10. Union and Fellowship
It is by knowing God Love inside of us, and all things carried inside of God Love, that we are transformed and become the vessel, the light bulb of God Light, God Himself revealed through us, normal and real human beings.
© Daniel Yordy - 2014
Before starting this topic, I want to talk about how I write.
I write, in part sometimes, as the conductor of a symphony. The music of a symphony orchestra is far, far more than the sum of each individual instrument being played. The conductor goes from one group of instruments to the next, directing each one as it plays its part, but all must play together, all the time. Thus I weave the truth together, calling one reality to sing its part, and then immediately calling the next to sing its part, all at the same time. Some may find my writing hard to comprehend, but I know that truth must be heard in the same way a great concerto is heard, all the Joy of God singing together.
The way many think and teach – and that's right for them because that's the way God made them – is to present to you just the clarinet. Then, just the violin. Then, just the drums. Then just the trombones. The problem for me is that all those lines of music were written to flow together. Each line or instrument by itself cannot give you the full meaning of why it is played in that way. As all the individual instruments, all the separate lines of truth, are played together, following the conductor, a new sound is heard by those listening, the sound of a symphony, a sound that can be heard no other way.
As I am writing, I am hearing the symphony. Thus I can only leap from one instrument to the next, one truth to the next, starting one, then going to the next, and the next, and then calling in again a line I had started earlier, then leaping to the next. I write in that way because I must, because only when all the instruments are playing together in your heart, all the lines of truth, can you hear what I hear.
~~~
We have written ourselves, in these last couple of letters, into a very specific place. Let me explain.
God Spirit is all now everywhere, yet entirely unknown. God Light is the desire and intention of God, yet it is the third that He is, coming by one means alone.
The center and essence of God is God Love. – And God Love is known by only one means.
God Love is known by fellowship, by communion with the Father and with Jesus Sent inside of our present human frame. And that fellowship is made full and complete inside of us by God and us together casting off the curse that presently limits our human frame, yet never discounting the weakness God made us to be as our glory, as the counterpoint to His strength. We knowGod Love inside of us before creation will ever see God Light and be set free from all vanity, fallen or unfallen.
It is by knowing God Love inside of us, and all things carried inside of God Love, that we are transformed and become the vessel, the light bulb of God Light, God Himself revealed through us, normal and real human beings.
The communion is the thing.
And our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ. 1 John 1:3
Now, this topic has grown so very large for me, the fellowship of His sufferings. One letter will not be enough to convey all the many thoughts churning in my heart right now. First, let's place two of the texts concerning this incredible reality before our eyes that the Word might be birthed as Christ inside of us.
Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith; that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if, by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead. Philippians 3:8-11
Merge these lines from Paul together in your heart with the following words from Peter.
For to this you were called, because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that you should follow His steps: “Who committed no sin, nor was deceit found in His mouth”; who, when He was reviled, did not revile in return; when He suffered, He did not threaten, but committed Himself to Him who judges righteously; who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness—by whose stripes you were healed. 1 Peter 2:21-24
Now, what I am presently engaged with is a merging of the line, “by whose stripes you were healed,” together with the illustration God gave us in my last letter of the light bulb filament, representing our hearts. As the power flowing towards us, the power that IS God, passes through the resistance of our hearts, that is, through our faith, and by the engagement of God with us, we are excited with heat, that is, our full and intimate communion with the Father and with Jesus Sent. As that heat, that fellowship, comes to its fullness, it bursts forth from us as light, setting all creation free from the darkness of not knowing God or reality.
We cannot know this communion except we place ourselves, by our own decision and by the words of our mouth, entirely into the union into which Christ Jesus has already placed us.
It is by considering the physical marks inflicted upon Jesus' body as He walked the Path of Atonement that we enter the next level of knowing our utter union with Him. And we consider those marks, not as Catholic idolatry, not as the crucifix, “Look at what you did to Him and be sure to feel bad,” but as our Salvation, we utterly inside of Him.
First, the walk of the Atonement, though it occurred in space and time of necessity, yet it was in no way a temporal event. What we saw, from the upper room to the right hand of the Father, was not a temporal event, but rather the unfolding of ALL GOD HERE NOW into the first visible manifestation granted to creation.
