Eternal Glorious Fountain Ministry (EGFM)
Programme: Anamnesis 2022 – Day 2 Morning Session
Date: Thursday, 8th December 2022
Speaker 3: Pastor Dimeji Elugbadebo
The subject of glory is a core subject in the New Testament because it is the essence of the Godhead. You cannot talk about the Godhead outside glory; They are glory beings. It is the laws of glory that wired them up, that is why everything They do typifies glory. God cannot do anything outside the nature and facility of glory. Glory here is not just brilliance or shining although there is a physical demonstration of glory that is like that. Glory is actually a life in God. God is wired as a naturally glorious being. If we are not wired to identify the character of glory, we might not know when glory is being displayed.
God stratified creation from the heavens to the earth according to glories, and those glories are the conversations of men. What we see in Psalm 103 are the conversations of men of the present heaven. Conversations are what they do; it is their profession. Profession is what describes their glory.
Glory is fetched from separation. It is what a man displays because of laws that are wired in him. Every glory conversation is tied to a holiness -- a separation. We cannot give God glory except there is a work inside of us. It is the work in men that blesses God.
“Bless the Lord, ye his angels, that excel in strength, that do his commandments, hearkening unto the voice of his word.” (Psa. 103:20). The glory of this category of angels is in their ability to harken. The glory of this category of beings is in their obedience - they could give God swift obedience. Glory is the ability to come into alignment with the perfection of God's thoughts. It is the ability to perfectly mirror whatever God thinks. Glory is the ability to give expression to the conversations of God.
“Bless ye the Lord, all ye his hosts; ye ministers of his, that do his pleasure. 22 Bless the Lord, all his works in all places of his dominion: bless the Lord, O my soul.” (Psa. 103:21-22). This stratification of glory is preliminary to the true world of glory. There is a world of glory that is also stratified according to conversation and obedience. The present strata of glory in the heavens are teaching obedience and knowledge of the glory of God.
“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. 2. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.” (Psa. 19:1). When a man is seeing heaven, he is seeing knowledge and a demonstration of wisdom. The conversations of these glory beings in the present heaven shows us how God wants man to ascend to his full glory.
God has a plan for mankind. The reason Jesus came is to show us how we can increase in glory status. The increase of our glory status is tied to our holiness. It is the laws of righteousness in God that fetch this holiness. Holiness is not just what God does, it is who He is. In pursuing glory, God must define consecrations for us -- laws that alter our rightness. Man can design a status that he can fit into and get pleasure from, but anything that does not describe the wearing of God upon a soul is not glory. Jesus came to demystify what Satan had raised as glory for man.
Jesus is the sent one from glory. He is an anointed man to bear God's conversation to mankind. Jesus is the apostle of the Godhead. An apostle is a diplomat of a country. In other words, an apostle is a mobile country; everything about that country is in him, not just in knowledge but in experience and raising. The dimension where Jesus' apostolic ministry comes from is the dimension where God is best at home.
Jesus is the messenger of glory conversation. Eternal Life is the conversation of glory. It is glory because of the laws and properties that make it up. He came to show us how we can also attain unto glory. Every profession has its glory. A man does not come into glory without a profession. Access into glory is by learning; the conduct of the profession must be learnt.
What we call iniquity is a perverted law of glory; it is a fallen cherubic law that Satan wants to populate. Fallen glory is a world that is being sold to us by the enemy of God. There is a way we think of God as something we just do by the side. What Satan did was that he perverted the concept of glory and sold it to man. Pursuing glory is the real warfare on the earth. Our warfare now is to lay hold on all which God prepared for us before the world began.
Glory is attached to tables. We cannot come into glory without a table or a communion. What we are served determines our glory. The communion tables are tables of glory. We move from one table to another until we come into the full communion of glory. The interpretation of God’s glory is demonstrated in dying. So, we cannot know glory outside death. Anamnesis has something to do with the breaking of bread. It brings the communion table to remembrance. When we tear bread and come into the fellowship of the cup, we are being shown how we will be made glorious beings. Communion is a table where they serve us things that would make us glorious.
"For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come. Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord." (1 Cor. 11:26-27). Glory cannot be accessed outside dying. When something is becoming glorious, it is because it is losing a life that it once held. We often cannot relate glory with dying; we mostly relate it to something shiny or an attainment. However, the true interpretation of glory in the New Testament is the degree to which we die. We must be hewn as a tree and made a deadwood for God to rest.
The ark of covenant is a deadwood that can capacitate glory. The reason it can do so is that it has been disconnected from its source and completely dried. So, the path to glory is dying to what we see or understand as glory. This is where God needs to show us mercy because it is possible that commandments have not touched our glory attainment yet. Our attainment to glory is how we go through the death process of losing things that we have called glory here.
"Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. " (Jn. 12:24). Jesus was describing how He would become glorified. He was saying that we would be glorified by much dying. Jesus entered glory by dying everyday. He had the opportunity to disobey the Father and do His own agenda, but He chose differently. He saw what He could get by doing His own will and saw death in the Father’s will, yet, He stuck to the Father’s will until He was fully sown as a seed.
“He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.” (Jn. 12:25). God needs to deliver us from loving our glories and attainments. We cannot know these things we have wrongly called life except mercy shows it to us. It may not make sense to us but we have to hate our lives. The word ‘hate’ in this regard is in comparison to our commitment to following God. It does not mean we should not go to school or get married; it just means that while doing those things, we must see our higher commitment to God as a much superior glory than learning. We must see marriage as a tool in the hands of God for us to come into the true marriage which is the marriage of the bride and the Bridegroom. In essence, nothing here is worth your commitment.
