OBEDIENCE
Surrendering your will. This just involves bringing to consciousness whatever resistance we experience in ourselves to anything or anyone in our lives. Every time we feel any resistance, we are to offer up to God our willingness to surrender our will in order to align ourselves with His will, with whatever already is manifesting in our lives. This is a practice to be done throughout our lives. Gradually, your resistance will become less, even when you’d ordinarily object, as you practice surrendering to the truth of what is, to God’s will. Surrendering our will means we surrender our expectations, our assumptions and our preferences.
The benefit of surrendering our will, of practicing obedience, is that we are giving up all our resistance to God and allowing our deeper self to emerge.
OWNING MY STUFF, REBELLIOUSNESS, SUFFERING, ETC.
If you are on this path seeking to live in Christ’s mind, you will from time to time be reminded of your sin, or of your pain or suffering, or of any place where you fall short of God’s will. This is an important part of the journey, not to be ignored. Whenever an issue comes up, the practice is to own all of it—your part in it, your resistance to it, whatever is on your heart and mind and soul in regard to the issue, confess it before God. Lay it on His altar to heal and to transform in you. It is a matter of integrity and truth, where the interior state of mind is also
visible on the exterior. No more hidden motives or agendas. What people are to see is the real you living in truth. So confess whatever it is to God. Withhold nothing. You will be freer with each issue, able to stand in the truth and eventually what is on the inside will shine out of you to all that you meet, as you clean out whatever stands between you and God. [Exodus 32:20 where God had Moses reduce Ba’al to ashes and then made the Israelites drink it. In Numbers 21:9 the Israelites were dying of snake bites. God had Moses built a bronze snake. Anyone who looked at the snake would not die. Both of these refer to owning what we have done.]
The benefit of owning my stuff, my rebelliousness and more is that I can live with integrity and consciousness of who I am in God at all times.
OTHER SPIRITUAL PRACTICES
