BEING WITH GOD
01/01/25 12:15
We can live prayer as pieces of religion of we can be in prayer as a state of being. Jesus is our Mediator but is not engaged in a constant stream of verbiage as in ‘Receive poor hopeless Joe.’ He mediates to us Himself. Such mediation is towards God and towards us. He is meditating His Presence and life into us by what is called incarnation. It’s life in the Spirit. His Person is His mediation.
IT’S NOT A COMPARTMENTALISED KINGDOM
If we are living in religion it’s natural to think of prayer as bits and pieces done in that compartment of our lives we think of as religion. If Christ is our life we will not be living in some fenced off space we call our religion but will be living in oneness with God. Christ our life is not Christ at our prayer chair or Christ in church. It is Christ our life. We are not eliminated by Christ. We are imbued with His Spirit. Christ incarnated in us is a foretaste of the New Earth which will not be the old earth destroyed but the planet expressed as the Dwelling Place of God and the Saved.
We may think of prayer as being one with God where we are and in whatever we are doing. We may say things to God. We may just be as one can, when with a good friend or with someone we love. Incarnated with God we are an expression of the New Creation and the New Earth. We are agents of Christ’s Kingdom of grace and real life.
A STATE OF ONENESS
Christ our life is as different from living in a compartment of the knowledge of good and evil to being an eagle who is let out of the chicken pen to fly in the wild.
THE UN-PEACE OF MISGUIDED EFFORT
For some, much of what is done in ‘Christianity’ as religion, is not only working to obtain our salvation but disciplining our lives to have Jesus and be worthy of Jesus. Thus, the saying ‘Keeping close to Jesus.’ This is both a ‘double jeopardy’ and a mistaken view of a life in Christ. Everyone’s gift from God is our inclusion in God in Jesus. This is CHRIST OUR LIFE rather than ‘Us our attempted Christian life.’ This is to say that much of what passes for Christianity is a ‘work’ which means that such ‘workers’ might look askance when it is proposed that our life in Christ is far more simple and much more efficacious than any life as a worker or a slave as Paul urges in Galatians.
“But what does Scripture say? “Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman’s son.” Gal 4.30 NIV.
HE IS US
The vicarious humanity of Jesus means that Jesus is for us and as us in every way. There is no link that you have to join up yourself – other than agree with Christ that He is your life.
HE IS OUR LIFE
Thomas Torrance observes that “Christian prayer as grounded in and governed by the fact that through his Incarnation Jesus Christ has stepped into that relationship as the Mediator, who not only brings God and man and man and God near to each other in propitiation but who in doing so stands in our place where we cry in prayer to God and makes himself our prayer, a prayer not in word or even in an act only but a prayer which he is in his own personal Being.” (1) Of course what we are saying in these posts is that Christ represents us in His personal being continuously in every way. You are never alone.
GOD IN YOU
‘Jesus replied, "Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them’
John 14.23 NIV.
Jesus is our prayer and our life. This is what mediation means. He mediates Himself into our being and mediates our being into oneness with God in actual fellowship with the Holy Family. You can live in this and talk to Jesus in this reality.
(1) Thomas Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, p81.