11. Christ Is God Speaking

The Lord Jesus is right now in the room with you. He is standing face to face with you, His hand resting on your shoulder. He looks you in the eyes and you in His. Then He speaks these words into your being. "Be ye therefore perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect." Suddenly, those words are no longer fodder for theological discussions. This is the Creator of the universe speaking creation into you.

It is so easy, when considering any word that God is speaking, to come under a sense of obligation and duty – and then to impose that obligation on ourselves and on others.

The expectation of God is an expectation of joy. We know that He with us is working all things for our good and for a continually better future. But we also understand that this expectation is held in the midst of tribulation. Jesus said, “In the world you will have tribulation (everything that can go wrong will go wrong), but be of good cheer, for I have defeated the world.” John 15.

In my book, The Jesus Secret, I made this statement: “I can believe anything God speaks in the New Covenant, and God will fulfill it in me.”

Everything begins with God. God would not have spoken something and placed it in His Covenant with us if He did not intend to fulfill it in our lives in this age. The prerequisite, the quality that the Word seeks as it comes to be planted, is faith. Faith is personally appropriating what God speaks, making it mine, claiming it for me now, and then expecting God to form in me that which His Word is saying. And that Word is Christ Jesus. More than that, faith sees that the Word God speaks is already completed fully in God and that we are not ‘waiting’ for something to happen, but we are standing in the full expectation that all that God is speaking is always fulfilled in its entirety in us right here right now.

Let’s take something God says in the New Covenant: “that you might be filled with all the fullness of God.” Notice the “might be.” Does this place such a word in the “maybe, maybe, someday” category? Of course not. Nothing God speaks can be found in such a category; it is a fictional place found only in a mind that cannot receive such a word from God. The “might be” Paul is referring to here is that being filled with all the fullness of God is based on two prerequisites that He has just named. Here they are:

We must know the unknowable (the love of Christ) and comprehend the infinite (the breadth, depth, and height).

Can we do that? Of course we can.

Jesus is the unknowable made known and the infinite made comprehensible. I love that word ‘comprehend.’ It means “with seizing”; “to seize hold of something with a grip that does not let go.”

And Jesus lives in my heart. That says everything.

John says in 1 John 3 that “we shall be just like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.” Jesus did not walk this earth as God. He walked and lived here among us as man. A man – filled with all the fullness of God. Jesus accepted His humanity. He was not at war with Himself. He knew His own weakness and He was at complete peace with it. He understood, fully, that His human weakness was God’s perfect order, that God had created Him weak – He had taken on Himself the likeness of sinful flesh (Romans 8) – that the excellence of the Power that was in Him was only God Himself. Jesus said, “I can do nothing of Myself, but what I see the Father doing, that is what I do.”(John 5)

Jesus was fully man – filled with all the fullness of God.

I am fully man – filled with all the fullness of God. I am just like Jesus.

We like to define Jesus as one who was ‘great’ in His humanity. Then we imagine that if we were like Jesus we would be ‘great’ in our humanity. But this is not so. To be like Jesus is to be fully human and fully weak – to be at peace with ourselves as God made us. It is to know, with all certainty, that we are filled with all the fullness of God.

Did God speak in the New Covenant that I, Daniel Yordy, might be filled with all the fullness of God? 

What we have done in the past is to make an idol out of being like Jesus, and then consider that our idol has been blasphemed when someone receives what God speaks as being personal to him or herself.

Jesus was not an idol; He was a simple and weak man, a man who could do absolutely nothing. But Jesus was a normal man as God created man, that is, Jesus walked with the full knowledge that He was at all times filled with all the fullness of God. That is a normal man; that is a normal Christian life.

Always, let’s consider Mary. I love having watched The Nativity; it made Mary real and personal to me. The picture of this simple teenage girl who quietly accepted what God said to her and trusted God to keep her through all things is a picture that needs to be central in our hearts.

God spoke something to Mary. It was God who initiated the conversation. Mary did not dream it up; nor did Mary have any inkling of any part of what God would do in her before the angel appeared. Yet take the word Mary heard and lay it against all theology and all the theologians of the day, then and now. Look at all theology and all theological systems and all students of the Bible from Adam to today, and find one who would have told Mary that her theology was correct! All, then and now, would have quietly and gently explained to her how it was that her understanding of God was simply wrong.

