God is—and always has been—about liberation. Liberation for our soul, for our entire being.
There can be no complete and enduring liberation without living in the fullness of His Will, and without His Will living fully in the midst of creatures. His Volition and Spirit alone can set paralyzed man free.
It is because the first man stepped out of God’s Will that we are paralyzed in the first place. That we are stuck in ourselves, held captive by lies, wrong thinking, our passions and addictions.
The truth can set us free, but it is like a blinding light, so unaccustomed are we to seeing and embracing it. And so we must be willing to accept the initial pain truth brings if we want to be free—and continually live in the truth if we want to remain free.
How much we yearn to be fully liberated, to be set free from the gravity of our fallen natures, soaring effortlessly in the Spirit like birds in flight. It is the deepest longing in man: to fly straight to God. That desire may be buried under layers of humanity, of human pride. But it is still there, the original desire of the soul to find its Origin.
Jesus came into our world to set us free from every spiritual malady. To enable us to see God again, to be able to walk with HIm and hear and speak to Him. To touch HIm and be touched. He came to remove the fever of our passions and restore us to complete wholeness and health.
Because so many things have bound us, we don’t know what Original Grace—what the real normal, the original normal—feels like. We get a sense of that when Jesus touches and heals us, restoring us with a new energy and a brighter, more complete outlook on life.
But he doesn’t come to transform us so we can enter the prevailing Christian lifestyle. He comes first and foremost to restore us to a full and intimate relationship with Himself, our God. He calls us to find our lives in HIm and to be faithful to that calling. That life is at times common, but never cookie cutter.
We must not confuse the Church, which God uses us to form in collaboration with His Spirit—or confuse being Church— with the lifestyle modern Christians often portray, so unwittingly tied to the customs and comforts of their culture.
Our culture has gotten the better of us. Oblivious to it all, we’ve grown up as genetically modified souls, stripped of any real spiritual life by quick-and-easy, self-assuring “Christian” slogans. We’ve come to accept Christianity as another consumer-packaged good, preventing us from entering into the deeper mystery of what it means to live in Christ.
God is not calling us to a Christian stereotype, to cookie cutter Christianity. He is not calling us to the “good life.” He is calling us to live in His own Likeness. To live the interior life of Christ upon earth.
The true liberation that sets us free is to be exactly who God created you and me to be, living in his Likeness, and diffusing that Likeness among the rest of the world. That is how we mix it up and how Christianity grows.
There are billions of unique souls, each with its unique relationship with God and unique mission to express another facet of God’s inexhaustible Will. And according to his Divine Order, there are billions more levels of expression and activity for each soul because of the unending number of relationships we have with each other. That is how God mixes it up.
HIs Divine Order becomes the matrix of activity. God’s perfect order is joined by His spontaneity of good will, of love, and is always held intact by His Divine Equilibrium. That is God’s nature, which longs to repeat itself within us—an idea that too often eludes us.