Tag Archives: abiding

December 4, 2024 · 3:19 pm

The Pinnacle of Spiritual Growth—The Abiding

[Dive deep with me into the secrets of the Spirit of Truth. Let us light upon the flowers of His garden and not flit onto the deceptive blossoms of the tares.]

The abiding is the apex of the spiritual life cycle. When God abides in you, you cease to feel bound up in the prison of your earthly body. God’s desire is for us to surrender and let His Spirit take up residence in our hearts and minds. This is the ultimate growth that His elect will reach. Those who are chosen for this honor will read on.  

Conversely, a 30-fold child of God wavers and is “tossed to and fro with every wind of doctrine.” They do not have their “senses exercised to discern both good and evil” (Hebrews 5:14). They have need to be taught again the “first principles of the doctrine of Christ.” Spiritual “young men” and young women are walking in these principles. These are contained in the apostles’ doctrine (Heb. 6:1-2) [The book, The Apostles’ Doctrine, is available without price here: Ordering My Free Books in Paperback | Immortality Road].

Misconception of the Godhead

Children of God can’t grow very fast when they are bogged down with false concepts about God. That is why Christ in His first words to audiences, commanded them to repent of false teachings. Top on the list of false concepts is the misconception of just what the godhead is.

You could take a poll with this question: “If you could see into heaven’s throne room, how many gods would you see sitting up there? Most proclaiming Christians would say two or three–persons. This is the fruit of the trinity doctrine.

However, the Word says that there is only one God. The Spirit cries out to us: “Hear, O Israel: the LORD [YHWH] our God is one LORD” (Deut. 6:4). Only One. But many would ask, How can that be? You have the Father, the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit. It looks like three. Yes, great is the mystery of godliness.

The Father Yahweh is an invisible Spirit (John 4:24). One Spirit. He inhabits the Son of God. “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself” (II Cor. 5:19). The Father shows Himself through the Son. When you see the Son do something wonderful, it is the invisible Spirit Yahweh doing it. All the miracles Christ performed were really done by the Father Yahweh who abode [dwelled] in the Son.

Everything that the Son of God did, it was not him doing it. The Son said that it was the Father inside of him doing the miracles. Christ’s fleshly body was the veil that concealed the Father who dwelled inside of him. “No man comes unto the Father, but by me,” Christ said. “The fullness of the godhead dwelt bodily,” the Spirit through Paul said.

No wonder Christ said, “It is expedient that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you, but if I depart, I will send him to you (John 16:7). We have seen that the Comforter is the Spirit of truth (John 14:6-17).

And we know that the Holy Spirit of truth is the Father. Why? Because the Son said that the Father is inside the Son. Christ said, “…The Father that dwells in me” (John 14:10).

Consequently, Christ at the Last Supper said that he had to finish the job he had to do, and then leave, for this purpose: He had to go so that the Father, the Holy Spirit, could come and enter the apostles’ bodies. Yes, the Father is the Holy Spirit!  Remember these words spoken by the Son? “God is a Spirit.”

The Promise of the Father

For “the fullness of the godhead dwelt bodily” in Christ’s body (Col. 2:9). Therefore, the Son contained the fullness of deity. After the ascension of Christ, the disciples waited “for the promise of the Father” (Acts 1:4). The Father was the promise; the Father came down at Pentecost and baptized those assembled in the upper room—with the Holy Spirit and fire. “Our God is a consuming fire.”

That is what Christ confirmed. “Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you, I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work [the miracles]” (John 14:10).

The crux of the matter is this: If you can’t believe that the Father dwelt in the Son and did the works, then you will never believe that the Father could dwell in you and do the miracles that Christ said we would do. He promised that we would do greater miracles than what he had done. That’s what he said.

Getting this right is so important for your spiritual growth. One must repent of any doctrine that pushes aside the truth of who God is. The Father is Yahweh, and He dwells in the glorified form of the Son of God. He dwells in the dimension we call heaven. Getting this right is so important that Christ pleads with us all: “Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me: or else believe me for the very works sake” (John 14:11-17). Kenneth Wayne Hancock

[You are called to dive deeply into His teachings. To do that effectively, you must slow down and savor His word, for Christ is the living Word (Logos). Christ is the purpose and plan of God. He wants us to study—not jump from here to there in His word. It helps to slowly read aloud words of truth found in the scriptures and in His teachings. This wards off alien thoughts, those careless interlopers who interrupt our sacred time with God. Time is growing short. Pray that Yah would send forth laborers into His great harvest.]

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November 30, 2024 · 2:54 pm

Two Ways to Prove that You Really Love Christ

Then Comes the Abiding

How does the abiding come into us? God promised that He would abide in us after certain conditions were met. It is a conditional promise. We are not talking about doing something to attain salvation. As a child of the King, we already have salvation. But to grow past spiritual childhood, to have the Spirit grow in us and dwell in us—that is conditional. Christ is saying, “If you really love Me, then you can manifest the agape love that I am. But you must prove to Me that you love Me.”

Two Ways to Prove that We Love Christ

At this growth level, Christ is trying our hearts, to see if He can trust us with His deepest secrets. He desires a clean vessel to pour His Spirit into.

Christ is looking for two criteria. Christ explains the first one: “If a man love Me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come into him and make our abode with him (John 14:23). “If a man love Me…” Here is the first condition. The person that loves Christ will “keep His words.   

