MUCH MORE THAN THE GIFTS
22/12/24 09:14
Life in the Spirit is counter-intuitive. Abraham lived in it when he lived by faith and not by sight. Sarah lived it when she had a son well past her years of fertility. Abraham missed it when he attempted to realize the prophecy through Hagar.* We live in the Spirit when we agree with Christ that He is our life rather than the law or some amalgam of law and spirit. Realizing life in the Spirit and manifesting this as ourselves is living our sonship in spirit and in truth.
Ignoring Christ our life - incarnation - is the lie re-visited. It’s choosing independence when God has joined us to Himself in His Son.
There is nothing intuitive, nothing reasonable about Christ come in our flesh. Following his own reason, the unprofitable servant buried his inheritance in the ground after accusing his master of being unreasonable. Life in the Spirit is not about reason. It’s about God’s life as ours.
There is nothing rational about the incarnation, about Christ our life and the manifestation of sonship as our person because Christ is woven into our being. Ignore this and we live a spotty life - the life of the Sower’s Field was choked with weeds, filled with rocks, littered with stones and pecked at by crows. This was a garden that had not been born again because it was an old covenant garden - a garden that thought itself so reasonable that it must live Adam/Moses and legalism/moralism instead of Christ our life.
Heaven comes to earth as the Christ manifest in you and in us. It’s not all bells and whistles, but it is the mystery of Godliness.
There’s nothing abstruse about the post cross realm. It’s Christ manifest as you and as us. This is the Body of Christ - the incarnated Jesus in people who take Him at His word and do what He said to do. Eat Him.
Christ’s Body is not a rationalised construct. It’s the state of being that is us when we live in the oneness with God He has given us. Observe this oneness delineated in Jesus’ prayer. ‘That all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity’ John 17.21-23 NIV.
ALL BELONG
Karl Barth affirms the open door of belief in truth as the reality that can be the possession of all. “There is no man who ought not to believe or who cannot believe. Neither the Jew nor the Greek is disenfranchised from the Gospel. By setting a question-mark against the whole course of this world and its inevitability, the Gospel directly concerns every man. As surely-as no one is removed from the universal questionableness of human life, so surely is no one excluded from the divine contradiction that is in Christ, by which this questionableness seeks to make itself known to men.” (1)
Christ sets a question mark into our being that constrains us to examine life, what we have been taught and what goes down as orthodox thinking. When Christ is our life we have a passion for life and an instinctive rejection of death in all its forms - if we live from Christ rather than an ideology. Inertia about falsehood and truth is always associated with passives, self-delusion and decay. The Gospel is both reason and contradiction, reason and faith, principle and ambiguity and though it all the wisdom of God that is spirit and life. We can deny this and still go to heaven. But we cannot ignore it and be a river of life while we are here in in the Body. Heaven invades earth when we live the incarnation. Not always when there are signs and wonders.
* Abraham’s strategy is a parable of those who talk Holy Spirit, yet still live in the law.
(1) Karl Barth, Epistle to the Romans, p.40.