CHRIST’S KINGDOM IS A LIFE. ALL OF LIFE

The Kingdom of God does not happen in a religious cocoon. Neither is the Kingdom of God an entity in which the religious cocoon expands into the world. The new creation kingdom of God is God incarnated in you and through you and the church into Everyday Life. The Kingdom of God is the life of God expressed by you in you, in marriage, family and the world.

The Kingdom of God is holistic and wholeness is Christ our life Lived in the Spirit.
SIDE-LINED BY WE LIKE SHEEP.
Yet this can be ignored because we are intent on our own way, our own imagined specialness and ingrained stubbornness. Keep in mind that “Many of the Jews, even of the scribes and priests, knew that Jesus was the Messiah, and yet wilfully blinded themselves because he was not the kind of Messiah they wanted, and they still insisted in trying to bend the will of God to their ideas and desires. And so to the very last, they resisted the purpose of God's wonderful love and actually crucified the Messiah, the Son of God.” (1A) This is the mindset that today produces bent gospels, false christ’s and crippled communities of deviant belief.

NEW CREATION IS CHRIST ACTUALISED IN US
The Kingdom Jesus began is about how to be human in the world. What the Kingdom of Jesus is, is not is the system of law with a Jesus gloss.  ‘New Daily’ Columnist Michael Pascoe observes that.  “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.” It’s pretty much the opposite of prosperity theology – the idea that God makes nice believers rich. Clap hands and shout hallelujah to win Lotto while poor people must be undeserving. That sentence attributed to JC is a warning to use whatever talent and good fortune we might have to improve the world – and the more talent and good fortune, the more opportunity to do so and thus a greater expectation that more will be achieved.”

SHARE CHRIST’S LIFE
Christian love entails the obligation to make a better world, give more people a chance and multiply the life that is Christ in every way. Quite the opposite to the ‘I’m alright Jack’ self-absorbed materialism of the supposed ‘quiet Australians.’

RELIGION
Religion can be an attempt to promote ourselves in the eyes of self and God by creating compartments of ‘god and not god.’ This is the culture and epistemology of the knowledge of good and evil, the lore of Adam and the old covenant regime of Moses. But these manoeuvres separate us theoretically and practically from God by using the law which was given by God in a perverse manner. God in Jesus steps into us and our realm in joining us to God and His love of the world and its people. This is authentic love, life and Godliness.

