A Journey Around the Sun @sheisonlysleeping-blog - Tumblr Blog

Because Christ Jesus Has Made Me His Own

“What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.”

Thomas Merton says that we don’t quite believe that we really exist, and when confronted with the thought that we might, we don’t believe that we deserve to exist. We are caught between Being and the Void, between Life and Death. It was not that we wanted to die, but we wanted something beyond what God had ordained should Be, and so a part of us ceased to Be, and became nothingness, though we were made in the image of Him who Is; we died, though we were the children of Life Himself. We desired instead a way of “life” and “being” which is actually a mockery of Life and Being, since it runs entirely on the fundamental belief that we are lacking and must be constantly distracted from this lack.

“You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, ‘He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us’?”

God yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us. Attempting to live by a system opposed to Life and Fulness simply does not work with a God Who is the essence of Life itself, and Who has given that Life to us freely. By desiring any of the things of this world, we make ourselves His enemies.

Complimenting this, James says of the “rich” of this world,

“Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten.Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous person. He does not resist you.”

The world we live in makes it impossible to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, since all of us have been active participants in this system of corruption and injustices, both by our direct defiance of God’s laws, and our negligence. We’ve all been in bed with the world, we’ve all offended the holy God Who made us, we’ve all been double-minded, trying to play it both ways and laughing when we should have been weeping and crying out for mercy.

“But he gives more grace.”

As Christians, we believe that we are actually co-heirs with the Son of God in all that He possesses, and in the status and relationship He enjoys with the Father. Sharing with Christ, Who has been given all power and authority and dominion, we now possess everything. That means that we have infinite Love, infinite Goodness, infinite Grace, and infinite Life. We are spiritually, physically, and mystically connected with the Son of God, Who is the True Vine.

What does this mean to Jesus? He was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief; he was the kind of man people pretend not to see when they walk down the street. He was totally despised, and no one cared.

He tasted death for us, and He suffered for us, but not to take away our suffering or even to take away death, as some would have us to believe. He did it because God had given us to Him as an inheritance, and that meant all of us, just as we would receive all of Him. We suffer under sin and death and shame, and in order to give us His own Life, He too suffered and became like us in every way, so that if share in His death, we will share also in His resurrection.

As righteous people on the earth, we will not be greater than our Master by any means; if He suffered, we too will suffer; if He was lonely, we too will often be lonely. But the marvelous, incomprehensible mystery is that through our apparent deprivations and sorrows because of this world, we can come into closer intimacy with Him in Who’s presence is the fullness of joy, with pleasures at His right hand forevermore, becoming like Him in His death, that we may share in His resurrection. When we suffer with Christ, we fellowship with the Man of Sorrows. It is in our greatest losses in this world that we are given the matchless grace to obtain everything.

Nothing in this life can be saved unless it is lost, nor can a seed come to life unless it dies and is buried.

The world wants us to believe that we are not whole, and that only by playing into its game can we get what we need. But God tells us that we already possess Him, because He has given Himself freely out of an infinite abundance.

What you must give up in your life is your needs, child of God. You must forsake the way of continual emptiness and greed to learn the path of life and enter in to the reality of an infinite possession in the inheritance of Christ. Surrender your discontentedness. Surrender your loneliness. Surrender your feelings of worthlessness and sorrow. Let the Lord of Life weep with you as He wept over Lazarus, and let Him work wonders to restore you as He restored Lazarus.

In this reality, by faith in Christ and Who He is, we can finally truly love others out of the abundance of love we have from God, through Christ. We can love them without needing them to affirm or validate us in return, because we are loved by God, and in His love we are fully satisfied. People may cause us pain, but if we turn to Christ they will only succeed in giving us a greater degree of intimacy with our Father. In this reality, we have nothing to fear, because we know that God supplies all of our needs, and that nothing can snatch us out of His hand. In this reality, we have no need to work for our own glory, but are free to walk in awe of the glory of God. Just as Christ did not glorify Himself, but gave all the glory to His Father, so we can humble ourselves before the Lord, and just as the Father in turn gave all glory back to the Son, so He will exalt us in Him.

“Therefore it says, ‘God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.’ Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.”

So life is no longer about my needs, my lack, my emptiness, but it is about He Who suffered, and His overwhelming fulness.

“The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup;

you hold my lot.

The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;

indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.

I bless the Lord who gives me counsel;

in the night also my heart instructs me.

I have set the Lord always before me;

because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.

Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices;

my flesh also dwells secure.

For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol,