Join me -- I am working on something eternal.
Introduction
Why is it that most people today recoil when they are invited to church? Why are people so turned off by religion?
Many people will tell you that they believe in God while telling you that they cannot stomach organized religion. If you press them, they will tell you about their personal experiences where they felt diminished, shunned or even rejected by "the church". Mahatma Ghandi was one of these individuals. This man changed the lives of millions if not billions in India as he stood up to the policies and prejudices that made the lives of those less fortunate - less important leading to misery and abuse that was intolerable. Ghandi said it very well when he said, "Everybody would be a Christian, if it weren't for the Christians."
Ghandi used the principles of Jesus. He stood up to the authorities in India. He stood up to the caste system. He did all of this without the use of violence. in several cases he endured periods of time where he put his own life at risk to gain the opportunity to voice his concerns for those who were suffering without the opportunity to voice their concerns. He was a voice for the voiceless. He was Christ-like, but his early experiences as a student of Jesus led him to people who tried to mold him into the image and likeness of bigotry, tradition, prejudice and small minded religiosity. All of these things Jesus hated. All of these things Ghandi hated. For us to be like Jesus and to make serious impact on our world, we must become like Jesus and be very careful to avoid becoming religious, traditional or churchy.
My Deeper Life is my effort to touch people the way that Jesus did. It begins with a number of revelations that have come to me over my lifetime of searching, seeking, finding, repenting, reevaluating and writing. As I search and seek, I find. As I find, I face what I once knew and am forced to repent and reevaluate. This second phase requires courage and the willingness to humbly admit that no matter what we know, we will always know only in part. Still, we must teach what we know with a real effort to better the lives of all those that we come in contact with. This effort requires more than just a tangential touch or a momentary point of contact but a willingness to fight to stay connected.
As I share these simple principles with you, you will soon learn that one of the ways that we sin/miss the mark is through neglect, apathy or our willingness to just look the other way. There are two reasons people neglect others. The first reason is that they are too busy or self-absorbed. The second reason is that they feel that they will not be able to help the person in trouble to the extent that help is needed.
God loves all people. God has no rival or challenger. Since God loves everyone, we are to do our best to see things the way that he does. God loves you. He loves your immediate and extended family and all people who look like and think as you do. However, He also loves people who do not look like or think as you do. He loves the healthy and the sick, the rich and the poor, the believer and the unbeliever. He loves the non-violent and the violent, the obedient and the disobedient and He loves those who help Him to love all others. In our efforts to please each other we lose sight of His aim which is to love all men back to Himself. God has no powerful enemy that could ever ultimately defeat Him. We are not really in a fight. We simply need to obey Him and His teachings, rather - follow his loving instructions and we will experience the kind of victories that He has promised. Loving people and following instructions should not be so difficult. Historically, these two basic principles have been ignored because they require from every individuality a humility that most people refuse to acquire or put on.
In this book, I am going to lay out a plan to end wars, to end poverty, to end prejudice and to set people free to be who they were created to be. The simplicity of this plan is astounding. The implementation of this plan will require a daily decision by all that choose to follow. Still, if we stick to the teachings of Jesus and apply them to ourselves each and every day within 22 years we will have moved from a system of competition/us against them to a world where we are all required to work toward seeing others through to the realization of what they were created to do here.
Sometimes you have to go in, to bring people out.