CHRIST OF POTS AND PANS
12/08/24 10:18
Thomas a Kempis lived ‘God of pots and pans.’ God was not only with Him but in Him as Jesus had promised. A life of joyful and useful worship is ours as we live a non-dualistic communion with God as true worship in the Everyday. This is the sacrament of Christ our life.
J. I. Packer writes, “The incarnation is in itself an unfathomable mystery, but it makes sense of everything else that the New Testament contains.” First, God in Christ comes among human beings. Second by the Spirit Christ is expressed in human beings. Third we build His Kingdom by mediating His life into all we do.
IT’S REAL
In the atonement and incarnation, the reconciliation of man to God is made actual in the person and action of Jesus Christ. It is Christ who mediates the belongingness of man to God and Christ who mediates the incarnation of God in man - so that we are united to Father in the spirit of sonship and nurtured as daughters and sons in the communion of the trinity. If we could live this rather than religion and its routines we would like ourselves more and do better at marriage, family and society.
CHRIST ALONE
It is Christ and no other element that imparts His life to us, graces us into His communion and transforms us into His likeness. Thus, Paul speaks of Christ our life and our appearing with Him in glory. Paul adds no other element but asserts that the entirety of our identity and emerging sonship is Christ expressed as us.
CHRIST YOUR BEING
We don’t participate in the divine nature by compliance with the law. We participate in the divine nature because we have been enfolded in God who has reached out to us in Christ to draw us into God’s Communion. Christ by the Spirit is imbued in our being. This is life in the spirit that bears fruit in the flesh.
‘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 NIV.
INTERWOVEN
We are made one with God by the Christ of God and are made godly as a result of our participation in the divine nature. Godliness is not an abstraction. Godliness is the maturation of who we are as sons and daughters of God in our inclusion in God. True holiness is more than the absence of sin. It is growth into the limitless expression of a son/daughter of God.
Baptism is an excellent picture of this participation, in that we are immersed in the communion of God that is the trinity as a result of which we take on the likeness of the sons of God.
BRIDGED
Thomas Torrance writes, “It should now be clear that the oneness of God's being and act in the incarnation and the atonement once for all bridges the relation between man and God, history and eternity. Jesus Christ himself, God and man in his one Person, is the way, the truth and the life, and there is no other way to the Father.
LIVNG WAY
“In him priest and sacrifice, offering and the offeror are one, so that he constitutes in himself the new and living way opened up for us into God's immediate presence… In him God has drawn near to us, and we may draw near to God with complete confidence as those who are sanctified together with Jesus, and who are included in his atoning self-presentation through the eternal Spirit to the Father. That is surely what it means for us sinners to have access to the Father through the blood of Christ and in one Spirit.” (1)
Earl Paulk writes, “We are on earth as extensions of God to finish the work He began. We are the essence of God, His on-going incarnation in the world.”
(1) Thomas Torrance, The Mediation of Christ. P 115.
