Living From the Son
The Awakening of the Life Within
In our message, Beholding the Son: The Awakening of Your Divine Identity, we discovered that transformation begins with vision. What we behold, we become. We saw Jesus not merely as a distant Savior to admire, but as the pattern Son, the living revelation of what humanity in uninterrupted union with the Father was always intended to look like. As we behold Him with an unveiled face, the Spirit awakens us to something religion has often taught us to postpone: His likeness is not merely our destination after death; it is our calling in the earth. But awakening to our identity is only the beginning. Once we behold the Son and begin to see who we truly are in Him, we must move from simply recognizing that identity to actually living from it, awakening more and more to the divine life that already exists within us. Yet first and foremost, we must actually believe the new, God-given identity we have received in Christ. We cannot consistently live from an identity we still secretly doubt. Before His life can freely express itself through us, our minds must become persuaded that what God has declared about us in Christ is actually true.
But once we have seen the Son, another question immediately confronts us: How did He actually live? Jesus did not spend His earthly life attempting to become spiritual enough for the Father to use Him. He did not wake every morning wondering whether He had prayed enough to get God close to Him. He did not labor to manufacture an anointing, struggle to obtain the Father's presence, or attempt to generate enough faith to make something happen. He lived from the Father. Jesus described the source of His life plainly: “As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who feeds on Me will live because of Me” (John 6:57). In one remarkable statement, Jesus reveals both His source and ours. His life flowed from the Father, and He declares that our life would flow from Him.
Jesus lived from the Father, and we live from the Son.
Jesus Is the Revelation of the New Us
Here is where we must go deeper, because this may be the most important revelation in this entire discussion: Jesus is not only the revelation of God to us; He is the revelation of the new us. For generations we have studied Jesus primarily to discover what God is like, and rightly so. Jesus said,
“He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).
He is the perfect revelation of the Father. But if we stop there, we miss an enormous dimension of what God was revealing through the Son. Jesus did not merely reveal the Father to humanity; He revealed humanity as the Father intended it to be. He showed us what man looks like filled with God, walking in communion with God, living from God, and expressing the nature of God in the earth.
That changes the way we read the Gospels. We are not merely reading the history of what Jesus did two thousand years ago. We are beholding the One Paul calls “the firstborn among many brethren” (Romans 8:29). We are looking at the pattern of New Creation humanity. His life reveals what sonship looks like, what union looks like, what communion with the Father looks like, and what humanity looks like when the life of God is expressed through it. The Gospels therefore become more than a record of miracles, teachings, confrontations, and journeys through Galilee and Judea, and they are all of those. They become a revelation of the kind of life into which we have now been brought in Christ.
When I watch Jesus walk in communion with the Father, I am learning about my New Creation life. When I see Him trusting the Father, loving the rejected, forgiving His enemies, confronting darkness, healing the broken, speaking with authority, refusing condemnation, and living without fear of separation from His Father, I am not merely observing an extraordinary life that exists forever beyond my reach. I am beholding the Son to whose image I have been predestined to be conformed. Romans 8:29. I am seeing the pattern of sonship that the Spirit is now forming and expressing within God's people.
I am studying the New Creation in its first and perfect manifestation.
Discipleship Means Learning His Way of Life
This is also where we must recover the true meaning of discipleship. Jesus did not merely gather people who believed certain doctrines about Him; He called disciples. A disciple is a learner, a pupil, one who attaches himself to a teacher in order to learn his teaching and his way of life. That means discipleship was never intended to be reduced to learning facts about Jesus while simultaneously believing that the life Jesus demonstrated is forever beyond us. We are His pupils. We watch Him to learn how a Son lives. We listen to Him to learn how a Son speaks. We observe His faith, His rest, His obedience, His authority, His compassion, and above all, His union with the Father.
John says it plainly:
“He who says he abides in Him ought himself also to walk just as He walked” (1 John 2:6).
That verse should challenge much of what we have accepted as Christianity. John does not say, “Admire how He walked because you could never possibly walk that way,” which is what I hear continurally. He says that the one who claims to abide in Him ought to walk as He walked. The language of discipleship itself assumes that there is something about the walk of Jesus that His pupils are supposed to learn.
