GRACE IS CHRIST OUR LIFE

A colleague observed that the grace many of his friends practiced was a limited grace constrained by the law. A truly diminished version of grace, to be sure. We are not graced to cope with the law. We are graced by the person of Jesus to be the expression of Christ. The eucharist is the sign of the ultimate grace.
 
THE BETTER GOSPEL
 
Much of the expression of Christianity today is about church and religion. But our inheritance in Christ is far simpler and more powerful than that. It is comprehensive. It’s Christ as us in our Everyday. Jesus’ Message is a life more than a belief system. The core of the Kingdom Jesus began is the incarnation of the trinity in His people. Thus, we have the potential to manifest Jesus everywhere and every day.
 
HEAVEN INVADES EARTH
 
Catholicism is almost correct in its belief in transubstantiation. But the point is not that the elements become Christ. The point of the eucharist is that you/we become the manifestation of Christ.
 
Heaven comes to earth not just because we make a good moral stance or do some signs and wonders. Heaven comes to earth when we are the manifestation of God. This is the holistic life of which the Eucharist is the sign and the celebration. The eucharist means that Jesus is expressed as you and in your life.
 
TRINITY IN YOU/WITH YOU
 
The Kingdom of God is communal and personal.
The trinity is a perichoretic communion of persons.
The nature of God is the nature of His drawing us into Himself.
We have a perichoretic relationship with God and through God with each other.
Such a relationship is realised in the Spirit and never in the law which is an expression of the knowledge of good and evil. In Christ we have the knowledge of God and more. We have oneness with God.
 
NOTHING IS BANAL
 
The incarnation brings heaven into the ordinary. God is as much with you and in you at the clothesline as He is in a praise and worship service. He is just as much with you and in you every day as He is in church. The ultimate sacrament is Christ our life of the Everyday.
 
BEING, PERSONHOOD AND COMMUNION
 
The following observation takes some concentration but is worth thinking about. Thomas Torrance traverses this territory this way. “When the Church Fathers thought out the homoousial [ Jesus one substance with God] and hypostatic interrelations [the distinctness of the three] of the three divine Persons within the one Being or Communion of the Holy Trinity, it became clear to them that the ontic relations [ State of being] between the divine Persons belong to what they are as Persons”. God is not some law/abstraction.
 
PERICHORESIS
NO DIVINE PERSON IS WHO HE IS WITHOUT ESSENTIAL RELATION TO THE OTHER TWO, and yet each divine Person is other than and distinct from the other two. They are intrinsically interrelated not only through the fact that they have one Being in common so that each of them is in himself whole God, but also in virtue of their differentiating characteristics as Father, Son, or Holy Spirit which hypostatically intertwine with one another and belong constitutively to their indivisible unity within the Trinity.
TRINITARIAN RELATIONSHIP
There is an indivisible and continuous relation of being between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit so that the Being of the Godhead is understood to be whole or complete not in the Father only but in the Son and in the Holy Spirit as well. These ontic and holistic interrelations between the three divine Persons in virtue of which they are what and who they are as Persons are substantive relations.” (1) The issue of life is not the law as the solution to chaos and fragmentation. It’s our union or not union with God.
It is this Trinitarian Relationship that has included you. You are included in the Communion of God in Jesus, period.
BELONGING
We are talking union and communi0n – the complete undoing of the fall. This communion has reached out, the enterprise of the trinity that we call salvation and made us part of this communion – part of this perichoresis. This is the model of a good marriage and is quite contrary to the spirit of control embodied in some notions of the husband as the head of the house. Why? The trinity is not a hierarchy.
RE-ONED
Alienated Adam and his race have been re-joined to the Family of God. This is what it means to be sons/daughters of God as a state of being in oneness as opposed to a figurative or notional oneness achieved by citing a proof text or seeing oneself as a part of a definition or ticking off a commandment or two. Your being is included in God. Holiness, wholeness and real life is participating in God who has drawn us into Himself. Us in God is the church Jesus began and the Church that is nurtured in trinitarian life. The issue is, are you in it our out of it? Only believe.

(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (pp. 156-157). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.