YOUR TREASURE IS LIFE TO THE FULL
18/10/22 15:01
Jesus Christ is always Himself. He is life Himself. He lives in the shadow of none and restores those who are shadows of themselves to real life. We are alive and real in Christ our life.
IS OUR REALITY CHRIST
As someone noted on Anzac Day, Jesus is, so to speak, like the original Anzac who gave His life for the world. I see teens and youth at Anzac Cove remembrance services weeping for the dead. Or are they weeping for humanity. Both, I suggest. If Jesus, the Prince of Peace had been received as who He is, there would be no need for Anzac days and tears over the cruelty and folly of war. Who is to blame? The father of lies? Or are we at fault because we have never embraced the reality that it is Jesus and not His stuff (actually our stuff) that is our life?
A LESSER LIFE?
Writers like Gregory Boyd and Stephen Crosby emphasize the new covenant. They minister its freedom and life because so many of God’s people living in something less – like old covenant religion or a mixture.
Being right is good but being love is better. Love may be expressed in truth and realizes itself in sound doctrine. But real love is Jesus Christ.
BE TEACHABLE
While we may not live out of doctrine we should live out of what God accomplished for us in Jesus. We cannot afford to dispense with the new covenant out of ignorance or stubbornness. God in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, Christ in us, Christ our life, we and Father living as one – all this is ours because God won it for us. To ignore the new covenant and its life in the Spirit is grave folly and a sentencing of ourselves to smallness.
‘I say this because many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist’2 JOHN 1.7 NIV.
CHRIST YOUR LIFE
Don’t label Truth-Tellers as ungracious to preserve your delusion. The spirit of anti-christ is an attitude. Within Christianity, it seeks to substitute religion for Christ, to reduce His significance and hollow out the power that is in His name by making Him less than He is. By focusing on His stuff and living in the conceit that this stuff is Him, we delude ourselves and rob the world of light. But in Him we are light.
DEADNESS DISGUISED
Anti-christ is a spirit that flourishes in all that is not Christ promoting itself as Christ. Satan sought to kill Jesus when He was an infant. He succeeded in getting the religious to crucify Jesus. But in doing so he undid Himself and His kingdom. In Christ all that Satan succeeded in letting lose in Adam died. In Christ the killing of death and the resurrection of the life of heaven began when Jesus rose from the dead. When we as Believers can embrace Jesus Himself as our life and let go of religion and its suffocating 'stuff,' we will see a rapid advance of the new creation. We will see social and economic turmoil abate and a witness that Islam has no answer for.
INCARNATION
Incarnation meant God came as Jesus of Nazareth. Today incarnation means Christ come in you.
Religion can produce some strange beliefs and practices. There is this scourge that manifests hate and violence in the name of God. The plan to save the world through murder and atrocity did not come from God. Naively the uninformed and obtuse say the rise of terror and violence has nothing to do with religion. It does. The seed makes the tree and the tree bears the fruit. It is an ideology and there is a spirit in that ideology - the spirit of anti-christ that is anti-life, anti-love and anti-human. But here’s the thing. A Christianity obsessed with law, judgment, condemnation and wrath differs from this culture only in degree. Christianity that favors law over incarnation promotes subtle forms of death.
‘Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us’ 1 John 7 – 12 NIV.
NONSENSE IN GOD’S NAME
Religion produces peculiar distortions. Some obsess over ancestry. Some forbid blood transfusions. Others worship church and the Bible but do not know Jesus. Others rob Jesus of His divinity and rely on their faint christ. Still others ignore the new covenant. They tie themselves to the law and attempt to make their Sabbath their christ. By tying themselves to their Sabbath they neutralize Jesus and strive to maintain themselves in the law of sin and death. They are the marketers of self-made grace/sanctification. People across many religions can call their bondage freedom and its humbug a privilege. I heard a Christian pastor tell a man from another denomination that 'the law' made him 'free.' But this is the same kind of freedom that a holy man might manufacture with a mind-game as he sits on a bed of nails. Never speak nonsense in the name of God.
‘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 PLAN
Father’s plan for you is for you to live in His Son and for His Son to be your life. This is a life of renewal and transformation by the Spirit of Christ pervading your being. In Jesus you are constantly washed and continually renewed into His likeness. The life of Jesus is not yes and no. It's not double-talk or humbug or nonsense dressed in god-clothes. It is life itself. Christ our life is our best witness to captives. Where He lives and is seen in us captives are set free. People come under the influence of His wisdom and revelation. Their hearts are revived by His life-giving Spirit and all veils are taken away.
