“IMITATION OR ACTUALIZATION?”
By: J.Farrell Fisher, October 26-27, 2017
Before we get to the major thrust of the message, “Imitation or Actualization?”, I sense the need to make you fully aware that there are unbelieving men and women across the world who have no shame that, yes, they are “enemies of God”! Unbelief IS the major calling card of many people who are content in the ‘darkness’ of their minds and hearts of no need of God – they are ‘sufficient’ in themselves and what they stand for and want to hold on to it!
You may not be familiar with the Pharoah of Egypt that Moses and Aaron confronted in Exodus 5:1 on appointment from Holy God. They told Pharoah, “Thus says the Lord God of Israel, ‘Let My people go, that they may hold a feast to Me in the wilderness.’” But in Verse 6 Pharoah said, “Who is the Lord that I should obey His voice to let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, nor will I let Israel go.”
There are many ‘pharoahs’ across our known world who are staunch enemies of our loving, merciful, caring God! There are many ‘pharoahs’ who are so ‘self-mastered’ that to suggest submission and surrender to the Author of Life and His authority is to release from within resentment of, hatred for, and opposition to the King of kings even if it ushers in more and more of unbelief, and they’ll willfully “crucify the Christ” over and over, again and again, in their hearts and minds!
There IS ‘the counsel of the ungodly’, there ARE ‘paths of the sinners’ clearly marked out, and there are those who “sit in the seat of the scornful”, fully opposed to Divine, Eternal Truth! Around you are “the chaff which the wind WILL DRIVE AWAY,” with the way of the ungodly becoming a ‘wall of separation eternally’ because they refused to bow before the King of kings and Lord of lords, not fully surrendered to His good and perfect will for their lives but content with the “best” sinful flesh has to offer! There ARE highly intelligent individuals in man-made ‘philosophies’ who, for themselves, “have no need of God or your Savior”, and they are strong, at times even, vindictive in their responses, but they ARE THE ONES FOR WHOM CHRIST JESUS SHED HIS INNOCENT BLOOD ON THE CROSS FOR THEIR REDEMPTION AND RECONCILIATION, Jesus even knowing there would be those who turn from Him, not to Him!
Unbelievers, yes, are ‘savorless salt’, yet they sense the world around them can’t do without them, even though they themselves ‘drink’ the poisoned waters of their own intellectual philosophies! Unbelievers speak of “my good chosen lifestyle” but void of abiding peace with God and with his/her fellow man. Unbelievers choose life apart from the sacrificial nature of Christ as He willfully gave Himself to fulfill God’s perfect will; unbelievers live without divine, sacrificial love, lives without the foundation of true faith that lights the way in and through their dark world, and, certainly, for them, no true foundation to withstand life’s, at times, brutal storms; oh, and void of sustaining power against the world, one’s old sin nature, and Satan Himself!
Unbelievers are unaware they’ve been totally blinded by Satan and the powers of darkness; they are unaware of Heaven’s intent, and without knowing it, blinded to demonic intent through Satan’s ‘disciples’ – they are well-trained in the deceptions of darkness; and, in Luke 14:34-35, Jesus describes lives who know nothing of “salt’s intent”, who are not ‘fit for the land nor for the dunghill, but men throw it out’! Consider that for a few moments before continuing!
Unbelievers ARE slaves to their old sin-natures, carnal in a man’s ‘self-will’, always “behaving like mere men” (1 Corinthians 3:3!), ‘natural men’ bound by what their sin-natures dictate! There are ‘unrighteous men and women’, and they do not inherit the kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 6:9), Paul then saying, 1 Corinthians 6:9b-11, “Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, not thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of God.”
