Journal

What is sin?

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:18:16 +1100

Sin is a ‘lessness’ of some sort, in us, as created beings, compared to our Creator. Trinity God - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are perfect and complete, they live to love and are in need of nothing. We however, as created beings are necessarily ‘less than’ God. Nothing created by God can be equal to God, which is to say God cannot create himself because he is all in all. There can be only one Trinity God.
So sin had to be.
Lessness had to be.
So, how do we define our lessness?
How is it quantified and qualified?
How is it experienced by us as lesser beings (even though made in the image of God)? And how is it expressed or manifest in us?
I believe it is the tendency, even compulsion, of us to want to live a life independent of Jesus, God, who is our life.
This lessness of self determined independent thought does not dwell in the perfect and complete Godhead. They live for and within each other.
Adam was heading into the knowledge of this lessness right from the beginning, even if he did not know it.
He was a created being, destined to becoming one with Trinity God though the incarnation, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus one day - but not yet.
Lucifer on the other hand was never destined to be made one with the humanity of the incarnated Jesus because Lucifer is a spiritual being, not a human being (and human beings are created a little lower than the angels).
Jesus can redeem humanity but not ‘angelity’, and the lessness of Lucifer and those who fell with him had greater gravity because of their elevated spiritual state and insight and proximity to the Throne. Their lessness was an alien independent self determination.
Lucifer targeted the lessness of Adam and hit the bullseye in Eve. Poor Eve was exposed to something so unfamiliar, so alien, so alluring, so compelling, but so inherent in her lesser state of being.
God knew all of this fully beforehand of course, and somehow accommodated it. Nothing was a surprise.
It was a disappointment perhaps, but only with the sadness of a love that hopes all things. Trinity God had already predestined humanity to adoption into their perfect circle through Jesus.
This was way before a created being existed as an entity – a creature, less than the Creator.
Trinity God does not have this flaw of self determined or alien independent thought because their oneness precludes alien independent thought.
They cannot sin and don’t want to because they don’t want independence but are joyfully dependent within one another.
John’s voice swells with faith as he speaks to us out of his majestic love epistle and tells of the person who ‘cannot sin because he is born of God’ (1 John 3:9). How good is that?

Because Trinity God’s perfection and wholeness is this relational interdependence of divine love, then the slightest degree of lessness from this perfection must strike at the very heart of this pristine state. That is why it defines itself as a self determined, and alien, independent thought. And that is what sin is.
That is a deception, a lie of separation, not meant to be, between us and God. But the enforcer of darkness never lets up. This alien independence is a stance, a posture called pride. Its demonstration and articulation is rebellion. There we have the three hallmarks of sin – deception, pride, and rebellion. What created beings do with this mix is anybody’s guess, but it’s a downward spiral of death and destruction – the bad news.
This is what Jesus came into and took upon himself and overcame, for us. The rest is an upward spiral – the Good News.
The Good News – Jesus taking away the sins of the world is simply Jesus remedying the lessness, replacing it with a oneness. And it just goes on from there.
The knowledge of lessness is the knowledge of incompleteness, like an instinctive or intuitive awareness of lacking satisfaction of some kind.
Satisfaction can only be found in a relationship - but gratification can be found in isolation - self feeding self.
But being gratified is not being satisfied and wears off, creating appetites but no fulfillment, or satiation.
Being gratified, like being satisfied, is not wrong.
It is when the quest for gratification crosses the boundary of someone else’s comfort or safety that unlove happens and harm is done and sin becomes an active force of evil.
Jesus came into our lessness but was able to say ‘I and the Father are one’, and that satisfied him completely.
That is what he hands to us.

The Jesus Commands

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 12:08:53 +1100

In my last journal entry I ‘rewrote’ the Ten Commandments in plain English. I called this set of statements from a loving God ‘A Cycle of Trust’. It means that every circumstance we go through in life will involve an encounter with God whether we believe in him or not. He is there, involved, up close and personal, asking the question of us, whether we can trust him to take us forward in life with purpose and meaning and fulfillment. If we accept and believe this we have the opportunity to go in a cycle of one experience to another learning to develop a deep and abiding trust in his love and goodness towards us.

But how did Jesus hear the Ten Commandments? Did he hear his Father say to him ‘Don’t kill’ as it says in Commandment number six in Exodus Chapter 20? Did he even hear his Father say to him ‘don’t get angry and suspicious with your friends’? - which is a paraphrase of how I interpreted that same Commandment in ‘A Cycle of Trust’.

