Christianity Oasis Forum

[Netchaplain]

There is no time like the present for you to begin resting in your Father’s presence. He sees you there, in His beloved Son. It is a simple, scriptural matter of seeing yourself there “in full assurance of faith” (Heb 10:22). You are there in glory before the Father; not in the flesh, not in the body, but in spirit as a “new creation” in Christ Jesus.

This is not the time to visualize, or even to verbalize; and certainly not to fantasize. It is the time, by faith in the facts, to actualize. It is the time to rest in your residency, to personalize your position. The Father has seen you there before His face since the day you were saved. In eternity past He chose you for that position, “according as He hath chosen you in Him (Christ) before the foundation of the world” (Eph 1:4).

As you by faith in the positional facts realize that you are in the Father’s presence, you will not try to depend upon any sense of His presence. Adulthood supersedes childhood. Now you know His presence because you know that your position in the Christian life is a life of faith in the facts—nothing else. Thus the Father enables you to live by faith so as to draw you into His presence—not you, by sense, seeking to draw Him into yours.

Fellowship between you and your Father involves oneness, a commonality. As you in faith occupy your position, you find yourself not only in His presence, but in His life and nature—the human-divine* newness of the life of your rebirth. You are there in the full acceptance of His beloved Son (Eph 1:6), and that is what you are: beloved of God. “We are bound to give thanks always to God for you, brethren beloved of the Lord, because God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation” (2 Thes 2:13).

Your blessed responsibility and privilege for now is to quietly sit where you have been seated by the Father—and that is in His presence. You have no other place. This world is certainly not your home. The Father “hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph2:6). You occupy and abide in your position by faith; you will begin to experience the resultant fellowship as the Holy Spirit prepares you (2 Co 3:18).

As you rest, abiding above in your Source, in “Christ who is our life” (Col 3:4), you will have a new appreciation of a sound doctrinal foundation and superstructure. Without regeneration of course, you would not be where you are; without assurance and security, you would not be able to rest where you are.

Further, without knowledge of your identification with the Lord Jesus in His death unto sin and life unto God, you would not even know of your position before the Father, nor of your privilege to abide there in His Son. These same truths assure you that you have been freed from the old man by death and made a new man in the New Man, thereby being made “fit to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light” (Col 1:12). The basis upon which the Holy Spirit carries on the subjective work in you, is the objective truth of your eternal completeness in the Lord Jesus Christ: crucified, buried, risen and ascended (Gal 2:20; Rom 6:3-5; Eph 2:6; Col 3:3, 4).

As J.B. Stoney stated, “When I look at this place, He is not here; and when I look at myself naturally I am not fit for Him. How happy then to know that I belong to the place where He is; and that through grace I have been made suited to Him in that new position; so that I set my mind and affection there, as the place where my deepest joys are realized.”

- Miles J Stanford



Poster’s Opinion:

* “Human-divine”: Gill – ‘That by these you might be partakers of the divine nature’; not essentially, or of the essence of God, so as to be deified, this is impossible, for the nature, perfections, and glory of God, are incommunicable to creatures; nor, hypostatically and personally, so as the human nature of Christ, in union with the Son of God, is a partaker of the divine nature in Him.

“But by way of resemblance and likeness, the new man or principle of grace, being formed in the heart in regeneration, after the image of God, and bearing a likeness to the image of His Son (Col 3:10), and this is styled, Christ formed in the heart, into which image and likeness the saints are more and more changed, from glory to glory (2 Co 3:18), through the application of the Gospel, and the promises of it, by which they have such sights of Christ as do transform them, and assimilate them to Him; and which resemblance will be perfected hereafter, when they shall be entirely like Him, and ‘see Him as He is’” (1 Jhn 3:2).


Miles J Stanford Devotional: http://www.abideabove.com/hungry-heart/