Sunday 27 March 2011
Coming Out of Darkness 5 by Gary Sigler
Facebook on Friday, 25 March 2011 at 15:03 It was not a surprise to God, that His creation was going to be lowered into the physical realm. Every man that was born after Adam was separated in his consciousness and his awareness from that life that was in his spirit, and every man was then left with nothing but the discernment to choose between good and evil. Man was cut off in his spirit rom the knowledge and the life of God, and because of it he had nothing left but the knowledge of good and evil. Therefore some men would become very good, and other men would be very evil. The people of the world as a whole, looking only through eyes of good and evil, would see that there was a group of good people and there was a group of evil people, and they would imagine that all the evil people needed God, but all the good people were pretty much OK. But listen! In God’s eyes, every man that is born, is born in death. He is alienated and separated in his mind from the life of God that is in his spirit. He is left only with knowledge of good and evil. John 1:9 says that Jesus was "the true light that lights every man that comes into the world." Proverbs calls the spirit of man, “the candle or light of the Lord." So every man that comes into this world has a spirit, has hidden deeply in his being that candle, that spirit from the Lord which needs to be ignited. We can go to men, and we can tell them about the Gospel; we can convert them, we can even get them to believe intellectually that Jesus is the Son of God. But then we begin to teach them how to live according to the Bible, to choose the good over the evil, and we have done the same thing that Adam did in the very beginning. Even within ourselves we try to choose the good over the evil, rather than learning how to contact and live by that Holy Spirit of God that is within us. Can’t we all see that? That is what is happening! We do not have, especially in the Church in America, many godly people who are manifesting the life and the character of God to a lost and dying world. We have many good people. And most of them think that because they are good, they are OK, and they are always trying to convince the one who is evil to change his ways so that God can help him—not realizing that good and evil are the same tree. We need the light of God to see this! Whether you are very good, or whether you are very evil, it is the same source of life that is cut off from the life of God. Look again at Ephesians 4:17-18. "This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you walk not as other gentiles walk, in the vanity of t heir minds, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart." This is the situation today. We have people all over the earth who have been regenerated by the Spirit of the Living God, who have never learned other than to discern the difference between good and evil. Let’s go back and take another look at Calvary. God realized that because of Adam, the whole human race would be raised with a concept of knowing only the good over the evil. And He knew that it was absolutely hopeless. Paul told the Ephesians that before Christ, they were alienated. They were not members of the same family. But through the cross, God put into one both Jew and Gentile. Now one has to understand the mindset in those days, which was that the Jew was very "godly," and the gentile was the "ungodly." So Paul says that God by one offering put both the Jew and the Gentile into one body, thus bringing peace. The scripture says Jesus was "the Lamb of God slain from before the foundation of the world." The question we have to ask —and this is a hard one to fight, this religious concept—is this: Is the magnitude of Calvary’s victory limited only to those who are able to choose the good over the evil? I questioned God about this for years, before I came into the understanding that I am sharing with you. I used to question God, because I was so full of the lust of the flesh, as a young person, and even as a Christian! I loved God. I used to cry at night over my condition. But I wanted the things of the world. I wanted everything that you are not supposed to want. And I went through hell on earth as a man living to the full extent the experience of Romans,chapter 7. And the only reason we go through that is because of having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God that is in us because of the blindness that is on our hearts. We have to realize the magnitude of Calvary’s victory. The Emancipation Proclamation from the cross of Calvary was that you are not guilty. You are living your life by the knowledge of good and evil if you are not one who has the ability and who has learned how to exercise your spiritual being so that you can live by God’s life. It makes no difference how good you are, or how evil you are, your life source is still coming from the wrong place. In God’s eyes, there is no difference. In the man or woman who is not living by the life of God, there is no difference between the good and the evil. It is all from the wrong tree. And all we have had for two thousand years, in Christianity, is religious teachings, trying to teach us how to be godly, trying to teach us and warn us to choose the good over the evil. We need to read again Romans 5:12-21. You see, God understands our condition; we don’t. Because of our religious traditions, we think that we deserve all the guilt, we deserve all the shame. But I didn’t ask to be born having all the lust and wanting all the wrong things. I didn’t ask for it; that was Adam’s gift to me. And so because Adam made a mistake, religion tells me that I came into this world constituted and filled with the character and the nature that loves to sin, or maybe I’m fortunate and I have been born with a character which is good. But religion will tell me that because I inherited a life that loves to sin, and loves to do all the things that I’m not supposed to do, I somewhere have