Encouragement

God's Gift of Adventure

by Lawrence Walkup 
01/06/15
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GOD'S GIFT OF ADVENTURE

By

Lawrence Walkup

When we give God serious thought and think about a being who has no beginning and has no end, and at just before the point of our minds being blown, it is then that we realize how much we do not understand spirit. Science who tries to explain the existence of the physical doesn't even deal with spirit. To them it doesn't exist. The problem with science is that it always starts with something that is already existing. My logical brain tells me...I want to know where the something came from. In Romans 1:19-20 this is exactly what the Apostle seems to be alluding to when he says that man has no excuse not to believe in God simply because the physical exists. Where did the physical come from if it didn't come from God? The question I want answered from a scientist is: where did the very first piece of matter come from? They can't answer that without sounding nonsensical. The fact that God is...is what makes the most sense. And I don't say that as a believer but as anyone would who is exercising common sense.

What we do understand of spirit starts at the moment we became born again. And even at that moment, all we really understand is that something has happened to us that is not of this world. In order for us to grow spiritually, God has provided our own spiritual food. It is called the Bible...or, the word of God. God is a spirit who has always existed. When he creates other spirits like angels and humans, they will have had a beginning; but because they are a spirit now like God, they too will continue to exist forever. Evidently, it appears that a spirit cannot die once it has been created by God. Since a spirit cannot die in the way that we understand death, the Bible defines death for spirits as being separated from God. And according to the Bible the cause of death is sin (Rom. 6:23). Therefore it becomes a matter of location where spirits who have sinned will spend their eternity. The only two options available are: spend eternity with God forever, or, be separated from God forever.

When Jesus came to the earth speaking of giving a life; he was speaking of gving his own life (John 10:10). For those of us who receive his life, we are assured of spending our eternity with God. We have been saved from spending eternity separated from God. This salvation only applies to humans. Evidently for some reason fallen angels do not get a second chance. Unlike God and the angels, we humans live in a completely different dimension. We live in a dimension that was created by God and was specifically designed for humans. It's called the dimension of time. For all practical purposes we humans cannot even begin to fathom anything that falls outside of the realm of time. In fact, absolutely everything we do is always in relation to time.

This is why the dynamics faith and hope (even after becoming born again) are so paramount in our relationship to God. The Bible says in 1 Cor 13:13: 'And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.' The now is referring to the dimension of time we currently live in. And what must remain while we live in time, in order to stay in relationship with God, is faith and hope. Love is the greatest of the three because it will always exist no matter where we are. In regards to humans, according to scripture, it appears that faith and hope are not needed when we are in the presence of God (1 Cor. 13:12); (1 Peter 1:9). They are needed while we are on the earth (1 John 5:4).

The definition of faith is: 'The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen' (Heb. 11:1). Because we live in a physical world that is based totally on our five senses; is it any wonder why we have such a hard time with faith...even though we as people...saved or unsaved...exercise faith all the time. We have faith in a chair supporting us, we have faith in our car starting up every morning, etc. etc. etc. Our faith problem is: we do not want to put our faith in God who we can't see. And this is why Jesus said that we have little faith. We don't want to put faith in God because that is seen as being religious instead of seeing it as being practical, which is the way we should see it. We don't understand God from a practical point of view; we only understand him from a religious point of view. And to be religious these days is very uncool because it is perceived as something that a person needs to get past in order to be accepted amongst the progressive thinkers of the world. To be accepted within the 'in crowd' is a very big deal with a lot of people.

The thing about faith besides being the very dynamic that connects us to God; it is also (because of the lack of it) the very cause of why death entered the universe in the first place. The wages of sin is death; but the definition of sin is: 'whatever is not of faith' (Rom. 14:23). When Adam stopped putting faith in God's word that stated not to eat from the tree, that is the day he died spiritually. That is the day when the life of God that was indwelling him...departed from him. This is what has been past down to all men born after Adam. The purpose of Jesus coming 4033 years into the furure was to restore to man all that was lost. Because of what Jesus has done for us, we get to start all over as if each one of us was the Adam that God first created. At 'new birth' we are at that moment Adam before he fell. What Adam could have done...is what we can live out now. Think of the potential of what all that must encompass.

God's intent in creating man to live within the dimension of time was for the purpose of living a life that is an adventure. An adventurous life is a life that is exciting, exhilarating, fulfilling and has purpose. This is God's original intent for us that he wants us to fall back into. This is the real life. It is a life that can start immediately regardless of our circumstances. It's not dependent upon how rich we are or how healthy we are. God's world transcends our world. The life that does not involve God is the fake life. It's the delusional life.

We all know as Christians that our goal is to become like Jesus. But what we do is we view that goal as being unrealistic because we know we can never be God. The Father would have never asked us to become like Jesus if it wasn't a legitimate request. Jesus became our example as a man, not as God. We must understand the significance of Him relinquishing his diety in order for him to be the perfect example to us and for us. Jesus never performed any miracles. It was God the Father who performed all the miracles through him. The miracles aren't the issue. They are only the results of the issue that Jesus wants us to get. And that issue is: look at my life that demonstrated the very thing that pleases God...faith. We also don't get that we are already Jesus. And I don't mean like Jesus...I mean we are Jesus. We are the physical body of Jesus on earth today. The reason we don't see that about ourselves is because we are still so attached to worldly thinking. And I don't say that judgmentally because we are all coming from our own individual point of how well entrenched into the world we once were. The only difference between us and Jesus the man is that he never acquired a history of worldliness like we did.

If Jesus is full of grace and truth, then that means because he lives inside of us, we too are full of grace and truth. The fullness of this grace and truth resides in our heart; it has not yet reached our minds (the place where we carry out real life functions) that God is continually renewing in order for us to see that we are Jesus. We are Jesus when we are letting him live through us over ourselves living through us. We are to present our bodies as a living sacrifice as it says in Romans 12:1. And what we are sacrificing is the self. The adventurous life awaits us. It's adventurous because it is his life. You talk about a miracle! Everyday we wake up and jump to our feet is another day to live a miracle. It's another day to live in the supernatural. It's just a matter of making the choice to get out of his way so he can do the living through us.

I want to conclude by plugging and referring to the book: 'The Indwelling Life of Christ (all of him in all of me).' Listen to his words as the author Ian Thomas describes the Christian Life and living with a purpose: "I know of nothing so utterly exciting as being a Christian, sharing the very Life of Jesus Christ on earth right here and now, being caught up with Him into the relentless, invincible purposes of the almighty God, and having available to us all the limitless resources of Diety for accomplishing those purposes. Can you imagine anything more exciting than that?

Do you know what it is to live purposefully? Is there an urgent sense of mission or some compelling thrust within you which makes life add up to the sheer adventure that God always intended life to be? Or are you simply engaged in the struggle for existence and survival?

Worse still, have you been caught up into the rat race of competitive existence? Haunted by the fear of being overtaken by others at the next bend in the road? Breathlessly trying to keep up with events that travel faster than your capacity to cope with them?

If so, there is good news awaiting you, good news about a treasury of purpose and truth and wisdom to be found in the person of Christ, for living purposefully means trading our poverty for Christ's wealth...our weakness for Christ's strength. We exchange the bankruptcy of the fallen Adam for all the fullness of the Life of Christ, and we discover the sheer adventure of allowing Jesus Christ to be God in our own experience, for God He is!"

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