And true believers forsake the world, their old sin-nature, and the Satanic deceptions, yes, even willing to die for the “Eternal Truth”! Do you remember what Christ Jesus said to the ‘religious’ (?) scribes and Pharisees, products of the false teachings of Judaism in Matthew 23:2-5, self-appointed, and, yes, out to deceive true seekers and true believers? “The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. Therefore whatever they tell you to observe, that observe AND DO, but do not do according to their works; FOR THEY SAY, AND DO NOT DO. For they bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men’s shoulders; BUT they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers. But all their works they do to be seen by men.” [Do you understand? There’s no radiant life in the ‘scribes and Pharisees’ unveiling Christ but only unbelieving men ‘trying’ to religiously pump their ‘flesh’ up to an acceptable level before God’s eyes and feel themselves ‘superior’ even to ‘grace-birthed-disciples of Christ; in fact, they’ll see to it you’re crucified or banned from legitimate, fleshly lives like theirs !].
I was awed recently reading again Dallas Willard’s book “The Great Omission” where in it he wrote the following: (pps. 11-12), “Nothing less than life in the steps of Christ is adequate to the human soul or the needs of our world. Any other offer fails to do justice to the drama of human redemption, deprives the hearer of life’s greatest opportunity, and abandons this present life to the evil powers of the age. The correct perspective is to see following Christ not only as the necessity it is, but as the fulfillment of the highest human possibilities and as life on the highest plain. It is to see, in Helmet Thielicke’s words, that “the Christian stands, not under the dictatorship of a legalistic ‘You ought’, but in the magnetic field of Christian freedom, under the empowering of the ‘You may’.”
And I must ask! Do you understand “the magnetic field of Christian freedom, under the empowering of ‘You may’”? Here’s how Paul explained it in Colossians 1 as he unveiled “the mystery”! He said in Verses 26-29, “the mystery which has been hidden from ages and generations, but now has been revealed to His saints (that’s those set apart by God FOR the dwelling place of His earthly presence!). To them God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles: which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Him we preach, warning every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ. To this end I also labor, striving according to His working which works in me mightily.”
That, my friends, is a “Wow Word!” It’s not you ‘trying your best’ to serve Jesus! He crucified your worst and your best, raising you up to be the temple of His Holy Presence, so that His Resurrection Life, His Resurrection Hope, and His Resurrection Power would be continually manifested in and throughout the ages through any life finished with its self but available to Him as the earthly abode of all He is and all He desires to do through them! Most ‘church folk’ are so in love with their own ‘Christian identity’ that Christ is shut out from being Himself in and through them, and a lost world around them never sees the Savior and Lord being Himself!
But, in Galatians 2:20-21a, Paul wrote: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God…”! I am an A.W. Tozer fan because his writings truly align with Biblical Truth! Many years ago Tozer wrote about, his “feeling that a notable heresy has come into being throughout evangelical Christian circles – the widely accepted concept that we humans can choose to accept Christ only because we need Him as Savior and that we have the right to postpone our obedience to Him as Lord as long as we want to,” adding that for one to profess that falsehood is to deny its tragic deception but heighten the Truth “that salvation apart from obedience is unknown in the sacred scriptures”, with Jesus speaking in Luke 6:46, “But why do you call Me ‘Lord, Lord’, and not do the things which I say?”
Christ Jesus Himself declared that obedience to Him is not an option in the day of grace and mercy! In John 6:63-64 the Lord Jesus said: “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh (that’s the best and the worst of all fallen mankind!) profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life. But there are some of you who do not believe.”
He went on to say, because He knew there were some who professed, followed, but did not ‘believe’, AND they eventually did and eventually will betray Him! (Of course, there are those who say: “It happened with early disciples, but not in our day or our time or in our ‘assembly of believers’!” Really?). And John 6:66 then says: From that time many of His disciples went back and walked with Him no more. (For you, how sad is that?).
You understand, I pray, that there is a natural world AND there is a spiritual world, the world of fallen humanity AND the spiritual world of the Kingdom of God, a world of ‘self-direction’ AND the world, the kingdom, the family of faith, trust, and obedience who give King Jesus His rightful place as Savior and Lord and Sovereign Administrator ushering in His Kingdom-Will in repentant, available vessels who accept “crucified with Christ” but through Redemptive Faith have become vessels, temples of His Holy Presence!
