Angels are great, but God has chosen Jesus whom He made into a human to inherit His kingdom. Humans will inherit the Kingdom, not Angels. Jesus inherited God's kingdom by sonship, and we receive this same sonship through completed adoption. And as adopted children grafted into this inheritance that was destined for Christ, who has chosen willingly to share this with us, how amazing is that?!, we too are now heirs, and coheirs with Christ and with one another. Jesus inherited from God, and we inherited from Jesus, but God willed that it would all happen from beginning to end. Without God's will Jesus would not have given us this inheritance because Jesus only does what the Father wills. So we can say, for short, Jesus inherited what God gave Him, because that was His Son, and we inherit what God gives us through the mediation of Jesus because we have become sons and daughters of God. The Angels minister to us as His children, we have Angels ministering to us! Although we may not see them or know exactly when or how this is happening, the Word says they are sent out to serve those who are coheirs with Christ! If you believe you are a child of God you must also believe that Angels serve you by ministering or encouraging you on this process of going towards the promise of the inheritance. That's cool. It's probably happening right now, or maybe everytime I blog or speak with someone.
“So He became higher in rank than the angels, just as the name He inherited is superior to theirs.
Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve those who are going to inherit salvation?”
Hebrews 1:4, 14
So pay attention to the kind of words or encouragements around you, it could be Angels sent by God to minister to you. You have help in an abundant number or ways if you will pay attention and allow God to show you these awesome things!
“We must, therefore,
pay even more attention to what we have heard, so that we will not drift away."
Words, thoughts, feelings, are all things we live by, and so we can either pay attention to them or let the wind toss us whichever way it pleases. We can feign indifference or apathy. Or we can desire purpose and design by God because in desiring to know this we are not changing His plans but are participating in them. No matter what God will have His way, but whether we participate in them will be another matter. Whether we are in awe at what He is doing or completely oblivious will be on us.
"and subjected everything under his feet.
For in subjecting everything to him,
He left nothing that is not subject to him.
As it is, we do not yet see everything subjected to him."
Everything is happening as subjection to God. We serve a powerful God. Every thing, person, weather, circumstance, and everything is subject to Christ. Even though we may not see it yet that doesn't mean it is not yet. But it means we don't see it yet, there is an element of faith necessary for us to believe it despite not seeing it.
"For the One who sanctifies
and those who are sanctified
all have one Father.
That is why Jesus is not ashamed
to call them brothers,
and free those who were held in slavery all their lives by the fear of death.
For it is clear that He
does not reach out to help angels,
but to help Abraham’s offspring."
We have the same Father as Jesus. Jesus is our brother, and we have the Holy Spirit in us as our mark that Christ says in essence: that's my kin! My family! My coheir, because the Spirit I have is in them. We share a unity in the Spirit. It is the Spirit of God that sets us apart from our old self and sheds light on who we are now by the Spirit.
Empathy as the means of help we receive:
For since He Himself was tested and has suffered,
He is able to help those who are tested.”
Hebrews 2:1, 8, 11, 15-16, 18
Why is empathy helpful?
Empathy is when someone is able to place themselves in your shoes and experience what you experience with you, so that you are not alone nor are you not understood. Empathy is having a friend by your side to take on what you have taken on and, at times, the right friend can even lead you in the right direction for how to go forward in a difficult situation. By allowing all the emotions and thoughts to be fully expressed, you can empty yourself of those things that needed emptying before moving on. Otherwise we carry excess baggage from our pasts into the future, but Christ is our empathetic friend who takes all of our emotions and thoughts for every situation and knows how to experience them with us because he has been where we have been in humanity. He knows the way age and beauty affects our cultures, or how acceptability gives rise to our sense of being okay, and all the other ways in which this world can play tricks on us by our own thoughts and emotions. He knows the power of being affected. He knows this power more than we do because He died because of it. He was killed by it. So there is no feeling or thought regarding our hardship that he cannot most fully step into with us, since none of us has yet endured such hardship to the point of
Death. Point being, He knows what we are feeling and thinking, because He's been there too.
He's been in our shoes and it wasn't good. It was evil, it was painful, and it was what hammered His body to the cross. So Jesus knows, man, He knows that what we suffer is not easy. Every time we share with Him we never get sidelined or misunderstood as being weak or pathetic, because that would also imply that Jesus died a weak and pathetic death. Jesus knows that the sickness of sin, when it prevailed, was powerful over humanity, and when He broke that power through the giving of Life eternal, He did so by giving us His Holy Spirit. Now we have Christ in us, our friend, who takes all the sin and the power sin had over us, when we lay them down continually and everyday for Him to take through empathy, and as we empty our emotions and thoughts connected to sin He fills us with His way to move forward.
He is not only like our therapist, but our Doctor, our lover, our guide and our Leader. Imagine that! You have all those things in one person. Not only is your Leader the one you follow, but He is also the one who heals you when you're sick, and the one who kisses and embraces you whenever you want, and the one who listens to all your problems, and the one who tells you which way to go.
