The Wisdom of Jesus
Common gospel sayings attributed to Jesus of Nazareth suggest that anyone in range of his voice with ears to hear should listen. To do so is to hear a past message which still applies today. His words speak of our true nature, which is a love within to be expressed outwardly to all.
Historically, Jesus was a Jew who led a small band of disciples in Roman occupied Galilee and Judea in the early first century CE. He taught his views on God’s sacred authority to all who would listen. In doing so, he acted against temple and Roman sovereignty, and those in power regarded him as a rebel. As such, the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, had him crucified. After his death, adherents continued to revere him. Oral tales of his teaching circulated for decades among Jewish sects of Jesus followers. Later, several of these sects depicted his sayings, acts, and life in written gospels as they separated from traditional Judaism. Today, millions of Christians worship Jesus as their lord and savior. Others, Christian and non-Christian alike, see him mostly as a spiritual master.
I know Jesus as a teacher of wisdom. I hear him say that to be saved from ourselves, we must shift our consciousness from the world outside to a world within, which he calls the kingdom of God. He says this kingdom is present now for all to enter and be fulfilled. No one is turned away. It is the source of all we seek. For me, this is the room within.
I hear Jesus say that there is a realm within us which is the presence of our creator. He calls this realm the kingdom of God and says it is the home of Love. Jesus speaks of Love as the intimate love of a child for a parent, the loving presence of God within. Jesus knows we are Love’s expression and calls us the children of God. As children of God, we share Love with all as one.
Oneness is like God as a dancer, and we are the dancing. We are God-expressing. The presence of the dancer is in the dancing. Creator and creation are the same. God-expressing is Love. We are Love. Our true nature is expressing Love for all to receive. Jesus says to share Love as he did, so we come to know that we are one with our creator. We reside in God’s kingdom as Love just as dancing resides in the dancer. There is no separation.
Jesus says to express Love as all-inclusive without conditions. Love knows no requirement, judgment, or punishment. It expresses freely through grace, unmerited. Jesus desires that we be Love as God intends, so he describes a kingdom where we can remember our true nature. Jesus knows the way to the kingdom. He describes it for our ears to hear that we may follow him. His wisdom guides us in our hearts, helping us to remember to be the expression of Love that we are.
Jesus says that the kingdom is our consciousness of Love or God’s presence. When we live in consciousness of Love we are in the kingdom and revere God. Jesus says that the presence within us is both personal and communal. As our awareness of Love grows, our consciousness of God expands, helping us to remember that we are one with all. As we remember that we are one in God, thoughts of separation slip away, worldly concerns disappear, and peace appears in our midst as we choose to love one another as God loves us.
The joy found in Love is greater than any happiness in the world. Love is God in us by grace. It is given freely for all to receive God’s abundance and goodness. But we don’t always accept what is given. We deny Love. We choose to believe that we are separate from God and each other. When we live the fearful lie of separation, we suffer in a world built by our own fear of being emptiness—of being abandoned, unloved, and without existence. Fear misleads us into finding our meaning in worldly possessions, dependent relationships, and noteworthy achievements. These become who we are, then we attack each other to preserve our misguided illusions of self. Although our worldly self is encouraged by thoughts of separation, Jesus reminds us that we are one with all of creation as God’s expression of Love. When we live as God intends—knowing our truth as Love expressed—then our ego withers, along with our fears and illusions, and Love’s joy and peace prevail as we live consciously in God.
Living as God intends brings fulfillment because it opens us to accepting God’s grace. Love, joy, peace, prosperity, and health are ours to receive abundantly. They are gifts whether we accept them or not. God offers abundance fully, but we live too often as if God’s grace is nonexistent. We ignore God’s blessings in favor of worldly gratification, which never satisfies fully. Jesus says true fulfillment lies in the kingdom, in our consciousness of God. He says to accept God’s abundance by giving it away. It is easy to share in this abundance when we see ourselves in others. God’s blessings are given for all to receive the same, which we do when we offer them freely to everyone in turn.
Our consciousness of God is dimmed by our attempts to find fulfillment outside the kingdom. It is in the kingdom that we find real joy and peace. We enter the kingdom by being Love above all else. What we are as Love expresses God truer than who we think we are in the world. Joy and the deep satisfaction of peace that we desperately seek come from Love, not from the world and its fleeting gratifications.
In the kingdom we realize our true purpose, which is to express Love freely. Knowing that we are Love expressed, we shed our worldly attachments and their associated fears. We recognize that what we regard highly and cling to in the world is only an illusion of fulfillment. Knowing Love as our true nature we are free to accept God’s grace fully. Expressing Love totally, as God intends, subdues our worldly self, and diminishes our insane illusion of separateness. Expressing Love allows the presence of God’s truth to abound in our lives, leaving false thinking and its miseries to wither in the dust as they drop along the road to the kingdom. There is neither beginning nor end in God consciousness, so our being Love is eternal. Jesus says that Love is without end. Give Love freely with great joy and peace to all so that you will never feel that you lack.
Jesus leads us to the kingdom to be renewed by God’s presence. He says to focus on Love, for compassion is the key to the kingdom, not righteousness. Following divine law might guide us to the door, but compassion opens it to God’s welcoming embrace. We tried to close heaven’s door behind us forever when we became insane and made a false world outside the kingdom that we think separates us from God. Jesus returns us to our sanity, to our consciousness of God. Once we remember the kingdom, Love rids us of the guilt of sin we hung link-by-link around our necks like Jacob Marley’s ghost. We break free from the false promises of worldly gratification to find true peace and contentment.
