To be in the Spirit is to be one with God. Jesus and His Father were one and he had the Spirit without limit. ‘In the Spirit has two aspects. Oneness with Father which is our becoming the expression of the triune God. The other is the gifts of the Spirit. The first is the cause of the second.
ONENESS IS LIFE – NEVER PIETY
Jesus was one with Father as the Son of God. He was one with us as the Son of Man. As such Jesus was the expression of God and the expression of Himself.
Every time Jesus spoke, he spoke exactly what Father meant Him to speak in that moment and that season. The reason: He and His Father were one. Our competence as new covenant ministers, comes from the fact that we have the oneness with Father than Jesus had – if we are living in our new covenant inheritance and not separated in a law mindset.
DROPS AND RIVERS
It’s possible to present a blurry, muffled gospel and fill a religious space from an old covenant mindset or a mixture of the old and the new. In this mode we can manage a theological address with a few grace given droplets of spirit and life. Holy Spirit digs Jesus in the side and says, ‘He’s not living in the inheritance we gave him, so we better help him out and save him from disaster.’ Nevertheless, the tenor of our effort, no matter how theological its clothing, is mostly ‘has little Kingdom Agency.’ We would do much better if we were graced with the fullness of our new covenant privileges so that we as ourselves become spirit and life.
‘The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you--they are full of the Spirit and life’ John 6.63 NIV.
There are increasingly powerful declarations of the real gospel declared by apostolic representatives of Jesus. I’m aware that the word apostle has been hollowed out by inflation over the last twenty years. Yet there are apostolic people who are representatives of Jesus in the real sense. They are competent to minister the Kingdom. Competent in that they declare His Gospel rather than some theologically constructed derivation of their own. Or some insipid version of try-harderism. They do so because they live in the oneness of their inheritance and are able to share the wisdom and revelation of Christ.
SIMPLE POWER
The real gospel is profoundly simple and simply profound in its intensity and expanse. J Baxter Kruger writes, ‘The real gospel as I have come to call it is rather different from the news that was handed to me in my youth. Listen to the end of Jesus’s prayer moments before he went to the cross. “Father, I have made Your name known to them, and I will make it known, in order that the love with which You love Me may be in them, and I in them”’ (John 17:26).
Along with the real Christ comes the real gospel and the real Body of Christ. It is this Body – the non-mummified kind - that is joined to Jesus and not insulated from Him by some another entity like the law. The real gospel is spirit and life. This is the real solution to the worlds self-confident chaos and inner alienation. It’s also the solution to a stagnating existence in the coma of religion.
RICH INHERITANCE
‘That the love with which You love Me may be in them, and I in them”’ (John 17:26). This scripture declares that we now possess the relationship with Father that the Son has and that the love Father has for the Son is the love Father has for us. We are one with God. Not Gods, but God’s daughters and sons, alive in the Last Adam and purveyors of new creation life.
ENFOLDED IN GOD
Here we have the embrace of ourselves and the world in the love and the fellowship of God. This scripture has everything to do with our state of being – as in “In Him we live, move and have our being. It prophecies the soon coming atonement, the at-one-ment of ourselves and God and the incarnation – of God in us and ourselves in God and the manifestation of the Spirit of Sonship in all who believe. In being made one with God we are not being made one with an abstraction like the law or an ideology or a lesser christ on which regulations and Christian values are hung. We are drawn into the fellowship of the trinity where we are one in the unity and diversity of the three personed God.
Let’s be clear. If we are still attached to the law, we are not joined to the Spirit and do not live in the Spirit. No matter how hard we try to bolt Holy Spirit onto our old covenant mindset that God left behind at the cross, we are not people who live in the Spirit. Attached to the law we live in the letter that kills. Because of grace we have drops of life – but never rivers of living water. Is our ministry a dry creek or a brimming river?
REAL LIFE IN THE SPIRIT
Leanne Payne writes of the incarnation as the REAL PRESENCE. Just as there is a real as distinct from a notional presence, so there is real life in the Spirit as opposed to a notional life where the spirit is suffocated by our imprisonment in the law.
Our union with God is the ground of our being. Our personal rootedness in the trinity; our union with the womb of all life is the soil of personhood and the reason for our spirit and life. Out of this union grows the new creation Kingdom of God and the agency of kings and priests. It’s also the womb of the Real You.
SHADOW TO REALITY
Now we are fully human and fully alive; we are capable and competent to minster the Kingdom in the terms of new covenant authenticity, fertility and potency. This is our living fertility and inherent potency, derived from our embraced union with God that is the real life in the Spirit.
Attached to the law we are notional sons of the letter. Interwoven with God we are sons in spirit and in truth. Real life in the Spirit is the result of our rootedness in Father, which makes us sons in spirit and in truth. Life in the Spirit is the effect of union with the divine persons. This flow of life is personal, alive and spirit. This is why new covenant union with God makes us competent to minister the kingdom and a rootedness in the abstraction of law does not. The latter insulates us from His life and eliminates entirely any genuine living in the Spirit.
‘So it is written: "The first man Adam became a living being"; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit’ 1 Cor 15.45 NIV.
ROOTED IN LIFE
The core of new testament life is the incarnation – Christ in us. Paradoxically life in the Spirit is the result of Christ come in our flesh. This is to say that the person of Jesus and more - the entire trinity lives in your body so that as a human being with a body you are also a life-giving Spirit in the manner of Jesus Christ. We live in the Spirit when we live in our new covenant provision of being interwoven with the being of God. John describes this when he wrote the words of Jesus,
‘On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14,20. We can realise this and live in it now.
As such we become sons in spirit and in truth with an apostolic witness. We are alive with spirit and life because we live in the Spirit. We are not joined to a body of death and nor are we insulated from union with God by an untimely attachment to the law or n the miasma of religion. We are in Christ. He is our life and we have what is His. We and our Father are one. We are alive in the Spirit of Christ.