SONS AND SLAVES
02/05/24 14:57
When someone gets a new job you hope that they will find satisfaction in it and do it well. The ideal job is a job that is the expression of you. If your job allows you to be who you are and the fruits of its success are the result of who you are, we can expect that your work will have been life-giving to you and those you touch. We are who we are in glory in Christ our life. It’s our oneness with Him that does not smother us but makes us the I AM our ourselves.
The ideal you is to be fully human and fully alive. Jesus imparts His humanity and Godliness to our being if we are considerate enough to take Him as the living way to be the best self.
A litany of externalities do not change people. We are made the best Dads and best Mums when we invite the trinity to live in us through Jesus Christ. Fatherhood and Motherhood originate in the Trinity.
IT’S ABOUT BEING YOU
Our fruitfulness in life is not the result of living to formulae and spirituality is not about the law. We can do without our accountants view of God and the ticking boxes mentality of fragmentation and un-wholeness. A fruitful life comes from our being one with God as daughters and sons.
This is not a religious accomplishment. It is who and what we already are in Christ. Just as the trinity are part of each other, yet distinct persons, so we are one with God and fully ourselves as a result. This is the way of spirit and life. Spirit and life is the identity of us in the I AM of Christ. It’s personal and a flow of life from the Life-Hub of the universe. You can touch people with this life.
ONE DIMENSIONAL MAN
Herbert Marcuse wrote of One dimensional man. Many jobs in contemporary life have this effect. One might find acclaim from bosses and colleagues without ever having developed into one’s real self. Capitalism and socialism favour some and dull many. So does religion. Only Christ makes us fully human and fully alive.
Some jobs are an affront to who we are and others suck the life out of us. Others, even when we are held to be successful in them, cloud our real selves. We can, if we are satisfied with being economic or religious constructs rather than sons/daughters of God, develop a false self that is never the real us. There are folks who have no real self and no inner life - the hollow women and men cited by T.S Eliot.
HOLLOW MEN
Hollow/wooden men and women is the effect of a false gospel and a false Christ. It is often promoted by the sham of the kind of ministry that spends its life on trying to put a decent face on a gospel that is ‘no gospel at all’.
MADE SOLID IN SPIRIT
Oneness with God is Christ’s achievement for us. Our part is agreeing with Jesus that it is. The fact is that you are one with Christ whether you agree or not. But not one as an expression of Christ unless you choose what is already yours. You don’t have to sit in cattle class when you have a first class seat.
TO FLOURISH AS YOU
The trouble with some kinds of success at work is that this success comes at the cost of the diminution of the self. We may even think that our proficiency in a job is who we are, when who we are is who we are. The who of you is Christ manifest as you.
Who we are – identity - is more precise than a self-made persona. Who we are as genuine sons/daughters comes about from who we are in Christ. In Christ we are formed in communion with the Fatherhood of God. In the Kingdom ‘doing’ is a function of being – sons. The soil of our being will determine if we multiply life or some degree of death.
YOU AS AN EXPRESSION OF FATHER AND FATHER’S LIFE
Myk Habets following Thomas Torrance writes, “The supreme end for which God has designed his creation and which he activates and rules throughout all his relations with it is the purpose of his Holy Love not to live for himself alone but to bring into being a creaturely realm of heaven and earth which will reflect his glory and within which he may share with others the Communion of Love which constitutes his inner Life as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
SHARING CHRIST’S RELATIONSHIPS
It is in the incarnation of God’s beloved Son in Jesus Christ, and in our sharing in that relation of the Son to the Father through the Holy Spirit, that the secret of the creation, hidden from the ages, has become disclosed to us.” Habets observes, “Here theosis is a sharing in the Divine Life in a creaturely way as a direct result of the creation from the Love of the Father through the omnipotent grace of the Son and realised by the life-giving work of the Holy Spirit.”
THERE IS GLORY FOR YOU
Glory is our true self realised in Christ our life. Christ in you is this hope of glory.
THE ROUTE OF RE-BIRTH
Stagnant religiosity is the result of not listening. Richard Rohr writes of how the first part of life in the experience of the sensitive ‘listening’ person leads to the Second Part of life. This can be seen as a change of life paradigm from doing to being or as our new birth out of religion to Christ our life. The omega of our alpha is Christ come in our flesh as John emphasises. This is real glory/fruitfulness when compared to the sub-life of law and religion. Oneness with Christ makes us agents of His spirit and life in all we do.
REAL RICHES
‘To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory’ Col 1.27 NIV. This hope is realised in Christ our life, aka incarnated with God.
STAGNATING
Many folks never enter the Second Part of life because they live from thought patterns or a kind of faith that does not leave behind the tree of knowledge to enter Christ their life. They do not depart adamic separation for the union that is Christ. They may talk rebirth of a religious kind, but it is not the rebirth of being that is ours when we die to Adam and Moses and begin to live the life that is Christ as us. Don’t live from counterfeit gospels.
A religious life will get us to heaven, but it does not bring heaven to earth.
THE NEW CREATION BECOMES YOU
Myk Habets quoting Torrance observes, “Torrance notes how the universe requires ‘redemption from disorder’.. In other words, in the whole human life of Jesus the order of creation has been restored; in the midst of our disordered, sin-disrupted existence, there has been lived a human life in perfect order and proportion to the Will of God…This is the order of redemption which reaches back to the original order of creation and far transcends it in the amazing purpose of the divine love, as the order of the new creation.”
THE ORDER OF CHRIST OUR LIFE
This restored ‘order’ embraces you and the present creation. It’s more than the restoration of mere order. It’s the restoration and indeed the beginning of a new creation life of love, purpose, spirit and life and the real identity of persons, churches, societies and nations. This transformation is Christ in us, Christ our life. It is direct and unseparated from you and from us. The trinity in you is part of you. This is how heaven comes to earth and how Babylon gives way to heaven. Paul calls this ‘the law of the Spirit of life’.
NEW CREATION – CHRIST YOUR LIFE
The new creation is us in union with God by atonement and incarnation. You as a new creation is Christ expressed as you.
‘Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is the new creation’ GAL 6.15 NIV. Religious rites added to Christ are superfluous. The new creation is Christ as us.
‘If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!’ 2 Cor 5.17 NIV. Don’t politicise what God has abandoned and pretend it is a gospel.
