Becoming Jewish from the stronghold of Christianity requires a continual examination of thought and a questioning of beliefs. I don’t see this as bad, but I need to be careful about what beliefs I allow into the picture. In that context, I see the need to retract some of my statements about Judaism and even Christ in my previous posts. Most of the retraction comes from semantics.

In baseball there’s a term called “sacrifice”. A batter deliberately hits the ball in a direction that will likely get caught, but far enough away from the other basemen that members of his team can advance to the next base. There’s also a religious term “sacrifice” which could involve killing an animal or human to pour that blood over something to appease a deity.

Since God forbids human sacrifice, and Jesus constantly referred to himself as the Son of Man (not Son of God), could it be that Jesus was giving us a message throughout his teachings that his death wasn’t for atonement or as a human sacrifice, but rather to advance people to God? Would I be at this point today, seeking out what God wants if it weren’t for someone hanging up for execution nearly 2000 years ago?

So what is spiritual success? For a teacher it’s leading people to God and enlightenment of the truth and a better life. For the individual it’s to live out the truth, to live a better life now and have an even better eternal life later.

How does anyone get spiritual success? John Macarthur Jr. said “Spiritual success requires commitment to others.” but the scriptures indicate it has to do with commitment towards God. People were committed towards the priests during Jesus’ day, but Jesus didn’t condone the acts of those people and even condemned the acts of the priests. Commitment towards the wrong person isn’t a path to success. So that brings me back to my search for God. The key to spiritual success is finding Him and being obedient to what He has to say. More often than not what I hear is theology and philosophy that people taught over the years directing towards self-inflicted suffering, which doesn’t equate to denying one sense to accentuate another. Fasting, for example, for the sake of suffering through it doesn’t get anyone anywhere but hungry. Fasting to deny that physical element of comfort that can impede on our search for the spiritual can make people more observant of the spiritual world around them.

I still have more searching to do… On a final note, is it possible to prosthelytize myself?