THE EMBODIMENT OF JESUS
AND THE CHANGE GOD IS BRINGING
THE GOSPEL'S PATH TO REVIVAL OF THE CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY
Written and posted by John Brusseau.
When Jesus saves a person by being God’s forgiveness of their sins and then becomes Lord of them, and by extension the ruling principle in their life, Jesus will work to make use of those aspects of their personality and those aspects of their family culture that are not in conflict with God, who is love. And Jesus will then seek to either cut out those cultural and individual personality traits that are wholly a product of fear or pride, or purge the fear and pride from the person’s set of traits that are inherently natural but have become damaged by emotional wounding.
Likewise Jesus will do the same work in an entire community of people that become saved by Him and make Him their lord. With this in mind, and given the long-term transformation process Jesus utilizes, it is clear that a Christian community’s present set of traits, their customs, rituals, organizational structure, their order of service (even their choice to have what we think of as a service,) is not in any way even close to a completely authentic embodiment of Jesus.
Like each of us individual followers of Jesus, each of our Christian communities have a very long way to go before we are a complete embodiment of Jesus. Each Christian community’s religious personality and religious culture still retains much that has not yet been sanctified by Jesus yet. And so it is very important that we understand that our respective Christian community’s will require a great deal of deep, or radical change, of Jesus engineered transformation. To be defensive of our individual or our
collective spiritual state by asserting that it is mostly the embodiment of Jesus in its present form, accept for a few minor issues, is heresy, and needs to be recognized as such. We need a lot of change, all of us.
So, where is this change to come from, given the natural need for systems to maintain a significant level of continuity just to remain functional? A system without continuity falls apart. And where is this radical transformation to come from if this natural need for continuity manifests as a system always working hard to perpetuate its present state? All religious establishments can only experience radical transformation from external factors. As Jesus stated, a prophet is not without honor accept in his land
and his own home, meaning radical change comes from outside the system. The only thing an establishment can do to support radical change is to humbly confess its many sins and cry out to God to send change. It can never be the catalyst for radical change itself. An establishment can only ever implement maintenance level changes in its system, not fundamental change. That must come from the founder.
It has become a commonplace to see "Calls to Revival" that are conducted by the religious establishment. Religious leaders in the Christian community think to hold seminars or conventions of believers in Jesus that are set up to allow them to teach the convened believers what needs to change in order for an influx of the Holy Spirit to manifest in their community. Such events are classic expressions of a denial of the reality that they are the system that is broken and needs fixing. They are the problem God must resolve. All they can possibly do through those calls for revival is to perpetuate the very issues that need to be resolved by God's Spirit in new hidden forms.
The system that seeks to fix itself is depicted in the Bible as Babylon the mother of harlots; who is quoted as stating; I am a queen, and have no King, and I am not a widow. System is synonymous with the mother. In Latin the two words are actually the same; Matrix. The mother/system/establishment that will not submit to God's authority, who only recognizes and trusts in her own control of things, is a spiritual prostitute in God's eyes. The Christian pastor, priest, teacher, professor, etc. that will not humble themselves and confess to God that they (the system) are damaged goods and cannot fix what is broken in them is a spiritual prostitute in God's eyes. At present, this constitutes most of the religious leaders in Christendom. This needs to change, and only God can resolve this lamentable institutional condition.
This spiritual equation is exactly the same for each individual believer as it is for the members of the religious establishment. One must begin with entering into God's stopping, God's rest, God's Sabbath. And that will look like humbling ourselves and confessing that, even though we may not see how we are, just yet, we ARE THE PROBLEM that needs God's transformative governance. Can you at present do this humbling thing? If you cannot, and yet you do genuinely want more of God, then ask God to stir up a hunger in you for more of God so that you can find the motivation to humble yourself before God.
There is a simple and obvious psychological equation here; if you want to be fed what you cannot feed yourself, you must first be convinced that you cannot get this food for yourself. You must be convicted that you are naked and you are poor, to use the Apostle John's expression for this state of being.
