BETTER THAN MULTIPLYING EMPTY BOXES
02/05/24 09:11
What are we offering the non-believer other than church? What are we looking for ourselves other than ‘church growth’? If we are missional do we have much to be missional about? Persons of any sensitivity recognise the need to be better than they are. Some long-term Christians hanker for more life than they have. The treasure that is ours in our jar of clay is union with Christ. In His mission statement Jesus offered the end of robbed life and Himself as life to the full. ‘In Him is life and that life is the life of men and women.’
MIS-UNDERSTANDING
People can be quite satisfied with themselves. This can be because they do not understand the Gospel, or themselves as a result in living from a distortion of the truth based on the supposition that perspective is Bible based. But it’s not since it is of the kind that Paul defined as ‘dung.’
KNOWING LIGHT
Should we live an un-real gospel the result will be an un-real self. Our life will be a religious construct and we will be harbingers of death rather than life. Knowing self, knowing others and knowing life – discernment is the result of knowing Christ as He is without amendment and distortion.
DELUSION OF GOD SEPARATION
God has made you one with Himself in Jesus Christ. The atonement is complete and covers all people. We enter it when we agree with Christ that He is our life. Salvation is ours as soon as we believe Christ as our Saviour. But a life work is to grow into the fullness of His life in us and as us.
OLD AND DEAD WAY
The fruit of the knowledge tree is legalism. Legalism is formulaic, reductionist and at time gnostic. It dulls our perceptions and our humanity. It separates us from God, from the self and from others. Legalism is the legacy of separation that became extinct in actuality when Jesus cried out. ‘It is finished.’ Separation was finished. So, are we are diminishing ourselves by living in it? Our life in the Spirit is the Living Way of oneness with God. This is to be lived as the normal Christian life. This is our wealth in Christ.
IT’S OUR STATE OF BEING
You are not one with Christ only when in your prayer chair or engaged in praise and worship. You are always one with Christ as a person everywhere and at all times. This is the Living Way called incarnation. It is the ignited you and your living out of the Lord’s Table as a fact rather than as a religious rite. It’s the difference between us as a tree of life or a wood pile.
LIGNIFIED MINDSET
The essence of sin is separation from God and ‘non-being’. The essence of our Christ life is ‘I AM’. Who are you? You are the man/woman Christ saw at creation and the one whom He re-envisioned at His resurrection.
In ‘sin consciousness’ we fall naturally into legalism. Legalism is often our version of God. In this mindset we live from a self-devised contractual relationship with God that consists of formulaic fundamentals and oft repeated positions. These are easy enough to master but have little to do with real Godliness. This kind of imagination leaves us with a dormant spirit and a crippled soul.
CHRIST OUR LIFE AND MIND
‘Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped’ Phil 2.5.6. Paul is urging humility and urging us to rest in the ‘who’ that we are in Christ, with0ut strain or artifice. Paul asserts that we have the mind of Christ because he is the same Paul who asserts that Christ is our life.
ADVANCING GLORY
Earnest Carrere writes, “about a very elemental reality: being human. One does not have to agree with Kierkegaard that being human is becoming human, but we all recognize that to some measure we must deepen the person we are and that the task is a challenging and never-ending concern.” (1) Real humanity is realised in Christ.
GRACE AND TRUTH
The making of a decent person lasts a lifetime. Jesus was more than decent and ‘full of grace and truth.’ He liberates us from guilt and lives in us to impart His nature to each of us. In Christ your life, you will not become Jesus of Nazareth. But you will become the New Creation Jesus has purposed you to be.
LIBERATED TO BE
Once we learn that we can be good people because of what we are before what we do, we can make some progress in our liberation from selfishness and the notion that we are the center of the universe. It’s not hard to develop a formula and mode of behaviour in which we cast ourselves as being some kind of benefactor of humanity - a mode in which we demonstrate to ourselves and to others that we are making a contribution to society – and maybe we are. But this does not negate the fact that our life is about us and our self is the center of our universe. The paradox is that hidden in Christ we become our best self and enter our glory as sons/daughters who are the multiplication of Christ where they are as agents of His life.
SELF VINDICATION
There is nothing selfish about oneness with God. It’s the process of becoming nothing in order to become everything. Richard Rohr calls this living in the ‘naked now’ because it’s a life with Christ plus nothing. Not a religion. Not a belief system or an intellectual structure. It’s incarnation: Christ as us. In this ‘living way’ we become our true selves as life-givers and people of grace.
This is why churchism may not be life. Life is a lived and joyful communion with God in Christ. We can live in real companionship with Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Life becomes you and you become a life-giver. Legalists are not bad people. They are just not alive.
If we could live from this bread of life, rather than from the junk food of self-vindication or religion, we would be more human and Godlier. There is a living way who is Christ who is the Door for the trinity to be woven into our being. The result is that that we are the manifestation of Christ. When Christ is our life all we do and are is the fruit of Christ our life.
RE-EVALUATION, RE-BIRTH
After the Second Vatican Council many Catholics of serious Christian intent began to question the basic structures of Catholic life, as well they may, because sooner or later sensitive people become aware that what they are doing as religion, is not in fact God or even Godly. They become aware that God is not institutions and may even realise that their soul has been quenched by the doctrines they have held as ‘truth’.
The more daring re-examine the basic assumption of their faith and the foundations of their theology. The honest among them discover that they have spent too long attached to myths; that the truth of Christ their life has been veiled and even what they have believed as the gospel of the Kingdom was such a perversion that they have tried to make a life out of cunningly devised fables.
CONTAINER NOT THE REALITY
Thomas Merton wrote, “In the monastic community not a few took for “Granted that "the contemplative life" is sterile, foolish, wasteful, selfish and that it serves no purpose but to keep monks immature, walled off from contemporary reality, in a state of self-delusion, dedicated to childish formalities.” (2) This has an affinity with Protestants who can be glued to icons of their faith, to habitual routines, to moralisms and legalisms that they think are the fabric of Christianity when these forms are the container and not the reality.
THE REALITY OF FRUIT
The seed, root and Branch of the Christian life is Christ come in our flesh – Christ our life and Christ in us, the hope and realisation of the glory of the human condition. The new creation Kingdom of God grows from incarnated people – those who are the manifestation of Christ.
When Jesus came among us physically, He did not contain Himself in a tower or a temple. He walked in the ordinary life of ordinary folks. When Jesus came by the Spirit at Pentecost He came to manifest Himself in men and women of ordinary pursuits who would become extraordinary daughters and sons because each of them had become the manifestation of the Christ. How? By the Spirit. What Spirit? The Spirit of Sonship which is the One Spirit that draws all into the life that is God. What is the life of God? It’s not the law, morality or good works. The life of God is God Himself with whom you are one, in Jesus Christ. You are in God’s life because Christ is your life.
(1) In the preface, ‘Contemplation in a World of Action by Thomas Merton.’
(2) Ibid.
