Thou Art Worthy...(Part 1)

Thou Art Worthy (Part 1)

Revelation 4:11 states “You are worthy, O Lord, To receive glory and honor and power, For You created all things, And by Your will they exist and were created.”

 God you are worthy to receive glory because You are not asking or expecting too much from us to glorify You in character and essence of life. We shall honor God's memory and as an act of faith and have confidence in His teachings. His power gives us credibility!  In other words, as a part of His creation, you and I as men, were created to please God. Created to act in faith on the complete foolproof plan of God or Blueprint pleases God. Even Christ, but  He just happened to be God.  Even Christ pleased not Himself, because man was created to please God (Romans 15:3).  In this there is freedom. You are not indebted to anyone.  You are under no obligation whatsoever to anyone, anywhere, at any time.  That would make it possible for us at all times to exclusively do that which pleases our Father, which is true freedom.  Are you free?

Without Faith it is impossible to please God.  Faith is never ever under any circumstances demonstrated by what you are doing for Jesus.  Faith is a disposition or an attitude that invokes the activity of a second party.  Faith, when you exercise it, invokes the activity of someone else.  It brings somebody, something into action on your behalf.  Your faith becomes effectual (Philemon 6) by allowing the object of it to discharge its office, proving it's integrity.

In regards to faith two principles must be understood.  First, man was created to please God, and second without faith it is impossible to please Him, because that is how God engineered us.  This is a sure Divine Logic that there is a hidden factor present in the Divine Logic of God absent any human understanding or reasoning, which alone is the mountain of difference between what is Divinely possible and otherwise cannot be humanly unreasonable,

 You and I are so engineered with a body, soul, and spirit, -- mind, emotion, and will that God alone could (in us) be the origin of His own image.  He's the only one that could do it.  He, God teaching the mind. He God controlling the emotions.  He, God governing the behavior; so that you behave in such a way that God can be seen.  He alone must be the origin of the act and the only person to be congratulated.  The Lord Jesus deliberately forwent the exercise of those attributes of Deity that would have been incompatible with his humanity.  I don't mean by this that at any moment the Lord Jesus repudiated His identity with the Father and the Holy Spirit as God, for God He was, God He is and God He will always be.  

It's simply that in order to accomplish that redemptive transaction that allows us now as redeemed sinners, forgiven though guilty, acquitted, though born at enmity with our maker, allows us to become the recipients again of that life for which man was made and that life which was forfeited that He might accomplish that reconciliation to God through His death that we might thereby in response to our faith be saved by His life.  He has to set aside, forego the exercise of those attributes of Deity that would have been incompatible with that humanity in which as the Last Adam, the Second Man, the Lord from Heaven, He fulfilled that redemptive and regenerative purpose.  God alone has immortality.  He is not subject to any form of death, but the Lord Jesus died. As God, He never could, so He had, though God, to assume our humanity, so that he could suffer as man what he never could as God.  I Timothy 6:16 says God is invisible. No man has seen him or can see Him at any time.  So if the Lord Jesus had come not only to be God, but to behave as God, nobody would have seen Him, but deliberately for your sake and mine, He assumed that humanity that God engineered for a creature called man in which in that physical, visible, audible expression of an invisible self intimately identified and in spiritual union with an invisible God, and of course he did it t perfection because he as God, knew how he as God made man.   And if he didn’t know as God who crated man, how he should behave as man, in terms of his relationship with the Father as God, nobody else does.  That’s why he said as the Farther sends, I’m gonna send you.  Well, quite obviously, the Father didn’t send him to be God and behave as God, otherwise he never ever could send us the way the Father sent Him because we don’t happen to be God, nor could we be God.  He can only send us as men as the Father sent him as man. 

Now remember, he need never have done it.  He together with the Father and the Holy Spirit could have stayed in heaven and let us perish.  But God so loved the world that he deliberately by agreement between all three, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, gave his son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have restored to us that life that was lost in Adam, Life which alone is eternal and that life is the life of God.  For this is the record that God gave to us eternal life, and this life that he’s given to us, is in his Son.  He that hath not the Son of God is still without that life that’s in the Son – he is dead.

That’s why the Lord Jesus came, to raise the dead.  I’m come, said he, that you might have exactly what dead men need –Life—resurrection, which we have already fully recognized to be that which the Lord Jesus described in His conversation with Nicodemus – New Birth—spiritual regeneration, that which took place for the first time in all human history on the grounds of the redemptive act a t Pentecost when our Risen Lord came for the first time to re-inhabit the humanity of 120 men and women who at his command were waiting for that enduement with power from on high that could be theirs only in the presence of a person, who would then through life, by his presence, abolish death, and impart to them by his presence all the dynamics of Christ’s Divine indwelling.  And you s in that humanity in which he was born, born a human being incumbent upon him in all points, we are told in the Epistle to the Hebrews to be like unto his brethren assuming our flesh and blood, he sanctified himself.  The Lord Jesus set himself apart as man in terms of his relationship to the Father as God for that intelligent purpose which he Christ, as God, created man.  He sanctified himself.  He presented his body and his soul and his spirit in the totality of his being as man.  He became holy unto his Father God, without whom, he said, I could do nothing.  For he said, the Father who lives in me which was the purpose which we as God made man, the Father who lives in me, he does the work, because I’ve given him, my body, I’ve given him my soul, my mind, my emotions, my will.  I’ve given him my human spirit so that he in the person of the Holy Spirit, indwelling my human spirit, may invade my soul that I walk as one being full of the Holy Ghost, told what to do by my Father, doing what I’m told. 

Sanctified - in all its simplicity - the simplicity which is in Christ.  Now in sanctifying himself in this way, presenting to his Father, body, soul, and spirit, the Lord Jesus deliberately submitted himself to the criteria of the man's humanity.  This criteria characteristic of a man when he's true to his humanity.  The first involved is found in Revelations 4:11 - You are worthy, O Lord, To receive glory and honor and power, For You created all things, And by Your will they exist and were created."  You and I are part of that creation that God made for his pleasure.  In other words, as part of his creation, you and I, were created to please God and not to please ourselves.  We constantly insist that we ourselves.  How many times have we said that?  How many times did the Lord Jesus say that?  Romans 15:3 speaks of Christ of his own free will, playing the role of man, did not please himself. How important do you imagine you are?  How smart do you think you are when Jesus Christ, as God, playing the role of man, never ever, could please himself.  Why couldn't he please himself?  Wasn't he God?  Yes!! But though never ever less than God, he came deliberately into this world to play the role as though he were never ever more than man.  And you see he as God created man to please God, so the Lord Jesus couldn't be true to his humanity unless he was prepared at all times to please only one person -- His Father.  He could only please himself in the sense that it pleased him to please the Father. 

The testimony of the Lord Jesus in John 8:29 tells us that He that sent Jesus is with Him, because Jesus presented to him his body, his soul, and his spirit.  The Father is with him in the person of the One, who inhabits his humanity-- The Holy Spirit.

Thank you for your continued viewing and reading.  Feel free to visit us at: ArtesianWellChurch.com. If this Blog and its contents have been a blessing to you, then I ask, with God's leading, that you consider supporting Artesian Well Church.

Talk to you soon,

Pastor Norman

Artesian Well Church
6031 Linden Avenue
Long Beach, Ca