We are continuously in God’s presence; prayer is as simple as breathing. We spend time with God because he is our lover and we receive and respond to His love.
God’s heart for us is that we enjoy and delight in him, now and forever. For his heart is for us to rest in all he has done for us.
Now in Christ, we are now filled with the fullness of Christ. We are not a work in progress, we are a New Creation in Christ and God says it is perfect and good. We are not becoming holy we are holy and righteous in Christ – Ephesians 4 : 23-24 – “and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness.”
God put us into Christ, on His own initiative
It was always God’s intention to shower his glorious love on us. He is the beginning and the end. He is the start of all things and the end of all things. God took the initiative and all we did was respond to his invitation. It was his desire and passion that caused him to reach out and embrace us. We are the child he always dreamed of; we are the delight of his heart. We are God’s treasure.
We are In Christ and Christ is in us. We are never separated from Christ; he lives in us. We are in a love relationship with him, we are his desire and He is our desire. We are his delight and He is our delight. He will never leave us or forsake us. We are eternally married to Christ.
We do not do things to try to get somewhere with God – We are now in Christ; we are accepted, and we are held and kept as Joint-Heirs with Christ.
It is not our performance that makes us mature, but our acceptance of who we are in Christ – Our old way of thing is that if we do right, we will be right and therefore we spend our lives trying to do all the right things, to make ourselves acceptable. But Paul says in Ephesians in his prayer – “that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your [understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints” – It is our acceptance of all Christ is that we grow into the full knowledge of God.
In Christ we enter the radiance of God. The overflowing, overwhelming, Glory of God now lives within each Christian. We become the express radiance of God. This is our new birth in Christ. Adam’s sin had given us a heart of dullness. And dullness had become our identity. But Christ took our dullness, killed it and put His radiance in our hearts. Paul describes it as being transferred from the Kingdom of Darkness to the Kingdom of light. In Christ, the light has been switched on. We are not new creation of dullness; we are new creations of radiance.
The only way to get off the hamster wheel of drivenness and performance is to know and accept the everlasting, Glorious love of God. The sin of one man, Adam, gave us a consciousness in our natural birth that fills us with shame, guilt and condemnation. Adam’s sin haunts us even when we come into Christ. God makes us a new Creation in Christ and we die to sin and become a New Creation in Christ, and it is in our New Creation heart that we receive the love of God. By accepting God’s love, His all-encompassing, limitless, accepting love we lose the lock of guilt and condemnation and realize that in Christ we have been eternally set free. We are no longer think of ourselves as sinners in Adam but as Holy and Righteous in Christ. Jesus has paid the price for Adam’s sin and now in Christ we are eternally set free.
Living Grace 