This psychological reality leaves us humans with the two options, of either holding onto our pride, our over-identification with whatever good life God has previously given us, and thus find ourselves angrily despising offers of new life, or we can admit to ourselves and God that we are a long way away from what God wants to make us into, and thus need His providence to get there. That's it; those are our only two options, and none of us are exempt from having to make this choice. We had to make it just in order to be restored to relationship with God in the beginning of our spiritual life (when we were spiritually reborn), and we have to make such choices periodically as God wants to move us toward further growth, toward more life in Jesus. In other words, spiritual progress absolutely will require that we remain in a state of perpetual humility about our true state of being. Stop being humble and you stop growing; with no exceptions.
A very good example of this systemic-change situation we find ourselves in is the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers. God early on chooses Joseph to bring God's spiritual rule to his brothers. And early on they pridefully, and secretly self-loathingly reject him playing such a role. And this is just the beginning of this restoration process God will take Israel's sons through. Both Joseph and his brothers must undergo a great deal of suffering in order for them to experience the spiritual life God was bringing to them. And part of this suffering for Joseph necessarily involved him being rejected and shuffled off to Egypt, which was then a symbol of the world's godless system. The sons of Israel were not really all that godly themselves, but they saw themselves as being God's chosen and so tended to overlook their own enormous set of spiritual flaws. Does that sound familiar oh Christian leader? Do you see the godless world around you as being morally different than you? Are those godless people over there placed by you in a group that you completely cannot identify with?
And the radical, transformative changes God was going to bring to those sons of Israel was going to involve God taking away from them something He had previously given them (their place in Canaan - God's land.). They were going to have to find God's salvation, God's transformative governance, in a place they associated with worldly, Godless existence. And this is God's way of saying that we have relegated aspects of the humanity God wants to get glory through, to something inherently Godless. In
other words we have thrown the baby of unloved aspects of our human existence out with the bathwater of our dysfunctional version of those aspects of our humanity. And God knows He needs to redeem those aspects of our humanity. And all this means we have become wonderful, self-righteous, legalistic hypocrites. And God knew we would, on our path to ultimate transformation, and He has just the cure for this little tendency in us. Yes, I mean you too, and I as well. We all go through this same
biblically depicted process.
There are two kinds of leaders in the religious establishment (among Joseph's brothers). The first kind is the Reuben-like kind of leader, who is more interested in appearing like He cares about His father's will than he is actually having the kind of relationship with His father that renders him close enough to truly care about his dad. He is all about fixating on his place in his social surround.
The second kind of leader in the religious establishment is the Judah kind of leader. He does not crave recognition as a leader like his brother Reuben. Yet he is recognized as a leader by his fellow sons of Israel because He was designed by God to take responsibility for the wellbeing of everyone, not just himself and tends to do so in lots of unofficial ways. And even so, this Judah religious leader is not ready to take full
responsibility at first. He is too selfish to do what he was designed by God to do. In fact he adopts the don't call us; we'll call you attitude, when he is called upon to take responsibility for his own eldest, deceased son's need for an heir (by lawfully giving his last son to impregnated his deceased son's widow, and thus carry on that son's line). This kind of irresponsibility manifests in our present set of Christian leaders as their unwillingness to make any kind of personal sacrifice, to take any kind of personal risk in order to see spiritual life come to pass in their community. They instead just commit themselves to playing it safe, and maintaining the status quo with the system they rule. Real growth involves radical change, and that requires real risk, real sacrifice. And they are not ready to make such sacrifices, to take such risks to their personal situation. All leaders know all too well, even the slightest changes bring enormous negative reactions from members of their community. And radical changes can lead to insurrections which may leave them looking for a new job, or at the very least such radical changes may leave them no longer being viewed by their ministerial peers as being in their little group.
