NOT LIVING OUT A CONTRACT

The command of God is to believe His Son. The testimony of Jesus is that He is our life.

If you have made the effort to understand the basis of the Christian faith – you may have come to see that the gospel you were taught is not the Gospel of Jesus and the apostles. Basically because of what Paul says so definitely: That if we are still living from the law, then for us Christ died for nothing. The scriptures do not endorse a law-based gospel. ‘I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!” Gal 2.21 NIV.

We can suffocate our Christ-life by living from the law. This is spiritual suffocation because it substitutes the law for the incarnation of the Christ in our being. Jesus did not live to the law or subordinate Himself to the law. He lived from oneness with His Father. It could be argued that ‘Law-ism’ is not a Christian religion. How can it be if we live in ‘the letter’ that suffocates life – a mode that is a negation of true Godliness.

‘He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life’ 2 Cor 3.6 NIV. If we are in the law, we are not in the Spirit of life.

CONCRETE THINKING
Not a few Believers contain themselves in the law, it’s legalisms and legalistic epistemology because they see this as ‘real substance.’ To them holiness is what you do, which is why to them, the Ten Commandments must be retained and Jesus employed to realise these precepts in our lives. But the law makes a body of death compared to the reality of Christ incarnated in us to make us sons in spirit and in truth.

Jesus said ‘The Kingdom of God is within you,’ meaning that in Him the Kingdom of Heaven is realised on earth in us. But it’s more than this. The eucharist means that Christ is realised as us by the Spirit.

CARCASS THEOLOGY
Law addiction restricts us to the observable, to a religion of externalities. woodenness and in the end, hypocrisy. Since none of us are capable of a comprehensive obedience to such laws we are apt to dilute them, to give ourselves over to pretence and self-made contract in order to gain A self-made grace – not to mention that law-based righteousness is skeletal compared to Christ expressed as His disciples.

EMPIRICISM
To insist on the observance of any law, binds us to the entire law which subverts Christ as our life. Legalism is akin to Hume’s empiricism and the notion that only that which is observable is real. ‘If you cannot see it and measure it, it is not there.’ This is the kind of reasoning that can be offered in law-based cultures that deny the force of Paul’s ‘Christ our life’, ‘Christ in you’ and John’s ‘Christ come in our flesh’  - all statements of the incarnation and impartation of Christ into our being.

BEING AND SPIRIT ARE IN GOD
Jesus declared, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’ meaning that He is comprehensively our life and personally the reality/hegemony of the Kingdom. In the Kingdom Jesus began, being is foundational and doing is the fruit of being. This means that life and righteousness are the effect of our sonship in God.

US IN CHRIST AND CHRIST IN GOD
Thomas Torrance explains how and why we need to know God and ourselves from ‘being’ rather than from mere appearances. “Ernst Mach claimed that atoms were no more than 'mental artifices' or 'scientific fictions' needed for the convenient arrangement of observational ideas, which was in line with his conventionalist and positivist notion of science. 

Max Planck, on the other hand, one of the founders of quantum theory, claimed that atoms were 'real' … 

Before long, however, atomic physicists succeeded in cracking open the atom and knowledge of it steadily advanced empirically and theoretically in terms of its intrinsic connections and nuclear structure. 

“Thus physical science threw off its obsession with an observationalist approach that restricted it to the knowledge of appearances, and developed in a realist direction in which knowledge of things was controlled through the disclosure of things in their internal relations and structures… 

“Now at last the same kind of change is taking place in theology and must take place if we are to understand Jesus Christ in any realist or authentic way… the way is open for the development of appropriate forms of inquiry in which we allow Jesus to disclose himself to us in the light of his own intrinsic Logos and in terms of his own internal relations…”

APPEARANCES TO BEING
A law-based theology is not only outmoded and left behind as an artifact of God’s fellowship with us. Being a construct of the tree of knowledge it is wooden and life-denying. The letter kills as was seen at the cross. Calvary’s cross is a representation of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil on which we would all be crucified if it were not for Christ being our substitute and then our life.

ENGULFED IN GOD
The love of God, God’s active grace, enterprise and genius of the trinity is seen as it reached out to us in the person of Jesus Christ. In Jesus we are engulfed in the Family of God. The cross which was meant for evil ministered to a tree of life who is the Christ. The leaves of this tree heal us, heal the nations and the fruit that is Christ Himself becomes us as we eat Him by living in the incarnation. The fruits of the Spirit are real in you because they are the expression of Christ as you.

RELIGIOUS HOSTILITY TO LIFE
‘Now you, brothers and sisters, like Isaac, are children of promise.  At that time the son born according to the flesh persecuted the son born by the power of the Spirit. It is the same now’ Gal 4.28,29 NIV.

SELF BOUND
In Galatians Paul speaks of law-slaves who resist and deny this life the Spirit. In a manner of speaking, they persecute themselves because they deny themselves spirit and life. In doing so they remain outside their inheritance of Christ their life. In Romans Paul describes them as belonging to this body of death which means they are fellow travellers with Adam rather than living in the oneness that is theirs in Christ. ‘Oneness with Christ’ has been called mysticism. There’s no mystery here. It’s Christ come in our flesh, which means that we become the expression of Jesus Christ as Bill, Jane and Mary.