Charlie Lewis

The scriptures are our Operating Agreement and our provided agreement for governance. The scriptures provide for our reference the values, the principles, and the established precedents that we are to selectively review and then choose how we are to live our lives based on our desired outcomes. The scriptures are our Constitution, our governmental agreement with the government of Heaven which Jesus Christ, Emmanuel – God with us – delivered to the earth Himself, to empower and to enable Humanity to know how to make good choices for the good outcomes that we are designed to want/desire. All of this establishes and defines what is right, and our Bill of Rights.

God will do nothing that hinders us or takes us away from us His stated, established desire for relationship with us. If we want to be in relationship with our Creator and our Designer our God, we must understand that His primary goal and His purpose for us first and foremost is for relationship and we must know how that works. Relationship requires fellowship. No fellowship, no relationship. Fellowship requires that we spend time together, and time spent together requires that we give Him the time. Time is our given commodity of a specified, certain number of days that we each have received for us to manage while we are here, on the earth. We choose and we display what is important to us by the selective management of our time.

A person cannot be, nor can they be considered to be, successful by what they have (assets/things/material possessions). Success can only be identified by whose they are (relationships). As Jesus said, first our God and secondly our neighbors, family, and others that our God brings to us for relationship. Success for us/humanity cannot be asset-based but must be purpose-based and measured by our active, assigned, and designed relationships. We are designed for relationships and our world is designed to function on relationships of mutual respect and love for our God and for each other. My, how we have missed that mark. Returning to course for the target begins with each of us making choices that align us with our God’s created design for our eternal purpose. What is that for you? That is why we are here and our purpose for being.

Nothing will deliver the contentment and the fulfillment that we are designed to desire and to enjoy that is not founded in the relationships that are based on our created design for our eternal purpose. When we understand how important relationships are and how they work, everything within us – spirit, mind and body – will draw us to our designed objective for our designed purpose for our designed outcomes. Spend time together and develop a continual, flowing relationship of fellowship and communion and communication, face to face, spirit to Spirit and breath to breath. That is His desire and our purpose for being. That is His Kingdom, His system, His plan for us and His way of doing and being right.

Have you ever wondered or thought, “Why doesn’t God just provide for each of us at our birth a clear picture and the absolute understanding of what our purpose on the earth is?” Maybe we should arrive/come with a written Manufacturer’s handbook or an Operating Manual?

Well, what do you call the Scriptures? What is their purpose? We have presented and proven earlier that they are not religious, but they are relational and interactive. They are not about regulation and compliance and being judged. The Scriptures provide access for us to an interactive system of competing and conflicting forces where we choose our actions for our success based on our desired outcomes. The scriptures are dynamics of conduct and behavior that humanity engages for a chosen and a predetermined outcome. Each choice of action contains within their selection the inertia that follows a prescribed path to a known result and outcome.

What is the difference in how a dynamic operates and how a law works? A law has the necessity of outside enforcement by a third party, someone to judge and to execute judgement. With a law, someone must see or make known that the violation of the law has occurred, and there is enforcement action outside of the law itself that follows and is performed. The hope of violators is that no one sees or knows, or ever becomes aware of the violation, and they presumably can get away with their violation.

A dynamic is different. As an interactive reaction, the outcome innately follows the chosen action without any action being necessary by anyone else. Like gravity. If you jump off the roof you will reach the ground. And, like inertia, falling from the roof you will continue to the ground unless you are interrupted or disturbed by an outside force.  A dynamic contains within itself the ability, the inertia to follow the chosen course of action to the resulting outcome. No one has to know your choice of action. There is no hope of escape or getting away with anything. The values and principles and the established precedents presented in the scriptures are dynamics of conduct and behavior that are made available to us for our choosing. You choose your outcome by your chosen action.

More than any other subject or topic, Christ taught about the Kingdom of God. He said that was why He came to earth. To deliver the Kingdom. He said it is here. He described the Kingdom more than anything else as a relationship. A relationship with authority. A relationship with a King. He demonstrated by everything He said and everything He did, the presence, the power, the authority and the reality of His declaration, “I bring you the Kingdom, and the Kingdom is here now at your service, at your disposal.”

