Tag: works-based religion

543. The Living Water Within: The Gospel of Inclusion

Mike Parsons

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The Gospel of Inclusion: Already in Christ, Already Transformed

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For me, this reminds us of where God is and the life that is within us. So we turn to that source: we are saying we have no other source but him, and we turn to that source of life within us. That life will never run out. And if we keep drawing from it…

Christ in everyone

Jesus used living water as a symbol of that fountain that we can drink from,  rivers of living water flowing from our innermost being, various analogies that he used of that life that would be in us. The religious system has basically turned all of that around to become only true if we do something to allow God to do that, when he’s already done it for everyone.

It says in Corinthians that the things of the spirit are only spiritually appraised. Well, if that is true and our spirit is dead, then how could we spiritually appraise anything? How would anyone ever turn to God if their spirit were already dead? It would only be the soul that would be engaged. But it is not. It is the spirit. So the spirit is already alive. We have already received resurrection life in the spirit, which brings that to our mortal bodies so that we are immortal. And the spirit and the soul need to be coming back into correct relationship. The Holy Spirit dwells in everybody, not just when someone prays a prayer and asks Jesus to come into their heart (which he already is!).

People say, well, no, that can’t be true. But Paul very clearly stated that in Galatians 1:16, where he was talking about what happened to him on the Damascus road. Saul at the time was a Hebrew Pharisee, persecuting believers, thinking he was doing God’s will, resisting what God was wanting to do in him. He was on the Damascus road, going to Damascus to persecute more Christians, when this light came around him. And Paul said, who are you, Lord? And the response was, I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But he describes that in Galatians 1:16 as God being pleased to reveal his Son in me. Not outside of me, that he needed to invite him into him. Not in the light that was around him, but in him.

And the reality is, that is true for everybody but they are not aware of it. They may be living their lives completely independently of that. They may be living their lives in a very religious way. What Paul described there was a revelation of what had already happened. He had been resisting it by choosing to follow his own religious path. And Jesus said, you’ve been kicking against the goads. You’ve been resisting me all this time. And then God called him to go and preach Christ in the Gentiles. If you read most English versions, you’ll find it says Christ among the Gentiles, because they’ve completely misinterpreted it. The same word as Christ in me is the same word as Christ in the Gentiles already. That was Paul’s message. The gospel that Paul preached was inclusion: all are included in Christ already; not that they’re all excluded and have to do some sort of works to get included.

And unfortunately, the gospel has therefore become a gospel of works. It is said to be by grace, but actually it is not. You have to pray a prayer. In their parlance you have to ‘repent’, which in their view means you have to be sorry enough to recognise that you’re a sinner and you need forgiveness and you need God in your life. And unfortunately it’s become for a lot of people very insecure, because they wonder, did I mean it, did I do enough, did God accept what I said?

Everyone is already born from above

How do we think that just praying some sort of prayer is going to suddenly transform us? We are already transformed. We need to come to that realisation. I am not saying we should not pray, or should not ask God to come in, but what we are doing is recognising what has already happened. From that realisation, we accept what has already happened. We do not make it happen. We come to a realisation that it has happened and we experience it. But it already happened for everyone. Everyone is no longer born in Adam. Everyone is already born from above. God already dwells in them and is looking to reveal that to them, through the Spirit, bringing them life so that they can enter into that relationship that Jesus promised, that they would be a dwelling place for God and that they would know.

339. Universal Inclusion in Christ

The disciples already knew the Spirit. The Spirit was with them but not yet in them. That was the promise of drinking from him and having rivers of living water, which was of the Spirit that would not yet be in them because he was not yet glorified, as it says there. So they would have recognised the Spirit, and they knew the difference when Jesus breathed into them and they received that Spirit. They were representative of all. But they knew it. Most people would not have recognised that at the time.

Wouldn’t people know? Well, a lot of people immediately started to know. The gospel spread throughout the whole known world very quickly because they did know. And at that point, they were preaching a message of inclusion. Most evangelicals today preach a message of exclusion: that you will only be included if you pray a prayer, if you are repentant. Now the word repentance, metanoia in Greek, means to have God’s mind, or to have a change of mind, to agree with God, which is what happens when you realise what God has done and you accept it. It totally changes your whole view of your relationship with God, and you then enter into and experience it.

But we have made it works-based. Every church or every stream has their own way of people responding to that: asking Jesus to come into your heart, putting your hand up in a meeting, coming to the front, an altar call. In the Catholic Church it would be taking the sacraments. They all have different ways of doing it, but it’s all based on what they do. Therefore it is works. Which is why no wonder people struggle with the affirmation of that in their lives and are always doubting and in unbelief, because they’re looking at what they did and whether it was good enough. Whereas if we look at what God did, the Father accepted all of us in Jesus, included us all in Jesus even before the foundation of the world. We were predestined to be restored to face-to-face relationship with him. Already done.

