Aloneness to Oneness
There is a difference between loneliness, a state of mental suffering when alone, and aloneness, which is recognizing one's unity with God. This article emphasizes that being one with God means never being alone or lonely, as one becomes a living temple for God's spirit. It discusses the narrow and often challenging path of a deep personal relationship with God, which involves radical trust and a transformation from self-centered to God-centered living. This article also reflects on the Biblical narratives of figures like Job, Abraham, and King David, emphasizing their personal journeys with God amidst struggles, and highlights the profound spiritual connection found in relationships with others who share a similar depth of faith.
“Jesus said to him, ‘I am the WAY, the TRUTH, and the LIFE. No one comes to the Father except through Me.’” (John 14:6)
One With God Means Never Being Alone or Lonely
There is a difference between loneliness and aloneness. Jesus was never lonely even though he was rejected, despised, misunderstood! Aloneness is realizing I am already ONE WITH GOD. I am God’s expression on earth, just like Christ.
“…yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me” (John 16:32)
There is a love and unity in the Godhead that we can enjoy since we are made to partake of the Divine nature, if only we could deny worldly greed, selfishness, ego, lust, materialism.
Loneliness means when being alone causes mental suffering/pain. You are not your trauma, circumstances. Aloneness is recognizing you are already ONE with God. Accept your aloneliness is really oneness. In John 17, Jesus prayed the prayer of oneness for Himself and all who would believe in Him right before His crucifixtion. He was not focused on pain and suffering but knew that God was with Him always!
You are a LIVING TEMPLE for God’s Spirit to dwell in! You have need of nothing. Life is not about owning anything because God owns everything already. Life is not about owning/buying/selling/eating/drinking/pleasure but about realizing God is already in me. I have all I need because I don’t need anything but God! God is always with me!. Your deepest identify is really about realizing you are God’s self-expression in bodily form! God is expressing Himself in your body, soul, spirit! You are already ONE with God. Guess what? God shares His nature with all creation! Even though we are ONE with GOD, we not God (we cannot know the past or the future, only God knows everything!). Being ONE with God does not mean we get to be proudful, feel better than others or tear others down, instead we show respect and honor to all because God is good to all! There is no separation between you and God! Nothing can truly harm you because LOVE only does the HIGHEST GOOD TO ALL.
The Loneliness Of A Relationship With God Is A Narrow Road
“Turn not to the right hand nor to the left: remove thy foot from evil.” (Proverbs 4:27 KJV)
I am not politicaly conservative. I don’t believe rules and fear make people authentically loving and compassionate. Conservatism preserves order, civility and protects people from anarchy, but has the potential to become corrupt in the wrong hands. The 10 commandments (rules) were given to show us that we can’t keep them on our own, but we must rest what God can do in us through resting in His work of grace and individually hear His voice and shift from self-centered living to God-centered life. Real spirituality is being honest with God, yourself and others, not putting on a self-righteous show!
Religion a human attempt to catch the reality of God who just is I AM (too big to define) from our side of the universe. The word “religion” (Latin: “religare” which means “bond” or “re-unite”) is a good word, but unfortunately it has become a symbol of the human attempt to seek, reject, or make sense of God. Religion is in its very essence anthropomorphism (Transfer human views and perceptions on to God). Religion is the desperate attempt to make sense of God from a human perspective. I don’t believe you can “theologize” God unless you experienced God in your consciousness. You can talk “about” God, your can practice religion like an addict, you can talk about God like you talk about the weather, or biology, or computer science.
I am not politicaly liberal. I don’t believe everything goes. I don’t believe the answers to the complex fabric of the human existence are liberal views. Liberalism is as extreme and unrealistic as conservatism is. One is obsessed with “preserving” (rules), the other with “bringing walls down.” (anything goes)
I BELIEVE IN LETTING GOD LOVE ME, BECAUSE I BELIEVE LOVE IS A POWER THAT CAN TRANSFORM MY LIFE FROM THE INSIDE OUT. Love defines the existential reality and unlimited power of God. I BELIEVE THAT A “RELATIONSHIP” WITH GOD IS NOT ONLY POSSIBLE, BUT VITAL TO A LIFE THAT NATURALLY MANIFESTS LOVE AND COMPASSION.