No I don’t think so.

This is how I believe Jesus heard his loving Father talk to him through the Commandments. He heard something special that Moses didn’t hear. He was the ONLY human being who ever really knew the heart and mind of the Father. I call the following statement of the Ten Commandments ‘The Jesus Commands’.

But not only that! I believe these statements that follow are what the Father is saying to each one of us, his children, now that we can share life with Jesus. These are words of encouragement and hope, that we can expect to hear no matter what circumstances we might be in – and certain statements are perfect for certain circumstances.

1. Trust me and me alone as your loving Father who wants to make life work for you.

2. Don’t let your imagination invent anything else that could replace me. I want to mean everything to you.

3. Only put my name to something you know I am doing in you and through you. Ask me first – otherwise you own it.

4. Don’t waste energy on empty options but be at rest and confidently enjoy what you do by trusting me to make life work for you.

NB. Those first four Commandments are not too much different from the ‘Cycle of Trust’ – just a bit more personal – but now they REALLY begin to take on a more powerful and personal meaning.

5. I will protect you and guide you in your decision making showing you what to do and how to do it.

A healthy relationship with someone who knows more than we do (first our parents then ultimately GOD), based on a realistic trust in them, allows us to be influenced by ANOTHER PERSON. We learn to accept direction and correction and we learn to know our own place of authority and autonomy and not suffer from inferiority. That is true humility – not thinking too highly or too lowly of ourselves. It is not a matter of self esteem but of self acceptance. God is committed to guiding our lives – if we will listen.

6. I accept you totally for who you are

The Sixth Commandment is not just about killing and anger, but about accepting and forgiving others. God has no illusions about our bad reactions that lead to bad decisions. He accepts this in us and forgives us. He just wants us to trust him to do this and stay close. That’s when we start to change and start to accept and forgive ourselves and others too.

7. I am committed to your joy and fulfillment in life

The Seventh Commandment is about not committing adultery, which is all about commitment to another person’s joy and wellbeing. God wants to be our source of real satisfaction, which only LOVE can achieve. The world can make us feel gratified, but that is not the same as feeling satisfied.

8. You are worth everything to me – and I want to share everything I have with you

The Eighth Commandment, which is about not stealing, is really about what a person thinks they are worth.
We are his ‘Treasure in the field’ that God gave everything for so that he can share all he is and has with us.
When Jesus touches a life that person has the opportunity to see themselves as being of great worth and value and they begin to value others like never before.

9. Be true to me and you will be true to yourself and to everybody else – and you will be free and know my power in your life.

The Ninth Commandment is all about Truth, Freedom, and God’s power in our lives.
Life is 50% about knowing who WE are and 50% about knowing who GOD is. Jesus saw that the only power in his life came from his Father and he gave the power of his life over to God. He saw that the power of God in his life was effective to the degree that he saw and accepted his own weaknesses without justifying himself. We can do the same, and know that in our weaknesses we have his strength.

10. You have enough of everything when you have me

This speaks for itself. It sums up what true contentment means.

The Commandments - A Cycle of Trust

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:34:27 +1000

What does the Bible mean when it says in Romans 8::2 ‘The law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death’ And what does it mean when it says in Hebrews 8:10 ‘ …I will put My laws in their mind and write them on their hearts; ?
It means that the Law is now not an outward imposition but an inward disposition. These are the things that the Holy Spirit whispers to us

1. Trust me and me alone as your loving God who wants to make life work for you.

2. Don’t let your imagination invent something else to replace me as your God - I am jealous for you

3. Don’t abuse my name by attaching it to something your imagination invented – You’ll be to blame for the consequences.

4. Don’t waste all your energy on your empty options but relax and enjoy life by trusting me to make life work for you.

5. Trust in people who care for you and know more than you do – and you will go well and go a long way

6. Don’t kill friendships with anger and suspicion but build them with kindness and trust

7. Don’t betray people by using them

8. Don’t rob people of their worth by taking from them

9. Don’t weaken your world with the power of lies but strengthen it with truth

10. Don’t crave for what someone else has got but be thankful for what I have given you

The Whirlwind

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 12:36:44 +1100

Very recently I experienced an overwhelming sense of disappointment and grief at all the things that had gone wrong just a few short years ago in my ministry. I allowed myself to get into regret and remorse and I felt an acute sense of failure about it all. There was the failure concerning the purchase of the land on the main road and the shame and loss associated with that, and how it affected people in the church and the school. I then remembered a word that God had spoken to Tineke and myself at the end of that difficult time that put it into a new light.