In complete contrast, God filling Solomon's temple with His presence was very much a temporal event lasting only 380 years. Nebuchadnezzar's army did NOT destroy the temple of God. They destroyed only a building made of stones. God had left that building made of stones six years before. From the moment God left that pile of rocks, it became, not just another building, but now the focus of idolatry. In those six years, the people of Jerusalem, turning to that temple, were in no way considering the God who had departed from that temple, but rather their own vain-glory “chosen-ness” exalted as God Himself.
God makes dramatic for us the contrast of the temporal nature of a pile of rocks in order for us to see its opposite, the place God has chosen, His elect built together inside of Christ as the dwelling place of God forever.
Of truth, we have treated Isaiah's statement, by His stripes we are healed, as a form of Christian magic. If I can just fix my eyes on this image set before me, this image of something outside of myself, something beyond me, a walking crucifix covered with bloody whip slashes, then, somehow, some power from this image will connect with me and, pow, I will experience a miracle in my body.
May I suggest that Jesus is not and never has been that dark and wicked thing, the crucifix, the nailed god hanging on the wall. – Having turned our backs entirely to that darkness, let's look at the truth.
Two mighty, mighty universe-changing events happened in the hours just before the whips opened up long and bloody stripes across Jesus' body. We must know HOW you and I are utterly inside of those two mighty ACTIONS of God.
The first was the prayer of Jesus recorded by John in Chapter 17 of his gospel. Whether Jesus prayed that prayer before they left the upper room or on the walk to Gethsemane, John does not clearly say. It could have been either one. The second was the ACTION of Jesus at the end of three hours in Gethsemane.
Understand that these things are in no way temporal events. They are God made visible for us to know the reality inside of us of an All Now Here God.
The prayer Jesus spoke in John 17 is of the same type as, and far greater than, the words coming forth from God creating the original universe. If you and I came forth into existence by the words God spoke in the beginning of creation, HOW MUCH MORE did we come forth into existence by these words of Jesus, the very Heart of God, by which He spoke the New Creation into being.
Now, I suggest again, even if you have done it before, to go again to my letter on Father in The Two Gospels, read through it to convince yourself of the rightness of the action I am asking you to do. Then read the prayer as I have inscribed it there, placing your full name in every blank. Read it out loud, engaging with Father as you do.
Read it in this way, however. Those words you are speaking out loud are not speaking life “into” you. Those words of Jesus that you are speaking out loud have already created you in the New Creation. You are not and cannot be anything other than those words alive in you. You speak them for one reason, to KNOW the Father and to KNOW Jesus Sent inside of you.
Union IS, whether we know it or not. Communion is knowing the Father and Jesus Sent.
Jesus' prayer in John 17 is the first part of our union with Christ. Gethsemane is the second part.
You see, this is God's way. This is God by His being and nature. Jesus did not just birth the New Creation and then go dancing through fields of flowers. God speaks, and then God travails to bring forth all that He has spoken. When God spoke, “Let there be light,” those very words were the travail of God, God becoming a Servant that He might be seen and known. God speaking, “Let there be light,” is God Himself, transforming Himself by travail into that which can be seen and known by all creation – and creating the creation by those same words – Jesus, the Word God is continuously speaking.
Gethsemane. Oh, how we must know that most precious, most incredible, most glorious ACTION of the Lord Jesus Christ, when He rose to His feet, having shown to us, by that movement, ALL the will of God.
Words cannot express how much what Jesus did means to me and to you.
In that day you shall know that I am in the Father and you in Me and I in you.
It is the last phrase, and I in you, by which we are saved from all pain and darkness. The reality of those words was marked by Jesus' arising to His feet, and in that ACTION signing the Covenant with the Father to drink into Himself all the pain, confusion, and darkness of all creation, but most especially of you and me, into His body – and then to become us in all that we are right now, that He might live us all the way into life.
Who Himself bore our sins in His own body.
Now, God does want us to see the whip slashes scored across Jesus' naked torso, but only in a very particular way. Those deep and long cuts, exposing bone beneath, flesh laid back against itself, ARE God as He IS – not as physical form, but the full substance of Spirit meaning and reality showing itself by physical form.