Death is what we would get from the communion table. Showing the Lord’s death till He comes means that as we are communing with the Lord, we learn how to die and lose the attainment of glory at the communion table. We have fallen glories coded in our genes; if given the opportunity, we would pursue some things. What limits us is just God’s mercy to make us find ourselves in a place where we can hear things that can save our souls.
"If any man serve me, let him follow me; and where I am, there shall also my servant be: if any man serve me, him will my Father honour." (Jn. 12:26). To serve Him is to walk in His steps which were laced in death. Jesus did a work to enter into God. This work is the path into glory; it is the interpretation of what glory is. Glory is serving the cause that Jesus served; it is to die the death that He died. Jesus did not get the slightest pleasure for Himself on earth; He did nothing for Himself; He pleased the Father all through. Jesus Christ submitted to God to the very end, denying His will and committing to God’s will. At that point, He stepped into an arena where He could become the first man to bring the conversation of God to us as a pursuit. Because Jesus did all that, we can now walk in His steps.
“Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour. [28] Father, glorify thy name. Then came there a voice from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.” (Jn. 12:27-28). Jesus was a man that was constantly warring because He had temptations. He was so meek that He asked God for mercy to save Him. As Jesus was speaking, He had a measurement of glory but He was not satisfied because He knew that was not the glory that would give the Father high pleasure. Glory is living out exactly what God thinks as conversation for mankind.
God thought of man as one who could be in the fellowship of the Godhead. So, God thinks of man in glory, giving perfect representation to the content of His life. God will not be satisfied with anything short of that. Jesus’ attainment was to do that work of realising God’s dream, which is for man to live out God’s conversation. Jesus lived just to please His Father, just to fulfil the project of God. The project of God is that God wants to find rest in man.
When we think of God, we see a being that we can come to get things from, but God has a need. God wants to rest in us; He needs a home in man. Our Lord Jesus Christ was the first man that gave God rest. He gave God pleasure such that God could rest in Him. The fulness of the Godhead was in Him bodily (Col. 2:9).
"Thus saith the LORD, The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me? and where is the place of my rest? For all those things hath mine hand made, and all those things have been, saith the LORD: but to this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word." (Isa. 66:1-2). Heaven is the office God uses for His project, and we know that nobody sleeps in their office under normal circumstances. The heaven that is His throne is where the project of rest is beaming from. Once the project is done, heaven will be rolled up because heaven does not constitute a habitation for God. Earth as His footstool is where the project is carried out. Earth does not refer to the planet but to the souls of men.
What God wants from us is our growth; our growth is our dying. We already have things that constitute buildings in us. Satan has raised buildings of sin and death, and of iniquity in us. For God to rest in us, those buildings have to be pulled down. God is the wise master builder and knows the specifications of the kind of house that will attract Him to come. There is a kind of soul formation that God wants to find in us for Him to rest. We must give God a place of rest. That is our responsibility and our dying. Our dying is that we must lose what we have called gain.
The specification for a man who God desires to rest in is to be poor and contrite. There is a definition of poverty that we are afraid of. There is something about man and money that God must deal with. Man thinks he cannot live without money. One of the things God can teach us is how to live without money. This will happen as God teaches us contentment. It is an everlasting nature to be content with what grace makes available.
We ought to be concerned about giving ourselves more to God. We should not be afraid of death, for death is glorious. Death is something we will perpetually be in. We cannot leave that life; it is the secret of God’s life. It is the source of the eternal fountain. Death is the path to glory. Everything of the present order should not be found in us. It is only then will God come and rest in us. Nothing will stop this building in us. Nothing can separate us from the love of God, not even death. This generation will give God rest.
Summary
- The subject of glory is a core subject in the New Testament because it is the essence of the Godhead. Glory here is not just brilliance or shining; it is actually a life in God. If we are not wired to identify the character of glory, we might not know when glory is being displayed.
- God stratified creation from the heavens to the earth according to glories, and those glories are the conversations of men. The glory of the category of angels in Psalm 103:20 is in their ability to hearken -- they could give God swift obedience.
- The reason Jesus came is to show us how we can increase in glory status. The increase of our glory status is tied to our holiness. It is the laws of righteousness in God that fetch this holiness. In pursuing glory, God must define consecrations for us -- laws that will alter our rightness. Jesus came to demystify what Satan had raised as glory for man. Jesus is the messenger of glory conversation, and He came to show us how we can also attain glory.
- Glory is serving the cause that Jesus served – to die the death that He died. The interpretation of God’s glory is demonstrated in dying. We cannot know glory outside death. The path to glory is dying to what we see or understand as glory. God needs to deliver us from loving our glories and attainments, and we cannot know these things we have wrongly called life except mercy shows it to us.
- Death is what we would get from the communion table. This means we cannot come into glory without a table or communion. What we are served determines our glory. And we move from one table to another until we come into the full communion of glory.
- Jesus lived just to please His Father to fulfill the project of God. The project of God is that God wants to find rest in man (Isa. 66:3). Our Lord Jesus Christ was the first man that gave God rest. He gave God pleasure such that God could rest in Him. The fulness of the Godhead was in Him bodily (Col. 2:9).
- What God wants from us is our growth, and our growth is in our dying (1 Corin. 15:31). We already have things that constitute buildings in us. Satan has raised buildings of sin and death, and of iniquity in us. For God to rest in us, those buildings have to be pulled down. There is a kind of soul formation that God wants to find in us for Him to rest. The specification for a man who God desires to rest in is to be poor and contrite (Isa. 66:1-2).
- There is a definition of poverty that we are afraid of. This is because there is something about man and money that God must deal with. Man thinks he cannot live without money. One of the things God can teach us how to live without is money; He will teach us contentment. It is an everlasting nature to be content with what grace makes available.
Blessings!