DEEP REST
09/05/24 09:40
The author of Hebrews speaks of a Rest from self-validation. No externality in this, but there is true rest for our entire being in Christ who is our life and our Deep Rest.
ENTER THIS REST
‘For if Joshua had given them rest, He would not have spoken of another day after that. So there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested from his works, as God did from His. Therefore let us be diligent to enter that rest, so that no one will fall, through following the same example of disobedience’ Heb 4.8-10 NIV. There is a form of sabbath keeping that is disobedience.
GENUINE REST
The rest cited here is our rest from attempted self-validation before self, before others and before God. Not only this. We are liberated from the accoutrements of religion so that we may rest in the very person of Christ. The Christ who is for us and becomes us when we have faith in Him and are done with the need to accrue religiosities and postures that might commend us to God.
God has commended us to God in His Son.
We need to know that we cannot add anything to Christ to make ourselves more acceptable to Him or to be more devout, holy or saintly. Christ is all of this for us and as us. Adding rites to Christ insulates us from His direct Presence as well as becoming a form of idolatry.
CHRIST IN YOU
Christ is in us for our spirit and life by incarnation. His anointing ignites us for ministry and special occasions.
‘Jesus has become the guarantor of a better covenant’ Heb 7.22 NIV.
THE WAY INTO L IFE
The New and Living Way into the Holy of Holies is union with God in the person of Jesus Christ. It’s actual union with the trinity – the fall undone, separation from God over and your life with Father, Son and Holy Spirit assured as a daily reality. Be sure to live this incarnation rather than cite it as some doctrinal checkbox.
‘By his death, Jesus opened a new and life-giving way through the curtain into the Most Holy Place’ Heb 10.20 NIV.
MARY
Martha missed the import of what Mary had already realised. The elixir of life and transformation comes from Jesus who by the Spirit is with us and in us. Spirit and life is not being near Jesus or active for Jesus. It is union with Jesus. This is why we can be active in missionary ventures but still be dead in our spirit. Oneness with God that He has drawn us into means we are lived in our spirit and capable of imparting this life to others. Don’t spends your life in mission while remaining a dead person walking.
SACRAMENT OF DAILY LIVING
Sacraments can be helpful – but the most direct sacrament is His life as you lived out in your daily doings and lifetime through Christ come in our flesh. The Lord’s Table does not bring The Presence. It reminds us that we live each day in oneness with Jesus.
TRUE DAUGHTERS AND SONS
Human beings were created to fellowship with God and enjoy the life that God enjoyed as the trinity. Because Christ is the logos of the universe and the universe finds its meaning and purpose in God, we find out meaning and purpose in Christ in relationship with God. We are not just saved. Not just near God. We have been woven into God and God has been woven into us. In a sense your daughter/son is an expression of you. Our intimacy with Father is closer than this. By the Spirit we are part of each other yet fully ourselves. This is the mystery of Godliness.
UNION OUR INHERITANCE
All forms of Christianity whose basis is an implied separation from God are a denial of our inheritance in Christ. We know God, experience God and know ourselves as we are meant to be in oneness with God. There is no spirit of sonship in the law. Just a spirit of alienation. The spirit of sonship is ours in the Son of God who joins us to Father by The Spirit.
Christ is your union with God.
Godliness and holy humanity is not initially about doing but primarily about being. We are the branches of Christ’s Vine and His root is the trinity. It is the fissure between God’s being and our being that is the fall. It is our union with God and His life expressed as us that is the Resurrection of humanity and ourselves in its universal sense. We distribute spirit and life by living in this completed union as the fruit of Christ’s vine. We can live from the law and be meticulous about our religiosity. But we will never be a stream of spirit and life. We become such rivers when Christ is our life.
LIVE BECAUSE OF HIM
Each day, when we drink from the cup, eat the bread and drink the wine they become us – literally. When we live in the incarnation – Christ come in our flesh - Christ becomes us and each of us are a representation of Christ and of the triune God. We are not deities. But we are sons and daughters of God and members of the Body in actuality rather than notionally because we are the Expression of our Father in heaven in our life on earth.
ALIVE OR DEAD
A law imbued gospel is a peasant’s gospel – a miserly, minimalist parody of what life can be: A manifestation of Christ. His life in the Spirit is Christ come in our flesh. Anything else is a lie.
