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Please click on a question below.
# 1 How does God see us?
# 2 What is a façade and why do we develop façades?
# 3 How does God help us strip away our façades?
# 4 What helps us to see ourselves as we are?
# 5 What is the core of our poverty of heart?
# 6 Is self-love a sign of pride or humility?
# 7 What does our conscience insist that we do?
# 8 How does facing Reality enable us to find the satisfaction for which we yearn?
# 9 What does facing Reality do for us?
# 10 What is discernment of spirits?
# 11 How does discernment grow in us?
# 12 How do we come to truly and personally accept that we are loved and valued?
# 13 What is eternal life?
# 14 What is the Kingdom of God?
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God sees each of us as we are: priceless, valued, vulnerable, exposed, sinful, weak, beloved, needy. He knows that we seek to cover ourselves and use all sorts of façades to insulate ourselves — from others, from Him and even from our own heart. God knows how we are made to deeply desire love and capability, and so how we fear our own inadequacy and unlovable behavior.
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When it is used as an architectural feature, a façade gives a building a pleasing appearance and apparent unity. In this course, I use the term façade, not to describe how we construct a building, but how we construct our lives. In that sense, a façade is a cover-up for what our real issues are. It's an apparent balance; it's an illusion of true living. It's a false solution; it's a temporary solution, one that will not and cannot give us the authentic and full living for which we crave and for which we are made.
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God wants to help us strip away our façades. His timing is perfect, tailored to the needs of each person. God does not violently rip off our façades. Neither does He leave us where we are! God, who is Truth, reveals Himself to us. Then in the light of His truth, we can begin to see ourselves as God sees us: as His beloved, hurting children who are stuck in false ways of living.
It can feel scary to acknowledge the truth about ourselves. Often we put more energy and focus into resisting exposure of our true selves than into receiving awareness of ourselves as we are. That's because we feel so exposed, so naked, when we remove the outside covering of façades to reveal our true inner selves.
When Adam and Eve saw themselves as naked, they sewed together fig leaves to cover their nakedness. We sew together façades to cover our nakedness. However, God doesn't want us to use façades to cover up. God wants to wrap us in the Robe of Righteousness.
Let me tell you how happy God has made me! For he has clothed me with garments of salvation and draped about me the robe of righteousness. I am like a bridegroom in his wedding suit or a bride with her jewels. (Isaiah 61:10 TLB)
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There are several things which can soften us to see ourselves as we are:
- Disappointment forces us to realize that we can't always have everything work out our way. Disappointment forces us to realize that many times when we did get our way, we still didn't find the satisfaction in life for which we were looking.
- Pain, of any kind, forces us to acknowledge our powerlessness. Pain forces us to acknowledge God as the Higher Power in our lives.
- Acceptance allows us to rest in His way and His timing as we acknowledge those things over which we have no control.
Disappointment, pain and acceptance help us to see ourselves as we are. Love helps us to accept ourselves as we are. It takes fresh trust in God's lovingkindness and provision to risk seeing ourselves through His eyes of love for us. Yet, this is what God wants!
The ability to see and accept ourselves as we are can be expressed in other words. Sometimes, it is called interiority or the ability to be present to our own heart. We could describe prayer as a way to make our insides present to ourselves and to God.
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We look for ways to distract ourselves from our own poverty of heart:
- I can't make myself love at all times by my own power and ability.
- I can't make myself do right at all times by my own power and ability.
- My attempts to do right prepare me to receive Jesus more fully.
- My doing right flows from my trust in and my love for Jesus.
The wonder of the Good News is that God knows this. In love, He waits for us to know and experience that we are sinners beloved by Him. He waits for us to turn from condemning and excusing, pushing and pulling, saving and forming ourselves. Then, we can receive and claim His mercy and love toward us. We can accept what He has done for us in Jesus.
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Pride is not the same thing as self-love. Jesus wants us to love passionately ― to love God, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. We must have a healthy love of ourselves in order to be able to love others. In fact, we need genuine self-love in order to be humble.
Humility does not mean we should be self-demeaning. Genuine humility allows us to see ourselves as God sees us. God sees me as someone of great worth and value. I am a VIP. So are you. We are Very Important Persons, because God loves each of us with a passionate, enduring love. His love is unconditional. God loves me even though He knows full well that I am not perfect. He loves you, even though He knows full well that you are not perfect.
