PARTAKING OF CHRIST

“For we have become partakers of Christ” (Heb. 3:14). The Christian life is not an imitation of Christ, it is a participation in Christ. Exceedingly great and precious promises have been given to us “that through these we may be partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). We must transcend the natural realm, immersing ourselves in the supernatural nature dwelling within. We must experience the power of this indwelling life, the resurrected Christ-life, and, relinquishing our own Self-life, become ever more fully possessed of His divine life. In a word, we desperately need Transformation, the metamorphosis of sin stained spiritual cripples into beacons of radiant light reflecting the holy nature of Christ to a world drowning in sin’s darkness. Transformation is the regenerating life process of “Crucify – Renew – Transform”, which completes the sanctification process of the Holy Spirit as the believer grows into Christlikeness.

The Kingdom Lifestyle, the crucified life, begins in submission to the Lordship of Christ, presenting our body as a living sacrifice and dying daily to Self’s self-serving interests. “Wants” reside deep within the human condition, within the human nature. This unregenerated nature, Self, is, ultimately, the real enemy for it is where our “wanter” lives. My disposition to sin is my claim to my right to my Self. I am my own god. I am not holy or likely to be; I am doomed to failure because “Self” rules, and Self has a lot of worldly wants. The moral transition on my part is to recognize my need and yield my will to the Lord, allowing the Holy Spirit to form Christ in me. Without holiness, without Christ formed in us, no man shall see God. This is the crucified life, the submitting of our Self to death on the cross of Christ that His life, His very nature, might rise up within us and reign. This is a death march we all must make, death by a thousand nails as we visit the cross repeatedly, nailing bits and pieces of Self to the cross.

The Kingdom Mindset, the renewed mind, means what our mind expresses and reflects is patterned after our inner spiritual nature, the DNA of the Godhead. We must willfully and continually Seek... with practical striving, and Set... with inward impulse and disposition, our mind on things above, thinking the Kingdom as a mindset, the focus of our thoughts. As we make God and His Kingdom the center and focus of our mind’s preoccupation we are able to strip away the strongholds of our old thought life, they simply lose their power and strength. We begin to submerge ourselves in our new spiritual nature reflecting the mind of Christ. Eventually we become so much like Him in thought, feelings, and desires that we begin to reproduce the life He lived, inward change manifesting outward... walking in the Spirit!

Transformation, the sanctification process of the Holy Spirit, grows believers into Christlikeness. To access and immerse ourselves in Christ’s supernatural indwelling nature and experience the out flowing power of His resurrected life, something must die, something must be refocused... and someone must be willing. These are not independent   but interdependent processes, operating in tandem and stimulating one another. Much like a nuclear chain reaction, submission and death fuels mental renewal which in turn fuels more submission and death, and so on, growing us exponentially into the likeness of Christ.

“There is another kind of life which science as yet has taken little cognizance.  It obeys the same laws.  It builds up an organism into its own form.  It is the Christ-life.  As the bird-life builds up a bird, the image of itself, so the Christ-life builds up a Christ, the image of Himself, in the inward nature of man...According to the great law of conformity to type, this fashioning takes a specific form.  It is that of the Artist who fashions.  And all through life this wonderful, mystical, glorious, yet perfectly definite process goes on “until Christ be formed in it” (Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World).

SOMETHING MUST DIE

SOMETHING MUST BE REFOCUSED

SOMEONE MUST BE WILLING