The purpose of you and I is to live in sonship. Sonship in spirit and in truth arises from the at-one-ment of God and man made actual by the cross and the Spirit. It is because of this oneness with God in spirit and in truth that we multiply God’s nature as humanity and fulfil God’s purpose in the world: to bring heaven to earth. Christ our life is the engine of the new creation.
EXPRESSION OF HIS LIFE
Our life is not only about us. We would do better to look for a church that meets Christ’s needs than one that meets our needs. Self-satisfaction is ours as sons of God doing the work Christ set for us to do. Not enlisting Him as a lacky to our agenda. You find genuine satisfaction as daughters and sons as we live in the Spirit of Sonship as an extension of our Father.
“Because humanity exists on the boundary of two worlds humanity alone is ‘the one constituent of the universe through whom the creation discloses its astonishing order and harmony and comes to expression in such a way as to prize and glorify God the Father Almighty, Creator of all things visible and invisible”. In God we are the agents of the new creation.
SIGNS OF THE GREATER HEALING
Jesus engaged in healing and signs. They were advertisements that He would heal our relationship with ourselves and with God. A person with a healed leg who still lives in the old covenant is not healed. A missionary who lives from the law is not healed or one with ultimate life.
A person with a healed ear who strives to earn acceptance with Christ when acceptance is hers already is not healed in her being. A gospel of anointing, healings and gimmicks is not the Kingdom Jesus began. He initiated the Kingdom of oneness with God by the spirit of adoption. Spiritual gifts are a function of the greater healing which is atonement/ incarnation.
Myk Habets observes that “Torrance develops his doctrine of humanity through the interconnection between the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self (Calvin), which constitutes the very life of humanity. Human persons are created to know God – that is their chief end (telos) and so one is not truly a person unless one knows God.” Living this is the basis of our personhood and the guarantee of Kingdom agency.
KNOWING GOD IN ONENESS WITH CHRIST
This means that the God we know needs to be the God who is God. God is not some apparition of the law. Neither is God a Father Christmas of the prosperity gospel. God is Jesus Christ and Jesus manifest in you to be the expression of His life. We can, if we choose, think that ‘Christ in us’ is not good enough and make some additional moves. But in doing so we repeat the fall, thinking to add to our status that which we already are – sons and daughters in oneness with God.
ENTER THIS REST
‘For if Joshua had given them rest, He would not have spoken of another day after that. So there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested from his works, as God did from His. Therefore let us be diligent to enter that rest, so that no one will fall, through following the same example of disobedience’ Heb 4.8-10 NIV. There is a form of sabbath keeping that is disobedience.
GENUINE REST
The rest cited here is our rest from attempted self-validation before self, before others and before God. Not only this. We are liberated from the accoutrements of religion so that we may rest in the very person of Christ. The Christ who is for us and becomes us when we have faith in Him and are done with the need to accrue religiosities and postures that might commend us to God.
God has commended us to God in His Son.
We need to know that we cannot add anything to Christ to make ourselves more acceptable to Him or to be more devout, holy or saintly. Christ is all of this for us and as us. Adding rites to Christ insulates us from His direct Presence as well as becoming a form of idolatry.
CHRIST IN YOU
Christ is in us for our spirit and life by incarnation. His anointing ignites us for ministry and special occasions.
‘Jesus has become the guarantor of a better covenant’ Heb 7.22 NIV.
THE WAY INTO L IFE
The New and Living Way into the Holy of Holies is union with God in the person of Jesus Christ. It’s actual union with the trinity – the fall undone, separation from God over and your life with Father, Son and Holy Spirit assured as a daily reality. Be sure to live this incarnation rather than cite it as some doctrinal checkbox.
‘By his death, Jesus opened a new and life-giving way through the curtain into the Most Holy Place’ Heb 10.20 NIV.
MARY
Martha missed the import of what Mary had already realised. The elixir of life and transformation comes from Jesus who by the Spirit is with us and in us. Spirit and life is not being near Jesus or active for Jesus. It is union with Jesus. This is why we can be active in missionary ventures but still be dead in our spirit. Oneness with God that He has drawn us into means we are lived in our spirit and capable of imparting this life to others. Don’t spends your life in mission while remaining a dead person walking.
SACRAMENT OF DAILY LIVING
Sacraments can be helpful – but the most direct sacrament is His life as you lived out in your daily doings and lifetime through Christ come in our flesh. The Lord’s Table does not bring The Presence. It reminds us that we live each day in oneness with Jesus.
