Daring Adventist

 

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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

Agreeing with what Jesus has done

Jesus is life in Himself. Those who live in Him will live completely and eternally. Nothing can be added or subtracted from Jesus. He is all sufficient and fills the universe with His Presence. There is no such thing as a Baptist Christian or an Adventist Christian. Christ is not divided. Jesus is one. He re-creates people to be one and draws people into Himself to make them one. Jesus heals us, draws us to Himself and together with each other because God is love.

You either live in Him or you don’t. Add anything or subtract anything from Jesus and you have created at best a sect and at worst a cult. Phrases such as ‘we as Adventists’ and ‘since I became an Adventist’  and ‘our perspectives on’ indicate that something is amiss.  This phraseology need not be used by those who are Christ’s. It does not have to be. Those who believe have a place in Him. They have the same place that Jesus had with His Father, which means that you and the Father are one. There is nothing more glorious than this.

Followers of Jesus find their life in Christ. Indeed He is their life because He manifests His light and righteousness through them. Jesus is either the righteousness of God in you or you are embroiled in the vain attempt to prove your righteousness to God. Nothing surpasses being in Jesus as a son/daughter and one with His loving embrace of the universe.

‘And the same one who descended is the one who ascended higher than all the heavens, so that he might fill the entire universe with himself’ Eph 4.10 NLT.

Jesus is your life and the life of the world. This is not always well known, even by Christians, not a few who think Jesus is an addition to their life. Jesus is the life and the light of the world. So why is the world in such chaos? It’s writhing and thrashing because people live in their own light and life. This is what is meant by living in the knowledge of good and evil. Living in this mind-set people can live ‘a good Christian life’ without ever representing the Kingdom of God. People can be moral and ethical yet powerless, blind and continually defeated. But to have Christ as our life is to reign as kings and priests today!

The Kingdom of God is the realm where Jesus reigns, where He is worshiped as Lord and lived in by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit in us and on us means that we are never orphans and always sons. It is by the Spirit that we can live in God and He in us. By the Spirit of Sonship we become the Kingdom of God.

Eternal life is Jesus. So is temporal life. The Kingdom of God is eternal life in you today and every day. It is Christ in you. The Body of Christ is those joined to Jesus and who are literally His life because they become who they are – new men and women in Jesus. This is the manifestation of Christ on earth, Christ in the work place, the kitchen and the nursery.

Live from the law and you will know perseverance but never glory. Live in the Spirit and you will reign as daughters and sons.

The Kingdom of God cannot be lived by planting the Old Testament in the New. In the Old Testament God lived in no one. He was with men and women of God and His anointing rested on some, but He did not live in any.

It was not until God became incarnate in Jesus that Jesus became incarnate in people. The latter occurred when the Spirit was poured out at Pentecost. Pentecost made possible much more than the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Pentecost achieves the reality of Christ in you. This is the mystery of the ages revealed in Jesus. Those who live in the Spirit of God are the sons of God.

‘And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ’ Eph 1.9 NIV.

Surely you have heard about the administration of God’s grace that was given to me for you, that is, the mystery made known to me by revelation, as I have already written briefly’ Eph 3.2-3 NIV.

‘This message was kept secret for centuries and generations past, but now it has been revealed to God’s people’ Col 1.26 NLT.

‘To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory’ Col 1.27 NIV.

Keith Allen

Where Eagles Dare

We were made to live in God, and be His daughters and sons. Yet many Christians live like chickens when they could fly like eagles. Unless we are living in Jesus; unless He is our life and unless we are part of God as a son is of a father, we are missing most of what we have been resurrected to be: Sons and daughters of God. In the Spirit we are participants in Jesus’ resurrection. Jesus is life in Himself and we are alive and functioning as sons and daughters of God to the extent that we are one with Jesus.

We have an inheritance. Our inheritance is that we as Believers are sons and daughters of God, called to exercise the life-giving ministry that Jesus did when He was physically among us. Now He is spiritually among us, manifest in our flesh as HIS BODY. The inheritance and mandate of every believer is to multiply today what Jesus began. Just as Jesus healed sick bodies so we are called to heal the earth, society and the nations. This is not a self-reliant work. It is Christ through us as us. This is the Kingdom of God.

