Christmas and the Feast Days of the Lord

How is Christmas related to the Feast Days of the Lord?

What I'm going to share is probably going to be a very different message during this holiday season of Christmas, than most messages the churches are teaching. I recently heard a pastor try to be humorous by making fun of the end time and the return of the Lord in essence of having a talk with God and saying, "Father, can we kind of hold off this end time return because what I'm seeing in the earth of my bride, my church, they're not ready. They're not ready for consummating this marriage. They're not ready for me to return. I'm hearing a whole lot of negativities coming out of their mouths. I'm hearing a whole lot of ‘woe is me.’ I'm hearing a whole lot of blemishing. Father, can we just give them some Botox?" 

There is so much truth in that joke! However, it gives an awareness that sometimes when we are talking about the return of the Lord, and seeing all this darkness taking place, how do we tie in the Christmas message with the Passover, the Pentecost, and Tabernacles and the end times of the return of the Lord?

What I would like to do is turn to Hebrews 11, the famous chapter on faith. "Now, faith is the assurance of things hoped for the conviction of things not seen. For by it the men of old gained approval. By faith, we understand that the worlds, were prepared by the word of God. So that what is seen was not made from things which are visible. By faith Abel offered to God a better sacrifice than Cain through which he obtained the testimony that he was righteous. God testifying about his gifts. And through faith, though he is dead, he still speaks" (Hebrews 11:1-5).

If we take a quick glance through the rest of this chapter and we see “by faith, by faith, by faith,” all the way through. Much of this information comes from the Book of Genesis. By faith this person, by faith this person. We have Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, all of them by faith. 

However, the Book of Genesis was written by Moses, and when Moses wrote it, he didn't live in that season, and he wasn't even born for almost 1500 years after a lot of this was even taking place. We don't even get to Moses's faith until verse 23.

So, my thought process is, wow! This is information that we have just thrown out there that said, “just have faith” like those that have gone before us in the Bible. Remember the Sunday school lessons that said, “If you just have the faith of a mustard seed, mountains can be moved?” Then with a child’s heart you, you looked at a pebble on the ground and said, “I think I can, I think I can move this pebble…and it didn’t move. Then you gave up with a frown telling yourself you just don’t have enough faith!

But is there a deeper pattern here of growing up in Christ as sons and daughters of God to prepare ourselves as a bride of Christ truly looking for the return of the Lord and in the essence of what Jesus is coming for? Not as an escapism to get out of this world, but to be a bride and then a wife of Christ Jesus?

Let’s reread the first two words in Hebrews 11… “now faith.” We have used the word, faith as a verb… just have faith. But a bigger picture is it's a noun. It is the primary essence of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is a noun and everything about the Holy Spirit love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, goodness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23). Those are all essence of the personification of the Holy Spirit. This is Christ. Let's reread this again and plug in where it says Faith in verse one to plug in the word Christ…Now Christ. 

We can see why in Genesis we had to know about these people as a pathway of understanding our journey of growing up in Christ, to prepare ourselves to be the bride of Christ, as John wrote in Revelation.

Now read verse one, "Now Christ is the assurance of things hoped for the conviction of things not seen." Wow, that takes a whole different ballgame. "For by it the men of old gained approval. By Christ we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made from things which are visible. By Christ Abel offered to God a better sacrifice than Cain, through which he obtained the testimony that he was righteous. God testifying about his gifts and through Christ, though he is dead, he still speaks."

Wow! Let's just stop there for a second and rethink about what we are reading. First, in Hebrews 11:3 the word ‘worlds’ is plural. We're not talking about just one place. We're talking about the word of God. Is not Jesus Christ the WORD made flesh? Yet, there is plurality that is often missing when we refer to Jesus Christ. 

Are we not Christ in you, which is the hope of glory (Colossians 1:27)? So that Christ in me and I'm in Christ is a oneness. Is that not what we're trying to obtain? So that the head of Christ and the body of Christ unifies coming together as one body in Christ (Ephesians 3:6).

What is seen was created by words. Our words can create life and death. It is Christ in you that when you speak, when you decree just as Jesus, did Christ in you, all of creation stops and responds to the voice of Christ in you. However, you must know that. You must believe it. So, when we use the word faith, the faith is a manifestation, not just a verb, it's a noun of manifesting the Christ in you.

Go to verse four, "By Christ," the Christ in Abel, "Offer to God a better sacrifice than Cane." This isn’t referring to Abel as a man offering a better sacrifice than Cane, but Abel is personifying Christ. Cain is personifying his ego. They're both sons, they're both twins, but one is personifying everything of Christ coming through, which was the better sacrifice. We should be doing the same thing.

The testimony of righteousness, the gifts he speaks from death. See, Abel's blood is still speaking. Christ's blood still speaks. We are dead to ourselves, but Christ in us is what is speaking, what is decreeing, what has power and authority. Not the old man, the old man's supposed to be dead. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!" (2 Corinthians 5:17).

Let's go on to verse five here. "By Christ or faith, Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death, and he was not found because God took him up for, he obtained the witness that before his being taken up, he was pleasing to God." If we only see Enoch in essence of he didn't die in the flesh, that he was transformed through a veil on another side, we're missing something really connecting because death is more than just the flesh dying. Death is the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

When Enoch was taken up, he was functioning at a higher realm in his Christ identity while in his natural body. He's functioning from the Tree of Life. He's eating the fruit of the Tree of Life. He's moving and having his being in Christ so that the essence of Christ in Enoch was so manifested. What is that essence? Galatians 5:22-23 tells us to be led by the Spirit. When we are led by the Spirit, we don't see a double mindedness, we don't see the good and evil off the Tree of Knowledge because even the good on the Tree of Knowledge still brings death. All we see is life. That's the reason why Enoch, he didn't die because what's he eating? He's not eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

How many of our churches today are eating that fruit? Think about your own conversations that you have. It's not to say yes and no, I'm holier than thou, and you're not doing this or that. 

