When man sinned through Adam in the fall of man, what he lost was his original specific nature. He became a prisoner in his own body when he died spiritually, and was now dominated by his emotion and intellect. When your body and mind team up together (which is your normal state) we call that the carnal mind. Also called the fallen or flesh nature, or just flesh for short. To be carnally minded is death, as it is the death nature we arrived at in the fall. It is the place we fell to and the thing we are talking about when we say man is fallen. It is not something you come to through a few bad choices, it’s how you were born. It is the very way we are in the earth. Whether you like it or not, regardless of how you feel about it. Your feelings and thoughts have absolutely no impact on this condition you inherited, and are actually part of the problem. In the fallen nature they will act only to distract you from identifying this condition. Because when you see it you will have to do something about it. You will have to get out of it.
The problem is not in your skin it’s in your spirit, which is dead. Which is kind of why you are not aware of your spirit, and the things of God seem so unreal to you. You cannot fix a spiritual problem with flesh and blood, though they will be involved. Spiritual problems must be fixed spiritually. The essential meaning of spiritual death is to be separated from God. That is why Jesus had to finally be separated from God spiritually, which was the worst part for Him. He had never been separated from God, ever. That’s why He said “My God My God why have you forsaken Me,” which meant why have you left me, why have you departed from me. Now God is a Spirit and deals with everything Spiritually, including you, me and the fall of man. The reason God had to become a man to fix everything is because it was a man who broke it.
Paradise was lost under the authority of a man (given to him by God), so God became a man to bring it all back. Which is the only way He could do it and be right. Leading us to one of the first things you have to get clear about God, is that He is always Right. About everything. He is never wrong, not once not ever, about anything. He wants you to be Right too, but it’s all something He is going to do. All you and I do is let Him. Before He can make you Right, you have to admit that you are wrong in relation to Him and His plan for your life. Most people will not admit to this lifelong error because they are too proud. Though few stop to consider what exactly they are proud about. It is the sin that separates us most from God, the Great Sin as C.S. Lewis calls it. That is why the devil fights so hard to keep you bound by your past, to keep you trapped in it. If you are continually defined by your past and the sin you were born into, then you will never become the son that God wants to make you.
Eden was a real place. In it our heart and our head would have been in alignment. After the fall they came into conflict. They are still that way today. After receiving Christ as your Savior the biggest battle is to bring your head back under the control of your heart, and keep it there every single day. To do so is to become spiritually minded, which is only done by washing your mind in the water of His Word daily. His Word is His plan for your life, and will even bring you to the things it does not talk about. But only as you continually fill yourself up with it. Most christians don’t do this themselves, which is why they don’t act any different than people who are not Christians. But then that’s not really being a Christian, it is just saying you are. Everything outside of His Word is part of some plan, it’s just not His. Most of it was designed to distract you in the short term, from doing His plan. But in the end it is meant to kill you. Along the way it will just steal from you and destroy things. That is actually another name of the enemy of our soul in the Bible – the Destroyer.
Because this death thing is a large part of what you were born into, until you get rid of it, it will always be there waiting for you. Its success rate is 100%, with the single exception of One. The One who defeated death. In all of history only Christ did this, anybody who says different is just flat out lying. There were hundreds of eyewitnesses, many of whom wrote the Bible. Both the Old and New Testament. Moses saw Him, David saw Him, Elijah saw Him. You could say on some level that all the prophets saw Him, and the whole Old Testament (the Hebrew Tanakh) was written by prophets. In the New Testament more than 400 people saw Him at one time, after He was raised from the dead. As well as His disciples, who saw Him several times after His resurrection. We must always remember that the Bible is a record of multiple eyewitness testimonies.
If you really want to get ahold of the big picture in world religion, you have to remember that only the Bible is historical. It is not more historical than the others, it is the most historical document of any nation and any era in all of world history. Period. It always has been. The historicity has always been incontestable. Just because we live in the information age and the era of the skeptic does not change anything. Believing is a choice, and we live among a people who choose to believe in nothing but the moment, and the continual attempt to satisfy Self for that moment. It certainly does not change the facts, let alone the Truth. The only thing it means is you better check yourself, make sure you take a good look at who you are believing. I mean look at their life, and the way they live or lived it.
