Day 19: Living Daily in Reality: God’s Action
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How does the life we have been describing differ from the day to day life
most of us are living? If you want to refresh your memory on the
intellectual basis for what we are saying in these discussions, please do
view again (or read) Days 1 to 6: this will help you to see that Christ
is the being inside whom we all exist. When you do that, you’ll begin to
understand why Paul wrote in his letter to the Ephesians (2:4-10) “But
God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us,
even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together
with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with him and
made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus (by grace you
have been saved) that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable
riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. For by grace
you have been saved through faith and this is not your own doing, it is
the gift of God – not because of works, lest any man should boast. For we
are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God
prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them”.

In other words, God created us in his Son so that he himself would bear
personally every affront and trespass that he foreknew would be inflicted
by the free will of every human-being that would ever exist. And despite
that infinite pain, he lifted us out of time-space and remade us in
eternity in his Son. This present world is our temporal, fallen state –
but our actual, eternal state exists now in Christ. If we live as if we
are dependent on the world for our needs, then we experience the
limitations of that; if we live in dependence on the life of the
Creator’s son, then we experience the limitlessness of that.

Our real choice, then, is between the deformed creature we have become
through our dependent attitude to the world or the original being we were
re-created in Christ. The deformed, perverted old self cannot free itself
from a slavish dependency on the temporal world and the original
re-created being can only take its place through our embracing of it in
Christ. Thus faith creates nothing – it simply accepts and treats as real
or it rejects and treats as unreal; in that sense, our attitude
determines everything in our lives.

Can we clearly distinguish which version of ourselves we are living in?
Let’s talk about this next time.