So, God has this Judah type of leader go through what has been referred to as the dark night of his soul, through the death of his Heart, metaphorically represented as his wife. And during this dark time in his life he does what we all do in such dark circumstances, he escapes via is coping mechanisms. And while he is away on a business trip he engages the services of a temple prostitute (who unbeknownst to
him is his widowed daughter in law to whom he has been irresponsible). She represents that call upon his heart to serve his brothers. He basically writes her, this call upon his life, off, as just being too much trouble.
So God does a very sneaky thing. He has this Judah unwittingly get caught up in fulfilling this call upon his heart to take responsibility for others. He is taking responsibility because his heart wants him to, before he is even aware that he is, and before his objecting head can stop him. So, finally, when his taking responsibility becomes manifest (his widowed daughter-in-law becomes noticeably pregnant by him) he
is confronted with a choice to admit to others that he has been unfaithful to God's call upon his life, and that he has now chosen to officially accept the responsibility God has placed upon him for the well-being of his Christian brothers.
And because God has taken him through this time of darkness, this time of suffering, in order to get him ready to accept his calling, He is now fully ready to do so, and that
looks like his leading his brothers to a place that looks very godless and worldly to them, to get the provision He knows God has for them there. The early followers of Jesus looked very Egyptian to those in their religious establishment. The did not observe many of the rituals and traditions of their Jewish brethren, and were castigated for it. They put their trust in God's atoning forgiveness instead of in making themselves acceptable by observing the laws of God.
Just as God had to let Peter know that although his religious training taught him to view some things as being un-kosher/unclean, though God saw them as being kosher, so too do we need to see God's salvation, God's revival come to us in a form we would never have thought God would come to us in.
I believe the form this worldly looking salvation will come to us in for the last great outpouring of God's Spirit will involve His children stopping their efforts to make themselves more moral, and finally truly and fully trusting God to fix what's broken in us.
And to make us ready to go to this place with God, God must first take us through suffering with Him, just to get us to let go of our firm control of our life to Him. That's what suffering does; it takes our fear-driven control off the throne of our own life, and lets us trust God with it.
And it is this work in this Judah leader in the Christian religious establishment that can and does positively respond to what seems like an unjust and even and adversarial request by the very aspect of them that they do not yet recognize as a Christian brother, the Joseph leader who God has already been taken by God through his own journey of letting go, of suffering with Jesus.
The religious establishment does not recognize this one as being a Christian brother because he has been raised by God outside of their establishment. And Judah leads his bothers to accept this dangerous-looking offer from this seeming godless and really very foreign-looking leader, not because he sees God in this leader, but because He knows that He must take the responsibility to save his bothers any way He can, and it looks like this strange-looking set of opportunities in a foreign-looking spiritual circumstance is the only way he can do that.
This acceptance of a strange-looking, even Godless looking source of radical spiritual growth happens in every major move of God's Spirit. Note the Protestant reformation,
and the Pentecostal and the more recent spiritual-gifts (Charismatic) movements. Each of these movements began well outside of the mainstream of the religious establishment.
The Charismatic movement, which began in the Catholic Church, began in that church just because it was no longer credited with being capable of producing new wine. The antiquated, dusty, old Catholic institution could not possibly generate a move of God's spirit, could it? And certainly the top leaders of the Catholic Church did not generate this movement of God's Spirit, either.
This is very much how radical, transformative, system-wide change comes to a system. And this is how it will come to the Christian world-community as well. The entire world of Christendom must undergo this kind of divinely operated transformation. And Before this can happen, the father must first reject the ones in the establishment that do not genuinely care about the relationship with their father. This process of rejecting those Reuben leaders is now taking place in the Christian world. And only the father knows who He can really use in this transformation process that He will shortly take us, Jesus' body, through.
I cannot guess and you cannot guess who our father will choose, so don't try to guess. Just focus on your own need to humble yourself under God's hand. God will do all that is needed to take us through this timely and badly needed transformation process.
