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Pursuing Love, Walking in the Spirit

Walking worthy of our calling

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“I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called, with all lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love, endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” (Ephesians 4:1)

“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.” (Romans 12:1)

I’ve been reading Romans 12 alongside Ephesians 4 recently, and I was struck by the similarities in both Paul’s messages. They both begin with the same entreaty: “ I therefore beseech you.” Paul beseeches the Romans to “present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service,” and goes on to encourage them “not to think of himself more highly than the ought to think but to think soberly…“ In essence this is very similar to “walking… with all lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love.” To the Romans he explains that this is necessary because “God has dealt to each one measure of faith,“ whereas to the Ephesians he writes “to each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ’s gift.“ The Romans are taught that “we, being many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another,“ whereas the Ephesians are encouraged to “keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling…“ (3 to 4). In both letters Paul considers how different grace gifts perform different functions. For the Romans Paul focusses on the functions (sometimes called “motivational gifts”) themselves, whereas to the Ephesians he looks at the different types of people performing them – the “(fivefold) ministry gifts.” However both passages essentially have the same message:

“Don’t think of yourself as special: the identity and purpose that you have has been given to you as a gift by the grace of God and is yours by Faith. Your life isn’t about you. It’s about the point you play in the Kingdom of God, which is the rule and reign of Christ through his body on earth. It has meaning and value when it is used for the benefit of others out of a motivation of love for the Lord and love for others. If you can put your flesh and your self-importance on the altar and get hold of the glory and majesty of the Kingdom we are being called into, and concentrate on using what it is that God has given you to do to equip and build up others, not in your own strength but in His mighty power that can move mountains with mustard seeds, the whole body of Christ will grow in love and maturity and God will be glorified.“

The Hope of our Calling
In the light of this, what is “the hope of our calling,” and the ”calling with which we are called?” Paul says “I press on towards the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:14) Our call is from Heaven. It’s a prize. Bible teacher Andrew Wommack says: “When you see a therefore, you’ve got to find what it’s there for!” Romans 12 begins: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.” What’s the therefore there for? Read the last verse of the previous chapter, which is all about the unsearchable wisdom of God in His plan for “all Israel,” Jew and Gentile, to be saved. The last verse reads: “For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things, to whom be glory forever. Amen.” When we offer our lives to Jesus as a living sacrifice because we realise there’s nothing else we can reasonably do in the light of all that He is, we are pressing on for that goal.

In Philippians 3:12 Paul also talks about pressing on, “to lay hold of that for which Christ has laid hold of me.“ Jesus got hold of our spirits on the cross and has taken them to heaven with Him, and now he’s calling us to live lives that will manifest on earth the amazing truth of who we have become. We are called to leave our own bodies behind and humbly join ourselves to the spiritual body of Christ. That is the calling which we are to walk worthy of. A hand isn’t a hand for its own sake; it’s only a hand in as much as it serves the body. My call isn’t my ministry: it’s the coming perfection of the body of Christ – “a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ;” (Eph 4:13) – that it serves.

Measuring Mustard Seeds
Paul introduces his passage to the Romans on gifts with the explanation “God has given to each of us a measure of faith,” (Romans 12:3) whereas the introduction to the parallel passage in Ephesians four is “but to each of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ gift.”  This leads me to the final point of this teaching. If indeed these two texts are expressing the same truths in the way that I suggest they are, then the “measure of faith” corresponds to “the grace that has given according to the measure of Christ gift.” The point is this: what measure does God use? I have always understood these passages as saying that God gives each one of us a particular measure of faith to correspond with the gift in which we are operating, and every translation I have seen seem to imply the same thing – ie that God deals, or assigns, different measures to different people. However Jesus Himself says “God does not give the Spirit by measure.” (John 3:34) Christ’s gift to us is the power that raised Him from the dead (Romans 8:11), and “the power to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we could ask or think.” (Eph 3:20) If we only need a “mustard seed” grain of the faith that comes from God to move a mountain, is God really going to measure our mustard seeds depending on the size of the mountains He want us to move? I think not. God didn’t give me more, or less, grace than He gave you: we both received His grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift, which is actually beyond measure. As we know from 2 Cor 12:12, when we are weak, we are strong. It’s when we operate in our weakness but in His measure of grace that God is glorified. Peter puts it like this: “If anyone ministers, let him minister as with the ability that God supplies, that in all things God may be glorified through Jesus Christ.”

