Should You Quit Your Job? | Eckhart Tolle on Doing What You Love and Loving What You Do

Some people think of February as the depths of winter, some see it as the early coming of spring. Below are some February “homework assignments” you can do to keep your spiritual development rolling during the cold weather.

When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak designed the Apple I in 1976, conventional wisdom was that personal computers could not be marketed. Today encoding and distributing analog and digital information happens globally at hypersonic speed. In the age of Information conventional wisdom has become the default position.

Now, there is honesty and there is openness. This top theologian, Nicodemus, and the Lord Jesus Christ are having a profound conversation and Nicodemus has been struggling, but he did see this, and this is vital and this is so important. “Rabbi, Teacher, God is with you,” and the implication is that God is not with me. Nicodemus, you are disappointed with your religion. It has not given you power in your life. You are looking for something and you just cannot see it. You know it is there but you do not know where it is. You can almost see Nicodemus nodding in agreement. How many may just be in that situation?

When we love it is often done when certain conditions are met. When God the Father loves there are no conditions attached. His love is unconditional and reaches to the furthest corners of the earth.

When Jesus Christ made a whip to cleanse the Temple of all the sinful activity that was going on, there is a very negative reaction from those whose interests Jesus had moved against. The Temple was where God lived, and the day when Jesus Christ died the Temple became obsolete, and now the Temple of God is in the individual believer. We meet in a place for prayer and praise and worship and teaching, but our New Testament teaches us that the bodies of believers are a Temple of the Holy Spirit. Do you see the sort of thing that makes Jesus angry?

There were sixty to ninety children in each class! I visited a school on the island of Boracay in the Philippines. The principal gave me a tour of a series of dilapidated, cement buildings without lights or air conditioning. She kept warning me not to trip on broken stairs and crumbling asphalt.

We must be careful not to follow the Jesus of our dreams, but follow and serve and obey the Jesus of the Bible. We have to see Jesus as He really is, and love the real Jesus, and not some dreamt up idol. So many have illusions and false pictures and ideas of what Jesus Christ was like, but when we stay in the Word, we will not stray very far. Jesus goes up to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover and in the Temple he finds everything a bit of a sinful shambles.

This is a crucial conversation and we are so privileged to be permitted to overhear it. The conversation is between Jesus Christ and a man called Nicodemus. It is one of the most crucial conversations ever to be recorded! It is never good to interrupt a conversation but that is what happens when we stop in the middle of these verses in John Chapter 3 in the New Testament, but it is too long and too rich to incorporate into one article. Nicodemus is a religious leader in Jerusalem. We could even regard him as a professor of theology.

The ‘stick stick’ men I saw in the Chinese city of Chongqing came immediately to mind when I read Jeremiah 30:8. Like many cities along the Yangtze River, Chongqing is very hilly with winding steep stairs cut into the rocky cliffs which lead from one location to another. The ‘stick stick’ men make up an army of thousands of porters who walk around with their bamboo poles.

The New Testament idea of being Christian is summarised very effectively in the one hundred English words in the above five verses at top. We do nothing for our salvation but accept what has already been done. We love each other. We obey his commandments, in joy. In this is faith, and the conquering of the world; all to the glory of God.

Jesus calls us to do many things. In Luke 14:26 he says that we must hate our children in order to be his disciple. What does this look like?

As the holidays near, it is important to remind ourselves of what we are really celebrating. Christmas day is symbolically the birthday of Jesus Christ, who according to the Christian Faith, died for our sins to be forgiven. Jesus is an important figure today regardless of what faith you may follow.