Zealous Christians have been fed concepts of good works that serve God to reform governments, fast and pray, struggle against life's unfair circumstances, fight evil in foreign lands, tarry at medical altars, pray all night, protest by fasting for change. All of this has all been done to better other people’s lives. Yet how can Christians confess love for others yet mask mountains of condemning judgment, outright hatred, and malicious retribution for even minor offenses and traspasses in the lives of other people?
Even we Christians seem to be blinded to our own hearts’ attitudes. Vain imaginings have inflamed the reasoning of the carnal mind to embitter our religious soul to judge others as failures because of what they experienced in this life. Our life can easily be marked with bitter religious attitudes if we allow them to work within our own heart. It's not so easy to come out sweet, when our own life's circumstances stink, but God is expert at making zealous believers whole. His answer is placing His resurrection life within our spirit.
A thrust of the Bible's message is that God raised up Jesus as Christ from the dead. He, God, loosed the pains of death in Him. There is remarkable qualification worked into Jesus, revealed in these significant words:
“Men! Israelites! Hear these words: Jesus, the Nazarene, a Man demonstrated to be from God for you by powerful deeds and miracles and signs, which God does through Him in the midst of you, according as you yourselves are aware, This One, given up in the specific counsel and foreknowledge of God, you, gibbeting (executed) by the hand of the lawless, assassinate, Whom God raises, loosing the pangs of death, forasmuch as it was not possible for Him to be held by it.” Acts 2:20-24 concordant
In plain language, God had in-worked His power into that firstborn son that made it an utter, total, absolute IMPOSSIBILITY for the grave or any other pain of death to hold Him. As it is possible for the dark realms of death to not have any hold on the firstborn Son of God, we too are disposed toward seeking the things above, the light at the right hand of God. Those things that the Father has placed in our spiritual life now are part and parcel of our future heavenly experience.
We do have a future, for we have had our spirit quickened, loosed from the darkness of death. We are changed to a loving nature that asks mercy for the brethren, praying for peace among nations, and sealed into blessing others without curse until all the families of mankind everywhere gain total victory in God’s righteous Kingdom.
"Verily, I am saying to you, Whatsoever you should be binding on the earth shall be those things having been bound in the heavens, and whatsoever you should be loosing on the earth shall be those loose in heaven." Matthew 18:18 concordant
NOTHING could divert, influence, motivate, or control Jesus EXCEPT THE WILL OF THE FATHER. The pain of death could not hold Jesus — NO DEAD THING COULD HOLD HIM. Nothing in the whole world could keep Him from doing the Father's will. Sin could not take hold in Him, yet He was:
“…tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin.” Hebrews 4:15
His mother could not hold Him, for when He was told His mother was standing outside looking for Him, He said:
“Who is my mother?” Matthew 12:48
And He stretched forth His hands toward His disciples, and said, “Behold my mother.” His friends could not hold Him, nor His disciples, for He upbraided and rebuked them for their lack of understanding. He said to Peter when he would have dissuaded Jesus from the predesignated will of the Father:
“Get thou behind me, Satan!” Matthew 16:23
The Pharisees could not hold Him. The traditions of the elders could not hold Him. Religion could not hold Him. The hatred of His enemies, nor the plaudits of His friends could not hold His attention. His own inner desires and the center of His own will could not hold Him:
“If it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not my will but Thine be done.” Luke 22:42
So it is a supernatural thing that God supplied Resurrection Life so DEATH COULD NOT HOLD JESUS CHRIST. That power was divinely granted unto His being by our loving Father so sufficiently that nothing He faced in life could hold His devotion. God has appointed a way of spiritually in-working a circumcision of our hearts, as our heavenly Father deals with us as sons also.
Resurrection Life is conquering our death. Herein lies secrets of life and hope for immortality in every son of God. Paul said if the spirit that raised Jesus is making a home in you, it quickens your spirit and renews your mind to put off fleshly ways, and even grants divine quickening to your mortal body. Yes, this includes healing for our mortal bodies from all the pains of death through God’s transforming, vivifying resurrection Life:
"Now if Christ is in you, the body, indeed, is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is life because of righteousness. Now if the spirit of Him Who rouses Jesus from among the dead is making its home in you, He Who rouses Christ Jesus from among the dead will also be vivifying your mortal bodies because of His spirit making its home in you.
Consequently, then, brethren, debtors are we, not to the flesh, to be living in accord with flesh, for if you are living in accord with flesh, you are about to be dying. Yet if, in spirit, you are putting the practices of the body to death, you will be living. For whoever are being led by God's spirit, these are sons of God.” Romans 8:10:14 concordant
The great mark of the resurrection was the empty tomb, some say. Christian people travel thousands of miles and annually spend untold millions of dollars to see that empty tomb of Jesus in Jerusalem. But the Lord’s disciples NEVER REFERRED TO IT IN SCRIPTURE. They did not need proof in an empty tomb, for Jesus had appeared to them in numerous ways.
