This is about us – we look to Christ. But wait! “Oh! If only I looked at Christ all the time, then all of Him would be manifested through me, like through Peter walking on the water while he looked at the Lord!” Hmm… something here does not smell of the finished work of Christ and His rest in us. Are Christ’s eyes open? Does He see our completely provided-for life? Or is He looking at some problem of ours? What does Jesus see now? What did He see when He looked at the man’s withered hand? Or at the blind and the lame? Because of God’s finished works, Jesus saw not a fallen and dying world but a new world, a new reality, divine order in everything. He saw how all His divine power abounds for every person. Being born with Him, we received the same eyes. Wait a minute, brother! What do you mean, the same!? Do we see Christ every second? That is exactly how it is. We do. A foundation never slips out from under a building, not for a second, otherwise one moment would be enough to destroy the whole structure.

Our foundation is Christ, and that is why the Church as a building will never collapse. Our eyes are His eyes. And the dust in the earthly mind of believers does not cancel the reality of our complete identity with Christ. It is our earthly spacesuit – the still mortal body, with the dusty shelves of the library of old thinking – that can sometimes experience restless feelings, fears, anger, hurts, arguments. These “old books” are images, strongholds that put on a show in our name in our today. For example, a stronghold or the devil says in your name: “I’m not a good enough father”, feelings and emotions join in, desires are born to prove that you are a good father after all, but trying to correct these false images with deeds or some kind of “right” behavior is powerless. Everything has already been done by the Lord, and you are already a “good dad”. So it doesn’t matter at all whether you snapped at your child or not; it only shows which film was playing today in your mind – the cinema of the flesh. More and more we feel ourselves flowing from grace to grace, from one day into the next, when we don’t stress about our behavior, feelings, emotions, circumstances, when we listen to our heart – that whole anointing of the Holy One in us, which will show in our mind a film about the superhero of today – Jesus, and the anointing will always reveal us in Him. It will not separate us from Him. It will remind us how personally and completely His grace was poured out into our life even before we were born in the maternity ward. Christ in us – the hope, the expectation of glory! So we are expecting right here and now, tomorrow and a year from now, the manifestation of His and our Life.

In chapter 4 of Ephesians Paul says how one and the same grown-up Lord lives in every believer, and we show forth the truth because we have already grown up in all things as He is (that is in verse 15). In the Russian Synodal translation, for some reason, the past tense of the verb “grew up” became future, and it is as if some condition of growth was piled up between us and God… translators, what were you eating over there, too much cabbage? By the way, more than one verb in this chapter was translated from the original past tense into the future, thereby blocking the voice of the anointing, which will always only confirm that we are already as Christ in this world. Unlike unbelievers, whose mind is quite darkened by ungodly strongholds, we have heard Christ and been taught the truth in Him, have put off the behavior of the old man and put on the behavior of the new. Our mind has a master – the Spirit of Christ. For example, there once lived a thief; the Lord gave him faith, but he still thinks he needs to steal. So the Lord says to him: “But you’re not a thief anymore!” Bam – and the thief’s behavior drops off like a sack of potatoes. That is why Paul goes on to say that we should speak the truth to one another. Obedience to the truth is not to stop stealing or to do or not do something else, but to attach no significance to these old manifestations, and, being children of rest, to easily hear from the Spirit the truth about who we are. More than once I have noticed how the Lord suddenly says exactly what takes away the significance of those old, wrong conclusions because of which today I could have been sad or even angry. He gently reminds me of the good news.