John Gavazzoni

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Help for the helpless

Without Me you can do nothing

Daring to extrapolate the full implications of Jesus' statement, "Without Me, you can do nothing," I reached the conclusion years ago that the point of intersection of the sovereignty of God and the collective believers' subjective state is an intersection of the Father's decision to act, and our fully recognized state of utter helplessness until He does.

I expect to see indication of the impending, final, consummate move of God in an accelerated realization of our poverty of spirit; that is, of having no autonomous spiritual resources in ourselves. As long as we imagine that God is awaiting our facilitating of His purpose, we deceive ourselves into thinking that we are not, in fact, spiritually bankrupt in and of ourselves and bereft of any ability to contribute to the doing of God.

http://greater-emmanuel.org/jg/2008/help.php

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Belonging

The believer's identity is that of a slave of Jesus Christ. Seldom do we hear in today's teaching of coming to know our true identity, the joyful exultation, "Oh yes, I now know who and what I really am. I'm Christ's slave." Continuing on that theme is the hope of belonging to the truth of Jesus' Lordship, and our relationship to that central truth of the New Testament. We are not our own, we have been bought with a price, that of the precious blood of Jesus Christ. Simply stated, we do not belong to ourselves, we belong to Another who owns us  not for His own selfish purposes  but so that by belonging to Him, we might share all that He is. We belong to Him as our Lord, but also we belong to Him in union with Him. His Lordship does involve His loving and gracious control, but that control is not as a Boss merely giving orders to underlings, but as the Lord who controls us by infusing us with His life of devotion to the Father.

Jonathan Mitchell---by thoroughly researching one of the Greek words conventionally translated as "commandment"--has uncovered that at its root, the word conveys the impartation of a goal. This truth, shines brightly particularly in John's first epistle as translated by our brother, Jonathan. Jesus doesn't get His way with us as our Lord by barking out "commands," but by being, Himself, in us, the imparted goal of God's eonian purpose. As our life, He is moving toward and into that goal with the certainty that accompanies His trustful confidence in the Father working within Him. Having already been perfected by His human experience to be the Seed-form of the New Humanity at the heart of God's wondrous purpose, by Him sharing Himself with us, as God's finished workmanship, we have God's goal-impartation within us in the Person of our Lord, by His Spirit.

http://greater-emmanuel.org/devotional.htm#Belonging

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Primal Deficiency

Deficiency is at the heart of all creaturely maladies; deficiency rooted in deliberately planned deprivation....not of our own will, but by the will of Him who has so subjected our creaturehood. We are deficient because we have been temporally denied existential sufficiency. "To him that has, more shall be given, and to him who has not, even that which he has shall be taken away." Wow! Harsh words. I imagine that those whose view of God will not allow them to think of Him as other than nice, encountering such a shocking statement in Holy Writ would necessarily find them baffled at how they can make sense of such and remain faithful to their favorite theological paradigm.

The human condition, spiritually, traces to deficiency of the knowledge of God. By the knowledge of God, I mean not mere conceptual knowledge, not merely giving intellectual assent to biblical facts, but of "gnosis," the experiential, intimate knowledge of God which is intrinsic to the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Paul prayed that believers would be given "a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the full knowledge of Him." Why? Because they/we, came into this world deficient in that knowledge due to a deliberate deprivation. Even after experiencing initially the beginning of the Spirit's regenerating work in our hearts, we still suffer an ongoing deficiency until we progressively leave behind & are healed of that affliction as we are drawn into the full brightness of the light of Christ.

http://greater-emmanuel.org/jg/2022/primal.php

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Being & becoming

What is the relationship between being and becoming? Is it, as seems to be thought conventionally, that all being, all existence, comes to be by becoming to be?  I think that difference of understanding might be very strategic to the search for truth. "He that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is the rewarder of them that diligently seek Him?"

