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Another excellent article from Dan Stone. Part 1 of 2
Enjoy Being Yourself
by Dan Stone
The religion I preached for twelve or thirteen years told people what they ought to become. Everybody else told me I "gotta become," so that's what I taught others.
Do you know what that kind of religion is like? It's like a bunch of us who all bought new shoes which were too tight for us. We paid so much for them, we thought we had to smile. But all the time we were smiling, our feet were killing us.
A group of six or seven of us who know "Christ in us" as our hope of glory were together recently, and it was wonderful to have this dimension of truth in common. I find in my own life that I don't need to be with people who really know this mystery, whereas once it was very necessary for me; but I enjoy that kind of sharing and look forward to more of it.
You see, I'm tired of people telling me what I "ought" to do. I want to be with people who already know who they are, so that we can just rejoice in God and know that we are complete in Christ - that we are already holy, already unreprovable, already blameless. When we know this, we can have fellowship in the "I Am" and drop the "I gotta become."
During the years of my ministry when Christianity was a matter of trying to "become," I really did try to smile, because Jesus was supposed to be so good. But it was painful. I came to the place where I began to think that God wasn't a God of love. He was a tyrant. Do you know why I thought He was a tyrant? Because every time I got a little close to Him, He seemed to pull. back a little bit. I'd get near, and He'd draw back and say, "Now you've got to work a little harder to get this next step." And about the time I'd get there, He'd point to the next step and say, `Edited to Remove Profanity ----"Now you gotta work a little harder if you want to get there." And I could never get to Him. I could never reach Him.
I'd scratch my head sometimes and say, "Well my goodness, we're worshiping a God of love, so why can't you ever get to Him?" I always longed to hear that "Well done, good and faithful servant"; but I never did hear it. While I sat in the pew at church I heard: "You're no good. You ought to confess your sins. You ought to try harder." Oh, I sure did want to hear that "Well done, good and faithful servant." But it looked as though the cheese was always just out of my grasp.
If there's a theme verse in my life, I guess it's Galatians 2:20. Recently my first experience with this verse came back to my mind. I remembered that when I got saved as a young man, this was one of the first verses to hit me. I was a pagan in those days. I had no biblical background - didn't know anything about the Bible. I walked into church one Sunday morning, not caring one thing about God, and walked out in love with Him.
The first thing I did was to buy a new Bible. My mother gave me a Bible when I was about eleven because I joined the church, but this was the first one I bought. Buying new Bibles became a habit in my years as a struggling Christian. Every time I had a new experience with God, I bought a new Bible. I've got about thirty of them! But when I got saved I thought I ought to have a new Bible because I had made a new start.
I was working for my father at that time and it was a boring job. He had what we called a "job printing shop." We did hand bills, letterheads, envelopes, and all kinds of jobs of that nature; and I was supposed to be learning the business. But all I did was stand in the back and watch a press go "clickety click, clickety click, clickety click." As long as it went "clickety click," I didn't have a thing to do but be bored. But if it threw a piece of paper out, or something else went wrong, Then I had to do five minutes work. But I'd start it up again and watch it go "clickety click." So I read the Bible, and I came across Galatians 2:20. This was just after I became a Christian. In those days I didn't know anything about the Spirit of God within a person being the Teacher. I may have read it, but I didn't know it. So the only thing I knew was to depend on outside sources, mainly people in whom I had confidence. Well, I really loved this man who had become my pastor, and he always had time for me. So I went to see him because I had read Paul's statement that "I don't live, but Christ lives in me." I didn't understand that, so I decided to ask my pastor about it. Whatever his answer was, it didn't quicken me.
The next time I came across the verse was when I had been called to preach. I was at one of the Baptist colleges, because in those days I was a Baptist. (I'm nothing now - just a Christian.) The one who had a real influence on me at that time was the Bible professor. Somehow or another Galatians 2:20 came up and I went to him. But again, his answer didn't quicken within me. Later I was at Louisville Baptist Theological Seminary, and while studying New Testament Galatians 2:20 once again struck me. I went to another person whom I loved and trusted, and I asked, "Is that real?" But still there was nothing quickening in his answer.
In 1973 I was outwardly and inwardly "bothered." I praise God for that time. That's the way He got my attention. I didn't have my life together either outwardly or inwardly, and He used that to reach me. It was during this period that I met a man who knew Galatians 2:20 as a living reality. What he had to say had a quickening effect. It became real to me. I saw it for the first time as a possibility, now Paul isn't talking about an ideal situation," I said to myself. "He isn't talking about something I'm going to get when I die.
