I know where I belong. I’m a living stone. In His house I belong.
It is an amazing and thought provoking story, the story of God’s desire for a family and His bringing it about. It is a story of success and tragedy, failure and betrayal and it is found in the bible. Most Christian teaching touches on this story or an aspect of it in some way. The truly mind blowing part is that God is so intentional about this and His attention to detail so concentrated that the conclusions we draw describe a reality of living with Him that is so huge that our minds just cannot comprehend or place it in the humdrum of daily life on this planet.
For many of us, me included, it is a big enough thought that He wants to grow us up spiritually from babes through to fathers in His Family as mapped out by John in his gospel and letters. We are so used to feeling small in this world that the thought that He actually has plans for us that involve us working with Him in a deep and personal way just does not really compute in our hearts. We are good at nodding our heads and saying yes mentally to these ideas, but what we really believe at heart is quite another matter. What I have written and taught is aimed at His truth and to confront the beliefs that lie buried inside which hold us back from truly engaging with our Father who loves us most dearly.
Do you know that you belong in His household, or are you uncertain? Do you know with certainty that you are a child of God with a vital, living connection to Him? What is it to be a son or child of God? One result of being a child of God is to be as Jesus to this world because He dwells inside you. Surrender and let Him flow (John 7:37-39).
We do this by picturing who He really is in our hearts (John 1:1-5, Matt 17:2, Rev 1:13-18) and letting Him flow through us. The flow through you of who He is, makes you Him (light) to the world around you. You can’t help it. But you can shut Him off by your choices. When you realise you have made a shutting off choice, don't beat yourself up, just change it. Refuse to dwell on the mistaken choice, just refocus on Him and restart the flow (1 John 1:7-9).
I am an ardent advocate for Christian family relationship, but not in what I have found to be the generally accepted sense of being committed to a church fellowship first, then working out what our relationship with God is. That may be helpful for a baby christian for a time, but I believe that our Father sees family primarily in terms of an individual realationship with each of His children.
He desires this relationship to be intensely personal and well-connected. In fact, He sees that we need a vital and empowered personal relationship with Him, in order to be a living interface between Him and this world. In the past, I have been taught from many pulpits all sorts of conditioning about being the family of God that pays only lip service to this "vertical" relationship. But over the years I have walked with Him, He has revealed again and again from the story of Jesus that this vertical relationship is in fact the critical part of family life. So much so, that all of the rest of Christian life is completely dependent on this primary relationship with Him being connected and flowing.
He also intended us to walk together in encouraging relationships. I am not an isolationist. Far from it, because in order to walk out the fullness of Jesus' commission Matt 28:18-20 together with Mark 16:15-18 , there must be in each of us a willingness to lay down our lives for each other. There is a natural willingness to do so correctly that is already present in our new creature space.
It is according to His (agape) love and works properly to truly encourage one another, and to disciple (or father/mother) a new disciple to this - the place where they can stand and remain standing before Him, discern and hear His voice, and walk with Him. This is a good family connection with Him which will allow us to truly assist our Father in His work on the earth and begin to be able to encourage a few others.
This is a very much larger place from which to live, beyond the confines of any one form of 'doing church', for then church becomes anything that is happening when the Family gets together - just as Jesus said wherever two or three gather in My Name - and we can begin to successfully get rid of the territorial conditioning that we have learned. So then, are we really expecting to be the fully prophetic and pastoral sons and daughters He has always intended?
If we truly see that church is whatever happens when Family members are around then we will expect to be operating all the day long as His children instead of only at 'meetings', and the expectation we carry will be to be ready to flow with other Family members into any situation, at any time. Now there’s a thought! We like to define and refine all of this stuff because of the need to teach, but where the rubber hits the road, it's all about being:-
- Surrendered to Him more than to anyone or anything else.
- Having our personal inner life focus on who Jesus really is (because as we do, He influences who we are to the world in outward flow)
- Living in a full release of resurrection life that results from baptism in water.
- Baptised in the Holy Spirit, and then filled with the Holy Spirit on an ongoing basis, receiving daily (revelation) bread and knowing and heeding His promptings.
Having seen and understood that, then we are free to see that there is no distinction to Him between secular and religious. He is vitally interested in every smallest part of each of His children’s lives. There is no difference to Him between caring about our secular involvements and caring about our Kingdom involvements. He wants to be involved in all of it with you.
In some Christian teaching, we have been taught that He is really only interested in our Kingdom involvements and abandons us to struggle with the secular. This thinking comes from a religious expectation that is focused on the pinnacle of Christian existence being the main church meeting on Saturday or Sunday mornings. All the politics, and all the thrust of church existence for many, focuses on how wonderful - or not - this meeting is.
Our Father is more interested in how He can help you to do the washing, and how you can experience His overpowering presence with you as you clean the house, sweep the factory, or any of many tasks from mediocre through to great. He is more interested in how you and I can be flowing with Him and, as a result, more effective in our job and at home than for an hour and a half on Sunday. But beginning to believe this messes with our religious concepts of how much He is really allowed to interfere with our lives.
Is He Lord of your life or not? Are you bought by His blood or only partly? How much do you really surrender to Him through the day? How much are you sharing your daily tasks with Him and hearing all His good ideas about what to do? Contrary to what we might think, He doesn’t get nasty if you don’t take His advice, but it's good advice, always designed for the long-term best outcome for you.