PART TWO:
Becoming ONE: Releasing the Power
CHAPTER 4 -
Truth + Grace = the Power of Love
The Importance of Truth
A person cannot become ONE with God until he or she accepts the truth of who he or she is as one apart from God. Without this truth, we will not experience grace sufficiently in order to encounter the love of God required to become ONE with the Creator God revealed through Israel. The promises of God to all humanity were originally made to the patriarchs of the nation of Israel over a period of hundreds of years. They were mediated to all of the families of man first by the nation and ultimately, eternally, by the Messiah-Son known as Jesus/Yeshua.
The rational person rightly demands proof of these claims as well as of the book in which they come, the Bible. In a political realm devoid of Messianic rule, people desire and require a personal experience with God in order to believe in Him. God must become real, tangible, testable and true to His written Word. If God is love, then one must receive the honest love of forgiveness that possesses the power to heal torn souls and broken bodies. To be transformed by faith, humans need more than traditional form. They need something they can take home and take to heart - something that possesses its own inherent proof and guarantee. They require something that contains its own inherent testimony of divine power in proof that God is indeed alive, relevant and real to them as well as in them.
This proof manifests itself ideally in the forgiving fellowship of a community united in the Holy Spirit. It is through and in mystical fellowship that one may today meet God in the very tangible flesh of a true believer. Despite humanity’s personal and social imperfections - even to the great evils of terror and torture – the immortal and omnipotent God still chooses to work through the weaknesses of mortal flesh. Throughout human history, the most common spiritual encounter the world has experienced is with the human and angelic agents of evil. Just as there is no darkness without light, neither is their evil without goodness. The personal experience of evil people, of an encounter with the devil or ONE of the fallen angels seeking to destroy us is probably one’s most tangible proof of God’s existence.
Aside from such unhappy encounters, people often seek fellowship with the Spirit of God in organized churches. Yet it is an uncomfortable realization to admit that churches have steadily lost impact on the philosophy and conduct of private and public life in the western sociocultural complex of nation states. Without intention, organized religion has obscured God from the unbeliever, the skeptic and the nominal Christian. Instead of overturning the corrupt values of “what comes naturally,” Christianity has lost its virtue (power) through the absorption of societal hypocrisy and doubt into its functional practice of doctrine.
The Mission of ONE is conceived in an attempt to remove the personal and socially imposed obstacles to the random occurrence of honest spirituality. Instead of the earth hosting a chance one or two media famous spiritual leaders within a lifetime, let there be millions of true disciples scattered around the world, known face-to-face, in person and linked across time and space by a unity of little christs - Christians by grace and in deed through the presence of the connecting Holy Spirit.
Success of the Mission of ONE is reasonable because God is present already within millions of disciples. If even a fair number of them accept their assignment, then the impact will be noticed in western consciousness: just as a little salt is noticed in food. If you haven’t lately, take salt completely out of your diet. People notice more readily the lack of salt than its presence. Likewise, the goodness of God’s ways and values are taken for granted until they are gone. When nations are subjected to oppressive evil, they long for righteousness. Human nature lacks the patience for well doing and lacks the humility to continue in submission to God when things are good. While too much salt can be a bad thing for food, there is never enough of the love of God to go around. Success in your mission will yield a fullness of God's blessed promises of spiritual fruit filling the lives of all whom His Spirit touches. Don’t worry about having too much of it because the Spirit of God never unbalances or harms the carrier or anyone who comes into contact with Him.
Whatever the stage on the road to success, this mission will benefit both believers and non-believers. In fact, the revealed and released goodness of God as lived by millions in mystical unity will naturally lead other multiple millions into a Christian faith as a byproduct - not as a direct purpose. Once communicated with understanding, the Word always bears fruit by its nature, and humbly led, faithful churches have many critical roles to play in a revitalized, self determined, spiritually oriented culture of Christian tradition and foundation.
However, the Mission of ONE does not originate, nor does it depend on any church's endorsement. The Mission is not put into motion by organizational adoption. It begins with ONE person who commits his/her life to Jesus/Yeshua in confidence - knowing that each Mission of ONE is connected to the larger Unity, seen or unseen. As I will expand on later, no ONE acts alone but in divine coordination. Each disciple becomes at once a singular temple of the Holy Spirit and a single stone of the complete and whole spiritual Temple of God, Who is also His Body, the agency of His works.
