Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Cecily Feldman unpacks what it means to be truly united with Jesus — not just a church-goer, but a new creation fused to the risen Christ by the Holy Spirit. Moving beyond an Old Testament mindset, she shows why you are never alone, never separated from God's love, and called to walk in resurrection power. Scriptures: 1 Corinthians 6:17, 1 Corinthians 15:22, John 1:12, Ephesians 2:4-6, Joshua 1:5, Hebrews 13:5, Romans 8:38-39, John 10:27, Isaiah 30:21, Genesis 1:26
We are a local Church in Orange County California who are passionate to witness lives being renewed in Christ, strengthened through discipleship, and to thrive in the fullness of living for Christ.
Get connected to us by visiting www.c3oc.com or emailing us at hello@c3oc.com
Before I start today, I just want to share a little bit of testimony and just to give you context for what I'm speaking from. I got saved at the age of 20. Many people know that. And pretty much from the age of about 23, 24, I served in ministry in some capacity. And for the next 45, that'll give you a clue as to how old I am. For the next 45 to 50 years, I served in some church in ministry in some capacity. Now, that had a positive side. But I found out later there was a downside to it as well. And some of that was to do with there were certain truths that in all that time, and I'm not saying small churches here, I'm talking big, powerful ministries. My husband and I had the opportunity to work with the team for Benny Hinn. We had the opportunity to be in Rodney Howard Brown's meetings. Rodney Howard Brown, as you know, is a South African. Kim Clement, another one. And so these were ministries that were extremely powerful. And in that time, we learned the presence of God. So nobody. We had come out of unsaved families, so nobody in our family had experienced what we were able to experience in these meetings. I don't care whether you like Benny or don't like him. It is an irrefutable fact that when he prays for people, something happens. It's an irrefutable fact. I don't care if you like him or you didn't like him. The point is, is that there was a presence of God that was released through the word of God when these people pray for you. The same with Rodney Howard Brown. So coming from lives of extreme anxiety, extreme depression, suicidal levels, for both Gary and I, this was amazing. We got prayed for more times than we could remember, got hands laid on us, and we fell out under the power of God. Now, I know there's a big trend in the churches today. Oh, that's all just a lot of nonsense. It's a lot of Pentecostal. Hoo ha. It's all just fake. No, it's not fake. There may be fake in it, but in that both of us would experience times where we would lie on the floor and we would experience the power and the peace of God. For me, this was amazing. I had never in my life experienced peace, but for that time when I was lying on the floor, the peace of God was so real and it stayed with me. However, after all this and about 40 years, I began to think now why I was no longer able to be in those meetings. By the way. So we moved to America, came to work in churches here, but that presence was not there to the same degree. Eventually, through circumstances not related to me, left the church and began to work in my husband's medical office. He opened a medical office in Irvine. And I could not cope because I was living with an Old Testament mindset. And what do I mean by that? What I mean here is if I wasn't in the meeting or I wasn't in church, I did not feel the presence of God with me. I felt, I went back to that same level of depression. I went back to those panic attacks. I went back to mindsets that, that I'd had before I got saved. And so what I began to learn was there was something missing in my teaching. In all the years I'd been in Bible school, in all the years that I'd studied the Word, in all the books of the Bible that I'd studied, I taught in a Bible school, for goodness sake. So I studied the Word all day, every day. But, but in all those years, there was a foundational teaching that somewhere, somehow I had missed because I could not walk with God and I could not get victory over certain things. So today I want to teach you a little bit by reason of testimony of some of the things I learned. Let's go to 1 Corinthians 6, 17. I've titled this message United with Christ living with a post mortem resurrection mindset. The resurrection of Jesus Christ fundamentally changed humanity. There are many events that brought change to humanity, but the singular most important event was the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the new man that developed out of that. The potential for man to be a brand new breed, as it were, was established not just through the Bible and through history. It was established by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And the brand new breed that God is talking about here and that has become evident to us is tabulated or explained in the Pauline epistles. So the Catholic Church, for example, when they want to lead someone to the Lord or they sense somebody is interested in God, they encourage them to read the book of Matthew and the book of Matthew. Yes, what is in there will point you to Jesus and it will bring people to the Lord. There are people in Hollywood, for example, that were encouraged to read the book of Matthew and got wonderfully born again. However, the new creation man is not in the Book of Matthew. The new creation man is in the Pauline epistles. And so do yourself a favor, invest your life in studying who you are. Study the Pauline epistles. What do I mean by that? Romans. Almost the whole of the New Testament besides the Gospels. Romans, Corinthians, Ephesians, Colossians, these all tell us what Paul received from the Holy Spirit as to how we ought to live. So 