You are one with God: a Bible study
A short devotional to start your week in God's Word
Welcome back to the Monday Morning Bible study on EWT, free for all subscribers! I invite you to think of two friends who’d be blessed by reading this devotional and forward it to them. This is a huge way you can support my work at EWT, and I appreciate it greatly!
“And I have given them the glory you gave me, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be brought to perfection as one, that the world may know that you sent me, and that you loved them even as you loved me.”
-John 17:22-23
You are one with God.
Hear that again: you are one with God.
By your inherent, indissoluble nature as a child of God and by the graces given to you at your baptism, you are one with Him.
Not because you did or could do anything to deserve it, not because you hustled your way up some divine ladder to reach Him, not because you have a great track record of being a generally good person—
You are one with God just because He loves you.
You might have caught that this came from last week’s Sunday Gospel. Our visiting priest shared an excellent homily in which he identified this passage as a critical glimpse into what Jesus’ heart is truly about: perfect love for us. In this prayer here He reveals that His most prized possession is His relationship with God, and more than anything He is desperate for us to have this, too.
Why wouldn’t He be? If He truly, fully, unconditionally loves us, then He’d want us to have the most priceless treasure known to mankind: perfect union with God.
We are already one with God by the nature of our childhood in Him and baptism in His Name, and we choose whether to become more or less unitedly one with Him every day by growing in virtue by His grace or not. Both are simultaneously true: we can’t change our inherent oneness in Him as His children, but we can decide whether we will live in and engage with this oneness or not by how well we love God and others.
The Saints lived in this oneness. You and I are invited to live in this oneness, and the great news is that we don’t have to stress and muscle our way to “get there”—God gives us every grace we need to receive Him well, to respond to life from this beautiful, radical, un-shaking oneness with Him. We are called to merely ask and receive His graces, let them build upon our nature, let them flow through our hearts so that as we receive His love, we can freely pour it out to others and Him—to tune our hearts to sing His grace.
The greatest lie in Christianity is that we can’t, or don’t need to be, or don’t have what it takes to be holy. Complete unity, overlap, and oneness with the Father is for all of us—He wouldn’t love us into human existence if He didn’t want us to experience this! This is the meaning of life: to be one with God, experience His perfect love, and let that oneness and love spill out into everything we say and do.
Truly, I can’t imagine anything better than perfect union with Him. There’s nothing I want more.
In Him,
-Eliza
ELIZA LIKES THINGS
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LET’S COMMIT IT TO MEMORY:
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Begin:
“God and I are one.
He loves me just because I exist.”