Experiencing Wholeness Happens On A Daily Journey With Jesus
What is wholeness? Wholeness means the state of forming a complete and harmonious whole. Another possible definition is the state of being unbroken or undamaged.
When talking about spiritual wholeness both definitions work. Spiritual wholeness means that our spiritual self is complete and whole, nothing is broken or damaged. In Christ, that’s our reality in the spirit realm. However, our earthly or physical realm usually doesn’t line up with what happened in the spirit realm.
My Personal Study & Steps To My Own Personal Quest For Wholeness
In 2002 I studied about Jehovah Rapha, God’s name which means, the God who heals.
I studied in preparation to teach a lesson about Jehovah Rapha, but equally I studied to understand what that meant for me. My personal study shaped me and set my feet on a path I never predicted. Little did I know that I would write a Bible study out of that study. And even more surprising was that many other studies would follow that first Bible study, Quest For Wholeness: Healing The Broken.
Quest For Wholeness: Healing The Broken was not the original title of that study. The first title was, Extreme Faith; the second title was 7 Weeks of Healing. It wasn’t until I sat across from a publisher who asked me to explain the book that I knew the true title. That day I explained to the publisher, “This study lays out the steps to my own personal quest for wholeness.”
What I have learned is that while spiritual wholeness may be completed in the heavenly realm, Scripture pictures a progressive transformation that continues throughout our earthly existence. The term Scripture uses for this is Sanctification. Sanctification is the ongoing process of our salvation and spiritual wholeness. It is the “we are being saved” element.
The Degrees And Cycles of Wholeness
Truly, on this side of eternity, we experience wholeness in degrees, in areas of our life, and in cycles.
As I wrote in my recent blog post, Not Already Perfected, But We Press On, we strive and push ourselves toward experiencing more and more wholeness in our physical self and our earthly life.
All of our years in school from kindergarten to elementary school, to middle school, to high school, to college, and then even on to higher graduate programs in college picture cycles of learning. This learning grows us and develops us as we go through life. Each grade or level of learning builds upon another.
For Example
We first learned short sentences like, “See Jack run.” Once we learned that, more was added until we read fluently.
Another example: We first learned 1+1=2 and 2+2=4. Then when that became easily understood, we learned to subtract, then to multiply and divide. After years and cycles of learning, these mathematical methods became common. And just when you thought, you knew math, your teachers add letters to the equation and you have to figure out what the letters stand for. So, the learning process and cycle begins again.
I believe experiencing wholeness in our physical self that manifests in our earthly life is a lot like the learning cycles we experienced in school.
Let me explain.
When I came to Jesus, I was a mess. I had ugly language, dressed like Madonna, and I lived a wild partying lifestyle. My thoughts and beliefs were tainted with sin, lies, and brokenness. Truly, I was the epitome of the polar opposite of wholeness.
My First Step
But I wanted something different. So I accepted Jesus outstretched hand and began my journey with Him. If you haven’t accepted Jesus outstretched hand, do it now. Click this Finding God link and I will guide you through that initial decision.
My Journey Began
I started going to church, reading my Bible, and doing the best I could to pray and live out this new life. In the beginning, my pursuit probably wasn’t daily, but pretty close. As I learned and grew in my journey with Jesus, I longed for more. I longed for more understanding, for more life change, and more and more of being in His presence.
My Life Of Daily Walking With Jesus
Jesus changed me and that change reflected on the outside. I stopped using ugly language and changed the way I dressed. I would say this was at the “See Jack run” or the “1+1=2” stage.
Then my lifestyle slowly changed. You might equate to the learning subtraction and then multiplication and division stage.
Every bit of that change happened in and through a daily journey with Jesus.
Eventually, He got to the deeper issues. The issues of the heart, the hurts, the deeply imbedded lies, and even scars from a sin filled life. Daily Jesus taught me truth and transformed me from the inside out.
25 Years Later
Today, I daily live with Jesus, still healing, still transforming me in cycles that lead me to experience more and more wholeness.
I have heard people identify themselves as Christians because they once upon a time walked an aisle and said a prayer. While that may be legit, if that is where we leave our spiritual life, at a specific date and time of the past, we miss the adventure of our lifetime. We miss experiencing healing and wholeness that is ours and that makes this earthly life the best life we can possibly live.
Jesus calls us to daily walk with Him because He wants us to experience the abundant life that He came and died for us to have. Matthew 26:55 and Luke 19:47 tell us the Jesus daily taught in the temple. And when teaching His disciples how to pray, He taught them to say, “Give us this day, our daily bread.” (Matthew 6:11; Luke 11:3) And in Luke 9:23 Jesus taught His disciples,
“If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.
Luke 9:23
Ultimately, what I have learned in these 25 years with Jesus is that the dailyness of walking with Him, seeking Him, listening to Him, following Him, and obeying Him is the key element to experience the continued cycles of healing and wholeness in this life.
Another term that the Bible uses to picture this dailyness is Abide. Click here to see all the New Testament uses of the term abide.
