Faith In Jesus
In the mind of God, both the Old Creation and the New Creation were originated simultaneously - before the world ever began.
Think about it. It means that God, who knows all things and has all power, before the foundation of the world, imagined you and I as created beings. We have been imagined by Him, designed by Him, given life by Him and, to this day, are sustained in life, by Him.
In Him we live and move and have our being.
At the same time, before He said “Let there be light,” the decision was made by the Godhead that the Word would become flesh. Jesus would join the Creation story as the Son of Man and the Son of God. That means that somehow, mystically, we were with Jesus, in Jesus, and as Jesus, from before the foundation of the world. Why is this so? Because both the plans of Creation and the plans of the New Creation were jointly in the mind of God from before the beginning.
Incredible. But true. Jesus was never God’s Plan B. He IS the Plan!
Isaiah says in Chapter 51, ‘However, along the way, through the Fall, we had forgotten the rock from which we were hewn.’ But God hadn’t forgotten. Nor had He given up. Nor did our treachery, disobedience or unbelief, thwart His plans. But neither does our faith make God’s plan any more complete or perfect.
Think of this. The believer is the one who begins to recognise and remember his true identity - as revealed to him by the Holy Spirit. Remember in Romans we read that the Holy Spirit cries out inside our hearts ‘Abba Father’ - and it is His voice that we hear and respond to. This is the voice we come alive to and begin to believe. But our belief doesn’t make it true. Your sonship and daughtership is already true. You are simply just waking up to the plan that God has had in place from before the beginning of the world that He totally and completely accomplished in Jesus, and now offers to the world through the conviction and prompting of His Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is working to restore us to the very image of sonship, which is exactly the prototype of Sonship that Jesus came to reveal to us and model for us. He is our true image before the Father. The true Head of the human race. The Second Adam. The First Born from the dead. Our Advocate and Mediator. Our experience of this is just an awakening to a forgiveness that He purchased before we were born. In fact, before the world began. Not that Jesus had come at that point. But God had already decided. And God’s goodness and faithfulness was never going to change its mind or fail in its plan. His deciding to come - was as good as making it done.
God decided to reconcile the cosmos - before the cosmos even existed. Jesus rebirthed humanity when He stepped into human skin. Jesus regenerated mankind. Objectively - it was done. Just like you didn’t have any say in your natural birth, you don’t have any say in your spiritual new birth. Jesus did it for you, as you…then gave you the gift of it. Completed and done.
So, what is the role of our faith?
When we hear this good news, faith effortlessly pops up as an ecstatic ‘Yes’ to what He has done. Faith is the eyes to see what He’s done. Faith is not an extra ingredient that you need to add to the finished work of Jesus in order to climb into His family. You are already in! We do not self-spawn the new birth. You had nothing to do with your natural birth; and you have nothing to do with your spiritual birth. You were born from above. Faith is the lens through which we see this reality. That faith comes by hearing. Hearing with the ears of our heart - the same heart that Adam ‘heard the voice of God’ with in ‘the continuance of the Spirit.’ You see, our faith helps us to awaken to our True Selves. The false self, under the legacy of lies and myths propagated by the serpents original temptation, has no real substance. Our ignorance to the truth gives his lies its substance.
A lie only holds power to the degree to which you believe it has any real truth. Through faith, we are awakening to the truth of our true design, our true fellowship with the Father, our true origin. The origin that we see in Jesus, that He has re-birthed for us and now seeks to reveal, by His Spirit, in us.
Humanity has been in an identity crisis. But Jesus came to awaken humanity to the truth – that we are a divine race, with a Father God that loves us without restraint. We are heirs of an immortality that cannot be gained by human endeavour. Eternity is stamped on our souls and is brought to light, in our hearts, by the power of the Spirit, through the example of Jesus. We are meant to look just like our Elder Brother. He has empowered us to be who we really are. There is a massive difference between becoming something and realising who we always were all along.
