IN US, THROUGH US AND AS US: MOVING AS ONE IN THE IMAGE AND LIKENESS OF THE TRINITY - by Joel Pollard

2 Corinthians 4:6-7 in the Mirror declares, “The light source is founded in the same God who said, “Light, be!” And light shone out of darkness! He lit the lamp in our understanding so that we may clearly recognize the features of his likeness in the face of Jesus Christ reflected within us. And now, in the glow of this glorious light and with unveiled faces, we discover this treasure where it was hidden all along, in these frail skin-suits made of clay. We did not invent ourselves; we are God’s idea to begin with and the dynamic of his doing and amazing engineering!” It is not God in us, it is God as us. It’s not Jesus in us, it’s Jesus as us, for we are joint heirs in Christ. What does a move of God actually look like? I believe that the body of Christ has been looking externally for the answer so long to this question instead of internally. We’ve been looking “out there for the next move of God” when the move has been in us all along. When see God externally, it creates a sense of separation and alienation from Him. The good news of the Gospel is we don’t just have love, we are the very love of God, for there is no separation in Him, for we are one with God. He’s not working through us, He’s working as us for we ARE the very expressed image and likeness of Jesus! We’re the object of His greatest affection - we are the pearl of great price. We have been invited into this great adventure with the Trinity. We died with Christ, and because our life is now His life, this means that we’ve literally been given Jesus’ relationship with the Father (Col. 3:1-4). This is a place where we enter pure grace and rest; we already are because he is; as he is, we are already. When we already know who we are, it stops us from thinking who we are. It’s important that we don’t confuse behavior and identity - they are not the same thing. In the words of one my friends, Dr. Matt Pandel, “Mankind’s original sin is a propensity (a behavior pattern, not an identity or state of existence) to strive for what one already possesses. Our behavior often expresses what we believe about our identity. We “act” according to our beliefs about ourselves and who we think God is.” Faulty beliefs bear the fruit of faulty behaviors. For example, some of us may have experienced trauma in our past and the behavior from that has created a pattern that is not in who we inherently are. Trauma makes you who you aren’t but healing allows you to be the person you were always meant to be. My prayer is that as we awaken to the reality of who we really are in the Father, Son and Spirit, who we’ve been all along from when we were created before the foundation of the world, that we would come to further experience and encounter the reality that we are One with the Trinity, as They continue to move in us, through us and as us.  With Love, Joel