Morning Prayer - Easter Eve

1 John 5.5-12 (Click here for text)

We are being offered new life in Christ every day. This new spiritual (spiritually evolved) human being that each of us is called to be us real, every day. Our role is to live it.

How do we do this?

There is no avoiding that the starting point is faith. While we search and argue and debate (and no doubt we will always do this) we are not necessarily embracing this new life offered. We embrace through believing it - accepting that this the reality. God through Jesus really has bought into being a new way of being a human being and the Holy Spirit enables us to become this. The first step to living this is believing it and embracing that like is often linked symbolically with the water of baptism, not simply a washing away of sin but an act of commitment - saying this is my view of the world.

The second thing we do - and this is very difficult -  is that we begin to die with regard to things of the old way of being. Jesus death on the cross - as well as a physical death - is a death to the old order of being. He will not retaliate, He will not use the sword, He will not flee, He will  have faith that God is bringing in to being the new order. So he forgives; he blesses; he offers peace even to those who hate Him. In this day and age, with an aggressive secular, atheistic streak there is a real temptation to respond in kind. Such a response is a lack of faith. The new order forgives, reaches out, blesses, understands their blindness and reaches out. The blood of Jesus is the symbol of an atoning death that fulfils and removes a previous sacrificial system but it is also a symbol of overcoming the brokenness of the old humanity - of dying to the world - so that the new can grow. This is the blood that we must share in - the cross that we must carry.

And finally we must allow the Holy Spirit to do His work in us. To take the points of tension in our lives and resolve, like a spiritual dissonance into the cadence of the Kingdom. We must allow ourselves to be for others even when they are against us - 'for others' meaning that the hope that they too will embrace this new humanity and allow the Spirit to draw them on too.

We live it primarily through 'becoming' - through being changed in our mind and our desires that our actions will flow from the Kingdom that one day will be fulfilled in Jesus.