TO BE WHOLE AND HOLY BUT NOT A HOLY JOE
14/09/23 15:56
We can live as whole persons in Jesus Christ when we live in Him as our life rather than attempting to be righteous by living a Christian religion. To attempt holiness and to imagine we are Godly because we adhere to one or two iconic beliefs of a denomination is an illusion. We can’t manufacture our own grace by adherence to church fundamentals or routines and we cannot make a dent in sinfulness unless Christ is our life.
NO POVERTY MENTALITY
In any case a life based on sin-management is a beggar’s version of the gospel. Your inheritance is life in itself in Christ who is in you and with you. We are taling incarnation.
To live in an imagined separation from God because we have maintained ourselves in the law is an unfortunate and basic sin – subtle though it is. To live the incarnated life where Christ is our life is to live as a whole person graced and empowered in a holiness that is genuine and complete and which does not come from us. In Christ separation from God has gone and union with God is ours.
BORN AGAIN TO TRUE SELF
Richard Rohr is helpful in his use of the true self and the false self. The latter is what we make of ourselves in the world, in the law and in religion. The true self is who we are and are becoming in Christ. Some need to face the fact that they will never be real in the law and start to live where Jesus has put them – in company with Himself.
UNBENDING CROOKED THEOLOGY
Leanne Payne observes that, “A right understanding of the true self and our acceptance of it is necessary to a sound and balanced theology. Christ who is my everything is also my righteousness. In accepting myself in Him, I am no longer trapped in the mode of trying to win my own righteousness or God’s love, or in trying to keep the law, the very thing that Christ fulfilled. The true self finds “fullness of being.” It knows completion, for it is in the Perfect One.” (1)
DON’T ROB YOURSELF
“Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber.”
John 10.1 ESV. Any theology that substitutes the law for Christ our life is bad and unbalanced theology to the extent that it is a delusion. Reject it because it comes to you from people who did not enter by The Door.
(1) Payne, Leanne. The Healing Presence (pp. 54-55). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
