10. The Importance of Being Wrong

I had never understood how important it is to God for us to “be wrong.” But to understand that statement, we must start at the beginning.

God loves Jesus, the Word He is always speaking, above all things. God desires to be seen and known by His creation. Jesus makes God visible. The speaking of God, Jesus continuously coming out from God's mouth, is that which not only causes all things to exist, but also causes God to be known. Jesus is the One who gives God form and expression inside His creation.

The Father loves the Son and shows Him all things that He Himself does (John 5:20). – For You have magnified Your word above all Your name (Psalm 138:2).

Jesus is the entrance of God into visibility. Jesus gives the Father the desire of His heart.
The first words of sin and accusation in the universe, the words that embody in themselves all other sin and all other accusation, were shot directly and with all hatred and scorn at the Lord Jesus Christ, the Word God is always speaking by which He sustains all things. – Did God indeed say?

Do you see the mockery and contempt in those words? Do you see how they must shatter all creation if they are believed?

Here is exactly what God meant for Adam and all mankind by the tree of life. Adam eating of the tree of life was the final piece of God's entrance into visibility to be seen and known inside His creation. Adam eating of the tree of life was the completion of all God's desire.

We now know exactly what that would have meant, what would have occurred in and through Adam if he had followed the initial desire of his heart to eat of life. I assume that the tree of life was literal simply because Jesus and Paul assumed that Adam and his story were literal; however, the outward appearance of the tree of life, whatever that might have been, only represented the Spirit reality behind it.

Here is that Spirit reality. – Eating and faith are the same thing. Eating and faith are, then, the entrance of Word, the Seed of God, into an individual human being by which that individual, unique among all created beings, now knows God inside of him or herself.

Eating of the tree of life, eating of the Seed, the Word God speaks, “let it be to me according to Your word,” is the first upwelling of the Father inside of His only visible image and representation, man.

It is clear to me that the entire process, from being conceived of God (that is, born again), to Christ being formed in Adam in his knowledge and experience, to Adam's body being transformed into incorruptibility and rivers of living water, the rivers of Eden, then proceeding forth from Adam's heart to cause the entire creation to live in the knowledge and experience of God, would have been no different for Adam than it is for us.

Put on the Lord Jesus Christ was God's purpose from the beginning, God's entrance into all the fulfilment of His desire.

The Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us. God manifest in the flesh; that is, God the Father becoming incarnate in Person inside His dwelling place, many sons just like Jesus.

Jesus is the entrance of the Father into being known by His creation. Jesus is that same entrance within each individual person. But Jesus as the Word sent forth from the Father was not sufficient for us; Jesus also had to become flesh so that we might see for ourselves the relationship the Father wants with us. Then this same Jesus, poured out into His church on the day of Pentecost, having become us, is again that entrance, that portal of the Father, through us, into being known by His creation.

God incarnate. The Father revealed – through human flesh, the image and likeness of God, the place of God's choosing, the only appearance of God in heaven and earth.

Here is how Isaiah and Ezekiel saw the difference between the Lamb upon the tree of life and the serpent entwined around the tree of knowledge, between the entrance of the Father and the accusation against that entrance.

He has no form or comeliness; and when we see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him. He is despised and rejected by men, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him. Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. . . (Isaiah 53:2-4). – Versus – You were the seal of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was your covering. . . You were the anointed cherub who covers. . . (Ezekiel 28:12-14).

Let me define Christ. Christ is the entrance of the Father into me. His name is Jesus.

The Father magnifies Christ Jesus above all creation and above all of Himself BECAUSE Christ enables the Father to incarnate Himself, to dwell in knowledge and expression, in us. The entrance of the Father, Christ Jesus, bears my griefs and carries my sorrows. That is who He is.

When Adam sided with the accuser against Christ, he broke the Father's heart. When Christians “deify” Jesus on the one hand, placing Him far away and high “above,” turning Him into Apollo the sun god, the image of the cherub, and when they join with the accuser on the other hand and see only evil inside their hearts, they break the Father's heart.

