Living from the inside out

Hi all,
Jesus said "The Father had life in himself, and He gave to the Son to have life in himself." (John 5:26) Have you ever wondered how the Father 'gave birth' to his only born Son, into the very nature of their Father & Son relationship? My new 4-cd series; "I AM; Who Jesus is, where He came from", does just that - link to the right.



External framework of rule & regulations
Last week I laid out how the Father, being a Spirit, created physical beings (us) to be a bridge between His Spirit realm and the physical realm (universe) He created. His plan was that man would be filled with the Holy Spirit, thus by nature walking with God through life in the physical world.

But when Adam sinned, essentially kicking God to the outside looking in, He provided the Mosaic Law and temple/priesthood system as an external framework for fallen man to live by. When you have a world of un-born again people - sinners by nature - they need an external system to corral that nature. Thus He set before them rules for life and the consequences of death, and asked that they choose life. (Deut 30:19)

That external framework included a temple, a priesthood, and a system of rules & regulations governing worship and conduct. The priests told the people what God was saying and what He expected. The temple building and grounds provided a central location for the people to come together to hear what the priests were saying. If you wanted to be where God was or hear what He was saying, you had to go to the temple.

After all, the priests were the ones who spent time in God's presence, for by His choice the Lord made the tribe of Levi His priests and no one else - so they were the font of God's wisdom for the people. Thus the people did what they were told when they gathered in the temple. They had little responsibility for their spiritual lives, and because they were sinners by nature (Eph 2:3), the law could only deal with the actions of a person's life, not the heart. The motives of the heart didn't count under the law, only the act counted.

But the Lord told Jeremiah that a day was coming when He would change the very nature of mankind, that He would make a way for God's law, His ways, to be written on man's heart so man could by nature do what was right, that he by nature could walk and talk with God like Adam did at the start. Things would come full circle, and more than full circle even! People could be born of the Spirit! (Jeremiah 31: 33-34; quoted in Hebrews 10:15-17)

Bye bye temple, hello temples
When the day of Pentecost came, God moved out of the temple in Jerusalem and into people as His temples. Living temples, mobile temples, each one uniquely built and individual, and each having God's laws written, hard wired, into their spirit-man's nature. (I Cor 6:19; Eph 2:20-22, Rom 5:5, Heb 10:16-17)

The change from a central temple location where God's people gathered to be in God's presence in the building, to God's presence being found in individuals, required a change in format, for moving out of a central building made that system not only obsolete, but incompatible with the dynamics of God living in individual people.

For instance Jesus is "meek and lowly in heart" so the new format would by its very nature be one of love and humility and service to one another, rather than all people serving a priesthood via external rules by eye-service.

When God moved into people it meant that motives mattered. No longer would just the act of murder be counted, but the true murder took place when the person was angry with another with no reason. No longer would the physical consummation of adultery be the sin, but the motive of lust was the sin of adultery. It wasn't the flashy public production of prayer/worship that mattered, but the prayer in the 'prayer closet' the Father counted. (Matthew 5:21-22, 27-28; 6:5-6)

Now at last, after all these years, the Spirit-Father in His realm, had a living, breathing means by which to manifest Himself in the physical world He had created, by these living temples. Now all the structure was internal instead of external because that is where He lives.

Loving God with all your life, and your neighbor as yourself sums up all that He required, and that ability was placed within mankind when a person is born of the Holy Spirit - so that by nature man could walk with God, naturally, conversationally, without hoops to jump through and hurdles to climb. (Romans 13:8-10)

Re-learning
But here is the rub: Most living temples, the born again people, grew up in or think like the old temple structure. They are trained to go to a temple thinking that is where God lives. They are trained that they know little about God and a trained priest/cleric must be the font of God's word for them. They first want the man of God to give them a word instead of walking in the truth that THEY can hear from God themselves. They are trained to follow rules & regulations, formulas & processes, in order to please God or manipulate Him to want to be moved to do something for them.

But there are people seeking New Testament realities and walking in the ramifications - the consequences - of Christ in them, that they are living temples, now responsible for their own faith and love and walk with God.
But at first, when they first start to truly know New Testament truth makes the mind go 'tilt' like an old pin-ball machine that's been shaken too hard.

The temple-based-mind screams: What about accountability? What about leadership? How do you keep from getting off balance? Who will control me, who will teach me, who will be my covering?

The temple-mind demands external controls (thus it is fear-based), not able to believe that people can truly be 'real people' with God in them, walking in love towards others, in relationship with others in faith, hearing from the head of the body, controlled by His Spirit, and that it all works.

