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Friday, February 26, 2010

On what basis are we marrying and living our marriages. Are we building the church or is Christ building His Church? Are we living our relationships out of God or out of the knowledge of good and evil? This post is about expectation as a form of performance orientation and law.

I returned from India on Wednesday night. Being more tired than I had realised I slept in until 10.00 AM the following day and woke up to a discussion on the ABC’s Life Matters. The issue was the fraught process of not only choosing the right partner but living with the one you chose. Quite a contrast to India, where most marriages are still arranged and yet last longer than many in the west, where the choice is supposedly based on love and romance. Could it be that in our country our choices are made more on self love and unrealistic expectations?

Expectations: The key word in the ABC program was expectations. The word expectation was on everyone’s lips. ‘Expectation’ had led many to compose lists of what they expected in a partner. Not surprisingly it was difficult to find a partner who met these expectations, let alone one who could maintain them in a marriage. The result reported by many was that when one partner failed to live up to the expectations of the other, the marriage was over.

It could be said that when we fall in love with someone who meets our expectations, the romantic love we experience, is to a large degree, self love. Have we fallen in love with the possibility of feeding our love of self. It’s interesting that those who seek the perfect marriage seldom find it. Just like those who seek perfect community in the perfect church. I don’t know about you, but I have observed that church folks who are always going on about community do not find it, while those with an unremitting focus on Jesus have it handed to them on a plate.

There’s a reason why many marriages and many house churches fail. Like those who attempt marriage based on expectations, those who attempt to build church community based on formulas and expectations have the same misfortune. They go from relationship to relationship never satisfied, never sated and experiencing constant separation and divorce. Or alternatively they accommodate themselves to a dysfunctional church community similar to a bad marriage. All of which brings me to the point: Separation and alienation are the essence of a life lived in the knowledge of good and evil. To live in this knowledge; to live in expectation is to be less than you were made to be and to make others less than they are. It is to live in abstractions when you could be living in personhood. It is to live in Adam when you have been gifted to live in Jesus. You were made to live as a person in the Person of God – a spiritual relationship that enables you to flower in individuality and in community – a spiritual relationship that is meant to enable marriage partners and the Body to live out of personhood instead of out of lists.

God so loves people that He sent His Son so that fullness of life can be experienced by living in Him. Such fullness is to be experienced in all relationship. A life in Jesus is a life in grace. Our failure to meet our personal expectations is covered in His love. The failure of others to meet our expectations is covered in His love (read His blood). So important is it that we live in God rather than in expectations, that God shed His blood to secure it. But it does not end there. Our union with God made possible by His blood transforms us. With Jesus living in us by the Spirit we become more loving, more human and more Godly. We become more able to be ourselves and to meet the needs of those around us. We get to be persons rather than list mongers. We create people rather than diminish them or abandon them. We live in a new and living way. Not the old way of performance and expectation. We live as sons in God’s Son. We are the Bride of Christ who multiplies the glory of persons. The definition of holiness and wholeness is not a list. He is Jesus the Person. Wholness in marriage and church community is Christ in you and with you.

‘Put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness’ Eph 4.24 NIV.

THURSDAY, February 4, 2010

Recently I changed my religious views info on my Face Book page from charismatic to ‘living in the Lordship of Jesus.’ I wanted it to be more like what a friend had written which is ‘Jesus is Lord.’ I realized also that putting charismatic in that space could give the impression that I was attempting to live out of being a charismatic. I have nothing against charismatics. I have simply seen that charismatics can live out of ‘religion’ like anyone else. The Father has provided that we live out of His Son.

If you are one who follows what I write you would know that I would not want anyone to think that we can live out of religion and be whole, let alone walk in the authority of the sons of God. I attempt to live in God’s Son Jesus and encourage others to do so because we were made to live in God by the Spirit. That’s what ‘sons’ do. Charismatic churches can be joyous. But they can also be amazingly stuck in the forms of joy without having the joy itself. And sometimes preoccupied with the things of the Spirit but lacking His Real Presence.

I don’t say this to be unkind. I spent most of my life in the an evangelical culture until I found that there were gatherings and communities of people who experienced the Presence of God in their assemblies and personal lives. I mean not as a concept but as a reality. Once you have been where God is you can quickly tell where He isn’t. The Presence of God is addictive. It is meant to be because it is the only addiction that brings life.

If that is not your experience, I urge you to seek it. But we don’t have to be charismatics to experience God. We simply have to live in His Son by the Spirit. Living in religion we can neither know God or know ourselves. This is why many churches are places of politics rather than the House of God. To live out of church is to rob God and each other. Tp live in God and know His Son is to release rivers of living water.

Living in God is not a church pattern or set of cultural behaviours. We are refreshed, emboldened and precipitated into who we are as sons when the Presence that comes is God – not by having gotten ourselves into a trance by singing songs that are mainly about us!

