11.1 The Reproduction of Life

 

Life brings forth life. Everywhere you look in God’s creation, life is always bringing forth life. Rabbits bring forth new rabbits, goldfish bring forth new goldfish, a grain of wheat brings forth many more just like itself. And in all of these teeming illustrations of life bringing forth life, it is always a process of three parts. First is the conception, second, the gestation, and third, the birthing, that moment when the new life, having passed through a travail, is now seen and known by all.

This metaphor of God fills the Bible, and nothing in the Bible can be rightly understood apart from it. We are conceived of God, Christ is formed inside of us, and we become sons of God, incorruptible, birthed into the world out from God.

That Life Might Flow. It is the Spirit that gives LIFE. – The words that I speak to you are Spirit and they are Life. – You have been conceived from above out from incorruptible Sperm, through the living and abiding Word of God (John 6:63 and 1 Peter 1:23). – If anyone thirsts, let him come towards Me and drink. The one who believes into Me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Rivers of living water will overflow out from his belly, his womb, his innermost being.” Now He spoke concerning the Spirit… (from John 7:37-39).

You and I are birthed out from God for this purpose, to be the visible expression of God the Father, that LIFE might flow out from us, bringing forth new LIFE everywhere we go.

Source and Flow. In this chapter we want to consider our ministry out from God forever. Forever, God Himself remains invisible, and forever He becomes known through us as Rivers of Spirit causing all creation to know Him as He is, to know Him as the Love we share together.

What are these Rivers of Living Water? What is their source, and how do they flow? What is their power? What impact do they have on everything with which we interact? What is a world in which the knowledge of God – LIFE – covers everything as the waters cover the sea? We begin with source and flow. Do you thirst? Do you believe into Jesus? Do you drink always of Him? Then these rivers of living water ARE flowing out from your belly right now.

Life as Every Next Step. Word and Spirit are always together. The Son out from God and the Devoted Spirit out from God are always entwined together, always moving as one together, causing us to know God our Father.

We have formulated a beginning or working definition of Life. Yet Life is as big as God, and thus we must continue to expand our understanding of what it means. First, life is movement within and without. Movement within is with purpose, to sustain and to cleanse; movement without is also with purpose, but purpose coming out from desire. Movement without is every next step we take, the days of our lives becoming our life story. Thus Life itself, God sharing Life with us, is the generation of time, every next moment.

Life Brings Forth Life. To this initial understanding of something that is “alive,” we add the only definition of age-unfolding Life found in the Bible, John 17:3 – paraphrased. “Age-unfolding Life is to KNOW God the Father through knowing Jesus Sent into us.” Thus Life is a living thing, found inside of Grace, the sharing of life together, every unfolding step, with the Father.

Now we are adding this definition to life, that Life must bring forth new life. Life, by its very nature, causes others to KNOW the Father. Life is always making God visible through His form and dwelling place inside of creation, the Church. Thus Life is the doing, the energeoing, of the Devoted Spirit. In the upper room, Jesus said, “You have been seeing the Father as you looked at Me, but watch closely, for now I will show you the Father – as He really is.

What Jesus Meant. The walk of Jesus from the upper room to the resurrection, the Walk of the Atonement, every next step He shared with God, was the clearest visibility of GOD in the Bible, the True and bold report of the Father just being Himself.

– And we also. –

Now, we have set out this added understanding of Life, that Life always brings forth new life, in order to comprehend what Jesus meant when He shouted at the top of His lungs, “He who believes into Me, out of his belly will flow rivers of living water,” the third ruling verse of the Bible. The Greek word that God gave to John as he wrote these things was koilia. Koilia means the entire organ cavity from the throat to the reproductive organs and all in-between.

The Source of the Rivers. It is correct to translate koilia as heart, as womb, as belly, and as innermost being. In this context, Jesus meant it all. Our belly, our hearts, our innermost beings, are the SOURCE of the rivers of Spirit flowing out as the knowledge of God into all creation.

Thus we return to the opening premise of Our Glorious Salvation, that God’s purpose for bringing us humans forth from Himself is that we might be His revelation, that our love for one another might be God seen and known, bringing Life and glorious liberty to all created things, in all spiritual realms and in all physical realms everywhere we go – forever. We together are God our Father’s entrance into our world.

How the Rivers Flow. How, then, do these rivers of Spirit flow? They flow through our faith, through our confidence that God our Father is telling us the Truth, that Jesus is every Word God speaks fulfilled, written all through every part of our humanity.

Let’s turn Hebrews 11:6 into a fully positive statement. With faith one is fully capable of pleasing God; indeed, it marks the one approaching God [in the Holiest], the one who believes that God is and that He becomes the rewarder of those seeking out and requiring of Him. And then Hebrews 3:14. For we have become partakers of Christ IF INDEED the source of our substance and assurance we should hold firm until all completion.

