February 2004 archives

a meditation on fruit

³He shall be like a tree...that brings forth its FRUIT in its season, whose leaf also shall not wither; and whatever he does shall PROSPER.² Ps1:3
When God is in charge of the whole planting, tending and harvesting process, the fruit is life giving and eternal. When we jump ahead and in our own way, try to get to the fruit, or rush the tending process, we bear mishapen fruit that will not last. The church has done this often.

There is an ordering principle in this, with a promise of durability and prosperity on earth. Wisdom knows when God is planting, and when he is pruning, and when he is harvesting the fruits. There is a season for each. To know where God is at in His Own fruit bearing processes in us and in those around us, is essential both to move in wisdom, and to get to know God as we help one another where each is at. There is a time to plant, a time to heal, a time to tend, a time to harvest. Knowing where we are in the growth process is basic to moving with God.
³being filled with the fruits of righteousness which are by Jesus..² Phil1:11
To be filled with fruit is a seasonal completion. He is forming His Fruits in us--ie growing His own fruit within us. And we are told to become filled with these fruits. In many ways we are the fruit of jesus, but in another way, He is the fruit in us. There is a growth process implied in the metaphore of fruit--a process of planting, prunning or caring for, and then having ripe full fruit.
The are many spiritual laws around fruit--for example, ³He who tends a fig tree will eat of its fruit, prov. 27:18, which means if one joins jesus in his tending process, one will be allowed to eat of the fruit which is grown.

³the FRUIT of the righteous is a tree of Life..² Proverbs 11:30. For when people eat of this fruit they are tasting jesus who is the tree of life. So we become a tree of life for others.

ŒIsrael will blossom and bud, and fill the face of the world with fruit.² Isaiah 27:6

Jesus is cutting off branches in the church which bear no fruit. One branch being cut off is this tendency to work out of season with His Purposes.
The church has often been trying to harvest, when He is planting, or tending or prunning when He is only planting. This is basically pride, blindness and at worst, rebellion for it is saying that we know how to tend the world and ourselves rather than God. God grows fruit in a manner that when it is ripe it is also whole and others can eat it and be eating from the tree of Life, His Son. When we move out of his order, we are not only ineffective, but we actually rebell against His order, and therefore no longer reveal Him to the world.
If you look carefully at that first psalm, you enter the image of the growth process when completely controlled by God.
To meditate on God ways, and enter them extends us out into bringing forth fruit in its exact season. And when we allow God to do this, our leaves shall never wither!

Rick Joyner writes, ³There is a time to plant and a time to reap, but there will not be a reaping if we have missed the time to plant. The church has had a ³reaping mentality² which has caused it to overlook many of the planting seasons.² (pg29, the Harvest)
God wants us to be involved in His Harvesting process, but not only that part of the process. To bear eternal fruit, one must know the whole process of God¹s way of growing things into His Fulness. To know even and especially in our own lives if He is planting, tending, or harvesting is essential to be aligned with his Purposes in our lives. Then we can let Him grow his Son in us, and we will become trees of life for those around us. Fruit bearing is a process. If we are overly fruit focused, we miss His full revelation, and we grow premature fruit that does not bring life.

you know we think of networking as serving either our own needs, or that of the company or organization we work for which we may or may not believe is doing a good service....
the real reason we go meet different people is to complete God's joy. For when we meet another person, we are allowing those parts of Him in us to touch those parts of Him in them. God likes fellowship with Himself!
i was thinking today of all the times i felt i had helped certain people to meet one another, or just got to meet some people who would will probably never meet one another, and i was thinking of how He then gets to touch and join and have that feeling of connection through me--a bit like synovial fluid in the physical body, which is the fluid between joints allowing bones to meet without grating--you know we meet one another and touch, only in part for us, most of it is to bring Him that joy...and that joy is our strength.

The reformation began a new level of formation of God¹s Son in His People. This is still being completed, but He is able to fully form Himself in us and together to incarnate the fullness of Himself. The fulness is expressed when all his People are joined properly together in Him. This is His integration of Himself in us. This is His Unity.

a prayer:
l believe in Your ability to form yourself in every area of my life!
You are able to do this, and as you do, Your Power and Ways will be made manifest through and in Me. Nothing in me can produce this--only You in me Jesus. There is not an area which You cannot govern. This is true in me and in the world around me, but I begin in Me. I know You have your ways of coming to rule within me--ways which reveal and teach about Your Father. I want those ways, and Your Order. I know You take the lands within, in Order--an Order that is mysterious, but also reveals Your fulness to me in the best possible way. I trust your parenting, your birth order of Yourself in Me.
I know that many along side me have been caught up in doing spiritual activities and have fallen away from You Yourself. I myself return to a devotion to You, and a commitment to allow You to form Yourself in every area of my own being, and I believe that you are able to finish this formation which You began in me.