There are so many things that popular teaching, such as I gave for all those years, pushes on into the future. People talk about, "Oh when I get to that place in the sky, I'll have peace!" What are you going to need it for? "When I get to that place in the sky, I'll have faith!" Again, what are you going to need it for? When You need it is now. I found that it was now I was in a desperate situation, didn't you? This is when we need faith, peace, and all of the other fruit of the Spirit.
As I listened to this man unfolding the mystery of "Christ in You, the hope of glory," it was so clear that it was real to him. "That's what the gospel is all about," he said. As a Baptist minister, all that had really grabbed me up to this point was the fact that Christ died for me, and I could trust Jesus for the forgiveness of my sins. That was all I could preach. I had to have three sermons a week, and this was my whole message. I don't mean that I couldn't construct a special sermon for Mother's Day, or a sermon on tithing, or on other topics; but regardless of what my subject was, I'd always get around to the only thing that had so far really grabbed me, which was the blood side of the cross. I really only knew the first five chapters of the book of Romans, and my message was capsulized in Romans 3:25 -justification as a gift of His grace, which is redemption.
Of course, this message left me in a quandary. I was still as self-centered now that I was a saved person as I was when I was a lost person. I was terribly sin-conscious. "Is that the right thing to do, or is this the right thing to do?" "Should I have said this, or should I have said that?" "Lord, forgive me for this, and forEdited to Remove Profanity ----give me for that." And I would repeat the process over and over again, trying to make the right decision, making the wrong one, and then asking forgiveness for my sins.
Every morning I would say something like: "Now, Lord, I want to be a good Christian today, and I don't want to miss a chance to witness if it comes along. I want my language to be clean, my thoughts to be pure, and to live a good life" Then when night came I'd say, "Lord, forgive me for not doing it." If I could get today into the past, I could get it forgiven because the blood had cleansed my sins. But this kept me on a treadmill, and the attention was always on me. How am I doing? Am I succeeding? Am I failing? Am I really imitating Christ? Is He really my Lord? Am I in His will?
Then I discovered that we don't really get on in the Lord until we can just forget ourselves. Because as long as we are preoccupied with ourselves we really see ourselves as a liability to God. As long as you still have the attention on yourself, imagining that there's still something that needs to be done for your soul, you see yourself as God's liability. "Oh, I can't really do that, because I haven't conquered this yet." "I can't do this because I don't have enough love." "I can't do this because I don't have enough faith." The attention isn't on God in all of this, it's on you! And I think we would all agree that this kind of living doesn't measure up to the biographies of the great believers of God in the Bible. It isn't until I got hold of the reality of Galatians 2:20 that I could take old Dan, put him on the shelf, and forget him. Only then could I begin to say, "I'm not God's liability - I'm God's asset."
I'm not bragging, but the truth is God has got to have Dan! Why? To reach Dan's world. You can't reach my world, and I can't reach your world. God has to have me to reach the world that I come in contact with. So I'm His asset. He has to have a vessel, and He needs the kind of vessel that sees himself as O.K.
I'm fifty-three, and I finally decided when I was fifty years old that if it had taken fifty years for God to get me this way I was going to quit trying to change myself. So I went to my shelves and threw all of those "how to" books away. Because if I don't end up like me, how is God going to reach my world?
If I end up acting like you, then I've lost contact with the world God wants me to reach. He wants my warts - the things that look like my failures -so that His strength can come through. He doesn't want me to try to copy you, and He doesn't want you to try to copy me. He wants you to be you, and He wants you to be satisfied with yourself. Because through you as His asset, His vessel, He is going to touch the world you are in contact with.
Now you don't have to be a missionary for God to do that. My wife Barbara and I thought that we might be called to be missionaries, because Baptists think that way. I was so glad when I passed thirty-five years of age, because I knew that you can't be called as a missionary then! But we are all ministers, in all our different walks of life, and that's the way God means it to be.
Why do I stress that we need to get the attention off ourselves? Because there is so much emphasis on the self in our churches. Crucifying the self, for instance. I don't try to crucify the self; I just try to enjoy the uniqueness of myself! I'm through with crucifying myself. Do you know why? Because I've already died. I died in Christ, didn't you? I've already been buried, haven't you? I've already been raised. And I get excited like Paul and say as he did in Ephesians 2:6 that I've already ascended! Haven't you? We're living the ascended life. So we are acceptable to God.
