LIFE DIRECTLY IN YOU
16/11/24 13:44
In Thomas Torrance’s’ book, The Mediation of Christ, he makes it clear that Christ mediates Christ and God mediates God – directly to our being. Leanne Payne assures us that real presence comes from the incarnated Christ in us. Kingdom life is this state of being – not an ideology and far more than a belief system.
This might seem strange to those who have spent their lives affirming a set of beliefs. And attempting to break through their supposed separation from God by the many artifices of religion. But their heart knows they have direct access to Christ even if their head does not. The heart longs for the reality that it owns.
‘Mysticism’ appears quite a lot in these posts. It is not mysterious. Just mainly unknown in the one-dimensional image of scarcity Christianity. This can be the materialist concept of economic man, in which we have allowed ourselves to be made as a construct of a materialist economy. Unless Christ is our life our Christianity makes us vulnerable to the Babylon of Confusion that is much of society today.
EXTERNALITIES
Humanism seeks to effect reform using externalities like education, manipulation and compulsion. Political correctness is a secular form of legalism. Describing culture as either right or left is a knowledge of good and evil usage that imposes are largely irrelevant grid on political culture.
REAL LIFE GUYS
Centuries ago, Isaiah urged a life of oneness with God. Such oneness then was not complete in the sense that it is today. The incarnation had not happened. Even so, there were people like Moses and David who lived in intimacy with God because they desired real life rather than a fabric of externalities. David’s Tabernacle was a prophetic sign of the coming incarnation of God with us and in us.
Since the cross, you are one with God. Obedience and faith is living in what is yours.
THE ROCK
Isaiah wrote, ‘Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness and who seek the LORD: Look to the rock from which you were cut and to the quarry from which you were hewn’ Isaiah 51.1 NIV. In Jesus we are rejoined to the Rock. We are not earning oneness. We have it in the at-one-ment of the cross. This is the start of our life as sons and daughters with vision, life and agency. It’s the end of wood-heap religion and the genuine rebirth.
ROOTED IN SPIRIT AND LIFE
We are not things and the essence of life is not found in doing. Fulfilled and wholesome doing is enjoyed in being – in being one with God.
When the disciples asked Jesus what was to be done to inherit eternal life, Jesus answered, ‘Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent’ John 17.23 NIV. The ‘knowing’ mentioned here is the kind of ‘knowing’ of a man and his wife – the perichoresis that originates in the trinity. Here we are joined to God yet being fully ourselves to flower in our true identity.
LIFE WITHOUT LIMIT
Real life, which is life to the full, meaning the infinite life that is eternal, is knowing God. Knowing in a spiritual sense is knowing that is being. This is the kind of ‘knowing’ that is the oneness between a husband and a wife. So, there is nothing new about the oneness that mysticism denotes. Such ‘knowing’ began in the trinity – our true home - which is the archetype of marriage, family and community.
FATHER IS HOME
In his book, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, Andrew Louth quotes, ‘Let us flee then to the beloved Fatherland’: this is the soundest counsel. But what is this flight? How are we to gain the open sea? For Odysseus is surely a parable to us when he commands the flight from the sorceries of Circe or Calypso — not content to linger for all the pleasure offered to his eyes and all the delight of sense filling his days. The Fatherland to us is .. whence we have come, and There is the Father.’ (1)
WHERE WE HAVE COME FROM
This is a lived union with God of the kind experienced by Jesus. Because Christ stands for us and is us, His life is our life and His union with Father is ours.
NOT IN EXTERNALITIES
All can have more of God. You do not have to do ‘praise and worship’ to get it. Nor is God contained in ‘holy days’ or sacred places. He is in you and with you.
Through us God is in the world – or not. Which is why we must live from the incarnation and not legalism and pragmatism. Christ in you is not the deity rattling around in you. God is woven into your being. This is the way. Walk in it (John 12.35).
The incarnated life is not a path set aside for the monk, the introspective or the morose contemplative. Nor for the person driven to afflict the body. It belongs to all. It is open to all, irrespective of disposition. We meet God within in our person. God is not somewhere else but is incarnated in our being.
‘Realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20.
(1) Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, Page 39.