People talk about having to be born again. We’re all born from above, because that’s what the term really meant. It’s been coined ‘born again’ because Nicodemus said, well, how can I be reborn in my mother’s womb? He used that illustration because he didn’t get it. And Jesus said, you don’t get earthly things, so how am I going to describe heavenly things when you don’t even get this simple illustration? But the reality was that Jesus was promising what was going to happen, and it happened on the resurrection day, which is why we live in the power of resurrection life. It is so much more than religion has made it out to be. The Catholics focus on Good Friday, and a lot of evangelicals also make a big deal of Good Friday, but Easter Sunday, the resurrection, was the key to it. If Good Friday happened without Sunday happening, it isn’t going to work. But it did happen. Jesus overcame death, conquered death, overcame our lost identity to restore us to life.

420. The Power of Resurrection: Our Union with Christ

Jesus was not killed. He gave up his life. He surrendered his spirit. They could not take his life; he gave it up. He needed to identify with our lost condition so that he could overcome it.

And what happened while Jesus was in the grave? He went into Sheol and preached good news there to those who were imprisoned. There were those who did not have a relationship with God who were imprisoned there, and he went to preach to the spirits of those who were imprisoned. And those who did have a relationship with God would have embraced the reality of that. It says he led captivity captive. He preached, they responded, and he led all those out of that place of the grave into a new place. When he said to the thief on the cross, today you will be with me in paradise, paradise was the part of Sheol where those who had a relationship with God in the old covenant were. You have the illustration of Abraham’s bosom and the gulf between those who had a relationship and those who did not. But Jesus went and preached to them all and led them all out of that place to be with him.

245. What Jesus Did

So the thief didn’t stay long in paradise, because when Jesus was resurrected, he took those out of the grave with him. And literally, some people came out of the grave. It says so in Matthew. They were seen, wandering around Jerusalem telling people what had happened. Now, that is a one-liner in the text, but it happened. I believe those people went back into heaven with Jesus when he ascended. That cloud he went up into heaven in: you could say that is a cloud of witnesses. They didn’t stay around on earth. They went with Jesus, and he went in that cloud of witnesses back into that realm to be seated at the right hand of the Father.

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539. The Misunderstood Image of God | Relationship versus Religion

Mike Parsons

 

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Can you know God? Can you know Allah?

We think of Islam and other religions, some of them being polytheistic, some monotheistic, but actually when you look back into the history of Islam, they chose a moon god out of other gods and then developed that into a monotheistic belief in Allah. But if you go back into the very roots of it, they were polytheistic when they started. They just chose the moon god. Hence we have the crescent moon associated with those kinds of beliefs. Most Muslims don’t know that, because they don’t know their own history and they don’t know where it came from. They tend to live from the Quran and from the teaching of the imams and all that sort of thing, but they don’t really know God, because their God does not allow for relationship. It is a blind trust of Allah who is sovereign, and therefore everything that happens must be the will of Allah. It leaves out the relational, the interactive, and the communicative dimension of that.

So I would not really try and argue with any Muslim about anything. I would talk to them about their experience. Can you know God? Can you know Allah? And they would probably say no, we can’t do that. Allah is holy. And so actually, I can say, well, I do know God. I have a personal relationship with him in which there is communication and sharing and life and joy and peace and love, using words which are evocative of good experiences rather than fear, which is what a lot of them associate with their god. They are afraid to get it wrong. Their knowing of God is by intellectual understanding of a concept rather than a relationship with a person who is loving and kind and good and gentle and all of the fruit of the Spirit. Where do you get angry, harsh and judgmental in the fruit of the Spirit? You don’t, because it isn’t there, and it isn’t in God.

523. How We Can All Connect with God

Why Jesus came

God does make judgments based on verdicts and evidence, but those verdicts are always going to come out of his love. And that is the problem with intellectual knowledge, with theology, with the understanding or study of God through an external medium, the “word”, the Bible. That is how many know God: through what the Bible says about God. But the Bible says very different things about God in the Old Testament and the New Testament, because in the Old Testament they didn’t know God. They thought they knew God and had their own understanding, their own religious construction of him. But he wasn’t the God that Jesus came to reveal. Which is why Jesus came.

Jesus came to reveal the true nature of God as love, and to help them have a relationship with the Father, because they didn’t have God as Father. In one sense they had a wider concept of God as Creator, but the relationship of Father and Son, when Jesus said “Abba”, was scandalous to them. When he said I and the Father are one, it was deeply challenging, because they had a view of God which was coming entirely out of religious knowledge and not experience.

443. Unconditional Love – NO RECORD OF WRONGS

Transactional knowledge of God

Let’s face it, only one of them could go in and meet with God once a year, and that was very much on the basis of, we’re terrible sinners, we need to atone for our sin, will you forgive us? It wasn’t a relationship; it was a transaction from their perspective. So they had a transactional sort of knowledge of God which you could say was covenantal, but they didn’t understand the nature of covenant as God fulfilling himself within the covenant. He tried, but they wouldn’t have it.

He wanted them to come up on the mountain when they came out of Egypt. He invited them into his presence, into that spiritual dynamic of his presence. They were afraid. Why were they afraid? Because they had 430 years of fear living under Pharaoh, and they had very little sense of what they had started with, with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and their sons and all of that. And even then, their relationship with God was somewhat distant. Abraham, in a dream, was put to sleep to come into the presence of God. It never really started off in what Jesus came to reveal.