³We must make way IN US for the coming of the Lord.² Francis Frangipane

³Whom He foreknew, He also predestined TO BECOME CONFORMED TO THE IMAGE OF HIS SON, that He might be the first-born of many brethren.² Romans 8:29

The new level of incarnation which many of us are beginning to experience is in many ways the completion of what was started at the reformation (or, what He calls the formation--ie of His Son in us).
The restoration of the earth will come through His full incarnation in us and on the earth. As we find ourselves experiencing more of Him in us--as you see the Body at large starting to testify to-- we see how He has parented us towards this moment of a fuller revelation of Himself in us. God in man, us trully a living temple for His Presence.

The priesthood of all believers is in fact the sonship phase of the church¹s maturation. The Son of God is the High Priest, and it is this part of Him He is living through us. As we allow Him to share His Priesthood, we recognize our heavely identity. What do priest do? Pray for, consecrate, confess personal and collective sins, remain holy...and so on. As the church journeys out of mere religious activities and enter His Priesthood, we will begin to know the Inheritance of The Son, as He possesses the earth.

The earth will be fully restored as His Inheritance, for all the nations are His. This means that things will be put in order, before there is a new earth and a new heaven. We are part of that generation of restoration of the earth in Him! As He incarnates in us, we will join Him in restoring the earth into its proper order. Dominion (kratos) does not just mean having power over, it means to help complete by putting it back in God¹s Order, which is the order which perfectly reveals God¹s Ways.

We know that the earth¹s restoration will mean the proper order established between nations and people. This is a matter of the Spirit rather than man, ordering relations. We see new alignments being made on the level of freindships and between nations, companies, states and ministries.We see that the arts will be placed in their proper context, as will medicine and bussiness. Already we begin to see this happening. He is harvesting the lost, yes, but this is part of restoring His Order to creation. His order is that men would see who the Son really is and then to know and love the Father.

As Christ forms Himself in us, the earth also will be placed in order. All that is rebelling against His Order will be made very manifest, so men will see His Kingdom more clearly, and be given an obvious choice. Jesus is in the act of coming. He is coming into us as we speak.

...to be ourselves the open gates of jerusalem to allow This King of Glory to enter the earth---lift up ye gates, open up your door...and we ARE those gates and doors for Him to enter through...

Christ in us allows us to see earth and sky as also in Him. To the pure all things are pure. From Christ we see Christ. This is how Patrick found God in the sunset and stones. To see through Him, is to see Him in all of creation, and to enter that Divine Dialogue.
Jesus is tree--earth, sky and stone
jesus in me--skin and bone
jesus this sight by which i see
jesus in you
jesus in me

and so on...

Jesus wants to touch His Own creation through us. This is the restoration of the earth, and it is the restoration of our relations. We come to see His creation as gravitied within HIM, as it was formed from Him. We come to see nature as a meditation back into Him, as we do our friends!

His Being in us poetrying through the lines of our being...as in we ARE His Poesia (ephesian 2:10)...like jesus speaking the poem of Himself through our unique nuances,
broken as we are, but He is whole in us, and His singing through us creates an ambiance of His expression.
I'm looking at a true foundation for art and arting. It goes to Him here in us wanting to express through us--how it comes out uniquely styled based on the shape of the poem you are. As He comes more fully to reside within us, so our own shapes are revealed more acutely and freely, so new voices are heard as He Winds through us.
John was a reed played by the Wind--ie he was yielded, so his identity played forth. That space of freedom was Jesus singing through him less interruptedly than most of us. His Being in us singing out through the unique nuances of what He formed us to be--and that is beautiful! And is the method of restoration of His Creation!

..back to this theme of what it means for the different parts of God to touch one another in His Order...
as He integrates Himself through us, we see newer alignments and relations between one another. Sometimes what feels like odd connections are being formed!

