BVOV Magazine 2013 - present

The same thing is true of God. He’s your heavenly Father. He didn’t create you to be different than Himself. He didn’t create you to be a lower class of being than He is. He made you as much like Himself as He possibly could. The reason you don’t act very much like Him at times is because you still have some spiritual growing to do. I do too. So does every other believer. We’re all born again as spiritual babies, so like natural babies, we start out immature. If we’ll continually feed on the Word, however, and develop our spiritual muscles by doing what God says, we’ll keep growing up into the likeness of Jesus until eventually “we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13). Notice, according to that verse, every full-grown son of God looks just like Jesus! As believers that’s our ultimate destination and, although we’re not there yet, we can move closer to it every day. All we have to do is keep looking into the mirror of the Word, keep seeing ourselves as God sees us, and we will be “changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Laminated Together For us, this is an exciting process! For the devil, on the other hand, it must be very depressing—especially given that he also has another problem when it comes to dealing with us: God has given us His Holy Spirit to live in and work through us, just like He lived in and worked through Jesus when He ministered on earth. That’s right! Just as “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil” (Acts 10:38), we’ve been made partakers of the same anointing so we can do the same thing. We’ve been equipped to operate just like Jesus did. We’ve been authorized and empowered to minister in His place, in His Name, as His representatives, with all the power that was vested in Him being manifested through us! The Bible says that believers shall lay hands on the sick and they (the sick) shall recover (Mark 16:18). How is such a thing possible? Because of our union with Him. According to the Bible, “He that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit [with Him]” (1 Corinthians 6:17). We’re united with Jesus as surely as a husband and wife are united in marriage. As the Apostle Paul explained it: “We are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:30-32). This mystery of our union with Jesus is another scriptural truth the devil wishes he could keep hidden. He’s fought for centuries to keep us from seeing the reality of it. But he’s fighting a losing battle. More and more these days the Holy Spirit is revealing it to our hearts. He’s showing us that we truly are one with the Lord. I remember one flash of insight He gave me a few years ago that really helped me a lot. It came to me one day when I was checking on some construction work being done here at the ministry. While I was looking around the building site I noticed several long beams lying on the ground that hadn’t yet been put in place. They caught my attention because they weren’t just single slats of wood. Each beam was composed of four or five boards that had been laminated together. As I looked at them, I suddenly remembered John 17:21 where Jesus prayed for believers, “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us.” These boards are a good illustration of what Jesus was talking about! I thought. Although they can still be identified individually, they are all one because they’ve been joined together. You can’t pick up one of them without the other. You can’t move one without moving the other. That’s what it means to be one spirit with Jesus! It means when you move, He moves. When He moves, you move. When you minister to someone, Jesus ministers to them by His Spirit. When you lay hands on the sick, He lays hands on the sick. When you command a disease to leave a person’s body, it obeys you just exactly the same way it would obey Jesus if He were here—because He is here. He lives in you! 30 : BVOV

• Cover