A BITTY LIFE
As Christians we can live a dichotomised life, thinking to ourselves that Christianity is about church and worship and holding the line against bad morality. The difficulty comes when we, with closed eyes define morality to suit ourselves, our imagined entitlements and our class.
For convenience or identity we may have embraced the notion of sacred and secular even though this demarcation ceased at the cross when Jesus cried, ‘It is finished!’ The curtain that  enclosed the Most Holy Place was ripped down the middle. There are no non - God places in the Kingdom Jesus began.
NOT DIVIDED
There is no sacred and secular in the Kingdom of God either. If there is, the kingdom is not a kingdom and Christ is not sovereign. But He is. All things are under His Feet and Christ is all and in all. The resurrection marked the end of a reality split in two by the knowledge of good and evil – an interpretive frame that was a function of Adamic separation from God and the knowledge of good and evil writ large.
DUALISM UNDONE
When we clutch this frame to ourselves we immunise ourselves from oneness with Christ. Law-mongering nurtures us in promoting self-made versions of righteousness that suffocate the real righteousness we could have had in Christ. Of course, we get more than righteousness in Christ. We get unlimited life welling up into a liberated earth.
CHRIST BASED GRACE
Paul Molnar quoting Torrance observes that ‘The cross of Christ’ is an ‘interruption of the ethical order of the fallen world’ and sets ‘our life on the wholly new basis of grace’. This is why all forms of self-justification are so horrible.” It’s horrible and threadbare. This is why Christ our life is a holistic garment and the law is a parody of holiness and wholeness. (1) Law keeping is an attempt at self-made grace. To abide by even one element of the law as a means of gaining acceptance with God advertises the fact that we are not in the Gospel of Jesus and the apostles and do not understand what Jesus won for us.
ENFOLDED IN GOD BY GOD
We are not separated from God now. We are included because the triune God has reached out in Jesus Christ to include us in the Holy Family. God’s presence in the world is mediated through the Christ by the Spirit and the result is the Spirit of Sonship indwelling the Believer. When Christ is our life it is we who mediate the regenerative life of Jesus to our surroundings. Or not.
LAW-BASED LIFE
Baxter Kruger observes, “I had a carpenter working on my house not long ago. He was a Christian, and I asked him if he ever thought about how Jesus Christ relates to his carpentry. He said, “No, not really. I guess Jesus makes me an honest carpenter.” Wrong answer.
MORE THAN MORALISM
“The minute he said that, I thought to myself, is that it? Is that all we have to say to the carpenters of the world, the engineers, the designers, the artists? Is that all we have to say to the doctors and nurses and teachers of the world, the cooks and fishermen and janitors? Jesus will make you honest? He can save you and get you into heaven when you die, and in the meantime he will make you honest? Is honesty the extent of the relationship between Jesus Christ and human beings? Is the influence of Jesus Christ upon human beings and what they do, day in and day out with their lives, reducible to mere morality? Is that all that we have to say?”  
Christ as Himself in us is a far higher righteousness than our puny legalism and church posturing.
Moralism/legalism allows us to be selective about our self-salvation. It’s embedded moralism of the kind that explains how we can make a self-recommendation of ourselves as church-goers and be blind to the needs of the poor, the turning of nature and life into money under the disguise of jobs and growth and how we can kill the earth in the name of progress. Jesus is about life. All of it. There should be no disconnect between those who claim Christianity, yet deny Jesus in their policies, actions and casual attitude to the truth. If Jesus is anything, He is who we are as individuals and a society.
THE FOUNDATION IS CHRIST
Foundationalism is a ‘foundational’ lens by which all other phenomena are interpreted. There is a foundation and this foundation is the trinity which is the hub of life and the core of authentic knowing and being. When we posit an extraneous foundation onto Christ like moralism and the law we dilute our Christ of His substance, create a false God and false Christ. This results in a false and insubstantial us. The reason for Christ is not moralism as Baxter Kruger observes. The reason for Christ is to be in you to be your life in your life and in the world.
LIFE TO THE FULL
People can live in illusory conceits. ‘Yes, yes, ‘ they say. ‘We live in grace.’ But then they go on to list the things one must do to show they are in grace. Mostly a short list of denominationally defined ‘righteousnesses’ that has no real effect on authentic Godliness.
Grace described in terms of the law is a parody of our inheritance of Christ your life.
‘The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full’ John 10.10 NIV.
LIFE-MULTIPLYER
Righteousness and morality are a very narrow view of the kingdom of God. So are the rites of religious observance. Jesus never announced Himself as the purveyor of morality or religion. He presented Himself as the Multiplier of life without limit. When Jesus is our life we receive His life, His righteousness, His belonging in the trinity and His love of life. Every form of robbed life starts to be restored and we are progressively set free from religion and every variety of unlife that presents itself as a substitute for Jesus.
We may not be life-givers simply because we have a ministry or do a mission program. Our agency is dulled in any aspect of the law. We are life-givers when we live Christ our life by inviting Him to be us. Mary positioned herself to become a life-giver. Martha spoke out religious cliches.
LIMITLESS
The new creation is not just about morals and if so defined is much more than a self-serving morality that kills the earth in the name of jobs and growth. Care of the earth and preservation of humanity is not a cult. Materialism and unlimited consumption is the cult of mammon and the mass stupidity of the thoughtless. Jesus as the Wonderful Counsellor is the opposite of dull minds, populist ignorance and boof-head utterances. We can do better than a form of Christianity that is the ‘kings new clothes’.
(1A) Thomas Torrance. The Incarnation. P 43.
(1)   Paul D. Molnar (2015). Thomas F. Torrance and the problem of universalism. Scottish Journal of Theology, 68, pp 164-186 doi:10.1017/S0036930615000034