JUST SAY YES
01/10/24 12:14
All of life comes from union with God . Humanity was birthed out of God, out of the trinity to be precise. The trinity desire that we share in their joy of being – of being alive in the fullness of life. Jesus came from this Communion to draw us into its Fellowship.
To be part of His life we must say ‘yes’ to His invitation ‘to come to Him’. That’s yes to Jesus inclusion of us in His life.
WHERE THE LIFE IS
Unless we enter the Rest of God and come to God with humility and in response to His invitation to receive life to the full , we will not understand life to the full and neither will we enter this abundant life.
In an Age piece, the leader of the Hindu community in Vitoria said, “Hinduism is more than just religion. “For us, it is indivisible from our everyday life.” This what it should be for Christians. Not compartmentalised, not restricted to praise and worship services or sacred days – but as the incarnation in all of life.
This is Paul’s meaning in the words ‘In Him we live and move and have our being’ and ‘Christ who is our life.’ We bring disgrace on the church and the name of Christ when there is a disconnect between our touting ourselves as Christian but exhibiting public dishonesty while disparaging the poor and espousing negativism/stagnation as a way of life. Don’t advertise yourself as Christian when you are about everything to do with the political spirit of self-interest and greed.
Our life is not found in words about God which means it is not found in a list of beliefs about Him or our claiming to be Christian. It’s found in ‘being’ – in being one with Him.
NOTIONALITY
We may be joined to words and yet not one with the Living Word in a fulsome sense. We are not rebels. But we are Believers who have embraced a gospel that leaves us short on the entirety of the reconciliation that is ours in Christ. The ‘carnal Christian’ as Watchman Nee describes it.
But you are not in Adam’s realm of compartmentalised godliness/self-justification. You are in Christ and His love and grace to the self and to all.
BLIND MAN’S HUFF
We are saying that if we will not enter our inheritance of oneness with Christ and leave it in the ground with the attitude, ‘You are a hard man, reaping where you did not sow,’ we will not understand the meaning of life, let alone the meaning of the scriptures and the truth of our new covenant inheritance of Christ our life.
IT'S NOT JUST WORDS
Speaking of knowing God and our inheritance in its fullness Torrance writes, “In a faithful interpretation of the New Testament we may not treat the words employed in it as if they were no more than transient linguistic symbols detached from any objective content in divine revelation, and as if they were not lively oracles through which God speaks to us in Person.
Rather must we treat them as words which the incarnate Word of God has deliberately assimilated to himself in communicating and interpreting himself to us in the course of his reconciling activity.
That is to say, in the words of the Bible through which the Word of God’s trinitarian self-revelation reaches us, we have to do not with some divine Word detached from his Being and Activity, but with the very Being of God speaking to us and acting upon us in an intensely personal way.
In and through them we encounter the living Word who is identical with God himself, the Word in whom we have to do with the Person and Act of God, the Son made man in Jesus Christ, and are thereby summoned to personal commitment and faith in Christ and through cognitive union with him to have knowledge of God the Father.”(1)
The above is about not living in the letter but in Christ come in our flesh. This is the incarnated life.
PROOF TEXTING
The real body of Christ are part of His Being. They are the incarnation realised. ‘Realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20. The incarnated you makes you part of the one loaf.
Our oneness with God and membership of the Body of Christ does not depend on our citing a scripture about belonging to the One Loaf (1 Cor 10.17). It depends on our living in Christ apart from the law. One might be married to a spouse according to a marriage certificate without ever having lived with that spouse and consummated the marriage. People in their thousands leave ‘marriages’ that are not in fact marriages because they are marriage in the letter only. Similarly, it’s possible to have christianity that is not life because we are not married to Christ but a projected version of ourselves.
ONE HUSBAND
‘I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy. I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to him’ 2 Cor 11.12 NIV.
One with God we have a quality of being and a power of perception that is not available to the legalist/ fundamentalist tied to abstractions and word structures. But we do see with light when one with Christ we are spirit and light.
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (p. 42). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