1 Corinthians 6:17 says, but whoever is united with the Lord is one with him in spirit. This is a foundational concept. It's a foundational teaching that will change how you pray. It will change how you see life. It will certainly change how you deal with a difficult boss. It will change how you deal with loss. It will change how you approach your finances. It's foundational because if I don't have this revelation, I will live with an Old Testament mindset. I will live just needing to go to meetings all the time. I have to go to the next best conference. I don't say that's bad. But I have to be able to grow in God to the point where I begin to move past that need. Okay, so who are we? Anthropology and evolution would basically say approaches the identity of men from a biological standpoint. And so many of us grow up in schools, particularly in America, where we're, I call it, indoctrinated with this concept. I myself had to sit here in the US in an anthropology class, and it was a tough sell for me because this guy was telling me that, that I was an offshoot of this creature called Pantherbus or Pantheropus, whatever his name was. And what he was, was an early human being, my ancestor, he said, who had this huge, big, square jaw. And he was also known as the Nutcracker Man. And this creature, or this homonym, as he said, was one of the predecessors, the precursors of mankind. The Bible is different. First of all, when I looked at that, I was like, ah, you maybe, but not me. I'm made in the image of God. Genesis 1:26, verse 7. God made man in his image resembling him. God reproduces after his own kind. And so he made me with the same potential that he has. So I was like, all right, dude, you know, think whatever you think, but that's not me. So on earth today, Scripture approaches us, approaches man from a created being made in God's image. Now, when we made in God's image, we made with his capacity, with his likeness, his potential. In the similitude, the Bible says we resemble him. Well, you might say, well, I don't see a lot of gods running, walking around the earth. You know, we in a lot of trouble here, which we are. But on the Earth Today, there are two sets of humanity. There are two types of humanity. This has nothing to do with evolution. The this is to do with our spiritual birth. So on the earth, there are two types. Those that are in Adam that were born in Adam. 1 Corinthians 15:22 says, for as in Adam, all die, so in Christ, all will be made alive. So you either in Adam or you, you are in Christ by default. We are all going to be born in Adam. We don't have a choice. The sin that occurred in the garden is passed through in the DNA to every person. So that baby, and there's no one better who knows this than a parent, because that baby is so cute when it's born. It is so beautiful. It's just the sweetest, sweetest loveliest little creature. But they turn two and a half and they turn three, and then the will of that little baby begins to be expressed. And that will is nothing like your will. It has its own mind and it has its own will. And from that point on, we see the in Adam, we can't help it. So when somebody is in Adam, they are spiritually dead. That's the first thing. They are spiritually blind. So the Bible says we are not able to even see truth if we wanted to. And we're under the influence of the ruler of this world. So because we're dead, we're blind. We're influenced by demonic activity because we do have an enemy running around on this planet as well. Unfortunately, it's not just us. And so the person that's in Adam lives according to the flesh, the lust of the heart. The Bible says so essentially, that's what that is. I do what I want, when I want, and when I feel like it's. That's. That's how the lust of the flesh operates. Type number two are those that have gone through the process of John 1, chapter 12. So if we could look that scripture up, Very important scripture, John chapter one and verse 12, it says, yet. So despite what we all are by our default, it says, yet to all who did receive him. Who's him here? This is Jesus. To all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become the children of God. So all of us sitting here, or most of us, I would assume, since I'm not doing an evangelistic outreach, most of us, I would assume, are in this subset of humanity. We are those who saw Jesus, we believed in him, we have received him, and we are in the process of. Of becoming so positionally we are children of God, but we are not fully formed, mature children of God. We are in the process of the becoming children of God, where we are growing daily. And God has a different plan for your life and for my life than I would sometimes have. See, we send children away to college and we say to them, well, what would you like to be when you grow up? What is your vision for your life? And they will come up with something like, I'd love to be an engineer, or I want to go to medical school and I'd like to do this and I'd like to do that, and that's good. But you know what God's plan is for you? That you would become the full stature of Jesus Christ. That's a whole nother vision because medical school might be part of it. But what I call trial, he calls formation. So see, how we interpret our lives is extremely important. I'm going to go through a passage just now where Paul interprets some of the things that happened to him. So when I'm a born again child of God and I believe in Jesus number one, I am a new creation. I am no longer in Adam. I'm definitely not part of that paranthropus or whatever that's called there. Definitely not that. I am a new breed, a new creation, a new species of humanity. Say to yourself, I am a new species. Amen. Don't forget that ever. You are not just a normal human being, you are a new species. Corinthians puts it this way. If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has, has