God's Dream for the World

The future doesn’t yet exist—which is why it’s future instead of the present or past—this doesn’t mean I’m claiming the future is wide open. To the contrary, it’s very clear from Scripture that God has a great plan for the future, and this plan steers the course of history by setting limits on what can and can’t occur and influencing what comes to pass. God created the world and is now moving it to the fulfillment of a glorious dream.

We see God’s glorious dream expressed in Jesus’ prayer in John 17, which is the most outstanding prayer ever recorded, if you ask me. Jesus prays to the Father on behalf of all who will come to know him (which he hopes will be the whole world) (vss. 20, 23). He further prays to the Father that his followers may be “one…just as you are in me and I am in you” (vs. 21, emphasis added). He then proclaims that he has given us the same “glory” that was given him before the foundation of the world (vs. 22, 24), and he did this so that we may be one, just as he and the Father are one. “I in them and you in me,” he continues, “so that they may be brought to complete unity.”

Clearly, the “glory” Jesus refers to is the glorious loving unity of the triune God. And when his disciples reflect this glory, Jesus says to his heavenly Father, “the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (vs. 23, emphasis added). Jesus ends his prayer by telling the Father he will continue to make him known so that “the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them” (vs. 26).

What a dream! God’s vision for humanity is nothing less than for us to be participants in the perfect love that he is throughout eternity. He wants the love of the Trinity to be the replicated toward us, among us and through us to the whole world. God’s dream is for us to be in him, and he to be in us—in the same way the Father is in the Son and the Son is in the Father. The dream is for humanity to be loved by God, and to in turn love God, with one and the same love that is the eternal triune God.

I’m convinced this is what the Bible means when it says God makes us participants of the divine nature (1 Pet 1:4), for the divine nature is love (1 Jn 4:4). I’m also convinced this is why Paul repeatedly says that believers are placed “in Christ.” We don’t simply relate to God through Christ. We relate to God in Christ. We share in the Father’s relationship to the Son and the Son’s relationship to the Father. When we are saved, you might say, we are pulled into God and are eternally allowed to share in the ecstatic love that he eternally is.


I believe Paul is making the same basic point when he says that all things were created by Christ and for Christ. Christ was always intended to be the head of humanity, his “body,” and the means by which God united the cosmos together (Col. 1:15 -20). This is also why Paul taught that the grace that saves us was “given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time” (2 Tim. 1.9) and why Jesus said that the glory he gives to us was given him “before the foundation of the world” (Jn 17:24).

- Greg A Boyd

Religious Self-isms

The believers involved in the religious culture of the western world have been brainwashed into believing that in order to have value as a believer, we need to be religiously, self-sufficient, self-efficient, self-motivated, self-involved, self-reliant and self-dependent. This religious myth of the religious system praises this independence as spiritual maturity because we are thoroughly involved in religious disciplines and are working toward out full spiritual potential. All we have to do is work hard enough, read the bible more, pray more, attend the one hour Sunday-go-meeting, sing in the choir, serve on the board, believe the religious creeds and and adhere to the religious bylaws and all is spiritually well.

Religion has removed total dependance on God to total dependance on religion. It is as if admitting total dependance of the finished work of the cross and resurrection would imply that we are spiritually lazy, spiritually deficient, spiritually crippled, and worthless to God and His Gospel.

This is a lie of religion. God gave everything, did everything, to give maintain your salvation.

If God gave everything to save you, it naturally follows that you were worth it. Our value in God’s eyes is not based on self-sufficiency, or self-anything, but on the fact that we belong to God. To understand this we must understand “worth” as God does.

I have just become a granddad to a beautiful, adorable, little girl and I love her to the unconditionally. My grand-baby did not do one iota of a thing to gain my love and admiration, she did not do one thing to earn my love. She cannot do anything that will make me stop loving her. Her worth and value is intrinsic. As part of God’s family, you were created valuable, and don’t need to “earn” God’s love. In fact, there’s absolutely nothing you can say or do to make God love you more or any less. (This too is an area where we are dependent on God, for God loves us because of who we are not what we do.)

