TO BE HIS SPIRIT AND LIFE
14/08/24 07:52
There is no condemnation in Christ Jesus. But there is salvation and a full life in Him.
‘Therefor there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. For those who are according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who are according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace, because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.’ Rom 8.1-9.
CULTURE OF SIN AND DEATH
The law of sin and death is any morality or culture we embrace that is not Christ. To live in the flesh is to live in the law when Christ has given Himself to us in which to live. The law of the spirit of life is the life that is ours in union with God in the person of Jesus Christ. Alive in the law of the spirit of life means the trinity lives with us and in us and we as Believers are their expression as the self and as the Church.
CHRIST IS YOUR LIFE BECAUSE CHRIST IS YOU.
“The New Testament is at pains to make clear the full humanity of Christ. He comes as bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh; he speaks with a human voice, is brought up in a human family, eats, drinks, thirsts and is hungry, grows weary and is pained, rejoices and sheds tears, and is encompassed with our frailty and infirmity. Here in Jesus the eternal God comes so near that he is a particular man among others, a particular historical individual, a frail human being, such a man in fact that people could easily pass him by as just another man, and easily fail to see anything else in him than ordinary humanity.
All that means that in Jesus Christ, the eternal God has actually come to us, and is one of us in the same sphere of reality in which we exist, and with which we are so very familiar. The stark actuality of Christ's humanity, his flesh and blood and bone, guarantees to us that we have God among us.” (1)
Pentecost was the dynamic declaration that the Christ who came to Palestine lives in us to be expressed as us. This is life in the Spirit – of Christ.
(1)Thomas Torrance. The Incarnation. P 125.
