Conformed or Transformed
Salvation is not a Conformation to Someone...Salvation is a Transformation by Someone.
Therefore, conformation without transformation is not salvation...Salvation is transformation plus conformation.
Conformation is an outward action that does not produce the inward action of transformation...Transformation is an inward action that produces the outward action of conformation.
The religious gospel is about conformation not transformation...The Grace Gospel is about transformation that results in conformation.
The question is, how does transformation take place?
The flowing of divine life within us because of redemption...what Christ has done for us...transforms our inner man conforming us to the image of Christ.
The Church of Jesus Christ is made up of living precious stones, why are they precious? Because they are as He is in the world...As Jesus was the express image of God on earth...the living precious stones...transformed and conformed people...are the express image of Christ on earth.
Though the finished work of Christ on the cross FORGIVES ALL, that does not mean that ALL are saved...being saved is a process that begins with repentance...not repentance as defined by religion to escape hell in order to gain heaven...but repentance that fits people to be effective in the Kingdom of God in the earth and entails a life long process of conforming to the image of Christ.
Living stones do not become precious stones by conformation...they become precious stones by transformation.
In Revelation, we are told about a river with precious stones. I take the river as representing the Spirit of Truth. In our spirit is the flowing of the Holy Spirit and as we continually focus our hearts toward the Spirit in our spirit, the river in us begins to fill us and flow out of us. As the river flows from our spirit into our soul our mind is being is being strengthened in its renewal, and we are transforming into precious living stones. The natural man becomes transformed by the flowing of God’s Spirit within and out of His belly flows rivers of living water that gives life to spiritual dead "sinners" as well as bring spiritual life to the religious walking spiritual dead people who do not understand the Gospel if they open up to the Spirit of Truth and reject man-made denominational understanding that has them in religious deception.
If we are living precious stones, then our living will change people. We as His royal priesthood will dispense the life of God as the river of life outflows from our inner most being. We become ministers of His love and grace, we are not ministers of the the letter of the New Covenant...bible knowledge or the quoting of it. Quoting the bible does not mean we understand it, it is only understood and given life by the Spirit of Truth. As we speak or write, people are fed with the Spirit of life, and life always brings change. If we are living, we are always changing for the better. Dead people never change for the better.
That says volumes about the religious system of Christianity. If you never advance beyond the fundamentals of Christianity, then you are dead and not alive. If you have been a Christian for a few years and you are the same today as when you were saved, you are not alive, but dead. To be alive means that Christ has quickened us by His Spirit and He is constantly bringing transformation to our life and we are conforming to the image of Christ because of that transformation. We can only be effectual in the Kingdom of God by dispensing what God is doing in us by allowing Christ to do His work through us as to what we have experienced because of the transformation by God. We cannot minister life to people if we have not undergone salvation transformation by God.
In the religious denominational system, when someone feels they have the call of God to be a preacher, the first thing they do is make plans to attend a denominated Bible School to train to be a minister in that system. One can go to Bible school and learn how to prepare denominated sermons, how to preach denominated messages, learn different marketing strategies to market "their" ministry, and study their particular take on the end times. Study the denominated man-made doctrines, learn homiletics and hermeneutics, BUT that will not qualify them as living precious stones equipped to minister spiritual life.
When the Apostle Paul was called, he did not go to some seminary of higher scriptural learning...no, he was taught of the Lord. When God arrested Saul on the road to Damascus He did not send him to the seminary training in Jerusalem under the apostles. They undoubtedly had the credentials. They had been eyewitnesses to the works of Jesus that people would never know unless they told them. They had personally been with Jesus for more than three years. They heard more fall from His very lips than most men of that day ever hoped to hear in their lives. They had been designated by the Lord Himself to help lay the foundations of the Church! What a wonderful opportunity for Saul to spend two or three years under this sort of ministry experience and he could be trusted to be sent (of Man. the same as the learned seminarians of today are) any place with the gospel of the kingdom.
But God did not send Saul, who was to become the apostle of apostles, to Jerusalem for instruction and training for ministry. Why? "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:8-9). Instead God sends him toward the desert school of obscurity and isolation and gives him a crash course in intimacy with God. There is something infinitely better than merely knowing the written word about Christ..;It is knowing Christ through an intimate spiritual relationship with Him.
"But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by His grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen; immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood: neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me; but I went into Arabia, and returned again unto Damascus. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days. But other of the apostles saw I none, save James the Lord’s brother."
This is why the apostle Paul could say he was a minister, not of the letter, but of the Spirit. He ministered by the Spirit, not from a book of pre-written sermons or seminarian learned scriptural knowledge, he didn't even preach from the Bible. He was ministering as a precious living stone in God’s Kingdom. He was transformed from within and conformed without and the river of life flowed from him to give life to people.
To minister by intellectually learned denominational knowledge is to build with wood, hay and stubble. When God judges by fire, wood, hay and stubble works will be burned up. But His fire does not consume the gold, silver and precious stones works, it purifies it.
Comments
Post a Comment