From the beginning, Adam and Eve were dependent on God. Through all eternity, we will be dependent on God. We were made to be forever dependent. The independence and self-sufficiency so fruitlessly sought after by religion doesn’t exist. Our lives are always empty without God.

Thus the emptiness of religion!

Preparing For Death

Ancient Greek philosophers -- or at least some of them -- understand their activity as philosophers to be a preparation for death. That is how Socrates describes philosophy in the Phaedo. Because the philosopher is concerned with the soul over the body, and seeks to perfect the soul by its knowledge of the truth about the universe, therefore the philosophical life is a preparation for death at which point the soul is separated from the body.

Regardless of the metaphysical and anthropological differences between the two, Christianity and ancient Greek philosophy are similar in this respect. Paul speaks of baptism, the beginning of the Christian life, as a sort of intentional death undergone through union with Christ's own death (Rom 6). Elsewhere he speaks of putting of the old self, which is effectively dying, and putting on a new self (Eph 4, Col 3). Of course the real perfection of the new self comes at the resurrection, so Christian life is a kind of training for death and resurrection.

Because death is an inevitable reality, it makes sense to prepare for it. To some extent we have to ignore the fact of our death and its unpredictability in order to go on in the world; many people, if they spent much time thinking about their own demise, would be too depressed and anxious to move forward. But for those who want fortitude of spirit, who want to face reality and adjust themselves to it, and especially those for whom (as Athanasius says in De Incarnatione) death is something dead because of the resurrection of Christ, meditation on and preparation for death are essential.

Meditation on and preparation for death are important for at least the following reason: they help us to understand well the finitude and preciousness of time. They help us to use our time wisely; in an interesting way, meditation about the imminence and inevitability of death can inspire a profound, ardent zeal to live and to live well. One of my favorite lines from The Imitation of Christ:

Many have died suddenly and without warning; for the Son of Man will come at an hour when you least expect Him (Lk 12:40). When the hour of death comes, you will begin to think differently about your past life and great will be your sorrow then that you have been so negligent and lazy in God's service.

How happy and wise are those who try now to become what they would want to be at the hour of death (I, 23, 3-4).

The Faith Way

Is our faith the way we get God to bless us by answering our prayers?...Or...Is our faith the way God comes to us bringing His blessings that are the answer to our prayers?

This verse in Rev. 3:20, although religion applies it to sinners, is in reality addressed to believers. "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me."

The picture I see here is that believers have shut Jesus out of their heart by opening it to the vain philosophies of men. The faith door of their heart is closed. In their religiosity they try to muster up enough faith to open their hearts door and gain access to God's presence to make their demands of prayer and lay claim to being a person of great faith if they get an answer to that prayer, no matter if the answer is from God, natural healing, or deceiving spirits.

In the midst of all our religious activity God is gently knocking on the door of faith to our hearts so He can come in and sup with us and us with Him and in doing so, bring His blessings because "in him all the fullness of the Godhead dwells.

It is not that we get to God by our faith...it is that God gets to us by our faith! Faith's only role is to let God in, and when He is in, we have anything and everything we need!

We have simply to open the door and let the grace that has always been there, welling up, come flooding in, filling our hearts and lives with the presence of Christ and His blessing.

“If any man open the door, I will come into him.”

Ponder carefully every word here. There is nothing saying our praying is what draws Jesus into our hearts. Nor is it our prayer which moves Jesus to come into our hearts. All He needs is access. He enters of His own accord because He desires to come in. And He enters in wherever He is not denied admittance.

As air enters in quietly when we breath, and does its normal work in our lungs, so Jesus enters quietly into our hearts and does His blessed work there by opening the door of faith.

I trust that you can see now how you can pray continually,  prayer is nothing more involved than to let Jesus into our needs.

Faith is simply trusting Jesus by opening our hearts door of faith and supping with Him and He with us.

Both Wind and Tide to Forward Your Voyage

“Mark well the great advantages you have for the attainment of holiness by seeking it in a right gospel order.

You will have the advantage of the love God manifested towards you, in forgiving your sins, receiving you into favor, and giving you the spirit of adoption, and the hope of His glory freely through Christ, to persuade and constrain you by sweet allurements to love God again, who has so dearly loved you, and to love others for His sake, and to give up yourselves to the obedience of all His commands out of hearty love to Him.

