It's Time To Become Who You Really Are

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L.D. Turner

In the Christian’s journey of faith it is foundational to understand the following biblical principles before we travel very far down the road of spiritual formation:

God has provided everything we need in order to develop and evolve spiritually. It seems he has done this in ways that are highly mysterious but also highly effective. One way of looking at it is that he has provided all that we will ever need on the spiritual level and also he has provided, through the person of the Holy Spirit, the power we need in order to contact these spiritual blessings and bring them down from the spiritual world and into manifestation in our daily lives.


Once we understand this fundamental reality, the logical questions now center on what our responsibilities are in this process. Some advocates of the “everything is by grace” school would insist there is nothing we can do to grow in the spiritual life, but even a minimal check of the reality of the situation would prove that position untenable. There is plenty for us to do as the process of our spiritual development, what is called our “sanctification,” is a joint venture.

Our part in this is first, to place ourselves into a position of receptivity and obedience. We can increase receptivity by practicing the classical spiritual disciplines, especially meditation, prayer, lectio divina, and contemplation. In terms of obedience, we do not need to make this process overly complicated. Most of God’s will for our lives in revealed in Sacred Scripture, but many of us ignore this aspect of obedience by looking for God’s “specific will,” which is fine, but can also be an exercise in self-absorption.

The other aspect of practical Christianity involves advancing God’s kingdom through service to others. That service, motivated by compassion and fueled by kindness is our main task. If we are to be truly obedient, we start right here.

So you see, here we have three aspects of practical faith before us:

Receptivity
Obedience
Service


The fourth element I might add to this is Sacred Character. The formation of sacred character is the goal of any path of spiritual formation. Sacred Scripture informs us that we have the mind of Christ and few of us it seems realizes just what a blessing this is. In addition to our own mind, we have operating in us the same mind that operated in Jesus when he walked the earth. We find that mind through quieting our own internal chatter enough to encounter Sacred Silence. The disciplines of meditation and especially contemplation are highly important here. It is through the transformative encounters we have with Sacred Silence and our Inner Light that the foundation stones for our journey of spiritual formation are laid. Encouraged by our increasing contact with the Divine Source, we are better equipped to walk boldly in the world and deal with the vicissitudes of life.

Sacred Character is synonymous with moral integrity. We know who we are, how we are supposed to live, and with the power of the Holy Spirit, we live consistently with those values. Sacred Character means that we have a highly developed, internalized worldview and concomitant value system and that we live accordingly. In this way, Sacred Character becomes a bridge that connects our receptivity and our obedience with our service to the world. Here, then, we have the dynamic of our four responses to God’s grace and equipping:

Receptivity
Obedience
Character
Service


If we seek a workable model of a person who integrated these four aspects of a dynamic relationship with the Father, we need look no further than Jesus. If ever a person was receptive and obedient to God, it was the Master. A deep, abiding sacred character was also evident in all Jesus said and did. And as far as service is concerned, Jesus gave us a great example in the 13th chapter of John when he introduced the disciples (and us) to the ministry of the towel.

I am certain you are aware of Paul's idea, repeated in one way or another throughout his correspondence with the fledgling churches, of the relationship between Jesus and God. Paul tells us that all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell in Christ, which meant that God and Jesus were in some mysterious way the same being. In the Jewish culture of his day, Paul was making an incredible claim here. Jews were not supposed to make any image of God and even to speak his name was considered a capital offense. Now, here was Paul echoing Jesus by implying that the great and mighty Jehovah was in essence a loving, creator who was not only the Father of Jesus, but was also Jesus himself. And the reverse was true. Jesus was not only a great teacher and a skilled Rabbi; He was not only a great healer and the leader of a band of shady-looking disciples; Jesus, according to Paul, was Jehovah Himself.

Standing alone, that sort of statement was enough to give the High Priest a major migraine. Paul, however, wasn't finished. In fact, he was just getting started. If you take a look at Ephesians 3:19, the Apostle tells the early church members that he prays "that you may be filled with all the fullness of God." (NSRV) Here Paul was pulling no punches; instead, he went straight for the knockout. Paul basically was saying that he prayed for and believed that, as Christians, the new believers were expected to become like Jesus.

