ONENESS WITH GOD IS YOU ALIVE
07/01/23 14:30
The Kingdom of ‘doing’ is not the Kingdom of God. ‘Doing’ as self-validation is an anabranch of the river of the knowledge of good and evil. Fruitfulness starts with ‘being’ one with God. Jesus stated this clearly with His picture of Himself as the Vine with us as the branches. We are life and we multiply life in actual union with His person. This is the only doing that is actually alive with Christ’s life. We are not life-givers because we are busy, have a mission or a ministry. We are life-givers because Christ is us.
PARTICIPATING IN CHRIST
With Christ as our life, we are alive with spirit and life and alive to the realisation of our real self. Positioned in the womb of the law, you can come to the end of your life without having become more than a muffled self. Christ your life is not contained in categories. He is life. The reality of Kingdom life is not found in words other than in the Living Word. It’s found in Jesus, in persons, community and being. In being one with God. So live in what you have.
Life and truth is found as you in God and God in you and God in the community of the saints. John asserts this when he says that the foundation of the Kingdom is ‘Christ come in our flesh’ and Paul declares it when he uses the words, ‘Christ our life.’
ETERNALLY ALIVE
‘The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you—they are full of the Spirit and life’ John 6.63 NIV. Oneness with Christ is our us alive in our spirit with the life of God.
A ‘do gooder’ attitude can irritating and bereft of spirit and life. Mary had life and Martha did not. Life-giving action starts with union with God.
We are not alive when Christ is not our life. This is why as fundamentalists we can try really hard to be Godly by specific ‘doings’ yet, be so devoid of spiritual life that we are a parody of what we strove to be as ourselves. This is why the law cannot create life and why Jesus can. One is an abstraction and the other is a person who becomes us by His Spirit.
LAW IDOLATRY
Let’s be clear. By attaching to one element of the law we are joined to all of it – all of the law as a way of being. ‘Law’ is more than Mosaic. It is Adamic. Fortunately, we are not totally dead even if we have not divested ourselves of this body of death. We live in the reality of the Kingdom of grace and drops of life do get through. But we are living as dry creeks when we could be living as rivers of living water. We are not rivers because we have a ministry or a mission. We are ministers of living water as ministers of incarnated spirit and life.
Let us never deny ourselves fullness of life in this life because we devoted our lives to maintaining our received ideas.
THE SELF
The Self by which I mean your spirit is what you were born with. It is created at conception and is the essential you. You can try to enhance ‘the self’ by adopting all kinds of externalities but you do this in vain. You may acquire an identity by various behaviours and acquisitions but your real identity is the you who came into the world and the you who will go out of it.
The self is nurtured by spirit and truth and stunted by iniquity and lies.
This is why the soul, which is the container of the Spirit must be formed in God and nourished in the womb of the trinity so that the house of the self, promotes our glory and not our emotional disease.
GENUINE REALITY
“[Jesus] tells them that Ultimate Reality is “not here and not there,” taking us away from our typical attachment to time. “For the Ultimate Reality is ‘within you’!” (Luke 17:21).
If you let people concentrate too much on special times, feasts, services, and seasons, they forget it is always now and here when God happens. They stop living in the naked now and wait for Christmas or Easter, Sunday morning, or some far-off future day of enlightenment (see Colossians 2:16–19). (1)
UN-HINDERED BY RELIGION
The you whom God created and redeemed is the you who is un-encumbered by any accomplishment other than the discipline of grasping our uni0n with God. We can come to the end of our lives with little glory because we buried the talent of our real self in the ground, telling Jesus that He was a hard man expecting that He could be our life. Rather we would devote ourselves to fashioning a self from the law and by our own by serious effort. The result is that we do not get to be a son in spirit and in truth. We remain workers.
Grace is not a means of keeping the law. Real grace is Christ expressed as you by the Spirit.
SHADOW AND REAL
The self is who we are having realised and applied the truth that ‘I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20 NIV. Any other self is a shadow of the real.
God is not contained in times or places. But He does inhabit you and you are woven into God’s being which is the fellowship of the trinity. God is in your present time and space which gives you the capacity to be holy as God is holy. As a son/daughter you impart spirit, life and joy to any and every situation. This of course is you as an agent of the new creation. One of the greatest joys of being a son/daughter of God is that you live graced in the freedom to be your true self as a distributor of Christ’s life.
(1) Rohr, Richard. The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (p. 76). The Crossroad Publishing Company. Kindle Edition.