to find within myself the power to put that down and to choose to live right, so that God can bless me and I can someday die and go to heaven. Yet the very first thing that was said of Jesus by John was, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!" I can testify that if you cannot overcome sin no matter how hard you try, if you will continue to seek after God, He will eventually grow within you, and you will overcome! The Christian life is not a matter of will power, but a matter of the Spirit of God flooding every area of your being, and that takes time. We are as "newborn babes" and it takes some of us many years to be transformed. Church isn’t a happy place today. Why? Because we are under so much guilt and condemnation. When we get together, there are times when we break through and we touch the Spirit of God, and there is some rejoicing, but it is so limited! It’s so limited, because when you have the slightest—and I mean the slightest—bit of guilt in your consciousness, it separates you, and you can’t break through to the Spirit of God. The very first thing John said was, "Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world!" Did He do that? If you are religious, you will say He did, but you won’t believe it, because your religious concept says, "Yes, He took away the sin of the world, but only for those who say, ‘Jesus I receive You,’ or only for those who learn to live and choose the good over the evil." Calvary is only beneficial to those who learn to make the right choices, that is what religion teaches us! And so we have multitudes of people all over the world who genuinely have been regenerated by the Spirit of God, but they never have been taught how to live by that life of God that is in them. All they are ever taught is how to choose the good over the evil. And when you do that, it alienates you from the life of God in you, and you become like an unbeliever, having your eyes blinded. You see, an unbeliever has no consciousness, no awareness at all that they have the Spirit of God in them. But if you have been regenerated, you do have that consciousness. At times you will experience the flowing of God, but because of your concepts, when you sin it will cause a blockage, for guilt cannot enter into the presence of God! The only people who enter into the presence of God and live there are people who know how not to be guilty. As long as you are in the flesh, I can guarantee you every day of your life you are going to err and miss God. Since 1969 I have avidly, every day of my life, sought after and hungered after God. In 1969, when I had the experience of being caught up into the heavenly realms and of experiencing God flooding me, I became extremely hungry for God. And I have spent literally hundreds and hundreds of hours on my face and in the Word of God, hungering and seeking after God. I have been one of the most hungry-after-God people, yet I still make mistakes every day. It is because I have not learned how to live fully by the life of God within me. And, in fact, it is not even a matter of learning. It is a matter of God’s life growing, it is a matter of the Spirit of God maturing within me. It is a matter of my seeking, every day of my life, not after something which is in a distant heaven, but that which is within—learning how to contact the reality of the Spirit, the energizing, quickening spirit of God, so that every day I can enter into His presence, and I can feast upon the spiritual manna. From that experience, I am energized and quickened and enabled a little more to walk in the life of God. But when I begin in my consciousness to choose the good over the evil, I am separated in my consciousness from God, alienated from that life. And I am left as Adam was again, to struggle around in darkness trying to choose the good over the evil, trying to whip my flesh into line. Jesus did say, "If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me." But that has been so misunderstood in the Church, because there is no way that Adam, your carnal man, can put himself to death. It cannot be done! That is why the Apostle Paul said in Romans chapter 8 that if you through the spirit put to death the deeds of the lesh, you will live. The Christian life is totally a life of learning how, through the spirit to live godly. You will never do it in your own strength. You will not live long enough to learn how to live godly. All you will be is condemned because you can’t make it. The flesh cannot live godly. God’s concept of death is having the consciousness of being separated from Him. You simply need to behold the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world! You have absolutely no problem with God except in your religious mind. God’s people have a hard time believing the goodness and the loveliness of God, because we feel that we have to be justified in His sight by what we do, rather than by what He has done. Yet I can go to anyone on the street, I can go to a prostitute in the gutter, and I can say to her, "Lady, you have absolutely no problems with God, absolutely none." And I can guarantee you that when I begin to speak this way, the words that flow out of me will begin to generate in her. I will say to her, "Little lady, there will come a day in your life when you will fully reveal and manifest to the world the glory of God." There will come that day! Another verse we need to look at says that the last enemy to be destroyed is death. What is God’s concept of death? It is living not by His life, but by a life of good and evil. God’s concept of death is having the consciousness of being separated from Him. If you are separated from God, then you are in death; so for the last enemy, death, to be destroyed would mean that there would not be anything, anywhere, in any place that was not reconciled to Him—for if there were any place, anywhere in the universe, that was not reconciled to God, then it would be in death. To be continued
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