AFFIX TO THE CHRIST OF GOD
14/11/24 17:21
‘I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it’ Matt 16.18 NIV. The Rock is the affirmation that ‘You are the Christ’ with the implication that we mean the Christ of God and not some self-generated construct.
In the Christ of God you become who you are, not as a mere person but as a son/daughter of God who was seen before time began and who has been redeemed in the fullness of time into the fullness of your personhood by Christ. It’s not presumption to be know yourself as a son/daughter of God. It is the fruit of obedience.
THE WHO OF YOU
The steady advance of civilisation in the technological sphere has occurred because men and women had a passion for truth. Industrialisation has not given us a better life in every way, however. It has created the phenomenon of ‘one dimensional people.’ That is to say persona and identity have come to be constructed/constricted as a function of what we do in the division of labour. But we are much more than this.
WORK
We do well not to get our all of our self-worth from our work. This is not to downgrade craftsmanship and skill. But it does mean that we need to get our identity entirely from Christ and not externalities. Jesus knows who we are and has invested Himself in the transformation of the false self into the True Self. Invest our lives in commandment keeping and ‘sin-management’ and we will miss this. Remember that Jesus lives to give us life to the full. This means His life expressed as us.
Too much of our labouring can involve alienation from our true self. Education serves largely to prepare us to work in a technology based society. Mrs Dobbs commended pupil Mark for his maths prowess. Receiving the compliment he replied, ‘I’m a lot more than that..!’ We all are.
BETTER THAN ENDURING
Much of life as a Believer involves living out our lives and imparting life to situations that are less than optimal. Some find their way into work in which they are able to flourish as themselves. Many do their best in situations where money is more important than they and people are. It’s not uncommon for those with lesser ability rule over those with more intelligence and humanity than their subordinates. President Trump is the apotheosis of this.
KNOWING
Not knowing that there is a crevasse under the snow when you are walking on a glacier is immediately deadly. Not knowing the Gospel of the Kingdom and following a false gospel is not as immediately dangerous even though it leads to the slow death of the spirit, the soul and the mind. Living in substitutes for Christ and distorted gospels we die in our spirit and live a muffled self.
DECAY AS A WAY
Death flowed from the false narrative proposed by Satan. Death flows in similar fashion from ‘other gospels’ that claim to be the truth when they are only a slight a perversion of it. Just slight enough to make them ‘no gospel at all’.
Oneness with God is real spirituality and is the antidote to dead spirits and sick souls. The good news is that you belong and already are one with God. Agree with Christ that you are included.
CURIOSITY
The miser clings to what he’s got, is narrow minded and stagnant in thought. Living from scarcity when you are not poor shrinks the mind and binds us to pettiness and triviality. We are talking the resistors of truth and collectors of ignorance in religion and politics.
KNOW GOD
I have always been motivated to know, which means that I have had a passion for truth. This is because truth is life and any accommodation to untruth, even the smallest amount, infects us with a degree of death – an infection that is foreign to our being and foreign to God.
KNOW JESUS AS JESUS IS
‘Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent’ John 17.3 NIV.
Jesus did not come among us as ‘almost the truth’. He was the truth in person. Also life in person. This kind of truth was required to undo the lies and the state of being that confined humanity to imprisonment in bad ideas and a diseased state of being. Jesus’ forgiving and healing ministry denoted the fact that He was among us to restore the truth and favour us with unlimited life. Don’t excuse your accommodation to a deficient gospel as faithfulness to your parents’ legacy. It’s living in stagnation with a dead albatross around your neck.
DILUTED TRUTH
Scripture reveals that the antichrist spirit propagates perversions and amendments of God’s truth as life and truth. The result is a bundle of lies without truth and a lie rather than life. But this is what many choose to follow, on account of people lying to them or because they choose to remain in what they know rather than enter real life As a result they don’t know that they are dead. This present season has revealed than large segments of society are not interested in evidence. But they are obsessed with making up their own truth. The result will be not only presidents and leaders without clothes. Whole sectors of society will be seen to have no clothes and a degraded life.
INIQUITY
God calls the embrace of untruth iniquity. It has the connotation of perversity. An example of this latter meaning is seen in the description of truth as ‘false facts’ and choosing to ignore evidence because it suits them. The false narrative used to seduce Adam and Eve was iniquitous. It remains the home of all distortions and is actually witchcraft. Negativism in religion and politics is the spirit of anti-christ.
FULLNESS
Why accommodate oneself to a degree of degradation and death when Jesus has given us unlimited life? Why propagate a gospel that is not a true gospel when it stifles life because it’s partly a lie?
In my youth I was thrilled to read in the book of John that Jesus is our light and our life. ‘In him was life, and that life brought light to humanity.’ I know a young man who has just entered the ministry whose journey to God began as a search for life. He would go to various social events and come home unsatisfied because these activities, as fun as many of them were, did not impart life. He did find life and he found it in the person of Jesus Christ. Now He is a life-giver.
LIVING WATER
When Christ is our life, life is where we are and spirit and life is what we emit. Less than adequate life situations can be endured and become an opportunity in which to release Christ’s spirit and life. Situations can be redeemed by those who are actually alive because Christ is their life.
If we do not know that only Jesus is life we have not been born again. ‘Born again’ marks our transition from religion to life itself in the person of Jesus – Christ our life. When Christ is our life we are alive in His spirit of life and are able to impart life to dead situations. If living to the law we are not born again.
Christ our life is not a prompt to be more Christian. It’s the declaration that Christ our life is Christ incarnated in our being and that this interwoveness is the substance of ourselves and the growing Kingdom of God.
CHRIST IS TRANSFORMATION
The editors in Thomas Torrance’s book, The Incarnation, assert that “The incarnation of Jesus, in which the eternal Word and Son of the Father became flesh and took on human form, is the beginning of his incarnate work of revelation and reconciliation. It is the miraculous event in which the Word through which the universe was made out of nothing became himself one of the creatures he had made. In love and compassion for the creation which he had made but which through sin and rebellion was in the process of disintegration. Jesus came to undo sin and death by himself becoming human.” (1) Jesus as you is how you become human.
CHRIST IN YOU
This creative force lives in us as the Person of Jesus Christ. We can know Him and He will be our companion in redeeming and re-creating life and truth as a result of His life in us. Jesus is not a law or a force. He is the Christ of God who joins us to the trinity and certifies our oneness with God. To ignore this is at best careless and at worst stupidity.
(1) Thomas Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, xxxii.
