TO BE A LIFE-GIVER IS TO BE ALIVE YOURSELF

In the law we are always dead. As legalists we are dead without knowing it because we are devoid of spirit and life. Legalism has a wide influence. It conditions those aiming for oneness with God into thinking that it is something you do.

But oneness is something we are.

Oneness is ours by agreeing with God that we are one with Him in Jesus Christ. This is the mind of Christ. Mindfulness is currently a thing. But people of various religions have been practising mindfulness as contemplation since well before the coming of Christ. Having the mind of Christ is to agree with Christ that He has made us one with His Being as participants in His fellowship in the trinity. We are not deities but we are sons/daughters of God.

FALSE CHRIST’S
We can be so embedded in our own ideas that we cannot be taught. We may live a life that is so active that we have little inner life. The result can be that we get our ideas from inherited misunderstandings of the Gospel or worse – the fictions of social media. Social media can (at times) be a mirror to wisdom or the evidence that we are among those who think their ignorance is common sense. This is what Martha had – cliched religion. But Jesus assured Mary that she had chosen life over activity – thus ensuring that any practical venture that Mary began would be a stream of spirit and life.

JESUS THE RIVER
Holy Spirit is not the source of spirit and life. Jesus and our inheritance of the incarnation is the source of spirit and life. The gifts of the Spirit will not fix the lack in the soul, the partial blindness and the semi-death that we are living in Adamic/Mosaic separation from God. The gifts work properly when we are in the Vine and joined to the trinity.

We are one with Christ not so much by the work of receiving Christ or even ‘keeping close to Jesus.’ We are one with Christ and with God because we have been received into His life. In Jesus the trinity has reached out and engulfed us in God. Thus, all can swim in this river of life because the river of life swims in you.

INCLUDED
We can get a healed leg and be an unhealed person in our being because we live in a false mindset that thinks we are separated from God and must undo this by self-effort. Healings are signs that point to Jesus as the un-doer of separation from God. Foundational healing comes from the cross, Christ’s atonement and His incarnation in our being.

WE ARE INCLUDED
We belong to the Body of Christ because we have been included in God and because God has been woven into us. This is a state of being wrought by the enterprise of the trinity. God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. We are reconciled because we are enfolded in God in the person of Jesus Christ – not because we have done something, done things, kept the law or demonstrated that we are religious. Dilute grace and we have nothing even though we think we have something.

IDENTITY
The Father of Lies began the age of iniquity by questioning the identity of Father then the identity of Adam and Eve, God’s sons. A major ploy of the Enemy is to get us to embrace a false identity in order to suffocate our sonship. There are many false selves we can embrace. A common false self is put on over our real self when we embrace religion instead of union with God, or when we make a life out of pumping up the faith community we have been born into rather than pursuing an uncompromising pursuit of Jesus and His Truth. The pure in heart see God. The double minded see what they have chosen to see and shrink because of it.

If we have an identity flowing from a different christ and a different gospel our membership of the Body is problematic. It may exist notionally but may not be connected to God.

We participate in the divine nature by agreeing with Christ that we do so participate. We live from the reality of this union.

Genuine ‘being’ and authentic identity are the result of Christ come in our flesh.

THE BODY IS CHRIST AND US IN CHRIST
Myk Habets commenting on Thomas Torrance observes, “The imago Dei is thus a dynamic and eschatological reflection that, while initiated and developed in time-space within creation, is ultimately only realised in the eschaton of which the church is currently a foretaste.  The onto-relations work on two levels, vertically and horizontally. Vertically, one is justified and sanctified through a relationship with the triune God; horizontally, one is formed into communion with other believers in the Body of Christ, the church. But these two levels are one integrated whole, not two separate spheres. What is clear is that theosis, communion with God, is a ‘personal’ activity and persons are defined as humans-in-relationship.”

‘Humans in relationship’ starts with oneness with God and results in oneness with each other.’

MEMBERS OR TUMOURS
The pre-requisite to the quality of Godliness in this relationship is believing in the Christ of God and growing in the Gospel of Christ rather than in some variation. This is why Jesus warned against false christ’s and paddocks of tares that are false gospels.

CHEAP GRACE
Cheap grace is not about moralism or the law. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “Cheap grace is grace .. without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.” To be incarnated is to be alive with eternal life. A Martha life, done by way of self-justification imparts no spirit and life because we are not alive – just active. Real life-giving starts with our personal oneness with Jesus.

Grace that is not our inclusion in Christ is not grace at all. Grace is not proof texts and positions but Christ’s life as ours. In oneness with God, it is possible to love as God is love. In the form of the letter, we may be adept at talking life but we cannot live it.

THE EXPRESSION OF GOD IS YOU
Yet we can live love when one with Christ because Christ is us and we become love. ‘I in them and you in me--so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me’ John 17.23.

Such love is not a criterion we have attached to ourselves as a badge. It’s us being life and love as the expression of Jesus Christ.