Aug
Conversation with Jesus
by William in Uncategorized
THE INDWELLING JESUS
In recent time I have reconsidered the way Our Lord Jesus lives in us. Previously, I thought of Jesus as a purely spiritual presence within me. I thought of Him as present in me through the indwelling if the Holy Spirit. Or, on the words of Paul, I thought of Jesus as living in my heart, not exactly really, but “by faith”. Those ways of thinking are true but they leave out the simple presence of the Lord in His own Risen Body living in me.
During the time of His mortal flesh, Our Lord could not physically be “in” any body but His own. But the limitations of space and time were left behind when He rose from the dead in a body that Paul calls “spiritual”.
The resurrection is not a mere interesting detail of our faith. The Resurrection of Christ, and our resurrection in Him, is of the constitutive essence of our faith and life in Him. If Christ is not physically raised from the dead, our faith is empty and we have no hope. The Person at the origin and center of the Christian Gospel is Jesus of Nazareth risen in His Body from the dead.
I do not claim to know much about the nature of the risen body. And I will not speculate. However, the New Testament accounts of the Risen Jesus make some things patently clear. In the first place, the body of Jesus was not transmuted into a spirit. He rose in a body that we must call physical. “Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.” Lake 24:39.
From that text we see that the Risen Body has solid flesh and bones in three dimensions. The Risen Lord eats, walks, talks, and even cooks breakfast. He is the same person He was before, but now His glorified body, though still a tangible concrete recognizable body, is free from the limits of space, time, and physical vulnerability. Death no longer has dominion over His body. Impassibility means that His risen body is no longer subject to any physical evil or limitation. He can be in Jerusalem and in Emmaus at the same time. He can go from one place to another place without having to pass through space.
This Jesus, in His own divine person and His own human personality, in His risen body with risen flesh and bones—this Jesus lives in me and in every faithful Christian. This is the One with whom we speak in our interior conversation.
CONVERSING WITH THE RISEN LORD JESUS IN OUR HEARTS
In these days I have been visited with a stronger conviction than ever before that it is the will of God: Father, Son and Spirit, that those who are in Christ should be engaged in a continual personal conversation with Jesus in our hearts.
The popular teaching of the church on prayer presents it chiefly as a conversation with God in Christ in terms of praise, thanks, petitions, intercessions, and repentance. That is entirely correct. Yet there is more to our conversation with God, based on who God is to us and who we are to God.
The nature, content, and intensity of our conversation with people in this world depend on our relationship to them. We speak to mother as mother, to spouse as spouse, to neighbor as neighbor, and so on. Therefore we can describe our on-going conversation with the One who dwells in our hearts in terms of the relationship that we have with Him.
SAVIOR GOD: The life of our Blessed Lord Jesus reveals to us the plans and the desires of God. By what Jesus said and did in the world, we know that we (with every human creature) are the objects of divine predilection. God, in Christ is reconciling the whole world to Himself. For God so loved the world, that He will all human beings to come into His grace and life. If we know these and other things that are dearest to the heart of God, we ought to be engaged in the same plans, desires, and efforts. What God wants is what we want. These shared wants for the salvation of the world and the glory of God should be a constant theme of our conversation with the Father and His Son Jesus Our Lord.
LIFE-GIVER: Jesus dwells in us to give us His life. He wills to live in us.
COMFORTER: He gives us encouragement and comfort as we pass through the trials, sorrows, and sufferings of our life in the world.
GUIDE: Jesus guides us in making our choices. To accomplish the supernatural will of God in this world, we need constant revelation on the will of God for us in the moment. Jesus, from His throne within, shows the way we are to walk in.
ILLUMINATOR: Our Lord teaches us things of God that cannot be known by mere human inquiry. He reveals to us ineffably precious truths about God that no man can know unless it is given from above.
POWER-GIVER: From within us where He lives, the Risen Jesus gives us all divine power both to do and to suffer all things necessary in order to accomplish our personal mission to live by faith and love in the world.
DIVINE FRIEND: We were created by God with the final goal that we should reach the perfection of our being in the perfect and complete exchange of love between Jesus and ourselves. The Blessed Lord dwells within us in order to engage us there in a conversation of ever deepening love. His love for us is full from the beginning. Our love grows continually as we receive the gift of His love more and more.
We should be engaging in intimate personal conversation with the Lord Who loves us, about our mission from Him in this world. We should be talking with Him about the wisdom and power He wants to give us every moment. We should be continually talking to our Lord about the mysteries of God that He reveals to us. We need to listen to Him as He comforts us in sorrow and encourages us in our trials. His personal love for us should be the permanent center of our conversation with the Risen Lord.
If Jesus is real to us; if we really experience Jesus living in us; if we love Him–or even if we only desire to love Him, then we should continually enter His presence in our hearts to converse with Him about the things of God. The Father and the Son engage each other in an eternal conversation of Love (the Holy Spirit). By our incorporation of into the Body of the Incarnate Son, we are destined to be caught up in that divine conversation.
