Position

Good morning. I must admit, I hope this thing doesn't make a bunch of noise. I must admit that my fellow elder is a chicken. I said to Vern, I got a title for my talk. It's called What does the real what is the real meaning of PC? PC meaning political correctness. He wouldn't put it in the bulletin. So if you look at PC, it's political correctness means to to describe language policies, measurements that are intended to avoid offense to the disadvantage to members of a particular group or society started in the 1980s. The terms have come to refer to avoiding language or behavior that can be seen as excluding marginalizing or insulting groups of people considered disadvantaged. Well, that's not what PC means here. PC in this environment means position and condition. So today, we want to talk about position and condition. What is a position? Excuse me. What is a position?

It's a spiritual principle, and it describes the standing that every believer shares and enjoys before the Lord. Because it's a principle, it can't change. Principles are those things that are unchangeable. They do the same thing the same way every single time. So are there principles that are relative to humanity that that are true of everybody in this room because you're a human being.

The answer to that is yes. Through physical birth, we entered the human race family position. And from that source, we derive certain characteristics. We are the product of our position. It's the source from which we come. It's important to understand that. It is the source of where we come. Where does all humanity come from? Where did we come from? We came from Adam.

And he's the source of our position. Even before we were saved, he is what we are. We are what he is. We have been born into the fallen, sinful, condemned, Adamic line of creation. We were born into the wrong family. Let's list some of the wonderful things that are true of us in Adam. By natural birth, we were born in trespass and sin. We love darkness because of that position that we enjoyed.

John 3.19 said there was a judgment that this is the judgment that light is coming to the world. And men love the darkness more than the light because their deeds were evil. We were ungodly. You know, we like to talk about us being sinners or this or that. God describes us as ungodly.

He says in Romans 1.18, For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

We were enemies of God, Romans 5.10.

We had the wrong father. You are of your father the devil and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth because there's no truth in him. We were lawless, lawless because of where we came from. And the most important aspect of all of this is that we were dead to God. We were separated from him totally.

In Ephesians 2, 1 through 3, it says that you were dead in your trespass and sins in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air and the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.

Among them who were all formerly lived in the lusts of their flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and the mind, and they were by nature the children of wrath, even as the rest. So, due to such factors like heredity, social and religious training and environment, the consciousness of the unbeliever is erratic. It has an erratic range, all the way from good to very bad.

But either way, the problem is that the ground of reference is wrong since it's centered in the self-life. It's centered in me. 2 Corinthians 10, 12 says, when they measure themselves with themselves and compare themselves with one another, these are all men and women from Adam, they are without understanding and they behave unwisely.

The number one problem that all men share outside of Christ is that the principle of position is unchangeable. Adam isn't going to change. He can't. The man who came, the man we came from can't change or be improved. To try and be acceptable to God or to live a Christian life by improving the old source is an impossible task. Adam, our source, will not change.

Let's put it another way. God called the world into being. He created Adam to be the head of the human race for that world. Hence, we were all Adamic. He was our life. But when Adam sinned, thereby he positionally died to God. We sinned and we died in him, Romans 5.12. For this cause, even as by one man sin entered the world, and death came with sin, and death passed upon all men, why? Because all men sinned in Adam. When he became flesh, we became flesh. When he was sinfully disobedient, so were we. When he was condemned, guess what? So were we.

So when you think about the blessings that are beyond measure, for one of those positioned in Adam, an Adam human being, to come to the saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ and believe in Him and His work, that one thereby receives the forgiveness of all of their sins and they are reconciled back to God. So, did their position change when they believed? Did our position change when we believed? Answer, it sure did. And that's what we want to talk about today. We want to talk about what kind of a change took place when we believed.

God's plan of salvation not only included the forgiveness of sins and guilt, but it also included the replacement of the Adamic man with a new, eternal new man. The rejected old Adam was superseded by the accepted new man, the last Adam. When the father sent his eternal son into the world, he subjected him to the death of the cross. in order to vindicate himself, to satisfy himself about the sin issue, and to rescue us from that entire Adamic death position. He loved us as his own and as his chosen ones from all eternity. When the Lamb of God was on the cross, not only, not only and not until then, The Father laid all of our yet uncommitted sins. When Christ was on the cross, everybody in this room, our sins were future. He laid all of those uncommitted sins on Christ, and his death for those sins freed us from the penalty that we otherwise would have had to pay, and it freed us from the guilt. But in addition to that, while the Lord Jesus was on that same cross, The Father identified you and me in our Adamic sin with his son who was made to be sin. Second Corinthians 521 says he made him who knew no sin, notice the word sin singular, to be sin on our behalf. Why? So that we might become the righteousness of God in him. In him. All those who believe in Him died on that cross.

