Bringing to Life What Is Born of God

31 Dec Bringing to Life What Is Born of God

Before we leave Christmas to begin the New Year, a parting gift waits to be opened . . . the most important gift we will ever receive.
Like the star crowning a Christmas tree, my last message was carefully set into place, capping 15 months of writing. I shared the crown jewel of all my experiences with God — how the Father brought me to the revelation of Jesus Christ. [1]
Your experiences with God are also unfolding in a one-of-a-kind story, unique in every detail God has scripted into His dialogue with you.
However it happens for each of us, a moment comes when we understand what God is saying to us about Jesus, we believe what He is saying, and we are catapulted into an entirely new experience of God.
I hope you grasp the world of difference between believing what God is saying to you and believing doctrine. No mortal persuasion, no human theology is ever going to create in you what only God’s Word, God’s sperm can.

You have been regenerated (born again), not from a mortal origin (seed, sperm), but from one that is immortal by the ever living and lasting Word of God.

1 Peter 1:23, The Amplified Bible

No one born (begotten) of God . . . practices sin, for God’s nature abides in him [His principle of life, the divine sperm, remains permanently within him] . . .

 1 John 3:9, The Amplified Bible

God cannot accomplish what He wants for us except through creating something from Himself in us — an entity capable of bearing the life He wants us to have. As a man knows a woman and she conceives, God seeks to know us so that we will conceive. He proactively draws us into the intimacy, into the give-and-take of a divine dialogue with Himself, so that His implanted Word can take root, creating that sole entity in us that is capable of receiving all that God wants to do and be for us.
During this past year, I’ve described how precious God’s guidance, comfort and correction are. BUT this is not the primary reason the divine dialogue exists. Its highest end is to create this invisible entity — what is born of Him — within us.
It would be unthinkable if in our darkness all God did was to bring us random assurances of His Presence, telling us He cares, bringing us a bit of light, some small miracle of healing, even a measure of financial relief . . . BUT He left us essentially unchanged and powerless in the grip of our vulnerability. Yes, the divine dialogue communicates God’s comfort to us in painful circumstances, BUT this is only the dawning of its power in our life.

The zenith of the divine dialogue’s power

is to beget  what is born of God in us.

In my natural man I can receive nothing from God, but that which is born of God can receive all that He wants to do and be in my life.

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That which is born of God

In past lessons I’ve defined faith as the capacity to receive God’s power into our circumstances. How do we get faith?  Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.
In my mind’s eye I see faith shining like an iridescent supernatural luminosity borne to us by grace from the fire of God Himself.  Bundled into dynamic tight packages of His Word, it is released in us, as we listen to and believe what God is telling us. This flow of grace, this river of enabling outreach has the amazing ability to conduct God’s power from the invisible realm into the visible.  But faith is very often transitory: dimming in darkness and tending to dissipate in the heat of a trying circumstance — unless that entity which is born of God can be found in us, capturing and breathing faith in us.
In a moment when iridescent, supernatural faith explodes within us, God begets that entity born of Him in us. And from that moment, that which has been born of God becomes our supernatural ability to live by, to walk in and to see by faith continuously.
In my last message, about my conversion experience, I shared how I listened to and learned from God before that entity was brought to life in me. True, my ability to hear and understand Him was rough and shallow, nothing like what I know now. But how did I do that, when I was still operating out of my flesh, out of my carnal natural man?
Before I was born again, that which was to be born of God in me existed as a nascent possibility not yet brought to life. But then the message came to me from God . . . grace and life burgeoning from within its plain seed coat . . .  and that which was to be born of God in me heard; it stirred; it yearned; it received — I was impregnated and it came to life.

Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.

John 5:25, NASU

Who (or what) are these “dead” who will hear the voice of the Son of God and live?
The “dead” waiting to be brought to life is that which is meant-to-be born of God in you. It is, always was, and always will be the most essential you — the real you — the you that has its existence and its life in God . . .  the you that is meant-to-be . . . the only you that can receive God’s promises and live to see them fulfilled. This is the YOU He makes alive that once was dead.

AND YOU [He made alive], when you were dead (slain) by [your] trespasses and sins

Ephesians 2:1, The Amplified Bible

When the voice of the Son of God comes to find “YOU,” it is not coming to find your natural man, your carnal lost hostile self — it comes to find, to bring to life that which is waiting to be born of God in us.

So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that [I] walk no longer . . .  in the futility of [my] mind, being darkened in [my] understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that [was] in [me], because of the hardness of [my] heart . . . [I laid] aside the old self . . . renewed in the spirit of [my] mind,  and put on the new self . . .  created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.

Eph 4:17-24 

God does not come into our life to patch up, to educate or discipline our natural self into better shape — He breathes life into what has died to make us alive — clothing us in a garment beyond our ability to imitate or fabricate.
If God’s presence and power are missing from our walk, it is for one of two reasons:

• Either we do not have that which is born of God — it has not yet been brought to life in us.

