GET THE RIGHT MIND
02/05/24 14:59
We can, with a wrong mindset separate ourselves from God. Life in the law belonged to the Age of Adam and separation from God. A powerful oneness with God became ours with the atonement and incarnation. Our union with God is Jesus Himself.
You have been joined to God in the person of Jesus Christ. We are in Christ and He is in us – which means that His union with God is ours. This is why Christ is our life and the law is not. The tragedy of a law-gospel is that it seeks to achieve by works what is already ours in Christ: Oneness with God.
IT IS FINISHED
‘The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one’ John 17.22 ESV. We are one with God in similar fashion to the oneness of the trinity.
The delight and adventure of a life in Christ is never that this is a religious life separated from real life. Christ our life is this life. A vision of godliness restricted to sin management is a miser’s existence in the midst of abundance. Law-based Christianity shrinks the soul and the mind. Christ come in our flesh – which is what the Lord’s Table celebrates - means that the limitless life that is God is mediated to your life via the Spirit of Christ. To style oneself as a ‘commandment keeper’ is not the identity that Jesus has given you. It’s the one Adam has given you. In Adam all are dead. In Christ all are alive in His spirit and life.
A WHOLE AND INTEGRATED LIFE
There is no sacred and secular division of life in the post cross age. Baxter Kruger observes that, “The goal of the incarnation is … to reach us with the very life that the Father’s Son experiences with his Father and the Holy Spirit.” When and where you are.
“Adoption—being included, fellowship, the sharing of life, union, not legalities and accounting—is the point. .. In the incarnation there is a two-way movement of ‘accustoming.’ In Jesus, due to his unbroken relationship with his Father and the Holy Spirit, the Father and the Holy Spirit are accustoming themselves to dwell with and in us, and in his life and death, Jesus is accustoming human nature to receive and share in nothing less than the life of the blessed Trinity.”
A HOLY LIFE
Christ our life is Christ our life every day. All of it. Every possibility and every contingency. But it’s much more than saving us from some negative situation. It is positioning us to be alive in every situation.
MERTON
Thomas Merton, is speaking of the monastic life and speaking cogently into the Christ-life that can be ours every day in the ordinary. “The real problem of monastic renewal: [is]not a surrender to the "secular city" but a recovery of the deep desire of God that draws a man to seek a totally new way of being in the world.”
You can do better than an accountants religion. You are positioned in God as gift. There is a totally new way of being in the world that is not materialistic, not grasping, not mundane and totally sacred. You need not be a monastic to live a sacred life. Just live your life incarnated. This is not a moment by moment feat. But it is comprehensive and continuous. This is simply having our being in Christ and through Christ living in the full companionship of the triune God. It’s a rest, a vitality and a vision. Paul called it Christ our life.
CHRIST DRAWS EVERYTING INTO HIMSELF
I found this quote on the web. ‘Oneness is an experience that transcends the mind. When we experience oneness, we feel a connection with everything in existence on every level. In other words, we feel ‘at one’ with all things.’ This is the effect of Christ our life.
Authentic oneness is ours in Jesus. Not only is Jesus the Christ of God, meaning the Son of God. As a human being He is fully God and as such joins us to the triune God and to Reality. Jesus Christ is the logos – the One in whom all creation holds together and finds its meaning and purpose.
FEAST ON LIFE
The Lord’s Table is not only a celebration of our oneness with God. One with Him we are one with life and one with the creation. We don’t just feel at one with all things. We are at one with all things. Jesus Christ is the pointy end of oneness with God and the entire creation.
The Jesus who speaks to you through your being and sometimes through gifts of the Spirit is the Son of God in whom the universe expresses its love and purpose. You are graced to be human in Christ our life.
