HOW TO BE A RIVER OF SPIRIT AND LIFE

The clearest and best revelation of God is Jesus Christ. Jesus is in you and with you. He reveals Himself into your being so that those who seek Him will find Him and know God. God represents and reveals Himself to us and the world in Jesus Christ.
 
GODLINESS REVEALS TRUTH
 
Subsidiary to this, the knowledge of God is revealed to us through Godly people. We can serve as priests of His life. Priests mediate His life and reign over all that is dead. Undoing it with the Resurrection Life that is Christ in them.
 
The un-deading of normality does not happen through religious people but from those in whom The Living Word is made flesh in their person. In their person because Jesus is their life – life not from the fact that they may be called ‘good Christians’ * but because Jesus is woven into their being and expressed as George and Sarah and others who have pushed through the layers of myth to live in the naked presence of Christ.
 
LIFE BLOOD
 
Truth is as vital as life and truth is life. To be careless of truth or to absorb that which is not truth for the sake of status or ‘bloody mindedness’ is to insulate ourselves from life and to promote non-life as though it is life. The result will be stagnation and implosion.
 
DULL SPIRIT
 
It’s possible to be a good Christian yet dull in our spirit. Dull because we are not actually alive in Christ but have sought to be alive in religion, its observances and externalities. Some of the most active people are just not alive in their spirit.
 
Because of Christ’s grace we will have experienced drops of His life and occasional jugs of living water -  but not the rivers of living water that are ours when by the incarnation He has become us. This becoming of us is called perichoresis, a word we must understand if we are to be certain that the incarnation is life and legalism a counterfeit.
 
THE NAKED NOW
 
We are the Bride and Jesus Christ is the Husband. Should we read Proverbs we will see that Jesus is not captured by the kind of sexual prudery that can reign in religious circles.
 
Thus, it is our nakedness and oneness with the bridegroom that births wholeness in ourselves and births sons and daughters for God. Perhaps if we realised this and lived in the being and the oneness of God (incarnation), we would be more fertile in advancing the Kingdom of Sons. Certainly more than we are by living in oneness with words, definitions and belief systems. We grow in living as persons.&
 
NON-INSULATED
 
Richard Rohr writes of the ‘naked now’ in which we have allowed Jesus to bring us into encounter with Himself without our religious clothes. Here we are naked of our strategies of self-justification and living from an identity that is totally Jesus; an identity shorn of our inherited presuppositions and personal prejudices. This is the identity that is Christ our life.
 
NAKED YET CLOTHED IN CHRIST
 
Writing of this nakedness Rohr overserves, “We still think of ourselves as mere humans trying desperately to become spiritual, when the Christian revelation was precisely that you are already spiritual and your difficult but necessary task is to learn how to become human.” (1) The problem that the religion addicted person has in discerning the vitality of the uncomplicated Christ our life – is that he is not alive and cannot see. When we comprehend this grow into our glory as individuals, persons and sons/daughters to become agents of real life in the Everyday.
 
PERSON OR ABSTRACTION
 
A law adherent can be a religious person but not a spiritual person. In the law we cannot know God as God is because God is not law. God is personal and God is love.
 
FIG LEAF INSULATION
 
We are insulated from our humanity in religion, especially religion of the fundamentalist kind, where we are captured in words and dualisms. Dualisms that appear to have substance but which in the truly spiritual realm have none. We are always insulated from our humanity when we are insulated from God in the law and in Adamic separation. Oneness with God is ours when Christ is our life because in Him we are one ALL LIFE and absorbing the nature of trinitarian persons.
 
In the life of Jesus we have been brought into the communion of the trinity to be in His communion with the trinity. Thomas Torrance nails it when he writes, “We can know God only if he brings us into communion with him in the inner relations of his own being as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”
 
OURS IS WHAT CHRIST HAS IN GOD
 
This sharing in the knowledge that God made possible through the incarnation of God’s Son and his mediation of the Spirit of the Father and the Son to all.
 
REAL PRESENCE/REAL JESUS DIRECTLY IN YOU
 
“In the incarnation God communicated himself to us in Jesus Christ his beloved Son, not something about himself, but his very Self, and thereby made himself known to us according to his own divine nature as Father.
 
And at Pentecost God poured out upon us his own Spirit who as the Spirit of the Father and the Son is the immediate presence of God to us in his own very being as God. In Jesus Christ God has embodied in our human existence the mutual knowledge which the Father and the Son have of one another.” (1)
 
This knowing of God; this oneness with God is embodied in us because Christ  has come in our flesh. God is incarnated in us. Life in the Spirit is never the old covenant and the law with the gifts added. It cannot be, because the old is separation from God. Life in the Spirit is you and all of us living in the union with God that is already ours. Ours because God is in us and with us.
 
* We can insulate ourselves from this life if the life we think we have – the status and identity we think we are afforded by our sectarian beliefs is more important to us than our identity and life who is Christ.
 
& See The Meaning of Persons by Paul Tournier.
 
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (pp. 54-55). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.