Okay, now let me tell you what this change is that is coming to Jesus Body. The Christian Community and its establishment are collectively what we individual believers are in terms of our present state of being made over in Jesus image.
Everyone, more or less knows that the religious system we have inherited needs to experience significant transformation in order for it to be a viable manifestation of
Jesus, just as we understand that each of us individual Christians needs to undergo massive restoration, still, in order for us to embody Jesus to the world around us. Even though we are all kinds of defensive about our own individual or our own groups state of spiritual life, we all really can see that whatever it is that our church structure and church religious culture is, it is not a genuine embodiment of Jesus.
What God did through Jesus was immaculate, pardon the expression, and our church systems are enormously far from being immaculate. Does anyone really have a problem with this assessment?
And here is where this need for change, in both individual believers and in our collective embodiment of Jesus will come. Yes, I am not going to simply point out our spiritual decrepitude. I am actually going to clearly state what God is going to change in us.
We need to have our trust/faith in Jesus be purged of the six thousand years of inherited self-righteous legalism that was unleashed upon our species when Adam and Eve chose to feed upon the knowledge of what constitutes good and evil behavior, in rebellion against God's directive not to.
In other words, our collective problem, like our individual problem is that we do not trust God to lead us through the transformation process. It is because we cannot trust God to govern us through this process that we individual believers in Jesus do not get to experience the kingdom of Jesus, the presence and empowerment of the Holy Spirit to do and be what God wants us to do and be.
And it is because we Christian communities of believers have formed establishments that mirror our unbelief, that our religious establishments have presided over church structures and systems that (precisely like our individual legalistic self rule), cannot trust God to govern our corporate needs, so that they are likewise spiritually decrepit.
And just as we individuals rationalize our disbelief in God's ability to govern our
individual human condition, and rationalize our rebellious trust in our own human strength to govern this dysfunctional human condition (via legalism), so too do our religious establishments mirror this same rationalization as it relates to all of the church systems that are embodiments, not of Jesus rule, but of our own human solutions to what ails our communities.
For example, in the early centuries following the death of the Apostles, the religious establishment had already ceased to trust God to authorized and empower them to deal with the violent strains of heresy that were ravaging the Christian world. The Apostles never did, nor would they ever have, relied upon an agreed upon policy, or an agreed upon doctrinal statement/creed, to resolve the emergence of heresy in their midst.
Rather, their agreed upon statements of orthodoxy were meant to support the new
expressions of the Gospel that the Apostle Paul was being used by God to deliver to the world. When it came to dealing with heresies, the apostles would have waited upon God for the spiritual empowerment to address each situation individually. They would have been given a word for each heretic, and that word would have resolved the matter decisively.
And yes, even though we can, many of us, agree with what was laid down in those creeds, they were were generated out of a disbelief in God's ability to govern the dysfunctional human condition. We thought to help God help us, like we humans always have. And the proof of our creeds un-divine origin can be seen in the fact that the creeds have never stopped any group of believers from falling into heresy. Note how the Old-line churches that hold most firmly to creeds are the very churches that have had the biggest problems officially turning away from a faith in Jesus.
The solutions God's spirit comes up with will never fail, and certainly not as spectacularly as the churches creedal solution to heresy, have. God's solutions are,
again, immaculate in their power to effect the desired change. {I know, many of you are foaming at the mouth as you read this last point about Creeds not being God's work, but our own human fleshly attempts to solve a real problem with heresy. We have long been taught that creeds are something the Church can be proud of. And that in itself should be a red flag. We ARE proud of those creeds, and are just because they are human in their origin and in their implementation. We are only ever proud of our
own efforts.
I bring this example up to show this one truth; it is a return to an undiluted, unpolluted by legalism, trust in Jesus being our means of experiencing absolute harmony with God, that will be the very revival, the very expression of the Bride making her self ready for the coming of the our Groom, Jesus, that we long for.
