Life, the universe and burnt porridge

This morning I burnt our porridge. What I intended to do was put the oats in the saucepan, put the water and milk in the saucepan, turn the heat on and quickly go to the loo. I managed to omit the vital step of putting the liquid in before turning the heat on, resulting in a smoke-filled kitchen, and a blackened mess stuck to the base of the saucepan. Life is often like that; we start off with good intentions but somehow, we mess up.

 The Christian life often seems like that as well; our aim is to serve God with a pure heart and mind, but usually our pride and self-love or sheer stupidity get in the way.  Our bodies are created with powerful survival instincts which reward us for actions which enable us to outperform our competitors in the struggle to breed and survive. This is totally at odds with loving our neighbour as ourselves. Paul struggled with the same problem, which he describes in the 7^th Chapter of Romans, when he talks about two laws controlling us. Our minds and spirits want to follow the law of Christ, but we are thwarted at every turn by the natural laws and instincts of our bodies (what Paul calls the “law of the flesh”).

So, we find ourselves doing things we are ashamed of, which we try to hide from God and our fellow Christians, but which produces shame and condemnation in us. This results, in Paul, with this massive cry of frustration. 

  Rom 7:24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? 

However, the Christian experience does not stop there. It is the springboard from which we leap into Romans 8. When we offer our lives to Jesus, he doesn’t just reprogram us, He comes to live in us by His Spirit.  When Jesus comes to live in us, He brings with Him all the benefits and attributes that resulted from His death and resurrection.  When we become Christians something very radical happens to us. Jesus talks about it as being born all over again; when we become joined to Jesus, we are joined into His crucifixion and resurrection; St Paul explains it like this:

“I died so that I might live for God.  I have been crucified with Christ. I don’t live any longer, but Christ lives in me. Now I live my life in my body by faith in the Son of God. He loved me and gave himself for me.” Gal 2:19b-20 NIRV.

As far as God is concerned our old sinful bodies are dead, our position in Christ is that all the guilt and condemnation have gone, and we now live a life controlled by the Holy Spirit. As adopted sons and daughters of God, this is the inheritance we are guaranteed by Christ. As Tom Wright explains: "When Jesus died on the cross, everything changed, not only for us but for the whole of creation."

However, as Paul continues to explain in

 Romans  8: 22 We know that all that God created has been groaning. It is in pain as if it were giving birth to a child. The created world continues to groan even now. 23 And that’s not all. We have the Holy Spirit as the promise of future blessing. But we also groan inside ourselves. We do this as we look forward to the time when God adopts us as full members of his family. Then he will give us everything he has for us. He will raise our bodies and give glory to them.

In the present, we still struggle with our old bodies, with impure thoughts and actions. However, we are no longer alone. We have the Power of the resurrected Christ surging within us, to renew and transform us into the image and likeness of Christ. We have the promise of Jesus that He will no longer leave us or forsake us. Our bodies are still earth bound, but our spirits can soar into the heavenly places with Christ. We can live on earth as whole-hearted disciples of Jesus telling others of our love affair with Jesus, and working to bring His kingdom of love into the lives of everyone we meet, but from time to time we still burn the porridge.  

The day our world changed forever

"By six o’clock on the Friday evening that Jesus died, something had changed, and changed radically. Heaven and earth were brought together, creating the cosmic New Temple. God was reconciling the world to Himself in the Messiah (2 Cor 5:19)”                                              Tom Wright

What Christ did for us on the cross is much wider and deeper than any individual can imagine. As western Christians, we have a very personal view of the cross and rightly so: if we were the only sinner in God’s creation Jesus would still love us so much that he would have come and died for us!

However so much more happened when Jesus died and rose again, a new creation was inaugurated. “If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come, the old has gone, the new is here! 2Cor 5:17

The physical death and resurrection of Jesus Christ ushered in not just new life for us as individuals but new life for His whole creation, a New Heaven and a physical New Earth joined together in completion when Jesus comes again.

So how does the future reality effect our present-day reality, when we are surrounded by a beautiful but awfully wounded world where greed, pride, war and poverty, among many evils, abound? In many ways, we are people who straddle two worlds.  As Paul says in Romans 8: “you received God’s Spirit when he adopted you as his own children. Now we call him, “Abba, Father.” ¹⁶ For his Spirit joins with our spirit to affirm that we are God’s children. ¹⁷ And since we are his children, we are his heirs. In fact, together with Christ we are heirs of God’s glory. But if we are to share his glory, we must also share his suffering.  ⁸ Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later. ¹⁹ For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. ²⁰ Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope, ²¹ the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. NLT

As Christians, our bodies ache and age. We are called to the same sufferings as Christ, but we have the Holy Spirit living inside us, a powerful source that is released as we pray to see healings and miracles breaking in, as foretastes of our new heavenly bodies, and our heavenly home.  

Likewise, we live on an earth that is ravaged by the greed and all the pollution we humans create. Many starve, and lives are made miserable by war and displacement, living as refugees. As Christ’s representatives, living and shining in the midst of this, we can work, through our prayers, actions and giving, to help create little glimpses of a New Heaven and earth here in our present world.

When Christ died and rose again, His kingdom was established in all power and authority.  All the powers of death and hell were defeated. We can pray with confidence, “thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as in heaven.”, because it is the actual situation with Jesus sitting on the throne of power and majesty, and all things, all principalities and powers, subject to Him under His feet.

 So why does Christ delay His return?  Christ gives us the privilege of helping to bring in His kingdom, doing His will in showing the Love of Jesus to those around and telling them about Him; of caring and nurturing His creation, all the time hastening the day when Christ will come again in His glory to bring us to our new home, where we will live in perfect union with Christ and all His New Creation.