The Center

            Because of the cross, we are now free to abide (take up permanent residence) in God and God in us (John 15:4–10; Rom. 8:9–10; Col. 3:3; 1 John 2:27–28; 4:13–16). When we live in God and God lives in us, we live in love, for God is love (1 John 4:7–12). This is what it means to live in Christ. Instead of living in a lie about God and ourselves, we live in the trust that God’s life toward us is God’s life toward Christ, and our life toward God is Christ’s life toward God. And we must aspire toward living here. It is not enough to understand abiding in Christ intellectually as a fact; we must yield continually to it in order to know it experientially and transformationally. We are to live in faith and live in love (Eph. 5:2).

            We are called to live in love and in Christ because this is our true home. It is the garden in which God always wanted us to live. Union with Christ is to be the center around which everything else in our lives revolves and the center out of which everything we do flows. We live in this place when, because of our faith in who God is and who we are (uncovered in Christ), we relinquish every echo of living off of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We honor the prohibition in the middle of the garden (Gen. 2:9; 3:3) and are given access to the provision. As we do this, as we live in our true source center, we begin to experience the unsurpassable worth God ascribes to himself, to ourselves, and to all others. We experientially participate in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4).

            The goal of the Christian life is to increasingly let go of the alien and illusory world “in Adam” and to live in this center, our true home, “in Christ.” As we live out of this center, we see past all the external appearances—things that our judgment normally latches on to—and we ascribe unsurpassable worth to people before God. In this place, ambiguity is no longer a reality to be resisted. Rather, it is something to be embraced, for it frees us to do the one thing we are created to do: love without judgment.

            To live in this place is to live in the purpose for which God created the world. It is to live right now in the eternal, abundant life that Christ came to give us (John 10:10; 11:25–26). It is to begin to live right now in the ecstatic dance that shall never end. It is to finally live as God intended us to live. It is to cease living in the endless judgments of the knowledge of good and evil and to begin living in the simplicity and freedom of the will of God.

Greg Boyd - "Repenting from Religion"