We do not need to know more about the gifts of the Holy Spirit (though we will
undoubtedly require them in the days ahead in order to do all we are called to do). We do not need to have a clearer vision of what constitutes moral behavior, though we will undoubtedly be getting a clearer vision of what a genuine human life is as we come to trust more and more fully on Jesus to be our righteousness with God.
We simply need our most holy faith in Jesus to be purged of our species'
long addiction to legalism.
Okay, you are thinking. I already know all of that. Yet we do not really know it fully, any of us. That is to say, our mind may have gotten the concept, but our heart, which has logged every experience with pain we have ever had, and has stored up all of those subjective lessons we have learned from those painful experiences, really does not get it much at all.
We need, as the apostle Paul expressed it, to have God open the eyes of our heart. He needs to take our heart through a healing process in order for us to fully trust in Jesus to be our righteousness with God. This is not some strange arcane truth that I am laying out for you here. This stuff is pretty much self-evident from everyone's own experience with life.
Let me break this down even further for you so that you can more easily see the problem we believing humans are facing in coming to a full trust in Jesus. If you have addictive or compulsive behavior, should you invest in "trying to stop this behavior"? Or is this "trying" an example of us trusting in our human strength (that is, trusting in the FLESH as the Apostle Paul would have expressed it)?
Well, it should be obvious to us that it is trusting in our flesh to govern our ungovernable compulsions and addictions, and yet this remains highly confusing to us all, does it not. Even I, a person who has been called to help the Christian community sort out this very issue have all the same heart-embedded reservations about completely trusting in God to resolve my issues, and I do because my trust in Jesus to be my absolute harmony with God is not yet completely purged of doubt and fear.
So you and I, without even being aware we are doing so, opt to trust in our own strength, and then we sew God's label on our deeds after the fact. Isn't the rational mind a great thing? In the book of Revelation we are told over and over again that if we conquer (overcome) we will be given God's blessings. God does not want us to try. He demands that we overcome, that we win. He does not care if we simply tried hard.
That is not anywhere near good enough. And we cannot possibly do that winning
thing without God doing it through us. And we cannot possibly stop trusting our own efforts at conquering sin in our life and trust in God's spirit for the strength to overcome unless we know and decisively trust Jesus to be our absolute acceptance with God.
This is why Jesus is so stern in telling us we must win, must conquer, must overcome. He is wanting us to stop trusting in our own strength, first of all to be loved and accepted by God, and then to be transformed, healed, delivered from our bondage
to sin.
I realize this gospel of Jesus will need to be further spelled out for you than what I just did in the paragraph above. It still needs to be further spelled out to me too. We humans have been conditioned by over 6 thousand years of self-righteous, legalistic, self-rule and God must heal our heart of all of that misbegotten experience (plus our own personal experiences with legalism) in order for us to see Jesus and His gospel for what it truly is.
And that healing begins with God bringing us to repentance of our self-rule, of our legalism. God does not need to start by enlightening us about our what is good and what is evil human behavior. We think to do that with people, but God knows better.
God wants us to know that we are always going to be dysfunctional, sinful humans, unless and until, and only to the extent we know we are loved absolutely by him. He wants to heal our broken connection to Him first. Only then will he begin to enlighten us as to what a functional human looks like, and even then, He will want us to trust Him to make that enlightened picture of a functional human come into existence. God made us. God must remake us.
If we become drawn into a position of authority in the religious establishment, then in order to defend the religious system we are now apart of, which is largely an embodiment of this trust in the Flesh, and not an embodiment of Jesus total trust in His Father, we typically rationalize our churches fleshly behaviors.
Jesus stated for the entire human species to hear; I do nothing of myself. I do only that
which is of my father. And we leaders of the Christian religious establishment hear that and think: Well, Jesus still had to try hard to do what he did though, didn't he? I mean, God doesn't want us to just not try does He? We need to put legs on our faith, people!
