REAL LIFE IS ALIVE AND ABOUT ALL OF LIFE

We can live a parody of the riches God has for us due to lack of thought or misguided belief. We may do this by living out a formulaic contract between us and God made from personal obsessions and church distinctives. But this does not make us whole or holy or dissipate guilt. This is because compared to Christ our life it is a charade and a fig-leaf grace we have contrived ourselves. Power to be our real selves and live as agents of the Kingdom happens when we agree with Christ that He has included us in His life.

CRUMBS OF LOAVES?
We can live pedestrian lives if we do not seize the day. By settling for routine religion one has little of God and hence little of one’s real self. The paradox is that genuinely holy people are not very religious yet they are life-givers. Their humanity is Christ expressed as Jill and Jack.

Why do some revivals start with a flash and end in whimper? Those that grow begin with yeast. Those that don’t may be bad seed or sown in the soil of ‘other gospels.’

SUBSTANCE
The key to a substantive life with God is living in the union He has provided in Christ. This union is not achieved by you doing things. It’s ours by believing that in Christ we are joined to God in the kind of union that the trinity have with each other. We are speaking of ‘Realization of union and birth. For Eckhart all experience of union is meant to bear fruit— "by their fruit you will know them" so creativity/imagination/vision and helping is as much a test of true spirituality as it is a result of it.”

APOSTOLIC LIFE-GIVING
The incarnation as the foundation of the new creation Kingdom of God is most significant for the role of human beings as kings and priests. I disagreed with a colleague once on apostleship. He wanted apostleship to be restricted to the church and religion. I argued, as I do now, that one might be an apostle in any sphere of endeavour as a Multiplier of the life of God at your spot in the world.  Why? Jesus did not give us a dualism of God versus not God. Nor did He bequeath to us religion. Jesus imparts His life directly to us so that we are life-givers no matter what the context.

Richard Rohr speaks of the ‘naked now’. This is the self, naked to Christ un-encumbered by the stuff of religion that is too often fig leaves  suffocated by lifeless motions and lack of the real presence. Real Presence is the incarnation lived as life.

NONE OF LIFE IS PROFANE IN THE POST CROSS AGE
Christ’s life is all of life in Himself incarnated in us. Jesus did not leave us  a bunch of compartmentalised religion. Our inheritance in Christ is incarnation – the one authentic ‘whole person’ whole creation approach in which you ignite your world with the presence of Jesus.

ABSTRACTIONS
Significantly my friend had a notion of God and mission couched in the law. But the law has always been a compartment of the compartmentalised realm of the knowledge of good and evil. Here segmented notions of sacred and secular loom large. These separationist mindsets obscure the agency of the incarnation in the sons and daughters of God. It’s hard not to think like this when our notion of the good is bits and pieces of the knowledge of law/ good and evil rather than the comprehensive state of our being alive in the trinity and mediators of the new creation life.

NO COMPARTMENTS
There is no sacred and secular in the Kingdom of God – otherwise the supremacy of Christ would be a fiction. If we lived and had our being in God in the Old Testament, we have this more so in the new. Now God is incarnated in our persons on account of Christ. God is mediated by Christ into us and from us into our daily activities. Incarnation and Holy Spirit anointing are Christ expressed as us in the entirety of our lives.

HOLISTIC LIVING
We need to look with scepticism on exhibitions of praise and worship accompanied by a penchant to dishonesty, carelessness towards the poor and a lack of interests in an economy that kills the earth. The Kingdom Jesus began is not contained in ‘churchism’.

Christ our life means His Kingdom is in the world. The implication of this is that although we may participate in the Lord’s Table as a sacrament. The real sacrament is Christ in you and your living your Every Day life in God as mediators of the new creation Kingdom of God. Sons of God are agents of the new creation. They don’t kill the earth in the name of the Economy.

YOU ARE THE SACRAMENT.
“Torrance .. considers the world as God’s gift to humanity in order that humanity may gift it back to God. In this way, .. the sacrifice offered to God by men and women is a Eucharist, making every person a ‘priest of God for the world’.  From this relationship of Creator to creature human beings derive their significance and responsibility in the formation of the world towards its final consummation.” (1)

Holiness is union with God and the mediation of this life among us and from us into the Creation.

Real life and life that is real cannot be hidden. It will out and it will grow until it eliminates the darkness.
 
(1)  Myk Habets, Theosis in the Theology of Thomas Torrance, p 46.