As members of the human race, we are shrouded in ignorance. Barely do we know our world around us; even less do we know the nature of our own souls. Without realizing it, as we search for God’s heart, we are also searching for our own. For it is only in finding Him that we discover ourselves, for we are “in Him.”
~Francis Frangipane
Then Jesus said to them again, “Most assuredly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. All who ever came before Me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not hear them. I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture. The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.
~ Jesus, King of the Universe, in John 10
Yet He is actually not far from each one of us, for
‘In Him we live and move and have our being’
as even some of your own poets have said,
‘For we are indeed His offspring.’
~ paul, the Least of the Apostles, quoting truth from from Epimenides of Crete, and Aratus’s poem “Phainomena”
Oh beloved it is true. It really exists.
The story of the Pearl of Great Price is not just some allegory about the importance of things eternal. The Pearl is Him. It is He, Him and all of Who He Is in His great beauty and abundance that pours out on our lives.
And it only gets better.
He does not simply impart some quality of life on our lives. He is the very context in which our existence unfolds.
He came as a man that we might have life and have it more abundantly. He also, as G_d, created existence itself, that He might enfold Himself in it – and that creation might know Him by living and moving and having its being within Him.
There is this infinitely wide and deep boundary to life that is far from boundless – for we are wrapped in the very Person who is our Life. There is this intimate abundance that is simply unspeakable to those who have sown themselves to the Spirit and seen that the reaping is only a gorgeous, overflowing, eternal harvest from that abandoning of hope in the flesh; and a placing of all hope in Him.
A mystery? Yeah, but not really. Once we understand that life is really not about us – but that, in fact, everything is His, and everything is about Jesus – we then begin to see that there is this immense flow of Goodness flowing towards us. We no longer need to reach out to find Him (we never needed to anyway). No, once we understand, we see that we are awash in Him and all of Who He Is. And in this space we no longer look for abundance of Life. We, in fact, wonder deeply why we ever thought there was any life lacking in the first place.
Join me friends. Simply see the Truth for Who He Is. See the abundance He has brought to our lives tonight!
All that is made seems planless to the darkened mind, because there are more plans than it looked for…There seems no plan because it is all plan: there seems no centre because it is all centre.
~George MacDonald