John, in his amazing meditation on what fellowship is, goes on and on inviting people to fellowship with what He is fellowshiping with. What was he communing with--that vast love-filled space between The Father and The Son--that is the communioning space, and is what we get caught up in as we allow Him to commune through us with Himself in others.

We see misalignments between companies, states and people which have happened either based on our wounds, or on building based on the ideas of man, rather than the leading of the Spirit. When the spirit draws things together it for the delighting of the Divine in having the proper parts of Himself in the proper relation with one another. It is like His Arm actually connected to His Shoulder. This brings Him great joy as it is about His own integration.

We tend to think about our own integration as a private process, but the joints being properly fit together means we being properly related to others. Allowing Him to pick our friends and occupations is a starting point, for we come to know ourselves in relation. And we come to see our friendships as a meditation on Him and how He orders in order to reveal a fuller expression of Himself.

Religion has many false alignments between things. Our programs and practices can get us into the wrong relations with one another. But when we trully are led by His Spirit, we start to see relations forming which reveal His Nature. Just as companies often make "teams" of people who were never meant to be in relation, so do many of our religious institutions, making "teams" which were not formed by His Spirit. Not only is this not effective for manifesting His Kingdom, it is a misrepresentation of God!

Is He being allowed to be the choreographer or not? is one question. If not what vision is guiding our netting or relations, and what is being formed through them--ie what are they representing? What kind of painting is being portrayed. Often it is a painting about our own ideas of what we think would fit together, but that won't last, nor will it--but by His Grace--bear real lasting fruit!

This is also true of our core beliefs--both personally and as a whole. When we overemphasize one idea, and do not balance it with others, we go off track. In spiritual terms, this is like not balancing Grace with Judgment, or over focusing on our need for repentance without balancing it with faith that God is able to trully forgive and restore. We then make an idol of our own guilt and block the spirit from flowing throug our lives.

In fact, all the core christian doctrines must be in balance to reveal truth. His Nature is integrated! So we know that the foundations are operating at all times, even when He is emphasizing one aspect of Himself. So Jesus is respledent King above, and He is also Warrior Chief below. He is healer, and He is builder. He is both the tender shepard and the one who will kill a bear if it gets too close to one of His kids. There is a balance within His Nature, which we must mirror when looking at our own doctrines and beliefs in order to reveal Him fully.

To have things pulled up and out of us which are misaligned with The Order of things in Christ is basic for growth. As in a garden, when we pull weeds or things blocking the growth of what is planted, there is a necessary clearing out of things which pull us away from the path of Life, or Christ Himself.

Confrontation is a method of exposing weeds in our inner garden. It is rarely about the thing which exposed the weed, and more about looking at the weed itself and allowing it to be pulled.

You see this happening internally, and that is where the focus should be. God uses confrontation to expose those misaligned areas. When we become in conflict, to quickly turn and see what is being exposed in us is the core practice. We often try to return to a state of peace without allowing the weed to be fully exposed, and so miss the purpose of the confrontation. When we are confronted with something that rouses our defenses, it is good to look at what we are defending, and let it get exposed. Conflict in this way becomes part of our growth.

To make connections on a deeper level allows different parts of Jesus in us to touch other parts of Himself. The essence of growth is Him integrating Himself through His People. If the confrontations just bring up wall against wall, we miss the touching, the possible intimacies He is trying to have with Himself through us. Fellowship is to be communion, which is a inner touching inner in another---spirit touching spirit. This is where love rest as well, and is not ultimately about donuts and coffee, but fusion and relationship between parts of Himself which yearn to be together.

derek

"..to make our joy complete.."
tis enigmatic phrase feels like it has to do with the parts of God distributed in His People coming together and touching through and in love. This little phrase has always hooked me, not being sure why or what it was about--how could our joy be made complete...looking at how He completes Himself through us, and really how communing with one another is a vehicle for these different parts of Him to touch--that touching brings God delight and joy, which is why there is always so much coming against us hanging out in Him together!

ok, that may sound a little grand for a topic, but I'm back on my favorite subject...which is looking at the true identity of things. In this case, two things: the church and the jews.

These two have obviously not found the way which they are properly related up til this point, and for this to happen each must know who it is and what is its particular destiny; and then see how they fit together in God's grand plan.

In short (very short), the church is to be a supernatural manifestation of God, and the jews are to be a natural manifestation. Having said that, it does not mean that one is better or more valued than the other, only that they have unique identities and destinies, which I believe come together and touch in Christ.

