THE TRUTH IS THAT GOD HAS WOVEN US INTO HIMSELF IN JESUS

The Woman at The Well came upon Jesus unexpectedly going about her daily tasks. How could she have known that she would meet her Messiah that day? Jesus remarked to her that Father was looking for worshipers who would worship in Him from the heart and as He was. Who Father was, was standing in front of her in the person of Jesus. To worship in spirit and truth means to seek God from the heart in Jesus. But it is more than this. It’s a state of being in which we join with God in Jesus Christ to live authentically as sons and daughters who originated in God and who have been re-joined to God and made one with Father in Jesus Christ.
 
This is not a think about ‘copying Jesus.’ It’s about agreeing with Jesus, Paul and John that Jesus lives in us to be us.
 
PART OF GOD
 
‘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. This is the how of justification and sanctification – the substance of grace.
 
As parents we know that our children are part of us. As sons of God, we are part of God in a closer manner than this. We are one with God by origin, by destiny and by the Spirit of Sonship. We are one with God by the One Spirit as the result of the reconciliation of the cross and the incarnated presence of God in Believers.
 
IN GOD IN CHRIST= WORSHIP
 
Our union with Father is found in Christ’s union with Father. James Torrance observes that, “Christian worship is our participation through the spirit in the Son's communion with the Father, in his vicarious life of worship and intercession. It is our response to our Father for all that he has done for us in Christ. It is our self-offering in body, mind and spirit, in response to the one true offering made for us in Christ, our response of gratitude (eucharistia) to God's grace (charis), our sharing by grace in the heavenly intercession of Christ.
 
IS IT ABOUT SHARED COMMUNION?
 
“Therefore, anything we say about worship, the forms of worship, its practice and procedure-must be said in the light of him to whom it is a response. It must be said in the light of the gospel of grace. We must ask ourselves whether our forms of worship convey the gospel. Are they an appropriate response to the gospel? Do they help people to apprehend the worship and ministry of Christ as he draws us by the Spirit into a life of shared communion, or do they hinder? Do they make the real presence of Christ transparent in worship, or do they obscure it?”
 
WORSHIP IS A LIFE
 
Many Christians live a meagre life when they have riches in Christ who is their life. Some people are misers because they have been raised by a miser. We can live miser religion because we have been socialised in a distorted miser style religion in which you earn Christ rather than living in the riches that Christ has earned you.
 
CHRIST YOUR LIFE
 
The ‘worship’ Torrance describes is a life and a state of being, crafted by the ingenuity of God to be manifest, in the Christ of God. Then by Him in us. What Torrance describes is our being enveloped in God so that separation is undone, and we are restored to communion with God as a state of being that always applies and always is, irrespective of time or place.
 
LIFE IN THE SPIRIT
 
There’s no compartmentalised life here, no sacred and secular, no clothing that makes one holy and no law from which we live. Why? Because we live in Christ. We live from God and we are the expression of Christ as sons and daughters of God. This is what it means to worship with our life. Christ in us draws us to Himself in ‘order that we be us’.