A SUBSTITUTE MIASMA
24/04/24 14:39
A friend once said to me, ‘At least if they are in religion, they are near God.’ Not really. Religion can be a great insulator between us and God. Like drinking the milk-carton instead of the milk.
INERT SUBSTITUTES
It’s good to realise that even for defenders of the faith – there is no substitute for knowing Jesus as a person. Years ago I read an excellent book entitled Discovering Jesus by Rev. Dr Gordon Moyes. He emphasised that Christianity is not a religion but a person. This is the core of the Kingdom Jesus began – what Paul called Christ in you and John described as ‘Christ come in our flesh’. This union is mystical yet more real than anything of the law or religion. Christ our life is a state of being – not an abstraction, a construct or doctrinal position. It’s our actuality of oneness with God.
I once saw it argued that humans have a spirit while animals do not. Not sure about that one but I do know that our spirit is that which we have in common with God. He breathed this into us at creation and Christ did it again to the disciples as the Last Adam. To be alive in Christ is not to be religious. It’s to be the expression of His Spirit and Life.
CHRIST AS YOU
It is the atonement and incarnation that makes Jesus the reality of living for individuals and the church. The atonement made us one with God and the incarnation makes the trinity to be in you and in us.
When we agree with God that we are the expression of Christ and embrace the truth that Christ really has come in our flesh. When this fact rather than a religion called Christianity is the new creation in us – we will advance the Kingdom of Jesus rather than expanding Christianity as religion.
WHOSE DISCIPLE?
You will do better as a son/daughter of God if you settle for being a follower of Jesus rather than a disciple of a church.
KNOW WHAT HIS CHUCH IS
Christ did not leave us a way to do Christianity or even empower Christianity. He left us Himself to be Himself in each person so that the church is Jesus manifest among men and women. The church as an institution is a faint imitation of Christ. People as the manifestation of Christ are His Church and the new creation. It follows that we may do better to keep this front and center instead of obsessing about reinventing versions of the church.
With Christ as us we will enjoy many life-giving expressions of the church.
HUSKS
Institutions will be incarnated if the people in them are. Institutions can be stale and heartless if that’s all they are. Yet if we live as the manifestation of Christ by inviting Him to be us, we will be less vitiated and more fruitful. He did say ‘His burden is easy,’ so we need to guard against our Christ-life being more elaborate and more complicated than it is.
PERSONHOOD AND BEING
Thomas Torrance writing of the Trinity remarks on the personhood of God. “It was specifically the understanding of the incarnation of the Word and Son of God in Jesus Christ in which the ‘I am’ of Yahweh and the ‘I am’ of the Lord Jesus were brought together within the three-fold manifestation of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that not only deepened the Old Testament understanding of the Being of God as profoundly ‘personal’, but forced the Church in giving explicit expression to the implicitly trinitarian self-revelation of God to develop the theological concept of the ‘person’.” (1)
Our personhood and the authenticity of Christian community takes its being from the trinity in us. God was known as personal in the Old Testament and revealed as unconditionally so in the incarnation of the son of God as Jesus of Nazareth.
PERSONAL
I’ve known religious men who believed dullness is sanctified. Many more believe that moralism/legalism is life when the only spirit and life that is real is Jesus Christ as our life. Sections of the church can live in appalling woodenness exhibiting stilted worship and threadbare love because they live from the artifice/externality of the law. Parts of the church do not advertise eternal life in the present because they are not alive.
THE CONSTRUCT IS NOT IT
An institution and a belief system are not the essence of God. God is personal and so are you. Your personhood will flourish as you relate personally to Jesus Christ who introduces you to His communion with the persons of Holy Spirit and Father. There is nothing dry or abstract about your personal life in God. His personhood and God’s personhood is your life in the long term. It is this Spirit and Life that ignites your being, re-creating society and the world.
God is the Breath of Life in Person. You are alive when breathing Jesus.
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (p. 156). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
