LIFE ISSUE
17/03/24 14:25
The issue of life is that you are included in God in Jesus Christ. The worst thing about a law-theology is that it is not true and that it is the expression of the knowledge of good and evil instead of this Gospel of the Kingdom. The the worst thing about this theology is that it must rely on manipulation, intimidation and scaring people into compliance with virtue. The best thing is that it can provide droplets of life even though rivers of life are ours for the asking.
A principal at a school at which I taught went to America, came back and told the staff that they needed to regard every child in the class as a figure of Christ. Christ is our life but law-mongering has a mean way of warping grace and wholeness into intimidation. This is the ‘You better shape up’ Gospel.
THE LORD’S TABLE
‘Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you have no life in you.’ This is incarnation. It is life in the Spirit and the living way of Jesus’ life being realised in you.
CHRIST MULTIPLIED
The genius of the incarnation is that Christ becomes Jane and George. The fruits of His Spirit are Jesus manifesting as us. This is quite different from the attempt to use Jesus as an ally in doing good works. The fruits of the Spirit have nothing to do with the law or self-justification. They are the effect of Jesus as you.
DOESN’T DEPEND ON YOU
The Bible is not for the purpose of reading bits and pieces then trying to put stuff into practice with Jesus’ help. It’s about seeing that Jesus is your life and agreeing that He is becoming your better self. You are one with God. By the Spirit Jesus manifests as you.
‘ONENESS’
The remarkable oneness of God in Himself – three persons, one God- is repeated in the oneness of God’s action and the oneness that has become ours as daughters and sons of God. We are included in God to be our True, holy, selves.
THE WHO OF GOD IS LIFE
The grace of God flows out of God because it is God’s nature. The grace and oneness of the trinity is the grace of each and the grace of all. Jesus Christ became grace incarnate. In His person Jesus has graced us with the grace and nature of the trinity by joining us in oneness to the oneness of the Holy Family.
The genius of John 17 is that we become Christ’s grace.
MAKES US IN HIS IMAGE – sons and daughters of God.
The truth is that Christ has taken steps to you. God in Christ has reconciled us to Himself. The oneness that is the trinity has been deployed to make us one with God, to overcome our separation from God and rid us of the captivity to the law so that we are set free from the abstractions of legalism and the humbug of the knowledge of good and evil. We are liberated to be sons/daughters, in order to to know God by being saved by God; being saved by who God is, to become as God is, in oneness with Himself and with each other.
BE ONE
This is the meaning of, ‘My prayer is not for them alone. 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 17.20-23 NIV.
NO SEPARATION IN CHRIST JESUS
In Jesus we are neither split in nature or split from God. The two have been made one. The dualism of Adam and the knowledge of good and evil dichotomisation of all and sundry, is dead and the oneness of being and action they is the trinity is incarnated into us by the One Spirit.
“This trinitarian self-revelation of God as three distinctive divine Persons who are indivisibly one ultimate divine Being enshrines the profoundest and the most positive conception of God’s Oneness. Trinity and Unity exist in and through each other. That is why it is through the Trinity that we believe in the Unity of God, and it is through the Unity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit that we believe in the Holy Trinity.” (1) It is because of this that we know the trinity as the paradigm of the human family and as the Source and empowerment of all genuine community. The communion of each with each other is kind of communion with God that is ours in our participation in Christ.
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (p. 24). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
