YOU CAN LIVE IN YOUR RICHES IN CHRIST
03/05/24 13:25
God is unity in diversity. God is inclusion. Baxter Kruger observes that, “The doctrine of the Trinity means that relationship, that fellowship, that togetherness and sharing, that self-giving and other-centeredness are not afterthoughts with God, but the deepest truth about the being of God.” This is why our completed inclusion in God is the core while legalism is the parody.
GET IT ALL!
Many Christians live a diluted gospel, and some live a non-gospel. The core of your life is your already certified union with God in Jesus. Jesus is the New Covenant – the guarantee of our oneness with God in Person. This is holy communion in the Everyday.
There is nothing fragmented or compartmentalised about God; no hybrid where one part is an abstraction and the other part person. Baxter observes, “The Trinitarian life is a life of unchained fellowship and intimacy, fired by passionate, self-giving love and mutual delight. Such love, giving rise to such togetherness and fellowship, overflows in unbounded joy, in infinite creativity and unimaginable goodness. The gospel begins here with this God and with this divine life, for there is no other.” This is the state of being into which Jesus has drawn us in Himself.
LIFE IN GOD BEGINS WHERE RELIGION ENDS
Our spirituality and life starts with the nature of God as trinity. We become sons/daughters in spirit and in truth as we allow ourselves to be drawn out of the fragmented realm of the law/the knowledge of good and evil, right/left dichotomies agree with Christ that He has woven us into union with God. This is our life in Christ and is our justification and sanctification. This guarantee of inclusion in God in Christ is the New Covenant. The non-dualistic life of fatuous divisions and compartmentalisations is gone as Jesus draws all things into Himself.
AN INCARNATION OF JESUS
It cannot be emphasised too much that Christianity is a person rather than a religion. There is no other religion based on God incarnated in humans and manifesting as the church like there is in the Kingdom Jesus began. The fact that God gets to be manifested as His people is why the Faith Jesus began is a kingdom and not a religion. It begins in the spirit and manifests in our flesh.
Jesus’ Kingdom is the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of the sons and daughters of God.
FACE OF CHRIST IS YOU
Jesus Christ is not only fully God. Jesus Kingdom is the multiplication of Himself as the people who believe Him. Thus, He spoke of the church built without human hands. It is in this way – the new and living way that God comes in our flesh. It is in this way in the living expression of Himself as us that we are the church built without human hands and not an ideology, not a belief system, a sect or a cult. We are more than an institution. We are an incarnation that is the Kingdom of God’s sons with agency, not as the religious.
BRANCHES AND FRUIT
The simplicity of the Gospel is not only that we are forgiven for our sins. But that all who believe are the manifestation of Christ. We manifest Christ as ourselves when we live the eucharist rather than perform it as a rite. In Christ we become part of God and fully ourselves. As the expression of Jesus we are the Body of Christ. It’s not a definition. It’s oneness with God actualised as us. The fact of the personal Jesus joining us to the personal trinity makes us sons of God in a way that law or religion can never do.
BEING THE BODY OF LIFE
We are the Body as we live in this oneness. Not so much as we cite scriptures about being the Body. We can if we are not careful live in a half-gospel in which we are notionally in the Body of Christ but actually living this body of death in the law/moralism/religion.
CHRIST OUR FREEDOM
‘Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!’ Rom 7.24,25 NIV. We are made alive because our adamic body of death is being extinguished and replaced by Christ our life.
SONS OF GOD OR DEAD BONES
One can live a skeletal, fundamentalist Christianity of word-constructs. We might live out our lives in a literary, intellectualised, contractual Christianity. Or we may adopt a religion of good works. Whether we are rivers of spirit and life depends not on how sincere or avid we are. But whether we have started from first base: The trinity in us. You live as the expression of Christ because He has come in your flesh and is the multiplication of His life and our inheritance in you and in us. This is the authentic Body of Christ.
PHANTOMS OF THE UNSELF
Living from the law we might rise to be ciphers of righteousness and by adhering to religion we might get to be shadows of real ourselves. Only through incarnation and Christ come in our flesh can we actually become persons in the sense of persons who are sons of God and not figments of some construct of the knowledge of good and evil. Spirituality/sonship is not our possession in a law mindset. It is ours in Christ our life.
A PERSONAL EXPRESSION
Genuine spiritualty cannot be defined in words. It is the state of being that is Father manifest as His daughters and sons.
Torrance writes, “[It Is] in and through Jesus Christ in particular that God’s interrelations with us and our interrelations with God are acutely personalised, for Jesus is the personalising activity of God incarnated in the midst of our human existence and our subject-subject relations. He the incarnate ‘I am’ of God is the personalising Person in relation to whom in the Spirit we are personalised through the reconciling and re-creating activity of the Holy Trinity. In the Lord Jesus Christ himself the one Mediator between God and man, divine and human nature are united in one Person, as the Council of Chalcedon formulated it.” (1) This is the ‘how’ of being spiritual people. It is the ‘how’ because it is the who – who is Christ our life. The simplicity of this mystery is Christ expressed as you and Dawn and Syd and Mary.
THE REAL YOU – SON/DAUGHTER OF GOD
In the I AM of God you become the I am of you, growing into your glory as a son/daughter of God and a river of living water. It should be well known - but it isn’t - that old covenant Believers are unlikely to speak words of spirit and life. One will never be spirit and life simply by ‘doing the law.’ We irrigate the world with spirit and life in oneness with God. We already have it. Just live in your inheritance.