We are not meant to live robbed. We don’t have to live as an ox when we are a son of God

The grace of Jesus covers the ignorance of Believers. But it is not meant to sustain them in it, but draw us ever more fully into Christ from glory to glory. Jesus did not allow Himself to be nailed to the cross to in order to sustain even the smallest amount of captivity. Jesus came to set captives free. His cross multiplies liberty, dignity honour and authority. His cross opened the door for Jesus to live in us and through us by the Spirit. Significantly His Spirit in us is called the SPIRIT OF SONSHIP.

Jesus’ cross is the gate whereby Jesus transforms sons bound in slavery to sons who are His kings and priests in the earth. Because of Jesus’ cross all are at one with God, embraced by His love, privy to His thoughts and representatives of His grace in the world. Because of His Spirit Jesus fills our being with Himself and makes this statement real: In Him we live, move and have our being, or as Paul wrote, ‘I am crucified with Christ, yet I live because Christ lives in me’ Gal 2.20.

Keith Allen

Belittling ourselves and creating ‘little people’ in the name of Jesus

We can produce malnutrition in the name of God or we can feed the people Living Bread. Living Bread comes from heaven. Junk food comes from the earth, the flesh and the letter. Christ is either our life or something else suffices as our substitute for the living Spirit of God.

In this hour Jesus is calling us to leave all and follow Him. Leaving all means leaving all that is a substitute for Him and all that is not Him for a life that is unconditionally Jesus and nothing else. This call is a call to re-birth that exceeds all others. Jesus asks us to find our identity, purpose and mission in Him and in Him alone. Since we are the Bride of Christ, all else is adultery. This is a blessing since attachment to smaller things leaves us smaller people.

If you have said to Jesus, ‘I’ll follow you no matter what’ the freedom and authority you will develop is infinite.’ But if you give a conditional allegiance and try to bargain with Jesus saying, “I’ll follow you so long as I can retain my religious identity and distinctive doctrines and continue to seek the approval of those who make me secure and comfortable” If this is your walk, don’t expect to reign as a king or a priest in the Kingdom of God. True we may make a start in the gifts or we may develop a ministry in some niche we did not have before. But compared to an immersion in Jesus and a genuine baptism and rebirth, our growth will be small, our spirit will be dulled and our ability to sense the Kingdom and feel God will benumbed. If we are leaders we will be a blind leaders of the blind. But we will not know it.

‘Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me’ John 12.26 NIV.

Some are controlled by a political spirit. The political person is tied to what man thinks. No matter what such a one affirms, he or she is less concerned about offending Jesus that about offending people. Such a one is a people pleaser. As a result they are bound by the spirit of religion. Their discernment is unreliable and their spiritual authority is small. Since such a one remains bound as a leader they binds others in the un-life and un-power of religion, exercising influence over a community of the bound. But Jesus is here to set such people free.

‘A life in Jesus is not life in the religion of Jesus. It is a life in the Spirit of Sonship.’

Jesus is all and in all. You can’t have two masters or three or four. You have no right to have ‘a perspective’ that is contrary to the New Covenant or a view point that is simply a plank in the knowledge of good an evil. As a minister of God you have no right to limit the fullness of Christ for the sake of ‘our theology.’ If you are Christ’s it is all or nothing. You either live totally in Him or you don’t. You are either a son or a slave and you are either preaching malnutrition or infinite life.

‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world’ John 6.51 NIV.

The Bread of Heaven is Christ as you by the Spirit of Sonship. In this season the sons of God live as the sons of God – not as sons of denominations, ministries or perspectives. Sadly there are sincere believers who believe it is godly to live diminished. Look to your self through Christ and not through the religion that blinds you. You represent either authority or captivity, knowing God or knowing the knowledge of good and evil. We can live in the Light and see light. Or we can talk of going from glory to glory while blindly leading the blind and celebrating our malnutrition.

‘I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy. I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to him’ 2 Cor 11.12 NIV.

 

Keith Allen

Walk through the door into Sonship

Pdf booklet here.

Creating a Storm

THE REAL STORM CO – BEATING UP A STORM

There’s a saying that goes, ‘Someone with an experience is never at the mercy of someone with an argument’ This is why God’s amazing plan is so powerful. His plan was not a list of abstractions or formulations. It was not a matrix of behaviors and beliefs. His Plan was Jesus. God’s Plan is Jesus and all that He is, has done and will do.

His Plan is Jesus in you.

