The following is an email (and my response) I received from a brother in Christ, a fellow sojourner, just recently. For those of us who know we have fully given our lives and self over to the Lord and have died on the cross (perhaps, the few chosen out of the many called?), or are in the process of dying to self and this world, the following should sound familiar. For those who are content practicing a religion about God and His Son (the many called), the following will probably not register that much or even at all!
Good Morning Mark – I am not sure if this helps, but it did for me. I heard Lance Lambert say in a message the other day, that when the Lord went up on the piece of wood, on that Tree of Death, we either went up with Him, or we chose to stay on the ground thanking and praising Him, trying to explain it all, to appropriate it all (essentially what most of what modern Christian faith represents), but never really committing to hang there ourselves. Yet Paul said he had been crucified there with Christ. Have we? All things in the New Creation rise up out of the rotting ground and decay of the old – it is newness of life, as life out of death, much like a forest bed and all of the abundant, verdant, ever-increasing life there because if it.
It is not so much about the world’s things, but about whether they have been “made safe” or not. Paul teaches us that in one sense things don’t matter (don’t touch this or don’t touch that), but what matters is whether we have died to those things, to all the world’s things, even good and normal things, and that they have died to us. It may be easy relatively to “give up” things that hurt us, but what about things that in themselves are good or very normal, but in an uncrucified believer are dangerous? This is different for each of us, depending on how much the cross has taken from the old man in us. I like the translation Sparks uses – “my interest in this world has been crucified”. In one sense, it is all under water, part of the old creation, all that which is being replaced.
The Lord himself could travel everywhere in this world, and touch many things (He came eating and drinking; even called by some a winebibber), because it had not no spiritual power over Him. He could touch money, any amount of it, or power or pleasure, because He was totally abandoned to the Father’s will and plans. He knew what it represented, the powers in the air behind it all, and that it was all going to be replaced. He was free! And the cross had done that!
As for me, may I never boast about anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Because of that cross, my interest in this world has been crucified, and the world’s interest in me has also died. (Galatians 6:14 NLT)
A truly crucified people are never in danger of the world. It is only when the Cross has not done its work that the world has a place. The world has no place with a crucified man or woman, or a crucified company of believers. The Cross is a great defensive against the world. If you want to keep the world out, put the Cross in its place. If the Cross is truly in its place in fullness, then everything else will come into order. The Cross is the great defensive against the world. The Cross is the great defensive against evil powers. The Cross makes everything safe; it makes everything safe for the Lord.
You see, the Lord wants to commit Himself. He wants to trust Himself to His people, but if the Cross is not there at work, the Lord cannot trust Himself to them. The Lord says, “It is not safe for Me to give Myself there, or I should be involved in their un-crucified condition.” The Cross makes everything safe for the Lord, and the Cross makes everything safe for the Church. If the Cross is really at work in all of us, we can trust one another. It is quite safe to trust yourself to a crucified man or woman.
By T. Austin-Sparks from: The Altar (The Cross) Governs Everything
My response:
All of this describes, in so many ways, why I feel so isolated on this planet, and I would venture a guess that this is true with all of you also. Sparks says put the cross in front of the world, but, in my experience, it was the Lord, once I had initially delivered myself to Him as much as I could, Who placed the cross in front of me. It was the Lord Who ruined me for this country and world. He didn’t ruin the world, since it was already ruined, He ruined me to the world. It seems to me we need to ask the Lord, as with everything else, “Please, Father, put the cross in front of the world for me, for I have no [earthly] power to open my eyes to Your truth about this world.”
I find it very hard to exist in this world, since, evidently, the blinders I once had on have been permanently removed by my Lord and Savior. And now I begin to see as He sees, to sense as He senses, to hear, smell, feel and taste as He does; and these new-to-me heavenly-senses are not always easy to process, to deal with! I am always amazed, and confounded, when I hear the Christian religionist, pagan, or atheist, profess a belief that “THINGS ARE ONLY GOING TO GET BETTER,” when all I can see around me is destruction and death coming.
Yes, “my interest in this world has been crucified,” my interest in this world is broken and dead, or being broken and dying, since this is a life-long process. And yet I know I have pockets of resistance in me. I don’t know what most of them are, but I know they are there, because I am still struggling, Spiritually, still being broken and slain by the will and purpose of my Lord and Father, as will be the case, I believe, until the last day I suck wind;-) on this planet!
Could it be, then, that if we sense we’re failing in all Spiritual things, we sense no purpose or good, in ourselves, for our Lord and others, and we’re even flat (we seem to be unconcerned about our state) that this is exactly where the Lord wants us? Maybe He wants us so broken, so malleable, that we can’t even sense any eternal worth in ourselves? Are we, like Christ, to be poured out as a drink offering on that cross, so that we have no control, no immense awareness of the Lord in us, the hope of glory, the Lord in us the Father sees when He looks at us? Could it be that what we’re struggling with, now, is the residue of man’s religious traditions (that make void the word of God), which we were indoctrinated in and which told us we must do this and/or that, that we must be this and/or that, or we’re nothing to the Lord? Paul said, not looking back, I press on…, could it be that not looking back means not even looking back (or even forward, Spiritually, as it applies to our perception of our Spiritual growth) a second ago?
As with all of you, I have given myself as fully as I can to the Lord, and now He is going to have to take me the rest of the way! I can’t get there! I can’t even get through an hour without feeling ungodly! So, Mark, maybe your flatness or unconcern is not flatness or unconcern at all, but the contentment Paul spoke of, a contentment that I find hard to get to also? Could it be that if the Lord now lives in us that we can trust Him, no matter how much we see the fallen nature that remains in our flesh, to take us the rest of the way?
Mark, you quoted Philippians 1: 6 yesterday: For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus. So, according to Paul, it is the Lord Who will perfect the good work in us, not ourselves! So, if I’m sensing this scripture rightly, then it is the Lord’s responsibility to complete me (us), and not mine (ours)!
Help us, Father (help me) Father, to come to a place of rest in wherever and whatever state, Spiritually, physically, mentally or emotionally, or financially, you have us in, knowing that we belong to You and that we cannot thwart Your will and Purpose for our lives, the very Will and Purpose we desire more than life itself! Amen!
Let us pray for each other, because we all know things are not going to get better or easier!
I shared this for one reason, and one reason only, so that those of you out there, like us, might know that you are not alone on this planet, and that your isolation and pain is for a purpose, an eternal one! We all struggle, at points, with the Life the Lord has given us: a part-temporal and part-eternal life, depending on where are walk is in Him, that is nothing in comparison to the full and perfected Life we will have when this temporary arrangement is over! Let us all hold to this hope, this truth!
With this being an election year, I thought I would remind everyone that the Lord has no part in this fraud we call a presidential election! The Lord will use all of this nation’s political backstabbing and corruption to further His own will and defeat His enemy, who rules with such impunity over this morally (and economically) bankrupt nation, but He will never embrace this Godless nation or its ways and agendas! Once again, read the following post and then tell me “the founding fathers” were practitioners of the Christian religion, not to mention true 