They break the Father's heart because they are calling Christ, the place of God's entrance into all of His desire, to be evil. Their prophecy must rule their lives and the course of their futures. – Until they shut up.

What does God want? God wants to be incarnate in you and me, through the Lord Jesus Christ who is our shared heart, that He might be seen and known by all of His creation through man, His image, His visible representation.

Those who object hate the Father. They hate the Father because the Father, coming through Christ, is contemptible to them. There is no beauty to be desired in Him. The Father is meek and lowly of heart, the opposite of human ambition.

But let's look at the rebellion. All the cry of every human heart is and has been against God arising from beneath of them, carrying their griefs and bearing their sorrows as His own. Every human ambition is to attain, to achieve, to put on a show of appearance, to look like “god,” that is, like the accuser.

The accuser is not the one who broke God's heart. Man is. And every Christian cry of “I am my own self, constructed by evil and cursed,” breaks His heart all over again.

I want to give a more complete picture of why it is so important for us to be wrong. Two verses.

His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the ages; who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high… (Hebrews 1:2-3). – Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God… (Hebrews 3:12).

 “Express image of His person” is, in fact, the appearance of His (the Father's) substance. Man is God revealed. Another phrase, however, has grown very large in my understanding of myself and all things.

Upholding all things by the word of His power. Here are the Greek words: pheron panta rhemati dynameos

We have come across the word pheron before. It means to bear, to carry, to bring forth. Love bears all things. – Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. Rhema means a dynamic living word, a word spoken by voice; panta is, of course, ALL, and dunamis is power and ability.

Now, the Christian mind has always pictured God and by extension the Lord Jesus as creatures living inside of time and space. Any such reference of God is now, for us, childish and immature. We see and think of God as an invisible ALL-now every -moment Person, personally present in every point and particle of all things. Thus carrying all things by the word of His power means that all things are continuously coming out of the speaking of Christ.

This word, Christ Jesus, spoken into us from within every point of our being not only causes us to be, but carries all that we are. All that we are is coming out of Jesus, the All-Speaking of God, every moment literally and substantially. This speaking is always goodness with no shadow of darkness in it.

You can see how, by taking into himself the serpent words “Did God indeed say,” Adam not only broke God's heart, but killed himself.

Departing from the living God means to turn our back on knowing Christ Jesus always causing us to exist in goodness by power. This turning one's back on the voice of the Son of God always sustaining us is a willful and violent action that must be maintained by any creature every moment. Yet this turning our back never causes Jesus to go away, for all are always sustained by Him. Rather, it casts us into a false and imaginative darkness in which we exist in death, even though life always creates, sustains, and carries us.

Let's come at it from another angle. Take your hand and place it on your heart. Then move your hand to your lips, then your eyes, then your forehead, then stretch your hand out in front of you. You have traced the progression of all things human.

Out of the heart the mouth speaks. – We believe therefore we speak. – And God said, “Let there be light.” – And God saw the light that it was good. – From heart to tongue to eyes.

The statement, “I believe what I see” is false. If one were to say, however, “I think about what I see,” that would be correct. We think about what our eyes see and the doing of our hand progresses out from that thinking.

But we see ONLY what we first believe, and that believing is expressed first with our mouth. The believing of our hearts determines whether we live in the darkness of human imagination or in the light of Christ Jesus always speaking us into being by utter goodness. We know exactly what anyone believes by listening to their words.

Notice that this One who continuously causes us to exist in all the goodness of God by the creative voice of power always arising from within every point of our being, has, already, BY HIMSELF, purged our sins. Here's the deal. Either He did, or He did not. There is no “partly” in anything of Christ.

Let's tie all this together. Christ is the One who (a) causes me to exist every moment by goodness, (b) carries me in all that I am, and © is the entrance of the Father into ME, but only as I believe.