The Perfect Man
Paul gives us this vision of the Body of Christ in Ephesians 4:16 “from whom (ie Christ, the Head) the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effectual working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.”

The phrase ”effectual working” is the Greek “energeia”, which is only used in the New Testament for superhuman power. “Share” is metron, the same word as the measure (metron) of Christ’s gift. We are called to participate in God’s plan by devoting ourselves to laying hold of His superhuman power to fulfil our assignments. We aren’t going to access His energeia unless our walk is aligned with His will, and to align with His will we have to lay down our own. There is no such thing as compromise in the service of the King: our sinful nature is such that we can’t walk  “with all lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love,” unless we’ve left our flesh on the altar and stepped away as the new creations that we are in the Spirit. I believe that it’s only when we succeed in this that Ephesians 4:16 is fulfilled in our lives.

The “perfect man” that the body of Christ is being called into is the mature bride of Christ filled with a love that matches His own. To play our part in that high calling our lives must display a love and desire for unity that is worthy of the goal we are pressing on to attain.

The word of God, Walking in the Spirit

Walking in Newness of Life

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The God  who is Love created man in His image, so we were made in the image of Love. Satan marred that image with sin, so the foundation of God’s design for society was ruined, and love was replaced by the Law. God’s perfection and beauty could be found in His Law (See all of Psalm 119), but for men, even the priesthood and the Levites, the dedicated servants of God, it was impossible for that Godliness to be reflected in their behaviour. As we learn from Romans 7, “The Law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good … but sin, that it might appear sin, was producing death in me through what is good.” (Romans 7:12) Instead of living in the freedom and safety of Love – the fulfilment of the Law – human beings outside of Christ are now only free and safe to the extent that sinful behaviour is held in check by law. The law is like the sign that says “don’t step on the grass:” Since by its nature sin always looks for ways to bypass the law and step on the grass, law is always multiplying to keep pace with sin.

Recently I saw a village primary school with a tree in the grounds. It was the beginning of the school day. Children were climbing the tree and swinging on the branches. There was no visible supervision, although various parents were around, dropping their children off. It was a happy, joyful scene. I thought: “Goodness, this is wonderful. Children climbing the tree, doing what God designed them to do, with no health and safety police wagging their fingers? I must take a photo!” Then a second thought came hard on its heels. “No, you can’t take a picture. The safeguarding police say No.”

In the world, the law of sin and death proliferates, both in fact driven by fear: fear of death (in this case, health and safety) and fear of sin (safeguarding.) But in the Kingdom of God there is a different order, because peace has come to Earth:

“For He himself is our Peace, who has made both one, having broken down the middle wall of separation, having abolished in his flesh the enmity, that is the law of Commandments contained in ordinances, so as to create in himself one new man from the two, thus making peace, and that he might reconcile them both to himself in one body through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity.”  (Ephesians 2:14–16).

On one level, Paul is writing in this scripture about the enmity between “those who are near and those who are afar off,“ (Eph 2:17) that is the Jews and the Gentiles. The Jews are “near“ because they were chosen by God to manifest Him to the world through their obedience to his law; the Gentiles are “far off“ because they are lost in carnality and enslaved to the world’s thinking. But there is a deeper level, another war, a level of reality in the spirit that is represented by the two people groups. The enmity between Jew and Gentile represents the war between flesh and spirit that Paul refers to in the epistles to the Galatians and the Romans:

“The flesh lusts against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh, and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish.“ (Galatians 5:17) 

When Paul writes to the Romans he says: “I delight in the law of God according to the inward man.” (Romans 7:22), and in verse 23 he calls it “the law of my mind:” “But,” he says, “I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.” (Romans 7:23) The “war” between the law of God and the law of sin that Paul describes here is the same as the battle between flesh and Spirit that he writes about to the Galatians. His terminology has evolved (His epistle to the Galatians was the first one written) but the conflict is the same – whether it’s called flesh against Spirit; the law of sin against the law of God, Gentile against Jew.

