All IN from the Heart
The Karma video, “Grateful: Love Song to the World” is a beautiful expression of natural, spontaneous, effervescent gratitude; the kind that spills over and reminds us of what life is all about. We are often serious to a fault and miss the memo on life and relationships. “Grateful: Love Song to the World” is a perfect backdrop for the holidays.
In reflecting on gratitude I was struck by how grateful I am for the acuity that a spiritual life offers. Sometimes in our lives we “see” something and yet “miss it” at the same time. We only get half the story. You can’t really “see” or understand something you haven’t experienced. Certainly, you can learn about it, study it, absorb facts about it and even imagine it but in experiencing it directly you take a quantum leap in your real understanding.
Rim Huggers and Hikers
It’s the difference between being a rim hugger and someone who has hiked down into and across the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon is on my bucket list. I think I am attracted by its sheer size and wonder. I’ve flown over it and looked down and seen it from 30,000 feet. I’ve read about it but I have never hiked down into it.
Frankly, there is a difference between someone who has hiked the Grand Canyon and the person who has taken a coach ride to the rim and looked down. Rim huggers might know facts from a travel guide but not really comprehend the grandeur of the canyon. They have “head knowledge”….their understanding is intellectual rather experiential; informational rather than transformational. Hikers know the Canyon in a way that huggers don’t. Both have knowledge but the experiential knowledge of the hiker has added value. They “see” the Grand Canyon with different eyes.
The hiker knows the vastness of the Grand Canyon, its dangers, its beauty and its depth. They’ve crawled in tight spaces, got covered in dust. They’ve paid the price to understand and have sweat equity. Consequently, their experience is vastly different.
Knowing About God and Knowing God
Similarly there is a difference between knowing about God and knowing God. We don’t get to know God by looking at him from a distance. We need to hike into his heart, learn about his life, and experience his love. We have to travel the distance with God. It’s not enough to just sit in church and be a rim hugger. God wants us to go All IN and discover him.
“Eternity won’t be long enough to discover all he is or praise him for all he has done.” A.W. Tozer.
Most of us are educated beyond the level of our ability or willingness to put into practice what we have learned. We know too much and it bogs us down because we don’t live it.
We need to do more with what we know. At the end of your life God doesn’t want to say “Well contemplated, well thought, you good and faithful servant!” He wants to be able to say, “Well done you good and faithful servant.”
Goodness and faithfulness need to be lived. We don’t need or want a theoretical relationship with God; we need a substantial, real, breathing relationship with God.
God’s word is nothing more than a theory until you have experienced it. This was brought home to me through an article on Faith Fusion’s website entitled, “True Religion: To care for the needy, the widowed, the orphaned.” People are skeptical of religion because it seems to be a bunch of words and doctrine rather than action.
To be All IN you have to go All OUT for God. All Out Means 110% effort. It means loving God with all your heart, effort, and soul. It’s not about saying words. It’s sweat equity – the blood, sweat and tears kind.
One of the reasons I so admire Rev Moon is that his personality and heart are summed up in the words All IN for God. He reveals a lot about his life in his autobiography:
“I enjoy listening to other people talk about themselves. When people open up to me and talk about themselves, I don’t even realize time is passing. I listen to them for ten, even twenty hours. People who want to talk have a sense of urgency. They are looking for a solution to their problems. So I feel I need to listen to them with my full dedication. That is the way to love their life and repay the debt that I owe for my life. The most important thing is to think of life as precious. In the same way that I listened with sincerity to what others had to say, I also shared with them my sincere heart and fervor, and I would pray for them with tears.”
One Family Under God
We can’t be rim huggers at church either. It’s funny because you hear questions like, “Are you going to church?” like it’s a destination. You can’t “go” to church because you are the church. Church isn’t just gathering at a certain time –church is who we are all the time.
That’s why, if you notice, we prefer to call ourselves a faith community rather than a church. We’re a family and family happens all the time. I love the mission of The Family Federation for World Peace to create One Family Under God. This is not a rim hugging organization but an All IN venture that we want to realize in our lifetime. But the only way it can really happen is if we are All IN and All Out for God because it will only happen through him, and by him, in relationship with him, not just based on our own effort.