We died unto sin. The source of our Christian life now, resurrected, the source of our life as an Adam, it was death and sin and evil. Now the source of our life is perfect. It's established in the Father's presence. And it was established for you and I at the cross. All of our spiritual life, All of our spiritual growth is based upon the principle of position, and it can be summed up in a single word, and the word is source.

Where did we come from? Where do we come from now? Just as sin, just so in our spiritual birth, when we were born again, the risen Lord Jesus Christ is now the source of our new life, our new Christian life. And in him, we're positioned before the Father. in whom the word makes a statement regarding.

2 Corinthians 5.17. Think about this in terms of source. Therefore, if any man be in Christ and everybody in this room is in Christ, what's the result?

He's a new creation or a new creature. old things have passed away behold new things have come or in Acts 17 28 for in him we live and move and exist as even some of you your own poets have said for we also are his children Ephesians 2 6 says and raised us up with him and seated us with him in heavenly places in Christ Jesus Ephesians 2.10 says, for we are his workmanship. We were created in Christ Jesus for good works which he prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. Your source, the source of your life, the Lord Jesus Christ prepared your life and the good works that we should walk in them.

You and I who were once sinful, from our source, do you know that our sin natures were not forgiven? You and I were forgiven, our sins, but the sin nature wasn't forgiven. The sin nature, our sins forgiven, but our old man, this old Adamic man that was our old source and the source of our sins, he was not forgiven.

In Romans 8.3, Paul says, God sending his own son, in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin. What did he do? What did he do with your sin nature in mind? He says he condemned sin in the flesh.

So our sins, the acts that we do are forgiven. The source that we come from is not forgiven. He's condemned. That is really good news for us because it means that we're going to be free. We are free. We're not forgiven so that we can start all over again as a first Adam person. Does that make sense? He didn't forgive us so that we could go back to the Garden of Eden and be a brand new Adam.

We were crucified with Christ. We died to sin in him. And in that death, we were positionally separated from our old Adamic life, the indwelling source of sin, separated. The Lord Jesus' death for us redeemed us from the penalty of our sins, but our positional death with Him freed us from the condemned Adamic life with its penalties, with its power, and with its reign. Now, whatever alteration we pass through in our new birth as to soul and spirit, whatever changes awaits our body at the rapture, we will never lose our essential identity in which our Father conceived us prior to the foundation of the world.

In 2 Timothy 1.9, our Father has called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which he's given us in Christ Jesus before the world began. I remember in high school we used to have to study, we had to study English. My school was a liberal arts school. And we had to study like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and people like that. But I didn't know Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a believer.

Listen to a poem she wrote in the 1800s. Ere suns and moons could wax and wane, ere stars were thunder-girt or piled, the heavens God thought of me his child, ordained a life for me, arranged its circumstances every one. To the minutest eye God said, this head, this hand should rest upon, thus before he fashioned star and sun." Isn't that cool? A hundred and some years ago, she knew.

And this new position that we enjoy can't change because it's a principle of position. Some of the statements regarding positional truth, and Roger and I were talking about this the other night, positional truth is described as our living union with Christ. Positional truth describes our new history in Christ. Positional truth never changes, nor is it ever lost. Positional truth is discovered only in the Word of God. And positional truth is independent of what we feel or what our emotions are. So let's talk about some of the elements of this new position that we enjoy. The first and most important part of it is it's based on grace. The source of our Christian life is based on grace. And Courtney talked about grace in Sunday school. It's unlimited, and it's unmerited blessings from God. Unlimited means you can't ever get your arms around the totality of it, and you can't merit a single bit of it. If you could merit it, it wouldn't be grace. So it's unmerited. It relies on the facts of our position and not on promises. We're talking about facts here.