We do, however, have to be worshipers of Jesus, who worship from the heart rather than attempting it from the head. Living in God is a life made possible because the Father loved the world; because Jesus re-joined us to the Family of God and because the Spirit of Christ will live with us and in us. We just have to live in what Jesus has done. In the Spirit we are able to transcend what we are by advancing into the fullness of Christ. The Father’s stupendous plan in which the whole God-Head has conspired is Christ in you and more. It is Christ as you as your spirit is ignited with the Holy Spirit of God. It’s more important to be a son than conformed to the world, even a culture of the religious world.

The church has been weak because so many of us have been living out of christianity, which boils down to living out of church. When we live out of Jesus the Son, as sons, the church will be mighty and the Kingdom of God will be real because a race of kingly priests will be at large in neighborhoods, towns and cities. Authority looks like what Jesus did. This is the authority that cast out demons and healed sick people applied to the inner life, to families, to industrial relations and commercial production.

The Kingdom of God can never be the result of law, performance and the expectation of ourselves and the various authorities. The righteousness and life of God is more simple yet more profound than this. The wholeness of God by which He means to bring harmony to nature and the nations is as exquisite as it is massive. His love is His logos and His logos is His light and restoration power. His word is living and active because this word is the Living Word. It penetrates because it is the righteousness of God that comes from God and is God – not the relative and incomplete righteousness that expressed itself as the laws of good and evil. This is none other than the life of the tree of life that is restored in Jesus and which enters us as we eat Him.

‘His Spirit searches out everything and shows us God's deep secrets’ 1 Cor 2.10 NLT.

‘For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart’ Heb 4.12 NIV.

‘I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me’ Gal 2.20 NIV.

Posts will resume after Feb 24, when I return from India.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Having been raised in Western culture we live out of the notion that we think our creation into being. This is true of a lot of it. You built a cubby house because you imagined it. We have our society and technology because people thought it up. We understand about ourselves because we have history, psychology and sociology. We can become better than we already are through wise reflection. We can be either captured or empowered by our ideas. Western culture is built on the Descartes notion that ‘I am because I think.’ This is part of the truth but not all of it.

I’ve mentioned already that cultures create their own reality. Even though the theory of evolution is an attempt at it, we did not think creation into being. The social construction of reality that arises from the theory of evolution is consistent with its base, which is the knowledge of good and evil. These categories legitimize an environment where the fittest alone are judged worthy of survival. As such Gordon Gekko can say with conviction, ‘Greed is good.’ But God’s love for the world transcends this. The Fittest died so that the unfit might live. In Jesus Christ we see that we are worthy because we are loved as sons. We are made, not to live in the figments of our own minds but to live in God as the sons of God. We are His House and His Family.

Many of us may believe that I think therefore I am. But there is a truth deeper than this and this is it: “I am because I am in God.” Or “I am because God is.’ Or ‘Because God is I am known.’ Or ‘Because I am in God I participate in the new creation by multiplying new creation life.’ Happy are those who know they are sons because they know God as their Father. Such people not only have the mind of Christ. They arise from His being. They are His Offspring.

Originally this was how our world was meant to be constructed. The self, society and our material culture where to have been sourced in God. This is to say, we were to take our being, nature, essence and identity from our Creator. Our system and culture of education, commerce, the arts and government were to be the outworking of our life in Him and His life through us. As Paul put it, ‘In Him we live and move and have our being.’ This is the reality. It is also the reality that Christ is restoring. But many of us have reversed this and imagine that we can think and reason God into existence. That He is the net result of our studies and a production of our Bible reading. Or that He materializes out of us doing community. Or that we will have more of Him if we do simple church rather than complex church.

We may think that God is the result of our Bible study when the reality is that God is because He is. Happy is the man or woman who reads the Bible in God (in the Spirit). From a position in God we grow in knowing God, rather than in knowing a version of scripture than supports a denominational identity or our view of the world.

It may be seen that a life in ‘the letter’ is not only a life lived in prescriptions. It is a letter life is lived out of theology instead of a life lived out of God. This is a situation in which we not only create a god from our own reasoning. We also create a self – a self that is dramatically inferior to the self that is created from living in the Person of Jesus. For this reason, to live in the letter is to live as a shadow in shadows. But to live in God’s Presence is to be a son. By living in I AM, we become who we are. “I am because I live in Jesus.” By living in Jesus, the Person, by the Spirit we advance into the fullness of Christ the Son of God from glory to glory as Paul says. In doing so we ourselves progress from glory to glory because immersion in the Presence of Jesus reveals us as sons.

