Grace Gems - Clothed In Christ

For just as the body is clad in clothes, and the flesh in skin, and the bones in flesh, and the heart in the whole, so we, body and soul, clad and enclosed in the goodness of God. Yes, and even more intimately because all these other things will wear out and vanish, but the goodness of God is always whole and close to us without compare.

Elizabeth Obbard

The Graveyard

Among the granite slabs

Of monumental lives

Erected to the fallen

The wooded path winds

Drifting through a forest

Of deeds and acts recorded.

Just spend a moment

To take special time

With senses of aged wisdom

In the copse of graves

The dead lie still

Void of sin and temptation.

Will you find fallen acts

All cavorting together

By the dead?

Their lives extinguished

On this carnal realm

Free from the deeds of Adam.

We in Christ are dead to sin

Silent is our accusations

Righteousness is now our life

Alive in the new creation

As the Spirit gives life

So we live in His resurrection.

Charis Notes - Jesus Is The True Picture Of God

Jesus is the only filter we look and evaluate scripture through -

John 14:7 - "If you had known Me you would also have known the Father."

Jesus is the true picture of God. In Jesus we see God and we see who God really is.

Everything in Old Covenant was a shadow and picture of who God was. The images in the Old Covenant were like individual pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Each piece was important, each piece showed an image, each piece told a story, but each piece was only part of the story. Jesus was the whole jigsaw puzzle put together and his resurrection completed the jigsaw puzzle.

Everything Jesus did he did in relationship, with God, with the Holy Spirit, with man, because the Father is only revealed within relationship. Take God out of relationship and He becomes supreme and man cannot relate to him. Suddenly, It becomes the duty of man to keep this supreme being happy and to appease his anger. We cannot experience him totally because we are always afraid we might upset him and he will punish us.

To know the Father you have to know Jesus. You can only experience who God really is through Christ

Look at the life of Christ, those he was in fellowship with, those he healed, his heart of compassion, his overflowing power, his overwhelming love, see Christ and you see the true heart of God.

Charis Notes - Separation Is In Our Minds

Colossians 1 : 21

And you who once were alienated and enemies in your minds, by wicked works, yet now He has reconciled.

Our lives produce what we believe in our hearts, how we see and understand God will eventually show in our lives. Here in Colossians, Paul uncovers the heart of the problem; our alienation from God is in our minds.

Adam in Genesis 3 was alienated from God in his mind after he fell. Adam was afraid to meet with his loving Father; he expected punishment instead of love. If we see ourselves as sinful, dirty, separate in our minds, this will manifest in our lives and actions.

God is not alienated from us, but we in our minds are alienated from him. We need our minds transformed into the truth of his goodness and His unconditional love. God never has separated himself from man, we separate ourselves from him.

All our sin, past, present and future sin was nailed to the cross with Jesus and died at the cross. Everyone born this side of the cross, 2,000 years ago has had their sin forgiven before they were born. They made have been born into Adam but their sin was already washed away never to be recalled. Sin does not separate us from God, unbelief in God’s goodness; in our minds is what separates us from God.

As we look on Jesus, feast on His love, bask in his grace and are consumed with his words, we are transformed in our minds and start to reflect our new born spirits. 

Charis Notes - The Power Of Sin

Genesis 3: 9-10

Then the Lord God called Adam and said to him, “Where are you?” So he said, “I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself.”

In these two verses we confront the power of sin. When Adam sinned, everything in his world changed. More importantly Adam’s heart changed towards God, but God’s heart towards Adam stayed exactly the same. Sin turns our back on God and makes us ashamed. Sin turns a loving Father into an angry God who must be appeased. Sin brings us under the deception of punishment. 

Sin made Adam cover up and hide behind the tree. It was sin that caused the separation between man and God, and this separation was only in the mind of Adam. In his mind Adam now saw himself condemned and hid in fear from the punishment he expected to receive from God. Every day he had walked and fellow-shipped with God, they had laughed together, talked together, and were both eternally and blissfully joyful and happy. Adam in his foolishness had thought that he could add something to this wonderful bliss God had provided, that he could make it even better. But he already had perfection.

Our sin causes us to judge God, in our minds we determine what makes God happy or angry and what we have to do to make it right.

Sin causes us to have unbelief in the goodness of God.

God in Christ took all the consequences of our sin. Christ nailed our sin, our old selves to the cross and died as me. Sin no longer causes the separation between man and God. The only separation is in the heart and mind of man which causes him not to believe in all Christ has achieved for him at the cross.

We question God because we are afraid of him, Adam thought God came to punish him, but God came to have fellowship with him. God wants to have intimate, close, fellowship with us every second of every day enjoying all the riches of his grace.  

Charis Notes - Where Are You?

Genesis 3: 9-10

Then the Lord God called Adam and said to him, “Where are you?” So he said, “I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself.”

Perhaps here we have the heart of the gospel emanating from the unconditional love of God to us in those few words, "Where are you?". Our wonderful, all knowing, all seeing Father knew every action that Adam and Eve took, He knew that they had succumbed to the Serpent’s deception and by free choice had tried to be righteous by their own act. Adam was not trying to be evil when he committed the ultimate evil of eating from the morality tree. He was actually trying to do good and avoid evil so that he could be more like God. But he already was like God. 

God knew man had sinned and had fallen into the evil of self-righteousness, but he did not separate himself from fallen man. Everything changed when Adam sinned, everything but God. God did not change His relationship with man because of sin. God loved Adam, He cared for Adam, He was there in the garden wanting to talk and fellowship with him. God is the same, Yesterday, Today and Forever.

The unconditional love and heart of God is that He desires with an unquenchable passion to bring us into the eternal dance of his glorious trinity. His cry to us, to everyone is “Where are you?” for everything that would separate us from Him has been taken and placed on Jesus and we can now freely respond and enter into the joyous dance of the Father.

Charis Notes - Made In God's Image

Genesis 1: 26

The God said, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.”

It was the divine dance of bliss and happiness that created man. God here in Genesis is an “us”. An eternal, uncreated, trinity of passion, wonder, creativity, expression, love, grace, joy, happiness, fulfilment. God has never existed in a place of loneliness. God has never felt alone. He has never felt deserted. He has never felt the need to create something to fill the void of loneliness in his magnificent existence.

Out of God glorious goodness and infinite passion He was so overflowing with infinite joy that He created man to share and experience the wonderful, blissful fellowship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Man is an expression of all the glory and goodness of the Trinity created out of dust.

Man in God’s image has all the creativity, passion, wonder, love and beauty of the abundance of the Trinity. God’s abundance is so overwhelming He could not stop Himself from giving it away, and He gives it away to us.

Christ came to give us life and give us His life to the abundance. Rivers of the Trinity to fill us up and overflow into every word, thought and action of our lives. Christ gave us by grace; all that He had created us to be.

We are wonderful, creative, glorious, beautiful, creations made from the abundance of God’s love and his passion to share everything He is.  

Gaze

Gaze upon His goodness

With unveiled face

Boldly we approach

The throne of grace

Taste freely His kindness

Love so intense

Beauty in desire

Filling every sense

Insecurities die

And fears fall away

Replaced by shadows

In the new born day

All through Christ’s blood

Life is made complete

Love now accepted

My chains released.