With the exception of particular disciplines in science and mathematics, we are not taught all the facts pertaining to any particular Truth. You are taught some of the facts as we know them, which all combined only equal a partial Truth. Which means what we are mostly taught is what people think. Professors at university and your favorite school teacher do not teach you Truth. Most do not have any so they teach you what they believe. And a belief is simply something you think to be True (whether it is or not is irrelevant). Now you do learn a fair amount of facts in any given school year, maybe about 20 to 30%, depending on what was studied. But facts for the most part tell you how we look at it now, not how anything really is.
Some facts change daily, even more change within a matter of years. Within a century, more than half of what we thought we knew gets turned on its head. The last 100 years have been no exception. That is the thing you have to get clear about facts, is that they mostly change. Whereas Truth does not change at all. Truth supersedes facts, always. Truth is what the right disciplines ministered in the right way by the right people, lead you to. Truth is what the facts (in this context – not all) are trying to uncover, trying to show you. So the real question is – do you want to know the Truth, or do you prefer the bliss of ignorance. The comfortability of it. Because the Truth will make you uncomfortable, as it insists that you change. But in that change it will lead you not only to life, but to eternal life, the God kind of life. Which is the truest form of life.
As a Christian minister what I minister is Gods Truth, which is The Truth. But I do not have all of it, only a part, as all ministers do. And I can only minister what my part has, not what I feel like or happen to think. Ministering what my part has comes with a power that we call the anointing, which comes only if your ministry as an entity and what you are ministering in belief through teaching – are authorized. The authority of course being God, and His plan or constitution being His Word – the Bible. God having called you and appointed you to that Office of ministry is the only way to get the power. There is no other, there is just a bunch of people pretending. Many of them are the clergy in the church. Ordination is not on paper its in power. Both the Call to an Office of ministry and the ordination of it (the power makes it official) are from and of God.
Not a college, seminary, piece of paper, or group of men anywhere can Ordain you. It is impossible and everyone involved knows it. Nor will you find a single example of such a thing anywhere in Scripture. The Biblical model is drastically different from the education model used by every modern nation. Nothing wrong with education, it’s a good thing, even a wonderful thing. But it is not at all the same thing as God ordaining you. There are of course some ministers in various Christian Churches who were called by God, and got an education as well. But their education did not give them the anointing. You have to get up under someone with the anointing to get the anointing. The vast majority of those in the man made religious institution of the church did not answer a call from God, nor were they ordained by Him. It simply appealed to their personality or intellect, or they thought it a good idea.
That is why there is so little power at work in so many churches. God did not call the men running them, they called themselves. So if you do not know Jesus don’t despair, most christians don’t know Him either. They just say they do, and spend their whole lives doing little or nothing of what He says. Which is the only way you will get to know Him, by doing what He says – not acting as though you like Him. You can agree that He died, but it is not enough. The demons believe that, and they tremble. The two offices of ministry in the Hebrew Tanakh (the Old Testament of the Christian Bible) were replaced by 5 Offices of Ministry in the New Testament. That is, Prophet and Priest of the Old were replaced by Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Pastor and Teacher in the New. All of this is in the Bible.
The New Deal is part of the Old Deal. It is contained within it and always has been. Hundreds of Scriptures in the Old speak of the New over and over again. That is why the Old is quoted hundreds of times in the New. To say see, this is what that was talking about. All of the men used by God to write down the New Deal (which again was always in the Old) knew the Old Deal by heart. With the exception of Luke all of them were Jewish. One was a religious legal scholar known as a pharisee, and in fact was highly esteemed among the pharisees of his day. His name was Paul, and he was on his way to Damascus with letters from the High Priest in Jerusalem authorizing his actions. These letters were actually a sort of religious arrest warrant, to arrest the followers of the Way (an early name for followers of Christ) when he met the Head of the Way, Jesus himself.
At the same time Jesus appeared and spoke to him in the Spirit. Paul became blind, and would stay that way for three days. A Biblical type and symbol of the same death and resurrection that Christ had gone through years earlier. Death to the old life and old man, resurrection into the New. Paul would never recover from his Damascus Road experience, which was the original one. He would go on to be used by God to “set on fire the conversion of the Roman Empire.” The world would never be the same. Not because of some greatness in Paul, but because of what God was doing through him. All along the Way we can look back and see that God was using people who were available for His use. To do what He had always wanted to do, which was to bring man back to Himself. Out of the dark and painful corrupting sting of sin, into the bright joy filled glory of Christ within.
Brother Greg
Full Grown Ministry
http://www.fullgrownministry.wordpress.com
Much Grace 