The Kingdom Heart

No good tree produces bad fruit, nor any bad tree good fruit... The good person, from the good treasured up in his heart, produces what is good. 
         ~(Luke 6:43)

Welcome to chapter 5, both of the book we are reading and of the Gospel of Matthew. These next few weeks will look at both. As per the title of this posting, this chapter is about the heart. More specifically, it concerns the heart as it relates to good and evil.

We must understand that when Jesus tackles human existence, he does not do so in platitudes and proverbs. Wise sayings are great for general ideas of where to go with life. For instance, "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" is vague enough to allow me, if I understand its meaning, to apply it to situations when I feel it applies and ignore it at all other times. 

Jesus does not give us that luxury.
When Jesus deals with moral evil and goodness, he plunges right into the guts of human existence: 

raging anger

contempt

hatred

obsessive lust

divorce

verbal manipulation

revenge

slapping

suing

cursing

coercing

begging

It is the stuff of soap operas and the daily news - and real life. He knows that people deeply hunger to be good but cannot find their way. His aim is to enable people to be good, not just talk about it.

We, the people, have talked about. We have discussed it and dissected it and condoned it and condemned it. We've put it on posters and stickers and buildings and bombshelters. Indeed, in nearly ever location in modern world Jesus' teachings have found their way to the core of the culture.

What Jesus had to say about human good and evil was of sufficient depth, power, and justification to dominate European culture and its offshoots for two millennia.

But how many of us have actually lived his teaching? His famous Sermon on the Mount leaves most readers confused and cringing at the thought of doing some of the activities he suggests. Sell all our clothes? Cut of our hands? Gouge out our eyes? Become salt? Never insult anyone? Tie a large rock around our necks and hurtle ourselves into the sea? Certainly not, you say. Certainly not, I say. 

Jesus' words in Matthew 5-7 are perhaps the most misquoted and misunderstood sentences of the entire Bible. Everyone knows them, and yet no one seems to agree on what they mean. To this point, Willard offers hope.

First, what is now called his Sermon on the Mount should indeed be read as a sermon, as one unified discourse. It is organized around one purpose and develops along a single line of thought in masterful unity. When taken as independent sayings, the various statements the "sermon" contains will certainly be regarded as "laws" dictating what we are and are not to do. If that is all he is doing, they will certainly be laws that are impossible to keep. 

I can vouch for that. In growing up as a legalist and perfectionist, I sought to figure out how to be good and great, beyond everyone else around me. I was much like the rich, young noble who came to Jesus and said, "All the laws I have kept since my childhood, so what must I still do to inherit eternal life?" 

Then I opened to the dreaded Sermon, and my eyes were opened to the impossibility of my task. I was not going to dismember my body. I was not going to sell even what little I had and just blindly give it away. I was going to continue to structure my life around blindly following what I thought were the rules of the good life and hope that that that produced my sought after reward. In the end, I, like everyone else who travels down this path, ran into the obvious conclusion.

The keeping of the law turns out to be an inherently self-refuting aim; rather, the inner self must be changed. Trying merely to keep the law is not wholly unlike trying to make an apple tree bear peaches by tying peaches to its branches.

My outer appearance may have put on the guise of righteousness, obedience, and piety, but my heart never changed. As we shall see in this chapter, the heart is heart of the matter. It is the crux, the building blocks, the capstone, the keystone, the foundation, and the page one on the book of life. 

In the words of Paul, "If I have faith that can move mountains and I give all I have to the poor, it still amounts to nothing if my heart does not love." (1 Corinthians 13)

He goes on to describe such a person as a clanging gong and banging cymbal. Such a person is a loud noise-maker, sure to draw attention to himself, bu unable to ever produce anything of substance or value. He is an apple tree, showing off his wonderful peaches, while everyone around wonders what he'll do when those have all dropped away.

This chapter is about the heart. For me, it's about my heart. For you, it's about yours. Jesus' words were meant for the individual, the seeker of life's secrets. His words will give you the secrets you seek, but you will have to look inside yourself to find the answers. And if you want to produce real fruit.

Living the Beatitudes

I promised you last week a look into how the Beatitudes could be lived out in our lives today. How do they apply to us on a day to day basis? 

You are really walking in the good news of the kingdom if you can go with confidence to any of the hopeless people around you and effortlessly convey assurance that they can now enter a blessed life with God.

This alone provides basis for a new way of living our lives. Just stop and think of all the people you will run into in a given day. The grocer at Safeway. The security guard on the light rail. The guy with headphones who sits across from you. The girl who brings you coffee. Your boss. Your manager. Your best friend.

These people live a life that is human and that is ordinary. Can you confidently walk up to any of them and give them the good news that they can enter a blessed life with God? Do you believe they can? Jesus certainly did. He did more than that. He approached, not the ordinary, but the hopelessly unordinary. He took to the outcast and the outlier, and he told them that they, too, could enter the blessed life of relation with God.

Who would be on your list of "hopeless blessables" as found in today's world? Who would you regard as the most unfortunate people around you?

I mentioned this thought before in the concept of making a neighbor of people that the most common example is the poor and the homeless. However, I understand that not everyone is at a point where they feel comfortable talking to such outcasts as these. Perhaps a smaller step is in order. The outcasts of Jesus' day were all those who didn't have what the rich and powerful had. They didn't have land or power or religious knowledge. Hence they were ostracized. What criteria would we use to form such a list today?

If you judge from what people devote time and effort to, you come to the stark realization that to be fat, have thinning hair or a bad complexion, be wrinkled or flabby, is experienced by them as unconditional personal condemnation. Jesus took time to point out the natural beauty of every human being.

I doubt many of us could do the same. We tend to laugh at the fat ones, the ugly ones, the smelly ones, the drunken ones, the high ones, and those without style or taste. These people can't possibly be blessed in our eyes. Just look at how far off the mark they are. Funny, because I think Jesus would have had something different to say were he preaching his sermon today.

Blessed are the physically repulsive,

Blessed are those who smell bad, 

The twisted, misshapen, deformed,

The too big, too little, too loud,

The bald, the fat, and the old -

For they are all riotously celebrated in the party of Jesus.

Oh, and we are just getting started. What about the people we haven't brought up yet because, well let's be honest, they aren't talked about in church or in polite company. We can't mention the word Jesus and then bring in:

The flunk-outs and drop-outs and burned-outs. 

The broke and the broken. 

The drug heads and the divorced. 

The HIV-positive and herpes-ridden. 

The brain-damaged, the incurably ill. 

The pregnant-too-many-times and pregnant-too-early. 