We are all like fruit trees. All fruit trees aren't apple trees. Some are orange trees, some grapefruit, even lemons and limes. Now I've noticed that everyone doesn't run up and grab an apple when fruit is served to a group. Some like oranges, and some like' grapefruit. But if all of the apple trees were trying to be like grapefruit trees, what would people do with all those apples? We are all meant to be just what we are. God isn't trying to change
The key is recognizing that God has actually put His nature into us. I think one of the difficulties people have in believing that Christ already lives in them as a present reality lies in the difficulty they had believing that Satan ever lived in them. Most of us at one time thought of Satan as "out there," so that he just had an influence on us. We really thought we were independent people, but that Satan could have an influence on us and God could also have an influence on us. But we never really knew that from the time of our birth - from the dawn of the human race, when our first parents took the wrong fruit -we were born with Satan in us. You don't find many people who believe that Mr. Sin, Mr. Phony God, Mr. False Way, Mr. Self indwelt them before their conversion. No, we weren't merely under the influence of evil: Jesus rightly said that we were of our father the devil and fulfilled his lusts from within (Jn. 8:44).
I didn't like to hear that at first, because there were some days of my misspent youth when I wasn't quite so bad. But then it dawned on me that whether I was good or bad, everything I did was from unbelief. Everything was based on self. Finally I saw the folly of the "good and evil" game. You can be just as good as you want to be, but if you're indwelt by the wrong god you are lost! The "good and evil" game still amounts to evil.
In I Corinthians 10:16-17 Paul says that we share in not only the blood of Christ, but also the body. We received the benefits of the blood as the necessary sacrifice for sins. But it is the participation in the body that takes care of Mr. Sin - Satan - within us. Paul witnesses to the effect of the body of Christ in his own life, in Galatians 2:20. He teaches it plainly in Romans 6. Paul saw in the death of Christ a spiritual truth that transcends time. He saw that though he wasn't there bodily, he was in Christ on the cross. Whatever Jesus experienced on that cross, he experienced it as Paul (indeed, II Corinthians 5 makes it for the whole human race). So he said in 11 Corinthians 5:21 that God made Jesus to be sin. He looked at Him and said, "He is really the sinful human race. I make Him the embodiment of all who are in sin." As a sinner, I was in that body; and what that body experienced, I experienced. So I have already died.
If you are not a Christian, then you are a spirit in prison. If you are a Christian, you are the spirit of a just man made perfect. Spirit is who we really are; it is where we live. Now if I died in Christ, I was also buried, because He was buried. Jesus' opponents went to Pontius Pilate and said, "He's dead, but we hear a rumor that they plan to steal His body and claim He was raised from the dead. Put a seal on that tomb if you will, and guard the tomb, because we're absolutely convinced that He's dead and we want to be sure He stays in there."
But just as surely as Jesus was dead, and I in Him, God raised Him from the dead the third day and I rose with Him. That's why Paul says to walk in newness of life. But this isn't Christ and me, or Christ with me. A lot of people get excited about what I preach about "Christ in you, the hope of glory," and they run up to me after a meeting and say, "I've heard that before - I know what you are talking about. I've read Andrew Murray," or something similar. No, no, no! We're not talking about Christ and me, and we're not talking about Christ with me.
We're talking about Christ having replaced Mr. Sin in us so that He now lives His holy, blameless, unreprovable, perfect life through us. This is a replaced life. It's not Christ and me, or Christ with me, but Christ is me. Not that Christ is Dan, you understand, because I'm just the vessel to contain Him. But He is evidencing His love life, His concerned life, His jealousy for the world - my world - through me. How? As me. What I'm interested in, He's interested in. Where I go to speak, He speaks. Where He takes me, He's there. What I'm doing, He's doing. And the only way He has of doing that in my world is as me.
This is what Paul saw. He said that he filled up the suffering of Christ in his body. He was an extension of Christ. It wasn't Paul living. It looked like Paul - people called him Paul. But it was Christ, the hidden One, living out His concerned life for the world as Paul.
When this dawned on me, I saw the reality of spirit. When God told me I had died, I stopped disagreeing with Him. When God said that He had buried me, I agreed with Him. And when He said that He raised me, I said, "Yep, You raised me." I saw that I was already walking in the heavenlies. I was already participating in the kingdom life.