come. The old has gone and the new is here. It's not coming tomorrow or the next day. The new is already here. Why? Because Ephesians 2, 4, 6 says God made us alive with Christ, raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms, in Christ Jesus. So we are no longer dead in Adam, we are made alive. Once I am made alive in Christ, there are possibilities that begin to come to me that were never there before. Possibilities for health, possibilities for victory, possibilities for provision, possibilities for resources way beyond what I and my human limitations can achieve. The Spirit himself will testify of your to your spirit that you are a child of God. What do we mean by that? We mean by that that when you become born again, you have a knowing in your spirit. You don't have to convince yourself anymore. You don't have to walk around saying, well, I became a child of God. It's not an external event, it's an internal event. Now, many times people actually are not Born again. But they are involved in church. So it's the Catholic Churches particularly. This is the case where you can grow up going to church, doing church things and externally even having ascent and following Jesus kind of from a distance in the Word and doing the things that Jesus is asking you to do. But there's never been a testimony in your spirit. There's never been a crossing over from the, the man in Adam to the man in Christ. And there is no testimony and knowing in your spirit that you are loved and you are a child of God. And so what happens then is all you have is religion. Now it's one thing if you have Hindu religion or Buddhism or even Judaism, but this very sad one is when you have Christian religion and you follow after the Sermon on the Mount and you know, different to Moses and the Israelites actually because you're following after Christian activity, but you are not born again. Your spirit does not testify to you that Jesus is alive. Okay, so what does it mean to be united to Christ? United with Christ. In that scripture, 1 Corinthians 6:17, the word united carries the first of all. It's used also to speak of a marriage and a man and a woman becoming one flesh. But what it actually means is it carries the idea of being joined or being glued or being cemented. So when Jesus comes to live in me by the Holy Spirit, this is no small thing. I am cemented to the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, the Word that was from the beginning in his resurrection power. I am not alone and I am no longer just little old me. I am me fused to God. This has enormous implications for me. Let's take one scripture. How do we live now with this post resurrection mindset? Remember, the disciples never had the benefit of this when they were following Jesus. They were just following Jesus. And yes, they recognized him to be the Messiah. They recognized the power of God on him, but they were just following him. This new breed of humanity only came after Jesus was resurrected and and the Holy Spirit was poured out on the earth. Then the disciples became born again, then they became full of the Holy Ghost, then they became workers of miracles. But not before. So how does this translate? Let's look at Joshua chapter one, verse five. We're going to do a bit of contrast between an Old Testament mindset and the New Testament mindset. So In Joshua chapter 1, verse 5, God has an encounter with Joshua. Joshua is about to enter the promised land and the angel shows up with the presence of God and says to Joshua, you're going to go in and you're going to fight all the nations that have occupied this land that I've given you. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you. I will never leave you nor forsake you. So Joshua had that moment where he knew that God was there. But what about when he stood to take Jericho? That angel wasn't there anymore. And so he had to believe and have faith in that encounter. And he had to hold on to the memory of that encounter. Was it true? Yes. God was there with him. God went before them. They were able to fights that supernaturally were only possible because God was with them. They would have lost otherwise. But let's take Hebrews 13, verse 5. We see that same scripture this time show up in the New Testament. Hebrews 13, verse 5 says, and it's quoting the Old Testament says, never will I leave you, never will I forsake you. Let's follow the logic of this. How can one that is fused to me ever abandon me? He cannot. He cannot. I do not have to drum up the energy. I do not have to convince myself. I do not have to hold on to that memory in the Benny Hinn meeting. I do not have to do that. He is fused to my spirit. Where I go, he is going. I will never walk through life again alone. Never again am I walking through life alone. I wish I had learned this and could tell my 20 year old miserable self. Somehow I got all the way through Bible school, all the way through ministry, and still felt alone. Until the Holy Ghost began to speak to my heart and said, you are never alone. You and I are one. Romans 8, 38, 39. For I am convinced this is Paul again testifying of what he had learned. