In this clip from our recent “Art of Awareness” live session, Graham Cooke and I discuss being alive to God. When you are truly aware of who God is, you become truly aware of who you are in Him.
Transcript
Today, we are going to take a “Posture of Peace” by being alive to God.
Posture is a short, audible fist bump to remind you, God is with you in everything. Together, we’re going to be emboldened to take a daily Posture of perfect peace.
So all this week, as a Posture community, we have been talking about awareness. We’ve been talking about tuning into your real life, the true you who is in Christ. Just a quick reminder, a key scripture from this week has been Romans 6:11 where it says, “So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” And if you have been following along all this week, then you know that also what’s been happening is a live challenge with Graham Cook. And we’ve been deep diving into this truth about awareness and so today, I’m gonna share a clip from one of our live sessions and in this clip, Graham and I are talking about how being alive to God means that all of your focus is towards Him in every circumstance of life. And how when you are truly aware of who God is, you become truly aware of who you are in Him.
The Bible talks about crucifying the flesh. And the way we crucify the flesh is by ignoring it. Is by focusing on the new you, not the old you. Whatever you focus on, you give life to. The Bible never tells us to focus on the old life. It says God is making all things new. I give you permission, consider yourself to be dead. Just be alive to me. If you’re alive to me, the very fact that you’re alive to me means that the old man is dead ’cause you’re ignoring it, it doesn’t play any part. We don’t have to try and kill it every day. It’s not what we’re doing. We crucify it by ignoring it and by focusing on what God is really doing, which is building up, He’s not fixing the old you. He’s only dealing with the true you in Jesus. And that’s what Christ in you, that’s what He’s holding open for you. This is who you are.
Okay, so this is the next part of me that you’re gonna come into and enjoy with me. We’re gonna do it together. I’ll be giving you myself here and you will be joining me in that thought, in that perception, in that language. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m making you. Jesus is in us in order to make us in His image and His likeness. So all of our situations are about that and when you know that and that God is happy about that, and He’s relentlessly joyful about bringing you into that space of being a new creation, then it’s like the pressure can actually fall away from you because the peace of God rises up in you. And Jesus said, “My peace I give you not as the world gives, it’s not situational peace.” It’s a lifestyle of peace that God is doing. He doesn’t want you to learn peace when things are going bad. He wants you to learn peace as a lifestyle so that you have peace when things go bad and you don’t get affected because your peace is greater.
And I think being aware of what we mean to God and being aware of ourselves as to what our true nature is is just as key as being aware of God. You have to be aware. This is my identity. And religion will focus you on behavior. God says, “It’s not about that. All that died on the cross. This is about identity in us, with us.” And so what we’re learning is we must not allow our awareness of God to be smaller than the issues of life. You know? So we’re always making God, we’re not making God bigger, He’s big enough. What we’re doing is we get an awareness of just how big He is. You know?
So when I started learning that a number of years ago, I remember the Father saying to me, “Graham, what would it take for you to believe that I’m unceasingly magnificent towards you?” And so I said, “That will be a whole different way of thinking.” And okay, done. We’ll do that. I will teach you how to think like I think. And as part of that, I’ll also teach you the way I see your situation. And then I’m gonna give you a language that enables you to trust and have faith. So that’s what we’re doing. We agreed on that, that the plan, okay, let’s do it. And it’s been that way ever sense. Learning about the majesty and the sovereignty of who God is.
And it’s again, the order of things. When we are aware of the nature of God because we’re being made in His image and likeness, then we become more aware of our true selves. That’s the way in which things work in the kingdom. So often, religion wants us to focus on ourselves first, which is really the dead self, fix yourself, do this, behave well, check this off your list and then somehow that’ll bring you closer to God. But when you’re aware of who God really is, I mean, this is what we find in the story of Numbers 13. The spies. The 10 spies were unaware or refused to believe who God said he was, so they didn’t trust Him to be a promise keeper and therefore, they saw themselves as grasshoppers and they saw themselves as grasshoppers in the eyes of their enemy and they disregarded what God was able to do and what God said he would do. But the difference between Joshua and Caleb, same circumstance, they received the same promise everyone else did, they knew who God was. They trusted in His nature. They were so aware of the nature of God that therefore, they were aware of their identity in Him and they said, “We are well able.”
The promise of perfect peace is found in Isaiah 26:3. In Hebrew, it is “shalom, shalom”, meaning complete wholeness. Nothing missing, nothing broken. This is who you are in Jesus. Because of Jesus, you are a living testimony of Jesus’s ultimate win. With every step you take today you’re putting Jesus’s victory on display and satan’s defeat on replay.