Jesus came as life. At His resurrection life, not death, was forever established as the norm. At His inauguration and the right hand of authority in the heavens, the authority of man to reign on the earth over circumstances and death was established for eternity. Such authority in Christ is a now reality.

Jesus did not retreat into heaven. He rose into heaven to advance the work He had begun. Christ in us it the hope of glory because Christ in us is the defeat of death and the resurrection of life in all its forms. By the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned to earth at Pentecost to multiply Himself and all He did in every believer who believes. ‘Doing God’s will on earth as it is in heaven’ is multiplying what Jesus began.

We can do better than sit in circles and discuss God. We can do better than ‘Me being the kindest person I can be.’ In the power of the Living Jesus, we can do things that are impossible for any human to do unless God is present and active in our words. We are able to release God’s power to cause the masses to respond: ‘That has to be God!’ We have the authority to speak LIVING WORDS.

People need to know that God is real and present with us. Should we live in the knowledge of good and evil, we can speak religion. Should we live in God through Christ we can speak life. In the near future expect to see examples of the dead being raised to life in Australia.

Rather than bleating about the Second Coming, might it not be a good idea to multiply His first coming into our every-day situations as some are beginning to do?

We can do better than focusing on behavior and doctrine in the Bible while ignoring the entire supernatural fabric of the book. We can do better than doing the kinds of charitable things any kindly atheist can accomplish. We have the authority. We need to believe in what we have been gifted with and stop making religion out of the devil’s robbery. You want to stir up a storm? Just repent of being the unbelieving believer and shake the kingdom of Satan!

We are mandated and commanded to heal the sick, raise the dead and caste out demons. Stop living Christianity as a philosophy and live Jesus as a Person.

Jesus is life without measure. He is forgiveness, righteousness, wholeness, light, liberty and wisdom. He is healing and life. Jesus is authority and power clothed in love. Jesus is the resurrection and the life alive in you. Jesus multiplied in His people is the advance of the Kingdom of God in the world.

 

Keith Allen

 

 

 

 

 

 

I wish to live through you

In Adam all are dead but in Me all are alive. Go and see what it means to live in God rather than in the knowledge of good and evil. You live in God by living in Me. You are one with God when I am your life. When I am your life the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one with you to live through you.

When I am your life you are rest.

Your life in Me is not gifts of the Spirit added to your life in the letter and the law. Your life in Me is much more than information about spiritual gifts. Your life in My Spirit is not a power method of living in the laws of Moses and the knowledge of good and evil. I am now your life and your righteousness. You are complete in Me. I live to be your life. Live in Me.

You are the righteousness of God when you live in Me. Your life in me is not the Holy Spirit rubbed in or added to the Old Testament wine skin. You life in Me is a completely new way. It is a new and living way because through My Spirit the Way is My Presence in you and through you. In Me you are being renewed even as you age.

The work I started in you is not complete. You have not made the transition from law to Spirit, from religion to Me. You have made Me subordinate to your law and a means to keep your law. I am your identity and infinitely more safe and fulfilling than the Package you rely on. My plan is for you to release my life without limit.

I love you. I am love. Live in Me. I am your safety and your rest. I am the revolution of the Kingdom of God in you.

Your work is sincere but pedestrian. It is sincere but it is without power and authority because you still live in the realm of Adam where your potency as sons of God has been stripped from you. I am you life, authority and power in its completeness. Come to Me and find rest and potency.

 

Keith Allen

 

Daughters and Sons

The Lord’s word to many sincere and striving believers today is this: It is not your performance I desire. It is you. My hunger is to have you and love you. Many wish to add something to what I have already lavished on you – union with God. But there is nothing that can be added to your inheritance in Me.

It is your life in Mine, your life connected to mine, my life flowing around you and into you that loves you, binds you to my heart and establishes you as who you are. You are my daughter, my son. You are safe in Me and you are being transformed by My Son’s life in you. You are continually washed by Jesus and continually clean in My Son.

I have totally taken care of your sin and your sinning. I am taking care of your life, imparting to you my likeness, my ability to love. I am gifting you with my eyes that enable you to see things as they are rather than as they appear to those who do not live in Me.

You are able to live in Me because you are not orphans but daughters and sons. You are intimate with Me, not from anything you have done but because I have placed you in Myself.