No doubt this is why the Lord Jesus said in John 6:63, “The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life”! Do you think this just might be why Jesus said in John 4:24, “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him MUST worship Him in spirit and truth”? Jesus said and still says, “You MUST be born again,” stating the reality of spiritual birthing through repentance toward God and faith alone in Christ’s “finished work” at the Cross AND through “His empty tomb” presence and living as intercessor at the right hand throne of Holy God!
In Colossians 2:11-15 Paul testifies, teaches, and trains true disciples in Truth! He said, “In Him you were also circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the sins of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, buried with Him in baptism (that’s the ‘baptism’ of crucifixion-death’!), in which you also were raised with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead. (Dare I tell you? Believe I will! “If you NOW don’t see yourself crucified with Christ, you and your old sin nature, then you are still captive of the world philosophies, satanic deception, and your own brainless, godless nature!”) – “YOU MUST BE BORN AGAIN!”
Again, remind yourself of John 6:63! “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh (your old sin-nature!) profits nothing.” To give you understanding, let me take you to 1 Corinthians 2:1-4 where Paul wrote, “And I, brethren, when I came to you, did not come with excellence of speech or of wisdom declaring to you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I was with you in weakness, in fear, and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.”
What does 1 Corinthians 2: 14 declare to us and, yes, witnessed by us in the spiritual blindness of many unbelievers? “But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned,” which affirms Jesus’ words, “God is Spirit; and those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth”, affirming, “You must be born again, born of the Spirit, for new life in Christ alone!”
But, having moved away from the initial statements about “unbelievers”, has there been clarity for you of the difference between “imitation” of the faith and the “actualization” of re-born, Spirit-birthed, “new creations” through their repentance toward God and, yes, faith alone in Christ’s redemptive work at the Cross, taking ‘natural mankind’ to be “crucified with Christ”, and aware of it, repented, and then “rested” in His Resurrection Presence? HEAR ME:
No more ‘knowledgeable’ awareness of the ‘good self’ substituted for God’s verdict of worthiness of the Cross alone, what one author called “an embarrassing encumbrance”, but, yes, now, the Bible confession, “it was for my sin, my sin nature, my devotion to ‘self’ rather than all-out allegiance to “God’s Way” that Christ Jesus willingly, lovingly, obediently, submitted Himself to God’s perfect will and Way, and in the willful laying down of His own life for the sin of all the world because of God the Father’s still great love for all of fallen humanity, enduring the Cross”!
I close with Jesus’ words in John 7:16-18! “My doctrine is not Mine, but His who sent Me. If anyone wills to do His will, he shall know concerning the doctrine, whether it is from God or whether I speak on My own authority. He who speaks from himself seeks his own glory; but He who seeks the glory of the One who sent Him is true, and no unrighteousness is in Him.”
And, I ask, WHAT DOES JESUS’ WORDS EXPLAIN OR EXPOSE IN YOUR TRUST IN HIM ALONE OR ARE YOU STILL LEANING ON YOUR SELF-CENTERED UNDERSTANDING AND EXPRESSION OF YOUR ‘RELIGION’ BUT NOT HIS TRUE SCRIPTURAL FAITH OF AN INTIMATE, LIFE-EXCHANGE THROUGH YOUR DEATH WITH HIM AT THE CROSS, ACCEPTING HIS RESURRECTION PRESENCE AS YOUR HOPE ALONE – NOT ME, BUT CHRIST IN ME THE HOPE OF ETERNAL GLORY?
HAVE YOU “DIED TO YOUR OWN SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS”, NOW CONSCIOUSLY AWARE HE TOOK YOUR OLD SIN NATURE TO THE CROSS THAT IT MIGHT DIE WITH HIM, BUT THEN GLORIOUSLY RAISED UP TO BE HIS “MASTER-FILLED” “NEW CREATION”?