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Tested Under Glory

Part II

Embracing the Unembraceable God

[ Part I ] [ Part II ] [ Part III ]

We last wrote concerning the hidden testing process that occurs beneath the glory Presence of the Lord. It is, as I said, a testing of which we are largely unaware, being masked by the glory itself. The point of testing we highlighted concerns our ability to overcome offense in our relationship with the Lord, not allowing the glory of the Lord's Presence to submerge unresolved points of offense we have experienced in our journey with Him.




My heart is receiving more that the Lord wishes to communicate concerning this aspect of relationship with Him that we need to understand in order to fulfil His highest for us and enter our deepest possible relationship with Him. If our last word was in any way capable of speaking to your heart, this word hopefully will prove helpful to you as well.




An age-long tension has existed in the church over the positive and negative aspects of relationship with God. To this day that tension remains unresolved and (I am personally persuaded) it will remain unresolved up to the point that we actually transition to life beyond the veil. Nevertheless, how we handle this tension now holds, I believe, the ultimate key to how we end up in God. Specifically, our response to this tension will prove to have everything to do with how and when we actually make that transition to immortality.




I believe it's clear to most of us who inhabit the prophetic-intercessory-worship movements that

• God is longing to bring us into the fullness of His embrace,
• That, as His offspring, we each share a similar reciprocal yearning for Him deep within,
• and that where we have tasted of His embracing glory, we have seen that He is good—that there is none other more desirable.




But between His yearning for us and ours for Him is a gap that has to be spanned. That gap is the revelation of where we (with our small deposit of His radiance) fall short of all that His radiance is. In that gap of distance from Him, we have exposed to us where we are not like Him nor He like us. And wherever He appears to us as yet not like us, there we find Him naturally unembraceable.




Unembraceability: the Gap Between the Known and Unknown Love of God




This place of unembraceability is no small matter! Bringing tension into our otherwise positive desire for God, it is a place that unavoidably belongs to the cycle of moving "from glory to glory." It stands in the road between us and our next realm of intimacy with Him. It is the place where our offenses in God are born, and where, like Moses and many others, fulfilments of destiny are won or lost based on our response to those offenses.




The reason for this place of unembraceability is that we cannot discover and embrace the Lord for His desirability until we have first been made like Him, and we cannot be made like Him until we first say "yes" to that next something in Him that in its first revelation to us appears unembraceable.




The place of unembraceability (also known as the cross) is that place of next beckoning where God is exposed as so far unlike us that to embrace Him, we have to do so out of something other than fulfilling desire. We have to embrace Him from a place of darkness, a place of aversion or unpleasantry, a place of blind faith and surrendered commitment rooted in the inability to understand Him or to feel His desirability.




Proving and Overcoming




It's here—in this very place of God's unembraceability—that our hearts are continually proven for their love—a place where careless assumptions about the state of our relationship based in earlier levels of intimacy prove blindingly dangerous (represented by Gideon's army) and where unresolved offenses hinder love and thus derail destiny (as seen in Moses).




The issue of proving our hearts is based in the fact that at every level of growth, our love must necessarily start in a place of unrewarded conviction-based obedience before it discovers its satisfying rewarded place of rapture and intimacy (see John 14:21,23). This is why in our relationship with Him, Jesus says He must perpetually "search our hearts". (And, as we saw yesterday, no level of presently surrounding or increasing glory on the earth, no matter how great, alters or abolishes this need for proving as long as we remain mortal.)




This brings us to the meaning of the word "overcomer". When the New Testament speaks of overcoming, its primary meaning is not the overcoming of bad practices in the flesh or of demonic powers, though these are of course definitely included. The larger overarching meaning of New Testament "overcoming" is really the overcoming of offenses in God that always appear at the edge of His next beckoning to a further unrevealed level of intimacy.




Overcoming is about entering into God by committed faith beyond the realm of our present pleasurable feelings for Him. It is because this is the only way love with God develops that the New Testament concept of overcoming and qualifying through obedience is so critical.




Love and Immortality: The Same Track




... Which brings me finally one last time to the issue of immortality—what it means to be part of that heavenly manchild of Revelation 12 and of the Lord's Bride, and what it is (my heart is persuaded) the Lord is really trying to communicate to us all under the developing glory cloud as part of the Rev 12 woman of these last days. It is this:




Our progress in love and our progress toward immortality are inseparable and function together as one goal to be obtained. Immortality is but the final clothing of a heart that has become so like our Lord's through the overcoming cycles of love that we actually obtain a body "like to His glorious body" that is finally able to be joined to Him in the union of a completed intimacy. This is what being The Bride is all about.




In other words, both brideship and immortality are a single woven product of proven love that has come to its final resting place of intimacy in the Divine One. Neither can be based on careless assumptions about our relationship with God rooted in a superficial knowledge of scriptures pertaining to the end times or in present mortal experiences under the glory cloud. Both are subject to derailment if we fail the tests of love through hidden unresolved offenses in God. And finally, it is here only in both that Rev 12 declares, "Now are the kingdoms of this world become (prisoners of) the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ"




-all preliminary earthly glory and revival notwithstanding!




**********




Friends, whoever you may be, God earnestly desires us to come into a new perception concerning what is happening to us as His glory increases—to know where we are truly headed, and how we must respond to our Lord in all things if we want to safely arrive there.




May this writing help lift your eyes to an unmovable horizon and be an encouragement to every faithful pilgrim whose heart is following hard after Him (Ps 63:8).





Chris Anderson
Riverside, RI

First Love Ministry
- a ministry of Anglemar Fellowship
http://www.firstloveministry.org

02/01



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