15 March 2022
Forget leadership; the word has come to misrepresent how God works in our lives. There is no democracy with the Holy Spirit. Creation itself is feudal by its very nature. The issue is dominion and authority, and for each of us, divine dominion rests in the heart. The Holy Spirit of God does not speak to your intellect; He lives in your heart and speaks there. The language of the Holy Spirit is moral imperative. Your flesh works from sensory data, reason and knowledge; its all about the facts and the logical analysis of them. That's not good enough. When you get a Word from God, it's always a matter of moral imperative.
What is supposed to happen is that your conscious awareness rests in your heart. It hears from God and commands your mind to organize and implement the divine imperative. Your conscious awareness trains the mind to carry out the agenda of God in your life, on this earth. It's not leadership; it's a command from a feudal superior. Sure, there's love and mercy in that rule, but it's not like leadership, which always rests on the consent of those led. Your flesh can rebel, but it's not a matter of being free to take advice or not from the heart. The heart commands, and the flesh either obeys or is in rebellion.
While there is no precise line was can draw with words, there comes a point when rebellion goes too far. The Father keeps a rod in His hand, and it's there to punish. If you resist the correction of the Father, you face the sword of the Master. It's the same Person, but different roles. You get to choose which role you encounter. You can be a child who truly loves Him but struggles against the flesh, or you can be a servant who has no real interest in the Master's purpose and plans.
The path of His children is blessing in the long term -- shalom -- but the path of the servant is eventually separation into eternal damnation. Only His children retire to their vested interests in the Kingdom.
But the path to childhood is through the heart. God will not address Himself to the flesh except through Law. The Law Code has always been with us. From the days of Noah, we have that Law revealed. In the Covenant of Moses, it became a specific law code for a specific nation. But as we can see from the record of the Old Testament, that never worked out as it could. So, in the death of Christ on the Cross, we also had the death of the national law code. It's gone. There is no earthly Israel any longer. There is only the New Israel in Christ, and His Kingdom is in hearts, not in laws.
Granted, He still holds out a law code expectation for the nations, and it looks just like obeying Christ. But actually following Christ is an update of the far more ancient Covenant of Abraham. What American Christians typically fail to understand is that this remains mystical and fuzzy, because it has always been that way. No, we are not subject to any law code; we use it as a reference to inform the flesh. Your heart subjects your flesh to the Law, but your heart is personally committed to the Lord person to person.
If you look for precise and legal definitions, then you are just a modern day Pharisee. The Word is inherently mystical in nature. It requires that you grasp things from the heart. That's why Jesus taught in parables; parables are the language of the heart. Your heart will understand the divine imperatives, even if your brain does not. Until you make a clear break between your flesh and your soul, you will never get a handle on how we are "under grace, not under law". If you live in the flesh, you are under the Law Code. If you live in your heart, you are under grace.
You have to come to the place when you realize that the pronoun "I" may refer to two different things. Your flesh is you, but it's the part of you that will die soon, and the eternal part of you won't miss it. If you do not live by the domination of your heart, then you are not walking in the Covenant of Christ.
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