In order for you and me to walk in Victory through the darkness of the next few years as God brings all things into judgment, we must know what those stripes mean.
Refer back to the last lines of my last letter, “The God of Union.” – Those who see the old woman in the Bible, see a God of anger against sin who prates a little bit about “love.” Those who see the young woman in the Bible see the enormous cost Love bears continuously to set all free from Himself. –
That's what Love does, and that is it's pain. Love respects His Beloved so very much that He always sets her free of Himself. Always.
Now, I want you to take ALL of the expression of God's hatred against sin in the Bible, all of it. Start with “In the day that you eat thereof, you shall surely die,” all the way to “But the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death,” and “But outside are dogs and sorcerers and sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters, and whoever loves and practices a lie,” and include everything in-between.
Every human being thus far, living in ignorance of God, reading any of those words of God's hatred against sin, have used those words to define God.
God spoke those words, not to define Himself, but to define Salvation, to define Love. Jesus, walking the Path of the Atonement, defines God. And when we see that physical body walking through time and space, we SEE God bearing in His own body ALL the PAIN, all the CONSEQUENCES of sin.
Jesus did not die in order to compensate for the wickedness of a few.
Jesus laid down His life to show us what God is always doing, from the moment He created us and by Love, set us free from Himself, and by that same Love, bore in Himself all the just consequence of sin.
The “lake of fire” and the stripes Jesus bore in His body are the same thing. God – bearing all cost in Himself.
Now, we cannot make this personal for ourselves in the way that we must, unless we consider the Mystery of God. The Mystery of God is expressed for us by these words of Paul in Ephesians 5: “And the two shall become one flesh.” This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church.
Again, for a moment, we must consider the shadow of darkness in order to know the full face of truth as we must. Augustinian theology created the “Trinity,” as the Mystery of God. Nowhere in the Bible does God say that the Mystery of God is how “three Persons are One God.” Yet all Christian reasoning down through the centuries has puzzled itself in endless explanations over how three Persons are One God.
The fact that twice Paul said, “There is One God, the Father,” does not slow them down.
For there are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit; and these three are one. (1 John 5:7)
Why have I inserted this verse in this way? It is an acknowledged fact that John did not write these words; they are not found in any early manuscripts. This line was inserted during the middle ages by some copying monk faking Augustine's “Trinity” into the text of the Bible.
And modern translators, even these at Nelson Bible publishers who translated the New King James Version, LIE by inserting this line into 1 John.
Wow! – Dishonesty, the same dishonesty that inserts the words “of Us” into Genesis 3:22 to perpetuate the foundational Christian belief that the serpent spoke the truth in the garden.
These are not light things, but the very tares Jesus said would grow in the field of the church, tares He would not remove, not until now.
Now, I want you to consider all the mental gyrations used over centuries to argue that God is “Three Persons in One,” all of which deal with God as a set of human ideas concerning some far away Thing. Yet, in spite of the fact that one cannot speak an Augustinian “Trinity” by speaking what God speaks, almost all Christians will become argumentative against any challenge raised concerning this “Christian” MYSTERY.
We have accepted it as true even though we don't understand it – because Augustine said.
BUT!!! The New Testament does present us with a MYSTERY. Only the mystery of the gospel is not found in any attempt to “prove” that God is Three Persons, co-substantial with each other, in One.
The mystery of the gospel is expressed in these words.
Christ IN you. One spirit with the Lord. Flesh of His flesh, one flesh with Him.
The Mystery of God is not some theoretical, theological construction of a Three Headed Person far away; the Mystery of God is how God, the Father, can live in our persons, one Spirit with us and one Flesh with us, just as He did in Christ Jesus. And we can speak out loud this Mystery, over and over, using a very long list of direct statements from across the whole New Testament.
HOWEVER, anyone speaking this Mystery of the gospel, using an unending list of direct statements from the mouth of God, is instantly challenged by Christian theologizers as a blasphemer for daring to speak contrary to the accepted Christian “Mystery,” the inviolability of Jesus being “God the Son” completely other than us. When the brother challenged me for speaking falsely when I said “whatever we can say about Jesus, we must also say about ourselves,” his argument was a defense of Augustine's Trinity AGAINST my expression of Christ my only life as I speak what God actually says.
