JUST AS YOU ARE IN ME AND I AM IN YOU

‘I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.  I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me’ John 17.2023 NIV.
THE ABOVE IS THE REALITY OF ONENESS. IT IS LOVE
Our state of being cited in the scripture above is  the cause of the life of God as us – because we are in God and He in us. This is a description of our union with God as a person, our healed and harmonious self, the source of our immersion in the love of God as persons and our ability to love others with the love that is the nature of the trinity.
The being of God, God’s trinitarian nature, the truth of trinitarian oneness yet distinctness of persons is the nature of God and the nature of us. It was our oneness with God that was temporarily disrupted by the fall and  realised again through the at-one-ment and incarnation that is the model and the reality of our present union with God. Love is everything. Love is God expressed as you and as us.
GOD IS NEVER SOMEWHERE ELSE
As a result of the cross, the resurrection and the incarnation we have been gifted oneness with God. This is never our achievement. It’s God’s. Our response is to step into the reality wrought by Christ. In religious mode you can strive to overcome separation from God that no longer exists. In the practising the presence mode, you can step daily into the reality of the incarnation because you are incarnated with God.
HE HAS PLACED YOU IN HIMSELF
This reality that is Christ is our perichoretic* relationship with God. It’s a mirror of trinitarian relationship. This is our union with God in which we are hidden in Christ yet revealed as ourselves. It has nothing to do with the law and everything to do with the nature of God and the nature of our humanity in God. We were made to live in God and have been re-woven into His being. God is woven into our being in the person of Jesus Christ.
The knowledge of good and evil is a child of fallen Adamic separation. The law and its words on stone is part of this mode. Stoney words like abstractions, definitions and propositions are the stuff of the tree of knowledge. The end of Adamic separation brings us into union with God in a state of being – a state of being one with God. Because Christ is our life, meaning because Christ is us, we are now of God and God is of us.
WRONG WAY – GO BACK!
The law as a salvation issue is a red herring. It is irrelevant. Legalism infects many Believers as a religious imagination. In some circles legalism has been crystallised into a denomination with the law as the foundation of church life. In both cases the result is a gospel that short-changes us of our inheritance in Christ. It limits the spirit of sonship imprisoning our being as a worker and creating paddocks of tares instead of paddocks of wheat. Tares are not wicked Believers. Just Believers who have been robbed by a variation of the original lie. The lie is that you are not enough and you must add something to be Godly. The lie that Christ our life is not enough and that you need a list from Moses to conform you to life makes you wooden. But it does not make you alive in your spirit. It conforms you to a lie.
You are complete in Christ.
John declares, “In the beginning was the Word, what God was, the Word was, and the Word became flesh. He sees that the destiny of the Word was not the book, but human life! God finding accurate expression of himself, his image and likeness revealed in human form.” (1) Incarnated with God, God is revealed in the form of Jesus, of you and us and the church not made by human hands.
If you have ever been angry at God and annoyed at who you have thought Him to be, you can see Him in Christ who is fully God and who ever lives to reveal our Father to us and us to ourselves – you might find comfort and confidence in the following.
GOD’ TRUTH
“1) that there is no God behind the back of Jesus Christ; 2) for that reason we cannot know God truly apart from our own personal union with Christ that takes place through the Spirit; 3) that what God is toward us in Christ and for us in his Spirit he is eternally in himself so that ‘if he were not Love in his innermost Being, his love toward us in Christ and the Holy Spirit would be ontologically groundless’; 4) that it is in the cross of Christ that God’s love is revealed ‘for in refusing to spare his own Son whom he delivered up for us all, God has revealed that he loves us more than he loves himself.” (1)
God loves us more than He loves Himself. Live from that.
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) . Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
* PERICHORESIS: We have union but no loss of personal distinction, which means that we matter and that our humanity, our motherhood and fatherhood, our work and play and music form the arena for our participation in the Trinitarian life of God. The Triune God meets us not in the sky or in our self-generated religions, but in our “ordinary” human existence.
% This can offend some because it devalues the life of good works and religion in which they have striven to achieve entitlement to favour with God. Many of these don’t seek union because they think they are not worthy of it. But Jesus is and Jesus is you and I.
(1) Du Toit, Francois. Loc 720. God Believes in You . Mirror Word Publishing. Kindle Edition.