it?  I know it is for me.  I think things like “oh, I can’t (fill in the blank), because I (fill in another blank).”  Honestly, it isn’t about us.  Steve Thompson said last night at our new Saturday night meeting at MorningStar, something like “Your standing with God has nothing to do with you doing things right, it has to do with the One Man who did things right living inside of you.”  *pause for dramatic effect.

The other day, I was with a group of about 30 first year students at MorningStar University.  I was leading a morning “spiritual fitness” time, basically training people in the program how to connect with the Lord and transform their minds and hearts so that they are more effective in their life.  I woke up that morning having not put any thought into what we were going to do, even though it started in like 12 minutes.  I had a quick idea about worship.

When I say worship, most people’s first thought is something concerning music, singing and maybe dancing if you are from that kind of denominational bent.  But the worship that the Father is looking for, desiring, longing for is from those who will worship Him in “spirit and in truth”.  For me, that indicates that worship is a matter of your spirit over-flowing with honest and real declaration of who God is.  This can be done through songs, or by painting, or by writing, or by weight-lifting, or by golfing.

*Funny side-note:  also last night, JohnMark McMillan said something prfound.  He said “Because Christ is in you, if you don’t go play golf, He doesn’t get to play golf.  If you don’t go pray for the sick, He doesn’t get to go pray for the sick.  Everything you do, He does.”

Anyhow, back to the morning training.  So what I had everyone do was take 20 minutes and write down everything that we can think of individually about the Lord.  After about 8 minutes most of us had run out of Biblical things and had to just go with who He REALLY is to us.  I had things on my list like “sneaky, hysterical, un-offended, invested, aggressive, unreserved, never indifferent”.  So with a long list, (mine was like 7 dozen things) we all at once, in a small room, just told God what we thought of Him.  We “read our lists” but it was more than that, we were talking to Him.  After all, He was more in that room than we were.  I was only in the room once, He was in every single one of us, so He was in their like 40 times.

Needless to say, it was pretty powerful.  But then, in the spirit of Jahovah-Sneaky, I brought up two verses that flipped us upside down.  Second Corinthians 3:18 says that as we are beholding His glory, we are being transformed into His likeness.  This means that as we are considering the truth of who He is, we are changing into that very same thing.  Then I read First John 4:17, which says “we are as He is in this world”.  That means that we are on this earth, walking around just like He is up on His heavenly throne next to the Father.  We are of the same nature, the same authority, the same lineage, the same spirit.  So everything that we had just told God about Himself, He was telling it to us about us.  As Becky Langford saw in a vision the next night, we are throwing praise at Him and He is batting it back in our faces, telling us that we are only talking about ourselves.

Now, here is the real kicker for me.

The same night that Becky shared that vision at our Friday night School of the Spirit meeting, Stephen Alls (the pastoral advisor of our school) talked about turning to the Lord.  When he did, I remembered a verse about something good happening when we turn to the Lord.  But I couldn’t remember where it was.  It turns out that it is only 2 verses befor the Second Corinthians 3 verse about us being transformed into His likeness by Beholding His glory.  It says that whenever someone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away from our faces and we shine with glory.  But something really hit me when I realized WHERE the Lord is to be turned to.

Whenever we think of turning to the Lord, or looking to the Lord, we tend to think UP.  But Colossians 1:27 says that Christ is IN us.  So when we turn to the Lord, which removes the veil that hides our glory, we are turning IN to the Lord.  then I thought “Holy Smokes!  It isn’t turning inward towards the Lord, it is turning INTO the Lord!”  We become the Lord, we fulfill the truth of being as He is, we are transformed into His likeness and we walk in His power, His grace, His authority.

We run around trying to gain favor when Favor lives in us.  We search and manipulate our way into influence when we have power greater than an Atom Bomb, we have a “Last Adam Bomb” in us.  We have the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead RESIDENT inside of us.  One of my friends, Bethany Oiler, is a worship leader here at MorningStar.  She recently wrote a song that has a great line that says something like “I am God’s house and He is always home.”

