WHEN YOUR SPIRIT IS ALIVE YOU REPRESENT CHRIST
01/12/24 14:54
Jesus has given us all of Himself. Our part is to ensure that we are all of Him and His entire un-diminished Gospel.
The love of God in Christ is comprehensive and complete. We have salvation in Christ, yes, but we also have the life of God in our being in Christ – the spirit of sonship which makes us sons/daughters and makes us ourselves in spirit and in truth. A law-view of holiness binds us to the letter that leaves us less than we are. A religion of the letter kills no matter how sincere we may be. It kills spirit and life.
Christ our life is our holistic Gospel that makes us more than we ever imagined.
ATONEMTN/INCARNATION
By incarnation Christ is expressed as us. Christ our life in and for us enables us to love self, other people and the world.
EXTERNALITIES
Legalism and the more subtle legalism of ‘behaviour management’ comes under the heading of externalities. Externalities do not change us for the better because they are external to our being. Don’t expect to be your best self in the law/church lore. While what we see, read and learn from the example of others may prompt us but it is Jesus woven into our being that changes us.
An incarnated Christ is our inheritance. Don’t leave it in the field because you settle for religion instead. There is a quality of being in sonship that is far above the ‘animal’ and way above the ‘one dimensional man or woman’ of economic /religious man. This is a lived experience of the joy of being a son/daughter of God in your Everyday. Christ in us, opens us to the healing of life’s wounds and the progressive realisation of the Real Self in Jesus Christ. This is the one true ‘ whole person approach’ and the approach that enables us to love liberally and be spirit and life..
We can live resurrection in Christ who is the resurrection and the life. In Christ the most broken can become life-givers.
PEARL OF GREAT PRICE
None need be a shell of humanity or a husk of their real selves. The greatest holiness is to love. The next is to become the son, the daughter God made you to be – never a clone of someone else or a shadow of your real self. This is always possible to become should we be formed by religion instead of formed from Christ. Many muted persons are sons of the law rather than sons of God. They pass away without having become what they could have been. Why? They lived from a muted christ and a bent gospel. Complete transformation happens in heaven with Christ. But this is the life where sin and death are to be overcome and people won to Jesus and His Living Way. Don’t mute yourself with a bent gospel.
CHRIST HAS YOU COVERED
You are joined to God and joined to your real self in Christ. Myk Habets following Campbell and Torrance observes, “Campbell sought to present the atonement in filial as opposed to judicial terms, emphasising the love of God for all humanity. This drove him back to the doctrine of the incarnation which, in his later theology he sought to explicate as the twofold movement of God to humanity and humanity to God in the one person of the incarnate Son, something he labelled the retrospective and prospective aspects of atonement.
DIPPED IN RESURRECTION NOW
“Retrospectively God has dealt with every human being’s guilty past by penetrating the depths of human sin and guilt and pardoning them. However, this cannot be understood apart from seeing that God prospectively brings people to share in Christ’s Sonship, lifting them from imprisonment in their mortal existence into the new life of the risen Jesus.
“Campbell argued that traditional doctrines of atonement had limited themselves to the retrospective aspect only, resulting in a doctrine of strict penal substitution. When the prospective aspect is considered, not only are the necessary means of atonement taken into account but the goal of the incarnation is also set forth, namely, the Father’s filial purposes for all humankind .
A ROBUST YOU IN CHRIST
[Torrance notes] ‘At the heart of Campbell’s thinking on this matter lies a concentrated focus on one’s union with Christ – a union which is the fruit of the incarnation’. Christ in our humanity offers a perfect vicarious response to the love and judgement of God.” (1) Our past is healed and our future self is set on the path to glory in Jesus Christ.
FATHER TO SONS
What are the Father’s filial purposes? They are that in Jesus we will become sons/daughters in spirit and in truth because Christ has come in our flesh. This means that Christ has come in us holistically, has infused our being with Himself so that we become the expression of Him while maturing into the real glory of our true selves. This begins in this life with new birth - if indeed we are reborn into Christ and not into religion. Unless the experience of Christ our life is ours, we travel like cattle in cattle class – even though we are sons of God entitled to be first class beings conveyed in the first-class cabin.
Grace construed in terms of the law is scarcity grace. Grace as Christ for you and in you is real grace. Paul calls this Christ our life.
REAL IDENTITY
We are who we are in our being. Glory is not wealth, status or power. Glory is the result of being re-born in Christ so that you become who you are in the mind of Christ and in the reality of your life. Real glory is Christ’s impartation of His ability to love.
If lies, and the perversion of our identity led to the fall, our resurrection and establishment as sons and daughters of God is found in the forming of true ourselves in the truth of our God-given identity as the sons and daughters of God.