NOTHING SPIRITUAL ABOUT STAGNATION
09/10/24 13:48
Our adamic separation from God had been put to death and the world, unbeknown to itself awaited the resurrection of Jesus and the start of the new Creation. New because we rose with Jesus to grow in the fullness of God in God’s vision for the sons/daughters of God.
HOW KINGDOM BEGAN
The Gospel of Jesus, the Father and Holy Spirit is replete in the at-one-ment and actualised by the incarnation of the trinity in and with us. We have been woven into God and God has been woven into us.
Whether the Easter we celebrate is on the actual date of Jesus’ passion and resurrection, is irrelevant. What it means is that we as human beings have been given a new start in Christ. The cross is the crossroad between Adam our life and Christ our life. Easter is the essence of the Gospel. Easter is sacramental. But the reality is that we are resurrected in Christ into a sacramental life.
GOSPEL IS NOT THE GIFTS
Holy Spirit and the gifts are not a ‘gospel’ on their own. They are not to be lived ‘silo-ed off’ as a sub-set of Christianity as if they are the whole. By itself ‘the gifts’ cannot be the Gospel of the Kingdom. A focus on the gifts and the signs that neglects the atonement and incarnation is an incomplete gospel that makes workers and does not produce sons of God. We are sons of God in Christ and more. Christ is for us and we are His expression.
THE FULL GOSPEL
There was a time when communities spoke of the full gospel as the gifts and anointing of the Holy Spirit. They were correct to do this because a gospel minus Holy Spirit’s presence is a form of Godliness without power. But so is a charismatic gospel when disconnected from the oneness that is ours as a result of the cross and the incarnation. A Holy Spirit gospel detached from the new covenant is not a full gospel and is what Paul named as ‘no gospel at all’.
IN YOU AND WITH YOU
God is not absent from you if you do not have the gifts of the Spirit. God lives in you when you choose Christ as your life. John specifically asserts that the trinity make their home in anyone who obeys Jesus’ teaching. What is this teaching? Not the law and not the gifts. Not even church. This teaching is that Christ is our life. Paul calls this ‘Christ in you’. The gifts and the anointing function properly when they are the expression of healed lives that are healed and whole because they live in oneness with God.
THE GREATER HEALING
Gifts of the Spirit, miracles and signs are advertisements pointing to the healing of our humanity in Christ. This healing is the foundational healing in which ‘The two are made one in Christ’. This healing is the undoing of Adamic separation and the alienation from God that is the fall. The healing is god’s impartation to us of the quality of union that is found in Himself as the Trinitarian God. This is to say that the gift of oneness with God in Jesus Christ and the consequent oneness with self and others is the healing of the creation.
Unless this healing is a feature and the foundation of our ministry in the Spirit it is not the ministry of the Spirit and heaven has not invaded earth.
THE RELEVANT HUMAN CHRIST
Thomas Torrance observes, “Like Christ the Holy Spirit is one in being and of the same being as the Father, but unlike Christ the Holy Spirit is not one in being and of the same being as we are, for he incarnated the Son but does not incarnate himself, he utters the Word but does not utter himself. He directs us through himself to the one Word and Face of God in Jesus Christ in accordance with whom all our knowledge of God is formed in our minds.” (1)
It is Jesus Christ through whom we are woven into God and God is woven into us. It is Jesus Christ incarnated in us who is the resurrection of us and the chaotic world. This is the Easter Life.
ONE SUBSTANCE WITH FATHER AND WITH US
Jesus Christ is one substance with God and humanity. Holy Spirit is not. He is simply deity and never human. Thus, salvation and oneness with God is ours because Christ has come in in the flesh and is incarnated in our being. We may be empowered by the anointing of the Holy Spirit and we should flourish in this empowered agency. But the salvation of God and the oneness with God comes to us by the Christ of God who is both a human being and fully God. We are joined to God because Jesus of Nazareth is fully God. First things first.
Nevertheless, it is Holy Spirit who manifests the presence of Christ and who draws us into the reality of God’s reconciliation of ourselves to God in Christ. Holy Spirit is a Helper and the Comforter because He makes real to us the reality of our inheritance in Christ. Torrance observes again, “God was accessible to his people [Israel] within the covenant relations he had graciously established with them, nowhere more evident than in his personal interaction with Abraham, Moses, or Samuel.
THERE WAS MORE
“Nevertheless, it is also clear that he did not make himself personally accessible to them but remained hidden behind his mighty acts of revelation and salvation. St Paul tells us here, however, that access to knowledge of God as he is in himself has now been provided [by the incarnation] for us through the reconciliation with God brought about by the Cross of Christ. By his blood Christ has reconciled us to God and thereby opened the way for all who believe in his name to enter with him into the holy presence of God and share in the gift of the Holy Spirit which he received from the Father.
“Thus through the Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Communion of the Spirit we sinful human beings have access to the Love of the Father, and know him not from afar but intimately as he is in himself.” (2)
Step into more of the fullness of Christ your life because Jesus is your life.
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (p. 66). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
(2) Ibid. (pp. 68-69). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
