Session 1: Living the Divine Conspiracy through Jesus' Words of Eternal Life
Jn 6: unless we ate his flesh and drank his blood, we would have no life in us
we have eternal life via a deep and abiding personal relationship in which we literally take the substance of our life from him
the language frightened many people, and it's frightening for a human to hear it from anyone because we're being told of our utter dependence on God
the challenge has always been, since the garden, will we be our own god, will we trust ourselves, or will we trust God?
when Jesus as the incarnate God humbly invites us to put our trust in Him, we face that same challenge: can we trust Him? can we really stop thinking that we can provide for ourselves?
'Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. And we have believed and come to know that you are the Son of God.'
the Sermon on the Mount is the most valuable piece of knowledge that has ever been committed to human beings, deepest, most profound treatment of what our lives were meant to be
'those who hear my words and do them are like a wise person who builds his house on a rock'
our life can become an eternal life by becoming a part of the life of God Himself in our time
that's what it means for our lives to become eternal: that they are so caught up in what God is doing in our time that they become an everlasting part of what God is doing for all time
John laid the foundation with a simple invitation for human beings to come and bring their lives into the life of God Himself
repent. metanoete. think about your thinking. it's hard to do. ideas are those assumptions that guide our action without thinking. they lie so far back in the self that we don't think about them, we just act on them automatically
Jesus came preaching the same message
'Repent, for the Kingdom of the Heavens is available.'
message continues throughout the Scriptures and the NT
Mt 11.11-12: the least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than John the Baptist
'From the days of John the Baptist until now the Kingdom of the Heavens suffers violence and the violent take it by force.'
He's talking about people who did not stand on formalities, but when they saw Jesus X they simply rushed into His presence, and you see that over and over in the Scriptures
Mt 8: leper, woman with issue of blood, Roman
cf also Acts 1: 'speaking of the things concerning the Kingdom of God'
Act 9.12: Philip in Samaria 'preaching the Good News about the Kingdom of God and the name of Jesus X'
down to the end of the book, Paul in Rome 'preaching the Kingdom of God and teaching the things concerning the Lord Jesus'
if you're going to understand Jesus and His message and if you're going to be able to respond to Him appropriately so that the words that were given in the SotM would sound to you like Good News and the best instructions on how to live you ever heard, you have to understand that Jesus came into this world and comes now and stands level with everyone else who claims to tell you and me how to live
we all have the problem: how to live
[One reason we go to others is we judge teaching on what sounds good to us, not what is true]
Jesus had compassion because the people were scattered abroad, like sheep without a shepherd
our human 'knowledge and understanding' cannot cure the running wound of the human soul
and Jesus comes and says 'come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy-laden and I'll give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and lowly of heart.'
many of us don't have confidence in Jesus and what he teaches because of our human idea system
we hear the SotM and think 'what am I going to do with this? Bless those who curse me? I can't even bless those who bug me.'
He has put in place a process that is going to eventuate in human beings who understand and live in the truth that He is and the truth that He gives.
the Divine Conspiracy is nothing but the form the Kingdom of God takes in human history, the mystery of the Kingdom of God that is at work among human beings.
it's a mystery and a conspiracy b/c God in His wisdom has decided not to run over us. what He wants will be won by love.
His way is to approach us gently, with love, and to leave us room to seek and to find Him
He is bringing to completion, in the way He knows to be best, His purposes for human life
Nietzsche says the will to power is the ultimate drive in human existence. Satan tempted Jesus with power.
Jesus said no. He knew power would not solve the problem.
won't solve nationally, internationally, or in the home
the alternative is to step back into the kingdom of God. That's the answer.
Three basic questions:
1. what is real?
2. Who is well off? What is happiness? How do we get it?
What if we wrote it on your tombstone? 'She had great teeth.'
3. Who is a truly good person?
Very few people want to be truly bad.
Most people want to be good. We are prepared to do what is wrong for good reasons.
Jesus answers those three questions:
1. God is real, the kingdom of God, the world of the spirit
his message is designed to pull us away from the world of matter
it's fortunate for most of us that we don't have more power
If you're empowered, what are you going to do?
Jesus gives us guidance regarding what is real so we'll know what to do with our power.
he says 'you are spirit too.'
Since we've turned away from understanding God, we can't figure us out. So we see ourselves merely as physical entities struggling in a social setting to achieve our aims and ends in life, rather than seeing ourselves as citizens of God's world.
'Our citizenship is in heaven, from whence also Christ will come.' -- Philippians
'You are dead and your life is hid with Christ in God. If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things that are above where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God. set your affections on things above, not on things below.' Col 3.3
we're not here to just avoid death as long as we can and then go out with a squeak
God made us to be unceasing spiritual beings with an eternal destiny in his world.
once we understand that God is real, then we are able to picture our own lives in a way that suddenly Jesus' other teachings make sense.
2. who's well off? The person who lives in the kingdom of God.
Look at the Beatitudes, and with them the 'woe bes' in Luke 6.
We turn it around.
Being rich isn't bad in itself. Poor people can be slaves to money. What matters is what is in your heart.
[I think Dallas is too soft on wealth here. On the other hand, he grew up quite poor and knows something about it.]
Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the poor. This is not teaching us what to do, but who is blessed in the kingdom of God. People humans think are not blessable can be blessed, and people humans think are super blessed, may not be blessed at all.
'Pursue happiness in a car that can catch it.' Peugeot
human thinking has to be corrected with Jesus' understanding of who he is and who we are.
being poor or rich doesn't matter if you are alive in the kingdom of God.
