A GENEROUS OVERFLOWING GOSPEL
15/01/25 12:41
Should we choose, we can ‘make up’ our theology or at least assemble it according to our own ‘lights.’ This will turn out to be the sociology of knowledge culture of the denomination in which we were raised.
LIGHT AHEAD
Being raised in an unorthodox or even an aberrant Christian theology is not all bad. If we have a passion for life – which is none other than a passion for Jesus, whether we realise it or not – we will seek out the truth and eventually ‘know of the doctrine.’ We will if we have not become paralysed in the bubble in which we have been raised.
Double-mindedness in any sphere confuses and paralyses. The pure in heart get to know God as God is. They get more of life. Knowing God and experiencing life to the full is not had all at once but it’s a revelation that takes place over the course of one’s life.
LIFE IS INFINITE
I knew of a girl who had a passion for life from her infancy. As she grew older she was impatient of any belief or practice that restricted uninhibited life – especially when as a religion it smothered people in the name of God. Wrong beliefs, when held to, because we have some vested interest in maintaining them. are the sisters of ecclesiastical sexual abuse. Both of them in their own way, misrepresent God and degrade others in the name of God.
YOU WILL LEARN HOW TO SEE
If you have a passion for life, you will ‘see God’ and learn from the teaching of Jesus and the apostles. Incarnated with God you will be accompanied and taught by Father, Son and Holy Spirit in all you do as well as in your spiritual life – which in the incarnated life is all of life un-bisected by the sacred and secular illusion.
GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD
Our life is not just about us, our devotions and our family. Our life is about the earth. If we are not interested in nurturing the Earth we are not interested in what God is interested in and in this aspect of our living, Christ died for nothing. Healing is more than some gimmick we do at the front of the church. Basic healing is the healing of the world’s separation from God.
‘Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is the new creation’ Gal 6.15 NIV.
CHRIST DIED/LIVES FOR THE WORLD
God so loved the world that He gave His only son. The ‘world’ means society, the nations, the physical earth and the biomass. ‘Christ our life’ means that the resurrection life of Jesus is to flow to the entire creation. Not just to the so called ‘deserving.’ But to all for whom the at-one-ment of God applies, which is everyone.
Make sure your god is the God of Christ and that your christ is the Christ of God.
FALSE GOD
“If we attempt to grasp in ourselves the knowledge of God through an independent natural theology, then we do not arrive at the God and Father of Jesus Christ, the Christian God, but at an abstract deity who is in truth merely the projection of ourselves.” (1) This is the delusion in which some communities live.
HONEST BELIEF
In science the projection of our own ideas into the data and the conclusion is not science - at least not honest science. The interpretation of the Bible according to our preconceived notions is not God’s theology. The purveying of a partisan gospel that differs from the gospel of Jesus and the apostles is not Godliness nor is it a fulsome belonging to the Body of Christ. The incarnation can be lived according to our persona and individuality, but there is only one gospel that is the soil from which this gospel grows.
A degraded gospel produces degraded, malformed and limited people. The gospel of Jesus and the apostles always makes people who they are and more than they were.
(1) Morrison, Stephen D.. T. F. Torrance in Plain English (Plain English Series Book 2) (p. 99). Beloved Publishing, LLC. Kindle Edition.