We (or at least I) tend to polarise our thinking, with the result that our drive is to be “more spiritual” at the expense of the flesh which, as we know, has to die. But the key is not to strive to crucify the flesh, but to recognise that Jesus Himself is our peace because, as Ephesians 2:14 makes clear, “He has broken down the middle wall of separation.” He has put to death the enmity by creating in himself “one new man from the two.” When we step back into Jesus, the Word made flesh, we step into the peace that He has created, where the flesh is no longer captive to sin but merges with the spirit in one new creation, and we are no longer striving against the law of God, but seeking to fulfil it in faith and love.

I was in the Spirit one day; it was sunny outside, and the thought came to me: “I fancy going birdwatching this morning, instead of sitting here having a quiet time.” I said: “Lord, I fancy going birding now. What should I do” He said, “Do what you like.” So I thought about that, and decided that what I liked doing just then, rather than going out looking for birds to photograph, was sitting with Jesus and studying is word with Him. So that’s what I did, and in the few minutes that followed received a revelation that I will share in another post. And I learnt an important truth: whatever we do when we walk in newness of live is going to be in His will.

Paul first explores the idea of the wall of separation in the letter to the Galatians, when he says “In Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avail anything, but a new creation.” (Gal 6:15). We often say/hear/read statements like this; “I keep putting my flesh on the altar, but it keeps climbing off again!” I wonder if this is because we haven’t grasped the reality of who we are as new creations in Christ, where flesh and Spirit have become one in Him? In His Kingdom, religion and carnality are both equally irrelevant, as they play no part in the new creation. If we overlay Galatians 6: 15 with Galatians 5:6, which is “in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avail anything, but faith working through love,” we find an equation that states “a new creation is faith working through love.”

If this is true, and scripture confirms it is – because “without faith it is impossible to please God,” and “unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God,” – our actions must always be not only carried out in a spirit of love, but in a place of faith, if we are to be walking “in newness of life”, living as new creations. Does this mean our actions “avail nothing” in the Kingdom of God unless we are in some way walking on the water and trusting God for the miraculous? I don’t think so. Since “faith comes from hearing,” I think we are walking in faith whenever we hear God directing our steps and do – or don’t do – whatever it is He says. We are in faith whenever we allow Him to guide us with His eye (Psalm 32:8). Our faith is in the person of Jesus: not just because the righteousness of God that is ours by faith is going to clothe us in white and give us a place at the wedding banquet, but because in Him, clothed in Him, we live our lives as new creations in a world that is passing away, “in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation.” (Phil 2:15) And when, by faith, we are in Christ, then our deeds will be directed by love, because God is Love.

One of the leaders at a recent Alpha that we ran at our church bought a little toy bus for a child who loved busses, and left it on the table at the Alpha meeting. A young man on the course noticed the bus, and asked about it. “There’s a kid I often see at work who has got a thing about busses. I saw this and bought it for him.” The young man was so touched that someone would go out of their way to buy a toy bus for a child that he had no real relationship with, just because “the kid loves busses,” that he realised in that moment that the love of Jesus was actually a reality that directed people’s lives, and gave his life to Christ. Buying the bus didn’t require miraculous provision; it just required responding to a prompting from the Lord and doing a small act of kindness. Faith working through love, at the heart of the new creation, availing much for the Kingdom of God.

The scriptures give us many analogies for living out our lives as new creations, as children of the Kingdom and not of the world. Paul likes the image of putting on clothes: “clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh.” (Romans 13:14), or “put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness.” (Eph 4:24) We “put on the armour of God,” and we “put on” Christ’s own character (Col 3:12-17). But to put on clothes we need to go to the wardrobe, and this wardrobe only exists in one place, and that is heaven. We may call it spiritual realms, or heavenly places, or, as both Jesus and Paul do, just “above;” but it’s the place where Christ is seated. “Seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.” (Col 3:1-2) And just like the atmosphere of places on earth are unmistakeable and tell us clearly where we are – be it beach, forest, desert, mountain or city – heaven too has its own atmosphere. It’s the atmosphere of rest.

