HOW TO BE REAL AND ALIVE
21/02/24 13:15
The miser is so intent on hanging on to his stuff that he never gets to possess himself. The spiritual miser has a very short attention span that shuts off any alternate view that if examined would gift him the life he does not know he has and does not know that he does not have.
The comatose – not alive – Believer is contained in the law that Jesus did away with through the cross and resurrection. God has not given us a Jesus mode of self-improvement. He has put us to death and given us a new life – His.
ENTITLEMENT QUANTIFIED
The law addicted Believer is hooked on the law because for him it’s a way of measuring his ‘entitlement.’ Doing the law is scoring points by entering into an imaginary contract in which we ‘do’ in order to ‘deserve’ acceptance and life in God. We can do a kind of dot points that we tick off as if these points are righteousness, and some kind of ‘achievement.’ But they are not life and we are not alive in doing them.
“To understand the Gospel in its purity and in its transformative power, we have to stop counting, measuring, and weighing. We have to stop saying “I deserve.” Can we do that? It’s pretty hard . . . unless we’ve experienced infinite mercy and realize that it’s all a gift.”
UNGRACED ENTITLEMENT GOSPEL
A dear man occasionally took a sermon. He was not literate in theology or a robust understanding of the Gospel. I asked someone how he managed. They replied that just gave a talk on self-improvement. As innocent as this was it was a Christian version of the knowledge of good and evil. Not exactly a medium of spirit and life.
Many Believers think they live in grace, not bound to the law, do not regard their life in God as a gift but something they earned. They give the truth away with words like ‘Keeping close to Jesus’ which is a personal kind of law and ‘earning.’
FALSE SELF/TRUE SELF
There’s a true self and a false self. A man had a vision of Jesus who said to him, ‘How have you been going with your life?’ The man began to list his achievements. Jesus smiled and said, ‘I didn’t mean that. I mean how have you been going at being yourself.’
The true self is who we are as Christ our life.
There’s a true self and a false self. One is who you are in Christ and the other is the result of our self-effort. The false self is a starting point. But if we remain here we will never become who we are – which is hard for those acculturated in the law who as a result think of this self as their real self. New Birth is the result of the death of the false self and the embarkation in the life of the new self in Christ as us. The one way of this living way is Christ our life.
“Your egoic false self is who you think you are, but your thinking does not make it true. Your false self is a social and mental construct to get you started on your life journey.
“It is a set of agreements between you and your parents, your family, your school chums, your partner or spouse, your culture, and your religion. It is your “container.” It is largely defined in distinction from others, precisely as your separate and unique self. It is probably necessary to get started, but it becomes problematic when you stop there and spend the rest of your life promoting and protecting it.”
In the TRUE SELF version of the new birth, which is the authentic and authoritative version, we do not become the real us until we have given over our false self to Christ so that He becomes our life. Here we do not lose ourselves. To the contrary we become we really are. Sadly, there are Believers who spend all of this life in religion never entering the freedom to be themselves in spirit and in truth as sons of God. Sure, we can all enter degrees of sonship but authentic, rich, authoritative sonship is the effect of a life of rebirths rather than a life in words.
Expect a rich life in Christ your life.
