{"id":16597,"date":"2018-03-30T09:58:53","date_gmt":"2018-03-30T13:58:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=16597"},"modified":"2018-03-30T10:03:06","modified_gmt":"2018-03-30T14:03:06","slug":"growing-in-loves-likeness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=16597","title":{"rendered":"Growing in Love\u2019s Likeness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Richard Rohr<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Becoming Fully Human<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Friday, March 30, 2018<\/strong><br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Dqwpli3On2U\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><br \/>\nThe glory of God is a human being fully alive. \u2014St. Irenaeus of Lyon [1]<br \/>\nBarbara Brown Taylor, an author and Episcopal priest, will be joining me at CONSPIRE 2018 (along with Barbara Holmes, Brian McLaren, and Mirabai Starr). [2] Taylor writes eloquently of the spiritual journey in her book Leaving Church:<br \/>\nLike every believer I know, my search for real life has led me through at least three distinct seasons of faith, not once or twice but over and over again. Jesus called them finding life, losing life, and finding life again, with the paradoxical promise that finders will be losers while those who lose their lives for his sake will wind up finding them again. [Matthew 16:25] In Greek the word is psyche, meaning not only \u201clife\u201d but also the conscious self, the personality, the soul. You do not have to die in order to discover the truth of this teaching, in other words. You only need to lose track of who you are, or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart. Do this, Jesus says, and you will live.<br \/>\nAs hard as preachers may work to clarify this koan, I do not believe that it can be done. The promise contains truth that can only be experienced, and even when it is I do not know anyone who readily volunteers for loss again. Yet loss is how we come to surrender our lives\u2014if not to God, then at least to the Great Beyond\u2014and even those who profess no faith in anything but the sap that makes the green blade rise may still confess that losing really has helped them find their ways again. . . .<br \/>\nMy losses have been chiefly in the area of faith, and specifically in the area of being certain who God is, what God wants of me, and what it means to be Christian in a world where religion often seems to do more harm than good. . . .<br \/>\nI thought that being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was, in other words, and it was not until this project failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness. . . .<br \/>\nCommitting myself to the task of becoming fully human is saving my life now. This is not the same as the job of being human, which came with my birth certificate. To become fully human is something extra, a conscious choice that not everyone makes. Based on my limited wisdom and experience, there is more than one way to do this. If I were a Buddhist, I might do it by taking the bodhisattva vow, and if I were a Jew, I might do it by following Torah. Because I am a Christian, I do it by imitating Christ. . . .<br \/>\nThere are still a few [Christians] who believe that becoming fully human is the highest honor they can pay to the incarnate one who showed them how.<\/p>\n<p>______________________________________________<\/p>\n<div class=\"row title-row\">\n<div class=\"row\">\n<div class=\"utmost-devo-title col col-sm-12 col-xs-12\">\n<h2 class=\"entry-title\">Holiness or Hardness Toward God?<\/h2>\n<h4>By <a href=\"https:\/\/utmost.org\/oswald-chambers-bio\">Oswald Chambers<\/a><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"clearfix\"><strong>He\u2026wondered that there was no intercessor\u2026 \u2014<a href=\"http:\/\/www.biblegateway.com\/passage\/?version=31&amp;search=Isaiah+59%3A16\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Isaiah 59:16<\/a><\/strong><\/div>\n<div class=\"row entry-meta\">\n<div class=\"col-sm-4\">\n<div class=\"top-sharing\"><strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"top-rule\">\u00a0The reason many of us stop praying and become hard toward God is that we only have an emotional interest in prayer. It sounds good to say that we pray, and we read books on prayer which tell us that prayer is beneficial\u2014 that our minds are quieted and our souls are uplifted when we pray. But Isaiah implied in this verse that God is amazed at such thoughts about prayer.<\/div>\n<section class=\"entry-content\">\n<div class=\"post-content\">\n<p>Worship and intercession must go together; one is impossible without the other. Intercession means raising ourselves up to the point of getting the mind of Christ regarding the person for whom we are praying (see\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.biblegateway.com\/passage\/?search=Philippians+2:5\">Philippians 2:5<\/a>). Instead of worshiping God, we recite speeches to God about how prayer is supposed to work. Are we worshiping God or disputing Him when we say, \u201cBut God, I just don\u2019t see how you are going to do this\u201d? This is a sure sign that we are not worshiping. When we lose sight of God, we become hard and dogmatic. We throw our petitions at His throne and dictate to Him what we want Him to do. We don\u2019t worship God, nor do we seek to conform our minds to the mind of Christ. And if we are hard toward God, we will become hard toward other people.<\/p>\n<p>Are we worshiping God in a way that will raise us up to where we can take hold of Him, having such intimate contact with Him that we know His mind about the ones for whom we pray? Are we living in a holy relationship with God, or have we become hard and dogmatic?<\/p>\n<p>Do you find yourself thinking that there is no one interceding properly? Then be that person yourself. Be a person who worships God and lives in a holy relationship with Him. Get involved in the real work of intercession, remembering that it truly is work\u2014 work that demands all your energy, but work which has no hidden pitfalls. Preaching the gospel has its share of pitfalls, but intercessory prayer has none whatsoever.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Richard Rohr Becoming Fully Human Friday, March 30, 2018 The glory of God is a human being fully alive. \u2014St. Irenaeus of Lyon [1] Barbara Brown Taylor, an author and Episcopal priest, will be joining me at CONSPIRE 2018 (along with Barbara Holmes, Brian McLaren, and Mirabai Starr). [2] Taylor writes eloquently of the spiritual [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16597"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16597"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16600,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16597\/revisions\/16600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}