Are We To Live The "Good" Life - Or The GOD LIFE?

What is God’s purpose for our living? What is the nature of the life we are created for? Is it just to live a “good” life, or is there much more to our existence?

The Christian life is the Life of the Son of God. The Christian life is not our religious systems, our doctrines, our ceremonies or even our worship. We are forever propping ourselves up with these externals, while God is busy removing the props so that we may live by the single eye of the faith of Christ dwelling within who operates by the Divine Life - the Life of God the Father.

There are two kinds of life possible for human creatures - 1) the “death-life” that we are born with which is really not life at all as God views it and 2) the God-Life or divine Life which is contained in Jesus Christ who lives in us if we have accepted Him by a new birth.

As new Christians and lovers of God, until we know who we are in union with Christ, we are most likely to try to live our “death-life” in GOOD ways. Since the enemy knows that we would not deliberately choose to center on blatant evil, we are deceptively drawn by the “angel of light” into the other side of that forbidden tree - the knowledge of good.

The “good” may take various forms:
character development, freedom, programs for growth, power. But all are an attempt to live a good death-life and all are less than God, for none of them is LIFE. To concen­trate upon these is to be focused upon something less than the One who said, “I am THE Life” (implying that there is really no other!).

When we, by faith, concentrate our awareness on the fact that we contain the Life of God in Christ (i.e., when we “walk in the Spirit”), these other “goods” become ours. In fact, they become the righteousness of God within His Divine Life. They are ours as natural and spontaneous by-products of being wholly devoted to the Life of the Lord Jesus Christ living within us. These “goods” are called “rivers of living water,” and they flow from our innermost being - from the LIFE of God functioning as we allow it to do so.

As we keep our focus upon Jesus Christ the Source, rather than on the objects of our death-life desires or the obstacles in our way, The River of Life already within us applies the atonement (at-one-ment in Christ) to all our experience.

The problem is that we, as born again Christians, still tend to overlook the fact that death-life is not real Life at all. We have been raised with the concept of the importance of human life in all the modes of earthly living. All our previous actions in dealing with the world have been based on the functioning and interaction of the death-life of humanity. It is not easy for us as Christians to switch gears and to get into the overdrive power of the Life of Christ. But that is what Christian living is all about. That is why we were not taken directly to heaven at our conversion and new birth. We are to grow in our awareness of the LIFE of God within us and then be used by God within our own little surrounding world.

Godly character develops naturally from within. A sense of freedom unfolds within us causing others to question, as Peter said, “From where comes such hope?” As we shed the burden of trying (by death-life), of keeping up appearances (by death-life), and of per­formance (by death-life), we discover new energy. We are being set free to live in the power of the Life of the Lord, Jesus Christ.

When Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the LIFE. . .“, He also meant under His breath, “...and your human death-life is NOT the way, is NOT the truth, and is NOT real LIFE at all!” Jesus said, “I came to give you LIFE and that more abundantly!” The death-life we are born with is a rudimentary kind of existence which God doesn’t consider as at all proper for His human creatures. There is no abundance to it as there is to His Divine Life.

Centering our focus upon Christ’s Life, instead of trying to do good, changes our perspective - our grace given Life perspective is “unearthed”, and we begin to see what He is seeing. We begin to live the Life we were purposed to live - eternal life in union with Christ. Having the nature of God as His child, we begin to LIVE like a child in His Family. And as we do, all the attributes of the Trinity are working for us!

“But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption” (1 Corinthians 1:30)

There is only one real life - GOD LIFE!

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