This is God’s unimaginable restorative justice. God does not love you if and when you change. God loves you so that you can change. That is the true storyline of the Gospel.
From: a.co/42NfbE8
Learning From Others, Seeking The Way
An Emerging Viewpoint
This is God’s unimaginable restorative justice. God does not love you if and when you change. God loves you so that you can change. That is the true storyline of the Gospel.
From: a.co/42NfbE8
Western culture has become all about the self, and that is just way too small an agenda. The very self that Jesus said “must die” is now just about all that we think about!
The real moral goals of the Gospel—loving enemies, caring for the powerless, overlooking personal offenses, living simply, eschewing riches—can only be achieved through surrender and participation.
We know God by participation in God, not by trying to please God from afar.
God’s freely given grace is a humiliation to the ego because free gifts say nothing about me. Only the soul can understand grace. The ego does not know how to receive things freely or without logic.
We feel much more comfortable with our slavery than with freedom. Freedom means that we have to assume radical responsibility for what we are. To be enslaved means that we always have somebody else to blame for our problems.
The true goal of all religions is to lead us back to the place where everything is one, to the experience of radical unity with all of humanity and hence to the experience of unity with God. Religion has no other purpose than to make possible this one journey.
If you draw close to someone who is in a violent or fearful state, you will likely discover that his or her operative image of God (usually largely unconscious) is inadequate, distorted, or even toxic. That’s why good theology is still important.
We cannot attain the presence of God because we’re already in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness.
We must all overcome the illusion of separateness. It is the primary task of religion to communicate not worthiness but union, to reconnect people to their original identity “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3: 3).