MacDonald Lite Archives -

The Inheritance – Lite

Dale — Tue, 18 May 2021 12:48:07 +0000

See the links below for other articles connected to this summary:

Sermon Quotes – from Original Version

Inheritance – Introductory Blog

The Inheritance of the Saints is to be One with Them, no separation between us and the origin of our Life. To fail to receive our inheritance is to deprive others of theirs. Not only should we know God as our Life and Light, but be aware beyond our consciousness and imagination that our creator God is always and forever present, transforming us into the live beings that we are!

The sole claim we can demand of Him is Himself, for God is our Inheritance! What I am trying to express is this: That if we understood that everything comes from God, then our inheritance, whatever form it takes, would be seen as Him, for everything is God’s, not just as being in His power, that of course, but as coming from Him, the Light.

The Meaning of Share is not what we can get or keep, but what we can give away. What is mine is that which I have the power to give away. What I cannot share or desire to share with everyone is not fundamentally mine. We can say that whatever is the source of joy or love, whatever is pure and strong and awakens aspiration, lifts us out of selfishness, and is beautiful or admirable is Light!

Heaven is God Himself, not just a place or time in the future, but continuous fellowship and communion with God now and then! It is the movement from Alone, to Together with God, to Others!

However, what boy, willing to be a disciple of Christ and a child of God, would prefer a sermon to his glorious kite. A kite is the most divine of toys, and with God Himself as his playmate, watching it together in the blue wind, tossed hither and thither in the golden sky! He might be willing to part with his kite, the wind, and the golden sun and go down into the grave for his brothers, but surely not to be admitted to an eternal prayer meeting!

For my part, I rejoice to think that there will be neither church nor chapel in the heavenlies. Yes, there will be nothing of religion but its Love and no law but the perfect Law of Liberty.

Heaven will be continuous fellowship with God, in this relationship, in this very sense of being, is Joy! For to experience real Life, there must be actual and conscious contact with its very source. Therefore, this Life is simply goodness, as good as the very Life of God is good, filled with the Joy of our very being!

The Hell of Things is reserved for those who love only things, and for them, the prospect of inheriting Life holds no attraction. If we do not care for relationships, then God’s Heaven will be Hell for us! They can be assured there will be no danger of a requirement of them to accept their inheritance. Many say they believe that God is love, but they cannot quite believe that He is the source of the Love in which we are most like Him, making His love either a mockery or torture.

Light is for repentance and Life, and in it The Only Constant is Change. Relationships are dynamic, not static. They are ever-changing. It is the joy of the true-hearted, of an heir of Light, a child of God, to love and desire an open soul. Sheer joy awaits the one who hates the wrongs he has done and can say, “I was wrong; I am sorry!”

For never have I felt quite at Home, in the middle of the good things of this beautiful world. All that is needed to set the world right for me – and no celestial heaven could be without it – is that I care for God as He cares for me!

What springs from my selfish self is not from God and is evil; it is a perversion of something of God’s. Whatever is not of faith, that is, not trusting and living from the Life of God, is sin! Independence is a stream cut off – a stream that has cut itself off from its source and thinks it runs on without it. But Light is the inheritance through Him whose Life is the Light of men, to awaken in us the Life of our Father in heaven. All love be to Him, Who in Himself generates the Life, which is the Light of men!

See the links below for other articles connected to this summary:

Sermon Quotes – from Original Version

Inheritance – Introductory Blog

The Inheritance – Sermon Paraphrase

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Abba, Father! – Lite

Dale — Sat, 15 May 2021 06:37:30 +0000

Romans 8:15 NKJV

The most beautiful and challenging thing in the world is to cry Abba Father from a full heart! And I would help everyone I could to call upon this Father. – George MacDonald

When a child’s heart hears it needs to be Adopted, its love is chilled! It is here MacDonald calls on the image of “Mist” from his first sermon’s title. The mist is the evil implications of separation. The shout or whisper, whichever the evil one uses to tell us we have no Home! That we are orphans in a dark and broken world! The lie that we have no Father is the mist through which the Gospel’s light struggles to appear!

Therefore, the rejection of Our Common Father is the source of all our human difficulties. Separation creates those who are IN and those that are OUT. Separation is the lie; division is its fruit. This lie is at the heart of all human misery. It is the justification for our lack of care and love for all of Our Father’s children. However, no matter how bad I become as His child, I am still his child, and my heart still cries out, “Abba, Father!” in our common struggles.