Jesus was made part of a Trinity, a Three Headed God, for the sole purpose of eliminating the direct threat to man and demons posed by Christ walking this earth as us.
The Mystery is God in us.
And yes, that is a concept impossible to wrap our heads around, impossible to grasp.
How can my body BE Jesus' own physical body? – Inconceivable.
Yet if we speak what God speaks concerning Christ our only Life, we must speak exactly that,flesh of His flesh, one flesh with Him.
And here is what happens when we do speak what God speaks. The entire fabric of the universe, the substance of both heaven and earth, changes astonishingly in our understanding. Things are quite different in reality from what we have always imagined them to be by outward appearance and in our separated darkness. And yes, parts of science today attempt to tell us that very thing, including the electrical theory of the universe.
I want to talk more about Jesus in our bodies in upcoming letters. At the same time, the part ofthe fellowship of His sufferings that is most important – for the sake of His body – also requires another letter. Here, however, I want to talk about us, you and me, in Jesus' body as He walked the Path of the Atonement, God revealed. In fact, this letter is the Union part of Fellowship, and an upcoming letter will be the Fellowship part of Union.
We are in Jesus before Jesus can be in us.
By His stripes we are healed.
Let us consider what these words must mean.
Yes, by outward physical appearance, the flesh of Jesus was laid back in long, penetrating, and bloody stripes across His torso. But we understand that God and flesh cannot be separated except as death. Thus the outward appearance of the Flesh of Jesus simply shows to us the inward reality of God. The outward Flesh is what it is by the continual workings of the inward Person, the Father inside of Christ.
For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also. James 2:26
We can turn these words right around and say it this way as God speaking.
For as the body is the expression of the spirit, so works are the expression of faith.
Now, let's apply the Mystery of God, as it is actually expressed all through the New Testament, into this equation, that the outer form is an expression of the inner spirit, that earth reveals heaven and man reveals God.
In that day you shall know that I am in the Father and you in Me and I in you.
Jesus placed Himself, in the entirety of His Being, into the Father, first. Then He placed us, in the entirety of our beings, into Himself, second. Then He placed Himself, in the entirety of His Being, into us, into the entirety of our beings, third. We place no limit on the word “IN,” especially concerning our flesh.
This is the Mystery of God, a great and inconceivable mystery – but I am speaking of Christ and the Church.
We cannot begin by understanding how such a thing could be. We begin by believing what God speaks, and then by exercising the first work of faith – we believe, therefore we SPEAK –. Only then, as the Spirit of God makes the Words that we are SPEAKING alive to us, do we even begin to understand. We understand only hazily, yes, but understanding must come because Fellowship is only by understanding.
And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us an understanding (a mind to know God), that we may know Him (Fellowship) who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life. 1 John 5:20
I have laid out all the background thinking we need in order to understand this most precious of truths.
By His stripes we are healed.
I am a very personal person, as are you. And everything that has ever happened to me in my life, every circumstance I have ever gone through, I take and have always taken, as very personal to me. More than that, I take myself seriously, as do you. And we should, for we are created in the image of a very serious God. Certainly, the ability to laugh at one's self is a mark of grace and of God. But consider, how could we laugh if we, and every part of our lives, were not of great value and of most important consequence.
If we, and every particle of our lives, were not of consummate importance, we could never laugh.
My life has been filled with goodness, most certainly, as has yours. Yet, at the same time, my life has been filled with unending brokenness and confusion, pain and agony.
Our lives have been a continual mixture of goodness and awfulness.
When Jesus spoke us into existence out from Himself in the New Creation, in His prayer on the way to Gethsemane, He spoke us into Himself. From that moment we were utterly inside of Him, spirit, soul, and body.
Of truth, we can freely call the stripes opening up in Jesus' flesh a metaphor of the reality of the God who filled Him full, reconciling the world, heaven and earth, to Himself.
The Walk of the Atonement is the unfolding to us in visible form – outward appearance – the reality of the New Creation – which we ARE.
Here is an absolute reality of God. God NEVER eliminates the old in order to bring in the new. Every expression of that concept in Christian speaking is false.
