great awakening

THAT QUICKENING MOMENT: Part 2

/ Darlene Franklin-Campbell / 2 Comments

YE MUST BE BORN AGAIN

rebirth

Rebirth means coming out differently than you went in.

If you want to enter–

–to know

–to percieve

–to experience

the realm of the spirit,

the kingdom of God,

you have to spiritually be born anew, regenerated, from on high.

The only way to do this is to hear, see and encounter truth,

truth about who you are, why you’re here and where you’re going.

The moment you wake up, it’s like a new birth, as if you’re spiritually coming alive. This is that quickening moment.

Some quickening moments happen in an instant. Some happen over the course of time and as a result of culminating events, but regardless of how it happens, you will never be the same again.

In the New Testament, book of John, third chapter, Jesus does the best job I’ve ever heard of describing the quickening to Nicodemus. Let’s look at what he says.

In the following passage, I am using the New International Version with the King James of the Book of John as a reference. I’m also reading from the Greek linear Bible and consulting Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance. Bolded areas are my own thoughts.

…………………………………………………………………

FLESH IS FLESH. SPIRIT IS SPIRIT.

Night sky

That which is born of flesh is flesh. That which is born of spirit is spirit.

Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council. 

2 He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.”

He came to Jesus at night because Nicodemus was a religious teacher of Judaism and Jesus had no credentials in the religious or academic circles of his day and culture. In other words, Nicodemus was a member of the “experts” and Jesus was just a guy from Nazareth.  

3 Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see (perceive, comprehend) the kingdom (realm, way) of God (the Supreme Divinity) unless they are born again (from above, on high).[a]”

4 “How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!”

5 Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter (come into) the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit (God’s spirit). 6 Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit[b] gives birth to spirit.

A person is born into this world via the flesh, the physical, and we live in a body made of flesh, but we are not flesh. We only live in flesh. We are spirit and when we are born into the flesh body, we can only comprehend physical things unless we are reborn, regenerated, awakened from on high to spiritual things, i.e. The Kingdom of God, the Eternal Way.

YOU CAN’T IMPRISON THE WIND

who can control a tornado?

You can’t imprison the wind!

 7 You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You[c] must be born again.’ 8 The wind (Spirit) blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”[d]

The Greek word used for wind here is identical to the one used for Spirit, “pneuma” and it means a current that is breath or a breeze, a life spirit, a divine spirit.

You can hear and see the effects of the Spirit of God, the Way of Life, but you can’t contain it, control it, or determine which direction it is going to move, just as you can’t control or predict the wind.

I am thinking of how, even with all our modern technology, we can’t always accurately predict the activity of hurricanes and tornadoes. We don’t know exactly where they’re going to touch down or what they’re going to do. Sometimes tornadoes pop up that weren’t even on the forecast and newscasters can only assess them after the fact.

There is a line from the movie, China Cry, where Lam Nang Ye tells the Chinese military general that in order to lock God away, you’d have to imprison the wind. It can’t be done, not with force, not with coercion, not with technology or threats. You can’t imprison the wind. And you cannot control the Spirit of God that resides in each of us and when we are regenerated, reborn, awakened from on high, we are like a wind.

9 “How can this be?” Nicodemus asked.

10 “You are Israel’s teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things? 

Again, Nicodemus was the “expert.”

 LIGHT HAS COME INTO THE WORLD AND DARKNESS JUST DOESN’T GET IT!

light has come into the world

Light has come into the world but those who live only for this world do not understand it.

11 Very truly I tell you, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still, you people do not accept our testimony (evidence given, stated).”

I find it interesting that Jesus uses the term “we” in this statement. Why? Who is the “we” and “our” of which he speaks? Could it mean all those who had come and tried to explain the Way of God? In another place he spoke of how the Jews had stoned the prophets and messengers from God instead of believing them. Could he be speaking of all those who bring messages of eternal truth? When he says, “You people do not accept our testimony.” In the Linear Greek Bible it reads more like he is saying, “And still, you people do not get it.”

So, I understand this verse as thus: “I tell you. Here’s the way it is. All of us who have come from God (including the prophets and teachers who came before me) have tried to explain the way the Realm of the Spirit, the Kingdom of God operates, and still, you people, with your man-made degrees, religious doctrines, rules, laws, and credentials, just don’t get it.” That which is born of flesh is flesh and that which is born of spirit is spirit and the earthly mind will never comprehend spirit. Spirit speaks to spirit.