When we look inside ourselves allowing the Holy Spirit to do a double check on our Christ image so that when we say something, or even when we think something, are we thinking with the mind of Christ Jesus? Are we moving and having our thought process the way Jesus did? 

People will say, "Well, I'm not Jesus." It's not about being Jesus of Nazareth. It's about being part of His body of Christ, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That's what the whole Passover is about. 

Here is the Christmas story of it all. When Jesus came as the baby in the manger, He still had to grow up in wisdom and in grace (Luke 2:52). He was born from Divine essence but had to grow up in the unveiling of who he was. We're doing the same thing. This is the pathway that Jesus gave to us. The Father knew you before the foundations of the world and He said, you were beautiful, you were wonderfully made, and you were with Him in the beginning - in Genesis. 

When we came into this world as a baby, as a newborn, our memory of who we were before being conceived in our mother’s womb was blocked (Jeremiah 1:5). You had to learn in a fallen natured world that you weren't really part of this fallen natured world, but that you were a Christ-one of the one body of Christ Jesus who is the head of His body.

So, the trials, the tribulations, the challenges that were working on your soul, maybe even on your body, are all part of the process of rising a little bit higher, and a little bit higher, so that the faith in you, the noun faith, has a pathway of being developed by the quickening of the Holy Spirit in His timing to impregnate each of us “according to His WORD” as Mary said to Gabriel (Luke 1:38). 

God is patient, God is kind, but not just as a verb, but as an essence of identity so that the Being presence of Christ in you isn't about trying to be kind or patience or trying to be good. You see all of that trying, you're never going to get it.

We can never be good enough as long as we keep trying. That's the reason why we might as well just die. When the Holy Spirit moves upon us, we will surrender it all to him. That’s what the power of unconditional love does. In Christ, He starts to work those situations out in us, and we don't react the same way because it's Christ in you. You don't get angry like you used to. You don't get frustrated. You don't do different things from ego. What you're doing is you find out that those trials are just platforms to develop the identity of your divineness that's already there. So, you end up finding out that if God is laughing at this, I'm going to laugh too.

Our trust becomes more developed. Our faith becomes more developed. The last thing of the nine essence of the Holy Spirit is our temperaments, our self-control. But it's not about, “Oh, good, I kept myself together.” It's because the ego isn't even there anymore involved. It becomes all God. All God identity as a child of God. But not as an egotistical separate any more than a finger could adjust and function as a whole body on its own.

Did you know that every time you move a finger 14,000 signals are going off in your body? There's that many connections every time you move a finger! How much more vibrational light energy of God is going on in our body naturally just by several body parts. Brain cells, thought process, eye connection, how I'm sitting, where my legs are at… all these just because of my fingers. 

Consider that with one word having the ability to produce life or death, we must be careful with our words for the tongue is a many-membered part of the body. Allow your tongue to become the essence of the Holy Spirit.

Christ is in you now. Everything in Hebrews 11 is talking about you as part of the foundation before Jesus came into the world as a baby. The faith of each person is part of our DNA given to us through Jesus Christ was born on Christmas Day. 

When we finish chapter 11, none of them received the promise. Verse 39, "And all these, having gained approval through their Christ identity, did not receive what was promised because God had provided something better for all of us so that apart from you and me, they could not be made perfect." Just as we receive our genetics from our natural parents’ linage, so we receive our spiritual heritage from what we read of our ancestors in this chapter. This is our foundation of who we are today. We are part of the Christmas birth when Jesus was born in a manger. 

It's all Christ. It's Christ in you, and it's Christ in me, and it's Christ in Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Moses, and in the beginning. It's even Christ in the first Adam.

Now, that's a question you can ask yourselves. Now, where is the first Adam? See if Jesus died once and for all and the graves are empty, the first Adam is with Jesus Christ sitting in heavenly places. When we use that as a tool in our church of meaning that you came into this world through the first Adam as a no good sinner, saved by grace instead of the last Adam that took the end and brought it into the beginning and finished it all, we miss an awful lot (1 Corinthians 15).

Often, we identify with Romans 3:23, "For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." But if you back up on verse 22 that says, "Even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ, for all those who believe, for there is no distinction. It's inclusive." 

What the word ‘righteous’ means is a technical term indicative of the means of appropriating what God in Christ has for man, resulting in the transformation of man's character and way of life. It's termed gospel faith or the Christian faith. 

It takes the quickening of the Holy Spirit to introduce you to the unconditional love of God “When the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and the power of the Most High overshadows you, and for that reason the holy offspring shall be called the Son of God – Christ in you” (Luke 1:35). You accept Him because He first knew you while you were in ignorance and darkness – lost identity (Romans 5:8).

So, when we believe because the Holy Spirit has quickened our spirit, it gives a pathway working through you for the Holy Spirit to now have a vessel, a living vessel, and an epistle of Christ to where the Holy Spirit through your words, your thoughts and your love and actions to minister to someone else that doesn't know Jesus Christ. Not in a condemnation way, but they see Jesus in your essence of the Holy Spirit released into their relationship with you. 

That's the Christmas message for today. The Christmas gift of Jesus becomes our gift as Christ in us to the world. Jesus is coming back for a bride, but He is coming back for a bride’s body that looks like Him, that talks like Him, and is doing signs and wonders like He did, the greater works, in one Spirit and in one body with one Father. 

“Let us be glad and rejoice and give honor to him: for the marriage of the Lamb comes, and his wife hath made herself ready” (Revelation19:7).

“For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:13).

“Endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; One Lord, one faith, one baptism, One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all. But unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ” (Ephesians 4:3-7).