8. Christ and Victory

God is not passivity; He designed our lives to thrive with Him as we act in union with Him against all opposition. The human heart increases by challenge. No challenge, no task, no overcoming, no victory is the most non-glorious way of living I could imagine. It is not Christ as us; Christ as us is triumph and glory. Muscular strength increases by work. Mental ability, and even IQ, increases by using the brain in difficult exercises. Love increases by bearing the pain of love. Spirit increases by spirit endeavor and warfare.

© Daniel Yordy - 2014

For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. 1 John 5:4

Trust in God is general and all-pervasive, but faith is not the same. Faith is very specific. Faith is actively engaging with God inside the unending increase of every Word God speaks. And when we engage with God, Personal inside of us, concerning every Word of Christ as it arises into us through our faith, we find ourselves going places we have never considered. We find ourselves ever deeper inside the Heart and intention of God, and we find ourselves further and further from humanly “acceptable” Christianity.

When Isaiah said, Of the increase of His kingdom there shall be no end, the Spirit of God was referring first to the increase of the knowledge of God within every Word God speaks, a knowledge revealed through us. The outer workings of the kingdom come only out from that source.

My letter on “Victory” that concluded The Two Gospels explored the ultimate meanings of Victory; here I want to look more closely at the HOW of Victory.

I just read a study comparing human response with chimpanzee response. The researchers discovered that the majority of humans will choose to do what other humans do even if it means going explicitly against what they know to be factual and to their own loss. And they discovered that when chimps have the facts, they pay no attention to what the other chimps do, they simply go straight towards their goals.

The researchers puzzled over why this is so, why humans will conform to the group against the truth while chimps will stay with the truth regardless of the group. I thought, “That's easy, chimps are smarter because they are not descended from Adam.” One of the most significant elements of Adam's decision and the death that flowed from him to his children is that very decision. Adam knew the truth; he was not deceived. In fact, he knew the truth more than any human since except Jesus. Adam also knew the full extent of the consequences of his decision; he knew what death meant. Yet he preferred to control the face of Eve towards himself above the facts even though it meant all ruin.

And thus, this desire in the majority of people to conform to the majority, to regard the face of other people, even though it means living against the truth, living in dishonesty, is the tendency that evil men use to turn the masses to the purposes of tyranny. I know of fewer groups of people living or having lived more in this kind of dishonesty than American Christians today. It is not difficult to understand why Christians in Germany in the 1930's would choose to be silent against evil out of fear. It is impossible to comprehend why Christians in America exalt and worship that same evil.

Yet there are always some who will not conform; in fact, history, over and over, turns on those who do not conform. Yet, in later generations, humans turn the positions of the non-conformists into enforced conformity.

Every single conformist position in today's world is built on the staked-out ground of a prior non-conformist.

You may have noticed that I tend towards non-conformity. (I have a purpose in this sidetrack; I am circling around so that when I drive the how of Victory home, the shot is straight and true.)

When I find myself going in the flow of crowds of people I become very nervous. Lakewood Church is a wonderful study in flow dynamics, as the thousands of people flow into the service and again flow out to the parking lots. The majority flow together down into dank and smelly underground parking lots where they will sit in very slow lines waiting, finally, for their turn to drive out. We also park in a designated Lakewood parking lot; yet we walk through a grass parkland, by flower beds and rippling waters, almost always by ourselves, going no more distance to our car than the majority, and driving out before almost everyone else.

To do so, we must thread our way, me first, with my wife and children trailing behind, across the flow of conformity, and sometimes against it. It makes me happy; though I bless and love all those going the other way.

We don't go another way because we are contrary; we go another way because we enjoy sun and flowers and wide open spaces.

I don't go another way than Nicene Christianity because I don't like other Christians; I go contrary to Nicene Christianity because I find a different word on the pages of the Bible, a word that is ignored by the rest, a word that takes me where I want to go – into the Heart and into the knowledge of Father.