By nature God is beyond human control and direction. Forgotten are the spiritual laws practiced by the early faithful who turned their age downside upright in a love of truth and understanding. To succeed it is necessary to put aside the doubts and questions that reign in our secular and "scientific" world of technological miracles and wonders - even while accepting the reasons for their existence. The lure of science and technology has always been its predictable and usually manageable performance. Science can be trusted because natural law can be tested, observed, and defined.
Despite doubts, the hope and myth remains alive in modern life that ONE person can make a difference. But how?
The answer is not to be found in rugged individualism. It is to be found in contextual individual commitment. The context must be spiritually oriented small group fellowship even if that group is no larger than one’s immediate family. This conclusion is in accord with the growing public nostalgia for an undefined sense of community. Neighborhood organizations and programs are a productive but incomplete response to these idealistic sentiments.
Community fellowship among intimate groups of a dozen to two dozen participants is the spiritual growth factor for the Mission of ONE. Without the witness of widespread daily interaction with dedicated individuals of faith, Christian civilization is supine to the challenge of secular humanistic materialism. God must be more than a personal belief or vision, concept or comfort in order to become publicly real. Without mystical fellowship a proclaimed ideal of faith is separated from dynamic public impact. In gracious community the internally personal perceptions of the divine are joined to an externally real experience of God through the unity of others.
Because mystical cohesive identity has been largely lost to the Christian experience, the potential power of multiple autonomous testimonies is substituted by a confining and miscommunicating witness of individual style. Though charismatic leaders can be highly effective and attract large followings of hangers-on, the temporal spiritual power of human charisma is not what defeated Rome. The story of the early church, which overturned the world order, is not that of Peter, Paul, John and Jesus. Rather the reality of the hundreds and thousands of unnamed or briefly mentioned in whom God dwelt securely by grace and in knowledge, love, power and peace. And it was very good!
If it Works for You
While the experiential practice of a person's life solutions can be and is often discussed in toleration as acceptable for that person, it may not necessarily seem compelling to the observer. However, the witness of a diverse body of individuals freely living in the love of spiritual fellowship cannot be ignored or lightly dismissed. The challenge of its existence and divine identity prohibits irrelevance and demands attentive engagement from the non-committed members of society. In the true exercise of faithful forgiveness, God is not hidden in the written Word, obscured by congregational social climbing or misplaced in individual meditations of personal insight and revelation. Neither does He become debatably elusive to the audience of an emotional testimony recited as a very real encounter to the true believer.
In the mystical community of the faithful saints the ancient God of world dominion can and should be found today. Through the Holy Spirit, Jesus is come in the flesh of today's believer - even as He came anciently by that same Holy Spirit in the baby's body born of Mary. Should His present Body be any less forgiving and forgetting than Yeshua was when His sandaled feet trod the land of Israel?
Not if God is real and His Word is true. This is the sensible and rational conclusion of a reasonable person of open mind. If a rational, relatively unbiased person cannot find, nor experience such a manifestation of God's life and power, what else can he or she charitably conclude other than, "God is nice, perhaps, but not relevant to me being impotent in my experience."
God's power is founded on and directly proportional to one's awareness of His forgiveness. He is omnipotent only where His forgiveness knows no limits or restriction, such as was evident in the mortal life of Yeshua the Messiah, who performed fabulous miracles including Lazarus’ resurrection from the dead. Forgiveness becomes vital when guilt is uncovered in the presence of death's finality in oblivion - that is, in the complete absence of conscious existence or life.
There are no external requirements, no dramatic sacrifices to enroll in the Mission of ONE, just many seemingly small ones in service to self and others. These are made in faith not knowing the whole picture of God's purpose for each person so touched. Dedicated commitment begins inside with whatever part of ONE's life or identity that you can honestly and truthfully surrender to God's direction. Such a decision does not guarantee immediate success, however, though many can honestly claim so.