Mary could not have planted the seed of God in her own womb; yet it happened the moment she said, “Be it unto me according to Your word.” Her quiet acceptance of what God was speaking and doing was required; Jesus could not have come into this world without it – without Mary.

Mary could not have caused the baby in her womb to grow; nor could she have caused or prevented it from coming forth into the full light of day. Yet that baby belonged to Mary just as much as He belonged to God. Jesus was as much Mary’s doing as He was God’s doing. Jesus was birthed out of the union of Mary and God. As Mary walked through the violence and unbelief of her day, she walked with the knowledge written so clearly upon her face that she was kept by God. Nothing could touch her because of the life that she carried inside of her belly.

Do we have any understanding of the Word God spoke into us that caused us to be born of God? This is the normal Christian life; this is what it means to be human. “And her child was caught up to God and to His throne.”

I am fully human, weak and unable to accomplish anything – and I am filled with all the fullness of God.

Nothing could be accomplished in my life or yours except God be doing it. But God does what He speaks. And He does what He speaks through those who believe. Mary accepted what God was speaking as personal to her. Theology will never do that. Theology will always say, “That’s talking about something else – do not presume to think God is speaking of you.”

But God is not speaking of me, He is speaking of Christ. And Christ lives in my heart. He lives there because I believe He lives there. That says it all.

All things that God speaks in the New Covenant, including the book of Revelation, are Christ in us in every generation of the church. All things in Revelation were as true in the day John received them as in Augustine’s day, as in Luther’s day, as in our day. John’s vision did not come for us to figure out future events, but for us to understand God in us in this world now.

I believe that we are at the end of the age of human folly because I can believe nothing else. All that God speaks He fulfills, and He fulfills it in me, this is what I must believe. I must expect the casting off of the curse in all of its meaning in my life right here right now. I cannot believe anything else. To believe that God “may not fulfill it in me” is to believe not God. To believe in God is to believe all that He speaks. And to believe means the full expectation and confidence with joy that all that God speaks is personal in me right here and right now.

This is the normal Christian life. This is Jesus.  Christ is everything God speaks fulfilled in me.

~

We used to think we were reading the Bible. However, God is eternal. We can not say that God spoke, we must say that God is speaking. More than that, God is omnipresent and He reveals Himself through Christ.

The words on the page are no longer ideas we contemplate. Consider all that God speaks. Let’s look at one word.

Be ye therefore perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.

The Lord Jesus is right now in the room with you. He is standing face to face with you, His hand resting on your shoulder. He looks you in the eyes and you in His. Then He speaks these words into your being. “Be ye therefore perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.”

Suddenly, those words are no longer fodder for theological discussions. This is the Creator of the universe speaking creation into you.

We receive every word God speaks exactly as it is, a generation of creative life flowing from the All-powerful One into our beings. Is there anything God speaks into us that is not?

Do we, like Peter on the water, turn around and look about us at all of life’s imperfections and say, “How do I “DO” this? This is how all Christianity has approached the words God speaks, and of course, they immediately sink. And we will sink faster trying to do any of the “Just As” commands of God than other words that are safer to read.

But there is never any need for us to turn away from His eyes, for we have no other life nor are we found in any other place. If, for a moment, we imagine that our eyes are elsewhere, we realize they are not. How could they be? We live in Him. Our forgetfulness does not change absolute reality as we once thought it had the power to do.

But if the Lord Jesus spoke these words into you face to face and eye to eye, what would that mean to you? Would you not receive those words as an impartation of life? Would they not flow into your heart in an overwhelming Spirit of transformation? No, you would not understand them, “Just as the Father?” no more than Mary understood.

But all words that God is speaking in the New Covenant, this is how He is speaking them to you and me and He has never spoken them any other way than face to face, personally, as an impartation of the creative power of Almighty God into your being.

Christ is God speaking into you. How can such a word not fulfill itself in our life?

