X. Purified
Identity and the Promises of God
Purified
identity is the explanation behind all the delays,
disappointments, and disasters we experience in our
attempts to find fulfilment in this life through
faith. He has ordained to tie the process of our
purity to our basic need to find fulfilment through
our relationship to creation. But to understand this,
you need to follow very very carefully what I'm about
to explain:
If you're
sharp, you've just picked up what sounds like a
contradiction. At the beginning I said that our new
identity finds all sense of meaning, fulfilment, and
purpose only in Jesus Christ, without
reference to anything He has made. If so, how is it
I'm now talking about finding some kind of fulfilment
through our relationship to creation?
If Jesus is
our only source of fulfilment, and if our relationship
to earth is thoroughly polluted by our earth-based
identities, how can I now be talking about fulfilment
of earthly needs and desires outside Jesus? Isn't the
person of Jesus enough? Shouldn't we rather be
shedding off all awareness of earthly need and desires
outside Jesus as part of the process of purifying our
identity in Him? Shouldn't we deny our entire
relationship to creation as "worldly"? (This is what
stoics, ascetics, buddhists, Christian mystics, and
holiness teachers, including myself, have wrongly
taught at one time or other.)
The answers to
all the above questions is "no." No, there is no
contradiction; and no, it is not for us to deny all
awareness of creation even though our relation to it
is polluted and Jesus is our only true source of
meaning and fulfilment. But to understand this, we
have to understand a certain mystery about creation.
Come back with me to Eden a moment…
·
The
Role of Creationary Fulfilment
God created
man for fellowship, for relationship with Him. But God
did not create man to worship or enjoy Him in a
vacuum. He put him in context of a beautiful
creation where He left a certain measure of man's
fulfilment to be found through the creation.
So He created
man with needs and desires with respect to creation.
He left man a certain sense of purpose and destiny to
be fulfilled through the creation. Specifically, He
gave man creationary calling (a garden) and
creationary companionship (a woman).
He gave man something
to
do and someone to do it with. Yet all
this sense of fulfilment in creation was part of
man's total sense of fulfilment in God alone.
There was no distinction, no dichotomy, no dualism
between finding meaning in creation and finding
meaning in God alone. Fulfilment in creation
was part of fulfilment in God.
If you can
grasp this, you can grasp what I will now say. God has
not changed. In His purpose to restore us to Himself
through purified identity, His will is to include
restoring us to that same fulfilment concerning
creation. It is part of the total restoration.
Therefore, in
calling us to Himself, God still issues calling and
vision and promises over the fulfilment
of our sense of needs and desires in
this life. He plants all this in us as part of our
new identity.
And here is
the mystery:
God
believes
He is able to call us to this "creationary
fulfilment" in Him without reinforcing our
idolatrous ties to creation through earth-based
identity, but rather as part of His strategic
process of purifying our identity in Him!
But how can
this be? How does it work? How is God able to call us
to lose our earth based identities and to purify our
identity in Christ alone by giving us all these other
callings, involvements, dreams, and desires for
creationary fulfilments?
The answer is
simple, but follow it carefully:
God's
creationary
promises to us are only through the new man. God
makes no promises to us on the basis of our old
identities. So the only way we can obtain the
fulfilments is to first obtain purified
identity.
·
Fulfilling
Creationary Promise “Over My Dead Identity”
This happens
as follows:
Every time we
respond to God's promises, we respond out of a mixture
of our new man and our old
man. When we believe, our new man believes, but
so does our old man. Our old man understands the
promises a certain way. Our old man acts on his
understanding of the promises. Our old man has his
earth-based expectations.
But
what
happens? Our old man gets hurt! Our old man has his expectations
destroyed! Our old man suffers humiliation! God
does not come through for our old man!
Consequently, our old man dies. He dies
through the travail of smashed dreams, desires, and
expectations in hope of God's promises.
As our old man
dies, what is left? What happens? As our old man
life-force shrivels up, dies and surfaces out of our
body, our new man rises from the depths of our
soul to replace our lost personality. He rises up to
manifest himself through our personality more
perfectly. This is none other than the purifying
of our identity in Christ!
When
the
new man has sufficiently surfaced through our
personality to be able to receive the fulfilment
only he can receive, that is when the promise
comes to pass!–all in perfect enjoyment of Jesus Christ.
This is how
heaven and earth are brought to meet in our lives. And
this is how God uses His creationary promises to
achieve our purified identity. The meeting of heaven
and earth in our lives begins first with purified
identity, then blossoms into creationary
fulfillment—as it was in Eden.
·
The
Endurance of Purified Identity
At the
beginning, I said I wanted to especially direct this
letter to those of you who are yet sensing lack of
fulfilment of God's promises and vision to you, lack
of fulfilment of your earthly needs and desires. We
all have callings from God in hopes for this life.
But…
What do we do
when the longer we wait for God, the less we see from
Him, the less evidence we have that He will do what He
said? What do we do the longer that time goes by and
everything we ever hoped for from God loses all its
original desire and meaning, dissipating into
oblivion?
Where do we
turn without abandoning the promises when faith just
doesn't translate out into sight for us—when our faith
just can't bring heaven and earth to connect? How do
we stand up to the shame we incur for having acted on
the promises only to be left holding the "prophetic
bag"?
How do we
overcome the taunts of "Job' s friends" who, on the
proof of visible evidences, cause us to question
whether we heard from God—to question the legitimacy
of our vision, our call, our desires? (In dealing with
a God for whom nothing is impossible, visible
evidences are proof of nothing.)
How do we
resist the urge to deny our already costly faith and
to "start over" with something that appears more
promising?
The answer is
purified identity:
·
Purified
identity is what is left when nothing else is.
·
Purified
identity gives us meaning when creation has lost all
original meaning.
·
Purified
identity is our ever unchanging reference point for
reality when our natural life has been poured out.
·
Purified
identity is our haven of rest under the altar when we
have been martyred.
·
Purified
identity through the Presence of God gives us back
lost assurance that God has not lied, only that we
have died.
·
Purity
of identity provides us release without having quit.
·
Purified
identity is our personal proof and badge of witness to
all men that we truly know God and have heard from Him
when creation bears no witness—until the confirmation
of creation appears.
All those to
whom the promises came received them through purified
identity.
·
Before
Abraham could become a father, he had to become a
Father of Many Nations.
·
Before
Hannah could become a mother, she had to obtain the
identity of a prophetess—one who could release a son
into his own identity as a prophet.
·
Before
Joseph and Moses could be elevated to receive their
callings, their old identities had to pass away. They
became new men through the demise of their original
identity and through the knowledge of God acquired in
that death.
Identity
comes
first! Then the creationary fulfilment under its dominion.
God is not
interested in answering prayers only to reinforce our
old identities. He's not willing to give us marriages,
babies, families, healings, provisions, involvements
and ministries just to reinforce our original
identities of gender, family, and culture. We have
been called out! And our creationary
fulfilments are to be called-out fulfilments whose
promises are a means to purified identity before they
manifest.
If we can keep
our perspective straight, then we will keep our root
sanity when our first identity undergoes demolition,
nothing is left to hope for, and creationary
meaninglessness sets in. Acknowledge the
supremacy of the purifying of your identity in
Christ—not the hope of your creationary
fulfilment. And when you are destroyed, your identity
will survive, and your creationary fulfilment will be
revived, here and now—in earth, as it always was in
heaven.
[NOTE: For
further in depth study of this topic, see the letter,
"God's
Promises to the Hidden Man.”]
Part
XI