He who was going to redeem Israel (Luke 24:21)

Dealing with misunderstanding and disappointment is one of the hardest things to do.  The two men on their way to Emmaus, along with the rest of Jesus’ followers, thought that Jesus was going to be the Jewish Messiah.  They thought that they knew what that would look like.  And indeed, they were right in their understanding of who He is, what they did not have right is what that would look like.  They thought He would rise up militarily and overthrow the unrighteous governmental system over Israel.  But God just doesn’t do it that way.  His plans always involve changing people’s hearts and releasing them to take over by changing the structures from the inside out.
Replacing one overpowering government with another is not a good change.  Infiltrating the systems and mentalities of culture is the only truly effective way of to change a culture, a nation or a planet.  That is exactly what He intends to do now in our culture, our nation and our planet.  Christians will be up in arms until abortion is made illegal, all abortions, all the time.  One problem with that is that people will still get abortions if it is illegal.  This is because the hearts of the people have not changed, just what they are allowed to do without getting in trouble.  I am not saying that abortion is a good thing at all, what I am saying is that ending abortion means transforming how people think about it.  Even if abortion is legal or even encouraged, people will not do it if their hearts desire their seed to be perpetuated.  Abortions don’t happen in groups that want children.  Islam is taking over Europe by having half a dozen babies per family, encouraged by the religious leaders.  In one generation they will be able to vote in whom ever they want into any governmental position, because the current generation is not aborting their babies and is raising them with their values.
When God does something different from the way that we want Him to do it, the problem is not with His ways, but with our understanding.  When we get offended because God is not doing something, and we think that our anger is righteous anger, I believe that it is wiser to step out and change what we don’t like rather than get upset.  Jesus said that He was the light of the world while He was in the world.  But now we are the light of the world, we are the sons into whose hands the earth has been given.  It is our responsibility to change and transform culture through stepping into it and effecting change, not by complaining and hoping that our whining is going to reach the right ears to change something.  There is a place for intercession, but the Lord told His disciples to pray for laborers, people who would do what is needed for a harvest.  We need laborers.
In principle, no one would disagree with how the Lord does things.  No one would say that He is doing something the wrong way, at least not openly.  But in our hearts we question His ways more than most of us would like to admit.  We know that, just as the Scriptures say, “He is righteous in all His ways”, but we don’t know what to do with the government officials He allows to get into office or the injustice of a friend or family member dying when they die.  Even disasters are from the Lord according to Amos chapter three, verse six.  At some point we have to come to a place of humility where we can honestly say “I don’t understand You, but I trust You and I love you.  I’m sticking with You no matter what.”  We will not always get it, nor will we always agree with what or how he does something, but we know that He is good.  And if that is true, then we can rest assured that He does everything from a place of goodness and love.
*Lord, we trust You, help us grow to trust You more and more easily.  Amen.*

Jesus’ Desire for the Revolution

As I was reading Luke today I ran across a curious statement that Jesus makes.

“I have come to cast fire upon the earth; and how I wish it were already kindled!
But I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it is accomplished.”
Luke 12:49-50

We talk about the fires of revival, God releasing power through the people of God to show His love.  I believe that Jesus was at least partially talking about this.  John the Baptist was obsessed with the coming of a Messiah that would baptize God’s people with fire and not merely water.  The revolution of the human race was what John was longing for, as was Jesus here in Luke 12.  Jesus wanted so desperately to give mankind His Spirit.  The kindling of the revolutionary fire would be on the day of Pentacost when manifest tongues of fire would spark on 120 people’s heads.

Then Jesus says that He has a baptism to undergo.  Paul talks about being burried with Christ in baptism.  Jesus had to be put into the earth and conquer death on our behalf SO THAT He could rise up in resurrection power with us soon to follow.  When Moses and Elijah spoke with Jesus on the mount of transfiguration, they talked about Jesus’ departing from the disciples.  Jesus was rearing to get going so that He could let an army of resurrected, invincible lovers of God and man go into the world and take it over.

