What Adam perpetrated in the fall, bringing man under the curse and losing his God given authority – Jesus in His redemptive act of sacrifice remediated. What Adam lost in the fall through his disobedience, Jesus restores to man by faith in the shed blood of Calvary:
[Rom 5:15-19 KJV] 15 But not as the offence, so also [is] the free gift. For if through the offence of one many be dead, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, [which is] by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many. 16 And not as [it was] by one that sinned, [so is] the gift: for the judgment [was] by one to condemnation, but the free gift [is] of many offences unto justification. 17 For if by one man’s offence death reigned by one; much more they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ.) 18 Therefore as by the offence of one [judgment came] upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one [the free gift came] upon all men unto justification of life. 19 For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.
That word “righteous” not only defines as upright, but also implies “entitled”. You are entitled in the cross to be a god-man upon the earth through faith, not in yourself, but in the efficacious work of Christ on the cross.
God’s Rest is Not Inactivity:
Realize that the rest in God is not inactivity. It isn’t sitting on the porch in your sock feet with a straw in your mouth and the theme song to “Hee Haw” playing in the background. What God actually did was spin His processes into the earth by His hand and His word, and then infused them with the forward momentum of His eternal power to proceed along the curve of time and eternity until (as the Quantum theorists would agree) creation turns back on itself to consummate God’s purposes at the end of the age. This is the day in which you and I live.
As is the cosmic activity of God, so likewise, we find in our infinitesimal lives, a like process at work that is discernable, which we can identify and cooperate with in our own daily lives. What does the rest of God look like at ground level of the everyday believer’s experience? You will know it as that season of life where you know that the momentum of blessing and favor begins to carry you out of the reach of the rigors and pitfalls of the fallen environment that you find yourself in.
It will be that moment when you move in your faith from the pressure of failure to the pressure of success. Paul warned the churches of Acts in his first missionary journey of just this eventuality:
[Act 14:22 KJV] 22 Confirming the souls of the disciples, [and] exhorting them to continue in the faith, and that we must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God.
That word tribulation is not cancer, accident or catastrophe. It is that time when the momentum of God’s blessing in your life becomes as Jesus declared in Luke 6:38;
[Luk 6:38 KJV] 38 Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again.
The emphasis in Jesus’ statement above is PRESSED DOWN, or PRESSURE! This is the pressure that you encounter as you are walking in the kingdom, cooperating with God’s word and His ways, insomuch as He reveals them to you on a moment by moment basis. Now your forward momentum is not because you are hanging on to God but because He is carrying you into a whole new metric of favor and blessing, that in reality, is accompanied with a much greater pressure than any failure you have ever faced.
Most people know nothing of the pressure of success at this level. The pressure of success is much greater than the pressure of failure, it just has a different outcome. In fact, the pressure of success is MUCH MORE BRUTAL than the pressure of failure. The pressure of success also has a much more unknowable outcome. We all know where the pressure of failure is taking us: ROCK BOTTOM. That is familiar territory for most people. They know what failure looks like. They are familiar with repossessed cars, late mortgage payments, broken relationships, broken bodies, etc., we all know and are acquainted with heartbreak. The deception is this – that the FLESH, the beast nature in fallen man, will choose the familiar EVERYTIME rather than face the rigors of trusting God for an unknowable outcome, even if it leads to favor, benefit and the dividends of the kingdom being manifest in your life beyond your wildest expectations.
You will have entered into the rest of God when you suddenly realize that all those prayers and faith confessions you made for decades, have suddenly laid hold on your life, and are thrusting you into the harvest of God at an astonishing speed and immense intensity that could pale the courage of the boldest among us. When you realize that the fear of God is not that He will NOT act in your life, but that He WILL, and did you really know what you were asking for when you prayed all those desperate prayers years ago?
If you will commit yourself to God’s process, you will see EVERY PRAYER ANSWERED and EVERY PROPHETIC WORD over your life come to pass. I am here to testify as one man whose every prophetic word came to pass in a matter of a few short years when I began to abandon myself to God’s deliberative process as testified to in this book. I walked off my personal map onto a blank GPS grid in which I stood in the depth of a field of all possibility, having no clue what God was going to do next, and knowing that His goodness would come upon Me and overtake me, whether I could take it or not, before I could make my next move. This is what life on the cutting edge of God’s purposes looks like. It may manifest differently for every person, but this experience has your name written on it, if you will just commit and make a decision that you will no longer be one that is WAITING ON, but rather one that is WALKING INTO, by God’s revealed deliberative process, that which has been promised to you.
