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from Coming Out of Darkness Part 26
from Coming Out of Darkness Part 26
"For the Son of man
shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward
every man according to his works" (Matt. 16:27).
We are judged according to what we do and how we do it. Do you go to church every Sunday? Do you read
your Bible every day? Are you a "Good Christian"? You may discover
when judgment comes that some of those things were to no avail. How could that
be, you say? When God comes to you, He is not looking for good people, He is
looking for Christ. He is looking for His Son in you. How much of Christ
has been worked into you? If you stand in God’s presence and hear Him say,
"Well done thou good and faithful servant," it will be because Christ
has been formed in you. You would have to fall at His feet and give Him the
glory for working His life into you. In all the things that I have accomplished
for God, I can never see where I have done anything, but I can always
see the miraculous power of God that has been working in my life. I cannot
personally take credit for anything. This is why if we are given a crown in the
natural sense of the word, we will throw it at His feet. It is He who deserves
the crown. It is God who has worked in us both the willing and the doing of His
good pleasure.
We Shall Be Tried by Fire
"For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any
man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay,
stubble; every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it,
because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work
of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he
shall receive a reward. If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer
loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire" (1 Cor. 3:11-15).
The judgment here is what you use to build on the foundation and how you did it. The foundation is
"Christ in you".
When we are regenerated by the Spirit, the foundation is
laid. How you build on that foundation in yourself and in others is what you
will be judged for. You can build with gold, silver and precious stones, or
wood, hay and stubble.
Building with wood, hay and stubble represents building with our human nature. Anyone who has studied
typology will tell you that wood represents human nature. For instance, the Ark
of the Covenant in the Old Testament was a type of Christ. The Ark was made of
wood overlaid with gold, signifying that Jesus was human and divine. Gold
represents the divine nature.
To build on the foundation with wood simply means that we work by and with our human nature. This can be
very good. We can teach Sunday school, be a missionary in Africa, give a tenth
of all we receive, and write Christian books. These are all very good things,
but if they are done out of our natural human effort, our works will be burned
up when the fires of judgment come. Wood is consumed in the fire. An example of
this is Cain’s offering. He brought the best his hands could produce and
offered it to God, but God rejected it. Able didn’t bring anything of himself;
he just brought an offering according to God’s direction.
We can build with wood or gold. Gold represents divinity, the divine life. So these two items, wood
and gold, represent two ways to build on the foundation of Christ. I can build
by, through, and in the Spirit, or I can build with the natural human religious
concept and work for God all of my life, and when judgment comes, everything
will be burned up. I won’t be lost, but I will go through the fire. This judgment
is not just a future event; this takes place at various times in the Christian
life. Many work for God for years, and then realize they did it with human
effort and not by the Spirit.
Building With Gold
We must learn that everything that has lasting value and can withstand the fires of judgment is
only that which we do out of the Spirit of God within us.
"Except the LORD build the house, they labor in vain that build it: except the LORD
keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain" (Ps. 127:1). Unless
it is Christ in me, by His divine life and nature flowing through my humanity,
my work is in vain. It is what we do by the power of the Spirit, not by natural
human resources, that will gain the Lord’s favor.
In the book of the Revelation, we are told that the New Jerusalem has streets of gold. Streets
represent the walk and gold represents the divine nature. This simply means
that those who are living in the reality of the Kingdom of God, which is the
city of God, are walking in the divine nature. The New Jerusalem is to be
entered into now. John said,
"And I John saw the holy city, New
Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for
her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the
tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be
his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God"
(Rev. 21:2-3).
Christianity always puts things off in the future. There is a day coming when the New Jerusalem will be realized fully in a people, but we must begin to enter into the experience now or we will miss it
in the future. If we are progressively walking in the Spirit, we are being
transformed into His image and are walking at least in a degree today in the
New Jerusalem.
Building With Silver
We must not only build with gold, but with silver. Silver in typology means redemption. There should
not be anyone on this earth who does not know that they have been redeemed.
Jesus paid the price of their redemption on the cross. There will come a day,
because of our Father’s heart and His love for humanity, that He will cause all
to bow before Him in worship. No one should feel as though they are not
redeemable in His sight, no matter how bad or corrupt they are. We should be
building on the foundation with the redemption of Jesus. No matter how many
times we sin and miss the mark, we must realize the silver. We have been
redeemed back to God, purchased by His blood, and we belong to Him. And because
we belong to Him, He will continually judge us and work in us, until one day we
will stand complete in Him, giving Him all the glory and honor. His fire will
one day purify everyone who comes to this earth.
