Greetings!
Does the Life of Christ actually flow through us?
“Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13–14).
All that I inherited from the first Adam
— the Adam life with Adam’s spiritual DNA — has been crucified with Christ. It is left behind.
Nevertheless, I live. Yet not I, but Christ in me. The life that is in me now is Jesus Christ Himself (Galatians 2:20). He is life and He is in me.
In John 15:5, Jesus uses the earthly visual of vine and branch to illustrate this spiritual truth. I am cut off from the not life and grafted into the life. “I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.”
“If you remain,” He says.
In other words, “If the graft takes.” He is using language that implies a branch that has been grafted into the vine. This means that the branch used to be part of a different vine. It started out attached to another source. I have been cut off from my old life and grafted into my new life. I used to be attached to the not-life vine, the Adam vine; now I am attached to the life vine. I have been transfused with the life of the living present Jesus and the flow of His life is overwhelming and pushing out the death that used to flow.
When the graft takes, the life in the vine becomes the life that flows through the branch. The branch has no other life except the vine’s life.
Whatever flows through the vine
, now flows through the branch. The life in the vine and the life in the branch are one and the same. The vine’s life circulates through the branch like blood circulates through my body.
I know it seems like we still have Adam life (death) active and operational. After all, that’s what constitutes flesh and keeps it on life support. But I think it works like this: we still have leftover residual death circulating, but little by little it is being flushed out. As we learn to live in an altar’d state, the death sloughs away and is replaced by new, fresh life.
When, instead, I let my leftover Adam life
have its way and run the show, it hangs on and stays on its life support and I miss out on what the Spirit of the living present Jesus had available in that moment.
Life at Work
Let’s imagine Mary, and base her on real experience. She hasn’t learned that she wasn’t designed to be self-consumed. She hasn’t realized that she is breaking down little by little under the stress of being a self-worshipper instead of a God worshipper. Mary is a believer, and has living Jesus in residence. She truly loves Him and spends her days reading Scripture and praying and praising. In fact, she will tell you how early she got up to pray, and gush about her great love for the Father. All true. All genuine. Mary thinks of herself as extremely spiritual. But, Mary is easily and often offended.
She deciphers every word
, expecting to see affront. She reads insult into many innocuous interactions, and is always geared up to feel mistreated or dismissed. She feels martyred and is sure that she loses friends and finds herself lonely because she is so spiritual and others are so not.
Let’s step back and look at the chaos Mary has created around her. She has driven away relationship after relationship. Those who have maintained relationship with her — her husband and children and family — all have to carefully navigate the field of land mines that is Mary’s sensitivity to offense. If her husband is troubled, he has to add to that burden by worrying about how to tell Mary without setting off an incident.
She can’t be his comfort.
Instead, she adds burden to every difficulty. Do you see where this is going? Flesh gives birth to flesh.
Now let’s give Mary a wake-up call. Maybe nothing dramatic, but rather a sudden insight. The present Jesus speaks tenderly to her about how much time she spends nursing wounded feelings, and she sees that it is all out of proportion in her life. He begins to whisper to her, “You don’t have to carry around that dead weight. You could become a strengthener of others instead of sapping life from them. I am calling you to a crucifixion of that flesh, because I want to give you a resurrection.”
So, what does Mary do?
How does she enter into the crucifixion? The
next time she feels offended, instead of embracing it and nursing it, she says, “I feel like Sue meant to insult me and belittle me. That feels like the absolute truth to me and I will never be able to talk myself out of it. But I recognize that as my very strong flesh response. Even if Sue did mean to offend me, I don’t have to take offense. I choose to live in an altar’d state. I surrender that feeling to crucifixion. It might stay around in my emotions and try to get my attention, but I will not act as if it is true. I will not line myself up with it. I will dismiss it and turn my concern from myself to Sue. I will choose not to take her words at face value and not look for hidden agendas. I will choose to assume that if she said something I found offensive, she likely did not mean it so. I will choose to turn my attention to God’s agenda in this moment rather than my own. I will choose to let perceived slights (even if they are real) roll off me instead of feeding my flesh by mentally rehearsing them and dissecting them. I will choose crucifixion. Right now, I will deliberately focus on the flow of Christ’s life
in me. I will lean in to Him. I will let Jesus be Jesus in me.”
Choose Life
When we act from flesh, then we produce dead works. We bear fruit for death. Dead fruit makes a great home for bacteria and fungi. It attracts organisms that feed on death. It releases its aroma. Death spreads.
Live your life in moments
. You can choose in each moment: life or death. Let life flow or let death reign.
“This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob”
(Deuteronomy 30:19–20).
The more we just let life flow, the more the last vestiges of death get swept
away and slough off. Turn your eyes to Jesus and be present to the Presence.
Let your mind, which is trained to follow your flesh, start following where
Jesus leads your thoughts.
Jennifer Kennedy Dean
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Jennifer Kennedy Dean 2019
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