The overemployed, the underemployed, the unemployed.

The emotionally starved or emotionally dead. 

The lonely, the incompetent, the stupid.

Have we gone too far? Have we not gone far enough? What of:

The brutal and the bigoted. 

The murderers and the child-molesters.

The drug lords and pornographers.

The war criminals and sadists.

Terrorists. 

I believe we can all agree with Willard's words here when he states:

Sometimes I feel I don't really want the kingdom to be open to such people. But it is. That is the heart of God. And, as Jonah learned from his experience preaching to those wretched Ninevites, we can't shrink him down to our size.

Living out the Beatitudes as a set of laws seems nearly impossible. Living them out in the way Jesus meant them seems not only impossible but downright insane. At least, it does to anyone who has not experienced his kingdom already. 

Paul's policy with regard to the redemptive community simply followed the gospel of the Beatitudes. He refused to base anything on excellence of speech, understanding, and culture as attainments of human beings. Rather, "I resolved to regard nothing in your midst except Jesus Christ and him crucified." (1 Cor 2:2)

Jesus Christ offers access to the kingdom of God, the kingdom of the heavens, kingdom living, and, as we shall see in the next chapter, a new kingdom heart. Upon receiving this, loving your neighbor, even the homeless, stinking, drunken man on the street corner, suddenly becomes as natural as loving yourself. And loving your enemy, even to the point of terrorists, suddenly doesn't seem the uncrossable void it once did.

Unbelievable? Believe it.

The Personal Ministry of Jesus

Continuing where we left off...

And then there are the pure in heart, the ones for whom nothing is good enough, not even themselves.

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. I love the rendering of this classic depiction. For me, it rings a personal note.

 These are the perfectionists. They are a pain to everyone, themselves most of all. In religion they will certainly find errors in your doctrine, your practice, and probably your heart and your attitude. They may be even harder on themselves. They endlessly pick over their own motivations. They wanted Jesus to wash his hands even though they were not dirty and called him a glutton and a winebibber.

Not your average interpretation of "pure in heart," is it? You would imagine that have a pure heart would propel people into God's favor. But that is not and cannot be what Jesus speaks of. The pure in heart are listed with the poor, the persecuted, and the broken. They are broken. They suffer as much as any cripple or beggar, though it is a disability of the heart and mind that ails them. Again, we see a reason why these people would not feel blessed. Yet they are. When Jesus brings God's kingdom to them, they are blessed.

How miserable they are! And yet the kingdom is even open to them, and there at last they will find something that satisfies their pure heart. They will see God. And when they do they will find what they have been looking for, someone who is truly good enough.

How wonderful the Beatitudes suddenly appear when I see in them my own weaknesses. The most troubling and debilitating condition of my own heart lines up against the meek and the martyrs, and Jesus says to me, "You, too, are blessed when my kingdom comes to you."


I had always imagined that I had to become poor or destitute or persecuted or killed before I could finally feel God's blessing on my life. My life could always be "ok", but never perfect (again, see pure in heart). With this new look at the classic lines Jesus quipped, it becomes abundantly clear that I have access to the best life now. I am blessed now. God offers the perfect life, but he also offers an alternative to my perfectionist world view. He offers an eternal life view that far exceeds and outweighs the limits I used to place on life.

Willard continues through

1) the peacemakers

2) those persecuted for righteousness

3) those persecuted for Christ

before concluding his look at the Beatitudes.

Thus by proclaiming blessed those who in the human order are thought hopeless, and by pronouncing woes over those human beings regarded as well off, Jesus opens the kingdom of the heavens to everyone. 

The kingdom of heaven is open to the priests and the pastors. It is open to the righteous and the pure. And it is open to you and to me. Jesus begins his entire ministry with this first proclamation. "Come to me you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest." (Matthew 11:28) Not only that, he will turn you into a living heir of his kingdom.

Indeed, such transformation of status for the lowly, the humanly hopeless, as they experience the hand of God reaching into their situation, is possibly the most pervasive theme of the biblical writing. In general, many of those thought blessed or "first" in human terms are miserable or "last" in God's terms, and many of those regarded as "last" in human terms may well be blessed in God's terms as they rely on the kingdom of Jesus.

The truth of the Beatitudes lies herein. We should now feel fairly confident in the purpose of Jesus' ministry. He is proclaiming life changing truths, not bringing regulations and laws. He proposes a new social order instead of new social rules. Now that we know this, how now shall we then live? How do we respond to such revolutionary words?

 We respond appropriately to the Beatitudes of Jesus by living as if this were so, as it concerns others and as it concerns ourselves.

That shall be the discussion of next week.

Kingdom Proclamation: The Specifics

Finally, we come to the individual Beatitudes themselves. Keep in mind that, according to the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus has done only 3 things so far in his ministry.

1) He went out preaching, "Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is near."

2) He healed the sick, broken, and the demon-possessed.

3) He called those around him together to tell them the good news that the kingdom of heaven had come to them, and they are blessed by it.

This third piece becomes even more explicit when Jesus takes each person where they are at on an individual basis and lets them know how they are blessed. We shall do the same. Before doing so though, you may wish to read yesterday's post so you understand the context in which Jesus is preaching. Let's begin with those who mourn.

Luke refers to them as "the weeping ones" (6:21): men and women whose mates have just deserted them, la parent in gut-wrenching grief and depression over the death of a little daughter; people who have lost their careers or businesses or life savings. So many things to break the heart!

This is what Jesus had in mind when he said, "Blessed are those who mourn." He is not saying that we should mourn and hence gain a blessing. He is saying that mourners are out there, and that they will be blessed; they will be comforted.

As they see the kingdom in Jesus, enter it, and learn to live in it, they find comfort, and their tears turn to laughter. Yes, they are even better off than they were before their particular disaster.

So fret not you mourners, for the night is darkest just before the dawn. And Jesus is the light of the world.


Next we have the meek.

These are the shy ones, the intimidated, the mild, the unassertive. If something goes wrong around them, they automatically feel it must have something to do with them. When others step forward, they shrink back. They do not assert their legitimate claims unless driven into a corner and then usually with ineffectual rage.

I can think of many examples of where the church has asked us as Christians to be meek. Meekness, we are told, will allow God to work. And that may very well be true. It does not, however, equate to a command from Jesus ever to be meek. Growing up, I can remember times when I shrunk from confrontation and situations because I believed in the virtue of a meek Christian. Why risk stepping on toes? Why stand up for what is right? Why not just let God do everything?

