LIVE THE REALITY THAT THE CROSS GAVE YOU

Start at the right place.
 
Why is Christ our life? The answer is that Jesus undoes our life in Adam, includes us in Himself and joins us to the life of God.  Jesus is the Last Adam who starts the New Creation you and us. The only relevance the law has in the post cross age is that it leads to Christ. Christ does not lead to the law. Believers make their way from the law and religion to Christ their life. Thus, they are reborn and their life as sons and daughters in spirit and truth begins as the spirit of Christ manifests in their flesh (being, person).
 
INCLUDED IN GOD
 
Jesus positions us in the Communion of the Triune God where we live with God in oneness. The old testament leads to the new, but the new testament does not lead to the old. The law was a Schoolmaster during the age of the knowledge of good and evil that would eventually lead to the revelation of Grace in the fullness of Jesus Christ – who as Paul said, would be our life. Christ our life is our being in union with God.
 
DISTRACTION
 
The fact that we may engage in charity work or some avenue of mission is not a reason to purvey a half-gospel or a non-gospel. Good deeds to not justify non-life. Jesus feeding the 5000 means that bread/charity alone is not enough. We need the life that is Christ in our spirit, soul and body. In this way we mediate Christ’s spirit and life in what we do – not just us.
 
People deserve the living presence of Christ in themselves to make them who they are. The lesson of Jesus feeding the 5000 is not about filling  bellies but leaving people spiritually vacant. Paul warned that such gospels attract a curse – which is none other than the suffocation of the spirit and life of Christ in the Believer.
 
THIS GOSPEL
 
This Gospel of the Kingdom is simple and comprehensive as James Torrance explains.
 
“The good news is that God comes to us in Jesus to stand in
for us and bring to fulfilment his purposes of worship and
communion.
 
JESUS FOR US AND THE REAL US
 
Jesus comes to be the priest of creation to do for
us, men and women, what we failed to do, to offer to the Father
the worship and the praise we failed to offer, to glorify God by
a life of perfect love and obedience, to be the one true servant
of the Lord.
 
HEART ALIVE
 
In him and through him we are renewed by the
Spirit in the image of God and in the worship of God in a life
of shared communion.
 
Jesus comes as our brother to be our great high priest, to carry on his loving heart the joys, the sorrows, the prayers, the conflicts of all his creatures, to reconcile
all things to God, and to intercede for all nations as our
eternal mediator and advocate.
 
JESUS FOR YOU
 
He comes to stand in for us in the presence of the Father, when in our failure and bewilderment we do not know how to pray as we ought to, or forget to
pray altogether.
 
By his Spirit he helps us in our infirmities.
As the head of all things, by whom and for whom all things
were created, he makes us his body, and calls us to be a royal
priesthood offering spiritual sacrifices.
 
JESUS IS US
 
He calls us that we might be identified with him by the Spirit, not only in his communion
with the Father, but also in his great priestly work and ministry
of intercession, that our prayers on earth might be the echo of
his prayers in heaven. Whatever else our worship is, it is our
liturgical amen to the worship of Christ. (1)
 
This is the living out of Christ our life in you and in the Church. This is the fullness of Christ lived as Christ our life rather than in the scarcity mentality of the law or the insulation of religion as a half-life.
 
James B. Torrance, Worship, Communion, and the Triune God of Grace. P 14.