The life is in the blood.

Praise God!

I have a couple good posts cookin’ to follow up with, but I need to go for now.

Peace and grace to all.

It is the oneness that Jesus shares with His Father which keeps me from viewing His (crucifixion) as a “Dad conceived me to kill me” frame of mind.
In fact, God became everything (and everyone) that ever could have been against God and took it all to the grave.

AND THEN HE ROSE AGAIN.

There was death for Jesus, but it could not hold Him.
Same for us who are born of Him.

Jesus, while facing His death said to His misunderstanding (however sincere and well meaning) followers, “Don’t weep for me. Weep for yourselves because you don’t believe.”

“Death” is such a tragic thing to those who cannot see beyond it.

Don’t get me wrong.
I mourn the loss of my loved ones (and even strangers sometimes!!), but all in all, it’s because I miss them, not because I see death as the ‘grand finale’.

One of the most blessed things about being in Christ is the fact that, although Christ died, we do not have to ‘miss’ Him.

He Is….here!!!!
We possess Him, and He is in our midst.

Okay…the last thing that I want to say for now is about the “Now what?” factor which Mike brought up earlier*.
First, check out the immediate scriptural context for John 3:16 verses 12-15 (NKJV):

“If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things?
No one has ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven, that is, the Son of Man who is in heaven.
And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up,that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”

There it is folks.
The Son of Man MUST be lifted up just as Moses lifted up the bronze serpent on his staff.

Now, 3:16:

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.
For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved”.

PURE SACRIFICIAL LOVE FOR THE WORLD.
And how is this salvation appropriated (or refused)?

“He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.”

Jesus declares that condemnation is a given! (YIKES!)
But then He also elaborates on what that condemnation is:

“And this is the condemnation, that the light (Christ) has come into the world, and men loved darkness (not Christ) rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (Because if Christ hadn’t come, mankind would not have known sin).

Now for the “Now what?” question:
“For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God.”

Deeds.
“Works” even.
The stuff we do (or don’t do).

Maybe even more accurately, ‘The Way we Live our (His) Life’.

But it is all founded in Christ…not only His teachings, which reveal the sinfulness of mankind, but also His work, which is the answer to that darkness.

The problem with considering truth to be theory, is that it prevents one from coming to the truth.

No offense, (from me) anyone.
I just callz ‘em like I seez ‘em.

Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock,…
Time…
More precious than gold.
Gotta run!
Grace to you all!

* The “Now what?” factor, I believe is more or less, “Now that we know that we have been redeemed by God, what do we do in light of that fact?”
My response at this point is, ” Let’s be sure that we are in the light of that fact, and then we can ‘work out’ our (notice the plural ‘our’ as opposed to the singular ‘my’) salvation from there”.

Peter K Bell
Sep 12th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
I’m just like Brian Smith, Johnny, and Mike in this: I don’t have acres and oceans of time in front of me, the quantity and quality of time and attention needed to even begin to face this issue with the degree of importance–with the CENTRALITY of focus–that it rightly deserves (and actually HAS) in our spiritual (which is our ONLY) lives, to quote Johnny…

So I will give this a ‘lick and a promise’ (as the old saying goes) and say only the following about it as my knee-jerk ‘instant’ response:

1) I am making a promise to go ‘inward’ and look into the witness of my Spirit on this topic, to see what I may have to add to the conversation, as soon as a little of that coveted time becomes available.
2) Historic revivalism (from AT LEAST the Moravians and the Pietists in Europe to the great American camp-meeting awakenings of the past 2 centuries–not to skip Wales, Azusa Street, and many others) often contains the testimony that a re-discovery (which in the case of most individuals is a NEW discovery)of the life-giving properties of the cross, the blood of Jesus, the atonement, has the power to transform individual lives and consequently the state of society. The reason I mention this it to confirm the validity and key importance of Johnny’s current quest.
3) The fullest, richest, craziest, most intensely personal, most radical and most complete single source of understanding of this topic, spiritually, theologically, poetically, and experientially all rolled into one–that I have ever run across in my own search–is the Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich. The love of God for us is the only ground of all God has done for us in Jesus, and Madame Julian spells this out incredibly thoroughly. Please forgive me for exalting any human vessel this much, but I am quickened and rejuvenated in my spirit nearly every time I read Julian, and this refreshing comes directly from her treatment of the atonement and its application to our individual experience.
4) Oh yeah, there is one other part of my “knee-jerk” response I want to toss in here:
In our growing home group of ‘Recovering Baptists’ we had a rather intense discussion a couple of Fridays ago about whether (why, how, how much, etc.) we need to repent and receive forgiveness after our initial justification or ‘born-again’ experience. I responded passionately, in three ways:
>1) Immediately I prophecied over the most worried and self-condemning of the saints there, by the Word of the Lord: “I see no sin in you.”
>2) As soon as I got home I fired off to the whole group a link to John Wesley’s sermon of 240 years ago called “Repentance of Believers.”
>3) The next morning I woke up with a complete sermon outline (only we don’t do sermons in our group!!) on the topic. The essence of this says that in our ordinary lives we have far too weak a view of how bad the bad (the “old life”) in us really is, and far too weak a view of just how wonderful and powerful and miraculous the nature of the new life of Christ in us actually is too. I have not been able to share this fully with the group yet, but I carry it as a (light and easy) burden for the church, that we would see this and come to know the reality of it, for the sake of the victory and power it will release into our lives.

I have a feeling that all this is intimately tied in with Johnny’s quest–in ways that I haven’t even discovered yet!! I look forward to looking farther into this.
5) One final comment:
“The only thing in the Scripture”? Well, yes, actually, I see that this IS the only thing in the Scripture, in this sense:

In “The Man Born to Be King,” Dorothy Sayers has Mary the mother of Jesus say of the crucifixion of Jesus, “This is the only thing that has ever happened.”

I agree: this is the center of reality, the Lamb on the throne, slain before the foundation of the world. This is where all the rest of it comes from, and where it is all heading as well.

I agree with Johnny that this is a “key.”

In the interest of furthering the conversation,
Peter

Be blessed,
Richard

The Lord Jesus told His disciples that His words were (are) Spirit and Life.

I certainly do hold to His words, but I also hold to Him.

Although I’m sure that you are not saying that the rest of scripture isn’t important, I would like to clarify that it’s my belief that we should value it all the same.
Paul, John, James, etc…
(okay, okay…the old testament too… )

It was God who spoke through Jesus, but it was also God who spoke through the other writers of scripture as well.
(I know you know all of this, but I’m just elaborating).

Even still, there is a good amount of scripture which points to the necessity of the Lords people learning to live by the Spirit rather than the letter, as one works death, while the other brings life.

My understanding of Jesus’ teachings is that they lead us to to an experience in and of Him rather than them being the ‘Divine Handbook to Christian Living’.