Good Friday? Good indeed!

Chapter 3 - "No More Separation" is a chapter that I need to read once a month!  Better yet once a week, better still.....I need to hear Jesus' words, "It is finished" daily!

Pg 50 - "At the cross God suffers the abandonment so we never do! The cry from the darkness that shook the earth, split the rocks, opened the graves, tore the huge curtain has become the declaration: "It is safe to enter the Holy One's Presence. Come, just as you are. Everything that needs to be done has been done.  Forsakenness, alienation, abandonment are finished. Come!......There is nothing we can do to gain access to the Holy Place..... 
-Ritualism will not do it
-Moralism will not do it
-Mastering right doctrine will not do it
-Adopting the right lifestyle will not do it.....no of them overcomes the separation.  None of them opens the curtain. None of them opens graves!" (It is finished Pg 50-51)

I read that and my spirit cries out YES! Amen!  Then, not too long after, I find myself putting my faith in ritualism, moralism, mastering right doctrine, adopting the right lifestyle.  I am not comfortable with NO SEPARATION between the Holy One and I so I create the neccessary separation through the following!

1. Ritualism - I and everyone else must attend church, be in a bible study, tithe......faith in ritualism creates separation between me and the Holy One.........and me and everyone else!

2. Moralism - I and everyone else must obey the 10 commandments and the 600+ rules and regulations the priests attached to the 10 commandments.......faith in moralism only reveals my own depravity and sin to me and everyone around me. 

3.  Mastering the right doctrine - I am right and you are wrong.  If you want to be right you must believe what I believe.....faith in the right doctrine is telling people to NOT put their faith in Jesus but in law.  I am pretty sure faith in doctrine is PRO-REID and ANTI-CHRIST!

4.  Adopting the right lifestyle -  (See 1-3 above).   Author Parker Palmer states our predicament well in this quote....  "I pay a steep price when I live a divided (separated) life - feeling fraudulent, anxious about being found out,  depressed by the fact that I am denying my own selfhood.  The people around me pay a price as well, for now they walk on ground made unstable by my own dividedness.  How can I affirm  another's identity when I deny my own? How can I trust another's integrity when I defy my own?  A fault line runs down the middle of my life, and whenever it cracks open - divorcing my words and actions from the truth I hold within - things around me get shaky and start to fall apart.   (Palmer, Parker, A Hidden Wholeness. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 2004, 5) 

Everything that needs to be done has been done. Forsakenness, alienation, abandonment are finished. Come!......There is nothing we can do to gain access to the Holy Place..... The way is open. Come, just as you are.  There is nothing to fear!

There is nothing to fear!
There is nothing to fear!
There is nothing to fear!