Christ come in the flesh is the opposite of the flesh come in the flesh. Christ come in the flesh is God manifesting as your life. This is life in the Spirit.
It’s a nonsense to think we are in the Spirit when joined to the law.
The deceit of the law is that it binds us in self-centredness. Even the task of overcoming sin is innately binding to the self because it contains us in the original deception that made Eve a captive to a narcissism. A self-absorption that clothes itself in false godliness: The attempt to be like God in mistrust and independence of God. Remember that the person who said, ‘You are a hard man, left his treasure in the ground in order to make his own way on his own terms. But he made no profit and multiplied nothing because he began with nothing.
GRACE
God is gracious. Floundering in misunderstanding we can produce something. But only drops and not rivers of life because truth liberates unfettered life.
Some communities of faith occupy themselves almost entirely in defending their aberrant gospel. The selfishness promoted by The Fall often clothes itself in religion. It offers an identity and status that appears to be godly but is in fact the mystery of iniquity. It ties people to an identity that is not an identity, causes them to settle for imagined ‘blessings’ that appear to confirm their path of pious infidelity and makes them blind and deaf.
Such people have the least spiritual discernment of any of the Believers.
They are ingenious at developing fictions that keep the truth that Christ is our life at bay. They deconstruct this to mean Christianity is my life or ‘my perspective’ is my life. As pleasant as they may be, they blunder about in a fog of death as dead men and women walking and talking.
HIDDEN IN LIFE
Jesus sets all free from the law and offers Himself as THE WAY. This liberates us from an obsession with sin and sets us free to be captured and SWALLOWED UP IN LIFE – by being hidden in Him. This is the meaning of baptism – dying to any kind of self-obsession to be liberated into life itself. Such life is never impersonal or an abstraction. Jesus is the law of the Spirit of life and not a law as in Moses’ laws on stone. Jesus is life itself. Life that is ours because we have been drawn into Christ’s life.
Rick Joyner writes, “No one can make it through this valley [of the shadow of death] without knowing and living the truth that if you seek to save your life you will lose it, and only if you lose your life for Christ's sake can you find it,” the prophet exhorted. But it is clinging to their false life and false self that certain Believers are determined to do. (1)
Our false self is the self that grows out of a heart reliance on anything that is not Jesus. Our true self is who we are when Jesus and our heart are one.
ADDICTION
Should we persist in the habit of addiction to our own ideas so that we keep truth at arm’s length, we sentence ourselves to seeking nurture in ‘another gospel.’ This is not Christ’s gospel of the Kingdom. The result is that we lose the ability to hear and see spiritually. We begin to die. Our faculties begin to atrophy and our souls lose their zing. We multiply death in the name of life. This is the reward of those who look to prop-up and embellish their sense of self in identities that are superficial.
SELF OBSESSION
“It is all related to the same thing. Selfishness is the prevailing spirit that enables the spirit of death, and thereby is the 'shadow of death.' It comes in many forms, but the most selfish will tend to look for security first, not purpose, and not what they can do to help others. Many have truths of God but they are not built on the truth of the cross, and without that solid foundation even the truths of God can be distorted and used to mislead.” (2)