LIVE A FULL AND SPIRITED LIFE

For some Christians, the Lord’s Table is an add-on to the main project of keeping the law and doing the contract.

Eternal life, infinite life is knowing God and Jesus Christ whom God has sent. This infinite grows in us as we live the incarnation, aka the eucharist as life instead of rite.  The essence of God is Relationship. God is trinitarian which means three persons one God. The nature of God is that each person of the God-Head is part of the other, yet each person is fully themselves. It’s perichoresis.

The relevance of this to us is that each of us are part of God in similar manner in which the trinity is part of each other. No legalism or abstraction here. It’s entirely relationship. We are included in God. A good marriage is perichoresis. So is a good family. Lived perichoresis is a deeper church community than most of us have seen. The Way of life outside of Christ is increasing fragmentation. The Living Way of Christ our life is the healing of us and the healing of the Earth.
PERICHORESIS
The exquisite bonding and union of this oneness that has been made ours by the enterprise of God illuminates the preposterous the heresy of legalism is in comparison. Legalism can be subverted Christianity or a cultish aberration.
God is being and knowing God is about being - specifically about being one with God. In Christ this is what we are – one substance with God as illustrated by The Lord’s Table in which the elements of bread and wine become us as Jesus becomes us by incarnation.
ONENESS
Belonging to the Body of Christ is less about ticking boxes, citing proof texts and making assertions and all about oneness of being. In Christ you are one with God. In law and religion you are not. You are one with yourself. Law based religion is about making religion out of the treasure you have left in the ground.
WHOLE BEING
Thomas Torrance assures us, “Knowing God requires cognitive union with him in which our whole being is affected by his love and holiness. It is the pure in heart who see God. That God may be known only in a godly way, in accordance with his nature as God, is an emphasis that one finds in whole areas of Christian theology, especially in ancient times. I have in mind what is sometimes called the tradition of ascetic theology in the patristic period, where stress was laid upon the need for askesis or spiritual discipline in mind and life promoting a way of understanding of God that is worthy of him.” (1)
BEYOND CONFUSION
People deny climate change until their house is burnt down or their cattle herd is carried away in the flood. Even then some say it’s a myth. People who make a life out of myths while denying truth are complicit in their own version of hell.
The head in the sand denialist excludes himself from intimacy with God. The law aficionado insulates herself from God with layers of behaviors and rites. The double minded do not see God clearly. Jesus, plus another agenda is not purity in heart. My church plus Jesus is not unconditional discipleship. We can have two masters and receive a measure of grace. We may promote a cause. But our cause is not the Kingdom of God. It’s the kingdom of us. We can produce droplets of life but not rivers of living water. We may make a career as a blind leader of the blind and accrue a following of malnourished persons. But all along, we have the potential to be a source of wisdom and revelation and  sound apostolic leadership to those who can see.
 
(1)    Thomas Torrance. The Mediation of Christ.