MOVE TO LIFE
14/06/24 14:29
Any form of religion that is not Christ our life will vary from some degree of human effort/sacrifice to full-blown human sacrifice. Abraham had no Bible and little knowledge of God except that God had called him. He was grief-stricken but not shocked when God told him to sacrifice his son. Not shocked because that’s what ‘gods’ in Abraham’s vicinity did. The shock came when the angel staid his hand and God provided a ram caught in a thicket.
HOPE I’VE DONE ENOUGH SYNDROME
The basis of fallen religion is humans earning entitlement is sacrifice. Sacrifice of others or fullness of life. The basis of our restored sonship is the cross, meaning atonement and reconciliation. The glory of our salvation is the gift of our Christ incarnated life.
EARN
Lesser forms of Christianity have this in common: You must make some sacrifice, earn your acceptance with God - wear a burka, keep a sabbath or do a church routine. Our inheritance in Christ is that God gives Himself to us in Jesus. He gave Himself to the cross and He gives Himself to us to be our life. This is Christ come in our flesh and life in the Spirit. It’s being and living with God in the Everyday.
BE CLEAR
If we are attached to the law we do not live in the Spirit. Even if we can practice some gifts we are not ‘in the Spirit.’ We are generically sons of God but in spirit and in truth we are workers and slaves as Paul states in Galatians. We are in the Spirit when living the eucharist and not the law.
‘But what does Scripture say? "Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman's son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman's son’ GAL 4.30 NIV.
SCARCITY
If you have lived with people who live from scarcity - when things are not scarce - you will know that they are limited in means and in vision. Misers have a deprived and un-generous view of life. Legalism is the dry bones of a miserly religion. If you have come across a two year old sheep carcase in a paddock as was common for me when I was a boy, you will know what I mean – a pile of rib-bones, rotting skin and dead wool. The parallel for us as legalists is to be a dead person walking. The legalist can give the illusion of being alive through activity but is not alive as a son of God. It takes life in the Spirit to do this - which has nothing to do with the law, other than it has been left behind with Adam and Moses.
LIFE IS NOT ZEAL
‘I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other!’ Rev 3.15 NIV. One is not hot with zeal. But one is on fire with life when Christ is our life making us an expression of Him.
Purity is relevant. But it does not come via moralism. It comes because Christ becomes us by way of incarnation – the mediation of Christ.
WE SHARE CHRIST’S LIFE
Mike Habets observes of Torrance, “As he makes clear, theosis ‘does not mean “divinisation”, as is so often supposed, but refers to the utterly staggering act of God in which he gives himself to us and adopts us into the communion of his divine life and love through Jesus Christ and in his one Spirit…’. (1) Your wealth is your union with God.
ABUNDANCE
We have been given oneness with the Communion that is God.
The cool thing is that we are not left in separation from God to invent ways to overcome that which has already been overcome (Adams separation from God). We are in a communion that is real and so close that it is an interwoveneness more than a fellowship. Christ is with us and in us and transforming us by the presence of Himself.
In Christ we are the recipients of pure and ultra-life. The Bible calls it eternal life and it is eternal because it is infinite.
(1) Habets Myk, Theosis in The Theology of Thomas Torrance. p97
