Jesus lives to reproduce Himself in us and to manifest Himself as us in the world. One whose life is Jesus and who aspires to live in the fullness of His life as a son of God participates in divinity. This is a state of being far above any attempt to use Jesus as a stepping stone to something less. What is less?
I used to think that Jesus existed to empower us to keep the Ten Commandments. Many people do, or if not so persuaded are hostage to a more subtle form of legalism that grows out of the ‘should doism’ of their church culture. A legalistic spirit can graze in the garden of a house church just as happily as it can in a mega church if the people going there have not stepped out of the letter into the Spirit.
‘The Spirit is not a tricky way of helping us live the letter. “The Spirit” is how we live in God.’
The Spirit of Christ re-invents us in the image of Jesus – not in the image of the law or a series of performance criteria. Jesus is not the Grand Master of the to do list. Live out of to do lists and we live in the letter. But should our to do lists be a manifestation of Christ in us, we will be life-multiplying people wherever we go.
The knowledge of God is progressive. God is teaching us today to live entirely in His Son and not in a mixture of ourselves and Him, which is to say not in a cocktail of flesh and spirit. Jesus has revealed to many of us the power and fruitfulness of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. But we can employ the gifts of the Spirit without living in the Spirit. But in so doing we remain crippled in our lives and carry quite a small sword, which is to say our authority in Christ is limited and way below the infinite potential of one who lives entirely in Christ by the Spirit.
‘The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned’ 1 Cor 2.14 NIV.
We cannot live in the Spirit and live in the knowledge of good and evil at the same time. We cannot be both slaves and sons. Some believers remain slaves because they are still hostage to the law. Their identity and security depend on it. But it’s not the kind of identity or security that enables one to walk on water. Only sons do this because they live in the Son of God whose Spirit is in them. Other Christians remain in the knowledge of good and evil because their belief system is a Christianized version of it. Their thought patterns and modes of knowing what they know, by which I mean their epistemology, are steeped in the constructs of the knowledge of good and evil. Consequently their power over the evil one is small and they are prone to represent themselves and a culture of judgment in the name of God. This kind of things can produce ‘the church’ but never the Kingdom of God.
‘And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him’1 John4.16 NIV.
It may shock or annoy us to learn that the essence of God is not law but love. The definition of love is Jesus and Jesus is the human face of God. Jesus did not tell us to ‘law one another.’ We have been commanded to love one another as Jesus loves us. Such a feat is accomplished supernaturally as Jesus lives through us by the Spirit of Sonship.
With Jesus as our life we become humility and we become love. Best of all we grow in what it means to be sons and daughters of God, all because it is Christ who is in us transforming us constantly from glory to glory. To be glorious is to be as Jesus. But in Jesus, glory is also to be you and flower as His daughter or son in your place of authority. We love best not only when we forgive and multiply the spirit of reconciliation and unity. We love best when we are serving others as who we were made to be.
A few years ago, the woman who won Master Chef in Australia remarked that she saw her cooking as a way of loving people. Our work is a way of loving people. In Christ being ourselves is a way of loving people. When we live in Jesus who is THE NEW AND LIVING WAY we become a way of revealing Jesus’ life, love, light colour, liberty, wisdom and all the adventurous and exciting things that are JESUS! We multiply the Kingdom of God in the world.
Keith Allen