• Or, for lack of spiritual maturity, we do not know how to operate out of what has been born of God in us. . . or for lack of needed healing, we continually fail to walk in that which has been born of God in us.

It is time for me, it is time for you to master this — to become people who consistently walk in the power of God  —  operating out of that which is born of God in us.
The revelation of Jesus Christ is always going to be the crown jewel of our experience with God. But that which is born of God, which He brings to life and gives us, is the most precious gift we will ever unwrap — for it is the means by which God will finally realize all that He longs to do and be for us.

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Today marks both an end and a beginning.
Today’s message concludes the first book in my trilogy of The Divine Dialogue and begins the next:  the eager and desperately needed exploration of Christ in us, being born again, being led by the Holy Spirit, the difference between living out of our soul or out of our spirit, the difference between living out of our flesh or out of that which God has begotten in us.
And so, I conclude Book I (How We Understand What God is Saying to Us Now) as I begin Book II (How We Receive God’s Power into Our Life) with a short story illustrating both . . .

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I will never forget that Monday morning in the basement of our large Atlanta church, during our women’s Bible study.  Many of you who read this blog were there that morning and will remember these events.
As the announcements finished, I was keyed up, ready to rise from my chair and stride to the podium where I would teach the lesson I was tremendously excited about. But Jean lingered.  The strength of her tall willowy body visibly melted as she gave in to the sorrow she could no longer constrain. We watched silently as she was inundated by a wave of emotion. Her eyes filling with sadness, she continued on a personal note.
“I feel as if I am supposed to make this prayer request now, rather than waiting until after our lesson.”
She looked at me apologetically, and then continued with growing difficulty.
“A little boy named Evan has been very sick for months.  He is on a heart-lung machine — and has been, longer than any other patient in the hospital.  Evan is, was, the cutest little boy you ever saw—so healthy, so athletic, so normal.  He has been going to school with my boys, but he got a bacterial pneumonia they can’t seem to get on top of.  It is some new strain that resists every drug they give him, and every time they take him off the machine to see if he can make it on his own…”
Jean looked down struggling for control.  She finished softly, “Everytime they take him off the machine they begin to loose him.  Last week the doctors told his parents that after this weekend they would have to take him off.  This morning is the morning.  They say that it usually takes about two hours…”
Jean’s voice trailed off.  “Please pray for Evan.”  And then she stepped away leaving an empty podium.
My notes, my lesson— suddenly they seemed so very trivial.  What was I to do?
Should I respectfully walk to the podium, asking for a moment of silence, allowing each woman to pray on her own, and then start the lesson?  Should I lead a prayer out loud, and if so, what should I pray?
Walking forward slowly, I took my place at the podium, sliding my notes into place. Looking up and out upon the faces of the women before me I saw misery, sadness, helplessness, powerlessness in a roomfull of eyes glued to me.
“Oh God, “ I cried out silently, “some of these women are brand new believers.  If I pray for his healing and he dies, what will that do to their faith?  If I pray a safe prayer asking for ‘Your will to be done,’ I feel like I will be letting this little boy down.”
I can’t quite describe it, but as I stilled myself to listen for God’s response, the moment began to ripen as if it was pregnant. I began to see . . . how we were standing at the portal of one of those strategic moments when something specific is meant-to-happen,  but you don’t know what, and you are afraid of missing it or making a mess of it by taking a wrong move.
It was a tense pivotal moment in which I knew — that whatever was meant-to-take place was more likely to take place, if God walked me through this.  Looking to Him, I silently cried out for direction, “Jesus, tell me how to pray.”
And then, from within myself, [2] I heard three words.  “Go for it.” 
It was not at all what I would expect God to say, but let me tell you, the authority booming through those three words ignited me with overwhelming confidence. It wasn’t just His spoken Word sounding in me, but the passionate intent of His heart begotten in me, exploding through me.
I did go for it.
I prayed aloud, suffused with faith, believing.  I cried out with passion, because I knew we were giving God the channel to pour His power into Evan’s little body to heal him. I knew God was using our prayer to pour Himself into that family’s bleak despair transforming it to joy and hope and the magnificent realization of God’s power investing itself in them.
We all prayed, some of us with tears, choking back sobs.  Nothing was held back. It was one of those prayers that leave you worn out but satiated.  You know a river has coursed through you, a flood of power that has left you weak, consuming all your physical strength as it has used you to gain entrance into the world.
Evan would not only survive that day and begin to breathe on his own, but he would continue to improve until he could return home.
When he opened his eyes and squeezed his parent’s hands and held up fingers in response to their questions, their hearts rejoiced, but with great uncertainty. For they had been warned that Evan had probably sustained brain damage, and there was a question of how well his lungs would do.
There was no brain damage.  Evans lungs grew strong and healed.  He returned to kindergarten, and even after missing so much time, he caught up quickly.  His school saw no need to hold him back. Evan would advance with his classmates the following fall.

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I do not need to tell you there is a hurting world out there

that needs to see the power of God.

Who through, if not you?

Please join me in upcoming weeks as we begin a new journey in The Divine Dialogue.

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