The message has been pretty harsh on the other blog this past week. It’s the message for those who are not heart-led, whose faith is suspect because they aren’t obeying the Word. They get the Law part of divine revelation because they are on that level. Ephesians 2:10 says that God made us alive in Christ for the purpose of an existence consistent with His divine moral character. While Paul uses the term “good works” there, we should all know He consistently said it was impossible to do genuinely good works outside the Covenant of Christ.
So we aren’t in this to get our heads on straight. Getting our heads on straight is just a part of the good works. And the good works are never done; they are merely the expression of our changed nature. But claiming a changed nature means nothing if that change is not manifest in the net change in our behavior. The whole thing is organic and cannot be sliced and diced for viewing under the microscope. The moment you begin to deconstruct, the whole thing dies and what you get is death. It’s all one thing or it’s nothing.
We speak the prophetic message in demanding people do things they cannot do without Christ. We voice His demands, wholly consistent with the track record of His servants from the past. We know that people can’t do those things without a touch from His hand, but that’s the whole point of every Law Covenant: making it obvious you can’t do without Him.
The doorway to grace is the Cross, our New Testament equivalent of the Flaming Sword. We must crucify our own carnal natures. Without the Cross, there can be no genuine faith in Christ.
On the other side of the Cross is the Covenant. And without a covenant community, we are not serving Him. He intended that His Body be scattered over the earth, just like at the Tower of Babel. Each community of faith will generate its own unique covenant identity. So we should know instinctively that each local body will have it’s own subsidiary covenant of the Covenant. No two bodies will live in the same exact context as each other, so variations in those small-c covenants is a necessity. Our subsidiary covenants reflect the unique context in which we find ourselves called together, but must be true to the capital-c Covenant.
“Do not neglect the assembly” speaks to the purpose of a covenant community: We require fellowship to live by faith. Equipping is ongoing. No one of us is complete alone; we are a body fitted and held together by what each member provides (Ephesians 4:16). I need you, and you need me. If you withhold your fellowship, I suffer. My faith and yours will both suffer, and our ability to manifest His glory will be weakened.
Keep in touch or we die. All the more so during this tribulation. That “big thing” I’ve mentioned a few times is here now. It’s the undeclared martial law conditions of the quarantines, and now the riots, and whatever else the Nimrods of this world dream up. Of course there’s more to come. This isn’t going to stop until it has served God’s wrathful purpose in the US. This is going to be hard enough on us with strong fellowship; it will be an embarrassment to His glory without that fellowship.
It’s too bad that many of those who claim Jesus want their expression of covenant to be everyone’s. I guess that’s a part of the spirit of globalism and the Enlightenment, etc. People ignore the idea that we weren’t meant to change the world.
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