CHRIST IS YOUR INTIMACY WITH CHRIST

 
A woman said to me once, ‘We have to be free of sin in our lives before we can be intimate with Christ’. But your intimacy with Christ depends not on your worthiness before Christ. It depends on His finished atonement for you. And His intimacy with Father. It depends on Christ’s inclusion in the trinity on your behalf. This assumed barrier to intimacy cited above is one of the lies of mis-informed Christianity. Sadly, this is the mistaken foundational belief as a subtle, ‘earning of Christ’ that stifles hope and joy before we can have his salvation. This a piece of misinformation pervades much of Christianity. As a wise man said, ‘Christ receives you as you are. Not as you should be.’ But some don’t like this because they think they need to rely on some skerrick of earned recommendation of their own.
ONENESS – JESUS IS OUR RESPONSE
“For T. F. Torrance especially, but also in J. B. Torrance, it is clear that an ontological relation with Christ on account of his incarnation and vicarious humanity calls for the human response of faith by the Spirit. This means that our response through the gift of the Spirit is a participation in Christ’s response for us, which avoids a logico-causal semi-Pelagianism.” (1) We belong in Christ’s life because of Him and not because of us.
MORE THAN ONE STRING TO THE BOW
It is interesting to note that among many Christians ‘righteousness’ is associated too often with sexuality and the Godly ordering of it. This is not surprising since transgression in this field is both personal and guilt producing. Yet this narrow obsession obscures what could make for our advances in wholeness in marriage, family and our need to refrain from lifestyles that we bumble on with – without any sense of responsibility or guilt.
The living of Christ our life as our grace and sanctification overcomes short-sightedness and self-congratulatory legalism, so that the whole life of Christ’s Kingdom can mediated to us and from us into our lives. We are whole persons due to Christ our life, never in the law.
(1) Introduction - Radcliff, Alexandra S.. The Claim of Humanity in Christ: Salvation and Sanctification in the Theology of T. F. and J. B. Torrance (Princeton Theological Monograph Series Book 222) . Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.