Where are you going?
The other day a line of thinking dropped into my conscious, and I began to munch away at it.
When we get to Heaven, our identity will be different. We won’t be wives, or husbands, daughters or sons, grandmas or grandpas any more. At that time, we will be totally the Lord’s, and our identity will be entirely based on Him… our relationship with Him, in Him. We will be freed from all the identifiers of our earthly existence: status, wealth, position, education, wife, husband, child, etc. They will have been lifted from upon us like a yoke that gets replaced…
But our identity will not be less. It will be complete! We will be complete in Him.
I believe the Lord is moving upon our hearts, even in this moment, to embrace a freedom that transfigures us here on earth even while we await heaven. This being transfigured is a work of God that we can cooperate with. It has to do with sanctification.
I am greatly stirred by Oswald Chambers (My Utmost for His Highest 1992, July 22-23. He discusses the importance of sanctification for death and for life.
According to the death side, it is a stripping down of me of all things until just me remains. It it like me at the molecular level: the smallest bit of me that can be achieved and yet still be me. It is a scrubbed me. My naked self. It is the lump of me without all the worldly fallout. It allows me to become “free from being determined and persistent toward anything except God.” Before this action of working death on me, I was a highly charged particle with heavy attraction to the things of this world…
After being worked on towards death (sanctification), all the “load” in our soul/flesh (devotion to things that are temporal whether towards intellect, will, or emotions) loses its attraction and weight. We become neutral in a sense. Like Paul conveyed in Acts 20:24, “none of these things move me.”
There is also the installing of life side to sanctification, where we are not left in deficit, but rather the very qualities that are of Christ are imparted to us. His very nature is imparted to us, so we are not left to simply imitate Christ, but rather to express His nature that is transmitted to us by the power of the Holy Spirit (John 16:14). We are thus, filled….
Oswald Chambers reveals:
“The most wonderful secret of living a Holy life does not lie in imitating Jesus, but in letting the perfect qualities of Jesus exhibit themselves in my human flesh. Sanctification is ‘Christ in you…’ (Col 1:27)”
It is the “hope of glory!”
So let us pursue this understanding of glory for a moment…
It is a process. It doesn’t happen overnight, but over a lifetime…
It occurs because we continue… we go on continuously, beholding the image of the glory of the Lord….
Our eyes are fixed on the goodness of the Lord. His majesty, power, stellar and perfect goodness, awesomeness, qualities that defy imagination but that are found resident and embodied by our beloved Savior.
Now, look at this for a moment. We are sanctified and part of this process is a removal, a destruction, a dying out from our-self and our temporal baggage that is dead weight. Self blocks our capacity to believe… and more, it actually has “veiled” our capacity to apprehend truth without distortion in the word of God.
With all these elements left in us, without being sanctified, they are like the dross in silver not being cooked off and skimmed away. They cause the strength and purity of the silver to be diluted…
Not to leave us deficient, however, the Lord deposits within us His own perfect nature, His DNA, His very own life by which I can now live by a new life lived for God. (Romans 6:5-6; Col 3:10-14)
The point of this is, I don’t for a moment believe that our becoming and living according to the New Man Christ is to wait until we get to Heaven. I believe that this new nature begins to unpack, assemble, and manifest itself as we turn to God fully and search for Him.
Remember in 2Cor 3:18, when a person turns in repentance to the Lord, the veil is stripped off and taken away. Repentance works with sanctification to allow the death side to do a work in us… removing and stripping us down to that smallest molecule that is still essentially us.
At the same time, timbers of the “Old House” are being removed, New timbers of Jesus are being placed. The New Creation which has been present since new birth is being assembled as room is given to renovate – for it to operate.
So our identity in Christ, which will be fulfilled in Christ in Heaven, first gets underway here on earth. It is here, on earth, that the perishable puts on the imperishable, the mortal puts on immortality….(1Cor 15:53).
You see the perishable can’t enter heaven, so it must put on the imperishable before it enters into heaven – that is right here on earth!
You and I are both being transfigured into the last Adam, Who became a life giving Spirit [restoring the dead to life]. Yes, our physical life came first. And we have borne the image of the man of dust (Adam). But now more than ever, it is time that we bear the image of the Man of heaven, Christ Jesus (1Cor 15:45-49).
It is not something we make happen, but it is something that we cooperate with and moves into place as we behold the Lord’s glory as in a mirror…
Seeing His goodness, seeing His glory (and how far we operate from it) brings us to repent and it destroys the veil that blocks us from seeing Him in fulness. It is a wheel of beholding, and transfiguration, and glory, from one degree to another … emancipation from every bondage of our soulish life and perspective. Until one day, we are freed from the very last restraint… the last cord — death itself, and then we enter into the fulness of life in His full presence. No more mirrors!!! Just reality before us!
So really, where are you going?
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