Enjoy Being Yourself
by Dan Stone
The religion I preached for twelve or thirteen years told people what they ought to become. Everybody else told me I "gotta become," so that's what I taught others.
Do you know what that kind of religion is like? It's like a bunch of us who all bought new shoes which were too tight for us. We paid so much for them, we thought we had to smile. But all the time we were smiling, our feet were killing us.
A group of six or seven of us who know "Christ in us" as our hope of glory were together recently, and it was wonderful to have this dimension of truth in common. I find in my own life that I don't need to be with people who really know this mystery, whereas once it was very necessary for me; but I enjoy that kind of sharing and look forward to more of it.
You see, I'm tired of people telling me what I "ought" to do. I want to be with people who already know who they are, so that we can just rejoice in God and know that we are complete in Christ - that we are already holy, already unreprovable, already blameless. When we know this, we can have fellowship in the "I Am" and drop the "I gotta become."
During the years of my ministry when Christianity was a matter of trying to "become," I really did try to smile, because Jesus was supposed to be so good. But it was painful. I came to the place where I began to think that God wasn't a God of love. He was a tyrant. Do you know why I thought He was a tyrant? Because every time I got a little close to Him, He seemed to pull. back a little bit. I'd get near, and He'd draw back and say, "Now you've got to work a little harder to get this next step." And about the time I'd get there, He'd point to the next step and say, `Edited to Remove Profanity ----"Now you gotta work a little harder if you want to get there." And I could never get to Him. I could never reach Him.
I'd scratch my head sometimes and say, "Well my goodness, we're worshiping a God of love, so why can't you ever get to Him?" I always longed to hear that "Well done, good and faithful servant"; but I never did hear it. While I sat in the pew at church I heard: "You're no good. You ought to confess your sins. You ought to try harder." Oh, I sure did want to hear that "Well done, good and faithful servant." But it looked as though the cheese was always just out of my grasp.
If there's a theme verse in my life, I guess it's Galatians 2:20. Recently my first experience with this verse came back to my mind. I remembered that when I got saved as a young man, this was one of the first verses to hit me. I was a pagan in those days. I had no biblical background - didn't know anything about the Bible. I walked into church one Sunday morning, not caring one thing about God, and walked out in love with Him.
The first thing I did was to buy a new Bible. My mother gave me a Bible when I was about eleven because I joined the church, but this was the first one I bought. Buying new Bibles became a habit in my years as a struggling Christian. Every time I had a new experience with God, I bought a new Bible. I've got about thirty of them! But when I got saved I thought I ought to have a new Bible because I had made a new start.
I was working for my father at that time and it was a boring job. He had what we called a "job printing shop." We did hand bills, letterheads, envelopes, and all kinds of jobs of that nature; and I was supposed to be learning the business. But all I did was stand in the back and watch a press go "clickety click, clickety click, clickety click." As long as it went "clickety click," I didn't have a thing to do but be bored. But if it threw a piece of paper out, or something else went wrong, Then I had to do five minutes work. But I'd start it up again and watch it go "clickety click." So I read the Bible, and I came across Galatians 2:20. This was just after I became a Christian. In those days I didn't know anything about the Spirit of God within a person being the Teacher. I may have read it, but I didn't know it. So the only thing I knew was to depend on outside sources, mainly people in whom I had confidence. Well, I really loved this man who had become my pastor, and he always had time for me. So I went to see him because I had read Paul's statement that "I don't live, but Christ lives in me." I didn't understand that, so I decided to ask my pastor about it. Whatever his answer was, it didn't quicken me.
The next time I came across the verse was when I had been called to preach. I was at one of the Baptist colleges, because in those days I was a Baptist. (I'm nothing now - just a Christian.) The one who had a real influence on me at that time was the Bible professor. Somehow or another Galatians 2:20 came up and I went to him. But again, his answer didn't quicken within me. Later I was at Louisville Baptist Theological Seminary, and while studying New Testament Galatians 2:20 once again struck me. I went to another person whom I loved and trusted, and I asked, "Is that real?" But still there was nothing quickening in his answer.
In 1973 I was outwardly and inwardly "bothered." I praise God for that time. That's the way He got my attention. I didn't have my life together either outwardly or inwardly, and He used that to reach me. It was during this period that I met a man who knew Galatians 2:20 as a living reality. What he had to say had a quickening effect. It became real to me. I saw it for the first time as a possibility, now Paul isn't talking about an ideal situation," I said to myself. "He isn't talking about something I'm going to get when I die.
