Except You Eat My Flesh From: Daniel Yordy

You will find that below is part three of a series "Coming Out of Darkness" first appearing here at www.dyordy.com by Daniel Yordy himself. I make no apologies for reproducing this one today as various prophetic occurrences happened in today's meeting in Havant which followed right through from a play Jonathan and Emma did with the kids right through to celebrating Communion together. The constant theme was expressed in the play...moving from stars and spots culture and here you needed to see the play, to a relationship with the Father based on His valuation of us and not our own. See stars and spots as a culture based on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and leaving that all behind to relate with the King of life himself.
But the other aspect of coming out of stars and spots culture is the whole idea of separation whereas Christianity is about fusion. And uncomfortably close fusion at that! And this has always been the plan right through from Jesus's sermon about Eating His Body and drinking His Blood onwards through the centuries since. This morning a Word was brought about God removing the scaffolding.....as though everything in the Temple building process up to this present day has been at one stage of removal....but now was the time for a more direct form of building...His own glory and Life poured into the walls themselves....layer upon layer.
I love the totally chaotic sense of God's order appearing before our eyes, unmanaged,in all corners of the earth, here a voice, there a voice....not a human HQ in sight.
+++++++++++++++++++++++
Daniel Yordy:For some weeks I have been pondering this truth scattered throughout the New Testament, that we are His flesh. A couple of weeks ago, Fred Pruitt sent out an email in which he said the same thing, that he had been pondering for several weeks the meaning of eating His flesh. In other words, this is something the Spirit of God is focusing us on right now as His sons. (I will include some things that Fred shares in my next letter.)
A truth like this, we receive bits and pieces of understanding from the Spirit of God. It is so profound, and our understanding is so limited, yet what is revealed is the very salvation of God.
I am writing this letter for those who are on this journey with me, a journey of knowing Jesus, the Christ, in all of His revelation in us, through us, as us, in this hour of His glory. More than once, people have written to me and said, "Wow, this letter is different than previous ones, it's really life to me." So I compare what I said in that letter and what I said in previous letters and see the same thing. What happened was that before, the reader, though previously interested and drawn to what I shared, was now hearing it, for the first time, through the revelation of the Holy Spirit.
And so I am sharing, particularly in this letter, with those who know that they have the mind of Christ and who hear all things by the revelation of the Holy Spirit.
It is in John 6, just after the feeding of the 5000, that Jesus says these words, "He that eats My flesh and drinks My blood shall have the life of the age to come."
Every single person who heard Him say that turned their backs and fled in horror except the twelve who were, nevertheless, shattered and confused.
We need to understand the extent of the blasphemy and the horror that Jesus chose to speak to the ears of those who heard Him.
Israel, in that day, survived, barely, in a sea of Greek culture. The party of the Sadducees, who had the greater power and wealth, had embraced much of Greek culture, while still remaining Jews. But the memory of the Law of Moses and the Prophets would have long since been swept from the earth in face of the overwhelming onslaught of all things Greek if it were not for a small group of devoted, gallant men who had committed their lives to keeping at least a small group of people in Israel connected to Moses and the Prophets, and separated from Greek culture, philosophy, and paganism.
These men were the Pharisees. Certainly, they get a bum rap, but without them, there would have been no people left for Jesus to minister to.
But the Old Testament did not, nor was it intended to, restore man back to the relationship with God that Adam enjoyed - infused utterly with God, no separation of self. And so the Jewish mind had elevated God as "untouchable" and way beyond the commonality of man. To equate God with the dregs of degraded humanity dragging upon the earth was, to their thinking, the most horrible evil that a person could conceive. Thus the idea of "blasphemy" was a huge deal in the minds of all Jews of that day.
Inside of the Greek culture that pressed at all times against all things Jewish, there was a particular religious cult called the cult of Dionysus. In this cult, a person, usually a child, was presented on the stage as the god, Dionysus. Then, at a certain point in the ritual, the worshipers would tear the child to pieces and eat his flesh and drink his blood. They did this because it was Dionysus who said, "Except you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you."
The Romans were a hard, cruel, and wicked people. They had learned, early on, that tolerating a certain "freedom of religion" was necessary to keep captive peoples quiet, and so they did. But to the Roman sensibility, the cult of Dionysus was so excessive and awful that it was completely banned from the Italian peninsula.
Every Jewish man, woman, and child was fully aware of the gross paganism and filthy ritual of the cultures and peoples that swirled around and through their midst at all times. They were a captive people, living in a land claimed and possessed by others. They were fully aware of the cult of Dionysus and the gallant role of the Pharisees in keeping such evil away from their lives.
Moses, on the other hand, had commanded the people of Israel not to eat the blood with the flesh of an animal, because the blood was the life of the flesh. The Pharisees had expanded greatly on the rituals and rules of Moses, and so great effort was present in every one's mind, to separate the blood so as not to eat any bit of it and thus defile themselves in disobedience to Moses.
Because we have heard these words of Jesus all of our lives, they seem weird to us, but no more. We have no ability to comprehend the awfulness of these words to the minds of those who heard them. For Jesus to quote this most horrible of pagan deities in the most excessive pagan ritual that even the Romans could not stomach was beyond all human reason. And to the Jewish ear it was BLASPHEMY in every possible way and to all extent. It was not possible for Jesus to have dreamed up any more "wicked" and "evil" thing to say to the mind of those who heard Him speak.
