Day 70: The Exchanged Life
Day 70: Living Daily in Reality: The Exchanged Life ===================================================
So the world is exactly like it was not meant to be, and our Maker has permitted this so that we would have a clear choice. This meant the capacity to love because we had the freedom not to love.Â
The reason his only son appeared as the human Jesus in the first century was so that we would see clearly that the world we have created is something that brings great pain to him. It is evident that either it has to change or we have to change.
This is why our maker designed you different from all the rest of us – so that his son could complete the world through you as you lived inside-out, but we all have lived outside-in – that is – as practical atheists who have no maker and need to get security and significance and happiness from the world. We can never get enough of this from people and things and experiences to satisfy our need for the love of our maker, so our very nature has become perverted and needs to be remade. This is the meaning of that old Biblical clause “the wages of sin is deathâ€(cid:157) – sin is living as if there’s no God – and practical atheism so perverts human nature that it requires radical destruction and re-creation by God’s power so that it can operate the way it was originally intended.
Our maker has done all this in what our physicists call a parallel universe – or eternity – above time and space as we know them, so we now can experience our creator’s son living in us and through us — beginning to fill the world instead of emptying it for ourselves, subduing it instead of being subdued by it and using it rather than abusing it.
This is called the “exchanged lifeâ€(cid:157) – described by Paul in the Bible when he said, “this life I live – yet not I – but Christ lives within meâ€(cid:157). It is “Christ in you – the hope of gloryâ€(cid:157) – you as a permanent resident of the eternal life for which we were made, no longer living in fear that you won’t get what you need, but preoccupied with what your creator’s son wants to do or say through you. You know that you were made part of him and that you share the benefits of his ability to use the sub-atomic particles to modify even matter to develop the world in ways that accord with the Creator’s will. From time to time these seemingly supernatural powers will be manifested in the interim years before eventually the whole world will have to experience the renewal that already exists in a parallel universe.
But such powers of Christ’s uncreated life can only be manifested where we have exchanged our life for His. This requires the projection of ourselves outside ourselves – a total acceptance that we were destroyed with him in His death – and that his will alone counts in our everyday
life. It means “not I, but Christâ€(cid:157) – only then can his Spirit live through us the life for which we were made.
This means that we no longer live from the outside-in, as in this little diagram, but we live from the inside-out – from the heart and thoughts of our creator’s son within us – expressing his thoughts and his heart and what he wants.  It means stopping our looking to the things and circumstances and people around us for our security and happiness and sense of significance – but instead trusting our Father’s faithfulness, enjoying the gifts he has provided all around us and pleasing him and wanting his favor above man’s.
This changes the way our minds work: they concentrate on understanding how our maker’s plans will work out and affect the world, our emotions will enjoy his company and using the powers he has given us, while our wills direct firmly our life’s actions and feelings. All of this is motivated by a real oneness we sense with our God – and a preoccupation with what He is thinking and wants. We enjoy walking through the world with the owner beside us as he explains what his ideas and plans are. Let’s do just that during these next thirty segments – let’s look at some of the ways our Maker might guide us in the challenges and problems that our world faces.