CHRIST HIMSELF IS YOUR LIFE BY THE SPIRIT
16/04/22 08:05
“Nothing is more central to the Christian walk than love. Scripture repeatedly and emphatically commands us to live in love (Eph. 5:2) and to put love above and before all things (Col. 3:14; 1 Peter 4:8). It tells us that if we love, we fulfill everything else the Lord requires of us (Matt. 22:39–40; Rom. 13:8, 10; Gal. 5:14) but that if we don’t love, nothing else we do is of any value (1 Cor. 13:1–3). Most remarkably, Jesus prayed that his disciples would replicate the loving union he has with the Father by participating in the eternal union he has with the Father.” (1)
JOIN THE UNION
Nothing is more central to Godliness than loving. It’s the core of Godliness yet loving self and others is often the hardest to do. Earning love from God and others is a common addiction and the basis of bad religion. Good religion, if there is such a thing brings a rest in God’s love an ability to love self unselfishly and a loving concern for the well-being of others.
INCLUDED IN
Our inclusion in the communion of God is the foundation of our Godliness and humanity. We are graced because Christ represents us and graced with His communion with Father and Holy Spirit. There is no lack, no scarcity mentality in our achieved salvation. Imbued with God Himself we become the people we were made to be as we express the nature of our Father. In Christ we do who and what we are. We do sonship by the living way of the incarnation. Christ come in our flesh enables us to be love as sons/daughters of God. As the expression of Christ we become love and do loving things that come from the source of our being – Christ in us, Christ our life.
LIFE AN LOVE
Life and love are analytically distinct but part of the same thing: Part of God and part of us when we live in God and not in legalisms and religion. Oneness with God makes us one with life and love and we grow as life-givers as His daughters and sons. Our mothers may have told us to ‘heap coles of fire’ on our enemies. But we have Buckleys chance of doing it unless it comes from the Christ within.
UN-UNION
Our foundational sin is separation from God and attempting to be as gods in a religious or secular morality. We are not born again until we divest ourselves from our ‘earning godship’ through religion. We get to represent the Kingdom when we transition to Christ our life which is our union with God.
Boyd writes, “Because we do not usually understand and internalize the nature of our foundational sin, we usually think our job as Christians is to embrace a moral system, live by it, and thus to be good people in contrast to all those who are evil. In fact, I shall argue, God’s goal for us is much more profound and much more beautiful than merely being good: it is to do the will of God by being loving, just as God is loving.” I would add that the more profound Godliness as sons/daughters of God is to live incarnated in the reality that we as ourselves and the Church are the manifestation of God in the world.
(1) Gregory Boyd. Repenting of Religion. P12.