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At one ment

A new year is under way. However our new congregations are only five months old. Last September we concluded our 9am service and started two new congregations, at 8.30am and 10.00am.  One of our aims was to make it possible for more people to join in. Another was to provide some variety so that at 10am especially we could provide a different context for families and children to join.

Behind all this is our desire to see many people come to know the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. As month number six starts, let us keep praying, inviting, welcoming, befriending and generally looking forward to helping people experience the love and power of Jesus and helping them understand what he has to say to us.

That is one reason we spend the period leading up to Easter thinking about the death and resurrection of Jesus. It is his death and resurrection that is the centre and foundation of our Christian life. No death of Jesus, no life. No resurrection, no hope. No atonement, no Christianity.

Atonement? Apparently it first turns up in Tyndale, to mean being at one with God. What a wonderful thing, to be at one with God, with nothing between us, no resistance or fear on our part, no list of sins hanging over us on his part, no outstanding accounts. An unrealistic fantasy were it not for the death of Jesus.

It is his death that makes it possible for humans to clear their debts, to expunge their sins, to be rid of their wrongs, to have their judgment cancelled. Not that we humans have much to do with any of that. It was all done by Jesus for us. That’s what his death was about. Taking our debts, sins, wrongs to death so that we could share in what happened next. Actually he was taking us to death, so we could share in what happened next – a new life lived at one with God. With nothing between us except God’s Spirit himself. How wonderful.

Is that your life? Is it not a wonder? Are you not really happy?

Too right.

Dale

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