Jer. 45:3‘You said, “Woe is me now! For the Lord has added grief to my sorrow. I fainted in my sighing, and I find no rest.”’ 4“Thus you shall say to him, ‘Thus says the Lord: “Behold, what I have built I will break down, and what I have planted I will pluck up, that is, this whole land. 5And if you seek great things for yourself, do not seek them, for behold, I will bring adversity on all flesh,” says the Lord. “But I will give your life to you as a prize in all places, wherever you go.”
This is what it meant to me.

This Scripture showed us that God had allowed some things to be taken away that he had actually given to us in the first place, so that he could bring us into better things that would be totally from him and be done through him. He would also give us his life, which would be our life no matter what else we thought we had or did not have. I have experienced that and have been preaching about this dimension of a shared life with Jesus ever since. But now God is adding more to that picture.

When I was re-experiencing that time of disappointment just recently and revisiting the sense of failure, God gave me a vision of a whirlwind. I was actually coming out of a restful sleep. The whirlwind was sweeping up all the debris that was involved in that era of our lives and twisting it around and drawing it into himself. I saw buildings and houses and pieces of wood and rocks and stones and dust all swirling upwards together. Then he changed the whirlwind into a gleaming column stretching from the earth, up into heaven. It gleamed and shone with pieces of precious and valuable metal and there were flashes of intense light.

When I awakened from the vision I went straight to a Scripture that I remembered that spoke about a whirlwind that God would send to his people.
Zech 9:12-14 "12 Return to the stronghold, You prisoners of hope. Even today I declare That I will restore double to you. 13 For I have bent Judah, My bow, Fitted the bow with Ephraim, And raised up your sons, O Zion, Against your sons, O Greece, and made you like the sword of a mighty man 14 Then the Lord will be seen over them, and His arrow will go forth like lightning. The Lord GOD will blow the trumpet, And go with whirlwinds from the south .”

This added another dimension of meaning to the vision
Those things that were swept up into the whirlwind were things that I had or thought I had, that made up my life. I had attached effort and meaning and importance to those things, and they had been lost. But now instead of feeling grief that there was nothing to take their place and that it was all a waste of time and effort I saw that God wanted to bring into my shared life with him life things that were of far greater value. These were things that would change earthly things into heavenly things. These were things that would never be destroyed and that would last forever. This would be something good that he had touched and he would delight in.

I knew that this would not mean newer and bigger buildings etc. The same old things done up in a better way, but it would mean something new that would come from the treasury of God’s goodness and abundance that would unfold as I trusted in him to bring this promise to pass, whatever it was. I asked God for more understanding about what was this shining column of precious gleaming metal and flashing light. Then I received another Scripture from The Lord.

Isa 60:16 : You shall know that I, the Lord, am your Savior and your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob. 17 “Instead of brass I will bring gold, Instead of iron I will bring silver, Instead of wood, brass, And instead of stones, iron. “

This means the stones turn into iron and the iron turns into silver - the wood turns to brass and the brass turns to gold. The stones stand for the foundation of our natural strength and ability which is unformed but is full of potential. We turn those stones into iron as we apply ourselves to managing life’s problems and coping with them. The iron stands for what becomes welded into self confidence or lack of it, and our independence and need to control situations. We end up becoming a mixture of these things. Silver is the perfect truth of God’s word to us which becomes faith in us and that becomes the real strength and power in our lives that overcomes all obstacles.

The wood is the raw material of our personality and temperament, which is the potential expression of who we are to ourselves and to everybody around us. We turn that into brass. Brass stands for our decision making, our judgments and habits, which form our character. A persons’ character can be good or bad, strong or weak, generous or selfish. Again, our lives become a mixture of all of these things. I saw God changing this brass into gold. Gold stands for God’s nature and that is what he wants us to display in our shared life with him. This is his love, his compassion, his peace and joy, and this is how he wants to reveal himself through our lives to others.

Silver stands for truth, light, and the power of God’s creative word revealed through our faith to others. Gold is God’s beauty revealed.

I realized that this vision was not just for me and my family – it is for us all. God wants to take all of the debris of our past experiences and draw it into his whirlwind and turn it into a column of shining silver and gold. This means anything that have done foolishly or unwisely, where we have lost money or wasted time and effort and invested our lives into something that has gone wrong and seemingly produced no fruit. It means things or people that you have attached your life to that have let you down, disappointed or betrayed you.

