Apostolic Transformation (eBook)

Introduction

Over the centuries, we have taken the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, which our Lord Jesus Christ came to proclaim to all mankind and have fitted it into the old wineskins of man’s religion that we call Christianity. To enter His Kingdom, we necessarily must destroy the old wineskins of man’s religion that we have so easily accepted. This is a daunting task since we have all been trained under the form of man-made Christianity.

Since the birthing of the ecclesia, we have had only one major work of reformation through Martin Luther and John Calvin. The entire movement known as the Reformation was focused on reforming the established Roman Catholic Church. The very meaning of the word reformation is the restructuring of what already exists. It does not address the fundamental flaws of the foundation itself. Jesus was not sent by His Father to re-form Judaism but to transform the very foundation of our understanding of God and His eternal design for His kingdom.

Jeremiah 1:10 gives us God’s directive on our task of replacing the old, reformed structure of manmade Christianity with the God–ordained form of His Kingdom:

“See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms,
to pluck up and to break down,
to destroy and to overthrow,
to build and to plant.”

Will you pluck up, break down, destroy, and overthrow the Christianity of man-made religion? Only then will we be able to build and to plant. Will you unlearn what we have been given by men in order to accept the Truth our Lord Jesus has given us? Because of this fatal error in our wineskin foundations of man’s religion, we have never been able to fully know His design. In 2 Timothy 3:7, Paul declares that we are “always learning and never able to arrive at the knowledge of the truth.” Can we at least see that if our foundations are flawed with men’s religion, we cannot have the foundational knowledge of God’s Kingdom?

In Matthew 9:16–17, Jesus compares the old ways of men’s religion to the profound transformation required for the new wine and the new wineskin:

“No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch tears away from the garment, and a worse tear is made. Neither is new wine put into old wineskins. If it is, the skins burst and the wine is spilled and the skins are destroyed. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.”

We must have both His new wineskin and His new wine to live into and to proclaim the fullness of our Lord Jesus Christ. His new wine is spiritual transformation by the gift of the Holy Spirit. That gift is not just the Pentecostal outpouring of a new baptism (salvation Christianity). It also includes the radical and complete transformation of our hearts to receive the covenants of God written into our hearts (covenant Christianity). It is also the birth of the church (ecclesial Christianity) as the transformed people of God, then it is the transformed structure of governance (kingdom Christianity). We are finally sent into this world to overthrow all the works of Satan (apostolic Christianity).

His new wineskin is the external structure that gives the shape and form to that Spirit in us. We must return to His design to receive this transformation. We must pluck up, break down, destroy, and overthrow the very foundations of man-made Christianity in order to build and to plant according to the work that Jesus was sent to accomplish. Jesus is the new wineskin. He is the very form and structure that we, too, must have if we are to contain the new wine.

Wine has no form without a wineskin to hold it. The old wineskin was the Old Covenant given to Moses as the Law. The Law was the form by which everything had to be shaped and molded. The old wine was God’s requirement for absolute and total obedience to that Law. It included the system of priests, celebrations, Holy Days, and sacrifices. To be included as a people of God, we had to conform to the wineskin of His Law.

The new wineskin of the New Covenant given through Jesus Christ gives us a new form. Jesus Himself is this new form. In our new birth, we are made into new creations and conformed to the very image of Jesus Himself. The new wine is the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which also filled Jesus. With both this new form and new wine, we are transformed by the renewing of our minds to comprehend and implement the mature gospel of all these identified foundational components. Only then do we have complete apostolic transformation. We simply cannot do the work of representing our King Jesus if we leave any of them out of our message or out of our lives. Father God desires the complete maturity of His messengers instead of some partial successes in any of these areas. He requires a fullness of Christ for us to complete His work.

Men have tried to put the new wine of the very person of Jesus into its old forms of man-made religion of rules and laws that continue to condemn us. Even the Reformation of Luther and Calvin only re-formed the old wineskin of the existing Roman Catholic Church. Neither of them went so far as to return to the complete transformation of the hearts of men to conform to the very image of Jesus. He alone is the new wineskin and the King who rules His Kingdom.

These are the five sequential layers in understanding this transformation of salvation, covenants, ecclesia, kingdom, and finally establishing the fullness of Jesus in the apostolic design for God’s people.

Salvation Christianity

The very first part of laying His foundation must be to unlearn a gospel we have been misled to believe: that salvation is about a new set of rules we must obey and rituals we must perform to have eternal life. There is a shadow of truth in that message, but only a shadow and not the substance of His Gospel! We will unlearn and disassemble the false doctrine of salvation. Then we can discover the substance of His salvation gospel of being born to a God who is our Father, rather than just a god that we have created to satisfy our God-given desire to be eternal beings.

Jesus’s message of salvation was founded on the necessity of being born to a new father who gives us His identity and His very nature and character. It is in receiving that new father that we are ‘saved’ from the old ways we have lived. With that transformation of a new father, EVERYTHING about us is changed to conform to HIS IMAGE. Obviously, if we are made in His image and His likeness, we will only want what He wants. We no longer have the nature to sin because He does not have that nature. We would truly desire His kingdom and His righteousness rather than our pleasures and comfort. We would no longer see ourselves as sinners but as the fully redeemed children of the Most High God.

Any other view of salvation is less than His design.

Covenant Christianity

If I have the same nature and character as my father, then I need only know more about Him to also know who I am. God established His covenants as the major markers or signposts of His own “I Am” identity. Both the Old and New Testaments are nothing more than His covenant promises. The word testament literally means covenant. When our new father, Father God, declared His covenants, He was actually making promises to us (His children) based on who He is.

His covenant with Abraham clearly shows us He is a God who desires to bless His own people. In fact, it also shows us that He is a God who will have His own people. Man’s religion has taken that character of God and perverted it into a theology that God loves everyone and always blesses us. We have erroneously called this Christianity, even though it does not agree with the Covenants of God. Of course, His reality in His covenant promise is that He loves and blesses those people who keep His will. His blessings that we love to claim as rights really only exist for us when we are living in His covenant design.

In John chapter eight, Jesus give us an eternal Truth in verses 31 – 32,

“Jesus said to the Jews who had believed Him, ‘If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’”

Please notice in this short passage there is a requirement: “abide in my word.” That simply means those who live my word! Knowing His word does not result in us knowing the truth, and certainly does not result in us being set free.

So how can we possibly know who we are if we do not know who our Father God has declared He is according to His covenants?

Ecclesial Christianity

For those of us who know we have a new father and who know the nature and character of who we are, we also realize that all His children have His nature. We understand that each of us is only one member of His much larger and greater family, the ecclesia. Since His nature is also our own nature, we want to bless and prosper each one of our brothers and sisters in His household. Our personal plan for our relationship as brothers and sisters is the same as our Father’s. We want to bless, not curse, them. We will love each of them as our Father has loved us. This really does encompass the second greatest command of our Lord Jesus to love one another as He (Jesus) has loved us.

At this point, we realize...