Faith Without Answers • Apr 27, 2026
Live the Unseen • Jul 01st 1987
Christ and the Father in Eternity – The Christian Life Began Before Creation (DCLC – July ’87, Part 2)
Where did the Christian life begin?
Most believers assume it began in Bethlehem… or at Calvary… or perhaps at Pentecost.
But in this sweeping and deeply theological message, Gene Edwards presses the Christian life back beyond time itself — into eternity, into the fellowship of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit .
The Christian life did not begin on earth.
It is not native to humanity.
And you cannot live it.
Those are startling claims — yet they are central to this teaching.
Jesus Himself said, “Without the Father, I can do nothing.” If even the Son lived by the life of the Father, then the Christian life must be something deeper than ethics, effort, or religious performance. It is not “doing for God.” It is not grit, willpower, or spiritual discipline as self-effort.
The Christian life is eternal life lived out.
And eternal life is not a duration of existence — it is a life form. It is the very life of God’s own species. God alone can live the Christian life, because He is the Christian life. That life is lived in the spiritual realm — the “heavenlies” — not in the physical realm of matter and time.
From there, Edwards unfolds a breathtaking vision:
- Before creation, there was the fellowship of the Godhead.
- The Father, Son, and Spirit lived in mutual love, freedom, and communion.
- No law. No demand. No performance.
- Only divine fellowship.
That fellowship is the fountainhead of the deeper Christian life.
When believers are redeemed, they are not given a new religious system — they are brought into that eternal fellowship.
The message then widens into the nature of reality itself.
The physical world is not ultimate reality — it is a shadow. Scripture declares that Sabbaths, feasts, priesthoods, even Adam himself were pictures of something greater. Reality belongs to the spiritual realm. Christ is the true Light, the true Bread, the true Water, the true Vine.
Man was created as a hybrid — part of the physical realm and part of the spiritual realm. Adam’s natural habitat was not merely earth, nor merely heaven, but the garden — where the spiritual and physical realms met.
The fall cut man off from that realm. His spirit died. He was exiled from the place where heaven and earth intersected.
But the deeper Christian life restores what was lost — not by effort, but by divine life placed within the human spirit.
You were “marked off in Christ before the foundation of the world.”
Your deepest origin is spiritual.
Eternal life intersected time at your conversion.
The tragedy of church history, Edwards argues, is that the Christian life was reduced either to mystical striving (Neoplatonism), intellectual doctrine (Reformation rationalism), or performance-based religion.
The answer is not in techniques.
Not in systems.
Not even in “positional truth” alone.
The answer is to rediscover how Jesus lived — how He fellowshipped with the Father on earth — and to enter that same fellowship.
The Christian life is not lived by you.
It is lived by divine life in you.
And that life began in eternity.
Brothers and sisters, that’s about where we are right now. We’ve got to get back to that first century, but no, we’ve got to get back further back than that: into the Godhead. We’ve got to go back where the fellowship of divine life began and begin looking at this. I want to proceed by saying our answer lies – I’ll tell you where our answer lies. You might say our answer lies hidden somewhere in the epistles. I just read something out of the epistles. All the riches of heavenly places have been given to you. They are now yours in Christ Jesus. Oh, that’s wonderful. Doesn’t mean a blooming thing. I mean, I can sit there and I can preach it. I can tell you how rich you are. But something inside me wants just a little modest reality.
One of the things that we’ve gotten in recent years in the deeper Christian life is positional truth. We are in Christ. We have been crucified. We have risen from the dead. We have been glorified and sanctified. We have been all these things. That’s a wonderful positional truth to grasp intellectually. Would you give me just two minutes of the reality of my position? Just two minutes. Let me have the reality of my position; I don’t want positional truth. Take positional truth out and hang positional truth. I want reality to be truth; I want truth that’s got reality to it. Now, then, the apostles were writing those books, and they were not writing theory. They were not writing Christian doctrine; they were writing that which was their own experience and an experience which was the experience of those dear brothers and sisters.
Now, let me just clarify here before I oversell. You’re not going to leave here today or this week perfectly. You’re not going to leave here sinless. You’re not going to leave here transformed, transfigured, glorified, sanctified, or petrified. You are going to leave here just about the way you got here, with a little equipment to touch the Lord in reality, in other realms in Him. That’s about all you’re going to get, but that’s a little bit more than most of you have got right now, and it will help you. And if you will pursue it, it’ll help you a great deal, and if you don’t pursue what little is given to you this week, very practical, very workable, if you don’t pursue it, it will stop working. Ain’t that amazing? It really will fall on you, your responsibility.
All right. Now then, the epistles, though, brothers and sisters, are really not the place to look because they are a statement of the reality that those men received. But they were, you might call a second motion, a stage two. The place we really need to look, and we have never looked, and why we’ve never looked, I don’t know. The place we need to look is in the Gospels, and find out how Jesus Christ lived the Christian life, how He fellowshipped with the Father on this earth.
The Christian life for us began in Judea. For Him, it began in the Godhead. But instead of looking at His life of those parables and those things, you know, and then you have to walk the second mile, and you have to be more perfect than the Pharisees. Rather than looking at the me part of this, I got to do this, and I got to do that, and God is expecting me to do more. Let’s look a little deeper. Do you know the song ‘Break Thou the Bread of Life’? It has a term in it that says, “Beyond the sacred page, I seek Thee, Lord. Beyond the sacred page, I seek the Lord.” To find Him, to find His way of fellowship, to get involved in His fellowship with the Father; this is what those disciples of old did and came back with this vocabulary expressing their experience. Well, we’re going to go back and we’re going to clip out those 200 or 300 years and we’re going to look at them. And this was the message I meant to bring to you last night.
More from the archives
The Mystery of God • Apr 21, 2026
Jesus’ First 12 Years
Return to the Beginning • Apr 13, 2026