CHRISTIAN BUT NOT KINGDOM
04/12/24 13:30

It’s possible for us to adopt of variety of Christianity that is the knowledge of good and evil with a Christian gloss. Some folks are fixated on the ‘glory of God’ but it escapes them that this glory could be found at the beach, in the surf, around wonderfully lithe and tanned bodies or in the ecstasy of sliding down the surface of a wave on a body board. This is the deceit of the idol of religion and the folly of those who don’t take seriously the life that could theirs in God. They exist in formula and contract instead.
BENT GOD
God for them is contained in separately from the world and ‘worldliness’ is anything that may be enjoyed – which casts a pious suspicion on sexuality and pleasure. Never mind that we did not make ourselves pleasure-enjoying or sexual beings. God did.
A misguided parent once argued to me that God was not pleased to teach children that they can enjoy God as surfers or while sunning themselves at the beach. Like a colleague who was shocked that substance of this verse in Solomon’s Song is about very intimate sexuality – and the intent of it is to portray intimacy with Christ. But if we live a life of externalities, as we do when we live religion, we will suffocate significant areas of our being in fallacious holiness. C.S. Lewis, who understood the foundational nature of incarnation, in contrast to some Believers, had a healthy/Godly attitude to the joys of food.
FENCE POSTS WALKING
Writing of the religiously inhibited, Baxter Kruger observes, “I assumed that these types walked more closely with God than the rest of us. They certainly appeared to do so. As far as I could tell, they were good people, and honourable, but they were about as interesting as a fence post.
NOT QUITE HUMAN
The highly committed religious types always struck me as being a shade or two on the nerdy side and heavy into religion because they could not do anything else. And the force of the threshold was obviously with them. Their presence alone could change people. Their presence could shut down laughter and stifle the best of parties. Whatever the highly committed religious types were, it was very clear to me that they did not have much of that invisible river about them. They certainly knew a lot about the Bible, and they talked frequently about God, but they did not know much about the great dance and how to live in it.” As we say ‘dead folks talking.’
THE DIVIDED NOT-LIFE
In other words, they lived the divided life in which God is held to be obsessed with morals but not with the world of Everyday. I have met people who accommodate themselves to glumness and others who are insulted when a surfer praises God for the sun and the waves. As a friend asserted once, ‘Some religions are a delusion’.
STILL NOT ALIVE
There are of course many who are not like this. They are just not alive. Not at any rate alive with spirit and life. But where does this spirit and life come from? It does not come from the law or the practise of religion. It comes from Christ in you. Jesus, who is of the Trinity, joins us to the aliveness of the Trinity. The joy of being alive in your spirit and robust in your soul comes from our being incarnated with the trinitarian God.
‘In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind’ JOHN 1.4 NIV.
Jesus said to them, ‘It’s about life!’ and I am that Life.