I want to share some things I wrote to two different readers of these letters.

~~~

Honesty without subservience is light, and light is life.

I write for myself, that I might know the Lord Jesus. I publish what I write in the hope that somehow, somewhere, the Lord Jesus would connect with others in the same way by what I share.

I embrace with all my heart all the jeopardy/responsibility statements of God in the New Covenant without ever leaving my union with Christ.

I know the difficulty in which you live, but I can give this assurance, perseverance inside of Jesus, as I share through my writing, wins. You know, I have stumbled a million times, and a million times I have risen up through the murkiness, found again the knowledge of my Salvation, and continued on with Jesus as if I had not stumbled. Yet my heart has grown in strength, and I do not stumble in the way I once did.

But that "strength" is not my own self-discipline; rather, it is my simple, human, and final decision that I belong to God and God belongs to me, an arrangement I value above all things.

It's heart God is after. Overcoming is by engaging with God at the level of heart, to seize hold of the God who has seized hold of us.

God is not passivity; He designed our lives to thrive with Him as we act in union with Him against all opposition. The human heart increases by challenge. No challenge, no task, no overcoming, no victory is the most non-glorious way of living I could imagine. It is not Christ as us; Christ as us is triumph and glory.

Muscular strength increases by work. Mental ability, and even IQ, increases by using the brain in difficult exercises. Love increases by bearing the pain of love. Spirit increases by spirit endeavor and warfare.

~~~

I also have been charged with thinking too much, but that's the way God made me. There are two things in that, however. The intense need to know normally takes people down either science paths or occult paths. But with you and me, underneath the intensity is a heart to know God, a heart that is inherently honest.

After we left community in 1998, God led me on a path of healing coming definitely from more than one direction. But by about 2004, those sources of healing were no more. We cast about, here in Houston, trying to find a church that was real. We found one in which the word was decent but the praise empty; then we found another in which the praise was wonderful, but in one year of attendance, I could not find one thing of God speaking to me from an empty word. And all of them promoted the worship of America and of war. For a year, we just did not attend much, except for occasional fruitless visits. Then, in June of 2006, I was without work from the inability to persevere in the public school classroom.

Through that time, however, the seed God had planted inside of me at the age of 21 had begun to re-assert itself in my heart. I had committed my life irrevocably to the revelation of Jesus Christ and the fulfillment of the Third Feast in the earth. Yet where was that? In my seeking, once again, to know what God is speaking, I found that the only people sharing anything close to what I knew was truth were the ultimate reconciliation people, Preston Eby, etc. So through that time I had worked through the understanding that aeon is an age and not eternal. Thus my knowledge of what God is had softened; God was no longer schizophrenic to me.

But I was almost fifty years old and would I go into old age and death and fail to see the fulfillment of all I had committed my life to as a young man? It was not to be borne. So when I heard Pastor Joel Osteen say, in August of 2006, "Speak what God says you are," that word came into a field fully prepared for both seed and harvest at the same time. As I rushed home, intent on doing what I always do, taking something from one end of the New Testament to the other, I grabbed that task with all the intensity of my being. Once again, the Bible was a new book to me as all sorts of extraordinary realities flowed in - God is determined to make me just like Jesus; Christ is all there is in me; I am filled with all the fullness of God; I overcome just as Jesus overcame.

But it was not until February of 2008 that I saw myself disappearing entirely into Jesus and suddenly, John 14:20 became my defining verse. That's when I found the “Christ as Us” website. I read Fred Pruitt especially, having him in our home twice. Through that time, I tried to read Norman Grubb but got through only a few chapters. There was no knowledge of the Holy Ghost in him, and it showed in his lack of knowing a living word.