One line in Psalm 22:21 caused the flow of All Salvation. – You have answered Me.

After Its Same Kind. Having established the source and the flow of these rivers of living water, let’s return to our growing definition of Life. Life is movement with purpose, and Life brings forth life. God has a law regarding the bringing forth of life, set from the beginning. That law states that life brings forth life only after its own kind. Thus there is a particular KIND of God-Life called Resurrection Life. We assert from the Gospel that we possess and walk in this KIND of Life right now.

Resurrection Life is that Life that carries others inside one’s heart and soul, those others given by God, all the way through the darkness, out from death and into the same Resurrection Life, Kind bringing forth Kind.

The Smallest of Things. The walk of Jesus from the upper room to the resurrection, carrying us inside Himself, according to the central and most important meaning of Paul’s gospel, is the first and the greatest visible appearance of God the Father inside creation. Every part of that walk is critical to the visibility of God, especially this singular fact, that Jesus could not do it of Himself. The Father alone carried His stumbling Son all the way through, and we inside of Him.

Every part of this walk also appears to be “little,” that is, by human definitions of “greatness.” As Zechariah prophesied, “Who has despised the day of small things.” And it was the smallest of things in Jesus’ action that SAVED All, His whispered assertion, “God, You have answered Me.”

A ‘Little’ Task. Saying, “God, You have answered Me,” in the midst of all stumbling weakness, carrying others, is the greatest demonstration of KNOWING God there can ever be. Then, in Philippians 2, Paul directed us to be just like Jesus, to allow His same heart-gut DESIRE to be ours. Jesus wanted you and me inside Himself, sharing His glory with Him.

In the same way, we WANT our brothers and sisters, all who belong to Jesus through heaven and earth, to be with us, sharing Jesus’ glory. Thus we carry them inside our hearts, just as Jesus carries us. All who belong to Jesus are part of us, for we are members of one another. Yet we are little, and we appear little, and this task appears to be very little indeed. Many would despise it.

Be Just Like God. Consider this line Jesus spoke, a line that I have “kept on the shelf” for many years because I did not know what it meant. “Whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me” (Mark 8:34). This is the greatest “be just like God” commandment in the Bible, Kind bringing forth after His same Kind. For this is the meaning of Resurrection Life.

To “come after Me” is to be just like Jesus in this Walk of the Atonement, carrying our brethren inside our hearts. The word “deny himself” actually means deny any other SOURCE than God through Jesus. To deny yourself is to KNOW and to say, “I come out from God my Father through Jesus; I have no other Source.”

The Only Seed. To “take up our cross and follow Jesus,” is to stumble as Jesus’ stumbled, under a cross we cannot carry, carried by Father, carrying all our brethren, through death and into LIFE. It means to be just like Jesus.

Now, John used a word to describe Jesus, the Greek, monogenes. Monogenes means the only SEED, the only Sperm of God, that brings forth after God’s same Kind, many more seeds just like Himself, as Jesus said in John 12.

We want to get right at the heart of being just like Jesus, of being our Father made visible as Resurrection Life. We stumble under a cross we cannot carry, carrying others, carried by Father. And we KNOW that we arise with them into life, because we KNOW God, that He always answers us.

Just Like Jesus. In Luke 18:29-30, Jesus told His disciples that as we give all that we are to the Father, so we receive a hundred-fold in this life, a clear reference to Christ Community, with age-unfolding Life, that is, Resurrection. Give all and receive all. Yet, just like Jesus, we never imagine that we could “give ourselves” to God. Just like Jesus, we cast ourselves upon the Father, that He is all giving inside of us. And we allow Jesus alone to carry us through, carried by Father.

Then, here is a line from earlier, in “9.2 Reciprocal Love.” ~ The very thought that you would be dishonored in any way is more than I could bear, and I give myself to Father that you would always be the honored one. ~ This is KNOWING the Father, knowing that He answers us.

Salvation Revealed. Being just like Jesus is found only in the little things, and never in the “great things” of human definition. It means sharing every next step with God our Father, sharing all with us for the sake of others, carrying us, even as we carry all our brethren as we place ourselves utterly upon God, all the way through death and into LIFE, Resurrection Life. “Father, You will raise me up, and these, my brethren, with me.”

This heart, our human heart of flesh shared with God, is the SOURCE of the Rivers of Living Water, Rivers of Spirit flowing out, carrying that same life and meaning into all creation. And we KNOW that we are well able to be the revelation of our Father in this way, because God sent Jesus into our hearts, that we might know Him, that we might be, with Him, His same Kind, born of the same womb. This is the Glorious Salvation of God – revealed.