Rest (katapausis) is a state of the environment. When the Father finished the work of creation He rested. “Rest“ refers to the state of Tranquility, literally a “calming of the winds.” It is the atmosphere of heaven, the atmosphere of the Spirit. God instituted the Sabbath day for men to keep holy, so that His creation could share something of the atmosphere of rest in which He dwells. Peace (eirēnē), however, is a state of the soul. It’s an experience. Jesus gives us His peace. He’s the prince of peace, He made peace when He broke the wall of division between Jew and Gentile, and all they represent, at the cross. Peace is what we experience when we are at rest, when the winds have stopped.

The Prince of Peace is also Lord of the Sabbath. Jesus is lord of our circumstances and Lord of our souls. The writer to the Hebrews exhorts us to “diligently enter into that rest,” (Hebrews 4:11), and affirms that “we who have believed“ have done so (Hebrews 4:3); while Peter, quoting the psalmist, exhorts us to “seek peace and pursue it.” The peace that Jesus gives us, “not as the world gives,“ is our experience of the spiritual atmosphere of heaven.

And here’s the thing: we cannot put on Christ unless we go to the wardrobe, the place of God’s rest, and if we’re not experiencing peace we haven’t entered it, and so we’re in the wrong place. We will either be operating out of our carnality or out of the religion that tries to control it (and religion has many spiritual disguises), but we won’t be where the wall of division has been broken down. To “seek peace and pursue it” is more than just trying to calm down, and more even than trying to seek the face of Jesus: it is to ensure that we are walking in newness of life, because nothing else avails anything for the Kingdom of God.

Holiness: You shall be perfect, Pursuing Love, Walking in the Spirit

Be Renewed in the Spirit of your Mind

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Changing the points…

“But you have not so learned Christ, if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus: that you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness.” (Eph 4: 20-24)

The verses that follow (Eph 4: 25- Eph 5:5) give the Ephesian church – and the rest of us – a blueprint of what “true righteousness and holiness” look like as we walk in love as children of light and imitators of God. So we read them, maybe underline them in our Bibles; we pray over them, we memorize them and write them down – and yet we find that the old man is stubbornly clinging on like an unshakeable shadow. “O wretched man that I am,” we cry, quoting Romans seven, and maybe go back to our Bibles and our worship, feeling weak and defeated in our personal walk but thanking Jesus for His saving love. But we will have missed a key, though: like changing the points on a railway line, there is a course of action from which all those attributes of godliness can flow, and it’s that little one-liner that makes up verse 23: “and be renewed in the spirit of your mind.” If we can really grasp verse 23, the rest of the verses will follow.

The Blue Letter Bible lexicon defines the word spirit (Greek pneuma) as it is used here as “the disposition or influence which fills and governs the soul of any body.” Paul’s exhortation is quite uncomplicated: instead of letting the “old man” influence our thinking, we allow our minds to be filled and governed by the “new man.” To move the language away from first century male-dominated culture and into the twenty-first, I am going to use the term “new creation” from now on where Paul uses “new man.” The new creation is born of the Spirit, and, just as Adam and Eve before the fall, is made in the image of God. Since God is Love and He is light (1 John 1:5), the disposition of the new creation is always towards love and light. The new creation is a spirit being and has to walk in the light, and will always pursue love: not to do so is not to walk in the spirit. To be renewed in the spirit of our mind is to let our thinking be controlled by the desire to love.