We are not transformed by lighting candles, by saying long and repetitive prayers, by reading the
Bible or by anything else we may do. Our redemption is based on His work.
If we could have possibly made it into the Kingdom by our good works and human
effort, then the Cross would not have been necessary. Oh, how the world needs
to know that they are redeemed! The price was paid.
God was in Christ,
reconciling the world unto Himself, not holding men’s trespasses against them.
To build with silver means to build with
redemption in mind. We are not trying to get people saved. We realize that the
Blood of Jesus redeemed every person. We just need to let people know of their
redemption. We are not saved by our performance. The system of Christianity is
a performance-based religion. Christians are not built with redemption, but
with performance. If you are good, God will bless you, if you are bad, you go
to hell. How sad that the gospel of salvation for all has been reduced to a
performance. If you understand redemption, you can minister to a prostitute
without condemning her. You get her to understand that God loves her just the
way she is and that he paid the price for her sin at Calvary. Because of that,
she can turn to Him and fellowship with Him and find that her life will be
transformed, not by her performance, but by His Spirit arising within her. Once
God begins to grow in her, she will forsake her old way of life and begin to
flow in the new. Oh, how I wish the world could have the realization of His
redemption! One day all the peoples of the earth will know of this marvelous
plan.
Building With Precious Stones
We build on the
foundation with gold (the flowing of divine life), with silver
(redemption, what he has done for you, not what you can do for Him), and with
precious stones
(the transformation of the inner man). Precious stones are precious
by transformation. A natural stone has gone through a process and become
precious. In the books of Genesis and the Revelation, we see a river with
precious stones. The river represents the Spirit. In our spirit is the flowing
of the Holy Spirit and as we continually turn our hearts toward the Spirit in
our spirit, the river in us begins to flow. As the river flows from our spirit
into our soul, our soul is transformed into precious stones. The natural man
becomes transformed by the flowing of God’s Spirit within.
If you minister as a precious stone, then your ministry changes people. A true minister dispenses
the life of God. We become ministers of the New Covenant, not of the letter,
but of the Spirit. As we speak or write, people are fed with the Spirit of
life, and life always brings change. If you are living, you are always
changing. Dead things never change. That says volumes about the system
of Christianity. If you never advance beyond the fundamentals of Christianity,
then you are dead and not alive. If you have been a Christian for a few
years and you are the same today as when you were saved, you are not alive, but
dead. To be alive means that Christ has quickened you by His Spirit and He is
constantly bringing change and transformation to your life. You can only be
effectual in ministry by ministering what you have experienced.
What you have experienced of God, you can minister to another.
You can go to Bible school and learn how to prepare sermons, how to market your ministry, and learn homiletics and hermeneutics, but that will not qualify you to minister life.
When people feel a call of God on their life, most of them immediately fall
into the trap of religion. When the Apostle Paul was called, he was taught of
the Lord. Larry Hodges, in his article on the "Oxcarts" from The Shofar Letters, issue 6, 1997, says:
When God had summarily
arrested this man, Saul of Tarshish, He did not send him to the
Bible School at Jerusalem with its noted teachers and preachers. They
undoubtedly had the credentials. They had been eyewitnesses to things others
would never know unless they told them. They had personally been with Jesus
for more than three years. They heard more fall from His very lips than most
men of that day ever hoped to hear in their lives. They had been designated
by the Lord Himself to help lay the foundations of the Church! What a
wonderful opportunity for this young man, Saul of Tarshish! A year or two
under this sort of ministry and he could be trusted to be sent (of Man) any
place with the gospel of the kingdom.
But God did not send
His man, who was to become the apostle of apostles, to Jerusalem for
instruction and training for ministry.
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and
my thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:8-9). God turns this
young man toward the desert’s school of obscurity and isolation and a
crash course in intimacy with God. There is something infinitely better than merely knowing the Bible. It is knowing the Bible’s Author.
"But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by his
grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen;
immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood: neither went I up to
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| Bible Cover - Kremlin-Gold,silver,precious stones |
Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me; but I went into Arabia, and
returned again unto Damascus. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem
to see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days. But other of the apostles saw
I none, save James the Lord’s brother."
This is why the apostle Paul could say he was a minister, not of the letter, but of the Spirit. He
ministered by the Spirit, not from a book of prewritten sermons or learned
Bible knowledge. He was ministering as a precious stone in God’s Kingdom. He
had the transforming power of the Spirit of God in his life. To minister by
intellectually learned knowledge is to build with wood, hay and stubble. When
God comes to bring judgment, wood, hay and stubble will be burned up.
The fire does not consume the gold, silver and precious stones.To be continued
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