TRUE DAUGHTERS AND SONS
Human beings were created to fellowship with God and enjoy the life that God enjoyed as the trinity. Because Christ is the logos of the universe and the universe finds its meaning and purpose in God, we find out meaning and purpose in Christ in relationship with God. We are not just saved. Not just near God. We have been woven into God and God has been woven into us. In a sense your daughter/son is an expression of you. Our intimacy with Father is closer than this. By the Spirit we are part of each other yet fully ourselves. This is the mystery of Godliness.
UNION OUR INHERITANCE
All forms of Christianity whose basis is an implied separation from God are a denial of our inheritance in Christ. We know God, experience God and know ourselves as we are meant to be in oneness with God. There is no spirit of sonship in the law. Just a spirit of alienation. The spirit of sonship is ours in the Son of God who joins us to Father by The Spirit.
Christ is your union with God.
Godliness and holy humanity is not initially about doing but primarily about being. We are the branches of Christ’s Vine and His root is the trinity. It is the fissure between God’s being and our being that is the fall. It is our union with God and His life expressed as us that is the Resurrection of humanity and ourselves in its universal sense. We distribute spirit and life by living in this completed union as the fruit of Christ’s vine. We can live from the law and be meticulous about our religiosity. But we will never be a stream of spirit and life. We become such rivers when Christ is our life.
LIVE BECAUSE OF HIM
Each day, when we drink from the cup, eat the bread and drink the wine they become us – literally. When we live in the incarnation – Christ come in our flesh - Christ becomes us and each of us are a representation of Christ and of the triune God. We are not deities. But we are sons and daughters of God and members of the Body in actuality rather than notionally because we are the Expression of our Father in heaven in our life on earth.
ALIVE OR DEAD
A law imbued gospel is a peasant’s gospel – a miserly, minimalist parody of what life can be: A manifestation of Christ. His life in the Spirit is Christ come in our flesh. Anything else is a lie.
The purpose of you and I is to live in sonship. Sonship in spirit and in truth arises from the at-one-ment of God and man made actual by the cross and the Spirit. It is because of this oneness with God in spirit and in truth that we multiply God’s nature as humanity and fulfil God’s purpose in the world: to bring heaven to earth. Christ our life is the engine of the new creation.
EXPRESSION OF HIS LIFE
Our life is not only about us. We would do better to look for a church that meets Christ’s needs than one that meets our needs. Self-satisfaction is ours as sons of God doing the work Christ set for us to do. Not enlisting Him as a lacky to our agenda. You find genuine satisfaction as daughters and sons as we live in the Spirit of Sonship as an extension of our Father.
“Because humanity exists on the boundary of two worlds humanity alone is ‘the one constituent of the universe through whom the creation discloses its astonishing order and harmony and comes to expression in such a way as to prize and glorify God the Father Almighty, Creator of all things visible and invisible”. In God we are the agents of the new creation.
SIGNS OF THE GREATER HEALING
Jesus engaged in healing and signs. They were advertisements that He would heal our relationship with ourselves and with God. A person with a healed leg who still lives in the old covenant is not healed. A missionary who lives from the law is not healed or one with ultimate life.
A person with a healed ear who strives to earn acceptance with Christ when acceptance is hers already is not healed in her being. A gospel of anointing, healings and gimmicks is not the Kingdom Jesus began. He initiated the Kingdom of oneness with God by the spirit of adoption. Spiritual gifts are a function of the greater healing which is atonement/ incarnation.
Myk Habets observes that “Torrance develops his doctrine of humanity through the interconnection between the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self (Calvin), which constitutes the very life of humanity. Human persons are created to know God – that is their chief end (telos) and so one is not truly a person unless one knows God.” Living this is the basis of our personhood and the guarantee of Kingdom agency.
KNOWING GOD IN ONENESS WITH CHRIST
This means that the God we know needs to be the God who is God. God is not some apparition of the law. Neither is God a Father Christmas of the prosperity gospel. God is Jesus Christ and Jesus manifest in you to be the expression of His life. We can, if we choose, think that ‘Christ in us’ is not good enough and make some additional moves. But in doing so we repeat the fall, thinking to add to our status that which we already are – sons and daughters in oneness with God.