– (I am saying this about Norman Grubb because we MUST sever all ties to the knowledge of God coming through past individuals, not throwing away what they said that remains truth, but acknowledging that they were ignorant of many things in God and that only by going forward ourselves in all that God speaks can we find our way home. What is true of Norman Grubb is true of Sam Fife and John Wesley and any non-conformist anyone might look to. We do NOT turn past non-conformists into today's rigid conformity as too many do.) –

I think that is one of the keys, that by immersion into the Holy Spirit, we know in our spirits that the Word coming into us is not ideas for our minds, but living Seed for our spirits and hearts, Seed that births life inside of us. Without that knowledge, speaking Christ remains only empty ideas.

As I write these things, I am thinking about all the things you share in your letter to me. We walk a very similar path. But God so orders my life, I expect He has done so with yours as well. You see, while I was working on The Jesus Secret, while I was discovering my wonderful union with the Lord Jesus, and Christ living as each one who belongs to Him, I was teaching in the Christian school. Now, this was a Holy-Spirit-filled church that moved in the anointing and could accept prophesying. They were good people who sought the Lord. At the same time, many of the background ideas concerning authority structure in the church were similar to what I had known in the move of God communities. It was through the principal there that I heard again the injunction, "Step aside so that Christ can be seen in your classroom and not you."

At the same time they embraced the US government and military as if they represented Jesus in the earth. The levels of expressed blasphemy, equating demonic activity with Jesus' sacrifice, were, at times, staggering.

So I was caught with this huge contradiction that I wrestled with all the time I was there. I was scared to say anything, particularly about 9/11, because I did not want to lose my job. I had to say that I would not speak the pledge of allegiance, and thus I was held in some suspicion, but I was considered by my students as one of the best teachers they had known. I certainly threw some monkey wrenches into their smoothly oiled definitions.

But the contradiction was, if Christ lives as them, what about "Do not love the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him." I wrestled through this in my early letters until I no longer taught there in the summer of 2009. How can Christ as them and"the love of the Father not in them" both be true at the same time? The issue is still not resolved in me.

But here is where speaking all that Christ is becomes so very important.

Yes, the farther I go into the Father, seeing out from Him, the more I see the falseness and darkness everywhere I look, as you also see. Yet Christ comes to seek and to save what is lost. I know that He carries all these wayward ones inside His heart. I do not need to feel anything to know that the love of God is shed abroad in my heart.

It is not "natural" for me to follow the path that takes me to the bottom of the Jordan, to laying down our lives for the sake of these our brethren. I follow it because I am honest and because I know that it is the only path of Christ. I read others who are engaged with the truth of the manifestation of the sons of God, and I see that they have written off all those who are "apostate" and do not regard them. I know they do not truly engage with the heart of Jesus. Yet they also are carried by Him.

This is a strange God we know, One who binds and who looses both at the same time, One who pronounces judgment and mercy with the same breath.

You wonder about your wrestling with God, whether that does not mean some sort of separation.

Ah - not at all. It is not you wrestling with God, but God Himself in travail through you. There is no more precious and valuable calling in all the depths of God than to be chosen to be His very travail.  There is no doubt in my mind that this is your calling for I see the anointing of God upon your words.

Your wrestling with God is God Himself.

Do not give God rest until He has made Jerusalem a praise in all the earth. Isaiah did not speak a command of separation, but God Himself inside of Christ as us.

You see, I had imagined (silly me) that, having completed the set path of The Feast of Tabernacles, and not having a clear path to follow, I would just write about whatever interested me. It didn't take long for me to know that I was in the grip of intense purpose from the first letter, “Union AND Freedom,” on.

War! – And thus I am in the grip of pondering the very thing you are reaching for in these words.

This travail, this casting off of the chrysalis, how is it expressed, what is it's purpose, how does it work, how does it fill the Bible?

There is no question that sometimes I feel like I MUST be totally off my rocker. What other conclusion could there be? What I am teaching is so absolutely heretical that I can't imagine anyone touching it, yet I am doing nothing more than repeating what God says at the core of the New Testament over and over until I believe what it must mean. There are not many who are truly engaged with what I teach. Yet those who are engaged are most precious to me.

