Jesus is much more concerned about shaking your foundations, giving you an utterly alternative self image, world image, and God image, and thus reframing your entire reality. Mere inspiration can never do this.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the transformative power of Jesus' teachings, which can alter one's perception of themselves and the world.
Richard Rohr suggests that the essence of Jesus' message is not just about providing inspiration but about fundamentally transforming an individual's understanding of themselves, their worldview, and their relationship with God. This profound shift in perspective is so significant that it reframes one's entire reality, leading to a deeper and more meaningful existence.
In practice
In a sermon discussing personal growth and spirituality.
My scientist friends have come up with things like 'principles of uncertainty' and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of 'faith'! How strange that the very word 'faith' has come to mean its exact opposite.
The gift of darkness draws you to know God’s presence beyond what thought, imagination, or sensory feeling can comprehend.
I cannot illustrate huge differences between male and female spiritualities except in their starting points, style and fascinations along the way. This is significant, however, and has huge pastoral implications: men must be challenged in the world of doing; women must be challenged in the world of relating.
Much of the Christian religion has largely become “holding on” instead of letting go. But God, it seems to me, does the holding on (to us!), and we must learn the letting go (of everything else).
We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.
I've had the good fortune of teaching and preaching across much of the globe, while also struggling to make sense of my experience in my own tiny world.
Perhaps a man may commit suicide in self-defense.
If we open our history books, we shall see that the laws, for all that they are or should be contracts amongst free men, have rarely been anything but the tools of the passions of a few men or the offspring of a fleeting and haphazard necessity.
The sort of dependence that results from exchange, i.e., from commercial transactions, is a reciprocal dependence. We cannot be dependent upon a foreigner without his being dependent on us. Now, this is what constitutes the very essence of society. To sever natural interrelations is not to make oneself independent, but to isolate oneself completely.
A rational man acting in the real world may be defined as one who decides where he will strike a balance between what he desires and what can be done.
Oh what idiots we have all been, this is just as it must be
I think midlife crisis is just a point where people's careers have reached some plateau and they have to reflect on their personal relationships.
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