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (p. 160). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
GET IT ALL!
Many Christians live a diluted gospel, and some live a non-gospel. The core of your life is your already certified union with God in Jesus. Jesus is the New Covenant – the guarantee of our oneness with God in Person. This is holy communion in the Everyday.
There is nothing fragmented or compartmentalised about God; no hybrid where one part is an abstraction and the other part person. Baxter observes, “The Trinitarian life is a life of unchained fellowship and intimacy, fired by passionate, self-giving love and mutual delight. Such love, giving rise to such togetherness and fellowship, overflows in unbounded joy, in infinite creativity and unimaginable goodness. The gospel begins here with this God and with this divine life, for there is no other.” This is the state of being into which Jesus has drawn us in Himself.
LIFE IN GOD BEGINS WHERE RELIGION ENDS
Our spirituality and life starts with the nature of God as trinity. We become sons/daughters in spirit and in truth as we allow ourselves to be drawn out of the fragmented realm of the law/the knowledge of good and evil, right/left dichotomies agree with Christ that He has woven us into union with God. This is our life in Christ and is our justification and sanctification. This guarantee of inclusion in God in Christ is the New Covenant. The non-dualistic life of fatuous divisions and compartmentalisations is gone as Jesus draws all things into Himself.
AN INCARNATION OF JESUS
It cannot be emphasised too much that Christianity is a person rather than a religion. There is no other religion based on God incarnated in humans and manifesting as the church like there is in the Kingdom Jesus began. The fact that God gets to be manifested as His people is why the Faith Jesus began is a kingdom and not a religion. It begins in the spirit and manifests in our flesh.
Jesus’ Kingdom is the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of the sons and daughters of God.
FACE OF CHRIST IS YOU
Jesus Christ is not only fully God. Jesus Kingdom is the multiplication of Himself as the people who believe Him. Thus, He spoke of the church built without human hands. It is in this way – the new and living way that God comes in our flesh. It is in this way in the living expression of Himself as us that we are the church built without human hands and not an ideology, not a belief system, a sect or a cult. We are more than an institution. We are an incarnation that is the Kingdom of God’s sons with agency, not as the religious.
BRANCHES AND FRUIT
The simplicity of the Gospel is not only that we are forgiven for our sins. But that all who believe are the manifestation of Christ. We manifest Christ as ourselves when we live the eucharist rather than perform it as a rite. In Christ we become part of God and fully ourselves. As the expression of Jesus we are the Body of Christ. It’s not a definition. It’s oneness with God actualised as us. The fact of the personal Jesus joining us to the personal trinity makes us sons of God in a way that law or religion can never do.
BEING THE BODY OF LIFE
We are the Body as we live in this oneness. Not so much as we cite scriptures about being the Body. We can if we are not careful live in a half-gospel in which we are notionally in the Body of Christ but actually living this body of death in the law/moralism/religion.
CHRIST OUR FREEDOM
‘Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!’ Rom 7.24,25 NIV. We are made alive because our adamic body of death is being extinguished and replaced by Christ our life.
SONS OF GOD OR DEAD BONES
One can live a skeletal, fundamentalist Christianity of word-constructs. We might live out our lives in a literary, intellectualised, contractual Christianity. Or we may adopt a religion of good works. Whether we are rivers of spirit and life depends not on how sincere or avid we are. But whether we have started from first base: The trinity in us. You live as the expression of Christ because He has come in your flesh and is the multiplication of His life and our inheritance in you and in us. This is the authentic Body of Christ.
PHANTOMS OF THE UNSELF
Living from the law we might rise to be ciphers of righteousness and by adhering to religion we might get to be shadows of real ourselves. Only through incarnation and Christ come in our flesh can we actually become persons in the sense of persons who are sons of God and not figments of some construct of the knowledge of good and evil. Spirituality/sonship is not our possession in a law mindset. It is ours in Christ our life.
A PERSONAL EXPRESSION
Genuine spiritualty cannot be defined in words. It is the state of being that is Father manifest as His daughters and sons.
Torrance writes, “[It Is] in and through Jesus Christ in particular that God’s interrelations with us and our interrelations with God are acutely personalised, for Jesus is the personalising activity of God incarnated in the midst of our human existence and our subject-subject relations. He the incarnate ‘I am’ of God is the personalising Person in relation to whom in the Spirit we are personalised through the reconciling and re-creating activity of the Holy Trinity. In the Lord Jesus Christ himself the one Mediator between God and man, divine and human nature are united in one Person, as the Council of Chalcedon formulated it.” (1) This is the ‘how’ of being spiritual people. It is the ‘how’ because it is the who – who is Christ our life. The simplicity of this mystery is Christ expressed as you and Dawn and Syd and Mary.
THE REAL YOU – SON/DAUGHTER OF GOD
In the I AM of God you become the I am of you, growing into your glory as a son/daughter of God and a river of living water. It should be well known - but it isn’t - that old covenant Believers are unlikely to speak words of spirit and life. One will never be spirit and life simply by ‘doing the law.’ We irrigate the world with spirit and life in oneness with God. We already have it. Just live in your inheritance.
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (p. 160). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