You are well off, perfectly safe, in a good place to be. It's good to be the person you are. That's the primary message of the Beatitudes. It's okay to be who you are. God accepts you and has a place for you in his eternal kingdom, which is greater than the stunning physical universe by far. In that kingdom you have a place of eternal dignity and joy and fulfillment as spiritual beings.
God is the creator who creates creators and that's what we are to be: creators of what is good and right and beautiful, just as he was. Jesus says it's all open to you.
3. Who's a really good person? Someone whose heart is filled with love. The word love stands at the center of the human problem and that human solution. love is the heart of the universe. The heart of the universe is a person, a community of persons, the Trinity. 'God is in himself a sweet society.'
Love is the bottom line, the final word.
Mark 12: what are the great Commandments? Love the Lord God and your neighbor as yourself.
John 1.4: God is love.
Colossians 3.14: 'above all these things, put on love, the bond of perfectness. And let the peace of God rule in your hearts in one body which you were called to.'
A good person is permeated by love all the way to the body level. Not full of hostility in their body. They are possessed of love.
You live without fear. 'Perfect love casts out fear.'
'Be ye perfect as your father in heaven is perfect.'
That's for us. It's good. When we enter into it, fear goes out, anger goes out.
you show me a person is angry, I'll show you a person who's scared.
[Not always]
get rid of the fear, the anger goes out. The contempt, the need to look down on other people disappears.
All the divisions that set humans against one another – race, religion, culture, sex, etc. go out as love comes in.
I can see the people I meet with love and generosity and hopefulness, not with contempt and fear, because I know that I am secure in God's kingdom.
God's kingdom is the range of his effective will, where what God wants done is done.
God allows people to do other than his will. That's our choice. When we come to know the father and to live in the Son, then we pray 'thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.'
As I pray that, I'm inviting the kingdom to come into my life in all its aspects and to make me transparent, loving, compassionate, and without fear.
There is progress to be made. The body hasn't gotten the message yet on some things. It's coming along. The embodied self has to be retrained for us to live in the Divine conspiracy.
We are invited through faith in Jesus Christ to live in the kingdom of God. That faith means that we know that Jesus was right about everything.
Swearing is steamrolling people, trying to convince them were really serious.
Jesus says, 'let your yes be yes and your no be no.'
You can only do that if you're trusting God to care for you. Otherwise we try to manipulate people with our words (song and dance).
[I think the point of this section of the SotM is be the kind of person who doesn't need to swear.]
We have to retrain ourselves to [ ] and stand in the good things of Christ as he taught us, so we don't need anger, contempt, lust, vengeance, or to secure ourselves with money or reputation. We can simply seek the kingdom of God and his righteousness and see how God adds everything else to that.
what if we approached the Sermon with the attitude 'Lord, please show me what my life could be like in your hand.'
can you say you really want that?
it means admitting I don't know how to do it. I have to be taught.
In this life you can stop pretending. You can stop pushing.
We come to Jesus and we say 'Lord, be our teacher. let the world experience through me the power of your kingdom.'
'Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.' -- St Francis
our challenge to the world as apprentices of Jesus, in all of the world's agony and pain, is very simply 'Show us a better way.'
it's painful sometimes, because it's so pathetic what people think will solve their problems.
I'll have students occasionally asked me why I'm a disciple of Jesus Christ and I always say 'who else did you have in mind?'
Occasionally someone will say 'well, I don't follow anybody. I'm my own person.'
And I say 'well I unfortunately can't take that position, because I'm the one with the problem.'
Then the world's challenge to us is 'show us in practice the life that is truly eternal.'
Christ came into the world and electrified a small group of people. And they went across the earth and brought to life multitudes of people who saw.
The intellectuals in the second century Greco-Roman world converted en masse and they said it was because the problems they had been struggling with for centuries and had been unable to solve were solved by Jesus Christ.
Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans: these were attempts to solve that basic human problem.
It was not without reason that people saw the reality of eternal life and said 'we will take it.'
And our guide and a response to that is simply the sermon on the Mount, taught in a way of grace and love, not condemnation, not law. Taught in a way that people understand as they simply fellowship with Christ and his people, they learned the easy way to live is Christ's way.
When you look at the sermon on the mount you think 'that's hard.'
No. That's easy. What's hard is what we've got.
repent for the kingdom of the heavens is at hand.
Questions
it's definitive of every person that they have an area in which they alone have say. And if you take that away from a person, you destroy them. God even respects that. That's why he allows us to have a kingdom.
God invites us to take our kingdom into his kingdom. He also invites us to have a share in one another's kingdom.
that's what two great commandments are about. Love the Lord your God with all your heart mind soul and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.
The second commandment won't work without the first. That's the fallacy of human power. You can't enforce loving your neighbor. It has to come from the inner person because that's who we are and that's what God is interested in. And as we are faithful in our little kingdom, then he wanted to expand. It may be money. It may be influence. maybe knowledge. It may be family or social status.
Everyone is invited to bring their kingdom into God's kingdom and experience the incredible potentialization, the increase, that comes from that union.
Illustration from The Divine Conspiracy about the kingdom of electricity. The Kingdom is meant to be lived now.
The Kingdom of God is not meat and drink, that is, it is not outward performance, but righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.
What we're talking about here cannot be done in human strength alone. It's not 'give peace a chance.'
The REA came down the road with electricity and suddenly a new way of life was possible. Some people wouldn't accept it. The electricity was right there, cost almost nothing, but it would have changed their way of life, and they didn't want it. The Kingdom of God is at hand and, to know it, you certainly have to step into those commandments of Jesus.
You begin to know the Kingdom of God when you undertake to do things which you're sure won't work, and they do.
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