He gave us many teachings and many examples of how to see the kingdom, how to enter the kingdom, how to live in the Kingdom, how to experience the power of the Kingdom, how to utilize the financial, spiritual, physical, emotional and relational benefits of the Kingdom, how to make deposits into the Kingdom, how to make withdrawals from the Kingdom and how any and everything we could ever possibly need was prepared for us before we were born, before the foundations of the earth, and he had placed it all in the Kingdom.

Additionally, He has given us complete access. And, even better than all this, we do not have to earn it. He makes it clear that we cannot be good enough for it. He knows that, so He has given it to us when we believe and declare out loud with our voice that all of this is correct/right because we know, believe, accept, and do receive that it has been provided for us by God who is our Father through Himself, Jesus Christ. He came to set the captive free, to declare the liberty He has brought to us, and to make our experience one of power, not weakness and defeat. He declares His plans for us are for good, for a hope and a future. He adds His plans are not for disaster. How do we make this our reality? Our constant experience?

Not to oversimplify, or understate the commitment and work required, but there are four steps that we can take, four experiences we can establish in our lives as our reality that will provide the Kingdom experience promised and delivered to earth by our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who was and is God. He did what He said He would do. So we can do, have, and experience what He said we could.

Steps to Experience the Kingdom of God:

1) We must know what He said we were to have and to experience.

2) We must allow God to turn the knowledge into the vision – the picture, the understanding – of how we walk this knowledge, this understanding out in our lives. Minute by minute, day by day, continually, without exception.

3) We must allow God to show us by His Word, His Spirit, His Teachers, His Prophets and His Preachers the Plans for the vision He has given us to become our reality. It will become easy to know the will and plan of God for activation and for perpetuation in our lives. He will create a hunger for the relationship that achieves the plan. It will be a dominating desire of our lives.

4) We must allow His plans to become our plans. Our experience will be the reality of the results He promised. Then our plans will be established and we will succeed.

We then possess and will display through demonstration what the hungry, desperate, lost world is looking/searching for. It is the image of God in us the Body of Christ recreated in Christ Jesus/the Word/the Spirit. It is the power for victory over situations, circumstances and relationships that is in us through the relational experience of the presence of the Kingdom of God lived out in our lives and delivered into every opportunity God presents. It will be birthed by the Holy Spirit God with power and easily and readily identified with undeniable results. God will deliver what we believe and expect.

Praise to His name.

Next to a home on a lake where we visit occasionally, a young man in his early forties has a home. Every time we visit and he is there, he has a different female partner with him. And always the lady friend has younger children with her, many who are teenagers and younger. They stay up late, drink heavily, and sleep late the following day. They always get up complaining about the way they feel because of all the excess the night before. I always am stirred by the questions “what are these young people learning, what impact are these life choices displayed by their parents and these adults saying to them, and what will be the results in their lives and their children’s lives?”

My spirit grieves. I am torn between wanting to rescue them and wanting to tell the parents and adults about the Love of Father, the real and abiding Love that provides a better choice, a better way, an experience that you can wake up in the mornings with joy, with peace and with contentment feeling good in body, spirit and mind.

What are we to do? How do we positively impact the lives of those around us? Those who God brings into our lives? One simple word: demonstration. The people around you and I are not looking for religion. The world is full of religions. We do not need a new religion. Those who are desperate do not need a new philosophy, or a new theory, or a new approach. They are looking for something that will change their situations, their circumstances, and their relationships permanently, and for the better.

They want to have the power to influence the situations, the circumstances and the relationships in their lives that are driving them crazy, where everything seems out of control, and more than anything else in their lives they are desperate for help with their circumstances, situations and relationships. These conditions that dominate their thoughts, their actions and their desires. Too often they look at the followers of Jesus and see the same messes that they are battling happening in our lives.

We must realize that even if this is in fact our present reality, it is not right/correct. Our spirits tell us it is not right/correct. There is a better experience with the Lord, our God. We must learn what is right/correct. We must determine how to change our reality. And we must change our experience permanently and for the better. Our lives, our daily living, must be a demonstration of the power and reality of this correct/right way of thinking. More than anything else, demonstration proves reality.

