This is a compilation of twenty articles on the topic of Spiritual Identity, yours and those around you. Knowing who you are in Christ is very important; he does not want his children suffering from identity crisis. He wants you to know that you are loved; you are blessed and paid for. Topics covered include: Daughters of Zion; Giving under the law and under grace; God's choice of you; Not destined for wrath; The Christian and her/his confessions; The church as the body of Christ; The house of God is the gate of heaven; The kingdom at this time; The Lord is coming to judge the earth and Understanding sonship.
3. CONTENTS
Chapter one | ‘I am God’s dwelling place’
Chapter two | A heart’s cry to be guided
Chapter three | Called from darkness into light
Chapter four | Called into God’s kingdom and glory
Chapter five | Daughters of Zion
Chapter six | Giving under the law and under grace
Chapter seven | God with us
Chapter eight | God’s choice of you
Chapter nine | Not destined for wrath
Chapter ten | The blood on the ear, thumb, toe and altar
Chapter eleven | The Christian and her/his confessions
Chapter twelve | The church as the body of Christ
Chapter thirteen | The foundation
Chapter fourteen | The house of God is the gate of heaven
Chapter fifteen | The kingdom at this time
Chapter sixteen | The Lord is coming to judge the earth
Chapter seventeen | The marred image of God
Chapter eighteen | The release
Chapter nineteen | Understanding sonship
Chapter twenty | Your relationship and your inheritance
Chapter twenty one | Appendix | How to be born aain
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4. 1
I AM GOD’S DWELLING PLACE
2Corinthians 6:16: What agreement has the temple of God with idols?
For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, “I will make my
dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God,
and they shall be my people.
That we become God’s dwelling place is a profound thought. I am sure
when Jesus Christ was talking to the disciples before he was crucified that
the Holy Spirit is with them now will now be in them, they might be
wondering what he meant (John 14:17). That is totally against their world
view: the Spirit of the almighty God dwelling in them?! Also Jesus said that
himself and the father will come and dwell, make their abode in the one
who obeys Him (John 14:23).
Remember that Paul said that we are being built into an habitation of God
in the Spirit (). This takes us back to the tale in Genesis of the creation of
man (Genesis 1:26-28, 2:7).
Man was created to be a bearer of the image of God and that can only
happen after He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life: God put
himself in man. What God had in mind is to be at one with man, but due to
sin that plan was temporarily aborted. Sin resulted into a separation from
God, from the life of God, since the judgement on man’s sin was death
(Genesis 3:1-10). But in Christ, we have the way back to God (Colossians
5. INTERCESSION: THE KEY TO THE NEXT MOVE OF GOD
1:14).
We now have new life in Christ Jesus, we are called new creatures
(2Corinthians 5:17); a new creature with another kind of life, that life is
actually a person. What we read in the book of John is that in Jesus Christ is
life (John 1:4), he actually affirmed that fact that he is the life (John 14:6),
he said God has granted him to have life in himself (John 5:25-26). In one
of his letters, John said God wants to give us life and that life is in him son
(1John 5:11-13). That is why he concluded that the one who has the son has
life.
The gift that Paul especially desires that we express as Christians is the gift
of prophecy; which is the articulation God’s thoughts as he speaks through
us for the comfort, progress, and encouragement of others (1Corinthians
14:3). That is the exhibition of God living in us. What Paul meant is that we
become God’s mouthpiece, expressing his thoughts in a way that will be a
blessing to others.
You’re God’s dwelling place.
Under the old covenant that was not achieved, that man was God’s
dwelling place. However, as a temporary measure, that falls short of what
God wanted, he established the building of the a Tabernacle and temples in
the wilderness and in Jerusalem.
For centuries that became what you can call the dwelling place of God. As
an Israelite, when you think of God you think of Jerusalem, you think of
where the temple is.
There are ceremonies and observances that surround the temple, which had
been attached to people’s experience of God for centuries. So you can
imagine what the relation of the Jews was when after they asked Jesus for a
sign, and he told them that they should destroy the temple and he would
rebuild it in three days (John 2:18-22). This was a temple of such gigantic
dimension that has taken decades to build: 46 years.
Imagine the kind of emotional commitment and investment they would
have on the temple, how for years they get excited waiting for the day the
temple would be completed.
