Day 295- Oneness
📖Daily Reading
Ephesians 1-2
🎥 Video
Join me on my morning walk as we rise and shine together by walking through the Bible daily and learn a practical applicable coaching nugget from the ultimate life coach - our creator (whatever that means to you). No judgement zone here, all are welcome, we are all on a spiritual journey because we are after all spiritual beings having a human experience.
📝 Reflection
Ephesians 2:16
“Together as one body, Christ reconciled both groups to God by means of his death on the cross, and our hostility toward each other was put to death.”
I am going to forewarn you that I am wrestling with some big things in my faith walk. I am going to be vulnerable and honest. I think that if one thinks deeply about what this beautiful book called the Bible is saying you will also need to wrestle at some point in your journey. I think we are supposed to do this. Or maybe this is just me trying to make sure you still like me after I am honest with my wrestling.
Jesus came to show us the way by being the way. We have taken his name and his death and turned it into another system of rules, dogma and doctrine that creates otherness and separateness. I do believe there is value and a need for believers who are genuinely trying to live the way to come together to support each other and fellowship and build each other up and reinforce and remind so that they/we can live in the world in harmony with others who do not live by and in the way.
Anyway, the word grace, at least by the religious definition is the free gift of love and unmerited favor of God. God the creator of humanity and all of creation loves humans. They don’t have to earn it, in fact they can’t and they more they try the more they will block it. I have been wrestling with this for a few months now and really thinking and meditating deeply on it. As I am accepting the message of grace fully for myself I first had to be humble. I call it my humble crumble.
As I started to allow humility in and begin to accept Gods love offered through grace to crumble and humble me, I can’t help but now look at others and all of creation in a new way. A natural shift towards oneness has begun to happen. I find myself more easily offering grace and love to others because I see that they already have it too, even if they don’t know it. By my attitude maybe they will hopefully begin to be open to it as well. I can plant a seed of hope and love.
We become messengers of grace only when we have truly accepted it. Otherwise it is a false version. We humans attach strings and conditions to things. This is not of God. Humans also by how we are designed as linguistic and thinking beings we have a need to label things. This is tricky for believers of ‘the way’ that Jesus showed. We can’t preach and teach about God’s love, grace and oneness while simultaneously creating a system of separateness and otherness can we - in Jesus’s name?
If God is love and he is the creator of all humanity, does he really only love us conditionally? That is not the message of grace, that is the opposite. I am wrestling out loud and risking your disapproval I know. When even by Paul’s own teachings that those who are living by ‘the way’ have the fruit or the evidence of it in their lives. I see many great examples who seem to exemplify this who did not wear the label of ‘Christian’ but their lives and their teachings speak for themselves. Jesus did not ask us to wear the label of Christian and ask us to live in the way AND label ourselves as Christians and put ourselves in a privileged position as the owners of ‘the way’. This doesn’t invite oneness with God, this creates another opportunity to become a modern day Pharisee.
It seems to me that if you know you are loved in the way that Jesus says we are, through the message of grace and live in absolute humility that should be the result and evidence of this grace and love. Then you will have faith, hope and mercy and want to love others and treat them with kindness, patience and gentleness. You will be generous, peaceful, joyful. You will not see yourself as an ‘other’. You will live in the oneness of it all and have access to the spirit of god. You will have found the way. People lived in the way along side Jesus before he died on the cross. God made of one blood all nations..
““He is the God who made the world and everything in it. Since he is Lord of heaven and earth, he doesn’t live in man-made temples, and human hands can’t serve his needs—for he has no needs. He himself gives life and breath to everything, and he satisfies every need. From one man he created all the nations throughout the whole earth. He decided beforehand when they should rise and fall, and he determined their boundaries. “His purpose was for the nations to seek after God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him—though he is not far from any one of us. For in him we live and move and exist. As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’”
Acts of the Apostles 17:24-28 NLT
We have to be careful with labels and being part of groups even ‘good’ groups. Labels don’t promote oneness they promote otherness. Grace is strips away the paradoxes that block us. It unveils the heart to live a new way. I am deep in the wrestling and struggle of owning my own faith walk… Love does not have walls and can’t be contained by walls and labels -those will lead to pride and downfall..
✍🏼Daily Journal Prompt
How do you understand grace and oneness?
📖Tomorrows Reading
Ephesians 3-4
Coaching Opportunity
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