Ambassadors of Christ
Jesus the Delegate of God

Studio Session 115
Sam Soleyn
05/15/2007

Continuing in this series entitled Ambassadors of Christ, I want to give a brief summary of what we have said to date. We've said that Jesus claims that He has all authority in heaven and on earth, Matthew 28:18. And we traced that back to see that God, the Father, gave Him this authority by designating Him the Son of God; as Son, He was also the heir of God. Now we intend to look at how this authority has been commissioned in the earth. So I want for us to take a look at, if you like, the great commission and see what it is that we've been commissioned to do.

In pursuing this, it is necessary for us to ask the question: How did this great authority of Jesus, which the Father gave Him by making Him both King of kings and Lord of lords and the heir of God; how does that authority actually come and vest with us? I want to posit this thought to you, it's something that should be said but people are afraid to say it: The way we are doing things simply isn't working and this doesn't compare with what Jesus did and the fact that everything He did worked.

In the majority of church situations, today, people tell you if you say certain magical principles of scripture, then a certain result will come about, but the truth is it doesn't work. 99 out of 100 times when we make these declarations, if we were honest enough to follow up, we would see that the declarations we made in fact do not work. Contrast this with what Jesus did; everything Jesus said worked and yet we are supposed to be like Him. Where is it going wrong? Now I understand where we say it's going wrong but that too is not true. We say it's going wrong because the people don't believe. If you were to hold the leaders accountable, you would see that the same percentages of things NOT working for the people are identically the percentages of the things NOT working for the leaders.

So, something is wrong with the system as we have posited it. The leaders will say, "The people have no faith," that's why their pronouncements and declarations are not working. The truth is, these pronouncements and declarations that the leaders make on their own behalf's and that the leaders themselves make about all kinds of things, no more work than what the people are encouraged to say doesn't work, but this absolutely contrasts with what Jesus said. If Jesus made a prophetic declaration, it came to pass. As an example, Jesus said, speaking of the temple, He said, "Look, you see this temple (the temple in Jerusalem) there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down." Now today the temple mountain has no structure of the temple left, every stone of the temple was thrown down, not one stone was left upon another. But if you ever saw these stones, you would see how implausible it was for Him to make that statement and for it to actually be true. These were massive stones that would require, in those days, the best of Roman technology to move them. These were not small blocks of stone that a couple of people could work together and throw off the mountain, it require tremendous effort by a team of people, using the most up to date equipment of that day to move them.

So when He said, "Not one stone will be left here upon another that will not be thrown down," that's what He meant but it was highly implausible as to how that would happen. You know how it happened? When the Romans burned the temple, in AD 70, the roof of the temple was covered over with a thin layer of gold. The heat of the burning temple melted the gold on the roof and it ran down in streams off the roof and lodged between the stones of the temple. The Roman legionnaires discovered the gold in between some of the stones of the temple and the rumor quickly spread that the Jews had used gold as mortar to set the stones of the temple. These Roman legionnaires, working in teams, using the best equipment in the Roman military of that day, literally overthrew every stone to find the gold.

Now, did Jesus know how it would happen? That doesn't matter, the things He casually said, things that He prophetically declared, absolutely came to pass. Now today we hear in all kinds of conferences people get up and they make all kinds of outlandish statements and none of these things actually end up being true or very few of them. My point is not that people shouldn't prophesy, my point is there is no comparison between the accuracy of what Jesus said, and the systematic way in which everything happened as He said it and the way that leaders today make pronouncements and virtually nothing happens. As a result of which, no one remembers what was said in these conferences. So what is the difference? If Jesus came to show us a particular way of life, we have simply not gotten it. Because by comparison to what He did and how He lived, what He said in the fulfillment of those things and what we are saying and their fulfillments; by comparison He is 100 percent accurate, and we barely get it right. So what's the deal, what's wrong with the picture? The picture is we are operating out of a model of relationship to God that is fundamentally different from the model of relationship between God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

So when you deal with the question of the delegation of authority, we must understand how the delegation of authority actually works. The Father had all authority in heaven and on earth and the Father gave to the Son this authority, the Son acted within the scope of that authority and therefore all that He did, the Father was also doing. Therefore everything He did worked, everything He said came to pass. Our authority today is based on, not that model, which would make us ambassadors of Christ and would define our role differently, it would define our role more nearly like the role Jesus had with the Father than it is the way we see it. We operate out of a model known as church, where the church filters the relationship between the Lord and ourselves and filters it in such a way that it causes the church to elevate itself to a position of primacy, rather than that the church is a result, collectively, of all of the relationships that we have, individually, with the Lord. This is a Roman model, this is the model that we inherited from Rome. And in subsequent messages I will take the time to explain to you how this model not only doesn't work, but the existence of this model structurally prevents us from getting back to the relationship of the Lord Jesus Christ to mirror and to model the relationship He had with the Father.

