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, loved God sincerely and learned many systems of theology. I had a full head and still bore bad fruit. Not consistently but sporadically. Sometimes good fruit, sometimes bad fruit. Everyone around me said this was normal Christian growth, an unavoidable part of human life in this present world.

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

He showed me Jesus clearly. Not the exceptional theological Jesus I had studied for decades, but the actual Jesus of scripture and creed. A real person acting through our shared ordinary human nature, a nature identical to mine without exception, who never once sinned. Not because His divinity upgraded or overrode His humanity, nor because His humanity was a different version than my own, but simply because as a person He operated through that ordinary humanity lovingly, in daily dependence on the Father, through the Holy Spirit. The same Holy Spirit I, and every Christian had already received.

That single insight collapsed every excuse or expectation I had ever built for ongoing sin. If He acted through the same nature I act through, distinct from His divinity as scripture and creed both insist (for he was fully and really human), and His victory was won through the same Spirit now living in me, then any ongoing sin in me was not inevitable. It was not the unavoidable consequence of a broken nature. It was a choice, and I could make a different one in cooperation with the Spirit just as He did.

Look around the churches and you will see what happens when this is never taught. Sin is expected. Hypocrisy is normalised as humility. Excuses for sin are codified in traditions and fiercely defended. The cycle of sin, confess and repeat called Christian maturity and “progressive sanctification” despite Jesus being sanctified (John 17:19). Anyone who questions it called a legalist or slandered as a perfectionist as if love and righteousness are bad things. People call ongoing sin, realism. I call it unbelief. For Jesus was really human and lived in love free from sin. Precise Christology is to Christian hypocrisy what sunlight is to mould, it removes every excuse and every doctrine built to legitimise it. Jesus warned to be on guard against the leaven of the Pharisees which is hypocrisy. For a little leaven leavens the whole lump.

Most Christians already have the pieces, they were just never shown how they fit together, or what the assembled picture actually demands of the way they presently live. If Jesus was really human as we are, with a human mind, a human will, a human body and a genuine human experience distinct from his divine mind and experience (as scripture and creed teaches), his life of love is not only a possibility, it is a realistic example, expectation and standard for all who profess to follow Him by the Spirit. You can abide in Him right now (not merely after death), and by doing so you can walk in love far from the presence of sin. A denial of this possibility is a denial of the reality of the incarnation, for Jesus did exactly this as us. Confessing Jesus became a human is not the same as believing he became a human. Really believing it and actively following the Son is what transforms a person into a child of God in practice (living with a clear conscience, abiding in love perpetually by the Spirit, identical to Christ - 1 John 2 & 3).

This book exists to show you what I saw.

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

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

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.

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.