NO OPIATES HERE
18/12/24 10:00
The sociology of knowledge means that we may construct truth using the lens of the culture in which we live. This truth may be no more than a construct or an expression of fact. Otherwise known as living in a bubble false constructs are idols of the mind – mental structures that are illusory. We can be imprisoned in our own views or in the mindset of our community. It’s usually helpful to grow out of our parents ideas or at least modify them to accord with the Truth.
It’s not ok to live in mistaken ideas just because we and our friends are nice people. Addicted to a self-made reality we can be hostile to evidence, intelligence and education.
OPIATE OF THE PEOPLE
Yours may be the task of being polite to those who effect to ‘know everything about everything’. There are those not only in the boof-head category who are certain/smug about everything but are right about very little. They seldom listen because their attention span is minute and they live in the opiate of their own ideas. They create a bubble of fiction that contains them in a lesser form of being. Don’t live a bubble of misguided reality when there is a Door open to you who is Jesus Christ.
If wedded to our bubble it may take us decades to learn what the humble learn in a relatively short time. In churches as a person of imfluence we may hold back the spirituality of the community for decades because we are anchored to our misguided ideas. But there are those who can be taught and who are capable of an apostolic witness to Christ’s abundant life. They are always ministers of the new covenant.
JOY OF LIFE
We do well if our passion for life exceeds our obsession with our inherited ideas. One can find joy in the mystery of creation and be a person of insight without having to categorise, compartmentalise or reduce everything to money or to numbers. There are commonalities and principles in the creation, but they are never abstractions unconnected to ‘being’. Even matter is less determined than it appears so that Paul’s quote to the Wise of his day, ‘In Him we live, move and have our being’ is even more cogent than it first appears.
WORDS AND WORDS OF LIFE
We have our being in His being. We have certainty about life in Christ our life.
Some church administrators are renowned for their dry and boring addresses because they are not alive. By living in the letter instead of The Word, we can give a Bible Study consisting of a series of linked scriptures and present a construct of words. But we may not have multiplied spirit and life – not unless we are one with the Living Word because we are alive in the incarnation and not dead in the law.
IN THE SPIRIT
We are not in the Spirit if we are not in the oneness offered in the Christ of God. We are in the externalities of religion. To be in God is to have agreed with Christ that we are included in the oneness Jesus has won for us. Yet we are graced with His Presence even when we are in error. However, grace and truth is better than grace alone. Grace and truth because truth is life. Every aberration of the Gospel dilutes our life. Each advance into truth increases our life because we enter more of Christ’s infinite life. Why sit in the goods van when you have a first-class seat?
THE GIFTS ARE NOT THE GOSPEL
The gifts and the anointing are not something separate to the incarnation. They are not a gospel and will not provide life in the Spirit when added to a legalistic base. Neither do the gifts add something to our already accomplished union with God. They are a function of it. And they will not function properly if we do not live in the new covenant. They will rapidly fade if seen as a formula or something to jolly-up our old covenant separationist religion.
THE ANOMALY
The contradiction of living the law and claiming belonging in the Body of Christ comes from the fact that the law was made to cater for the mode of separation from God in Adam’s alienation. Christ is our life because He makes us one with God in His Person. Paul intimates that to live in the law in the post-cross age is not Christian (Gal 2.20-21).
WORD IS CHRIST
This alerts us to the fact that the word of God in its fullest sense is not words on a page. The Living Word is the Christ of God. A law framework pushes us in the direction of presenting words as life – what Paul called the letter that kills. Incarnation allows us to present as Christ our life. To live alive, on account of the fact that in Christ we are woven into the trinity and the trinity is woven into our being. In Christ we are one with the life-hub of the universe. One with Christ, we are sharing ‘being’ and inclusion in God. One with Christ we speak words of spirit and life. One with Christ we are alive.
The Bible is alive to us when we are alive in Christ.
LIFE FROM ONENESS
Life and truth proceed from being – not being from words. Thus, in the prologue to the Book of John we find that in the beginning was the word and the word was God and was with God. All existence proceeds from God. This Word was and is the Christ of God who comes among us as Jesus of Nazareth and is the Messiah. He is our Light and Life.
SOURCE OF LIFE
‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it’ John 1.1-5 NIV.
‘Ultimate Being’ is the trinity. The trinity is God and the Source of all that is. Jesus as God is the Emissary of the trinity and one of us. Jesus lives in us. In Jesus we are one with God. One with Jesus we are one with the communion that is God and one with the creation. Trees and rocks are not gods. Neither is the Sabbath or Church Going. But the landscape is spiritual when we are living in the union of the One who draws all things into Himself.
INTERWOVEN
‘That all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me’ John 17.1-23 NIV.
ONE WITH GOD’S BEING/ONE WITH LIFE
Jesus has drawn us into His life. We are one with Him and the trinity. We can attempt to find life in the certainty of fundamentals, proof texts and positions – but we will not be alive or in the light. We live in spirit and light and are alive and alight when Christ is our life and we are one with the Reality that is our triune God.
Richard Rohr observes that “An incarnational worldview is the only way we can reconcile our inner worlds with the outer one, unity with diversity, physical with spiritual, individual with corporate, and divine with human.”
STAGGERING REALITY
Baxter Kruger exults in the “Staggering reality of our inclusion in Jesus' relationship with his Father in the Spirit.”
Thomas Torrance writes, “God draws near to us in such a way as to draw us near to himself within the circle of his knowing of himself.” And again, “Worship is.. the gift of participating through the Spirit in the incarnate Son’s communion with the Father… He lifts us up out of ourselves to participate in the very life and communion of the Godhead, that life of communion for which we were created.”