So they had their own version of God, carrying around idols all the way through the wilderness and into the Promised Land from Egypt, which is what Stephen said, and which is revealed in other places as well. They made a golden calf because they wanted something like other people’s gods, whereas God had invited them to come up into the fire of his presence, which is love, but they saw it as something to be feared. And therefore they sent a mediator, Moses, to go on their behalf. The seventy elders also went with him on their behalf, and then they set up a religious system so that they could have some connection with God at a distance, which was what they wanted. You don’t really get any sense of intimacy with God in much of it. Gideon meets an angel; there are various encounters.

Then the prophets begin to have more of a sense of hearing God speak to them, and I’m sure they were quite shocked by some of the things they said, because that’s when it started to turn around. Sacrifices and offerings you never required, they began to declare, and all of a sudden they were saying things that were leading up to the new covenant, beginning to reveal what God was truly like, and fulfilling all of those promises that they had viewed through their own understanding, revealing them in the truth of Jesus being the Way, the Truth and the Life, the express image of God; being one with the Father and having a relationship of I AM.

379. Created in His Image | The Purpose of Our Existence

John 14

My favourite chapter in the Bible has always been John 14, in which Jesus describes the relationship, describes going to the cross, coming back in resurrection, enabling them to have relationship in which they would know, “Where I am, you may be also.” And of course that’s been totally trashed in the meaning, to mean heaven in the future, where it actually means is where I am in relationship. Jesus says, I am in the Father and the Father is in me, and that is the relationship he was describing that they would have.

And then later on it says, “on that day (resurrection day), you will know this relationship: you will know that I am in you and you are in me and we are in this relationship with the Father together,” which is what he came to unveil. There was no veil. Hence the veil of the temple was torn, showing that there had never been any separation. And then they gradually began to work out that the Gentiles could come into this, that it was for everyone. Even after three and a half years with Jesus, they still didn’t grasp the fact that this was for everybody. He came to take away the sin of the world, not the sin of the Jews.

339. Universal Inclusion in Christ

Tabernacle of David

So the concern was, we can’t associate with Gentile people because they’re unclean. And then the revelation comes from heaven in the vision: don’t call anything unclean that I call clean; take, taste and eat, as a symbol of, you’re all one now, there is no separation or division. And of course they then described this as the tabernacle of David, which was God in their midst, no temple or holy of holies or structure, which is what they had celebrated for quite a while, dancing and celebrating in the presence of the Ark, not hidden away in a box somewhere.

And I guess the sad question I’ve asked a lot is: why did David then want to go and build a temple for the God they had just experienced and enjoyed in their midst? Maybe because the timing of Jesus’ coming was not yet. Things had not yet reached the point where Jesus was going to come, and therefore another system was set up through David and Solomon building the temple, and eventually the next temple with Herod and everything else.

You can know God for yourself

But when I look at what Jesus came to help us come into, he was the door so we could come into a relationship with the Father. Jesus made us to be a dwelling place, a habitation of God, which was what it was all about and what John 14 was describing: you will be like me in this relationship with the Father. They never had that before. None of them. Even John the Baptist, who was the greatest of the Old Testament prophets, the least in the kingdom is greater than he. We look at all the miracles and the amazing things that happened, but they did not know him. He was not in them the way he is in us. There is a huge difference.

And that’s what we come back to: you can know God for yourself. God already dwells in you. He lives in you and he wants you to know him in that inner relationship. That’s what I would encourage people to experience, and if anything, that’s what I would share with others who have not had that experience, to help them think, “I would like that.” So I wouldn’t argue theology with a Muslim over the Quran or the Bible or Abraham or all the other things people try and use to find some sort of common ground. I would simply ask: do you know God by experience? Do you have a relationship with him through experience? And then share the testimony of your experience with God, which would hopefully open their eyes to something they had not considered.

God is awakening the Muslim world

Let’s face it, God is awakening the Muslim world. There is huge revival going on in Muslim countries. People are having visitations of Jesus in dreams. There is great transformation. The gospel is spreading in places like Iran under persecution far more greatly than in our sort of western, “Christmas and Easter” sort of culture where not much else happens, and where we have got inoculated from it all because it has become another religion rather than the relationship God wants all his children to experience and know.

496. When Love Rewired My Mind, Goodbye Religion!

So definitely, stick with the relationship. Present God as a good God, a loving God, a kind God, rather than the angry, judgmental God who is so distant that we can’t really know him. Muslims have very little certainty, because their relationship is based on performance. If they don’t perform to a particular standard, they won’t make it. It’s the works-based mindset: you have to be good enough, keep a standard, perform, live according to the manual, rather than follow Jesus. Jesus made it very simple: come and follow me. He didn’t make it hard. He didn’t say do this and this and this and this and this. He just said, come and follow me, because he invited them into relationship, and then he opened the door for them to have a relationship with the Father and the Spirit through following him.

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