NO NONSENSE GOSPEL
30/06/24 14:40
Grace without life in the Spirit is a limited grace. The ultimate grace is Christ come in our flesh – which without an understanding of ‘spirit’ is a ‘nonsense’. In the Spirit Christ is expressed as us – which is the effect of the eucharist lived as our life in Christ rather than as a Christian rite.
PRECISE REVELATION
The revelation of who God is and who we are meant to be is revealed to us in Jesus Christ. We were not destined to be some patchwork of the knowledge of good and evil with Jesus’ help. We are not this amalgam and not that duality. There is no dualism in Christ and no great controversy between Christ and Satan. All things are under His feet and one in Jesus Christ and being made one in Jesus Christ. This is the success of the at-one-ment.
TOGETHERNESS IS KINGDOM
Dualism is pagan. Togetherness and belonging is the essence of Kingdom Life.
‘And this is the plan: At the right time he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ—everything in heaven and on earth’ EPH 1.10 NIV.
HEALING THE WORLD
We were born as sons/daughters of God and we have been re-born in Christ to grow into the glory that God intended by oneness with Him. The cosmos comes together in the person of Christ. We are co-labourers in togetherness as we live the incarnation.
Thomas Torrance observes, “God's self-revelation .. was brought to its culmination in Jesus Christ through the Incarnation when the Word of God actualised itself within Israel and within mankind in the visible, tangible form of a particular human being who embodied in himself the personal address of God's Word to man and the personal response of man to God's Word.” (1) This is Christ our life in every way.
Father was manifest in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus is manifest in the person of you, Bob, Joy and Cynthia. But there’s more. Jesus is not only your grace, not only your righteousness. He is your response to the salvation of God that is Himself.
CHRIST IN YOU/your inclusion in God
‘Jesus replied, "Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them’ John 14.23 NIV.
You are not in a double jeopardy. You need not earn oneness with God and before you can attempt that, earn oneness with Christ by ‘keeping close to Jesus.’ God has made you one with Himself in the Son of God. Jesus’ relationship with the trinity is your relationship with the trinity and your relationship with Himself. You are in Christ and as a result in the Communion that is God.
JESUS OUR RESPONSE
Torrance continues, “In Jesus there was provided for mankind a way of response to God which issued out of the depths of its existence and as its very own and in which each human being was free to share through communion with Jesus. Thus in Jesus the final response of man toward God was taken up, purified through his atoning self-consecration on our behalf, and incorporated into the Word of God as his complete self-communication to mankind, but also as the covenanted way of vicarious response to God which avails for all of us and in which we all may share through the Spirit of Jesus Christ which he freely gives us.” (2)
Jesus is your response to God. Live in Him and agree that He has included you in His life.
(1) The Mediation of Christ, p.78.
(2) Ibid.