To turn one's back on the living God is to refuse to allow the Father to incarnate Himself in us. And the argument Christians use to turn their backs on God is expressed in these words, in whatever form they proceed from one's mouth: “My heart is deceitful and desperately wicked.”

What do those words, when they are spoken by a Christian, really say? They really say the exact same thing the serpent meant in the garden with “Did God indeed say?” They mean “Jesus is wrong.” But “Jesus is wrong” never comes by itself. You see, the moment a human says in the heart, “Jesus is wrong; I am not coming out of the goodness of God right now,” another word must replace that word of Christ always sustaining us. That word is, “I, then, must make myself right.”

Thus a Christian pretender who works and works to “save the lost” out of a sense of obligation and a murderer screaming in rage against his opponents are saying exactly the same thing. “I am right.”

What do I mean when I say, “Christ is my life”? I mean that Jesus is right. And what do I mean when I say, “I have no other life”? I mean that “I” am wrong. You see, my speaking of my mistakes and foolishness and my speaking of all the glory of Christ that is the only life I am go hand in hand, as Paul expressed in 2 Corinthians 12.

Let me refer to an experience of mine a while back. I noted in a certain person over time many good expressions of a revelatory understanding of God and much of what He is doing in the earth. But as I look back, I now realize that, in all of this person's words, two things were absent. Never was there an expression of “I am weak,” or “I am wrong,” and never was there an expression of “Christ Jesus, in all of His glory, is all that I am AND all that you are.” When I suggested to this one that, in a minor but hurtful episode, they should express publicly that they were wrong, meant by me as a point of healing and reconciliation, the river of life flowing out, in contrast, this one expressed publicly that I and my words were of Satan.

You see, it's an absolute. To say, “I am right” IS to say, “Jesus is wrong.” And to say, “Jesus is wrong,” is to live in death and to break the Father's heart.

Do you see how important it is to the Father that you and I just accept, simply and quietly, that we are guilty before God and thus crucified, without saying another word about ourselves, and then to turn away from any form of “I am right,” by embracing Jesus as our only reality – because He IS.

You can identify a Christian who has turned his or her back on Christ by finding in their words some form of “All that the Lord says, I will do.” And you can identify a Christian who has repented, that is, turned around, by finding in their words some form of “Let it be to me according to Your word” and then believing they have received all they have asked.

Which one is “keeping” Jesus' continuously spoken Word?

I want to refer now to two “Christian” expressions, one I heard for many years, and one sent to me recently. A prominent ministry under which I sat for many years made this claim many times and in many different ways. Although I will paraphrase his claim, I am saying it as he said it. – “The righteousness of Christ given to you is a 'gift' of righteousness; it does not belong, actually, to you. When you appear before God, God will require from you not the 'gift,' but rather the fruit of righteousness. That fruit of righteousness is your own perfected righteousness.”

And he meant that our own perfected righteousness was our doing instantly and perfectly all that the voice of the Son of God, separate from us, tells us to do. All that the Lord says we will do. Now, this teaching is, in fact, the argument adhered to by almost all Christians.

Here is what God says: For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted to the righteousness of God (Romans 10:3).

When we say to Jesus, “I am all that You speak,” we are submitting to the righteousness of God; we are saying, “Jesus, You are right.”

The one who says, “All that the Lord says I will do,” is lying. Inside those words is the necessity of always falling short, simply because that one is saying, “Jesus, You are wrong. And therefore, because You are wrong, I must make myself right.”

This teacher also taught that if we obey God perfectly, we will never make a mistake. Therefore, if we make mistakes, that is evidence that we are not submitting to God. – Seeking to establish their own rightness.

The belief in a “fallen human nature” possessed by any Christian is the belief that Jesus is speaking us every moment as evil. When we believe that we are MADE WRONG, as we find ourselves to be weak and foolish, we are believing that Jesus is speaking us wrong. When we accept ourselves as humans, made the way God wants us to be right now, the Father's image and likeness, then we are believing that Jesus is speaking us out from Himself.