Christ does not command this. On the other hand, he does not condemn it. He says that the meek will be blessed, and they will inherit that earth as they partake in God's kingdom. Those who push for themselves least of all will inherit just as much as everyone else. They need not fear or worry.

As the kingdom of the heavens enfolds them, the whole earth is their Father's - and theirs as they need it. The Lord is their shepherd, they shall not want.

God provides for the needs of the meek. He provided for mine. He will provide for yours.


Next, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Those who burn with desire for things to be made right. It may be that the wrong is in themselves. Perhaps they have failed so badly that night and day they cringe before their own sin and inwardly scream to be made pure. Or it may be that they have been severely wronged, suffered some terrible injustice, and are consumed with longing to see the injury set right. 

Note here that Willard does not allow for a positive interpretation on any Beatitude, including this one. Keep in mind the context of Jesus' sermon. Jesus is giving a kingdom proclamation to all around him, letting everyone know that the kingdom is theirs no matter their circumstances. Would he then switch to praise those who are hungry for righteousness as though they alone stand out from the rest? Says Willard:

It is unlikely to the extreme that Jesus would have been doing one thing with the remainder of his Beatitudes and then switch back for these two alone.

No, it makes all the more sense to realize that those who thirst day and night for righteousness, for things to be made right, that they have comfort also in God's kingdom coming to them.

The kingdom of the heavens has a chemistry that can transform even the past and make the terrible, irretrievable losses that human beings experience seem insignificant in the greatness of God. He restores our souls and fills us with the goodness of rightness.

Those who hunger shall be filled. Those who thirst shall be quenched. God's kingdom brings rightness, and for those who hunger for it, they shall be blessed; they need not fear.


And now the merciful.

The merciful are always despised by those who know how to "take care of business." 

Mercy is not a vice. God does not consider the merciful in a state of destitution, although humanity most often times does. We are taught to win, to succeed, to achieve, no matter the cost. Mercy is scorned in business circles and sports ventures and politics and board games. Humanity despises the merciful. "Woe to the merciful, for they shall be taken advantage of."

Yet outside the human order, under the great profusion of heaven's goodness, they themselves find mercy to meet their needs, far beyond any "claim" they might have on God.

God grants them mercy in his kingdom, as he grants all residents. Their mercy does not earn them his, but it does not deny them any advantage either. If their treasure is in heaven's kingdom, the world's threats are meaningless.



This, I think is sufficient thought food for the soul for today. Tomorrow I shall finish the other half of the Specifics. Until then, I bid you good reading.

What Jesus Really Had in Mind

You might find it of interest that we have thrown in a story of the Good Samaritan right in the middle of speaking on the Beatitudes. What does a parable have to do with a list? Quite a lot, in fact. The Beatitudes are not a new list of commands. They are not a collection of do's and don'ts to get us into heaven. We touched on this in an earlier post.

What then does Jesus say to us with his Beatitudes? How are we to live in response to them? 

This is an excellent question, one that is fundamental to this chapter, and Willard is about to answer it in an excellent way.

They serve to clarify Jesus' fundamental message: the free availability of God's rule and righteousness to all of humanity through reliance upon Jesus himself. They do this simply by taking those who, from the human point of view, are regarded as most hopeless, most beyond all possibility of God's blessing or even interest, and exhibiting them as enjoying God's touch and abundant provision from the heavens. 

Think back to the Beatitudes and all the normal interpretations that have gone with them. Did you ever consider them to be a declaration of the "free availability of God's rule and righteousness to all humanity?"

Here they are again from Luke's gospel (Luke 6:20):


Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now,  for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you  and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their ancestors treated the prophets.

To further understand this point, consider the three conclusions one could draw from a hearing of the Beatitudes by those who fall into the "blessed" categories. Consider hearing them if you were poor, hungry, and persecuted. Society has told you that you are the scum of the earth. They have pointed to successful people in life and stated that they are blessed, not you. If that were the case, and Jesus were to give you a declaration that they are wrong and you are now blessed, you would likely conclude the following:

1) No human condition excludes blessedness

Jesus has listed "the least of these" and the worst of these and stated they were blessed. If they're not left off the list, no one is.

2) God may come to any person with his care and deliverance

And why not? He came to you, after all in the form of Jesus and healed your injuries and diseases.

3) God does sometimes help those who cannot or do not help themselves

You are listening to his sermon because you cannot help yourself. You came to hear his message of hope and deliverance from an oppressive political and religious regime. And he helped you.

Anyone could come as well as any other. They still can. That is the gospel of the Beatitudes. 

We shall finish today with that overarching message. Tomorrow, we'll examine each listed Beatitude individually for the sake of understanding precisely of whom Jesus was speaking at that time, and for whom it is applicable today.

How to Make a Neighbor

Today we investigate the parable of the Good Samaritan. You have heard this parable, of this I have no doubt. It is a classic tale of an outcast of Jewish society who shows love to his enemy, even when that enemy cannot ween love from the religious elite of his day. Jesus casts this net into the crowd of people around him in order to demonstrate a key principle of God's kingdom.

In God's order nothing can substitute for loving people. And we define who our neighbor is by our love. We make a neighbor of someone by caring for him or her.

Jesus tells this story after a man asks him to define "his neighbor". The man wanted an excuse or an escape from loving everyone, so he asks Jesus to give him a list. After all, the man knows that the second greatest commandment is to "love your neighbor as yourself." A short and simple list of people to love is the perfect salvation by works. But Jesus is not concerned merely with the man's actions. He does not provide him a list.

Jesus deftly rejects the question "Who is my neighbor?" and substitutes the only question really relevant here: "To whom will I be a neighbor?" And he knows that we can only answer this question case by case as we go through our days.

Jesus cares about our hearts far more than we will ever know. One might say our hearts are the primary thing he cares about. Bear in mind his words when he tells the pharisees, "Clean only the inside of the cup, and the outside will be clean also."(Matthew 23) He speaks here of our intentions, our desires, and our will. Our actions, it seems, are of little value apart from the heart.

In the morning we cannot yet know who our neighbor will be that day. The condition of our hearts will determine who along our path turns out to be our neighbor, and our faith in God will largely determine whom we have strength enough to make our neighbor.

The heart is a strong and stubborn muscle. When we awake seeking to fulfill our goals and dreams and desires, we care little for the well-being of random strangers or close friends. Indeed, I can think of many times in my own life when I awoke and dreaded the thought of going outside for fear that I might interact with others and be forced to care for them and live my day for them instead of myself. Exceptionally selfish? Yes. Unique? Not at all. We all know the "walk the other way" cue our brains give us when we see someone we just don't want to interact with. Or perhaps it's a phone call we ignore. Or a text we just don't look at.