No wonder the religious establishment saw Paul as a dangerous, if not demented, man. Equating Jesus with God was a reach. Saying that a human being could become like Jesus was beyond the pale of comprehension and acceptability.

Yet is precisely the character of Christ that we are charged to develop within ourselves. In order to accomplish this great mission we have a divine partner in the Holy Spirit and our Christian brothers and sisters for power, guidance, and support. An open, honest relationship with the Holy Spirit is where we must place our energies at this time, even though much confusion and lack of knowledge about the Holy Spirit exists. We are told by Jesus that the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, is where we are to focus our efforts for learning and guidance. Unfortunately, many of us refuse to get too close to the Spirit, as we operate primarily out of fear and ignorance.

Part of our process of appropriating the divine gifts already provided by God in the spiritual realm involves claiming them. This process is not so much “name it and claim it” as often espoused in the so-called “Prosperity Gospel,” but does involve a similar principle. We are not claiming something that is not rightfully ours, but instead, we are claiming the free gifts of grace provided to us and for us as joint heirs with Christ. In this sense, we do “name and claim,” – we name and claim what scripture tells us we should name and claim. In fact, if we fail to claim these free gifts of God’s grace we are, in essence, rejecting much of what Christ achieved on our behalf.

One other aspect of this also needs to be mentioned. By naming and claiming the gifts of character that are rightfully ours by virtue of our new status of being “in Christ,” we are not pushing God to act in our behalf and do our bidding. Instead, we are recognizing, accepting, and appropriating what God has already done through Christ. This may seem to be a subtle distinction, but it makes all the difference in the world. By recognizing and claiming our scriptural status as new creations in Christ, we are exercising our faith in God and praising him for what he has already accomplished.

Unlike the prosperity preachers, we are not turning God into some sort of cosmic bellhop who fetches at our command. Instead, by claiming his free gift of a new heart, a renewed mind, and a transformed character, we are recognizing God for what he is, a loving Father who has provided everything we will ever need to live the kind of life he desires for us.

As new creations in Christ, we are blessed indeed.

© L.D. Turner 2011/All Rights Reserved

The Divine Hologram: Christ's Cosmic Nature (Part Two)

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L.D. Turner

As thinking Christians, we all need to pause and prayerfully consider the implications of this small but powerful verse. We must reflect upon the philosophical and existential ramifications of what Christ has accomplished and how all of this plays out in our daily lives as Christians living in the 21st century. For starters, we can say, along with Paul, that it is within the body of the Cosmic Christ that we “live and move and have our being.”

During the time that Christ walked the earth, his original band of disciples enjoyed intimate closeness with the Master. During the 40 days following the Resurrection, that level of intimacy continued. There has been much debate within the church over the nature of Christ’s body following the Resurrection, but the real issue here is the fact that the disciples were able to have continuing closeness with Jesus. Now, in our time, we also can partake of that divine intimacy due to the action taken by Jesus as described in Ephesians 4:10. Christ, through interpenetrating all aspects of creation, has made himself accessible in a way that even the early disciples were not privy to. The fact is, if our spiritual eyes are open, we can see Christ everywhere.

If scripture is indeed “God-breathed” and is to be believed, then the intimacy we now have with Christ far exceeds anything those who lived before his Ascension could have ever imagined. Even more, this closeness with Christ is as close as our own heartbeat. Christ infused the entire universe with his being, turning all reality into a type of spiritual hologram. The Master penetrated everything, including you and me. When I first really grasped this reality, I mean really took hold of it (or perhaps it took hold of me) – it was like someone slapping me in the face and screaming, “Wake up.” I can safely say my life, although still far from perfect, has never been the same. In her remarkable book, The Wisdom Jesus, Cynthia Bourgeault shares the following poem, penned by the 11th century Greek Orthodox spiritual master Simeon the New Theologian:

We awaken in Christ’s body
as Christ awakens our bodies,
and my poor hand is Christ. He enters
my foot and is infinitely me.

