Messengers of Life or Blind Guides?

Jesus asked me to give this message to a friend once: ‘Would you give up the Sabbath for Me?’ Why would He ask this question? Let me explain.

First, let us ask another question. What kind of leader are we? Leaders can be found giving people rivers of sand to drink. Leaders can be found binding people when their mandate is to set captives free. Or leaders can lead people in and out to find pasture. As the ‘led’ we can find ourselves in a parlous position when the very belief system we think gives us comfort is actually our prison.

Jesus came to set the captives free. Any genuine apostle does the same. Like Moses, Elijah and Jesus a genuinely apostolic figure is a liberator who joins God’s people to Christ’s infinite life. Life in law is innately limiting. Life in Jesus is without limitation. Life in Jesus is called life in the Spirit. This is the life of the sons of God who live in authority and not as teachers and keepers of the law.

We don’t have to be bad to bind people. We just have to put our faith in things that are not God. We just have to be out of agreement with what God has done. We just have to read the Bible through a lens that is not Jesus.

There is no way we can be apostolic with an old covenant mind-set.

Don’t let your perception be clouded by good works, spiritual gifts or a new mission endeavor. It’s sad when leaders do these things yet remain bound and crippled in their being. This is binding of the worst kind because it is invisible.

We don’t have to be bad to bind people. But we can get a false sense of satisfaction, a touch of smugness and a mistaken identity that comes from an attachment to ‘our perspectives.’ This shrinks who we are and limits what those to whom we minister can become. The worst kind of captivity is to be imprisoned in a sense of being that is much smaller than you are.

But formed and built up in Jesus we are furnished with discernment to see what is of man and what is of God. We can live in an atmosphere of liberty, peace and infinite possibility. But those who live in law cannot see. Their inheritance is veiled. Living in performance of any kind we bind ourselves. Tied to Moses we blind ourselves. As Sabbath keepers we are more than ‘kept’ by the Sabbath. We are deformed and belittled by it. But hey – we are complete in Christ. So live in Him!

‘But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read. It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away’ 2 Cor 3.14 NIV.

We are accustomed to think of ‘false christ’s as deceivers of other people, never suspecting that all our lives we have been limited by their presence and influence. The reason we do not easily discern the influence of a false Christ [sic] is that from our earliest years we have been socialized, indoctrinated and brain-washed by a system of belief whose source is something other than Jesus Christ Son of God.

A one time captive to false doctrine writes,

‘The proof of the power of the indoctrination I had undergone is that throughout my sojourn from all things Christian or Adventist I continued to believe in the Sabbath. As I write this it occurs to me that I didn’t just believe in the requirement of Sabbath-keeping. 

‘Believed in the Sabbath in the way she now believes in Jesus..’ She had a false christ [sic]. Do you?

A leader from God does not plant churches, community, identity or purpose. An apostolic person plants Jesus. Jesus draws people into Himself and creates sons and daughters of God. Re-birthed from the law into Jesus by the Spirit, such people live in the Spirit as sons of God. Deep rooted in Christ and the product of His Being, they become the church. They are the community of the saved and their identity and purpose flows from the Spirit of Sonship in which they live. They are the kings and priests of God who reign on the earth.

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See  Lyn’s story. See Also Greg Taylor’s perceptively argued study on Jesus our rest. What lens have you been using. Do you use The Sabbath to interpret the New Testament or are you using Jesus to interpret it?

Keith Allen