ADAM UNDONE AND YOU, WON

If our gospel is a Christianised version of the knowledge of good and evil, moralism will be our normal. We will be dealers in the currency of the knowledge of good and evil – being right and doing right. As a result, our version of truth may be seen by us as our entitlement to the approval of God.

But Christ’s Gospel is Adam’s perverse gospel undone. The delusion in which Adam became entangled was that God cannot be trusted – so you best add something yourself. This something is our version of the knowledge of good and evil, either secular or religious. Religion has continually sought to sell versions of the knowledge tree to needy and gullible people.  A Law gospel and legalism is one of these.

MARKETING RELIGION
Jesus cast money-changers out of the temple in a prophetic act that would be woven into the fabric of time by the atonement and the incarnation. In Himself Jesus would multiply life-givers who would be channels of infinite life flowing from Father, Himself and Holy Spirit. The life Jesus offers is inclusion and belonging in God which is ultimate life.

UNDOING DEATH
Christ undid Adam’s separation from God and gifted us His union with God.

Just as Jesus and His Father were one, now all who believed can participate in this oneness with Father. When teaching the gospel, we can do be alive with the Spirit and Life that flows from the trinity. Rather than minister bits of philosophy and moral exhortations, ministers of the new covenant minister undiluted life. Undiluted because they are personally alive in Christ’s 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.

BINDING THE SELF
If we remain mired in the old covenant, meaning the life of Adam and the tree of knowledge - we are imprisoned in our minds and our self-made reality -  part of Adam’s separation from God. Here in good conscience, we can offer up pieces of the knowledge of good and evil, and hand out homiletical tid-bits from the knowledge tree. We might offer up snacks from the Moses Bakery of the bread that is dead or pass out jugs of dead water that is not the water of life.

THE MEDIATION OF CHRIST
Life is not an abstraction. Life is personal because life is the trinity. This personal life – a communion that Paul called the law of the spirit of life – is unlimited life because it is personal and infinite. It’s mediated to you by Jesus and the Holy Spirit. In Jesus you are included in this communion which is your baptism into the spirit of sonship. ‘Now we are the sons of God’ is not just nice words. This is a state of being in which you are joined to Father as a son/daughter so that you possess Father’s likeness and life.

LIVING WATER
Living water is not an old covenant message given with the unction of the anointing. You can’t rub the anointing into Moses and Adam. It’s rooted in Christ our life.

PURE LIFE
Living water is the purest form of life. It’s the result of your oneness with God. It is God. It’s the fullness of God incarnated in you. Thomas Torrance in The Incarnation writes,  [The Messiah] “is the Word made flesh in a particular Israelite, Jesus the son of David, the son of Mary. In the Gospels, in the early chapters of Acts, and especially in the epistle to the Hebrews, the concepts of the Son, the servant, and the Word or revelation of God are all brought together to describe the incarnate work of Christ as he steps forth to reveal the Father’s will of love and reconciliation, and to effect it.” (1)

The incarnation is the living word that is Jesus in you.
THEY SPOKE WITH THE AUTHORITY OF LIFE
There are pastors in some communities who never speak words of spirit and life and never revelation. They belong to a gospel that is not alive and they are not alive. But they are earnest.

Christ’s witness was a living message given by the Christ who was alive in Himself, in Father and the Holy Spirit. Jesus ministered in the oneness of God that is God’s oneness. This is to say He belonged in the trinity and was part of the perichoretic communion that is the being of the triune God. Jesus was the life of the triune God manifesting in Palestine. You can be the life of Jesus Christ manifesting where you are – WHEN INCARNATION IS YOUR LIVED REALITY.

CHRIST IN YOU
In his book Galatians, Timothy Keller wrote, “One of the glories of Christianity is the assurance that “we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10). This statement by Paul that we are “created” does not simply refer to our physical formation, as God has, of course, created all human beings (see Genesis1:26-27). Rather, Paul is talking about being “created in Christ.” It means that every person who believes in Christ does so because she or he is the object of a process of God’s “spiritual creation.” The word workmanship is very important; it is the Greek word poema from which we get our word “poem.” It means that every believer is essentially a work of art--God’s art!”

Jesus was fully a human being and God. Father’s oneness in Jesus has become Jesus’ incarnation in us. This is to say that when Christ is our life He has come in our flesh. The trinity is alive in our being so that we are alive in the life of God. There’s a universe of difference in this between giving a talk that is a piece of the knowledge of good and evil and giving a talk in which one is one with Christ and alive with spirit and life. Holy Communion means that the word is made flesh in a particular person like you. Such a message/life is spirit and life, having the innate capacity to ignite hearers with the life of God. Of course it’s not just about talking. It’s about being Christ’s life as you.