In the story of the good Samaritan, Jesus not only teaches us to help people in need; more deeply, he teaches us that we cannot identify who "has it," who is "in" with God, who is "blessed," by looking at exteriors of any sort. 

The fact of the matter is that God throws people into our lives every day to whom we can "be a neighbor." We do so every time we choose to love them despite our copious thoughts to the contrary. Many times they aren't strangers. They could be old friends or new friends. Family members. Coworkers. Acquaintances. Even enemies. And yes, sometimes, I wager, they are people on the side of the road. The homeless man holding a sign, who would love for you to look him in the eye or give him a bottle of water or simply say hello before you pass him by. God uses all sorts of people. He isn't boring in his lessons.

We must recognize that the aim of the popular teacher in Jesus' time was not to impart information, but to make a significant change in the lives of the hearers.

Jesus gives us opportunities to love those we view as unlovable so that we can experience growth. He wants us to see the world as he sees it. He wants us to drop the labeling and the classifications. He wants us to stop judging people by the outside and begin judging by the heart. Or perhaps simply stop judging in general and start living. 

By showing to others the presence of the kingdom in the concrete details of our shared existence, we impact the lives and hearts of our hearers.

Not only this, we also impact our own lives. I will go further into detail on the matters of the heart in the next chapter. For this one, I need only continue to remind you that for God's kingdom to be at work in your life, for you to begin living THE ETERNAL LIFE NOW, you have to start living as God intended you to live. You can't simply read this blog or read the Bible or listen to a sermon and think what a wonderful person you are becoming. You have to live, and you have to love. And to love, you have to make neighbors.

Won't you be a neighbor?

Correcting Prevailing Assumptions

Within pages 107-109 of the book are simple, straightforward explanations of Jesus' sayings found throughout the Gospels. It jumps around a bit from the sermon on the mount, the main focus of this chapter, but it does so with a purpose.

Willard seeks to show that when Jesus teaches, he does so in order to correct prevailing assumptions of the time. For instance, he takes on the assumptions that God favors the rich by addressing a rich man who loves wealth more than God. This man does not have eternal life. He has not entered the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus does not say that the rich cannot enter the kingdom. He does not say that the poor have an easier job of it. He does say that no one can do so without God's help and that the rich certainly have a hard time of it.

I view this statement as especially relevant in a society as rich as ours today. Do we still have a tough time entering God's kingdom as a Christian nation? Yes, I believe we do. We have a fine time adhering to social traditions and norms that Christianity has presented. Ask a man, however, if he is willing to sell all he has and give to the poor, and he will tell you you're misreading Jesus' words. He will give you his well-educated excuse for why that's just not possible. Then he will continue life, believing he has eternal life because he "prayed the prayer" and so is saved.

These are just the kind of assumptions Jesus was all about correcting in his day. The rich of his time were thought to be blessed. They had God's favor, clearly. How else could they have become rich?

Jesus so wanted his followers to understand God and to experience God's kingdom. He looked at all their areas of ignorance and tried to explain to them eternal truths using concrete examples and everyday instances of spiritual concepts. We call them parables, but they were really just good teaching tools trying to get across a hard to understand point.

You can't love your neighbor if you believe him to be unlovable. You can't follow Jesus if you assume that what he tells you must be for someone else. But Jesus' words are not for someone else. They are for me; they are for you. They are for the present day, the American, the Asian, and the African. They teach you how to enter God's kingdom, and it's nigh well time we started doing so. I don't know about you, but I am sick of living in this earthly world. I'm sick of following my own desires apart from God. I'm sick of reaching for twigs when I could be inheriting the stars. I'm sick of lofty, inapplicable metaphors, too, but unfortunately, like Jesus, I find it difficult to express verbally precisely what my soul craves from this life.

I know it when I experience it. I read Jesus' words, and I know it must be hidden there within, because I can feel my spirit stir. But I simply cannot place into action what my heart declares is true. God's kingdom is so near, and I can't reach out and grasp it. Such is the Divine Conspiracy. Such is life.

I apologize for venting. I'm tired, and it's been a long day. And I've experienced another day when I did not wake up and embrace the kingdom around me. Food tastes so much blander after having tasted honey. Earthly living is so much less interesting after living the life eternal. This is why Christ said we must pick up our crosses daily. It's as easy as opening the car door and stepping inside in the morning. The door to the kingdom is always at the ready. And the ride is far sweeter.

Not on the List

 I shall do my best today to clear up any confusion yesterday when we were examining the Beatitudes taken in context. Thus far we have only examined the first Beatitude. "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Read once more Willard's explanation for why we should consider the spiritual poor to be blessed.

Those spiritually impoverished ones present before Jesus in the crowd are blessed only because the gracious touch of the heavens has freely fallen upon them. But mistranslations remain attractive because they suit our human sense of propriety, which cries out against God's blessing on people just because of their need and just because he chooses.


What kind of mistranslations are we talking about here? Concerning the first of the Beatitudes, you might hear a sermon explaining it as, "You are blessed when you know how poor you are," or, "Blessed are you when you humble your spirit before God." This kind of thinking is precisely what the last posting has argued against. It takes Jesus' words completely out of context, and then mistranslates them to make it appear as though we must do something before we can receive God's blessing.


If all we need to be blessed in the kingdom is to be humble-minded through recognizing our spiritual poverty, then let's just do that and we've got bliss cornered. And we escape the embarrassment of receiving pure mercy, for our humble recognition makes blessedness somehow appropriate.

Was Jesus giving us a list of things to do and not to do in order to be blessed? Many have read it this way. I read it this way. In fifth grade I put on a play that read it this way. The fact of the matter is it misses the point.

And of course this also means that we can very neatly tell people how to engineer their way into the kingdom. Here we have full-blown, if not salvation by works, then possibly salvation by attitude.

Jesus simply was not a do's and don'ts kind of guy. He told stories and pronounced incredible truths about the spiritual world in accessible ways, but he did not give lists. Not only is the usual interpretation contradictory to Jesus' style, it also makes no sense today.

Consider the argument that in order to be happy today you must be humble. That sounds fine, and I'd even agree with it. But follow through that misinterpretation with the rest of the Beatitudes. In order to be happy, you also have to be mourning. You have to be suffering. You can't have wealth, and you can't be in a position of power. In other words, you can't take Jesus' words and directly apply them to your life right now without becoming a weeping, penniless monk in the middle of an anti-Christian country.

