Cessationism is not real - except where practised as unholy writ. The gifts are not incarnation. There were miracles before the cross. But there was no incarnation. But there was law and separation from God formed in Adam’s dead and disjunctive way.
TO SEE It was a wonderful enlightenment to find that many of the things recorded about Jesus and the disciples in the New Testament were things that are still happening in our lives, or the lives of those who believe – not just miraculous curiosities that happened in the pages of the Bible or in the realm that we ponder as religion. But in our lives today. I’m talking about the ministry of the Holy Spirit, the gifts and anointing. These happenings are called manifestations. They are real. People do hear from God and people get healed of diseases. I have participated in these things and I have friends who have healed people in Jesus’ Name.
COMES FROM THE CROSS To experience these things illustrated to me that the Jesus who walked in Palestine was real and still among us by the Spirit. Yet as things in themselves they are not the Gospel of the Kingdom. Separated from the cross, the atonement and the incarnation they are less than the completeness of the Kingdom of God. They exist to point to Jesus and the cross as the Great Healing of the Human Race. The healing that is ours in Christ’s atonement and incarnation.
UNION WITH GOD IS THE HEALING OF GOD The cross is the healing point of history. It is the Great Reconciliation. It happened as some say because ‘God loved us more than Himself’.
SPIRIT OF SONSHIP God was in the world before Christ – manifested in the creation and its life and was present personally in the history of Israel. The ultimate manifestation was God incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth. There are subordinate renditions of God in Believers in whom Christ is incarnated. Christ come in our flesh is what it means by life in the Spirit – your life as the expression of the Spirit of God. This is you as a daughter/son who makes a Kingdom Difference.
SEPARATION UNDONE Adam’s realm of the knowledge of good and evil was undone at the cross. The curtain of the Most Holy Place was ripped on account of Christ’s achieved oneness of God for human beings. Before the cross the Earth was His footstool. David was aware of God’s presence in the everyday. But this has been exceeded since the cross and Pentecost. Today, the presence of God is not compartmentalised. There is no sacred and secular realm. Christ is all and in all. He is mediated to you directly by Himself and Holy Spirit and our role is to mediate His presence into the world of people and things. Christ is in you. We can live the eucharist or we can live like David’s brothers in the mode of ‘we were there’ rather than being life-givers.
FUTILITY Law keepers are often unaware of the meaning of the cross. As Paul said of them, ‘Christ died for nothing.’ There is small benefit in claiming membership in the Body of Christ when we are that part of the body that lives in separation from God – the part for which Christ died for nothing (Gal 2.21.) The essence of our life in God is not sin management, moralism and law-keeping. The ground of our being is union with God in Christ. It is Christ in us and for us that produces real life, true holiness and wholeness of being.
A SABBATH LIFE To live out a divided, sacred and secular existence when you and the creation have been made one in Christ is to resist the ending of Adam’s futility and live in ignorance of that which the cross has achieved for all – UNION WITH GOD. In Christ, Christ in you is the sacrament of your oneness with God. With Christ expressed as you, you can live a sacramental life as a decent person to glorify God by spreading His life.
Writing in his book, ‘The Great Dance, the Christian Vision Revisited,’ Baxter Kruger describes an encounter with the Presence enjoyed by C.S. Lewis. “A feeling that Lewis had never known swept through his heart. It was a sensation of the profoundest sort, more of an encounter, and it left him breathless and longing. While not always felt, this Presence is with us and in us always. ON THAT DAY Manifestations of Christ have the purpose of drawing our attention to what is – our union with God. Not to making a piece of religion out of it. On the Mount of Transfiguration, Peter wanted to build some temples. But Jesus indicated that this brightness was more than stuff about religion. ‘As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus gave them orders not to tell anyone what they had seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead’ John 9.9 NIV. Jesus told them what this means when He urged, ‘On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20. The day we realize this is the day we begin a life re-born from religion into oneness with God. We lessen ourselves when we make a relationship with church a relationship with God. We grow abundantly when we live Christ our life – the eucharist lived. THAT DAY FOR LEWIS “Through a memory of an ordinary moment of childhood play, Lewis encountered something that was larger than life, something greater and more beautiful than anything he had ever known. He had no idea what it was, or where it came from, or why it happened, but he knew that it was the best of all things. And he knew that whatever it was, he wanted to drink his fill of it. “At key moments in his early life, Lewis had similar experiences. They were always powerful, but fleeting. And they always stirred an inconsolable longing in the marrow of his soul. Lewis was being wooed by what he eventually came to call “joy.” It haunted him, and like Solomon, he turned over every leaf in his universe to find it. As the years rolled by, his quest for joy became the only quest that mattered. In his search, Lewis finally stumbled into God and was summarily shocked to discover that joy and God were connected.” (1) TALKING THE SPIRIT AND LIVING THE LETTER If our lens is the law we will interpret Jesus in the law and reduce all that is of the Spirit to the letter that kills with the result that we may talk much about Holy Spirit and the gifts, yet never emerge from the cocoon of the letter that kills life. This is futility lived. That which Lewis encountered was Father beckoning His daughters and sons to joy. Most people know that God is love. Not as many know that God who is love is the communion of the trinity who live in joy to share this with us. In Jesus Christ the trinity has spread its wings over human beings, and we are baptised in God’s living presence continually. This is incarnation. Live the eucharist and you will have a better life. (1)C Baxter Kruger, The Great Dance, p.10.