You will also enjoy the help of the Spirit of God to incline you powerfully to obedience, and to strengthen you for the performance of it against all your corruptions and the temptations of Satan, so that you will have both wind and tide to forward your voyage in the practice of holiness."

— Walter Marshall

Why Can't I Feel God?

Question:
Greg, you’re always talking about how we need to keep our eyes fixed on the cross to see and experience God’s love for us. But I find myself arguing with God, asking him: “How am I to believe that you love us that much when you don’t love me enough to lift the veil over my mind and break me free with your love?” I have never felt any of God’s love, or presence or anything! The truth is that God feels distant, unloving, and even non-existent, and it angers me that my Father, who supposedly loves me, leaves me in this godless prison. Why doesn’t God lift the veil and make himself real to me?   B.

Answer:

Hi B,
I’m so sorry to hear your plight. I completely understand the anger you express. You feel like you’re helplessly imprisoned in a godless dungeon and naturally wonder why God doesn’t deliver you, especially if he truly loves you as much as he says he does.

Now, I can’t pretend to know all the reasons why you can’t seem to experience the reality of God. But I’ll share with you what little I do know and what I’ve found has worked for me and countless others.
All of our emotions are associated with videos and soundtracks and other experiences we automatically run in our brains. We think by replicating our real life experiences in our heads, with all five senses, and there is always an emotional component to our thought. We tend to think that people and events outside us cause us to be angry or happy or whatever, but actually the thing that produces our emotion is the way we interpret people and events outside of us. And we interpret them automatically by conjuring up videos and soundtracks and other experiences in response to the people and events outside of us.

This is why a person might say to two different people, “you are fat,” and one cries while the other laughs. To the first, the words perhaps evoked memories of being publicly humiliated on a bus in 6th grade, while to the other it conjured up the image of an insecure five-year-old insulting them as they attempt to impress their five-year-old peers, or something like that. We usually aren’t aware of the videos and soundtracks we run in our brain, because they occur at about 1/3000th of a second, much faster than our consciousness can attend to. But THIS is how all emotions operate.
So, if you change the mental pictures you run in your brain, you change your emotions.

All that is to say if you’re feeling like God is distant, unloving, non-existent, it’s because you are unwittingly running videos and soundtracks and other experiences in your brain of a distant, unloving and/or non-existent deity. Anyone who experienced what you experienced in your mind would feel the way you feel. This isn’t your fault B. Who knows how the crap in our brain got there? The important thing is to realize that the crap is there and that this crap is the source of our crappy emotional experience. Most importantly, you need to know there is something you can do about it.

Here’s what I recommend.
a) First, know the intellectual reasons why you believe Jesus is the definitive revelation of God. Some people base their faith on personal experiences they’ve had, but I find this to be far too fickle and subjective. I instead ground my faith in historical and philosophical considerations. If I actually experience God’s love or anything spiritually, that is great, but if I don’t, it doesn’t at all affect my faith that this is true. (If you’re uncertain about why you believe, I encourage you to study the matter, e.g. Letters from a Skeptic, by my dad and me or The Jesus Legend by Paul Eddy and me).

b) Once I’ve intellectually resolved that Jesus is the definitive revelation of God, I now try to get all my thinking to line up with this (2 Cor 10:3-5). And a major part of this is making regular time to imagine Jesus. I put on some beautiful music, turn out the lights, and then meet Jesus, listen to what he has to say to me (always the same wonderful stuff he says in the NT, but now it’s to me personally). I sometimes take walks with Jesus, and we sometimes go back into the past and redo wounding memories. I talk about this in my book Seeing Is Believing and also in Escaping the Matrix (with Al Larson), both of which I strongly recommend for you.

