SO BELONGING TO LIFE IS BETTER THAN BELONGING

We can be practical and therefore useful and even godly by being an active Christian. And we can do some good. But we can release more spirit and life when we have been active enough to ‘rightly divide the word of truth’ rather than live passively from a half-gospel. We can release droplets or we can irrigate situations with rivers of living water. To do this we must BE LIFE. Jesus warned that action that is not spirit and life advances the Kingdom of God not one jot.
 
‘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. His words spoken to us are that we He is our life.
 
TRUTH AND LIFE BRINGS MORE LIFE
 
Any ‘other gospel’ curses us with degrees of non-life because all untruth fosters degrees of death. It starts with dullness and ends in implosion. None of us have the right to maintain death in the name of Jesus. None need be so naïve as to foster religion that is a Christian version of the knowledge of good and evil. As such we will have one thing in common. We will not be alive. Yet in the simplicity of Christ our life we are alive with His life.
 
JOINED TO GOD IN CHRIST
 
Life comes from God. We are alive in spirit and soul when we live in what is ours: inclusion in God. The ‘It is finished!’ from Christ marked the end of the good/evil dichotomy. Humanity has been joined to Christ. We have oneness with God if we will have Jesus as our life. The paradigm of life since the cross is inclusion in God. The delusion of dualism fades in the truth that Christ has made ‘the two one’.
 
There is no great controversy between good and evil and no actual division between sacred and secular in the post-cross era. Why? In Christ our life all is sacred and God-breathed.
 
Existence has been made one in the person of Jesus. In Jesus of Nazareth we have been made one with God. Evil is overcome by the advance of His life in us and as us. New Creation expands in those for whom Christ is them because they are the expression of Christ’s life in spirit and truth in the Everyday.
 
ROOTED IN GOD
 
A fruitful life is a state of being – of being one with God. This is not our work. It is Christ’s already accomplished work. Believe it. Live from it. Our life need not consist of random acts of religiosity or good works conceived in the flesh. In Jesus we now possess the oneness with Father that was His. As such we express His life as ourselves.
 
INCARNATED BEINGS
 
In The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf says. ‘A wizard is never late and never early.’ We are not wizards but we are incarnated with the Trinity. This means that we live in the moment and the season as the expression of Christ and His will.
 
Jesus only did what Father was doing because He was one with Father. So are we when we believe we are. By the one Spirit we are equipped with the wisdom to fit God’s purpose as fruitful gardeners. We have become a living channel of His spirit and life. To live in oneness with Jesus is to be one with the trinity and joined to the life-hub of the universe. In this mode the pointy end of trinitarian indwelling is you.
 
 
LIVE ALIVE OR LIVE THE COMA
 
We can appear reliable Believers by never questioning anything; by never interrogating what we have been taught and existing obsessively to pump up the beliefs and traditions of our parents. Or we can be led personally by Jesus into new areas of life not limited by religion or limited ideas. Don’t be among those who prefer the coma they were born into over the truth of the Gospel and the history of your denomination.
 
EAGER FOR LIFE
“When he was sitting out of doors mending the nets, and all alone, he would often look eagerly to the North. One could see nothing but a grassy slope running up to a level ridge and beyond that the sky with perhaps a few birds in it. Sometimes if Arsheesh was there Shasta would say, “O my Father, what is there beyond the hill?” And then if the fisherman was in a bad temper he would box Shasta’s ears and tell him to attend to his work. Or if he was in a peaceable mood he would say, “O my son, do not allow your mind to be distracted by idle questions. For one of the poets has said, ‘Application to business is the root of prosperity..’”
ALREADY BOGGED
We can exhibit a liberal attitude while being bogged in limited ideas. The part of the life-giver is to ‘make crooked paths straight’ – not make a religion out of them.
A sustained application to busyness and a contempt for reflection can eventually lead to torpor, ennui and the decay of the self. An addiction to one’s ideas has led to a denial of the truth and the promotion of lies and lying as a political/economic solution to increasing chaos.
THE ISSUE
The Big Deal of the Roman Empire was Christ come among human beings. The Big Deal right now is Christ in you, Christ in us, Christ incarnating Himself in the church and the church becoming the new creation. The church does not get to be the agent of the New Creation while it is imbued with the law of sin and death.
LIFE AND DEATH
Distorted ‘truth’ is not a solution to the challenges of the times. The world and its phenomena is not divided into left and right. The world just is. There is a division though. It’s a demarcation between life and death. We can see well when we look through the Jesus lens and have sufficient humility to be able to learn. When Jesus is our life we can see what is light and what is darkness. Without this as T. S. Eliot said, ‘We have our head-piece filled with straw.’ We are scare-crows instead of sons and daughters of God.
FREEDOM FROM DELUSION
One would hope that followers of Christ would be free of the futility of false facts and confidently uttered lies. Sadly not always. Segments of the church stick to their aberrant gospels because they choose to – because this is where they think they get their identity and status. But we cannot serve two masters because there is only one truth, one life in God and one Gospel that is the Gospel of the Kingdom.
 
(1) Lewis, C. S.. The Horse and His Boy (The Chronicles of Narnia, Book 3) (p. 1). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.