“I will bring you into the bond
of the covenant…”
Ezekiel 20:37
True freedom is found in the bonds of our relationship with Him and the ability to express Him in the circumstances of life. Spiritual freedom is revealed by our inability to harbor unforgiveness, envy or jealousy.
“Put on, therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved,
bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering…”
Colossians 3:12
The elect of God are known by the life they live and the character revealed. There is a dynamic in Christ that shows HIS qualities through the bonds of relationship. Submission to Christ is freedom. In our obedience, we reveal His Lordship; in giving up our rights, we discover His, for love is the reins of the free. He must rule and reign in this life if we are to rule and reign with Him in the Life to come. Faith and hope see beyond the reaches of today.
“Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another,
if any man have a quarrel against any:
even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye…”
Colossians 3:13
Forgiveness is the path to freedom. The injuries of others, if not forgiven, bind us in chains of our own making. To live free in Christ is to forgive as He forgives. To bear long with one another is the mark of a true disciple. Paul continues in this flow of life with the crescendo…
“And above all these things put on charity,
which is the bond of perfectness.”
Colossians 3:14
Bonds of Love
Love is the binding agent that brings our hearts to the freedom of the Cross. No power on earth could hold the Son of God to the cross other than the Love of the Father. The freest soul on earth is the one bound to the supremacy of love.
“I in them, and Thou in Me,
that they may be made perfect in one…”
John 17:23
The Yoke of Christ
being the path
to pure fellowship.
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“But if we walk in the light, as He is in the light,
we have fellowship one with another…”
1 John 1:7
Related Post: The Body of Christ – Unity
Brian Troxel
(Painting: Artist Spanish Title: Heraclitus around 1620-1640)
Forgiveness Part III
“For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. “When he had begun to settle them, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. “But since he did not have the means to repay, his lord commanded him to be sold, along with his wife and children and all that he had, and repayment to be made. “So the slave fell to the ground and prostrated himself before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me and I will repay you everything.’ “And the lord of that slave felt compassion and released him and forgave him the debt. “But that slave went out and found one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and he seized him and began to choke him, saying, ‘Pay back what you owe.’ “So his fellow slave fell to the ground and began to plead with him, saying, ‘Have patience with me and I will repay you.’ “But he was unwilling and went and threw him in prison until he should pay back what was owed. “So when his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were deeply grieved and came and reported to their lord all that had happened. “Then summoning him, his lord *said to him, ‘You wicked slave, I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. ‘Should you not also have had mercy on your fellow slave, in the same way that I had mercy on you?’ “And his lord, moved with anger, handed him over to the torturers until he should repay all that was owed him. “My heavenly Father will also do the same to you, if each of you does not forgive his brother from your heart.”
(Mat 18:23-35)
I had a dream once again regarding forgiveness only this one was given to me so that i would realize the severity of unforgiveness.
In the dream I found myself kneeling before a king, I have no doubt who the king was. As I said I was kneeling and my hands were in shackles and there were guards on either side of me. I believe that I was asking for forgiveness of the debt that I owed the king because of the words the king spoke to me. There were people behind me in the dream and the king asked me, “what of them?”, to which I replied, forgive them.
Again, I believe that I was given the dream because of the severity of unforgiveness and how God views it. I used the above scripture because it is the one that was laid upon my heart for this posting. Forgiveness is not an option it is a command and the requirement for you to be forgiven. May we all grasp this. Forgiveness is not easy. Trust me, I know!. There is an old saying that says that the ones you do the most for drive the knife in the deepest. I have found that to be true, however, it is no excuse for harboring bitterness. For the church to operate as a body we must embrace forgiveness and be a lover of mercy
As always, Tony, I am blessed by the visions and dreams given by the Lord to you. No one who has truly come to grips with the true forgiveness required of the Lord can say it is easy. It takes the workings of Divine grace to free us from our own sense of what we call justice and yield ourselves to his.
Blessings
BT
Forgivness, The Cross, Binding and Loosing
Whenever you forgive sins, they are forgiven. Whenever you don’t forgive them, they are not forgiven.”
(Joh 20:23)
I had a dream 04/27/2014 where I was kneeling at the foot of the cross. I could see the feet of Jesus, however, there was no blood coming down. This is significant because the word says the following:
As Moses’ Teachings tell us, blood was used to cleanse almost everything, because if no blood is shed, no sins can be forgiven. (Heb 9:22)
No Blood, no forgiveness. I turned around, in the dream, and saw people that had wounded me deeply. Betrayal is a deep hurt especially when it comes from close friends and family, however, it still must be forgiven. I, in essence, by not forgiving was blocking them from coming to the cross and receiving forgiveness. When I forgave, the blood flowed and then I got out of the way so that those who had hurt me could come to the cross as well and I was no longer an obstacle in their path
God Is Love (1 John 4:8, 16). Blessed we are knowing that the Life energy of our God Himself fuels faith, and that without the direct involvement and faithful intervention of Him who is the Holy One and the Supreme Justice, Love Omnipotent, the Alpha and the Amen, the moments, matters, and motions of our lives would be vaunted, verily vain, void of victorious value.