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ our Lord. I can live with a new awareness. I am not walking through life alone. And no matter how much comes against me. And Paul faced some terrible things. No matter what comes against me, I am fused to Christ and Christ is walking through that with me. So it doesn't matter when I die. This body may die and the anthropologist will be correct. I will turn to dust. But Jesus walks through death with me because he's already conquered death. So yes, my body, they may switch off machines and my body will go somewhere, but not my spirit, man. Because I'm fused and I'm joined to the resurrected Christ and he's going to walk through that with me. In Acts verse 9 and verse 4, Jesus actually reveals how he sees things. Remember Paul was running around murdering believers, pulling them out of their homes and murdering them for being Christians. You know, if that was me, if I was in charge and I saw that, I'd say, hey, somebody just take this guy Paul out. Do whatever needs to be done, man. Just go, go to his house at night and take him out. He's causing such trouble for the church. He's threatening them, he's preventing them from, from growing. Just go stick a bag over his head and do whatever's necessary but stop him. Get rid of him. That's not what Jesus did. Jesus came to Paul and he said to Paul, saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? So identified was Jesus with the suffering of his people so close was it, you destroy my people, you destroy me. He said, why do you persecute me? He didn't say my people. And Jesus in his mercy touched Paul's life so radically. He did put a stop to it, but a different way. A different way. And I want you to know today that it doesn't matter who says what about you. You know, people can be remarkably cruel. The Bible says all have fallen short and people can be remarkably cruel. We don't fight flesh and blood. We fight principalities and powers. Why? Because there's a whole bunch of people in Adam still and there's a devil running around the earth. And Jesus said, in this world you will have trouble. You will have trouble. But in that, he said, I have overcome the world. It doesn't matter what people do, doesn't matter what people say. Jesus in you is more than enough. He is more than enough. Now the Christian life is a bit like a three legged race. How many of you know what a three legged race is? Okay, I would have expected you all to put your hands up. My husband and I grew up under a British education system in South Africa and we had these sports days. There was a sports event at least once a year, right? And besides the really intense races like the hundred yards, because they were in 100 meters, because we did meters back there, there were all these other races. So there was an egg and spoon race, for example, and you had to put an egg in a spoon and you had to get from one side to the other with this egg still staying in the spoon. Took a lot of dexterity and balance. Then there was another one called the sack race and they gave you a big potato sack and you had to jump from one end to the other in this potato sack. But then there was the three legged race and that was always my favorite. There's a couple of secrets to a three legged race. That's where two people are joined, your feet are, are tied together so that essentially there's three legs. So there's a couple of problems with a three legged race. Number one, you need to choose your partner very carefully. If they're too big and you too small, you've got a problem right there. But you know what? The three legged race is a picture of the Christian walk. And what I love about that is Jesus chooses us because we're compatible. So there's no big guy choosing small guy. There's only he chooses me and he comes to live in me because I have the same potential as him. We are equal in potential. It's not a big guy and a little guy, it's people with equal potential. The other thing about a three legged race is, is that if you're joined to somebody and you don't pay attention to what they're doing and you decide, well, I'm gonna just run this race and I'm gonna just go for it as fast as I can, you're in deep trouble because the other person may not be going in the same direction as you. What's gonna happen is you're gonna take a tumble and you are going to go exactly nowhere. The only way to win this race is to move together, to cooperate and to move together. And this is a picture of how Jesus in us wants us to function in our Christian walk. So if we look at John 10:27, one of the big secrets is in the scripture. Jesus said, my sheep listen to my voice. I know them and they follow me. So the sheep here is the believer, the person that's given their life and he's living on the inside of us. My sheep listen to my voice. The word listen there means to be endowed with a faculty of hearing, not deaf. So you are not deaf. You might feel deaf, but you're not deaf or to give audience to. So my sheep listen to my voice. I know them and they follow me. So when we say that we are running the race of the Christian life, a big key here is for us to learn to hear the voice of Jesus because he's going to be continually directing, continually. He's not silent, he speaks. He's going to be continually speaking. And what is he going to be saying? He's so aware of everything that you feel, everything that you see, every place you go. So he's going to be prompting you to do certain things. He is going to be saying, let's not do it that way. Let's rather do it this way. Let's not. You're going to hear a voice. The Bible says, Isaiah 30 says. Verse 21 says, you will hear a voice behind you that says, this is the way, walk in it. Now, how does this practically play out? Let's say you own a business and we. I'm speaking here from experience. Let's say you own a business and you have to interview new staff and everybody sends in their resume and you start the interview process and in your mind, you know the best resume is the best candidate and that's the person I should employ. But you do need to ask the Holy Spirit, because we only see in part, we don't see everything. And so as you ask the Holy Spirit, he's going to show you things. And that might not be the best choice. It might be a better choice to take a candidate that's less qualified because of circumstances. We don't know what that person is bringing with them. So when we, when we are in Christ, the Holy Spirit is going to be bringing to remembrance the word of God in your life. And he's going to be steering you into the purposes