When the disciples watched Jesus withdraw to pray, trust the Father, confront sickness, forgive sinners, love enemies, refuse fear, and speak with authority, they were not merely collecting stories they could later tell about an extraordinary Messiah. They were sitting in the classroom of the New Creation. Jesus was teaching them what life sourced in the Father looks like. He repeatedly redirected their attention away from independent human strength and toward His relationship with the Father:
“The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do” (John 5:19).
His works flowed from what He saw. His words flowed from what He heard. His confidence flowed from knowing the Father. His authority flowed from union.
Jesus was teaching His disciples how to live from union.
And there is something even deeper happening. When Jesus taught His disciples to look at Him, He was ultimately teaching them to see the Father. Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father,” and Jesus answered, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:8–9). Jesus was revealing the Father as the Source from whom His entire life flowed. He said,
“As the Father has life in Himself, so He has granted the Son to have life in Himself” (John 5:26).
The Father is the fountain and source of this divine life; that life is perfectly revealed in the Son and, through the Son, shared with His people.
So discipleship is far greater than learning Christian behavior. Discipleship is learning the life of sonship. We behold Jesus to see the Father, and we behold Jesus to discover what a human life in union with that Father looks like. We are pupils learning to walk as He walked, trust as He trusted, love as He loved, hear as He heard, and live from the Father as He lived from the Father. Not through independent imitation, as though human effort could reproduce Jesus, but through participation in the very life He has shared with us.
The goal of discipleship, therefore, is not merely information. Jesus did not spend three years filling notebooks with theological facts. He was forming a people who would eventually carry His life into the world. This is why a disciple cannot forever remain merely a student discussing his Teacher. There comes a point when what has been seen must become what is lived.
The goal of the disciple is not merely to know what the Teacher taught. It is to become like the Teacher.
The Firstborn Among Many
This is why Romans 8:29 is so important:
“For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren.”
Notice both sides of Paul's statement. Christ is the firstborn, but He is the firstborn among many brethren. This is family language. God was not merely displaying one unique Son whom everyone else would admire from an unreachable distance. Through that Son, He was bringing forth a family who would bear His likeness. Jesus is unique as Lord, Messiah, Redeemer, and the One through whom this New Creation comes into being, yet the very purpose revealed in Romans 8 is that a people would be conformed to His image.
John makes this reality almost impossible to postpone when he writes,
“As He is, so are we in this world” (1 John 4:17).
Notice that John does not say merely, “As He is, someday we will be after we leave this world.” He deliberately locates the statement here: in this world. This does not mean that we become Jesus or cease to be ourselves. It means His life has become the defining reality of our New Creation identity. His righteousness reveals our righteousness in Him. His relationship with the Father reveals the union into which we have been brought. His freedom from condemnation reveals the life from which we are now called to live. His love, holiness, confidence, compassion, obedience, and rest reveal the nature of the life that now dwells within His people.
This is precisely why beholding Jesus matters so much. If Jesus were only revealing God to us, we could behold Him with wonder while remaining spectators. We could stand at a distance, worship Him, admire Him, sing about Him, and still believe that His manner of life has very little to do with ours. But if Jesus is also revealing the New Creation humanity into which we have been brought, then beholding becomes transformational. I am not simply looking upward saying, “Look how wonderful Jesus is.” I am beholding the One whose image the Spirit is unveiling within me.
Jesus is our New Creation dictionary. He defines the new man.
If You Want to Understand the New Creation, Look at Jesus
Paul writes, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Notice where this New Creation exists: in Christ. Therefore, if I want to understand the New Creation, I must study Christ. If I want to understand righteousness, I look at Christ. If I want to understand sonship, I look at Christ. If I want to understand union with the Father, I look at Christ. If I want to understand authority, holiness, love, compassion, faith, obedience, rest, or what humanity looks like when filled with the life of God, I look at Christ. He becomes the lens through which I understand what God has recreated me to be.
