© Daniel Yordy 2013
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Be transformed by the renewing of your mind… Romans 12:2
God created angels strong. Angels can do what they are created to do.
God created man weak, yet with the capacity to contain and release God Himself. Man is designed to be filled with another Person. Thus all the hard-wiring of the human form, all the programming of the human psyche was designed by God to enable a continual inter-relationship of Person inside of person.
God does not create simplistic things. When you read Dr. Paul Brand’s explanations of how the parts of the human body, things such as hearing and seeing, actually work, you say with David, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” The human body is extraordinarily complicated, the human spirit more-so. The human psyche, created at the juncture of the human body and the human spirit is equally complicated.
Thus we can conclude that God, in His make-up, is rather complex.
We are designed perfectly, in all the fantastic complications of our beings, to fit in every way this complicated Being who “fills us with all of His fullness.” And we are designed perfectly, in all the complexity of spirit, soul, and body, to release this Great and Mighty Being into His creation as rivers. We fit God in every possible way, in both earth and heaven.
The human body is extraordinarily complicated, the human spirit more-so.
Then God, in His deliberate intention, having created Adam so like Himself, that He could fill and move through Adam in every possible way an infinite God is, did not “finish” Adam’s construction, but left the final part in Adam’s hand.
Adam was filled with peace, yes, but he was not finished. He was constructed to contain all of God in Person and in fullness; he was designed to release God out into all creation. But God Himself had not formerly moved into this man who would contain Him. God cannot do such a thing; He will not violate anyone’s heart or person. He will never intrude. God is love.
To possess God, we ourselves must eat of Him.
Thus, God placed two forms of Himself before Adam.
In the first form of God Adam could choose, knowledge about God would come into Adam’s mind and heart, leaving him responsible to fit that knowledge where it should go into all the wiring and programming of which he was made.
The second form of God Adam could choose, however, was God Himself in Person, coming in as Adam’s very and only life.
Willingness of heart was God’s requirement before He would fill Adam with Himself, thus the tree of life was a thorn tree and it’s life could be won only through pain. This willingness to endure pain for life is also part of this God who would fill us full and part of our design for Him. Love suffers long.
Consider Adam’s state, then. Let’s say that he has in him, spirit, soul, and body, ten million receptors, each one designed to connect with a specific aspect of God’s Being. Every single one of these receptors is hanging there in Adam, unconnected. But Adam now has his own knowledge about God; he has the law. Thus Adam himself can take each outward definition of God that he possesses and attempt to fit that piece of knowledge with the correct receptor inside his person, his identity.
Except he didn’t much try. Now he had a better idea – fig leaves and tree trunks, and especially blaming his wife, much better things to attach to his ten million unfinished parts than religious knowledge about God!
What I am driving at is this truth. Angels are not concerned about identity; animals are not concerned about identity. They all are what they are and that’s it.
Then God ...did not “finish” Adam’s construction, but left the final part in Adam’s hand.
Man is utterly unique. If God Himself in Person is not attached in every perfect way to every single one of our ten million receptors, and if God Himself in Person is not flowing out of all the channels by which we were made to release God, than we are a mess.
Human identity, then, is the human effort to plant meaning onto all the receptors disconnected from God. Man, alone in creation, must have an identity formed from outside of his own person. Man, complete, is God’s Person in fullness filling man’s person in perfection. Man is a vessel created to contain Another Person.
Our entire identity, then, comes out of our lifetime of trying to fit some sort of meaning onto every one of ten million seemingly meaningless receptors inside our person. It is, to put it bluntly, absurd. But we draw meaning from everywhere; we especially draw meaning from our association and attachments to other people, especially to large groupings of people. That’s why symbols such as flags or logos are so very important to us. They remind us of what is “supposed to be attached” to our receptors when we are feeling empty and disconnected.
Then we have Christians; Lord Jesus save us.
Christian identity is such an incredible mess. Being a “Christian” is to make an intense effort, much more than most humans, to cram four unrelated realms of identity onto their ten million receptors in an unending variation of confusion. Now, one of those identities is Christ Jesus living in our hearts, yes. And for some, He grows in meaning and attraction. But most are also very, very busy hooking up three other complex things onto those same receptors. One is the law, the tree of knowledge about right and wrong writ large. Another is the world, which in the west has been “Christianized” and therefore sure “looks like Christ” (a lamb with horns of power; a superhero “Christ”). And the fourth source of identity is all the imagination about God convoluted up by the Christian mind, but that God Himself never says.