At this stage, neither is being what it truly is. The church is not living from the supernatural fully. It is not yet living from heaven down. And the Jews as a whole are not yet being the teacher of the nations that they will be. But both are beginning to turn in the direction of their destinies.

If you look at the promise given to abraham, you see that his seed had both a natural and a supernatural line. These two then come together to restore and bless the earth to the full extent that god intended. It is as if the earth and the sky will touch, and God will once again place His throne with men. For this to happen, both the Jews and the church must be in their proper role and relation.
There are so many scriptures about all the nations streaming to Jerusalem to have God teach them His Ways and sort them out, that it would take an entire book to catelogue them, but I pick one. It is from the beginning of the prophet Isaiah, and reads, "In the last days, the mountain of the lord's temple will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills and ALL nations will stream to it...the Law will go out from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He will judge the nations and will settle many disputes for many peoples..." and it goes on.

Both the church and the jews are looking towards this day! For it to come, both must be in place-- knowing both who they are, and how they fit together. The beginning of this conjoining is in our day.
These two methods of god--the church and the jews seem to come together in this passage so that both the metaphysical temple of god which the church is, and the literal physical temple building in jerusalem touch and reconjoin in such a way that jesus Himself is actually sitting on a literal throne in that literal city. There are of course mysteries in this, but one of them is not that the church replaced the jews, or that the jews will replace the church. They are two different aspects of God's plan which will come together at the end of the world, and already are moving towards their true identities!

We need to love and understand one another in our day, and part of this is to seek god's heart for one another, and a vision of how the church and the jews actually relate in Him! When we are both being who God intended us to be, the world will be altered permanently, and will see God in the fullness that He intended!

David gives us four areas of sin to confess from. They are interesting, as nearly all our sins fall somewhere within them. If we start by asking the Spirit to bring up any unconfessed sin in any of these areas, we may be surprised by how much house cleaning still remains. But the point isn't cleaning house, but entering up and in...

This is from Psalm 24:3,4...
Who can ascend? David asked.
One with clean hands.
Clean hands speak of relationship sins, or areas where we have either not forgiven or have not asked for forgiveness in our relationships. It includes any areas where our relationships are not clean.
One who has a pure heart.
Pure heart speaks of inner motivational sins, or areas where our motivations are mixed are not right before God. (The Holy Spirit will search our hearts and find these for us, so we can confess them!)
One who has not lifted his soul to an idol.
This speaks of putting our own soul solutions above God's spiritual solutions. When we come up with our own way of solving our problems rather than letting the spirit lead us, we sin. It is like the sin of rebellion which is no small matter.
And one who has not sworn deceitfully.
This one has to do with using our words as instruments of Truth, or areas our mouth has sinned.
As we let the Spirit take us through each, we are allowing the cross to cleanse us, so that we can enter the higher realms of his Life.

Jesus is the only one who has clean hands, a pure heart, hasn't placed his own soul's solutions above God's, and has not spoken untruthfully. So entering through His Life is the only way in and up. This is why the cross is the starting place, and confession is our way of allowing the cross to enter us experientially. It is also the way to begin ascending...

We are then moved to thank and finally to praise, which forms us into open doors into heaven, and allows us to roam above as He leads!

All of this has nothing to do with being religious. It is more like a spiritual map of Reality, so that we begin to know how to climb up into the realms we are to draw our life from. I am exploring practical, and less mystical sounding ways of ascending into the heavenly realms. There is of course no way around the cross, nor is there around confession, because he is Approachable Light, but He is Light, so we have to know how to approach Him in Light. If we have shafts of darkness in us, which we all do, we have to know the way to have them removed in order to enter the gates of heaven.

Continuing with this song of ascents...
confession which is the first step towards the mountain of God, is not really about our shortcomings. It is about Jesus!
When we confess, we are meditating on the Cross, and what Jesus did there. He both forgave us, and took power or dominion. When we confess, we are asking Him to forgive us, and then receiving his Power in that area of our lives.

In tradition, confession became a thing in itself. But it was meant to be "on the way" towards thanks and praise. It is basically positional.

Positionally we have no way to commune with God because of sin, so we must have that block removed in order to approach Him. Darkness cannot be in His realm, so we must have a way to remove that darkness in order to climb His Mount.

