LIFE STARTS WITH UNION WITH GOD IN CHRIST
16/05/24 13:10
You can if you wish, contain your religion in a kind of suit case that you pick up and carry about with you. This is the common dualism that separates religion from life, holiness from the ordinary and many of us from a real depth of relationship with God. False identity is ‘I am not.’ Real identity is I AM WHO I AM IN CHRIST. With substitutes for Christ we have no real identity and no life-giving purpose.
TO BE YOU AND ALIVE
In the person of Jesus, God is woven into us and we are woven into God. ‘The letter’ that deadens and dulls is legalism lived but it’s never alive. Real life is Christ your life because it is Christ expressed as you. Christ is the living embodiment of life. He is life. We can be active in charity/mission work and not be alive in our spirit. This is because spirit and life starts with being – not doing. No need to be a dead person working. Live the Lord’s Table because this is our life.
LOVE/LIFE ROOTED IN BEING
‘God’s love is much more than ‘doing’. We have been loved in Jesus Christ and His cross. God’s love is being. Love is who God is in relationship with Himself and with us. There is nothing about God’s life and righteousness that is abstract. For this reason, once humans became separated from God as a result of the lie, the default position became the knowledge of good and evil – an abstract rendition of life and righteousness and a form of ethics that is the effect of separation from being, separation from the the Being of God. The law slave does not perceive that ‘good’ that is separate from God is not ‘good’ and not imbued with spirit and life. It is always capable of perversion and always potentially evil.
OUR TREASURE
We possess a oneness with God that is far greater than the stilted legalism that many have been taught. Love and life come from our trinitarian God. But not from God by Himself. From our inclusion in God. The Christ of God, Jesus of Nazareth is the emanation of God to us. In Jesus God embraces us and we embrace God. We are drawn into God’s being and He floods into ours. We are not Godly because we have risen up to God. We are Godly because God entered our realm and has entered us to make us life in Himself.
CHRIST IS BEING REVEALED IN YOU
‘Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is’ 1 John 3.2 NKJV.
Our maturing as daughters and sons begins when we repent of religion and agree that Jesus is our life. Believers who remain in the law are not evil. They are just not alive with spirit and life. Jesus gave a woman a dream in which old covenant Believers were depicted as year eight students even in adult life. They had not matured into their adult inheritance in Christ.
AN EXTRAVAGANT INHERITANCE
Thomas Torrance writing of the nature of God and the nature of God’s incorporation of ourselves in Him writes, “The doctrine of the Holy Trinity supremely means, that God himself is Love.
This is not a static unmoved and unmoving Love, for God’s Being is an eternal movement in Love, and consists in the Love with which the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit ceaselessly love one another.
OVERFLOW OF LOVE/LIFE
It is in the free gratuitous overflowing of this Love of God to what is other than God in creation and redemption that our salvation through Christ and sanctification in the Holy Spirit are grounded, and through its outward movement in the fulfilment of God’s economic purpose in reconciling and unifying all things in heaven and earth that they are actualised in our existence in Christ, and therefore in the Church which as the Body of Christ is ‘the earthly-historical form of his own existence”. (1)
WE DON’T EARN BELONGING
‘Belonging’ in The Body is not a legalism. It’s an incorporation in God. An entrapment in the law – the tree of knowledge is incarceration in the body of death, Adam’s dead body. Belonging in the new covenant is union with God – inclusion in the fellowship that is the triune God. In Jesus we live His resurrected life.
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (pp. 162-163). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
TO BE YOU AND ALIVE
In the person of Jesus, God is woven into us and we are woven into God. ‘The letter’ that deadens and dulls is legalism lived but it’s never alive. Real life is Christ your life because it is Christ expressed as you. Christ is the living embodiment of life. He is life. We can be active in charity/mission work and not be alive in our spirit. This is because spirit and life starts with being – not doing. No need to be a dead person working. Live the Lord’s Table because this is our life.
LOVE/LIFE ROOTED IN BEING
‘God’s love is much more than ‘doing’. We have been loved in Jesus Christ and His cross. God’s love is being. Love is who God is in relationship with Himself and with us. There is nothing about God’s life and righteousness that is abstract. For this reason, once humans became separated from God as a result of the lie, the default position became the knowledge of good and evil – an abstract rendition of life and righteousness and a form of ethics that is the effect of separation from being, separation from the the Being of God. The law slave does not perceive that ‘good’ that is separate from God is not ‘good’ and not imbued with spirit and life. It is always capable of perversion and always potentially evil.
OUR TREASURE
We possess a oneness with God that is far greater than the stilted legalism that many have been taught. Love and life come from our trinitarian God. But not from God by Himself. From our inclusion in God. The Christ of God, Jesus of Nazareth is the emanation of God to us. In Jesus God embraces us and we embrace God. We are drawn into God’s being and He floods into ours. We are not Godly because we have risen up to God. We are Godly because God entered our realm and has entered us to make us life in Himself.
CHRIST IS BEING REVEALED IN YOU
‘Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is’ 1 John 3.2 NKJV.
Our maturing as daughters and sons begins when we repent of religion and agree that Jesus is our life. Believers who remain in the law are not evil. They are just not alive with spirit and life. Jesus gave a woman a dream in which old covenant Believers were depicted as year eight students even in adult life. They had not matured into their adult inheritance in Christ.
AN EXTRAVAGANT INHERITANCE
Thomas Torrance writing of the nature of God and the nature of God’s incorporation of ourselves in Him writes, “The doctrine of the Holy Trinity supremely means, that God himself is Love.
This is not a static unmoved and unmoving Love, for God’s Being is an eternal movement in Love, and consists in the Love with which the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit ceaselessly love one another.
OVERFLOW OF LOVE/LIFE
It is in the free gratuitous overflowing of this Love of God to what is other than God in creation and redemption that our salvation through Christ and sanctification in the Holy Spirit are grounded, and through its outward movement in the fulfilment of God’s economic purpose in reconciling and unifying all things in heaven and earth that they are actualised in our existence in Christ, and therefore in the Church which as the Body of Christ is ‘the earthly-historical form of his own existence”. (1)
WE DON’T EARN BELONGING
‘Belonging’ in The Body is not a legalism. It’s an incorporation in God. An entrapment in the law – the tree of knowledge is incarceration in the body of death, Adam’s dead body. Belonging in the new covenant is union with God – inclusion in the fellowship that is the triune God. In Jesus we live His resurrected life.
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (pp. 162-163). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
