7.4 No Sufficiency in Ourselves

© 2015 Christ Revealed Bible Institute

Personal Weakness Assignment Explanation

As I read the summary of a learner, repeating in her own words our union with the Father, sharing the same body together with us, symmorphy, I saw those words, words that had become comfortable and familiar to me, as so contrary to what most believe. Somehow, hearing those words outside my own “bubble” caused me to realize how radical they are.

In that moment I saw clearly the absolute importance to us and to God of our human weakness. Our human weakness and the absolute trust in Jesus found in it is of equal importance and standing with the Word God speaks coming into us for this symmorphy with God to be real.

You see, if there were to be one hint of self-arrogance, one ounce of human achievement shading those words of complete union with God here and now, or any shadow of “me” separate from God, then the words that we speak concerning Christ our only life would be a darkness into which few humans have ever foolishly blundered.

What is incredible, of course, is that we are speaking only what God already says so clearly concerning us in His Word. We ground ourselves utterly in what God says including His love without making things up. Yet we know the endless pretending of which the psychotic human self is capable.

And so I see that there is a pre-requisite course required by God for anyone entering this level of knowing Him. – Hopeless Failure 101

I have been pondering this assignment on writing about the connection between our weakness and Jesus for some time. For a while I thought I would write about Asperger’s. The problem there is that Asperger’s is both a strength and a weakness, plus, at a certain point we are no longer “boasting in our infirmity,” but boasting in our peculiarity, turning “weakness” into one more dead-end.

What we are after is the big moment, reinforced by many smaller moments, when we lost all hope in ourselves sufficient to cause us to willfully, even violently, abandon ourselves in favor of the Person of Jesus in our hearts as our only self.

That we would have no sufficiency in ourselves.

I now understand fully what this big moment, reinforced by thousands of little moments, is, and how God establishes it in our lives.

We are laying the groundwork here for the fifth most important verse in the Bible, the Door, the only entrance into Christ our only life. If you have made it thus far in this course, it is apparent that you have long before passed through that Door and live now only inside of Jesus. I have placed it fifth because we must have a clear grasp of what God is after, the end result, His purpose, before we can then look at how we ourselves got caught up in this incredible, mind-blowing, heart-throbbing enterprise.

Millions of believers in Jesus stand before the Door, looking at and honoring the Door, calling the Door Lord and Savior, longing to enter in, longing to become in glory all that is beyond that door.

What does it take, then, for us to pass through that Door and to go no more out?

God has set up a mighty, mighty collision between two immovable objects in our lives. As these two huge and impassible objects collide head on in our hearts and souls, in our psyches, in the circumstances and days of our lives, in the end, one must vanish and the other must prevail. It’s not that one “beats” the other; it’s that one swallows up the other.
 
Look at the lives and words of every believer in Jesus. One of three things is clearly evident in their words to us who live only inside of Christ our only life.

Either the Law has swallowed up thirst, OR thirst has swallowed up the law, OR both have cancelled each other out and the believer sits in a pew, sings nice songs, and waits for death.

Let me define the law. The law is NOT confined to the books of Moses. The law is any form of “obey what God says,” “do what God says,” “hear and obey,” etc. The law is any form of hearing any kind of word separate from what arises in your own heart, that is, “word” from another Person, including God, and then, by imposed duty, you do what that word says.

Here is what God’s people just don’t get. The law is the ally of thirst. The law is on the side of Christ. Thirst swallows up the law the very moment that you and I, for the first time in our lives, hear and believe the law.

Anytime I read or hear anyone teaching that we are to obey the law or do what Jesus says in the gospels, etc. etc., it is so clearly evident to me that this person teaching does NOT hear the law, does not believe what the law says, and does not regard God at all. In fact, I began to suspect that their real motive was to boast in themselves and by so doing, manipulate God’s people into exalting them as some sort of “man” or “woman of God.” And of course, such a practice works.

Then I read Paul’s words in a new light, you know, the passage where he says that all those who push the law upon the church should go castrate themselves.

First Paul says this: “Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not hear the law?” Then he says this: “For not even those who are circumcised keep the law, but they desire to have you circumcised that they may boast in your flesh” (Galatians 6:13).

The dirty little secret possessed by all who teach “the law,” whether obedience to Moses or obedience to the words of Jesus on the pages of the Bible, is that they do not. They do not hear the law, they do not believe the law, and they do not obey the law.

