Below is an excerpt from my paraphrase ‘The Gospel Cannot Be Chained‘, based on Philippians 3:1-11

And so, just as we are a united family in Jesus, enjoy your united life with Jesus and rejoice in him. I know I say this a lot, but it really cannot be said enough. It’s a joy to write it, and it’s also a healthy reminder for you. It does our hearts good to remember Jesus and the covenant of grace we have with him. Remind yourself of the depths of this love for you, and the inheritance that is yours in him. Rejoice in the reality of every good thing you have received through being made one with him. It is through remembering Jesus that the love of God refreshes us and the weight of the world is removed from our shoulders.

danger_2 © by openDemocracy

Watch out for those who desire to yoke you to religion. They are zealous for their own distorted ideas of what a follower of Jesus should be like, and will even try to use the name of Jesus, as well as taking Scripture out of context, to promote their false, religious perspectives. They love to establish their own form of religion, of which they lord their ‘spiritual authority’ over people. However, they purposely disregard the fact that Jesus did not come to start another religion, but to fulfill an old one! He now offers all mankind a covenant of grace that is based on his love and finished work upon the cross; not based on mankind’s observance of religious practices and obligations. We, who are in Christ, are truly free to live and commune with God and one another in spirit and in truth. We have had our hearts made new with the nature of Christ, and the old nature has been cut away by the Spirit of God. We don’t put our confidence in what we do to prove ourselves faithful to God; we put our confidence in Christ, who has proved God’s faithfulness to us. Religion will promote confidence in our outward performance in life, but we maintain that our confidence is inward. Our confidence is in the reality that Christ, our hope of glory, lives in us.

The reason I passionately place my full confidence in the reality of Christ in me is not because I have nothing I could boast about in regards to my own works. On the contrary, I could boast more than any man about my religious accomplishments in the flesh. In fact, according to a life devoted to God through religious acts, I was practically perfect. I was born into the right religion, passed through all the ceremonial rites of passage my religion required, I held to the strictest form of all the laws and spiritual disciplines my religion demanded of me. In fact, if someone were to judge me based on a legalistic, works based understanding of being a ‘godly’ person I would have been found faultless. But boasting in our religious or ‘godly’ accomplishments goes against the truth of the gospel; for life with God isn’t defined by how perfectly one can fulfil laws and religious requirements, but rather by God’s grace to fulfil all requirements on our behalf so we can rest and walk with him.

Rubbish in the Streets, Old City, Jerusalem © by David Masters

And so I consider the religious zeal I once had a loss, I could even go so far as to say I consider it rubbish; even if others around would gladly consider it to their credit, I consider it a loss. I think this way because I know God has offered me a far greater reality: the reality that Christ is in me, and the opportunity to know him as a saviour, a friend and a brother; to be one with him in perfect love and acceptance apart from any religious performance or self-imposed requirements. I long to know him more, and I desire to see myself in him. I want to see myself in the mirror of his perfection, and not in the mirror of religious obligations that can only reflect my poor attempts of earning a right standing before God. The mirror of Christ allows me to see the truth: that my right standing before God is by faith in all that Christ has accomplished on my behalf.

I want to know Christ, and this is exactly what God offers us freely, as a gift to all who freely receive it: the gift to know him. Like you, I’ve taken hold of this great blessing and simply refuse to trade it in for knowing merely a religious formula. I desire to know Christ and grow in my understanding of just how powerful his resurrection truly was and how the ongoing effects of that glorious moment continues to impact my life and the lives of all mankind. I want to know all of Christ, not only the moments of his triumphs; I also want to identify with him in his suffering. For Christ himself suffered rejection by those whose agenda was to defend their religion and protect their own self-appointed religious authority. They even went so far in their zeal as to despise the living God they claimed to believe in. As for me, I want to walk with Jesus, and identify with him. I want to experience the heavenly acceptance that comes through uniting myself with him, even at the expense of suffering rejection by the religious zealots who so fiercely oppose the message of God’s grace. I desire to be free in Christ’s love, empowered by his Spirit and ultimately live forever in his resurrection.

The full paraphrased letter to the Philippians, as well as Ephesians, Colossians and Philemon, are available on amazon kindle for just $2.99, or in paperback for $7.95

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When you really break down the understanding of God’s love, I think we can only understand it in one of two way: Big and beyond our understanding… or small and basic.

Personally, I feel that either God’s love is so big we continually look towards it in awe at its vastness, enormity and incomparably complex glory, or it is so small we quickly look back towards mankind and condemn them for failing to understand something so basic.

Basic? God, the cosmic sized creator of all things… basic to understand? Hmmm….

Again, to speculate a little based on random blogs and comments around the internet, some people seem to take the option that God’s love is so small they already feel that they are a qualified expert to talk about how others have or will fail to qualify for it.

© by quinn.anya

The problem I have with this is as follows: How can anyone who fails to understand how to fill out their tax return form without help, or have not, lets say, yet grasped quantum physics in its entirety think they can completely understand the universe creating God? How can one think Algebra is too hard to understand, yet feel they have the entire truth about God all worked out down to the finest details? So perfect in their understanding of God and all his ways they can, in fact, effortlessly (and feeling 100% justified to do so) condemn people in God name?

“Doing a tax return – very confusing”
“Learning quantum physics – verging on impossible”
“Teaching someone Algebra – not in a million years”
“Understanding everything about God, so much so you can be a verified expert on him in every possible way – oh yes, that’s easy!”

….hmmmm

I think one’s concept has to be very small if they feel they God all worked out. You see, God is big. I mean, he is really BIG. He is the cosmic God. He is the universe creating God. He is the guy who made the world a million times bigger than you, and then made the sun a million times bigger than the world, and then made the other stars in the universe a million times bigger than the sun. We’re talking about a God who created a universe the length of about 90 trillion football fields in length (9.4 million light years) to illustrate that the entire universe he created is like a speck of dust compared to his own size.

Jesus came to earth to help us understand our great God, but don’t forget he is not just the size of Jesus when he walked the earth, he is also the size of the cosmic Christ who created everything in the entire universe and beyond.

At the risk of sounding repetitive, I’ll say this again: God is big. God is really, really big. The question worth asking is: how many times to do you think he is bigger than you? 10 times? A thousand times? A million times? Unlimited times? Well, the answer to that question will define how big you think God’s love is.

For me, God’s love is unlimited, because whenever I measure God against my own ability in anything, he ends up with a ranking of:

unlimited.

So, if you want my perspective on God, and how we as people, created in his image, can truly come to understand and appreciate the largeness of God’s being, Here is is:

Imagine a love without limits. Imagine, if you can, an unending love. A love without boundaries. A love that stretches the landscape of eternity. Imagine this, and you will fall into the understanding of God. God is love.

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