A radical change has taken place, and we must now adopt the radical behavior that goes with it. I must emphasize that we are not marionettes made to act by the Spirit’s pulling strings! We act; we will choices; and our faith declares, “In Christ, this is who I am; therefore, I choose to act in accord with truth.” To “act as if” is the act of faith of Christ in my life, that He is truly within. Faith says, “That being the case, this is what I can and must do.” It is saying that we believe He has willed and worked within us and, therefore, we will now work out our salvation.
Therefore be imitators of God as dear children.
Ephesians 5:1
We imitate God, do His behaviors after Him; but notice carefully that this is not the old, dead-end path of the flesh trying to be like God. We imitate God “as dear children”; we have received His life, and putting on His behavior is a matter of drawing from His life that is within us and, in so doing, becoming who we are, His dear children.
I was visiting missionaries deep in the jungle of West Africa and flew from station to station in a small aircraft. As we landed on the bumpy homemade airstrips, we were greeted by the missionaries, accompanied by excited believers. On one such trip, I went down the receiving line shaking hands with each missionary and found at the end of the line a chimpanzee dressed in clothes from barrels of old clothes sent from the U.S. He stood solemnly extending his hand, which I shook. We walked back to the mission house, and the chimp followed us, hands behind his back and nodding solemnly as the head missionary was doing as he talked to me. His nearly perfect imitation of a missionary was greeted with howls of laughter from all.
I flew from there to London to be greeted by my daughter and a friend. The friend said, “Your daughter gets more like you every day.” I suddenly remembered the chimp. The more perfectly he imitated a human, the more we laughed; the more my daughter became like me, the more we were congratulated. I realized that my daughter, living from my life, was imitating the behavior of that life she saw in me; when animal life tried to imitate human life, it was obviously just that—and the better it was done, the greater the laughs.
When we have received eternal life and are joined to God our Father in covenant, it is natural to adopt His behavior and walk it out from His Spirit within. But when the flesh tries to imitate the life of God, it is a shabby imitation at best, and were it not so eternally tragic, it would be the best joke in the universe.
The Place of Feeling
But, someone says, “Is the entire Christian life void of feeling? Is it all lived in cold choices and willing?” Not at all. It is quite the reverse: The Scripture abounds with words indicating strong emotion. Words like “rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory” or “the peace of God that passes human understanding” tell us that the believer can be caught up in ecstasy in His presence.
But the terrible possibility is that we can become addicted to the feeling of His presence and rejoice in it instead of His true presence. I know some dear believers who are consumed by spiritual lust, living for the next sensation to assure them that God is with them. They are chasing the wind and ever seeking the new thing and never knowing the satisfaction of the person of the Lord Jesus, because they are obsessed with feeling Him.
Going hand in hand with that is the belief that we live the Christian life by experiences and feelings. The feeling of His presence is given to us as His gift, in which we rejoice, but faith settles in to act as if His presence fills our lives.
Many years ago, I walked with a brother in what I believed to be a covenant relationship. We prayed together, shared the truths we found together, and tried as often as possible to minister together in conventions, complementing each other’s message. What I did not know was that he was envious of me and quietly plotting the destruction of my ministry. When he finally showed his intention, it was in a large meeting; what he said and did shattered me. I knew that the lies he had announced publicly would be broadcast throughout the U.S. before midnight and by tomorrow would be accepted as truth, and my ministry would be over. But that the words had been spoken by him, my friend, left me paralyzed and numbed. I stumbled from the platform of the auditorium with every eye upon me and, like a robot, walked out of the building.
I walked for several minutes like a zombie, and then a rage exploded inside me. Feelings flamed like an inferno against him. I felt murder in my heart for the betrayal.
Deep inside me I heard the still, small voice of the Spirit, He can never destroy you, but if you continue the way you are you will destroy yourself! In that moment, I ceased to be present to what had happened, to my betrayer, to my hurt, and to what would happen; I became present to Christ, my life, to the love that embraced me, and I participated in and knew what I had to do.
The expression of rage that I had been entertaining was not a garment that fitted a child of God such as I knew myself to be. I knew that I had to forgive him. But in my entire being I did not have a feeling to forgive! I had never had to forgive a person for something as big as this; I had no track record, and my feelings were against the whole idea. I put on forgiveness; I acted as if I could forgive by a sheer act of willing obedience to God.
I turned in the road, pointed back to the building, and naming him said aloud, “I forgive you for what you have done, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. I am not your judge; I release you, and I send you to Him to deal with as He will.” I had immediate peace and walked on down the road.
Ten minutes later I heard within me, How could he have done that to you? And every revengeful feeling, like a furnace heated seven times hotter, surged through me.
I stopped and turned again in the direction of the building and said, “Ten minutes ago, this man was released to the keeping of the Lord Jesus. He is forgiven, and I have no more say in the matter.”
