In your faithful love, O Lord, hear my cry;  let me be revived by following your regulations.

(Ps. 119:149 NLT)

Sweeter also than honey are His living words—sweet words dripping from the honeycomb! For they warn us, Your servants, and keep us from following the wicked way, giving a lifetime guarantee: great success to every obedient soul! (Psalm 19:10-11 TPT)

We’ve missed something when we pull away from Joshua 1:8 and Psalm 1:1-3-level prescriptions for the victorious life in the Lord. 

Joshua 1:8 directs: “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall read [and meditate on] it day and night, so that you may be careful to do [everything] in accordance with all that is written in it; for then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will be successful.” (AMP)

And Psalm 1:1-3 augments this same call to be in the Word night and day: “Blessed [fortunate, prosperous, and favored by God] is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked [following their advice and example], nor stand in the path of sinners, nor sit [down to rest] in the seat of scoffers (ridiculers). But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on His law [His precepts and teachings] he [habitually] meditates day and night. And he will be like a tree firmly planted [and fed] by streams of water, which yields its fruit in its season;
Its leaf does not wither; And in whatever he does, he prospers [and comes to maturity].” (AMP)

We haven’t perceived rightly the whole aim of God in bestowing His gift of salvation when we stall out at His requirement that we respond with wholehearted submission to Him and “tremble at His Word.” The Lord states upfront: “I have made everything; that’s how it all came to be. I, the Lord, have spoken. The people I treasure most are the humble— they depend only on me and tremble when I speak.” (Isaiah 66:2 CEV) The Father’s entire buying back of us from the slavery to sin and bondage entails His giving us the choice to be fully yielded bondslaves to God so He can bring us to glory. This glory is what we long for and are designed for but often seek by way of selfish ambition, self-exhaltation and/or the independent exertion of ego or self apart from the Holy Spirit. But self at the center doesn’t taste of the risen Lord’s delicious glory and freedom.

Let’s first face the cost to have the pure walk and not just mere talk. Then let’s examine the deep and rich fulfillment of gaining Christ. And finally, let’s look into the eternal rewards of complete obedience to the Almighty and the losses we will incur if we say “no” and hold back on our Maker. When we do obey the Father, we come to find that He very much does know what He is doing with every one of us. [See Romans 8:28-29 TPT.]

God seeks to restore us to full dependence on Him as our source of life, freeing us from our independent bent that dates back to Adam and the rebellion in Eden. And willful independence is the state of sin from which He is delivering us. 1 Cor. 6:20 tells us when we turn to the Savior, He owns us: “You were bought with a price [you were actually purchased with the precious blood of Jesus and made His own]. So then, honor and glorify God with your body.”  The obedience is to yield our bodies or vessels as “Holy, living sacrifices” to become containers of Another—“bodies wholly filled and flooded with God Himself.” (Romans 12:1-2) (Eph. 3:19 AMPC) Jesus, in Matthew 16:24, said to those who desired to have a nature like His, “You must give up all right to yourself, take up your cross and follow Me.” In other words, disciples must harness their wills to His. 

The Message puts the true walk in contemporary language for us: “Then Jesus went to work on his disciples. ‘Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the driver’s seat; I am. Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your true self. What kind of deal is it to get everything you want but lose yourself? What could you ever trade your soul for?’” (Matt. 16:24-26 MSG)

The interchange with Jesus and Peter when the Lord confronted Peter’s reaction of logic and natural emotion to the Lord’s communication that He was headed for crucifixion reveals a reality we must face: Either we are yielded and aligned with the Lord of the Universe, or we open ourselves to the influence of the carnal and satanic. Jesus exclaimed: “Peter, get out of my way. Satan, get lost. You have no idea how God works.” (Matt. 16:23 MSG) Peter failed in that moment to walk in God and thus, gave expression to satan.

A passage from 2 Timothy further drives home this spiritual operation in the unseen for human vessels: 

“The servant of the Lord must not participate in quarrels, but must be kind to everyone [even-tempered, preserving peace, and he must be], skilled in teaching, patient and tolerant when wronged. He must correct those who are in opposition with courtesy and gentleness in the hope that God may grant that they will repent and be led to the knowledge of the truth [accurately understanding and welcoming it], and that they may come to their senses and escape from the trap of the devil, having been held captive by him to do his will.” (2 Timothy 2:24-26 AMP)

Thus, we see in multiple places in Scripture the cost of gaining Christ as our life is a fully yielded will  to Jesus, the Master. Jesus is to have Kingship over surrendered hearts.