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6. INTERCESSION: THE KEY TO THE NEXT MOVE OF GOD
The temple was so important in under the old covenant that God rebuked
the people who were focusing on their own private investments to the
neglect of the temple of God (Haggai 1:1-11). And contemporaries of God
read that from the writing of prophet Haggai, that since God takes his
temple seriously, they better take it like that. This was something their
forefathers have linked to, what has formed the fulcrum of their identity as
a people.
One thing we can take from that is the need for commitment to and
investment in the temple of God, even though now it is spiritual not
physical.
Since we are the temple of God, now (1Corinthians 3:16) in a spiritual
sense, which is exactly what he wants. Since God is Spirit (John 4:24), God
wants you to be committed to and invest in your spiritual life; and with that,
you become more and more of a temple of God in reality and not just as a
theological position.
Paul affirms that we are being built as a temple of God (Ephesians 2:22), so
there is a sense, positional speaking, that we are the temple of God and also
there is a sense, functionally, where we are becoming in a progressive sense,
the temple of God.
The onus is on us to invest in our spiritual life, in spiritual things. We are
enjoined not to be carnally mined but to be spiritually minded (Romans 8:
2-7).
Jesus announced though in an indirect way that, in him, the real temple of
God has come. Of Jesus it was said that he is the fullness of the Godhead
bodily (Colossians 2:9). And looking at another dimension of it, we are
only the temple of God, houses for God, to the extent to which we part of
his body. Therefore it is a lost game to attempt to get spiritual, in the
divinely and not the satanically sanctioned sense, without Jesus Christ.
The practitioners of the grail message and others who lay hold of extra
biblical views of Jesus as a means of gaining spirituality are backing the
wrong horse. They get something and even look at Christians as missing
something, but it is they that should be pitied.
Paul warned the Colossians lest anyone spoil them with philosophies, high
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7. INTERCESSION: THE KEY TO THE NEXT MOVE OF GOD
sounding religious propositions (Colossians 2:8), causing them to derail
from the truth of Christ.
No matter how dissatisfied you are with the church, it is what he has called
his body and That is what he said he was going to build and the gates of
hell would not prevail (Matthew 16:18). Paul warned against such teachings,
such holding on to extra biblical authorities, e.g. the grail message (even
though intellectually appealing, and in a sense caters for the intellectuals in
the society). Anyone who speaks of that wants to deprive you of your
reward (Colossians 2:18-20), such a person wants to cut you from the body,
that is if you were part of the body in the first place.
Don’t go seeking spiritual experience except from the biblically sanctioned
means of believing in Jesus, reading the scriptures, praying to God in the
name of Jesus fellowshipping with bible aligned companies, fasting.
These are means of emphasising your spiritual dimension.
God said he doesn’t dwell in temples build by humans hands (Acts 17:2527), therefore if your religion has an over-emphasis on (a) physical
building(s) on the earth, it does not lead to God since God is not physical
but spiritual. It doesn’t matter the centuries it had lasted or the structure
that has been built around it.
Once Jesus hinted that he is the temple of God, he rendered all other
“temples” obsolete and empty of real meaning. Actually it was after the
resurrection of Jesus that John and the rest of the apostles had the
understanding that what Jesus hinted as the temple that would be destroyed
by the Jews was his body.
That body was changed into a spiritual body due to the process of
resurrection. You are his body since when he rose from the dead, we rose
up with him, in a vicarious sense, all these because you believe, that is
foolishness to some, and they seek to add to the simple truth of the gospel
in Jesus Christ as plainly revealed in the bible. And since He is the temple
of God, we are God’s dwelling place also. His Spirit is in us (Romans 8:9),
that is the Spirit of God; God indwells us by his Spirit. That is how God
dwells in us.
Remember that is not in a physical sense, neither is it defined emotionally, it
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8. INTERCESSION: THE KEY TO THE NEXT MOVE OF GOD
is defined spiritually. God indwells us in our component part called the
spirit (1Thessanolians 5:23); man being spirit, soul and body. We have a
new spirit, regenerated spirit (John 3:1-7) from God. And God dwells in us
through that.
Am I contradicting myself? No, we have a new spirit from God which is
the Holy Spirit, which is God in us. Jesus has the Spirit of God without
measure and we are part of his body and share of his Spirit, the Holy Spirit,
which is, at once our individual Spirit and the eternal Spirit of God. That is
God in ones with man, the way he wants, and all these through Jesus Christ.
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