When you believe, change your thinking and receive the God’s Spirit, you can let God LOVE you, God will not make you a Christian, God makes you born again for a heavenly country. God will turn you into a loving, growing mature son/daughter of Heaven.
When you let God LOVE you, you won’t need to try to be a good person. That’s not your job. You will spend time with God, and let God transform you supernaturally.
I have found out that a RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD when I let God love me, is not about trying to overcome particular sinful behaviors, but a correction of what I believe God is like. This is a radical differentiation with the general spirit of religion. The real PURPOSE behind letting God LOVE you, is to establish a RATIONAL RELATIONSHIP with God, based on spiritually breathed reasoning that will grow your consciousness of God’s 24/7 presence in your life and TRANSFORM YOU! When you finally understand that God loves you matter what… When it dawns on you that God is with you no matter what… you will begin to wake up to the reality of a God no religion can teach you about!
“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: TAKE YOUR EVERYDAY, ORDINARY LIFE—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—(Yes, your exhausted self, your defeated feelings, your sense of despair, your multiple challenges, all of it) AND PLACE IT BEFORE GOD AS AN OFFERING."
A love relationship with God will heal you by changing your beliefs about God and transforming you into who you are meant to be. Meaning and purpose are embedded in this concept of becoming. When you let God love you first, you suddenly realize you are part of a history that spans all through human history. You become part of the body of God eternally connected with a huge, worldwide, global, historical, and timeless crowd of believers.
You begin to read the stories of the Biblical narratives and you suddenly identify with King David who lived and wrote many of the Psalms almost 3.000 years ago. You identify with Abraham who lied twice letting other men take his gorgeous wife to protect himself from being killed. Yet God chose him for a special mission.
You read in the Gospels about rough fishermen who became followers of God as Jesus. You read about a religion that hated his guts, while humble, broken people came to him to be healed and be comforted by him.
You were there 2.000 years ago. Those human beings were not much different than you and I. The words of Jesus begin to speak to you.
As your relationship with God matures, God stirs your heart for other people. As you connect with God, you find your heart going out like never before to people around in your sphere of action. Your relationship with God fuels and creates a longing for a relationship with your spouse, your neighbors, your kids.
Your relationship with God ignites in you a desire to connect and relate to others. The mark of God in your life becomes love, compassion, grace towards people who suffer and are needy.
Yet as you go deeper in your personal relationship with God you begin to find another reality Pastors, megachurches, religion and Christian friends don’t tell you about because they have seldom experienced it.
Suddenly God becomes the center of attention in your life. Your consciousness of God grows, deepens, and expands.
You realize God is with you all the time whether you are aware of it or not. You also realize God loves you no matter what you do. This shocks most people because they have been told by religion that God only likes “nice” people, and those who only do what God wants them to do.
Your consciousness of God’s love drives you to begin to practice a lifestyle of reckless and radical abandonment, by making God your sole desire and highest delight in life.
You find yourself conversing with God before going to sleep, or when you wake up in the morning. Or you decide to turn your radio off when you drive to chat with God.
You find yourself longing for intimacy with God.
This is what I have chosen to call in my own experience the “costly” side of my relationship with God. That’s when you begin to experience the attacks of demonic forces. You also experience antagonism from religious people.
This side of the relationship with God is costly because the crowd is not with you. Perhaps you know one or two people who share the same passion with you.
You find yourself struggling with the superficiality of religion in sermon, articles, books and social media.
Intimacy with God is costly. Here is the beauty of it.
The more you let God love you, the more you will experience love, and the more reckless and radical you will become in your response to people who feel antagonistic against you.
The more you let God love you the more naturally changes will happen in your life. Why? Because a walk with God is not about “trying” to be good and change, but letting God change you.
The more you catch a glimpse of the love of God, the more you will be attracted to broken people. The less you will be affected adversely by people who find you weird, too passionate about God, and compassionate about the needy.
I get a glimpse now of the spiritual loneliness and frustration Job experienced away from the church gathering, and the popularity of religious power. Wow… For all practical purposes he was perceived as a religious fiasco, a loser, a lost man.
Job was harassed by the leadership of God’s true church at the time. Job struggled, agonized, and did not surrendered to orthodox, conservative theology. He stood rooted in a personal knowledge of God.
