BEYOND THE FRAGMENTING DUALISM

The mystery of a healed creation comes to us in Christ incarnated in individuals, the church and society. Dualistic, separationist, ‘knowledge - of -good and -evil,’ fragmented gospels of the fundamentalist kind, produce a compartmentalised life and a fragmented us. The creation is not separate from God and not siloed off from what we do in church. Worship is a life – not a service.
 
We must not take refuge in words and as a result, obscure the reality that when Christ is our life, we are one with God and that in His unity and diversity, we participate with God in the oneness of creation. Thus, with God we have an interest in healing the earth and not destroying it by turning life into money.
 
HUNDREDS AND THOUSANDS
 
You can have a religion of bits and pieces in the law, make a house of compartments and boxes or make yourself lists of things that you should do and not do. Made from ideas that you got from your Mum or the Church Pioneers. You can go the whole way in the knowledge of good and evil and make this dichotomy the fabric of your existence. Then  invent a ‘great controversy between christ and Satan’ that never existed before the cross and certainly not after it, firstly because Satan was never that powerful and secondly because he fell like lightning at the cross.
 
You can bypass or ignore Christ’s bringing everything together under the authority of Christ—everything in heaven and on earth and make poetry out of the reality of Paul’s Christ our life. You can live in the contract you have imagined between you and Christ and insist on this self-made grace as your ‘entitlement.’ Or you can be whole and holy incarnated with the trinity.
 
BE A WHOLE PERSON
 
You can believe and live from the state of being that is yours by ‘Realizing that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ (John 14.20). And you can enter the reality that Jesus has achieved for us by agreeing that you ‘have the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one’ John 17.22.
 
HARMONY OF ONENESS
 
Paul wrote, ‘And this is the plan: At the right time he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ—everything in heaven and on earth’ Eph 1.10 NLT.
 
Thomas Torrance emphasises the healing and harmony that flows from the oneness of God when he writes, “It is through the incarnation and atonement effected by the conjoint activity of Christ and the Holy Spirit that God has opened the door for us to enter into his holy presence and know him as he really is in himself in his triune being.
 
In this two-way movement of atoning propitiation whereby God draws near to us and draws us near to himself, the access to the Father given to us through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the communion of the Holy Spirit is such that we are enabled, quite astonishingly and beyond any worth or capacity of our own, to participate, creaturely beings though we are, in the eternal communion and inner relations of knowing and loving within God himself, and know him there as one God in three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”
 
A BETTER COVENANT
 
In Christ God has come into us and we have come into God. The communion is direct and is the source of life and righteousness.
 
There is no sacred and secular in the post-cross age because there is no place where God is not and no time in which God is absent. Christ is in you by incarnation and with you by His real presence so that we are never orphans and never stepping about in a divided world. Never living as a self that is separate from God and His creation.