Lifetime Guarantee (28 page)

“‘And it will come about in
that
day,’ declares the Lord, ‘that
you
will call Me “my Husband” and will no longer call Me “my Master”’” (Hosea 2:16,
NASB
margin, emphasis added). She has been His beloved wife all along, but
she hasn’t recognized who she is.
God has called her by her true name (beloved wife) ever since the relationship began, but she saw Him as a burdensome master. She had to experience the valley of Achor before she began to call Him “my Husband.” She never appropriated her identity until she got caught in the box canyon of Achor where her flesh stopped yielding its usual productive return.

Look at verses 19 and 20:

Christian, is your life humdrum? Does your husband not appreciate all the things you do for him? Do your kids take you for granted? Does your wife seem to expect more than you feel you can possibly deliver? Does it seem that no matter how hard you try, your boss has always got another “if only” chinning bar for you to pull on? Is your earthsuit wearing out, and the jogging you thought would surely help hasn’t overcome the force of gravity? Did the deal for your dream house fall through? Are you widowed? Are you facing retirement, horrified at the prospect of having no “purpose” left in life? Do you fear death? Does no one seem to understand you? Have your friends or even family turned away from you? Do your years seem to have been wasted as you conduct “instant replays” of your life?

Dear, unhappy bride of Christ. If you are
under
the load, you are in the valley of Achor. Stop trying to milk your needs supply out of this world by the flesh.
That’s the wrong spouse.
You
are
loved. You’re the beloved bride who has “no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but…[is] holy and blameless” (Ephesians 5:27).

Turn from leaning on the “trustworthiness” of
your
talent,
your
attractive earthsuit,
your
spiritual gifts,
your
intelligence,
your
position,
your
popularity,
your
good job,
your
financial security,
your
good marriage, and
your
obedient kids as
your
primary means of generating and maintaining your inner peace and satisfaction in this life. That’s playing the whore! It’s fine that you have been blessed by your Husband (the Lord) with all the above, but don’t concentrate on that.
Remember who you are, and concentrate on and praise your Husband.

You are the totally loved, chosen, called-out, holy, virgin (see 2 Corinthians 11:2), blameless, righteous bride of the Lord Jesus Christ. Imagine your infinite worth! Your Bridegroom has promised by His blood to supply all your needs (see Philippians 4:19). You will never be a worn-out, old wife, cast aside for some younger lover. You are loved, totally loved with a loyalty unprecedented, by the God of the universe. He has identified you this way ever since you gave yourself to Him at salvation when you repented of your old life of rebellious independence and agreed to the marriage terms.

You entered into a oneness relationship with your spiritual Husband, but you must agree with His view (the only true view) and walk with Him as His beloved if you would experience abundant life on this planet. The music and lyrics of this song are usually born in the valley of Achor. It often takes that to get us to turn loose of the old ways.

Answers in “Answers to Questions for Further Study”.

Oh, Bill, I’m so free! Free in Christ! Free at last! Oh, why couldn’t I see all this before? It’s so plain to me in Scripture, now that I know what to look for! It’s all so marvelous!”

The dear lady was beside herself with reveling in her newfound righteousness in Christ. She’d spent her whole Christian life striving to become something she had always been since salvation. For years she had fought a war that Jesus had already won for her. She’d discovered that her victory is to be appropriated by faith in His work, not earned by hers.

“But Bill,” she said, “if I’m already holy, blameless, accepted, righteous, and all those other wonderful adjectives I see in God’s Word, what’s the purpose in God’s leaving me here? Why doesn’t He just take me home?”

That’s a good question and the answer is glorious! Oh, the fantastic opportunity that lies before you between now and the time you go home! You and I have been offered the privilege of preparing ourselves for our future roles in the celestial order God has planned. Earth is very much like graduate school or an NFL training camp. We’re all winners in Christ already, but we have only one opportunity to train for our eternal leadership role, and it’s here on planet earth.

To explain why God doesn’t just “beam us up” as they do in
Star Trek,
we’ll have to digress a bit to get the big picture of God’s plan for you. We’ll begin with your physical birth and represent this event by placing the word
birth
above the base of the triangle in Figure 12.1.

When you were born, God closed a door behind you so you could never cross back over that threshold. Let’s face it, a person can never cease to exist. We’ll let the base of the triangle in Figure 12.1 represent the closed door. God has established this limit that we cannot cross. Job 14:5 says, “[Man’s] days are determined, the number of his months is with Thee, and his limits Thou hast set so that he cannot pass.” Our God is the keeper of the door, and when He closes a door, it’s
closed
.