Transformational Identity
The self, the identity you have known from birth, does not die without a deceptive and dirty fight, but victory is assured because, as a part of the world, your body has been overcome by Messiah's resurrection. In Jesus' name, the life of Salvation comes to dwell within, the Father and the Son as the Holy Spirit.
The surrender of one's identity to God through Messiah removes the body from total slavery to death, which is sin. Acceptance of Jesus’ nature as the foundation of your own identity in the place of the old, naturally created ego, replaces the weaknesses of the flesh with the strength of the Spirit. Good deeds are empowered instead of selfish or evil ones. Joy replaces sorrow, faith replaces fear, truth supplants lies (to self and to others), and love fills the loneliness of empty mortality. A true spiritual metamorphosis of the mind occurs: one’s innermost thoughts and desires change beyond the boundaries of natural maturation as one old human identity becomes a new immortal ONE in Christ.
When Yeshua taught that "the Kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe the gospel," He not only referred to Himself as its King but also to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit within each who accepts His presence as the foundation to ONE's new personal being. The context of identity creation is formed within the realm of eternally existent love reconfigured and expressed in the outwardly ordinary, daily life of the new disciple.
With the coming of the Kingdom of God into ONE's life the environment around you will begin to change. Your natural body will become healthier, your mental attitude more positive. The attitude of and/or the kind of people around you change to be more pleasant, and the material circumstances of life improve towards beauty and bounty.
In thankful recognition of our natural unworthiness as people, ONE comes to know God as the giver of all this goodness. The result is that you will desire to share these blessings with others as it is given to you to do so. The God sourced acts of grace manifested through your body and mind only further strengthen the new spiritual identity and increase the transcendence of the Kingdom changes within the reality context of daily life.
Now I have implied that drama is not essential and written that the aid of others is not necessary, but the fact is that both are often helpful. It is miraculously difficult to break out of our self-imposed prisons, whether they are bonds of fear and misconception or cells of concrete and steel. The miraculous is present because ONE's liberty is spiritually caused as God's gift of Himself. Any difficulty occurs because of the habits and consequences of a life directed by fear, greed, and self-preservation at the expense of ONE's true self and others.
Overcoming Bondage
To change the apparent reality of bondage you live in, you must first break out of the prison of your mind by dying to it. In the silence of surrender, in the deathly peace of who you have been from birth, a new divine identity as ONE with God is born. This wondrous new creation of love occurs as you who were a separated and mortal creation voluntarily cease in strifeful struggle for life in order to secure a creatively unique identity within the vast realm of the ONE God’s expression of unfailing love in pure righteousness.
Instead of uselessly trying to beat the world at its own rigged game of certain eventual death, ONE overcomes the world through unity with Him Who is and was, and will be - the now eternally resurrected Son of God. The same identity that is "Him" is now "I", but still imponderably different because the unity of God's Holy Spirit is an indivisible collective of the creative expressions of God's love translated through human life.
The key to impact is found through constant renewal. The Bible refers to this as dying daily, and it is a difficult objective to realize on ONE's own. The Mission of One is a journey without end and under God's direction. The future is unknown but not a concern, for it is secure in Christ, the sealed covenant promise of God.
There is ONE God, ONE Creator and Redeemer, and ONE Redeemed - Yeshua/Jesus the Messiah/Christ - with you in Him and He and the Father in you. You have become ONE with God and ONE with Him in service to the world as you live in it. Unworthy and undeserving as every man is, ONE accepts His grace to demonstrate his/her faith in His forgiveness by giving it to others.
Belief in salvation is only real when we accept it without judgment and learned suspicion. Small children lack the experience that leads to suspicious mistrust. The Bible uses their trusting manner of dealing with life as an example of how to embrace God's complete and perfect forgiveness through the acceptance of His living presence within. For God to dwell in us, we must allow Him to work through us. We must not constrict, restrain or put limits on the goodness that may occur to us or to others through us.
True belief is expressed in the extension of God's grace towards others by forgiving them. I am referring here to honest and true forgiveness, which is akin to forgetting. Obviously, it is fully valid only in the face of honest repentance freely given and not forced by penalty or reward, fear or desire. Such honest repentance extends forgiveness to others without assurance of appreciation or reciprocity.
