THE KINDNESS OF GOD
18/12/24 10:05
“In Paul’s life we can detect an overt preference on God’s part for showing up through people. This seems to be God’s favourite mode of relating to us. It is the bread and butter of our relationship with God. If we seek God, then we must face the uncomfortable fact that God is hanging out with the people who are all around us, although some people are probably mediating God more effectively than others!” (1)
The kindness of the non-believer originates in God, despite his non-belief. We multiply Christ’s life the best when our Gospel is His, rather than some derivation. Some of the latter produce bitterness, criticism and religious non-life, instead of the life they claim. We are hampered when what we are trying to minister is not Christ’s Gospel but our own ingenious variation.
LIFE-GIVERS
We mediate God effectively when we are ministers of the new covenant – ‘He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life’ 2 Cor 3.6. Here we minister in oneness with Christ and possess His Spirit and life to distribute to those around us. In ‘the letter’ our counsel to others can be at best misguided and at worst ‘gaslighting’. The latter is a ‘thorn, briar’ of legalism.
TRUTH AND LIFE
In spiritual wealth, ‘those who have will have more’ and those who reject what they could have had will lose even what they have. Truth matters and it matters even more in Kingdom Culture.
Letter ministry is at best life-dormant and at worst judgmental. Keep in mind that the Pharisees judged Jesus as having a demon, even though He was light and life in person. There’s merit in truth because truth is life. There is the true Gospel of Jesus and the apostles, the Church Fathers and the Council of Nicaea. There are ‘other gospels’ that are the product of dilution, alteration and ‘doctrines of demons’. We can hide in this bubble of unreality and decay and pull the blankets over our heads because the illusion is ours and makes us feel special. Or we can know the truth by welcoming The Truth in person. We can know Truth and Life by believing that Jesus Christ is Everything. The pure in heart will know Christ and see God. The others, with their own agenda, will see largely an emanation of themselves.
One never has clear vision when one believes a lie.
THE HUNGRY GET FED
The single-minded towards God see God as God is. Ross Gittins wrote in The Age, “Owners and managers tend to be pretty happy [politically] with the world as it is.” They ‘don’t haves’ are hungrier. In Kingdom matters, those who want the most get the most in their Jesus Life. There’s a reason why the self-satisfied don’t experience the Kingdom of Heaven. They’re satisfied with what they have. But Jesus said ‘Those who eat Me will live because of Me’ and was even more blunt with the words, ‘Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you have no life in you.’ He was talking incarnation and ‘Christ our life’ which is life in the Spirit. If we live in the law we do not live in the Spirit. An outbreak of holy spirit anointing cannot be sustained if we are rooted in the law or any kind of diluted grace.
PASSIVE DECAY
Beliefs that we inherit can seem so right if we are content to live passively. Although Jesus’ cross atones for all and His life is available to all - we have to answer His invitation to participate in the fulsomeness of His life in order to enjoy fullness of spirit and life. The latter is the difference between life in religion and an incarnated life, aka life in the Spirit that is real in our flesh.
We can, as a recent politician commented, live as the ‘quiet Australians’ concerned only with being dormant people who consume and produce and be not alive enough to change the polity for the better. Or we can be agents of spirit and life because we believe life is more precious than anything else.
CHRISTIAN BUT NOT KINGDOM BUILDERS
We learn things as we go, if we have a heart to learn. I learned many years ago at a conference taken by a Godly pastor that one can go through to eternal life – without representing the Kingdom of God in this life. Being saved is not identical to being an agent of Kingdom Life. Kingdom people are sons of God in spirit and in truth. They possess agency as life-givers and are spirit and life in their person because they live in truth which is Christ come in their flesh.
BARNACLE LIFE
People can attach themselves to lesser gospels and false christ’s in good conscience or in a lazy passivism. A false Christ is a Christ that is the product of our own experience and thinking and the ideas we have absorbed from a misguided religious view of God.
INTERWOVEN INTO GOD
A good starting point for our advance as a son/daughter is to realise that the Kingdom of God is not a religion but a person. A second tonic is to understand that true Godliness is not what we have worked up, but God in us sharing Himself with us.
REALIZING
‘On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20. This is the day we are born again from slaves into sonship with God. From this point on we represent the Kingdom Jesus began rather than the kingdom of religion.
Jeff Turner observes, “Because God is jealous for His loving reputation, when we persist in beliefs that portray Him as angry, retributive and just plain old and mean, we will inevitably hit a wall and realize that our concepts simply do not work. While seeming so right initially, we find that they’ve left us crooked, bent in the wrong direction, disillusioned and desperately longing for reformation. Ideas and doctrines that we think will lead us into spiritual enlightenment and freedom often lead us, instead, down a path of darkness, depression, and spiritual death.” (2) This is how we get to be sincere ‘dead folks walking’. This is the reason why our relationship with God must not be the opiate of the people. It must be Christ our life.
NO OTHER WAY BUT UP
Nevertheless, a bankrupt religion can precipitate the start of our real life in God and the beginning of our true self. Jesus described it to Nicodemus as the new birth. He also told him that without it we cannot see the Kingdom of God. We may live in, and construct kingdoms and identities of our own but they leave us bereft of our true self. Our sharing of them binds people in their lesser selves and leaves people crippled rather than whole in soul and spirit. These are the paddocks of tares of the ‘almost but not full gospels’.
The Way to Kingdom life is narrow but visible and open to all. It is seen by those who love life more than their familiar ideas. It’s alive in those who seek an identity in Christ rather than an identity in a ministry or a denomination.
THE JESUS LENS
The author of Hebrews defines Jesus as the sharp sword who separates His Truth from ‘almost truth.’ It’s clear from this passage that the author is not only talking of the scriptures but of the Living Word who is Christ. Thus, ‘The word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart’ Heb 4.12 NIV. This is the Word that judges our every utterance.
BUBBLE RELIGION
We can if we choose live in our self-made bubble and interpret God through it. Douglas Campbell writes, “There is, a pre-existent relationship with God in everyone, confessing or not, that could resonate on a deep, intuitive level with the truths being spoken by any of God’s local representatives.
DILUTION/POLLUTION
But this resonance is tangled up with stubbornness, hostility, and constant collaboration with sheer evil. So, there is no basis here for a clear discussion. No definitive organization can be given to the tangled and distorted thinking of people until the lordship of Jesus is restoring order and clarity to the entire situation.” (3) Clearly this includes extra-biblical gospels, broken interpretive lenses and gospels that are ‘no gospel at all’ imposed over this Gospel of the Kingdom as espoused by Jesus and the apostles. So the question is, Are we promoting a legacy of life or an ideology of death?
(1) Douglas Campbell. Pauline Dogmatics. P 62.
(2) Turner Jeff, Saints in the Arms of a Happy God. Chapter 1.
(3) Op cit P 63.