"Unity" is a worldwide religious organization. I don't know if they would be considered a denomination, so let's just say they are more of a New Thinking religious organization. Andrea and I went to a Unity church here in Florida til the covid shutdowns, then everything seemed to be different afterwards and we just finally quit going. While I like the model of the church format and their teachings, something happend to the one in our town and it just didn't feel right to us anymore. With that being said, here's the story:
Michael Gott is the pastor of Unity Houston. I listen to his Sunday teaching sometimes. One day he said he grew up going to a Pentecostal church. He recalled his church teaching that if you aren't Saved AND speak in Tongues you aren't going to heaven. He remembered thinking, how can this be? This really narrows down who's going to be getting in. It was then that he decided he'd be leaving. He didn't say how old he was at the time, but if he was still young he knew this wasn't going to be his lifelong church. Along with that story and searching Buddhism, Hinduism and others, and hearing about so many people having encounters with God, I started thinking, how can Evangelical Christians say they have a monopoly on God? How can they say "If you don't ask Jesus to be your savior you aren't going to heaven?" I looked up some statistics, and these were just from last night.Now, according to this, if Evangelical Christians are correct, three quarters of the world is going to hell. Like Michael Gott, since God is a God of love, I'm not buying it. I don't have statistics to back it up, but I think there have been more encounters with God in other religions then the 700 million christians have had. We are watching The Saints series on Fox Nation right now, and every one that we've seen so far has been a person who has had an "Experience" with God. Not just one that goes to church on Sunday, but one that truly gets transformed like it says in Romans 12:2. A favorite line salvation based Christians like to say is "God is a God of love. He isn't choosing to sent them to hell, they have a choice to accept Jesus or not, so they are sending themselves to hell." I'm not buying that one either. Those Christians want to say the sinners prayer and use that as a license to sin. My thoughts on that are, if you can feel like you can "just keep on sinning now" then I question your Love for God.
I'm reading another book now called "The Soul's Desire-A Guide On How To Pray" by Glenn Clark. He talks about Jesus method of teaching was in parables and using your imagination from those parables to learn, therefore teaching us that we need to think past what we see as our reality and connect with God and "Not My Will But Thy Will." Jesus's teachings was meant for everyone. How did we get to the point where any given denomination can say the other is wrong? Now everyone is looking at each other and seeing their differences and not the Jesus they have in common. Even within the churches themselves there are cliques. A group of friends gossiping about a person or another group. People join together for a Sunday class and/of church service and sometimes can't even get out of the front door before gossiping. I have to admit, that writing about it now kind of feels like that's what I'm doing here. I'm not trying to imply that I'm any better, but as I was reading how this author was talking about it I found myself nodding in agreement with him.
The idea of the book is to pray using your imagination like Jesus did in the parables. Instead of starting to feel like you're catching a cold, taking medicine and praying to get better, connect to the Christ Consciousness in meditation that you are a child of God and have a healthy body. Instead of praying acknowledging you don't have enough money in your bank account to pay your bills that are due, meditate and listen for the thoughts to come to your for a solution. We want to pray, give our needs and desires to God and move on with our next task. What we need to do is sit in quiet and connect our heart with the heart of our soul's consciousness that was created in love and the solution will come.
To try to summarize all these thoughts on salvation, they're what I feel have been shown me in my frustrations about the christian community, and my quiet time solutions when searching for answers, just because you say a "sinner's prayer" but then don't try to transform to a life of love developing your christ consciousness, doesn't mean you're saved and get a free ticket to heaven. Salvation has nothing to do with church, a denomination, rituals or believing what I say or anyone else says. Salvation is your own connection with God. Jesus said "Be still and Know That I Am God." If we just take time to sit quietly, focus our concentration on the spot on our forehead between the eyes, look into the darkness and notice the thoughts and possibly the images that appear, your will eventually experience the peace and love of The Christ that Jesus the man taught that we can experience.
Salvation is connecting with That Love Consciousness. That Consciousness is God, not some man with white hair. God is Love. We were created in God's image, therefore we are love, we just have to bring ourselves back to the place where we remember our loving soul that love made.
What also used to frustrate me about the church was when we would have a weekend event and people would be pumped up about God, then the next week back to the same routine. I don't want that to happen here. If you have questions, ideas for topics to help you on your path, please leave a comment and let's address them. Let's study the things you're unsure about, or questioning, or just want to go deeper into.
Have a great rest of your week and,
Keep Searching,
Paul
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