For a number of years now, The Foursquare Church has utilized an excellent resource entitled Focused Living, in which a participant engages a process of discovery and develops a personal calling statement.
The components include one’s biblical purpose (Who am I to be?), values (How am I to live?) and vision (What am I called to do?). Focused Living helps people align their lives with the design God intended for them.
As I read Luke 4-10, I am reminded of the Focused Living process. The events that took place in this passage—from the time of Jesus’ baptism, to the wilderness testing, back to his hometown and the launch of His public ministry—included all the elements of a good Focused Living retreat!
At Jesus’ baptism, the voice from Heaven established His identity: “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” He was to live out of the confident knowledge that the Father was pleased with Him simply because He was His Son.
The Spirit settled upon Jesus to empower Him to “be” and to “do” what the Father had planned. Throughout His life, we see the value Jesus placed on being alone so He could be renewed in the Spirit’s power. He demonstrated a consistent commitment to do and say what He saw the Father doing.
Then, the Holy Spirit led Him into the wilderness to be tested.
During this time in the wilderness, Jesus’ values seemed to be forged as He experienced the pressure from within and without. In each setting, He answered the test questions about identity (“If you are the Son of God …”), how He would use His power and where His devotion would rest.
In the final “session,” Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned to His hometown, entered the synagogue and read His personal calling statement (Luke 4:18-19, NKJV):
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He has anointed Me
To preach the gospel to the poor;
He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty those who are oppressed;
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”
His words amazed the people, yet, even with all of this, his friends and family saw Him differently than He was. They asked, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” He was plagued with people who questioned not only His identity, but also His motives and action.
You may be asking, “So, what does this have to do with wholeness?”
As I studied this topic, I found an interesting correlation between the words “wholeness,” “integrity” and “alignment.” This process in Jesus’ early life and ministry reveals a deeper understanding of wholeness in what He modeled, proclaimed and delivered to this broken world.
“Wholeness” means not wounded, injured or impaired. It also means complete, entire and undivided.
The word “integrity” stems from the Latin adjective integer, meaning “whole, complete, aligned.”
“Alignment” is the proper or desirable coordination or relation of components, or identification with or matching of the behavior, thoughts, etc., of another person. Consider the philosophy of chiropractic medicine that if the body is in alignment, the healing agent inherent within it will bring about wholeness.
In the narrative of Luke 4-10, we see Jesus aligning everything He is, says and does with who the Father intended. By doing so, Jesus modeled the wholeness He was sent to proclaim and deliver. This wholeness is for the whole man: spirit, soul and body.
As a person aligns with Christ through salvation, his or her spirit is made whole in an instant. But for a person’s soul to be completely whole, the critical component is to live in alignment with the Spirit, inside and out. This allows the completed healing work of the Spirit to flow through every broken place of a person’s soul—no mask, no fig leaf, just the integrity of transparent honesty.
The alignment of the vertebrae of our core self allows the life-blood of Jesus to restore every painful place. The places that have become numb are restored to vibrancy, and the release of a full range of motion is returned.
Aligned in who we are, how we are to live and what we are to do, we can now be free and whole to fulfill our own personal calling statement. We can partner with God in His mission to proclaim good news:
“To proclaim liberty to the captives
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty those who are oppressed;
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”
By: Tammy Dunahoo, vice president of U.S. operations, general supervisor of The Foursquare Church
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