SCANDALOUS ROBBER GOSPELS

You have a treasure that is yours now. It’s Christ in you and as you. One of the greatest robberies of the thief and the robber is the robbing of our of our true selves. Jesus met a 40 year old male in a dream and asked him how he was going with his life. Joe (not his real name) rattled off a bevy of accomplishments. Jesus smiled and said. ‘No, that’s not what I meant. How are you doing at becoming yourself?

To be the real you is your glory and true fruitfulness as a Kingdom Agent.

HOLINESS – BECOMING YOU
Many Christians who have lived in religion/legalism, die without becoming their real selves, which is unfortunate given that it is this life in the body that our mission is to be witnesses to Christ in us. Witnesses living that we are spirit and life because we are incarnated with Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Real Life is Christ our life while death has many forms and comes in many shades of un-life. One of the main spectres of un-life is the false self-made from the clothes of religion.

There’s a constant parade of people who are busy making a self that is not them. People of intelligence and intellect may not know themselves because that are addicted to a gospel that is ‘no gospel at all.’  It is ‘this body of death’.

In the law we are baptised into abstractions.

THE TREASURE
All believers have a pearl of great price that is theirs. All have access to the treasure under their feet. But many leave it in the ground. Not all put the pearl necklace on and instead wear the dead albatross of externalities and works. They have shot down the life that is theirs where Christ is their life and elected to live in the externalities that muffle the real self in the name of God. Richard Rohr is spot on when he advocates living naked to Christ. He calls this the naked now in which one is exposed to life itself in union with Jesus Christ.

THE FALSE, UN-BORN SELF
The clearest teaching of the false self/real self-transition, I have found comes from Richard Rohr who writes, “Our separate self is who we think we are, but our thinking does not make it true. It is a social and mental construct that gets us started on life’s journey. It is a set of agreements between us as individuals and our parents, families, school friends, partner or spouse, culture, and religion. It is our “container.” It is largely defined in distinction from others, precisely as our separate and unique self. It is probably necessary to get started, but it becomes problematic when we stop there and spend the rest of our lives promoting and protecting it.” This is a tragedy when our mission is to promote a lesser gospel because it is ours.

OBSESSED WITH ADAM
Any law-based gospel separates us from Christ and from ourselves so that we live in a mis-informed view of Jesus and a crippled view of the self.

LOSING WHAT YOU HAD
Rohr continues, “If we do not let go of our separate self/false self at the right time and in the right way, we remain stuck, trapped, and addicted. (The traditional word for that was sin.) Unfortunately, many people reach old age still entrenched in their egoic operating system. Only our True Self lives forever and is truly free in this world.” Law-fulfilment is always about us. Its focus is the earning of acceptance with Christ and the building of the self from our achievements which include religion.
 
 We are not necessarily of the Kingdom because we are Christians. Kingdom agency denotes authority, spirit and life. We can live in political correctness – the legalism of non-believers or the legalism of Believers – the reductionist  un-gospel of the field of tares. Stagnation in the false self and its false epistemology is another way of saying that we must be born again if we are to be alive and fitted to see light/truth. Unless we do, we cannot understand the Kingdom of God and we don’t see much of anything. But we are not innately poor. We have this treasure in the jar of clay that is you/us. This pearl of great price is Christ come in our flesh.