There are folks whose moan is, ‘They have done me wrong.” This is their lament in every conversation. It is a neurotically debilitating symptom of living in the knowledge of good and evil – in one side of it at least – the other side of which is our self-justification in the intimation that we are not like those cads who have ‘done me wrong’. ‘I thank you that I am not as other men’ is a pumping up of our identity in a negative way. There is a living way to be a true self that is Christ our life. But this is not open to us until we stop living our private version of the knowledge of good and evil as if it is Christianity.
YOU ROSE IN CHRIST There is a new us – the person we are living in the resurrected Jesus. This is living a state of being instead of a religion that is pretty much a Christian version fo the knowledge of good and evil. What we need is the genuine new life that is ours by living Christ come in our flesh – an incarnation rather than a belief system.
DON’T LIVE CRIPPLED “Until this redeemed self is acknowledged and accepted, we live out of the immature, unaffirmed self, and we cannot hear God aright. From that centre, we also “mishear” our fellows, and they become the target of the diseased “matter” that yet resides within our souls—that is, our fears of rejection, our bitterness, envy, anger, and sense of inferiority. These invariably project themselves into the minds and hearts of those we love the most, piercing them like deadly arrows. Until we accept the new self, we are dangerous to ourselves and to others; even though we are Christians.” (1)
CHRISTIAN MISERY The sad fact is that Christians can be toxic to each other when they live in legalism and a form of Christianity that goes no deeper than externalities and formulations. Operatives in legalistic institutions can be adept at gaslighting each other. Christians who have served with each other in missions can tell horror stories of fraught relationships and spasms of judgmentalism. Gregory Boyd alerts us to the fact that this is the result of a subverted Christianity – the kind that is version of the knowledge of good and evil instead of ‘Christ come in our flesh’.
Unless the self is the expression of Christ in us we have no chance of being a real self, let alone a gracious self. Loving those not like us is a challenge and almost impossible unless the grace of Christ is expressed as us by the Spirit.
IMPOTENT WITNESS “My moral self, which is always in flux, becomes the measure, and we have again lost any Absolute Measure. It seems the False Self would rather have very few “wins” than let God win with everybody.” (2) Much Christianity is an addiction to partial grace because we love the idea that we can work up a measure of entitlement from our own innate goodness. How wrong. The truth is, however that any grace/virtue or Godliness we may venture is always the effect of Christ in us. To minister real grace and real love we may as well start here in the first place in the effective living way of Christ who is our life.
(1)Payne, Leanne. The Healing Presence: Curing the Soul through Union with Christ (p. 54). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. (2)Rohr, Richard. Immortal Diamond: The search for our true self . SPCK. Kindle Edition.