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The Two Sided Coin Part 1

I have been fasting for days, truly trying to understand the depth of the submarine vision. I have been asking the Father what I need to do to get the door open and let the water flow into the cabin and flood me completely. Upon hearing my question, the Father laughed and said, “You’re doing it again, Jim! You’re looking for something to DO!” I’m a doer, so concepts are something that I struggle with when there isn’t an action attached to them. So for me, operating in “faith” is in oxymoron. “Faith” and “operating” are words from two different worlds. How do you actually live by faith? How do faith and works actually coexist? What does it mean to actually walk in the Spirit and not in the flesh?

These concepts have eluded believers for millennia. Why? Because they are fusing a spiritual concept with an earthly reality. It’s like trying to make oil and water be best friends. They are complete opposites and opposites don’t go together. Or do they? Without the white background of the page, you wouldn’t be able to read the black text of your Bible. And most every married couple I know has married their complete opposite because opposites attract and complete. If the opposite is used properly, there is balance, unity, and blessing. Unfortunately, most people serve God from their side of the coin.

In the Greek, the word for complete is pleroo, which means to fill up, to bring full meaning to something, to show the full purpose of something, to bring to maturity, to make something whole or complete. Never once does it mean to destroy, do away with or nullify.

This is why in Mathew 5:17 when Jesus/Yeshua says that He came not to destroy the Law, but to ‘fulfill‘ it, He is saying that He did not come to do away with and destroy the Law, but to bring the full meaning to it, like a husband coming together with his wife so the two of them might become complete. Two chapters earlier, in Mathew 3:15, it says that He fulfilled all righteousness. He certainly didn’t do away with righteousness. He filled it up to its fullest meaning! He was the other side of the coin! Understanding how to live in faith AND doing what He says makes us COMPLETE AND FULFILLED!

Faith and works are two sides of the same coin that has been minted and fused together by the open hand of the power – koach – of God. In the last post, we learned what the word power is in the original pictograph of the Hebrew. In this post, we will continue with that concept and take it to a further destination.

When we truly desire with all of our heart to be closer to Him and we admit that we are complete failures, no matter how successful we think we are in any area of our lives, and we open our hand to His guiding help, the power of Yahweh meets the lighting rod of our soul. This is where we meet our true opposite, where we meet the real opposite side of the coin. By the way, the Hebrew letter tzadi in ancient pictograph Hebrew was a man lying down in need. It is representational of a righteous man, which, in Hebrew, is called a tzadik. This is beautiful because it tells us what righteousness in Christ really is. When you get to the end of yourself and are face down in your own exhaustion and you realize that you cannot do it yourself, THAT is the moment you become righteous…THAT is the first step of faith.

Most people serve God with whichever side of the coin they are really bent toward. The faith people tend to serve through compassion, mercy, grace, feeling, and unprecedented trust in His provision and power. They recognize that Christ has done it all and they can do nothing without Him. The works people find themselves working out their salvation in the physical realm and tend to know the Word, love to learn, and process their relationship to Him through their logic, bending toward pleasing God through the things they do. They connect heavily with the faith without works is dead scriptures from James and so their hearts are bent toward trying to find out what He said to do and do it with all their might. But both, if left without the opposite, will fall deathly short of truly pleasing God and experiencing the life-changing power that He desires for all of us. The following is what the Father has shown me in the last couple of days that has radically affected my coin and has taken me to a whole new level of understanding of what it means to walk in faith.

Like I said before, when the Father gave me the submarine vision through my daughter Sierra, I was quick to get busy to figure out how to make the vision come true (just like a true works person). But then the Father showed me one night in prayer that if there was something that I could do on my own to bring this level of breakthrough, then HIS power would be in vain. This was a lightbulb moment.

When I went to Blake on this, he told me that all I need to do is “agree with the word that was given through the vision as if it has already happened.” The Word came and cut through my time-space continuum, revealing a supernatural concept to me and I was trying to know it. I was seeking with my mental faculties to understand it rather than to stand under it. The problem is that you cannot try to know God. He is unknowable. Our pursuit of God should not be to know Him, but rather to be known BY Him. Ultimately, what we all really desire is to feel His glorious presence touching the very fabric of our soul. That is something He chooses to do to us, not something we can make happen.

“In the light of faith we do not seek to unveil or to explain but to perceive and to absorb the rarities of mystery that shine out from all things; not to know more but to be attached to what is more than anything we can grasp…This is the secret of the spirit, not disclosed to reason…The mind surrenders to the mystery of spirit, not in resignation but in love. Exposing its destiny to the ultimate, it enters into an intimate relationship with God.”*

Intimacy is not found in mere acts of obedience or doing acts of service for God any more than mowing the lawn or taking out the trash for your wife creates intimacy. Those acts are the acts that LEAD to intimacy because they please the one who is the object of your love, but that is only one side of the coin. True intimacy of the soul with its Creator is found by mastering not only the physical side of obedience to His commands, but also in the mastery of the faith that completes it.In part 2, we will dive further into this concept of faith and then throw the word trust into the mix finally bringing some real clarity on what the difference is between all these spiritual words that we throw around so much. When we truly understand what faith, trust, and works really are, and how we relate to each of them, breakthrough becomes automatic.

 *Abraham Joshua Heschel. “Man is Not Alone” (in italics). pages 93-95.

 

Shalom,
Jim Staley 

 

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