The With-God Life: What Is Reality?

We can reflect on much of our worldview with the following questions:

1. What is reality?
2. Who is well-off or blessed?
3. Who is a truly good person?
4. How does one become truly good?

For better or worse, everyone has answers to these questions.  Most of the time the answers are subconscious.  We act on them without thinking.  That is not necessarily bad, but since we are at the mercy of these ideas, they need to be evaluated and reworked from time to time.

Initially, we are going to spend time on the first question.  Another way to understand what we consider to be reality is to ask: "What can you really count on?" or "What is really going on here?" or "What is the story of your life?"  Can we really only count on what we discover in science?  Is what is really going on only power-grabs from various groups?  Is the story of your life, 'Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. . .  and then get to go to heaven'?"

We touched on a couple of important ideas concerning reality when these questions came up:

1. Is the kingdom of God really here now?  The Kingdom of God is God reigning. It is present wherever what God wants done is done. It is the range of God’s effective will. God’s reign is all around you and is from “everlasting to everlasting” — it is the natural home of the soul. Matthew uses the term the Kingdom of the Heavens to emphasize that the Kingdom of God is not far off and way later but is immediately and directly accessible to us through Jesus Christ. (see my blog for more information)
2. What is the gospel?  Trust Jesus and live in his kingdom with him.(see Dallas Willard article excerpt)

These touch on reality because they are questions about what we can really count on and what we may run into if we are wrong.  We will need to approach them carefully.

We will be careful, but we need not be worried or afraid.  We know that as we move forward, our Teacher, the living Christ, will go with us.  He hears our prayers and takes them seriously.  We need to take them seriously as well.  He will take us through the "dry and weary land" we face and lead us to green pastures and still waters and on paths of what is truly good because that is how he is.  This is what we count on.  "We rejoice for the river is here!"  (The River Is Here Song)  May God help us find what we can really count on!

Next Week:

• Meeting at the Seirps at 6:30pm on Tuesday, 27.
• Please Read C.S. Lewis section in Devotional Classics.