REAL HOLINESS IS NOT RELIGIOUS - IT’S CHRIST IN YOU

We cannot speak too highly of the incarnation for it is the genius of God, the enterprise of the trinity and the agency of real life in our being. Myk Habets observes that “Torrance argues that the incarnation is inherently redemptive, and redemption is intrinsically incarnational. This makes the entire life of the incarnate Son a continuous vicarious sacrifice sanctifying all aspects of our life.”

Christians would do well to give up the idea that the Holy life takes place in church, in meetings, and in praise and worship services. In Christ your entire life is a holy life in dwelt by God.

INTERWOVEN
The beauty of the incarnation is that Christ is not only in you but is so woven into your being that His life becomes your life. This is why it is Christ in us that is our grace and transformation and never the law or religion or some pious agenda. You need no ‘steps to Christ’. Christ has taken steps to make Himself, Father and Holy Spirit one with you.

FALSE AND TRUE
Thomas Torrance asserts that, “If Jesus is proclaimed to mankind as a Saviour or Healer, it can be only as one who fulfils his ministry through external relations and means like a human doctor, a moralist or a social worker. But if Jesus Christ is God the Creator himself become incarnate among us, he saves and heals by opening up the dark, twisted depths of our human being and cleansing, reconciling and recreating us from within the very foundations of our existence.” (1)

IN YOU TO BE YOU
The fullness of God heals you by living in you. Torrance is asserting the real gospel as distinct from hybrid, works oriented ‘gospels’ of the kind proposed by N.T Wright and law-based faith communities. Torrance asserts the truth that Christ is not only our grace. Christ is our sanctification as Paul declares in that Jesus imparts His creative life to us in the same way that He healed blind eyes and raised dead people.

SEPARATION IS THE LIE
If separation is the lie, Christ is our life. All aberrations of Christ’s gospel have this in common. They assume that we are separated from God and that it is our work to make His achievements for us our own. Thus we ‘keep close to Jesus’ or try to live lives that are worthy of His salvation and intimacy. But intimacy with God is yours in Christ because the truth of the real Gospel is that in Christ His relationship with God has become your relationship with God. Rather than agree with this false separation we can cultivate this mindset and ask Jesus to make more of Himself us. Growing up into Christ is the awareness of relying less on ourselves and more on Christ to be revealed as our real selves who are daughters and sons.

MADE ONE
Professor Torrance asserts, “Since in Jesus Christ God himself has come into our human being and united our human nature to his own, then atoning reconciliation takes place within the personal Being of the Mediator. In Jesus Christ the Creator Word and Son of God incarnate, his Person and his Work are one. What he does is not something separate from his personal Being and what he is in his own incarnate Person is the mighty Act of God's love for our salvation. Christ and his Gospel belong ontologically and inseparably together, for that is what he is, he who brings, actualises and embodies the Gospel of reconciliation between God and man and man and God in his own Person.” (2)

Christ is His Gospel, His reconciliation and our life because in oneness with Father He has united us as one with Himself so that we are alive and have our agency in the God as a state of being. We are one with God. This is our starting place, the assurance of our salvation, our real grace and our ongoing transformation into the sons of God we were made to be.

AVOID DELINQUENT GOSPELS
We do well to form our Gospel from that of Christ and the apostles and not accommodate ourselves to self-generated myths and gospels. Gospels that have been subverted into what they are not by the passage of time and the drive to secure our own salvation by validating the self with assorted works, reversion to the law and the subtle legalism that is often church culture.

Torrance continues, “In becoming incarnate he not only took what is ours to make it his, but thereby really took upon himself our sin and guilt, our violence and wickedness, so that through his own atoning self-sacrifice and self-consecration he might do away with our evil and heal and sanctify our human nature from within and thus present us to the Father as those who are redeemed and consecrated in and through himself. He did all that precisely as Mediator who brought God and man together in himself, thereby actualising reconciliation and recreating our humanity within the holiness and perfection of his own sinless human life, crucified for our sins and raised again for our justification.” (3)

(1-3) Quotes from The Mediation of Christ, p.63.