POSSESSING WHAT IS YOURS

Parents can do their best at raising a family, yet one of the children can become a delinquent. When I was a youth the word delinquent was used to describe deficient socialisation producing bad behaviour. Such delinquency was not always seen to be the fault of the parents but the result of youthful poor choices.

IT TAKES CONNECTION
Similarly, one is no more saved from degradation and spiritual disease by merely belonging to the Body of Christ, than one is guaranteed good mental health and an honourable disposition by being raised in a good family. We can, through no fault of our own or because of passivism live as delinquent members of the Body because we have not owned our rich parentage.

The Old Testament urged Israel to join the Rock from which they were hewn. This rock is Christ who is available in fullness to all. Wholeness, holiness and fullness of life is ours when Christ is our life according to the apostles teaching and the Gospel of Jesus. The pointy end of holiness/wholeness is Jesus alive in our being.

DEGREES OF INHERITANCE
Myk Habets, following Torrance observes, “For Torrance, the Fall of humanity resulted in total depravity, in Calvinistic fashion.  Total depravity does not entail, according to Torrance’s reading of Reformed theology, a thorough ontological break in humanity’s relation with God, but it does mean the essential relation in which true human nature is grounded has been perverted and turned into its opposite, something which only makes sense in a relational-teleological understanding of the imago Dei.” This is why religion can ruin your life and why Christ your life can resurrect it.
LIVE FROM WHERE CHRIST HAS PLACED YOU
To live in law and old covenant is to sit in the hold under the floor of the Boeing 777 when you have a seat in first class. You may be in the plane but not in its comfort or largesse. Similarly, being in the body and of the ‘one loaf’ is no help when we are living a mouldy piece of bread.
MISER LIFE
Old covenant addicts are not cut off from God. But they have a miser’s inheritance instead of an heir’s inheritance in Christ. Paul tells of the sons of the slave woman and the Free Woman in Galatians. The latter live in their inheritance. The former in a subverted humanity.
ENJOY HIS GOSPEL
It follows that we can have a relationship with Christ that is full or one that is limited. There is belonging for Believers but some have less belonging than others because they make do with a lesser gospel. Paul makes an astute observation. The nature of the communities of faith highlighted in American Gospel is a perversion of the Gospel of Jesus and the teaching of the apostles. What is revealed is a disappointingly ugly version of the money changers in the temple. Yet no one would wish to argue that these people do not belong to the Body of Christ. But Paul was right to describe such un-gospels as ‘this body of death.’
FALL NOT FINISHED FOR SOME
The fall separated man from God. But not totally. God was with Israel but not in the intimacy that He can be with any Believer since Jesus cried, ‘It is finished!’ Jesus announced that following His mission any person who believed would be ‘greater than John The Baptist’ – greater in the sense that a Believer would enjoy a similar communion with God that Jesus enjoyed with His Father.
DIVINE ENTERPRISE
The enterprise of God has woven us into God in Jesus Christ.
Thomas Torrance observes of Athanasius that “For Athanasius [the] apostolic tradition and the teaching given by the apostles in Holy Scripture were one and the same — there were no other written or unwritten traditions of truth, but only the one tradition comprised in the canonical "Scriptures, and it was from those Scriptures and upon the truth they mediated that the true Faith of the Church was derived and was as such to be guarded and handed on again.”  We can do better than be dung beetles living of the deviant dung gospels Paul cites in Galatians.
PATHETIC BLEATING
We may need to get over our addiction to cleverly disguised versions of the knowledge of good and evil disguised as the Gospel of Jesus and Paul. A Christian version of the knowledge of good and evil, no matter how legitimate it may appear contains the seeds of woodenness, decay and death as much as any occult culture. It is as Paul stated, ‘a body of death.’
ON THIS ROCK
Life and truth is not derived from divergent gospels but from the word of God and the teaching of the Christian Church – and certainly not from bogus visions and distorted versions of scripture  based on fraud that arose in the 19th century.
We are not at liberty to create our own gospel, manufacture an aberration of The Way, pervert the Message of Jesus and the apostles and revert to the law because we can. Living the new covenant and ministering new covenant life is important because it is a full Gospel and not a partial gospel. Any partial gospel is a lie and an aberration that causes’ illness in the Believer and disease in the Body of Christ. There is a dualism about the Kingdom Jesus began. Either we are ministers of life or we are minsters of death.