Thankfully, this is not the case.

The clear intent of the New Testament as a whole is that Jesus' teachings are meant to be applied now. Instead of denying Jesus' teachings to the present, we must simply acknowledge that he has been wrongly interpreted.

Let's attempt to move forward with a new interpretation. Here we have in clear letter what the Beatitudes are not.


The Beatitudes are not teachings on how to be blessed. They are not instructions to do anything. They do not indicate conditions that are especially pleasing to God or good for human beings. No one is actually being told that they are better off for being poor, for mourning, for being persecuted, and so on. 


Instead...


They are explanations and illustrations, drawn from the immediate setting, of the present availability of the kingdom through personal relationship to Jesus. They single out cases that provide proof that, in him, the rule of God from the heavens is truly available in life circumstances that are beyond all human hope.


What is heaven like? The poor are blessed. The mournful are blessed. The persecuted are blessed. This is the gospel that Jesus brought. This is the good news.


The Beatitudes simply cannot be "good news" if they are understood as a list of "how-tos" for achieving blessedness. They would then only amount to a new form of legalism.


Jesus, who spent more time arguing against the legalistic ways of the pharisees than condemning "sinners", would never have begun his ministry pointed telltale in the opposite direction. Christianity is not about following a set of laws or a list of rules. It's not about trying to figure out God and then get on his good side.

Christianity is about the heart, in the same way that Christ was about the heart. He healed the people around them, set them free, and then let them know that, in spite of everything they were to society, they were now blessed because they had experienced the presence of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Teaching from the Context

Do you ever read through the letters of the new testament, think you've figured Christianity out, then read Jesus' words in the gospels and feel like once again nothing makes sense? I used to love reading through Romans and Corinthians and the other New Testament writings because they were so simple and straightforward.

Do "A" but don't do "B". People who do "A" are doing well. People who do "B" are NOT doing well. Then I would see if it matched up with what Jesus said, and I'd get something obscure such as "how hard it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, it is like a camel passing through the eye of a needle." And I would be absolutely clueless as to whether I was supposed be poor and living the easy life or be rich and having a hard time of things.

This book has helped to fix that problem. It starts by following Jesus words as they were meant to be followed: in a logical and straightforward manner.

It will help us know what to do and what not to do with the Beatitudes if we can discover what Jesus himself was doing with them. 

Jesus was not walking down Broadway, chatting with a friend, when he was suddenly struck by an epiphany and started quoting platitudes to any man on the street who would listen. And so his message should not be taken that way. It should not be viewed as a dozen lines of pure truth that can be quoted on a dark day to make the storm clouds go away.

Since great teachers and leaders always have a coherent message that they develop in an orderly way, we should assume that his teaching in the Beatitudes is a development or clarification of his primary theme so far: the availability of the kingdom of the heavens.

So far Jesus has kept to a very simple and straightforward message. He preached just two lines in Matthew prior to his Sermon on the Mount.

1) "Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is near."

2) "Come and follow me, and I will make you fishers of men."

We studied his first line in Chapter 1 (see early blog posts). We haven't gone deep into his message to his disciples, to whom he directed his second line.

So Jesus has been preaching about the nearness and availability of the Kingdom. He has shown this nearness by healing sickness, casting out demons, and treating diseases.

Having ministered to the needs of the people crowding around him, he desired to teach them and moved to a higher position where they could see and here him well. But he does not, as is so often suggested, withdraw from the crowd to give an esoteric discourse of sublime irrelevance. Rather, Jesus teaches his students about the meaning of the availability of the heavens.

His message has been brief and straightforward up until this point in time. No confusing parables, no philosophical questions, and no re-examination of the Old Testament. You can imagine being one of the peasants of the day who strolled out on a Saturday to hear this kindly, blue-collar worker talk to you about this other kingdom and then demonstrate its presence to you by healing all the sick from your village.

Certainly after you saw the lives of those around you be drastically changed, you would want to know more about this kingdom, would you not? Who has access to it? Is it a one-and-done kind of thing? Could it change your life? Jesus, it would appear, saw this curiosity, this "teachable moment," and set about spelling out the parameters.

The context makes this clear. He could point out in the crowd now an individual, who was "blessed" because The Kingdom Among Us had just reached out and touched them with Jesus' heart and voice and hands. Perhaps this is why we only find him giving the Beatitudes from the midst of a crowd of people he had touched.


And so Jesus said, 

"Blessed are the spiritual zeros 

- the spiritually banrupt, deprived and deficient, the spiritual beggars, those without a wisp of "religion" - 

when the kingdom of the heavens comes upon them."

This is not the way many translations phrase Jesus' opening words. We hear, "Blessed are the poor in spirit," and we wonder what it means to be poor in spirit. Do you think it means humility? Piety? Do you think these common townsfolk and laborers were the spiritually pious of their region?

Look at the context! Jesus has just healed them; he has just shown them the blessing of the Kingdom of the Heavens, and so he naturally tells them that they are now blessed. I may be going to fast here, but do not fret. I shall be hitting this point home again and again.

Standing around Jesus as he speaks are people with no spiritual qualifications or abilities at all. They are the first to tell you they can't make heads or tails of religion. They walk by us in the hundreds or thousands every day. They would be the last to say they have any claim whatsoever on God. And yet, the rule of the heavens comes down upon their lives through their contact with Jesus. And then they too are blessed - healed of body, mind, or spirit - in the hand of God.

And that is precisely what Jesus tells them. That is the meaning of the first Beatitude. The poor in spirit are blessed, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs. Not exclusively theirs. Not theirs by right or by birth or by deed. But it is theirs, and that is what makes them blessed.

Those poor in spirit are called "blessed" by Jesus, not because they are in a meritorious condition, but because, precisely in spite of and in the midst of their ever so deplorable condition, the rule of the heavens has moved redemptively upon and through them by the grace of Christ.

This blows my mind. In all the mistranslations and misunderstandings of Jesus' words over the years, I've never considered that his words might have been meant, and still are meant, for real, everyday people right in front of him. Shouldn't there be some upper echelon or spiritual plane where this takes us? Isn't he the smartest man in the world? (see chapter 3)

Yes to both of these questions, and because of that, yes to the simplicity of this message. It's like staring at a diamond and realizing that in all it's glorious beauty is a divine simplicity of one single molecule latticed together. In comparing Jesus' words to the apostles', I've been comparing diamonds to gold, and wondering how they could both exist in the same place without presenting a problem. I think I've been suffering for quite some time from a lack of imagination. More on this topic tomorrow.