Godly repentance is not granted in order to enhance self-preservation but for extinguishing the existing self-identity of melded good and evil so that a new, Godfounded identity of pure goodness may be born again. First born in the Savior, the miracle of the new birth takes whatever was good from the old identity and translates it into the purity of God's nature through the indwelling Holy Spirit. Since no evil or imperfection is found in the pure light of the Holy Spirit, none can pass through it to the other side of time, known as eternity in the Kingdom of God. Throughout the eternity of regeneration, this new identity lives vibrantly joined to a spiritual body reserved in Heaven. (1Corinthians 15:31-58)
Despite the longings otherwise, the problem is that people are totally mortal and material. Although mankind has tremendous spiritual potential, we are factually not that different from animals. If humans were really immortal souls or flesh captured spirits, then God would not have needed to come in the flesh to die as a man, nailed to a tree.
However, man is indeed mortal, and so the resurrection meant the imparting of real power to the early disciples. It was a literal power of life overcoming death. As a proving transition to this revelation, Yeshua raised others from physical death such as Lazarus and the witnessing mortal resurrection of saints which occurred at the time of Jesus' death on the stake or cross. (Matthew 27:52-53)
The Hope of the Resurrection
The bodily resurrection of Jesus/Yeshua empowered the gospel that motivated the early disciples. It is the testimony and proof that the Holy Spirit may be born within the stinking, moldering composted soil of a dying and dead human body. A death of spiritual surrender in faith and obedience to Jesus, the Word in the flesh, births a new creation in the metaphysical realm – a spiritual body in heaven. Every believer’s fleshly body is dying from birth, but within the mortally fallible temple of flesh dwells a divinely perfect Holy Spirit of unlimited life and power in love.
The Spirit communicates without words and links the reborn with divine unity of substance to the metaphysical, eternal body of spirit reserved in heaven. Its variations of glory and appearance are one and the same time both the record of who a believer is in Christ as well as the eternal reward of variable glory related to the works of God through one’s mortal life lived on earth. Anything powered by, sourced by and effected by the Holy Spirit in a person’s life is eternally molded into that heavenly body. All that is of human effort, power, imagination and sourced in the fleshly, good and evil spirit of this world (the life force) remains in this world. The final filter of the Spirit is inviolate and incorruptible. (Read Romans 8:6-28)
Natural identities develop out of life experiences from birth in an interactive union between the physical body and brain, inseparable. As long as the body lives, the naturally mortal identity (the "old man" of Romans 6; Ephesians 4 and Colossians 3) continues to exist even as it desperately struggles for impossible immortality. Any human surrender to God begins small. If ONE would enjoy a greater fullness of the Kingdom of God now, as Jesus taught and encouraged His audiences to seize, then he or she must deal with his or her deceptive human nature daily. It is the only way to bring an ever-increasing portion of daily life under the direction of the supernaturally new identity. Death cannot end the believer’s new identity within the ONEness of God’s kingdom because it derives from the ONE same Spirit indwelling the Father, the Son and the believer as an individual and as a collective Body known as the Church, the Body of Messiah. Explanation of the nature and applied ramifications of this latter mystery composes part three of this book.
Fortunately, we live in an imperfect world together with a great number of often-troublesome people - beginning with our own families. It seems we have constant challenges in living with other people, and people really don't seem able to live without others of our kind. The reason is that we/they are all here to teach one another about God: what He is like and what He is not like and how to become like Him, to fully live.
Return in thought now to the proposed essential participation in mystical fellowship or small group commitment in community. Since a substantial portion of personal problems comes from relationships with other people, it is within those same relationships that a solution may be found. This is where the learning occurs. From birth ONE associates with various groups of other people interacting at various levels of psychosocial intensity. The types of joys and sorrows, rewards and conflicts, differ according to the basis of those relationship circles.
For example, the collection, sorting, and cleansing of dirty laundry is a home-based issue that usually does not come up as a significant issue in the work place. Or, a parent's/spouse's critical opinion of one's spending habits usually creates a more intense emotional response in us than a pointedly expressed view offered by an acquaintance.
