I have given them the glory that You gave Me, that they may be one as We are one – I in them and You in Me.
Jesus to the Father, in John 17:22
Why would we want to be one with God the Father?
He is our life. Whoever is disconnected from Him will die, but whoever is in Him will live and be restored.
How can we, who are sinful and broken beings, be one with God the Father, who is holy and without sin?
Through Christ Jesus. He is without sin and one with the Father, and at the same time He has entered our sinful world and taken on our sin so that He can reconcile those who are in Him with the Father.
Let’s unpack this together
The longer I journey with God, the more I’m convinced that oneness with God is our ultimate destiny and should be our core pursuit. Why?
In the first place because God is our life. When God created the world and ourselves, He made us distinguishable from Himself; we are not God, we are His creation and His creatures. However, I believe that He created us to keep receiving our life and to live from Himself. That we might, as Paul said in Acts 17:28, “live, move and have our being in Him.” God is the giver of life. Outside of Him, away from Him, there is no life. Though this supernatural reality feels mystical to our natural minds, this is not a mere philosophical statement. If indeed true (and I believe it is) this is rather a physical, practical truth; a law of nature – like gravity, or the fact that a baby who doesn’t drink milk will die. We literally can’t live without God; without Him or apart from Him we will die.
Now you might ask: if this is true, why don’t people who don’t believe in God and live apart from Him drop dead here and now? I believe that this short time on Earth is a time of grace, offered to us in love, where God has allowed us and all of creation to have enough of His life to live for a certain period of time (in Genesis 6 God proclaims that the age of humans will be limited to 120 years). Though in this life we’re broken and we’re dying, we’ve been given life and time to become reconciled to Him and live.
So the first reason is that He is our life (vs death). The second is that in Him we are restored. It’s not only about not dying. This reality that we know now is a broken one. It became broken because we, as humans, chose to live apart from God. We broke the connection, and we broke ourselves and all of creation along with it. All of creation groans. Not only do I not want to die – I want to become whole again and see the world and all of creation restored. Peace, joy, love, nothing missing, nothing broken, nobody hurting or suffering, no chaos untangling our efforts, no loss or evil. In God, we are not only safe, but we receive the restoration that comes from true life. Like a withering flower that’s grafted back into its plant and becomes beautifully restored.
The problem, though, is that we can’t be one with God. He is holy, perfect, sinless – and He can’t be one with someone sinful, broken, unholy. All of us are broken and blemished with sinfulness. We chose to break with God, who – giving us the freedom that makes true love possible – allowed us to break with Him. And we can’t go back. You can’t simply put back a branch that was broken off a tree.
But – and this is the Gospel – God made a way for us to be reconciled to Him by entering our world. He became a man. He provided a way for us to be grafted back into Himself. Jesus, the Messiah, Immanuel (God with us) is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Yes, the life, because through His death and resurrection, He has paid the price to be able to deal with our sin and brokenness, like an antidote to the most lethal poison! He can touch us, and instead of our impurity making Him impure, His holiness makes us holy. So that He can now be one with us. At the same time He is, has always been and will always be one with the Father. So He becomes our oneness with the Father. When we give our lives to Him, we confess our sins, die to ourselves, become baptised and become one with Jesus – He reconciles us with the Father.
We are then saved because in Jesus we are securely connected to the Source of Life.
And we start being restored because the Kingdom and nature of God flow into our being.
The main pursuit and joy of my life is to be one with God through Christ Jesus. It’s a journey of practising oneness: actively remaining in Jesus and becoming like Jesus. What does this look like? It’s a lot like practising oneness with one’s spouse, except that in a marriage two people are joined in parallel, “at the hip” as it were, where in Jesus we’re connected via our roots, our source of life. There’s a difference. But I’ve found marriage to be a helpful guide to practising oneness with God.
There’s a final aspect to this.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. And love your neighbour as yourself.
Jesus in Mark 12:30-31
Loving God means being one with Him (through Jesus) and living from Him and for Him. Note though that there’s a second part to Jesus’s commandment, in addition to oneness with God. Loving others means wanting and pursuing the same for them as the best I can want and pursue for myself – which is oneness with God. Therefore, my second biggest desire and pursuit should be to see the people near me and around me become reconciled with God through Jesus. And yes, through Jesus alone, as He said that nobody comes to the Father (i.e. becomes one with the Father) except through Him (John 14:6).
For me, oneness with God is the Gospel and the key to understanding our lives. Everything else flows from that. I’d be keen to hear your thoughts on how this compares with your experience of faith and God’s journey with us.
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Paul in 2 Corinthians 5:17-21
May you and I be one with our Maker and our Father God, through our saviour and Lord Jesus. Yes, may you be one with Him, that you may live and never die. May you be restored in Him, and live to see the restoration of all things. And may you take up the ministry of reconciliation that’s been given to you, and love the people in your life into oneness with God.
God bless you.
N
the barefoot ascent 