Living in Union - Aug 24
“There is no duplicity in him.” John 1:47
What an odd and wonderful greeting. “Here is Nathanial, a man with no guile, whose thoughts, words, and actions are all in harmony.”
Who lives like that?
I will confess nobody has ever said this about me, nor have I ever thought this about myself. Paul’s “I don’t do the good that I want to do, but I do the evil that I don’t want to do.” (Rom 7:19) feels like a much more apt description for most, if not all of us. It’s not for lack of want or desire, but our constant unsettledness leaves us with little harmony.
Even obviously good actions can be an expression of less than noble intentions: “I’ll volunteer to serve at the soup kitchen so that I’m noticed, and people think well of me.” We live in a constant internal clash of the noble and righteous vs. the base and self-interested. Being duplicitous is an anxious mode of being as we must maintain a constant false façade. You live in constant fear of being found out.
How do we find this sense of unity and oneness so that we are in complete harmony?
We do this by yielding our troubled will to the one whose will is pure and good. It is only by taking on God’s will as our own that we can live in complete harmony. It is then that our thoughts, words, and actions are one, lacking all guile. It is when we allow ourselves to be taken in by the oneness of God that we lose all duplicity.