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Wednesday Feb 28, 2024
As He is, so are we in this world
“What is God’s joy? What is His pleasure? How does He complete Himself or express Himself (for, as we have said, a self must have self-completion and self-expression)? What is life, this eternal life, in its ultimate meaning?
The answer is given us in the God who has shown us exactly what He is in Jesus. It is in self-transcendence. God’s life is others having life: God is blessed when man is blessed; God sorrows when man sorrows: God (in Christ) moves into man’s earthly hell when man is in hell, to get him out of it: Christ lives His life in man, so that man in his turn now, through God in him, begins to live other people’s lives. The gaiety of God, the seriousness of God, the joy of God, the sorrows of God, the song, the laughter, the eternal livingness of life, the total meaningfulness of eternal life–here it is.
And then John quietly writes: ‘For as he is, so are we in this world.’ Not ‘ought to be,’ or ‘could be,’ but ‘are.’ Of course we are, this new life is He in us. So we are now the eternal love. Exactly what He is, we are. That is the end of our self-preserving selves! God unlimited is love. Man unlimited is love. If we forget we are only the negative in ourselves, we quickly say, ‘Absurd. Impossible. We are self-lovers.’ But we are not, for the real we is not we, but He. ‘Love your neighbor as being yourself’ is the command. If that command comes to us in our independent selves, it is hopeless. But it is to set the absolute inescapable standard, the sine qua non, of a new kind of man–God in a man, and man thus able to do this and doing it. We must do it, we do do it, because we can do it–through Christ.”
Taken from: The Spontaneous You
By Norman Grubb
Pages 96-97