Thursday, February 13, 2014

Breaking Up the Counterfeit Ring

“Although we live in the world, we don’t fight our battles with human methods.  Our weapons that we fight with aren’t human, but instead they are powered by God for the destruction of fortresses. They destroy arguments, and every defense that is raised up to oppose the knowledge of God. They capture every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:3-5 CEB).

“See to it that no one carries you off as spoil or makes you yourselves captive by his so-called philosophy and intellectualism and vain deceit (idle fancies and plain nonsense), following human tradition (men’s ideas of the material rather than the spiritual world), just crude notions following the rudimentary and elemental teachings of the universe and disregarding [the teachings of] Christ (the Messiah)” (Colossians 2:8 Amp.).

Most have heard the idiom, “”a vicious cycle,” a rut not circumvented, but rather circumscribed and circumnavigated ad nauseum; a ditch run narrow and long across the brain inscribed by the blind leading the blind into an entrenched bad habit. 

The carnal mind is that reprogrammed brain in us which occurred when we started to believe the vagaries of our own thoughts above God and the established rules of reality.  We got off the foundation of things and started to believe lies, and as we followed down the broken logic of their crooked paths, we embroiled ourselves in an argument within ourselves which we couldn’t mollify to peace.  Our heart strings became a tangled up knot in our guts, and our brain paths became a crisscrossed huddle of confusion in our heads.

From time immemorial God designed us after His image, but alas, we have faded away from that image to the degree that we hardly bear a resemblance to His form anymore.  Like a bad copy, a copy of a copy of a copy, and on and on until the end copy fails to be a fair representation of the original master, so we are no longer discernible and therefore appreciated in accordance with the words of the master written across our lives.

This counterfeit ring of truth still reverberates down the empty but spherical corridors of the human mind even though God has already broken up this counterfeit ring and is nigh to removing all fake copies of value from circulation.  Perhaps legal tender is a harsh reality to those who value the present currency of their lives, but even genuine articles fade, become threadbare, and are eventually taken out of circulation.

In the end, whether you’re real or phony makes no difference; everyone gets tested by fire, and all paper excuses go up in flames.  Only the master is metal and lives on in the form of a perfect form designed to stamp out new paper replicas of itself.  God has broken up all the counterfeit rings and reprinted the image of his Son on every legally tendered bill placed back into circulation. 

We’ve all heard the phrase that “Imitation is the highest form of flattery,” and when it is made within the flat circle of insincerity, in the spartan den of thievery, it inflates the ego beyond the bounds of its track and the height of its rails.  But reimage the heart with legal tender and you reimage the mind with true currency. 

Until someone is reimaged by Jesus Christ, the vicious cycle is unbroken, and the paper trail, an endless evidence chain keeping them inside the prison cell of their own person.  Self-esteem without esteeming Christ is like a person who shouldn’t pay attention to themselves because they have no money (not even common cents)!  But too often, even without their own two cents to rub together, they continue to speak their mind for whatever its worth.

But when we are re-imprinted by the Master, we are reevaluated and become revalued at the going rate of return on investment.  From a decommissioned threadbare copy too many times removed and worth yesterday’s worn-out dollar, we become a newly minted copy off the first run of bills worth today’s crisp dollar.  We either decompose or are decommissioned as we are, but if we allow the intrusion of Christ into our calculations, and the infusion of Christ into our sentiments, we will become worthwhile.

Manifesting Christ in our mortal flesh is re-inking the paper and clarifying the faded glory of a once perfect copy, near identical to the masterpiece original it was first cast from.  Indeed, manifesting Christ in mortal flesh takes a low-grade counterfeited by-the-numbers manmade copy to a high-end original by-the-art made by God-and-man-together masterpiece.