Let us learn a deep lesson God wants to teach us. Ponder the words that make up the name of our Ministry: “FOLLOW ME!”
Before we can follow our Master, we must first believe very, very deeply that He is actually here with us. If He is not truly here with us, we have no one to follow, do we? So our training as disciples must begin with this first step:
We must come to believe very deeply in the revelation God has given us about the Resurrection from the dead of His beloved Son Yeshua…the eternal living Word that comes right out of the heart of Almighty God Himself!
Matthew 28:5-7
The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; for I know that you are looking for Yeshua (Jesus) who has been crucified. He is not here, for He has risen, just as He said. Come; see the place where He was lying. Go quickly and tell His disciples that He has risen from the dead; and behold, He is going ahead of you into Galilee, there you will see Him; behold, I have told you.”
Yeshua is Real! Yeshua is truly risen from the dead! Yeshua is truly present with you and in you, and with me and with all of His disciples. He is with us by the Power of God’s own Holy Spirit! The job of the Holy Spirit is to make God’s living Word REAL, DYNAMICALLY ALIVE and PRESENT and FRUITFUL…for us…in us…and through us.
So this is where we must all begin: we must put on His ‘yoke’, in spirit and in truth. That means we begin to believe very deeply and continually… in a life-transforming way… that our Master is alive and present with us and in us and all around us at every moment of our existence. We begin to interact with Him in every circumstance, activity, situation and interactive relationship we encounter on this Earth. He is with us… and He will never leave us or forsake us. We have His Blood Covenant promise on this. This is what He said to His disciples who were eye witnesses to His Resurrection. After He rose from the dead He appeared to them. And just before He ascended back into Heaven, this is what He promised:
Matthew 28:18-20
“And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, ‘All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations (gentiles) baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
He is not with us in the flesh as He had been with them before He ascended to Heaven; He is with us in an even better way. He is not near us or around us. Now, thanks to the Gift of God’s Holy Spirit, He is able to live IN US! This is true at all times. And because He truly lives in us, we are able to FOLLOW Him. We can abide and interact with Him and ‘put on His yoke’, which is a Jewish way of saying, ‘learning, absorbing and living out His interpretation of the Scriptures’. He is our Master and Teacher and ‘live template’. We are His students and Blood Covenant friends.
So, because He actually abides within us and all around us, we do not seek Him occasionally. His Presence is not merely in certain places within certain buildings. He abides within us! We are ‘God Bringers’! We bring His Presence with us, into any place we enter. Idolatrous pagans are the ones that have temples. But New Covenant disciples ARE temples! They are living, breathing and moving temples of the living God. They contain the Presence of His Spirit and the Spirit transmits into us the indwelling Presence of our risen Lord!
This is what makes us unique. This is what separates us from all man-made religions. Every man-made religion has a dead founder with some kind of book that the dead founder left behind. But our Founder is alive and always present with us and in us! The book we have is a revelation of His living Presence in the midst of His people. It is the written Word that is revealing the living Word. And the living Word is abiding and operating within His disciples…so that through them and in them and from them, He can fulfill every speck of what is written about Him. So we are not a mere religion. We are here to be living manifestations of the living Word of the living God, as He makes His Resurrection Presence known and experienced from within our yielded, crucified flesh!
So in the beginning, after we repent of our Sin and repent of our arrogant, self-indulging, radically independent, ‘Head-less’ life, the Lord breathes His own Holy Spirit into us. Our original radically independent existence cannot be improved or repaired. It must be forsaken, crucified and removed from the picture every day. Then God’s living Word is able to live and operate from within us and restore us to His original ‘image and likeness’ level of humanity. No man-made religion can penetrate or transform us that deeply. Religion can fill our heads with words and ideas; but it cannot begin to transform us into brand new creations, pleasing and righteous in the sight of Almighty God.
