UN-EARNED INTIMACY WITH GOD
17/12/24 11:29
You need not earn intimacy with Christ. You already have it. You need not get an obsession about original sin. You started in original blessing. You are not separate from God - even in your sins. Nothing can separate you from the love of God. Since God is love, You cannot separate yourself from God.
When you die you will not return to dust. Your spirit will return to God. Nothing can separate you from the love of God. You are joined to God for eternity in Jesus Christ.
‘For then the dust will return to the earth, and the spirit will return to God who gave it’ Ecc 12.7 NLT.
BETTER THAN WE THOUGHT
You are one with God right now – not because you have done something special but because God in Christ has done everything to undo the separation that Adam began. Be sure to live in Christ and not in Adam.
The fall and its effect were foreseen and known before the fall. Who you are in Christ as a son/daughter was seen at your spiritual creation and rejoiced over in anticipation at your rebirth in Christ. Pre-destination is not a curse. It’s the promise that you and the new creation will become that which God envisioned before our time began.
THE DOOR
Union with God is your starting point when you come to Christ. Coming to Christ is not so much receiving Christ but your being received into His life of forgiveness, grace, healing, new creation life and the first fruits of heaven’s life now.
Being in Christ is a state of being, - of being one with Him. Oneness is the interweaving of our self with Jesus and the trinity. It’s more than beliefs and more than behaviours. It’s a state of being that is union with God. In the incarnation God is interwoven with us. This is what we celebrate at the Lord’s Table.
ALREADY HAPPENED
John Crowder writes, “Your union with God in Christ is instant and effortless. It happened on the cross and was realized the first moment you believed. It is from this vantage point of being “in Christ” that all other doctrines of the church must be built… A real and vital oneness with God was achieved and completed on Christ’s cross. Nothing was left undone. This is the foundational principle of the New Testament and the chief thrust of the Pauline epistles. Cambridge Dean C.T. Wood wrote of Paul, “We must insist again that union with the ever present Christ is the pivot of his religion, and therefore of his theology.”
SONSHIP
Union with God does not create sinless perfection. It begins your new birth and the maturation of you and us as daughters and sons of God. But we are not in the split and frustrated life described by Paul in Romans 7.21. If we were we would be ‘in this body of death – which we are not because Christ is our life.
PART OF YOUR BEING
I read what I am going relate some years ago and believe it has merit. Christ grows us out of sin, sins and addictions. He does not snap us out of it. Why? Because our sin is not something outside us. It is us. It is part of our being.
When we live in Christ as our life the New Man grows inside of us and comes to completion at the Second Coming. It’s because of the nature of being human that it’s not helpful to utter sayings towards people such as ‘I love you but I hate the sin.’ The sin is part of them and part of us. There is no condemnation in Christ Jesus. Neither are we zapped into holiness. But we are grown into it when Christ is our life. ‘Growing up into Christ’ is a legitimate saying.
ONE LIVING WAY
Christ our life is the pivot of our life and the core of the new creation Kingdom of God. It’s the engine of real change and the one living way that righteousness/life has agency in our being and fruit in our everyday lives. A lived union with Christ is the avoidance of dystopia and the way of the New Creation.