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Living Grace

Christ in me, the hope of glory

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The Secret of History

“And this is the secret. Christ lives in you. This gives you assurance of sharing his glory.” – Colossians 1:27

There has been a radical shift in you.

You are a New Creation in Christ.

You have been transformed from a life of separation to one of unity.

God by the Holy Spirit has come to dwell within your heart . You have been reborn into new life and the fullness of Christ has been planted into you.

Every trace of your sin nature has been destroyed. You are New Creation, you are now Holy and righteous in Christ and Christ lives in you.

The divine inheritance of the cross of all God planned and purposed you to be has been given to you in Christ.

And part of God’s plan and purpose was to create heaven on earth through you. God’s glory would radiate in you and creation would be made complete through you.

The secret of history, of all of creation is that Christ has come to live in you. That heaven has taken up residence in you. That through you everything lost can now be reclaimed.

For each of us reborn as New Creation’s in Christ we need to wake up from the slumber of our old disconnected nature and connect with the glory and grace of God alive in our hearts.

We need to awaken our hearts to the reality of Christ living inside us, in his fullness and live our lives as sons and daughter’s of the living God.

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His Grace is Sufficent

Christ has taken you and placed you into his everlasting blessings. You have been given the place of highest honour at His banquet of finest delights. He says drink my wine of healing, eat the my fruit of goodness and receive wholeness and restoration to your soul and body.

His grace is sufficent for you. Sufficent to heal you, sufficent to set you free from oppression and captivity, sufficent to release you from all guilt and condemnation.

Today you are blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ. His grace is overflowing to you and it is more than sufficent to do exceedingly, abundantly above all could ask or think according to the power that is working within you.

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Word Whispers – 1 Kings 19:12

“After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.” – 1 Kings 19:12

What does God have to do to get our attention?

This fascinating passage from the life of Elijah certainly speaks volumes into our perspective of the workings of God.  Elijah fleeing from the threats of death on his life seeks refuge in the safety of the wilderness, but God tells him to go to the mountain. And there on the mountain, God sends the wind, an earthquake and fire but that was just a prelude, God actually revealed himself in the silence of a whisper.

We may flee to the wilderness but God calls us to the mountain, for it is at the mountain where provision is found. The wilderness is full of wandering, crying out and waiting, but the mountain is the place of revelation, and in Elijah’s experience commission.

The mountain was Mount Sinai, the birth place of the Old Covenant, the place where Moses met God.  This mountain was the revelation of God’s Covenant with his people, and with his prophet Elijah.  But now for us the mountain in the New Covenant is Jesus Christ. All our life is found in the finished work of the Cross, when we come to Christ we rest in his revelation alive inside us.

And how does that revelation come?

It comes in the intimacy of our relationship with Christ, not in loud noise, earth shattering events or seeking words that tickle our ears but listening to that quiet whisper of love which motivates us to trust.

Elijah had to learn the hard way, he didn’t have Christ living inside him, he only partially knew the presence of God, but we who are born into the glory of God have the Holy Spirit interceding for us, speaking to us and alive within us.

Today, take time and cultivate listening to the whisper of God, it is more real and more powerful than any external source and it will bring you into a deeper, closer, more intimate relationship with God.

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His Treasure

“You have captured my heart, my treasure, my bride. You hold it hostage with one glance of your eyes, with a single jewel of your necklace ” – Song of songs 4:9.

Christ came for you because you are his treasure. He came for you because you have infinite value to him.

He calls out the beauty and value in you.

God reached down into the dust he created and breathed into it his life. The very glory of God, the fullness of his goodness entered into creating, in the body of the first man.

You were created from the intimacy of God, from a perfect relationship. You were created as a reflection of perfect love and now in Christ you have been made a New Creation.

The journey of the heart is a discovery of who we already are in our new creation life. Christ has filled us with his fullness inside our spirit and we are now alive to Christ and dead to our old nature.

We were created beautiful by God. Now in Christ we have been restored to our perfect, innocent nature. As Paul says in Ephesians 4:21 “You are holy and righteous in Christ.”

You have captured God’s heart. You are his delight. Your eyes are alive with the glory of Christ placed in you.

You have made God a hostage of love for you. He pursues you, he runs after you and he embraces you into his perfect union with you.

You are his delight and he will never let you go.

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Every Promise

 

“Come with me from Lebanon, my bride, come with me from Lebanon. Come down from Mount Amana, from the peaks of Senior and Hermon, where the loins have their dens and the leopards live among the hills.” Song Of songs 4:8

Every promise of God finds its completion In Christ. God chose me to be holy and blameless in Him before the foundation of the world and before I had done a single thing to earn it but rather through his glorious grace in which he makes me acceptable to himself. It was predestined that Christ would be the cause of my adoption not me.

