THE MEANING OF THE EUCHARIST
27/11/24 16:24
God says to us, ‘Be still and know that I am God.’ This has been made infinitely easier since the cross. As a result of the atonement and the mediation of God to our being personally by Christ, it’s almost a no-brainer. As Jesus said, ‘He is in us and with us.’ The incarnation is the foundation of our life in God. We remind ourselves of this at The Lord’s Table.
NOT SPASMODIC
Some need to know that God is with us always. Not only when ‘manifesting’ and you can feel the Presence. Some don’t feel the Presence, yet live Godly healed lives of peace and joy. Some who operate in the gifts live a train-wreck life because the presence does not live in them. The Presence is not a thing of fits and starts. It’s ours by incarnation. Thus, Paul speaks of Christ in us while John highlights Christ come in our flesh.
HYBRID
The prime witness of Holy Spirit is to present Jesus as He is in the truth of what He has done and is doing. The Gifts and Anointing bolted onto a non-gospel set people up for disappointment. If we live from an innately separationist gospel – which we do in legalism - the gifts have no root. Like tomatoes planted in sand they just fade away.
INCARNATION IS HEALING AND LIFE
I remarked to a woman once, ‘The Presence is everything.’ Not everything’ she replied. I was taken aback. But at that stage of my life, I did not realise that the foundation of our post-cross life is the trinity in us – incarnation. The incarnation is everything since it is the foundation of our being and our adventure with God. Gifts based on this reality will last. The gifts based on a false gospel will not. They have no root.
THE PRESENCE IS
God is always present in the Believer. Some sense the presence. Others do not. Those who don’t should take courage in the fact that God is in you and with you because the age of separation is over. The age of Christ in you began when Jesus declared, ‘It is finished!’ The curtain into the most holy place was ripped from top to bottom showing the New Reality. The dividing line was undone.
Presence lives in us and we live in the Presence. Jesus said, ‘Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed’ John 20.29 NIV.
GOD IS IN YOU AND WITH YOU BECAUSE HE IS.
To live in this reality is to live in the Spirit, who has come in our flesh. This is not to endorse cessationism and head-banger deadness in the ‘letter that kills’. It just means that the foundational miracle is Christ come in you to be expressed as you.
IMPART HIS LIFE
‘The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you—they are full of the Spirit and life’ John 6.63 NIV.
Kingdom life is always sourced in spirit. Something is not ‘kingdom’ just because we are active. It’s Kingdom when the life of God is flowing through us to any situation of need. You are a minister of life when Christ is your life. Your words and deeds are then spirit and life. In oneness with Christ you are spirit and life and an imparter of this life to the things that you do.
GREATER
Any person in the post-cross age is ‘greater than John the Baptist.’ Greater because the incarnated Christ is woven into our being and we into His. This state of being is the reality that is ours as Believers in Christ. By trusting Jesus, we have not so much ‘received Him’ as been received into His life. God is never somewhere else for the Believer. God is in you.
STILL
Stillness with God is enabled in stillness. But we may be ‘still’ when surrounded by irritation and turmoil. It’s leaning to live in what we have – to live in the incarnation because this is the realm of our possessed reality when we grab life and live it in the present Christ.
THE PRESENCE
You are one with God when you are in your prayer chair and one with God when in the lab or tuning the car engine. Praise and worship music is an aid to being aware of the presence of God. But as Brother Lawrence did, we can live in the presence in the kitchen or hanging out the clothes.
‘The Presence’ is always in you and with you. Not just in manifestations. You are the major manifestation of God’s presence. Don’t attach to a God of fits and starts.
THE PRESENCE IS IN YOU
Marshal Davis writes, “When I learned contemplative prayer, I discovered that this open spaciousness, which I experienced in Nature, was not in the external landscape but the inner one. I had not discovered peace in the wilderness; I had brought it into the wilderness. Openness goes with me, and I can see it anywhere. It is Home. Love. Joy. Peace. God.” (1)
REAL PRESENCE
It is the Real Presence in us that joins us to Christ, to heaven and the life of God. This is the point of Leanne Payne’s book Real Presence that traces inner healing, true Godliness/humanness and kingdom fruitfulness to the incarnation of the trinity in you and us.
As Brother Lawrence notes, ‘practicing the presenc’ is practicing that which already is – your union with God and His presence in you and with you. This is the key not only to holiness but to imagination and creativity. It’s the soil of the gifts of the Spirit and the rootedness of the anointing. This is Soil that grows you, the church, and the Kingdom.
(1) Davis, Marshall. Experiencing God Directly: The Way of Christian Nonduality (pp. 5-6). Marshall Davis. Kindle Edition.