‘He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit’ Titus 3.5 NIV.
IS OUR REALITY CHRIST
As someone noted on Anzac Day, Jesus is, so to speak, like the original Anzac who gave His life for the world. I see teens and youth at Anzac Cove remembrance services weeping for the dead. Or are they weeping for humanity. Both, I suggest. If Jesus, the Prince of Peace had been received as who He is, there would be no need for Anzac days and tears over the cruelty and folly of war. Who is to blame? The father of lies? Or are we at fault because we have never embraced the reality that it is Jesus and not His stuff (actually our stuff) that is our life?
A LESSER LIFE?
Writers like Gregory Boyd and Stephen Crosby emphasize the new covenant. They minister its freedom and life because so many of God’s people living in something less – like old covenant religion or a mixture.
Being right is good but being love is better. Love may be expressed in truth and realizes itself in sound doctrine. But real love is Jesus Christ.
BE TEACHABLE
While we may not live out of doctrine we should live out of what God accomplished for us in Jesus. We cannot afford to dispense with the new covenant out of ignorance or stubbornness. God in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, Christ in us, Christ our life, we and Father living as one – all this is ours because God won it for us. To ignore the new covenant and its life in the Spirit is grave folly and a sentencing of ourselves to smallness.
‘I say this because many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist’2 JOHN 1.7 NIV.
CHRIST YOUR LIFE
Don’t label Truth-Tellers as ungracious to preserve your delusion. The spirit of anti-christ is an attitude. Within Christianity, it seeks to substitute religion for Christ, to reduce His significance and hollow out the power that is in His name by making Him less than He is. By focusing on His stuff and living in the conceit that this stuff is Him, we delude ourselves and rob the world of light. But in Him we are light.
DEADNESS DISGUISED
Anti-christ is a spirit that flourishes in all that is not Christ promoting itself as Christ. Satan sought to kill Jesus when He was an infant. He succeeded in getting the religious to crucify Jesus. But in doing so he undid Himself and His kingdom. In Christ all that Satan succeeded in letting lose in Adam died. In Christ the killing of death and the resurrection of the life of heaven began when Jesus rose from the dead. When we as Believers can embrace Jesus Himself as our life and let go of religion and its suffocating 'stuff,' we will see a rapid advance of the new creation. We will see social and economic turmoil abate and a witness that Islam has no answer for.
INCARNATION
Incarnation meant God came as Jesus of Nazareth. Today incarnation means Christ come in you.
Religion can produce some strange beliefs and practices. There is this scourge that manifests hate and violence in the name of God. The plan to save the world through murder and atrocity did not come from God. Naively the uninformed and obtuse say the rise of terror and violence has nothing to do with religion. It does. The seed makes the tree and the tree bears the fruit. It is an ideology and there is a spirit in that ideology - the spirit of anti-christ that is anti-life, anti-love and anti-human. But here’s the thing. A Christianity obsessed with law, judgment, condemnation and wrath differs from this culture only in degree. Christianity that favors law over incarnation promotes subtle forms of death.
‘Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us’ 1 John 7 – 12 NIV.
NONSENSE IN GOD’S NAME
Religion produces peculiar distortions. Some obsess over ancestry. Some forbid blood transfusions. Others worship church and the Bible but do not know Jesus. Others rob Jesus of His divinity and rely on their faint christ. Still others ignore the new covenant. They tie themselves to the law and attempt to make their Sabbath their christ. By tying themselves to their Sabbath they neutralize Jesus and strive to maintain themselves in the law of sin and death. They are the marketers of self-made grace/sanctification. People across many religions can call their bondage freedom and its humbug a privilege. I heard a Christian pastor tell a man from another denomination that 'the law' made him 'free.' But this is the same kind of freedom that a holy man might manufacture with a mind-game as he sits on a bed of nails. Never speak nonsense in the name of God.
‘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 PLAN
Father’s plan for you is for you to live in His Son and for His Son to be your life. This is a life of renewal and transformation by the Spirit of Christ pervading your being. In Jesus you are constantly washed and continually renewed into His likeness. The life of Jesus is not yes and no. It's not double-talk or humbug or nonsense dressed in god-clothes. It is life itself. Christ our life is our best witness to captives. Where He lives and is seen in us captives are set free. People come under the influence of His wisdom and revelation. Their hearts are revived by His life-giving Spirit and all veils are taken away.
‘He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit’ Titus 3.5 NIV.