Humility draws us closer to God and closer to each other. Pride drives us away from God and away from each other. Pride makes us think: “I can handle my life just fine, thank you! I know better than God what's good for me.” Pride makes us arrogant: “I don't need God and I don't need you.” Pride sets us up for disaster. The Bible warns us:
Pride goes before destruction,
and a haughty spirit before a fall. (Proverbs 16:18 RSV)
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Our conscience insists that we do good and avoid evil. However, we can use our mind to form rationalizations opposed to the revelation of our conscience. Rationalizations can silence the voice of conscience if we continually ignore its voice, and we end up with an erroneous conscience.
Conscience is given to us as an aspect of our human nature. We know this by observing all human cultures and by the revelation of Scripture (Romans 2:14-16). Our innate conscience must be shaped ─ conformed to God's truth. We need a balance between what life teaches us (subjective experience) and what is true apart from our immediate perception (objective reality). It is our responsibility to seek the truth.
Truth is not the truth because we say it is. It's handed to us. We receive it from God. Our choice is not to decide what is right or wrong, but to accept or reject truth handed to us. So, a well-formed conscience is essential. When we are confronted with the truth, it can be easier to say I don't believe that than to change our behavior. In today's culture, the tendency is to change conscience to fit behavioral trends instead of changing behavioral trends to fit truth.
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Reality is encountering the truth. It is perceiving everything in the world with God's perspective. It is hearing others, ourselves, and God, more and more as He hears. It is seeing in a fully human way with the mind and heart of Jesus Christ. It is being transformed and recreated in the image of Jesus. This way of Reality is a life-long process that is genuine, messy, passionate, fun, scary, beautiful, painful, alive, life-giving and profoundly human. Although it is hard work, becoming Real is worth the effort. That's because Reality frees us to love and be loved, thereby enabling us to find the satisfaction for which we yearn.
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When we are open to Reality, we will discover that genuine Reality:
- sets us free
- calls us to let go of our illusions and our denials
- asks us to be fully human and fully alive
- opens us to see as God sees
- is bittersweet
- frees our personal passion
- is the unlikely way to Joy
- closes the gap between our head and our heart
- gives us renewed thinking and doing
- replaces a hard heart with a soft heart
- gives us fresh belonging and purpose
- invites us to believe in and follow Jesus Christ
- teaches us to love
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The word discern, as it is used in Sacred Scripture, means to scrutinize, investigate, interrogate, determine, examine, search and distinguish differences. It implies a focused, intentional perception of what is true, right and good in God's view.
Discernment is the power to distinguish one spirit from another. This gives us an ability to perceive whether or not someone is operating in God's power and in accord with His will. In 1 Corinthians 12:10, St. Paul names discernment as one of nine special gifts of the Holy Spirit. Discernment of spirits is a manifestation of the Holy Spirit, active in our hearts and lives. God wants to give us discernment; He cares about our perceptions, our thinking and our choices.
Sometimes, God whispers to our hearts, giving us an internal sense of discernment. At other times, He speaks through the Bible. In Hebrews 4:12, God's Word is described as discerning (or as judging) the reflections and thoughts of the heart.
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Discernment flows from our love relationship with God. Like any love relationship, our relationship with God is nourished by being together and by doing together. Discernment grows in us as we practice being and doing. When we spend time being in His presence, then God sovereignly infuses us with the gift of discernment. When we spend time doing His will, then we learn how to become more and more skilled in accurately using the gift of discernment. Unfortunately, there is no formula; there are no “ten easy steps.” It's not problem solving.
Discernment is a process of listening to our heart in the presence of God.
| • What do we listen to? |
The heart |
| • Where do we listen? |
In God's Presence |
Both of these are important aspects of spiritual discernment. We must learn to listen to hearts: our own, God's and others'. And we must learn to be in His Presence where we experience His Love for us.
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It is only through reconciled relationship with the Father, through Jesus His Son, enabled by the Holy Spirit, that we truly and personally accept that we are loved and valued.
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Eternal life is participation in the life of God. (That does not mean that we ever become God.) Eternal life is the gift of God. Participation in the divine nature, the life of God, begins when we are born again through our faith in Jesus.
In general, the term eternal life has two meanings:
- the soul going to heaven when the body dies
- participation in God's life
The afterlife cannot start until the death of the body. However, eternal life must start before the death of the body. God's life is eternal, meaning that His life has no beginning or ending. As soon as we are born again, we begin to participate in God's life while on this earth and will continue forever to participate in God's life when we are in heaven.
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The Kingdom of God is God's governance over heaven and over earth―its people and everything else on earth. When we are born-again, we enter the Kingdom of God, becoming His sons and daughters. God does not want a realm of subjects; He wants a family of royal sons and daughters, each one a prince or princess. God's government on earth is exercised through His sons and daughters, who are His ambassadors on this earth. God's first Ambassador is His own Son, Jesus.
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