THE SPIRITIED TRAVELLER

Life to the full is union with God. This is not a pipe dream. It’s a reality in Jesus Christ. Just make sure we have the Christ of God and the Gospel of Christ. As someone aptly said, ‘All belong, but some belong less than others.’ Like marriage. We can have a good marriage and we can have a marriage that is a marriage in name only.
We enjoy oneness with God by believing we do.
CONTAINER
As we have said, religion is never an end in itself. It can be the container in which we find spirituality. But spirituality itself is not an abstraction. Spirituality is our union with God expressed as us. It is what Jesus was urging when He said,  ‘Realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20 and more pointedly in ‘The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you--they are full of the Spirit and life.’
Spirituality, Godliness, life without limit, is you having the relationship with God that Jesus has with His Father.
RIVER OF LIFE
Why were His words spirit and life? Because He was spirit and life. And why was Jesus spirit and life? Because Jesus was one with His Father and because Jesus was fully God.
CHRIST IN YOU
But it is His oneness with Father that is our focus here because it is this oneness that has become ours and which Paul named Christ our life.
Christs forgiveness is not separate from His Transformative power. He is our life – incarnation – Christ in you.
IN THE SPIRIT?
No matter what spiritual gifts we possess and no matter that we can heal limbs in Jesus’ name, we are not in the Spirit if we are not in our new covenant oneness with God. Unless we make this transition we will spend the remainder of our lives circling our iconic mulberry bush in arrested development.
SPIRITUALITY
 We can write PhD theses on spirituality and still miss it. It’s a state of being. Believers can have trouble understanding spirituality and separating it from religion when they have been socialised into seeing Godliness as ‘doing.’
Such a view is a natural result of being raised in legalism and the result of defining Christianity as religion when in essence it is not. It is Christ and more specifically Christ as you. Christianity in its Kingdom reality is God incarnated in you. This spirituality is always being before it is doing.
IGNITED EXTERNALITIES - FRUITS
Union with God always elicits ‘doing’ but in acts that are alive with spirit and life. Spiritually alive in the oneness that is ours all our externalities are ignited with spirit and life.
Deeds that impart spirit and life to a drought stricken world come from those whose oneness with Christ make them spirit and life. Yet they do not live in oneness because they have earned it. They are one with God because they believe it. They believe the truth. Thomas Torrance observes, “It is not atonement that constitutes the goal and end of that integrated movement of reconciliation but union with God in and through Jesus Christ in whom our human nature is not only saved, healed and renewed but lifted up to participate in the very light, life and love of the Holy Trinity.” (1)
YOUR LIVED SPIRIT AND L IFE
Torrance is talking reconciliation and incarnation, not as abstractions but as the state of being that belongs to saved Believers who are walking in the light rather than in the fog of tradition and the handicap of their parents’ beliefs.
Atonement is a word. Union with God is a state of being that flows from the oneness with God that Has been gifted us by Jesus and His cross. It is our union with God that is the subject of Paul’s remarks on life in the Spirit in Romans 8. Here in verses 9 through 11 Paul talks of the death that has been driven out and the life in the Spirit that is ours as a result of Christ our life. Quite plainly he states that we are not alive unless we are in the Spirit and as we have said we are not in the Spirit if we are in the law.
 
(1) Morrison, Stephen D.. T. F. Torrance in Plain English (Plain English Series Book 2) (p. 195). Beloved Publishing, LLC. Kindle Edition.