The wording didn’t seem to make sense to me, though, in verse 50.  I just cannot connect Jesus and distress, it doesn’t seem like His nature.  Distress sounds like stress and worry.  So I looked at the original language of this section.  Luke uses a word that comes from two words, one meaning “to hold” and another “together”.  Jesus essentially says “I’m just trying to hold Myself together until I can go through this baptism of Mine.”  Jesus and the Holy Spirit were united, just like we are united with the Spirit, the difference between us and Him is that in His case, there are two FULL Presences of God.  Imagine trying to hold two full manifestations of God in one human body.  You would be bursting at the seems, too.  Jesus longed to release His Spirit to His people so that the flames of the revolution might be kindled and the spark-heads could take over the earth.

Redefining Revolutionary Repentance

Those who know me are starting to realize that I am stuck on this “Revolution”, let me give some background understanding on that before I talk about repentance’s role in the Revolution – afterall, if we have no context, we cannot understand each other.

A revolution in physics is when something comes back to its original place of origin.  The human race was not made to be dominated by demonicly empowered media that controls and manipulates every person into an impotent and insignificant pauper.  Rather, we were made in the image of the Almighty, therefore, we were made to be like the Omnipotent One.  Our destiny is to have all power.  Read Paul’s prayer for the Colossian church (verses 1:9-12) to see how that works.  The revolution is man becoming what he was made to be in the first place.  The revolution is men, women, children being filled with the Holy Spirit and not having to TAKE authority over things, but WALKING in authoirty.

When Jesus, the Founder of the Revolution, first presented His main message, it was this: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”  For sermon junkies like me, you know that Bill Johnson and other great prophetic teachers of our day talk about repentance meaning “to change the way you think about something” or “to turn your mind around”.  Now Jesus was not preaching this message to born-again, Spirit-filled believers, He was the only One at that point.  Too often preachers take messages intended to be directed at the world and apply them to the Church, this does not work.  Granted, we have to change the way we think, but the message “Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” is our message to the world, not so much God’s message to us.

“The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” is a revelation to us that we have Heaven’s resources and power as close to us as in our hands.  The Old Covenant prophet Habakkuk saw that the Messiah would have light flashing from His hands.  If we are made in His image, and we are, and if we are being transformed into His likeness from glory to glory, and we are, then when we see Him, we see us as we are meant to be.  Not only will we be like Him, we can be like Him right now.  We will do greater works than Him (John 14:12).  But the Messianic Message was directed to us, it was directed to those who were yet in need of a Savior.  We don’t need a Savior, we already have one.

Everything that the Lord does or says is a multi-level revelation.  Meaning that just because we were not the subject of His message, does not mean that we should not glean understanding from the message.  We are indeed ambassadors of the Kingdom, that means we carry the authority of Heaven’s Kingdom with us, it is at OUR hand.  This is where the Revolution meets repentance.  We repented to get in, now our message is to do the same.  By releasing the power, authority and peace of the Kingdom from our hands, the world has no choice but to repent.  When a man goes to Walmart with crippling back pain and an ambassador touches him and his decade-long bout with back pain ends, the man must change the way he thinks.  His mind must turn, either in faith towards God’s love for him or into dillussion and denial.

This is how the conversation goes:
Ambassador:  “Repent”
Lost Sheep:  “Why?”
Ambassador:  “Because the Kingdom of Heaven is in my hand.”
Lost Sheep:  “Prove it.”
Ambassador:  Receives and presents a word of knowledge for healing that is correct, lays hands on the Lost Sheep and they are healed.
Lost Sheep:  “How did that happen?”
Ambassador:  “My Kingdom is a better Kingdom than the one you are living in and you are officially invited to join it and immediately receive an inheritance.”
The Lost Sheep then either believes and responds or rejects reality and chooses dillussion.

When an ambassador lives in the Revolution, Heaven is on hand, ready to back up what they say.  When an ambassador releases the power of the Kingdom of Heaven, the atmosphere changes around the unrepentant and a door is open for them to step out of the domain of darkness and into the Kingdom of the Christ.  We bear fruit in keeping with repentance by continuing to keep our minds set on the things above and call the dizzy sheep to fix their eyes on the Resurrected One whose love covers the multitude of their sins.  Our job is to display His power as evidence of His love.