The Spirit of the Child is simply the state of being a Child in a relationship with its parents. Our Father convicts us of sin and disciplines us because we are His Children. Not in some twisted way to make us them. What child has ever chosen their parents? Parents, when did your offspring become your child? What did they do? What could they do? Again, I say, Paul’s use of this Greek word does not imply that God adopts children that are not His own. But rather a second time, He fathers his own, a birth, a transformation from above so that we might learn that we can live nowhere else!It was for this purpose that Jesus died for us!

It is Not Western Adoption. It is a spiritual coming of age, a Jewish Bar Mitzvah. As beautiful as western adoption is, it cannot be imposed upon Paul’s teaching with their eastern, biblical, and Jewish cultural context. Paul means by adoption the raising of a father’s own child through tutelage and subjection to others to the place of a son. Only a child could become a son or daughter, and only when they mature are they really and fully Sons.

God wants Sons and Daughters after His own heart. There is confusion created by this IN and OUT concept. It confuses the fundamental issue of finding Life in our relationship with Them. Not only in His love and devotion to them, or their love for Him but in that we love like Him, love as He loves! For this relationship, western adoption will not do. He dies to give us Himself, thereby raising us to His own heart. He is our Father, but we refuse to surrender to Him as His children! Because we are His children, we must become His sons and daughters.

Because Our Father draws to Himself sons and daughters, not merely having originated in His heart, but having returned to Him and chosen to be what He is. God created us to share in His being and nature. To be strong as He is strong, tender and gracious like Him, and even angry when and how He is angry.

Becoming What You Are! – Sons of the Father of Light!

These statements are the theme and thesis of the entire Unspoken Sermons. The becoming of what we ARE, not what we are not! God has not asked us to change nature but form, the metamorphosis from the caterpillar to the butterfly. From what we are by nature to its full expression in us! This change is The Mystery of the Gospel, the good news of our destiny in Christ!

Creation’s origins lie within the mind and heart of the Trinity. Therefore our Divine destiny is in becoming what we are! In creation, the Word expressed the Father’s thoughts about us, and the Spirit made them so! So we, humanity, were made in Their “image and likeness” and have within us Their Divine Life! And this Life is the Light that reveals everything. Those who choose to live in a relationship with the Light, living as Jesus lived, living in obedience to the Father’s love, realize and participate in their own becoming! And this Light guides our journey into the fulness of Their Eternal Life. Jesus, the firstborn in His incarnation and vicarious Life, lives for all humanity. And so through Jesus, we are alive with Their Life in our obedience and union with Him!

“Yet wherever men did accept him he gave them the power to become sons of God. These were the men who truly believed in him, and their birth depended not on the course of nature nor on any impulse or plan of man, but on God.“ John 1:12 Phillips

The Father does not make us sons but gives us power, as Their children, to become sons. By choosing and obeying the Truth, that is living and loving with Their Life. By this Life, we are transformed into what we are! That is fulfilling our destiny by becoming one with Them and sharing in the Father of Light!

Becoming what we are, not only in our spiritual condition but also in the Adoption of our Bodies. This becoming is outward as well as inward. You do not become a better caterpillar; it is only a visible shell of your true self, but a beautiful butterfly.^art1 Paul’s ideas are so large that they surpass his language and strain the use of existing words. All of this is entirely consistent with his concept here of “becoming.”

In the Liberty of Sons, our souls saved one thought, want, and way at a time. Freedom comes with Sonship! Redemption is not an escape plan. Freedom is the death of the selfish self a little at a time. So then, we are sons the moment we cry, Father, but a long way from being free and mature sons. So long as there is the least distrust, hate, or fear, we have not received our full sonship. We have not received such Life as raised Jesus from the dead.

Transformation is the process of creeping out of our cocoons and spreading our heaven-storming wings. Becoming like Jesus is our destiny! Until our outward condition as sons divine and these mortal bodies remain as torn and stained, weak and weary, old and forgetful and weighted with earthly things, we have not yet received our sonship in full. We groan under the process, waiting for our full sonship, the redemption of the body.