He will not violate
anyone’s heart or person.
He will never intrude.
God is love.
To possess God,
we ourselves must eat of Him.
Jesus in our hearts brings wonderful peace, yes. But all the other forms of identity that we attempt to cram in alongside of Him provide for most Christians agonizing and unending psychosis. That’s why Jesus said in Revelation 3 that it would be better to be a happy pagan (cold to God) than to live in Christian psychosis (lukewarm, that is, some of Christ mixed with a whole lot of other stuff).
All the years I lived in deeper truth, mightily anointed of God, Christian community, I was truly psychotic, along with everyone else. And much of what they spoke into me served only to increase my own confusion. Look at the word at the beginning of this letter. “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” That was just one more thing I “had to do.” And I surely did not know how, and any idea I may have had, I was certainly a failure at implementing. I believed with all my heart that I must renew my mind. I did not know how, but in desperation, knowing that I must obtain life or die, I surely tried. I surely tried, and I more surely failed.
God wins our hearts first, before He begins to change our minds.
I think it could be easier to lead a happy pagan ignorant of God – straight into Christ, than it is to lead a “Christian” into Christ. Christians lead the unsaved to Christ, yes, but then fill their minds and hearts with an anti-Christ identity of confusion. (Jesus said something along these lines, didn’t He?)
All the years I lived in deeper truth, mightily anointed of God, Christian community, I was truly psychotic, along with everyone else.
I have painted this picture as clearly as I can to show us the great task in our hand, that is, altering, in the joy of Christ, our identity from confusion to Christ.
We know our true identity by the three verses that are far larger than and that swallow up entirely all the rest of the Bible. In fact these are not even three verses, but three phrases. They are the sum total of who and what we are.
— You are filled with All the Fullness of God —
— Abide in Me and I in you —
— Rivers of Living Water flow out of your belly. —
All three of these statements are talking about our human makeup. Let me give a rough definition of our true human identity. (I use percentages for no other reason than to give us some form of picture, the concept of percentage does not otherwise fit.)
Eighty percent of the human is God the Father in Person filling us full with all of Himself in all of His divinity. Ten percent of the human is Christ Jesus living as us in weakness. And ten percent of the human is God by His Spirit flowing out from us, bringing life and joy to all.
Just like Jesus, we are the form and shape of God in creation.
Here is a diagram of our true identity, a diagram I have used before.
Our true identity is to have every single one of our ten million receptors, spirit, soul, and body, connected perfectly with that particular place in God’s complex Being and Person to which they were designed to connect and God Himself, then, flowing through those connections all through us in joy and power, and flowing on out through our many channels into His creation as rivers of Spirit.
This is the normal Christian life; it is the normal human life. It is the image and likeness of God. Perfecting our true identity and “the renewing of our minds” are the same thing.
Our task is to escape “Christian” identity by taking on Christ identity, that is, as Paul said, to be clothed with the Lord Jesus Christ. Being clothed with the Lord Jesus Christ causes us to put off the false identities of Christian thinking. You see, a receptor cannot be attached to it’s rightful place in God without also throwing off the false thing we placed on it to somehow give ourselves meaning (God’s definition of false “flesh”). But Christ always comes first by faith.
God wins our hearts first; then He changes our mind. As we win all true meaning, the false meaning is cast aside. That willingness is the win of our hearts; it is being rooted and grounded in love.
Adam’s heart would have been fully God’s before he had ever climbed high enough in the tree to pluck the fruit of life and eat it. Thus Jesus said, “To those who overcome, I give to eat the fruit of the tree of life.” “Overcoming” and “God winning our heart utterly for Himself” are the same thing. To overcome means to come over.
The only thing that can change our minds is to eat of the fruit of life, as Jesus said, “Except you eat My flesh and drink My blood.” Only hearts won fully by God are willing to – desirous of – eating that fruit.
“If any man thirst. . .”
Never in all the history of the world have the requirements of the law ever won any one’s heart for Christ. In complete contrast, righteousness acquired by self becomes the greatest barrier against Christ.
What was the moment when God won my heart, fully and without holding back? It was the moment when, in the sweet Spirit of Christ, I saw that Jesus had become me, that I was swallowed up utterly into Him, that He carries all that I am, and that He lives, now, as every part and particle of the human me.