Demonstration is the verification of the existence of a belief that cannot be denied. It may be obscure, but it is not hidden. The answer is clearly presented, demonstrated and verified. The one who longs for, hungers after, and will not be denied, the one who knocks and keeps on knocking, the one who seeks and keeps on seeking, the seeker will find. The greatest teacher said, “Blessed is he who recognizes his need (of help), the Kingdom is given to him.”

A Kingdom-First life is a life of character. What is character? Character is that ingredient in a person’s make-up that determines their actions in any given situation, circumstance or relationship. Whether they become angry, bitter, resentful, happy, sad, forgive or seek revenge or any other description one might use to describe one’s decisions.

When Jesus said to “seek the Kingdom of God, and His righteousness – His way of doing and being right (correct),” He was describing the government of God, the plan of God, the method of God. He further indicated that knowing this and following the Kingdom method would lead “to doing and being right (correct).” This appears to be one of the greatest needs among humanity today.

Everywhere one looks a void of character is obvious. Government in America and everywhere else acts independent of God’s way of doing and being right (correct). No longer can we trust government to do what is right. Government enacts laws for its citizenry that it does not obey. Good citizens in legislative and enforcement positions believe “there is a higher good” that allows them to violate the laws they swear to uphold and enforce. No longer is right sufficient. They must do wrong to create right. God is not enough. Times are different now. The law is perverted.

Our challenge is not sin. When one looks on the opposite sex, is attracted physically and enters into an extramarital relationship, lust is not the problem. It is a character issue.

That person knows it is not right (wrong) to pursue such a relationship. Their character must be strong enough to say NO. The fallout is devastating and reaches others for generations to come. How do you develop Kingdom character? Seek His Kingdom first, and His way of doing and being right. Lay down your own desires, your own wants, your life, and take up Christ’s.

Character is not determined by fear of getting caught. You can walk into a room full of thousand dollar bills stacked to the ceiling, and know no one will ever know you were there and you will walk out leaving every bill where you found it because you know what is right. Not because someone might see you, or someone may find out. You can be completely sure, one hundred per cent positive no one will ever find out, but you in your life have chosen to be a Kingdom-First person. You seek God’s method of doing and being right. There is nothing you desire that compares to God your Father, and your relationship with Him.

There is such arrogance today. Everywhere there is such lack of character. It is an “in your face” kind of arrogance. It is commonplace to see in the news this person and that person are having a child who have lived together (some for just a short time, and many who before that lived with many others before, and had children with them) but they have not consummated or sealed the relationship before God and man by taking the vows of the covenant of commitment found in marriage. And marriage has become expendable. When marriage is a part of the relationship, the termination of the covenant is regarded as “just the way it happens today.” Things have changed. God does not care if we divorce. But the God of the universe, the Creator of Heaven and Earth declares, “He hates divorce.”

He declares He does not accept our prayers and sacrifices because we have not honored our covenant that we made with the spouse of our youth. And earlier in the same Word, He reminds us that He is God and He does not change. He points out it is good for us that He does not change or He would have destroyed us.

What are we telling our children? What are we saying to the young and impressionable who are looking, who are searching for the right way, the correct way to live their lives? They want to make right decisions. God created us with that desire built in us. We long to do what is right and be in a deep, abiding relationship with our Father. The Father who does not change, who is constant, the one who is steadfast and reliable. It is easy to see what they are hearing. Their character that is being displayed by their life choices clearly indicates the messages they are hearing and the guidelines they are learning.

Never before has there been more young people living together outside of marriage. And for that matter, never has there been so many older persons living together outside of marriage.

They compare their failure to honor the covenant of marriage to buying a pair of shoes, or buying a car. “You don’t buy a pair of shoes until you try them on, or you don’t buy a car until you drive it.” Older people say, “ I can not afford to lose my Social Security.” God is no longer their provider. Social Security has become their source.

What is your source? Does your character reflect the values and principles of the Kingdom of God? Join me next week as we continue with Part 2 of this discussion of character.