{"id":17834,"date":"2019-02-27T08:29:27","date_gmt":"2019-02-27T13:29:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=17834"},"modified":"2019-02-27T09:47:46","modified_gmt":"2019-02-27T14:47:46","slug":"in-christ","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=17834","title":{"rendered":"In Christ"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/R3Wf2ptiAbk\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Wednesday, February 27, 2019<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Paul summarizes his corporate understanding of salvation with his shorthand phrase\u00a0<em>\u201cen Cristo,\u201d\u00a0<\/em>using it more than any single phrase in all of his letters (over 100 times).\u00a0<em>En Cristo\u00a0<\/em>seems to be Paul\u2019s code phrase for\u00a0<em>the gracious, participatory experience of salvation \u201cfrom the beginning\u201d\u00a0<\/em>(see Ephesians 1:3-12)<em>,\u00a0&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Ephesians 1&nbsp;New Living Translation (NLT)<br><\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>1&nbsp;<\/strong>This letter is from Paul, chosen by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus.I am writing to God\u2019s holy people in Ephesus,&nbsp;who are faithful followers of Christ Jesus.<sup>2&nbsp;<\/sup>May God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ give you grace and peace. <sup>3&nbsp;<\/sup>All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ.<sup>4&nbsp;<\/sup>Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes.&nbsp;<sup>5&nbsp;<\/sup>God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure.&nbsp;<sup>6&nbsp;<\/sup>So we praise God for the glorious grace he has poured out on us who belong to his dear Son.<sup>&nbsp;7&nbsp;<\/sup>He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his Son and forgave our sins.&nbsp;<sup>8&nbsp;<\/sup>He has showered his kindness on us, along with all wisdom and understanding. <sup>9&nbsp;<\/sup>God has now revealed to us his mysterious will regarding Christ\u2014which is to fulfill his own good plan.&nbsp;<sup>10&nbsp;<\/sup>And this is the plan: At the right time he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ\u2014everything in heaven and on earth.&nbsp;<sup>11&nbsp;<\/sup>Furthermore, because we are united with Christ, we have received an inheritance from God,<sup>[<a href=\"https:\/\/www.biblegateway.com\/passage\/?search=Ephesians+1&amp;version=NLT#fen-NLT-29178c\">c<\/a><\/sup>&nbsp;for he chose us in advance, and he makes everything work out according to his plan.  <sup>12&nbsp;<\/sup>God\u2019s purpose was that we Jews who were the first to trust in Christ would bring praise and glory to God.&nbsp;<sup>13&nbsp;<\/sup>And now you Gentiles have also heard the truth, the Good News that God saves you. And when you believed in Christ, he identified you as his own,&nbsp;by giving you the Holy Spirit, whom he promised long ago.&nbsp;<sup>14&nbsp;<\/sup>The Spirit is God\u2019s guarantee that he will give us the inheritance he promised and that he has purchased us to be his own people. He did this so we would praise and glorify him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;.the path that he so urgently wanted to share with the world. Succinctly put, this identity means\u00a0<em>humanity has never been separate from God\u2014<\/em>unless and except by its own negative choice<em>.\u00a0<\/em>All of us, without exception, are living inside of a cosmic identity, already in place, that is drawing and guiding us forward. We are all\u00a0<em>en Cristo,\u00a0<\/em>willingly or unwillingly, happily or unhappily, consciously or unconsciously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Paul seemed to understand that&nbsp;<em>the lone individual was far too small, insecure, and short-lived to bear either the \u201cweight of glory\u201d or the \u201cburden of sin<\/em>.\u201d Only the whole could carry such a mystery of constant loss and renewal. Paul\u2019s knowledge and experience of \u201cin Christ\u201d allowed him to give God\u2019s universal story a name, a focus, a love, and a certain victorious direction so that coming generations could trustingly jump on this cosmic and collective ride.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I hope that Christians will come to enjoy the full meaning of that short, brilliant phrase, because it is crucial for the future of Christianity, which is still trapped in a highly individualistic notion of salvation that ends up not looking much like salvation at all. Paul calls this bigger divine identity the \u201cmystery of his purpose, the hidden plan he so kindly made&nbsp;<em>in Christ&nbsp;<\/em>from the very beginning\u201d (see Ephesians 1:9-10).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Every single creature\u2014the teen mother nursing her child, every one of the twenty thousand species of butterflies, an immigrant living in fear, a blade of grass, you reading this meditation\u2014all are \u201cin Christ\u201d and \u201cchosen from the beginning\u201d (Ephesians 1:3-4, 9-10). What else could they be? Salvation for Paul is an ontological and cosmological message (which is solid) before it ever becomes a moral or psychological one (which is always unstable). Pause and give that some serious thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wednesday, February 27, 2019 Paul summarizes his corporate understanding of salvation with his shorthand phrase\u00a0\u201cen Cristo,\u201d\u00a0using it more than any single phrase in all of his letters (over 100 times).\u00a0En Cristo\u00a0seems to be Paul\u2019s code phrase for\u00a0the gracious, participatory experience of salvation \u201cfrom the beginning\u201d\u00a0(see Ephesians 1:3-12),\u00a0&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230; Ephesians 1&nbsp;New Living Translation (NLT) 1&nbsp;This letter is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17834"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17834"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17834\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17841,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17834\/revisions\/17841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}