The temple-mind has no means of comparing it to anything its known, therefore all the books and teachings about New Testament realities only bring up arguments against what they have learned (the NT out of the home-based context it was written in). But in truth, you really have to see New Testament relationships in action and be around it if you are too steeped in the temple to fully understand.

The temple-mind cannot grasp that a group of temples meeting in someone's home regularly, would be accountable to one another, keep one another from getting off base, would be connected to the larger body of Christ no matter where and how they meet, honoring the gifts as they function within their midst rather than honoring an 'office' of this or that above the others. That's so foreign to the temple-mind.

The temple-mind cannot grasp a leadership that is humble, approachable, seeks others above itself, eschews attention to itself, because the temple-mind exalts a caste of priests who are the font of God's voice, like the focus on them, and should therefore be exalted accordingly. The living-temple reality is that one plants, another waters, God is the One who gives the increase, so we are all equal. (I Cor 3:1-10)

It takes time to rearrange the temple-mind into the New Testament mind of being living temples. In Acts 2:46 right after Pentecost it says the people were daily in the temple and also in each other's homes. They had 1 foot (and 1/2 their thinking) in the temple and 1/2 in New Testament living-temple realities for about 18 months. That transition between temple-mind and living temple reality lasted about 18-24 months, for Acts 8:1 says Saul of Tarsus so persecuted the disciples they all left Jerusalem except the apostles. Even after Saul met the Lord in Acts 9, you never again see people returning en mass to the temple - they were now fully renewed to THEY are the temples of God.

Today we often see that same 18-24 month time frame needed for people to renew their minds from temple-building thinking to living-temple thinking of the New Testament.

When God moved out of the central temple building in Jerusalem and into people, instead of making them come to Him, it meant God could now meet with people where they lived, in their homes, in their work, in the marketplace and streets. God the Father, this Spirit-Father from another realm, could now have what He always wanted, what He had back in the day with Adam - He could walk and talk with people in their own gardens, in their homes, where they live! Thus home became a convenient place to meet, though the point isn't the home, it's the people, the church, the living temples that is the focus.

Thus when we say "where is (the) church" we point to a group of people meeting - THERE is the church!

Think of it like this...
This past Sunday in our house church meeting south of Mounds, Oklahoma, our hosts Jeff & Mary, brought up these analogies and I think it's great - we had fun drawing out the parallels. Have fun with this, we did.

The temple-based system of thinking is like computers at work before the Internet. Back then at work all the computers were connected to a massive IBM mainframe in a big room in the building, but cut off from others outside that building. All the computers at work were in offices in 1 building, and they could communicate within that building only, and back in the days of cobalt language there were cards to be punched and holes to align - you had to work hard to please the mainframe computer and its attendants who alone knew how to work the computer.

When people would go to lunch or outside the central building they could talk to other people who worked in other buildings and each of them had their work computers too - like various church people meeting other church people, but each person was tied to their own work computer and limited accordingly.

That was before Pentecost, during temple times, but illustrates the temple-mentality that still exists today.

The realities of the New Testament however can be compared this way: Each person is connected to the world via the Internet, each person has Wifi, each person is connected to the Super Computer individually and also at the same time wired to every other computer in the world.

Each person is now able to download information as they wish - they don't have to go to a central building to connect to a main frame and line up all the holes in the cards just right for the computer or attendants.

Each person can download wirelessly even, from the Super Computer - and also talk to other computers on their own, as they wish. But each other computer has to be willing to 'speak up' and participate or they don't become part of the larger network.

Each person therefore downloads different parts from the Super Computer - so that what you have is valid and what I have is valid, and we have to love and appreciate the different parts each of us have experienced and 'downloaded' from the Super Computer.

And finally...even through your 'computer' is full of viruses, you can still download 'clean' information from the Super Computer. Your hard drive has no viruses because the Super Computer Himself made you of His workmanship, but over the years you've collected other programs with viruses in them that make receiving from the Super Computer seem cumbersome and complicated - but over time He cleans up all that defective software so your hard drive is in flawless communication with Him.

God doesn't live in a temple made with hands...for in Him we live, and breathe, and have our being. (Acts 17: 24-27) That's New Testament reality. Now make your thoughts line up with God's truth instead of trying to make NT truth line up with a temple context and thinking.

Next week, details about how to walk in balance and fullness as a New Testament living temple...
Blessings, (remember if you want to write to me directly write to cwowi@aol.com)
John Fenn
www.supernaturalhousechurch. org