The New Greater Life

God has cleared the air! He went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. We are no longer living under a low-flying black cloud.

He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, He personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to get it right once and for all. The law code, weekend as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.

The law always ended up being used as a band aid on sin instead of the deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embraced what the Spirit is doing in us.

Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them--- living and breathing God!  Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God.

But if God Himself has taken up residence in your life, you could hardly be thinking more of yourself than of Him. Anyone, of coarse, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, won’t know what I am talking about. But for you who welcomed Him, in whom  He dwells---even though you still experience all the limitations of sin---you experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason, that the alive and present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, He will do the same thing He did in Jesus; bringing you alive to Himself.  When God lives and breathes in you, you are delivered from the dead life. We don’t owe the old life one red cent.

The life with God is an adventure, is  full of anticipation, and childlike. “What’s next, Papa?” In Him, we know who we really are and we know who He really is!