Being Raised up with Christ?
written by Michael McBane
The Book of Colossians is to me such an uplifting and progressive invitation to rise up and into our Christ apprehended destiny. In ways the Book of Ephesians reveals a blueprint but this Letter to Colossians reaches over the mind and into the heart. Lets just take the following two verses and dwell on them, chew on the content and merge onto the provision they offer.
If then ( this is a question folks) you have been raised up with Christ, KEEP seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set (or settle) your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth. For you have died ( in Christ being taken from one kingdom and put into another) and your life is hidden with Christ in God. Colossians 3:1 and 2.
I am not one to subscribe to being a positive thinking type, but it seems things are clear here. Think on, meditate with consistency on the things pertaining to bringing heaven to earth, things that are found and thus complete in Christ. This then is a dwelling place, a settlement of resolve and persuasion. We then are changed into His likeness because we have been with Him.
There can be a change of our likeness that exemplifies the encounter of salvation but if we do not begin to reveal HIm we have not been with Him. I suggest that Judas did reveal Christ but he held back and did not fully trust Him. For this world had entrapped him. Thus he fell. This is why Jesus said, leave everything and follow me. ( let me interject, Jesus spent the night in prayer to ask His Father who He should choose or who His Father had appointed to be His disciples. Judas was not a mistake. So I suggest that as we are instructed to take these things as examples and learn from them so should we here. What is the example, the divided heart of Judas. Jesus is driving a point home to save us, you must leave all behind. Leave all including your head and the demands of what was. ) If we do not have this resolve, this surge to cling with no fear of loss or death, we cheat ourselves and the body. For here we will give who we are more then the Christ within us. We here can neither give fully or receive fully for we are immersed in our own ambition and our minds have not settled on the things above. This is the failure of the church of this age we give who we are more then the Christ in us. We proclaim and return to what we are or have known. Just in case Jesus is wrong. This is often why we attach to personalities in the body rather then persuading the whole of the body to function with no part left unfunctioning. We deny life together. We dwell in a mixture so much so that we receive nourishment from such mixture and consider it the bounty of new revelation. We step up on the ambition of our own strength and ability. We refuse to leave all behind and fully allow God to reveal the fresh and vibrant and redemptive life we are meant to have. We have enough that we actually think we are in “revival” or have stepped into a reformation of sorts. I tell you Christ can not be treated like a game boy or some interactive experience that disengages you from life together and among those who are called to reveal a fully engaged community of life. Christ followers are Christ revealers because they have known that to be raised up with Christ they must also have a mind that has settled on the things above because these things are redemptive and recreate life from death.
I tend to think that the whole concept of revival is a deception that has created a life of its own. Christ did not come to expand us every few years or to skip about geographically to engage a migratory people that are nomads with no effect. Not at all, He came that we might have life and have it abundantly and thrive in places that we are meant to plant and grow in. Yes, surely we must know where we are to be. And let us not be deceived into what it means to thrive. We thrive in Christ not necessarily the values of worldly definement. But we cannot reveal a kingdom when we do not allow the pegs of our tents to be extended by Him. He extends those tent pegs into the formation of life one to another and then across geographic areas. He is the life within the tents, we are the temple of His life of His provision.
Remember Christ said to His disciples, Have I been with you so long and yet you cannot feed them. Would He say the same to us today? I am afraid so. We do not adequately feed each other from the life we have in Christ. again we deny the body and thus we do not discern it correctly and many among us are ill in sickness and...ill equipped because of false applications and misaligned parts and false heads. Thus our condition is revealed.
Is Paul saying in his letters as some mistake that we are becoming Christ. No. We shall remain who we are because that is who Jesus came to redeem. Are we changed, yes. We must change or our Christianity is of no affect, it has no point. Do we wait until our death? Our death comes when we allow Christ to take its sting away, when we accept or agree that we have been taken in Him from a place of hopeless darkness and placed deliberately into a Kingdom of eternal light. We are not as angels of light who deceive others for death or their own gain. We take nothing unto ourselves we reveal Christ for Christ’s sake.
Paul tells us we have died, and our life is hidden in Christ. But this can only be revealed when we have our minds set or settled upon Him and the things that He is and the things that He is about. Jesus demands community. He reveals life in community. He sent them out not as one but in at least twos. This alone disassembles most models of ministry that prevail today. He gave the life and example of marriage between a man and women and the life meant to thrive there in. He did not create a ministry world of dominate male figures that evoke images of male driven egos nor did he present a female subjected ministry that manipulates life in demands of misguided directives. Jesus demanded marriages that cultivated life in love and services by honoring not in words but heart felt life laid down interaction that not only reproduces babies but extended community generationally because they had Christ among them. They first were with Him, with Him not some warped encountered that destroyed life but gave life.
We have met those who can wield a sword of language and proclamation. Spouting scriptures but they are insulated and lifeless. Bravado spills out all over them, they pound their chests with what seems to be authority but it is lifeless there is no fragrance of Christ that is broken around them. They are running from love. They have touched it but its content more then likely scared them. So they live and gather those who also enjoy the insulation of self protected but lifeless Christianity. There is truth spoken but it does not quantify into life among the body in fact it may at times leave a stench of bitter sorrows in the wake of such proclamation. God wants what He reveals to us to saturate us and ferment into a wine that speaks more then words it speaks in all manor of life, it is fully creative and God’s nature is seen. God’s life in us worships in awe.
God now is offering us a renewal that demands that we resettle our minds on Christ. On the things that look like Him and reveal Him. Most of us, even we who have walked long years crying out for such have not been here. This is new territory. A new frontier. But I tell you that we have been prepared for the next steps and Jesus will draw us into a place were our fears and our failures are buried in His death and we are hidden in His arms.
Come let us quit, give up our thoughts and conclusions so He can love us, fully. For His names sake.
He wants to win the world by allowing His life to be seen in us. Let us not then speak from the persuasions of men nor doctrines but because we have been with HIm.
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