Title: Spirituality that begins with emptying (Philippians...
Contents
Spirituality that begins with emptying (Philippians 2:5-11) 2003.04.02.
blessing to meet good people
On the other hand, there are people who do not want to be together. Some people are happy when they are together, but others are upset when they are together. I know well that it is my job to change the person who becomes angry when we are together into the person who becomes a blessing when we are together, but it is our honest sentiment that we want to work with a person who is a blessing to be together rather than a person who becomes angry when we are together. This is the title of prayer.
There is nothing more terrifying and terrifying than working with someone you don't want to work with. It is to be myself like him. I want to become a person who will be a blessing to all people if I live and work together, but I am afraid that meeting me and working together will be unlucky in the world, and I will go one step further and become a person who will become angry with people.
God blesses Abraham and tells him to become a source of blessing. He tells you to become such a person that a nation and nation will be blessed because of you and your descendants. That must be one of the greatest blessings God gives to us humans. Meeting good people is a blessing, and being a good person is really a blessing. Above all, I hope that you, dear ones, strive to be good people.
What is a good person? A good person means a person with a straight heart and a straight mind. It means a person who has a straight heart and a straight mind, and whose life and life are straight. Simply put, a good person is a good person.
What kind of mind is the best mind in the world? It is unquestionably the heart of Christ Jesus. The heart of Christ Jesus is the best heart in the world. The person who has the heart of Christ Jesus is the best person in the world with the best heart in the world.
becoming like Jesus
One of the most important purposes of believing in Jesus is to become more like Jesus. Talking, thinking, and even facial expressions are becoming like Jesus. When God first created us humans, He made us in His image. The fact that God created us humans in His image means that our thoughts and hearts resemble God. When God created us, He first molded us out of clay and breathed His life into our noses. It was not just the wind that God blows into our people. It was the Spirit of God. So we humans have become beings with the Spirit of God.
A person who has the Spirit of God has a heart and mind like God. Humans with God's heart and thoughts were very good in God's eyes. In other words, he was a good person. We humans were created out of clay and the Spirit of God. When we take the Spirit of God, that is, the mind and heart of God, from us, man becomes just a lump of clay. No matter how smart, wealthy, or high-ranking he may have in the world, he has no meaning or value. Human worth is in the Spirit of God. It is in the heart of God. In Romans 8:9, it says, 'If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ'. I interpret that saying that without the Spirit of Christ, we are not human. It's true. If we remove the Spirit of God and the heart of God from our human beings, we can no longer be human.
However, when our ancestors Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and sinned, we people lost the Spirit of God. I have lost the heart and mind of God. He became a strange being with a completely different mind and heart from God. Our people couldn't be nice anymore.
Humans who have lost the Spirit of God have become evil beings. He has become a being who attacks and destroys people and the world for his own gain with evil thoughts and hearts. Before the crime, people were good and beautiful. As the Bible says today, he considered others better than himself.
When the first man, Adam, saw Eve, the first thing he said was, 'This is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh'. He understood others other than himself as the most precious of himself. Adam understood Eve to be more precious than himself. But after he sinned, Adam turned into a being who blamed all his sins and sins on Eve. Adam called Eve 'that woman' before God. The difference between the words 'bone of bone, flesh of flesh' and 'that woman' is as great as heaven and earth.
Humans who have lost the heart and spirit of God have come to see people and the world as rivals rather than good friends. From there, hatred, envy, and strife arose that had never been before. The terrible incident in which Cain stoned his brother Abel was a natural occurrence as we humans lost the spirit and heart of God.
Pascal referred to man as a 'thinking reed'. Humans are weak like reeds, but by being able to think, they have become stronger than any other beings in the world. We can learn that the most important thing in us humans is our thoughts. There is a saying in Korean 'to think about'. It means that the same situation can be considered good or bad depending on thinking. In the same situation when the cup is half full of water, some may think 'half is left' and another may think 'half is left'. It is the same situation, but the former person feels despair in such a situation, and the latter person feels hope. And that despair and hope do not end with a simple feeling. That despair and hope become a real situation and have a concrete impact on us humans and the world.
Emptying is the beginning of Christian spirituality
The spirituality of Christ began with emptiness. Although he is God, he did not demand equality with God, but emptied himself and lived as a servant. The first thing to do before filling is to empty it. A bowl full of something cannot hold anything. To fill in the grace that God has given me, I must first empty what is full within me. Just like when you go to a hospital and go for a health checkup, you empty your stomach by fasting and perform various tests, in order for a Christian to be healthy, you must first empty out harmful things such as germs in you.
If emptying is the top priority of spirituality, what does emptying mean?
The people of God in the Bible understood and obeyed by leaving this emptiness. When Abraham left his hometown after being called by God, he entered the path of faith. Hometown is the foundation of life with parents and siblings. I grew up after that. Thousands of years ago, in a society that had a family-centered farming culture, leaving your hometown was not an easy task. However, God tells us to give up everything and go away for a new job. Because there is nothing to start over. This is because it is difficult to believe in God and live alone in a culture without God.
After that, God told Abraham to sacrifice his son. Who is his son? It is the life you hoped for and depended on. But God tells us to cut the umbilical cord of that life. You really are telling me to quit. It is because only God remains only when the Son is empty.
Spirituality is perfected in leaving only God alone and emptying out everything that hinders us from believing and following Him. We must depart from the greed of idols and fetishism, our hometown of the flesh, and also from Sodom and Gomorrah, the cities of pleasure. When Jesus called his disciples, ?쏪esus said to them, ?쏧f anyone will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me??(Matthew 16:24). The way to follow Jesus is to constantly deny yourself. Without self-denial for devotion, you cannot be like Jesus.
The reason we long for change but hate it is because of our fear of change. Because of fear that if we leave, we will not live, fear that we will lose if we serve, and fear that we will die if we empty ourselves, we are unable to make a decision even though we want change. But you have to leave. You cannot see the new world without leaving.
God made Moses give up being the son of Pharaoh's princess. After leaving, Moses became the leader of Israel. Let us also leave. ?쏤ollow me, and I will make you fishers of men. Just like the disciples who left everything behind and followed Jesus, let us follow them as well. Emptying the immortal for the eternal is never a foolish decision. It is the wisest belief to forsake what is not for the sake of the most precious value.
Jesus cleared the sky. He emptied the king's throne. You emptied your life. He emptied everything for us. ?쏬et this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as robbery, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in human form, and being found in human form, humbled him and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of a cross.??
Emptying is for filling, filling is emptying for another devotion. Emptying is repentance. Repentance is change. It is a transformation from humility to humility, to slavery, to the cross, to death. let me give up Let's get rid of greed, pride, hatred, anger, envy, and distrust. let's throw it away Let us no longer become prisoners of hurt and inferiority, and spread our wings to the new world that God has prepared. You have to be light to fly.
Those who long for grace should spread their hands out. God's grace is placed on empty hands. The people of God are not people who become great by holding on to something, but rather people who fill the spirituality of Jesus by emptying and throwing them away. You cannot follow the kingdom of God by grasping the world. Only those who give up on me can follow Jesus. And there is a new fullness.
Just as Jesus Christ gave up and emptied himself for the whole world and mankind, so he gave up his most precious things, life and heavenly throne, and did not work to be served, but set an example of serving himself. Just as you gave up all your work and threw it away, spirituality begins only when we boldly throw away or empty the things we value.
empty-handed prayer
I gave up everything I had to put my hands together
I close my eyes to the world, close my ears to temptation, and only look to the Lord
Alas, the Lord is the master of all my love
Ah, the Lord is the owner of all my hopes
I open my unfulfilled heart to you
Come, Lord