He Did It All For You (6 page)

You see, the Apostle Paul could write to the church at Corinth with a clear conscience, and complete freedom of spirit saying, “We have wronged no man…we have defrauded no man.” Paul realized the power of the gospel to raise him up when he was dead in trespasses and sins. He accepted the fact that he was a new creation in Christ Jesus—that his old spirit was dead and gone—that his past sins were forgiven and forgotten. Paul was born of God, and the power and force of righteousness was at work in his life.

Conformity With God

We have discussed the fact that Jesus was aware of His rights—His righteousness—with God. He relied on it completely during His earthly ministry and ministered freely. He did what the Father told Him to do. This is the key to the mystery: The Father was in Jesus and Jesus was in the Father—
they are One.
Jesus’ will conformed completely to the will of God. They walked together and worked together in total harmony. This is how believers are to live with God—not His will
de
forming ours nor our will bucking against His, but both wills conformed to each other.

Conformity with God is a much higher form of life than just merely being in submission to Him. When you conform to God’s will and do His work, you will reach a point where you will lean entirely on your right-standing with Him. Then you, like Jesus, will not hesitate to lay hands on the sick and expect God to heal them. You will freely exercise your rights in the kingdom of God as His child and as a joint heir with Jesus.

God sees you through the blood of the Lamb—the same as He sees Jesus. This is almost more than the human mind can conceive, but it’s true! I will prove it to you from the prayers of Jesus Himself. Jesus knew how to pray, and if anyone on earth could get his prayers answered, Jesus could. Therefore, it would be to our advantage to examine some of the things He prayed.

In John 17:20-21, Jesus is praying to God at a vital time in His earthly ministry. It is just moments before Calvary, and He says, “Neither pray I for these alone [His disciples], but for them also which shall believe on me through their word.…” This includes you and me because each of us received Jesus, either directly or indirectly, through the words of one or more of these men.

So Jesus, referring to us, prays, “That they all may be one;
as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee.”
This is the example we are to follow in being one with each other, in conforming to one another and in conforming to Jesus. We are to be one with the Father as Jesus was one with Him. First Corinthians 6:17 says, “But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit.” Another translation says, “He who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him”
(New King James Version)
.

The Holy Spirit, the life force of God, lives in the heart of a believer. We get our life from Him. As Jesus taught in John 15:5, He is the vine and we are the branches. Praise the Lord!

When you begin to operate in these things, acting on the righteousness that Jesus has given you, you will then realize that many of the differences that have separated the Body of Christ for years are actually foolish and unimportant. We have bickered and fought with one another over the most ridiculous issues.

Jesus goes on in John 17:23 and prays to the Father to show them “…that You have loved them [even] as You have loved Me”
(The Amplified Bible)
. God loves you
as much
as He loves Jesus! He sees you as equal with Jesus—there is no difference in His eyes. Begin to see yourself as God sees you and take advantage of His free gift of righteousness. Your right-standing with Him was bought with a high price…don’t take it lightly. The Father’s heart was hungry for a family, and Jesus freely gave Himself for this desire. What a love act!

The Gift of Righteousness

For if by one man’s offence death reigned by one; much more they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of right-eousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ…. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous (Romans 5:17, 19).

Here again, we have heard it preached, “There is none righteous, no, not one.…” This scripture is found in Romans 3, but you must read the whole book. In the first three chapters of Romans, the Apostle Paul, by the Holy Ghost, writes a serious indictment against man in his natural state—that there is none righteous—which is absolute truth!

But as we have previously discussed, Paul explains that our righteousness does not come through the Law or through our conduct. It comes only through faith in Jesus Christ and is “unto all and upon all them that believe.”

We have read in Romans 5:17 that because of one man’s offense—Adam’s treason—death reigned in the world. Satan became the lord over mankind and everything man did was in response to fear—of death, of accident, of failure.

Do you know of anyone who has lived two or three hundred years because there wasn’t enough death to go around? Of course not! There is an abundance of death in the world, but this scripture goes on to say, “
Much more
they which receive
abundance of grace
and of the
gift of righteousness
shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ.” Praise God!

Jesus bought the free gift of righteousness, which was
much more
alive,
much more
real, and
much more
abundant than death. The fear of death is dispelled by life in Jesus Christ. As the Apostle Paul said, “O death, where is thy sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55). The force of righteousness completely overcomes the power of sin and death like a bonfire overcomes a drop of water. We have more power over our lives as the righteousness of God in Jesus Christ than Satan had over us while we were in sin.

Romans 5:17,
The Amplified Bible
says, “Much more surely will those who receive [God’s] overflowing grace (unmerited favor) and the free gift of righteousness…
reign as kings in life
through the one Man Jesus Christ (The Messiah, the Anointed One).” When you make Jesus the Lord of your life, you receive the abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness to enable you to reign in life as a king! You will be in a position to reign over your life and the circumstances surrounding you the same way a king reigns over his kingdom.

The believer must learn to lean and depend on his free gift of righteousness. This is one of the first things I found out from the Word of God. Satan told me I didn’t have any right to be healed. He said I didn’t have any right to receive the infilling of the Holy Spirit and that I certainly didn’t have the right to minister to the needs of other people. Well, if I happened to feel a little sinful at the time, then I would agree with him.

Actually, I didn’t realize Satan was telling me all those things. I thought they were my own ideas. Then I saw in the Word that I had a right to healing, the Baptism in the Holy Spirit and to minister to the needs of others simply because Jesus gave me the right. I saw that I had been made the righteousness of God.