 12 I have spoken to you of earthly things, and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things? 

LIFTED UP

13 No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man.[e] 14 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up,[f] 15 that everyone who believes in him should not perish but may have eternal life.”[g]

From the Greek: No one has ever entered into the abode of God except the one who came from there—the Child/Offspring of the Human race. Just as Moses hoisted up the serpent in a desolate place, so it is necessary that the representative of the Human race must be hoisted up so that all people who adhere to, trust in, and cling to his words would not destroy life, lose life, or perish, but have perpetual (continuously renewed) life because of him.

The life Jesus offers those who trust him isn’t just in the hereafter, but in the now. The peace he offers is NOW. The promises he offers for those who trust him is far superior to anything we can gain in this world; the peace surpasses any and all amounts of human understanding. I am thinking of an old song that says, “I’d rather have Jesus than anything this world affords today.”

A PURPOSEFUL, HAPPY, FULFILLED LIFE–NOW AND FOREVER

16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Because the Supreme Divinity agapao (valued, accepted, and appreciated without regard to conditions or circumstances) the inhabitants of earth he brought forth and delivered his sole offspring that all people who committed to and trusted him should not lose life, destroy their lives, or be lost from their way, but have perpetual existence.

17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn (punish) the world (people), but to save (heal, deliver, protect, make whole) the world (people) through him.

LOVE

Wow! What a departure from things so many people have heard. Do you hear this? Jesus didn’t come into this world to start a religion.

He didn’t come to punish people for their errors.

He came as a result of LOVE, and he came from LOVE because God is LOVE.

He came so that anyone who hears his words and believes them, who follows the Way, would have a blessed, happy, healthy, complete, and fulfilled life.  No matter where you’ve been, what you’ve done, what lie you’ve believed, Jesus brings this message to you. GOD IS FOR YOU, NOT AGAINST YOU.

LOVE is not an emotion. LOVE is the WAY! And the ONLY means to having a truly happy life is to walk in the WAY. If we live only for ourselves and what we can attain in this life, if the only hope we have is in this life, we will be miserable people.

BE IT UNTO YOU AS YOU BELIEVE

18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.

If we refuse to believe the message of Jesus, if we refuse to trust him, to commit to following his words, to walking in the Way, we are punished already, not because God is punishing us but because we are choosing to walk contrary to the guidance of the Divine Spirit. The only way to have inner peace, joy, fulfillment, and contentment is to walk according to the Way. If we choose not to follow the Way, we end up punishing ourselves.

19 This is the verdict (justice, condemnation): Light (illumination) has come into the world (inhabitants of earth), but people loved (valued and appreciated) darkness (obscurities, shadiness) instead of light (illumination) because their deeds (efforts, toil, works, acts) were evil (hurtful, degenerate, diseased, derelict, malicious, grievous, harmful, facinorous, guilting, culpable—unkind, unmerciful.) 

20 Everyone who does evil hates the light and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.

21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.

Think of ANY, and I mean ANY, thing that people do to others that cause pain, destruction, hopelessness, etc. (evil) and I will tell you there is a lack of love, i.e., a lack of God’s Way. Love does nothing to cause intentional pain to others.

Whenever we ignore that inner gnawing that we have stepped off the path and continue, little-by-little, transgressing our own moral boundaries, our own souls, we start down a slippery slope that can explain away any immoral behavior until we find ourselves doing things we never imagined we would do and involved in things we never imagined we’d be involved in.

Yet, no matter where we are or what we’ve done, if we come to our senses IN THAT QUICKENING MOMENT and realize we’ve been walking the road of pleasing self and/or others instead of the road of LOVE (the Way), doing things God’s way, we can make a shift. We can change. We can surrender to the Way and the Way is LOVE. When we do, God, LOVE itself, meets us and wraps spiritual arms around us and all the forces of the universe work together for our good, to bring us to a place of inner peace, which is the true and only measure of success.

Jesus said, “I am the WAY…” Do you know why he said that?

Because he is LOVE. He is LOVE because he came from LOVE.

For John 4:7-8 says, “Beloved, let us love one another, for everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not, knoweth not God for God is Love. So, beloved, let us love one another.”

When we make that shift, that change, our entire perspective on life and all our values shift. In the next blog post I will discuss what these changes might look like.

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  1. John 3:3 & 7: The Greek for again also means from above.
  2. John 3:6 Or but spirit
  3. John 3:7 The Greek is plural.
  4. John 3:8 The Greek for Spirit is the same as that for wind.
  5. John 3:13 Some manuscripts Man, who is in heaven
  6. John 3:14 The Greek for lifted up also means exalted.
  7. John 3:15 Some interpreters end the quotation with verse 21.

John 3 NIV – Jesus Teaches Nicodemus – Now there was – Bible Gateway

(33) China Cry (1990) | Trailer | Julia Nickson-Soul | Russell Wong | James Shigeta | France Nuyen – YouTube

 

Twice Born.