This means I no longer define myself primarily by Adam, my history, my failures, religious tradition, or even what I presently feel. I discover the New Creation by beholding the One in whom that New Creation exists. Paul speaks of the new man as being “renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him” (Colossians 3:10). Christianity is not God's program for rehabilitating Adam. The gospel does not announce that God has forgiven the old man and is now helping him become a somewhat better version of himself. Paul says, “our old man was crucified with Him” (Romans 6:6). What emerges in resurrection is something genuinely brand new. We are not improved Adamites struggling to resemble Jesus; we are a New Creation people whose life is hidden with Christ in God, learning through the renewing of our minds to manifest what has already become true of us in Him.
And this is why the study of Jesus can never be merely academic. Every time I see something in Him, I am being invited to recognize something about the life I have received. When I see His peace in the storm, I see that peace of the New Creation in me. When I see His compassion toward the broken, I see the compassion of the New Creation in me. When I see His confidence before the Father, I see the confidence of sonship in me. When I see His authority over darkness, I see what life looks like when it is no longer governed by fear manifesting in me. When I see His obedience, I see what complete trust looks like in me. When I see His union with the Father, I see the source from which the New Creation is designed for me to live.
We study Jesus because in Him we are studying both the revelation of the Father and the revelation of God's new humanity available to every disciple.
From Imitation to Participation
There is an important distinction here. Christianity is not simply an imitation program. We are not standing outside Christ attempting to copy Him through determination. If that were the gospel, we would simply have exchanged the Law of Moses for an even more impossible standard: “Here is Jesus; now try harder to act like Him.” But the New Covenant announces something radically different. The One we are called to resemble has given us His Spirit and made us participants in His life.
“He who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him” (1 Corinthians 6:17).
And furthermore, it is now Him working in us both to will and DO his good pleasure. (Philippians 2:13)
This is the difference between imitation and participation. Imitation stands outside and attempts to reproduce what it sees; participation draws life from the One it beholds. Jesus did not say, “Study Me carefully and do your best to copy Me.” He said, “Abide in Me, and I in you” (John 15:4). The disciple not only learns the Teacher’s way but receives and lives from the Teacher’s life.
And I could speak on this for days, because one of the most forgotten dimensions of Jesus’ teaching in our day is His repeated emphasis on the surrender of the self-life. “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). He then explained, “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it” (Matthew 16:25). The word translated life is psychē, the word from which we get psyche, referring to the soul or self-life. Jesus was not teaching self-hatred or the destruction of our God-given personhood, but the surrender of an independent life centered in self.
Paul captured this perfectly: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Galatians 2:20). I died, yet I live. I remain, but Christ has become the source and center of my life. This is why Christianity is not self-improvement or an attempt to imitate Jesus through greater human effort. Imitation says, “I must try harder to live like Jesus.” Participation says, “I have been crucified with Christ, and now Christ lives in me.”
Before we can fully awaken to this divine life within, we must believe what God says happened at the cross and embrace our new identity. The old identity in Adam was not improved or rehabilitated; it was crucified with Christ. The Christian life is not Adam trying harder to imitate Jesus. It is Christ expressing His life through a new creation who has awakened to who he is in Him.
This is why Jesus used the picture of the vine and branches. “He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). A branch does not imitate a vine. It participates in the vine. It does not observe the vine producing grapes and then strain until it produces something similar. Fruit appears because the same life flowing through the vine flows through the branch.
The branch does not visit the vine on Sunday. It does not beg the vine for life. It does not fast until the vine agrees to send sap. The branch bears fruit only because it is joined to it.
And so do we.
Living From God Instead of Merely for God
This brings us to one of the greatest shifts that must take place in our understanding of the Christian life. Christianity was never intended to be merely a life lived for God; it is a life lived from God. Many sincere believers have spent years working for Him, sacrificing for Him, praying hard enough to reach Him, worshiping enough to feel Him, serving enough to please Him, and remaining faithful enough to someday finally be with Him, while never fully awakening to the staggering announcement of the New Covenant: the God they have been reaching toward has made them His dwelling place.