The desire to be a “better” person IS the hatred of Jesus.

The acceptance of self, as we find ourselves to be, that all that God intends is fully executed in us, our guilt dead upon the cross, our life Christ alone, is found only in the expression of “Jesus, all that You are, I am.”

To hate yourself is to hate Jesus because what you are before God is coming every moment out from the good speaking of Christ all through you. To call one's self “evil” is to call Jesus evil and to set one's course on a pathway of proving “how right I am.”

We speak ONLY what we first believe. We see ONLY what we speak. All of our thinking and doing, comes, then, out from what we see.

But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith which we preach) … For with the heart one believes unto righteousness (that is, rightness), and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation (Romans 10:8-10).

This is the same rhema by which we exist, and which carries us in all things, Jesus, the All-Speaking of God.

I received the following note from a reader of these letters. – The question was asked – where will you find the devil? A Christian answered this way. “You will find the devil in man,” and then added that, “the biggest devil to be found is what I see when I look in the mirror.”

This is the expression of all Christians who deliberately choose to see evil when they look in their hearts or in their mirror. They see evil because they believe that the Jesus who is speaking them into being is lying.

Here is the only thing I see when I look in my heart, the sum total of all that I am. – Christ lives in my heart through faith.

The through faith part is the human part, the human consent through which the Father is then free to win the longing and desire of His heart, to incarnate Himself in us, to be seen and known by His creation. The through faith part is Mary's “Let it be to me according to Your word” and then believing we have received.

Because I believe that I am coming every moment in all that I am right now out from the good speaking of Jesus all through me, I speak Christ my only life. Because I speak Christ my only life, it's perfectly fine for me to say, “I was wrong,” with no sense of shame or loss. Because I speak Christ my only life, I see Christ when I look in the mirror. Because I see Christ in goodness all through me, my thinking changes to thinking like Jesus, as one with the Father. Because I think like Jesus, the doing of my hands becomes the rightness of God.

The Christian who says, “You will find the devil in man; the biggest devil to be found is what I see when I look in the mirror,” is 100% correct. The words of the serpent, “Did God indeed say,” rule his or her heart and mind.

The Christian who says, “You will find Christ all through me as I find myself to be; the purest expression of Christ Jesus is what I see when I look in the mirror,” is 100% correct.
Everyone finds what they seek; everyone receives precisely what they are looking for.
Singing the Song of the Lamb is agreeing with the Father that Jesus is pretty cool. Singing one's own song of rightness is agreeing with the serpent that Jesus is false.

What do you want? You can be right in your own eyes (only), if you want. But only by first making Jesus wrong. Jesus can be right, if you want, but only by accepting yourself as you find yourself to be, stumbling and foolish, with all joy and peace.

Jesus said, “You will know them by their fruit.” Christians who live by the words of the serpent read that to mean human performance, the masquerade of faces. Christians who live by the All Speaking of Christ all through themselves, who live only in John 14:20, read that to mean the fruit of the Spirit, starting with love, joy, and peace.

I think, though, that the first and most important fruit of God is peace. – And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:7).

Oh, how I know that peace, running all through me every moment, keeping my heart and mind inside of and through Christ Jesus alone. Precious fruit; precious, precious Holy Spirit. – Our Holy Spirit, the Father's and mine.

By saying “I am wrong, being silent before God is only joy for me” and “Jesus is right in goodness all through all that I am,” is to repudiate the treachery and horror of Adam. It is the only way we “put off” the old man.

We honor the Father only by honoring Jesus, the One through whom we exist in goodness every moment. And to honor Jesus is to honor the Father, allowing Him to win the desire and longing of His heart.

– Allowing the Father to be seen and known through us, His image and representation, the only appearance of the Father's substance, Christ, many sons walking together in glory. –

God incarnate; God manifest in the flesh.