And so we, like Cain, murder the Abel part of our life, and the Abel aspect of our Christian culture as well.
I hope you can hear what I am saying to you about this. If you are hearing it, you are now beginning to see just how immense the need for humbling ourselves, how immense the need for us to repent of our self-righteous legalism there is. By the way, it has only ever been self-righteous legalism that any human has ever needed to repent of. All of our compulsivity, all of our delusional immorality, is but the fruit of that old legalistic grasping for the knowledge of what constitutes good and evil human
behavior.
The entire species has been sucked into the delusion of performance-based-acceptance, and the legalism that is what we humans turn to to cope with the self loathing result of that delusion. It is not we followers of Jesus who generated legalism in the world. We are actually called to be the antidote to that delusion. And it is
only when God has perfected our trust in Jesus that we will fulfill that calling.
The Godless world-system we live with is completely saturated with legalism, and look at what their legalism has accomplished for them. They are progressively externalizing all of their own un-faced emotional issues, projecting them violently on everyone around them until peace is just a distant memory.
And here is the idea in a nut shell. We cannot trust God to govern our corporate human condition by His Spirit except we first come to trust in God to govern our individual human condition by His Spirit.
And only to the extent we have come to trust in Jesus to be our individual righteousness with God and the source of our restoration can we trust God to govern our enormously dysfunctional collective human condition.
So, I do not seek to bring you some new gospel. I bring you the first one, the one the Jesus and His Apostles brought you. Jesus said, I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me and you will bear much fruit. The Christian world is bearing so little fruit, compared to what we are called to bear for God, because of one thing, and only that one thing. We do not abide in the vine fully yet.
Let's not invest in complicating our decrepit circumstance further. Let's just humble ourselves and admit we are full of disbelief In God, and in His means of transforming us, the Jesus sacrifice for our sins, Jesus' sacrifice being the means of establishing our absolute harmony with God.
All of our education, all of our training, is nothing if it does not assert this gospel of Jesus. It is but dross, and God is going to shove that Reuben dross mindset in each of us aside.
God wants to embrace those who truly want more of Him. If we do want more of Him than we currently have, then God will choose to resolve our issues with selfishness and unbelief, and free us to take responsibility for the well-being of others as He has called us to do. And God is pretty good at doing that. As He Himself put it; I Am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That's God's perfect resumé!
HUMBLE YOURSELF UNDER THE MIGHTY HAND OF GOD AND IN DUE TIME HE WILL EXALT (EMPOWER) YOU. He will, individually and corporately. Now is the time for real repentance. Repent of your self-rule, your self governance of your troublesome dysfunctional humanity. Cry out to God to free you from your fears and disbelief and thus free you to trust Him to transform you into the very image of Jesus.
Cry out to God for this same blissful oneness with God that Jesus had every moment of his life on earth and still has as He sits empowered on God's thrown. And do this in the privacy of your own individual connection with God in Jesus. Don't do it glamorously, in front of others, like the Pharisees of old. Do it with the intensity of a real desire for more of God in your life, in the privacy and honesty of your own thoughts.
This collective transformation of Jesus' embodiment of Himself on earth is coming, with or without you. It is unfolding now, in our time. I want it to be with you.
Pray with me now this prayer. God, I am the rich young ruler. I have not followed you fully because I have had more regard for what I have than what you can provide for me. Yet you said the following promise about this very predicament, that what is impossible for men is possible with God. Thus I ask you to free me from my own pride in my own strength, in my own spiritual and moral and social wealth, and preserve me in my
enduring the painful process this must surely involve until you bring me out into the blessed air of Jesus Kingdom.
Forgive me my self-righteousness, Lord. It has caused me to mock and slander and murder your gift of righteousness. I have been horribly evil to You God. I am broken with this understanding of my spiritual decrepitude. Save me, God.