c) This imaginative exercise will probably initially feel like you’re “making this up” on your own. Any time we do something “new” in our imagination, it feels like WE are making it up. Don’t worry about this. Even if you were “just making it up,” you’re still bringing your mind in line with what is true (see “a”), and that’s a good thing. For example, if I imagine Jesus right next to me right now, who cares if I’m making it up? I have good reason to believe Jesus is right here next to me. So if I imagine him here, I just made my overall worldview more accurate. In fact, my perception of my room at any moment is inaccurate to the degree that I see the room without him.
But if you open your imagination to the Spirit, whose job it is to unite us more and more with Jesus, I think that over time you’ll sometimes become aware that you are not “making this up.” We encounter the real Jesus in our imagination. (BTW, this is a very traditional practice, called “cataphatic prayer,” and the imagination has been called “the inner sanctuary,” precisely because it was understood to be the place where we encounter Christ).

d) Don’t enter into this imaginative exercise for the purpose of experiencing emotions. That will sabotage the whole thing. Rather, enter the imaginative exercise because you believe it’s true that Jesus is the definitive revelation of God. So don’t try to experience anything, and don’t get bugged if you don’t. But over time, if you are consistent with this, you’ll likely find that you begin to experience the feeling of being loved by him and begin to feel love toward him. Most of the time I spend in imaginative prayer I don’t feel much, but on occasion I get beautifully moved.

Finally, you might be wondering — why doesn’t God just “remove the veil” and cause me to experience him? There are always an unfathomable number of variables that affect the extent to which God can and can’t break through in our world (see my Is God to Blame?). But one important variable may be this. God wants us to be empowered to take back all that the enemy stole. And the first thing we need to learn to take back is our mind. We do have authority over what we think, and therefore over what we feel. It’s just that in our fallen state, we rarely use this. We thus allow our thoughts and feelings to be dictated to us by others — which is why most people feel they just are the way they are and can’t change. But Scripture everywhere tells us what to think (e.g. Phil.4:8), which presupposes we have power over what we think. And while God is always working to open us to as much of him as possible, I don’t think he ever wants to lobotomize us by controlling our brain for us.
Anyway, I hope you try this for a significant period of time and I hope you find it begins to make the truth of Jesus feel more real.

Blessings,

Greg

Religious Abracadabra

With the use of faith formulas and using the "religions abracadabra"...IN JESUS' NAME...it is easy to get caught up in the religious spiritual mystic of instant spiritual gratification.

Does the phrase "in Jesus' name" tacked on the end of a prayer assure your prayer will get answered and force God to give what was asked for in the prayer. Does ending a prayer with  "in Jesus name" give us a blank check or give the prayer a hocus-pocus, abracadabra instant gratification?

The confusion that religion has caused in this area stems from their ignorance of what faith is. Faith to the religionist is something we create within ourselves as payment to get God to do what we want done. If we can "muster" up enough faith the mountains will be moved into the sea.

In times of crisis we do forced faith exercises as an effort to believe, which adds more frustration and stress to the overwhelming circumstance.  This added weight called “faith,” instead of bringing us life, has added the yoke of guilt to our misery.

When faith is seen as a mysterious force which magically changes adverse circumstances and when the circumstance does not change people feel condemned, guilty and spiritually anemic because they don't seem to "have" it. When we have faith in a friend it simply means that we trust them. I have faith in my friends, but this doesn’t mean I possess some power that makes them respond in my favor. There is no inherent power in faith, faith is simply trusting God.

A.W. Tozer stated that, “faith is the gaze of the soul upon a loving God.”

God is here, ready, willing and able to help us. Our faith does not change God's mind or force Him to respond to our demands, faith changes us to totally trust that God has done it all like He says He has. When we don’t believe Him, we shut ourselves off from experiencing God’s power and limit His work through us. If we do not believe that Christ did it all, we will live trying to do what we think  He did not do and we will fail to see that it is already a done deal. God is present saying, “Listen, I love you!” yet by unbelief, we can shut the eyes of our heart...blinding us from seeing and experiencing our loving Father.

Praying in Jesus’ name really means to pray as His ambassador, and with His desire. It doesn’t give us a blank check to get what we want, when we want or how we want, it means having our prayer echo God’s heart, desire and will. His will is for us to trust Him 100% as did the man who said; "you don't have to come and heal my daughter, just speak the word and she will be healed". Such faith...(trust) in Jesus and who He was was not found in all of Israel.