TO BE A SPIRITUAL COMMUNITY
19/01/25 09:11
Some of us have been socialised in a religious poverty mentality that produces a scarcity culture, that is not spiritual at all. Here we have learned to earn our acceptance with God by good works. We enter into this unofficial self-made contract. This can involve a ‘Jesus’ who is amenable and nice - and a father who is not amused and not like Jesus – but he who must be obeyed. Obeyed because our eternal life depends on it. This is why the religious works enthusiast feels addicted to a limited atonement and limited grace. Addicted because he hopes, fitfully, that even fragments of success provide the entitlement of self-made grace. In fact it provides nothing.
DISTORTED MIRRORS
We can live from a severe view of God. We can be amiable folks but without spirit and life and sadder folks of a certain morbidity. Others try to find the spirit and life they lack in diets that promise a new freshness of life. But the real you with spirit and life is Christ your life.
We can attach ourselves to a false christ since this christ who is subordinate to the law and therefore not God. Stephen Morrison nails it when he writes, “I no longer operate with a dualistic way of thinking about God, in which Jesus is somehow different from His Father; my understanding of the cross no longer leads me to assume any sort of division. The notion that the Father indifferently forsook the Son, coldly abandoning Him to suffer and die, is one of the most damaging ideas in the Church today, because it calls into question the oneness in being an act of the Son with the Father, thereby driving a wedge between Jesus Christ and God.” (1) Not everyone believes this. But many are attached to a christ of the law when He is not this at all. He is the Christ of our Father and our spirit and life.
A legalised christ is a false christ and a lie. Jesus is life itself and of the same nature as the Father. “Jesus is the fountain of all life, the mediator of all existence, the centre of the whole cosmos, “the Light of the world” (John 8:12), and the sole reason for the continued existence of creation. He is “the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Rev 22:13). This Jesus Christ is “the King of kings and Lord of lords” (1Tim 6:15; Rev 17:14; 19:16).(2) That being said, Christ our life is more than enough.
ABERRATIONS
Legalism is as harmful to spiritual well-being as the heresy of Arianism would have been had it taken hold. Even in this day there is some association between the two in cultures that have a lesser Christ and a lesser gospel.
WEDGE THEM
All varieties of legalism drive a wedge between you and God because they are a product of separation from God – the tree of the knowledge of death. Live from the law and we have insulated ourselves from intimacy with God. Live from the Christ and we have His union with His Father. Legalism is one of the lies that originates with the father of lies. It is an emanation of the antichrist.
ONENESS REALITY
Jesus Christ, Father and Holy Spirit are one. Due to the success of their enterprise you are one with God and God is one with you. Live from this oneness and you will be alive, able to love yourself and love others. You will be an agent of Christ’s new creation life.
‘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’ John 17.21 NIV. Don’t be in yourself when you could have been in God.
(1) Morrison, Stephen D.. T. F. Torrance in Plain English (Plain English Series Book 2) (p. 80). Beloved Publishing, LLC. Kindle Edition.
(2) Baxter Kruger. The Mediation of Christ. p 4,