From earliest times people have lived in small groups with face-to-face interdependence and interaction for survival. At the core of these essential groups are the nuclear and extended families. Over the course of millennia, the nature of the larger community has changed in character and dimension. Also differing over time and place, were nuclear family members' roles and responsibilities. As a consequence of this extensive sociocultural history, healthy personal identity formation always occurred within the context of several intersecting circles of relationships. Whenever rapid change or confusion happened in these social structures, secure individual identity and self respect suffered. In the absence of stable relationship contexts, young and old seek them out in gangs, clubs, or in imaginative interaction with media personalities. Such observations are not secret information but rather well known to the point of almost being considered common sense.
But how often does emotion crowd out common sense left unused in solving people problems? Or staggering social issues? Scale scares. It demands answers of similar dimension, yet often the solutions to big problems are the same as to small ones. It's just necessary to break the big problems up into manageable pieces.
The Mission of One is not an exception to this vital dimension of human relationship communities. Without spiritual fellowship ONE's effectiveness is limited. Without mystical fellowship spiritual growth is stalled or slow at best, and certainly more painful in the learning of lessons. For the lessons must be learned, and the trials to teach those lessons continue until the disciple succeeds in changing by nature.
Formal organization is not the objective of the Mission of ONE. Organizations, formal and informal, spring up like weeds in spring whenever there is need or money to be spent. I mean this as an observation and not necessarily as a criticism because organization is the only way to accomplish certain tasks. Run properly social or group organizations produce far more fruits for the efforts and assets invested in them than the sum of the individual efforts of its members, but they are not prerequisite to individual transformation. When a person in faith chooses to become ONE with God through Christ, informal, spiritual connections take place, and any formal association with a church or spiritual fellowship is secondary.
Community or group organizations are social machines that undertake and perform sets of tasks. Organizations rely on the material power of ideas, leverage, talent, money, and hours of effort. A different sort of power is needed to effect the Mission of ONE. It is tapped by doing nothing by the flesh, by dying to it, by accepting the grace of God as given, when given, and for the purpose given.
Powered by God’s Holy Spirit
'Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,' says the LORD of hosts. 'What are you, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel you will become a plain; and he will bring forth the top stone with shouts of “Grace, grace to it!”’ (Zechariah 4:6-7)
The Mission of One relies on the holy power of God's Spirit - unfathomed, unplanned, yet present in ONE’s commitment and ability for now, past forgiven and future entrusted. It is set forth in faith: the first step being to place it in God's hands and the second is to begin. Understanding the purpose itself is a matter of continuing revelation and discovery.
With God's love as ONE's source of power, the experienced reality of daily life will change: family, business, friends, fun, politics, and creative expression. Secure in the experience of God's unconditional acceptance by forgiveness, ONE's faith needs no defense. ONE's knowledge can freely grow on this foundation, and life's challenges of living truths will develop a new identity that is truth to self and to God. The example given in the Bible is the divine Son – Yeshua/Jesus. He was God's Son begotten by the same Holy Spirit and declared proven so in power by the resurrection. (Luke 1:35; Romans 1:4) Jesus was ONE with the Father yet a distinct, unique person. (John 10:30)
To live this way is to surrender to the faithful care of a God beyond human comprehension, both collective and individual. It is to reach out and embrace the intangibly known as experienced in this life, His expression of love and grace towards us being packaged in a peace which surpasses understanding. The Mission of One is to believe that, out of the apparent randomness of the natural world, there is purpose and not fate. As a consequence, the issues, tactics, and the battlefront of belief are redefined.
The focus of the Mission of ONE is founded on the unmerited grace of the Holy Spirit at work in an undeserving and imperfect human life. Therefore, a first step in understanding God is to better understand man. Only in the studied revelation of human nature may the nature of God's essential substance be intuited, and only in human weakness and mortality does God's strength and immortality unfold and so become relevant - yes, and even important. Because it is based on God’s omnipotence, ONE cannot fail in His mission to spread the grace and goodness of God in every direction. Life becomes once again "VERY GOOD!" This very good life fallibly found in psychologically healthy human flesh is integrated into the mystically powerful and metaphysically perfect spiritual Body of the ONE God - Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