I find this sense growing in me in power, that God takes me through all things for the sake of my readers, and He takes us together through all things for the sake of His bride, and her for the sake of all creation. This is God's way. But that is why the humility of Christ coming to us through the worst experiences of our lives is the most important thing for us to know right now alongside our knowledge of the Father.  That's why God made it necessary for me to weave the thread of that humility as the foundation for the revelation of Christ through The Feast of Tabernacles series.

You think you are wrestling with God. It is God who has you and me firmly in His grip. He has seized us (“apprehend” means grab like a crab-claw grabs, with tensile strength) for His purposes. Regardless of our own turmoil, we can rest knowing that there is no other possibility.

I highly value your communication with me for the Father uses your words – and even my response back – to strengthen my own heart, helping me to know that I am not insane. I know I am clear minded, though all the world would call me insane if they read where I am going.

You see, I cannot be found anywhere except inside of Jesus. When I read what God actually says, I see that to be found in Christianity is to be found outside of Jesus. I cannot invent my own religion; I'm not powerful enough to do that. So I place three guides before my eyes at all times: one, the Blood of Jesus my Savior, two, all that God speaks in the Bible as a living Word, and three, the anointing of the Holy Spirit hovering over me since I was a boy, though I often knew it not. I follow these things, and I find them taking me straight into the Heart of Father. And I know that I am on the right path, and I know that you can follow with me on this same path.

~~~

I want to refer back, now, to the mental contention that I stumbled into by taking the graduate courses in English last year – is there actually no such thing as a “God?” Please understand that such a question never comes near my heart for the simple reason that I gave my heart away thirty seven years ago and it is simply no longer mine. However, in contending with the God who lives in my heart, I do contemplate the reasons for this question.

God is invisible. God is not known. And God is as invisible and as not known in heaven as He is in the earth. Yes, there is an appearance of God that is more known in the heavens than the blindness of man in the earth, but that appearance is no more “God” than a stone or a piece of wood could be God.

The goal of God is to be KNOWN. Yet God cannot be known.

And now I want to bring back in the text of this letter. For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith.

I have stated that this faith is not a general “believing,” but it is specific to Word and therefore specific to purpose.

God is always arising out of formlessness, by the form of a Servant, the form of the Mercy Seat, through the speaking of Word. Yet Word is still on the invisible side of God being unknown.

God enters being KNOWN as Word, but only through faith, for the simple reason that God is love.

God NEVER does anything except through human consent.

God cannot even be known by us or by any part of creation except by human consent.

God cannot have His desire except by human consent.

Human consent is faith. Let it be to me according to Your word.

And the Word became FLESH and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory full of grace and truth.

God has chosen my body and my spirit in which to live and through which to be known, my body specifically, the body and spirit of Daniel Yordy. But God is big and cannot be known through one only. Therefore God joins me with you and all who love His continuous appearing into visibility, into God known, as one many-membered Body together, the Body of Christ, the Body of God.

We are engaged right now with something that has never happened in creation, from our view of time, not even through Jesus. We are talking about the entrance of God. God known. God made visible. God in and through a many-membered Body. God revealed.

This revelation of God comes specifically through ONE THING alone – Victory!

Overcome the world!

Subdue – Victory – overcome the world – the entrance of God – God revealed – God known.

All the same thing.

Let me define “overcome the world.”

The world is the present union of heaven and earth.

The world, that is, the present marriage of heaven and earth, is ignorance of God. That ignorance of God, God NOT known, is the normal state of creation apart from man as God intended, God's image. Yet because of the agreement made between Adam and the serpent, the exchange between the two of them, an exchange that continues in full power through the age of human folly, the vanity of not knowing God has become the darkness of open hostility against the knowledge of God, a hostility in which angels and men join fully together as one.

