NO BONES AND SCRAPS
06/06/24 13:30
We can live from the provision of God or from a religion of bones and scraps. We can live from a faded gospel, a perverted gospel or a gospel that in Paul’s terms is ‘no gospel at all’. If we are not to be passive travellers on a travelator of half-truths we will live because of Christ in a union so close that Jesus described it as ‘Those who eat Me will live because of Me.’ We cheat ourselves when we live from anything less than Christ our life.
THIS IS THE GOSPEL OF THE KINGDOM
“We preach and teach the Gospel evangelically, then, in such a way as this: God loves you so utterly and completely that he has given himself for you in Jesus Christ his beloved Son, and has thereby pledged his very being as God for your salvation.
“In Jesus Christ God has actualized his unconditional love for you in your human nature in such a once for all way, that he cannot go back upon it without undoing the Incarnation and the Cross and thereby denying himself.
“Jesus Christ died for you precisely because you are sinful and utterly unworthy of him, and has thereby already made you his own before and apart from your ever believing in him. He has bound you to himself by his love in a way that he will never let you go, for even if you refuse him and damn yourself in hell his love will never cease. Therefore, repent and believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour.
JOINED BY GOD TO YOU
“From beginning to end what Jesus Christ has done for you he has done not only as God but as man. He has acted in your place in the whole range of your human life and activity, including your personal decisions, and your responses to God’s love, and even your acts of faith. He has believed for you, fulfilled your human response to God, even made your personal decision for you, so that he acknowledges you before God as one who has already responded to God in Him, who has already believed in God through him, and whose personal decision is already implicated in Christ’s self-offering to the Father, in all of which he has been fully and completely accepted by the Father, so that in Jesus Christ you are already accepted by him. Therefore, renounce yourself, take up your cross and follow Jesus as your Lord and Saviour.” (1)
WRONG WAY- GO BACK
You could spend your entire life seeking holiness through the law and be no further ahead on the day of your death than you were when you began your journey on the wrong path of the law. Then again you could become holy as God is holy in an instant because His life is your life. This is Christ come in your flesh and the reason why Jesus urged, ‘Realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20.
NO SEPARATION
Christ is not separated from infinite righteousness. He is that righteousness and life. In the mystery of the Spirit and the incarnation His life becomes your life. He is your justification and sanctification.
HOLY COMMUNION IN EVERY-DAY
The Achievement of the cross is that we have been forgiven for our sins, made one with God, drawn into the life of the Holy Family and made the habitation of the fullness of God. God lives in us and we are personally the expression of Christ and as the Body Christ represented in the world.
HOLISTIC
We have here a co-mingling, an interpenetration and an indwelling gifted to us in radical grace and supreme love. In Christ we are graced with His life and graced as ourselves to be who we are as daughters and son. God’s oneness with us is direct and our oneness with God is in Christ. This far exceeds the chunkiness of the law and the contrived manoeuvres of the knowledge of good and evil. You are infused with God’s being. The Christ is expressed as you.
Thomas Torrance puts it this way. “It may be said that the 'objective' union which we have with Christ through his incarnational assumption of our humanity into himself is 'subjectively' actualised in us through his indwelling Spirit, 'we in Christ' and 'Christ in us' thus complementing and interpenetrating each other. In other words, there takes place a relation of mutual indwelling between Christ and the Church which derives from and is grounded in the mutual indwelling of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in the Holy Trinity.” (2)
GOSPEL OF CHRIST AND THE APOSTLES
This is the teaching of Jesus and the apostle’s doctrine. This is the teaching of blessing that overcomes a curse. The is the reality of a life that becomes your life. The ‘being’ that becomes you that is not just words because it’s the word made flesh as you. In the post cross age we are transformed into Christ’s image as He is revealed and expressed in our person. This is the new birth and our growing up into Christ. The presence of Christ is in you and it is direct – if you have not insulated yourself from Him with religion and the law.
BEING TRANSFORMED
‘And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit’ 2 Cor 3.18 NIV.
(1) Thomas Torrance in The Mediation of Christ.
(2) Thomas Torrance, The Mediation of Christ. P.67.