When Job’s religious, conservative wife saw her husband suffering she said, “Are you still maintaining your integrity? (Your belief in your kind of God) Curse “God” and die!" (Job 2:9 NIV)
The real dark loneliness of Job’s journey was caused by a clash between the flawed views of strict religion about God, and his own experiential knowledge of God.
“So hold your tongue while I have my say, then I’ll take whatever I have coming to me. Why do I go out on a limb like this and take my life in my hands? (Why do I risk my own existence? Why do I put my own life on the line by standing against your conservative theology AND YOUR LIES ABOUT GOD?)"
And here comes Job’s stunning answer…
“BECAUSE (I know God so well) that EVEN IF HE KILLED ME, I’D KEEP ON HOPING. I’d defend my innocence (against your accusations based on lies about the character of God) to the very end. Just wait, this is going to work out for the best—my salvation!" (Job 13:15, Message)
Job’s experience gets to the core of what I am describing as spiritual loneliness in a journey with God while surrounded by people who don’t comprehend your path, unless they are or have been there.
What Job did not know, because he was not privy to the information we can read in the book today, is that the conservative theologians who confronted Job day and day out, were part of a demonic strategy to destroy Job. Job was a test case for the whole universe to see. God knew about it. God allowed the test case to take place to prove that love wins over pain, suffering and fear. Of course, Job and the conservative religious Pastors did not know what was behind.
It’s simply a fascinating story when put in the context of today’s contemporary religious landscape.
I understand Abraham’s broken human nature, manipulative behavior, allowing men to take his gorgeous wife twice to protect his own life. He became very wealthy because he lied, and the King bestowed fortune on him, driven by fear of punishment by the “gods.” What would you say of that kind of wealth created by someone today?
in spite of it, God saw in Abraham a struggling sinner with a mission, a purpose. Abraham’s lack of faith in God’s promise, like many of us, drove him to “help” God, which created a mess we are still dealing with as a global community, 4.000 years later. It just blows your mind!
I thank God every day for the Biblical narratives that shed light on the human fabric, how broken it is, how fragile, how twisted, and then on the other side of the spectrum glimpses of the character of God.
I understand the loneliness of King David, as a fallen sinner in the presence of God. Persecuted day and day out by his enemies, and his own family. Suffering the consequences of his own fall, David surrendered in the presence of God and saw the face of God’s grace, mercy and redemptive power.
David did not find affirmation in the Jewish religion of the time, but in a personal relationship with God. Yes, God used a prophet to get his attention, but the spiritual journey was David’s and David’s alone.
I read the Psalms and I find in them a guy who was intimately connected to God. A struggling sinner hanging on to God. His hymns, poems, and utterances about God were born in a deep empirical consciousness of God’s presence you don’t learn by reasoning, or simply theologizing God. It’s knowledge rooted in a relationship.
You Will Find People Who Are Experiencing The Same Existential Loneliness In Their Journey With God
There is a depth of fellowship only available between like-minded (or rather: like-spirited) souls that share the same depth in their relationship with God. They have experience the same intensity and passion for God. They have “seen” with the eyes of faith the same treasures, and “tasted” the same pleasures of heaven.
These are people who may looked ruined socially, economically, but they are rich spiritually. Their hearts are fixed on the same thing and they share the same commitments.
Believe it or not, many of these people are homeless, some of them are struggling with mental disturbances, they are suffering, they carry the scars of painful memories of the past, abandonment, and abuse. They know a God I know, and we can talk about the same God!
And let me add that the people I meet and connect because we know the same God, are not religious conservatives. They are not denominational loyalists. They don’t push organized religion as the “way” into the Kingdom of God. They are not social liberals. They are not obsessed with social justice, for the sake of activism, THOUGHT they stand for love and compassion (as God does, above legalism, right and wrong) as the core of God’s call in their lives… They are the modern “JOBs” experiencing a personal relationship with God which I call mystical, real, profoundly satisfying, and manifested in a life of humble service and compassion for others.
They may be suffering, they may not be successful in the eyes of the culture but we know the same God.
This is the narrow road. This is a lonely journey!
Very often in this kind of walk with God you truly feel like a peg in a square hole. A misfit. You get fingers pointing at you from all directions.