It cost Jesus in His mortal body all the sufferings of His passion, crucifixion, and death in order to rise a spiritual body. He rose a spiritual body in order to dwell in our hearts. He came into our hearts to engage us, up close and personal, in a conversation of love. In your heart, the Risen Lord is waiting to tell you of His love; He is waiting to hear you speak your love to Him.
Jun
A Fellowship of Missionaries of Christ
by William in Uncategorized
Every human being is born in this world with no idea where she came from, where she is going, or why she is here.
When we are illumined by the divine Light, Who is Jesus Christ, we begin a journey of increasing understanding of the origin, meaning, and destiny of our existence.
We came into the world from God at our creation. We are passing through time on earth. We will leave this world and enter the glory of Jesus with the Father in Eternity.
Our journey through time on earth seems chaotic. It is chaotic. Yet the chaos of our lives has been planned by God before the world was made. There is divine meaning in this human madness.
We are not resistant impenetrable beings like billiard balls that collide and bounce off each other. We all abide in Jesus and He abides in all of us. We are all one in Christ, without ceasing to be unique individual persons.
As the Father sent Jesus, so Jesus sends each one of us into the world on a personal mission. Our mission from Christ is the purpose and the meaning of our passage through time on earth.
The mission of each person is this: to initiate and bring to increasing perfection relationships of faith and love with the persons to whom we are sent and who are sent to us.
The most effective way we preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ is by the incontestable evidence of our transformed lives. The most effective way we draw to Christ the people to people to whom we are sent is by the powerful attraction of the love we give to them.
The existential conditions and practical details of our mission are revealed to us moment by moment. From each present moment we move forward to meet the unknown future in peace and confidence because we believe our future moments will express the infinite love of God for us. We know in faith that, as in the present moment, so also in every future moment, Christ Jesus lives in us with all divine power to do and to suffer everything necessary to fulfill our mission of faith in love in the lives of those to whom we are sent. Our complete victory over the world was decreed by God before we even began to engage in the struggle to love fully in the world.
The Holy Spirit of Jesus that we have received from the Father is our life, our strength, our courage, our creative power, and our wisdom.
Our journey through time as missionaries has an inner dimension and an outward dimension.
The inner journey consists in the progressive assimilation of our whole person into a transformation mystical union with Jesus. Inwardly, we are to become more and more like Jesus in all aspects of our spirit: our thoughts, consciousness, understanding, values, desires, judgments, hopes, sorrows and joys. These are the well-springs of all of our words, actions, and reactions to what we experience in the world. The more the grace of the Holy Spirit increasingly prevails in us, the Risen Jesus lives in us.
In the outward dimension, we increasingly produce the fruit of faith and love in the lives of the people we are sent to. Our inner transformation makes us increasingly easily moved, inspired, and empowered by the Spirit of Jesus in our interactions with others.
Our mission from Christ, in both the inner and outward dimension, is made up of what we do in the world and what is done to us in the world. We act and we are acted upon. In our action, we will be supplied by the Spirit with power to do. In our passion, we will be supplied by the Spirit with the power to suffer.
All our good actions are gifts of God. They are expressions of God’s love to us. They are also expressions of our love for God and for the people to whom we are sent.
Sufferings are intrinsically evil and worthy of hate. But, in the use God makes of them to purify and glorify us, they become instrumentally good and worthy of love. Christ and Christians embrace the Cross with love. As instruments God uses to bring us to eternal glory, our sufferings express God’s love for us. When we humbly submit to suffering in faith, they express our love for God. When we offer our sufferings as prayers for the salvation of the world, they become expressions of our love all human beings. God so loved that He sent His only Son. The Son of God so loved the world that He sent us into the world to do and to suffer for the salvation of the world.
Sisters and brothers who belong to the Fellowship of Jesus agree about these things. They believe in their personal mission and in the mission of each other.
We write a testimony of our mission from Christ in the form of a Personal Rule of Life. This Rule is temporary and provisional. Changes in our circumstances of life reveal to us changes in the mission Christ is sending us to accomplish. Our Personal Rule changes with these revelations.
The greatest spiritual value in the composition of a Personal Rule of Life is that it expresses our absolute faith in the mission we have from Jesus and our most profound commitment to accomplish the work He has sent us to do.
All Christians are trying to carry out their mission. Members of the Fellowship of Jesus do not do anything more or better than any other committed Christian. However, in composing and presenting to the Fellowship our Personal Rule of Life, we are dedicating ourselves to the mission we have from Christ with conscious intention and public profession. In the Fellowship, we give each other faith, prayer, encouragement, accountability, companionship, and fraternal love on our missionary journey through the world to the eternal glory of our blessed Lord Jesus in the presence of the Father.