Let us hear the law. The only way thirst swallows up the law to prevail in carrying us through the Door into all the glory of Christ our only life is if we first hear the law.

First, Paul’s version in Galatians 3:10. Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things which are written in the book of the law, to do them.

Then Moses’ original words in Deuteronomy 27:26. Cursed is the one who does not confirm all the words of this law by observing them. And all the people shall say, ‘Amen!’

When you ate clam chowder, when you wore a shirt of cotton and polyester threads, when you saw your friend’s shiny new car and said, “I’d sure like to get one of those,” did you say “AMEN? It’s over with, I’m toast. I am cursed of God, and I am sentenced to dead without mercy” in obedience to the law?

Now here is all “obedience to do what God says” bowing itself in total submission to our THIRST to drink of Christ. Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God (Romans 3:19).

Do you hear the law? Then obey the law.

Put your forehead on the ground, shut your mouth, and BE the guilty loser that you are in total silence before the Almighty. And whatever you do, do NOT say, “Yes, Lord.” Your “Yes, Lord” is a LIE and God does not tolerate liars. If you will obey the law, if you will shut up, then you will hear Christ.

Those who run around in defiance of the law telling everyone to “obey,” knowing full well that they themselves do not, teaching “obedience” for the sole purpose of being able to boast about their pseudo-conquering of the flesh of other believers, cannot ever hear Christ and do not even know that He is speaking.

BUT, these are all ideas. This great collision comes into our lives, not as ideas, but as ruin, as hopeless failure. The verse that brings us to ruin and failure is not found in the law, it is found in the gospel of John. We must place this verse before our eyes and see which one wins.

If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him. He who does not love Me does not keep My words . . . (John 14:23-24).

Here is Adam/Satan’s way of hearing these words. If you don’t do what I tell you to do, then it’s clear, you do NOT love Me. And because you do not love Me, both I and My Father will stay far away from you.

I can’t. I cannot.

BUT, Paul says that those who talk about “obeying Jesus” don’t. They just act like they do. And here is the point of my greatest failure, the most important year of my life.

Yes, I was and remain a total failure at obeying Jesus. But far worse than that, I committed the unpardonable sin. You see, every believer in Jesus walking this earth today, every anointed ministry you have ever listened to IS and REMAINS a total failure at obeying Jesus, that’s not the problem. You can preach for fifty years, gathering thousands to hear your words and follow you, teaching them that the only way they will know the Father, the only way they will show God that they love Jesus is “to hear what He says and to be sure to do it,” you can minister this word successfully, even though you yourself clearly do not obey.

But there is one unpardonable sin in the church among those called into the ministry of Christ. You must not FAIL to PRETEND.

I could not pretend. I could not be a ministry in the church. I had failed.

It was 1996, beyond all measure the most difficult year of my life, and beyond all measure the most important year of my life. I was 39 years old – turning 40 at my lowest moment.

It was the year I took the course Hopeless Failure 101, a course that continued until the fall of 1998, a three-year course. In the middle of that course, in April of 1997, God spoke to me as I sat in an anointed service, hearing a word preached that was designed entirely for me right then, “Son, you passed the final exam.”

I was too hopeless to have any idea what He could possibly have meant. And it would be 10 more years before the wonder of Christ my only life would upwell from the overwhelming thirst that filled my heart, the desire to know Him, to be with Jesus, in spite of all my hopeless failure.

Let me give you the gist of the illustration preached that April of 1997; the speaker was Ernest Watkins, my Bible teacher over many years, telling a story he had read.

A certain young man, a son of the Mafia, had been slated by his superiors to move up in the organization. First, however, they knew they must test him to see what was inside of him. They put him on a plane to Missouri with the instructions for carrying out a job. Then they betrayed the young man to the police. He was caught and sent to prison for a few years.

When he was released, he returned home to sit down with the Mafia men who had sent him on his mission. They all put their guns on the table. Then the young man asked the question that had been bothering him through all the years he was in prison, “What did I do wrong?” (You see how that question is entirely inside of “obey, do not disobey,” that is, the law.)

Their reply made him reach for his gun to kill them all. “We were the ones who betrayed you to the police.”

Except the young man had the sense to ask another question before dying. “Why?”

Their answer was simple. “We have great plans for you in the leadership, but we must know first whether or not you would betray us to save your own skin. You passed the test, son. What area of wealth would you like to take charge of?”

