TO GET ALONG WITH YOU AND OTHERS

 
By living the incarnated life, the communion that is the trinity is imparted to us in marriage, family and church life.
 
In Jesus Christ we have been made one with God. In Jesus Christ God has been made one with us. In this mysterious communion we have an interwoveness with God that exceeds the fellowship that was ours before the fall.
 
The fall is undone in Jesus Christ.
In Jesus you are one with Christ and not one with Adam.
In Jesus you are not in the law. You are in the incarnation.
In the incarnation you are in the Spirit.
In the Spirit you are graced to be at one with yourself and equipped for community with others.
 
GRACE IS CHRIST
 
Grace is Christ our life. Martin Davis observes with Torrance that “All human relations with God derive from God’s grace, whereby He freely establishes reciprocity between himself and his creatures.” It is ignorance of this that makes many attempts at Christian community still born.
 
GOD HAS DONE IT
 
Our acceptance with Christ is of God. It’s not something acquired by taking steps to Christ. Before the foundation of the world God took steps to ensure that Christ would become our life in God. God had chosen humanity in Christ “before” the foundation of the world (Eph 1:4).  Christ, the Lamb of God, was slain before the foundation of the world to make us one with God forever (Rev13:8).
 
GRACED TRANSFORMATION
 
The words ‘Christ come in the flesh’ mean that Christ has come in humanity as well as in our personal lives. This truth realised is the engine of the new creation and of personal healing and wholeness. The pristine life of God is funnelled into our being in the person of Jesus by the Holy Spirit. In Jesus the Spirit and Father we are truly daughters and sons who are undergoing transformation and tutoring in life. In His life we have access to the trinitarian life of God who is the Source of all true community.
 
GOD IS SALVATION
 
Thomas Torrance asserts that, “Unless there is a relation of oneness in being and act between Jesus Christ and the eternal God, then the bottom falls out of
the Gospel message of salvation, and we are still in the grip
of our sins.” (1)
 
This ‘being and act’ is the accomplishment of God, being who God is in Christ. God has mediated Himself to us in Christ and us to Himself in Christ so that we are enfolded in God as a state of being. Our part is to agree with what God has done in Christ and REALISE that we have been woven into to the Holy Family. This is where we take on the divine nature, where we mature as daughters and sons and fulfil our destiny as our real selves in this life. Thus we are agents of His kingdom rather than ‘place holders’.
 
(1) The Mediation of Christ, p.124