God predestined me to relate to him by his righteousness and not my own. Before time God chose me. In time he justified me. After time he will glorify me. Neither my adoption, justification nor my glorification has anything to do with me. Only God can qualify me. The only thing I am called to do is have faith in Jesus and that faith is a gift given to me by God, I did not even have it. Faith is just my positive response to all God has provided for me by grace.

God called me to him because I was incapable of qualifying myself to respond by faith, it was all His ability to qualify me. Because he called me in Christ and He justified me In Christ, I will be glorified because I am In Christ. Likewise, those people who trust in their own self-efforts to be qualified will be lost for eternity.

I am now filled with the sunlight of God’s grace. God delights in me because he sees Christ in me, I am the apple of my fathers eye and the joy of his heart. As a chosen child of God I have all the riches and glory of heaven living now inside of me. The overflowing waterfall of all heavens grace flows and cascades over every part of my life.

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The Hill of Frankincense

“Before the dawn breezes blow and the night shadows flee, I will hurry to the mountain of myrrh and to the hill of frankincense.” Song of songs 4:6

Before the foundations of the world and before the beginning of time, God loved you.

Before planets were thrown into space, he decided to come for you. He came and journeyed with us into a world of dirt and flesh to capture our hearts. He came because we are the joy of his heart.

He came for us so that he could take us and adopt into his family. For adoption is the true heart of predestination.

For it is the love of God that takes the initiative. And there is nothing you need to do to get his love because God’s love for you is not based on anything that you have done, but on who you are.

God’s love is eternal. It does not have a beginning and it does not come to an end. It existed before time and was poured out in time and was sacrificed at a specific moment in time.

Calvary the hill of frankincense was the moment when God’s love kissed our dirt.

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He Holds You

“Then scarcely had I left them when I found my love! I caught him and held him tightly.” Song of songs 3:4

We are all on a journey of love into the heart of God to discover who we already are.

This journey is alien to us, it is a complete contradiction to all the world teaches us.

It is a journey to trust the promises of God.

It is a journey of realisation that we have died with Christ and have been raised with him into his resurrected life.

It is a journey into the realisation that we are now sons and daughters of God.

And this journey is a journey in the decisions of our heart, in those little acts of love and kindness that we find our true identity.

For the faith of Christ is the faith in our hearts, the peace of God is the peace in our hearts and the trust the father has in Christ is the trust God has in you.

He holds you, let yourself be held.

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The One I Love

“So I searched for him but did not find him. The watchmen stopped me as they made their rounds and I asked “Have you seen the one I love? ” Song of songs 3:3

We are all faced with a choice to either seize control of our own destiny or enter into a deeper realisation of the love of God .

This choice is no more evident than in the search for love. It is here in the realm of our emotions and feelings that we make fashion our own God’s in a heart response to discover true value and acceptance.

God knew the enchantment of sin would entice his chosen people away from his love for them. Just before they would cross the river Jordan to enter the Promised Land he warned them “Do not bring any detestable objects into your home, for then you will be destroyed, just like them.”

God knew that what you see every day, what you accept as normal, begins to cloud your heart and starts to make God seem distant.

For sins enchantment is that it make evil normal.

God is never distant from us, he never draws away from us, we draw away from him when foreign God’s of worldly wisdom, worldly diagnosis and worldly enlightenment creep into our thinking. But there is also a more subtle foreign God that of religion. When we start to make God fit our plans by our self effort and performance.

Love is not found in self effort it is found in intimacy.

Love bears all things, it is found in a heart of compassion and mercy.

Love is the oil that runs through your heart. It has been poured out into your New Creation life. You are a fountain of the very love of Christ in your Spirit. Don’t let the world seep into your thinking and into your heart and enchant you into believing the world’s diagnosis of your life.

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Faithful to His Promises.

“So I said to myself, “I will get up and roam the city, searching in all its streets and squares. I will search for the one I love.” Song of songs 3:2

We live in the moment, we breathe each breath in the present , every heart beat is an affirmation of life.

The time is now.

The great patriarch of old a man called Abraham wasn’t wandering about looking for the one true God. God appeared to him, unexpectedly and offered him an amazing invitation. A choice to up sticks and go or stay in the land of Haran.

This choice for Abraham was one of emense proportions for at its heart it meant leaving behind all that had brought him life. He turned away from every familiar place, every thing that had bought him wealth, every thing that had bought him security and every thing that gave him love. To journey into the unknown and new life offered to him by God in a promise.

Abraham faced the same choice that we face everyday to turn our hearts away from all that would attach us and to turn our hearts towards the promise.

For if your heart is truly to be free it needs to detach itself from all influences and awaken its self to the promises of God.

For Abraham had no plan, no map, and no planned out itinerary. He just had the promise of God.

It is here in Abraham that we can see that life is not to be managed but lived. We can’t remove all dangers, we cannot forsee all the twists and turns, we cannot fear the future by managing our circumstances. But we can place our trust in the promise that God holds us and is faithful to his promises.

It is here in the heart that we know God offers us all things and that as we detach our hearts from all that would pull us back we find that God is there holding us.

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