Church History Conference Part 3 – The Christian Mind: Older Than Creation and Found in Christ

You take away from Him His past eternal fellowship with the Father. You take away from Him, His ability to remember past eternity. He had lived the Christian life for all eternity, and within His being was the Christian mind. He did the things He did because He had done them through eternity, and now He was doing them on this earth. And the Christian mind, the Christian way, the Christian whatever it was, was lodged in Him. All the rational study and all the intellectualizing and all of the philosophizing that mankind is capable of will never lay hold of the mind of Christ, for it is not laid hold of in the material realms any more than it was laid hold of by Him when He was on this earth in material realms.

He often spoke of the Father speaking to Him. Do you get the impression that He’s God the Father’s out there speaking to Him in this ear? I think maybe we do. Where was the Father? Please tell me where the Father was. He was right in here. And where was He speaking? In here. There was the fellowship of eternity in here. Are you following me? What He had done with His Father for all eternity was just keeping on, going on, right in here. It was not new to Him, and as He grew in His life, He grew in the apprehension of the material world around Him, but He also grew in eternal recall. He could recall His past. Don’t you believe that? He said, “Before Abraham was, I am.” On the day before He was crucified, Philip said, “Jesus, show us the Father, and that will suffice.” The Lord had grown so much into oneness with His Father, not only in their spiritual oneness, but in their memory oneness. Can you follow me? I believe without question that there stood a Lord before them who remembered the departure of the Red Sea, the fall in the garden, and the creation of the universe vividly. And who spoke? We will never know who spoke out of those lips. The Father and the Son, so utterly one said, “Have I been so long with you, Phillip, and you don’t know Me yet?” There was the Christian mind.

Now, where was that mine located? Here. No, here. Here, I said to you a moment ago, the Christian life cannot be lived in this realm. I’m going to press that for a minute, and if it’s not correct, it’ll at least get your attention.

Jesus Christ is sitting in someone’s room talking to them. He’s a religious leader. He’s a senator. In the next room, John the Apostle has his ear right up against a curtain or a door listening to this whole conversation. He’s listening very intently, and this incredible statement by Jesus Christ, “The Son of Man who came down out of the heavens” …and what’s the rest of that sentence? “The Son of Man who came down out of the other realm, the spiritual realm” …and what’s the rest of that statement? You don’t know it. Say it really loudly, someone. “…and who is now in the heavenlies.” Now wait a minute. He was sitting in a room on this planet. He said He had come down out of the heavens, but He was even at that moment in the other realm.

Brothers and sisters, the other realm was right in there. The other realm was right in there. He walked by means of His internal parts. He walked within His Spirit where His Father dwelled, and there He listened and there He fellowshipped, and there He lived with His Father. And He never spoke unless His Father first spoke to Him. Out of the eternal fellowship that had been established between Them, He had the mind of His Father. It was a spiritual mind. Are you following me?

Did that mind get passed on? Did it get passed on? He died, rose again, and ascended into the heavens. Did He take it back with Him and not leave it here? You can talk to me if you want to. What do you think? That life…He said to them, “Without Me you can do nothing.” There in the room on the night of the resurrection, He breathed into them. On the day of Pentecost, He enveloped them. They had Him without and within. It didn’t matter which way He moved. They were in Him, and He was in them. He was there, living within them.

Now listen to this. The fellowship of the Godhead. 1 Corinthians. Did you hear brother Lance last night? “The fellowship of Christ.” That means Christ’s own fellowship. The fellowship Christ has, the fellowship of the Father and the fellowship of the Son dwelt inside those men. The Father and the Son lived in those men. Now those men were really remarkable. This is where this Christian vocabulary came from. It came from this enormous, overwhelming, overpowering experiential sense of the other realm of the spirituals of the place where God dwelt. There was another realm, the realm of the Spirit, the realm where God created and lived. But that realm had moved inside Jesus Christ. He had an indwelling Father, and you have an indwelling Lord. Do you understand? Within you is the Christian mind. Within the Son was the mind of the Father; within you is the mind of the Son. There’s only one thing lacking: to penetrate. Now in our day, you and I experientially are able to crack open, and get in there, and get involved in the fellowship. I wonder if you followed that. You followed that? Alright, let’s do it this way.

