REAL GODLINESS IS A REST

“Jesus lived as a human united to His Father, reconciling our humanity to God through His vicarious life of perfect faith, obedience, and prayer. The Christian life in all its aspects has been taken up in His life lived in our name and on our behalf. Our faith is understood rightly as an echo within His faith, sustained and made perfect in Him. We are set free from the burden of looking over our shoulders and worrying if we have "enough" faith, what little faith we have has been taken up and perfected in Christ.” (1)

This is why Jesus’ burden is light and we are free to enjoy life in the adventure of Jesus.

YOUR UNION IS ACCOMPLISHED
You have union with God. You have had it since Jesus cried, ‘It is finished!’ What was finished? The separation of human beings from God, from self and from all of life, as a result of the fall. The Fall had been undone. Dualism is finished. In the person of Jesus Christ human beings have been woven into God, reformed as themselves and given a real oneness with Creation in Christ. Authentic new birth is our death to religion and our resurrection to Christ our life who unites us as with all of life as agents that multiply His life.

YOU ARE NOT A COMPILATION OF GOOD AND EVIL
Father’s purpose it that goodness will not be separated from who you are. Jesus Christ is what He represents: Righteousness wholeness and life is Him. In our ‘now we are the sons of God’ Jesus has become the living way in which Christ is us since we live as sons. The nature of our beings is sons/daughters of God. The fruits or our life are the effect of Christ expressed as us. Sons of God are not people who do a list. Sons and daughters of God are those who participate in God by the Christ of God and are the effect of God. Daughters and sons bring life to wherever they are because they are alive with His spirit and life.

JESUS OUR LIFE
Jesus is His own mediator. Life mediates life which is why Jesus mediates Himself to us. The emblems of the Lord’s Table do not mediate life but they do remind and illustrate that Christ is our life and that by the One Spirit Jesus becomes one substance with us. The Lord’s Table is what and who you live in. The mystic reality of the eucharist is that you become the manifest presence of God. This is the eucharist lived.

Jesus is one substance with Father and fully God. The fact that we are one substance with Jesus because He is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh means that we are in fellowship with the triune God in Jesus Christ. You are the expression of Christ in the world.

CHRIST IS ALIVE
It is common to make idols out of religion. Religion itself is not alive but it can be a means by which we celebrate the life that is already ours in Jesus. But the motions are never life themselves. Christ in you is you alive and one with life.

‘For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart’ Hebrews 4.12 NIV.

LIFE AND LETTER
The Bible contains life-giving words, but these words are not God and are not necessarily alive to us. Not unless we read them in the Spirit. Read in the law we confuse the meaning and multiply darkness as light. We have been gifted oneness with Christ. In this state of being we will know right doctrine because we are reading the Bible in light and life.

WORD MADE FLESH
The Word is a person – the Son of God. We can be literate in the word and scarcely know The Word who is God. It’s sad when people preach from the Bible but do not release revelation. When Paul [or some contemporary] talks of The Word that cuts between spirit and flesh as a two-edged sword they are speaking of the Word that is alive because it is Jesus. In oneness with Jesus we can speak such living words in everyday life. In Christ we are sensitive to humanity to the max.

LIFE NOT A BOOK
 George MacDonald speaking on The Word observes, “The Bible itself [is] greatly wronged. It nowhere lays claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ “in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” not the Bible, save as leading to Him.” Jesus made this distinction but many do not. He said, ‘You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me’ John 5.39 NIV. A lived union with Christ means we are alive and that we see/read/comprehend properly – which is to say in the spirit of life.

NOT AS THE SCRIBES
Jesus spoke life with authority on account of His union with Father. Seeking and knowing Jesus as the Light and the Word equips us to read God’s version of His own book with grace and confidence. One with Christ in spirit we multiply Christ’s life ‘with authority’ quite different to the law-mongering scribes.

The Word is a person to which the written word is subordinate. The Word is alive because The Word is the Christ. To read the word in Christ is to read it in the Spirit. To read it in the law is to degrade it to the letter that kills.

We become living words of life when Christ is our life. The Bible comes alive when read in Christ our life. In oneness with Christ we have entered a realm of spirit and life that surpasses god-talk.

HOW TO WALK
‘If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself’ John 7.17 KJV.
If our priority is to follow Jesus rather than run a project to maintain our ideas. Pump up our culture or those beliefs we have inherited, we will not be discerners of truth and life. If Christ is our life because He is our Everything,His truth will set us free. And his Light will make us see.

(1) Stephen D Morrison. Torrance in Plain English. P 151.