I marvel in utter disbelief at American Christians who swear oaths of allegiance, binding their hearts to the world, that is, to open hostility against the revelation of God. They are incredibly dishonest, living in a fractured psychosis, knowing the wickedness to which they bind themselves, yet convincing themselves that such is “the will of God,” casting a spell of darkness upon themselves by the soul-numbing chant of “America is great; America is good; God bless America.”

For the weapons of our warfare are. . . mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, and being ready to punish all disobedience when your obedience is fulfilled. 2 Corinthians 10:4-6

The world, this marriage of a shattered heaven and a drunken earth, is united against the knowledge of God, against God being seen and known, against God manifest in the flesh.

Why? – Victory.

These are of one mind, and they will give their power and authority to the beast. These will make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb will overcome them, for He is Lord of lords and King of kings; and those who are with Him are called, chosen, and faithful.Revelation 17:13-14

Now, let's bring this home to you and me, just before we shoot the arrow straight at the center of the target.

I have taught many times on the butterfly, fully formed, yet restrained by the chrysalis. If you reach down to help the butterfly by breaking the bands of the chrysalis, you condemn the butterfly to death. God designed the butterfly to know all the life inside of it by pressing against the restraints and by casting them off.

That is exactly how God designed us; more specifically, that is exactly how God designed the point at which He, for the first time in the experience of all creation, becomes seen and known, not through one solitary individual, as glorious as that was, but now through a many-membered body, the eternal dwelling place of Almighty God.

God has given several huge metaphors for this moment in time in which we are now caught – casting off the chrysalis, casting down every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, a woman bringing forth the Word God speaks through travail, overcoming the world – even Tolkein's picture of throwing the ring of power (the power to hide wicked deeds with invisibility) into the fire – all speaking of the exact same thing, in as many ways as God can weave into our knowledge.

Thus the revelation of Christ through us and the breaking of the world curse are the same thing.

The entrance of God-Known comes only through the doorway of human faith.

I know that God fills me full by one reason only: I have simply decided that He does and thus alter my thinking until I know nothing else. This decision of mine is based entirely on what God says at the core of the Covenant; yet it is also attended by the unction of the Holy Spirit.

I know that I fellowship with Father inside of me and He with me as equals every moment by one reason only: I have simply decided that we do, and thus I alter my thinking until that is all I know. This decision of mine is based entirely on what God says at the core of the Covenant; yet it is also attended by the Holy Spirit.

I know that God flows out from me as light and life to others through every circumstance that we go through together, whether difficult or glorious, by one reason only: I have simply decided that He does, and thus I alter my thinking until I know nothing else. This decision of mine is based entirely on what God says at the core of the Covenant; yet it also coincides with what the Holy Spirit is doing.

That's it. No lightning strikes. No angelic visitation. No voice reverberating out of the clouds. No visible miracles. No ability to command. No emanating power.

Two things only. Word—Faith – in full marriage union in my heart and in my mouth. Yet these two things always inside the Spirit of God.

This is the only HOW of overcome that there is.

This decision of mine, quite a presumptuous decision, is my human consent granted to God to show Himself through me.

God is revealed only because those humans who love Him above all else SAY and KNOW that He is revealed through them. This is the only entrance of God there will ever be.

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. – But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. Hebrews 11:1 & 6

Now, don't get me wrong. As this door of God's entrance into being known, God made visible to heaven and earth, is swung wide open, we will be part of mighty, mighty things. But this is the Door by which God entered our knowledge through Jesus, and this same Jesus is that same Door through us.

We walk just as Jesus walked.

You see, God could want to send Jesus into the earth to be our Redeemer all He wanted to, but He could never have done such a thing by Himself. Mary had as much to do with God manifest in the flesh as the Father did. Mary's response to the Word God had spoken into her was the only Doorway available to God.