One more command from Jesus Christ to note is that found in Romans 12:2: “Be inwardly transformed by the Holy Spirit through a total reformation of how you think.” (TPT) The directive is to give up fallen, natural thinking i.e. our reasoning and logic, and yes, be changed by night and day learning to think as God thinks or becoming a walking, talking Word. 

With cooperating and coordinating with the Holy Spirit in embracing all that this blog post has laid out, we come forth not as merely nice or good people who go to church but as glorious ones—Jesus’ very look-a-likes. Few go the whole way with this transformation. But why not? The fulfillment of our eternal purpose is at stake.

Jesus put obedience this way: “I have loved you just as the Father has loved me. You must go on living in My love. If you keep My commandments, you will live in My love just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and live in His love. I have told you this so that you can share My joy, and that your happiness may be complete. This is My commandment: that you love each other as I have loved you. There is no greater love than this—that a man should lay down his life for his friends. You are My friends if you do what I tell you to do. I shall not call you servants any longer, for a servant does not share his master’s confidence. No, I call you friends, now, because I have told you everything that I have heard from the Father.” (John 15:9-15 PHILLIPS)

In becoming obedient ones or bondslaves, we recover His Genesis design for men and women and their children as beings infused by God’s selfless love. We as glorious ones come more and more into the glorious freedom of the sons of God that all the earth awaits with groans. (See Romans 8:21-23.) As we walk in union with the Godhead, like-souled relationships result among the forerunners in the Body. Those who walk in the light as He is in the light have “unbroken fellowship” with one another. Their spirits connect because there is light shining from within. [See 1 John 1:7 TPT.] The potential of John 17 emerges. And heavenly realities are our lot as, like Jesus, we function as seers under an open heaven. The Lord releases the powers of the age come to touch our earthly walk. From consistently being seated with Christ in heavenly places with all spiritual blessings already bestowed upon us in Christ, strategies for dominion over the powers of darkness are released. (See Ephesians 1:3 and following.) The ecclesia comes into position and operates in authority in the realms above over various regions. 

There is even more. As we feed on the life of Jesus, the Pattern Son of our design as the new creation people of God, we can flow in rivers of supernatural living water. The church experiences the anointing she was meant to know. And we don’t earn any of this blessedness. Because of the cross, Jesus IS now our righteousness. His perfect life IS our life. All we do is say, “Yes, I will be Your Bride” and “Yes, I will yield to You and express You.” (See Song of Songs 4:6 TPT.) “I will lose my life for Your sake and thereby, find it.”  (Matthew 10:39) The Edenic state of redeemed innocence is our new identity in Christ. Our name is the beloved of the Lord. 

We must not let the enemy seduce and steal from us our “wholehearted and sincere and pure devotion to Christ.” (2 Cor. 11:3 AMP) What’s coming as we gain Christ to the full is us transfigured as the Lord’s work of art. To quote Witness Lee on Ephesians 2:10, “For we are His masterpiece….” (RcV)

Footnote 10-1 The Greek word (for masterpiece), poiema, means something that has been made, a handiwork, or something that has been written or composed as a poem. Not only a poetic writing may be considered a poem, but also any work of art that expresses the Maker’s wisdom and design. We, the church, the masterpiece of God’s work, are a poem expressing God’s infinite wisdom and divine design. The heavens, the earth, and man, created by God, are not God’s masterpiece; but the church, the Body of Christ, the fullness of the One who fills all in all (1:23), the corporate and universal new man (v. 15), is a masterpiece that we may walk in the good works prepared beforehand by God.^[1]

“Let [our hearts] be sound (sincere and wholehearted and blameless) in Your statutes, that [we] may not be put to shame.” (Psalm 119:80 AMPC)

The rewards accrue to the overcomers! Let’s pursue. 

(See the letters to the churches in Rev. 2-3.)

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^[1] Notes by Witness Lee. Note 10-1 Ephesians 2:10. The New Testament Recovery Version. (Anaheim, CA: Living Stream Ministry, 1985, 1991), p. 860.

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