BEYOND PHLEGMATIC CHRISTIANITY

A friend of mine had a vision. Some people do. The vison showed a group of living corpses in a cemetery being approached by a Messenger. The Messenger said to them, ‘Your misguided gospel has made you dead people walking.’ But they replied, ‘we like ourselves the way we are because this is our identity’. The bubble that is lived in is an example of an opiate of the people.

Christ’s real Gospel makes us more alive – not more comatose.

NOT ENOUGH STYLE RELIGION
Do you know what the New Covenant is? Basically it’s Christ our life. The new Covenant was never an afterthought. It is The Plan that God had in mind from the foundation of the world. The fall resulted from Adam’s acceptance of the twin lies that Father was not enough and that Adam and Eve were not enough. The lie continued is that you are not enough .. But. you are in Christ. In Jesus you are complete.

PREFERRED THE LIE
Living by the knowledge of good and evil is the result of ignoring truth to live in a lie about God and about self. To live from the law is to perpetuate these lies of the fall. To live in legalism is to blunt our lives. To live from a law-based religion is to live in a delusion.

TRUTH IS CHRIST FOR YOU AND AS YOU

Everything about the fall is separation from God. Everything about the Kingdom Jesus began is our  interwovenness with God and His interwovenness with us in Jesus Christ. All crooked religion assumes our separation from God and offers itself as the solution for the attainment of union with God. Reject gospels that name themselves as The Way.

BELONGING, COMFORT AND JOY
Jesus urged that we live in the light of our oneness with God. He said, ‘Realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20. Jesus’ passion was that all who believe would enjoy the interwovenness with Father that was His interwoven in the trinity.

‘Just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me’ John 17.21 NIV.

NOT CONTRIVED
There is nothing contrived about trinitarian love. It is love personified. This is the God is love that manifested with the cross and its atonement. In Jesus it is love imparted to our being. When this love is manifest as us it can be seen that it is not an externality, not an affectation or a religious discipline but that it is seen to be real. This is the kind of imparted love that makes us better men, good husbands and loving people.

THE UN-LOVE OF THE LETTER
It’s a sad fact that some fundamentalists are abusers of wives and girlfriends. It’s a result of the rigidity of mind that has been formed in the letter than kills instead of the life that is Christ.

There is a  difference between love as an expression of Christ our life and love as the affectation of duty and an insistence on position. Too often, as Gregory Boyd points out, Christians do not love each other, and this is because they are living in a Christianised version of the knowledge of good and evil – separation from God. It’s an ideology and intellectual schema of the kings new clothes.

INCLUSION
Since the cross none are separated from God. God has made the two one. Hierling ministries present key beliefs as a way to undo separation. But Jesus has undone Adam’s separation and our separation from Him, from self and each other. The Lord’s Table is a representation of what is: Our union with God.*

LIVE YOUR POST CROSS RICHES
The old covenant was ‘obey and live’. The new covenant is ‘I am your life.’ No separation between real and ideal. Reborn in radical grace, you are becoming the expression of Christ. Graced in Christ you become your real self by advancing from glory to glory as Christ grows in you. The fruits of the Spirit are not some New Testament version of the law. They are the effect of Christ as you.

MYSTERY OF INIQUITY
One might think that the oneness with God that is our inheritance in the post cross era, would be eagerly embraced by all. Not so with Believers who have made a religion out of the law. They correctly perceive that if the new covenant is real, then their faith community has no reason to exist and as such they are children of a delusion. They continue to defend the delusion, rather than embrace the living truth. They prefer their coma to wakefulness and their death to life. They are unwilling for their beliefs to become nothing in order that Jesus will become everything.

NEW COVENANT IS
The new covenant is a state of being. The new covenant can be expressed in the words ‘Christ our life.’ Or in the words of Galatians 2.20,21 - “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.  I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died needlessly.”

NEW AND LIVING WAY
There is no law in the new covenant living way. No law because the trinity is incarnated in us so that we become the expression of God. ‘GODNESS’ imbues us. This is the kind of spirit and life that is not the gifts. The spirit and life that is yours because in Christ y0u are included by the One Spirit in God. It’s Adam undone. This is Christ come in the flesh as opposed to law/religion come in the flesh. The livening sacrament of daily life is now the Believer living in the joy of communion with Christ and as the manifestation of Christ. No layer of religion is required between God and the sons of God. We are incarnated.

PRE-DESTINED TO LIFE IN CHRIST
The new creation was front of mind with God before there was a creation. The fall did not take God by surprise. The fall was anticipated and incorporated into the plan before the creation – so that the new creation declared by John in his prologue was anticipated as part of the first creation.

NEW CREATION BEGINS
“Torrance argues that atonement can be seen in terms of a ‘reordering’ of creation.  This applies not only to the human person but also to the entire creation ..Torrance notes how the universe requires ‘redemption from disorder’. [He writes] ‘In the whole human life of Jesus the order of creation has been restored; in the midst of our disordered, sin-disrupted existence, there has been lived a human life in perfect order and proportion to the Will of God…
This is the order of redemption which reaches back to the original order of creation and far transcends it in the amazing purpose of the divine love, as the order of the new creation.
By means of the life of Christ, and especially his resurrection, re-order was achieved out of disorder. In a similar way to Irenaeus, Torrance considers redemption to entail the restoration and perfection of the God-given order in which the cosmos came into being.” (1)

NEW CREATION/NEW ADAM DECLARED
John announces the New Order/Creation in the prelude to the book of John.

TRANSCENDENT LIFE
There is no anti-nomianism in the incarnation. How can there be when Christ’s life is our life and we become not words but a living Daughter/Son?
When Paul speaks of the law of the Spirit of Life He is speaking of this order. An order than is personal, an expression of the trinity, an order that is inclusive and an order than is love and joy personified. This is an order that springs from the creative power of deity.
It may be noted that the created order is an expression of the trinitarian God – of God’s being and relationship. Redemption and the new creation is similarly an expression of the trinity and of Christ – His acts flowing from His being as part of the God-Head. We are drawn into fellowship in the Holy Family because Christ who is God is also one of us and we participate in real time in this fellowship.Participate because the One Spirit has woven us into the being of God and woven Godself into us.

* The foundational issue is not sinning/not sinning. It’s not performance. The issue is inclusion and belonging. You are included because you are included in Christ: Fact. This is your status. The healing of your soul, the straightening of your spirit and forgiveness and deliverance from your sins and addictions, engulfs you in your baptised of union with Christ.
(1) Myk Habets, Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance