ONE WITH JESUS AND HIS GOSPEL

Why pose as a disciple of Christ and then make do with your own gospel? A feature of conservatism whether in religion or politics can be resentment/hostility towards those who are intelligent and educated in truth and factual verities. Jesus Christ appeared among as the way, the truth and the life. Vested interests said he had a demon and crucified him as a criminal. Both hostility and a casual attitude to truth are rooted in the spirit of antichrist. A passion for truth and life is the essence of the Kingdom Jesus began. To dilute the simplicity of Christ our life is to be a disciple of suffocated life.

SPIRIT OF CHRIST AND THE BIBLE

Writing in the preface to the first edition of the Epistle To the Romans, Karl Barth asserts that, “My whole energy of interpreting has been expended in an endeavour to see through and beyond history into the spirit of the Bible, which is the Eternal Spirit ...

If we rightly understand ourselves, our problems are the problems of Paul; and if we be enlightened by the brightness of his answers, those answers must be ours…
The understanding of history is an uninterrupted conversation between the wisdom of yesterday and the wisdom of to-morrow. And it is a conversation always conducted honestly and with discernment …

It is certain that in the past men who hungered and thirsted after righteousness naturally recognized that they were bound to labour with Paul.” (1) Those content with their torpor are content to slumber in their received ideas.

TRADITION OF TRUTH AND LIFE

Not only labour with Paul but participate in the development of the Christian faith that started with Paul, John and the apostles and continued with the Church Fathers, the Reformers and Christians of integrity whose roots are in the Way, the Truth and the Life. Apostolic people have a passion for Christ’s life in the fullness of that which it is – life without limit.

ANOTHER GOSPEL

Integrity is the foundation of sound theology because Christian theology that is any good has an obsession with truth. We cannot simply make truth up on the gr0und that we have some new revelation or because we have a tradition of old but distorted truth. Knowing God and our life in His life is not about any partisan doctrine. Nor is the truth about God and ourselves to be advanced by an addiction to pumping up inherited ideas or our clinging to a denominational perspective to which we think we are entitled. Entitled because we think it clothes us with an imagined status and identity that is actually what Paul warned us of as: ‘Another gospel’.

JOHN DECLARES THE NEW CREATION

John and Paul unveil the Gospel of the Kingdom which is the new creation in the post cross age. John’s new creation prologue is couched in the atmosphere of the original creation. He declares the coming of the light and the joining of life and light in the One Person of Jesus - who counteracts the lies of the thief and father of lies by revealing to us His intimate knowledge of our Father. And in His Person being the Way to the Father in Himself. John signals the beginning of the new creation in Jesus Christ. His prologue is about the reborn and new you in the Last Adam who reproduces new creation, Kingdom People.

JESUS THE INCLUDER

John cites the fact of Christ’s logos. Paul declares that all life finds its being in Christ, that it came forth from Him and finds its destiny in Him. Human communities and the biosphere are sourced in Jesus who is the undoing of the first Adam, the putting to death of death and the Firstborn from the dead. Jesus is the Reconciler between man and God, between all people and all things. (Col 1.1-19 NIV).

INERTIA AS RELIGION

It’s common for conservative governments to define government as not doing much; and even not doing anything that really matters - which means not actually governing. Like promoting a legalised gospel of inertia and woodenness because it’s ours.

We are not like this in the Kingdom. If we are of the apostolic tradition we will labour with Paul to reveal what it means for Christ to be our life.’ We will live to explain how this life of Christ as us is not religion but life. Not religion because it is not a continuation of the knowledge of good and evil in Christian clothes. It is Christ come in our flesh to be us personally and us as the church and the new creation Kingdom of God.

CHRIST OUR GUARANTEE OF BELONGING
Timothy Keller observed, “The electrifying original message [of the Gospel] was this: God’s power has come from outside of history into this world. Jesus died for our sins in our place so that through faith we can know his love and receive a guarantee of eternal life all by grace, as a gift. He also rose from the dead to bring into history the powers of the age to come, in which we will all be resurrected and every tear will be wiped away (Hebrews 6:5; 2 Peter 3:13; Romans 8:18–25). Because Jesus’s death for sin and resurrection happened in history, everything has changed. Everything.” You have a Christ who not only lives in history. He lives in you.