Day 74: Living Daily in Reality: The Fullness of Stature – The Hope of Glory
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The infinite creator conceived and created everything in a millisecond:
he conceived of children like his only son who wanted to return his
love. But he knew that love is only possible for beings who are free
not to love. This meant creating and bearing in his own son in eternity
all that he himself is not and then remaking it – this is the meaning of
the crucifixion. All humanity exists inside Christ who has borne the
effects of every choice of ungodliness possible – with the result that we
all see clearly our choice – God or not God? Our present world displays
temporarily some of that life without God – Christ displays life with
God, our father!

You were created in Christ (Colossians 1:16) and you are alive now to
grow up into the fullness of his stature as he is fully formed in you
(Galatians 4:19).

So part of our present life is Christ living in you and me as honestly
and truthfully as he lived in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Although
he did not act directly to change the social and political injustices of
his age, he did express the pain that his own spirit experienced in the
light of their lack of love and wisdom. He mirrored the beatitudes that
he described in his sermon on the mount because they expressed absolute
faith that our Father had changed and rectified the wrongs in eternity so
that we could trust his manifesting the rectification appropriately in
time. So slavery and military domination and persecution had all been
rectified by God before the world was created but their actualization in
this temporary society would take place in God’s perfect time and
way.Â

Meanwhile, however, Christ felt and expressed the pain of his
Father’s spirit in his own attitude: so with each of us as we
experience and express the heart of God in our present age. This
integrity in our response and restraint in our human action is part of
the fullness of his stature into which we constantly grow in this present
life on earth. So we feel the sympathy expressed by Christ for Mary
Magdalene and his pain at the hypocrisy of those willing to cast the
first stone when we see the same lack of sympathy for the pregnant
teenager or harshness in those who condemn her.

So we sense the same fear of impending doom when we see the inevitable
decline of our present economy because of the self-destructive influence
of the rich on our tax policies. As passive income is favored over
earned income and the gap between rich and poor increases between the top
.1% and the other 99.9%, so our economy puts four times more of its
income into passive capital. We feel the same concern for our poor and
under-privileged citizens when we see the power of special-interest
groups to manipulate our elected representatives rather than encourage

the exercise of their free judgments. We express Christ’s attitude
that respected those in authority over us because they are not a terror
to good conduct but to bad.

Just as Paul exercised his political responsibility to appeal to Caesar
so we exercise our responsibility to elect our representatives and
encourage them to exercise their free judgments regarding all our
welfare. At the same time we refrain from any activity that would
influence them to benefit us at the expense of our neighbors because our
trust is in the free elections that God has permitted and will use for
the common good. So we are blessed by God as the meek or gentle who
will inherit the earth by his action as we pray for those in authority so
that we are quietly governed — but our faith is in God’s maintenance
of the structure rather than in our taking it out of the hands he is
using. So we live Christ’s ascended life at God’s right hand
together with this present life where we continue to learn his obedience
through suffering the chastening and conforming effects of our godless
environment.

Thus Christ in each of us begins to be fully formed as he develops the
world through his faith in the rectification of the world that has been
accomplished by his death and resurrection. At the same time we
experience the conformity to his image which is accomplished through the
exercise of his faith as we face the chastening effects of the fallen
world’s godless deterioration and hostility. So in this life we share
in the development of the earth planned by our Father and we also benefit
from facing its unlikeness to its creator.