BUSY BUT NEVER ALIVE

We can live a diligent life of service, yet never be alive. Some of the most active in service are just not alive in their spirit.

Henri Nouwen writes, ‘Over the years we have developed the idea that being present to people in all their needs is our greatest and primary vocation. The Bible does not seem to support this. Jesus’ primary concern was to be obedient to his Father, to live constantly in his presence. Only then did it become clear to him what his task was in his relationships with people.” (1) Only then do we see our mission clearly and become imbued with Christ’s Spirit to accomplish it.
CHRIST OUR LIFE
In these posts we mean living in life rather than living in some substitute or mirage of life. Grace is good but grace and truth are better.
We can live in life itself because ‘Christ is our life.’ To live in God is to live in life and be alive with life. Unfortunately, many people live in religion when they could be living in oneness with God who is life. A dynamic oneness with God is life in the Spirit – which is the incarnated us resulting in the life-giving us.
A NUMBED EXISTENCE
Living in religion when we could be living in life itself insulates us from God. We have been saved to live naked in God – without the layers and cardboard packing of religion right up there in encounter with God. We are woven into His being and God is woven into us. This is the pearl of great price that we need to grab.
INFUSED WITH HIS SPIRIT IN OUR FLESH
Not a few Believers live their entire lives in a kind of ‘religious separation’ from the inheritance that is ours -  which is Christ as us. Incarnation is what Paul calls ‘Christ our life’, ‘living and having our being in God’  and ‘Christ is all and in all’. The result of this is that we are never actually alive in our spirit. As sincere as we are we are dead folks walking. Only Christ in us makes us alive in our spirit and true examples of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.
OUR DEADNESS RELINQUISHED
Leanne Payne writes, “I never cease to be awed at the simplicity and the extent of the spiritual and psychological healings that take place when we ask a person to look and see, with the eyes of his heart, Jesus on the Cross. As he looks to the One who took into “his own body on the tree” the sin, the darkness, the pain that is killing him, he is then enabled to yield up to the dying Christ the “death” that is in his own members.”
Unless we live in the Spirit of Christ we are dead in ourselves because we are attempting ministry in the non-life of our flesh. When Christ has come in our flesh because we live intentionally in the eucharist,  our bodies and being are alive with Christ’s spirit and life and we multiply this life as ourselves without artifice or effort.
(1) Payne, Leanne. The Healing Presence (p. 34). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
(2) Payne, Leanne. Ibid. The Healing Presence.