Living Connected: Embracing Divine Order and Shalom

You are meant as an individual being to be connected with God, never alone in His power and love, to be connected with other people, look them in the eye, care about them, bond with them, to be connected with your work in your task from one moment to the next, whether it's leisure, volunteering, for a paycheck, to be fully invested, engaged in it, connect with creation, love it, wonder at it, revel in it because this is what it is to flourish. [00:00:19]

God makes human beings in His own image, so we're meant to be created to Him, connected with Him. He makes us to be stewards over creation, exercise dominion that doesn't mean exploited but care for it, so there's a connection there, and then we're to be connected with each other while still being separate. [00:03:47]

Sin is to try to separate what God has joined together or try to join together what God has separated. What's racism? Well, God made all of human beings, every human being to share in His image, but racist says I want to try to separate you from your status as an image bearer because of the color of your skin. [00:05:37]

The unaided mind tends towards chaos, towards anxiety, discontentment, but he's studied over many decades, beginning with artists and athletes, and then others, the nature of our conscious experience, and he says at our best we were actually created to experience what he calls flow. [00:09:55]

Flow means what happens when I get so engaged in an activity that I experience such a deep sense of absorption in it that I'm still here, and yet I have a kind of oneness with what it is that I'm doing so I lose self-consciousness. I don't lose self and I don't lose consciousness. [00:10:18]

Christianity teaches that personhood is in fact an indivisible unit of creation, and that you are made in the image of God to be connected to God and to other people and to the work that you do as an image bearer into all of creation. [00:15:07]

God sent Jesus to reconcile us, to make it possible for us to be again united with God, and Paul would strain to find the language to describe that. He would sometimes talk about Christ being in you, the hope of glory, or very often talk about you being in Christ. [00:15:40]

Jesus came to divide, to tear down the dividing wall of hostility, so that we could become one. Now there is no longer Jew nor Greek, slave or free, male or female, all those things that caused us to separate the humanity that was intended to be together, for we are one in Christ Jesus. [00:16:23]

We are meant to be one and yet still to be separate. Paul says that we are one body but many different parts. The eye can't say to the ear I don't need you, the hand can't say to the foot I don't need you. This is called diversity training. [00:17:04]

We don't value each other because of our diversity, we value each other because of what we share in common, which is the image of God, and we are moving towards a day where the shalom will be so great that it's impossible to capture it. [00:17:28]

As you walk through this day, live connected, understand it's a really good thing that you exist. Don't go through life thinking that you have to appease other people or make other people like you or give up your self-existence. No, it's a real good thing that yourself exists. [00:18:37]

As you surrender it to God and bask in God's love from one moment to the next every time you think about it, and seek with each person as a free, powerful, God-loved self to give yourself in love to them and to the task you do like listening and learning in this moment into creation all around you, you become an agent of shalom. [00:18:55]