There’s the fellowship of the Father and the Son in eternity. It breaks onto this planet in time and space, where things are material and visible. There is yet the spiritual, invisible element that is introduced here. It is inside Christ. The eternal fellowship of the Father and the Son continues inside the Lord Jesus Christ after the resurrection and the ascension. That fellowship of the Godhead, the Father and the Son, is passed on to 12 men and some women; they are now part of the fellowship. They have entered into the fellowship of God the Father and God the Son. Man has now, for the first time, been locked into and captive to this planet; he has entered into a spiritual realm where God dwells, where the Son dwells, and man now stands in that realm, and there he fellowships with the Father and the Son. There, he is saturated spiritually. Not mentally, but spiritually. He is saturated with the fellowship of the Father and the Son. That which was going on inside Christ’s body: the fullness of God and His fellowship with Him, has been passed on to the elect of mortal men. Please say, “Praise the Lord.” Oh, it may be a little bit more limited. I don’t doubt that I have the veil of this flesh, but brother, it’s there.

Now, you’re not going to understand anything I say beyond this point. I don’t even understand what I’m about to say beyond this point. Albert Einstein stepped off a train surrounded by a group of reporters, and they said, “In simple English, tell us what this thing of relativity is.” He said, “Well, I will.” He said, “You always think of space filled with comets and plants and planets and things like that.” And he said, “If you were to remove all physical matter, you would think that there was a great abyss of nothing there, would you not?” He said, “That would not happen. If you remove matter, you even remove nothingness.” Chew on that. Only a Jew could have made such a statement.

Well, let’s go back and look at that. God created the eternals and the spirituals first, did He not? Yes or no? Then He created the physical realm. How did He do it? By putting matter there, it created not only matter but also something called space. You and I don’t understand this, but we can only think in terms of space and time. That’s why we have such a hard time with God’s…you know, Presbyterians have such a hard time, and people who are not Presbyterians have even a harder time. I’m going to explain to you how, and this will be the final word. No one will ever have to say anything about this again. No more books will ever be written. I will now resolve this riddle forever. Are you ready?

There’s no such thing as minutes, hours, or seconds. We invented those for our convenience. There is only one “Now”. Now, in time and in space. Correct? Alright. let’s have a “now”. There it went. Got a new one now. There it went. How short a time is “now”? Infinitely brief, is it not? So small that you cannot even comprehend it. Okay. Now, I want you to look at creation, especially the physical creation. Here is its beginning, and here is its end. Now, here is my “now”. It’s just so small it can’t even be measured. Well, God’s “now” is bigger than that. God’s “now” goes from one end of creation to the other end of creation. He is always “now”. He’s right now at the end. He didn’t say, “I am the beginning, and I will be the end.” He said, “I am the beginning and the end. I am the first, and at the same time, I am the last.”

Let me explain something to you. If you don’t like predestination, look at it this way. Your Lord very well may have started out creating the consummation of the ages. The second coming, the putting away of Satan, our material age, the fall of Adam, paradise, the Garden of Eden, the beginning of creation, and then the creation of eternity. Because to Him, they’re all the same. The beginning and the end, everything. He is there at this present moment. Now, if you think that boggles your mind, let me tell you one more thing that might be of interest to you. I have an article from a scientific journal. You may have read it. According to the law of relativity, there is no explanation as to why time only moves in one direction. Some of the most brilliant scientists, in fact, the world’s most brilliant astrophysicists, contributed to this article, and they said, “We should be able to remember the future.” There is nothing in the understanding of relativity that would prevent us from remembering the future.