ABOUT LIFE
16/11/24 13:47
The incarnation has two halves that make the whole. The first is that the Son of God comes among us as Jesus of Nazareth. The second is that the Son of Man is established beside our Father in heaven and in us on earth by means of the incarnation – Christ come in our flesh. Thus, Jesus is in us and with us as promised.
SIMEON AND ANNA
Some believed and some never did. Similarly, today some believe and others craft their own gospel.
“In the fullness of time, when God had prepared in the heart and soul and religion of Israel a womb for the birth of Jesus, a cradle for the child of Bethlehem, the saviour of the world was born, the very Son of God – born of God right into the midst of Israel with all its suffering contradiction of God, into the midst of the Old Testament faith and all that reached out in it to fulfilment in this very hour of incarnation.
And so when the hour came in the fullness of time, there were actually some who, when they saw him, recognised him as the Son of God come in the flesh, the redeemer of Israel, and the light to lighten the Gentiles Zechariah, Anna, Simeon, and John the Baptist, and who more than the blessed virgin Mary, and then, one after another, the twelve disciples, and many others who acknowledged that this was indeed the Christ, the Son of the living God, the saviour of the world.”
SCRIBES AND DISCIPLES
There are ways in which we can emulate the scribes and the Pharisees and miss the wedding. Or we can believe as did Anna and Simeon because our eyes can see and our religion has not made us bone-headed. Whether we choose to live in the incarnation today decides whether we live in our salvation today or keep circling the mulberry tree of our own suppositions.
CHRIST IN YOU
The Christ has come today to live in the flesh of the Believer. The Christians is not made to believe. There is a choice. We can live in the externalities of the law, moralism and religion. We may deny the incarnational reality of Christ being our life as Paul declared and Jesus announced when He said, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” In her book, Real Presence, Leanne Payne unfolds the truth that real presence is incarnated presence – the trinity in you, woven into your being. It’s real because Christ is real. Religion as structured living of the knowledge of good and evil is not real in comparison. It’s not the spirit and life of the direct presence of Christ by the Spirit in you and in us.
CHOOSE LIFE
We can ignore John’s dictum that ‘Christ come in our flesh’ is the sign and the core of Gospel truth. Like Adam and Eve we can live the lie that we must do some law-bits ourselves to validate our sonship. Like the priests and rulers of old we can deny this miracle of grace in which Jesus becomes us by the Spirit – and stick with the law and the concrete doings and justifications of our righteousness. In doing so we deny the law of the spirit of life incarnated personally into our being and become rivers of sand instead of rivers of living water.
WHAT TREE?
If truth is justified by its effect, folly is also demonstrated by its results. By their fruits you shall know them. Should we obscure the Christ and dilute Him with the law, the result is that we become a wood heap rather than a tree of life. With Christ as our life we are alive and bear the fruit of life in our person. We are life. ‘The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you—they are full of the Spirit and life’ John 6.63 NIV. What words did Jesus speak? He declared that He is our life.
