SERVANTS OR SONS?

SERVANTS OR SONS?

                I grew up as the son of an evangelistic minister. Night after night we preached the message that would convince people of the truth. I knew the information well intellectually; but Later on in life I became hungry for something I wasn’t finding back in those days. I wanted to know more about life in the Spirit. So I began to attend Charismatic/Pentecostal services searching for something that my heart knew must be there.

                It took time, but under the ministry of the Holy Spirit, I got delivered, born again and Spirit filled. And even though coming out of legalism and into the Spirit filled life was a long and rocky road, I knew that I had found a living relationship with my Lord through the Holy Spirit. Under the Law, there are always loop holes and a person can be a Christian intellectually without ever getting to the core of the heart’s problem. But in the Spirit there are no loop holes. You are either being faithful or you are grieving the Holy Spirit.

                But later on in my Charismatic journey I began to notice that many were drifting off point, leaving behind important foundations, abandoning a prophetic view of scripture and centering on prosperity  and emotions more than on the foundational truths of the Bible. And so I began to look for something more substantial.

                In my own personal study of Bible Prophecy, I became aware of the fact that the Fall Feasts, or appointed times of the Lord had yet to be fulfilled and so the Lord led us to the Messianic congregation to learn more about these important elements that make up the foundations of the New Covenant. And the more I studied the more I realized that all of Bible prophecy is wrapped up in and guided by these appointed times and that Israel is a key to end time prophecy.

                Some of you would be absolutely shocked that I would cross denominational lines in search of understanding, but my search for and my commitment is not to an organization but to Jesus Christ. I want to know Him and I don’t want to be hampered in my search by having to commit to one point of view, or one organization. Truth is much bigger than that and we severely limit its scope when we boil it down to a set of 26 or 28 doctrines. When we do that we tend to ignore the rest of the Bible.

                Now don’t get me wrong. I believe that there are certain organizations that come closer to fitting God’s definition of a remnant people. They keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus, but the testimony of Jesus is more than information, it is the very Spirit of Christ living in our hearts and guiding our lives in a living way. “For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God.” Romans 8:14

                However, in my years of searching I have found that God’s Remnant people are everywhere regardless of denominational lines and I am equally convinced that God’s Remnant people cannot be defined by a narrow set of doctrines. Jesus said, “ My sheep hear my voice.” and regardless of differences in doctrine there are people in nearly every denomination or church group that love the Lord every bit as much as I do. They are being obedient to all that they know and they are God’s Remnant people. They have been born again into the kingdom of Christ and they are no longer of this world.

                We need to understand as believers that we can go into any congregation where Christ is the center of the message and we can enjoy fellowship and receive wonderful blessings by doing so. And even though they may not have seen every point exactly as we have seen it, I have learned that they often know more than I do about other parts of the gospel in which I may be weak.

                We are the Body of Christ and if we can’t discern the Spirit of Christ in others who may not belong to our exact formula then we are the losers. Our unity is in Jesus Christ as I pointed out in my last article called “Obeying.” We enter into His Body through the cross and we are born into His kingdom when we are born again. We live by the same Holy Spirit and the same Word. So I have found that I can attend a wide variety of congregations, or conferences and find blessed fellowship with those who are filled with the Spirit of Christ. We are His children.

                However there are several distinctions and warnings that I want to make today:

1.       Across all denominational and non-denominational lines there are those that are living by the power of the Gospel and those who are falling away. In other words, there seems to be a great separation taking place between wheat and tares.

2.       Due to the great falling away that is taking place, we will find that some, even groups that used to be solid Bible believing congregations, are abandoning the foundations of the faith, the foundations of the Gospel and the foundations of Bible Prophecy by which we understand God’s agenda for these last days.

3.       There is a difference between legalism and life in Spirit and we need to understand the differences lest we fall either for legalism on one side, or lawlessness on the other. On this point there is a growing population in many churches that no longer have a biblical world view and many are embracing a self-centered vision of grace and as such, I believe that many have invited a different spirit into their lives.

                It is absolutely essential to have a solid biblical base in which the Old Testament forms the firm foundation upon which the New Testament sits. Jesus established this when he started with Moses and all the prophets showing His disciples all things pertaining to Himself in all the Old Testament Scriptures. We also need to realize that we cannot claim to have replaced the Jews, since the Bible has stated clearly that we have not. (See Romans 11) We have been grafted in and that makes us one family with all who have received Yeshua as the Messiah.

                There are only two camps in this world and every person is gravitating towards one camp or the other. One camp is based upon the Person of Jesus Christ as He is expressed in the entire Bible from Genesis to Revelation. They have been born into the kingdom of God and they now live by His Spirit.                    The other camp is gravitating toward the global kingdom of the antichrist. They have abandoned the foundations of scripture and the New Birth and they are seeking for unity through compromise. They are looking to the False Prophet for global unity. And because they have begun to abandon Old Covenant foundations, they are subsequently abandoning New Covenant foundations as well. So now portions of the church are seeking unity based not in the person of Jesus Christ and His Word, but upon a social consciousness and unity based upon humanism.

                On point number 3, I want to draw some distinctions between legalism and lawlessness and how it is that people on both sides of the isle often miss the mark.

