If the message of Jesus had to be summed in one phrase, one of my contenders would be Matthew 6:33, “Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven.” Arguably, Jesus’ primary message is to love one another (John 13:34). Or perhaps it’s his instruction about the importance of the first two commandments (Mark 12:29-31). What about […]
Judgment is one of the great themes of the Bible. It contains many passages referring to both individual and collective judgment. But what does it mean? Why do we judge? Why shouldn’t we judge? Don’t judge others I’m going to approach these questions through three statements from Jesus: “You can see the speck in your friend’s eye, […]
Honouring? Eh? What kind of a tool is that? A very powerful one. Many years ago, when I was a young man, I left New Zealand on my own on a world trip. My first stop was Tokyo, where I spent several days. Cleaning ashtrays One day, I was walking along a footpath. There were […]
For this nineteenth tool in the New Earth series I’d like to discuss a tool whose power I have only recently come to recognise: compassion. That itself seems weird, because I consider it to be one of the four key values of Jesus: non-judgment, forgiveness, compassion, and unconditional love. Although the word doesn’t appear in the Bible […]
Forgiveness is a word that gets bandied around a lot. Phrases like “forgive and forget,” or variations, like “I will forgive but I won’t forget,” trip easily from our tongues, often with little thought—let alone genuine—attached to them. Yet Jesus is explicit on the reciprocal nature of forgiveness. “If you forgive others for the wrongs they do […]
Previous articles in this series have looked at a variety of tools that are available to you, 24/7 and entirely free, to help you get to the New Earth. The next tool is faith. Jesus tells us just how powerful faith is in Matthew 17:20. “If you had faith no larger than a mustard seed, […]
In the first part of this series I described how breathing is the safety blanket of the inherently unstable evolutionary process. The second part covered intent, the rocket fuel of conscious evolution. But where is this rocket going? Neutrality is the compass that guides your journey to the New Earth. In John 16:33, Jesus tells […]
uOn the rocky road to creating ROCI21, I went through a painful process of emotional upheaval as all that was dysfunctional and damaged, old and outworn, surfaced in my life so I could accept, forgive, release it and grow towards Christ. During this time, as my life, job and friendships collapsed around me, I turned to […]
One day in 1983, Henri J. M. Nouwen, a Catholic priest and bestselling author, went to visit a friend. He was captivated by a print in his friend’s studio—a reproduction of Rembrandt’s painting, The Return of the Prodigal Son. The painting impelled Nouwen on a spiritual quest lasting almost a decade, which included visiting the […]