Who am I? And it's perfect. It's established in the Father's presence at the cross. And it is how God sees me. I said it can't ever change. It's the object. And this is an important aspect of it. Positional truth is the object of my faith. What am I to believe? Am I to believe my circumstances and how I feel about things, or am I to believe what God says about who I am in Christ? The Lord Jesus Christ is the center of my position, and all that He says in His Word regarding Himself and me is where my faith is to be focused.

Is the position of every one of us in this room exactly the same? The answer is yes, it is. Every one of us shares exactly the same position in Christ. We are in Him. Our position, the source of our Christian life, put it this way, when we receive the Lord Jesus as our personal Savior, the Holy Spirit caused us to be born into Him. To be born again, we must first die.

And Galatians 2.20 says, I have been crucified with Christ. But nevertheless, I live. Here I am walking around, living in this body. But the life I now live in the flesh, how do I live it? I live it by faith, focused on the person of the Lord Jesus Christ.

My faith is in Him and who He is and who I am in Him, resurrected and glorified. He created us in our position that was established through His work at the cross. Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he's a brand new creation. He established that at the cross for every one of us.

But we have this wonderful, terrific, almost over-the-top position, but we walk around every day in our existence, and that's the other part of the P and the C. The C is the condition. That's my walking around every day existence. It's experiential. It's the experiential aspect of the Christian life. I'm walking.

But it's dependent on what my position is. But it does change and it varies and it can change in any given time. God's promise is that he will work the facts of our position into our condition so that we will walk and live conditionally like he has already placed us positionally. Is the condition for every believer the same? I dare say it's not. It's totally different for each one of us. There are principles by which we grow. Those principles of growth are the same.

But at any given time, we can be on the rails, off the rails, left, right, up or down, resting by faith, or totally out of control. True spiritual experience, though, will result in standing in the immovable position that we have in Christ. All too often, believers allow certain experiences to move them from faith ground of their objective position to the unfaith ground, or maybe to the faith ground in their condition. But what happens is they're pretty soon adrift in the sea of subjectivity, and they're dealing only with their feelings. and the unscriptural influences in their life rather than resting in the position that they have. So the question is, can we do something about our condition? Do we have a role in how our condition goes? And the answer is, yeah.

You know, God gave each one of us a will, and we can debate some time other than this how free it is, but he gave us a will. And he gave us a will for only one purpose, and we use that will to believe. What we believe is really important, and our will is the thing that decides on what we believe. We can choose to believe, and we can choose to abide in the old nature and thereby become the victims of the internal civil war, which is depicted in Romans 7, or we can choose to believe and abide and rest in the risen Lord Jesus. the source of our new life and nature.

And then we become glad recipients of that life and liberty as depicted in Romans 8. The spirit of life in Christ Jesus has already set me free from the law or the principle of sin and death. That's where I come in. I get to choose. If I don't know what my position is, I don't have much of a choice, because I don't know what to believe. I'm still stuck in the subjectivity of what I feel something is, or what I think it ought to be, rather than what God's Word says. So God wants us to abide in Christ.

And he says in 1 Corinthians 1.30 that, of God, I am in Christ. I'm there. He wants me to stay there. How do I abide? How do I stay there? Well, one thing I have to realize that it's all a work of God to place me there. He's already done it. So just stay there.

Don't be moved back into the ground of the old nature. Never look at yourself as though you were not in the risen Lord Jesus. Look at Him and see yourself a new creation in Him. Look at Him as the very source of your new Christian life. Rest in the fact that God has placed you in eternal union with His Son, and let the Holy Spirit take care of the work in you.

It is for Him to make good the glorious promises that sin shall not have dominion over you, Romans 6.14 is one of the coolest verses in the Bible, and very few people ever talk about it, because we think that we have to strive to overcome sin. But think about what this verse says.

It says, sin will not have dominion over you. It won't control you. Why? Because you're not under law, but you're under grace. Grace was specifically given to us so that sin wouldn't control us. The minute that we move off of that onto thinking that we've got to do something to deal with sin, we're done. Because we've got outside of the principle of grace and into the principle of law. And law is designed to make sin exceedingly sinful.