God births the New first, full and complete, and then, by the NEW, swallows up the old.
Gethsemane came before the stripes.
Just as the light bulb has two parts among others, the bulb and the filament, so we were in Jesus in those two parts among others. We were there, in His body, and we were there, in His heart. In His body all of our pain, each individual and particular moment of hurt and confusion we have ever experienced, each tear in the darkness, each twisted agony of grief and anger, sorrow and bitterness, opened itself up in Jesus' own body.
It was not ours; it was always His.
– It was always His. –
But FIRST, before our own pain began in Jesus' body, we were in His Heart as He arose from Gethsemane. And in His heart we were the Fierce JOY of His singing, the Love of His existence, the Abundance of Father poured out inside of Him.
The Mystery of God is that I am in God's Person and that God is in my person.
Jesus bore our pain in His own body before ever it came into our life.
But we were the fierce Joy of His Heart before ever He bore our pain.
We are persons only because we are VERY personal to and in the Heart of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Can you hear with me the symphony playing? All the instruments of truth and reality giving each their own voice, all together as one?
Those who do not sing with me cannot hear what I hear. But that's okay, for with all the same Joy of Jesus, filling our hearts full in perfect Communion, we lay down our lives for them that they also might hear this song and sing with the same joy together with all the sons of God.
Earlier in this letter, I said this: Jesus' prayer in John 17 is the first part of our union with Christ.
Specifically, how did Jesus create us in the New Creation? Which of His words called us into existence?
That they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me. John 17:21-23
These are the words that created us. And if these are the words that created us, how can we be anything other than these words? Notice that Jesus speaks the same thing twice using slightly different words.
By the mouth of two or three witnesses every word shall be established. 2 Corinthians 13:1 & Deuteronomy 19:15
That they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one.
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one! Deuteronomy 6:4 & Mark 12:29
That they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one.
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one!
That they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one.
The Mystery of God is not that the Father and the Son are one, the Mystery of God is that you and I are one with God, essential parts of the fellowship of the Father.
And for what did Jesus, by these words, create us in the New Creation?
That the world (the cosmos, all of heaven and all of earth operating together) may believe, that the world may know.
God Light, God revealed, God manifest in the flesh.
You are the light of the cosmos. Matthew 5:14
We are not talking about temporal evangelism; we are talking about the end purpose of God, fulfilled in our lives right here on this earth, right now in these bodies of flesh.
But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us. We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed— always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.2 Corinthians 4:7-11
The travail by which God makes Himself known.
By His stripes we are healed.
The fellowship of His sufferings.
Let all the singing of God sing in your heart. “Sing, sing for Me! Sing for Me! Sing,” says the One who fills your heart with My glory.
I notice that when new readers write to me, they are often careful to express appropriate thoughts of how far above them is the God they worship. I understand their hearts, though they do not speak from the knowledge of God.
We cannot fellowship with the Father and with Jesus Sent except as equals. If there is no equality, there can be no fellowship.
I am equal with the Father and with Jesus Sent at the level of Heart and at the level of Covenant.
That they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one.
These words, and no other, created us.
We are eagles living as if we are chickens, swans living as if we are ducks.
One thing alone will bring us out of our present vanity, the transformation of our minds.
And truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.
The communion is the thing.
However, we must understand that this communion is very specific and focused right now. We are not dancing with God through fields of flowers, we are bearing down with God in the agony of travail – for the sake of His body.
By this we know love, because He laid down His life for us. And we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. 1 John 3:16
So then death is working in us, but life in you. 2 Corinthians 4:12
This “death” has nothing to do with the evil “You are bad and bad you must die.”
This is the fellowship of Love, the always arising of God, carrying all inside Himself, bearing all pain and consequence in His own body, carrying each one all the way through death and into life.
This is the God who reveals Himself, makes Himself known, God Light, through us.
Do you see His Bride? How His bowels yearn over her in this her darkest hour.
Because we love Him, we love what He loves; His love for His Bride fills our Hearts to overflowing.
And we know that everything God and us do together, every circumstance of our lives, every moment, good, bad, or indifferent, is God and us, laying down our lives, for her sake, for the sake of His body.
This is our secret, the Father and us; this is our Fellowship.