On the Grace of our Lord, the Father's love and the communion of the Spirit in the life of the Believer.
2Cor 13:14 is a portion of Scripture quoted so often in church that the mention of it brings closing of service or benediction to mind. In this portion of Scripture which indeed is a prayer, is hidden an eternally powerful truth. It is my confidence that the Spirit of God by the will of God will shed light on our spirits as we seek the light of this truth, embrace it and apply it daily in our walk with God.
It says "the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of God and the sweet fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all". What a prayer! First it is seen in this prayer, THE WORD, THE FATHER and THE SPIRIT. Once upon a time, in the beginning of time, there was a convocation and in that meeting, Elohim, was there with The Logos and His Pneuma, and the result was creation. What if there is a creative mystery embedded in this prayer in the life of a believer? What if also it gives us light into the hidden mystery that triggered creation itself, that reveals the intent behind it and the force that perpetuates it? What if from this light it will be seen the out working of this mystery in the redemption of man and how the believer's appreciation of it will help in daily walk with God?
In the beginning, Elohim created the heavens and the earth...His Pneuma hovered over the surface of the waters and by the Logos, Elohim brought forth light. There was nothing made that did not come forth from the Word. It is what the Spirit acted on. The Logos is the parent material of all creation. It means that for all the believers desire and hope to be in Christ, the Logos remains the parent material. This thus established, a detailed examination of this scripture will now be undertaken.
Grace is the grace of our precious savior. The Bible says that grace and truth or reality, came through Jesus Christ. The grace of Christ through Christ was given to man by the Father to serve the very purpose of creation. Scripture says that our Father is worthy to receive all glory and honor because He has created all things (by the Logos) for his delight. One cannot delight without love so the submission is that creation is a product of God's love. All God has done was for His ultimate pleasure so that creation should be seen as the object of the Father's love. No wonder when He had made each thing He saw to it that it delighted Him indeed and He said it was good. It was not just because He was a perfectionist God. Perfectionism is an element of self and flesh and is not of divine character. God is perfect in Himself and all He does is perfect. He requires that man walks before him perfectly but He is not a perfectionist like perfectionism is defined in man's standard. What then is God's perfection? It is His divine integrity. The integrity of His divine person and His word. The Bible says that in the beginning, the Logos was with Jehovah and that Jehovah and His Logos is one. This means Jehovah is the Logos and the Logos is Jehovah. His perfection requires of man that by faith through the riches of His grace, man conforms to His Logos. Man is to measure up to the measure of the fulness of the stature of Christ, who is the Logos, the very word of God. Note should be taken of this as it will be looked at again in view of the things that will be examined on the Grace of our Lord Jesus.
Oh, what an opening to such a wonderful prayer! The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is no accident that the prayer opens with grace. Man would never know the love of God nor experience the communion of the Spirit without the grace of our Lord Jesus. Notice how Jesus teaches that man must abide in Him as His blessed words abide in the man. He stresses that without this arrangement, the new man can do nothing. This is a blessed mystery. If where the Father, the Logos and the Spirit met there was creation, it follows that nothing creative or new or supernatural will happen to the new man in Christ till this arrangement is effected in his life. He starts with grace and this grace brings him into the very heart of the Father. Here he can ask for anything and it will be done unto him. Here he can do all things but without abiding in the grace of our Lord Jesus, in the Logos, he can do nothing. Why so far, has grace and the Logos been tied together? It is so because Grace is the Logos. The apostle, beloved brother Paul, prayed for the brethren at Ephesus and committed them to the Father and to the Word of His grace- the Logos of His grace. Why? Because, it was and always is able to keep and give inheritances to the saints! Again then, nothing happens in the life of the believer without the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.
When man fell, he fell from God's grace. Grace is not in existence because of the fall or the failure of the Law, there has always been grace. Eden was a typology of grace so that it can be reasoned that God made man and put him in grace. Man had done nothing to earn God's fellowship and provisions which he enjoyed in Eden before the fall. All man had to do was walk with God believing and obeying His word. This is how man was perfect. This is what caused his sinlessness. In examining the perfection of man therefore, it will be of greater gain to understand what causes sinlessness than to merely narrow down perfection to sinlessness. This is how God's sense of perfection is different from the humanistic concept of perfectionism which drives religion and religious behavior. Grace is a place. It is a mindedness. It is a state and it is an abiding presence for the believer. Grace should not only be seen as an event or a divine administration. It is also these things but it will benefit the new man in Christ little in his daily dealings to merely see grace as a dispensation and an event. Grace is what we receive to live by on a daily basis. God's word says that of the fulness of the Logos we make graceful exchanges, grace for grace. This is most remarkable. It means that on this level man is restored to the type and quality of life and relationship he had with the Father from before the fall. By the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, man comes again into the original knowledge and experience of the Fatherhood of God.
