God Is Showing Off

October Joy We are back in beautiful Hermanus, sprinkled with spring! The floral kingdom reigns; everywhere flowers are displaying the splendour of magnificent colour and scents they were designed for and patiently waited to present to the world. The same planet, different seasons. Our eyes were exquisitely entertained in Europe by the many brown brushstrokes of every shade of autumn. Lydia went for a walk in the mountain this morning and she said to me, “God is showing off, He is so excessive and extravagant, such an exhibitionist! Not even discreet, He just splashes His beauty all over in absolute profusion!” It was such a blessing working through the book of Ephesians again, this time doing the translation in Afrikaans. I am so thankful for my wonderful little laptop that goes everywhere with me; in cars, plains, trains, even a 17 hour ferry from Poland to Sweden. Often while doing the translation I would just break out into tears of joy and wonder at the inexhaustible wealth of inspired truth. Thank God for what Paul saw and for what we are now blessed to see in equal clarity revealed by the same Spirit of faith and truth. Between two teaching sessions in Warsaw Poland, an Ukrainian lady said to me that it seems to her that the South African men appear to be so joyful and positive about life compared to the Eastern European guys! I said to her that I could show her millions of miserable men in South Africa, the secret is not geography, it is Christ! So many sincere Polish people believe that Poland still carries the burden of the war scars and the many defeats by the Germans and Russians. The enemy would love to get mileage out of our past disappointments and failures, and will do so with glee while we let him. Eph.4:7 The gift of Christ gives dimension to grace and defines our individual value. (Grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of the gift of Christ) Only when we discover what happened to us when Jesus died and was raised, do we have a reference of absolute authority to defeat the lies of our weaknessess and inferiorities. In South Africa we often allow ourselves through ignorance to continue to feel disadvantaged and defeated. The economy is not the measure of your life, your history or political situation does not qualify to measure you... Christ is the only accurate measure of our lives, He is the exact blueprint of our design, the image and likeness of God in human form!

When He died, we died, the old things have passed away, BEHOLD, all things have become new! Note that Paul does not say behold the old, he says behold the new! This truth is not just true for a select few, it is true for you! “One died for all, therefore all have died” says Paul in 2 Cor.5:14. “From now on THEREFORE, I no longer know any man from a human point of view, even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know Him thus no longer!” (:16,17) Paul says the way we know Christ is the way we know ourselves! When we know and even worship Christ from a mere historic point of view we miss the point; we might even feel very emotional and sentimental about Christmas and Easter and shed a few sincere tears, but we will never know His life transforming power there! The miracle of transformation only takes place in the mirror, nothing changes when we’re in window-shopping-mode! 2 Cor.3:18. The mystery of God reveals Jesus Christ as representative of the human race! The Creator God camouflaged in flesh makes Him the only individual who would ever qualify to represent all of God and all of humanity in the same Person. This is the mystery which was hidden for ages and generations which God documented and decreed for our glorification! When Jesus died and was raised it wasn’t for Himself it was for us! He didn’t have a problem with sin, bondage and disease, we did. If the devil knew what was happening to mankind when Jesus died (and what was happening to him at the same time, Col. 2:14,15) he would never have crucified the Lord of glory. 1 Cor.2:7,8. However, he cannot reverse the cross, but he can deceive us with our permission and blindfold us with our own ignorance and unbelief. 2 Cor.4:4. Many sincere people of all religions and philosophies (including Christianity) worship God, or their definition of divinity in ignorance, but the Creator God in whom we live and move and have our being, whose offspring all men are, has overlooked the times of ignorance and now appeals to all men everywhere to come to a radical change of mind, because His righteous judgement fell on Christ and He has given assurance of this to all men by raising Him from the dead. Acts 17:30,31. As far as God is concerned the acquittal of the human race is accomplished. Paul says, “while we were still dead in our sins He made us alive together with Christ, and raised us up together with Christ and seated us together with Christ in heavenly places!” This happened to us before we even knew about it, before we believed! Now we have something of substance to declare and believe! Truth doesn’t become true after you believe it, it’s been true all along! Water doesn’t become H2O when you drink it, it’s been H2O all along! Drink it and it will quench your thirst! Your faith does not invent truth; truth awakens your faith. Look at Romans 4:25, “He was handed over (to judgement) because of our transgressions, and raised from the dead because of our righteousness!” Many translations does the first half of the sentence correct but then translate the same Greek word, dia, in the second part incorrectly, they would say, for, or so that we can be justified. Big difference! If we were not already justified because of His obedience, He could not be raised from the dead.

