Reflections on Jesianity: The scribes and Pharisees used God. Jesus chose to be used by God. And you?

https://youtu.be/5e4v71TB2gw?si=pC0KrZc_7m3P8I4P

Warning: Everything but what moves you to discipleship of Jesus is destructive of your health. jesianity.info/search/label/Jesus

7/23/24

The scribes and Pharisees used God. Jesus chose to be used by God. And you? 

Lightly edited transcript:

This is pretty much it in a nutshell. We use God, don't we? We use God to feel peace, to feel good. To feel hopeful, to feel optimistic. To control other people, to fool other people. To gain power over other people and exploit them.... 

Each of us doesn't do all these things. But practically all of us, our use of, our relationship to God is to use God for some combination of these things. 

Jesus chose a different way. He said, the Father never leaves me because I always do what pleases him. 

Jesus chose to become a child of God, a dutiful child of God, turning his life, his every breath, over to be used by God, which I think obviously is the humanity within him. Throughout history, one in a million have done the same, but not to such potential consequence.

You didn't create the humanity within you any more than you created your eyesight. It's a DNA-given neurological construct, along with many others inside us. But that's one, our humanity. Look it up, the word Humanity. Goodness, truthfulness, loving, brotherliness, sisterliness. 

Look at your own life for the definition. You can find times when your humanity was in charge of you, though you might not have thought of it that way. 

Jesus understood that, his humanity, to be God within him, and he decided to turn himself over to it. 

And in himself, he then manifested by doing that, the revolution, the only alternative to the way we've been for 7,000 years or more in complex societies. 

Everything else is just different flavors of the same thing. using ourselves as though we were placed here to do our own bidding. And no other creature has the capacity to do that, to put their head and flesh in charge of their lives, doing their own selfish bidding. 

The only other life form that has the ability to do that is cancer. It switches off its dutiful obedience to creation and turns its energies to serving itself. And it must be very pleasurable. It's physically very successful. 

But there's no joy in it. Joy comes exactly as the reward for each breath that we turn ourselves over to God within us, Jesus said, the kingdom of God is within us. And the kingdom certainly is where God reigns, our humanity, our soul, our Holy Spirit.