Now, in this transition from Jesus having all authority, all power, as our great King, to ourselves working in perfect harmony with Him; the essential ingredient, the essential element, is to recognize that we now do not have our own authority, instead we have His authority. How exactly did we get His authority? We got His authority through His delegate, the One He sent, whom He empowered to take His authority and to bring it and to distribute it to us. In the language of delegation, Jesus specifically says, "I am going away, and that is to your advantage because when I go away I will send you the Comforter who is the Holy Spirit. And when He comes, He (the Holy Spirit) will take of what belongs to Me and all that the Father has is Mine." Now we understand why that is true, the Father designated Him the Son and the heir and gave Him the right to everything that the Father had; made Him King of kings and Lord of lords, made Him the Anointed One, deployed Him in the earth to represent the interest of the Father. So Jesus says, "All that the Father has is Mine, that is why I tell you, the Holy Spirit will take of what belongs to Me and the Holy Spirit will distribute it to you."

Now in terms of the delegation of Jesus' authority, the Holy Spirit is the essential Person. God gives gifts to men, to humans; these gifts include governmental gifts and gifts of helps; governments and helps. These gifts are gifts of the authority of Jesus Christ delegated to the Holy Spirit to distribute to us. Because you see, before we were in our mothers' wombs, as the Lord said to Jeremiah, "Before you were in your mother's womb I knew you." We were known in the mind of the Lord before we were born, before we were issued into time and space, we had a designated purpose from God, if you prefer the word, we had a 'destiny' from God, which is the reason we're here. We're here to live out a destiny, everyone is here endowed with a destiny from God to be lived out in time and space, and your destiny is the way that God would live in time and space, in and through your vessel. For example, when Jesus came, He was the designated vessel, to entertain, to receive, and to carry the presence of God in a particular manner. He was designated to be the express image of God, mainly the image of God in physical expression. You see, God is invisible, God is real but He is invisible because He is a Spirit.

The visible world is only one of the two worlds that there are. The invisible world is more real than the visible world because the realities of the invisible world do not pass away, they transcend time, they're not linear, they are eternal. The realities of the present world are but types and shadows, pictures, pictures on the screen, one dimensional pictures of the realities of heavenly things. Jesus was here to give three dimensional expression to heavenly things. And by one and three dimensions I mean to give the full weight, and substance, and tam bra, and resonance of eternal things into time. Whereas, apart from that reality, the best we can come up with is a very linear, one dimensional perspective on reality. So it's always amusing from a heavenly perspective, from an eternal perspective, to see men and women obsessed with the temporal, when the temporal actually is fading away. You can't keep it from fading away because you yourselves are fading away, we are born, we matriculate through life, and we inevitably die without ever touching the reality of an eternal presence unless we are born again of the Spirit of God and enter into an existence of eternal dimensions within the limitations of time and space. This is both the mystery and the reality, frankly it's what Jesus came to present. So He would say, "You are from beneath, I am from above; you are of this world, I am not of this world." To understand Jesus purely in terms of His humanity would be to speak of the works He did rather than who He was. And you know very well that the age we are living in is obsessed with the works that Jesus did, but would deny who He was. The works He did were merely manifestations of the truth of who He is, who He was and who He is.

So today, the world is fixated on doing good. And there are all manner of ministries, secular and religious, that look the same in that respect. Religious people feed the poor, non-religious people feed the poor. To both, Jesus is an icon. To the non-religious person, He's a secular icon, He is the epitome of the human spirit triumphant; to the religious person, He is the mystery of God captured in a good work, they know His hand but they don't know His person. They want to represent His gestures of good will but they will not submit to His Lordship. And He would say, "Depart from Me, you workers of iniquity," to people who will say, "Lord, Lord have we not done all this wonderful things in Your name?"

Jesus did not come to do good deeds, let's understand this. Jesus did not come to do good deeds, Jesus came to manifest the presence of the Father; the manifestation of that was good deeds but He did not come to emphasize good deeds. In fact, the church that has obsessed on doing good deeds, now suddenly finds itself outclassed by secular men and women who in their aggregate finances can dwarf, by many times, the annual budgets of all the churches combined in doing good deeds.

