Acts 2:18 Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.
Cultivating a lifestyle of contact with God is an endeavor to stop living life from the edges and to start living life from the Essence. As humans, we have the capacity to be anchored in the Divine Reality. God’s call for us to come to him is an invitation to life…real life! Life is an adventure. It is high adventure, energized and moved along by the wind of the Divine Spirit for those who truly learn to maintain contact. This is how Jesus lived.
Learning this process is vital to real life. Especially in our Western proclivity to exalt knowledge, we must beware of being intoxicated by merely the message of the good news. Without anchoring our lives in communion with God, it will result in living merely from the ideas of the gospel. When this happens, our Christian living is quickly reduced to nothing more than a set of moral principles and a life philosophy. But God’s good news is a call for us to live in fellowship with Jesus (1 Corinthians 1:9).
Our call to live life for God must issue forth from our abiding in him. Authentic Christian living enters within the veil, moves in concert with the Mystery of our indwelling Father. We are invited to taste and see that the Lord is good. Tasting and seeing are much more than mere ideas or doctrinal understanding. They are experiential realities.
Developing patterns and practices of living that engage contact with our Creator enable life to be lived from our true Center, our true self, which is Christ in us. He is our living hope (1 Peter 1:3). He is our “righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Corinthians 1:30). He is our “hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27.) He is our new life, our real life, our eternal life:
Colossians 3:3-4 For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
The spiritual journey can be made. The spiritual reality at the center of your being is a real, indwelling person–Christ! That is what contact is about returning to your center and finding your center is the gateway to the Center of all. Christ in you.
In Revelation chapter 4 and 5, we find worship in heaven with everything and everyone circling the throne of God. He is our True Center.
We must make the time and take the time to stop living our lives from the edges and journey to the place, to the Person of our new birth and real life, Jesus Christ. The Essence of life is contact with God.
John 17:3 Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.
Living this life, real life, is not only preferred, it is possible. It is possible for you and for me. The challenge for this week is to expand your capacity to love. In so doing, we will reveal the Presence and release the power of our God who is love.
1 John 4:16 And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
In the troubling times in which we live, our greatest fear should not be the Corona Virus or our shrinking economy. We should not even fear death so much as living an inadequate life.
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. –Anne Frank
