THE HUB OF MEANING
24/03/24 16:45
Kelly Maestro writes of Nietzsche, “He understood that human beings are worshipful creatures, creatures who cannot bear to exist in the absence of one or another construct of meaning, that this longing after some kind of meaning is a basic and irreducible characteristic of human nature…we are creatures perpetually bound to seek after the meaning and value of our own lives.” Jesus Christ is that meaning and imparts true meaning to all who will have Him.
TO KNOW GOD
What we believe gives meaning and value to our lives and determines what we become. This is true and particularly relevant to our ‘knowing’ of God. To know God as God is, is to grow in our humanity and in a humanness that is a reflecti0n of God. Who we are is the fruit of what we believe. To have a crooked god is to make a crooked you and a bent I.
ACTIVE BELIEF
Since we are sons and daughters of God – God’s progeny, we honour God and bless ourselves by being who we are to the ultimate in Him – and not some pygmy likeness and faulty rendition that we have become because we were satisfied with a dodgy gospel. We may stick with our limited God and limited gospel, because we are too careless to embrace the fullness of our inheritance in a God. Or perhaps because our status and identity are contained in beliefs that are ours. Or because we so passive that we have allowed ourselves to be schooled in errors about God in a gospel that is parody of the truth. A parody because it is a variant of the lies that flowed from the fall. Any legalism-oriented gospel belongs to the culture of the knowledge of good and evil. But our culture is new creation life in Christ multiplied in us.
If we adhere to our perspective, in the face of its contradictions to the Truth of Jesus and the apostles on the grounds ‘that it is ours’ – we have placed ourselves in a web of confusion. Confusion because if everything is truth, then there is no truth for us. Truth is based on the possibility of deniability. If positions cannot be denied in the light of better evidence, the positions are futile and are the fabric of non-being. But we have our compass in the I AM of Christ who is way, truth and life. As such truth and life are found in His Gospel and not in ‘other gospels’ that dilute or pervert it.
NO ABSTRACTION
Thomas Torrance puts it well. “Since it is only through himself that God reveals himself, God himself is the personal content of his revelation to us embodied in Jesus Christ his incarnate Son. Since it is only through himself that communion with God is accessible to us, God himself is the personal reality of that communion granted to us in the Holy Spirit.” (1) This is the fortress in which we are protected from cunningly devised fables.
REVELATION
Both you and God are revealed as you are in Jesus Christ. God is, so to speak personified in you in your creation and your redemption. It is the being of God, the personification of God in His triune form that that makes us what we are and who we are becoming. What we are as sons/daughter and who we are as beings with a spirit, soul and body. The Source of life is our re-connection to the spirit and life that is the Trinity.
You can live your religion like a visionless accountant whose narrow reality is his credit and debit columns, or you can live in the expectation that you will breathe life into all you meet and everything you TOUCH BECAUSE YOU ARE ACTUALLY ALIVE in God and alive as a self who is a son/daughter of God releasing visionary and creative words and schemes into the world. In this living wat you are an agent of Christ’s resurrection life.
By means of the cross God has undone the lie, the lie that we are not enough and paved the way for us to be sons/daughters in spirit and truth to be imbued with the kind of spirit and life that makes us much better than ‘undead’ but fully alive with the infinite life that flows in the river that is Christ is our life. This is your Easter Life.
s
TO KNOW GOD
What we believe gives meaning and value to our lives and determines what we become. This is true and particularly relevant to our ‘knowing’ of God. To know God as God is, is to grow in our humanity and in a humanness that is a reflecti0n of God. Who we are is the fruit of what we believe. To have a crooked god is to make a crooked you and a bent I.
ACTIVE BELIEF
Since we are sons and daughters of God – God’s progeny, we honour God and bless ourselves by being who we are to the ultimate in Him – and not some pygmy likeness and faulty rendition that we have become because we were satisfied with a dodgy gospel. We may stick with our limited God and limited gospel, because we are too careless to embrace the fullness of our inheritance in a God. Or perhaps because our status and identity are contained in beliefs that are ours. Or because we so passive that we have allowed ourselves to be schooled in errors about God in a gospel that is parody of the truth. A parody because it is a variant of the lies that flowed from the fall. Any legalism-oriented gospel belongs to the culture of the knowledge of good and evil. But our culture is new creation life in Christ multiplied in us.
If we adhere to our perspective, in the face of its contradictions to the Truth of Jesus and the apostles on the grounds ‘that it is ours’ – we have placed ourselves in a web of confusion. Confusion because if everything is truth, then there is no truth for us. Truth is based on the possibility of deniability. If positions cannot be denied in the light of better evidence, the positions are futile and are the fabric of non-being. But we have our compass in the I AM of Christ who is way, truth and life. As such truth and life are found in His Gospel and not in ‘other gospels’ that dilute or pervert it.
NO ABSTRACTION
Thomas Torrance puts it well. “Since it is only through himself that God reveals himself, God himself is the personal content of his revelation to us embodied in Jesus Christ his incarnate Son. Since it is only through himself that communion with God is accessible to us, God himself is the personal reality of that communion granted to us in the Holy Spirit.” (1) This is the fortress in which we are protected from cunningly devised fables.
REVELATION
Both you and God are revealed as you are in Jesus Christ. God is, so to speak personified in you in your creation and your redemption. It is the being of God, the personification of God in His triune form that that makes us what we are and who we are becoming. What we are as sons/daughter and who we are as beings with a spirit, soul and body. The Source of life is our re-connection to the spirit and life that is the Trinity.
You can live your religion like a visionless accountant whose narrow reality is his credit and debit columns, or you can live in the expectation that you will breathe life into all you meet and everything you TOUCH BECAUSE YOU ARE ACTUALLY ALIVE in God and alive as a self who is a son/daughter of God releasing visionary and creative words and schemes into the world. In this living wat you are an agent of Christ’s resurrection life.
By means of the cross God has undone the lie, the lie that we are not enough and paved the way for us to be sons/daughters in spirit and truth to be imbued with the kind of spirit and life that makes us much better than ‘undead’ but fully alive with the infinite life that flows in the river that is Christ is our life. This is your Easter Life.
s
