You are never a burden to your Father.
You are only a delight to your Father.
“‘God is love.’ Now, my children, I beg you to mark my words. God loves my soul so much that His life and being depend on His loving me, whether He would or no. To stop God loving my soul would be to deprive Him of His Godhead.”
—Meister Eckhart (Sermon 5)
I have long taught on the radical, singlehanded work of Christ to usher in a new creation. We died with him and have been ontologically liberated from sin altogether. Therefore, we are to consider ourselves already dead to sin and alive to him (Rom 6:11). This is sheer euphoria to those raised in traditions where proximity to God is subjectively dependent on their own progressive self-denial, and death to self is posited as their ongoing humanistic work of attaining sanctification.
Nevertheless, many hear the Message yet wonder why their outward lives do not seem to be bearing the subjective fruit of this objective Gospel reality (if the old is gone, and the new has come). Though we may intellectually affirm that the old man—the false self—died with Christ, our minds and hearts remain cluttered with non-Gospel patterns of thought.
The answer is not to reinstate the false self as an empirical reality, then go about attempting to crucify it in the name of an in-turned notion of sanctification. Rather, we must recognize that our thoughts, emotions and desires are not yet fully grounded in the reality of our liberation. We are indeed whole in Christ. Still, we continually fill ourselves with noise. We neglect the reality of the ever-present Christ, functionally setting aside our union as a mere idea, while (often unwittingly) feeding on habits and narratives contrary to it. We then wonder why dissatisfaction persists. Many begin blaming the Gospel for deficiency; it is not enough. We must supplement it with additives and techniques until we find ourselves mired in a Galatian bewitchment of mixture: grace plus human effort.
The Gospel is not deficient. Rather, we scarcely recognize how shallow our roots have grown into its reality.
To hear the Gospel of union with Christ may still remain little more than thin soil of positive theological affirmation. Union itself does not change, nor can it be improved upon. Yet neither is it merely positional or static. It is unbreakable yet dynamic living communion to be actively inhabited.
Silence is the ground in which communion takes experiential root. Here the Gospel moves from abstraction toward embodiment. This communion exposes and dismantles many inherited distortions clouding our vision of Christ. Silence and word meet together to reveal him—not merely by presenting truth, but by clearing away illusion. The subjective fragmentation that does not truly define us.
*From my forthcoming book: The Silence of the Word. Now available for pre-order. https://t.co/dXAuzeSWlA
Living by the Spirit, walking in the Spirit, praying in the Spirit, and loving by Holy Spirit is the joy of life. Holy Spirit saves us from poor decisions, angry responses and a defeatist mentality. I pray for you today for a glorious reality of Holy Spirit to fill you!