To become The Sons of God is what I was born to be! Being right is overrated! Living in a relationship with the Father, Son and Spirit is Life indeed! They are patient and longsuffering with us, giving us room to grow. They will see to it that we know the Truth in the end. Both Jesus and His love-slave Paul have represented the Father as perfect in love, abundant in self-forgetfulness, supreme in righteousness, and entirely devoted to the lives of His children! Jesus is the perfect image of the Father, by which we imperfect images are to understand Him and move on towards perfection!

Creation is Our Nursery, and the whole world exists for our education. Our Home is in Their heart! Everything else is but stops along the way. Let us return to our Father as the Prodigal did, for He is always watching and eager to embrace us!

Beyond its own will or understanding, the whole creation works for the maturing of God’s children into the sons of God. When at last, the children have risen and gone to their Father. When they are clothed, with a ring on their finger and shoes on their feet, finally shining out in their predestined sonship, then creation will break out into singing, and the trees and fields will clap their hands.

See the links below for other articles connected to this summary:

Sermon Quotes – from Original Version

Adoption as Transformation – Introductory Blog

Abba, Father! – Sermon Paraphrase

National Geographic Article – Programed for Change

Zeke the Butterfly – Illustrated Children’s Book

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The Higher Faith – Lite

Dale — Fri, 14 May 2021 22:55:04 +0000

See the links below for other articles connected to this summary:

Sermon Quotes – from Original Version

A Big God – Introductory Blog

Covenant of Faith – Second Blog

The Higher Faith – Sermon Paraphrase

John 20:29 NLT

This opening is an autobiographical sketch of MacDonald himself. For in his revelation, he sees the Father filling everything and has not yet closed his heart and imagination. He has not yet learned to divide, divide between God and nature, providence and grace, love and benevolence.

For the unimaginative disciple, all revelation had ceased. The Truth was now buried in the Bible, being only unearthed with difficulty. The examination of its decayed form being re-united into a ridged skeleton of mental and legal creations. God’s love being limited by His other so-called “perfections” of being.

The Bible nowhere claims to be the “Word,” “. . . the Way, the Truth and the Life.” Sad, indeed, would this whole life be if the Bible had told us everything God meant for us to know and believe. In this has the Bible been significantly wronged. It leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible ever-unfolding Revelation of God the Father! Christianity is not knowing about God. It is knowing God!

The Holy Spirit is who knows and reveals the heart of God, giving us His very mind. The great heresy of the church today is unbelief in this Spirit. So, if we have ever received and experienced the mind of Christ, we know that the Bible has done its work and completed its task. Therefore, we move on and live in the “Word” that abides in us forever! The sole purpose of the Bible is to reveal Jesus in us! That through Him, we would come to know His Father and our Father, His God and our God, until we know Him as our Father! This Fatherhood is but a step towards the Life of the Trinity for those who can receive it.

The real danger here is placing Faith and Hope in SomeThing rather than risk trusting in SomeOne! What would I think of my child if I discovered that he limited his faith and hope in Me to just a few promises he heard Me say? A theology that confines itself to the revealed promises of God. This faith seems to me insufficient both in character and trust found in my child.

They try to believe based only on the truth of His word as a contract. But the nature of His being they do not understand. In His promise, they persuade themselves they put faith. But in Himself alone, they do not trust, for they do not know Him! It would be best if you came out of the legal, contractual bondage, to which you give the name grace, for there is little that is gracious in it.

Our God is Too Small! Will we not find You more than our faith can believe? One day, we will laugh at ourselves, that we looked so little to You. Thank God that our little faith in You does not limit Your giving and faithfulness.

Faith believes in God Himself! Can we not believe in God Himself?

Will God find Faith in the Earth? The higher faith is so far beyond what we can know, but not beyond Who we can know! We know in Whom we have believed and look for more in our hearts than our imaginations can conceive. Will God’s thoughts be less than our thoughts? His giving only by our asking? His creation limited by our imaginations? No! We have only the faith of ignorant but hopeful children. The children who know they do not know, but know that You do!