If we love Christ by keeping His words, then the Father will love us. And the godhead will come and stay and dwell within us. This is the abiding.

The Father Himself has promised to live in us—if we keep Christ’s words! As we have seen before, the word “keep” is translated from the Greek word meaning “to guard, to preserve.” And the word “words” comes from the Greek word logos, which is the plan and purpose of God spelled out from the beginning. We know that Christ is the Logos, the Word “made flesh” that dwelt among us and still does in the Spirit. Christ is the Purpose enacted for us all to see.

We are told to guard, protect, cherish, and preserve His words, the Logos. We are to watch and guard His eternal purpose, which was with God in the beginning. And His purpose is this: God is reproducing Himself. When we guard the Logos, the Father will love us, and God will abide, stay, and remain in us. That is the abiding.

Why isn’t this happening much more often in the world? Because before you can guard and preserve His eternal plan and purpose, you must know what His plan and purpose is. We are talking about “knowledge of the holy.” Those that love Christ will learn of the Logos.

And that brings us to the second way we show Christ that we love Him. You remember the story. The risen Christ has appeared to the disciples on the shores of Galilee. He asks Peter three times, “Do you love Me?” And Peter says “yes” three times. After each “yes,” Christ says, “Feed my lambs…feed my sheep…feed my sheep.” Christ was saying, “If you love Me, you will be feeding my lambs and sheep” (John 21:15-17).

But feed them what? We are to feed them the truth contained in the Logos. And the Logos is the very “mind of Christ.” From His mind comes His thoughts that reveal His plan and purpose. He wants to use us. Consequently, the Father will prune us like a vine, that we may bear more fruit.

Finally, we love Christ by guarding and protecting the truth, which is the Logos. We must cherish His mind, for it contains the boundless expanse of Love for us His people. He is the hidden treasure that is more precious than gold, diamonds and rubies. We love Him when we feed His lambs and sheep the vision found in His magnanimous heart. It is the vision of hope that He may abide and dwell in us forever.     Kenneth Wayne Hancock

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March 28, 2024 · 7:43 am

Reconciliation and the Abiding/Continuing

We must continue to believe that Christ through His death has reconciled everyone and has made peace between God and mankind.

That is the truth. The Father is the Spirit of truth. There is one Spirit, and He dwelled in the Son and did miraculous works (Eph. 4:4; John 14:10). Christ promises that the Father “shall be in you,” also (14: 17).

This promise is astounding! But what is the catch? What activates this promise of the Father taking up residence in us? What knowledge brings the promise into a reality in our Christian lives?

We need to know that it is a conditional promise; it sets up like this: If you do this and this, then He will abide in you. The promise is that the Father, who is this invisible Spirit, will come and dwell in us—if we continue in the faith. If we abide in the faith. If we dwell in the faith. If we remain in the faith. If we continue in the faith.

Faith. Belief. In what exactly? There is a whole lot of invisible action going on here. It takes faith to believe that the invisible Creator Spirit God would take up residence inside our bodies. But this is what He is asking us to do—trust Him. To maintain the Father’s presence in our hearts in a powerful reality, we must “continue in the faith.”

We see “continue in the faith” in Colossians 1:23. “If indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard…” The thing we must continue to believe is that Christ through His death has reconciled everyone and has made peace between God and mankind (Col. 2:20-22).

That sounds wonderful, but Christ’s death and the reconciliation involves so much more. The question becomes: How does His death bring about reconciliation with God? Reconciliation comes through our old sinful self dying on the cross with Christ. Then we are buried with Christ, and then by faith in His resurrection “we are raised to walk in a newness of life.”  Our sin has died with Him. “The soul that sins must die,” the law says. We fulfill that at the cross.

The Spirit through the apostle Paul lines this out clearly. “Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we may live a new life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin–because anyone who has died has been set free from sin” (Romans 6:3-7 NIV).

Christ the Lamb of God took on the sins of everyone. “He was made to be sin for us who knew no sin that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:21). Our sins died with the sacrificial Lamb, for He carried our guilt and sin to the cross, and when He died, our old sinful self died, was buried, and—Praise Yah—was resurrected with Him!

[Someone reading this will say, “I knew that about the cross.” Yes, many have experienced the cross, but can they teach it to others? Is your belief of Romans 6 strong enough to weather the storms and trials both past and future?]

Back to the beginning of this article: Reconciliation with God is when we are at peace with Him, when there are no doubts and worries about our relationship with Him. For it was the sin nature that separated us from Him. When we realize that our sinful old self has already died on the cross with Him, things begin to clear up. The scriptures open to us. Things make sense.

This clarity He honors and reveals more of His truth. Reconciliation with God happens if we “continue/abide in the faith.” If we continue believing what He did for you and me at the cross and walking in that truth as seen in Romans 6: 3-12, then we will be ready through reconciliation to go deeper by adding His “divine nature” to the faith. [The Additions to the Faith is my latest book. Peter talks of seven additions that are vital to our growth in Christ (II Peter 1:1-12). If you have read this far, I know that this book is for you. The book is free with free shipping. It is my offering to God. Instead of money in an offering plate, I give a book to you…Please share your testimony in the comments section. It is very edifying to hear how God has touched your life.  Be sure and share this and give us a “like,” if we have edified you].    Kenneth Wayne Hancock

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