Heralded Incompetence
There are people - like some of the governments that we have in place as leaders of institutions at this time - who boast of their expertise in managing society and economy. But they make a poor job of it. They are either blind, bad managers or stupid in the tradition of the kings new clothes. Wherever we are and whoever we are we have the honour of being life-givers. In the new covenant we are life-giving spirits. In the old we remain perpetuators of the flesh.
COMPETENT MINISTERS
We need to be up to date people to be real people. The real you is who you are in Christ - not a collection of precepts but a son of God. To do this we have to live in the Spirit - the Spirit of Christ who invests and ignites us with the life of our Father. We have the Spirit of Sonship and are sons in spirit and in truth. In this mode we are competent ministers of the new covenant.
COMPETENCE AND LIFE
The new testament is not a moral agenda. It's the witness to the fact that Jesus is your life.
Life in Adam/Mose or Jesus your life?
It may surprise some that reading the Bible and attempting to put all that goodness into practice is not the new and living way. Reading the Bible and asking Jesus to live those values in us is the new and living way in which He is both our grace and our righteousness. He is also our wisdom filling is with the spirit of wisdom and revelation. We are declared righteous in Jesus and we are transformed into righteousness when we receive and embrace Jesus as our life. This is a holistic process. Never an itty-bitty endeavour originating in the knowledge of good and evil.
SPIRIT AND LIFE
The healed life of sonship is a life and not an endeavour. It is a rest. It is Christ as you and as a result you as the true representation of yourself. You dont have to prove anything. You just live as a son. This is life in the Spirit. If we have contained ourselves in the law we cannot live in the Spirit. If we are in the Spirit we will become the manifestation of Christ and of our true selves. In the law you and our Father are separated. Your spirit has stagnated. Your soul is dead and you are not your real self. You are a clone of someone else or a leader without vision. In the Spirit of Christ, you and our Father are one.
We can gain a following by unearthing a snippet of new covenant life, like the anointing and the gifts. We minister the Kingdom in fullness when we are minsiter of the new covenant - the mode that replaces the impotence of the letter with spirit and life.
THE ISSUE
The issue is life versus death
We were not made to be a moral clothes horse. Good and evil are not the real issue. Life is the issue and we are talking life to the full. Just as God is Father and as such is so Himself, so we are sons who in Christ are sons and daughters in spirit and in truth. We are invited to live in this spirit of sonship to be living channels of life and doors through which non-believers may step into God’s life without limit. As ‘sons’ we are more than human beings. We are life-giving spirits who originated in God and who are every moment increasing our life in God - going from glory to glory as the Bible invites. As a son/daughter you are a river of living water. As a worker and a slave you produce drops when you could be emitting rivers.
JESUS THE LENS, THE DOOR, THE LIFE AND WISDOM OF YOU
The person who reads the Bible through the law or uses it as a ‘do good’ manual is much different to one who reads the Bible through Jesus. In the former Jesus becomes a function of the law and as a result is imagined as a lesser god. A christ who is not THE CHRIST. In this mode, which is a distortion of the gospel we become lesser people of the kind Paul called slaves and workers.
TWO REALITIES
Dont come to the end of your life and not know that you gave your life to a delusion. Our mind-set determines how we see the world and how we see ourselves. On the deep level this is called epistemology - our concepts of knowledge. What we have construed as ‘knowing’ shapes what we think is real. The person shaped by the law thinks religion is real. She cannot escape the letter no matter how much she promotes the spirit. The new covenant person is a life-giving spirit because he lives in the spirit of Christ. Christ is him. The law-shaped person thinks his religious life is real when it is but a shadow. The Jesus born person knows that His life is real because he lives in reality. The reality is Christ.
LIVING EXPRESSION OF HIS FATHER
Jesus lived from His Father. Never from the law or from religious rites. By living in Jesus we too live from our Father. We become sons of God not notionally but sons in spirit and in truth. Christ is more than the way to live. He is life and He is our life in every way. In Him the life of the trinity is our life. Good people have spent their entire lives teaching Christianity as a moral program. They short-changed themselves and those to whom they ministered. The Kingdom is not a program or an agenda. It’s Christs’ life as yours, Christ’s being manifest by the Spirit in us all. This is the difference between your false self and your real self, this gospel of the Kingdom and the lesser kingdoms of this world.
The one loaf means Christ is you and Christ is us.
NO 'OTHER GOSPEL'
To live as part of the one loaf we need to be one with the Christ of God. Never from a lesser christ or another gospel. Believers may differ in their their practice of things like baptism by sprinkling or by immersion. But they may not differ from the gospel as preached by Jesus and the apostles. Any revision of the new covenant into the old or the re-doing of Moses as the present ‘way’ or a hybrid of the latter is a perversion of the gospel of Jesus and the apostles. Paul warned that any ‘other gospel,’ other than the gospel he preached was a curse. It is a curse because it separates us from the life of God, from the real Christ and from the real body. In this state we may consider ourselves as the body but only to the extent that a tumour is part of the body yet not of it. Jesus spoke of the effects of ‘other gospels’ when he cited withered branches that are detached from the vine.
PART OF THE NON-LOAF
‘But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God's curse!’ Gal 1.8 NIV.
THE SOWER
The story of the sower is not a ‘Try Harder’ story. It’s about a seed that drives out rocks and weeds. It’s about a seed that is the soil, a seed that is Christ and a seed that is Christ in you. In ourselves we are not capable of being good soil. Of ourselves we are rocks, weeds, thorns and casters-away of the seed truth of God. ‘But the seed on good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop.’ There is only one who fits this description and it is not you or I. It is is Christ our life. But hear the good news. This Christ lives in us by His Spirit and becomes who we are. This is the vicarious humanity of Jesus.
GOOD SOIL
Christ Our life is the good soil. This is to say that due to the vicarious humanity of Jesus, He is our life and our good soil. By living a Jesus life in the Spirit He is the Soil and we are in Him. The result is that these lesser surfaces- the rocks, weed infestations and demonic snatching away of living seeds is eliminated and we become both good soil and good fruit. Weeds are more than things like materialism. They are religion and ‘other gospels’ that pose as life when they are death. You need not belong in a try harder gospel. You can live in a Rest Harder kingdom where Jesus represents you and manifests His life as you in every way. He is both the seed and the soil and in a manner of speaking He is you! As an astute teacher has remarked, ‘To see Jesus is to see yourself.’ When Christ is our life we are the seed , the good soil and the abundant crop.
GRACED IN OUR OBSTINACY
You do not have to live in the Spirit. Jesus will not make you. He will grace you as a cripple. He can grace you with a few drops of life. But grace is for fullness and not for lethargy or an encouragement to the obstinate to live from the law or from their personal hybrid of law with a dob of Holy Spirit. You are not only the aroma of Christ. You are the expression of His person. This is why His Kingdom is not a religion. It’s Jesus come in our flesh; Jesus come as Mary and Jane and Bob and Clive. Because of the incarnation Jesus has come in fullness in all who believe that He Himself is their life.
THE QUESTION
So where's the law in all this? No where. It's not relevant because Christ is your life. Only He can be in you what the law can never make you be. A human being who is a son/daughter of God. Rest harder in Jesus. Agree that He is your everything. He is you. The real you.