ALIVE IN YOUR UNION WITH GOD

Professor Alan Torrance writes of His Dad, “There was nothing more liberative and transformative for Dad than the good news of the grace of God - that we are accepted and embraced unconditionally in Christ, that we are forgiven before we even ask and that God’s purposes for us are that we might discover this and be freed by it to love and forgive one another unconditionally.” (1)

REALITY IS CHRIST

It would be wonderful if all Christians lived in this reality, but in fact many of us do not. While claiming to live in grace, some of us live in a routine that we call a relationship with Christ. If we are formed in the law this is more a relationship with ourselves and our religious culture. We are graced by Christ even if our doctrine is wrong. But we possess all that is ours in Christ when we live in grace and truth.

If the law was a schoolmaster to lead to Christ, so is religion. It can be a pathway to direct union with Christ. Christ becomes us at our new birth – when we are born from religion into oneness with Christ. When Christ is our life we are free to be ourselves in the ‘frame’ of the Spirit.

GLORY OF SONS

To live from the law is to live a dis-integrated, un-whole self. To live from religion is to live a muffled self, muffled from spirit and life living as a worker instead of a son. “sons” are manifestation of our Father. Don’t insulate yourself from this direct incarnation by being a manifestation of religion.

God is in fact in you and with you so much so that you are woven into God’s being and He into yours. The ‘two have been made one’ in Christ when you say with Jesus, ‘I and my Father are one.’ The way to access this reality is not to ‘do something’ or earn it. The only ‘doing’ is to believe it. Even then it is Christ’s doing and believing that counts. You have oneness with Christ, oneness with the trinity and an increasing oneness with yourself and with humanity.

(1) Professor Alan J. Torrance Chair of Systematic Theology St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews Scotland in the Introduction to Kruger, C. Baxter. Across All Worlds: Jesus Inside Our Darkness . Perichoresis, Inc. Kindle Edition. Kruger, C. Baxter. Across All Worlds: Jesus Inside Our Darkness . Perichoresis, Inc. Kindle Edition.