To know that He carries all that I am at all times and in every way is the sweetest reality in the universe. A God who would take me into Himself as the Lord Jesus Christ, stumbling, bloody and bruised, carrying me through death into life, along a way I could never traverse by myself, this is a God who forever holds my heart as His own.
Never in all the history of the world have the requirements of the law ever won any one’s heart for Christ. In complete contrast, righteousness acquired by self becomes the greatest barrier against Christ.
Then He asks me to allow Himself in Person to be all that I am, to have no other identity than Father God filling me full, than Christ Jesus, my most Precious Friend, living as me in weakness, and the Holy Ghost just always billowing out of me as rivers, to be nothing else, to know nothing else. This I would do, with all my heart.
In Christendom there is a definition of the propitiation of Jesus that is abhorrent to us. That is the idea that God punished Jesus with our punishment, that redemption was an act of injustice committed by God against His Son. This idea says, “We humans deserved to be thrown into hell, but God took the punishment meant for us and punished Jesus instead. Thus we get to go to heaven; that’s what being a ‘Christian’ is all about.”
We see a completely different picture.
The BLOOD – The CROSS – The
RESURRECTION of the Lord Jesus Christ.
First and foremost, the path of Jesus through the Atonement is God Himself showing all creation who and what He is for the first time. And seeing God as He really is, we discover ourselves caught up into Him, that He takes us into Himself and carries us through a path we could never find ourselves, all the way up the tree of life. And there God Himself gives us to eat of that fruit, fruit we could never have come near by ourselves.
However, inside that most real reality, there is also a picture to us that is central to our transformation, to our change of identity. You see, we are very psychological beings. The picture of ten million receptors, of which nine million, nine hundred thousand are attached to all the wrong things, with only one hundred thousand being attached to Christ living in our hearts, this picture shows us how screwed up our psyche really has been.
Thus Jesus said knowing our true psyche causes us to lose this psyche of Adam’s confusion, that is, having every last one of those ten million receptors attached fully into their rightful places in the God who fills us full.
These three MIGHTY things, three powerful images, rooted in absolute reality, having come out from God and shown themselves as utterly profound and absolute inside the physicality of this planet and inside of time, are given to us FOR THE SOLE PURPOSE of severing us forever from the imagination of the tree of knowledge, from all the foolish and false things we have attached from birth to our ten million receptors, to give our empty lives some sort of meaning.
The BLOOD – The CROSS – The RESURRECTION of the Lord Jesus Christ.
These three things ARE total and absolute.
He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world. 1 John 2:2
The Blood erases all sin; God simply cannot remember any of it.
For the love of Christ compels us, because we judge thus: that if One died for all, then all died. 2 Corinthians 5:14
The Cross eliminates the sinner; he no longer exists, end of story.
For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive. 1 Corinthians 15:22
The Resurrection is who we are; each in his time.
If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new. Now all things are of God… 2 Corinthians 5:17-18
God made these three pictures total and absolute for us so that we could utterly let go of any need for any other meaning in our lives. Our human psyche needs such a picture.
There is no sin; there is no sinner. The purpose of the sacrifice of Jesus is so we can turn our backs on any and every concern over “me,” and what “I do,” and busy ourselves with the one thing, the only thing that is important, knowing this God who fills us full.
Here is the most important negative verse in the Bible.
For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted to the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes. Romans 10:3-4
You see, every voice in Christendom, it seems, argues that we need to find meaning, to attach our receptors into every possible form of our own righteousness, our own doing, our own “obedience.” Yet every receptor that holds onto that which has no meaning is a receptor not enjoying its place in God.
God gave us the bold and absolute picture of the Blood, He gave us the bold and absolute picture of the Cross, and He gave us the bold and absolute picture of the RESURRECTION so that we could leap utterly into the tree of life and never worry about any aspect of the tree of knowledge ever again. So that we simply never again concern ourselves with ourselves. We are a done deal. Now, all we need to do is plug every part of our minds into God in Person filling us full without ever once worrying about any limitation or inability on our part.
To know God and to know Jesus-Sent — Christ is perfected in our weakness.
Just like Adam, we are part of our own creation. God will never form Christ in us without our active and continual involvement. He simply never pushes anyone around, but He does all things in joy and delight together with us, including transforming us into the image of Christ, the express image of the Father.
God has given us a very specific mechanism, a precise exercise by which we take on our Christ identity, losing in the process even the memory of all non-meaning we have ever known.
