A Final Re-Creation ...

It is said Lincoln freed the slaves.  But did he?  I guess the answer lies in your definition of freedom, your sense of timing, and who you are talking to.  When the emancipation proclamation was written and disseminated, the only places it could even remotely be considered valid were under the control of the North.  In Union controlled territory this proclamation may have had some effect, but for slaves still on southern plantations, it made no substantial difference.  It is also worth noting this document was not the precursor to the war.  The civil war began over a dispute of secession not technically over slavery.  Lincoln’s proclamation would wait a while before entering the domain of the war, and would wait until the war’s conclusion to have real meaning to those it was intended to benefit.  But even then, a recently “freed” population with no education, no means, and living in a hostile environment is not exactly the idea of freedom we conjure up in our heads today.  One might argue it was a good beginning, but not until the civil rights movement of the 1960’s would a better version of “freedom” actually start to take meaning.  It would be still another 40+ years past that before Barak Obama would be elected President.  President Lincoln may have put a milestone on the path towards freedom, but I would argue the journey is not over just yet.

 

 

We think ourselves “free” in our country today.  Indeed no person can be legally owned by another.  But if our minds are still enslaved, can we ever call ourselves truly free?  The disease of slavery that long affected our nation before the civil war had two very long term negative effects on the mind.  It robbed dark skinned people of their basic human rights, while teaching light skinned people this was somehow perfectly acceptable, even in Christian circles.  It was founded in greed that nurtured hate.  Slavery constructed a wall of hate that placed the interests of one group over another on a collective basis.  The legality of slavery has ended in our nation, but the prison of hate is still active in some.  When we hold on to greed or to hate for any reason, we bind ourselves.  Our chains are invisible, but our bondage is no less real, and the real victim is only us.  Lincoln ended the legality of slavery, but he could do nothing to end a legacy of hate; that would only begin to dissipate over the next 100 years. 

Today our racial divide is almost completely gone.  We no longer use skin color as the criterion for putting one group’s interests over another.  We seem content to use criterion like socio-economic success, citizenship status, education level, career choice, religious denomination, or regional geographies.  Now our group interests are less severe and more political, attempting to insure our version of “rights” and “freedoms” that government is required to protect.  But to be truly free, we must be truly free of hate, truly free of greed, truly free of self-service.  This definition of freedom was something Lincoln could not even begin to scratch the surface at.  It is the freedom of the mind and of the soul.  It is the domain of God alone, and only a final and full freedom could ever be truly enough.

The process towards perfection is the road to real freedom.  The less we seek to serve only ourselves the more we are liberated from hate, from greed, from jealousy, from avarice.  Indeed every sinister and hateful thing we would wish to never encounter is closely associated and rooted in self-service.  To be bound at all, is to be bound.  Our goal cannot be merely “less” chains, but it must be to wear no chains at all.  Only complete freedom could ever be acceptable to us, and so only complete perfection will ever see us truly free.  For too long we have lost hope that it was even possible.  I suppose a 400 year history of slavery made it hard for the Israelites to believe it would ever happen to them either in the days of Moses.  Being bound in chains in Egypt for so long had to make it hard to have hope considering what they would see every day.  So too with us, we see ourselves fail so often, and experience the pain of the failures of others so often, we begin to think that perfection of any variety is nothing more than a pipe dream.

This loss of hope is the goal of our enemy.  When a person believes themselves a slave, they react differently to life than someone whose only thought is bent on freedom.  Christians have so long taught the removal of sin being the responsibility of the sinner, resulting in a harvest that has been nothing but failure, guilt, repentance and thankfully forgiveness.  To teach even the possibility of perfection is to invite nothing but ridicule of non-believers as it seems no sinner has been able to rid themselves of evil to date.  And so Christianity gave up on the ideas of perfection and became content to teach only the value of forgiveness and repentance.  But “guilt” was not the message Christ came to preach to the world; His message was one of freedom.  Christ did not offer freedom from Roman oppression, because He knew that physical oppression is irrelevant compared to being bound in your mind no matter what your physical circumstances.  Christ came to free the Roman Caesar as much as He came to free the poor slave in the gutter.  While the life of the slave was hard, Caesar was no more free than the slave.  A life of opulence, gold, and gluttony does not bring real peace, or real freedom, it only changes the nature of the chains.  Christ came to free us of what binds our minds.  For the rich young ruler, his next step was to free himself of his possessions.  But Christ asked no less of the humble fishermen in forsaking everything he knew of his own life, to follow Him.  Freedom beyond what the world can touch was the message of Christ, freedom that could only come from the removal of sin from within us.

Perfection, or the complete removal of self, is the message of hope Christ offers to everyone no matter what circumstances they find themselves in today.  He does not ask us to do the work of salvation, rather only to benefit from His work in us.  He does not seek only a partial removal of our disease but to instill within us a full and complete cure.  His only limitation in treating us has been our reluctance to allow Him to do His work.  By teaching that the sinner must somehow remove his own sin, we have delayed and deferred the work of our Re-creator.  As we instead realize our own complete incompetence and accept the “gift” of our freedom from evil, we submit ourselves to our Master Physician and He performs the miraculous work of redeeming the human soul.  For it is a miracle of a most important nature to be freed from sin.  A miracle (as no human has yet to accomplish it), that Christ alone offers to do on our behalf.  No other deity offers to reform the hearts of their enemies, only Christ, and only Christ has proven He can accomplish it.  It is why those who are free in Christ are truly free, and why those who deny Christ are enslaved already.