We face many challenges in our lives that we feel we don’t necessarily have the courage to face. The Bible is filled with stories of men and women who had to rely on God. They met God in their personal All IN moment.
Jonathan’s Daring Plan
One such story is Jonathan’s Daring Plan described in 1 Samuel 14. The scenario has Saul and his 600 men camped on the outskirts of Gibeah, around the pomegranate tree at Migron trying to decide how and if they should attack the Philistines. Jonathan has little patience and a whole lot of nerve and decides to take his amour bearer and attack the Philistines by himself. In order to confront them he has to scale a rock face and attack from beneath. In the annals of military history that would not be considered a master plan. Nevertheless, he is convicted:
“Perhaps the Lord will help us, for nothing can hinder the Lord. He can win a battle whether he has many warriors or only a few!”
Now, that’s ALL IN and Jonathan’s conviction won the day. He climbed the cliff and battled 20 Philistines at which point an earthquake struck and the huge army scattered. The chapter ends with, “For God helped him do a great deed today.”
What’s your cliff?
Today, we don’t need to battle Philistines but we do need to battle the forces that would defeat us. Our mission is small but at the same time it’s big enough to take everything we’ve got. We climb a spiritual battle each day as we try to overcome resentments, hurts, or simply develop a truly loving heart. Our cliff is scaled the moment we decide to be a hero in our community instead of walking away from a situation declaring, “It’s not my problem”. Just like Jonathan’s daring plan we can succeed if we go all in with God.
Our cliff might be simply reaching out to our neighbor. We are told to “Love our neighbor” and that, on the surface, seems like such as small gesture but honestly speaking for most of us it’s a huge cliff to be scaled because we have to overcome our inertia, reach out to someone we don’t know and break down the barriers in our heart.
It’s easy to love the notion of world peace and brotherly love; it’s much harder to get to know your neighbor. So how does that breakthrough happen? What’s our earthquake?
Creating seismic shifts
Rev Moon was uniquely practical about a life of faith. In one of his sermons he addressed the issue of breaking down barriers and finding the power to really love others.
“Where do you think our inner power comes from? By loving our parents as much as we can, we become more and more capable of loving the world and God. I have tried to show everyone by the things I do that this is the way for mankind to live. Each person must love his parents and be a son or daughter of filial piety. Once you gain this understanding you can go out to meet people knowing that you have a real connection with parents, and you can love your brothers and sisters with the attitude, “I am coming to see you because God wants me to.” The whole universe and every person is your brother and sister, not just in idea but in reality.
Mankind does not know that all people are brothers and sisters, so how can they love each other? We have to teach them and prove that they are brothers and sisters. This is why we study the Divine Principle. When each of you knows this deeply enough you will one day burst into tears, embracing each other, crying, “I did not know you were my brother, I didn’t know you were my sister.” You can pray to experience that.
If your supreme purpose is love, can you give up when you meet with persecution? With the right point of view, resistance will only intensify your desire. Let persecution work to encourage you even more to bring your true brother and sister to the bosom of their Parents.
This is what Christianity is all about, teaching everyone to gather all their brothers and sisters together as though they were their own physical family.”
These words are precious to me because they strike at the heart of the matter. How can I motivate myself to become someone who can love everyone in a real way – not as a spectator but substantially? God wants us to be All IN and really love other people. He wants us to make One Family Under God more than a tag-line. He wants to re-create the original family that was lost at the beginning of human history and for that God wants us to match him in being All IN. This is why we value the Marriage Blessing because it’s the vehicle that makes us one family under God.
When Jesus died on the cross 2,000 years ago his life epitomized what it means to be All IN. That heart enabled God to work miracles and turn a rag-tag group into the foundation that Christianity was built on.
God can work miracles in our lives too when, like Jonathan, we go All Out. That is the place we meet God. Books help, church helps, prayer helps – all these things stimulate you but God is waiting to meet you when commit to being All IN.
The moment you do is the moment you begin writing your own story that will end with the words…..”and God helped him, or God helped her do a great deed today.” I don’t know what your deed is but I believe you will find the power to do it when you connect to God.
To learn more read Mark Batterson’s book All IN
