CHRIST GIVES THE ABILITY TO UNDERSTAND

Christianity for some, is pure moralism. But Jesus announced His mission as the Giver of life to the full. He is the Gift and the Life in every part of life.

Jesus began The New Creation that John describes in the prologue to his book. This was the second genesis - the dawning of Light and Life come into the world in the person of Jesus Christ, the Last Adam. In Adam all died. In Christ all are made alive and sighted in Christ’s Person. Note that this life is in His Person and not in His religion.

INVITE HIM TO EXPRESS HIS LIFE AS US
The gifts and signs are not everything. Revivals fade because the signs were not the main even. The incarnation is. We can do better than twenty minutes of stream of consciousness talk of no substance posing as a prophetic word. We can live incarnated lives to be transformers of life.

TREE OF LIFE
In Jesus, the first Adam and the culture of the knowledge tree of inertia, blindness and death is undone and Jesus establishes Himself as the Tree of Life and Light for all nations. In doing so Jesus becomes the new and living way of light and life in contrast to hotchpotch of lies and truth that is the knowledge of good and evil. By the incarnation He imbues His Person in us. Thus as the church we become the manifestation of Christ.

CHRIST IN YOU
When Jesus rose from the dead the law had been replaced, Adamic separation was no more and those who live in Jesus possessed the light of life. Jesus, Paul and John never spoke in uncertainties. Jesus as the chief apostle along with Paul and John as His apostles spoke with clarity, conviction and agency – the agency of life and truth expressed by them because they agreed with Jesus that He was their life. Christ as our life makes us multipliers of life in every sphere. This is the Living Way to have a society rather than an economy run along the lines of the survival of the fittest.

NOT A RELIGIOUS ECLECTICISM

Representatives of Jesus do not speak ‘yes and no’. They are life-givers because in oneness with the Living Word they do not separate religion from life itself. As an apostle of the law, we may be able to speak generalities and religiosities as a result of eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil – but in the main, we will not speak spirit and life. We will be largely insulated from genuine spiritual discernment – the reason being that religion from the tree of knowledge as a medium of life is a lie. Law and religion as a ‘god’ makes blind folks talking and dead women walking. There are people who speak words of spirit and life because they are alive. Others speak rivers of sand because they are married to the law – the most vitiating kind of adultery.

LEGALISM IS ABOUT SELF-VALIDATION AND ENTITLEMENT
The need to cling, to even a smidgeon of self-validation prevents some Believers living in the Spirit. They are unable to embrace Romans 8 because it abolishes what they imagine is their personal dignity in earning some aspect of their salvation. So, they stick with a version of self-vindication that is actually a version of the law and the tenets of the knowledge of good and evil. Thus, they are encased in the lie. This is the lie in which we have been seduced into thinking there is something we must add to ourselves to be like God or be worthy of God.
OUR LIFE IN CHRIST
In Christ we are not sinners by identity because we have a new identity as sons of God. In the law we remain sinners, stuck in the identity of sinners who constantly attempt to manipulate the law in order to construct a ‘worthy self’ and make us look better than we are to escape God’s judgement. But in doing so we judge ourselves and insulate ourselves from the grace of Christ our life, who is our grace and our transformation into His own image.
DON’T LEAVE IT IN THE GROUND
In the post cross age, the command of God is to believe His Son. The testimony of Jesus is that He is our life.
Christ our life means we are remade in His image because we agree with Him that He is our life and our righteousness. This is life in the Spirit with the mind of Christ. Here Jesus is expressed as us. This is the incarnated life lived by us – the eucharist actualised in Bob and Mary.
BOUGHT A TICKET
The law-worker assures herself and others that she belongs on account of some adherence or performance that earns her entitlement in the eyes of herself. In this mode we live a contract even though our life in God is the Gift of Jesus.
In doing this the worker implies - whether she realises it or not -  that those who have not purchased this ‘entitlement’ which is a fragment of the law, are excluded from belonging in Christ.
NARCISSISM SANCTIFIED
A law outlook focusses attention on the self, making us obsess over sins and sin consciousness or clutch at iconic ‘denominational righteousnesses’ when our inheritance is to obsess over Christ as our life so that His life is our life in spirit and truth – which means living in oneness with Christ in an unfolding adventure.
SOURCE OF REAL LIFE
Paul writes, ‘You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ.  But if Christ is in you, then even though your body is subject to death because of sin, the Spirit gives life because of righteousness.  And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you’ Rom 8.9-11 NIV.
ETERNAL LIFE TODAY
This life in the present is the Spirit of Christ in us that is the spirit of life that will eventually manifest in us as eternal life. This life is creative, it is re-creative. It is the life of Christ in you that is transforming you into His image. Christ’s life is never legalism done in His name. Neither is it stream of consciences gibberish pretending to be prophecy. It is not restricted to signs and wonders even though these have a place. Heaven invades earth in the incarnated you.
Real life is Christ manifest in ordinary people in ordinary life. This is Christ our life and Christ come in our flesh.
MISGUIDED EMPIRICISM
Some communities live a concoction of rationalism, materialism and legalism. They have difficulty in accepting that Christ is in them because to them life in the Spirit is a foreign realm. That Christ has  come in our flesh replaces the regulations and stipulations of the law. The fruit of the spirit is not some law-based version of legalism. IT IS CHRIST EXPRESSED AS YOU.  Real Godliness is the life of Christ manifest as you by the Spirit of Christ in you.
The letter is a delusion in which we can persuade ourselves that we are being righteous by living a list – which is selective and supposedly sufficing as a self-made form of grace. But written down regulations and marks on paper lack substance and are a vapour when compared to Christ your life -  which is Christ as you. This gospel just is and it is the Spirit come in your flesh. In the Spirit you are a manifestation of Christ. In the law we are misguided versions of ourselves.
DEFIES REASON
In his commentary on Romans, Karl Barth observes that, “The Gospel does not expound or recommend itself. It does not negotiate or plead, threaten, or make promises, it withdraws itself always when it is not listened to for its own sake…The Gospel of salvation can only be believed in; it is a matter for faith only. It demands choice. This is its seriousness. To him that is not sufficiently mature to accept a contradiction and to rest in it, it becomes a scandal—to him that is unable to escape the necessity of contradiction.” The contradiction is that the ordinary you and I become the expression of Jesus Christ where we are. That’s extraordinary.
ILLUSORY
Holy Spirit will come with gifts, manifestations and power out of grace and love. But Holy Spirit lives to manifest Christ and draw us to Christ and His truth and life. The Spirit draws us into the accomplishment of Christ – union with God.
If our gospel is not Christ’s Gospel but some aberration that depletes the power of the cross, re-instating Adam, Moses and the law there the effect will be dullness, dead men talking, spiritual blindness and the death of the soul. Holy Spirit will withdraw and leave us to our own formulations until we are astute enough to realise that Holy Spirit will not continue to anoint an aberration that binds believers in the law. In degrees of Adam’s non-life and Satan’s captivity. Holy Spirit comes to vindicate Christ our life and establish us in Christ’s Gospel of unlimited life. Our treasure is atonement, incarnation and life in the Spirit – a life in which Jesus is manifest in our flesh in the Everyday.