There are so many things that popular teaching, such as I gave for all those years, pushes on into the future. People talk about, "Oh when I get to that place in the sky, I'll have peace!" What are you going to need it for? "When I get to that place in the sky, I'll have faith!" Again, what are you going to need it for? When You need it is now. I found that it was now I was in a desperate situation, didn't you? This is when we need faith, peace, and all of the other fruit of the Spirit.
As I listened to this man unfolding the mystery of "Christ in You, the hope of glory," it was so clear that it was real to him. "That's what the gospel is all about," he said. As a Baptist minister, all that had really grabbed me up to this point was the fact that Christ died for me, and I could trust Jesus for the forgiveness of my sins. That was all I could preach. I had to have three sermons a week, and this was my whole message. I don't mean that I couldn't construct a special sermon for Mother's Day, or a sermon on tithing, or on other topics; but regardless of what my subject was, I'd always get around to the only thing that had so far really grabbed me, which was the blood side of the cross. I really only knew the first five chapters of the book of Romans, and my message was capsulized in Romans 3:25 -justification as a gift of His grace, which is redemption.
Of course, this message left me in a quandary. I was still as self-centered now that I was a saved person as I was when I was a lost person. I was terribly sin-conscious. "Is that the right thing to do, or is this the right thing to do?" "Should I have said this, or should I have said that?" "Lord, forgive me for this, and forEdited to Remove Profanity ----give me for that." And I would repeat the process over and over again, trying to make the right decision, making the wrong one, and then asking forgiveness for my sins.
Every morning I would say something like: "Now, Lord, I want to be a good Christian today, and I don't want to miss a chance to witness if it comes along. I want my language to be clean, my thoughts to be pure, and to live a good life" Then when night came I'd say, "Lord, forgive me for not doing it." If I could get today into the past, I could get it forgiven because the blood had cleansed my sins. But this kept me on a treadmill, and the attention was always on me. How am I doing? Am I succeeding? Am I failing? Am I really imitating Christ? Is He really my Lord? Am I in His will?
Then I discovered that we don't really get on in the Lord until we can just forget ourselves. Because as long as we are preoccupied with ourselves we really see ourselves as a liability to God. As long as you still have the attention on yourself, imagining that there's still something that needs to be done for your soul, you see yourself as God's liability. "Oh, I can't really do that, because I haven't conquered this yet." "I can't do this because I don't have enough love." "I can't do this because I don't have enough faith." The attention isn't on God in all of this, it's on you! And I think we would all agree that this kind of living doesn't measure up to the biographies of the great believers of God in the Bible. It isn't until I got hold of the reality of Galatians 2:20 that I could take old Dan, put him on the shelf, and forget him. Only then could I begin to say, "I'm not God's liability - I'm God's asset."
I'm not bragging, but the truth is God has got to have Dan! Why? To reach Dan's world. You can't reach my world, and I can't reach your world. God has to have me to reach the world that I come in contact with. So I'm His asset. He has to have a vessel, and He needs the kind of vessel that sees himself as O.K.
I'm fifty-three, and I finally decided when I was fifty years old that if it had taken fifty years for God to get me this way I was going to quit trying to change myself. So I went to my shelves and threw all of those "how to" books away. Because if I don't end up like me, how is God going to reach my world?
If I end up acting like you, then I've lost contact with the world God wants me to reach. He wants my warts - the things that look like my failures -so that His strength can come through. He doesn't want me to try to copy you, and He doesn't want you to try to copy me. He wants you to be you, and He wants you to be satisfied with yourself. Because through you as His asset, His vessel, He is going to touch the world you are in contact with.
Now you don't have to be a missionary for God to do that. My wife Barbara and I thought that we might be called to be missionaries, because Baptists think that way. I was so glad when I passed thirty-five years of age, because I knew that you can't be called as a missionary then! But we are all ministers, in all our different walks of life, and that's the way God means it to be.
Why do I stress that we need to get the attention off ourselves? Because there is so much emphasis on the self in our churches. Crucifying the self, for instance. I don't try to crucify the self; I just try to enjoy the uniqueness of myself! I'm through with crucifying myself. Do you know why? Because I've already died. I died in Christ, didn't you? I've already been buried, haven't you? I've already been raised. And I get excited like Paul and say as he did in Ephesians 2:6 that I've already ascended! Haven't you? We're living the ascended life. So we are acceptable to God.
