Agape: In Christ

As we go through this time of Holy week together I am sadly reminded that not everyone is for Jesus and about the things that Jesus is about. We just haven't been very interested in what God, the Father, is doing and wants to do...and this is the important part...what trips most people up...the Way He wants to do it.

Luke tells us that 'the chief priests and the teachers of the law were looking for some way to get rid of Jesus, for they were afraid of the people. Then Satan entered Judas, called Iscariot, one of the Twelve.' The 'righteous' were praying against Jesus to the point that one of His own went accuser on Him. Why? Things weren't going the way Judas wanted them to and there was some money to be made. No body every wants to identify with Judas...yet there he is...that same spirit in so many today. We say...I would never turn over the word of God for a profit. Yet, it's done every day in a thousand different ways.

Not everyone who claims to know God and be of God is very much interested in God's Kingdom. His will done on Earth as in Heaven. It is more often our will done on earth in God's name, till we get someplace else called heaven. I'm as guilty as the next person who has fallen short in this, if not in word surely in deed. Praise God for his grace and patience. Amen?

God loves us so much that He gave His Life for us in and as His only begotten Son. Jesus suffered and he did not bite back, he did not curse, he blessed, He told the truth with grace and love. He loved His enemies...that is... those that hated Him and He gives us this same upward calling. It's an endurance race, a boxing match, a battle to walk in Love, not only as a regenerated person, but as a person through whom the Spirit of regeneration flows...this is a fallen and degenerate world we inhabit, but it is a world that God loves, a world that God has reclaimed and is remaking, filling it with Himself as the waters cover the sea. That's His job. Our job is to love Him with all of our heart, mind, soul and strength and like that to love our neighbors as ourselves. The only way any of us can partake in that Love is in and by the power of the Holy Ghost, by turning to Jesus and looking to His strength to not only see the Kingdom, but to enter it and to have it enter us, to live in it, walk in it and give Him glory in it.

Jesus who says to us, 'Come, follow me', that we can actually be in Him. To know, in the most intimate way, the Father and Jesus Christ whom He sent. That doesn't always look like what we want it to, that hasn't changed and it won't until what we want it to look like is what God wants it to look like...namely Jesus. It certain doesn't feel good to have the Power drained right out of you, to be baptized for the dead or to even vaguely perceive what is in the hearts of men. But when you see a response of faith in the other person, when you see the Light in their eyes as though something just changed and they can't quite figure it out...well that is the Power of God and that is sharing in the sufferings of Messiah, that is the mystery of the Gospel at work in our midst.

To know God and be in Christ is to serve, it is to suffer and it is to overcome and it is to rejoice and celebrate in progressive up-building of one another in the faith. We are being made into a Holy Temple for the Lord...every day...individually? yes! Corporately? yes! Holistically? yes! and AMEN!...New Heavens and New Earth where righteousness dwells is our hope...the place where God is all and in all. That is the promise and that is the word of the Lord.

There is no greater joy than being in Christ...John puts it quite perfectly...'I, John, your brother and companion in the suffering and kingdom and patient endurance that are ours in Jesus.' Jesus, the crucified and resurrected Messiah, it is still foolishness to westerners (even a lot of Christians) and still a stumbling block to the Jews just as David prophesied it would be...

The stone the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
the LORD has done this,
and it is marvelous in our eyes.
The LORD has done it this very day;
let us rejoice today and be glad.

Even so it is promised that every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of the Father. Think on that...

To be in Christ is a powerful thing...the power of it is not expressed nearly as it should be it is a power perfected in our weakness. The power behind the absolute truth, God is Love...that's who He was, who He is and who He will be...there is NO shifting of shadow in Him who is Light. He has transferred us from the dominion of darkness into the Kingdom of His Son, the Kingdom of Light. Oh, that we would receive it in humility. I urge you to do all that you can to humble yourselves, the other option is to be humbled by God and His hand is heavy upon the proud. He who makes low the hills that the valley's might be filled has warned us. To Him ascribe all glory and honor and praise.

So today I joyfully remind you, or maybe you're hearing it for the first time, of what we first received. Jesus died on a cross for our sins, was raised on the third day and appeared to many before ascending to the right hand of the throne of God, where He will be seated until all enemies are under His feet. Then the Son will descend to us even as we receive Him, becoming subject to Him who glorified the Son, that God might be all and in all. AMEN