God’s plan for you was to draw you to Himself (see 2 Peter 3:9). To accomplish this, He established limits around you to “crowd” you toward making a decision to submit to Christ. This is not an abrasive teaching, but a beautiful love story of our Lord’s wooing His bride to Himself. We’ll let the apex of the triangle in Figure 12.2 represent salvation, and the two sides the circumstances, or limits, that crowd you toward the decision to receive Jesus as Lord, Savior, and Life. (How many of us failed to get the message about Christ as Life? We simply claimed Him as Savior and Lord; and alas, some didn’t even consider Him as Lord of their ring. They just wanted to go to heaven when they died. They saw Jesus as a type of Celestial American Express Card:
Don’t leave earth without Him
.)

Perhaps you can recall an episode from your past where in the midst of your sin you worked yourself into such a pickle that you did a 180-degree turn, vowing to reform, motivated by the painful experience. That was one of those limits beyond which God wouldn’t let
you
go. Others went beyond, but you turned back toward a more middle-of-the-road position. You over-corrected and traveled too far, however, until God let you bump your nose on yet another of His limits. Your pathway as you bumped back and forth between His limits for
you
led you to a confrontation with Jesus Christ unto salvation. Some, however, shrink back from this decision and carom about inside the triangle till they die in their sins. What a tragic waste of God’s grace.

Let’s presume that you chose to repent and accept Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. Once you did, God slammed another door behind you. I believe that just as a person cannot cease to have been born physically, so he cannot cease to have been born spiritually. Keeping him in this position is God’s business, and He is well able to do so (see Philippians 1:6). (See Figure 12.3.)

I will quickly confess that some folks who are truly born from above perform as though they are still in the bottom triangle. But when they do, our Father will discipline them by tightening up the circumstances around them until they begin to act more like they’ve been born anew (Hebrews 12:9).

God’s goal in all this is clearly revealed in Romans 8:29: “For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the first-born among many brethren.” His plan is to conform us to the image of Christ. Can anything bring more excitement to your heart? He isn’t going to accomplish this
after
we die, with physical death being the agent of change, but here on earth with the Holy Spirit being the agent of change.

Notice that word,
predestined.
That means God is going to do it to you. You’ve been placed into the loving obstacle course; I call it the University of Earth in which the Lord is hard at work conforming you. What’s more, He says that He is going to finish what He started with you (Philippians 1:6).

God has two plans for accomplishing His goal. Plan A is for you to see truth in the Word and respond in faith and obedience. I find, however, that most of us Christians are mentally slow. We see a verse such as, “Pray without ceasing” (1Thessalonians 5:17) and respond with, “How can I do that? I can’t pray continually and still accomplish my work.” So God has to revert to Plan B, Romans 8:28. He has to let a little “all things” come into a person’s life. He tightens up the limits around a person to box him into a more dependent position. Gang, 2Corinthians 12:9 says, “The weaker you get, the more My power in you will stick out like a sore thumb” (loose paraphrase).

God hates independence.
He wants you to be
de
pendent on Him as Jesus was. So He’ll let something happen to jerk the rug out from under a person’s self-sufficiency, then show him the alternative of opting for
Christ’s
sufficiency in us. Through this trauma, the person will learn how to pray without ceasing and accomplish his work simultaneously. In fact, he’ll learn that this is the easier way to fly. He will have “entered into God’s rest” by trusting Christ to accomplish the work through him.

Jesus Christ was the most dependent person who ever lived. Many fail to see it. They see Him in His earthwalk as self-sufficient, when actually He was totally dependent on another. “The Father abiding in Me does His works,” Jesus said (John 14:10). Thus, since our Father has dedicated Himself to the task of conforming us to the image of Christ, the circumstances of this planet are
designed
to bring the Christian person to the end of
his
sufficiency. Just look at them as courses in the University of Earth which are designed for your best eternal good.

Stop fighting it, brother. Give up all your “rights”—all talents, all abilities, all gifts, all the things you’ve clung to to get your need met for self-acceptance. You’ll love the results! You will find “life” through allowing Him to express Himself through your talents, your abilities, your gifts, and your personality to a hurting world to do
His
will. That’s the way Jesus walked. He let the Father do it through Him.

Many don’t realize it, but Jesus did not raise Himself from the dead; the Father raised Him. The Word records more than forty verses which
categorically
teach that Jesus was raised by His Father as opposed to only three which speak
metaphorically
of Jesus’ raising Himself (e.g., “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up” [John 2:19]). Jesus was committed to staying in that grave until the Father did it
for
Him. Check it out in the Word. Oh, that makes His voluntary death for you just that much more precious! Think about Him hanging on that cross, the Father having rejected Him because of your sins, and calling out,
Father! Why have You forsaken Me?
And yet, He stayed there, committed to dying and going to hades, trusting only in the Father’s integrity to raise Him up again!