Reclaiming our Personal Relationship With God, Part 1
Think about the Bible stories we grew up with. Whether or not we consider ourselves religious people, we know most of these stories by heart: Noah’s Ark, Moses and the Burning Bush, The Journey to the Promised Land, The Birth of Jesus, The Ministry of Jesus, The Death and Resurrection of Jesus, etc. Yet, as well as we know these stories, we seem to have forgotten their connecting thread: Our relationship with God is meant to be personal.
In the Bible, God speaks to and through people like you and I, people who are changed and motivated to change by their encounter with the Divine. God speaks to and through Moses, even revealing the greatest information in the universe to him: I AM. God speaks to and through Jesus, whose entire ministry is an attempt to teach and convince people that God wants to speak to and through them as well.
The stories in the Bible (at least the ones that are spiritually motivated) are about a humanity that is greater than we ever dared to imagine: a humanity that finds unity through the understanding that there is something bigger and greater than us, out there, somewhere, yet also smaller than us. Universal Love is within every one of us, knitting us magnificently together like a living, breathing quilt of love. If we could only remember that we are each imbued with the ability to directly connect to the Infinite Universal Power, our worldview would change completely. When we understand our personal relationship with God, we understand our personal relationship with each other. We are manufactured from the very fabric of God—as is everyone else. We need to get back to this absolutely fundamental understanding of God and our personal relationship with the Divine if we are ever to live in a world of peace and love.
In the Bible, God speaks to and through people like you and I, people who are changed and motivated to change by their encounter with the Divine. God speaks to and through Moses, even revealing the greatest information in the universe to him: I AM. God speaks to and through Jesus, whose entire ministry is an attempt to teach and convince people that God wants to speak to and through them as well.
The stories in the Bible (at least the ones that are spiritually motivated) are about a humanity that is greater than we ever dared to imagine: a humanity that finds unity through the understanding that there is something bigger and greater than us, out there, somewhere, yet also smaller than us. Universal Love is within every one of us, knitting us magnificently together like a living, breathing quilt of love. If we could only remember that we are each imbued with the ability to directly connect to the Infinite Universal Power, our worldview would change completely. When we understand our personal relationship with God, we understand our personal relationship with each other. We are manufactured from the very fabric of God—as is everyone else. We need to get back to this absolutely fundamental understanding of God and our personal relationship with the Divine if we are ever to live in a world of peace and love.
We could so easily be living in a world where we share our resources—both material and intellectual with each other. This is the world Moses imagined. This is the world Jesus died hoping to create. This was the world the early church tried to establish, harkening back to an even more ancient Jewish ideal from the 8th Century, BCE.
If humans would embrace the idea that each of us is made from love, to love, we could accomplish astounding things. If we spent as much energy loving God and each other as we do creating fighter jets, missiles, and nuclear and biological weapons, we’d be traveling through the stars making contact with other civilizations. We would be warping space-time and stationing food replicators around the planet, literally creating an endless supply of food out of nanoparticles. There would be abundance for all. We wouldn’t just tolerate each other’s differences, we’d embrace them with the understanding that every single one of us is a small portrait of God. We could be working together as a single species—one loving people, drawn together by an awakening that we are more than individuals, and much more than the sum of our individual parts.
To move the world forward, we need to reclaim our personal connection with God. This connection reminds us that God is love, and that any ounce of hatred, disrespect, fear, loathing, or discrimination we see in the world (or in the Bible) is of human, not Divine origin. If we truly have a deep, personal relationship with the Divine, then we become all about Universal Love. We become the instruments of God’s Love in this hateful and hurtful world.
A personal relationship with the Divine does not require obedience to a leader or an institution—why do you think Jesus rejects the title “Son of God” every single time someone tries to foist it upon him (other than the fact he probably knew the title was treasonous)? It’s because Jesus didn’t want to become the person everyone felt they had to bow down to. He was fighting the religious hierarchy of his time, because it put a wall between the people and God—literally. The only people allowed into the Holy of Holies, the place God was most present, were the highest of the high priests. Jesus recognized this was a terrible idea, and certainly one that flew in the face of his Jewish traditions.
The stories about Jesus remind us, in an exceptionally powerful and moving way, that we are all destined sons and daughters of God, no matter our skin color, no matter our gender, no matter our sexual orientation. God is love. We are love. Anything that suggests otherwise is a lie.
Meditation: Open my heart to realization of Oneness with you, my loving God, and through you with love to realization of oneness with my brothers and sisters around the world.
If humans would embrace the idea that each of us is made from love, to love, we could accomplish astounding things. If we spent as much energy loving God and each other as we do creating fighter jets, missiles, and nuclear and biological weapons, we’d be traveling through the stars making contact with other civilizations. We would be warping space-time and stationing food replicators around the planet, literally creating an endless supply of food out of nanoparticles. There would be abundance for all. We wouldn’t just tolerate each other’s differences, we’d embrace them with the understanding that every single one of us is a small portrait of God. We could be working together as a single species—one loving people, drawn together by an awakening that we are more than individuals, and much more than the sum of our individual parts.
To move the world forward, we need to reclaim our personal connection with God. This connection reminds us that God is love, and that any ounce of hatred, disrespect, fear, loathing, or discrimination we see in the world (or in the Bible) is of human, not Divine origin. If we truly have a deep, personal relationship with the Divine, then we become all about Universal Love. We become the instruments of God’s Love in this hateful and hurtful world.
A personal relationship with the Divine does not require obedience to a leader or an institution—why do you think Jesus rejects the title “Son of God” every single time someone tries to foist it upon him (other than the fact he probably knew the title was treasonous)? It’s because Jesus didn’t want to become the person everyone felt they had to bow down to. He was fighting the religious hierarchy of his time, because it put a wall between the people and God—literally. The only people allowed into the Holy of Holies, the place God was most present, were the highest of the high priests. Jesus recognized this was a terrible idea, and certainly one that flew in the face of his Jewish traditions.
The stories about Jesus remind us, in an exceptionally powerful and moving way, that we are all destined sons and daughters of God, no matter our skin color, no matter our gender, no matter our sexual orientation. God is love. We are love. Anything that suggests otherwise is a lie.
Meditation: Open my heart to realization of Oneness with you, my loving God, and through you with love to realization of oneness with my brothers and sisters around the world.
