If anyone wills to do His will, he shall know concerning the doctrine”
The golden rule to follow to obtain spiritual understanding is not one of intellectual pursuit, but one of obedience. If a person wants scientific knowledge, then intellectual curiosity must be his guide. But if he desires knowledge and insight into the teachings of Jesus Christ, he can only obtain it through obedience. If spiritual things seem dark and hidden to me, then I can be sure that there is a point of disobedience somewhere in my life. Intellectual darkness is the result of ignorance, but spiritual darkness is the result of something that I do not intend to obey.No one ever receives a word from God without instantly being put to the test regarding it.
We disobey and then wonder why we are not growing spiritually. Jesus said, If you bring your gift to the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift (Matthew 5:23-24). He is saying, in essence, don’t say another word to me; first be obedient by making things right. The teachings of Jesus hit us where we live. We cannot stand as impostors before Him for even one second. He instructs us down to the very last detail. The Spirit of God uncovers our spirit of self-vindication and makes us sensitive to things that we have never even thought of before.
When Jesus drives something home to you through His Word, don’t try to evade it. If you do, you will become a religious impostor. Examine the things you tend simply to shrug your shoulders about, and where you have refused to be obedient, and you will know why you are not growing spiritually. As Jesus said, First go. Even at the risk of being thought of as fanatical, you must obey what God tells you.
____________________________________________________
Richard Rohr
Salvation as At-One-Ment
Deepening Connection
Thursday, July 27, 2017
If we would imitate Jesus in very practical ways, the Christian religion would be made-to-order to grease the wheels of human consciousness toward love, nonviolence, justice, inclusivity, and care for creation. Mature religion serves as a conveyor belt for the evolution of human consciousness. Immature religion actually stalls people at very early stages of magical, mythic, and tribal consciousness, while they are convinced they are enlightened or saved. Then we are more a part of the problem than offering any kind of solution. Only the nondual and mystical mind gets us all the way through, and that happens only by continual enlargement of the True Self and continual loss of the small ego self.
Unfortunately, Christianity became another moralistic religion. It was overwhelmingly aligned with a very limited period of history (empire building through war) and a small piece of the planet (Europe), not the whole earth or any glorious destiny (Romans 8:18) for us all. Not surprisingly, many Christians ended up tragically fighting evolution”along with most early human and civil rights struggles” because we had not been taught any evolutionary notion of Christ who was forever groaning in one great act of giving birth (Romans 8:22). Until the reforms of the 1960s and the Second Vatican Council, Roman Catholicism was overwhelmingly tribal. Protestantism wasted too much time reacting against that tribalism”which made it tribal too. We become another version of anything we dislike or react against too strongly.
Authentic mystical experience connects us and keeps connecting us at ever-newer levels, breadths, and depths, “until God is all in all (1 Corinthians 15:28). The world, life and death, the present and the future are all your servants, for you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God (1 Corinthians 3:22-23). Full salvation is finally universal belonging and universal connecting. Our word for that is heaven.
God is forever evolving human consciousness, making us ever more ready for God. The Jewish prophets, Jesus himself (Mark 2:19-20), and many Hindu, Catholic, and Sufi mystics used words like wedding, espousal, marriage, or bride and groom to describe this phenomenon. That’s what the prophet Isaiah (61:10, 62:5), many of the Psalms, the school of Paul (Ephesians 5:25-32), and the Book of Revelation (19:7-8, 21:2) mean by preparing a bride to be ready for her husband. The human soul is being gradually readied so that intimacy and partnership with the Divine are the final result. Note that such salvation is a social and cosmic concept, and not just about isolated individuals “going to heaven. The Church was meant to bring this corporate salvation to conscious and visible possibility, but it was itself too tribal to accomplish much in this regard. It was not catholic (universal or according to the whole), a word we began using to describe ourselves as early as the year 108 AD. In some ways we’ve gone backwards.
Gateway to Silence:
I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.
Click Image for John White's Original Vision For CO2's