The Puzzle of the Beatitudes

Three months into the blog, one quarter through the book. I can do the math, and I'm looking at a full year to finish this book. I think it will be worth it. Especially this chapter.

For weeks now we've explored the idea of "God's Kingdom" or "The Kingdom of the Heavens" or "The Eternal". We've examined how this is the first thing Jesus teaches in the gospels, and how it seems to be the last thing taught from the pulpits of churches today. In the last chapter we studied how knowledge and belief of God formulates knowledge and belief of God's kingdom. In other words, the two are intertwined.

In Chapter 4, we finally begin to study how we can live inside this kingdom.

What we have come to call the Sermon on the Mount is a concise statement of Jesus' teachings on how to actually live in the reality of God's present kingdom. It concludes with a statement that all who hear and do what he there says will have a life that can stand up to everything (read: the eternal life now).

Great! We have access to God's kingdom; we have access to the eternal life now. We need only hear Jesus' words and put them into action. Of course, there are a few in between steps. First, we must understand Jesus' words. Second, we must understand how we are supposed to put them into action.

To give a general idea of how complicated this task is, I have been studying Jesus' words for well near twenty years now, and I am only just beginning to understand what he meant by them.

As outstanding thinkers before and after him have done, Jesus deals with the two major questions humanity always faces:

1) Which life is the good life? What is genuinely in my interest, and how may I enter true well-being?

2) Who is truly a good person? Who has the kind of goodness found in God himself, constituting the family likeness between God and his children?

Chapter 4 deals exclusively with the first question. You may think that an entire chapter devoted to a single question is stretching the point, but honestly I think you could devote a library to this question and people still might come away unsatisfied with the answers they receive. Thankfully this is not the case when exploring Jesus' answer to the question.

His teaching on what is good for human beings are, taken as a whole, unique and uniquely deep and powerful. 

Currently this is just hearsay. If you haven't read Jesus' words or you haven't understood Jesus' words (as I have not for the past two decades), then you may wonder how he stands out from the other great moral, spiritual, and religious teachers. Hopefully, by the end of the next two chapters, we will have answered that wonderment. However, until then, patience is required.

Let us start with the first question.

Who is it, according to Jesus, that has the good life? The Beatitudes of Jesus drive home his answer to this question. They are among the literary and religious treasures of the human race. They are acknowledged by almost everyone to be among the highest expressions of religious insight and moral inspiration. 


The Beatitudes, or the Blesseds, are common knowledge among much of the world's population. Read them to anyone you know, and they will probably acknowledge that they have heard them once before. In fact, you can do that right now, as here they are, taken from Matthew 5:

   ³ “Blessed are the poor in spirit,
   for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
⁴ Blessed are those who mourn,
   for they will be comforted.
⁵ Blessed are the meek,
   for they will inherit the earth.
⁶ Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
   for they will be filled.
⁷ Blessed are the merciful,
   for they will be shown mercy.
⁸ Blessed are the pure in heart,
   for they will see God.

⁹ Blessed are the peacemakers,

   for they will be called children of God.

¹⁰ Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,

   for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

   ¹¹ “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. 

¹² Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

We can savor them, affirm them, meditate upon them, and engrave them on plaques, but a major question remains: How are we to live in response to them?

This question you can ask to a hundred different people, and I doubt you would get the same response twice. The fact of the matter is, while we as a people have become extremely familiar with the words of Jesus, we are exceptionally unfamiliar with how to put them into practice as he intended when he spoke them.

Keep in mind our theme from the last chapter. Nothing about the ultimate condition of man has changed since Jesus was alive. When he spoke to the question of "what is the good life?" he spoke words that have not changed in their intended meanings because mankind has not changed. And Jesus spoke to mankind. But did we hear him right?

Misunderstanding of the "blesseds" given by Jesus have caused much pain and confusion down through the ages. Outright rejection of Christianity so understood is a constant burden of guilt conscientiously borne for not being on this list of the supposedly God-preferred. On the other hand, pride often swells in those who think of themselves as conforming to the "blesseds".

Speaking as one who has always misunderstood the Beatitudes, I can say with great honesty that I am looking forward to learning much from this chapter. After all, I do believe that Jesus gave the words of eternal life, and that is something I desire to have and live out.

Until next time...

Jesus, Smartest Man in the World

Rudolf Bultmann, long regarded as one of the great leaders of the twentieth-century thought, had this to say: "It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles."

Impossible. Oh really? To quote my dear friend Inigo: "I do no' sink dat word means what you sink it means."

To anyone who has worked through the relevant arguments, this statement is simply laughable. It only shows that great people are capable of great silliness.

We've just spent the last three months exploring how people are living life in this world upside. These are the people trying to tell us that they are not only flying right side up, but that followers of Christ are the ones flying upside down. I might be concerned here if in fact these people could show me lives that they were living which were completely fulfilled, satisfying, purposeful, meaningful, and full of goodness and love and hope. 

They cannot.


They love to point to "life-saving" and "time-saving" machines and philosophies. "Why throw away your life on religion," they ask, "when you could be living a life that's worth throwing away." Read that statement again if you missed my point. It should be quite clear by this point in time, that the greatest minds of the twenty-first century and before still have not given us anything worth rejoicing about. How is it any better to be alive now than it was two thousand years ago if your still unsatisfied with the life you get to live?

Many will be astonished at such a remark, but you can be very sure that nothing fundamental has changed in our knowledge of ultimate reality and the human self since the time of Jesus.

Read carefully those above words. Nothing has changed in our knowledge of the human self. That's a bold claim. It also just so happens to be true. Christ came teaching and preaching that we humans live lives that are unfulfilled, unsatisfactory, and missing the point. He said we spend our days chasing after valueless things like fame and fortune, both of which leave us desiring something more and both of which will fade away in the blink of an eye. He said that because our priorities are focused on the wrong things we miss out on the abundant life right in front of us.


Jesus' work and teaching, as well as the main path of historical Christianity that sprang from him, is essentially based upon the substantial reality of the spirit and spiritual world.

And the substantial reality of the spiritual world has NOT changed in two thousand years. It's still one and the same. The great fictional character Dr. Gregory House famously quips that "people don't change." I disagree with that profusely, but I would agree with the more general statement that "humanity doesn't change." And hasn't changed. And won't change. We are spiritual beings missing out on the spiritual world in which we live, and Jesus knew that from the beginning. 


Once you stop to think about it, how could he be what we take him to be and not be the best-informed and most intelligent person of all, the smartest person who ever lived?

