Fear No Fear

(All scripture from Lexham English Bible, Copyright 2012 Logos Bible Software)

“for I will give you a mouth and wisdom that all your opponents will not be able to resist or contradict.“

Luke 21:15

We cannot sin by accident. We have to choose to sin. We have to choose to be selfish. We have to choose not to trust in Jesus. We have to choose to forget who we are in Jesus. We have to reject our calling to be holy in our living. We have to do it on purpose. “Everyone who is fathered by God does not practice sin, because his seed resides in him, and he is not able to sin, because he has been fathered by God” (1 John 3:9). When Adam was our father, we had a sin nature because we were descended from a man who chose rebellion against Adonai. When we believed in Jesus, the last Adam, we were able by Grace through our trust in Jesus to gain a NEW Father. A HOLY Father. THE Father. When we did that, we gained a new nature (the old having died) and got renewed into Jesus’ righteousness (2 Corinthians 5:21). Since we have to choose to sin, that means that when we do sin, WE OURSELVES are our own worst adversary.

But we have a promise. We have a promise from Adonai that we will be given wisdom and we will be given the words that we need so that all of our adversaries (including ourselves) will not be able to resist or contradict what Adonai is saying in and through us. That means that if we will make the effort to first listen to Ruach HaKodesh, then confirm with the Word, and then to obey, we will NEVER sin. That is a WONDERFUL promise and one that we should ALL be walking toward. This is the personal race that we run. Every hurdle along the way something that we have been empowered to clear through the training in righteousness that we receive from Ruach HaKodesh and through the Word. So nothing can defeat us, nothing can escape us, and the promise will not fail – if we will give Him place in our lives. If we will submit to Him. It isn’t a burden. We aren’t missing out. We are gaining something that nothing else in this life will give: certainty that we are connected to Jesus.

The Father is our Source. He is our provider. He may use our employers, our friends and relatives, or even our governments. He could use perfect strangers. He could use un-asked-for opportunities. He could use just about anything, and He does, in order to provide for our needs and assist us in our godly wants (wants that don’t interfere with our walk with Him or indulge things incompatible with His moral character). To receive from that source we need to trust in Jesus because it is Jesus who made the covenant, not us. We don’t get our own new covenant, rather we enter into HIS covenant with the Father through trust in Him. It’s one of the reasons that trust pleases Him (Hebrews 11:6). Trust keeps us connected to Him and able to receive what He gives. We maintain our connection to Jesus through our trust in Him (John 15:5).

This connection is not visible. It is not tangible. Trust is neither of those things no matter who or what we put our trust in. There is always an element of BELIEF that the thing trusted in will in fact prove trustworthy. It is no different with Adonai. We DO have an advantage, however. We have been given Ruach HaKodesh to live inside of us (1 Corinthians 3:16) so that we can have a voice telling us the truth – He IS the Ruach of Truth, after all. We all have broken thinking leftover from when we had a sinful nature. We trained our bodies on a demand to fulfill desire right from birth – babies are SO SELFISH, aren’t they? We continued in that training, adding the training of our thinking, and the world/world systems fed right into that. Because the world is about the flesh – about that which is SEEN. When we believe and choose to trust in Jesus we get a new nature and our spirits are sealed by Ruach HaKodesh (Ephesians 1:13). But we still have a physical body that was trained in broken thinking. Our muscle memory (present in our physical, mental, and emotional selves) will default to those broken patterns we trained ourselves in if there is nothing to replace them. Even then, we have to RETRAIN ourselves to accept the new patterns (emotional, mental, and physical patterns). It won’t happen automatically. It won’t happen just because we are putting the bible in front of us. It takes effort, it takes listening to Ruach HaKodesh, it takes study, and it takes application. All the things we spent our lives doing before Jesus was our Lord. Jesus ACCOMPLISHED everything, but He gave us the tools forged through that accomplishing and tells us to use them. He does not use them on our behalf – that’s dictatorship, not lordship.

Since WE need to make the choice to engage the tools that Jesus forged for us and on our behalf, it is required that we learn about them. Enter Ruach HaKodesh our teacher, guide, partner, correcter, and truth teller. He doesn’t sugar coat things. He doesn’t let us off the hook. He speaks from righteousness and to righteousness because that is the standard. Perfection. We get ours in Jesus. Jesus got His by doing it. We can never do what He did, but we get to enter into His work by believing He did it, accepting that we access it in and through Him, and then trusting Him the entire way through the process of changing (2 Corinthians 3:18). This is a ministry of Ruach HaKodesh. We’ve talked about it before. He calls us to remember who we are in Jesus. He convicts us when we don’t trust in Jesus by reminding us that we can trust in Jesus in every single area of our lives. He teaches us about the love Jesus has for us and He poured it into our hearts so that we could spend our lives experiencing it as well as learning about it and its transformational power. In Ruach HaKodesh’s ministry there is a certainty about the certainty that we can walk in in Jesus.

It’s hard to make a leap when we don’t trust our equipment. We don’t have to know where we are exactly going to land, but we need to know that our equipment won’t fail us. That we will survive the leap. Ruach HaKodesh is our manual. Our teacher of certainty. Our five-point safety review. By interacting with Him, we learn more about interacting with Jesus, and through Jesus we learn more about interacting with the Father, which is made possible through Jesus, which is pointed out by Ruach HaKodesh. There is a flow to it. And the sureness of that flow is what gives us the confidence and certainty that is the foundation of everything we do in Jesus. It is the basis for our walk. The light on the pavement which is the Word (Psalm 119:105). Whenever there is anything about our lives in the Kingdom that we aren’t quite comfortable in, we need to sit down with Ruach HaKodesh and listen to His teaching. He is as certain as certainty is. And He’ll gladly impart that wisdom of certainty to whoever asks and seeks it wholly (James 1:5). It’s what He does!

Daily Affirmation of the Goodness of Elohim: Luke 1:4

“so that you may know the certainty concerning the things about which you were taught.” Jesus WANTS us certain about what we get taught. Jesus WANTS us to investigate it and take it to heart. He wants us to know that we know that we know. Adonai isn’t about uncertainty. You can’t trust uncertainty. You can only really trust a sure thing. Everything else is total chance. Certainty means you KNOW. We don’t even need the details. The whens and hows. They aren’t important. They could even change and we wouldn’t care. What we KNOW is the foundation of success. Jesus IS successful. Jesus ALREADY won. Jesus ALREADY got us the victory. Jesus ALREADY released healing. Jesus ALREADY empowered us and raised us to the heavenly places and filled us with all blessings. Jesus ALREADY finished it. Our future is His past. It is a sure thing. And we know it because He shows it to us. Throughout the Word we get picture after picture after picture. Prophesy after prophesy. So that what we can examine matches with what He speaks to our hearts. So that we can be certain. So that we can KNOW. So that we can live the certainty that knowing creates. He ALREADY did it so that we can ALREADY walk in it. No waiting, victory now, present-tense eternity, relationship with the Father right now today and every day that follows. What a GOOD God!

Your Daily Confession of Elohim’s Goodness:

I taste and see that Yahweh is good; I am blessed because I take refuge in Him.

Psalm 34:8