The Ordinary Stone

A book about clear sight of the ordinary humanity of Jesus being the cornerstone of everlasting righteousness and present freedom from sin.

There is no greater captivity than the illusion of freedom.
The most enslaved are those bound who think they are free.
That was me.

I sat in chains for over twenty years and called it freedom.

I experienced the Spirit, served in church, sincerely loved God and spent years learning systems of theology, yet despite all of it I still bore bad fruit. Not constantly, but intermittently. Sometimes love, sometimes sin. Everyone told me this was the normal Christian life.

Then God showed me something so simple it destroyed nearly everything I thought I knew. 

He showed me Jesus clearly.

Not the distant theological abstraction I had studied for years, but the actual Jesus revealed in scripture and confessed with precision in the creeds.  A real human being who lived through the same ordinary humanity we share and yet never sinned. Not because His divinity overpowered His humanity or because His humanity was fundamentally different from ours, but because He walked in continual dependence on the Father through the Holy Spirit.

The same Holy Spirit given to us.

That single insight shattered every excuse or expectation I had ever built for ongoing sin. If Jesus truly lived and overcame through the same weak  humanity I possess, and if His victory was accomplished through the Holy Spirit rather than by some hidden advantage unavailable to mankind, then sin was not inevitable, nor was it the unavoidable consequence of human nature itself. It was a choice and the excuses were self deception. For Jesus fought our exact battle against desire in our weak flesh through the power of the Spirit and conquered, and bids us to follow Him and do the same.

Look around the churches and you will see what happens when this vision of Christ is lost. When Jesus is looked upon as a demigod or superman gliding above human desires and untouched by human weakness, sin becomes expected, hypocrisy becomes normalised, and rebellion is even thought of as essential for humility lest a person become proud. The endless cycle of sin, confess and repeat is labelled maturity. Anyone who dares to question these assumptions are quickly dismissed as legalists or perfectionists, as though righteousness, love and a clear conscience are impossible things.  They call evil good and good evil.

Jesus Himself warned us to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy, for a little leaven leavens the whole lump. John warned us not to be deceived, those that do righteousness are righteous as Jesus was righteous (1 John 3:7). How thick the deception is today within the institutional churches. Many Christians today scarcely believe it's possible to live righteously for a single day, let alone for years. Jesus abided in perfect love for thirty three years by the Spirit in the same ordinary humanity we share. When His humanity is subtly made different from our own, His life ceases to function as a real example for humanity and becomes something distant, admirable yet unattainable. Scripture and creed both insist that the Son truly became what we are, distinct from His Divinity... truly the Son of Man, a fellow son of Adam according to scripture (Luke 3:38). His humanity is not exceptional, but the ordinary, common humanity we all share.

Confessing Jesus became a human is not the same as really believing he became a human.

Most Christians already possess the pieces needed to see Christ clearly. They have simply never been shown how those pieces fit together or what the finished picture demands of us. If Jesus was truly human in the same way we are, then His life is not merely something to admire from a distance, but a revelation of what ordinary human life looks like when abiding in love and walking by the Spirit. His walk becomes our example and our expectation, not theoretically, but practically.

You can abide in Him now, and abiding in Him you can walk in love free from the dominion and presence of sin. Jesus said exactly this:

John 8:31-32 ESV

So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

This book exists to show you what I saw.

Jesus, the Son of Man, our older brother, is reaching out to shatter your chains. When you see Him clearly and follow Him, you will be what He was in this life, a true child of God in practice.

1 John 2:29 ESV

If you know that he is righteous, you may be sure that everyone who practices righteousness has been born of him.

He experienced life exactly as you and I experience it, with the same weakness, desires and limitations, distinct from His divinity, yet despite all of this He never sinned. This was not because His personal divinity empowered or softened his human experience but because in His ordinary humanity He chose to submit his human will to the Father, deny his flesh and walk by the Spirit. We have received that same Spirit and can walk the same path, abiding in love, which is freedom from sin. We can abide perpetually in intimate communion with God, just as Jesus did. If we stumble, there is mercy but mercy being available doesn't mean sin is inevitable nor to be expected. Jesus proved we can and must abide in love and in doing so permanently cease sinning. (Scriptural support proving every assertion in this paragraph here)

This is His light yoke which we can indeed bear by His Spirit in us.

May you see Him clearly, and believing, be free.

1 John 3:5-7 ESV

You know that he appeared in order to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him keeps on sinning; no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him. Little children, let no one deceive you. Whoever practices righteousness is righteous, as he is righteous.

John 3:19-21 ESV

And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.