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 around me told me this was normal Christian growth, an unavoidable part of life in the present world.

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 in creed: 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 upon 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 around ongoing sin. If Jesus truly lived and overcame through the same 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.

Look around the churches and you will see what happens when this vision of Christ is lost. Sin becomes expected, hypocrisy becomes normalised as humility and the endless cycle of sin, confession and repetition is renamed maturity. Anyone who questions these assumptions is quickly dismissed as a legalist or perfectionist, as though righteousness, love and a clear conscience were impossible things. Jesus Himself warned us to beware 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 great that deception is today within the churches. Many Christians today scarcely believe it is 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. But scripture and creed both insist that the Son truly became what we are.

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 as we are, then His life is not merely something to admire from a distance, but something deeply revealing about what life by the Spirit actually looks like in human flesh. His walk becomes our example, not theoretically, but practically.

You can abide in Him now, and abiding in Him you can walk in love free from the dominion of sin.

This book exists to show you what I saw.

Jesus, the Son of Man, our older brother, is reaching out to shatter your chains.

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 in His divinity carried Him through, but because in His active humanity He chose to walk by the Spirit in ordinary human flesh. 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. (Scriptural support proving every assertion in this paragraph here)

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.