LUXURY GODLINESS
21/05/24 08:33
We can have a skinny kind of godliness in which we abide by a few iconic behaviours peculiar to ourselves and our community and think to ourselves that this is ‘our grace’ – when in fact it is a parody of what is really on offer: Oneness with Christ and fellowship with the Trinity. Holy Communion is an actuality, not just a rite.
HOW DIFFERENT?
As a youth I would wonder if apart from the several things I did as a construct of godliness was I really ahead of those who had no Christian faith at all. Mostly I did not because such a faith is not life-imparting.
THEY EARN CHRIST?
“If Jesus followers have to act in a certain way not only to advance their lives ethically but to relate to God in the first place, a fundamental displacement takes place in the whole relationship between God and humankind. It follows that this relationship must have had conditions inserted into it. [It assumes] that
“God will not relate to people kindly until they have acted in a certain way. Only after certain things have been done will a relationship be entered into at all and certainly for one of any benevolence …
THE CONTRACT PARODY
“This viewpoint consequently shifts the covenant of salvation into profoundly different mode, namely, a contract. And once we are structuring the relationship between God and humanity in terms of a contract, we are talking about a different God altogether.” We are talking a false gospel and a false christ. Unfortunately such paddocks of tares are more common than we might hope. They are represented by common legalism and statements like ‘keeping close to Jesus.’
ROBBED
Such legalism, whether overt of subtle undoes what is ours in Christ: Union with God by grace alone. Galatians 2.21 makes it clear that when the law and its culture is our life, then for us ‘Christ died for nothing.’
WE ARE INCLUDED IN CHRIST
You and we have union with God in Christ since Jesus declared separation finished. ‘It is finished!’ Means the separation began by the errant Adam has been undone with the result that we now have the kind of relationship with God that Jesus does as a member of the Trinity because we are included in His Person and thus included in God. So Holy Communion is not just a rit. It’s a celebration of the fact that because of Christ we live in communion with Father, Son and Holy Spirit and they live in us. It’s not a contract. It’s gifted union with God in Jesus Christ. You are always enough in Jesus.