People don't like to meditate on confession because we usually make it all about us rather than the Cross. But God loves for us to confess because The Son is then allowed to enter and open the way for true relating again. And the Father loves to be in relationship with us.

Since confession is the first step in ascending the Holy Hill of God, we see nearly all those close to Him constantly doing it. For what it does is apply the cross. It says that without the cross and what Jesus did, we could not enter heaven. The Cross is therefore the starting point on the journey into heaven.

But confessions also births thankfulness, and thanks gets us into the outer courts of heaven. We find ourselves thanking when we see what Jesus did and is doing both to forgive and empower us in the areas we are confessing! As we thank, we climb higher...

Our houses in heaven are the place where we are meant to dwell, and they reveal to us what is the domain of our authority on the earth. Our authority on earth comes from who we are with Him in heaven. It is how His Authority moves through us on earth. Jesus has all authority, but as He dwells within us, He shares His Authority through the unique shapes of our vessels. Many are not moving in their actual domain right now on earth, and therefore have little of His Authority flowing through them. We need to actually get with Him, and find out what our house in heaven looks like. What is its texture and shape, it¹s particular dimensions?

Many are beginning to let God show them who they are from His Eyes, and this is the start. For all the containers we have built on earth, and our categories of framing our lives are too small, and often just the wrong shape entirely. Once, we begin to catch a glimpse of how we look to Him, we can then go on and ask Him to show us the shape of our houses or domains above, so that we begin to move in our realm of authority on the earth.

LAWS OF ASCENDING AND DESCENDING FROM HEAVEN

It is a spiritual law not a principle that if we draw close to God, He will draw close to us. This means that it is a way that Reality is set up, that when people draw close to God, He perforce or by His Nature draws near to us.

There are ways of ascending into heaven. These are practical and taught in scripture. The most obvious maps are in David¹s writings. We need to know practical ways of entering God¹s Realm. Many people are entering heaven more often than before through worship and in dream and visions in our day, but few have been shown the basic maps of how to ascend and enter.

Here are practical tools for ascending. They are found in scripture and follow this pattern. First, we confess all our sins, for, ³who may ascend the hill of the Lord? He who has clean hands and a pure heart.² (Ps.24:3) Jesus did this for us at the cross. So we start there--with the cross. Because when we confess our sins He is faithful to forgive and cleanse, this is the way we begin our ascent--through confession. This is because sin blocks us from being able to be fully in God¹s Presence. So we confess.

When we do this, we realize what He has done and then enter thanks. We find ourself thanking Him for cleansing us--for the cross--and for the present application of the cross. Once we are thanking Him, we enter the courts--ie the outer parts of heaven. For thankfulness creates a space in us which allows God to flow and move us.

Once we are thanking, we enter, and once we enter His Courts, we will then find ourselves praising Him. That is the order of ascension: confession, thanks, praise. You see this pattern also in Daniel¹s prayer life, and in the Lord¹s prayer.

Once we are praising, God can take us anywhere in heaven and show us whatever He wishes us to see. He may show us our heavenly homes, or the parts of heaven that we are meant to, and will eventually completely, dwell within. Or, He may show us His Feet. He may show us something He is doing in a friend¹s life, or for a group or nation of people. But He will show us things! This may be a space where He shows us how He is praying for someone or a place, and so may bring intercession. Or it may be a place of gazing on some aspect of Himself. Whatever he leads us to we will go there and enter!

This is a simple pattern of entry, but it is practical. In our hour, many are being drawn up into heaven on a more regular basis, and this is for His Purposes. But we need to know these basic patterns or laws of The Spirit, so we will not become confused.

Many for instance, go worship once a week, and as they leave find themselves passing back into a spiritual valley of shadow. This is to be expected. For as we pass back through the gates of heaven, the enemy¹s hordes are outside of these gates, and they attempt to get us to focus on them, and leave the streams or ways of God pouring out from heaven. Know that on the outside of the gates, the enemy gathers--both to keep people out, and to keep people from returning, and to try to steal the things which one has gathered from heaven.

Once we know that this is the case, we are less immediately drawn away from the streams or ways or righteousness (the still waters) that keep us in the ways of God. The enemy is always trying to draw us out away from those streams. But to stay by them is a matter of staying close to the good shepherd as we descend into the valleys. We are to do whatever we do to stay close to Jesus. For me, it is spontaneous worship, or reading scripture out loud, or prophesying to strangers, or making music. Different people stay close to Him in different ways, but the thing is to cling to Him as we descend and not focus on the enemy, because that is the first thing you will see as you leave the heavens. This is especially true as the third heaven is beginning to press down into the second and onto the earth.

