TO BE OPEN-MINDED AND CREATIVE

I got this quote off Facebook recently. ‘Australians are a deeply conservative, insular and fearful people with a collective delusion that they are laidback and forward thinking.’ More than a germ of truth here. We were not always like this. And more recent trends show that this is not how we want to be as a nation. There is a sensible middle that is not based on selfishness racism, exclusion and stagnation disguised as policy.

Discernment is useful in all areas of life. If you have spiritual discernment, you will discern wisdom.

There are people – we may have them as friends or relatives -  who think that persons not in their preferred party are innately bad. There are people of integrity, ability and character in all parties even when these parties are led by incompetents with stagnant minds. This does not mean that it does not matter who we vote for -  because it does. It matters enough to support parties that are deeply humanitarian and not into institutionalising selfishness.

There will be a heaven one day. Genuine Christianity is about bringing as much of heaven as we can have here into the present. Don’t be so obsessed with healing limbs and eyes when we are surrounded by many who are crippled by political and economic circumstances that could be changed with vision and a genuinely humanitarian attitude. ‘Heaven invades earth in the macro’, not just in a healing service in the micro.

The survival of the fittest is the basis of evolutionary theory. It has nothing to do with the Christian vision of healing, grace and social well-being.

COMFORT OF NONSENSE
Masses of people can accommodate themselves to widely held illusions because these illusions lessen fear and appeal to human selfishness. They are widely held and often supported by those who have a vested interest in supporting half-truths and spin as well as a partial gospel and false gospels in the sphere of religion.

WORTHY OF CHRIST
Jesus was clear in urging that those who were more attached to their relatives, friends and their ideas than He, were not worthy of Him. By their own choice they had decided that they were not worthy of life. We will not find real life, real knowing and seeing in living to maintain the legacy of our relatives.

Paul urged, ‘Being rooted and grounded in love,  may [you] be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth,  and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God’ Ephesians 3.17-19. Being in God is more than an attachment to scraps of law and a few denominational icons.

If we love God we will love life, truth and the earth. We will love people.
The love of God is seen in His being, revealed in Jesus Christ and applied to us in the drawing in of our estranged selves to the communion of His Presence. Jesus healed people as a pointer to His healing of us and the healing of the earth through us.
HEAVEN COMES TO EARTH
Torrance states that “The Son became human without ceasing to be divine in order to make creatures participate in the divine communion without ceasing to be creatures.” This is a cute and succinct expression of our life in God in the incarnation. God draws you into Himself in Jesus Christ, fills you with His Person and becomes part of you without you losing your identity but gaining it.
This, and not moralism is the Gospel of the Kingdom. There was a time when the majority of earth’s people believed the earth was flat. That did not make it flat. It may be safe to say that large swathes of Believers think Jesus left them a religion called Christianity. In fact Jesus left us an incarnation. This is our life in God and this is His Kingdom in the world.