This changes the source from which everything flows. Prayer begins to flow from union rather than separation. Holiness begins to flow from identity rather than fear. Love begins to flow from participation in His nature rather than religious obligation. Authority begins to flow from knowing whose life we carry rather than trying to convince ourselves that we possess enough faith. Even obedience changes, because we are no longer servants anxiously attempting to earn the approval of a distant Master. We are sons and daughters learning to express the life of the Father who has already brought us near.
Again, this is exactly what Jesus modeled. He did not live independently and occasionally ask the Father to intervene. He lived continuously from another Source. “I can of Myself do nothing” (John 5:30). His words flowed from what He heard. His works flowed from what He saw. His confidence flowed from knowing the Father. His authority flowed from union. His faith was not a spiritual substance He desperately attempted to manufacture before every miracle; His faith was the expression of a Son who knew His Father.
And now the One who lived from the Father turns toward us and says, “Abide in Me.”
As the Father Sent Me, I Send You
Eventually Jesus says something to His disciples that should stop us in our tracks:
“As the Father has sent Me, I also send you” (John 20:21).
Think about the progression. The disciples had watched Him. They had listened to Him. They had seen Him reveal the Father. They had witnessed what a life of union looked like. They had been pupils in His classroom. But discipleship was never intended to end with observation.
The pupils were being prepared to carry forward the life they had witnessed.
The Father sent the Son into the world as the visible revelation of His nature, and now the Son sends His people into that same world carrying His life within them. We do not replace Christ, nor do we become Christ as individual persons. Rather, as His body, we become the earthly expression through which the risen Christ continues to make His life known. Paul calls the Church “His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:23). The invisible Christ is made visible through a people in whom He dwells.
This gives tremendous meaning to Paul's declaration that creation “eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God” (Romans 8:19). Creation is not waiting for Christians to become busier, louder, more religious, or more impressive. It is waiting for manifestation. It is waiting for the unveiling of a people who know the Son, know who they are in the Son, and begin to express His life in the earth. The same love, reconciliation, mercy, righteousness, peace, and life that were visible in Jesus are now meant to become visible through His body.
The earth saw the Son. Now the earth is waiting to see His life manifested through His people.
This is why identity cannot terminate in identity. Knowing who we are is not the finish line. Identity produces manifestation. Union becomes expression. Revelation becomes embodiment. What God establishes within His people begins to flow outward through His people. The purpose of awakening is not simply that I feel better about myself because I now understand my identity. The purpose is that the life of Christ increasingly becomes visible through me.
The Manifestation of God's New People in the Earth
This is the New Creation appearing in the earth. Not a people desperately trying to become something they are not, but a people awakening to what God has already made them in Christ and learning to walk accordingly. This is why Paul could say, “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works” (Ephesians 2:10). Notice the language: created in Christ Jesus. Something new has been brought forth, and that New Creation has an earthly expression.
God's purpose was never merely to collect forgiven people and evacuate them from the earth. He was forming a people in the image of His Son, a people through whom His nature, His love, His righteousness, His wisdom, His peace, and His life could be manifested. Jesus is the firstborn revelation of that humanity, and the Church is the growing family being conformed to His image.
This is why the New Creation must become more than a doctrine we affirm. It must become a reality we occupy. We are disciples, pupils of the Son, learning about the life we have received. We study Jesus because He reveals the Father, and we study Jesus because He reveals us. We behold how He lived from the Father so that we might learn how to live from the Father too. We watch His faith, His love, His rest, His authority, His compassion, and His obedience because we are discovering what the life within us looks like when it is allowed to manifest.
The progression is beautiful. We behold the Son. In the Son we see the Father. In the Son we also discover the New Creation humanity into which we have been born. As disciples, we learn His way of life. Through union, we participate in the life we are studying. And as that life becomes increasingly visible through us, creation begins to encounter the manifestation of God's sons and daughters in the earth.
This is “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27).
We have spent long enough studying Jesus as though His life were an exhibition behind glass: beautiful to behold, worthy of worship, but impossible to touch. He is certainly our Lord, our Savior, our King, and worthy of all worship, but He is also the firstborn among many brethren, the pattern Son, the Teacher whose pupils are called to walk as He walked, and the Vine whose very life flows through His branches.
We have beheld the Son.
Now it is time to live from Him.
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