As He Is part 5
As He is, so are we in this world. What's true about Jesus is true about us. That's what He came to show us; not what we could be if we tried really hard, but what we truly are. He came to show us what God looks like. And what He showed us was a man who was filled with the Holy Spirit. A man equipped and empowered to receive and release the love of the Father. A man who could say, "I and my Father are one." A man who knew that He was God's beloved Son and who let Himself BE loved by God. Jesus wasn't showing us something that might be true someday. He was showing us what has always been true. God always has and always will love us. Because God doesn't just love... God IS love. And because that's true about Him... it's also true about us. We are LOVED, and because we know and believe the love of Christ we are LOVE. Love is perfected in us when it overflows out of us. We are bold in the day of judgment when we understand the judgment that was handed down (from Father to Son) on the cross. The life sentence that was given after God accepted the SACRIFICE of the slain Lamb. God didn't kill Jesus. God was IN Christ reconciling the world to Himself. Jesus laid His life down so that He could pick it back up. He gave His life for us and He gave His life to us. Now, instead of going around judging things according to appearance--according to good and evil--we can be bold enough to simply execute the judgment that was handed down. We can bring people out of death and into life just like Jesus did. By loving them. By laying our lives down for them. By receiving and releasing the love that was always there for us. By sharing the gift that we've been given. See, the cross didn't turn us into something God could love. He already loved us. We just didn't believe it. It seemed too good to be true. What the cross did was it turned us into something that could receive that love. It got rid of anything and everything (sin, or unbelief) that stood in between us and that Father/Son relationship between Creator and creation. It emptied us out of all of the mess that we filled ourselves with when we were looking for love in all the wrong places, and it filled us with the Holy Spirit--the love receptor--of God. Jesus took away the sin of the world (unbelief, or believing that we have to earn God's love) by becoming sin and dying. And when He died, we died. Sin died. Death died. The light shined and the darkness fled. Now we are revealed to be the righteousness of God in Christ. As He is, so are we in this world. Seated on the right hand--power seat--of God. Equipped and empowered to rule and reign on this earth even as the King of kings rules and reigns in us and through us and as us. In Him we live and move and have our being, and in us He lives and moves and has His being! It's not Jesus AND me, it's Jesus AS me. It's a total identification with my true identity: Jesus, God in the flesh. Love in a body. God in MY flesh. Love in MY body. In my body, and overflowing out of it!