UNDOING EMBEDDED LIES
25/08/24 08:33
In this season there can be confusion among Believers with the hazard of our being side-tracked by false christ’s and false gospels promoted by habit or by presumption. Those who have been socialised into perverse gospels find it difficult to enter their freedom in the Truth.
THE LIE
The big lie is that you must earn Christ. Hitler was said to claim that the bigger the lie, the more likely people are to believe it. We can see this attitude embedded in the utterances of some contemporary political demagogues. People have asked me, ‘How do we avoid error and the folly of falsehood parading itself as Christianity? To put it another way, how do we avoid the futility of Christian populism and live in the riches of an un-diluted Christ?
THIS IS HOW
“According to Matt. 11:27 and Lk. 10:22, there is an exclusive relation of knowing between the Father and Son and we are drawn into that relation through the Spirit as is taught in 1 Cor. 2:9-12, such that it is only by receiving the Spirit of God from Christ that we can share in the Son’s knowledge of the Father and the Father’s knowledge of the Son which would otherwise be closed to us.” The Spirit shares the Father and Sons intimate knowledge of themselves with us who choose to know God as God is.
BASIC HOLY SPIRIT INSTRUCTION
“This is what was embodied in Jesus himself in the incarnation. Hence, the actualisation of that unique revelation of God the Father in Jesus Christ and its mediation to us in the Holy Spirit sent by the Father in the name of the Son, tell us that God may not now be known by us in his undifferentiated and unnameable oneness, behind the back of Jesus Christ, or without the gift of the Holy Spirit.” We learn who the Christ of God is from the witness of the Holy Spirit whose lives to reveal Christ to us as Christ and His Gospel are.
MIND OF CHRIST INSTEAD IT THE MIND OF YOU
“The incarnation therefore is the place within history where we may know God in himself because, if our thinking begins with Jesus Christ as the revelation of God the Son in his unique relation with the Father and the Spirit, then we are in fact thinking from a centre in God and not from a centre in ourselves.” (1)
This means we are safe from deceit and warped gospels when Christ and not our received ideas is our Lord. A false Christ can be the Christ we must un-learn because it is not Him, but a distorted construct – often a cunningly devised fable and as such our idol. This captivity is easy to undo when Jesus is our Lord and our idol is not our institutionally distilled ideas or our personal fantasies.
Some of us need to decide if we will let Jesus be our Savior. ‘Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom’. When vested interests are ‘the Lord’ there is the spirit of antichrist, and anti-life.
(1)Introduction to, Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) . Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