It is only our reluctance to fully surrender, our attempts to cling to some part of who we are, that impede Him from enacting the full recovery within us today.  But as we learn to trust, and learn to submit, and increase our willingness to be made whole – He is faithful to perform this very work within us.  It is a prayer He answers 100% of the time in the affirmative.  Christ is not willing that even one would perish, or continue to suffer in the pain that the pursuit of self can only bring.  He loves us all.  He wishes to redeem us all.  A perfect surrender should be the aspiration of our prayers.  A full and complete submission of who we are to the Son of God should be our daily goal.  In divesting us of even our own ideas of identity we can become the individual God intends for us to become.  Nothing the Lord tears down or removes from us in the process of re-creation will ever be something we miss.  Instead a full renovation of how we think, of what we want, of what we value will yield for us a freedom from chains that would have otherwise bound us until we died.  This is the process of perfection that is actually achievable, not because we achieve it, but because we allow it to be achieved for us, and in us.

Full perfection reached in our lifetime – this is a goal put back on the table by a restructuring how it can be achieved.  No longer is the removal of sin the domain and responsibility of the sinner, instead it is reverted to its source, the gift of Christ to us.  Our “work” transitions from actions designed to reduce bad behavior, to a full surrender and willingness to be remade in His image.  We must learn to “accept” perfection instead of attempting to acquire it.  By no means is this a license to sin, or compromise that merely throws the blame on God for failures we fully intend to commit.  Rather it is a zero tolerance policy towards evil within us in any form.  We ask God to completely overhaul and remake who we are at the very core of us, and He does.  He totally transforms us and removes every sin, every desire towards evil, every thought, motive, or action.  Letting go to God does not result in a baptism of depravity and evil abandon, instead it results in the removal of these very things.  In this process we begin to get over our own fears of how bad we have been, and our own histories of incessant failures that have led us to our current state of depravity; for in spite of all of these truths, we are still remade.  Christ, as only our God could do, takes the mess that is us, and re-creates us.  He removes what we would not wish to have anyway, and replaces it with love and joy to such a level we can hardly contain it.  The transition is remarkable and as big a mystery to us, as it is a miracle to us.

What words were once read as a fearful warning by the apostle John in the book of Revelations (22:11) where he writes … “let he who is holy be holy still, and he who is unholy be unholy still”.  They now become an affirmation of hope in that the process Christ is working within us to make us holy does indeed accomplish making us holy.  It is no accident.  It is no partial accomplishment.  It is a complete renovation, a complete rebirth, a complete re-creation of who we were intended to become.  Perfect.  Made perfect by Christ.  What man could never accomplish for himself, Christ accomplishes for him, and within him.  This is the miracle of salvation.  We are not made perfect in order to be saved.  We are instead saved by being made perfect by Christ.  It is evil we are saved from, not just some evil, but all evil.  Nothing of evil left within us, this is the hopeful prophetic words of John the Beloved of Christ in his revelations of the end of time.  What marks our current time in history is not the wars of the day, nor the many signs that have already come to pass.  Instead what calls out like a beacon in the night that we are living in the time of the end is a return to the possibility and reality of perfection in the Christian life, by allowing the gospel of Christ to actually do something inside of us.  This is the most solid sign that the end of days is upon us at last.  No more is Christianity a mere ideology of love, acceptance and forgiveness – instead it is more than that – it becomes a methodology that can attain an achievement of the miracle of perfection within us; a miracle that places the emphasis of true salvation back on Christ where it has always belonged.

The end of evil within me allows me to finally be reconciled fully to my creator.  I can enter the presence of God without fear, not because of my worth, but because of His salvation and redemption of me from evil and from self.  As Enoch one day simply returned home with God, so will we one day reach that level of reconciliation with our Lord.  The miracle God performed in the redemption of Enoch is the same one He offers to us today.  It is the denial of self-based-salvation that will finally and fully lead to the same transformation that took Enoch home where he belonged.  Our desires, our motives, our thoughts, and our actions become in perfect harmony with the God of heaven.  The chains of our slavery to self will be so fully broken and discarded that they will never again hold us back.  Now we can see and run to the throne of grace, unencumbered with doubt, or guilt, or apprehension of any kind.  The throne of God is now the cradle from which only love springs.  Our perfection as wrought by Christ within us is complete.  It enables us to approach the very throne of God and finally meet Him face to face.  Finally are the words of Christ true for us, to know God is eternal life.  It is the definition of life itself, and because of the miracle of Christ in saving us, it is now something we can experience.

It will not be the proclamation of this knowledge that will bring about the end of our world.  Instead it will be the experimental knowledge that can only come as one gives himself over to Christ and witnesses first-hand the miracle of the cessation of evil from the inside out.  Once you have personally tasted what Christ can do, it will develop an appetite for more than can scarcely be quenched.  To see the miracle of the removal of sin you have so long failed against brings a joy only you can fully appreciate.  Words are simply insufficient to describe it.  No acronyms for joy or fulfillment or gratitude could ever cover it.  But once it is a part of who you are, you will become something different, someone different, touched by what you have experienced.  You will know first-hand the power of God to redeem, and Christianity becomes a new religion to you. 

The words of scripture become more than words, they become truth revealed.  The more you learn to surrender the more truth you will discover.  It will undo what you have been taught in error, and will reveal clearer and clearer a portrait of love that Christ alone could reveal.  This is the end-game for our God.  This is what He has long wished to impart to the world.  It will begin in the church that calls itself by His name, but as it multiplies throughout the world, many who do not today really know what it means to be saved by Christ, will find out what that truly means.  Non-believers will be converted by the thousands, dare I say by the millions, not merely by the evangelistic efforts of pastors, but by the quiet lives of re-created believers.  A final and full freedom from the slavery of evil that Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Barak Obama, and you & I have only ever dreamed about to date.  It begins today.