"Let's Start With Jesus" -- Kinlaw's Thoughts

In His book, "Let's Start With Jesus", Dennis Kinlaw describes the design of human beings to be in relationship. He makes a direct correlation between the design of human beings and the grand theme of voluntarily yielding our independence so that we can know God in a right relationship.

“The key to understanding Jesus did not lie in Jesus. It lay beyond him. He lived joyously from Another, through Another, and for Another. Jesus was the divine son of God and a perfect human being, yet he did not find himself complete within himself. He was not the center of his own chosen existence. Since Jesus is the original pattern for the human person, it is safe to say that to be a person, even a perfect person, is to be incomplete, that no person is ever complete in himself or herself. The person’s completeness lies in an other. The Son is not complete in himself. He draws life from the Father and lives life to please his Father. Like the Son, who is named the first born among many brothers, we find our completeness in relation to our Source and our Sustainer.

The secular world has a different plan for and definition of fulfillment. That self-contained, self-directed life is looked to as providing the “center” and focal point of meaning, values, and even existence itself. The elevation of the self to the center of the world leads to the well-being of the self as the goal of living itself in this misdirected view of reality. Understanding Jesus illuminates personhood’s original meaning, to be expressed in relationship and mutuality. Modern social science’s concept of the self is at the polar opposite – promoting the notion of the capacity either to mold or actualize oneself. Like the eternal Son, we find our completeness in relation to our Source and our Sustainer. The person who is alone is not a whole person, because no person is ever supposed to be completely alone.

When Jesus begins to speak to his disciples about the cross, he insists that to find true life one must lose oneself. Self-protection, the refusal to give away oneself, he says, is self-loss and death. A person as a person, human or divine, finds fullness of life only in one beyond oneself. Christ came, died, and was raised again to make possible the reestablishment of fullness of personhood in people like you and me. That Spirit, who raised Jesus from the dead, wants to raise us from the death of living in and out of ourselves. The Spirit begets the very life of Christ within us.”

Holiness Unto The LORD!
Grateful