HOWEVER – it didn't matter one bit how much both God and Mary wanted Jesus to come into the world. Jesus would never have walked this earth, Jesus would never have borne our sins, Jesus would never have died and risen again – unless Mary had travailed in agony to bring Him forth from within her own body.

Victory costs us everything.

Travail brings forth Christ.

When Jesus said, “When the Son of Man comes will He find faith in the earth,” He meant that He comes only through that faith which He, as the Word God is always speaking, is continually seeking.

Jesus, the Word God is always speaking, continually goes forth upon the earth, seeking, seeking – for faith. He seeks for faith that He might enter that faith in order to become visible and known in both heaven and earth.

Here is the arrow and the target.

Father God shows up in His creation only because I believe He IS right now continually showing up through me. – Faith is the evidence of things (of God) not seen.

I now understand perfectly why God will never show Himself in any other way than through man.

– Thou shalt have no other gods before Me. –

If God appeared as an angel or as an animal, if God appeared as a piece of stone or wood, if God appeared as a star or planet, or even as a bug, we would worship that form as if it were “God.” But not so with the least of humankind. Who would be so foolish as to worship a beggar, a ridiculous-looking lowly human, a child born in a barn? The one place God has chosen through which to appear is among the lowest of humans, the crippled and blind and poor of this world, those who cannot boast in themselves, for there is nothing to boast about.

Through these alone, God can appear as He IS, lowly of Heart, gentle and tender and kind.

Yet only a fool would write off these lowest of humans, filled with all the fullness of God. Since heaven and earth is filled full with fools, there is a mighty upset on its way.

We are the butterfly, fully formed, but constrained by the chrysalis. We seem to be in darkness; we can't see anything. Our wings, created to soar in the heavens, are bound tightly against us. Their membranes are weak, and the fibers of the chrysalis are strong.

But deep inside of us is the will to life.

You see, most Christians who seek healing and blessing from God, want nothing more from God than a pleasant time inside the chrysalis. Not so with us. We give thanks for all things inside this chrysalis pressing us tightly within its bounds, yes, including the blessing of healing or the difficulty of no-healing, but our heart is fixed on one thing alone – casting off all the restraint of the chrysalis.

The face of all other humans, Christian or non-Christian, is against us. The unregenerate scream, “There is nothing beyond the chrysalis; death is the end.” The Christians whisper, “Just be happy, happy, happy, here in this comfortable chrysalis; the day will come when you die and arise into a 'higher life.'”

But we know something none of them know.

We know God inside of us, and we know that God designed the chrysalis, the outward appearance of limitation and all the difficulties of living in a body of unresurrected flesh for one purpose only.

Victory.

That Victory is the entrance of God through us. That Victory is God becoming seen and known.

And so we accept with great joy God's incredible purpose for the chrysalis, for all that binds and limits us, seemingly to keep us from our true purpose. No! The chrysalis is NOT meant to keep us from our true purpose; it is MEANT TO BE the only path there is TO our true purpose.

You see, Christ is inside of us, Life and Strength, but we don't know that, not really.

As butterflies, we press against all the limits that restrain this Christ who is our life. We press entirely inside our union with our Father. Possessing a body of flesh cannot be condemnation, for it is our glory.

As we press against the restraints, knowing that Christ is our only life, the reality of God in us flows out into every part of our being. We KNOW God inside of us before ever creation could know Him. And we know God inside of us by Victory, Victory, Victory.

Everyone else is going in a different direction: “Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep.”

But we laugh with joy as we refuse the face of Eve. We love our brethren, and we carry them in our hearts, but we do not regard their face, not for one moment.

The wings of a butterfly are incapable of flying in the heavens unless the butterfly presses with those wings against the chrysalis, breaking its fibers and casting it off. Most Christians, including Christian pastors, who die and are found in heaven only, cannot fly in the heavens. They are tucked away inside of Christ, yes, but they are useless to God, for they did not know Him in the one place He designed for our Victory.

This body of flesh.

And this God of all creation reveals Himself through us by one means only. Because we simply believe that He does against all seeing and against the face of all human judgment.