See the links below for other articles connected to this summary:

Sermon Quotes – from Original Version

A Big God – Introductory Blog

Covenant of Faith – Second Blog

The Higher Faith – Sermon Paraphrase

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The Consuming Fire – Lite

Dale — Fri, 14 May 2021 15:08:56 +0000

See the links below for other articles connected to this summary:

Sermon Quotes – from Original Version

Fire of Love – Introductory Blog

The Consuming Fire – Sermon Paraphrase

Hebrews 12:29 NASB

Love is relentless! There is nothing eternal but that which loves and can be loved, and this love is ever climbing to its consummation when love will fill and inspire the universe, imperishable and divine! Therefore, all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that separates and is not of love’s kind, must be destroyed. Once we finally see it, it is so plain and simple. We wonder how we could have lived without seeing it before. That we did not understand it sooner was simply that we could not see it. To see the truth, to know what it is, to understand it, are all one and the same! One glimpse of divine love, and you are face-to-face with the vital heart of eternal Life!

This Fire of Love, this fear and awe, causes us not to run from Him, but to Him, our very Father! However, the children of Israel could have no worship for any deity of whom they were not afraid. Mount Sinai was a true revelation of God. However, it was not coming from a demand of His holiness but His Love. This fire is not a condition of His acceptance but the pathway to His Life of freedom!

Other than A Partial Revelation,what else could the highest spiritual condition of men receive of an infinite God! Mount Sinai was a revelation, but only a partial one, a real image, but not a final one. Fearing God is better than no God, much better than a god made with hands! God relating to us, not as we are, but as we will be. Not as we will be only, but as we are growing and capable of becoming. Humanity created in His image is what we will become. Upwards to the best, we are now capable of being. This revelation of fire making future and higher revelations possible would support this partial one as being true.

The Revelation of Fire is that which kills the sin and gives life to the sinner. So how can we understand that this revelation from God is our savior? The word penetrates and divides between our true man and the evil in us, killing the sin and giving life to the sinner. Can it be of any comfort to tell them that God loves them by burning them clean? Can this cleansing by fire appear to them as anything beyond what it must always be, more or less – a process of torture? Was not God ready to do to them even what they feared? Though with another motive and different purpose and intent from any which they were capable of imagining? Our Father is against sin: in so far as, and while, sin and we are one! He then is against our selfish selves. Against our selfish desires, aims, and hopes, so that He can be always and altogether “For Us!”

The Coming Revelation is that God gives Himself entirely for us because He has no justice nor dignity to support. Jesus would do His Father’s will. He would lay down His life, suffering death, not that we would not hurt. But that our suffering would lead us to the Father’s perfect love! For the truth is that God is Love, all love, and nothing other than love! Perfection is love expressed! A selfish man cannot believe the Truth concerning this gift of grace and love and misrepresents it. This Truth cannot be understood in his selfishness. But the ones filled with love, oppressed by wrong teaching or partial truths claiming to be the Truth, will hear, understand and rejoice!

This image of What is to be Feared was helping them see that evil, not fire, was the fearful thing. This wrath against sin is consuming what we mistakenly call ourselves—freeing the self God made to appear. This self appears with ten times the awareness than before and brings with it all the blessings of Life. Bringing with it all the benefits we tried to find without God. Surprisingly, we now see and realize that we are our true selves. If we continue to cling to the destructible, the burning goes deeper and deeper into our souls. It burns until it reaches the root of the lies that enslave us – to the myths that appear to us as truth. This fire often reveals itself only as light, but it will still be the refiner’s fire. The consuming fire is just the original and active form of its purity and love that is God’s creative energy.

In this Outer Darkness, the fire will go on searching and burning in us, even as in the highest saint, consuming what is “other” for our liberation, so that we may be pure, even as He is pure.

Finally, Home, of all God’s natures, is His mercy, not infinite! Could a brother love a brother more than The Father loves His own? More than our Brother Christ loves His brothers? Would Jesus not die again to save just one brother more!

See the links below for other articles connected to this summary:

Sermon Quotes – from Original Version

Fire of Love – Introductory Blog

The Consuming Fire – Sermon Paraphrase

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The Child in the Mist – Lite

Dale — Thu, 13 May 2021 18:59:16 +0000

Mark 9:33-37 NLT • Matthew 18:1-5 NLT

The Essence of a Child is relationship, and this childlikeness is Divine. Jesus used an ordinary child with all the faults any child would have. MacDonald illustrates this by placing childlikeness in high contrast to what he calls “…adult, so-called worldly wisdom.” This adult perspective robs us of our childhood. Perceiving life from a child’s perspective awakens the Spirit of love, the love uniquely expressed to children.

