NO GNOSTIC ADDITIONS

Life comes to us from God. God is life in Godself and we are fully alive when we are one with Him in the creation as the expression of His will and His being. God chose to share Himself with us. As a result God created us and mandated us to be fruitful and multiply. Fruitful multiplication of who God is occurs as we live as sons of God in the creation that God has given us.

THE ADVENTURE

Our privilege is to glorify God by being ourselves as sons and daughters of God.

I’ve met many who don’t have much of God because they have made God into a religion. God’s plan is to form us into sons/daughters who are alive.

We minister life to ourselves, society and the earth as we live in the relationship that God has given us with Himself: Oneness. This relationship is personified and secured for us in the person of Jesus Christ. Thus to possess Christ as our life is to be one with God and one with ourselves, other people and the creation.

GIFT OF ETERNAL LIFE

Possessing Christ is not a work or a quest. It is a gift that is already yours. There are no steps to Christ. God has stepped to you in Christ who lives in you and transforms you. You are in Christ and Christ is in you so don’t live in the double jeopardy of deserving Christ, earning Christ or ‘keeping close to Jesus.’

AT HOME WITH YOU

‘Jesus replied, "Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them’ JOHN 14.23 NIV. His teaching is that He is our life. Don’t be distracted by gnostic additions and amendments.

A FELLOWSHIP WITH LIFE

Keep in mind that God is not a monism but a triune God with whom we may live in a delightful fellowship and adventure. God desires your companionship and desires to know you and for you to know Him.

Speaking of Jesus, John writes, ‘The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.’ 1 John 1.2 NIV.

‘This is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent’ John 17.3 NIV.

EAT LIFE

To suck the marrow out of life as in the ‘Dead Poets’ society is to drink the water of life and eat the bread of life. It’s to eat life itself. This is what we do in following Jesus command to eat Him.

‘Jesus said to them, "Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you’ John 6.63 NIV. Eating Jesus is a mode of life called the incarnation – Christ in you, Christ as you. We celebrate and remind ourselves of this living way at the Lord’s Table.

INIQUITOUS CONFUSION

It’s difficult to understand why anyone would accept less than this but people do – either because they are involved in some variety of Christian Gnosticism* or because they don’t know the glory of their inheritance or because their spirit is already dead. Thankfully Jesus can raise the dead in spirit and the drugged in soul.

FREE TO BE, FREE TO LOVE

Thomas Torrance observes, “To the fellowship of love which God establishes with us through the incarnation of his beloved Son in space and time there corresponds an eternal Fellowship of Love within God himself. The Freedom in which God enters into communion with us is grounded in and flows from the Freedom of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in their love for one another. The Communion which God eternally is in the mutual indwelling of the three Divine Persons within the relations of his one Being, he is toward us and with us and for us in his saving presence and loving activity in history.” (1)

EXTERNALITIES ARE REDUNDANT

In her book Real Presence Leanne Payne urges all to live in the incarnation – the real presence of God who is in us and with us. There are many substitutes for this presence in the paddock of religion. Simply put anything that is not God is a substitute for the divine presence. Unfortunate religion is the most common substitute for God, especially when rites and behaviors have been vested with sacredness that does not belong to them.

REALITY IS CHRIST

We eat the bread. It becomes us. The Lord’s Table is a reminder of that which already is – Christ come in your flesh. God is not some time or some place else. God is with you and woven into your being.

We were made to live in God and have been enfolded into His Being by the enterprise of the trinity and the atonement wrought by Jesus. Worship and obedience is agreeing with Christ that we belong in God and have been included in His Communion. Our life in God is less about us receiving Christ and totally about living the reality that we have been received into His life.

* As in The American Gospel or in revisionist gospels by those who promote a religion of extra revelation and ‘new light.’

(1) Torrance, Thomas F.. The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (T&T Clark Cornerstones) (p. 162). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.