As we happily hear at Hebrews 12:2, Christ is both the Author and the Perfecter of our faith. I do not think we can overstate or exaggerate the insuperable reality that apart from abiding in Christ, no person can do anything of actual eternal worth, and that the loving Trinity of living Infinity is the sole Source and Supply of our faith and function in His sovereign purposes and supreme plans, as partakers of His divine nature, and privileged co-creators, One/one in His image with Him of divine dimensions, realities, transactions, and outcomes.
Our faith never falters more than when we believe we can live the Christ Life without Christ Himself expressing, manifesting, demonstrating His Life as Love for us, in us, through us to others. No largess of power whatsoever is inherent in the letter or the linguistic, but rather exclusively in the Spirit indwelling, infilling, overflowing us as the resurrection Life of the New Covenant, cut in Jesus’ meritoriously, victoriously Love-shed blood. To the extent that any of us direly depends on the Supply of the Spirit of Christ as our All in all, we apprehend that for which Christ has apprehended us.
As James unequivocally states: “I will shew thee my faith by my works” James 2:18
While many declare in our day… I will show you my faith by what I believe. In the Day of Judgment, Jesus declares to the faithful… “Well done, thou good and faithful servant,” not well believed.
I can’t explain the press I feel in my heart, for which I am grateful. If you want to drink the Kool-Aid of a gospel that rests in the words of God apart from the fire of His life, that is your choice. I will in no wise diminish your reception of His saving wonder in you. Not all feel the “press” of His Spirit as the Apostle Paul, who felt the necessity to “apprehend” the Call of God instead of talking about it.
The call of God captures the whole being of an individual… A faith that costs nothing is worth nothing.
“But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.”
1 Corinthians 15:10
Blessings
BT
No Kool-Aid for us, brother.
Yes, faith that does not issue forth works is lifeless. So, I know that my faith is alive. Alleluia!
The authentic works of faith cannot be produced by pulling up our bootstraps (will-worship, carnal self-determination), gritting our teeth, or clenched fists, struggling yet harder and harder as the ambitious natural man.
Instead, the excellent works of faith functioning by love are the overflow of conscientiously cultivating intimate, abiding, extravagantly open communion with the Dearest and Best, Christ Jesus.
I will not make my boast except in Jesus of Nazareth, my All Magnificent Obsession and Forever First Love!
By His ceaseless compassion and constant companionship, I am blessedly a little I am from the great I Am, His perfect workmanship in progress, until that Perfect Day. Confident I am in Him that His having begun a good work in me, He shall perform it until the Day of Jesus Christ.
2 Corinthians 12:9
“I am very happy to make my weakness my special boast that the power of Christ may stay over me.”
Are you very happy to make your weakness your special boast?
Or do you believe you are alright to pat yourself on your back for your cooperation with operation bootstraps?
“Don’t try to hold God’s hand; let Him hold yours. Let Him do the holding and you do the trusting.”
H. William Webb-Peploe
Words can wisely, wonderfully convey celestial charges of Christocentricity, but cannot contain our concomitant completeness circumstantially in Christ, the Alpha and the Omega, the Living, Eternal Word of Grace and Truth, Who fills all in all with His creativity and conditioning, His authority and authorship.
By God’s enabling, words can call our consecration to Christ by concentrating and circumscribing our spirits’ sense of the direness of dependence upon His Spirit for conformity to His character, RATHER THAN ignobly relying religiously on a radicalizing, sin-sustaining, soulishly stupifying, spirit-sickening sense of self-sufficiency, the latter of which is the root of delusion, depravity, and death, and abject failure to give the glory to Him He infinitely deserves.
For the frequency with which I have fallen flat on my face so short of the splendor of the Three-Personed God I imperfectly but in all actuality adore, I am this side of heaven paradoxically both grieved and grateful, as I richly realize ever the more His endearing magnificence, mercy, and munificence, Himself Who Is All in all.
Romans 11:36
For from Him [all things originate] and through Him [all things live and exist] and to Him are all things [directed]. To Him be glory and honor forever! Amen.
Some of the most sinister of sins among saints happen from souls that flounder, failing to be fortressly founded on and formed by the Gospel of grace, grounded in gladness and gratitude, to the glory of God.
So, if we even seemingly see or sneer at the sins of any member of Christ’s body as more serious than the sins of self, it may be to our surprise that our jacked-up judgment of her, His love sought, blood bought, heaven wrought bride, is the larger lumber load.
And again,
2 Corinthians 12:9
“I am very happy to make my weakness my special boast, that the power of Christ may stay over me.”
Selah (pause and calmly think of that)
Yet not I, but Christ in me is my meaning, purpose, and direction, the ineffable fire of my enthralled Shulamite desire, my exceeding great and eternal Reward, my heavenly Inheritance.