                 While the Old Testament forms the firm foundation upon which the New Testament sits, we need to understand something. The Old Testament will make you a SERVANT of God, but it cannot make you a SON. Sonship comes only by new birth and new birth comes only through Christ, through His Cross and resurrection. In other words; being a Remnant person is much more than having the right information and keeping the right day. The kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ is not entered by intellectual persuasion, but by birth and as I stated above, this birth takes place through the cross and resurrection and the infilling of the Holy Spirit. He who has the Son has life and he who has not the Son has not life.

                So the Jewish religion was made up of all the types and shadows and feast days and temple services that pointed forward to what Yeshua would do in reality. Hebrews 9:23 says: Therefore it was necessary for the copies of the things in the heavens to be cleansed with these, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these.” So in order to bring about the New Covenant into living reality rather than symbols it required the shedding of the blood of the eternal Son of God.

                So our “religion” now, so to speak is not made up of “food or drink or in respect to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day-things which are a mere shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ.” In other words, as SERVANTS of God, Israel observed all of these types and shadows and by doing so they faithfully preserved for us the foundations upon which the New Testament is built, but as SONS, we are now living by His Spirit as born again offspring of God whereby we cry out Abba Father.

                In the Old Testament the idea of sonship was not known. Even Moses was known as a faithful servant. The children of Israel were just that… children of ISRAEL (Jacob) and when they came out of slavery at Mt. Sinai they were baptized into Moses, not Jesus.

                In fact, it was Jesus who introduced the concept of Fatherhood and He only did so, because He was about to offer a way, through His death and resurrection by which we could actually be born into His kingdom… into the family of God. This is the real difference between the Old and New Covenants. We are either servants of the Law, or sons who live by the Spirit of Christ and thus fulfill the Law through faith and love.

                We know son hood was not understood in Old Covenant times, because when Jesus called God His Father, they tried to kill Him for blasphemy because in calling Himself a son, He was making Himself equal with God. Sons contain the same substance as the Father and we have the Spirit of Christ if we belong to Him. We are sons by New Birth!

                Instead of being SERVANTS of the Law, we are now SONS who live by the Spirit and not by the flesh.

                In the book of Genesis and the book of Job we are introduced to the sons of God. (Bene Elohim) They were with God at creation and therefore they were immortals and pre-human.  The sons of God shouted for joy at the creation of man. They were most likely of a ruling class in heaven and one might be tempted to think that Jesus was one of these sons who agreed to die for the human race, but this was not the case at all. Jesus is very God, the everlasting Father, Prince of and He became a Son only when He was born into the human race. In this incarnation, He became a part of creation as well as its Creator. Jesus was the eternal God and in fact He was the Yahweh of the Old Testament because the Father has done everything concerning both creation and redemption through His Son, who is often identified in the Old Testament as God’s Right arm, or Branch, or Messenger (angel) of the Lord.

                Over and over again in the Old Testament it is stated as in Isaiah 12:2-4, “God has become my salvation. But said in Hebrew it says;” Behold Yahweh has become my Yeshua.” Yeshua is their Hebrew word for Salvation and that is why the angel told Mary, “You shall call His name Yeshua, for He shall save His people from their sins.” Yeshua means salvation! But listen to these words in Isaiah: “Behold, God (Yahweh) is my salvation (Yeshua) For the Lord (Yahweh) is my strength and song and He has become my salvation. (Yeshua) Therefore you will joyously draw water from the springs of Salvation. (Yeshua.) And what did Jesus say on the last day of the feast of tabernacles? He said, “If any man is thirsty let him come to me and drink.” John 7:37.

                So you see, as servants they obeyed the Law and it was in fact their religion, but as sons, we live by the Spirit of God, but then here is where the lawless class gets it wrong. Even as sons we are obedient. And within the context of training to reign, we as sons must certainly understand God’s plan of salvation both in its symbolic form and also in its living realities. In fact, if we abandon God’s Old Testament blueprints, we will be in danger of getting off track in the New Testament and this is what is happening in many circles today. They are abandoning the foundations and as such they are also drifting off course.

                As sons of God who are training to reign with Him, we need a thorough understanding of God’s blueprints as well as His Fatherhood as we become His sons through new birth. This is why Jesus, the only begotten Son of God emphasized that we must worship Him in Spirit and in Truth and these two must always remain together.

                If you want to be a son, you must also be willing to be a servant. Even the Son, washed His disciple’s feet. He died as the suffering servant, but when He returns He will return as King of kings and Lord of lords and we who are His willing and faithful servants must also come to know and understand our role as sons, for we are a part of His royal family and joint heirs with Yeshua.

                Would you not want to know and understand His ways then? For this purpose, just binding ourselves blindly to a doctrinal point of view and then putting our minds into neutral is not enough. We are in pursuit of sonship. We are not willing to submit to the limits of men and of religion. We are in search of Spirit and Truth and we know that both are found in Yeshua… not in rituals and traditions, but in His Person through the Holy Spirit and the Word.

                “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form and in Him you have been made complete and He is the head over all rule and authority…”  Col. 2:8-10.

                We must by all means have a right relationship to all of these things and that right relationship can only be established when Jesus Christ is Lord of everything. And remember this: we are looking for sonship. The Prodigal son came back to the Father, willing to be a servant, but the father put his robe on him and his ring of authority on His finger and treated him as a son, because he had been born a son.

                As servants we serve the Lord faithfully, but as Sons we are in training to reign with Jesus for eternity.