All of us are blessed in the kingdom. When we remember this, we forgive ourselves and help others to do the same. Forgiveness clears our path to the kingdom, brushing away the trip falls of hurt, anger, revenge, and other evils such as greed. We often lose our way, but the path remains for us to reclaim. God does not punish us for our waywardness.
When we wander off, Love awaits our return patiently. We can return to our path by focusing on Love in all relationships. We stay on our path by dropping the expectant conditions of our worldly love and expressing Love that does not fear, judge, or punish. When we trip or fall, Jesus will help us up, dust us off, and remind us that we are Love.
Love is the truth on which we can rely without fear. It rescues us from our failed attempts to find salvation outside of ourselves when we stray from the kingdom. Turmoil and anguish frustrate us when we leave our path, for then we are lost. By stopping and being still, we can rest consciously in God’s truth and find our way again. We can know and share the love that truly brings deep and abiding peace. Love is the way of the kingdom, and we are its expression.
Jesus says to focus on Love, to express Love as God intends. We do so by letting go of the illusion that we are separate from each other and God. With our mind on Love’s oneness, we live for God’s purpose and not our own, bringing abundant goodness to our lives. Our worldly self deceives us into using false goodness to get what we want from others for personal gain. But goodness without compassion is not God. Love’s compassion is the key to the kingdom. Compassion faked by our ego comes from thoughts of separation and fear of lack. When we allow ego to run our mind, we express fear instead of Love, even when we think we are doing good. Love comes from the kingdom without conditions. It is the very presence of God within us. It is love as God intends, given with no strings attached to everyone we meet. To gain the kingdom, we must be Love. As God’s expression, we must consciously and consistently share Love freely with all.
Giving Love is remembering the kingdom within as our home. God offers us sanctuary without expectation or judgment and wants us to do the same. Our afflictions cannot be overcome in a compassionless world of inequality. Jesus says to stop seeing faults in others and examine our own lives, for the faults we see in others lie first within ourselves. We are to bring Love from the kingdom into the world to gain salvation from our worldly limitations and suffering. Finding fault is insane because it keeps us from expressing Love as God intends. We are all one in God, so what we give and what we receive is the same. The judgment we give is the judgment we receive, so let us regain our sanity by practicing Love’s compassion above all else. That is God’s will. Love is the kingdom. It is the source of all we seek. When we know Love, we remember our oneness in God and the abundance of grace in which we all share.
True abundance comes from the kingdom. Love, not worldly wealth, is the source of rich and lasting blessings. Inevitably, all we ever gain by relying on worldly wealth for happiness is never-lasting illusions of gratification. Truly, the kingdom within holds more love, joy, peace, prosperity, and health than we can ever bring about by accumulating worldly possessions. Following Jesus by responding to Love’s call reveals the full goodness of God’s bounty, which Jesus says we gain by giving away. He says to serve God by bringing Love’s abundance to the world, sharing it openly and freely as God shares with us. We fulfill our purpose when we sit at God’s table as one, friend and foe alike, sharing the bounty of the kingdom together as God intends.
We have truly entered the kingdom within when we finally see Love in those we fear. Then we gather as one, like a lighted city on a hill, to cast God’s truth far and wide. This truth we learn from Jesus. His wisdom brings to light an awareness of presence that too often lies hidden in the depths of our unconsciousness. Because we know the world better than the kingdom, we seek salvation in the world’s bounty. Into our bins of hope, we gather possessions, achievements, and relationships. When attacked, we protect our treasures mercilessly in fear of losing them. Jesus says to give the world its due, but first know the kingdom. When we know Love intimately, as he does, it is God’s abundance that we gather and share in finding true salvation. Our purpose in God is to be the whole, complete, perfect expression of Love that we truly are. Then fear dies along with the illusion of evil that it feeds. How is evil to live when it is starved of fear? Remember that there is no fear in Love. The illusion of evil dissipates when we return to God and live in unity as Love, which is our true nature.
The fruit of knowing God is Love. Love is the goodness of the kingdom, and forgiveness is its nourishment. We pour forgiveness upon the world to grow our goodness for harvest. Worldly love is bland, impure, lacking the zing of Godly Love because it is tainted with conditions. The fruit of the kingdom is pure. We can pick it only with forgiving hands, hands which have let go of the guilt that binds us to the world. Jesus says to enter the kingdom with empty hands, then we will know our truth as God’s expression of Love.
To let go of guilt and find forgiveness, we listen to Jesus. With two good ears we hear his message that we are God expressing Love—we are the dancing of the dancer. We are God’s expression of itself. We are a single expression that insanely thinks it is many instead of one. This does not work, for then our insanity bears false hopes that we might find fulfillment in our own crazy world of suffering.
We fail miserably at self-creation because our attempts are built on falsehoods, the greatest of which is the lie that we are separate from God and alone in the world. Jesus knows we are not alone. He knows the unifying power of Love and wants us to remember to be the expression of Love that we are. He guides us to remember what we once knew: that we are the kingdom of God. When we remember our true nature, guilt is gone. There is nothing to resent or fear. The totality of creator and creation becomes our complete consciousness.
With two good ears I hear Jesus saying to follow him home to the kingdom we never left. This is the kingdom of the god that is Love, a personal god of grace in whom we dwell joyfully and peacefully. It is a short journey because we are there now. We insanely forgot that we are the dancing that is God’s dance. We lost consciousness of our true nature which lies in the room within. Jesus asks that we join him there. Knock and the door shall open. No one is left out. Jesus says that we all are included in the totality that is Love. We are free to come home to the kingdom when ready.