We don't come to a God whose Being is the result of a process of becoming. Of course not! He IS! And from that Being, i.e., the Being, that is without any source other than Itself, expansively becomes more and more of all that He is out of the richness of the depths of all that He is. Neither the Being of God, nor the perfection of that Being is static. All life, victoriously, in the face of the vicious enmity against it is, becomes, and continues to be, "a well of water springing up into eonian life." But let us be clear: Being is first, and then being proceeds to becoming. It is indicative of all being that it IS, and from that indicative of being proceeds the imperative of becoming. The latter needs no help from us for It's self-realization.

Contemplating God ought always to bring us to the church, or better, the ecclesia, the summoned-forth gathering or congregation, and since the ecclesia (transliteration of the Greek, ekklesia), as the body of Christ, according to Paul, is the fullness, or complement, or completion of Him who fills all in all, again, according to Paul, that ecclesia does not merely grow by a growth from God, as Paul is conventionally translated, but rather grows the growth OF God, or it can be translated, increases the increase OF God. Being is not static. The Being in which we all have our being is, Itself, not static, but gloriously expansive.

Being and Becoming

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The joy of the Lord

Set not your mind on things below, but on things above. Begin to look at yourself, your fellow believers, and all mankind from above. Reflect on God's joy from His perspective above, where Christ sits at His right hand. Meditate on what makes God joyful, and you will be on your way to enjoying His enjoyment. God is right now rejoicing over you, over all of us, with singing. Why? Because He knows the certainty of the goal of His goodness. God knows that He owns the field in which the pearl of great price is hidden, and He has redeemed the whole field in order to claim back you, His pearl of great price----yes you, together with all mankind.

The Lord's joy is a secondary experience for Him. Something causes Him, within Himself, to be joyful. That something is His knowledge that nothing can stand in the way of Him pouring Himself out in all of His goodness upon all of His creation. I don't think the Lord will be offended at me resorting to describing divine emotions anthropomorphically, so here goes:

When I think of God fully realizing within Himself the certainty of doing all His good pleasure, all I can think of is God saying to Himself, "Wow, that's a kicker," as His joy from within Himself washes over Him. The joy of the Lord is an ecstatic joy. Joy in the extreme. It has nothing to do with your fleeting feelings. In this matter, as in all things, don't trust your feelings. Get with God, and know His joy.

http://greater-emmanuel.org/devotional.htm#Joy

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The  cry of creation

From the Core of the Center of all things exists a pure, passionate attraction that results in the holy Conjugal Uniting of Being which is the Source of all life-reproduction.

Deity begets, and from the substance of that Divine Birthing, all materiality is created. This is why Paul called Jesus, "the first-born of all creation," for all creation derives from His birth, and as the first-born all creation is His inheritance.

This truth is at the heart of why creation is dependent upon the manifestation (unveiling/uncovering) of the sons of God for its deliverance from decay, for it is specifically the Spirit-Substance of God's sons from which God created all things. Therefore, as go the sons so goes all creation, according to and by "the liberty of the glory of the children of God."

A View From Beginning To End

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In Him

A personal pronoun has the effect of emphasizing, or pointing to, or identifying someone. It always pertains to a person. It is never used to refer to things, to qualities, principles, concepts, powers, metaphysical abstractions, ideas, forces , or anything of that sort.

Paul, the apostle, and by his own testimony also the slave of Jesus Christ, made the inspired claim that "in Him were all things (or the whole) created."

In HIM. In HIM.

The whole (all that makes up creation) was created in a Person. His Personhood is the containment field of the whole of existence. Outside of Him, nothing is. God, the Father, birthed the Son's Being, and within the Being of the Son, God created, carved-out, formed, designed and framed the infinite reaches of space, time and materiality---and He is mine. I have Him. You, dear fellow believer have Him.

The whole of the old creation ended with His death, all the fullness of the new came out of the grave in Him.

http://greater-emmanuel.org/devotional.htm#InHim