that God has for you. So if you are called to do work in finance, you will begin to feel by the Holy Spirit, you may not recognize it as the Holy Spirit, a desire to do so. Certain things God says that he works in us to will and to do according to his good pleasure. So you can trust hundred percent that the Holy Spirit is working in you to put desire in on the inside of you to do certain things. It will impact your career, it will impact your relationships. If you're running aground in a relationship, it's not about my way or the highway. It's not about he said, she said, they offended me, they did this to me, they owe me an apology. No, there's a bigger picture than that. First of all, there might be something the Holy Spirit's trying to work in you. Second of all, there may be something else going on there. And so as you run that bike, take that step back and pray. And this is where prayer becomes very important. And I want to just go briefly as we come to a close, I want to go to a passage in 1 Corinthians, chapter 2, where Paul talks about and interprets the events that have occurred to him. And there's so much we can learn from this passage. So in 2 Corinthians verse 1. It says, Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy, our brother to the church of God in Corinth. Here's a tip. When you read the word of God, insert yourself and pray it back to God. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus. Sean, a musician of Christ Jesus. Madison, a singer of Christ Jesus. We all have an identity. Put your name in there and begin to pray the Word. So Paul was in Corinth, and the Corinthian people were not particularly friendly. Paul had gone to Corinth. He wrote actually four letters to the Corinthians. The first got lost. We have the second. I believe the third got lost, and we have the fourth. So Paul had to go to the Corinthian church a number of times because they had some big problems. They had some big attitudes, and they had some big problems. And so Paul says here, verse two. Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort. Who comforted us in all our troubles. Who comforts us in all our troubles. If you have trouble today, there is a God that wants to comfort. He lives right on the inside of you. He wants to comfort you. And what is the purpose of that? So that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. So think about this. Every time that you're in a difficult spot and the Holy Ghost comes to comfort you, there's a deposit on the inside of you of the comfort of God that you have to give to somebody else. You never had it before, but now you do. You have something to give. Verse 8. Skip down there. We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure. We don't know. Paul doesn't say what was happening to him, but he said we were under great pressure. So much pressure that it was far beyond our ability to endure. Do you ever feel that you're in that place where you are under so much pressure? It's far beyond the ability that you have to endure so that we despaired even of life. You know, many Christians are. I'm just going through it, just hanging in there. Why? You have a comforter. You have a helper. You were never designed to live this Christian walk alone. This Christian walk exposes you to warfare that the unbeliever doesn't experience. You were never meant to do this on your own. No going through this is what Paul says. He says here. Far beyond our ability Indeed, in our hearts, we felt the sentence of death so bad. Paul said we were going to die. Definitely we were going to die. But. But, but he says this happened. Why? That we might not rely on ourselves, but on God who raises the dead. Doesn't matter what I'm going through. I have a God who's going to raise the dead. The lesson to learn is that I'm not going to rely on myself. Whatever the difficulty is, whatever it is that you struggle with, I am not going to rely on myself. I'm going to rely on the resurrection power of Jesus Christ. And then he goes on to say, he has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope. Are you needing finances today? On him we set our hope. Do you need healing in your body today? On him we set our hope that he will continue to deliver us as you help us by your prayers. I love this part. See, I help you more by praying for. For you than anything else. And Paul here was not too proud to acknowledge that he needed people to pray for him. In September, we're going to start a book study on prayer and learning to pray effectively. And the reason for that is I have a tremendous burden to raise up effective prayer warriors. There are many people who pray and nothing comes of it. They pray and pray and pray and pray, and their prayers are never answered or nothing ever changes. That's not God's way. The effective prayer of a righteous man avails much. So in prison, prayers are effective. It avails much. And we both have a deep sense that we have to raise up prayer warriors in America. We have to for the next 20 years. We need prayer warriors in this country. America is not in a great place, and we need to pray, and we need to pray effectively. And yes, Paul, in this tremendous condition of peril, he says, as you help us by your prayers, then many will give thanks on our behalf for the gracious favor granted us in answer to the prayers of many. So what is the solution to our Christian peril and our troubles and our difficulties? Well, Paul puts it bluntly. He said, I wouldn't have survived if you hadn't prayed for me. I learned not to rely on myself. I learned to rely on the resurrection power of Jesus. But if it wasn't for you all praying for me, I wouldn't be here today. Hey, thanks for tuning in. There's a bunch of different ways that we connect throughout the week, including Sunday mornings, and we would love to see you there. You can check out all the details@c3oc.com.