I move my hand, and wonderfully
my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him
(for God is indivisibly
whole, seamless in his Godhood).

I move my foot, and at once
He appears in a flash of lightning.
Do my words seem blasphemous? – Then
open your heart to Him.

And let yourself receive the one
who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him,
We wake up inside Christ’s body

Where all our body, all over,
every most hidden part of it,
is realized in joy as Him.
And he makes us utterly real.

And everything that is hurt, everything
that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
maimed, ugly, irreparably
damaged, is in him transformed

and recognized as whole, lovely,
radiant in his light.
We awaken as the Beloved
in every last part of our body.


I encourage you to spend quality time alone with these words from Simeon the New Theologian. Ask the Holy Spirit to open your spiritual eyes and grant you the same manner of vision as the poet exhibits – the kind of vision that will allow your spiritual heart to open like a flower before the sun and grant you full understanding of what holy scripture means when it says we are “in Christ.” Personally, I think our human understanding , no matter how advanced, has only scratched the surface of the true meaning of this simple phrase – in Christ. Taken in context with Ephesians 4:10, the ramifications are mind-boggling.

What we can say with certainty is the theme discussed above – that of deep intimacy with Christ in the new, vivified cosmic hologram. Through his final act of self-emptying love (Greek kenosis), Christ has filled the entire universe with his character, his being, and his selfless love. We also have been filled with that same character, that same being, that same love. Just as we live in Christ, Christ lives in us. Again, our comprehension of these mysteries is minimal but fortunately, we don’t have to understand it all to reap its benefits. Through faith we partake of this divine hologram, or as Peter tells us, the divine nature.
Our intimacy with Christ remains as deep and as profound as always. Cynthia Bourgeault explains:

.....our whole universe is profoundly permeated with the presence of Christ. He surrounds, fills, holds together from top to bottom this human sphere in which we dwell. The entire cosmos has become his body, so to speak, and the blood flowing through it is his love…..mystical visionaries have tended to claim that this “pan-cosmic” saturation of his being into the deepest marrow of this created world was the cosmic cornerstone turned in his passage through death. Without in any way denying or overriding the conditions of this earth plane, he has interpenetrated them fully, infused them with his own interior spaciousness, and invited us all into the invisible but profoundly coherent energetic field so that we may live as one body – the “Mystical Body of Christ,” as it’s known in Christian tradition – manifesting the Kingdom of Heaven here and now. Jesus in his ascended state is not farther removed from human beings but more intimately connected with them. He is the integral ground, the ambient wholeness within which our contingent human lives are always rooted and from which we are always receiving the help we need to keep moving ahead on the difficult walk we have to walk here. When the eye of our own heart is open and aligned with this field of perception, we recognize whom we’re walking with.


…..to be continued

(c) L.D. Turner 2010/All Rights Reserved

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On Servanthood and Being a Living Epistle

L. Dwight Turner

When we look at the life of Jesus, it is quite obvious that he did not see a dramatic division between the sacred and the secular. For Jesus, as it was for Jewish culture in general, the sacred was to be like a canopy that covered all of one’s activities, no matter how mundane. Jesus demonstrated this through his actions, his teachings, and his general demeanor as he went about his business. Paul, who was about as Hebrew as one could get, also shared this lack of a clear dividing line between what was spiritual and what was material or mundane. In 1 Corinthians 10:31, the Apostle writes:

So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.

The separation of the sacred from the secular is an aberration that is largely peculiar to Western philosophy. Neither time nor space allows for a detailed explanation of how this distorted and divisive element of the common Western worldview evolved. Suffice to say that it began with the thought of Renee Descartes in the 17th Century, gathered steam in the Enlightenment, and became the absolute, unquestioned norm in the century recently ended.

Fortunately, things are undergoing rapid change as our global culture has brought all parts of the world into more intimate contact. Western philosophy, theology, and even science are now taking a more expansive, holistic approach to spirituality, recognizing that anything can be spiritual if one has the right perspective. Tiellhard de Chardin, a Catholic theologian who was also a gifted scientist, spoke wisely to the point of this issue when he said:

Nothing is profane for one who has eyes to see.

