FRUITFUL NOT JUST BUSY

 
We can be ‘busy in God.’ We can fellowship with God in our work when Christ is our life because we agree with Him that He has come in our flesh. The incarnation – Christ in our being -  is a life that is lived as Christ expressed as us by the Spirit. In this state we live as the life-multiplying person where we are. This state of being is not about a religion that we carry about as a suitcase. It’s about being alive as a kingdom agent in Christ.
 
PLACEBO OF RELIGION
 
You may have noticed that not a few resist advances into greater closeness with God, preferring to hide in routine; to seclude themselves in church busyness and missionary work, while making recourse to ingenious references to ‘practical religion.’  They seem happy to be ‘busy for God’ but not greatly enthused about real closeness to the person of Jesus. Think Martha. Think that a lived reconciliation with God is more vital than charity or signs and wonders. An incarnated life is the basis of both.
 
KINGDOM MARY
 
Mary was one who chose ‘what was better’ and who found herself under criticism from Martha. Genuine fruitfulness comes from oneness with Christ. A lived oneness with Him – the incarnated life makes us Multipliers of spirit and life – which is the Kingdom. In this state of ‘rest at work’ we are not earning acceptance with Christ, not paying Him back for His cross. We are free from self-validation and free and empowered with His Spirit to share this life with others. Living incarnated we are able to define ourselves in Christ. We do what Jesus means us to be doing. Not what churchaholics think we should be doing.
 
RELIGIOUS MARTHA
 
It’s often assumed that Martha was the practical person of the pair. The story does not say this. Maybe Mary was the more practical of the two and the one who knew where one needed to be positioned to be a ‘doer’ as well as a life-giver. Doing that it mostly about us -  and our need to be earning self-worth -  is never the kind of river of spirit and life that one whose lives union with Christ multiplies. To minister Christ in your real identity is fruitful ministry. Martha insisted on making sandwiches Jesus had not asked for. Jesus’ meal was clearly His imparting of life to Mary who would go on to impart Him.
 
YOU CAN HAVE MY STUFF BUT I WILL KEEP ME FOR MYSELF
 
We can make religion from words, beliefs and positions while harbouring great animosity to the gifts of the Spirit. Some go berserk when confronted by manifestations, touting their rationalism about God as a more valid experience of God than the actual experience of God.
 
AND THEY SAID TO JESUS, ‘YOU HAVE A DEMON’
 
Godliness is not only about power gifts. The soil of Godliness is love and love results in the incarnation of Christ in us. God woven into our being. This is where love starts. The authentic form of Godliness is the grace of Christ welling up in spirit and in truth realised in marriage family and society.
 
MUCH FRUIT FOLKS
 
There are of course practical and holy people whose life in Christ makes them fruitful in practical action for Christ. They minister Christ’s spirit and life in the everyday. Their ministry to those in need comes with the spirit and life of Christ because they live the eucharist. They are an expression of the Christ where they are and they touch lives with His real life.
 
But we can be active but not alive. We may hide in our activism and imagine we are protected from (to them) a fearful a union with a God who is more about rules than about love. In religion it is not uncommon to subconsciously dislike God since our view of Him is warped.
 
GOD INTOLERANCE
 
It was the same in Israel’s day. “So long as the cords of the covenant were not drawn tight, and God remained, so to speak, at a distance, the conflict was not very sharp, but the closer God drew near the more the human self-will of Israel asserted itself in resistance to its divine vocation. Thus, the more fully God gave himself to this people, the more he forced it to be what it actually was, what we all are, in the self-willed isolation of fallen humanity from God.” (1) Our worship of an un-gracious god makes us worse than we were.
 
BENT GOD. BENT CHRIST. BENT US
 
We can prefer religion to union with God, because we fear the God we believe is represented by Religion. So, we keep Him at arm’s length by continuing in religion. It’s the natural way to make religion our god. But God is not religion and Jesus Christ is not religious. Father is revealed by Jesus Christ.
 
To see Jesus is to see Father. Father embraces you in Christ.
 
A PERVERSE INTOLERANCE OF LIFE
 
When in the fullness of time, God drew so near that He was with us in person, religion rose up and Killed Life before it could become a threat to vested interests, human prerogative and self-entitlement. When we oppose life in arraigning ourselves in opposition to genuine oneness with a real Christ, we would do well to recognise what spirit we are of and adopt a more authentic view of Godliness than the view we already have. We are either alive in Christ by the Spirit or dead as a place-holder in religion.
 
(1)  Thomas Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, p.28.