But as it is written: “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, Nor have entered into the heart of man The things which God has prepared for those who love Him.” But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit….
I Cor. 2:9-10 NKJ
Here, we are looking at the unperceived yet vital relationship between faith for the here and now and our future exercise of the “powers of the world to come” as immortals (Heb. 6:5). Everything the Lord brings forth unto a new era of covenant and existence, He does so by way of preparation. This of course is why John the Baptist was sent ahead of Christ. A way had to be made for the receiving of Christ, or else Christ could not have effectively come.
The same is true now as the spirit of Elijah is again released ahead of the Lord’s reappearing in glory. Without the present preparatory spirit of Elijah through the true prophetic ministry, the Lord cannot effectively reappear to collect us unto Himself. So it is God released the “Latter Rain” movement so long ago to begin preparing a people to comprehend the requirements necessary for actually crossing over from mortality into immortality. The purpose of that preparatory ministry is to reveal to us by the Spirit now what our eyes and ears otherwise can’t perceive of what is ahead.
To this very hour, extremely few have any thought of what God has prepared us for inside of the immortal context at hand, even though God’s Spirit has already been released to reveal it to us. We remain virtually clueless. Few have gained any comprehension of what our life will be like as immortals, or of how anything we do now has any relationship to that. Yet the Spirit is still speaking….
This brief writing is to bring more connection between where we are here and what we are being prepared for there. This pertains to the role of our present faith. So let’s listen up to what the Spirit would say to prepare us for that.
Many years ago, not long after the Latter Rain movement, the Lord also released the “Word of Faith” movement. The faith movement majored in teaching us how to believe for God’s manifestations in this life over whatever He puts in our hearts to believe Him for. It dared us to believe to convert the invisible into the visible. And that was its sole focus. Despite its numerous attendant errors, faith teaching broke a barrier for us concerning what is possible now through the spoken word as Jesus modeled and exhorted it. Now, we’re not here today to get into its errors. What we are here to do is understand the connect between this emphasis and what God has prepared us for as immortals.
The greatest challenge of faith remains how to blend present tense faith with the equally required faith that releases results into the hands of a sovereign God, and that otherwise blends with the faith not focused on temporal results at all, but on developing unseen relationship with the indwelling Father. Needless to say, other movements exist counter to the faith movement that major on these other aspects of faith. But what we’ve really wanted is to blend all into one satisfying experience without contradiction.
To find that blend, we look no further than the Son Himself who demonstrated perfected faith. Jesus spoke many things instantaneously into being, while at the same time not speaking into everything. But then His own most crucial faith moment was one of releasing His destiny into the Father’s sovereign hands. It was not for Him to speak to for Himself. In all cases however, His temporal faith expressions were all governed by His direct faith connection with the indwelling Father. (We discuss this in more detail here.)
What does any of this have to do with our future immortality? Where is the revelatory connect? It is only in this:
Jesus Himself was immortal, even while exemplifying perfect balanced faith in this mortal context. The Latter Rain writers rightly refer to Him as the “Pattern Son.” He is our pattern. What He lived out in demonstration by faith, He was showing us how to live as an immortal. He was showing us how one lives in a perfected faith consciousness as an immortal. This was by way of training.
This means that by teaching the disciples how to “live by faith,” (meaning, His perfected fully orbed faith), He was teaching the disciples how faith lives through an immortal. In other words, He was training them toward their own eventual immortality. This meant that, in order for them to eventually share His immortality, they would need to learn how to live by His kind of faith. What this means is, learning how to live by faith in all its dimensions is preparatory to being able to live as the same kind of immortal Son that He was.
This tells us that learning to live by faith now, which entails the pain of learning how to reconcile the humanly conflictory dimensions of faith for the immediate, the relinquished, and the eternal, is crucial to determining whether and how we will be able to appear with Him on the immortal side of existence! Remember, in learning to exercise faith, we are talking about learning now how to wield “the powers of the world to come.” We are being trained. Thus we are being prepared for immortality by our faith challenges here and now.
You can easily understand the corollary result. To the degree we fail in our faith, to the degree we give up when we should hold on, or hold on when we should relinquish, to the degree we complain over “failed results,” to the degree we focus on the faults and errors of others’ incomplete theologies of faith, to the degree we fail to engage one or another of faith’s dimensions in God’s season of call to us due to offense—to that degree we are declaring ourselves unready and unfit for immortal sonship.
All these things will impact how we appear before Him, whether or of what class of immortal body we will even be able to wear, and of what rank or assignment He will be able to give us in His manifest kingdom. The state of our faith developed by the end of our time in this life determines our effectual status and rank at His appearing. It affects the very substance and quality of our immortality. (This too is based in the justice of God.)
We are called to learn and understand now what will be required of immortals in the nearing eternal kingdom. At the Lord’s appearing, the earth will be in complete ruins! The entire face of the earth will have to be reconstructed. The remnants of failed human technologies will have to be rooted out. (Imagine an earth with no more telephone wires or cell towers or gas stations or nuclear power plants or cars or planes or computers or TVs—no more skyscrapers, and just keep imagining from there!)
When that time comes, it will be the job of the qualified immortals to go throughout the earth to exercise the new powers they have obtained to speak to creation, to the polluted rivers and waterways, to all the rubble of all the destroyed cities and their robotic technologies, to all the radioactively contaminated forests and farmlands—it will be their job to speak to all these things according to those divine powers to bring removal, healing and restoration to the earth. They will have powers to destroy the rubble and to creatively speak new things into existence using new substances and energy forms from the eternal realm never yet seen on earth. They will be given secrets to life in the universe never yet released by God in order to bring forth new foliation, new species, a new pure agriculture, ecosystems and so on.
But where and how will they have been granted these powers? It will be based on how they came to develop and engage and exercise the powers of the world to come now through faith!
This is the connection between our faith now and our millennial call in immortality. The Spirit wants us to know this. It is His will to impart this connection to us. This is so we can rise above where we are “stuck” in our faith. We need to be speaking to our ailing situations like sons in training, the way Jesus did (not begging God to do something about them). We need to learn where to relinquish what we have spoken regardless of the results or lack thereof. We need to anchor all our faith engagements to our internal faith in His indwelling. Everything we believe for from Him or relinquish to Him must be conformed to His superior habitation with us, being our source of His experiential love, demanding our priority time investment, as it did with Jesus.
Selah.
Be blessed, one and all.
Chris Anderson
New Meadow Neck, Rhode Island
First Love Ministry
- a ministry of Anglemar Fellowship
http://www.firstloveministry.org3/24
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