Too much of our heaven talk has gotten esoteric or mystical. But it is a practical matter to get into and out of heaven daily. And God has revealed spiritual laws of entry and exit in His Word. We need to know daily how to ascend and descend the mountain of our Lord! For from where does our strengh come from? Look to the hills, for our strength comes from The Lord!

This morning as I was confessing, thanking and then finally praising, God began to take me to a house in his Spirit. I saw a friend of mine getting annointed and freed to go into a new phase in his own life. I watched as He was lifted and then lowered and prayed over in a most exciting way. I got to see what God was giving Him right now in his life.
When we get up there, we never know what God is going to show us, or how He might use it. In another part of my experience, I was at God¹s feet just praising Him, and I felt that verse about blessed are the feet who bring good tidings, and I realized that those feet in that verse are always His, but that He lets us be His Feet at times! So this is part of a good tiding from The Lord. May it bless you wherever you are at on His Journey.

..to extend that meditation on identity a bit further--that verse reads that we are His workmanship IN CHRIST. That is we find ourselves not by a search "out there" but by entering His Life "in here"

just a note on living a you-shaped life..sort of an extended meditation on ephesians 2:10 about us being His unique poems or workmanship...
this has to do with freeing people up to find the path which matches how they are really made..this requires us to know who we were formed to be, and applies to nations, individuals, churches, companies and the rest...if we don't know who or what God formed us to be, we won't find ourselves "doing" things which match that shape.

Psalms 139 is also a meditation on identity, which I can never get enough of..if God really is our creator, only He knows who we are, so it starts there--asking God to reveal to us who we are...what we are to do comes out of who we are...this is sort of a favorite mantra of mine---being preceeds calling. Put another way, we need to know who we are before we can figure out what we are to do.

Many people right now, are struggling to find externals which match their internals so to speak. And this is good, for God is repositioning us in shapes and linkages which are more as he intended them.
There are new levels in certain friendships, and severings in others. God wants to link us in ways which match more closely who we actually are.

Many have been pressured into positions which were not His. You see this between companies and ministries and people--and obviously between nations.
But as He becomes more incarnate, so does HIS ORDER. And this occurs on every level. As this is a year or relinking, it is also a time or re-ordering. Part of this is so what we do matches more who we are. One way this is getting named in the ministry world is life and ministry are becoming one thing. Another way is to say that everyone has a ministry.

Still another, is to say that, we are His unique workmanship with a path prepared beforehand to be our way of Life!

Webster defines mercy as the disposition to forgive. God¹s disposition to forgive endures forever is what the psalmist keeps chanting. This is an eternal aspect of The Godhead. God IS merciful. He has an everlasting tendancy to forgive us--to have mercy. This is comforting, and is in co-balance with his Justice. But both are eternal.
His Mercy is a humbling meditation. It implies our deserving something less, that there has already been an infraction something that would issue forth mercy. Something which deserves to be punished.
The word mercy has both masculine and feminine dimensions--both carving, initiating/ and opening, receiving dimensions of God. (Best to play my way into it with a poem..or two)

mercy holds
with both woman and man parts of God
mercy--the warm m, and slicey c.
With justice, we see knife and law,
but with mercy, there is this soft strength
not soft as in weak, but as sea is soft
Grace also has power, and the femininity of love
(the grace to be is the one i wanted)
grace is sufficient--that sense of completion
(what do we know of dependence?)
charm, form favour...grace
but also Jesus as Grace and Truth.
the T gives truth away as sturdy
spiking out, dividing, carving, but
the g, r and the c of grace make us wonder how
it could be also a power word
There are different types of power
In Him, one Word,
holding
so many.

Us and Him warmly carving

God carves His Love into
the universe with His Son
who is both knife and bandage
who is both intervention
and prevention
who reveals both father and mother
parts...

God suaves the universe
in graceful streaks
of kindness.

And we who
hardly remember our names
were meant for love.

He forms, redeems, calls back
names and re-forms
us, born knowing
love as tumble act of Grace
We,
in our garden,
given to tend
with our spokey fingers
and warm round hearts, the universe
into place.