We are all like fruit trees. All fruit trees aren't apple trees. Some are orange trees, some grapefruit, even lemons and limes. Now I've noticed that everyone doesn't run up and grab an apple when fruit is served to a group. Some like oranges, and some like' grapefruit. But if all of the apple trees were trying to be like grapefruit trees, what would people do with all those apples? We are all meant to be just what we are. God isn't trying to change
The key is recognizing that God has actually put His nature into us. I think one of the difficulties people have in believing that Christ already lives in them as a present reality lies in the difficulty they had believing that Satan ever lived in them. Most of us at one time thought of Satan as "out there," so that he just had an influence on us. We really thought we were independent people, but that Satan could have an influence on us and God could also have an influence on us. But we never really knew that from the time of our birth - from the dawn of the human race, when our first parents took the wrong fruit -we were born with Satan in us. You don't find many people who believe that Mr. Sin, Mr. Phony God, Mr. False Way, Mr. Self indwelt them before their conversion. No, we weren't merely under the influence of evil: Jesus rightly said that we were of our father the devil and fulfilled his lusts from within (Jn. 8:44).
I didn't like to hear that at first, because there were some days of my misspent youth when I wasn't quite so bad. But then it dawned on me that whether I was good or bad, everything I did was from unbelief. Everything was based on self. Finally I saw the folly of the "good and evil" game. You can be just as good as you want to be, but if you're indwelt by the wrong god you are lost! The "good and evil" game still amounts to evil.
In I Corinthians 10:16-17 Paul says that we share in not only the blood of Christ, but also the body. We received the benefits of the blood as the necessary sacrifice for sins. But it is the participation in the body that takes care of Mr. Sin - Satan - within us. Paul witnesses to the effect of the body of Christ in his own life, in Galatians 2:20. He teaches it plainly in Romans 6. Paul saw in the death of Christ a spiritual truth that transcends time. He saw that though he wasn't there bodily, he was in Christ on the cross. Whatever Jesus experienced on that cross, he experienced it as Paul (indeed, II Corinthians 5 makes it for the whole human race). So he said in 11 Corinthians 5:21 that God made Jesus to be sin. He looked at Him and said, "He is really the sinful human race. I make Him the embodiment of all who are in sin." As a sinner, I was in that body; and what that body experienced, I experienced. So I have already died.
If you are not a Christian, then you are a spirit in prison. If you are a Christian, you are the spirit of a just man made perfect. Spirit is who we really are; it is where we live. Now if I died in Christ, I was also buried, because He was buried. Jesus' opponents went to Pontius Pilate and said, "He's dead, but we hear a rumor that they plan to steal His body and claim He was raised from the dead. Put a seal on that tomb if you will, and guard the tomb, because we're absolutely convinced that He's dead and we want to be sure He stays in there."
But just as surely as Jesus was dead, and I in Him, God raised Him from the dead the third day and I rose with Him. That's why Paul says to walk in newness of life. But this isn't Christ and me, or Christ with me. A lot of people get excited about what I preach about "Christ in you, the hope of glory," and they run up to me after a meeting and say, "I've heard that before - I know what you are talking about. I've read Andrew Murray," or something similar. No, no, no! We're not talking about Christ and me, and we're not talking about Christ with me.
We're talking about Christ having replaced Mr. Sin in us so that He now lives His holy, blameless, unreprovable, perfect life through us. This is a replaced life. It's not Christ and me, or Christ with me, but Christ is me. Not that Christ is Dan, you understand, because I'm just the vessel to contain Him. But He is evidencing His love life, His concerned life, His jealousy for the world - my world - through me. How? As me. What I'm interested in, He's interested in. Where I go to speak, He speaks. Where He takes me, He's there. What I'm doing, He's doing. And the only way He has of doing that in my world is as me.
This is what Paul saw. He said that he filled up the suffering of Christ in his body. He was an extension of Christ. It wasn't Paul living. It looked like Paul - people called him Paul. But it was Christ, the hidden One, living out His concerned life for the world as Paul.
When this dawned on me, I saw the reality of spirit. When God told me I had died, I stopped disagreeing with Him. When God said that He had buried me, I agreed with Him. And when He said that He raised me, I said, "Yep, You raised me." I saw that I was already walking in the heavenlies. I was already participating in the kingdom life.
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