07/28/2020
By Pastor Vinnie
"Rules Over Relationship?"
A week ago Sunday, we read about the Pharisees and their scrupulous observance of the Sabbath day with their scrolls and scrolls of “Sabbath-keeping rules.” For all their rules, they failed to see Sabbath through God’s eyes. They were not resting in God but trying to work their way into his favor. They tried to deny good to Jesus, his disciples, and the man with the withered hand all in the name of Sabbath. The following article spoke to me about the Pharisees and my own spiritual life…
Spiritual awareness for Christians, at its fullest, means seeing life through God’s sound eye. We could use other senses to describe this awareness: hearing life through God’s ear, touching life through God’s strength, feeling life through God’s compassion. Jesus revealed our incredible intimacy with the infinite One we call God, so we can dare to speak of being God’s senses in the world. Saint Paul called us to live in the mind of Christ so fully that we can say with him, “Not I, but Christ, lives in me.” The “I” that no longer lives then is the one that sees itself as an ultimately self-willed, self-centered being. The new “I” is one that lives moment by moment in the awareness that we are an intimate and unique expression of God’s joy and compassion, living freely by grace, called to reverberate joy and compassion, utterly interdependent with Creator and creation. The test of any spiritual discipline is whether or not it assists this deep awareness for us. Without spiritual discipline we become easier prey to the old “I” that is full of possessiveness, fear, greed, anxiety, violence, indolence, untrustworthiness, willfulness, confusion, and all other marks of life disconnected from our true being in God. From the book Living with Apocalypse
Application Questions…
· Are you seeing life through God’s sound eye?
· How is your intimacy with God these days?
· Are you reverberating the joy and compassion of the Lord?
· What spiritual practices might help you get back on track or stay on track?
· Is there a spiritual practice that you may have perverted because you have made it more about rules
and less about your relationship with Jesus?
