The gospel of the kingdom is that no one is beyond beatitude, because the rule of God from the heavens is available to all. Everyone can reach it, and it can reach everyone. We respond appropriately to the Beatitudes of Jesus by living as if this were so, as it concerns others and as it concerns ourselves.
More than any other single thing, in any case, the practical irrelevance of actual obedience to Christ accounts for the weakened effect of Christianity in the world today, with its increasing tendency to emphasize political and social action as the primary way to serve God. It also accounts for the practical irrelevance of Christian faith to individual character development and overall personal sanity and well-being.
We do not just hear what Jesus said to do and try to do that. Rather, we also notice what he did, and we do that too. We.
The advantage of believing in the Trinity is not that we get an A from God for knowing the right answer. The advantage of believing in the Trinity is that we then live as if the Trinity is real, as if the cosmos around us is actually beyond all else a community of unspeakably magnificent personal beings of boundless love, knowledge and power.
Generally speaking we are in God’s will whenever we are leading the kind of life he wants for us. And that leaves a lot of room for initiative on our part, which is essential: our individual initiatives are central to his will for us.
Genuine transformation of the whole person into the goodness and power seen in Jesus and his “Abba” Father – the only transformation adequate to the human self – remains the necessary goal of human life. But it lies beyond the reach of programs of inner transformation that draw merely on the human spirit – even when the human spirit is itself treated as ultimately divine.
Specifically, in our attempts to understand how God speaks to us and guides us we must, above all, hold on to the fact that learning how to hear God is to be sought only as a part of a certain kind of life, a life of loving fellowship with the King and his other subjects within the kingdom of the heavens.
Sin always splits the self to some degree, yes. You know that you have harmed yourself and others, but you probably are not going to come to terms with that because you’re carrying on a charade of righteousness, even if you don’t believe it. So confession is very deep in the process of discovering the soul.
Whatever our position in life, if our lives and works are to be of the kingdom of God, we must not have human approval as a primary or even major aim. We must lovingly allow people to think whatever they will. We may, if it seems right, occasionally try to help them understand us and appreciate what we are doing. That could be an act of love. But in any case we can only serve them by serving the Lord only.
Single-minded and joyous devotion to God and his will, to what God wants for us-and to service to him and to others because of him-is what the will transformed into Christliheness looks like.
There is a widespread notion that just passing through death transforms human character. Discipleship is not needed. Just believe enough to “make it.” But I have never been able to find any basis in scriptural tradition or psychological reality to think this might be so. What if death only forever fixes us as the kind of person we are at death? What would one do in heaven with a debauched character or a hate-filled heart?
Christ was not crucified so that we wouldn’t have to be. He was crucified so we could be crucified with him.
Disciples are those who have been so ravished with Christ that others want to be like them.
We have the ability and responsibility to keep God present in our minds, and those who do so will make steady progress toward him, for he will respond by making himself known to us.
Incarnation” does not concern just the events of his conception and birth. It was the taking on of “flesh” in all its human meaning. He could live in your circumstances now. He could be you and still live in the kingdom of God. You can be his apprentice no matter who and where you are. It is as his personal friends, living interactively with him, that we know the truth and have the freedom – the power over evil – that comes with such knowledge.
Spirituality has thus come to be regarded by the world as those futile, self-torturing excesses of strange men and women who lived in far-off, benighted places and times. Accordingly, the One who came to give abundance of life is commonly thought of as a cosmic stuffed shirt, whose excessive “spirituality” probably did not allow him normal bodily functions and certainly would not permit him to throw a frisbee or tackle someone in a football game.
We are required to “bet our life” that the visible world, while real, is not reality itself.
And they shall live with His face in view, and that they belong to Him will show on their faces. Darkness will no longer be. They will have no need of lamps or sunlight because God the Lord will be radiant in their midst. And they will reign through the ages of ages. REV. 22:4–5.
Often I have asked at USC and other places in public, “Has anyone shown that reality is secular? Could you show me the person and where this was done? If it has not been done, isn’t it a little on the questionable side to announce we are a secular university?
The so-called “right to privacy” of which so much is made in contemporary life is in very large measure merely a way of avoiding scrutiny in our wrongdoing.