Day 2 Ascension into the Mind of Christ
Dearly beloved of God, may His grace uphold you and His peace surround you. May the Spirit of Life who is in you, bring light to His Word and understanding to your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Yesterday, I began to share about living in prophetic consciousness and what that means. I mentioned how our carnal minds have no capacity for spiritual realities, and that we need an ascension into the mind of Christ. So today I want to explore this a bit further and begin by saying that, “As for the Bridegroom so also for the Bride”. The Bride will be prepared to be the perfectly compatible partner for her husband, and that means participating in all that He undertook on her behalf. In particular His death, burial, resurrection, ascension and glorification have all been prepared for us, that we might be partakers of, and follow perfectly down the aisle to the marriage altar. In our Christian communities, we focus much on the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus. What a wonderful victory He gained on our behalf – defeating Hell, death and the grave. He had no need to overcome these for Himself, certainly not as the Son of God, but as the Son of Man, and as the High Priest of our confession, it was necessary for us that He was crucified upon the Cross, died and was buried. So that now, by faith in His selfless act of propitiation, we might partake of the Cross personally, and reckon ourselves to be in Him when He was crucified. In this way, the body of Jesus became to us like the ark in which we entered and were saved. So that by being in Him on the Cross, and buried with Him in the grave, we might also be raised with Him into new life, hallelujah.
But what of ascension and glorification? Our blessed hope, is that one day, when our Saviour returns on the clouds in glory, we shall be changed to be like Him, putting off mortality and putting on immortality, we shall ascend bodily to meet the Lord in the air when He comes. We can indeed consider this as our ascension in the same way the Lord ascended, similarly we also fully expect to receive a glorified body like His glorified body – 1 Cor 15:43 “The body is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.” Yet whilst our bodily ascension and glorification awaits the time of our Bridegroom’s return, there is another ascension available to the believer, and indeed has already taken place. I talk here of the ascension of our spirit man.
Ascension is not just physical, but it is also spiritual! There is an ascension from one level of glory to another, from the seen to the unseen, from the physical realm to the spiritual realm. When Jesus ascended from the Mount of Olives, and returned to the Father, He transcended into greater glory, and passed through a dimensional veil into the unseen realm, where He sat down with all authority at the right hand of the Father. This is what Paul so confidently affirms when he writes to the Ephesians.
But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ, (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, Eph 2:4-6
When Paul writes “we have been raised with Christ”, he is not only referring to our resurrection but also to our ascension. We have not only been raised, but we have also ascended and have been seated with him in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. This is more than a theological statement, but is something to be appropriated in our daily walk. Now if through faith, we believe Jesus lives in our hearts by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and if through faith we confess “Christ in me, the Hope of Glory”, should we not also by the same faith believe that just as He is in us, we are also in Him! This confession, that we are in Christ, is a living truth with the potential to radically change our daily experience. For if Christ is seated in Heavenly places and we are in Him, then we are also there with Him. In other words, we occupy both an earthly and a heavenly position simultaneously. In this way we become a portal between heaven and earth.
I will continue more next time.