Kingdom Thinking is humble thinking. Jesus told them they could not even enter His Kingdom thinking like adults. They would have to become childlike by humbling themselves, moving from independence to interdependency. The idea of control and power was contrary to the essential quality of His Kingdom. There would be no more ruling but serving. No more looking down on anyone, but lifting, serving, and persuading people of who they are in Christ!

Secondly, the Simplicity of Childlikeness is our common ground. Our childlikeness originates in recognizing that whatever we are and whatever we have finds its origin in God! He asks nothing of us; He has not placed the resource within us to accomplish; this makes room for maturity. For this reason, Jesus set the child before them. Therefore, a disciple represents his master and lives as a reflection of Him.

Relationship simply flows from the Childlikeness of the Father and Son. To receive Jesus is to receive the Father. Therefore, to receive the child is to receive the Father Himself! I do not say this as some doctrinal truth, for I aim at no such logical certainty. Rather than prove, I aim to show, using my thoughts progressions to reveal the ideas I am relating.

Next, the Kingdom is a Community of Children serving one another in Truth and Love. The kings of the earth exercise sovereign power, but it will not be that way with you. Jesus, your King, came serving all! “Whoever receives Me, receives not Me but Him who sent Me.” To receive a child in the name of Jesus is to receive the Father Himself. To receive the Father, you must know Him. To know Him is to know that He is in us! Jesus is one with the Father. The child is one with Jesus. Therefore, the child is one with the Father, for they are all childlike! The secret of seeing this revelation lies in simply receiving the Divine in everyone!

The Father’s Devotion found in the Life of the Child is in Their Self-Giving Love. Let us take this truth to yet an even greater revelation, that the devotion of God to His creatures is perfect! The truth is that They loved and were devoted to us first. And our devotion is but a mirroring of Theirs in return! They do not think of Themselves, but us! They want nothing for Themselves, for the Trinity lacks nothing and only lives to be a blessing! Their devotion and self-giving love is at the center of the Divine Childlikeness, the Universe’s Heart and Life! They are the source and ultimate expression of human relationships at their best as a friend, brother, sister, father, and mother, expressed fully in our love-perfect God! They are grand and strong beyond anything our imagination could conceive of heroic thinking and actions! Yet, delicate and tender surpassing human intimacy as husband and wife! They are comfortable and welcoming, exceeding all we could envision as the height of love and acceptance coming from fathers and mothers!

The question for us is will we receive as a gift their other-centered and self-giving love, not trusting in ourselves but in Their sacrifice for us? Will we respond in kind with thankfulness, giving our lives to others for whom They sacrificed and loving others as They love us? God is pure and single-minded about His children, that we would be just like Them. Our thinking, feeling, meaning, and the possessing of Their Life is the plan to flow through us, to others.

How terribly have the theologians misrepresented God! “Nearly all of them represent Him as a great king on a grand throne; God thinking how great He is; making it the business of His being and the end of His universe the keeping up of His glory, wielding the lightning bolts of Jupiter against those that take His name in vain.”

He alone as the Father of Little Children is abandoned and devoted to them. Dear brothers and sisters, have you found our King? There He is, kissing little children and saying they are like God. A simple peasant who loves his children and sheep is a more genuine representation of God than these sovereign ones. For this peasant is a more accurate type of God than that monstrosity of a monarch they present.

We are Home, for our Childhood is Born of His Fatherhood! For it is His childlikeness that makes him our God and Father. The perfection of His relationship with us removes all our imperfections, defects, and evils. Perfect faith in us is when we come to our Father with a complete lack of true feelings and desires, without inspiration or aspiration. The one with the full weight of unworthy thoughts, failures, neglects, and unthankfulness and says to God, “You are my refuge and Life because you are my Home.”

For God to give us that which is in disharmony with His Life in us would be to damn us, to cast us into outer darkness.

Life is not a series of chances with a bit of grace sprinkled in to keep up a truly failing faith. But one of grace and the purposes of God.

See the links below for other articles connected to this summary:

Sermon Quotes – from Original Version

Divine Childlikeness – Introductory Blog

The Child in the Mist – Sermon Paraphrase

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