For the claim of the fame of Jesus’ Name above every name, I pray that you stay between the ditches as you are thus mercifully, providentially, graciously kept very happy to make your special boast in your weakness that His power may stay over you.
Keep yourselves in the power of the Lord; which power is over all that which is in the fall man and must have an end. Therefore be wise in the wisdom of God, which is from above, by which all things were made and created; that that may be justified among you, and you all kept in the solid life, which was before death was; and in the light which was before darkness was with all its works. In which light and life you may all feel and have heavenly unity and peace, possessing the gospel fellowship that is everlasting: ‘which was before that which does not last forever’, and will remain when that is gone. For the gospel being the power of God, is pure and everlasting. Know it to be your portion; in which is stability, life, and immortality, shining over that which darkens the mortal man. So be faithful everyone to God in your measures of his power and life, that you may answer God’s love and mercy to you, as obedient children of the Most High; dwelling in love, unity, peace, and innocency of heart towards one another; that God may be glorified in you, and you kept faithful witnesses for him, and valiant for the truth on earth. God Almighty preserve you all to his glory, that you may feel his blessing among you, and that ye may be possessors thereof.
GEORGE FOX
Yes, Amen Terry – a good and timely word.
“In which light and life you may all feel and have heavenly unity and peace, possessing the gospel fellowship…”
Such is my prayer.
Blessings
BT
“…No power on earth could hold the Son of God to the cross other than the Love of the Father…”
Dynamic thought! Of the greatest powers available, it is the tenderest of expressions of our Father, to demand this of himself.
We find it hard to yield the right of way to sometime else while our own pride insists it is our own right of way. We just have not learned how to submit to “love”.
Thank you brother, blessings.
The One All-glorious Triune God alone is worthy of glory because His infinite worth is underived glory boundless, Being the sole sovereign, supreme Self-existent Source of all worthiness. Ascribing to another these, His exclusive attributes, is the glory which He shall never share with another, and any doing so is engagement in idiotic idolatry to an enormously egregious extent.
The glory His creation shares in salvation and sanctification is a magnificent measure of the effulgent excellence of the sum and summit of the mercy and munificence that is Himself, in the blessing and beneficence of being imputed His righteousness positionally and conformed to His character experientially, constituting worthiness for His creation, and thus sumptuous sharing in His all awe-striking glory.
2 Corinthians 3:18 VOICE
Now all of us, with our faces unveiled, reflect the glory of the Lord as if we are mirrors; and so we are being transformed, metamorphosed, into His same image from one radiance of glory to another, just as the Spirit of the Lord accomplishes it.
The royally redeemed and richly reconciled to the Three Personed Creator, reflecting and radiating the gladness and graciousness of His ineffably wondrous glory of greatness, His glorified creation shares in and shows of the Holy Trinity of Glorious Infinity Their lavishing love union and intensely intimate communion, to realize, revel in, and rejoice forevermore.
“…No power on earth could hold the Son of God to the cross other than the Love of the Father…”
Oh, the reality and eternality of the tri-mutuality of unoriginated, uncaused, unformed Self-existent Love, that is the absolute affectuality and endearing effectuality of the Three Personed God for One and Other . . .
And for ourselves, as ones, in all actuality, created in Their image and likeness, for the supernality of the call and consecration of our hearts into the celestial closeness of Their vitalmost union, and Theirs and ours everlastingly undiminished Love communion!
The One Beautiful Triune God, the Happy, Holy Trinity of Living, Loving Infinity, He Is, Who immutably proclaims to impassion our person with His passionate Personage that nothing created shall ever separate us from Himself, the uncreated Creator Who Is our Wisdom, our Righteousness, our Sanctification, and our Redemption, our Love Omnipotent.
1 Corinthians 13 (MSG)
The Way of Love
1 If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.
2 If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing.
3-7 If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.
Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.
8-10 Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.
11 When I was an infant at my mother’s breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.
12 We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!
13 But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.
“…No power on earth could hold the Son of God to the cross other than the Love of the Father…”
Oh, the reality and eternality of the tri-mutuality of unoriginated, uncaused, unformed Self-existent Love, that is the absolute affectuality and endearing effectuality of the Three Personed God for One and Other . . .
And for ourselves, as ones, in all actuality, created in Their image and likeness, for the supernality of the call and consecration of our hearts into the celestial closeness of Their vitalmost union, and Theirs and ours everlastingly undiminished Love communion!
The One Beautiful Triune God, the Happy, Holy Trinity of Living, Loving Infinity, He Is, Who immutably proclaims to impassion our person with His passionate Personage that nothing created shall ever separate us from Himself, the uncreated Creator Who Is our Wisdom, our Righteousness, our Sanctification, and our Redemption, our Love Omnipotent.
1 Corinthians 13 (MSG)
The Way of Love
1 If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.
2 If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing.
3-7 If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.
Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.
8-10 Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.
11 When I was an infant at my mother’s breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.
12 We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!
13 But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.