The Love of God. This is the very nature of God for indeed God is love. It is also true to say that love is God for God cannot exist apart from His self. Man like God, has a self. God's self is LOVE. The Bible says that our hope in Christ will not be disappointed because the Love of God has been shed abroad in our innermost being by His Pneuma. This means that by the work of grace the man's fallen sense of self has been affected and corrected, the original program now effected. This is the result of the power of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. The new man needs an abiding mindedness of this inward force of the very nature of the Father in his being as well as the abiding mindedness of this love directed towards him to put him at right standing with God. While the love of God is at work for the believer placing him in favor with God, it is also at work in him to restore his sense of self and redefine his self esteem. Because of the love of God he now has "Christ esteem" not self esteem. Christ esteem is simply a christ-like sense and estimation of self and self worth. It is not the same as it is for natural man. Self esteem is tied to the transient but Christ esteem is tied to the eternal. Since the love of God towards the man is Christ and in the man in Christ is eternal, only the love of God can create in the new man Christ esteem. The love of God working in the believer and his awareness of the truth that this love is for him, does not renovate his self esteem which is a part of his flesh, but it subjects it to the higher force of God's love to create that which was not there, Christ esteem. This was Paul's prayer, that Christ be formed in the believer. Rightly did he also pray for the church saying that the spirits of the believers should be strengthened by God's divine ability in the Holy Spirit so that Christ dwells in our hearts through faith (this is Christ esteem, Christ living big in the heart of the believer through steadfast faith), so that the believer being rooted and grounded in love (the love of God), will be able to appreciate the dimensions of Christ and know the love of Christ (that love of God communicated through the incarnate person of Christ), a knowledge so blessed that it surpasses all other knowledge of self and the world, that surpasses all comprehension of self and the world, that in the end, the Saint is filled with the fulness of God. What is the fulness of God? The love of God! Bottom line then is that the believer should mature in the Father's love. In the light of this, suffice it to say that the believer's daily walk in love rises and falls on the degree of maturity in the love of God. Eventually he will love like God. This is perfection. He has been made perfect in love. This is God's will in redeeming man. This is the love of God.
The love of God judges sin in man. By the same love, righteousness was restored to man. Man (and consequently the church) will be perfected in the love of God by the power at work in the new man in Christ, the same which raised Christ from the dead and is able to do exceedingly and abundantly far above all we can ask to think. This is a process. The believer is abiding in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and being brought further into oneness with the love of God till he is mature in it. How then is this creative mystery in the new man actualized?
The last part of the prayer being studied is the SWEET COMMUNION OR FELLOWSHIP OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. The grace of our Lord is a life and the Love of God is the fountain of that life but the fellowship of the Spirit is how the believer lives this life and thrives in it. Being in fellowship means being one with or being together in union and interaction with what or who is being fellowshipped with. Communion or fellowship is therefore an active ongoing and continuous process. Fellowship cannot be implied when considering an occasional interaction. It was only for a time. The fellowship of the Spirit is not so. The sweet fellowship of the Spirit for the believer is how his recreated spirit breathes. Naturally, men breathe in oxygen which serves as fuel to metabolize that which he has taken in as food to provide the energy he needs for living. In the same way, the recreated spirit breathes in the life of God through the communication of the Spirit and in the process derives the energy for the Christ life. The fellowship of the Spirit is the avenue whereby the ministry of the Holy Spirit to the believer is carried out. Here is is comforter, counselor, teacher, standby, advocate. Here he guides the believer into all truth for He is the Spirit of truth. He is also the Spirit of Holiness and His activity in the heart of the saints is the force behind holy living, not the Law or some for of church doctrine or the other. The Believer must learn and cultivate the Godly habit of quiet times. Times of meditation and contemplation are times in the class room of the Spirit. The believer cannot afford a prayer less life. He needs an active prayer life, praying all manner of prayers and supplications for the saints and for the furtherance of the kingdom through the preaching of the Gospel. Indeed it is good for the new man to learn to talk with his ever present companion and to depend on Him for even the smallest details.
