GROWING IN OUR KNOWLEDGE OF LIFE IN CHRIST
18/03/24 08:04
Today I received a picture of some people at a church camp with their notebooks out as the speaker for the weekend assisted them in enjoying more of God. It heartens me that many Christians are not satisfied with living in stagnation and are enthusiastic about responding to His invitation of fullness in Him. Christ is in us and with us and our adventure is responding to His invitation to undo false ideas in which we have been conditioned and embrace our riches in Him.
Douglas Campbell writes, “God’s election is certainly unconditional, but in the sense that a covenantal relationship is. It will never be withdrawn and will ultimately prevail.
OUR HUMANITY
“In the meantime, however, it respects human agency carefully, as seen most clearly in God’s incarnation to meet us .. among those who respond to it, it enhances human freedom. Those who learn actively and wholeheartedly to live out of their new location in Christ can grow dramatically in their capacity to act in good ways.
FREEDOM AND INITIATIVE NURTURED
“Relational election nurtures human agency and freedom; it does not stifle it. It summons us to ongoing and deeper responsiveness, which is to say, to learning.. Nevertheless, any exclusion of human activity in response to God’s initiative in his name ..must be vigilantly opposed and rejected. [It].. the heart of the life of discipleship.” (1)
GIVE HIM YOUR HEART
‘Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you’ Luke 6.38 NIV. Give what? Give yourself entirely to Jesus to follow where He leads.
The Lord’s Table is not scarcely populated with goodies but is a feast of abundance and richness. We can sit under a culture of half-gospels and non-gospels and be deluded into thinking we are being fed when we are really being indoctrinated with peasant thinking and cunningly devised fables.
(1) Douglas Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics - The Triumph of Gods Love. 181