Only when we submit and surrender to the Authority of God’s Word, will we forsake the Serpent’s Lies and enter into God’s Eternal Truth. Only when God’s Living Word becomes our Lord or ‘Head’, are we set free from our state of living death so that God can impart a share in His Eternal Life to us. So we must see through the Serpent’s deceitful delusions, under which we’ve been laboring. We must deny the false satanic declaration that we, by our own personal devices, can learn and grow to become just as wise and capable as God is. When we admit and declare our actual personal bankruptcy and total neediness as creatures, then God, who is our sole Source, is free to join us to Himself and all of His Fullness, through His Perfect Finished Word and Holy Spirit. Then, since we no longer claim to have independent lives of our own, we become one with God, in His Eternal Covenant, by the Authority of His Word. By our obedient faith, we become one with our Messiah’s death and perfect atonement. Then God’s Spirit begins to fill us and makes us alive with our Messiah’s Resurrection Presence. Then we can begin to ‘fellow’ Him and God can begin to abide and operate from within our regenerated spirits.
Becoming Temples of the Holy Spirit
That is what happens when we repent of living apart from and in competition to Him, and begin to live as one with Him and to depend on and derive everything we are and have and do, from His Perfect indwelling Presence. Then the Holy Spirit goes to work, transmitting the perfect Presence of Yeshua’s Humanity and Character and obedient Love Nature and Heavenly Disposition into our innermost being and we become living temples of God’s Holy Presence! Beloved realize this: when that happens, we are equipped and privileged and honored to bring God’s Presence with us, wherever we go! That can only happen when we learn to forsake our former ‘Head-less’ way of living, our ‘original self-life’ that we inherited from fallen Adam and learned from the self-adoring, self-exalting ways of this God-less world and its system. Now we defer to our Master, Yeshua, so that He can be free to live His Life from within us. He died first so that we could have eternal Life. And now His disciples die to their original life, so that our risen Lord can live His Resurrection Life from within our flesh and teach us to abide in it with Him!
So God’s living Word is like God’s Vine to us; and we become the living branches of God’s Vine (John 15). The Vine produces the supernatural ‘Fruit’ that only God can produce…and the disciples who are one with Him and follow Him, are able to bear that Fruit for Him as He produces it in their lives and circumstances and relationships.
So…in the beginning, we must first learn to believe that He is here with us and in us. If we do not know this, we know nothing and we can do nothing that will profit for eternity and the Kingdom of Heaven. This is why I repeat this so often and try to say it in so many different ways. If we’re going to be disciples that are worthy of the name, we must know and do this! We must believe that our Master lives in us…so that we can know that He is here to produce the Fruit that is worthy of God and that will pass His Perfect Judgment. God is Perfect! His nature is Perfect. His standards of Righteousness are Perfect. But we humans are sinful and self-absorbed and ego-centered and very limited, Sin-corrupted and therefore, imperfect by nature, no matter how religious we may try to become while we continue to cling to our fallen state in a vain hope of improving and saving it! It is already condemned by God. So the only way for God to save us is by requiring us to die to it once and for all. When we die to it, then our Master is free to live His Life from within us.
God Himself must be free to meet His own Perfect standards…perfectly…from within our flesh…and in our name. So our Master, the living Word of God, must come to live within us, so that He can obey His Father and fulfill His commandments and meet His Perfect standards…Perfectly…in our name. And when we learn to live and rest and breathe and act in His Name, His Righteousness becomes our righteousness…since no fallen Sin-corrupted son of Adam has any spiritual life or righteousness of his own. The true, living God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob Himself must share His Righteousness with us, or we will never pass His final Judgment!
Dear ones…after we believe and repent and are saved…the very first thing we must begin to learn is to believe deeply and permanently, that we are always in the Presence of our Lord and Master, Yeshua. And if you truly come to believe this…something new will appear in your daily life. You will naturally begin to pay more attention to Him. You will rearrange your life to accommodate to His Presence, like a gracious host extends hospitality to the most honored guest imaginable coming to abide with you with your home. Your spirit, soul and body are His home from now on. So naturally you will spend more and more time alone with Him. You will develop your own personal Place of Prayer so that you can commune with Him and wait upon His good pleasure. This will happen indoors or outdoors, wherever you may happen to be. Wherever it is, He will be with you at all times. But in addition to what takes place at all times and in every place, there should also be a special place you will pick for yourself…a place where you will habitually go to be alone with your Master. And there you will abide in the Perfection of His living Presence…so He can teach you how to Follow Him as His disciple. That place will be your disciple class room. There He will teach you what He wants you to learn. There you will learn to abide with Him everywhere, at all times, without any interruption or distraction. What you learn in that class room will be what you take with you no matter where else you may go.
