Summer 1998
The Manifestation of His Kingdom
Paul Sexton

We are living in a time of unfolding revelation and disclosure. This is an hour in which the wicked will openly do wickedly; but they who have the Spirit of wisdom and revelation shall be wise, and will openly experience a greater measure of the Lord's Presence.

A right attitude of heart is a prerequisite to His abiding presence, and for the understanding of end-time events, which are available to us at this present time.

The truth of our union with Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection, is fundamental to the ultimate realization of His purposes in us. We are to see ourselves raised up together with Him, and seated with Him in the heavenlies. This must be more than doctrinal knowledge or mere mental ascent to truth; it must come to us by revelation of the Spirit of God.

From the beginning, it has been the purpose of God to have a medium by which to express Himself. God is the "great Self" of the universe, but He is not selfish. Rather, He fulfills Himself in giving.

It was the love of God that prompted Him to make man in order to share Himself. Adam was, by his creation in the image and likeness of God, a reproduction of God. He was created with all the potential that we see realized in the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus always did those things which pleased the Father, whereas Adam defaulted through disobedience to the word the Lord had given him in the garden.

Implied in the command to Adam and Eve was the knowledge of God's will, but they violated that will by their disobedience, and forfeited all that the Lord had capacitated them potentially to be. But God in His wisdom had foreordained a plan by which He could recover through the "incarnation" all that His original intent for Adam had included. God has never rescinded His original purpose in making man. It has all been recaptured for us in our union with the Lord Jesus Christ.

In order for us to participate in God's purpose, He had to dispense with our "old man," the Adamic nature. Thus the essential need for the Cross, by which God has destroyed all that was imposed on us through the failure of the first man, Adam. He gathered up all of mankind in Himself, and eternally dispensed with our fallen nature in His death on Calvary (Romans 5:10-21).

There is a "death side" and a "life side" to the Cross. Each of these must be understood and appropriated in proper balance. An over-emphasis on the death side of the Cross will arrest our spiritual progress through a subtle form of legalism that negates the operation of the "Spirit of Life" in the believer. But if on the life side, we ignore or exclude the deterring aspect of the Cross, we lose its power to deal with our fallen nature. The extent to which we embrace the Cross determines the measure of the Life of Christ that will come forth from us.

It is a principle throughout all creation that life comes out of death. At the foot of a great tree lies a grave in which the life of a seed was lost. So also with us; we can never dispense with the Cross, for life springs forth from a grave.

You and I are earthen vessels in whom has been made a deposit of the eternal purpose of God, as embodied in the Christ who now lives in us and finds His expression through us. The new creation life originates and has its being in the One Who is Life. It is born through the Cross; the old is shed off through His death upon the cross.

The Lord covets the inimitable features and characteristics of our soul, and yearns to combine them with the beauties of His own person. He does not intend to destroy our personality, rather, He desires to conform it to His own image and fill it with the expression of His life.

The Lord longs to redeem our soul; but the soul is the seat of our independence, pride, and rebellion. Independence finds its assertion through our soul, until we have experienced the work of the Cross, and are made aware of our need. Most of us are too strong. Therefore, God subjects us to things that weaken us. His dealings bring us into extremities which we would rather resist; but in them we come to appreciate the Lord. Only as we are broken, and weakened; only as we come to that crisis, and are thoroughly convinced that "in my flesh dwelleth no good thing" can God use us.

This does not mean that we are to sit and do nothing. There is a terrible snare in that. Many people have wasted years of their lives because they abide by this principle; "I can do nothing of myself, and the Lord does not seem to be speaking, so therefore I cannot be a witness because I have no leading."

The Lord does not intend us to be a do-nothing kind of person. We are to resort to prayer and waiting upon the Lord, expecting the Spirit to initiate His activity through us. In communion with God, the Spirit within us will become active. Our "moving in the Spirit" will become so habitual that we will scarcely realize that it is "God within us" precipitating the activity.

This is a day in which the Lord alone shall be glorified. He has a people who desire it so, and who will abide by the principles of the Cross that it might be so.

Addendum. Paul Sexton came to Pinecrest in 1976 and taught various quarters over several years. He was a Conference speaker and pastor of a Church in South Dakota until the time of his death in 1981.