Greater Emmanuel International - Serious Seminal Samplings - 2004

Christ suffered to bring us to God, the scriptures inform us. There, in God, where Christ has brought us--brought us by enlightening us that we eternally live and move and have our being in Him--we find the Truth and the Truth as it relates to all things. I once had a prophetic vision of being aware of a truth (one aspect of THE Truth) and it was connected to a string. Yes, I said a string. Strange huh? Prophets often see things in strange symbols.

I was told that when I sought to understand any truth, I was to follow the string to its other end which I would find to be in God, and there I would know the full meaning of that truth as an expression of the Truth which is God Himself. I came to understand that, having traced a truth back to its Source, I would find the Truth to be very essentially relational and since then have often referred to Deity as Pure Relational Being.

For instance, the new covenant is unilateral (occurring fully within God's Triunity), as opposed to the old which is bilateral, between God and man, with man acting in the delusion of separate, autonomous existence, and God making concession to that delusion under the dispensation of the law.

This is so because God, in His very Being, is internally, unilaterally related to and within Himself; but I hasten to say that within "Himself"

hides a Herself and the Son of Their love-union, and all the sons/daughters who are born of the extension of Papa's Seed, including the creation which they oversee. All doctrine that fails to bring us back to God our Father, there to realize the perfect love which embraces all things, will finally be shown to be intrinsically perverse in spite of its endless appeal to proof-texts.

So we come again to the nature of faith. I will proceed from this point on, on the basis of the above and on the proposition that the indwelling life of Christ, and that alone, constitutes right relationship with God and consequently right relationship to and within ourselves, healing us, making us whole, protected, safe, well in being---in short, saved.

We are healed by the Spirit connecting the damaged outer man to the whole Man within, the Real Man. He, Christ, is our life, and from His wholeness we are healed/saved, made whole, preserved, protected and safe. This is both an already accomplished reality in Christ, our Reality, and the existential destiny in the eons for every man as the inner Christ-man inexorably rises up to swallow up, and incorporate the outer into the inner and clothe the outer with glory from within.

Now I consider it to be elementary that since we have Christ as our life, we have all that His life includes. As elementary as that should be to all who claim to have an orthodox understanding of Christ and His Lord/Savior relationship to us, conventional theology is based upon the contradictory proposition that the life of Christ is somehow our life to the exclusion of His will and His faith.

Rather than faith coming with and in the coming of Christ to us and into us, faith is misunderstood as that which acquires or appropriates Christ by a faith-act which "gets" Him for us. Faith is misunderstood as something that must come from us, required by God as an act of our will (though helped toward that end by God), thus it is simply old covenant and bilateral in nature substituting faith in the place of the works of the law.

But Christ, His riches of grace, and His salvation are not a matter of willful acquisition or appropriation, but is God's gift to us as we are made to share in the divine relationship. Christ receives from the Father by sharing the nature of the Father, and His faith in the Father, rather than being an appropriating element, is the natural outworking of the Father being the Source of the Being and acting of the Son. The Son of God totally depends upon the Father because the Son is totally dependent upon the Father. One dare only totally depend upon that which is totally dependable and upon that which by nature one is dependent.

Faith is, as all things, traceable back to God's own interrelatedness. Faith is first to be understood as integral to the interrelatedness of the Family which God is. We, in that Family, by way of the Christ-Seed, participate in the faith relationship within Deity, a faith energized by love. Nothing characterizes the life of Christ, which is our life (no apology for laboring that truth), than His utter faith in, trusting surrender to, total dependence upon the fidelity of His Father as the Father, who has life in Himself, gives the Son to have that same life in Himself.

This is the nature of God's wholeness, of God's cohesiveness and is why faith, energized by love, must not in any sense be understood as a body of doctrine, but as the constitution of Deity's unity and the unity that God has purposed for the church, which is the body of Christ, the fulness (completeness) of Him that filleth all in all.

Nothing could be more doctrinally pertinent to the above than the truth that is once again coming forth in great power; the truth that the salvation of all men as an accomplishment of the Father through the Son, in whom all fulness dwells-- the fulness of Deity and humanity and all of creation-- which was visibly and historically demonstrated and portrayed in Christ, will be confirmed visibly and historically in every man and women and the creation for which we, under God, have been made responsible.

"Great things he hath taught us, great things he hath done, And great our rejoicing through Jesus the son: But purer and higher and greater will be Our wonder, our transport, when Jesus we see!

Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord! Let the earth hear his voice! Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord! Let the people rejoice! O come to the father through Jesus the son; And give him the glory - great things he hath done. Bless the Lord, Oh my soul!

The Nature of Faith (cont)

John R Gavazzoni

Thousand Oaks, CA