The Special of the Day… From the Orange Moon Cafe
"To Be? To Bear!"
Lucifer (light-bearer), a created angelic being, originated sin in God's creation by seeking to be that which he was not.
"I will be like the Most High" (Isaiah 14:14).
The devil led one third of the angelic host astray by his delusion, and later successfully and tragically tempted Adam and Eve with the same sin and darkness: "Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil" (Revelation 12:4; Genesis 3:5).
Since Eden, human beings do not know who we are in the natural awareness of ourselves inherited from Adam. Like the devil, we seek to be or become rather than to bear the life and presence of Another. No possibility of such independent being exists in a creation wherein the Apostle Paul declared of all humanity, "in Him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). We exist and consist by God, even in our sinful state before salvation, and certainly thereafter in those who believe and become the temple of the indwelling Holy Spirit. "By Him all things consist… we live through Him" (Colossians 1:17; I John 4:9).
To know ourselves rightly, we must rightly know our Creator and Sustainer. "In Thy light shall we see light" (Psalm 36:9). We must affirm His life and being as the central reality and truth of our existence. The great question of our lives is not "Who am I?," but rather the question Paul asked the Lord Jesus when encountering Him on the road to Damascus, "Who art Thou, Lord?" (Acts 9:5). In any situation and circumstance of life as believers, if we find and know the correct answer to this question, we will find and know the correct answer to who and what we are as God's sons and daughters in Christ, His servants, and His dependent supplicants who live not in the delusion of our own life but rather in the reality of "to live is Christ" (Philippians 1:21).
Consider the challenges of life, many of which cause us to feel weak and unable. Is the sense of our frail humanity the true matter of the moment? Absolutely not. "Be strong in the Lord and in power of His might… My strength is made perfect in weakness" (Ephesians 6:10; II Corinthians 12:9). Indeed, every seeming liability, whatever the mode or measure, actually glimmers with the light of opportunity. God privileges us to know and access His being and power as the means whereby we face the challenge. Such a response is actually the very reason we exist and the nature of who our Heavenly Father made us to be as human beings. We bear Him as the Life of our lives, and by faith know Him as He is, and ourselves as we are.
Apply this truth to everything in life. Because it applies to everything in life. "He is thy life" (Deuteronomy 30:20). God is God, we are not, and in the blessed synthesis of the the divine and the human rightly relating to one another, truth and reality becomes the realized glory in which we live and have our being - in Him and not ourselves. As the Apostle Paul declared of this bearing of God's being, whereby we truly live…
"I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live. Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. And the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me."
(Galatians 2:20)
Weekly Memory Verse
And I have declared unto them Thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith Thou hast loved Me may be in them, and I in them.
(John 17:26)
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