enters into all things and worketh his good in those that are called according to his purposes.”  What is His good?  Not to make me rich,I said.  He’s not just going to be a banker for us—not to just cater to a mutated shift of my wants.  His good’s the 29th verse.

And if I could buy up, and had the money, every promise box in this world I would pull out of it Romans 8:28 unless they put the 29th verse with it.  Because the 29th verse says what the good is.  Synopsis of them both: “He enters into all things and worketh his good to them which are the called according to his purpose” which is—His good that is—that we might all “be conformed to the image of his own dear Son.”  Lots of people say, “Well, you know God’s causing it to happen.”  Hogwash and pickle juice!  We get out of step sometimes and cause it to happen. 

God didn’t wind us all up like a bunch of clocks, because what He wants demands that the will finally surrender and that a choice freely given, without which no love is expressed, be made.  So we mess it up.  Then the old hard-headed sheep nature comes back and we seek our own way.  Now God enters in.  He’s had one purpose from the beginning.  That purpose is to make us in His image and He’s going to start shaping when our will surrenders to make that circumstance further His purpose, which is one-on-one with you and me to make us like Him.  Period.

The Ephesian letter I referenced said there was a barrier between us and God.  God by His grace gave His Son, split the barrier apart, and now we become the habitation of God through His Spirit and we have this “treasure in an earthen vessel.”  And as literally as the substance of God went through a stone and a locked door and sailed off to Glory, that nature—the hupostasis in the Greek, the literal essence of God’s own nature itself—now comes and joins with us and penetrates my being and

finds a root in that side of my nature that is God’s image that can respond to Him.  And with the barrier broken to let His Spirit come, we’ve become the habitation of God through the Spirit. 

Does that mean the old man, the raven in me, is gone?  No, he’s still there.  That’s why Paul says you’ve got to crucify him daily.  Does that mean because He’s come, it’s all a-okay, God’s work is finished, now let me get on bouncing around my little crock doing what I want?  Paul prays they might begin to comprehend the height, the depth, the breadth of that which is available to them in God. 

And then he says to those saints which had given their bodies to the habitation of God’s Spirit, “God gave some, apostles; prophets; evangelists; pastors and teachers; For the perfecting of the saints….”  The word is that which means ‘to bring forth to full completion of purpose.’  And that is done, “the perfecting of the saints,” by those gift ministries to the Church by bringing us all to “a unity of the faith” until our diverse views of what ought to be jelled into one character that “we might all come to the knowledge of the perfect man.”

          And we’re not left to understand what that perfect man is.  “The Word was with God,” of the same essence as God, “and that Word was made flesh, and tented among us.”  And John 1:18 says “No man has seen God…but Christ has declared him”—exegesis—‘led Him forth from behind a curtain and put Him on display.’  That’s what His nature looks like.  God’s purpose never changed.  He struck the proof coin—that’s one of the seven characteristics the Hebrews letter opens with in naming what Jesus is—He is the absolute proof coin struck in flesh, the measurement from which every other coin must be taken.  God struck it in flesh and though “No man had seen God,” from behind the curtain Jesus led Him forth and, in the flesh, put on display what it means to be like God.