OF THE ONE LOAF
09/10/24 08:15
We can, if we are naïve, think a relationship with church is a relationship with Christ. There is one living way of a relationship with Christ and this is personal. This is our personal agreement with Jesus that He has included us in His life. In this relationship we are the One Loaf.
DORMANT ENTITIES
A relationship with anything that is not Jesus does not impart to us divine life. But when we live in the union with Jesus that is ours, we impart to all else God’s Spirit and life. Action is not what makes us useful to Christ’s Kingdom. God’s spirit and life flowing through our actions makes us life-givers.
It’s an easy thing to give an address or write a piece in the mode of the knowledge of good and evil. An intellectualised bit of Christianity can have the appearance of spirituality when it is mainly a dry creek bed plus two drops of water. Rational-legal talks may give information, but not spirit and life. This is the province of incarnated living - of real life in the Spirit.
YOUR GIFTED ONENESS
Union with God is not something we earn. It’s something that is ours from Christ’s gift of Himself to us. In Christ you are in God in communion with the Trinity.
JESUS DID IT
“It is only through Christ and in the Spirit that we are given access to the Father, and thereby may know God in his one yet three-fold self-revelation as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. While this knowledge of God is actualised in us through the Communion of the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, its content is determined and informed by what has once for all taken place in Jesus Christ, the Lord and Saviour of mankind.” (1)
REAL CHRIST
The life of God is mediated to us by the Christ or God. Thus, we should ensure that we are not caught in a web of a lesser christ and a limited gospel vitiated by works, limited grace and a half-baked atonement that we have taken on board by mistake. It’s not that some of us are not fully saved. It’s that through a lack of personal attention and the malpractice of others we have absorbed a crooked version of the Gospel that is deficient in. spirit and life.
Jesus is for us to the extent that He is us by representation. Theologians call this the vicarious humanity of Christ. Its two barrels are that Jesus is in place of us and He expresses Himself as us – which is to say that Jill and Bob are an expression of Christ.
“In the modern church Christ’s miracles and supernatural ministry are highlighted to the relative neglect of his sense of justice, peace, and single-minded devotion to the Father’s will. This is true despite the now passé WWJD? (“What Would Jesus Do?”) phenomenon, which, despite its intent to retrieve a robust imitatio Christi, ended up throwing youth back upon themselves due to an almost complete ignorance of the actual life of Christ.
CHRIST EXPRESSED AS YOU
“In its almost total concentration on the cross, classical Christology has lost sight of the true humanity of Christ, lived out through his relationship with the Father in the empowering presence of the Spirit. It is here that a Spirit Christology speaks loudly.” (2) ‘Speaks loudly’ because Jesus liberates us from dead works and imbues us with the expression of Himself as persons and as the Body of Christ. – alive and not passive. The kind of agency that we become is the burning bush kind in which we are a green, fruited tree alive with Christ’s Spirit and Life and so different from a dead tree or a fallen log in the forest.
Holiness, righteousness and wholeness becomes you when Christ is your life.
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (p. 17). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
(2) (2)Habets, Myk. The Anointed Son: A Trinitarian Spirit Christology (Princeton Theological Monograph Series Book 129) (p. 13). Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition
DORMANT ENTITIES
A relationship with anything that is not Jesus does not impart to us divine life. But when we live in the union with Jesus that is ours, we impart to all else God’s Spirit and life. Action is not what makes us useful to Christ’s Kingdom. God’s spirit and life flowing through our actions makes us life-givers.
It’s an easy thing to give an address or write a piece in the mode of the knowledge of good and evil. An intellectualised bit of Christianity can have the appearance of spirituality when it is mainly a dry creek bed plus two drops of water. Rational-legal talks may give information, but not spirit and life. This is the province of incarnated living - of real life in the Spirit.
YOUR GIFTED ONENESS
Union with God is not something we earn. It’s something that is ours from Christ’s gift of Himself to us. In Christ you are in God in communion with the Trinity.
JESUS DID IT
“It is only through Christ and in the Spirit that we are given access to the Father, and thereby may know God in his one yet three-fold self-revelation as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. While this knowledge of God is actualised in us through the Communion of the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, its content is determined and informed by what has once for all taken place in Jesus Christ, the Lord and Saviour of mankind.” (1)
REAL CHRIST
The life of God is mediated to us by the Christ or God. Thus, we should ensure that we are not caught in a web of a lesser christ and a limited gospel vitiated by works, limited grace and a half-baked atonement that we have taken on board by mistake. It’s not that some of us are not fully saved. It’s that through a lack of personal attention and the malpractice of others we have absorbed a crooked version of the Gospel that is deficient in. spirit and life.
Jesus is for us to the extent that He is us by representation. Theologians call this the vicarious humanity of Christ. Its two barrels are that Jesus is in place of us and He expresses Himself as us – which is to say that Jill and Bob are an expression of Christ.
“In the modern church Christ’s miracles and supernatural ministry are highlighted to the relative neglect of his sense of justice, peace, and single-minded devotion to the Father’s will. This is true despite the now passé WWJD? (“What Would Jesus Do?”) phenomenon, which, despite its intent to retrieve a robust imitatio Christi, ended up throwing youth back upon themselves due to an almost complete ignorance of the actual life of Christ.
CHRIST EXPRESSED AS YOU
“In its almost total concentration on the cross, classical Christology has lost sight of the true humanity of Christ, lived out through his relationship with the Father in the empowering presence of the Spirit. It is here that a Spirit Christology speaks loudly.” (2) ‘Speaks loudly’ because Jesus liberates us from dead works and imbues us with the expression of Himself as persons and as the Body of Christ. – alive and not passive. The kind of agency that we become is the burning bush kind in which we are a green, fruited tree alive with Christ’s Spirit and Life and so different from a dead tree or a fallen log in the forest.
Holiness, righteousness and wholeness becomes you when Christ is your life.
(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (p. 17). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
(2) (2)Habets, Myk. The Anointed Son: A Trinitarian Spirit Christology (Princeton Theological Monograph Series Book 129) (p. 13). Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition
