Dear Sisters and Brothers in Jesus the Christ,  

“It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It’s a wonder God didn’t lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah. Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish! We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and the saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing. But don’t take any of this for granted. It was only yesterday that you outsiders to God’s ways had no idea of any of this, didn’t know the first thing about the way God works, hadn’t the faintest idea of Christ.” Ephesians 2:7-11 (MSG)

To say that the things of YHWH (with inserted vowels YAHWEH transliterated JEHOVAH commonly interpreted the LORD) supersede time pertains to the fact that God isn’t bound by time. To “take by faith” whatsoever has been gifted to us by the finished work of the Holy Seed of God – YESHUA/JESUS, simply requires unwavering or confidant belief in the grace (unmerited favor) and compassionate love of the LORD God. For the ever-flowing blood of Jesus cried and still cries: “MERCY!” Therefore, the outpouring of the LORD God by the redemptive work of Christ Jesus has absolutely nothing to do with our own good works. Rather, it has absolutely everything to do with the plan of the LORD God to re-align us with Him by the Lord Jesus’ perfect obedience to the will of His Father on behalf of all humankind. Now, seated at the right hand of YHWH – Creator of the universe, is a fully grown man – YESHUA/JESUS – The Mediator. “⁵For there [is only] one God, and [only] one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus,  ⁶ Who gave Himself as a ransom for all [people, a fact that was] attested to at the right and proper time” 1 Timothy 2:5-6 (AMP). Jesus paid it all by faith, fulfilling His God-appointed assignment as “the way, the truth, and the life” John 16:6 (NIV).  

Before the redemptive work of Christ Jesus, sin prevented us from being in the presence of the LORD God because sin can’t exist in the presence of holiness. Now, after the redemptive work of Christ Jesus, we have full access to God the Father. In fact, John 6:44 & 14:6, 1 Corinthians 1:9, and Colossians 1:13 relays that God the Father draws and attracts us to His only begotten Son, Who exemplified faith as He walked or operated in perfect obedience to God’s will on our behalf. The faith of the Lord Jesus is particularly discernible via His Prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane (John 17). That “being in agony He prayed more earnestly: and His sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:44) wasn’t about the impending brutality and physical death that He would experience. Rather it was about the imminent separation from the Father He’d never been separated from; the Lord Jesus had to have faith that God the Father would indeed raise Him up. Jesus is Lord because He played a major role on behalf of us; the Lord Jesus did the hard part in the sacrifice of His sin-less lifeblood on behalf of all mankind by faith.  

Now, through His mighty power within, we manifest the (always good) things the LORD God has already bestowed to us by faith. Though we were gifted “the measure of faith” (Romans 12:3), we are responsible for its further development. That “faith comes by hearing and hearing through the Word of God” (Romans 10:17) points us toward revelation of the information therein through the Teaching of the Holy Spirit. For though the spirit is re-created or regenerated or reborn instantaneously upon believing and confessing the Lord Jesus (John 3:1-7; Romans 10:9-10), the soul (i.e., intellect, will, emotions) requires transformation by the ongoing renewing of the mind (Romans 12:2; Titus 3:5). Moreover, study of God’s Word enables us to keep this irrevocable covenant, ratified by the blood of Jesus, at the forefront which helps to strengthen faith. As succinctly stated by Bill Winston, “. . . revelation elevates above the temporal and into the eternal; revelation is knowledge given by God which causes us to ‘see’”. By faith we give voice to God’s Word. The Lord Jesus led by example, only doing, and saying as He heard of the Father (John 5:19 & 8:26b,28,38 & 12:49-50 & 14:10,24b). By faith we say what God says regardless of what it looks like in the natural realm.

Speak the promise . . . Harriet