TO SOW LIFE INSTEAD OF DEAD SEEDS

Genuine Christianity goes back to Jesus, the apostles, the Church Fathers, the Council of Nicaea and the Reformation. It has a strong expression in Trinitarian Christianity. It isn’t something that was made up in the 19th century with little connection to the past. It’s not only the teaching of Christ and the apostles. It’s a state of being known as the trinity in you.
 
ATONMENT/INCARNATION
 
Because of the atonement the fullness of God is with us and in us – woven into our being. Jesus fed the 5000 showing that people need their spirit fed as much as they need bread. It may be argued that we need Jesus to enliven our spirit as much as we need food or more, given that there are many well-fed people who are dead in their spirit. In mission trip we need to share a gospel that is spirit and life rather than a deviant gospel that perpetuates a half-life. Building houses and doing maintenance for Islanders is not an excuse for leaving their spirit dim and their intellect dull. Christ’s life without limit makes us spiritually and mentally alive and enables us to see truth.
 
NOT BOTTLED UP
 
In the post cross age, God is woven into you. God is never somewhere else. He’s not captured in holy days or sacred/secular dichotomies in time or place. Jesus is not restricted to churches or conferences. Not divided from us in artificial distinctions of sacred/ secular or sabbaths and non-sabbaths. God is not accessed by wearing special clothes and not imprisoned in monasteries. He is alive in you. You are the agent of the new creation Kingdom of God. The comfort of the post cross age is that the temple of God is Christ in you and us. ‘Home’ is you and us at one with God in Jesus. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the Comfort, Peace and Security of our inner being.
 
NO SEPARATION
 
Leanne Payne wrote a book entitled Real Presence. It’s about living incarnated rather than living religious. Unless we live the atonement/incarnation we are not alive no matter who busy we may be.
 
You can live each day in the communion of God which is to say in His real presence. God is in and with you where you are, on any day, whether or not there is a pious demarcation in time or a bunch of manifestations.* The reality of your Christ-life is that Christ is in you and with you always. This is Gospel Reality. Christ in you, is the agent of your healing life and your fruitful life.
 
NOT WORDS BUT IT IS THE WORD
The Gospel of the Kingdom is Christ’s Gospel, the Gospel of the apostles, the Church Fathers and the Gospel that is real because it our living out of the ‘being of God.’ This Gospel is never a construct of the letter that kills because it is alive with trinitarian life – the life of Persons. It is alive because it is the inclusion of human beings in the Family of God in Jesus -  as a result of real activity on the part of the trinity. Alive because of the divine enterprise. Not being an effect of the law and the abstractions of the knowledge of God and evil it is a living word of God. It is the expression of Christ and the realisation of Christ in those who believe – the church made without human hands and the only real church of Kingdom Life.
NOT MADE UP
This gospel of the kingdom is not something anyone can make-up or bend to their own template because it came from God and is being lived out in people by the Spirit of God. It is objectively real in the world and subjectively real in you and I. Don’t make excuses for an adjusted gospel by engaging in works of charity as an excuse to maintain an attachment to a mutated gospel that grows like a cancer in the Body of Christ.
INCOMPREHENSION
‘They could not withstand the spirit by which he spoke.’ Despite the effluvium of false facts, old saws and tired traditions the bearers of dead religion could not cope with the spirit of revelation and life that flowed from Stephen’s lips. Embedded interests do not like truth, intelligence and informed thought.
Today, those who oppose union with God as the norm, either attack it or go into hibernation and live in the bubble they call ‘our perspective’. They become the opiate of religion manifest. Never allow yourself to be enclosed in a capsule of pride and self-indulgence that separates you from the Spirit of Truth and Life.
SELF VINDICATING
Karl Barth writes, “The best theology (not to speak of the only right one) of the highest, or even the exclusively true and real, God would have the following distinction: it would prove itself— by the demonstration of the Spirit and of its power… The word "evangelical” will objectively designate that theology which treats of the God of the Gospel. He is the God who again and again discloses himself anew and must be discovered anew, the God over whom theology neither has nor receives sovereignty…  The object of evangelical theology is God in the history of his deeds. In this history he makes himself known. But in it he also is who he is.” (1)
THE WHO OF GOD
God, as revealed in Christ, is who He is and we are who we are as revealed in Christ. There is one Christ and one Gospel. Not many Christ’s and many gospels. The lies that come forth from the pit would have it that there are as many christs and as many gospels as there are people groups. But this lie is the core deviance of every cunningly devised fable. The purpose of these fables is to dilute and dissipate the re-creative power of Christ’s life as our life. We cannot just make up a gospel and name ourselves as part of the Body of Christ when we are in actual fact an off-shoot.
We are on solid ground with the mind of Christ in the gospel of Christ and incarnated with Him and the fellowship of His life. Christ come in our flesh is our rectitude and our glory. This is the living way of being holy and a true self with potency and not dormant as the scribes.
*Could it be that Revivals consisting of amazing signs faded because they point to the Gospel but they are not the Gospel. The Gospel is our union with God in Jesus Christ.
(1)    Evangelical Theology by Karl Barth