Chapter 4 | Born Again
This is from a series of blog posts I wrote back in 2020 to share the background for what was to come.
To move forward I had to forget everything I thought I knew about God and about myself. My old view of God said that God was angry and that the reason my life wasn’t working out the way I wanted it to was that He was punishing me for my many hidden sins.
The God I encountered was inviting me to awaken to his love and begin to live out of the power of love.
The penny dropped for me when I saw that there existed an actual dimension of Love that we can live in here and now, namely the Kingdom of God.
When I heard ‘kingdom of heaven’ I had perceived only of a post-earth experience. I had made the mistake of thinking that eternal life is what you get after you die if you’ve followed all the right rules and acted properly in this life. I thought getting saved was primarily about avoiding hell in the afterlife.
“I thought getting saved was primarily about avoiding hell in the afterlife. ”
Heaven is Here
Now I was seeing that I could be saved right here and now. My shame, ego, false self, and limiting beliefs could die and I could rise up and live out a new God powered life. That I could become someone more like God who didn’t sin in the way that I had always sinned.
For the first time ever, I dared to see myself as someone who was free. God’s love flooded my entire being. Through most of the sermon, I sat there and wept. Not just tears running down my face, but shoulders shaking, head down, snotty-nosed weeping. My wife and kids had no idea why I looked like I had lost the plot to life, sitting there sobbing my way through our first Sunday at Journey Church. They knew nothing of my hidden sin, and had no idea that I might see myself as ‘needing salvation’.
Of course, I argued with God about this radical grace. My rational mind rejected the idea that I could simply receive His love for me and be healed and live a new kind of life.
“But God - you know what I’ve done. How can you love me?”
He answered back “[I have removed your] sins as far from us as the east is from the west” - Psalm 103:12
My protests were met with a warm invitation. An invitation to simply be in awe of a God who loves me this lavishly. To embrace the fullness and the mystery of knowing and being known. To be open and honest and unafraid and unashamed in the presence of a Divine Love.
That afternoon I tried to explain to MJ and the kids what I had experienced. I told MJ “my life just got wrecked, but in the best kind of way”.
“Dear friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from God. Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God. But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.”
