Releasing Jesus

This was so well written, the I could not do a better job myself, but wanted to share the power of Jesus with my friends on Simple Church:

Our job is to learn how to release the reality and power of the Testimony in the same way Jesus did.

Jesus represented God much differently than the Ark of the Testimony represented Him. There is a significant difference between a box of inanimate objects that points to spiritual realities and a living testimony that interacts with and manifests those realities. While the box could only preserve the relics of what God had done, Jesus declared and demonstrated the works of God for all to see. He revealed the secret of His ministry liberally to His disciples by reiterating often that He only did what He saw His Father doing and only said what He heard His Father say. That is, He and His Father were exactly alike, were in perfect agreement.

Likeness and agreement are the heart of covenant. It was this perfect agreement with God that enabled Jesus to release the Spirit of God whenever He spoke. In His words and works, He literally re-presented the God of the Testimony. As we saw in the previous chapter, Christ has given us access to this superior covenant relationship with God and called us to represent Him in the same way.

Thus keeping the testimony is not a matter of preserving what God has done in our memories, but of revealing what God is like to those around us through declaration and demonstration.

The very word testimony in Hebrew comes from a root word that means "to repeat, to do again." Notice that this repetition carries within it the two dimensions of saying and doing. The testimony is something to be repeated, both in word and in deed. This derives directly from the nature of the Word of God. His words cannot be separated from His works. It also derives from His nature as a covenant-making and covenant-keeping God. When we declare the testimonies of the Lord, we are actually describing who He has promised to be in relationship with us and more, we are putting a demand on Heaven for that covenant to be renewed and demonstrated in the present as it was in the past.

Putting this demand on Heaven is exactly what God wants us to do. He commands us to repeat His testimonies, because in doing so we create an atmosphere and an opportunity for Him to do again what He has done. Just as Jesus did, we are to create a context for His presence within us to be released to those around us through the declaration of the testimony. We carry the mercy seat of Christ wherever we go.

When we declare the testimonies of God to people, we are setting them up to meet God in the same way we are declaring. This is a powerful reality, but one that we only anticipate and access consistently when we learn to follow in the footsteps of David and make the testimonies of the Lord our delight and our counselors. If we are going to fulfill our role in this covenant relationship, we must learn to keep the testimony.

Bill Johnson - March 2010

This ministry can be found at www.bjm.org