It was as I sat there stunned by the truth in that story shared by Ernest Watkins, that I heard my Father speaking clearly in my heart. “Son, you passed the test.”

Here is the test: we have no sufficiency in ourselves.

Those who hear Christ never again consider whether they are “obeying” or not. They are dead. And in being dead, they have traded ALL that they are for ALL that Jesus is.

A self for a self. A false self that always must fail for a true Self that is always faithful and true without any consideration of falling short.

And there is one way only to make that trade – by faith, by believing that Jesus is our only self AGAINST the sight of our eyes and against the judgment of our self – because He says.

Here is the Door. You’re dead. – Good.

Yet at this point the question remains, the only question that counts. What do you want?

In this massive collision between God’s requirements and your thirst, which one is still standing? When you discovered that you do NOT obey and that all those who go around shouting, “Obey, obey, because if you don’t do all that Jesus says, then you clearly do not love Him,” are blowing smoke, that they also do not even try to obey, just as Paul said, did you then lose your thirst? Did you then become one more zombie Christian, sitting in a pew, alternating between singing nice songs and wailing, “Have mercy on me,” all while waiting for death?

Or did your thirst remain? And does your thirst prevail over all your fears, taking you through Death, taking you through the Veil, taking you into the Holiest place in the universe, causing you to turn around, no longer “approaching” God, but now living only in Him.

Do you dare to sit down upon the throne of heaven and go no more out? Do you dare in faith against all outward appearance and all sight of your eyes and all the condemnation of Christian pretenders? Because you are reading this, I know that you do.

The God who fills us full and in whom we live is the God of heaven and earth. The throne upon which we sit is the throne of heaven and the authority over all creation.

What is the ONE thing, the only thing that keeps us there? Our weakness. – We have no sufficiency in ourselves.

The very moment someone says, “Oh, but I must Do what God says,” they have abandoned the throne, abandoned the Lord Jesus Christ, taken upon themselves a self not His, having run back out to join the pretenders, alternating between boasting in something they DO NOT DO, and weeping before the cross the words of hostile unbelief, “Have mercy on me.”

They have become sufficient in themselves – except they are not.

But those who remain in Him, going no more out, never ever trusting again in their own ability to lie and pretend, discover something beyond all wonder arising inside of them for real, upwelling every moment from their hearts.

Christ Jesus is ALL – and all that is not Christ vanishes away.

It is in this manner alone, then, that we connect our weakness to Jesus, and that Jesus reveals His perfection through our weakness.
I have written all of this (cheating, I know, on the strict lesson “time” that I am attempting to follow), in order to set a clear foundation for this assignment. Thus, in the next page I attempt to follow the assignment concerning myself. I will also post my attempt in the forum for this assignment.

You see, we can say these things about our symmorphic union with the Father, only because we do not twist our weakness into some sort of peculiar sufficiency in ourselves.

Let us be real. Let us never ever pretend.
 
 
 
I had desired for many years while living in move of God Christian community to sit among the elders and to hear and share with the anointing and wisdom that rested upon them. Finally, in December of 1995, at the Lubbock convention in Lubbock, Texas, the apostolic ministry of the move witnessed to my walking out a year as an elder. That would mean that I would be and move in all the responsibilities and ministry of an elder, but as a proving time, after which I would be set into the ministry the following February at the Blueberry convention.

After returning from Lubbock to Blueberry in northern British Columbia, my family and I went through a period of fever and sickness, brought back from city crowds and magnified by the intense cold and the closed up little houses in which we lived. Thus I did not start with the Blueberry eldership until the first of February. I was humbled and overjoyed. I have known many hundreds, even thousands, of Christians personally over my entire life. I was, without question, sitting among some of the most anointed, wisest, and most loving of all Christians I have known.

Through that spring and summer, I was involved in many difficult transitions and circumstances in the life of the community, seeking to find the Lord’s direction along with the other elders. Some of those circumstances were very difficult for me. But as time went on, sitting weekly and sometimes daily with these wonderful brethren, a whisper of disquiet began to grow in me. I had no idea what it was or what it meant.