Jesus was faithful to God.
“He was faithful to the One who appointed Him, just as Moses was in all God’s household.”
Hebrews 3:2
He was faithful to the One who appointed Him.
Christ was faithful to us that believe in the same way He was faithful to God.
“But Christ was faithful as a Son
over His household.
And we are that household
if we hold on to the courage
and the confidence of our hope.”
Hebrews 3:6
Hope is that which we cannot see. It is invisible. There is no proof before us except what is told to us by the Words written in the Word. In Hebrews 3:6, in John 3:16-17, in Galatians, in Deuteronomy, in Isaiah, and in the entire Bible. Those words are the only proof we have that are above any other proofs.
Instead of thinking we need more proof we need to think we need less doubt. We need to make up our minds, because we can. We need to struggle and resist the urge to disbelieve and fight to believe with all that we can. I believe God wants this effort on our part, the effort to choose to believe in such a certain and made-up-my-mind kind of way. The effort of yes, I believe and that's it. Supported by the truth in the Word, and filling our minds with the life of Christ and all the ways in which He revealed Himself to be our yes for every promise God ever gave us. We say yes and make up our minds that this is true. That Jesus did take away all our sins. That He hears us, and listens to every detail of our thoughts and emotions to help us empty of them. That He kisses our souls and hugs our feeble minds. That He guides us in the direction we are to move forward in. This is what we have from God, by Jesus, through the Holy Spirit. We have this, and there is no doubt about it. But when doubts assail you, soften your heart by having faith to believe. Let yourself be wholly entrusted to a God who could ruin you or slow pain to happen to you. Entrust yourself to God despite suffering. Entrust yourself to God even if you don't know the outcome, because you believe that He is good, that He heals, and that He loves you so whatever might happen will be according to His supreme wisdom regarding what is most excellent for His children. We entrust our futures to this God when we believe what we have other proof save His Word.
“Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says:
Today, if you hear His voice,
do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,
on the day of testing in the wilderness,”
Hebrews 3:7-8
And as for our own conduct, we can practice what we profess is the condition of our heart by seeing if the way we respond is that of a person who has this great promise in God! If someone promises me that today, no matter what, I am protected, safe, and going to be given good things through every thing life has for me in this day, no matter what I see, then I will either believe this and it'll show because everything that happens will be according to this belief or I will say that I believe this but what I really believe are my feelings and thoughts according to what I perceive as good or bad. The one who believes, believes God, but the one who says they believe but fears, believes their feelings and not God's promises. And this is because believing despite feelings and thoughts (and not without them, since we are never without thoughts and feelings, we are humans!) is difficult. It's ...weird and strange because how can we believe something we don't feel and think? Only by knowing the Word. The Word must replace our thoughts and the Word helps us empty our feelings (through honest prayer when we dump them all out to Him with tears and snot) and the Word gives us His Word. Then by something we have no power or control in, God transforms our hearts. So this is difficult, but we have ways that we can help each other out, and that is by being the Word or giving the Word to others on days that we have it certain and powerful in us! On days we have the Word at all, we must give this to others because everyone needs this, and this is true encouragement. To bring the gospel to their thirsty souls or their embers of hope that are in desperate need of being fanned into flame. We receive in order to give. And we give only what we have received.
“But encourage each other daily,
while it is still called today,
so that none of you is hardened
by sin’s deception.
For we have become companions
of the Messiah if we hold firmly
until the end the reality
that we had at the start.
As it is said: Today, if you hear His voice,
do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.”
Hebrews 3:13-15
If you cannot give the Word to others it must mean you do not have it yourselves! If you realize this, understand the situation. You are not abiding in the Word. You are a branch without a source of life! You are a dead man walking. Is that okay with you? There is no complaining or nothing that could be said in your defense. Your heart reveals it all. Anyone who is okay with their lives as dead men walking, not concerned about having the Word nor subsequently about giving this great encouragement to others has no excuse but their own pride and apathy. Indifference makes no room for love. But if, upon hearing the Word or reading it, you tear open your heart to the truth and depth of what this means, you expose yourself to the awful truth regarding your pride and apathy, and it makes you a desperate needy person, then God has proven Himself to be with You for only God can cause us to come to Him in such a way. He uses all of who we are to bring those He has called to Him. When we realize our great and desperate need for Him, it was Him who gave us this realization for His good pleasure that we then be convicted to go to Him. He is both the cause and the end of our salvation, the author and perfecter of our faith (Heb. 12:2).
Do not harden your hearts friends.
Otherwise you will not enter into His rest, you cannot enter into His rest because you will be too caught up in trying to create your own. Rather take faith, in the measure you have, and bring your feelings and thoughts to receive the empathy of Christ by access of His Spirit in us, and take the promises in place of the doubts and fears.
Jmegrey
No comments:
Post a Comment