FALSE SELF/TRUE YOU
22/03/24 16:12
There is great wholeness and security to be had when we are hidden in Christ, when Christ is our life and we are not, with the result that we possess our life in security, dignity, honour and grace. We start the journey of becoming who we really are. This is because Christ is us and because reality is Christ. We are talking about growing up into Christ from the point of our new birth. Richard Rohr writes well on the growth of the Real Self, which we call the I AM of you.
TRUE SELF
He writes, ‘Your True Self, your deepest identity, your unique blueprint—is who you are in God and who God is in you. Your True Self is who you are and always have been in God. At its core, your True Self is love. Love is both who you are and who you are still becoming, like a sunflower seed that becomes its own sunflower.
In a manner of speaking, Jesus built us up by putting Himself down. Not in a false-humility sense, but in assuming the form of an ordinary person even though He was fully God and holding the universe in place.
NOT OBSESSED WITH THE SPOILS
J. Scott Jackson writes in the Princeton Theological Review, April, 2020, “In contrast to the prideful Christians at Philippi, Jesus Christ does not assert his rights by clinging greedily to the divine dignity and prerogatives that are his by right. Unlike a robber clutching his spoil, he willingly divests himself of the honour that redounds to his majestic form as the Son of God.” Phil 2.5-8 NIV.
OUR PEACE/FREEDOM TO BE
If you are complete in yourself, which you are if Christ is your life, you need not spend effort in rebutting put-downs that come from friends and enemies. You simply rest in the security of your person as you are - a son/daughter and an I AM in Christ.
AS A MENDICANT
If you are not in Christ but in the law or in a vexed hybrid such as christ + law you will be out to vindicate yourself, gaslight others and be a habitual judge of others - as you must be if the law is your life. Christianity that is a mixture of Jesus and law is a mongel-hybid that turns what could have been a discerning and gracious people into passive religionists. Or on the other hand know-alls and egotistical human cripples. The law does nothing for life, graciousness, the ability to love self and others and genuine Godliness, let alone intelligence and capability in any human endeavour. Only Christ makes us human as expressions of Himself.
FROM JUDGMENT INTO LOVE
Your life in oneness with Christ not only heals your fragmented self. It liberates you from the contradiction, judgments and meanness’s that are ours in the knowledge of good and evil. Oneness with Christ makes you one in yourself in your Sabbath peace and rest in the comfort of being in God and one with Father.
None of us are healed or whole in the law because we remain bent in Adam and fragmented in Moses – or simply a blurred self in religion. Hidden in Christ you grow from glory to glory as the person you are. Christ really is our life.