Let’s look at the central point of the terms of each covenant. First, the old.

You shall therefore keep My statutes and My judgments, which if a man does, he shall live by them; I am the Lord. Leviticus 18:5

In Galatians, Paul positions this verse as the exact opposite of the gospel of Christ and the opposite of the Covenant you and I have entered into with God.

The New Covenant is based on: the just shall live by faith. That is, we believe that what God speaks is already true in us even as we receive it. And then we walk by the reality of that word, not by what our eyes see in this world.

In the New Covenant, the only response we have to what God speaks into us face to face and eye to eye, is the response of Mary. “I belong to You. Let it be to me exactly as You speak.” Now, Mary carried that Word in her belly through the process of its development until it came forth into the full light of day. It was Mary’s faith; it was Mary’s womb; it was Mary’s body. But all the life and the power of that One growing inside of her belonged to God and to the Word which He had already spoken.

When a man plants his seed, most of that seed never finds the egg of the woman, never enters into that egg, and never brings forth its life. But with God, every word He speaks, going forth, seeking faith, God continues to speak that word. He is always speaking that word and it is always going forth, seeking faith, seeking the seed of the woman so that it can enter into that faith to bring forth its life.

“Be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect” is such a seed, sent forth from God, seeking, down through the long centuries of the church, seeking, seeking, for what? Theologians who are able to explain just exactly what it means and why you need to be careful around such ridiculous things God speaks since you might get yourself into trouble if you take it at face value and try to do something with it? Is this what that Word God is speaking continues, always, to seek?

Mental gymnastics? Human explanations? Fleshy, religious efforts to “do” what God speaks, or worse yet, to impose it on others?

My God, this is God the Creator, standing there with His hand upon our shoulder, face to face, eye to eye, and He is speaking a Creative Word of the Spirit of Power into your heart. What does He ask of you and me? He asks us to believe what He speaks.

Listen, if we want to be a part of what God is right now doing upon the earth, then these words must be continually part of our conversation with God.

“I belong to You. Let it be to me exactly as You are speaking.”

The world is insane. It is both growing more insane by the day, and our understanding of the extent of its insanity grows by the day. Yet, when the light turns on and we see all things as they truly are, everyone will be absolutely stunned at the levels of deceit and ignorance we all have embraced as "reality." I am speaking of science and medicine and government and finance - the list is endless.

It is my purpose in this letter to exalt Christ, so I will not speak of the specific insanities in this world, though the list is endless.

Most people want to be considered “normal.” They don’t want to be laughed at or ridiculed by “normal” people. Of course, in today’s world, “normal” is that which is spoken into their lives by the image of the beast.

Everyone, however, senses that something is terribly wrong, out of control, off-base, in the world today. And so everyone is sealing themselves off, walling themselves into what they feel most comfortable as “the truth.” Positions are being hardened. Decisions are being made. Everyone “believes” in something. Most people are choosing to believe in the beast. Why am I saying all this?

Since all are insane, let us also be insane. There is no better time in history to do so.

Let us take every single word God is speaking in the New Covenant, let us receive each particular word from the One who is speaking that Word into us, face to face, eye to eye. And let us believe that word with all our hearts. Let us receive every particle of life and power that is in the Word God speaks, and let us proclaim that Word as absolute truth at the top of our lungs.

“I am perfect, in exactly the same way that my Father in heaven is perfect!”

“I love others, in exactly the same way that God loves others!”

“I overcome, in exactly the same way that Jesus overcomes!”

“I sit upon the throne of God in exactly the same way that Jesus sits upon the throne of God!”

“What I have, I give you, be healed in the name of Jesus!”

“Out of my belly flows the very river of the Life and the Power of Almighty God, bringing life and hope to all who pass my way!”

I know it is insane to so believe what God says, but we are in good company.

Listen, if God does not prove these things in our lives in this world, then He is not God and He has never spoken. To believe in God a little bit, as most Christians do, is to believe not in God.

Without faith, it is impossible to please God. For those who come to Him must believe that He is (the Word continually speaking) and that He is the rewarder (He fulfills all that He speaks inside) of those who diligently seek Him. Hebrews 11