REAL GRACE
29/12/23 16:19
Grace is not something to help you cope with the law. Grace is incarnation. It's Christ come in your flesh.
Jesus Christ has achieved oneness with God for us. This is the fruit of His labour and our inheritance. It’s the talent and treasure that we should not leave in the ground if we are to live boldly rather than effetely and insipidly. God mediates Himself to us in Jesus Christ. His relationship to us is direct. It comes as Himself and not as law, agendas, values or religious rites. Christ is Himself to us – meaning that He is our union with God.
We are blessed if we belong to Jesus alone and not to a ‘Jesus Plus’ culture. The former is His Gospel, and the latter is a mistake.
DISCIPLINE
The discipline of the Christian life is largely concerned with living in this direct union rather than allowing it to dissipate in extraneous pursuits or in religion and futile additions.
CHRIST OUR UNION
Thomas Torrance in The Mediation of Christ writes, “Athanasius spoke of Jesus Christ as exercising a two-fold ministry. 'He ministered the things of God to man and the things of man to God.' That manward and Godward ministry are to be thought of as an inseparable whole in the oneness of our Lord's Person as God and Man, and as continuous throughout all the reconciling movement of his life to its culmination in his vicarious death and resurrection, but also as extending after his ascension into his heavenly intercession as our High Priest and Advocate before the Face of the Father.” We are made one with God and we are given Christ’s life as an indwelling. Your Godliness is Christ expressed as you.
NO SEPARATION
Since the cross people are not separated from God. Christ’s invitation to all is to join this communion of belonging with God. In rebellion and in religion we are separated from God in our minds. Our role is to participate in what we have. We must enter the truth to be part of it.
GNOSTIC DUALISM
Christians can live a split life in the mistaken belief that religion is holiness and the world in which we act is carnal. Not so since Jesus has ‘made the two one’. Jesus Christ is the Creator and re-creator of society and the Earth.
MISTAKEN HOLINESS
Leanne Payne writes, “I have ministered to Christians whose chief problem was their ignorant belief that to be a Christian is to cease to be human. They died intellectually, imaginatively, emotionally, and called that dying to the “old man” or old self. On the other hand, there are Christians who make the soul of man everything, calling it man’s sole treasure. In union with God, man’s soul is his treasure; apart from the God his soul was created to unite with and glorify, the soul is lost.” Payne is correct. The most precious example of the manifest presence is you and us. (1) Christ is multiplied in the world by those incarnated with Christ. Your glory is Christ come in your flesh to make the real You who bears fruit unto life.
YOU PARTICIPATE IN CHRIST’S LIFE
Grace is a state of being one with God. Jesus was full of grace and truth because the two are a pair. Jesus was the Way to the Father and was the Son of the Father and fully God. Since He was also fully man it is He who mediates His life and that of the trinity into our lives and our space.
THE DOOR
The truth is that since the cross we are not separated from God because the separation that Adam began has been undone in Christ. Union with God is Jesus. In place of Adam’s separation we have Christ’s union with Father and Holy Spirit. You are reconciled to God. God is present with you even if there is no visible manifestation. He is in you and with you because He is in you and with you.
‘I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you’ John 14.8 NIV.
Christ’ coming to us is a coming in us. There is no separation in Christ Jesus – unless we have been inveigled in a false gospel. Even then we are one with God despite our mistaken beliefs. We need to drop notions of an unfinished atonement and self-salvation of the kind expressed as ‘keeping close to Jesus’. Such gospels are as Paul said, ‘No Gospel at all.’ You are included in God, in Christ. You belong and oneness with God is your initial position.
WAY TO BE WHOLE
The new birth is not some effete religious piety. It’s the state of being that is the new you formed in Christ.
DEFORMED BY THE LAW – FORMED BY CHRIST
Leanne Payne writes, “Until this redeemed self is acknowledged and accepted, we live out of the immature, unaffirmed self, and we cannot hear God aright.
“From that centre, we also “mishear” our fellows, and they become the target of the diseased “matter” that yet resides within our souls—that is, our fears of rejection, our bitterness, envy, anger, and sense of inferiority. These invariably project themselves into the minds and hearts of those we love the most, piercing them like deadly arrows.
“Until we accept the new self, we are dangerous to ourselves and to others; even though we are Christians, we are still enthralled by the voices of this world and obey them. We fail to abide in Christ and instead remain self-conscious. A right understanding of the true self and our acceptance of it is necessary to a sound and balanced theology. Christ who is my everything, is also my righteousness. In accepting myself in Him, I am no longer trapped in the mode of trying to win my own righteousness or God’s love, or in trying to keep the law, the very thing that Christ fulfilled.” (2)
(1) Payne, Leanne. The Healing Presence (p. 113). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition
(2) Ibid (pp. 54-55).
