God’s Catch-22

God has a Catch-22 going on in His human creation. It seems to be an integral part of His Master Plan to bring mankind to Him. It has to happen so that the next phase of His plan to reproduce Himself can begin.

Remember how Christ, who was all about doing His Father’s work, promised His disciples to make them “fishers of men” (Matt. 4:19)? God is angling to catch human beings. That’s what you do when you fish. You catch.”

What does God want to do with us after He catches us? He wants to reproduce Himself in us by placing His Spirit in our minds and hearts. Like a seed, He then as the Great Gardner helps us to grow—or, rather, He grows within us.

How This Works

The scriptures say that God has given mankind the spirit of slumber. Man is asleep spiritually. And that sleep is a blindness. “For the LORD has poured out upon you the spirit of deep sleep, and has closed your eyes: the prophets and your rulers, the seers has He covered” (Isa. 29:10; Rom. 11:8).

And when you are spiritually blind, you cannot see the vision of what your Creator is doing. This leads to disastrous results, for “where there is no vision the people perish” (Prov. 29:18).

He has placed the world and all of its vanity and vexation in the human heart so that we would give up and surrender to Him and His plan. Ironically, He uses evil and sin to get us to a place where we will cry out for help and seek the Savior.

Man is never satisfied with sufficiency. The sons of old man Adam have to have a fancier car, finer clothes, and a younger and more beautiful woman in order to stave off temporarily the pangs of the prison of his old selfish nature.

As long as we humans drown in the oceans of our fleshly selfish desires, we will remain blind and asleep as to what God wants to do with us. He wants to take us from the slave dens of sinful shame to His throne room, eventually to sit with Him there, prepared by His Grace to rule the nations.

The Catch

The catch is this: It won’t be us doing the ruling. It will be the Spirit of Christ in us. It will be the King Himself multiplied and reproduced in all His glory—in the new spiritual bodies He has promised to those who love Him and His plan.

When you say, I can’t be like the apostles, much less Christ, you are saying that the Spirit of Christ could never live in me. Of course, you cannot because “you are dead and your life is hid with Christ in God.” This negative thought is a declaration of unbelief in the power of God to transform us! But as the prophet said, “Who has believed our report?” (Isa. 53:1).

The spiritually blind will only begin to see after they are born from above. Christ said, “Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” He also cannot “enter’ it. The Greek says, “born from above,” and in order to be born from above one has to spiritually die with Christ, be buried with Him, and by believing that He was raised from the dead, one experiences his own spiritual resurrection from the dead (Rom. 6:1-12).

That experience comes first before any kind of spiritual growth happens. A dry seed sitting on the shelf cannot grow. It must be buried in the earth, lose its own personal identity and then it sprouts; it resurrects. Then it starts growing. It’s the same with us. Our faith in Christ’s resurrection regenerates us. We don’t work to bring on the above. It is a gift. The honest hard work comes after. To grow up spiritually, to be like the early apostles and prophets and even Christ Himself, we must do certain things. We must study and pray, of course. But study what exactly? You can find some answers in my free books (with free shipping in the USA) that I offer. Here’s the info:  (https://immortalityroad.wordpress.com/donate/ ).

Advertisement

Open Letter to the Body of Christ

To my brothers and sisters in the body of our great Messiah and King and Creator. May His peace cover you with the warmth of His love.

I write to you His faithful ones who look out over this evil world, and who long for Him to come back to this bloodstained earth and heal its wounds. I write to you who walk on alone. But you are not alone. I write to you who realize that there is more we should know and more we should do. It is a lonely journey. But you are not alone, for this brother in Spirit walks with you and yearns for our fellowship in a better world.

I miss your eager desire to know our Savior as we walk on, believing that the Father dwells bodily in the Son, of whom we are a member. That means the Father is in us, too. I encourage you to walk on in this truth, knowing that it is His will. Pray according to His will, which is His eternal purpose—to bring us into His throne room in our new spiritual body.

I only ask one thing from you, just five minutes of your time to read these lines of love in Christ to you, and that you write a few lines to me to let me know how you are doing during this stressful time of pestilence and plague. I only ask for a few words from your heart to mine. [You can comment here or email me wayneman5@hotmail.com ]

May His peace and love abound in and through your heart and on out into the world,

Wayne

“Thy Will Be Done in Earth”

God’s will is His wish, desire, and purpose. It is to reproduce Himself. His will is strong, like a mighty invisible river that flows from His heart throughout the earth.  He is the cause of all things; His desire causes His vision for His universe to come to pass.  Nothing can stop His will from being done. Nothing can stop Him from accomplishing what He has set out to do. The King will make his wishes reality.

Consequently, if we have a purpose in this life that is not in His will, we will feel thwarted.  Futility will haunt our endeavors.  It will be as if we are paddling a canoe upstream.  We will thrash about, working hard, but we will be struggling against the current.  And that current is His will.

Knowing and surrendering to His will makes our burden light, as Christ said. He said that we are offspring of the King. Our future in Him fulfills His purpose. Our future is painted in scripture: “Christ in you, the hope of glory…Bringing many sons (and daughters) unto glory…That you might be filled with all the fulness of God…Perfecting of the saints…”

These words describes us. He believes in us. So let’s believe Him with His own faith. His will is to present His sons and daughters to the world at the end of this age.  He will accomplish His purpose “in earth as it is in heaven.” 

His Game Plan

God’s will is His game plan. He will win. The Kingdom of Light will overtake and destroy the kingdom of darkness. Like Gideon’s army, He will use human beings that are weak and powerless in their own eyes and know they need Him to overcome the adversary the devil.

Through this victory of good over evil, He will receive great glory as He helps His body of sons and daughters do this. His name will be honored and glorified. All will know that Yahshua means Yah Is the Savior.  And He shall enact what His very name means as He saves us from destruction in the latter days.  Yah will deliver us out of the ashes of a smoldering world system.

Christ spoke plainly about the Father’s will.  “And this is the will of Him who sent me that I shall lose none of all that He has given me, but raise them up at the last day.”  He promised us that He would raise us up at the last day!  He would raise up God’s sons; none would be left behind; none would be forgotten, whose names were written in the book of life.

Christ wants us to pray with this understanding.  This is why He included the Father’s will in His model prayer. When we pray with this knowledge, the Father will perk up His ears and will listen to us.

Let’s be honest. We have all tuned out our own children at times when they are talking foolishly or ignorantly. We did not take them seriously, nor do we even remember what they were talking about. It is no different with our Father and us. It is only when we get on His page. Then He will answer when we pray, “Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.” 

Yet, our Savior knows our frailty. So He has provided heavenly bread to sustain us on our journey. We will need to ask Him for His spiritual bread…

[This is Chapter 11 of my new book. The working title is The New Commandments of Christ. I hope to have it published in the spring of 2021. Obeying His “new commandments” is so important to anyone who desires to grow to the “stature of the fullness of Christ.” KWHancock