“You, GOD, are MY GOD, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water." (Psalm 63:1 NIV)
GOD’S PEOPLE ARE NOT GATHERED TOGETHER IN ONE PLACE. THEY ARE ALL OVER THE WORLD. OFTEN IN THE MIDST OF A LONELY JOURNEY LIKE YOU
I have to think of all these believers in the spiritual outbacks of this world. Those who cultivate lovesick hearts and an ever growing hunger for the presence and the knowledge of God where no one else does.
People in nations or regions that die from spiritual hunger without realizing, people who belong to the few who cultivate the secret place of intimacy and wholeheartedness before God without having any support from the people around them or any people around them who inspire them to give even more and go even deeper.
I have to think of the people who, after having been touched by God in a mighty way, return to their traditional, conservative, lukewarm churches where no one has a paradigm for what they have experienced.
I have to think of the missionary couple who moved to a spiritually desolate region, completely stripped of any spiritual fellowship apart from each other to serve the needy.
I have to think of the young man who encountered God in the most weird kind of experience (he told me he felt weird) and due to a lack of other Christians in his area started reading Matthew 5, 6, the words of Jesus on his own while his atheist parents scolded him for his insanity and religious fanaticism. He ended up joining a Buddhist community and his spiritual experience and connection with God put me to shame.
I have to think of the group of people who consistently come together and experienced the most intense prayer meetings, with crying and sobbing in, and because of the measure of the presence of God in their prayer meetings, they ventured to help people no one in the entire city understood, but they were compelled to do it by the love of God.
These are the modern day hermits.
People who - while living in cities, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people, even while being part of communities of believers or secular people - find themselves in a spiritual desert of loneliness.
These are the spiritual hermits who understand the words of David and cry with the same longing and commitment:
SOON OR LATER YOU AND I WILL BE FACED WITH GOD’S CALL TO LEAVE EVERYTHING BEHIND, LET GOD LOVE US, AND FOLLOW GOD IN THE WORLD. IT’S ALL ABOUT LOVE!
Love calls you and me to press on, to go deeper in in our relationship with God, to get to know God more as we journey together.
Once you have experienced the love of God, you will be emboldened like Job was.
You can’t go back, you can’t just stay where you are. You burned the theological bridges and the lies who kept you imprisoned in fear and legalism.
To the one who has tasted of God’s liberating grace backing down is an act of highest stupidity anyone is capable of. You are ruined for ever if you choose to reject such love. God does not stop loving you. You become miserable running away from God!
Love’s longing is to give everything, surrender all, leave everything behind to cling to God, just as a lover embraces a lover in real life. “Counting the cost” (Luke 14:27-28 NIV) makes sense in a capitalistic culture, but really… that religious approach to a relationship with God was “yesterday,” when you did not know better. “Calculating the cost” of a relationship with God is an absolutely absurd idea to the one consumed with yearning for the God who loves you beyond your wildest imagination!
Oneness As a Way of Life
John tells us the purpose of the book (John 20:30-31) is to document the miracles and message of Christ so that people will come to believe in Him and have life in His name (eternal and sanctified). The word “believe” (wedding-vows-type trust) is the key word in the book of John and is used 99 times. The meaning is to “commit” your life to Christ. “Life” is another key word in John to take on Jesus’ life within us. We have no life without Christ (we must be connected to the vine as the branch cannot live apart from the vine). The essence of all that we can study of the scriptures is “That we may know God and to know Jesus Christ whom God has sent” – on this, everything else hinges. John tells us the seven “I AM’s” that Jesus says, showing that He is everything to us and all we need. John clearly shows us that Jesus is a personal savior. God had no beginning and existed before the foundation of the world. Jesus is God and the perfect example of who God is. The person of Jesus is God in physical form. If you desire to know God, then know Jesus who is God. Jesus is our all and all. John describes Jesus using seven different attributes in the first chapter:
- The Word - verse 1, 14
- The Light – verse 5,7
- The Lamb of God – verse 29, 36
- The Son of God – verse 34
- The Christ – verse 41
- The King – verse 49
- The son of man – verse 51
Do you Want to know God better? We must READ and MEDITATE on His Word.
“To all who received Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:11,12).
Living the “I AM” Lifestyle means Jesus is my WAY, TRUTH, LIFE. I don’t own the truth and life and therefore cannot sell it or profit from it. Jesus’s LIFE in ME through the HOLY SPIRIT is my way of being and reality.
BE STILL AND KNOW JESUS IS I AM!