IT PAYES TO BELIEVE THE TRUTH

In the Last Battle C.S. Lewis has a monkey dressed as a lion who is purporting to be Aslan. Bent Christianity makes a monkey out of God and monkey out of us. The fulsomeness of our humanity is found in oneness with Jesus.

ATONEMENT COMPLETE
We have been made one with God. The accomplishment of this oneness through Christ and the enterprise of the trinity is the substance of our life and the reality of our life as new creation people of God. Living under the separation of the law we are not alive in the Spirit. Nor are we Kingdom people because we are not living from our inheritance of Christ come in our flesh.  Christ’s Kingdom is not ‘our perspective’ particularly when this perspective is another gospel. Don’t be among those whose marriage to their perspective is more important to them than being a disciple of Christ.

Jesus is not the way to do righteousness. Christ in us is our us righteous.

ROOT AND FRUIT
Righteousness is a function of life. This is why Christ who is our life is the Source of the fruits of the Spirit – the expression of Himself as us. Jesus is the one way we become human. Richard Rohr observes “We still think of ourselves as mere humans trying desperately to become spiritual, when the Christian revelation was precisely that you are already spiritual and your difficult but necessary task is to learn how to become human.”  Rohr’s observation is pertinent to why some folks lives are vitiated by their religion. The cool truth is that we become human and sons/daughters of God in Christ by living the eucharist rather than celebrating it.

SURFEIT IN CHRIST
Know that “Even more is gained in Christ than was lost in Adam.. According to Calvin what is restored to humanity in redemption far exceeds a return to the supposed perfection of Adam and Eve before the fall ..
Humans are created to ‘correspond’ with (Barth), or be a ‘mirror’ to (Calvin) God ..
 Men and women are persons-in-becoming. Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word of God, is the complete person, the imago Dei in perfection and the one into whom men and women are being transformed, from glory to glory” (2 Cor 3.18; Rom 8.29; 1 Jn 3.2 etc). This should alert us to the fact that retreating to legalism, deism or agnosticism from Christianity on account of life’s hurts is at best irresponsible and at worst withering to the soul.
NAKED
In Christ we become fully human and fully alive. Living in Christ we have no need of sowing our own clothes together to hide our nakedness. Because Christ is our life we are clothed in Him and we live unveiled in the unveiled presence of God. We are transformed by Christ in us being expressed as us.
‘And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit’ 2 Cor 3.18 NIV.
BECOMING CHRIST’S LIFE
It is our communion with God face to face that is the transforming power of our lives. One with God we become like God because we are drawing our being from God in oneness with God.
BEING ONE
Because of the incarnation; because Christ has come with the trinity in our flesh, “Reconciliation and communion with God through Christ and under the purifying impact of the Holy Spirit are progressively actualised in the renewal and transformation of human patterns of life and thought. The closer people draw near to God, the more integrated their spiritual and physical existence becomes, and the more integrated their spiritual and physical existence becomes, the closer they may draw near to God in mind and being in ways that are worthy of him.” (2) This is a picture of what it means to pass from glory to glory.
In Christ we have oneness with God. We are reconciled to God in Christ who is our life in every way. This is not achieved by law-mongering, the anointing or gifts of the Spirit. It is the accomplishment of Christ – the prior work that is the foundation of fulsome living and the soil of the gifts.
(1) Myk Habets. Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance. P 31.
(2) Thomas Torrance, The Mediation of Christ.