We can get up at 5.00 am and spend three hours in prayer and worship to God, but if at 8.05 our words to the person next to us are negative and unloving, the spirit of our mind has not been renewed by the previous three hours spiritual activity. If we have not love, we are nothing. Jesus hasn’t called us to spend three hours with Him in Heaven and not to bring Heaven with us when we come back to Earth. He taught us to pray “You will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven,” and the Father’s will is always going to be to show His love. In all our communication and all our interactions, this has to be our priority. It is only the thinking of the renewed mind that is in line with the loving purposes of God, which is what Romans 12:2 makes clear: “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”

Taking the steps
So how do we take the steps to walk in this direction? A few people are called to spend most of their time in prayer and public ministry, but for most of us the majority of our Christian life is spent with the relatively small number of people with whom we live and work. We work out our salvation in the close relationships of our daily lives. Our interactions may involve works of service and may involve prayer ministry, but most of all they are the words we exchange concerning the issues that affect us. These are the conversations that either build us up or break us up. We can either tend towards Ephesians 4: 14 “speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of Him who is the head, that is, Christ;” or Galatians 5: 15 “But if you bite and devour one another, beware lest you be consumed by one another.” It all depends on whether or not we are renewed in the spirit of our minds.

A key to the renewed mind is in the well-known phrase “speaking the truth in love.” There are two aspects to every conversation: the content, and the relationship. The way of the world – that Romans 12:2 says we are not to conform ourselves to – is to “tell it like it is”, to “have our say,” to “tell them straight,” etc., or at a corporate and governmental level to “have talks.” But the purpose is always the same: it isn’t to “prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God,” but for me to prove to you that it’s my will that is good and acceptable, and that you should comply with it. The discussion is about the content; relationship is secondary. If “talks have broken down,” at whatever level, so too has the relationship.

The Kingdom way is the opposite. Relationship comes first. It’s love that endures forever. If we are keeping in mind the law of Love we prefer one another (Romans 12:10); we submit to one another (Eph. 5:21); and through love we serve one another (1 John 4:7). Every conversation is an opportunity to allow the love of God to flow into a situation. Speaking the truth in love starts with considering what the other person wants from the conversation. This is what causes the body to grow “into Him who is the Head, Christ.” (Eph 4:15) “Knowledge puffs up, but love edifies,” writes Paul (1 Cor 8:1), and to the Ephesians he writes “Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers.” (Eph 4:29) Corrupt words come from the old creation, which “grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts.” Words that impart grace are what edify, and have their origin in the new creation, “created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness.”

Changing the Points
According to these scriptures, then, the purpose of everything we say should be to build up the other person and “impart grace” to them, releasing something of the love of God into their life. Every time we do this, prioritizing relationship over content, we establish our minds in the new creation rather than the old. Bob Dylan released the Christian album “Slow Train Coming’” in 1979. In one of the tracks he sings: “I’m gonna change my way of thinking, make myself a different set of rules.” When we change our way of thinking, we are renewed in the spirit of our mind; and when we renew our minds, as Romans 12:2 says, we start to “prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” We do literally change the points, because the purpose of my words is no longer for you to get my point, but for me to get yours. And once we have let go of our own agenda, it is a small step for me to move from trying to consider your agenda to actually being open to hearing God’s agenda for you, and to catch something of His perfect will for your life.

So if we want to impact the lives of others with the truth and the power of God, we start by seeing every conversation as an opportunity to love instead of an opportunity to make our point. And when we do this, we will be built up in our own lives too, because as we give, it shall be given unto us (Luke 6:38).  As Atticus said to Scout in  Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view […] until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” Jesus climbed into our skin, walked around in it and was crucified in it so that we could be renewed in the spirit of our mind and live, speak and act out of the new creation, rather than out of the old one that was crucified with Him. “Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God!” (1 John 3:1)

Becoming established
It is because the Son of God did this for us that we can to put off all the corruption and self-centredness of the flesh, and put on the new creation that has been born of the Spirit of God. We do this every time we make the decision to love. The more we do it, the stronger the new creation becomes, and the fainter the shadow of the old. This is what I think is meant by the idea of being “established” in God that we find, for example, in 1 Thess 3:13, 1 Pe 5:10, and Romans 16:25. The more we make it our habit to be renewed in the spirit of our minds, the more the new creation will walk in the love and the power of the Holy Spirit, bringing blessing to others, manifesting the character of Christ in the fruit of the Spirit, and building the Kingdom of God at every step. Who knows what miracles will flow, when we are open to God’s “good and acceptable and perfect will” for the person that we are talking to?”