There are men today who have put together unimaginable fortunes, in one case worth nearly 100 billion dollars, just to do good deeds. And they have taken on the world's great problems. These people don't profess to be lead by the Spirit or have any affiliation with evangelical or charismatic Christianity. They're doing good deeds because when you have that much money and there's no possible way for you to consume all this money upon yourself, then you look around to see how you're image may be enhanced and augmented by giving it away. If that is the basis of what Jesus came to do, then I'll make this startling statement: There are men today, in the earth, who are doing far more than Jesus ever did of good works. Jesus after all was limited to the region of Galilee and to Israel as a whole and He fed some people on occasion, He healed some people on occasion and so on. But there are people today who have put together massive funding to save lives and to rescue people and they are doing it on a global scale, in a manner that dwarfs what Jesus actually did.

So if good works are the ways by which one may know God, then these people are just as sensational in their presenting of God as Jesus Himself. Because volume to volume (hear me now), volume to volume, they are doing more. And they will leave things in place for a long time to do more. So the point I'm making is, Jesus did not come to do good works, He came to show us the Father; He came to mirror in His actions whatever God was doing. But God was doing things, not just to do good things, God was doing things to show humans the nature of God. So what God was doing amounted to a representative sampling of the nature of God. So that in the things He did, you could see who He was.

If you do good deeds and that's your basic premise, your motive for doing good deeds may be as widely scattered as possible; you may do good deeds for business reasons, it buys you a wonderful reputation among your business associates and it generates all kinds of new business. You may do good deeds to rehabilitate your image after you have been a vociferous competitor all of your life, and now you've gotten your pockets full you may do good deeds to show that you weren't such a bad guy after all.

Good deeds by themselves are not the expression of God, but the expression of God will be manifested in good deeds; one does not equate the other. Because of who God is, the goodness of God is inevitably on display and there is no falsity in the motives of God; God does what God does because God loves people. Men do what they do for all kinds of reasons, some of these reasons may be as corrupt as the men themselves are. So good deeds is not the inference of a good nature.

And the point of all of this is to utterly distinguish Jesus from everyone else because Jesus came to represent the interest of the Father. That means, He could do nothing of Himself, whatever He did was exactly what the Father was doing. So when He was asked by His disciples, "Show us the Father and that will be enough," His response was nearly consternation because He said, "How long will I be with you? Don you not believe that the Father is living in Me and all the works I am doing are the works that the Father is doing? I have given place in time to the Father to live out whatever the Father desires to do through Me and I do not interfere by imposing what I would do upon My Father's business. I am here to do the will of My Father, so whatever you see Me doing it's not Me that's actually doing these things, I am the vehicle that speaks these truths to you but everything that comes from Me, the power by which the loaves and the fish multiplied, the power by which the blind was made to see and the lame to walk; that power, I am telling you, though I was the vessel that did these things, the power that came through Me to do these things was My Father who lives in Me."

So Jesus utterly constrained Himself to what the Father was doing. In that sense, He was the original ambassador of heaven. Because an ambassador, you see, confines himself or herself to the requirements of his office. When you have been given power...power is given to those, great power is given to those whose character has been formed to reflect the Lord. Little power is given to those whose character has not been formed to reflect the Lord. So when we ask God for things outside of the scope of what our characters can sustain, God is obligated to deny our request. Because to give us those things without the requisite characters to sustain the result of being given those things, the only possible outcome is for us to be corrupted by receiving this measure of power.

So God spares us the embarrassment and the misfortune of being given more than we could handle. That's why 99 percent of our declarations and requests fall short of what we've asked for. Yet everything we ask for concerning our personal needs, not necessarily our wants but our needs; everything we ask for is routinely given to us nearly 100 percent of the time. So on one hand we experience this, nearly contradiction that what we have need for on a daily basis is routinely supplied or what we ask for by way of the demonstrations of Gods greater power, is nearly routinely denied. In Jesus' case, everything He asked for was granted, whether it was for His own self or for the expression of the will of God.

Now what I want to do in this ensuing session is to talk to you about how the role of the Holy Spirit is pivotal to this transition between the will of God regularly occurring in us, and the will of God only sporadically occurring in us. When men have denied the place and primacy of the Holy Spirit, in their actions and their activities, they cannot also expect to see God be who He is in a routine fashion, like He was with Jesus. So we ought to come back to walking in the Spirit, for the Spirit is the delegate of the Lord Jesus Christ to distribute His authority to us.

We'll continue this discussion. I'm Sam Soleyn, God bless. I'll see you the next time. Visit me on the website, www.soleyn.com. Thank you, I'll see you then. Bye, bye.