Our greatest minds have spent centuries trying to reinvent a wheel that Jesus has always been riding on. Like a stock car in a horse derby, he is racing ahead of the competition while they meagerly fight for who is first loser.

So here's a question: why don't we look to him for more answers to our life questions? Questions such as:

What should I do with my life?

What kind of career should I have?

How should I raise my children?

How can I best love my spouse?

How should I treat others?

How should I handle my money?

Maybe we've asked and trusted God with a few of those questions, but usually we like to stop it after one or two, thinking that Jesus' words couldn't possibly have any impact on other areas of my life in this modern world.

It is not possible to trust Jesus in matters where we do not believe him to be competent. But can we seriously imagine that Jesus could be Lord if he were not smart? If he were divine, would he be dumb? Or uninformed?

Take Christ to be the smartest man who ever lived, stop listening to the advice of "experts" of the field, and you will realize why some Christians go to such an extent to ignore what seems like common sense to the rest of the world.


This confidence in his intellectual greatness is the basis of the radicalism of Christ-following in relation to the human order.

"But," you argue vehemently, "Jesus wasn't a molecular biologist, or a financial consultant, or a rocket scientist!"

Not officially. But could any rocket science or molecular biologist you know do this:

Jesus knew how to transform the molecular structure of water to make it wine. That knowledge also allowed him to take a few pieces of bread and some little fish and feed thousands of people. He could create matter from the energy he knew how to access from "the heavens," right where he was. He knew how to transform the tissues of the human body from sickness to health and from death to life. He knew how to suspend gravity and interrupt weather patterns. He only needed a word.

I didn't think so.

So it cannot be surprising that the feeding of the thousands led the crowds to try to force him to be their king. Let us now hear his teachings on who has the good life, on who is among the truly blessed. 


And that, my friends, will be the focus of Chapter 4. Until next week, I bid you good reading.

 

Death Dismissed

I think it perhaps to early in the morning to be thinking on death already. Were this a normal book and a normal approach to death, it would be too early. Thankfully, this is not a normal approach on death; rather it is a dismissal of it. 

Once we have grasped our situation in God's full world, the startling disregard Jesus and the New Testament had for "physical death" suddenly makes sense. Nothing like what is usually understood as death will happen to those who have entered his life. 

Congratulations! You are not going to die. At least not in the normal sense of ceasing to exist and having all of your thoughts, words, and actions suddenly turn into a meaningless, non-existent puff of smoke billowing away in the winds of history.

 Those who love and are loved by God are not allowed to cease to exist, because they are God's treasures. He delights in them and intends to hold onto them. He has even prepared for them an individualized eternal work in his vast universe.

I should pause at this point to address the concerns of some that you will actually have to work in Heaven. Or should I say you get to work? You get the opportunity to continue doing something meaningful, relevant, and rewarding for all of eternity. I think this a much better view on paradise than sitting atop a cloud staring at all the other people sitting on their clouds.


But that's not even the best part of the realization of Heaven. The fact that God has chosen, not been forced or coerced but chosen, to take you to a place he prepared especially for you from the dawn of your creation has to be uplifting to some degree. You are his treasured creation, and he loves you.

Or maybe it's not uplifting because maybe you deem it impossible. How could there possibly be a place better than here? How could God possibly create a paradise that doesn't get old or boring? How could I really get along with trillions of people when I can barely interact with a few family members here?

Those who think it is unrealistic or impossible are more short on imagination than long on logic. They should have a close look at the universe God has already brought into being before they decide he could not arrange for the future life of which the Bible speaks.

There are moments of goodness and glory here on earth, whether the sun setting on the horizon, the last few notes of an opera, or the joy of holding a newborn infant. If God created these, why cannot he create so much more than that?

So as we think of our life and make plans for it, we should not be anticipating going through some terrible event called "death," to be avoided at all costs even though it can't be avoided. Immersed in Christ in action, we may be sure that our life will never stop. 

We have arrived at the applicable portion of this chapter. If we believe in a God who is so great and awesome and glorious, and we believe he loves us and is going to continue our existence into eternity, then the way we live now should reflect the fact that we are going to live forever.

We should be anticipating what we will be doing three hundred or a thousand years from now in this marvelous universe. We are never ceasing spiritual beings with an eternal destiny in the full world of God.

I must admit, this is beyond the scope of my imagination. I can barely think up what I want to do with my tomorrow much less my next millennium. But I think I can stop many of the worries that plague my day. What do I care if I don't get to the top of my career ladder by the time I'm 30? I'll do it in a thousand years when I get around to it. Why should I worry about experiencing every possible thing this world has to offer? I have a billion other planets to visit.

In other words, and going back to yesterday's posting, I should be concerned "with things above and not with things below." (Colossians) I should be concerned with the people in my life now, the opportunities I have been given, and the impact I can have where I'm at. I should not be focusing on getting ahead, after all, where am I in such a rush to get to?

Jesus said, "Do not worry about tomorrow, what you will eat or drink, for you have enough worries to get you through the day as it is." (Matthew 6:34) I believe this is the answer to Willard's question:
 

How should we take care of ourselves when we are never to cease?

Centrality of Will

I will begin this writing with a word of warning. If deep thoughts and high level thinking makes your brain hurt, you may choose simply to skip this passage and wait until I reach Chapter 4 of the book. What I am about to embark upon is not for the faint of heart, though it will certainly strengthen you who survive the onslaught of faith philosophy herein represented.


Still reading? Very well.

In response to Moses' question about who he is, God replies, "I am that I am" - a Being that exists totally from its own resources.

To understand this iota of fact about the nature of God's existence, we must have an understanding of what it means to exist. What does it mean for us to exist as humans?

According to French philosopher Descartes, we think therefore we are, but I posit that this in itself is not enough to warrant our existence as humans. A clock or computer could be programmed to run the same thought over and over, while containing no will to act whatsoever.

Every human being has a will. It is our inclination and capacity to act on our own and to produce what we find to be good. Because we have will we are not things. Without will we would have no life that is recognizably human.

As mentioned in earlier writings, part of being human is have dominion over some area of our lives. You can refer to this as free will or choice or whatever suits your fancy. The fact of the matter is, without the ability to make a decision and exert our influence into life, we are not, and cannot be defined as, human.

Why is this important? And why is this important to understanding God, which is the main focus of this chapter?

The heart, or will, simply is spirit in human beings, and it is the only thing in us that God will accept as the basis of our relationship to him. 

