The Highlander

 I started a series of messages last Sunday on the Kingdom of God.  It is a theme that has captured my heart for years now, and one that I see more and more that so many believers have little understanding of.  The fact that our God reigns is undeniable, yet we have forgotten the fact that He created man to rule and reign with Him!  Our rule was only meant to be exercised in union with God, as He would act with us.  He always intended to be our constant companion and co-worker in the creative enterprise of life on earth.

One of things that I was reminded of again as I was preparing to share, was that He intended for all of us to have a unique realm over which we would be responsible.  In fact, He prepared that realm for us, before the world was ever made (Matthew 25:34).  Now that just blows me away!

The whole of His relationship with us was not about religion, rituals, rules and regulations, it was all about love.  It was about Him being our Father, our Life, our Love.  He wanted to walk with us in loving and harmonious union and oneness.  It was not about going to a PLACE to meet Him, but living life IN HIM everywhere we went and in everything we did.  He was to be our all in all.

In the context of that wonderful relationship, man would be what He desired and He could turn Him loose to rule over His creation as he desired.   Of course we all know that sin entered the picture, and disrupted the whole process.

But that was no surprise to God!  He had a plan all along to redeem us and restore us and all that Adam lost.  He did that in the greatest demonstration of love ever exhibited on earth…through the death of His only Son on a Roman cross.  He gave us His best, when we were at our worst.  If that does not show us how much and how truly He loves us, nothing does!

When we, by grace through faith, enter into a relationship with God, we are restored, reborn, and released!  We become these wonderful new creations and God begins the process of making us into the kind of persons that can rule and reign with Him!  Life is not about WHAT we do FOR God, but the KIND of person that we are BECOMING in and by His gracious work IN us!  He is preparing us to rule over that unique realm that He has had prepared for us since the foundation of the world!

Obviously, good works flow from our lives as we walk with Him.  But they flow out of who we are, as He wills and does His good pleasure through us.  We do them because we love Him and others, not in order to gain brownie points with God.  We do righteous works because we are righteous people in Christ!

I needed to be reminded once again that God is not so much interested in how much I do FOR Him in my life, as He is in the person I am BECOMING.  Why?  Because the person I am becoming has eternal impact on the realm over which I will rule in the coming age.  If I focus on the person I am becoming, and give myself to those things that shape that, the works will flow as naturally as rivers do to an ocean.
Enoch’s life sums the whole matter up beautifully; he walked WITH God.  Now that is a life I am totally up for!

Peace,

The Highlander