KINGDOM LIFE - MORE THAN JUSTIFICATION, BUT NOT LESS
26/11/24 14:47
Our life in God is more than acquittal from sin. Grace is much more than release from the demands of the law and indeed grace is not a means of coming to terms with the law. Grace in its radical and ultimate sense is the trinity in you and Christ’s life as your life. We are talking being rather than just talking. We are advertising the new and living way that is our being alive in communion with our God who is the ultimate person and the ultimate reality – three persons, one God who has woven us into Himself in order that we may become our True Selves.
OUR LIFE IN GOD
Our life in God has little to do with the law and everything to do with our being positioned in the communion that is God – the fellowship of the trinity. Fundamentalism is a form of legalism in which words about God can be treated as if they are God. It malforms our epistemology into the letter that kills by the simple fact that such words are not alive. Only Christ is alive, which is why we eat the bread and the wine in remembrance and celebration of our inheritance in Christ – Our union with God achieved by God in Christ so that we are alive in His Life.
CELEBRATING WHAT WE HAVE
When we eat the bread and drink the wine, we do not in that act achieve union with God. This union is already ours due to the atonement and incarnation. We remind ourselves that Christ is our life and celebrate the fact that the fullness of God has been incarnated in all parts of our lives.
ABSTRACTIONS
Legalism as ticked boxes, like law keeping or ticking off a theology, strips fullness from life and leaves rib-cages and carcasses in the place of Christ our life. Jesus said, ‘Those who eat me will live because of me.’ We eat Jesus by agreeing with Him that He is our life and that we have been included in the Communion that is ours in God. The only thing worse than perishing in the desert is the delusion of being alive in the desert when one is a carcass - yet believing that one is living Christ.
MORE THAN A DOCTRINE
Writing in the introduction to Baxter Kruger’s book ‘Across All World’s, Adelaide Physician, Bruce Wauchope observes, “In working as a Family Physician, one encounters people of all strata, colours, and creeds, and on some occasions we are privileged to meet their inner worlds. In these self-revealing times, one is struck by the universality of the human innards. The chief landmarks encountered are fear, rejection, guilt, trauma, and their various shameful
combinations, covered in layers of defence mechanisms.
COMPILATION OF US
“These blended emotions are woven as threads through
our states of being and are involved in both the actions
and reactions of our lives.
“Does the gospel have anything to say to the average
suffering person, plodding through life in such pain? Is
Jesus Christ merely a concept, a doctrine that helps people
hope to avoid hell?
THE ‘YES’ OF CHRIST
“It is in this deep, helpless state that we are met by Jesus
Christ. He is the one who knows the Father. And he is
not distant. JESUS IS AT THE CORE OF ALL OUR BEING and he is
beyond all. As he is in the deepest parts of us..
To reduce and truncate this personal sharing to a doctrine robs people of the power of the gospel, as it robs them of the Father's love
in Jesus and his relational healing.” (1)
CHRIST IN YOU
The healing of the inner you takes place because Christ has really come in our flesh. To live in the truth that the Trinity has made its home in us is to have the personal dysfunction and sin driven out of our being.
Reality is Christ. Your life in Him is inclusion in His life. It’s a state of being in which you have been included in the communion of the triune God. It’s the baptism – our immersion into the communion of the triune God that our public baptism indicates. Included in the triune God our pains is healed by their life.
‘Jesus replied, “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them”’ John 14.23 NIV. Jesus’ teaching is that He is our life.