“For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, “Abba! Father!”Romans 8.14-17 NASB.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

There is a startling difference between teaching that comes from the Spirit and teaching that comes from the letter. God is I AM and His truth simply is. How do we account for the superb clarity with which Jesus and to a lesser extent, Paul spoke about the Kingdom of God? They spoke with authority and not as the scribes. There was no caviling. Their words were living words spoken through them by the Spirit of Life. Here’s a clue to their clarity. They spoke out of revelation and not out of the letter. They lived out of God and not out of the knowledge of good and evil. They were not attempting to represent views they were representing God. They did not speak on behalf of factions and positions they spoke what God had given them to speak. They were not constricted by elements of good or evil found in opposing positions. Their position was in God. They were not so compromised by politics that when they spoke they said everything and so said nothing at all. The task was simple for them. In living out of God they spoke out of good and they spoke the truth.

Every religion, philosophy, world view and mind-set that is not the production of a life lived in God is a production of the knowledge of good and evil. If the being of a thinker is not in God, then neither will be the creations of His mind. Philosophies in the secular sphere that are manifestations of the knowledge of good and evil are the thought of Rousseau, Marx, women’s liberation, evolutionary theory and the passing parade of political correctness. Eastern and Western philosophy are both expressions of the knowledge of good and evil as is capitalism and the society built on its justification.

We were made to live in God to express living thoughts and living words. The purpose of life in the Spirit is to produce life in a physical world – life that is good, wholesome and life-multiplying. For this reason a life lived in Jesus by the Spirit is called the new creation because that’s what it is. It is the outworking of God’s Kingdom through the creative labours of men and women.

But here’s the point I am making about clarity and authority in God’s spokespersons. We can put together a talk from the word of God that is not God’s word and not God’s message to the people to whom we are speaking. When pastors and teachers speak, their talk is not the word of God just because they are using scripture. The word of God is spoken when God is in us speaking through us by His Spirit. We speak in clarity and truth when our hearts are one with God; when we are speaking for God in the one Spirit; when we live in the Spirit; when we are teaching sound doctrine formed by personal revelation from the Spirit who is revealing the heart of God through a son to His sons.

Since the source of revelation is God we can speak His word when we are not using the Bible. It’s not part of the cannon, but it is His rhema word nevertheless. God requires that we speak to the issues of life with wisdom and understanding out of revelation. Those chosen to minister to the practical needs of the people in the early church were full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom. God is bigger than His book and so is His world. While all we speak must conform to the framework of Bible, our world is not bounded by its covers and neither is God. If we are living in God, deep rooted in His Person and engulfed in His Presence, we speak and teach His word when dealing with the issues of church, kingdom and earth. God loved the world and gave His son for the redemption of creation. When we live, move and have our being in Jesus we speak His life into our worlds.

Monday, February 1, 2010

Community comes from the Presence of God – never from an absorption in the presence of us.

In the 1980s the words ‘community church’ began to spring up everywhere on notice boards outside churches. Unfortunately writing ‘community church’ outside a church does not make a church into a community and neither does it attract the community into the church. What does attract people, both Christians and non-believers is the Presence of God – the Person of Jesus in and among the Gathered doing what Jesus has always done. Which is imparting His love, life, healing and deliverance to His people.

Community in itself is associated with the Presence of God. God in three persons is community. It is the healing of our mortal wound – alienation from God and fragmentation in ourselves and among ourselves - that creates community. Jesus heals by making us one.

Jesus created community by coming amongst people. The Father sent His Son, His Presence to be with people. The Presence is not an abstraction. The Presence is Jesus, the human face of God meeting people face to face. Jesus’ prayer in John 17 clearly shows that the source of community is the Presence of God. Community occurs when God’s people are blended and intertwined with God as one. The more we are one with God the more we as individuals are unique and distinct. The more we seek God’s Face in the Presence the more our faces are revealed. The more God is known the more we are known as we are. The interdependence of the body begins to flourish. This is to say that community is produced by Gathering in the Presence of Jesus. There is no substitute for God’s Presence and community will not produce community. Genuine community is facilitated by the radical worship of Jesus. Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty and community.

‘Community’ can become a little god that wants to squat in house churches and gatherings of all kinds. We need to rise above a worship of abstractions and earnestly seek God’s Presence. Because without the Presence of God we die.

The pursuit of ‘community’ as such binds people to a methodology that is but another form of law and letter. Letter always kills. Those who will not get out of their boat of methodology and walk on water in the Spirit are doomed to wander from one methodology to another in a vain bid to build with human hands the house of God. But Jesus said His House is would not built by human hands. It is built as hearts join themselves to Him, to His Presence, to the reality of intimacy with His Person.

‘How will anyone know that you look favorably on me--on me and on your people--if you don't go with us? For your presence among us sets your people and me apart from all other people on the earth’ Exodus 33.16 NLT.

‘I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: 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 lovedme’ John 17.20-23 NIV.