CRISPY LEAVES
18/01/23 15:55
We can live a methodical life in a Belief System. We can live in the joy and the pleasure of life as it is meant to be savoured when Jesus is our life. The mystery of life is that life is the person of Jesus. When Christ is our life and we are incarnated with Him, we mediate His life to our surroundings, to our projects and the people whose lives we touch. With Christ come in our flesh we are alive with His life. He heals us so that we minister His healing to others by being ourselves.
No one has to live a fading life. None need live as a community of slaves and workers.
Jesus joins us to life, propels us into life and draws us into the joy of life. Jesus turned water into wine at a wedding. Nothing pedestrian about our Lord. This wine wasn’t non-alcoholic. It was what it was – a drink of jubilation.
SONG AND DANCE
Some time back I enjoyed a wonderful musical about the life and work of Nelson Mandela. It was a joyous celebration of song, dance and humanity – a hymn to Freedom. I am too old now to run much and incapable of the joyous athleticism of the dancers I saw on the stage. But I can dance in my heart. I rejoice in the creation; I find nourishment in a landscape or an ancient tree. The play was a wonderful presentation of life in its own right. But it was also a parable of ‘setting captives free.’*
RELEASE FROM DARKNESS
“The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners’ Isa 61.1 NIV. Don’t expect much of the Spirit of the Lord, if what we are promoting retains people in the coma in which they have learned to live. In Adam all are dead. In Christ all are alive. This is a very strong affirmation of the new covenant.
We can invest much time and effort and propagating our false self. This is the self of externality, the self of the world that is not actually the real you. Jesus urged us not to be seduced into investing our efforts in this false self because this is the way to dull our spirit and lose our soul.
PROMOTING WILTED LEAVES
The unfortunate thing about this betrayal of ourselves is that in not really knowing life, we promote forms of the Christian life that are without spirit and life. Lacking spirit and life because the truth about us is that we cannot see. We will never find ourselves unless we are willing to die to all that we know ‘as us.’
SUCCESS IN BEING YOU
Jesus is less interested in what qualifications we have and the ‘success’ that we might like to think we have gained and more interested in what He came to die for – and now lives for: To give us great success in being our real selves.
‘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.
The beauty of holiness is that it is not an agenda or a list. It is you. Well it is you since the cross and Pentecost. It is you since the reign of the knowledge of good and evil has been put to death and life has gained full reign in in you through Jesus Christ.
BRANCHES AND FRUIT OF THE VINE
Rites and religious motions are extraneous since the cross. The life of God becomes your life because Jesus lives in you and becomes you – which is what John meant by Christ come in your flesh. In a manner of speaking Christ has become every man, every woman. He has become us all. He is all and in all when we agree that He is our life. Through Jesus, God has incarnated Himself in us – so that as sons of God we are the manifestation of God as Peter and Ruth and Simone.
IT IS YOU ALIVE IN HIS LIFE
You can dull this life by living from religion, the law and any old covenant delineation of your relationship with God. The common fact of all these is SEPARATION – Separation that is not real but is imagined and lived in by neglect, religious obstinacy or just plain folly. As harmless as such doctrine might appear it’s held in place by false, teaching, brainwashing and the spirit of anti-christ. We will not build the Kingdom by rubbing holy Spirit oil onto a false gospel. The result for us in this strategy is a faded life, hopes not realised and churches not revived.
TRUE SONSHIP
There’s real sonship and paper sonship. The former is ours by incarnation. The latter is ours in the law. When Christ is your life, you are the manifestation of His life. He’s not a stuffed shirt. If we are not experiencing a fair degree of joy, even in our bad seasons, what we have cannot be Him. Probably just a tare.
The infinity of this Christ life as you and its total efficacy for you has been called the vicarious humanity of Jesus. This is to say that He is everything for us all. And He is in you. Richard Rohr reports, “I was told personally by the leadership sisters in Calcutta that Mother Teresa never tried to convert a Muslim or a Hindu to Catholicism. She told the sisters that their job was not to talk about Jesus or even promote Jesus, but to be Jesus!” (1)
BE JESUS
You can be this with Jesus as you. This is the incarnated non-law muffled life. It’s you with a spirit that is alive in Christ. You will never be this in religion.
CHRIST BECOMES US
There are of course times to talk about Jesus and who He is for us as we are doing now. But the main fact is that in the Age of the Kingdom Jesus becomes us. It’s as bald as that. No, we are not clones of Jesus of Nazareth and we are not deity. (But we are sons of God). By His Spirit Jesus manifests as our flesh. That is, we give Jesus a face and a body that is us. This is Christ multiplied and it is the way of the new creation. It is real because we have been joined to God.
ONE SUBSTANCE WITH CHRIST
Jesus spoke of the bread and water of life. Eating is fun because it food gives life to our being. Thus Jesus says, ‘Those who eat me will live because of Me’. This ‘live’ is not mere existence and nothing as banal as a religion. It’s the Christ, Father and Holy Spirit woven into our being so that we take on their life.
“On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you” John 14.20 NIV. This is the day we move from religion to sonship; from yearning to be a compilation of character traits to be a son/daughter because we are the manifestation of Jesus. We can have this now or bumble along in still-born forms of Christianity that hide what Jesus has achieved and degrade our real faces – faces that are really the expression of Jesus Christ..
In her book The Healing Presence, Leanne Payne wrote of the healing of the self and the resurrection of the True Self in Christ who is woven into us by incarnation. She wrote, “A right understanding of the true self and our acceptance of it is necessary to a sound and balanced theology.
Christ who is my everything is also my righteousness. In accepting myself in Him, I am no longer trapped in the mode of trying to win my own righteousness or God’s love, or in trying to keep the law, the very thing that Christ fulfilled.
THE REAL YOU
The true self finds “fullness of being.” It knows completion, for it is in the Perfect One. When our Lord told us we must be perfect, even as our Heavenly Father is perfect, He was saying we must be completed. The word perfect, as translated in the Scriptures, can mean “without flaw,” but it also means “completed, finished, made whole.” We are here dealing with a number of profound things, one of which is personhood. We are becoming persons. We become as we remain in Christ, a state of God-consciousness.” (2) This is the sonship that will never be ours in the law but which belongs to all in Christ our life.
(1) Rohr, Richard. The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (p. 100). The Crossroad Publishing Company. Kindle Edition.
(2 ) Payne, Leanne. The Healing Presence (pp. 54-55). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