God wants to sweep all of this into his whirlwind. He wants you to know that everything you have been through is not wasted and that what you are going through now is not being wasted. Don’t let it the debris become a statement of you as a failure. Your story is part of the story of all humanity that is dashed against the rocks of adversity tearing everything apart, smashing our lives to pieces, fragmenting our souls. God wants to sweep it all up into himself and he wants you to know that he has been with you in and through the pain even if you did not know he was there. He wants to give us the same wonderful hope for our future that he has for us.

Jeremiah 29:11 “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.”

Reader Comments (3)
Hi Paul, I remember a long time ago noticing that the tribe of Levi, who served the temple of Moses, had no inheritance in the land of Israel because God said he himself was their inheritance and I think we can assume that was a better thing. What you are saying reminds me of that. Placing the highest value in God himself is what it seems to say. I am sure that in eternity, the glory of the person of God will so far outshine every other thing that there will be little room to look around elsewhere. Just a thought.
March 21, 2008 | Paul T

Hey Paul, how true, how very true. Our lives are filled with plans and dreams and then we realise that hey everything don;t always go the way we had originally thought and our dreams become our regrets...until we find that God turns our regrets into wisdom, strength and compassion. We need these moments I believe, or we become hardened to the pain in others lives.

Check out Mark Driscoll paying out Joel Osteen for his "God don't want you to have pain' kind of theology http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IuiUOapK1w
March 31, 2008 | Greg Colby

Paul, It's 34 years since I first met you at Faith Centre. Mate, how much water has gone under the bridge of life since you broke your nose playing rugby against Howard Carter's thugs in the Blue Mountains! (I warned you beforehand you were too old to mix it with those wild Kiwis!).

I still appreciate your kind help in the early 90's when the Jeremiah experience was on my own life; and the Saturdays you organised for leaders from other churches like ours, at your own church. But, the day I saw you bent over backwards at Rodney Howard Browne's Toronto Blessing meetings at Pringle's in 1995, I knew you were heading some time for a big gutser.

I published on that stuff in 1995, and it cost me heaps in some ways. But, the predictions made back then have worked through. Paul, it was a deceiving spirit, and those who submitted to it have their own stories to tell now all these years later.

I go into Zimbabwe a lot nowadays; it has sharpened my view re dealing with deceiving religious spirits (which Paul says "you put up with easily enough!" 2 Cor 11:2-5). Such powers, once opened up to, have to be identified and renounced before they lose their (long-term) devastating effect... confusion, loss of direction, mental harassment, ill health, sexual misconduct, etc, etc.
We are in it for the long haul, mate. Hang in there!
April 9, 2008 | Brian Rensford

Amen to that

Sat, 16 Feb 2008 12:38:32 +1100

Posted on Saturday, February 9, 2008 at 12:06PM

‘Amen’ is the word that has the most common usage among all the languages in the world. It started in the Hebrew language as ‘amen’– ‘to trust and believe in’, trustworthiness and truth, marking something to be totally believed in and to live for. It went into the Greek language as ‘amen’, then into Latin as ‘amen’ then through every Indo European language and into English as ‘amen’ and beyond and on and on and on. So when someone says ‘amen’ after proclaiming something, they are really saying ‘I believe it’, ‘too right’, ‘you bet’. The thought behind this is that there are things we can think and know and say that we are so sure of that we will stake our lives on them.

The wonderful thing is that Jesus is called the ‘Amen’ in the Bible. This is how it says it in the book of Revelation:-
Rev3:14 ‘…This is what the Amen says, the most absolute and reliable witness of all that is right and true, the source and completion of created beings…’

We are joined to this ‘Amen’ of all ‘amens’. We can stake our lives on what he says and live confidently in the truthful fact of his love and goodness and towards us. When you think of ‘amen’ today, think of how you can trust Jesus to take you into the life of love and oneness that he shares with his Father. He wants to be your ‘Amen’. He gave his life so that you could become part of his ‘Amen’. You can trust The Holy Sprit totally today to take you into his world, to lift your mind and heart out of the cares and worries of this world into the peace and joy and love of the supernatural world he lives in - with Jesus and his Father. Give Jesus time today to become your ‘Amen’. Amen.

There are some more audio sermons under ‘sermons’ in the menu bar and the translation of 1 Corinthians is still progressing. It’s all there in www.spiritcode.com . Amen from Paul.