IT’S NOT AN IDEOLOGY
31/12/24 11:45
We can - because we know no better - do things a certain way – in a way that is time consuming, ineffective and which results in a low-level chaos that we rationalise as ‘the way I do it.’ We say it’s our way. And it is. It’s our chaos. Our efforts can have a misshapen rationality and a bent order. But the overall result is mess, irritation, humbug and obstruction. Thus, those who know of a better way, talk of not working harder but working smarter.
CHRIST IN YOU
It’s the same with false religion versus authentic spirituality. Grace is simple and comprehensive. Grace is about Christ for you and as you. Grace is not a means of coping with the law as some misguided teaching would have it. We are graced with Christ our life. This is not an equation but a state of being in which, “Christ brought about our regeneration from within his own personal activity from the divine and the human side so that he lived ‘an altogether new way of life for us resulting from our being translated out of the bondage of law into the freedom of the children of God’. (1)
WORKING UP REPENTANCE?
I spent a good part of my life at the Lord’s Table, thinking that this was a celebration of the cross and a time for grief at the Lord’s sacrifice for me and us all – so I should do the right thing by Christ and try harder. But the eucharist is not so much about His sacrifice. It’s more about our oneness with Him as those who eat His flesh and drink His blood. It’s being one substance with the Lord. If you are imbued with the notion of earning Christ as in steps to Christ, you will be possessed of the idea that you must earn Him. This is a false christ and a false gospel.
We can, if we are not carful convince ourselves of some fragment of holiness if we ‘tear-up’ at the Lord’s Table. But it’s not about mourning a past event. The cross was gross, but it purchased our at-one-ment which is the ground of the incarnation of Christ in us. Jesus is not mourning about the cross because His atonement opened the door for Him to be our life in every way. The harvest of the cross is the millions who have been drawn into His life.
THE REALITY IS THE LIFE
This sacrament is not a method of becoming one with Christ. It is a reminder and celebration of the fact that we are one with Christ. Christ became one with us in the body and we have come one with Him in the Spirit. Jesus Himself is our oneness with God and the healing of us.
The Lord’s Table involves us drinking the wine and eating the bread which becomes our sinews and organs. The bread becomes us, which illustrates what Jesus urged about drinking His blood and eating His flesh so that he becomes us. WE HAVE NO GENUINE SPIRT AND LIFE UNLESS WE DO.
STATE OF BEING
Christ our life is not a rite. The reality is that we are one substance with Christ. This is atonement/ incarnation – the foundation of the Kingdom of God and the spirit of sonship.
MISTAKEN FOCUS
Consistent and unending life from God, comes not from the anointing. It comes from the incarnation which is ours as a result of the atonement. The best anointing comes from those who live the incarnation – the continual Presence of God in you.
YOUR SACRAMENTAL CHRIST-LIFE
This is a life in which we do what Paul spoke of. WE LIVE CHRIST AS OUR LIFE. This is the only ‘belonging’ in the Body of Christ that has substance. As well as this, we need to know that we are not imbued with Christ as we participate in the sacrament. Our imbued life in which Christ is us, is the already our status in Him. We have a sacramental life as ourselves as a manifestation of Christ.
CONTINUOUS PARTICIPATION
Thomas Torrance confirms what we are saying with the words, “The Lord's Supper or Eucharist, correspondingly, is the sacrament of our continuous participation in Jesus Christ and all he has done and continues to do for us by his grace, whereby we live unceasingly not from a centre in our selves or our own doing but from a centre in Christ and his doing. (2)
UNION. COMMUNION AND JOY IN LIVING
“It is the sacrament of our union with the whole Jesus Christ, the incarnate, crucified, risen, ascended Son, both in respect of his ministry from the Father toward mankind and in respect of his ministry from mankind toward the Father. On the one hand, it is the sacrament of Christ's reconciling union with us in which he became bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh in order to take away our sin and guilt and pour out upon us the love of God; and as such it is the sacrament of the real presence of Christ in which we are given communion in his very body and blood and feed upon him as the bread of life.”
PSEUDO LIFE
We can live in this union that is our inheritance or we can live in the law, hiding from God in the law’s patchy righteousness in the fantasy that we are recommending ourselves to God. Or we can actually live in union with God because we have agreed with Father than Christ has included us in His life of union with God.
RELIGIOUS CHARADE
Righteousness according to the law is a charade because, it is neither righteous or alive.
It is “God’s holy love which brings about peace between us and God. As sinners we use the law to ‘escape from God’s judgement, in order to escape from God’. We use the moral law, ‘seizing the ethical imperative of God, making it an independent authority which is identified with human higher nature’ and thus escape God by ‘deifying humanity – “you will be like God”’. Human moral awareness in other words ‘tends to sever its connection with God’ becoming ‘autonomous or semi-autonomous’ so that our relations with God cease to be direct and become indirect.” (3)
We are separated from God in the law, one with God in Christ who is our life.
NEW VERSION/OLD LIES
Legalism lies to us that we are righteous because we have ingratiated ourselves with God. It substitutes fragmented righteousness for holistic righteousness. It may give a smug satisfaction to the self and others. Legalism facilitates the reliance on false graces and substitute messiahs like sabbath-keeping and healthism. It separates us from God because in the law we are left in Adam’s tree of separation from God.
Law-keeping is an enchantment and a device of the Enemy to maintain Believers in the illusion of union with God when they in fact have captured themselves in Adam’s separation. This is why Christ our life is our life and why life in the law is our dead man walking.
THE UN-SABBATH REST
Paul Molnar observed. “Sinners fall back upon legal observance of the law to validate their actions. But in that way they ‘can yield obedience formally to the law without actually surrendering the citadel of the soul’ and thus exchange the ‘spirit for the deadness of the letter’, and ‘God for an ideal.’ (4) Molar is citing our unholy rationalisation of un-grace. This is how we can convince ourselves that we have a personal allegiance Christ when what we actually have is a personal allegiance to a status and identity that we think we have in the idol of our beliefs, in our church or in tradition we have inherited from our parents. Thus rather than being sons we are a pillar of salt.
(1) Paul D. Molnar (2015). Thomas F. Torrance and the problem of universalism. Scottish Journal of Theology, 68, pp 164-186 doi:10.1017/S0036930615000034
(2) Ibid
(3) Ibid p179
(4) Ibid p 180