CHRIST IS PERSONAL TO YOU

God cannot be known other than personally – which is to say that God is not known through nature, the law, religion or other people. True, God may be glimpsed via these things but only in the ‘hinder parts’ as when Moses was hidden in the cleft in the rock to see God as He passed by.

YOUR PRIVILEGES
You have more advantages than Moses. God has appeared visibly in Jesus Christ and demonstrated Himself in Jesus’ teaching, cross and resurrection. Not only that, but God is in you because Christ lives in you and by the Spirit witnesses to Himself and the Father.

YOOUR TREASURE
Anyone has more advantage than Moses and David in this post cross era as Jesus announced with the words, ‘I tell you, among those born of women there is no one greater than John; yet the one who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he’ Luke 7.28 NIV. Ensure that you are living in your inheritance and not in a lie.

Jesus along with the enterprise of Father and Holy Spirit undid our separation from God that resulted from Adam’s seduction by the father of lies. God did it by Christ with us, by the cross, the resurrection and the Outpouring of Holy Spirit. We have been made one substance with God. Ensure that you do not live in a lie of the kind that has you earning union with God. Jesus has done that. Live from the union already yours.

AN INFERIOR LIFE
There was no incarnation before the cross. The presence of the Spirit in the lives of the saints before the cross was small compared to the reality today when CHRIST IS ACTUALLY OUR LIFE.

Spiritual gifts and the anointing have their place. But it was not the Holy Spirit who secured your union with God. Jesus did it at great cost in His flesh and now lives with you and in you so that your union with God/communion with the trinity is your everyday life.

TREASURE IN JARS OF CLAY
The Lord’s Table reminds us of and celebrates the basis of our life in God-The fact that in we are one with Christ and thus one with God in Jesus Christ. He in His person is God and us. Our union with God is Jesus. Any believer today has the benefit of the this at-one-ment and the incarnation of the fullness of God in their being. This is not earned. It simply is.

This is you in Jesus, the New Adam. This is your inheritance, and you owe it to yourself to live from Christ as you rather than the more muffled and stultified way of the religion of Christ as you. Living from Christianity instead of living from the incarnation of Christ your life is living from the old covenant when you have been gifted life in the new covenant. What’s new about the new covenant? It’s not the regime of separation in the knowledge of good and evil. It’s the guarantee of union with God in Jesus Christ.

SOMEONE ELSE’S EXPERIENCE
People may take ‘worships’ every morning by doing a ‘reading’ out of a devotional book. The fact is that Christ is already in you and part of you. Whether this is our reality depends on whether we are living a religion or a Christ. To live in Christ is to have Him speak to us of His life every day in all we do.

YOUR LIFE
‘And when Christ, who is your life, is revealed to the whole world, you will share in all his glory’ COL 3.4 NIV. Christ has been revealed and is being revealed in you when you receive Him into yourself.

INTERWOVEN INTO GOD
‘As You, Father, are in Me, and I am in You. May they also be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me’ John 17.21 NIV.

God’s life is mediated to you, not by the law, not by religion, not by deeds of charity or moral behaviours. This life is in you because Christ is in you.  This infinite life is mediated to you by God in person into you innermost being. This is your starting point in Godliness. Realise that you are part of God and God is part of you and bounce off this into Kingdom agency from here. In this state of being you will love life and be alive.

ROOTED
‘Realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20. This is not to negate good works and a righteous life. It is the starting point of such a life. Unless we are so rooted anything we do in religion is bereft of spirit and life and as a result a well-intended but misguided obstruction of the Kingdom of God.

GOD HIMSELF
“Since it is only through himself that God reveals himself, God himself is the personal content of his revelation to us embodied in Jesus Christ his incarnate Son. Since it is only through himself that communion with God is accessible to us, God himself is the personal reality of that communion granted to us in the Holy Spirit. That is to say God’s self-revelation to us is actualised in the Communion of the Holy Spirit through whom God brings his divine Reality to bear personally, and indeed experientially, upon us, both in the address of his Word to us and in our hearing and understanding of that Word.” (1)

HUSK OF RELIGION
We can make an entire religious life out of externalities. If we do, we will exude drops of spirit and life when we could have been rivers of spirit and life. This lived union with God is the soil of the anointing and the gifts. If there is no such soil the gifts fade, become distorted and are unable to fill their purpose as an expression of the incarnation which is Christ our life. This is why at times there is a Holy Spirit bang that fades to a whimper. The incarnation that we celebrate is the basis of our life. Live in this and all you do will be alive and the gifts will be lived from their Source.
 
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (pp. 59-60). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.