Jefferson was not, in any way, shape or form, a Christian. Jefferson, like Washington, Paine and most of the other “founding fathers”, was merely an atheist masquerading as a “man of God” (a deist): his god was “reason” and “freedom”; Jesus was nothing more to Jefferson than a first century Gandhi! Jefferson was just like many of the other “founding fathers” in that he claimed belief in a supernatural being, but the supernatural being would turn out to be the false god of this age (
According to the Word of God, we are called into relationship with Jehovah, He, then, is the basis for our life, since “by no other name can anyone be saved.” If we approach Christ as Elohim, and ONLY speak in terms of “God’s wrath…,” and “God hates…,” etc, etc, then we, according to my Spiritual sense of things, are not in proper relationship with our Lord and Savior, Jehovah, and, therefore, we are also not in proper relationship with His (our) Father, God the Father.
Who is the author and perfecter of our faith, the propitiation for our sins?
But, lastly, it is this worshiping-at-the-alter-of-capitalism country (America) that has managed to turn the Church and Body of Christ into nothing more than an apostate-lover-of-the-world corporate-venture: an American ENTERPRISE!
This is a follow-up post to
The “church” the world knows today began in Rome and was founded by a pagan, Roman emperor, Constantine. This “church” was the work of Satan, and it was accomplished through the fallen nature of man, which drives his need for political/social control and power. This “church” had and still has nothing whatsoever to do with the first-century ecclesias the Lord had established through the Apostle Paul. Read the first three chapters of The Book of Acts, and see how the true Church, the true Body of Christ, is described, and then tell me I’m wrong:

So why do we, if we believe the scriptures to be the inspired Word of God, go to “church” every Sunday morning and listen to the priests, popes, ministers, pastors, reverends, etc? And, based on the Word of God, why would we even take part in these denominations and non-denominations that spawn these contrary-to-the-Word-of-God religious careers? If we thump the bible, then why can’t we read it, believe it, and then act on what it is telling us to do, through the Spirit that indwells us; that is, if we have the Spirit of our Lord? 

I believe Paul’s message of UNITY, of ONENESS in Christ, here, goes far beyond the “not forsaking the gathering together” sermons of the nominal “church”. I believe Paul is speaking of a unity that, perhaps, most of us have never experienced in the tradition-of-man laden religiosity that surrounds us: “Christian fellowship”, “church services”, “conferences”, “revivals”, and “bible studies”. I believe firmly that Paul is exhorting us, here, to a unity which will only occur when every individual in the lord’s gathering (ecclesia), every member of the Body, comes to know, experience and rest personally in the presence of the indwelling Christ and Spirit: a unity which has solely to do with a Spiritual and heavenly vision, a True knowledge of the Lord Who abides in all of us who belong to Him:
Lastly, we should look around us at the state of this decaying and dying world system of Satan, and then consider how much longer it will be before the Lord returns and finds us asleep in our pews:






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