You must be born again to enter.
My hope today is to shine a light on the nature of God. The truth that ‘Death is Glory’ is portrayed throughtout the scriptures and I want to draw it out and put it in focus. I believe it is paramount to understand this truth as we move forward into what God has for us as the corporate Body of Christ.
Let’s start with Abraham.
Abraham is a picture of our faith. He helps us understand what faith looks like and the lessons we learn from reading about his life, tend to be be about how to have faith. An invisible God called Abraham to leave all that he had known to follow Him into the unknown. This is a picture of literally everyone’s faith. We must leave all that we’ve known in order to follow God into the establishing of the promises. When God calls us, we dont know exactly what to expect. We find ourselves in Abraham’s story and are already seeing this principle of ‘Death is Glory’.
It is a ‘death’ to leave all that you know. This death that Abraham partakes in of his old life, initiates a new adventure of faith. You could call it a new life. There must be a death of the old, to initiate the new. There must be death to see glory.
You must be born again to enter the Kingdom of God.
To be born again, we must answer the call to leave our old lives and all that we’ve known, in order to follow God into the mysterious new life He promises us. This new life is in the Kingdom of God, where He is the ruler and His reality takes hold of you. This is where the abundant life that Jesus promised is! It is a state of being, where the Kingdom reality has full authority to inform your experience on Earth. The Bible says that we participate in the Divine nature of God through believing the precious promises of God. We die to our controlling nature and learn to submit to the nature of Christ which leads to the Life God wants for you.
Let’s look at Jesus!
Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life that leads to oneness with the Father. It would be smart to ask ourselves, “if Jesus is ‘the way’, what does that mean?” When I boil down Jesus’ life into a ‘WAY’ what I see is that He laid down His life for the good of all mankind. He exemplidfied Love. Self-sacrificing, unconditional Love.
Jesus was another picture of ‘Death is Glory’. He submitted to the Father so fully that He followed Him all the way to the cross and literally died for our sins. Jesus was the PERFECT picture of this WAY. This ‘death to self’, for the good of others IS THE WAY of Truth that leads to Life.
Let’s take scripture.
If you lose your life, you will find it.
I must become less, so He can become more.
If you have died with Christ, then you will be raised with Christ.
To the degree that we partake in the sufferings of Christ, we see will understand His Resurrection Power.
You must be born again to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
You must receive the Kingdom as a child. A child knows nothing, but learns everything from it’s parents. In the same way, we receive His Kingdom by letting go of everything we THINK we know, and allow the Lord to teach us everything anew. This ‘letting go of everything’ is the death that is required in Biblical faith.
Let’s take this Biblical principle a little further. I would propose that EVERY promise we carry, every thing that we hope to receive from Heaven MUST first include a death.
Going back to Abraham, the carrier of the promise. He was promised that nations would come from him through his only son, Isaac. When God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, He was purifying Abrahams heart. What could threaten to become an idol easier than something you have been promised from Heaven? We must have no other gods before Him, and in order to keep Abraham’s heart in fellowship with the Father, there had to be this test. This test was a death to the promise. Abraham had to die to the hope of the promise and place that hope securely onto the Father, who was able to keep His promise.
Will we follow God to the crossroads?
Will we choose to trust Him and face the death that is required?
Will we see the glory of God?
Its up to you, but my heart right now is encourage you to jump! GO, and dont look back! It will be humbling to forget all you know. It will be scary to leave everything you have built up for yourself this far in life. But the Kingdom of God is like a treasure buried in a field, once you find it you go and sell everything you have to buy that field.
He is SO SO SOOOO worth it and pray to see you on this Way!
JIK