Do you realize what “being made the righteousness of God” really means? You have to think about it to see the full reality there. The child, or the heir, of a king has the same rights as the king himself because he is part of the king. He is born of the king and, consequently, has the same legal privileges. As the Apostle Paul wrote, even though the heir may be just a child and is still being tutored, he is nevertheless king of the land and has the authority to rule.

When you were born again, the Bible says you became bone of His bone. You have rights and privileges because you have been born of the Spirit of God. God has been reproduced on the inside of you! These rights are yours because Jesus of Nazareth paid the price for the sin problem and caused you to be reborn.

Adam was born of God. If you read Genesis, you will see that God created his body and then breathed into it the breath of life (Genesis 2:7). It was completely lifeless until God gave it life by breathing into it. Adam’s life came from the inside of God, and essentially the same thing occurs in the new birth. You were dead in sins and trespasses until God re-created your spirit and gave you His life. When you accepted the sacrifice of Jesus, the Spirit of God hovered over your body and a new spirit-life that had never existed before was birthed inside you.

When you discover who you are in Jesus, your entire existence—your health, your financial life, your social life—will take on new meaning. The storms of life will be stopped as you exert pressure on them with the Word of God and the power of the Holy Spirit dwelling within you. You are to reign as a king under your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ of Nazareth! Hallelujah!

God sees you this way. He expects you to take your rightful place and live this kind of life above the beggarly elements of the world. As a believer, He has given you the power and strength of the Holy Spirit as your comforter and Jesus Christ as your Lord and high priest to change nations and governments around the world. Begin to take the New Testament seriously. Begin to believe it and put your total trust and confidence in it. Lean hard on the righteousness that God has freely given you. You will then realize that all things are possible to you as a believer. You will say, “Without Him I can do nothing, but thank God, I have Him, and I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13). Your testimony will then be one of power and strength as your life is molded by the Holy Spirit.

As a born-again child of God, you are to be a superman in the eyes of the world, holding forth the word of life! When you cross the rough spots, you won’t knuckle under—you’ll stand tall and triumph over them. You will walk hand in hand with Jesus through the storms of life and come out victoriously!

God does not put these storms and rough spots before you—He takes you through them and delivers you from them. Satan throws these things at you to stop you from acting on the Word and exercising your righteousness in Jesus Christ. He knows these are dangerous spiritual weapons in the hands of a believer, so he is constantly trying to stop their effectiveness.

Become Righteousness-Minded

Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:34, “Awake to righteousness, and sin not.”
Awake
to
righteousness
. Become aware that you have been made the righteousness of God in Jesus Christ, that you have been placed in right-standing with Him through the sacrifice of Jesus at Calvary. When you do, it will stop the sin in your life. As long as Satan can convince you that you don’t have any right to the things of God, he can keep you under his thumb and sin will control your life. But when you awake to righteousness, you will realize that Satan is a defeated foe and the struggle is over.

Awake to righteousness…
become righteousness-minded! You have been thoroughly equipped to handle every situation that comes your way. You are to reign in life as a king by Jesus Christ, living in conformity with the Father. Almighty God, creator of the universe, chose to come down on your level in the form of Jesus Christ, to dwell in your heart by the Holy Spirit, and to give you His righteousness, His ability, and His strength…“greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world” (1 John 4:4). Praise God!

Ephesians 3:20 says He is “able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think,
according to the power that worketh in us.
”

When I fully understood the significance of this scripture, I began to have some confidence in the ministry of the Holy Spirit in my life. In fact, the Lord spoke to my heart one day and said,
How much confidence are you placing in the God within you?
At that time, I had no confidence in Him whatsoever! I was praying, and
hoping
God would do something, obviously with no results. Then I grasped the reality of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit of God.

Jesus said that when the Spirit of Truth came, He would reveal the things of God to us (John 16:13-15). God, through the Holy Spirit, began to reveal to my heart the deep truths of the new birth, of the righteousness of God in Jesus Christ. He revealed the power of the Holy Spirit—God’s muscle, God’s mind, God’s everything—and showed me how this part of the Godhead was living inside every born-again, Spirit-filled believer! These truths then became deeply rooted in my spirit, and I began to become righteousness-minded.

How do you become righteousness-minded? Romans 8:5 says, “For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh.” We have occupied ourselves much of the time with fleshly things. Proverbs 4:20 instructs us to attend to the Word of God. In the past we have not done this. We have thought
sickness
instead of
healing…weakness
instead of
strength…trouble
instead of
victory…poverty
instead of
prosperity…sin
instead of
righteousness.
We have attended to these other things, almost completely ignoring the power of the Word of God to deliver us from the flesh.

Hebrews 5:13 tells us, “For every one that useth milk is unskilful in the
word of righteousness:
for he is a babe.” He doesn’t know how to use the Bible—how to believe it or how to fight Satan with it. Verse 14 says, “But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.”

Only by feeding on the Word will we grow and be able to overcome the things of the flesh and function in line with God. I can speak from experience here because I was overweight and hooked on cigarettes. For several years, I fought against my body with little success. But when I grew in the Word of God and began to walk in the spirit, I no longer fulfilled the lusts of the flesh. When I learned that I could control my physical body, my weight came down to normal and the smoking habit was broken!

Success in Righteousness

A person who thinks
righteousness
instead of
sin
is valuable to God, to himself, and to the people around him. He will always be there when you need him. This is not true of the sin-minded, defeat-minded Christian. There is a very deceitful area here that most people have fallen into at some time in their lives without realizing it. I have heard this many times and have been guilty of saying it myself: “Well, we’re praying about this situation, and if the doors are open, then it’s God’s will for us to go. But if they’re not, then it must not be God’s will.”