Your life is Christ

The Lord calls us to do the good and steer clear of evil. But from the very beginning we have been forbidden to live in it. Our place of living is God. Since the cross our place of living is Jesus. The Father commanded us to worship His Son. Jesus’ testimony is that He is our life. Jesus in us is quite different to the ‘christianity’ that is the mind-set and world view of many of God’s people. To the extent that we live in this we rob God and rob each other since we remain robbed in the robbery of the regime initiated by Satan.

Do not eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil or you will die. That’s God’s command. Satan’s contradiction of this is, ‘Live in the constructs of good and evil and you will be Godly.’ The catastrophic result of living in the laws of sin and death has been wickedness and death on a grand scale. Wickedness seen in the perversion of good things by greed and lust; nobility and heroism degraded by war and much that is good about human life reduced to money. Then there are the many forms of death manifest as disease in the physical sphere and the multitudes of emotional diseases in the personal and social sphere.

When we live in Jesus by the Spirit of Sonship we are living in God. When we attempt to find life in Christianity, churchianity, morality and personal ethics we are no further ahead than those whose version of the knowledge of good and evil takes a secular rather than a religious form. We are in death. But our place is in Christ with resurrection, life and light.

‘When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life’ John 8.12 NIV.

The present economic/social chaos is the result of eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. The scandals, corruption and vice in parts of the church, together with the obvious weakness of Christianity in the face of Islam is the result of the steady diet of the fruit of the forbidden tree. And all this after the tree of knowledge on which Jesus died, has been turned into the tree of life by His resurrection and inauguration at the right hand of power beside the Father! You would have to wonder what it is about the vision, ‘The Torch and the Sword’ we don’t understand.

Satan’s ploy in the personal sphere is ‘Live in the constructs of good and evil and you will have a sense of inner satisfaction.’ What is not revealed is that this satisfaction is parasitic in nature. It is based on self-righteousness and putting down others.

‘Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus’ Romans 8.1 NIV.

There is no condemnation for those who live in Christ Jesus. But should we have an internal criteria by which we attempt to live and expect others to comply, we ourselves live in condemnation and worse. We are incapable of modeling the love that distinguishes those who take the name of Christ.

Gregory Boyd writes, “We either live by God’s righteousness or by our own. Which way we live ultimately comes down to this decision: Shall we eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil or not? Shall we live in grateful dependence on God or not? Shall we let God be judge, or shall we try to be judge? Shall we live in God’s mercy and thus give God’s mercy, or shall we pass judgment as though we were God and thus live under God’s judgment?”

‘I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me’ John 17.23 NIV.

It is Christ in us that is the Kingdom of Heaven in the world. We were made to live in God. The evidence of living in God is that we love ourselves and each other. But we have no righteousness like this of our own. This is accomplished as Jesus lives in us and loves through us.

We have been redeemed to live in God’s Son. By the Spirit, God dwells in us. By the blood we dwell in God (John 17). The Father not only planted His Son in the earth (the cross). He has planted Him in us and among us by the Holy Spirit. The glory of life, love and light in our circles today is CHRIST IN YOU!

‘And [to] be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ–the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith’ Phil 3.9 NIV.

Keith Allen, Sepetember 2011