After the day of Pentecost was fully come, they themselves were filled with His Holy Spirit and cleansed with fire to be witnesses and proof that Christ Jesus was risen, alive, and now empowered to come again by Spirit to His people. The very same power and authority which had been manifested to raise Him from His crucifixion was then manifested mightily to raise these men into a new level of GOD'S RESURRECTION LIFE by giving them the Holy Spirit. Afterward, healing the lame man at the gate of the temple, Peter was called before the Sanhedrin and the record states:
“And when they had set them in the midst, they asked, ‘By what power, or by what name, have ye done this.’ Then Peter, filled with the Holy Ghost, said unto them, ‘Ye rulers of the people, and elders of Israel, if we this day be examined of the good deed done to the impotent man, by what means he is made whole; be it known unto you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead, even by him doth this man stand before you whole!” Acts 4:7-10
The proof of God’s resurrection power is found in Jesus Christ. Our own spirit is made to be alive through the very fact that He is alive and can make other men perfectly whole like Himself. It is God's will for His believing people to have their mortal bodies be refashioned like His glorious body, to be made whole.
Jesus is still the current evidence of resurrection Life. Life can be found in God’s Word and Spirit, coming to teach us WITHIN how resurrection power is not a historical fact to be commemorated, but a present power in Jesus. God’s life, God’s power is resting within lasting judgments He has written upon our hearts about the realities needed to demonstrate oneness with His resurrection life within our spirit.
The early church fell away from the place of its Pentecostal beginnings. They “left their first love” and their candlestick was moved into a much lower place where the dynamic connection to spiritual life was lost. Early believers were deceived by false teachings and false standards have kept the churches in a fallen condition throughout its history.
When the power of His resurrection is the greatest power working in our lives, we need no special day, no sunrise service, no egg hunts, or Easter bunnies to remind us of Jesus’s resurrection. The early church would never have begun celebrating Easter unless it had fallen into dead works of lifeless traditions. Christianity was robbed of the faith provided people to experience resurrection life WITHIN THEMSELVES.
Healings and miracles in church meetings are not the major proof of the Father's resurrection life. HAVING THE NATURE OF THE FATHER written upon us is proof that the mind of Christ is written within our quickened spirit. It proves that love is prevailing within us. What leads us to wisdom’s righteousness in containing the powers of resurrection Life within our inner spiritual man? His Word and Spirit has touched our spirit to make it alive, raised it from death’s holds.
Resurrection life has freed our inner spiritual man from all that would hold us to earthly viewpoints and practices. Our carnal minded death is consumed in the fires of God’s truth. The infallible proof of God’s RESURRECTION LIFE has been working to quicken our spirit to His Life. His Life is to rule over our own soulish ways as we grow to full stature in Christ, saved of death’s pains in spirit, soul, and body. Our mortal body CAN be refashioned like unto His glorious body. We shall not all sleep, but we all shall be changed by God’s Resurrection Power:
"Verily, verily, I am saying to you that he who is hearing My word and believing Him Who sends Me, has life eonian and is not coming into judging, but has proceeded out of death into life. Verily, verily, I am saying to you that coming is an hour, and now is, when the dead shall be hearing the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear shall be living.
For even as the Father has life in Himself, thus to the Son also He gives to have life in Himself. And He gives Him authority to do judging, seeing that He is a son of mankind. Marvel not at this, for coming is the hour in which all who are in the tombs shall hear His voice, and those who do good shall go out into a resurrection of life, yet those who commit bad things, into a resurrection of judging." John 5:24-29 concordant
We Christians realize that there are still some haunting shadows of limitation, sickness, fear, corruption, lack of understanding, and fleshliness about us. No matter how much we say that we are the elect of God, sons of Light, sons of the Day, kings and priests of the Most High, and all the rest, there is still the sense that we have not clearly attained a face to face, full loving portion of God’s Resurrection Life. When such realizations flood us, our spirit spontaneously says, “UNTIL the day break, and the shadows flee away:”
"I will get me up to the Mountain of Myrrh, and to the Hill of Frankincense.” Song of Solomon 4:6
The Hebrew root word “myrrh” is ‘bitterness’. Overcoming the mountains of bitter things in our life’s journey makes it necessary to do more than just an occasional trip for healing communion with Christ. Human life itself will become a bitter mountain unless God’s Resurrection Life breaks into our inner spirit with light that chases away every bitter shadow of darkness, causing them ALL to flee away.
Thank God our lips speak only the truth that our spirit is alive. We speak of God’s power to dwell within us now. It is raising us to know God in paradise in a higher state than church is ever able to do.