/ Darlene Franklin-Campbell / Leave a comment
Photo by Mario Wallner on Pexels.com

What makes you alive?

What makes anything alive, for that matter?

There is certainly an electrical current of some sort running through each of our bodies, but where does that current come from? What makes it enter a body and what makes it leave a body?

Erwin Schrödinger (a Nobel Prize winning Austrian-Irish physicist known for his work in the field of quantum physics) said, “Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.” At the close of his book “What is Life?” He expressed his conclusion concerning individual consciousness, presenting it as manifestation of an all-pervading universal consciousness. He wrote, “You can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one.”

WHERE DOES LIFE COME FROM?

I’d like to focus on the statement that consciousness is “absolutely fundamental.” As far back as we can go in human history, we find multitudes of people from a myriad of cultures who all believed in a spiritual dimension of some sort. I purpose that it is from this other dimension that the source of all life originates.

When I was a teenager, I attended a small Methodist church and I can remember to this day, a woman who would periodically stand up during the hymn singing phase of service and shout, “Glory! Glory! Glory!” She was so adamant that it would make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Then the song leader, a man named Willard, would tear up and he would say, “This world is not my home. I’m just passing thru.”

Some people would say that they were just emotional, but I believe they had a glimpse of a higher reality, a place they called “Glory.” Jesus called it “Heaven.” Recently, I’ve heard some people refer to it as the “Vortex.” I think Vortex feels rather impersonal to me, but for someone who isn’t from such an organic background as I am, it might work best. I like Heaven, Glory, Spirit Realm/World/Universe/Dimension, Kingdom of God, all much better. Whatever floats your boat. The point is—there is a reality of infinite abundance, joy, peace, love, and supply that is far superior to this one and the only way to access that reality is to realize that it operates on a different set of principles, a different wavelength, a different frequency.

SECOND BIRTH

You could say that we are born into this physical world in a physical body and the longer we are here, the less we remember of our true origin, until we believe that we are the bodies we live in and that what we see here is reality. At that point, we are trapped and enslaved to the rules of this time-bound reality. But there is a passage in the Bible where Jesus tells Nicodemus that the only way to see the Kingdom of God is to be born-again. More on that in a few paragraphs.

In Tla Wilano, an Indigenous American language that I speak, we have term that speaks of all things being connected in a connective reality that surpasses the mere physical manifestation in this world around us. It is universal, but more than that, it is spiritual. All things we see in this reality first existed in that other reality, that spiritual reality.

All things, in this reality, when left to their own volitions, tend toward a state of chaos and entropy, but in the spiritual reality, nothing ever decays or ends. Time, beginnings, and endings are all physical manifestations, because this reality is temporal, but spirit is eternal. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It has no true beginning and no true ending. However, energy can be harnessed to create, and energy can destroy. Therefore, energy originates from the other reality and animates matter in this reality, bringing life.

UNCONSCIOUSLY CONSCIOUS

We know that energy, semantically speaking, is the capacity for doing work and that work is done when any type of movement happens. When there is no energy in a body and the body no longer moves of its own volition in any way, we say that there is death, or the absence of life, the absence of that inexplicable force that animates. Beyond the mere animation of a lifeform, there is also consciousness. Some life-forms have a more advanced form than others.  Consciousness is beyond mere animating energy; it is the awareness of one’s own existence. A conscious being is sentient. Consciousness does not end when the animating energy leaves our bodies.  How do we know this? There are literally thousands upon thousands of near-death experience recounts where people talk about being out of their bodies, floating above their bodies, etc. Many of these people were verifiably dead before they were resuscitated and even though you can’t scientifically measure or do an experiment to prove or disprove their statements, reason dictates that thousands of people over the past several hundred years, coming forward with very similar stories, relating uncanny events that they couldn’t have known about naturally, can’t ALL be making it up!

So, I proceed under the premises that there are at least two realities existing side-by-side, and each reality operates on its own set of principles.

WAKE UP, SLEEPY HEAD

How then, do we who awaken to the fact that we are eternal, spirit beings, live in this world while being true to the principles of the Spirit World?

Everything in this reality is designed to trap you in this reality. Our spirits, the real us, are not originally from this reality, so our spirits see the bigger picture. We know that one day a shift is coming (think Biblical account of Millennial Reign and other accounts of such a time from several cultures) that will merge the two realities, but that is for another blog post on another day. Many people believe that here and now is all that’s real. They believe only what they can document, quantify, study, and measure, only what the five senses tell them, what the news tells them, what other people tell them. They have believed it for so long now that they don’t know who they really are. Once you hear the truth, really hear it, not just with your ears, but with your core essence, you awaken to the knowledge that you are a powerful being emanating from an eternal reality.

