THE ISSUE IS LIFE OR DEGREES OF DEATH

‘For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive’ 1 Cor 15.22 NIV. It’s apparent that we can be very active in church and in works of charity but not alive in our spirit, even if we are Christians. This happens because Christ is not our life. Not our life because religion is our life and we are attempting to be included in Christ’s life by self-effort.  No need to earn Christ because He has earned you.

We have been included in the Divine Fellowship and made Life-Givers by Christ’s Spirit. We are not workers and slaves but daughters and sons who belong to the fellowship of life-givers.

REJECT SLAVE-WOMAN RELIGION
‘What does Scripture say? “Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman’s son.” Gal 4.30 NIV.

OLD COVENANT CONFUSION
It’s a curious thing - some would call it an act for folly -  to live in the old covenant when God has given us a new one – a covenant vastly improved because it is not an addition to the old covenant and not rubbing Holy Spirit into Moses and the law. It’s not a contract and it’s not ‘action man’s’ ploy to ‘deserve Christ’. It a complete break because it is the end of the culture of the knowledge of good and evil and the start of the culture of infinite life that is Christ incarnated in us. The new covenant is Christ. New Covenant is not a theology. It’s the Christian doctrine of you in God.

CHRIST IS THE NEW COVENANT
What is the new covenant and how does it differ from the old? The New Covenant is Christ and the guarantee of your belonging in Jesus. The new covenant means you belong and are included in the fellowship of God in the person of Jesus Christ – plus nothing. The New Covenant abolishes the refrain, ‘Have I done enough’ and includes you in God in the person of Jesus Christ.
Thomas Torrance writes of the new and living way that is Christ our life.  “When we turn from the Old to the New Testament, we turn from the old form of God’s covenant to its new form, where it is perfectly and finally fulfilled. “In the Old Testament the covenant is described in this way: God out of sheer grace bestows himself upon his people as their God and gives them to himself as his people. In that covenant, he wills to be a father to his people, and desires his people to be his children. ‘I will be your Father, and you will be my children. I am holy, therefore be you holy. Walk before me and be perfect.’
BUT THEY CANNOT DO IT
“But God knows that his children in their sin and frailty are unable to fulfil his covenant, and so he provides for them a way of covenant response and fulfilment which was but a pointer ahead to the actualisation of the covenant in the very being and life of man. That would take place when God provided from within Israel, and from within man’s actual existence and life, complete and final fulfilment of the covenant both from the side of God and from the side of man. ‘Both sides now.’ God in Christ does it for us. Just accept His invitation to come to Him to have His life and inclusion in God.
INCARNATION
“That is what takes place in the incarnation. God not only fulfils his promise of love in the covenant in giving himself to humanity in complete and utter grace, but he accomplishes for man, and from within man, man’s fulfilment of the covenant, man’s appropriation of God’s gift of himself. This is why real life is found in Christ your life and only a half-life is found in  self-made grace religion.
RECONCILIATION
“But that fulfilment of the covenant will of God to give himself to man is also the fulfilment of the divine judgement upon sin, and the fulfilment from within mankind of man’s obedient submission to that verdict of the divine love against sin. Thus in the incarnation God comes himself, freely condescending to enter into our lost and estranged humanity, taking our lost condition upon himself in order to effect, through judgement and mercy, reconciliation with himself.” (1) THIS IS THE NEW COVENANT, and the reason why ministry from this reality and ministry from law is not the reality that Christ has given us in Himself.
LIFE-GIVING DECLARED
‘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. This is why an ‘earning mindset makes us dead in our spirit and just being where Christ has put you in Himself makes you alive.
MINDSET OF LIFE
Any doctrine and community of faith that is built on the old covenant is not only out of date but not the Gospel of the Kingdom. Whether it can be known as properly Christian is open to debate. We have a whole life in Jesus Christ. A life in which we are holy because God is holy and He lives in us. We are graced as holy and made holy by Christ’s indwelling and tutoring in the ways and life of the Kingdom Jesus began. In Jesus we have been drawn into the life of God and God has come to live in us. This is our agency and power grace sinners with His Belonging; to impart life to dead people and dead things and to be a manifestation of Christ in the world. Christ our life is this guarantee and the reason we are spiritually alive and not marketers of death in its many forms.
(1) Thomas Torrance, Incarnation, The Person and Life of Christ. P 56.