By: derek

The earth and the sky both reflect their Creator. They are not the same thing, but both were created by God, and reflect different aspects of Him.

The Jews and the Church both reflect their Creator. They also are not the same thing, but were both created by God to reflect back to Him. God likes to make Himself known, to express Himself. This is a fundamental part of who He is. We are to know and love out Source. Both The Jews and The Church have a common Source, and fit together in Him to reveal Himself and His Purposes.

Historically, The Jews and the Church have not known their proper relationship between one another. They have not seen how they fit together. Neither has seen their proper way of relating to one another from God¹s perspective. And in this blindness, both have done much to harm one another. The real tragedy in this is that we have blocked the full manifestation of God and His Purposes.

If we love God above all else, we will desire Him to be be able to reveal Himself fully through both The Jews and The Church. Our heart is for Him to be known and loved. And He has chosen a way to reveal Himself which includes both Jew and Christian.

In order for this to happen, both Christian and Jew must know who they were created to be. They then will begin to see how they fit together in the Purposes of God.

God is beginning to reveal to the church who it is. As this happens, we will begin to see who the Jews are. Knowing who we are in Him is the starting point. As we come to see who we are, we will no longer desire to lash out at one another in insecurity and hatred; for we will see how we work together in God¹s Plan. We will no longer want to conform one another into our own image, but allow the other to be confomed into His Image of them. As we help one another conform to His Image, we will be joining God, and sky and earth will sing together of Him!

a few months ago, I did something kind of radical for me. I was one of those people who became ruthlessly dedicated to organizing my books and CDs into style and subject categories. With books, I had poetry on one shelf, fiction on another, scholarly books on one, books about christians on another, "holy spirit" books on another, jewish books on another. I even separated my spiritual books down to constructed, hand-me-down categories--this one is charismatic, this one is contemplative, this one is theological, and so on. So when Derek and I put up our beautiful and towering new oak bookshelf one afternoon last fall, I let it sit empty for nearly a month. The bookshelf loomed ominous and desperate in that corner of our room, but I did not want to pressure it into all the categories that all my other bookshelves have had to become. Behold, bookshelf, you are a new creature, I said.

See, without knowing it, I had elevated certain types of knowledge above others. I was also separating stories, poems, gifts and spiritual gems into the exact categories that I have disdained doing so much in people. And of course I was doing it so that I would be able to find things again, which is normal. But this time I thought it would be a good idea if melancholic philosophers were sandwiched between, say, Ruth Ward Heflin's Glory with all of its heaven encounters and burbling pentecostal joy, and Derek's books on rabbinical midrash. Sure, some of my books no longer feed me. I have outgrown them. Some of my books have some falsehood in them. But I am letting all the people mix. The ones who have spiritual impartations need to throw some of their oil on the ones who, while being able to articulate themselves with incredible intellectual and creative license, just need to fall down and giggle for a few hours. By this process some books are getting "consecrated"--hee hee.

So now my bookshelf looks like a big party--everyone is mingling and having a drink and some people are getting drunk in the spirit for the first time. I like that.

Now of course this is not for everyone right now; for a time I needed certain books to be known for how much spiritual life they brought. For example, I needed to know the difference between things that were about God and things that are from God... so there is such a thing as healthy sorting and knowing who gives what kind of gifts. But for a time... it is good to let your categories blow out the window. Not all the systems and categories of the world are true, or lasting. We need to let ourselves be blinded to these ways of thinking so that our minds are led into Spirit thinking. Like tonight I was wondering if God separates art forms the same way we do--here is dance, here is painting, here is literature, here is music. It's just not that simple in His atmosphere. Christians can be among the worst at this kind of extreme "us-them" "either/or" thinking--and I am one of the guiltiest. But today I was reminded by Jesus that He comes to us to be ONE with us. He does not come to us to define himself against us.

There is such a oneness that is coming to earth from Him... we will not be able to contain it, or keep all the categories straight that we have kept so beautifully for so long. Even of Jew and Gentile, there is Him coming to make from both of us one new man! Oh it will be so beautiful. There is no erasing of identity in that--and there is order and even hierarchy in heaven. But the level of continuity and oneness between Him and all of His creation; each nation and tree and animal and expression of thought and movement and song and word will move and flow with each other from within the One who made it all. I want to be around for the finale!