Throughout that night this repeated, with the time between the feelings of rage returning getting longer and longer. Then they returned maybe once a day, then once a week, until they did not return. I still did not have feelings of warmth and joy at the sound of his name, but from my position of dwelling in Christ I held to the reality that he was forgiven.
A year later he called, weeping on the phone. What he had unsuccessfully tried to do to me, someone had effectively done to him. He had lost everything and was out of the ministry, homeless and living on the street. My heart was filled with divine compassion, and I brought him into my home and ministered to him and gradually restored him to faith and ministry.
That is what I mean by “acting as if” and “putting on” a godly behavior.
Overcoming Temptation
What of the temptations that come upon us—when like a whirlwind our feelings, thoughts, imaginations, and even our physical bodies are all swept up into the call of a sin, a habit, or lust?
We become deliberately present to God, which means that we choose not to be present to our feelings or to our circumstances or to the powers of darkness. For believers newly delivered from drug and sexual addictions, this cannot be emphasized strongly enough. Do not wait until the temptation is at full strength, but at the first thought, the first suggestive whisper, immediately be present to the Spirit of Christ. Realize that He is in you, your body is His temple, you are in Him, and He is your life and breath.
This is so important because if we do not believe it, we will believe that the churning of our flesh is our real person. Write this indelibly on your mind: “Through the blood of the covenant and by the working of the Holy Spirit, the real, true me is forgiven, washed, and cleansed; in my innermost and true self, I am hidden with Christ in God. From that position in Him, I look straight into the face of God my Father, who declares over me that I am His beloved child in whom He delights, and I respond with ‘Abba, Daddy, my Father!’”
This is the first weapon in your armory combating the shame that will suffocate you if you are not sure of who you are.
This is never more true than in the shame-filled bondage to sexual addiction. A man I
will call Chris shared with me how after a few days of repenting and calling on God for deliverance from pornography, the old seducing call to the magazine rack and the movies on television came as a whisper in his mind. His first reaction was shame. He told me, “I thought, Oh no! I am just the same person I always was. The thoughts and lusts only went into hiding, and now here we go again!” He felt deep shame and self-hatred and could not think of facing God. Because of such a mood, it was only a short time before he yielded and plunged into an even deeper self-hatred that sought medication for its pain in more pornography.
When I told him that the thoughts and lusts both in body and imagination were not the true Chris, for he was hid with Christ in God and was at that very moment the focus of His love, he was speechless. I told him, “The thoughts and physical craving are the death thrashings of your defeated enemy. Do not yield to the temptation, but do not give it your attention either; choose at that moment to deliberately abide in Christ, be present to the God who loves you, and at the same time be present to who you really are—His child. To think on your temptation, to give it all your attention in trying to fight it, is to practice the presence of the lust and be filled with shame, to not be present to God.”
Our pathway to sure defeat in any area of strong temptation is to feel shame at having the tempting thoughts and then to fight them and try not to think them. That course of action inevitably fails; and as the thoughts continue to come, pictures flash on the screen of the imagination, relentlessly crushing all of our resolutions to not obey their bidding. We inevitably fall and are then plunged yet deeper into hopeless despair and shame.
We do not deny the feelings that rage within us, nor do we try not to have them. The more we wrestle with them, the stronger they get, for in so doing we are giving them status; we are calling them forth as part of the true us, as valid feelings to be confronted and fought with. They are not! They have been crucified with Christ, and the real you is being called forth by the Spirit through this situation.
I told Chris, “When the gnawing of lustful habits makes you physically restless, choose to be still within, whatever your body is doing, and realize that in this minute you are in the presence of God. Know that He does love you and is on your side against the flesh. Without the presence of shame, you can tell Him your feelings, whatever they are, share with Him what you are going through, and give Him thanks that He has made you His very own. Do it out loud to take you out of the spaghetti bowl of your thoughts. He is in the process of separating you from your past and making you whole. You are at that moment beginning to be the new person that you truly are.”
Now, from that center where we have our identity as joined to Him, we choose to put on the action behavior of Christ. We put on the behaviors of Jesus, declaring that they reflect in our outer persons who we truly are in our inner persons.
Using Temptation
This is the secret of using temptation. We must not see temptation as the enemy but the necessary confronting of the negative for the glorious positive of our life in Christ to blaze forth. We cannot show forth the life of Christ in a vacuum; He is seen over and against the negative of the calls of the flesh.
One day, I was talking with some people about the raising of Lazarus from the dead, and some dreamy-eyed believer said, “Oh, that would be so wonderful to be raised from the dead by Jesus!” I reminded her that before you can be raised you have to die! The power of Jesus to raise the dead can only be seen with a dead body; it cannot function in a vacuum.