Increasingly, Christian pastors, teachers, writers, and theologians have jettisoned the erroneous teaching of Descartes in favor of a more inclusive perspective as to what constitutes the “spiritual.” Kary Oberbrunner, founder of Redeem the Day Ministries, tells us:

The perceived opposition between Christianity and culture stems from a dualistic, Western worldview that divides life into categories – categories like sacred and secular. Within this view, prayer and evangelism are spiritual activities, while exercise and eating are secular. Christian schoolteachers and missionaries have spiritual vocations, while business people and computer programmers have secular ones. God shows up in spiritual places like church and nature; he is absent from secular venues like sports arenas……This type of worldview is toxic on multiple levels. The theologian Abraham Kuyper recognized these dangers and said, “There is not an inch of the entire domain of our human life of which Christ, who is sovereign of all, does not proclaim, ‘Mine!’”

It should be unnecessary to say that we can be just as valuable to God in the office as we can in the church. We can accomplish tasks and goals that are quite spiritual at the Little League park, just as easily as we can in a Sunday School class. Our “secular” activities in the world are no less spiritual than those of our pastor, a monk, or, if you happen to be Catholic, the Pope.

Perhaps it is one of the enemy’s greatest strategies to keep us in that split and divisive state of mind where we draw an impenetrable line between our spiritual activities and more “worldly” pursuits. It certainly isn’t an idea that you can consistently support with scripture. I can be just as holy bowling with friends as I can be teaching a Sunday School class. I can be just as Christian showing my daughter how to ride a bike as I can be reading the Bible. I can be every bit as much a spiritual person at my desk at work as I can be singing in the church choir.

Christ’s mandate was for us to carry out faith into all out activities, not just a few that our culture has defined as “spiritual.” This is what Paul meant when he said we were to be “a pleasant aroma” and strikes right to the heart of what it means to be a “living epistle.” The bottom line here is that we are called to be followers of Christ and to be a follower of Christ, more than anything else, is to be a servant. The blessing in all this is that the spectrum of servant activity extends from the sanctuary to the street, from the narthex to the neighborhood, and from the holy to the hovel.

Recently, as I meditated on these themes, the Holy Spirit led me to see that in order to be a living epistle, with the teachings of Christ inscribed on my heart, I must first of all be a servant. These days we may much of the concept of leadership and, although competent Christian leaders are needed in all areas of our culture, we also need competent followers – especially Christ-followers. And to be a Christ follower is to be a servant. If you have any doubts about this, check out Matthew 26 where Jesus talks about separating the sheep and the goats.

A living epistle, a Christ-following servant possesses an obedient heart, filled with compassion and motivated toward being a proactive helper in ways great and small. Rarely is this call to servanthood involve our personal comfort, but instead, will often require that we renounce our own priorities and convenience. Listen as Bruce Wilkinson describes the Master’s call to servanthood:

The call to service is rarely a call to convenience, and Jesus’ life of servanthood was not easy. Note how Isaiah describes the role of the Servant-Messiah centuries before Jesus’ birth (Isa. 52:13 – 53:12). Mark frequently describes the difficult life of the servant. You’ll see Jesus interrupted as He spends time in prayer. You’ll feel the eager crowds pressing in to tap His power. You’ll sense His compassion for those in need and His anger at those using traditions as an excuse to avoid serving others. And you’ll sense His resolute commitment to face the cross in spite of its agony and shame. Truly, Jesus is the supreme model of servanthood….Your call as a disciple is likewise a call to servanthood. Do you place your Master’s will ahead of your own? Does your heart respond with compassion at the sight of needy people? Do your actions speak louder than words? Active, compassionate, obedient service to the Master – that’s your privilege today and everyday.

If we are to be living epistles, we are servants in the ministry of the towel, just as Jesus when he washed his disciples’ dirty feet. There is no debate about this calling upon our lives. The only question is to what extent we are willing to respond. Let’s close with Paul’s words to the Philippians:

Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant….

© L.D. Turner 2009/All Rights Reserved