Something inside of us longs for holiness, longs to leave this sinful world behind.
The Creator didn’t make you gay or a pedophile nor any other brand of pervert. You are that way because of the Fall. We are born under a curse; all of us are saddled with lusts and desires that nature itself would tell us were wrong if we listened. Thus, the entire human race faces the obligation to redemption. We must pass through the Flaming Sword of Revelation, turning it upon our selves and confessing what God has revealed.
As long as we have a fleshly body, we also have a fleshly nature. That nature militates against redemption because it does not want to die. But that includes both senses of “dying.” The flesh does not want to surrender to the Spirit, and it cannot be made to want it. Instead, the fleshly nature clings to life and craves all sorts of pleasures that aren’t in our best interest.
The best we can hope for in this life is placing our hearts on the throne of decision. Even that doesn’t guarantee your entry into Heaven, but it does make you sensitive to revealed truth. What gets you into Heaven is a divine miracle of spiritual birth. Your dead spirit receives Life when the Holy Spirit of God invades your being. The initiative for this miracle rests entirely in God’s hands. In that sense, there is nothing any human can decide or do to make it happen. And yet, at the same time, God says it is available to all.
But then, if you have received spiritual birth and do not then claim your divine heritage by living in your convictions, you have no Life here on earth. You are spiritually stillborn, a potential divine being with no realization in functional life. If you don’t live from the heart, your spiritual birth means nothing in this world.
It doesn’t have to make sense to us. In our fallen state, it cannot make sense to us. We can grasp it with our heart-mind, but not with our intellect. We can know it as conviction alone. We have to make our hearts rule in order to claim all the divine heritage God has said is for His family. Being born a human does not make you the family of God. Only by embracing the covenant He offers can you claim that heritage. And being spiritually born does not make you an agent of His revelation on this earth.
And all of this is clothed in parables because it is utterly impossible to simply describe in factual terms. This is our mission, folks: to breathe life into this truth by how we live. The single most important thing you can do is simply exist in this truth. Even if you said almost nothing about your faith, people would still perceive your witness because God uses us that way. There is more than one way to “tell the world about Jesus.” (Recall that Moses was not a public speaker, but led his nation to the Promised Land.)
Our covenant assumes spiritual birth, but that’s because we know no one can live this way without that unspeakable power. Instead, we focus on the one part of this that humans can decide, and that is to move the focus of consciousness into the heart. And based on this, we then promote the Covenant of Christ in its guise as Biblical Law. His person is the fulfillment of all God’s commands, all of God’s revelation of how to live in a fallen world. And Biblical Law of necessity includes the heart-led way; the heart of conviction is the foundation of it.
Furthermore, the task is to focus on seeking out what the Gospels refer to as the Lost Sheep of God’s flock. At one time it was manifested in the Nation of Israel. However, that nation kept violating the covenant, so God ended it all in the sacrifice of His own Son, Jesus Christ. Now the name “Israel” belongs to the divine family given birth by the New Covenant. If we embrace Him and all His teaching, then we can claim to be His family, the New Israel.
It doesn’t mean our fleshly nature is miraculously transformed, but that our divine nature is born inside of us and given the power to make war against the sinful nature of the flesh. We are taught that the spiritual nature has the advantage and can nail the flesh to the Cross. But it has to keep doing that moment by moment, guarding against the flesh coming back down from the Cross and causing havoc. So the burden is on you to decide for the divine nature and against the fleshly nature. The longer you live seeking and desiring the divine, the greater your strength against the flesh grows.
This is our mission until the day He calls us home to be with Him.