If we will know the fullness of the love of God in us, we must be in the midst of people who cannot be loved by the best efforts of human love. We will discover the peace of God that passes human comprehension when we are in a situation where human flesh would be in a state of nail-biting anxiety. The joy of the Lord is best experienced when our circumstances would naturally plunge us into despair. As we have seen, Paul had to learn the lesson that the power of God is best seen in our weakness and the conundrum of the covenant is that ...when I am weak, then I am strong (2 Corinthians 12:10).
Trial and temptation are allowed in our lives to draw out of us the fullness of the life of Christ that, but for the temptation, we would never think of drawing on, for there would be no need. We should not view temptation as an enemy but as the opportunity to live in the “act as if” and “putting on” mode and so to grow in grace where we have never grown before. James exhorts us to ...count it all joy when you fall into various trials (James 1:2).
Temptation is the opportunity for the Spirit to produce the life of Christ in our lives. We will always fail if we approach temptation as something to be overcome by our willpower for God, instead of by the strengthening of the Spirit of Christ. Temptation is the time when we die to the pseudo strength of our flesh and enter into the resurrection life of Christ.
Christine’s Story
Christine knew her problem: It was gossip. She could not resist the latest juicy morsel that her friends dropped in her ever-open ear. She could not resist passing it on with such an air of secrecy that the receiver felt honored to have been selected to be trusted with such a top-secret piece of information. She had been the center of more than one ugly situation in the church for the insinuations and half-truths she peddled. Then the Spirit began to convict her. She realized that she was grieving the Spirit and hurting her brothers and sisters. She knew that this was what the Spirit meant when He said, Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers (Ephesians 4:29).
The Spirit made her very aware that every time she picked up the phone a torrent of corrupt communication came out of her mouth, and she set herself to stop it. But she quickly discovered that she was powerless to stop it. When the other party said, “Have you heard...” she forgot her resolution, sucked up the information, and questioned to get the last drop out of the informer. When she put the phone down, she was heartbroken over what she had done and then disgusted with herself for not having more control. She posted notes by the phone telling her what to say when someone tried to share gossip, but given the chance she was blind to notes and forgot all promises and resolutions made to God.
Her determination to pass on only edifying and grace-imparting words didn’t work either. She was drawn to gossip with her friends, however much she prayed for strength. She began her day by promising Jesus that this day would be different. Before she met with friends, she whispered to herself, “I will not be drawn into gossip. I will not. Jesus, I promise You.” But before thirty minutes passed, she had forgotten all her vows.
She asked to see me after a meeting in her church. I had been speaking on the subject of our covenant union with Christ, and a ray of hope that she could overcome her sin made her seek me out. I listened to her story and then asked her, “How would you describe your approach to this temptation, Christine?”
She looked puzzled and almost annoyed: “I hate it. I don’t want it, and that’s why I say no to it every time I think it’s coming up!”
I said, “Christine, never say no to temptation; say yes to Jesus!” She looked shocked but nodded for me to go on. I continued, “When you say no, you are drawing on your willpower, concentrating all the energy of your flesh to refuse the temptation. You are mustering all your human ability to do something to please God. But that isn’t the way the Christian life is lived. That is dead religion at its best! This is your God-given opportunity to die to the flesh activity of gossip and of trying to stop gossiping, and let Christ by the Spirit live through you.”
I went on to share the truths of her union with Christ and show her Colossians 3:1-3: If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
The setting of the mind on Christ and our lives being hidden with Christ in God are worked out, among other things, in v
erses 8, 12, and 13.
But now you yourselves are to put off all these: anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy language out of your mouth.
Therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, put on tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness, longsuffering; bearing with one another, and forgiving one another, if anyone has a complaint against another; even as Christ forgave you, so you also must do.
The putting off of filthy language and the putting on of the language of love could not be achieved in isolation from the first three verses. I told her, “It is because you are now united with Christ and He is your life that you can learn the language of His love. It is not a matter of saying no to filthy language but yes to your true new self in Christ and letting His love pour through you. You are not a robot. You have a choice, a big choice, to make. But it is not the choice to try in your own strength to stop gossiping, but to yield to Christ your life, love, and strength.”
My meetings had ended, and I flew out the next day. She later wrote me of the radical change that had come to her since that conversation. Beginning that same night, her whole approach to the problem had changed. Instead of focusing all her energy in promising God that she would not gossip she instead prayed, “I thank You that I am included into Christ, and His Spirit lives in me. I thank You that this is who I truly am and therefore this gossiping, corrupt language is not compatible with my true self. You are my life, Lord Jesus, and I ask that all day and every day You fill my thoughts and the words that I speak. I am helpless before this desire for filth, and I ask that the Spirit bring forth Your desire for truth and love in my mind and mouth.” When she met with her friends or the phone rang, she whispered, “This is Your conversation, Lord!”
Power of the Blood Covenant: Uncover the Secret Strength of God's Eternal Oath Page 24