Nothing can separate you from Me. We are One. You are My Bride and My wife. The essence of My love is your union with Me – unconditionally and forever. Live where I have placed you in my Presence and in My Person. My Life, My Love and My light will shine forth and flow from you in rivers of My Presence. You are blessed in Me. Through My Son Jesus you will resurrect the world. I am the resurrection and the Life, as are you in Me in the world.

You name is not sinner. Your name is Loved of God.

‘But what does the Scripture say? “Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman’s son.” Therefore, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman’ Gal 4.30-31 NIV.

‘I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see’ Rev 3.18 NIV.

‘I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you’ John 14.18 NIV

‘Neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord’ Romans 8.39 NIV.

 

Keith Allen

 

 

Truth is the Person of Jesus

My daughter is a young adult. She is going to university, enjoying it and doing many of the subjects I did when I studied sociology, politics and philosophy. When she asks me to scan a letter she has written to a past teacher or a friend I notice, with satisfaction, that she writes in pretty much the style that I do. So does my niece, so does my brother and so did my father.

As persons we are potentially like our Father in heaven. More accurately we are like what we conceive our Father in heaven to be. Father has been generous. He sent us an image of Himself: Jesus. Yet many of us succeed in imposing our image of God on Jesus and attempting to live out of that. Consequently we can end up twisted and twisting those we love. There are families who are crippled in soul and spirit because of their view of God is distorted.

There are Christian cultures in which people are diminished by God distortions.  Adherents are smaller and more wooden as well as deaf and blind. To such people Jesus shouts

‘Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD rises upon you’ Isa 60.1 NIV.

The Son of God has come with healing in His wings. He is here today and speaks resurrection and life to those who live in the shadows of death.

There are people who do not desire more of Jesus. They have forgotten God and forgotten who they are. Hiding in religion that is largely man made, they do not hear God speak and do not see Him in the flesh of those God has sent to draw them into His Presence. Coming revelation in the power of the Spirit will shake and jolt such people into reality. But the choice is theirs. They either receive Jesus or they turn their faces away to live in the non-life they have substituted for a life in Jesus.

‘For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive’ 1 Cor 15.22 NIV.

Jesus declared that real life is to know God and Jesus Christ whom the Father sent. We ‘know’ Jesus through the Holy Spirit. We cannot know God accurately through Bible study alone. Unless Jesus is our eye and the Spirit is our interpreter we will distort what we read. The Bible will become a book from which we continue in the knowledge of good and evil rather than a book that enhances our life in God’s Son.

‘But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come’ John 16.13 NIV.

Some are severely crippled by their view of God. They have spent their lives in work for God. But spiritually they live in a wheel chair – not because they are bad people but because they still live in Adam rather than in Jesus.

‘But every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world’ 1 John 4.3 NIV.

Many of us are somewhat benumbed, partially limited or rendered semi- impotent by what we conceive God to be. Should we see the Father as chiefly interested in our performance we will become good draft horses but never eagles. We will be weight lifters and excel as workers but we will not live in the Spirit to bear the authority of sons. Should we see God as the chief guardian of propriety we will be good at conformist religion. But we will be poor at perceiving Jesus in radically different departures from Christian orthodoxy. So blinded, we will not believe Jesus has come in the flesh.

Many people worship Orthodoxy and think it God. In his small book, Dear Peanut an author observes that when certain people are attempting to teach about God, they are really talking about themselves. This is sad because some of them are severe, pompous, people without imagination and sometimes without God. It takes a sense of self that we get from knowing we are a daughter or a son in whom the Father delights to step out from the pack.

You can have a less complicated life if you choose to multiply religion rather than the Kingdom of God with signs following. Some who claim to speak for God get the most uptight when people start to heal like Jesus healed. But these people are not our example. Jesus told us to ‘Heal the sick, raise the dead and cast out demons.’  Show people that the King of  love is here and that He is deeply concerned about them PERSONALLY.

There are things that stand out about God from His witness in the Word.

The first is that He is a Person and His essence is Personal.

The second is that He is love, and love is the essence of who He is.

The third, flowing from the fact that He is love, is that He loves relationship and seeks to draw all of us into His arms.

The fourth is that you are a delight to Him and He delights in you.

The fifth is that only Jesus has the power to forgive sin and drive it out of our lives.

The sixth is that you are complete in Jesus, on account of His life not yours.

A person who sees God as primarily the Law-Giver will be a far smaller person than one who lives from the God who is love.

‘And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him’ 1 John 4.16 NIV.

Keith Allen