Jesus was not speaking in John chapter 6 to the Pharisees, He was speaking to the Jews who had followed Him, who had eaten the bread He had broken and multiplied, who had brought their sick to Him to be healed, who had hung on His every word.
We know that God needed the Pharisees to kill Jesus. Part of Jesus' mission was to provoke the Pharisees, to push their sensibility to the point where they would deliver Him up to be crucified. But when Jesus stood before the Sanhedrin, He limited His blasphemy to an oblique reference that He was One with the Father. That was enough for them to turn Him over to the Romans in a judicial way, which is what God intended. But if Jesus had made this statement in John 6 when He stood before the Sanhedrin, they would have stoned Him to death right there.
Jesus is a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense. He couches the greatest truth of the gospel inside the greatest blasphemy uttered in the pages of Scripture.
"Except you eat My flesh and drink My blood, you have no life in you."
Even to our ears, these words are awful, and we have none of the religious bent of the Jewish mind of that day.
In order to follow Jesus in this present unveiling, we must be willing to embrace that which, to the natural mind and to the religious mind, is utter horror and blasphemy.
To know Him, as He reveals Himself in us, is to be what the world and what Christianity will call a horror and a blasphemy.
And we ourselves, just like the twelve (or shall I say, the eleven, because it is here that Jesus says that one of them is a devil), have only one answer to give in our own confusion at the incredible insanity of what God speaks to us in the New Covenant.
"Lord, to whom shall we go? You alone have the words of age-abiding life."
And so we begin this journey.
1 Timothy 3:16 "And without controversy, great is the mystery - the secret - of godliness: God manifest in the flesh . . ."
There is a set of verses that I have known of all my life. If you said a few of the words from it and asked me where it was, I would have told you instantly, without thought, Ephesians 5.
Yet I have never known these words, nor ever considered what they say.
Ephesians 5:28-32 "So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church. For we are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church."
Did you catch that? I never have, nor have I ever heard any minister or teacher of the word catch it either.
Every human being loves and feeds his flesh. This is a given. That is why those sad Christians who see themselves as separate from God, with the obligation to hear what He says and do it, and who with all zeal put their "flesh" under foot, as they see it, are such an example to us of not the Lord Jesus. I have known people like that, who actually took seriously the injunction to get their flesh under foot. They are my brothers and I love them, but there is no light of Christ in their eyes. The very act of willfully and fervently "subduing the flesh" makes the flesh the greatest thing in their lives.
Every man, woman, and child loves and feeds their flesh. This is a given.
The question is to whom does the flesh belong?
Because, you see, Paul, here, in verse 30, says the most extraordinary and unbelievable thing in all Scripture.
He says that the reason that God loves me, the reason God cherishes and nourishes me is because I am God's flesh.
Is this not what God is speaking in verse 30?
I am God's flesh.
My flesh is His flesh.
My flesh is the flesh of God.
That sounds like blasphemy, doesn't it? It certainly does to me.
But I have put these bounds upon myself at this point in my life. All that God speaks in the New Covenant, I will believe. And if God does not speak it in the New Covenant, I refuse to consider it.
Christ is God manifest in the flesh. Jesus is the eternal entrance into all that Christ is.
Now, Paul here says that I am a "member" of His flesh. That is the same thing as saying "I am His flesh." The reason Paul uses the word "member" is that just as I am His flesh, so you are His flesh. There are always those who will take a word like this and use it to puff themselves up above others; that's why Paul says it this way.
This letter I am writing is supposed to be the third part of "Coming out of Darkness." It is supposed to be a reference to Revelation 3 where Jesus says, "I counsel you to buy of me white garments, that you may be clothed, that the shame of your nakedness may not be revealed." And it is.
But this word is so much more than one part of three. Yet it also has it's place there. To see as Jesus sees, we must accept our own blindness. To enjoy all the riches of heaven, we must accept our own poverty. And to be clothed with His flesh, we must accept our own flesh. For our flesh is His flesh.
The princess must kiss the frog.
You could spend some time thinking about that statement. Ask God to show you what it means.
And so, over the last several weeks, I have been pondering this thing that Jesus says. Faith makes everything God speaks personal to one's self. If it is not personal to me, it is not faith.
I have always carried great and overwhelming shame in my heart. Almost all people who, in their Christian zeal, have attempted to "fix my problem," to persuade me that I had better "get myself straightened out before God," have done nothing more than increase that debilitating and overwhelming sense of shame.
How many times has this thought cast its dark pallor over my soul, "I am so ashamed of myself." I could never count them all.
How many times has God revealed Himself to me? So many times over the years! Yet was it two or three days later that shame re-asserted its dominion over my heart and the glory was hidden from my eyes once again? Never more than three.
And so in recent weeks, as the reality of life in this world hits me with all of its viciousness, and once again shame mounts its familiar assault, both from within and without, I cast all to the wind. I have nothing else to lose.
I speak in my heart and with my voice, with tears streaming down my face.
"Jesus, this shame is Your shame. This flesh is Your flesh. This weakness is Your weakness. This inability is Your inability. This darkness is Your darkness. This sin is Your sin. You have become me. I am Your flesh. I am the cup and the dregs which You have drunk."
And I am clothed with an intimacy and a closeness to Him that I have never before known.
Yes, to the mind that is separate from God this is folly: to the religious mind, it is blasphemy, and to the natural mind, it is stupidity.
But to me, at this moment, as this present age of folly is crashing into ruin, as the heavens are turning, as my own days are caught in great stress and difficulty, it is LIFE.
It is Jesus.