The one new man (Jew and Gentile one in Messiah) is a very important goal that we as the people of God need to keep ever before us. Yeshua prayed that His people would be one for a very specific purpose (John 17). So that the world would know and believe that the Father sent His Son and has loved them.
Our oneness with each other in Him speaks volumes to the world. If we claim to want to see people saved from their sins and receive eternal life, to know God and Jesus Christ/Yeshua the Messiah, then we should want to be one with every fiber of our being.
But the truth is that this goes completely against our nature. Yes, it is an act of the Spirit, not the flesh. We must allow Him to work it in us. We must allow Him to mold us as the clay we are. That is the only way it is possible.
We must live in the power of the Spirit and be submitted to His Torah/Law (Romans 8) so that we may please Him and become one, completely one. This is not just a half way thing, it is an all the way thing. We either are or we are not.
Let us put off the old man and put on the new and be submitted to His will, not ours. If we know what pleases Him and still look for excuses not to be what He wants us to be then what is that?
To truly be one in Messiah, it is incumbent upon us to love one another! We speak rather easy of being one but saying it and living it can be two different things.
We still try to lord it over one another. All too often we are using our own opinions about how things should be done or said to distinguish ourselves from one another. We want to play judge over God’s servants and children. That is not our place.
Our place is to love each other. So much of the book of 1 John is given to this subject. Yeshua tells His disciple that this is what He wants for them in John 13. Why do we try to insist on having things our own way and to our own comfort?
We must be determined to love each other and have the bond of peace among us. If we truly want a revival that is true and lasting than we must make a concerted effort to move in this direction. We don’t want to wait for persecution to force this upon us? That is not what our Messiah wants.
Let’s be determined to be what He wants now so that we will please the One we say we love. Let’s not be so focused on the how we think it should be that we forget the way He wants it to be. Our Messiah wants us to love each other as He loved us.
That is not to say that we accept sin into our communities, but that we stop equating our opinions and desires to the Word. Our opinions and desires are no reason to separate and speak against each other. Even when we do put someone out of the fellowship because of true sin it is always in the hopes of restoration.
May we live up to His command to love one another!
Matthew 13 is the beginning of Yeshua sharing parables in fulfillment of Psalm 78:2. When His disciples asked Him about it His answer was twofold. First, He quoted from Isaiah 6:9-10 as He spoke of the masses, “Go! Say to these people: Shema, shema/be ever listening, but do not discern/understand; keep looking, but do not know what you are looking at/perceive. Dull the minds of these people; deafen their ears and blind their eyes; otherwise they might see with their eyes and shema/hear with their ears, understand with their minds, turn back, and be healed.”
In the time of Yeshua the masses did not discern what He was saying or know Who they were looking at. So, it has been for the last 1900 years in the Jewish community in regards to Yeshua being the Messiah and in the Christian community in regards to His Jewishness and the implications therein.
The second part of His answer said that His disciples were blessed because what they were discerning and knowing were the things the prophets longed to hear and see. So, it is today, many Jews are coming to faith in Yeshua as their Messiah and they are truly blessed because not only do they understand and perceive Who Yeshua is, but they also live in a time that the prophets and righteous people longed to see; a time when the physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are realizing Who the Messiah is and being forgiven.
We are also living in a time when Gentile believers are coming to realize the Jewish roots of the faith and the two are, at this point, slowly becoming one in Messiah.
Let us pray that more eyes on both sides will be opened to know and more ears will shema/hear to discern or understand so that we can be about the work of the Kingdom together, side by side as it should be!
Esther's Legacy 