HE SETS CAPTIVES FREE
22/01/23 15:20
We are liberated to be ourselves in Christ our life. Hidden in Christ our life becomes to us a revelation of who we are so that we grow in sonship and fruitfulness.
Captivity in the law has an infernal power to dull accurate perceptions of God and the knowing of ourselves as sons and daughters. This is so because our capture in this wrong-headedness belongs to the era of the knowledge of good and evil – the era of separation and non-at-one-ment. This finished when Jesus cried, ‘It is finished!’ When Jesus cried this out your life as a daughter/son began.
LIVING IN TODAY
Today, because the incarnation is core, the living word lives in us to reveal the truth about God and ourselves to us and those whose lives we touch. It is because God now lives in us and is interwoven into our being that we have a wonderful capacity to know God as God is.
WOVEN IN – IN CHRIST
If we live in the incarnation, which is the new covenant, embracing our inter-woveness as sons we are alive in our inheritance. Because we are eschewing a mindset of continued separation in the old covenant. Today God witnesses to Himself from within our being. This is foundation of what we have come to call ‘life in the Spirit.’ Clearly, since this is the new and living way, life in the law is not life in the Spirit, even when mistakenly labelled as such.
Life in the Spirit is Christ come in our flesh.
RE MADE IN CHRIST
“St Athanasius observes that, [Jesus] surrendered His body to death instead of all, and offered it to the Father. This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because, having fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men. This He did that He might turn again to incorruption men who had turned back to corruption, and make them alive through death by the appropriation of His body and by the grace of His resurrection.” Christ is your life and your righteousness.
SUPERIOR BEING
The appropriation of Christ’s body is our choice to own and be defined by Christ’s living body, in the Spirit. Here we have appropriated ‘Christ come in our flesh.’ Which is our rightful obedience and inheritance. This is no more and no less than the manifestation of the Spirit of Christ as us. It is why the law is passé in this age. Passé because it is inferior and external to our person, while the person of Jesus is interwoven into our being. Athanasius confirms this in the words, “The Word of God came in His own Person, because it was He alone, the Image of the Father Who could recreate man made after the Image.”
GRACE IS CHRIST
Grace, far from being a ‘tid-bit’ of the letter and a piece of theological data is a person. It is a Life that is not ours who lives in us in order to make our life His. It is the Christ in us and us as – the Jesus who said, ‘I will be with you and in you.’
Marketers of religion will sell you religion. Irrigators of life will gift you Christ.
Thomas Torrance writes, “Grace is to be understood as the impartation not just of something from God but of God Himself. In Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit God freely gives to us in such a way that the Gift and the Giver are one and the same in the wholeness and indivisibility of His grace…” As Paul declared, ‘Christ is our life.’ It is Jesus who separates us from the many manifestations of that body of death. He drives every form of death out of our being with Himself. He is the resurrection and the life.
Captivity in the law has an infernal power to dull accurate perceptions of God and the knowing of ourselves as sons and daughters. This is so because our capture in this wrong-headedness belongs to the era of the knowledge of good and evil – the era of separation and non-at-one-ment. This finished when Jesus cried, ‘It is finished!’ When Jesus cried this out your life as a daughter/son began.
LIVING IN TODAY
Today, because the incarnation is core, the living word lives in us to reveal the truth about God and ourselves to us and those whose lives we touch. It is because God now lives in us and is interwoven into our being that we have a wonderful capacity to know God as God is.
WOVEN IN – IN CHRIST
If we live in the incarnation, which is the new covenant, embracing our inter-woveness as sons we are alive in our inheritance. Because we are eschewing a mindset of continued separation in the old covenant. Today God witnesses to Himself from within our being. This is foundation of what we have come to call ‘life in the Spirit.’ Clearly, since this is the new and living way, life in the law is not life in the Spirit, even when mistakenly labelled as such.
Life in the Spirit is Christ come in our flesh.
RE MADE IN CHRIST
“St Athanasius observes that, [Jesus] surrendered His body to death instead of all, and offered it to the Father. This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because, having fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men. This He did that He might turn again to incorruption men who had turned back to corruption, and make them alive through death by the appropriation of His body and by the grace of His resurrection.” Christ is your life and your righteousness.
SUPERIOR BEING
The appropriation of Christ’s body is our choice to own and be defined by Christ’s living body, in the Spirit. Here we have appropriated ‘Christ come in our flesh.’ Which is our rightful obedience and inheritance. This is no more and no less than the manifestation of the Spirit of Christ as us. It is why the law is passé in this age. Passé because it is inferior and external to our person, while the person of Jesus is interwoven into our being. Athanasius confirms this in the words, “The Word of God came in His own Person, because it was He alone, the Image of the Father Who could recreate man made after the Image.”
GRACE IS CHRIST
Grace, far from being a ‘tid-bit’ of the letter and a piece of theological data is a person. It is a Life that is not ours who lives in us in order to make our life His. It is the Christ in us and us as – the Jesus who said, ‘I will be with you and in you.’
Marketers of religion will sell you religion. Irrigators of life will gift you Christ.
Thomas Torrance writes, “Grace is to be understood as the impartation not just of something from God but of God Himself. In Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit God freely gives to us in such a way that the Gift and the Giver are one and the same in the wholeness and indivisibility of His grace…” As Paul declared, ‘Christ is our life.’ It is Jesus who separates us from the many manifestations of that body of death. He drives every form of death out of our being with Himself. He is the resurrection and the life.
