CHRIST TOOK STEPS TO INCLUDE YOU IN HIS LIFE

Last year I went to the Outback and enjoyed being stunned by the harsh beauty of the MacDonnell Ranges. Unknown to me before our guides informed us, these mountains are just as extensive as the Great Dividing Range. Being ‘in country’ lights my spirit and enriches my soul. I do not presume to have the same sense of ‘Country’ as the aboriginal, but I know what they mean having spent my childhood and youth on the Land.

As four-year-old, my Dad took me on his shoulders on walks in the mountains around Rotorua. After our return to Australia, I grew up on our property named Mumble Peg, at Narromine NSW. The sunsets there were full of glory with noisy cockatoos and gum trees silhouetted against a yellow orange sky. In a sermon once, I described coming home and driving up the drive towards such glory. Some of the people started to weep. There’s a depth of comfort and being in landscape and home. Our ultimate comfort is the home of our Christ-accomplished oneness with God. 

You have a home in God.

ABOUT PERSONS
Our belonging is personal in a three-personed God. You may have noticed that the Gospel of the Kingdom follows the era of the law. Once it is in place it does not lead back to the law. Law is in fact a function of the knowledge of good and evil and an artefact of the fall. In the history of salvation, law belongs to the first part of life and in our life journey it is where we start, but is not meant to be where we finish. New birth is our leap from law into communion with God and from religion into oneness with God. In this Newborn Realm, Christ is your life.

In oneness with Christ you will experience a oneness with the creation – an empathy with the web of being that is not pantheism but actual fellowship with God.

NOT A STIPEND
The life God has on offer is a banquet – the Lord’s Table. It is not some proprietary truth, obscure revelation or a gnostic understanding. Christ’s life is universal and there for all who will come to the Table. It’s infinite life. Not a life cut up into dichotomies and compartments. In Christ we are in life because life is in us. In Christ life becomes us.

Kingdom life is not religious. A genuine life in God is not one of pieties, virtue signalling or the conceits and artefacts of religion. Kingdom life is Christs life expressed as our life – all of it. Kingdom life is you alive in ‘Christ who is our life’. “When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory Col 3.4 NIV.’ In Christ you will be the glory of you as a Life-Giver. You will be a channel of His Love.