Kingdom's Keys Fellowship
Where God's Kingdom Meets Man's Heart.
Pentecost 49 When God Turned the World Inside Out
Pentecost 49 When God Turned the World Inside Out
“So we are Christ's official messengers. It is as if God were making his appeal through us. Here is what Christ wants us to beg you to do. Come back to God! Christ didn't have any sin. But God made him become sin for us. So we can be made right with God because of what Christ has done for us (2Cor.5:20-21 NIRV).”
One year when I was in London studying at the annual Spring Bible conference I went to each year for about fifteen years where John Stott taught, there was constant reference to “the world.” So I asked him, “What is the world?” He answered without hesitation, “Secular society.” I pondered that for a bit and thought to myself, “He’s absolutely right.” “The world” is human interaction without God at the heart of things. It is an atmosphere void of spiritual consideration. That is what ‘secular’ means.
So let’s us ponder the meaning of ‘the world’ for a moment. If there is a godless atmosphere something else fills that atmosphere. There is no such thing as a neutral atmosphere especially when we consider how the world is so full of conflict and evil. As disciples of Jesus we know that sin is the atmosphere filler and sin has its one motivating force, the spirit of fear. If we look at ‘the world’ then what we really see is the invisible motivation of fear driving the engine of society.
Where does fear lie? It lies in the individual heart. It is not in the structures and institutions that people form to order society, but in the hearts of the people who submit to those forms that make up what we call society. It is sin that distorts not only how those structures and institutions were formed but also the actions that collective sinful hearts within them cause them to make. That’s why leaders of human institutions fear losing power and view anyone not in agreement with them, not fearing them, as threats.
What does fear do? It causes us to hide. Do we hear the echoes of Genesis here? After his disobedience Adam is asked by God, “Where are you?” to which Adam responds that he was afraid so he hid. His first consciousness after his disobedience is fear. There is no hiding from one’s heart condition. There is no neutral ground in the heart. No safe haven where we can rest from sin and its spirits. We are all afraid, born afraid, each day jockeying for our position in the world where all hearts operate from sin’s major antagonist, fear. Until we accept Christ in our hearts, fear reigns. When we accept Him, “…perfect love casts out fear.”
So what does all this say about the institutions we have formed to keep not only social order but spiritual order as well? There is only one perfect structure and it is an invisible one. It is called the Body of Christ, the spiritual family made up of those hearts that have been personally given to Jesus. It is His heart that controls it and it is His heart that His Spirit brings to our hearts in it. The mistake we all make is to assume that the institutions we call ‘the church’ are the Body of Christ. The Body of Christ transcends ‘the world’ and its structures.
In Jesus God revealed His heart. He started from within Jesus and His heart went out to those trapped in the heartless world. In Jesus they saw the heart of God. Now we all can see the contrast between God’s heart and the emptiness of ‘the world.’ In the process He exposed the devil as its prince as well as the spirits and the kingdom he runs. He exposed the destiny of sin as hell and its complete separation from God. He exposed the human heart’s lonely travail in sin, fear and evil. He exposed the kingdoms of this world as empty attempts to let man take God’s place.
What Jesus did was to reveal and live the truth that the heart is what needs to come from its dark hiding place and be healed by the open light of the Jesus’ heart. He turned out into the open what the devil had hidden about ‘the world.’ He turned the world inside out for all people to see and offered Himself to heal everyone’s heart from within.
“All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing. We're Christ's representatives. God uses us to persuade men and women to drop their differences and enter into God's work of making things right between them. We're speaking for Christ himself now: Become friends with God; he's already a friend with you (2Cor.5:18-19 Message Bible).”
Stay tuned…….
“So we are Christ's official messengers. It is as if God were making his appeal through us. Here is what Christ wants us to beg you to do. Come back to God! Christ didn't have any sin. But God made him become sin for us. So we can be made right with God because of what Christ has done for us (2Cor.5:20-21 NIRV).”
One year when I was in London studying at the annual Spring Bible conference I went to each year for about fifteen years where John Stott taught, there was constant reference to “the world.” So I asked him, “What is the world?” He answered without hesitation, “Secular society.” I pondered that for a bit and thought to myself, “He’s absolutely right.” “The world” is human interaction without God at the heart of things. It is an atmosphere void of spiritual consideration. That is what ‘secular’ means.
So let’s us ponder the meaning of ‘the world’ for a moment. If there is a godless atmosphere something else fills that atmosphere. There is no such thing as a neutral atmosphere especially when we consider how the world is so full of conflict and evil. As disciples of Jesus we know that sin is the atmosphere filler and sin has its one motivating force, the spirit of fear. If we look at ‘the world’ then what we really see is the invisible motivation of fear driving the engine of society.
Where does fear lie? It lies in the individual heart. It is not in the structures and institutions that people form to order society, but in the hearts of the people who submit to those forms that make up what we call society. It is sin that distorts not only how those structures and institutions were formed but also the actions that collective sinful hearts within them cause them to make. That’s why leaders of human institutions fear losing power and view anyone not in agreement with them, not fearing them, as threats.
What does fear do? It causes us to hide. Do we hear the echoes of Genesis here? After his disobedience Adam is asked by God, “Where are you?” to which Adam responds that he was afraid so he hid. His first consciousness after his disobedience is fear. There is no hiding from one’s heart condition. There is no neutral ground in the heart. No safe haven where we can rest from sin and its spirits. We are all afraid, born afraid, each day jockeying for our position in the world where all hearts operate from sin’s major antagonist, fear. Until we accept Christ in our hearts, fear reigns. When we accept Him, “…perfect love casts out fear.”
So what does all this say about the institutions we have formed to keep not only social order but spiritual order as well? There is only one perfect structure and it is an invisible one. It is called the Body of Christ, the spiritual family made up of those hearts that have been personally given to Jesus. It is His heart that controls it and it is His heart that His Spirit brings to our hearts in it. The mistake we all make is to assume that the institutions we call ‘the church’ are the Body of Christ. The Body of Christ transcends ‘the world’ and its structures.
In Jesus God revealed His heart. He started from within Jesus and His heart went out to those trapped in the heartless world. In Jesus they saw the heart of God. Now we all can see the contrast between God’s heart and the emptiness of ‘the world.’ In the process He exposed the devil as its prince as well as the spirits and the kingdom he runs. He exposed the destiny of sin as hell and its complete separation from God. He exposed the human heart’s lonely travail in sin, fear and evil. He exposed the kingdoms of this world as empty attempts to let man take God’s place.
What Jesus did was to reveal and live the truth that the heart is what needs to come from its dark hiding place and be healed by the open light of the Jesus’ heart. He turned out into the open what the devil had hidden about ‘the world.’ He turned the world inside out for all people to see and offered Himself to heal everyone’s heart from within.
“All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing. We're Christ's representatives. God uses us to persuade men and women to drop their differences and enter into God's work of making things right between them. We're speaking for Christ himself now: Become friends with God; he's already a friend with you (2Cor.5:18-19 Message Bible).”
Stay tuned…….
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