I heard things spoken, attitudes expressed, ways of thinking that, while common to all Christians, somehow did not sit with me as something I could become. The realization began to grow, that, for me to be what they wanted me to be, I would have to pretend to be what I was not before I would be recognized and set in as an elder. I did not know what to do with that conflict. I tried; God knows I tried. It was in my first few months with the elders, still the depths of winter, that I care took a logging camp by myself, deep in the frozen north, 100 miles from the nearest other people. There I poured out my heart to God, crying at the top of my lungs, “Oh God, please fix me. Please fix this thing in me that is so terribly wrong, this thing that makes me unable to be anointed and godly like all these others.” God gave me no answer.

Finally, in October, the struggle inside came front and center. You see, when God created me as an Asperger’s man, He left out something vital to success in this world. God left out of me the ability to pretend and put in me the necessity of being honest. Yet at this time in my life, I no longer could find scorn in my heart. God had removed it entirely. Thus I did not make any attempt to “figure out” what was the problem. I did not “see” anyone else as pretenders; I did not pass any kind of judgment. All I knew was that the only way I could be an elder was to pretend, something I had never been able to do.

In October, two of the men elders confronted me over a discussion we had participated in with some of the men who were not elders. In that discussion, I had agreed with the non-elder against the elder. The elder with whom I had disagreed sat there, arguing at me with the “authority of God,” that I must always side with an elder, because he obviously “loved” the family more than this brother who was not an elder. The falseness of his words and the madness in his eyes were the last straw for me. I went home immediately and said to my wife, “We must go.”

When I shared with the elders that we were leaving, I could not tell them why. I did not really understand myself. We packed all our things away; putting our two children into our little car, and drove away. Eventually, lost and confused, we made our way to the Christian community in Bowens Mill, Georgia, where Maureen’s parents lived, five thousand miles of emptiness. In a hotel room in California, I got me a bottle of wine, something I had not drunk since I was 19. In my sorrow, in a stupor, I saw the place I had been, in the forefront of the kingdom of God revealed in these last days on this earth, now to this lowest of places, drunk and confused and utterly incapable.

I had failed. I could not pretend.

A few months later, in the April convention at Bowens Mill, I heard Earnest Watkins share the story of the Mafia young man. Then I heard God speak to me: “Son, you passed the test.” In that instant I saw my heart through all of that difficulty. In every moment, in every contention, in the depths of awfulness, I had justified God, finding Him always right and true, blaming no one, not even myself. In that moment I knew that God is never about performance, but always about heart.

All the way through, I gave God thanks out from a heart longing to know Him alone.

At the Bowens Mill convention that April, the apostolic ministry agreed that I should continue walking out a time as an elder, this time at the small community of Blair Valley, not far from Blueberry, to which we had successfully immigrated.

Blair Valley was a good and quiet place for us, a place in which to see all the issues of my heart untangle themselves. Yet through that winter of 1997-1998, in the darkness of January and February, I came to my deepest point of hopelessness.

I could not be a man of God.

And in the midst of that hopelessness, God spoke a word to me. I have said at times that God has never spoken a word to me to do this or to do that, that God has never given me a commission out from divine visitation as so many have received. I was not quite correct. The truth is, this word God spoke to me, the only time God has ever told me to do anything, was so small, so inconsequential, so impossible and inconceivable, that I typically forget all about it.

God commanded me, sometime in the darkness and loneliness of February, 1998:

Give My people hope.

I had no hope of my own. I had no idea what God meant or how on earth I could ever do such a thing.

This morning I received a note from a sister who reads the things I write, a sister who has known great hopelessness through many years of life.

Thank you, Daniel.  I purchased your book, ‘The Ten Most Important Verses In The Bible’ and opened it up, this evening.  Daniel, seeing you approach “Abide in Me and I in you” fills me with comfort (hope).  There is no one else in my life who takes the Word seriously, or approaches it from the point of view of faith, that "Christ Himself fulfills the entire Bible in our lives”!  These are things I think about and meditate on, as you say, “how we abide in Jesus and how Jesus abides in us”.  Because I do not belong to the majority, I find myself quite alone in my faith, but, as always Father is the great God, who provides and He has provided you!  So, dear Daniel, thank you for your faithfulness.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. 2 Corinthians 1:3-4

It is the Lord Jesus who fulfills all the hope of God and who is our comfort. As He has comforted me and filled me with overwhelming confidence and supreme hope in Him, so He also, using my words just a little bit, brings comfort and hope to His people.

God does what He says He will do!

And it happens because I have NO sufficiency in myself. I am a lost cause. Good riddance.

Jesus IS the only life I am.