James

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In Christ Jesus - March 22

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I was trapped! Trapped in my own cave, I couldn’t see how to get out of this passage. It’s a cave carved by Elijah’s scriptural experience and his human boundaries. How could this man experience God in such extreme, demonstrative ways, personally and graciously subjected to God’s power with the wind, earthquake and fire, go to the front of the cave, in response to God’s personal presence, and repeat the tripe justification of fleeing for his life after abandoning God’s station for him in Jezreel?  This is the “Elijah Complex”, and ours as well! It is being loved beyond our comprehension even though standing comfortably in our wobbly reasoning.

How often do we interpret our reason as God’s light? How often do we use God’s blessings to confirm our own desire? Even as we drill down within our own humanity, exposing frail vulnerabilities, we layer a veil over our heart, hardening against the effects of God’s wind, earthquakes and fire, His righteous love is administrating.  Without God’s mercy, without God’s grace, we are lost! We have no means to see God’s righteousness and even more blatantly, we are powerless to walk in His truth without continuous and constant grace. 

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In Christ Jesus - February 22

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We have been “Drilling Down” this past year unlocking God’s word in our heart and mind. It has been percolation time for God’s word within our very soul, “dwelling richly,” filling us with the fullness of God.  However, as we began looking at Paul’s Ephesian prayer, in chapter 3, we began “fracking”  from inside at different angles.  We recognized how variable is our own capacity according to God’s grace and purpose.  Now, we want to observe God’s spiritual geological formations surrounding His fullness. Paul paints a cross-section of love, in this prayer passage, that encapsulates God’s fullness.  Penetrating God’s love is a requirement. Filling our fullness is receiving love out of His fullness.   

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In Christ Jesus - Dec 21

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We began a  “reverse drill down” last week on the following prayer of Paul to saints in Ephesus: 

 For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith – that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
– Ephesians 3:14-19.

Paul is giving us the things necessary to be “filled with all the fullness of God”.  This is the climax of his prayer so if we start with the premise that, indeed, we do want to be filled with the fullness of God, lets reverse engineer Paul’s prayer from the “fullness of God”, working our way backwards to where Paul kneels in prayer for the saints. In this way, we can identify the hinge points, the markers Paul uses, from praying on his knees to being “filled with all the fullness of God.”

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In Christ Jesus - Nov 16

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Our union in Christ is much more than an association with Jesus.  An association with Jesus is, in essence, having a “position” in Christ because we are justified. This popular seminary explanation of being in Christ tells us little, it is limited and lacking (l&l). When you hear, “It is our ‘position’ in Christ”, it is a hollow sound ringing out a warning.  The noise is academia creating structure for the church where Christ’s life is not seen yielding His power in resurrected lives. 

We are not challenging the validity of our position in Christ, it is most certainly true and does speak to our justification. Like many things containing truth, we get a warped sense of our identity when this is all we hear. We would go so far as to say, it actually vitiates our effectiveness, creating a skeleton without any tissue and mussel.

Justification will be more central to our discussion on righteousness in Christ, but we need to provide some mediation for our harsh observation. Yes, we are judged righteous through God’s sacrifice of Jesus for our sin, as expressed in the Greek aorist tense (Romans 5:1), telling us it was a completed act.  It is also expressed in Romans 3:24 in the continuous present tense, telling us justification is also ongoing for the believer who is justified once and forever in the aorist tense. In other words, our justification or our “no condemnation” in Christ (Rom. 8:1) is also our resurrected Lord living in our mortal bodies giving ongoing righteous life, justifying us as sure as He is in us and we are in Him. So, while we are positionally, in Him justified, He is also working his righteous work in us so that the essence of who we are is also being expressed through our polluted souls as we are glorifying Him. No, we are not talking about sanctification, this is in addition to sanctification. 

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In Christ Jesus - Oct 19

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Our union in Christ is much more than an association with Jesus.  An association with Jesus is, in essence, having a “position” in Christ because we are justified. This popular seminary explanation of being in Christ tells us little; it is limited and lacking (l&l). When you hear, “It is our ‘position’ in Christ”, it is a hollow sound ringing out a warning.  The noise is academia creating structure for the church where Christ’s life is not seen yielding His power in resurrected lives. 

We are not challenging the validity of our position in Christ; it is most certainly true and does speak to our justification. Like many things containing truth, we get a warped sense of our identity when this is all we hear. We would go so far as to say, it actually vitiates our effectiveness, creating a skeleton without any tissue and muscle.

Justification will be more central to our discussion on righteousness in Christ, but we need to provide some mediation for our harsh observation. Yes, we are judged righteous through God’s sacrifice of Jesus for our sin, as expressed in the Greek aorist tense (Romans 5:1), telling us it was a completed act.  It is also expressed in Romans 3:24 in the continuous present tense, telling us justification is also ongoing for the believer who is justified once and forever in the aorist tense. In other words, our justification or our “no condemnation” in Christ (Rom. 8:1) is also our resurrected Lord living in our mortal bodies giving ongoing righteous life, justifying us as sure as He is in us and we are in Him.