Here's an example. The believer doesn't walk in order to reach the throne of his position. On the contrary, his walk is determined by the fact that he has been placed in the Lord Jesus in a position of immeasurable ascendancy. He was made to sit together with Christ in heavenly places in order that, having received an abundance of this grace and the gift of righteousness, he might reign in life by one Jesus Christ. We walk like a king because we already are one. We're not trying to become one. We already are one. We are not called upon to walk in a kingly fashion in order that we may reach the throne.

God's order is different. The Christian life begins at the throne. And our kingly manner is only the inevitable outcome of the exalted position that we already enjoy. So are we ever going to be able to stand before the Father in prayer and fellowship because we're fit in ourselves? I don't think so.

In our walk, though, we finally come to see that we are in His presence because of our position in His Son. The ground upon which our Father deals with us is only grace now. Every blessing we receive of Him as a child is undeserved. Every single blessing we have is undeserved. In all of our spiritual existence, we're debtors. We are debtors to the rich, free, sovereign grace of our Father. So what is it we are privileged to enjoy on that ground when we enter into the grace where we stand? We have a new position, and that position is the glorified Lord Jesus Christ.

Whatever is true of Him is now true of you and me. We are not only pardoned but justified, made righteous. It's not merely that which has been done or by what he has procured and bestows on us freely. The believer must never lose sight of the fundamental truth of his position, that the basis of my fellowship with the Lord Jesus and your fellowship with the Father is not my own personal holiness. or what the Lord Jesus is in him, but his judicial position before the Father and what the Lord Jesus is for him. The Lord, our righteousness, is the foundation and source of everything we do in our walk. Everything.

But most of us, I think, try to get victory in order to gain peace. but it is peace already achieved by the Lord Jesus' work and risen life that is for sure and a certainty, and it's ours. We're going to have conflict, as all believers do, but we know that the Father is for us and that makes a lot of difference, according to John Darby. But until the believers, faith is firmly established in the fact of his position in the risen Lord Jesus. We won't be able to rest in him while the process goes on of taking our condition and lining it up with our position. We must be sure of the source. And then that once we're sure of the source, we can trust him for the growth that he's going to put us through.

Now, there are several lists available. that delineate the things that we have in Christ Jesus. And several godly men have compiled that list. And so we were, Roger and I were in an elder meeting on Tuesday and I brought this up, I brought this list up because I have one of them.

And boy did it trigger something in Vern. He went sailing out of the room into his office, he grabs a notebook and he comes back and he's got six or seven of these things written by different godly men of different things that are true of us because of our position in Christ. The one I was going to talk about was the one that Louis Sperry Chafer put together and it's 34. Well, Verne had one for 215. He was pretty excited about that. But I thought just to kind of Not to go through the 33, but I'm going to speed read a couple of these and then I'll stop and then we'll close up.

But our position in Christ is eternally the plan of God. He's foreknown. We're elect. We're predestined. We're chosen. We're called. We're reconciled. We're redeemed. There's no condemnation. We're related to God through satisfaction. Our sins are removed by his blood. We're virtually joined with Christ in the judgment of self. We're free from the law. We're children of God. were adopted, were accepted by God in Jesus Christ, were justified, forgiven all trespass, made close, delivered from the powers of darkness, translated into the kingdom on the rock, Jesus Christ, a gift from God to Christ, circumcised, and on and on and on it goes. All of that's true of us. All of it's true of us. And if you want a list of the 212, see me later, and I'll give you the list.

So you can see why, when we were reading Ephesians 1 verses 3 through 14, why we would call those verses positional truth. But watch what the Apostle Paul does, starting in verse 15. And we'll close with this prayer. And this is a prayer Paul prays for these people. For this reason, I too, having heard of your faith, In the Lord Jesus Christ, which exists among you and your love for all the saints, do not cease giving thanks for you while making mention of you in my prayers. And here's what he prays. And I would pray this for you and you should pray this for me.

That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation and the knowledge of him. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened so that you will know what is the hope of his calling, what are the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, and what is the surpassing greatness of his power towards us who believe. These are in accordance with the working of his strength, the strength of his might, which he brought about in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at the right hand in heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion and every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in the one to come. And he put all things in subjection under his feet and gave him his head over all things to the church, which is his body. the fullness of Him who fills all in all. Thank you.