Then here is what we discover. This is a big deal. We are not engaged in the task of changing our identity to all that is Christ – only. No! Much more than that, we discover that by winning our true Christ identity, we are altering the identity of the entire universe, both heaven and earth. The universe has never known it’s true identity; all it has ever known was the false duality painted by Adam.
This is a big deal. We are setting creation free.
The book of Revelation is all about identity.
…For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. Revelation 19:10
And I will give to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy one thousand two hundred and sixty days, clothed in sackcloth. Revelation 11:3
To witness, to prophecy, is to speak.
God creates all things by speaking. God opens His mouth to speak, and the Lord Jesus is always flowing out of the Father as the light and life that creates and sustains all things.
Then God SAID, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God SAW the light, that it was good.
Here is the foundational principal by which God brings forth everything.
…God, who gives life to the dead and calls those things which do not exist as though they did. Romans 4:17
First God says, then God sees. If this is God’s reality, how can anything else be ours?
We speak, then we see what we speak.
Let’s continue on in Romans 4. (Abraham) contrary to hope, in hope believed… according to what was spoken… And not being weak in faith, he did not consider his own body, already dead… He did not waver at the promise of God through unbelief, but was strengthened in faith, giving glory to God, and being fully convinced that what He had promised He was also able to perform. 18-21
So, you see, the line “And God SAW the light, that it was good,” that seeing of God was the seeing of faith. God spoke light, therefore light became. God saw goodness, therefore all things were good.
Speaking comes first, seeing comes second. Both are by faith; both enter into the darkness, into “nothingness” before they ever bring forth their reality.
Our reality in God cannot be any different than God’s reality in Himself.
We transform ourselves and the entire universe by the words that we speak.
…For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.
Creating and sustaining, forming and fashioning all things by speaking, and then by seeing what is spoken by faith, that it is truly good, is the nature and Being of this God who fills us with His Person.
When we speak what God speaks concerning Christ our only life, then God speaks through us. If God speaks through us (prophecy), then what’s the problem? There is none. Hold in faith and see God alone.
But it is absolutely true that, if we have not let go of all the meaning we find for ourselves in all “Christian” identity, double-hearted and double-minded, if God has not yet won our hearts, we will not speak Christ alone. Rather, we will speak an unending mixture of confusion. Our lives will always follow our speaking. And speaking Christ always begins in the darkness, that is, by faith.
Those who speak separation from Christ must live separated from Christ, trying as best they can, “with God’s help” of course, though God never seems to “help,” to do what they “know” God wants them to do. And to live in the inescapable knowledge that they are always falling short. This is the nightmare in which so many of our brethren live.
For their sakes, we speak Christ. Their dilemma is the first reconciliation we carry in our hearts.
But just as the world fights the Lamb tooth and nail in order to hold tightly to its meaningless identity, so also do our brethren. Thus we walk the path of Christ for their sakes, laying down our lives for them.
And so I want to include the ten most important verses in the Bible as statements of faith, in short form, as the speaking of Christ.
Speak these things; prophecy Christ.
As you speak Christ, God through you is transforming not only your entire identity, but the identity of the entire creation as well.
Here are the ten most important verses of the Bible, written as personal confessions of faith. Speak them out loud; shout them, over and over, until you see as God sees, until you see through eyes of fire.
1. From the very beginning, God determined to make me just like Jesus.
2. I am filled with all the fullness of God.
3. God flows out from me as rivers of living water bringing life and joy to all.
4. I cast down every voice that speaks against the Word God speaks, against Christ my only life.
5. Christ is my life; I have no other life.
6. I boldly enter the Holiest, the throne of God – with my heart sprinkled always with Blood, and with my body, flesh of His flesh, washed pure and clean.
7. I exult boastfully in all the victory of Christ revealed in me. I speak Christ; I keep the joy of my confidence high.
8. I love you; I lay down my life for you.
9. I set creation free.
10. Just as Jesus is IN the Father, so I am in Him and He is in me, every part of me in Him and Him in every part of me. I abide in Christ; He abides in me.
And thus we know God and we know Jesus-Sent.
I will continue weaving together these three strands in further letters. First, our speaking the prophetic word of Christ into all reality, second, the transformation of our identity and the identity of the universe as we do so, and third the reaction of the things in the darkness as the light turns on. All three of these things are woven all through the vision John saw on Patmos. They are indeed the revelation of Jesus Christ, the unveiling.
They are, in fact, the only things I have written about in seven years of writing. And so I will continue to speak and to write until all creation is gloriously free.
