LIVE A KINGDOM RELIGION
22/02/24 07:15
A pastor complained, ‘I am tired of all this talk about Jesus.’ Shocking for a pastor but not so surprising when we understand that what he called ‘his faith’ was more an ideology than a communion with Christ. Faith in faith may not be faith in Christ when it is no more than an attachment to a set of beliefs. Here it is a faith on oneself.
RELIGION IS NOT ALIVE
The generality of a belief system by itself will not bring us the communion and spirit/life that is ours in the person of Christ. Rev Gordon Moyes once wrote, ‘Christianity is not a religion. It’s a person. He was right about that. Even so, the best and most comforting/life-giving Christianity is us incarnated with the person of Jesus Christ. John calls this Christ come in our flesh. It’s personal union with God.
THE WHO AND ACHIEVEMENT OF CHRIST
In Christ we are elected to union with God by His nature and His act of atonement. Thomas Torrance puts it this way. “Election is Christ the beloved Son of the Father, and the act of election in him is once and for all .. an eternal decision that is ever present. God's eternal decision does not halt or come to rest at any particular point or result, but is dynamic, and ever takes the field in its identity with the living person of Christ.” It not a generality or ideology.
DYNAMIC AND ALIVE
“As such election is contemporary with us, acting upon us and acting upon us through our reactions in the personal relations of men and women which it invades and which it sets into crisis.
“It does that by facing them with the ultimate decision which God has already taken in his love on our behalf and now sets forth in Jesus Christ, but it confronts us with that ultimate decision in such a way that we are summoned in decision before it.
“What do you think of Christ? Who do people say that I, the Son of Man, am? Who do you say that I am?
“That is precisely what we see taking place in the whole ministry of Jesus as he penetrated into people's lives by his compassion, and revelation, and confronted them as the truth in the form of personal being, as election in the form of personal being.” (1)
CHRIST IS OUR UNION
At root union with God is not the result of our self-effort. It is not an abstraction and is the Person of Jesus Christ – not as a religion – but as the personal Jesus in us and with us by the Holy Spirit.
Spirituality is not found in information, good works or lists of fundamentals. Neither does it come to us from the sermons of Christian administrators who speak ‘rivers of sand’ – appallingly dry words of non-life. The multiplication of spirit and life comes from those who are spirit and life because Jesus is them. They are incarnated and live in the personal life of Christ – not in a generality, an ideology or a Christian version of the knowledge of good and evil. They live Christ their life.
(1) Thomas Torrance. The Incarnation. P 180.