There can be no substitute for the Lord Himself. No fallen, Sin-corrupted man can replace Him. No created person or thing or system or organization can be allowed to come between you and your Lord. He is here…and in Him is contained all the Fullness of God Himself…and so that is all that matters to us. If we have Him…we have EVERYTHING! And we must never allow any demon or other created thing or person to take this away from us. It is our God-given birthright and eternal Inheritance. And no one has the right to try to take it from us. Nor do we have the right to ignore it and try to replace it with something else. There is nothing else!
So it becomes our practice to learn to spend all of our time in His Presence and learn to follow His lead. We learn to abide in His Presence all the time, by practicing to do it in our special prayer closet classroom. There we learn to receive everything from Him and from Him alone. He is God…there is no other! He, the living Word of God, is Everything to us! He creates all things in the universe and holds them all together in existence. We, like every other creation of God, depend on His Word for every heartbeat, every breath and every brain wave we will ever have. It all comes from our Master. God puts all of His Fullness into His living Word and sends Him to us to be our Everything. God does everything through His living Word. And the living Word is the Master that calls us to serve and love and follow Him. Since we depend on Him for all things at all times, we learn to abide with Him and rely upon Him, accordingly.
That is why new disciples must be trained to spend more and more time, each day and night, being alone with Him, abiding with Him, waiting upon Him, learning to hear and obey His voice, attending to His every wish. We abide in His Presence not just a few times a day, but ALWAYS! He is Real; He is risen from the dead! And He is always living in us. So we attend to His will, His timing and His good pleasure because He is our Lord and our Source and we have no other. When we abide with Him alone…He can teach, train, correct, discipline and counsel us. He can warn us of danger and direct our steps and equip us with what we will need to carry out His will.
We are not doing things FOR God. We must learn to do everything FROM God. We must allow God to be God to us…instead of trying to speak or act for God on our own Sin-corrupted initiative. God does not need our help or our advice. He requires our faith and trust and obedience at all times. So His living Word and Holy Spirit must always be leading us; and we must always be following our Lord. If He does not tell us to do something, we must NOT do it. But if He does tell us to do something, we MUST do it. He is the Lord and we are His willing, loving bond slaves. And that is why the first thing new disciples must learn is to live lives of continual interaction with our Master, continual service to Him, given in our continuous prayer:
2 Thessalonians 1:11-12
“To this end also we pray for you always that our God will count you worthy of your calling, and fulfill every desire for goodness and the work of faith with power, so that the name of our Lord Jesus will be glorified in you, and you in Him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Begin to abide with Him continually, dear ones. We must be taught by Him to live in His Wisdom. I urge you to abide continually in the Presence of Wisdom Himself. Feast on His Perfect Presence. Feed on Him; drink deeply of Him. Let Him be your Food and Drink and your Life and Love and Righteousness and Purity. He is with you to guide your every step. This is why the psalmist wrote these awesome words of prayer to God, concerning His precious living and written Word:
Psalm 119:104-106
“From Your precepts I get understanding; therefore I hate every false way. Your Word is a Lamp to my feet and a Light to my path. I have sworn and I will confirm it, that I will keep Your righteous ordinances.”
I hope this will help you to begin to learn the ways of Disciple Wisdom dear ones. Learn this and teach it to others. Do not worry about doing nice things for God, or, like God. Only He is Almighty God; you are not. So listen to what He tells us:
Isaiah 66:1-2
“Thus says the Lord, ‘Heaven is My throne and the earth is My footstool. Where then is a house you could build for Me? And where is a place that I may rest? For My hand made all these things, thus all these things came into being,’ declares the Lord.
“‘But to this one I will look, to him who is humble and contrite of spirit, and who trembles at MY WORD!’”