WHEN YOUR SPIRIT IS ALIVE, YOU ARE ALIVE

There is a higher calling than being in church. It’s being alive in your spirit in church and in the world. Is your spirit alive or are you just busy? It’s good to help the less fortunate. But being a son/daughter who is alive in our spirit is just as important as decent housing and adequate food. This is the healing to which Jesus’ miracles pointed.  Jesus fed the 5000 with Himself. The bread pointed to the real food who is Christ.

All can be animated with Christ-Life. It’s called incarnation. This is not something we earn. It’s what we have. There is no need to live in a Valley of Dead Bones theology when we have Christ our life as our indwelling wholeness and humanity. Grace is Jesus Christ and Grace is the fullness of God at work. God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. We are reconciled and this is our starting place in our journey into true Godliness and selfhood.

CHRIST IS OUR RE-UNION WITH GOD
Cambria Janae Kaltwasser in The Princeton Theological Review writes, “Christ carries the full burden of our alienation from God. Yet, astonishingly, by making our abandonment His own, Christ re-establishes our relationship with Him. By following us into our darkness, He pours His light upon our human hearts, cleansing them from within, inviting us into a renewed communion with the Triune God. As Torrance writes, in taking up our humanity, “God takes upon himself the very thing that separates us from him and turns it into the instrument of his love in binding us to him.” (1) This is the mystery of Godliness made real in you.

This is as clear an exposition of grace as can be found anywhere, yet not grace as an abstraction but grace in the form of ‘Christ our life’.

(1)     Cambria Janae Kaltwasser, Meeting Christ in the Shadow of Death, The Princeton Theological Review, Volume XIII, No. 2, Fall 2007, Issue 37