Last night I had a series of dreams. In one dream some youth workers and their younger helpers were lined up across a church stage prior to giving a presentation on a new project. I noticed that none of them were Spirit-filled or Spirit led. Much less did they know what it means to ‘live in the Spirit with the authority of the sons and daughters of God.’ As I looked at them I wondered what well intended modes of the flesh and the letter they would rely on to kick-off their next endeavour.
There are people that multiply Jesus and people that multiply iniquity in His name. Iniquity is the institutionalization of the knowledge of good and evil passed down the generations.
As I write this I’m aware that there are churches who employ youth workers who have never distinguished themselves as having a passion for Jesus. There sole qualification is that both they and a parent live a version of being a churchaholic. Just in case you think this is too severe, it’s based on my observation as a church member over many years that there are plenty who believe church to be more sacred than Jesus.
The series of dreams I experienced last night were in the form of impressions. All of them about Jesus being incarnate in us by the Holy Spirit. All of them about Believers being sons and not workers because Christ was being multiplied as He lives His life through them – multiplying in the lives of His people the righteousness, love, authority and power that distinguished him in his sojourn among us. Once we realize that it’s not about us Jesus can manifest His life through us.
All of these dreams were about Believers finding their being, essence, life, identity and purpose in God. About being merged in God, about being in union with God to carry out our commission as sons and daughters of God with authority and not as proponents of the law. No ‘teacher of the law’ can live in the Spirit or represent the Kingdom of God.
At intercessors meeting last week one of the ladies remarked, ‘I’m just beginning to see the importance of the words, ‘In Him we live, move and have our being.’
For quite some time I have been aware that Paul’s seemingly casual statement‘In him we live and move and have our being’ is the essence of what Jesus means the sons and daughters of God to be living in today. In this season, Jesus is drawing us out of ourselves and our wooden and ‘bitty’ lives to live in the wholeness and authority of His Son.
In His Son – His Son is us: Christ in us. The authority of His Son multiplied through us is the reality of God’s expanding Kingdom on earth. Christ as you doing what Christ once did on earth through you TODAY spreads the hope of the dawn of His Kingdom in fullness and the arrival of His Kingdom of glory and light.
The Church of Jesus is that which grows from our union with Him. This kind of church is a tree of life that whose fruit is more life. Much of what is called the organic church is nothing of the kind. It is an attempt to forge through letter and formula a more lively version of the letter driven church. Man’s church is a construct of flesh and letter – useful for the management of slaves but useless for the establishment of sons.
To live in God is to have our being in Him. It is to be fathered as sons and daughters by the Father. To have our being in God is to live in the Spirit and be sons and daughters living in the inheritance of the Father’s authority and the Son of Man’s creative flow.
‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring’ Acts 17.28 NIV.
‘Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me’ John 6.57 NIV.
Keith Allen