Because we can understand our own will, to some extent we can understand God's. God is the own being who exists by continuing to will himself into existence from moment to moment. We cannot do that, no matter how hard we try. Once we exist, we can do a great many things with our wills, one of which is relate to our God and creator. In the classical tradition, this is the meaning of the term "spirit".

Our spirits are central to our selves because, as I just argued, in a sense we are our spirits. That is to say, we cannot be human without them.

Because we are spiritual beings, it is for our good to live our lives in interactive dependence upon God and under his kingdom rule.

This may not seem like a logical next step, and in all fairness it is not, based solely on my short posting; however the book does a fair job of showing why, if we are not solely physical, but rather spiritual beings, we should need to survive by interacting with other spiritual beings in a spiritual world.

We ought to be spiritual in every aspect of our lives because our world is the spiritual one. Thus Paul warns us, "To fill your mind with the visible, the 'flesh', is death, but to fill your mind with the spirit is life and peace." (Rom 8:6)

Your agreement with this statement will greatly depend on your agreement with the last three chapters of this book. For instance, you might spend hours debating whether God exists, whether Jesus' words were true, or whether such statements are fact or mere recommendation for good living. Or you could look at the fact that you have a will, a spirit. You know you have a will because you feel its pressing desires and wishes in the back of your mind on a daily basis. You feel it when you choose to be happy despite the circumstances or refrain from anger when it is the natural response.

We are spiritual beings just as a fish is an aquatic being and a bird an aerial being. Our natural habitat is in a spiritual world, though many of us choose not to live there. Like a bird willingly flying into a cage and locking the door behind, so also we fly from one thing to another, worrying about the results of our physical deeds as though they are the end-all-be-all of our existence.

But they are not. Realizing they are not is one of the first steps to living the eternal life now. You cannot experience life as God intended it if you continue to preach to him about things that only bring death. A bird who sings to you from inside its cage can never measure up to an eagle screeching down at you as it soars overhead.


As we increasingly integrate our life into the spiritual world of God, our life increasingly takes on the substance of the eternal.

Fly away, little birdie. 

Space Inhabited by God

If you pay attention to labels, you will notice that I have just skipped 10 pages. I may come back to them at some later point, but in all honesty, I wasn't inspired to write much from them, so I shall continue on in my journey.

Many say that God is not in space at all, but instead is "in" the human heart. And that sounds nice, but it really does not help. "In my heart" easily becomes "in my imagination." It gives us a pretty metaphor but leaves us vainly grasping for reality.


Where does God live? If you answer "heaven", then you should probably go back and read those last 10 pages of the book for a proper understanding of what we mean when we say "heaven." Or instead, how about rephrasing the question to, "Where is God when he is answering prayers?" Where is God when he is performing miracles? Where was God when he spoke out saying, "This is my Son whom I live. With him I am well pleased." (Matt. 3:17)


Does God sit on a cloud and throw down magic spells? Does he cast lightning bolts like Zeus or apparate and disapparate like Albus Dumbledore? These are the images we've seen, and so, I think, they are the ones that come easiest to mind. God is not someone we understand. Our mind dislikes gaps. It fills them with that which is understood or at the very least familiar.

Very well. Let us look at something that is familiar.

 Roughly speaking, God relates to space as we do to our body. He occupies and overflows it but cannot be localized in it. Every point in it is accessible to his consciousness and will, and his manifest presence can be focused in any location as he sees fit.

Simple, right? Okay, not so much. But at least it is better understood than picture an invisible something somewhere inside my cardiovascular region or my head. This metaphor compares God to me, much as God compared me to him when he said he created me in his image. (Genesis 1:26)

If God inhabits space as I inhabit my body, then he really is everywhere all the time, while not being pinpointed in any one location. For instance, I know I am in my feet and my hands and my head, while simultaneously not really being at any of those places at all. I am NOT my body. I am a consciousness and a will. I inhabit my body and am in complete control of it, but it is not me.

By Willard's example, God inhabits the universe in the same way. He's everywhere. He's in mountains and lakes and trees and people. He's also in stars and nebulas and galaxies and comets. He inhabits and exhibits his will from the farthest reaches to the closest corners. This is not in a "gaia" manner of saying that God is the mountains and the water and the trees. God is not his "body". He is not the universe; he merely inhabits it.

So we should assume that space is anything but empty. This is central to the understanding of Jesus because it is central to the understanding of the rule of God from the heavens, which is his kingdom among us. Traveling through space and not finding God does not mean that space is empty any more than traveling through my body and not finding me means that I am not here.

God is both among us and around us. When we pray, we talk to a friend next door as much as a Creator King. When God acts, he reaches out from around us, from his kingdom, and he enacts his will.

Ole Hallesby points out that the air our body requires envelops us on every hand. To receive it we need only breathe. Likewise, the "air" which our souls need also envelops all of us at all times and on all sides. God is round about us in Christ on every hand. All we need do is open our hearts.

Prayer requests should not be viewed as "snail mail to the clouds", as though we need wait for God to receive it and send back a response in due time. God hears us immediately. He most likely responds to us immediately, though often it takes us time to see his response.

I have not often struggled with this understanding of God, though I have ignored it when I haven't wanted to think of God's omni-presence. We learn about it in Sunday School, but we don't often realize it in our lives. We don't put it into practice. We lift our eyes to "heaven" when heaven is right in front of us. We shoot off prayers like Hail Mary passes (ironic, I know), as though we don't have much of a chance of getting through. Meanwhile, God stands right next to us and looks at us for our attention, many times hoping for a conversation more than a supplication.

We are his creations. He cares for us. He exists with us, and we with him.

Do we live our lives that way?
Is he real in the everyday?
I pray it is so,
and I know it, although,
I can't always live out what I say.

Finding Language to Express God

From the words of Adam Clarke,
God is...

The eternal,

independent,

and self-existent Being;

the Being whose purposes

and actions

spring from himself,

without foreign motive

or influence;

he who is absolute

in dominion;

the most pure,

the most simple, 

the most spiritual

of all essences;

infinitely perfect;

and eternally self-sufficient,

needing nothing

that he has made;

illimitable

in his immensity,

inconceivable

in his mode of existence,

and indescribable

in his essence; 

known fully

only by himself,

because an infinite mind

can only be fully 

comprehended by itself.

In a word,

a Being who,

from his infinite wisdom, 

cannot err

or be deceived,

and from

his infinite goodness,

can do nothing but

what is eternally just,

and right,

and kind.

Think of someone who's every action, whose slightest thought or inclination, automatically assumes the reality of the God here described. When you do this you will have captured nothing less than the thought of Jesus himself, along with the faith and life he came to bring.