THE LIFE AND LIGHT OF YOU

JOHN BEGINS HIS PROLOGUE WITH THE WORDS, ‘IN HIM WAS LIFE AND THAT LIFE WAS THE LIGHT OF HUMANITY’.

Jesus’ focus was not on ‘sins’ as many might think. His mission was life. He saved His people from their sins in order to give them life. His life drives out sin. Sin degrades and pollutes the good. But sin quenching is not an end in itself. Sin is the result of separation from God and believing the Father of Lies.

FOCUS WHERE IT COUNTS
Since sin is the result of separation from Life we would do well to focus on life and not on sin. Jesus Christ is life in person as He said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life.’ It is because He is life and He is God that in separation from Him, people ‘will die in their sins’. Separation from Him is death and degradation and perversion. Union with Him is life without limit.

TRINITY THE LIFE-HUB
The nature of life and its source is in God. Life is the property of persons and indicates that eternal and infinite life have nothing to do with the law and everything to do with our being one with God.
God is three yet one. Trinitarian members are fully unique, yet part of each other. Though one with themselves and each other, they lose none of their uniqueness. This is known as perichoresis (see below), which is the template of our relationship with God in Jesus Christ.
INTER-WOVENESS
In Christ we are woven into God and God is woven into us. This is the essence of the new covenant and incarnation. It’s the soil from which the anointing and gifts of the Spirit take root.
JOHN 17
In Jesus God is in us and with us. Jesus said ( John 17) that as a result of His cross and the coming atonement we would become one with Father as He is one with Father. This is incarnation – Christ in us and Christ our life – a vast improvement on fitful attachments to the law and partisan sacralising of isolated elements of the knowledge of good and evil to suit a denominational bias.
GRACE AND TRUTH
We are not whole or holy because we go to church, keep the Sabbath or are against abortion or gay marriage and certainly not holy if we are participating in killing the earth. But we do develop a holistic holiness when Christ is our life; when He becomes us by the Spirit and when the incarnation of God is real in the church rather than a point of doctrine.
When all of us live in the oneness that is ours we are the Body of Christ in spirit and in truth. By continuing in the law we are of this body of death as Paul indicated.
REALIZE YOUR TRUE BELONGING
Jesus urged, ‘Realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20. The realising and living out of this state of being (It’s not just a belief) is the life of God undoing sin and death. It’s the life of God manifesting through you and the new creation.
RED HERRINGS AND DISTRACTIONS
Should we attempt to please God by keeping the law. Should we try to know God through legalism; should we extend the law beyond the cross by making it a thing that Jesus empowers to make us good, we will have missed the point of the cross and the meaning of John 14.20. We will have embarked on a wild goose chase and adopted as ‘our perspective’ a gospel that is no gospel at all – and in doings so suffocated the life of God in us in the name our christianity.
LIFE AND LIGHT
But we can live in the largess that is ours in the Gospel of Jesus, the apostles teaching and the Nicaean Creed.  Do better as sons when our passion is to seek life rather than pump up received ideas.
PERICHORESIS IS?
Genuine acceptance removes fear and hiding and creates freedom to know and be known. In this freedom arises a fellowship and sharing so honest and open and real that persons involved dwell in one another.
 
There is union without loss of individual identity. When one weeps, the other tastes salt. It is only in the Triune relationship of Father, Son and Spirit that personal relationship of this order exists, and the early church used the word ‘perichoresis’ to describe it. The good news is that we have been included in this relationship and it is to be played out fully in each of us and in all creation.
 
‘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 NIV. Our life in the Spirit is not the gifts added to the old covenant. If we remain in the law and old covenant we are not in the Spirit.
 
THE INCLUDED YOU
 
You are included and this ‘oneness’ in your life as a son/daughter of God; a life in which you are whole and holy even as God is holy and you are advancing in the glory of being yourself in Christ, to minister spirit and life because you are alive. You are a minister of the new covenant, in the spirit of life because you have left the hag of death behind.