THE LIVING WAY OF BEING A LIFE PERSON
10/12/24 08:44
‘I say this because many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist’ 2 John 1.7 NIV. In order to be kingdom people we must understand that the Kingdom Jesus began is never the law come in the flesh. It’s Christ come in us. Living as legalists we represent religion but not the kingdom of Christ and His spirit and life.
WHAT SPIRITUALITY IS
John asserts that Christ come in our flesh is the core of Kingdom life. He is citing the incarnation as what it is – us woven into Christ and Christ woven into us.
God did away with the law in Christ because life and righteousness cannot be held in the container of words. The letter kills for the simple reason that it is not alive. Genuine spirit and life is the property of the Living Word who is the person of Christ. With Jesus expressed as us we too are a living word, made in His image. We are the expression of Christ. In a sense, we as the church are Christ manifest.
HOLY AS GOD IS HOLY
Some Believers think Christ our life lacks substance. But it’s the only reality that has substance. Life in the Spirit is Christ as you. Life from the law is convoluted, contradictory, partisan, fatuous and ultimately nothing but trouble. The knowledge of Good and Evil has no substance other than decay. We are only real as sons and daughters when Christ is our life and we live joined to God.
EUCHARIST LIFE
John Crowder writes, “I define mysticism as: an experience of union with God – a consciousness of the reality of God. The belief that the reality of God can be infused through subjective experience. Christians experience God directly through our belief in Jesus Christ, enabling us to apprehend spiritual truths that are inaccessible through intellectual means. The apostle Paul was the church’s first mystical theologian. He used the Greek word “mysterion” twenty-one times out of the total twenty-seven usages in the New Testament. Paul almost always used the word in the sense that the mystery has already been revealed.” It must be added that in the post cross age we are one with God whether we feel anything or not.
I have seen the gifts and the anointing flourish for a time, then wither and die in my lifetime. Why? The anointing and the gifts are a function of the atonement/incarnation. Not a thing in itself. A self-contained charisma is not a full gospel. Our reconciliation to God in Christ through His atonement and then incarnation in our being is the full Gospel. The Believer is one with God by fact, Not by manifestation or a burst of the presence -although these may result.
GREEN OR DEAD
To live the Lord’s Table as the normal Christian life is our healing, wholeness, agency and us as a landing place for the anointing. Whether we call this mysticism or incarnation, what it means is that if we have it we are a living tree. Without it we are a wood pile.
