Jesus Our Guarantee
The message of the gospel is good news. And, at the centre of our gospel of good news, is the Person of Jesus Christ.
The Bible talks about the Christian life as an awakening. Or, as Jesus termed it - being ‘born again.’
It’s as if our past ideas about human life, the world we live in, our purpose for being alive and who we believe ourselves to be, dissolve away or die…and we are progressively re-born into a different understanding of our lives and the true meaning behind our existence and purpose on earth.
Being born again describes the process of this progressive unveiling, in our hearts and minds, of a loving and ever-present Heavenly Father. Not an absent, disinterested, disconnected Sovereign; but instead, a deeply invested, highly relational – Abba – which means ‘Daddy’ – a Father in the most present, intensely connected and involved way, abounding in intimacy and love.
It’s not that God has changed in some way. It’s that we had lost the felt understanding of the truth of who He has always been: and we needed to ‘see again’ – to be re-awakened to – to be re-born into – a new vision of who He is. And then…into the close, intimate place of acceptance and love He wants to share with each of us…personally.
To find this place – we needed the Person and Witness of Jesus.
In Jesus Christ, God comes to earth not as an observer, not as a person of privilege or power or wealth or influence; but as a vulnerable baby, born in an obscure, irrelevant town under the tyranny of a brutal, occupying, Roman world super power. Wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a re-purposed feed trough, surrounded by the stench and noises of the animals of the stable, God enters our world.
But in this act, something profound was being stated by God.
I am with you.
I am not removed from you.
I am not standing above you.
I am becoming one of you - so that you can see plainly and clearly that - I am at one with you.
In joining the human race, the Creator became ONE with the human race and (here’s the really challenging bit), the human race became ONE with the divine. In the incarnation of God, the whole human race became ONE in Jesus Christ, and in His relationship with His Father, and in His anointing in the Spirit, and in His relationship with each person, and in His relationship with all Creation.
Jesus accomplished this inclusion in the power of the Holy Spirit in his incarnate life, death, resurrection and ascension as the fulfillment of His Father’s dream for the human race.
This is our true identity.
It is who we are. It is what Jesus’ life loudly declares to us. Jesus’ life is a declaration of the ultimate truth (or reality) of who we are to God.
Of course, our challenge is that this truth is often in direct opposition to what our experience of ourselves is telling us. And…we are more likely to listen to our experience than draw our inner identity from this truth. We are in a great darkness. A darkness that is perpetuated by our experience of this darkness. We rehearse inside ourselves profoundly broken notions of God, of who Jesus is, of His work, of others and, ultimately, of ourselves. These broken notions create brokenness in our relationships, in our attitudes, in our outlook, re-affirming the pain and chaos of our ‘present experience.’ Like a broken record, we play these familiar, but distorted versions of the truth, over and over to ourselves as a place of comfort and familiarity. But we are far from the truth. Floundering in our darkness.
In all this, we are not being true to ourselves. It is our bizarre, wrongheaded beliefs, and our acting out of those bizarre notions that keep us of from experiencing Jesus’ anointing in the Holy Spirit, which He is constantly sharing with us.
It’s why the Father sent the Holy Spirit; to guide us into all truth. To cry out ‘Abba Father’ in our hearts as loudly and resolutely as He can, until we hear it and start to believe it, and then start to live from the truth of it.
The message of ‘Abba Father’ is not just shaping how we see God, it is shaping how we see ourselves.
For God to be a good Father I have to become a deserving son.
The veil of separation has to be ripped in my heart. The shared glory of the Father’s never-ending approval and fellowship has to stream into my innermost being and heal me and lift me up. You see, the Faithful Presence of God, demonstrated in Jesus, says “we belong to the Father, Son and Spirit.”
The incarnation of Jesus has made this a reality forever. The truth of the universe is we live out of the Trinitarian life that the Father, Son and Spirit have generously and willingly shared with us. If our beliefs, which are rooted in the darkness, are at odds with this reality, then we need to repent. Meaning: turn away from our version of the truth and embrace fully Their divine vision.
When Jesus says,
“you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free” (John 8:31-32)
He is declaring something over us, and the Spirit is declaring something in us, that is real and true whether we believe it or not. But if we will respond to the declaration of the Godhead, and allow our darkness to be swallowed by the brightness and power of its startling light, we will be set free.
Truth sets us free.
And truth is not a set of rules or laws. Truth is a Person. His name is Jesus. His incarnation, life, death and resurrection is declaring something powerful to us. The Father, Son and Spirit have embraced us forever in Jesus. They walk with us relationally, always treating us as persons, never as distant objects. Jesus has included us in His own life. The Holy Spirit works to give us eyes to see this Jesus and the place we have in Jesus before the Father.
And, as we see ourselves loved and embraced, as we say our ‘Amen’ to the glory the Father is offering us, the more of the light of heaven invades our darkness and delusion, and the more the world we live in gets richer, deeper, and more beautiful.
The truth today to you is this - you are in Christ and Christ is sharing Himself and all He is and has with you, including, and especially, the Holy Spirit. Because of Jesus Christ, your created value and future hope is fully assured. It is not dependent on what you do, say or think.
It is secure because God as said that it is and Jesus, the very existence of Jesus, affirms this as our eternal guarantee.
Because of this, Paul could write:
I am persuaded…that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Jesus is our Faithful Presence. Our Guarantee. Our One True Savior, Healer, Deliverer and Mediator. Our Great High Priest and the Head of the Human race. And we are complete in Him, blameless and righteous; forever joined to the Father and Spirit in perfect union and freedom.
No wonder they call this gospel - good news!