The cross = our sins; the resurrection = our innocence. We are dealing with an already saved, delivered, healed and innocent world! Our reference is Christ; therefore we herald good news of great joy which is relevant to the entire world! What an insult to the cross, and accusation to our silence, if all we see is how sinful and wicked this world is; while something happened to mankind in Christ that is out of all proportion to Adam’s transgression. Let us lift up our eyes and see and proclaim the success of the cross, how ripe the harvest of His labour already is. It happened in those three awesome days, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up!” John 2:19. He did! “Know ye not that your body is His temple!” He does not live in buildings or institutions made by man. The Polish people have beautifully restored their cities that Hitler demolished in the war; the palace in Warsaw was restored from only a painting of the original building; what a joy it was to tell them of the original accurate blueprint of our lives, the Word that was in the beginning, the Word that is God, that same Word became flesh and now dwells within us! Our restoration to the full original splendour of our design took only three days!!! “Do not say there are yet 4 months, then comes the harvest!” We have wasted so much time playing for time and excusing our own unbelief! God does not need forty years of your unbelief to teach you some wilderness principles! Faith gives new definition to time! God calls things which are not yet visible as though they were. Rom.4:17, Gal.3:2325, 4:4, Heb.11:1. Jesus is the fullness of time. Righteousness by faith experiences contradiction with joy. Instead of reading the signs of disaster as confirmation of how unrighteous we are, “no blossoms, certainly means no harvest...” Hab.2:4, 3:17-19, righteousness by faith rejoices in the God of our salvation who is our strength, He makes our feet like hind’s feet, causing us to leap over the steep and slippery places! So many sincere believers today study and even memorise Deuteronomy 28 as a guideline to the blessings and curses, yet this passage has no relevance to New Testament faith. Eph.1:3 “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.” Gal 3:13 “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us; for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangs on a tree.” Gal 2:21 “I do not make void the grace of God: for if righteousness is through the law, then Christ died for nought.” It is not your obedience and diligent willpower that qualifies you for a blessing from God! It is His obedience, which prompts your faith; this is why Paul preaches the obedience of faith, and not the obedience of works and quality decisions. Rom.1:5.

Someone said to me the other day that the way their children behave is the barometer of how they as parents are doing spiritually; does this mean the prodigal son’s Father had sin in His life?! You cannot measure temperature with a ruler! It is the wrong measure! “Grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of the gift of Christ.” Paul’s place of contentment had nothing to do with a rumour that he would be released from prison in two weeks time; he learned the secret to be totally satisfied in Christ, in abundance and in lack; whether people spoke well of him or gossiped about him. Abundance cannot add to completeness, neither can any definition of lack take away from it. Abundance is not a sign of God’s goodness, neither is lack a sign of His absence! In Christ we live an unthreatened life. We face the same storms, but it is the rudder of our conversation and persuasion that makes the difference. Caleb and Joshua saw the same giants, but they had a different measure of themselves, certainly not the grasshopper size! “We have the same spirit of faith as he had who wrote, ’I believe and so I speak’ we too believe, and so we speak!” 2 Cor.4:13. We encourage you to walk in the authority and serenity of what your faith knows to be true about you, as declared in the revelation of Christ. Visit our web page, we have also started a new section there with transcriptions of teachings, the first one being one I did in Poland. I will shortly give you the link to all the MP3 downloads etc. I also attach the completed Afrikaans translation of Ephesians. You are bountifully blessed; God speaks well of you! Love Francois and Lydia