YOUR GLORY IS IN CHRIST
18/02/24 17:06
‘When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory’ Col 3.4 NIV.
Christ our life means that we are graced with Christ’s life and achievements. They are one and we are one in Him. The amazing fact of the incarnation is that Jesus is us. This is life in the Spirit. So what is not life in the Spirit.
1 Spiritual gifts added to the law and the old covenant.
2 The law is seen as separate entity to Jesus.
2a Jesus seen as an expression of the law
3 Jesus doing the law in us.
4 Living and old covenant life of separation from God in the new covenant age of union with God.
5 The incarnation is stifled on account of the law and Christ come in our flesh is annulled.
The above points constitute ‘another gospel’. A continued attachment to the law makes the soul sick and shrivels the spirit.
GRACED BEING
Life in the Spirit is Jesus being us. We are incarnated with God. God is blended in to our being so that we and the trinity are one.
‘The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one’ John 17.22 NIV.
Jesus Christ is not separate from His salvation, from the law or from the incarnation of Himself in us. Fragmentation and dichotomy is over. Union with God is now.
THE FOUNDATION
“Union with Christ is essential [for a proper] understanding of salvation. We are not reconciled to God through an external transaction, as if Christ can be discarded after His saving work is made complete. Justification is not achieved apart from Him but only in union with Him. When we separate Christ’s person from His work, we separate His benefits from His person.” (1) When we do this we produce a convoluted salvation that is ‘another gospel’ and one that is not ‘Christ our life’ and as a result not alive.
EMPTY BRIEF CASE
We can operate in spiritual gifts and at the same time be dead men walking possessed of a notable woodenness of spirit that comes from the law. Because we are not in the oneness of the new covenant. (Actually, we are but we have not embraced it and our outside our inheritance looking in.)
Our union with God makes us truly ourselves as sons and daughters and alive with spirit and life. In oneness with God we have the nature of our father with the result that we are sons, not notionally, but in spirit and in truth.
POSSESSED INHERITANCE
Our Christ life is not just to be righteous. Our inheritance makes us one with God, with the characteristics of God. The difference between life in the law and life in oneness is the difference between life in the knowledge of good and evil and your resurrected life in the Kingdom of Jesus your life.
MORE THAN THE GIFTS
“When we preach the Gospel only in terms of its benefits, we miss the point. The Gospel is not a list of things God offers us in exchange for our faith and allegiance to Him. The Gospel is Jesus Christ. The chief benefit of salvation is not freedom from sin or an escape from hell; it is ultimately fellowship with God. God is both the means and the end of our salvation.” (2)
(1) Morrison, Stephen D.. T. F. Torrance in Plain English (Plain English Series Book 2) (p. 141). Beloved Publishing, LLC. Kindle Edition.
(2) Ibid. (p. 142).
