TO BE LIVING WATER
20/02/24 14:25
Christ our life is a nuanced and comprehensive state of being in which we are not only in God, but God is in us and more. God is for us. This has been labelled as the vicarious humanity of Christ. It is so comprehensive that religion fears that it is a universalism. It’s not. But it is the grace of God – which is God being more radical than religion would have us think.
BROKEN GOSPEL
There are sincere Believers who work hard all their lives to make the best out of the bent christianity they have inherited from their parents and from misguided evangelism. All of them will inherit eternal life but they are only capable of bringing a limited kind of heaven to earth. Paul is abrupt about this, when he writes, ‘I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!” Gal 2.21. Nevertheless, people stuck on an earned entitlement often rationalise this away.The result that our oneness in God is hollowed out and the reality of Gal 2.20 is lived in shadow instead of reality.
HOLISTIC GOSPEL
‘I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me’ Gal 2.20 NIV. Paul goes further than this in Colossians, declaring that Christ Himself is our life. There is no restricted meaning here. This is universally true.
LIFE REAL LIFE
The reality that is Christ is incarnation and its oneness with God, which is radical grace. We don’t get an abstraction called the law or religion in which to live in the power of Christ. We get Christ as us, as the reality in which to live. While there are manifestations of the Spirit that are amazing and which point to Christ, we need to know that the main manifestation of the trinity is you.
WHAT IS IT?
“What is the “vicarious humanity” of Christ? Simply put, it is the faith, obedience, worship, prayer, repentance, and life of the Son of God lived as a human being before the Father on our behalf. He fulfils our human response to the Father by perfectly doing what we cannot do: living a life of true fellowship with God from within our sinful humanity.” (1) ‘On our behalf’. That is it.
LIFE NOT A COMA
If you are passionate about living a life that brings people into Christ’s life, you need to be sure that your gospel is His Gospel – that your gospel is actually alive; that you are alive and because you are a son/daughter in any situation you are a river of spirit and life. You are always this in oneness, only occasionally in the law and religion.
IDENTITY AND REALITY
In anything that is not ‘oneness’ we become a phantom of our true selves. C. S. Lewis in ‘Till We Have Faces’, wrote that people lose substance and become ghosts of their real selves outside of God. They do so in religion too. Clinging to the law, they think they have substance when they are without substance as sons of God. Notionally, yet, but in the spirit not so.
While Christ in us produces fruit, activism does not make us alive in His life. As works oriented people we will be dead in our spirit. While satisfied with our virtue signalling we will be dead in our spirit. Many activists are simply not alive.
There are Believers who are disseminators of drought with good intent. This is not because they have not prepared properly but because there is no oneness between them and our Lord. We are not one with God in an old covenant mindset. We are one with Adam’s separation. We are one with God when Christ is our life in principle and conviction.
FLESH COUNTS FOR NOTHING
In old covenant preaching there is a flow of talk that is not spirit and life. We can do this if we insist. But we need to know that in doing so, we are blind leaders of the blind and often blind leaders of those who can see. It’s a sad day when we have a situation in which members of the congregation can see but the leaders cannot. It’s a sad day when our ability to minister spirit and life is limited by the fictions we have spent a life-time creating to justify what is really our idol – an imagined identity and a different gospel.
(1) Morrison, Stephen D.. T. F. Torrance in Plain English (Plain English Series Book 2) (p. 143). Beloved Publishing, LLC. Kindle Edition.
