The Christian Life is a Spiritual Walk

     The Christian life is a spiritual walk; it is not about a new religion or religious experience.  The new creation we have become is unlike the person whose end is to live in the world.  A person who is living in the world, would embrace Christ as Saviour, but lives in pleasure and puts earthly pursuits above that of the Lord, and sinks his life into acquiring name, fame and money (1 John 2:15-17; 2 Peter 2, 18, 20).  This is walking in the flesh.
     Human wisdom and strength are useless in spiritual endeavors (John 3:6; John 15:5).  The desire to make a name for oneself is carnal and antagonistic to the Spirit of God.  All these are a contradiction to the Spirit of Christ.  Therefore, these are a preference, an attempt to make a good appearance on the outside while the inside is corrupt.  The Christian life is beauty from within and radiant reflection of Christ outside.
     This person possesses a divine life and is capable of making God visible on the earth and ruling the planet with divine authority.  As a Christian, one has been given God's uncreated life.  As such, one is not called to live by "a Christian code of ethics".  Instead one is called to live God's life.  When a person lives by God's life, that person would possess divine impulses, instincts, promptings, senses and tendencies.  This would yield to the person the secret of growing up with the Head, who is Christ (Ephesians 4:15).  When collectively as a Body we live by the Lord's life, the character of Jesus begins to take shape within (Galatians 4:19).  In the words of Detrick Bonhoeffer, "Jesus calls men not to a new religion, but to a new life." (John 10:10; Galatians 2:20; Colossians 3:4; 1 John 5:11-12).
     God's mind is that humanity would share His life.  He wanted us to live in union with Himself and express His goodness in the earth.  That is what the Tree of the Lord offered.  Hence, Frank Viola, warned that when we strive to be "good Christians we are eating from the wrong tree. " Living by 'right and wrong' is not Christianity.  It is old covenant living and its very human, certainly not spiritual.
     By contrast the Christian life is to live by the energy and direction of divine life which dwells in us.  It is to depend upon the living Christ rather than upon one's knowledge of good and evil; right and wrong.  Thus, the man who partakes of the divine nature lives by the indwelling Christ rather than by ourselves (2 Peter 1:9).
    Having been transformed into a new creation in Christ, one who walks in the Spirit is largely delivered from idolatrous abominations and Protestant misconceptions of Scriptures, and brought again to own in simplicity to the headship of Christ, the presidency of the Holy Spirit in the assembly of God's people and the authority of the written Word over the conscience of all who call upon the name of the Lord.
     These believers consciously seek to avoid losing sight of the tremendous importance of walking in the Spirit in living, fully realized fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ, to whose peerless name God would gather all His own.  Their Christian walk or life points always to Christ in them, the hope of their glory.  They are creations in Him, walking in the Spirit.

T. Cyprian Kia

Peter: Prisoner to the Will of the Spirit

In the last chapter of John, just before His ascension, Jesus spoke these words to Peter: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, when thou wast young, thou girdest thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest, but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee wither thou wouldest not” (John 21:18).

In our youth and immaturity (spiritually) the Lord permits many things in us that He later strips from us as we become more mature in the Spirit. One of these is the freedom of our own choices. When we were young, like Peter, we girded ourselves with our armor and went forth to battle, walking wherever we desired. Wherever we saw an opportunity to do a good work for God, we got involved and engaged. There was a freedom granted to us, and God graciously blessed and anointed our efforts as we prayed and sought His help.

If we pastored, He blessed and gave increase. If we decided to go on the evangelistic field, He blessed and anointed and gave us souls. If we decided to teach, He blessed and gave us revelation of His Word. Though we sought for His guidance and tried to be led of the Spirit, there was not that absolute binding to the perfect will of God and the voice of the Spirit. This was in our strength, our youth and immaturity.

With growth and maturity there came a discipline of the Spirit bringing us into submission to His perfect will. Sometimes, because of the strength of our wills or stubbornness and hardness of our own spirits, there comes affliction and tribulation to weaken our own flesh in order to make us submit to His purpose in us. Paul prayed three times for deliverance from a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, but God would not deliver him. In effect He told Paul that He was doing this to keep him weak. For the Lord said, “My strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

Peter found that, as he grew older in the Lord, there was to be no more of the walking “where thou wouldst.” Rather, there was to be a binding of his own strength, and his girding would come from another, and he would be carried to destinations determined by someone else. This is a mark of maturity. There is a work of the Spirit now going on to bring us to a place of absolute imprisonment to the direct guidance and will of the Spirit. What a glorious confinement!

Just to know that I am bound up in His divine purposes, regardless of what He chooses to do with me and to me, is a privilege worth accepting. It is a difficult and tortuous path at times, until we recognize who our Jailer really is. We fret and worry when we think we are bound by our circumstances, or by our associates, or by the devil. Those who are called into the high calling of God need to come to the realization Who controls their destiny, so that they can come into a REST, and submit to His workings and dealings in their lives. Like Paul and Peter and those other heroes of faith, we are prisoners of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Common Human Temptation

All our temptations are but diminutive demonstrations of our desire to hug center stage. They are beguiling enticements to insure power, to play God, king of the mountain, lord of our own lives.
Try that on for size. Think of the temptations you have had in just the past years. Didn’t they involve side-stepping some spiritual or moral law of God? Start with the basics. Begin with the first commandment, “You shall have no other gods.” All the rest of the commandments focus on the danger of breaking that fundamental spiritual law. We can make a false god out of controlling our use of time, people, the family, truth, sex or things.
The producer and director of that production is Satan. He is a fallen angel who tried to hug center stage. Having lost his place in glory, he is busy recruiting and casting power-hungry people in roles that usurp the spotlight in their life story. He delights in getting us to seek the glory rather than glorify Christ. But center stage is where we get the worst case of feeling at loose ends because we cannot cope with the pressure. It’s inevitable; we were never meant to be there in the first place.
Temptation to get and keep control are distracting loose ends. They keep pulling us away from our central purpose of glorifying God and doing what we know He has called us to do. And now the central question: Is Christ also Lord of these loose ends of temptation? Always remember when you are being tempted that you are seeking to hug the center stage. Stop! You’re not the star. Christ is.