MORE ABUNDANT THAN SIN-MANAGEMENT
30/12/24 07:22
The full gospel is much more than justification and a ‘Jesus way’ of coming to terms with the law/church culture. It is participating in the life of God so that we live as people who are fully human and fully alive.
YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT. CHRIST IS OUR LIFE
Rather than a focus on sin and death it is more life-giving to be obsessed with Jesus as our life from God and our life in God.
We own “A participatory, resurrectional, transformational gospel. At last we come to see that salvation is not achieved by retributive justice, but by participating in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Salvation is literally found “in Christ,” as Paul says over and over. With Paul’s gospel liberated from a conflation with the false gospel of the teachers, it becomes much bigger, bolder, better, and ultimately, far more universal—it is a gospel proclaiming salvation for Jews as Jews, and for gentiles as gentiles.” (1) This salvation is much more than our being saved from the ultimate non-being of death. It is the beginning of life now that reaches fruition in our eternal life at the end of the age.
GUNS WITH BLANKS
We can, as would-be spiritual leaders, fail to lead because, when we speak we say very little of Kingdom substance other than an attempted pumping up of received religion. Some services routinely specialise in rationalising their deviant doctrine.
We can front as leaders because we operate in dualism and its false contrasts in order pretend that the sky will fall in if we ‘make that dangerous change’. Such a leader, is a blind leader of the blind of the kind that Jesus and Paul were not. If you are a spiritual leader, you will confront death where it hides in words and in deviant Christian beliefs. Jesus was murdered by religionists because He spoke truth/ life and was life. While those who opposed Him were the representatives of unlife and death. Invested in torpor because of their reliance on self-serving religion. Jesus declared that He would set a fire in the earth (Luke 12 49) and He did in the person and actions of Himself. Jesus entire life and death was the confrontation of life over death.
LIFE VESUS DEATH
Jesus initial declaration of mission is about life over death; about the gift of life versus the robbery of life, mainly by religion. ‘The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full’ John 10.10 NIV.
Should we live Christ as our life our living is not ordinary. On the contrary there is a joy in the ordinary and even redemption in from the imperfections in our lives. Recovered wounded often go on to be Christ’s most effective healers. We are blessed with an abundance of joy, if we live Christ to live rather than doing our Christianity as a way to avoid sin. Christ as us is a barrier against sin in a way that legalism cannot be. The law is no barrier against carnal urges and leaves us broken, fragmented and as Christian failures who sought for strength of character in an abstraction instead of in Christ incarnated in our being.
Christ forgives you and heals you of emotional and spiritual disease. Th fruit of this is life and righteousness.
.
(1)Campbell, Douglas; DePue, Jon. Beyond Justification: Liberating Paul’s Gospel (pp. 26-27). Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.