Series: Other Speakers
Sun am 23rd September 2012 – Simon Earnshaw & Justus Swart
1 Cor. 3:1-8; 1 Cor. 4:14-17; Ex. 29; Ps. 133; 2 Tim. 1:6-7; Eph. 4:16
Eccl. 1 (NIV); Titus 1:1-3; Habakkuk 2:2-3; Luke 12:15; 1 John 3:23; Matt. 5:38-48
Simon: The order of father and son is not simply one theme among many; it is the foundational principle for all spiritual understanding in the Kingdom. Many people in Church are born into the Kingdom without any spiritual father and live as orphans lacking heritage and searching for identity. The order of father to son has been lost in many churches today. This order is the basis of spiritual inheritance and the basis of the generational blessing. The lack of this order explains a lot of the negative behaviours and ineffectiveness we see in the church today. God always wants there to be a magnification of revelation through the spiritual inheritance of the fathers being passed to the sons. Each generation should have a deeper relationship with God than their fathers did.
Many people seek anointing without the garments of a father. Garments in Scripture are a picture of spiritual inheritance from father to son. We see this in Exodus 29. Whilst Aaron was anointed with oil, his sons were not anointed at the inception of their ministry. The anointing that sons received was by the impartation contained when they received the garments of their father. This illustrates the necessity of the generational connection for proper continuation of ministry. The garments contained the anointing and cover the flesh of the ministry and hold the inheritance from father to son in ministry. We are not saying here that we need a spiritual father to have a relationship with God and receive anointing, but if there is not the garment, the fragrance and essence of the oil is soon lost and there is never a flow to the next generation.
As sons we must have the garment given to us by the father and not grab our spiritual inheritance before it is given to us by our father in the ministry. As well as this we must ensure we are in the right position to receive the anointing. It is like precious oil poured on the head, running down on the beard, running down on Aaron’s beard, down on the collar of his robe. It is as if the dew of Hermon were falling on Mount Zion. For there the Lord bestows his blessing, even life forevermore. (Ps 133) The power of anointing is the direction of flow and that direction is down, from the head downwards, this is the only way the whole body is covered. The head of the church is Christ. From Christ the head of the church comes the anointing of the church through the garment of the spirit provided by the Father. The church receives power by being clothed with the spirit of the Father. There is no anointing outside connection with Christ. The only anointing we receive has been poured from His head upon His body, the church and will empower us for service and to glorify God.
Sometimes the church talks about seeking anointing, what is meant is to “stir up” a gift God has placed within us already. God has already given power to the church; therefore we must not seek anointing but stir it up.
We receive our gifting by being properly clothed and positioned beneath the ministry of a spiritual father. Correct position equals constant anointing. If we lift ourselves and our personal gifting, above the purpose, position or person God has placed over us we remove ourselves from the flow. We may get the dew of the mountaintop but never the mighty flow of a river of anointing. The most powerful flow of water from Mount Hermon in Psalm 133 will not be the dew at the top of the mountain but the gushing river Jordan flowing down at the foot of the mountain.
The power of God flows from Christ the head, to the shoulders of the church, to the garments of the sons, to the hem of the garments the local church. This order allows for the fullness of spirit in the church which becomes the anointed garment of God. The hem of the garment of the church should be as full of power as the hem of Christ’s garment.
Proper relationships and unity in the Body are essential for every member to receive this anointing. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work (Ephesians 4:16).
The way people will find out about this order is when it manifests in the body of Christ regaining its mighty power through generational blessing and increase. We have a responsibility to position ourselves correctly in the Church to receive the anointing of God maximally, to allow the order of spiritual inheritance and generational increase to manifest in the Church.
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Justus: How Christ and culture interact remains one of the most central discussions for the Church in every age and in every society. A topic pivotal to this is the timelessness of God. How do you as a human being understand what it means to be unlimited, timeless or eternal? .
“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” … What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them (Eccl. 1:1-10).
A particular work of the Holy Spirit can only be accelerated by the truth that God brings. This is actually what it means to be prophetic; to assimilate a truth and make it into something tangible for how we live today. We take that truth and we use that to become prophetic and speak to the world, to speak to society and culture around us. We know now that being prophetic is not necessarily a matter of speaking into the far distant future, but more a matter of being present in that moment and knowing exactly what to do in the present.
In many ways, revelation comes as a sharp counter-cultural response. We receive Biblical instruction and are required to interpret and often reinterpret that principle within a specific culture. Materialism for example urges humans to accumulate material wealth and from that deduce a sense a self-worth. “You are the sum total of all your possessions.” We know this to be a polar opposite to the teaching of Jesus. “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions’ (Luke 12:15).
So here is the charge, to live against the current trends of culture. Richard Niebuhr writes: “The power and attraction that Jesus Christ exercises over men never comes from Him alone, but from Him as Son of a Father. It comes from Him in his Sonship in a double way, as man living to God and from God to world. Even when theologies fail to do justice to this fact, Christians living with Christ in their cultures are aware of it. For they are forever challenged to abandon all things for the sake of God; and forever being sent back into the world to teach and practice all the things that have been commanded them”.
So how then do we as the Church remain true to the Biblical instruction and wisdom while maintaining a relevant response to progressive culture? In other words, how do we make a book written more than 2000 years ago relevant to a society which is so far removed from the culture the Bible it was written in? In order to answer such a question it is essential to look to the past. In many cases the Old Testament is placed under the same umbrella as ‘the old covenant’ and left out. When we become Christians, our history dates back to the very first human being. We join our story with God’s story, we become part of Israel. There is one entire story from the first page of the Bible to the last, and that story is man returning and finding his way back to God. The entire Christian walk can concisely be summed up in an illustration of a journey; those who were lost being called back by the Shepherd and our response in journeying back to God. Stanley Hauerwas puts it like this: “The Church is a people on a journey who insist on living consistent with conviction that God is Lord of history. They thus refuse to resort to violence in order to secure their survival.”
One of the greatest misconceptions of Christianity’s focus is that when faced with more difficult areas of culture, we are often lulled into an over simplification of our theology as centering on the keynote of love and loyalty to Jesus. This can happen to us when we read a book like 1 John in particular. ‘In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us…We love because he first loved us…Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another…If any one says, “I Love God” and hates his brother, he is a liar…No man has ever seen God; if we love one another God abides in us and his love is perfected in us…He who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen’. We can read this and miss that the keynote of this book is actually love matched with the Lordship of Christ. And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us (1 John 3:23). Loyalty to Jesus is not an abandonment of the world; we do not leave the world to its own devices. John was so convinced of the end of the world and the return of Jesus that he had not time to write of other things, he just said, “Love Jesus Christ.” That was not a rejection of all other things going on in life. If you have a loyalty to Jesus, you are going to be in such a dysfunctional relationship with the world, but we have to manage that and take it to Scripture.
Matthew 5’s Sermon on the Mount indicates how intentional Jesus was about establishing culture that would in fact absorb other culture; transform other culture. It would be so desirable that you would not be able to resist it. When we read through the Scripture, let this fact grip you, that your God is constantly calling to you abandon everything of material possession or material thought that you have of yourself, and sends you back into the world because He loves the world.