From... To part 4
This is the best, most simple way I can say what I'm trying to say: "We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren. He that loveth not his brother abideth in death" (1 John 3:14). The journey is not from bad... to good. Good and evil are on the same tree. The tree of death. The journey is from death... to life! And it's a journey that Jesus already made both for us and as us. When He was lifted up from the earth on the cross He drew all men into Himself. Drew us out of Adam. So that, from that point onward, whatever happened to Jesus happened to us. When He died, we died. That was the second death. The death OF death. The first death was when Adam ate of the tree of death. The second death was the cross. And the second death was necessary so that we might be able to walk in newness of life. So that we might experience the abundant, everlasting, eternal, Resurection Life of God--which is the gift of God, which is the love of God! And just keep this in your brain while we talk about the shift from death to life--we are "changed" from glory to glory. We start at glory. Death may be where we were, for a time, but it's not where we started. It was never our natural habitat, if I can say it like that. We may have accepted it, even made peace with it... settled for it... but that's never what our heavenly Father wanted for us. That's why, at the appointed time, Jesus defeated death. 1 Corinthians 15:26 says, "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." But if you read it in the Literal Standard version it says, "The last enemy is done away with--death." Did you catch that? Past tense. Death IS done away with. That was a big part of what the cross was. And can I just sneak this in here? If hell is the place of the dead, and death is done away with, then it makes perfect sense that both death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. God, of course, being that consuming fire. Everything was swallowed up in Him. The Messianic rebirth of the world. The fire that burned, and consumed everything but itself. Himself. Love-self. What I'm trying to say is that we worry about a lot of things that we don't need to worry about. We focus on a lot of things that, quite frankly, don't matter. What we have is this life. What we have is right now. And we need to enjoy what we have--the life of God--by living! By giving what we've got. Which we do by knowing what we've got. Filling ourselves to overflowing with what God has filled us with. The difference between death and life, in a Word, is love. No love... no life. Know love... know life! And I'm telling you, it's a journey. It's a process. It's a knowledge that passes knowledge. Letting God love you and loving Him back by loving people. That's how we experience this life. That's how we live. That's how we accept the transformation, or the conformation, that took place on the cross. That's how we look in the mirror and see who we really are--by seeing who Jesus really is... in us. In us, and through us, and as us. Love is the bridge that gets us from where we were... to where God has always wanted us to be. And it was God who made that bridge. That Way of Grace. All we have to do is respond to what He did with the Walk of Faith. Let His Word (which is Jesus, which is love) be a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path. He has made the way straight--the way that leads to life. All we need to do is walk. Or, really, let HIM walk in our feet. All we need to do is be still and know that HE is God. Do what we do from a posture of rest. Do what we do heartily--to the best of our ability, because it is in our heart to do it!