CHRIST IS LIFE WITHOUT LIMIT. RELIGION IS LIMITED LIFE
01/12/24 14:57
The law is relevant in that all must pass through it on the way to the limitless life that is theirs in Christ their life. But to stay in it is to stagnate and be a dwarf when one could have been a son. Why stay in year seven all your life when you can graduate into university? There’s more to belonging to the Body of Christ than just belonging. The exceptional part is being in that position in the Body where we access our inheritance in spades. What counts in the Body of Christ is Being – that you are a fully alive organ/person, rather than a disease or a tumour.
GOD IS LOVE AND LOVE IS INCLUSION
The trinity is the key reality and agent of life in the universe. Your inclusion in this communion is the reality in which you should live – if you value limitless life above ‘getting by’. To talk belonging in the body and live from the law is to talk the kind of belonging that is a scarcity outlook. Here life is a poverty mentality because your riches in Christ are oneness with God.
Christ has earned us belonging. In Him we are sons/daughters of God in communion with the Trinity.
SERVED ITS PURPOSE
The law is unable to be a provider of life and an imparter of the life of God in us. As a mature Believer you should not be in it. Struggling in the law and religion has been called the ‘first part of life.’ The ‘second part of life’ is our entrance through the Door of Jesus into His life as our life. This is a mystery and a fact. A mystery because it is incarnation and of the Spirit. It’s a fact because it was accomplished in real time by Jesus Christ and objectively certified in the celebration of the Lord’s Table. The Table or the eucharist is not the reality, however. The Reality is Christ expressed in you and expressed as you. The subtle/powerful Manifest Presence of Christ in the world is the incarnated Jill, George and Ben.
GOD DRAWS US IN
In his book, The Incarnation, Torrance writes, “God knows that his children in their sin and frailty are unable to fulfil his covenant, and so he provides for them a way of covenant response and fulfilment which was but a pointer ahead to the actualisation of the covenant in the very being and life of man.
“That would take place when God provided from within Israel, and from within man’s actual existence and life, complete and final fulfilment of the covenant both from the side of God and from the side of man.
“That is what takes place in the incarnation. God not only fulfils his promise of love in the covenant in giving himself to humanity in complete and utter grace, but he accomplishes for man, and from within man, man’s fulfilment of the covenant, man’s appropriation of God’s gift of himself.” (1) In Jesus God draws us into Himself and comes into us.
FARCICAL BELIEFS
The notion that Jesus came to help us keep the law should be seen as the fallacy it is. It’s not Biblical and it is a sign of ignorance of what Christ achieved for all. Jesus came to multiply in us His union with His Father. This is His Gospel and your inheritance.
LOOK TO YOUR POSITION
The uncomfortable truth is that if we are still in the law or wallowing in religion, we have not been born again. We can if we are not careful, promote the Spirit and the gifts for much of our life without ever having lived in the Spirit. Because we are sons of the law rather than sons of God.
This new life is new because it is Christ as us. It’s what Paul wrote in Galatians 2.20 and warned us about in Galatians 2.21. “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me. “I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died needlessly.”
We can do better than live out an inventive ideology as a religion with an occasional reference to the Lord’s Table. We can live the Lord’s Table as Christ come in our flesh.
(1) Thomas Torrance. The Incarnation. Page 56.