Remember that whole born-again thing? A born-again person is one who has awakened to this truth of who we are and where we are from, and once we awaken to that truth, it frees us from fear, from guilt, from shame, from all of those things. Jesus also said, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” That freedom sometimes gives you a perspective that is not of this world and oftentimes puts you at odds with the authorities of this world, who frequently live by the principles of controlling others. Remember how Jesus told people things that caused them to think freely and that free thinking was a threat to those in power, so they wanted to be rid of him, to cancel him, so they killed him. They thought they were rid of him, but you can’t kill a spirit. That spirit remains and it will infect others and they will awaken and the spirit of Love, which always seeks to liberate, not control, manipulate, or capture, will go on. You cannot imprison spirit energy. You can only deceive people and try to keep them from coming in contact with it, from waking up.

Finally, here are some basic principles of the Spiritual Universe that we start to live by when we are Born-Again (Spiritually Awakened) live by.

  1. Learn the Rule of Heavenly Currency: The currency of the universe is attention: so, whatever you focus on, you draw to yourself. As you think, so you are.
  2. Practice the Golden Rule: Treat others as you want to be treated. Want more for them than you do for yourself. Whatever you want for yourself, make it a point to want it even more for others. If you want peace, pray for someone else to have it. If you want wealth, wish for your friend, or your neighbor or someone else to have it. No matter what it is, if you want it in your life, wish it for someone else even more so.
  3. Live by Faith: Emotionally respond to the things you want, that you wish for, as if they are already here. In so doing, you literally call those things that are not as though they were. You create their manifestation. Whatever is not of faith is off the pathway to the Kingdom of Heaven. If it’s not faith, it’s not God’s way. Simple as that.
  4. Praise Your Way to Victory: Have a thankful heart, an attitude of gratitude, being thankful every day for all good things in your life. Make it a point every day to thank God and if a thing is lovely, if it is trustworthy, if it is positive and joyful and loving and kind. If it is peaceful and beautiful—give it your full attention.
  5. Seek Out Opportunities to be Kind: Show random acts of kindness. You never know when one kind act from you might start a chain reaction in someone else’s life. As a teacher, I can think of numerous times when a teacher did a tiny thing that she forgot which a child remembered into adulthood and was so influenced that it sparked a career or a positive life-path. Look for every opportunity to be kind. Will Rogers once said that the best way to get rid of an enemy was to make him your friend. Seek peace and as much as possible, live at peace with everyone.
  6. Let Your Light Shine: Light a candle instead of cursing the darkness. Wayne Dyer said that you can never solve a problem by condemning it. When you use shame, name calling, put-downs, and blame, you are in opposition to the laws of the Spiritual Universe. If you want to shed light on deeds of darkness and expose them for what they are, then do so without stooping to their tactics. So, no mudslinging.
  7. Be Led by the Spirit: Does it line up with your inner being? Does it match up with what you know to be true about God? To do this, you kind of have to be in tune spiritually. You must be born-again. Otherwise, you’re not in-tune spiritually.
  8. Seek First the Kingdom of God (Glory, Heaven, Vortex) and its righteousness (right way of being) and all of these things that people strive for will just come to you by default. Exalt the principles of mercy, kindness, compassion, empathy, appreciation, humility, patience, forgiveness and joy above status, recognition, and power.
  9. Learn the One Big Rule: love (value, honor, adore, accept, and appreciate) your God with your emotions, your intellect, and spirit and love (adore, value, honor, accept, and appreciate) your fellow human being in the same way and in the midst of loving yourself.
  10. P&R: Pray and Rest: prayer is asking, so do it and then be still and watch the manifestation travel from Spirit Realm to this reality. Take time to breathe, to smell the flowers, to feel the sun on your face and just be.

POEM

by Darlene Franklin-Campbell, 2016

People wander through this life

Not knowing who they are

They push and pull to get ahead

Leave a lifetime full of scars

I hear a voice; it’s calling me

Come, wake out of the dark,

Give yourself to the reign of Love

Make an eternal mark.

Let the Great Awakening

Start right here in me

Open up my heart

Open up my mind

That I might really see

Let me pour this love

Onto every soul I meet

Let the Great Awakening

Start right here in me.

Sources:

“General Scientific and Popular Papers.” In Collected Papers, Vol. 4. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences. Braunschweig/Wiesbaden: Vieweg & Sohn. p. 334.

Schrödinger, Erwin. My View of the World, chapter iv, and What Is life?