Uniting Integrities of the Christ Identity

HOLD THIS quote below, in the tension of what might be, but don’t settle for just it:

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

― Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

No, there is something superior to being a first-class version of the first of ourselves – that is to be thoroughly won to the integrity of the Christ identity – for, in that, and in only that, we may be found to have secured something beyond humanity, though something also never more human.

Consider the potential for any of us to acknowledge the eternal identity – soul and spirit united and out of the body, and home truly in heaven. Hold that in tension with the inherent state of our human identity – that we are broken, fallen, sinful creatures so fitted to earth. Both of these designates are amazing in there oppositeness. As our Lord Jesus was both fully man and fully divine when he strode the earth, we too have features of both humanness and divinity.

When we can unite these two throbbing truths we can find ourselves cherishing an integrity that we always hoped would be ours; not a contrived integrity, but a real and an integral one.

The key is this: we must consider ourselves to have the fullness of the identity of a sinner, with – completely with – the fullness of one that Christ came to save.

This is when we have allowed God to unite these two integrities of our Christ identity. We have made two forms of integrity – humanness and divinity – positively integral, and together, both these two are keys to the unification of the integrity of our Christ identity.

Two-Into-One

Made in the image of God, and having the Holy Spirit dwelling deep within, affords us to say, we can identify with both our humanity and our divinity.

God asks us to hold these matters together in tension: 1) we are sinners, and 2) we have been saved. The second thing couldn’t have happened if not for the first thing, but the second thing is what we have ever wanted and needed. We always wanted to be our own gods.

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The true Christ identity is the integration of two important conditions: 1) we are sinners, fully human, fallen and broken, and 2) we are fully divine because of Christ’s cross, his resurrection, and because we are sealed by the Holy Spirit. Integrity is joining these two very different concepts-of-self together.

The fruit of integrity of self is peace within and peace all about: the Christ identity.

The greatest single advantage the integrity of our Christ identity gives us is the ability to be real persons, faithful in reality, honest to God.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.