Because He is the Spirit of truth, the believer who values and cultivates the communion with Him will grow in the love of the Father and will maximize the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. He will know the hope of his calling and the riches of his inheritance in the saints and the power of God at work in his favor. He will know and possess the things that are freely given to him in Christ because the Spirit will search out and bring to his knowledge the deep things of God that partain to him. Is this not what Abba wants, that we live growing in the knowledge of His will and loving Him as we become what He has made us to be? We are His workmanship created in His very image to do the good works which He had fore ordained from before the foundations of the world; Works He ordained in Christ to be carried out by the enabling of the Grace of our Lord, in Abba's love and by the guidance of His Spirit.
Very clearly indeed, we need always, the GRACE of our Lord Jesus Christ, the LOVE of God and the SWEET FELLOWSHIP of the Holy Spirit to be with us always. The fellowship of the Spirit brings men in contact with the glory of God. God wants to share everything with the new man in Christ. The spiritually dead man cannot take part in the glory. He will be obliterated by it. God in the old covenant said He will not share His glory with any man. This was because He was dealing with spiritually dead men. To the new man He says by His Apostle in the new covenant "Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord; seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence. For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust." These are blessed words. Walking with the Spirit in fellowship brings us into this experience. We have all these things assured to the new man and verily all of God's assurance to the new man in Christ are yes and they are amen. What then have we to loose in maintaining an intimate fellowship with our comforter? What will we miss out on by giving Him full access to our lives and the right of way to influence our volition? Nothing by any means! Thanks be to God who has made this arrangement so that indeed we can stay out of the corruption of this age and shine as beacons of the Kingdom to the many souls who would otherwise be shipwrecked on the dark waters of sin and death.
The glory of God is all that He is and has. It is the heavy weight of His presence and influence. It is the release of His beauty, love and holiness. He once clothed man in it. He is doing it again to the new man in Christ. It was meant to be so. The fellowship with the Spirit in the grace of our Lord and the love of the Father, glorifies the believer in God and God in the believer. This is the blessing of the ages indeed, God dwells in man and man becomes His very likeness in character and authority. This is the glory of God. The glory of God reveals His ways. No man truly knows God till he knows God's ways and they are freely revealed to the believer by the Holy Spirit. In the sweet fellowship of the Holy Spirit, the new man in Christ cultivates the fear of God or holy reverence. This is why the believer is encouraged to walk in the Spirit and not in the flesh. The man who uses the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ as a pretext for sin has not the fear of God and will meet with the Judgment of God. To His children His glory is prosperity but to the hardened in heart it is judgment and destruction. The man who uses grace to justify sinning has opposed the love of God working in him and has no communion with God's Spirit. If he is not restored to this fellowship and guided into the light of the truth, he meets destruction. It is not God who destroys him. It is him who self destruct because the Grace of our Lord cannot defend the man who has not the love of God. This is a very strong statement. Can a believer not have the love of God? There is a sound warning in scripture that points to this possibility. It says not to love this world nor the things in this world, if any man (believer in context) loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. This is the problem of the modern/civilized church. Men are churched through the world's devices so that they come in with the love of the world and are retained by fanning this love. These days service has to be exciting and entertaining. Where we miss it is that edification is sacred and can only be ministered by the unadulterated Logos. Are church people supposed to be boring? The bible says not to be drunk with wine where in there is excesses but be (being) filled with the Holy Spirit ministering to each other with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, rejoicing and making melody IN THE LORD. Now there are lots of scientific and intellectual believers and few spiritual men. Read well, whatever brings believers into the flesh hurts the body of Christ. It doesn't matter how good it is made to look and how many sermons and teaching series are used to "biblify" it.
Because many are not knowledgeable in the ways of God that only communion with His Spirit daily can impart, they have invented and are practicing their own idea of the ways of God. This is corruption. Many do not care about the ways of God, to know His secrets which men like David would gladly give any thing to fellowship with. They care for the acts. They want the exciting sermons, the word of knowledge, the prophecies, the healings and the mighty miracles. Many invest time and energy praying for the power to do mighty works whereas the key is knowing the ways of God.
The doctrine of fellowship is needful in the churches these days. Men should be taught the importance and practice of walking with God. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of God and the sweet fellowship of the Holy Spirit makes a three fold cord that cannot be broken.
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