Consciousness and Awareness
By John Gavazzoni
Is it possible to be delivered from what has come to be popularly called, "sin consciousness," WHILE being very aware of sin's continuing presence? I insist that it is not only possible, but a characteristic of balanced spiritual maturity. To know that God does not hold our sins against us relationally---that even as we are failing miserably in some dimension of our lives, He still holds us in the embrace of perfect love, qualifying us by that love into the glorious destiny of co-heirship with Jesus Christ, and that with unqualified certainty.
It is a right and good place to be, when we can say with Paul, "O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death," and then to proceed to declare, "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord?" O yes, it is a good and right place to be. I heartily commend it to my readership as an excellent place to be, and excellent spiritual posture to take, a position that recognizes the Jesus in His death has dealt the death blow to sin and death, but that duo is still hanging on for dear life, even as the process of their demise is being worked out by the power of that death blow.
The chicken's head has been cut off, but it's still running crazily around the barnyard kicking up a lot of dust, and making a spectacle of itself.The stem cells of Jesus resurrection life have been inserted into our spirits, and nothing has the power to surgically remove them. The resurrection life that contains the crucifying power of His cross is at work in us unto a fully manifest victory rooted in a victory already accomplished.
Can you accept the fact that even as God is progressively enlightening you, that He is also deliberately keeping you in the dark on some of life's important issues? Yes, I said, deliberately keeping you in the dark. Can you accept that a certain negative condition that exists in your life in the present---which is completely of the Lord, and sanctified as ultimately beneficial for you---traces to you acting stupidly in the past, in the ignorance that God, at that point, imposed upon you, and say to yourself, "Yes, I did that out of the darkness of my mind in that dimension, and I am suffering the consequences in the present, thank you Jesus, for showing me how dumb I can be when left to myself. It has worked to make me always rightfully skeptical of myself, and confident in you."
We have sloppy concepts of very fundamental issues re: God's relationship with us in Christ. We have, as it were, engraved certain sloppy concepts in stone, using very questionable expressions, such as, "God sees us through the blood of Christ." No He doesn't. The blood of Christ is not something God uses as a filter to look at us more favorably. He doesn't use the blood of Christ to paint over our sins. God knows us as seated with Christ in the heavenlies, WHILE seeing our wretchedness. God reckons the faith of Christ operative in us, and given to us as a gift---so that it is our faith---as righteousness, yet as His eyes run to and fro over all the earth, beholding the good and the evil, he sees the still existent evil in the believer's life also.
The power of the blood of Christ, is the power of the life of God given to us sacrificially. It is that very special release of life out of death that gives a special radiance to God's glory in us. I have observed in my own life, and in the lives of brethren very near and dear to me, areas of continuing profound ignorance that is causing pain along the full spectrum of little irritations, all the way to extreme suffering. To some degree we knew better, but we didn't know well enough to overcome the appeal to our egos that set in motion a chain of painful consequences. Can we live in light in some areas of our lives, while living in darkness in others? Yes. Emphatically yes!
To what do we ultimately trace this aspect of the human condition? Not to "what," but to "Whom." To the Sovereign of the universe. To the Sovereign of our individual universes. To the One who shines out from within the midst of darkness. To the One who shines out from within our own darkness.
